Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (35 page)

“Why the sudden loathing, dear Eustachius—if you’ll allow me to call you that?”

“Why the sudden love? I don’t hate him—I feel pity for him if you must know, because I have a fair idea of where his
reveling in stench
comes from. But you, you’ll never understand it. You’re too busy tinkering with the model of your proto-Man to be able to perceive the dirty and swinish, semisuccessful and quite unsuccessful versions of him in the phenomenological world. You cannot love Maestro, you can’t even see him. What you said about him isn’t true. Anyway, you were not speaking because of him—you had something else on your mind.”

“Your thought is far-reaching … and dangerous. You reveal … No, seriously now, the editor may have suggested such an affinity to me in the kind of laughter (and here I’m quoting you) Molière uses to deal with big issues. All I wanted to say was that even such a man—while being, as you put it, swinish, and while reveling in stench (which is, among other things, a well-turned phrase indeed) —even such a man has in him an integral, essential something, a nondegradable form that always manifests itself in some way, even as it revels in stench. This is what defines the personality after all. You yourself call him Thersites. So, what makes the parallel doable for you? Were nothing to him but the … fecal bath, how would he rise to the level of Thersites?”

Why’s he saying all this? It’s certainly not about Maestro. But what
is
it about?

“The editor, for one, thinks very highly of him—in a certain way, of course.”

“He thinks very highly of anyone who can be useful to him.”

“You’re wrong. The editor is useful himself; I daresay he’s very useful.”

Don Fernando stressed the last words with a certainty stemming from a
distinct
way of looking at things. “You seem to buzz around petty details and get snared by them.”

“What about his refusal to print your stuff in his paper? Do you find that useful, too?” Melkior tried to draw him out through vanity. Don Fernando smiled.

“Refusal to print my stuff? Only this one article … which is truly not suited to his paper. Or any other paper … for the time being.”

Such an air of the clandestine!

“Tell me one thing …”

“You’re sounding like Hamlet,” Don Fernando gave an almost offended smile. “Never mind—I’ll tell you everything I’m able to tell.”

“What did you write about?”

“Oh, that?” Don Fernando reflected for a moment. “About the need for preventive dehumanization … or, shedding tragedy through skepticism.”

Melkior made a stupid face.

“Is this something I could understand?”

“Maybe, if you try. You’re a theater critic, after all.”

“Then help me, for God’s sake!” cried Melkior.

They were strolling around the square by the National Theater.

Don Fernando had dropped his arms to his sides and was staring straight ahead as he elaborated on his thoughts. Melkior watched him, tensely awaiting the results of the process.

“In buildings of this kind,” Don Fernando pointed at the theater building, “people force themselves to be naïve for a few hours. Most tragedies, if not all, are founded on false assumptions. Take Hamlet: how is it that it never occurred to him, so intelligent and consequently so full of doubts, way back in the beginning—before the play begins—that Uncle Claudius might be capable of killing his father? I mean, wasn’t the uncle a cad, a drunkard, and a lecher the whole time? Hamlet was bound to have noticed. How is it that he was not wary of the bastard rather than wondering after the fact how someone could be such a scoundrel? All right, granted, Othello is naïve (though again you feel there must be a limit to his naïveté), he could not imagine Iago to be such a beast. But whence the naïveté in Hamlet?”

“It’s his youth, his faith in life, in people, in love.” Melkior didn’t think so.

“And all of a sudden, as the tragedy begins, he ages, he no longer has faith in life, in people, in love? Isn’t this a false assumption? Is this not a false assumption that Hamlet fails to realize that his mother is a woman capable of going to bed with another man, or that Polonius is a professional Lord Chamberlain who will ‘loyally’ serve any king, or that Ophelia is a woman whom he might as well have dispatched to a nunnery long before using the same arguments, or that his school friends are young careerists who stand by their royal pal only as long as he is Crown Prince … and so on. It took his father getting murdered, his mother marrying his father’s murderer, Polonius setting a trap that Ophelia walked knowingly into as bait, his own friends sending him to his death, for him to realize finally he’d been living among scoundrels. Too late. Too late for a Hamlet, and too naïve.

“Or imagine, for instance, just how idiotic Andromache is. She thinks she’s being sly, but hers is a naïve and not at all feminine wile. To save her son she marries Pyrrhus formally, the Hyrcan beast as Hamlet described him, and immediately after the ‘cunning’ wedding she kills herself to remain faithful to Hector. How very clever! She’s met Pyrrhus’s condition for sparing her son’s life: she has ‘become his wife,’ ha, and killed herself directly afterward, double ha-ha! Tragic indeed! And what, pray, is this terrible tragedy rooted in? A goose’s logic: Pyrrhus must not kill my son now because I have done what he asked me to do. He is bound by his word. My dear fellow, don’t you see that this is a piece of nonsense, though we are asked to see it as sublimely moving? I’m asked to believe, together with the tragic hen, that Pyrrhus is a gentleman. That he won’t go berserk when he catches on to how he’s been manipulated by a birdbrain and slay her entire household, all the way down to her cat, to take his revenge. No, I’m asked to believe in human greatness.
Merde!
”

What’s Andromache to him or he to Andromache that he should be so wound up about her? For these were merely the advance troops, Melkior was waiting for the main body of Don Fernando’s thoughts.

Don Fernando sensed the question with the instinct of a passionate analytical thinker.

“Odd, isn’t it, that I should be talking about this?” He halted for an instant, looking Melkior in the eye in an almost provocative way. “I mean, what is Andromache to me? Or Hamlet for that matter? Or all that tragic affectation? And yet you didn’t think to bring up Horatio. That would have been an objection worth making. Tragedy presupposes faith in goodness. Horatio is pure goodness, a naïve, magnanimous fellow, and yet he’s merely a supporting character. That is why the existence of such a Horatio is not subject to doubt. He is an assumption outside the sum and substance of the tragedy, an almost accidental phenomenon. A satellite, which hasn’t quite grasped the ins and outs of the dark constellation of tragedy. That is why I permit him to be good, because he doesn’t matter.”

“So he who
matters
must not be good?”

“He shouldn’t … that is, he can’t. He’s responsible. He must build up his malice inside himself lest he begin believing in goodness. He must doubt. This means he must look out, watch, listen (even eavesdrop), catch words, turn them this way and that to discover their secret meaning, the menacing and dangerous idea. He will thus determine his own thinking, his attitude, his course of action. If I know there’s a scoundrel who intends to set fire to my home (and there actually is such a scoundrel), I won’t just sit by the fireside reciting ‘To be or not to be’ with tears in my eyes. I won’t sit there believing that he might not set fire to it after all … won’t wait to become a tragic character. You can be sure that I will load my rifle and sit in wait behind my window to pick the scoundrel off before he sets my home ablaze.”

“But what if the scoundrel says to himself: if I don’t torch the scoundrel’s house he’ll torch mine?”

“Never mind what the scoundrel thinks (I know anyway), the point is what he does. The point is that I must be stronger than he is, or at least more deft.”

“So if I’ve got it right, ‘preventive dehumanization’ means ruling out the possibility of there being any goodness at all, it is the theoretical destruction of goodness?”

“Yes—temporarily destroying it, until conditions arise for it to exist in a genuine sense. Being good
in this world
is naïve and stupid. Anyhow it is a false goodness and consequently a false tragedy. We don’t need tragedy to discover the dreadful truth. Indeed tragedy cloaks truth with the charm of art, it seduces us into enjoyment by lifting its soiled theatrical skirt coquettishly before us and showing the seamy sides of life with a fetching grin. Not even death itself is serious here. Nothing is serious, all is simply
beautiful
and desirable. But I want to see the truth naked, without its tragic rags. Because I
know
that underneath those rags lies something else tragic, a profound and genuine and terrible tragedy, one that no Racine or Shakespeare can help me with. I’m no Hamlet, I know straight from the start that my uncle means to murder my father and marry my mother, so in order to prevent it …”

“You kill him?”

“Of course, if only in theory.”

“But how can you be sure that your uncle’s going to murder?”

“How? Let’s reply with a question: why shouldn’t he murder—what’s to stop him? Why shouldn’t he, if it will get him all the pleasures he has dreamed of his whole life? You of course would not commit murder, but don’t reason in terms of yourself. Our mistake and … our irreparable oversight is precisely that—reasoning in terms of ourselves. Which the scoundrel counts on—that we’ll reason in terms of ourselves, that we won’t smell a rat. But we should reason
on his terms;
that is why I say we ought to watch with doubt and distrust, we ought to
know
beforehand. But we’re too deeply caught up with ourselves, we explore our weaknesses, believing ourselves to be some brand of terrible sinner. Meanwhile he prepares, he plots eluding notice, in perfect safety. It’s too late
afterward
to smack your forehead: oh if only I had known, if only I’d had an inkling! Why is it that I never saw it, never thought, never paid attention before this? Too late—the deed is done. And now we ought to take our revenge, but we’re not up to it. So we reflect: what’s the use, what is the point of revenge when our father’s gone and our mother’s sharing the murderer’s bed? We reason. ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.’ We anguish. Which is exactly what the evil uncle wants—our anguish, our physical inaction; it spells safety for him. We make tragedies for people to weep, but he chortles and enjoys being used for the making of art. Art does kill him in the tragedy (or not, as the case may be), but it kills him in an
artistic
, symbolic way—and he doesn’t give a fig for its symbols when he knows he’s alive. And exults in being alive. He even enjoys the symbols, in which he sees someone else rather than himself, so that he will actually shed a tear over that Someone Else’s fate, for the pleasure. Oh, we pay the scoundrel a tremendous tribute in tragedies! And in real life we leave him alone to savor his criminal plunder. We also leave him his life, which is not only undeserved but actually a threat to other lives. The scoundrel ought to be gotten rid of in time. Physically and simply, not symbolically; without ceremony and catharsis and tragi-pathos mumbo jumbo à la Aristotle.”

“So we should kill preventively so as not to be killed?” concluded Melkior with a smile freezing on his lips. “But kill whom? By what criterion?”

“By a simple criterion, medical. There are symptoms. How does a surgeon know where to cut? Does he need a criterion? He simply pins down where the illness is hidden and what it is that is endangering the organism. This is largely a matter of talent, knowledge, intuition—but very often of simple cunning. The killer is lying in wait and the thing to do is provoke him. You’ve got to tease him out of the armor of his quiescence, to prod his murderous wishes awake. You will of course have observed such a character on the tram: sitting there with his legs stretched across the aisle, blocking the passage of others, everything there is his. Not that he does this purposely—he just feels like it. He doesn’t think of his legs as an obstacle, for people to step over, around, grumbling at having to adapt to him. So you trod on his foot on purpose. Step on it good and hard, with all your weight! But you apologize right away, awfully sorry, didn’t mean to, an accident, and so on … and then look at his face, look into his eyes: if you know how to look you’ll discover a murderer. What a pleasure it would be for him to kill you, given half the chance! There’s your ‘criterion’ for you!”

Don Fernando fell silent, wearing a sort of quiet sadness on his face, like someone who has had a good cry.

“Wait a minute,” said Melkior without irony, indeed with concern, “who could possibly catch them all?”

“You’re talking like a policeman!” frowned Don Fernando. “Then again, why not? That’s what the job should be of any intelligent police force which genuinely protects people’s safety—to catch murderers before they’ve committed the crime, instead of producing detective stories after the murder and inventing police geniuses and criminal heroes to tickle the fancy of small-time delinquents and romantic onanists.”

“So what you’re saying is … tread on people’s feet in trams and then peer into their eyes? But isn’t that a rather unreliable method, telling potential criminals by their eyes? There used to be this thing about low foreheads and beetle brows and skull shape … the so-called Lombrosian type …”

“There’s something in that, too. But a man with a nasty look in his eyes is undoubtedly a potential murderer,” said Don Fernando with certainty. “Just give him a chance, take a bit of a risk. Step on his foot—not literally, of course, not on a tram—I mean in a metaphorical sense … Incidentally, there’s a way that is more reliable still. You mentioned low foreheads and beetle brows … and I say: whoever’s been physically
marked
by Nature in any way ought to be put under surveillance. All those ill-matched arms, uneven legs, floppy ears, enormous noses (puny ones as well, mind), hunched backs, squinting eyes, and particularly—and I say
particularly
—anyone under five foot five. I can well understand the suffering of midgets and I believe it was one of them who invented crime. Just look at them in their platform shoes, their craning necks, their broadly inclusive sweeping gestures, settling issues in a ‘manly’ way; even their voices sound stentorian and heroic. But that’s not enough. They’re after other deeds, the real, acknowledged kind, the ones that inspire fear and awe. They aspire to
greatness
rather than to being
normal;
they would rule us, whatever the cost. They gave us Napoleon and, so it seems, Caesar the epileptic, too. Therefore beware
the marked
, particularly
the diminutive.
They are haters and will stop at nothing.”