Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (36 page)

“You’d end up with a large chunk of mankind ‘under surveillance,’” remarked Melkior acidly. “But who would be doing the job? By what right?”

“By the right of the majority …” said Don Fernando vaguely, as if he himself didn’t entirely believe this.

“But what makes you think the majority of people look ‘nice’?”

“History, that’s what!” Don Fernando sprang back to life, fortified by a fresh idea. “Every historical blackguard eventually paid his debt to mankind! But always too late, only after he’d been up to his eyes in human blood. Danton, Robespierre, Marat, and Saint-Just were too busy going after one another to notice the ambitious pint-sized general, and out he slipped between their legs to slaughter half of mankind for his greatness. Hitler should have been bumped off ten years ago (if not before) and Mussolini should have been given a resounding thrashing ten years before that until he cried and begged for mercy. He would have, too. As things stand, it will take a war and a victory at God knows what price (if we even win!) to finally strangle those two historical apes. It will be too late again, too late … because of that very same Hamlet-like inertia and naïveté.”

“Do you think, then, that anything can be achieved, on a large scale, through personal terrorism and assassination?”

“Assassination, assassination, yes of course!” Don Fernando agreed with a curious kind of rage. “Give the scoundrel a taste of fear on his own hide! It’s always educational! This seems to be the only kind of pedagogy these villains understand. Fear. Your fear and mine, that’s what the scoundrel should be made to feel! If nothing else, it would give me satisfaction—‘tremble, tremble, scoundrel,’ as they sing in the opera.”

Don Fernando took a breath. He was profoundly agitated, his face flushed bright red, the corners of his lips flecked with foam. He used a handkerchief to wipe his mouth, forehead, and cheeks, as if wiping a mask from his face. His features did in fact regain the exalted expression of his serene internal glow. He was now embarrassed by his excitement, letting the breeze of a kindly smile play over his face and conceal the shame.

“You seem, however, to prefer fairy tales of one sort and another,” he said superciliously.

“What fairy tales?” said Melkior in surprise.

“Oh, Russian fairy tales about various forms of goodness … Such as the one about Alyosha Karamazov, the little monk. You even gauge that drunken cynic Maestro using the little monk as a standard. But he doesn’t fit the standard, it’s too narrow for him. Your standards are too strict, my dear Eustachius—and too regular. People are like stones: irregular in shape, heavy, scattered. It’s the devil’s own job bringing order to the lot, assembling them in one place and arranging them by this or that rule—and it’s even worse hewing each individual stone. Indeed it’s impossible to carve out what people like to call a ‘moral profile.’ Illusory is what it is.”

This is something he has going on with himself, thought Melkior. I’ve never spoken to him about “goodness” or “standards.” He must be struggling with some “little monk” of his own.

“Incidentally, you haven’t asked me how all this fits in with my actual political convictions,” asked Don Fernando suddenly, giving a dry and somehow malicious laugh.

“Now that you mention it, did you ever discuss this with Pupo?”

“With Pupo? Discuss what with him?” said Don Fernando in surprise.

“Why, this business of … of individual terror … and assassinations.”

“Why with Pupo? Is he an expert on such things? He believes the man who bashed Trotsky’s head in with an ice pick was a Mexican anarchist acting on his own initiative, that Tukhachevsky was spying for the Nazis, and so on … he believes a lot of things. He is of course against ‘individual terror.’ ‘That’s anarcho-individualism,’ and he immediately reaches for the corresponding pigeonhole. Pupo’s a sort of monk himself, but one who keeps an eye on his career—in fact, a defrocked priest who goes on believing through inertia, but in rather a Jesuit way. I’ve nothing to discuss with him.”

“So I’m honored with this discussion?” smiled Melkior.

“You are a sensitive individual capable of
feeling
a thought. Not merely thinking (perhaps thinking even less), but also feeling a thought, which means keeping it constantly
in your mind
like private torment. The
Heautontimoroumenos
, murderer and victim in one and the same person, knife and wound, a vampire of your own heart, as Baudelaire put it. Your thought torments you with fear, I know it and appreciate it, because few people are capable of it, particularly in the way you are—and those drunken imbeciles at the Give’nTake mock you for it. I don’t mock you, because fear is thought (and vice versa), and I should like to join you at this point, if I may. Our fear is the sensitivity of the thought with which we perceive the terrible future of our existence. (Not that the human future has ever been anything but dreadful.) Your fear is not insane, your quaking is not inane as a Quaker’s, and yet there is in you (and this is where I leave you) a maniacal need to study the fear, to explore all its tonalities and tastes, from bitter to sweet. Sweet in particular. For there is a kind of pleasure in the sensation of fear (I remember it from childhood), a possibility of some obscure inner florescence taking place, of some strange solitary ripening going on to produce the black fruit of a particularly bitter wisdom. You have made yourself a home in there and you no longer search for a way out of the mousetrap—you have found your ‘accursed’ freedom inside. ‘Accursed’ because you exercise it in the pathetic manner of a prisoner for life who has found a ‘great’ pastime: drying his straw mattress straw by straw on the single ray of sun that falls into his cell …”

“Straw is, as we know, hollow. Are you sure it’s in my mattress and not your head?” Melkior took offense and rejoindered rudely, which made Don Fernando flush pink.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it so offensively. I meant to say that fear has tricked your imagination, but it came out all wrong. That bit about the prisoner was particularly bad. Fear has hidden its hideous face, which the wise man finds is beneath him to contemplate and generally beneath the accomplished man to address. That is why I meant to say that your fear was highly refined, all the richer for the beauties of your unconventional character, brought to virtuoso level, as it were, like the subtlest of
vibratos
on a violin string (this with reference to trembling), elevated to the point of the highest—indeed musical—sensitivity, ceasing to be a miserable human condition and becoming a work of some crazed art instead. Your alchemy has transmuted that filth into gold. That’s why I admire … Forgive me for calling it crazed—after all, any art is crazed in a certain way … that’s why I admire your heroism, for you know how to suffer. My fear is different. I don’t want to suffer. I’m afraid of
what tomorrow may bring
, as it may well bring it tomorrow, and there’s no rhetoric in it. I’m simply afraid for myself, for my pitiful life, like any ant that feels a storm brewing, and I have no particular ‘spiritual values’ in mind. I don’t care what happens to paintings, to books, to arty rocks. I simply fear, henlike, for my unprotected head, which in my hour of fear is my greatest cultural value, for it’s the only head that cares for me. To sum up, then: my fear is no violin
vibrato
, no
vibrato
at all, for that matter; there’s no subtlety to it, no art, no beauty—it’s intolerant, harsh, and aggressive. I don’t propose to ‘suffer for beauty,’ I don’t propose to cultivate fear like a poisonous flower garden. I’m less of a hero than you. I can’t support fear—that’s why I want to remove it from my life, like hundreds of millions of like-minded people.”

“But how are you going to remove it?” asked Melkior with grave concern. “And who are your like-minded people?”

“Common people, that’s who. Perhaps these very passersby around us. They all want to get where they’re going, to eat their lunch or kiss their wife, without the feeling of pressure in their mind, without a nightmare on their soul, with joy and certainty as if they will live forever. And that’s reason enough for me to consider them ‘my people’; they may not know it, but they belong to the large community of enemies of fear.”

“How can you be sure they’re ‘your people’? They may just as well be on the other side, they may be in favor of fear, which such ‘passersby’ usually refer to as order. They are in favor of order under the knout, and you offer them your concept of freedom, which is disorder and anarchy in their eyes.”

“What? Surely
this
is disorder, this general anxiety and uncertainty?”

“Anxiety and uncertainty for you, ‘the enemy.’ In their view, it’s no more than you deserve: you aim to bring down their ideals, kill off the leaders they worship precisely because they inspire fear. They
want
fear.”

“I’m not relying on those trained monkeys!” barked Don Fernando furiously.

“Whom are you relying on, then?”

“On men! On free, proud men who feel their human value, their dignity—”

“Again, this is a question of standards: what is
human value?”

“Standards …” Don Fernando was smiling quaintly, in a “last straw” sort of way, like someone tried to the very limit of his patience. “I know just where to claim my right to the discovery of
new value
and I reject any attempt to drag in standards as a piece of bothersome claptrap! I have no time to waste on procedural ins and outs, the only thing that matters is
value
, and I have a perfectly clear idea of what it is!”

“So let’s get on with the shooting, poisoning, setting of time bombs, bashing people’s heads in with ice picks? And all that on I-know-who’s-worthless grounds. Here take a look at the little man on the corner—that’s right, the one selling newspapers.”

The news vendor was crying the third edition of the
Morning News.
He was indeed a little man, as Melkior put it—ageless, scaled down, as if he had been built with an eye to skimping on material, his arms and legs short, his head small and narrow, but with a hunk of trumpety nose protruding from it, along with two large and floppy ears topped by a vendor’s cap like an upside-down pot, showing a logo for the
Morning News.
He was trumpeting through his nose, in a snot-ridden and tearful voice, as if begging alms, “Mawnen Ooze! Mawnen Ooze!”

“There, he, too, is a man, the Mawnen fellow. You can hear him braying, struggling for his existence. He, too, to use your words, is capable of feeling. If you were to come up to him and pull his ear (just look at those ears!) he would try to hit you, perhaps even kill you, for offending him. Because he has his pride. In other words, he
feels his value.
He is a value, by his standards, he,
Mr. Mawnen.
A
human value.
While Michelangelo’s
David
in Florence, a fine figure of a nude young man (and incidentally, a masterpiece of human anatomy), large, self-assured, and proud, full of strength and daring, is not a man. He’s not capable of ‘feeling.’ He’s of stone. He isn’t even ‘human’ enough to be able to utter the nonsense word
Mawnen
which that little freak over there
is
able to say. And yet
David
is a value, an enormous, unique value … or perhaps he isn’t, perhaps you disagree—you said just now you didn’t care for ‘arty rocks’?”

“I didn’t mean anything in particular, I meant it conditionally …”

“And I say, even ‘conditionally,’ that all the
Mr. Mawnens
in the world, however many there may be, and I’m sure they run into the hundreds of thousands, are not worth
David
’s left leg. And yet, listen to what I’m going to ask you, ‘conditionally’: supposing that saving
David
from destruction required the life of a single
Mr. Mawnen
, of our
Mr. Mawnen
over there, for instance, would you approve of the sacrifice?”

“That’s a typically ‘Russian’ pointless question. A piece of pure Dostoyevskyism,” muttered Don Fernando with intellectual disgust.

“Even granted it’s ‘Dostoyevskyism,’ the question is there, regardless of who posed it or why. Never mind, you needn’t answer it yourself, let’s ask the others, the ‘common people,’ ‘your’ people, the ‘passersby.’ Hardly anyone would approve. Not even you yourself, in particular view of your disregard for ‘arty rocks.’ Were we to show them our wretched news vendor sniffling on that corner over there and tell them, We’re going to pounce upon him: right, go die for
David
(David who? I don’t know him!), all of ‘humane’ mankind would rise most resolutely against the very idea of
such
a price being payable for the salvation of a ‘man of stone.’ All of a sudden all of mankind becomes ‘uncultured.’ Forgetting the unique, irredeemable value of Michelangelo’s sculpture and throwing itself with the full force of unbridled philanthropy at the little man of a news vendor. Raising him to the point of being an extraordinary, ‘human’ value, which of course not even
Mr. Mawnen
himself can properly understand. He becomes an exceptional, indeed legendary person (many a
Mr. Mawnen
has gone down in history that way), a kind of saint and martyr. And why is all that? Only because
Mr. Mawnen
is ‘capable of feeling.’ The mere elementary sensitivity sets that hideous body above a genius’s unique and unrepeatable work. Because
Mr. Mawnen
has an epidermis capable of feeling pain, while
David
is unfeeling stone. Therefore long live the epidermis, death to ‘stone’!”

“This is a conclusion in favor of the epidermis and generally in favor of the sensitive-living, stupid, and mindless, ‘valueless,’ ugly tissue of a freak who has picked up a handful of attributes along the way which under very superficial conventions are granted to man, too. The
David
is also a synthesis of attributes, which, by somewhat more cautious conventions, have turned stone into a ‘man.’ They both
exist in some way.
Don’t you feel that the Siamese concrescence of those two existences, no matter how it might intentionally be arranged to suit my purpose, is a question of existence in general? The question of
who
and
what
should go on living. Chang or Eng? But how is one to decide—that is to say, by what standards?”