Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (69 page)

Over the herd of low hovels that had dug themselves into the ground up to their knees in modesty and impoverished shame there loomed self-assuredly but quite unconvincingly a dark five- or six-story monster …

“What’s that thing doing here?” said Melkior in surprise.

“It used to be a storage facility for the bastards of the city’s bon vivants,” replied Maestro, the Inferno guide. “This is where unwed mothers used to wait for the fruits of their sinful loves to be born. Here bawled the unacknowledged counts, barons, dukes, in the arms of their mothers, crazy virgins. Of course, everything in noble penury, in rags worn with dignity. At this point, few of the old-timers are on speaking terms with each other, they’re like Russian émigrés —it’s beneath them to speak to
just anyone.
Now and then they jump from the top stories; they’re the
real thing
, the ones who don’t go for suicide notes and shit like that. But there are also the snobs—jumping from the second floor, feet first of course, into the grass. Breaking bones, getting their heads smashed … They leave their ‘life stories’ behind with detailed ‘pedigrees’—eager for a headline, of course …”

“And you write them up …”

“Yes, I do them that small favor—they take some risk after all … Some of them actually succeed.”

“Why, it’s … How can you live here?” Melkior was horrified, “… it’s a suicide house!”

“No, why? It’s a kindergarten!” laughed Maestro with malevolent glee. “You say what you like, it has a certain charm all its own. The charm of the waltz. The
upper-story
types don’t do it all that often, and the
lower-story
types … heh-heh … There’s this ‘Baron Sigismund.’
Si-gis-mund is not to blaaame for setting girrrls hearts aflaaame …
” all of a sudden Maestro launched into a hoarse rendition of a number from the operetta
The White Horse Inn
, but presently grew serious again “… who has jumped grassward twice. The first time it was trouble with the ladies. He wears a pencil moustache and a monocle, all our fifty-year-old virgins (we’ve got a lot of those) are crazy about him; there was nothing for him to do but jump. The second time he jumped because of the fourth partition of Poland, the autumn before last. A nobleman and a knight! Knows all of Sienkiewicz by heart—but doesn’t know a word of Polish.
Kobieta
and
herbata—the
two Polish words I know—mean
woman
and
tea
, respectively … I also know the word
bardzo …
it doesn’t mean
quickly
the way
brzo
means in Croatian. … I forget what it means.
Szesdziesiat piec
means sixty-five. … Sigismund doesn’t even know what
szesdziesiat piec
means, but that doesn’t keep him from attempting suicide over Poland, Pan Podbipieta strike him. But what was I going to … oh yes, I was going to say this is a true ‘home of the gentry,’ indeed a house of knights.”

“Speaking of which, how’s the knightly nose?” Melkior halted at the entrance.

“I’d already forgotten about it. But it seems to be feeling quite well in its larger-than-life-size like a statue in the middle of a town square. But what have you stopped for, Eustachius? Afraid of the dark in the stairwell? Wait, I’m going to strike a light; you can go up after me.”

“I’m not coming up with you, Maestro,” Melkior barely managed to spit out the words; he knew they were going to sadden Maestro. “I’m sorry, but I really …”

“What, you don’t mean to come up?” mumbled Maestro in poignant disappointment. “And I thought … You promised me so long ago! I’d been looking for you all evening, there was this Corso business, too …” he seemed to have pointed to his nose in the dark, “and now you won’t …”

Melkior felt sorry. It was as if Maestro had put out a hand, begging for alms. … Fear of loneliness? The suicide house? What is it he wants tonight? To put himself to death in a
brand new original medicinally pure
fashion? He spoke mockingly about jumping from
upper
and
lower
windows. He’s against jumping.

“Do come, Eustachius, for half an hour only,” pleaded Maestro. He plucked a candle stub out of his pocket and lit it. “Here, I’ll walk ahead and light the way. … I won’t keep you long.” Melkior followed him upstairs. “And the way back … there’s a roundabout, over there, a proper road. Pavements and electric lights,” he laughed in a way that seemed almost shy.

The stairwell reeked of stale cabbage, urine, and unwashed women. How can you have any kind of “medicinally pure” death in here? Melkior was nauseated by the cocktail of smells.

Clambering up the stairs on the wall behind them were two huge, terrifying hunchbacks. Melkior glimpsed their escort out of the corner of his eye. He turned around: he saw two quiet, patient gorillas, long-armed, noseless … we’re following you to the zoo.

“Have a look, Eustachius. Behind each of these doors,” he gestured at a row of doors in long dark corridors, “lives an exemplar, usually single, of those bastard gentlefolk
in noble penury, in rags worn with dignity.
The life of a convent—the cell being what is known as a
room with cooking facilities;
independence fiscal and otherwise … I now recommend a quiet ascent,” warned Maestro in a whisper, “we’re entering the habitat of street vendors of holy pictures, picture postcards, and writing paper—but at this late hour they might offer us interesting collections of pictures for the single man. They serve (for those who like them) as inspiration for solipsistic pleasures—
Ramona, give my soul its peace and quiet …
”

Melkior cast a furtive glance at his gorilla: what was it doing? It hunched its back, compressed itself, poised. … Maestro lifted the candle, the creatures crouched on the wall, bowing to the light.

“Here, Eustachius, behind this door,” whispered Maestro, “breathes the knightly soul of Baron Sigismund. If we hold our breath we might hear Andrzej Kmicic decapitating Tartars. Ssss …” he put his ear to the door. “No, Pan Wolodiowski’s wife is dead—he’s crying.”

“What is he—mad?”

“Depends on your viewpoint. Do you find Don Quixote mad? This one is fond of knights, too. We’ve strayed too deep, Eustachius the Myrrh-Exuding, into belle-esprit-ism of the ovine variety. Grazing on daisies in meadows
—she loves me, she loves me not
—exactly like sheep and goats, like meek Bethlehem sheep. Dainty souls in quatrains, in crowns of sonnets, ahs and ohs and
love that never palls …
what a load of balls! Whereas they charged tanks armed with spears,
credo quia absurdum. …
”

“Who did?”

“Who? The knights, that’s who! The Pans! Skrzetuski, Wolodiowski … never mind their names, the awakened forefathers! At Kutno, at Kutno was where the spearmen, the cavalrymen … we carried the story in our paper … went in against the Teutons, like Boleslaw the Crooked Mouth in the Middle Ages,” Maestro crooked his own mouth in honor of the royal moniker.

Crooked
Mouth—that one is missing from my Great Rulers list, thought Melkior.

“How long have you been such a knightly person then?”

“Perhaps since birth, Eustachius. I may be a Porphyrogenite, too, or a Leopold the Landless—this remains to be seen. You’ll know me in my full glory yet. Here we are, Eustachius.” Maestro held the candle aloft: halt! In the flickering candlelight, with its presence-of-death paraffin odor, there was a photograph stuck on the door: a bon vivant with a pencil moustache and a smile under a rakishly angled Maurice Chevalier straw hat.

“And this …”

“… is me, God bless the master of this house. Dating from the age of the Charleston, Eustachius:
adieu, Mimi. …
In lieu of a visiting card with a nobleman’s boar or some other ferocious animal. Enter my kingdom, Eustachius!” But Maestro bumped into something inside, in the dark; his candle went out in the draft when he opened the door. “Ah yes, the warning. Wait a moment.” He was striking matches and looking for the candle, but the matches went out, too, in the gust of air.

“Please stay where you are, Eustachius. There are certain small warnings here by the door. It’s my sober self in the morning asking a wardenlike question of my drunken self in the evening: where do you think you’re going, you nitwit? Thus the small
reality
of a common table blocks my way to the door opposite, which could take me to eternity. Can you see the sky? Because all this, dear Eustachius, is taking place on the fourth floor, and my angelic wings are quite stunted. …” explained Maestro from the dark, now using the blind man’s sense to grope for the oil lamp.

He’ll knock it over, spill the oil, set the house afire. …

But Melkior’s fears came to naught. Maestro lit the lamp quickly and with amazing dexterity as if he had flipped on a switch.
“Buona sera,”
he said with a bow.

An odd mix of coffee and lamp oil smells wafted over Melkior from inside.

“Do sit down, Eustachius, anywhere you like. Everything’s clean in here, that is to say the chairs and the chest are—but don’t look at the floor, it’s fertile soil, I’m planning to plant it with tomatoes.”

The room was with a cooking stove, as he said, and the floor coated with dried mud. Soil, that is, probably fertile at that. But the seats of both chairs were freshly scrubbed, as was the lid of the enormous chest. What did he keep in there?

Melkior sat down on a chair. Perhaps the dismembered body of a woman? A victim of sadistic lust. … Has anyone seen Viviana? He looked around the room as if with an eye to discovering clues … bloodstains, a hair or two, a torn shred of an undergarment … He surprised himself with the thought—God, what rubbish!—and looked back at Maestro, confused, with a pang of guilt.

“… perhaps since birth, even,” Maestro had been saying while Melkior was not listening. “And why am I one of the prize exhibits in this museum? You think I’m not authentic … oh, oh, oh, I merit preservation in alcohol—mind, body, and all! They call it
compote
up at the clinic. If you didn’t know, how will you ever be able to eat canned fruit again, when the plums, cherries, peach slices will … ah,
merde!
Medical science has befouled all of life. Reposing in alcohol is my destiny, even if only in pieces: some details of me are bound to get into the … alcohol compote. Damn it all, I should now heave a sigh of longing as befits a true-blue tippler!”

Melkior felt uneasy: set out in his imagination as if on shelves were a row of jars with severed ears, tongues, penises. … He gave a shudder. He wished he could get away.

“You’re chilly, Eustachius. I’ll stoke the stove straight away, get you warm in no time at all.”

In one corner of the room stood a folded iron cot with a rolled straw mattress in it. Maestro pulled a whole sheaf of straw from it, fed it into the stove, arranged some cordwood on top and lit it all. The fire set up a mournful mumble under the iron burner, came to life in its grave, thought Melkior.

“Do you always pull straw from your …” he nearly said
grave
“… from your bed?”

“Indeed I do. Stupid, isn’t it? And you spotted it right off. I steal from myself, dear Eustachius, like an imbecile out of Molière, only to end up sleeping on what used to be straw, on nothing but the little souls of the burnt straw. Once I even dreamed the burning souls. There were tens of thousands of them. You can well imagine how many I’ve burned, tantamount to some Spanish Inquisitor. There were all these little burning candles going around and around my bed, singing in piping female voices
requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua …
the ‘lux
perpetua’
coming from the straw! What a ridiculous business. I woke up in cold sweat.”

He was priming the oil stove while he spoke. First he warmed it using denatured alcohol, then he pumped air in. The stove suddenly hissed, having gone out, releasing puffs of gaseous petroleum. The room filled at once with a heavy, stuffy smell.

Melkior coughed. He was breathing with difficulty, choking. He remembered Nettle’s stable and feared he might faint.

“Might we open …” he mouthed in what was nearly his last gasp.

“Why should we, Eustachius the Welcome?” wondered Maestro carrying a lit match across the room. The match went out halfway across. He went back and struck a fresh one, which also went out en route; meanwhile the primus stove was eagerly hissing as it released petroleum stench.

“It’s been airing all day, I’ve only just closed the window,” said Maestro carrying yet another match across the room. It, too, went out, of course. But he was not at all miffed—he went back to strike another one … Melkior followed the insecure little flame with anxiety. …

“Why don’t you strike a match there by the Primus instead of carrying it over?” he said in near-irritation.

“Ah, seeing to that, too, are you?” Maestro resented interference in his habits. “The matches are duds. Incidentally, it’s not really much of an invention: carrying a flame on top of a toothpick! Kitchen Prometheanship!” The “Prometheanship” was what he snuffed the fresh match with: he had blasted out the word with such seething scorn and the tiny flame passed away like a premature baby.

“Everything smells of petroleum in here. …” grumbled Melkior.

“Everything?” asked Maestro with curious irony. “Ahh, Eustachius the Sensitive, you’re acting like a royal personage visiting a poor subject. Hold your royal nose for an instant … there, it’s lit!”

“And your cursed nose is ripe for a splash. Have you got a mirror?”

“So that’s what it is! You’re afraid of me … bloody as I am? What a physiognomy, eh? No, I’ve gone without a mirror for two decades, give or take. Since … the days of the Charleston. Why do I need one? To study the reflection of my beauty?”

“Why should I be afraid of you?” and yet an icy snake slithered up Melkior’s back, why was he out looking for me tonight?

“Just saying,” laughed Maestro and the swollen red nose made his smile mournful, clownish. “Children are afraid of ugly faces. I’m fond of you, Eustachius the Artless, and … perhaps for that very reason … am giving you a wee bit of a scare, boo. …”