Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (42 page)

By the time the veterinary experts arrive from the native village the agent is grazing peacefully, like all the rest of the cattle. Nevertheless down his throat they force several slimy balls made of herbs they have chewed and then kneaded between their fingers, spitting on them copiously. For all that they make the agent gag, he does his best to obey his well-intentioned tormentors: he downs the green pellets, with effort, like a hen. They are treating him. And his spirits immediately rise: if they’re treating me it’s surely because … and he smiles at them with agreeable gratitude.

“What is that stuff they forced down his gullet?” the captain asks of the doctor in a paterfamilial tone.

“Vegetal purgatives, I’d say. The gentleman is in for a good and thorough bowel flush. But this doesn’t seem to be the end of the procedure. They’ll go on to exorcise the evil spirits from his belly.”

And sure enough the patient is laid on his back and while four natives pin down his arms and legs the High Medicine Man thrusts a bamboo pipe into his deeply lard-lined navel, then takes a smoldering brand from his assistant’s hands and uses the ember tip to trace circles around the pipe on the agent’s swollen belly, uttering ritual words to which his assistants respond with the rhythmic chanting of other words, probably on behalf of demons which apparently are not leaving our friend’s innards without resistance. The agent is, naturally, howling in pain, which the High Medicine Man takes with satisfaction as a sign of a successful birth via the navel.

The chief engineer, who appears to be the most humane and certainly the strongest among the whites, makes a movement that would probably have him strangling the High Medicine Man had the doctor not stopped him in time.

“Have you gone mad, sir?”

“How much longer are they going to torture this man?”

“Until they’ve forced the last demon in his stomach through that chimney pipe in his navel. Demons are thought to flee from fire …”

“And when will that be?” asks the captain artlessly, with a layman’s curiosity.

“You’ll have to ask them,” replies the doctor unpleasantly. “Probably when our friend stops howling—the sign that all the puppies are born. Whelping over.”

“Why don’t you suggest he keep quiet for a bit then?” asks the first mate, who is dreadfully pale.

“I’d rather not get involved. Anyhow, I’m not sure. It could turn out to be a tricky business—perhaps they’d kill him then and there. I can’t assume responsibility. I know what it’s like when a human life is at stake—I’m a doctor.”

“You’re a demon. Burning’s too good for you!” hisses the captain hatefully.

“Well, angel … you help him then,” replies the doctor and turns his back.

“Sir,” the first mate addresses the agent, earnestly, “dear sir, try to control yourself if you possibly can. Grit your teeth and try to be quiet for just a moment. Perhaps they’ll stop. Pretend you’re feeling better and they will definitely stop.” The agent, mustering all his forces, obeys, and indeed they “stop.”

The High Medicine Man removes the bamboo pipe from the agent’s navel, cauterizes both ends on the embers and then tosses it far away, voicing horrible shrieks as he throws it, to which monkeys respond from the jungle. All the natives burst into loud and hearty laughter.

“Gloating at having cooked his goose,” says the captain maliciously.

“No, sir. They’re glad the demons have passed over to the monkeys,” replies the doctor. “They’re much kinder than your goodness imagines.”

In the evening the agent is separated from them. They don’t know where he is taken. Perhaps this is the poor man’s last night, the chief engineer voices his terrible suspicion and shakes with dread at the thought of his own place in the accursed hierarchy.

“Oh no, Mr. Doctor is of a different opinion,” says the captain, “he believes in the kindness of the cannibals.”

“Did you, sir, despise all the cattle you’ve enjoyed your steaks from?” the doctor asks him. “What malice have you nurtured in your heart for the many animals whose bodies have passed through yours? Just think of the little chicks cheeping for their mother … why, they were but young things!”

“But we are not animals!”

“As far as they are concerned we are cattle. If not swine.”

“That’s what
you
are!”

“Perhaps. Whatever the case, I thank you, sir. I would have considered you a gentleman myself, were that compatible with certain overdeveloped bodily characteristics of yours.”

“You truly are a swine!”

“A lean one, to your regret. Inedible, too, I expect.”

The captain, his dignity gone in a flash, tackles the doctor and would have knocked him down with his bare belly had he not been stopped.

“Gentlemen! Just think of our friend at this moment!” cries out the chief engineer with much pathos. “Not to mention our own fate.”

“Anyhow, gentlemen,” speaks up the doctor who has collected himself quickly, “is there really any point in panicking prematurely about our friend? Perhaps he’s receiving special treatment as a patient. Perhaps he’s even taken the place of a nursing baby at some native woman’s breast.”

They all spit disgustedly at this. All except the old seaman, who is chuckling as he imagines the scene. He has found many things to be good and amusing. First of all, he is in excellent company. Previously, he couldn’t have dreamed of passing his time with such gentlemen. Or of seeing them up close like this—stark naked, too … And while he feels sorry for them, he also finds it all very strange and funny. Somehow he still cannot quite grasp what has happened. And why are the gentlemen so angry at each other all the time? When they all could be living together nice and peaceful … like one happy family, so to speak. … He even feels ignored and outranked again for being dressed, which makes him regard the doctor as “lower class,” too, as his near-equal. It does mean after all, doesn’t it, that the two of them are not good enough to go showing their bodies in front of these gentlemen. That must be why their “hosts” have so ordered. No matter, he is used to being lower class and is not bothered by the situation. Apart from that he finds everything excellent. He feeds abundantly on the fruits the Earth offered up in this blessed part of the world that knows no hunger or cold or fatigue. Here you eat, sleep, and laze in freedom, in warmth, in nakedness, in God’s peace. He doesn’t seem to share the white masters’ fear, or to grasp just why these blacks take them out to pasture and fatten them up on the tasty fruits. He simply eats and enjoys lying down, his stomach full, in the shade of a thick-crowned araucaria or under a giant eucalyptus and snoring in carefree bliss. The old fellow takes his captive life with the Polynesian cannibals as an overdue kind smile of Fortune that is affording him, at long last and quite unexpectedly, some retirement benefits—and God knows they were well earned. He takes care to eat what he can get and to sleep his fill; as to other needs he has none. He has never spent enough time on dry land to marry; he has made love to girls, as long as he was able to, in all the ports (as was the seamen’s wont), he has worked and slaved knocking about the seven seas, and he has nothing to show for it but his own old and skinny body, which, on the Polynesian island, he has now suddenly discovered as something truly his, all he has in the world, and has come to like it and care for it so as to keep it as long as possible. The only thing he regrets is not having any of his old mates from the
Menelaus
around for company, because he feels lonely among all the gentlemen.

On top of his other shortcomings (social and intellectual), his body differs so much from the other
Menelavians
(including the doctor!) that they no longer think of him as “one of them,” not even to the extent required by the traditional solidarity of seafarers forced to share the common fate of
castaways.
He is already so distant from their fate, so firmly anchored in security by way of his body, that they not only despise his “animal” contentment but actually come to hate him.

For all his excesses of eating and sleeping, for all the unlimited pleasures with which he has surrounded himself, his body stays stringy and bony, in addition to being tanned so dark as soon to become uninteresting to the hosts in
that one certain
, most terrible,
sense.
They note his solitude, which quite probably strengthens their conviction that he is not the same as the others, that he is different from the cattle they are fattening for the slaughter, that the old fellow is not
meat
but … well, some kind of human not unlike themselves, and they no longer lead him out to pasture: they let him move about freely, feed as he likes and when he likes, and generally do as he pleases. The captain is enraged at the injustice of it.

“They lead us out to pasture as if we were their cattle, while he … I ask you, is that fair?”

“No,” says the doctor in sympathy. “But it’s much more unfair that a stupid crocodile might outlive Shakespeare. To say nothing of the various insect species …”

The gods are thirsty, my friend, but they’re not looking for a bedbug, a bloodsucker, to crush—they’re looking for you, a man. Possibly a man of significance, I don’t know—a Danton, as I’ve said … But where are you, secret man? exclaimed Melkior half-aloud in the middle of a noisy street. It was long past noon.
They, too
, have to eat, be it with angelic moderation, they do have bodies after all …

His own body spoke up, presenting its old demands and clenching the stomach like an enraged fist under his nose. He resisted its demands using the ever-ready force of intellectual reasoning and brandished the threat of the invalid’s weighing machine. You demented fool, would you like to stand in a doorway yourself one day, minus a leg, minus an arm, minus eyesight … next to a weighing machine with a card saying
CRIPPLED
IN
COMBAT
and call out beggar-style to the soulless street, “Check your weight—it’s never too late”?

He made the rounds of the large and expensive restaurants with delicate aromas (that was where
they
went to allay suspicion), going from table to table, peering into the faces above the plates … and, surreptitiously, into the plates themselves. Nothing but mouthfuls, munch-munch and the murmur of prayers, the clink-clink of glasses,
corpus homini
, trans-substantiation, gluttony …
Dominus vobiscum!
Melkior turned away in horror at the carefree ways of the “people of his day and age.” Stuffing sacks for better targets. While hiding their bellies under tables like something to be ashamed of. No, the cannibals will not eat the agent! You must intercede on his behalf, Melkior Tresić, don’t let him be eaten. He could come in handy. He could, for instance, organize a future economy. Exports of pineapples, coconuts, bananas, monkeys, and parrots—a large firm with the name
PINACOCOBANAMONPAR
-
EXPORT
, Pago Pago, Polynesia. The others, too … The captain … why he could set up a merchant fleet (the
TUTUILA
-
LINE
); the chief engineer could build workshops and servicing units to provide the basis for a future industry; the doctor might start a public health service, build hospitals and infirmaries; the first mate could come up with a new, more humane religion forbidding the eating of slain enemies and recognizing the prisoner-of-war status of captives in keeping with the Hague Convention, and the seaman … he would found trade unions and a Labor opposition … Yes, that would be about right. … But all this was wishful thinking as long as the war was on. The
status quo ante bellum
, i.e., the castaways might still end up being eaten—it would depend on their personal initiative, as well as, to be sure, on Melkior’s imagination, which was today charitably biased in favor of any man in danger.

Again he fell to leafing through the streets, as if they were so many albums with the photographs of strangers. But his untrained attention soon grew tired of a police-style checking of the passersby and he forgot the purpose of his unproductive wandering. He felt the bitter taste of his solitary roaming and all his efforts went into moving his body through bright, sunlit space, which suddenly appeared to him to be terribly large and empty, unnavigable. He therefore utilized every intersection to change direction, hoping for a small discovery. But there always stretched before him again the most merciless of the dimensions—length, with its illusory shortening in perspective. No one, it suddenly occurred to him, had ever built a street which really tapered off at the end. There was no such worldview. It was more dreadful than despair. He imagined two endlessly tall blind gray walls closing in at an acute angle and, between them, a solitary man who was no longer looking back. He went slowly toward the corner, his steps quite short now because he knew this was the end. Everything was now behind him: life and love and trust … and what used to be known as happiness. He was sentenced to live until he reached the corner, but he couldn’t stop because it was
time
itself that drove him on. He tried zigzagging, discovering the merciful dimension of width. But it, too, grew ever shorter, ever more yielding, ever more inclined to disappear in a mathematical zero. And the zero was the gallows noose, the rifle volley at the wall, the guillotine’s blade, and the severed head was the period that rolled along to the end of the sentence. A bloody, protruding, bitten-through tongue—and the end.

He spotted them from afar as they strolled in confidence down the colorless streets surrounding a block of police buildings which sporadic passersby eyed with suspicious and naïve courage, asserting their own innocence.
ATMAN
held her arm tucked under his with ostentatious intimacy and was speaking quietly to her, his mouth near her ear. He was not telling her funny stories, Viviana was not laughing. Indeed she had her head inclined toward his the better to hear him.

He didn’t remember to be surprised by the encounter. He himself was wandering around obeying a strange force of motion. Behind those gray walls of government property with barred windows at night old favorites could be heard played on a gramophone. Noisy music overhead, blaring through the attic windows. Underneath there yawned dark inner courtyards, salvation-bringing chasms of desperate heroism. Down there, on the silent, dull concrete, thudded the last answers to questions that had been plied to the musical accompaniment.