Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (71 page)

“Don’t frown, bookish Eustachius—the book does not deserve our respect. Verily, verily I say unto thee that thought, imagination, feeling, have gone dull in lead and resin. The book has imposed on the spirit a stupid, heavy (particularly heavy!) and totally unsuitable corpus. Did you ever wonder, featherweight Eustachius, why the book needed such weight? If there’s anything ridiculous in this world, it’s that weight. We glorify Guttenberg … for what? For transforming thought into a brick. To conserve the thoughts inside! Mummies, dried cods.
Bourgeoises, garamonds, minions, italics …
for thoughts to be ‘clear,’ to be preserved for generations to come. Homer and Socrates never wrote a single letter between them, and yet they were preserved for generations to come. Did Socrates need italics to make his thoughts clearer? While our Don Fernando drives typesetters up the wall with his italics and boldface, the better to set out some par-ti-cu-lar thought for posterity. Pharaoh Don Fernando (life—health—power) wants his mummy to be prepared carefully for distant centuries … but what of it? In a year or two it’ll be nothing but a dried cod—with no head, of course.”

Melkior was grinning. He was enjoying the image of the “headless dried cod.” A malicious imp of revenge was having its field day inside him. He tried to set his own “modesty” against Don Fernando’s “pharaonic grandeur” and bask in it.

“Smiling, Eustachius? You think his mummy will be anything more than a dried fish?”

“It will indeed,” replied Melkior ambiguously. “Don Fernando has some engaging notions. He has expounded them to you, too …”

“Expounded … yes …” Maestro’s mind had already moved on to something else. “Death disgusts me, Eustachius. I’m imaginative enough, I can picture my own skeleton, and it’s a horrible sight. Take a look, Eustachius—is my bald spot dirty?” he bent his head low: the denuded pate featured a mud-dirtied bruise, “I like cleanliness.”

“Why, they hit you on the head, too!”

“No, no, of my own volition I lay down on my back … in the middle of the road, in lieu of a protest rally, for freedom of movement …”

Maestro was speaking rapidly, in a muddle. He meant to hide from Melkior that he had been thrown out of the café head first. His “protest lie-down” was an ad-lib.

“But you’ve got a bruise on the top of your head?”

“Never mind, it’s not a bruise, it’s my beret leaking blue dye …”

“It’s muddy. You should clean it. The nose, too.”

“The pate I’ll clean, of course. But not the nose!” he declared defiantly.

“The nose is not dirty—it’s bloody, which makes all the difference. Tomorrow I’ll appear, bloody nose and all, at the Corso when the whole crowd is there.”

“But what’s the use of parading it in public?”

“What’s the use? It’ll be a public indictment! I’ll show the culprit up (as nose is my witness), I’ll thrash him, I’ll raze his nose to the ground! Right there, in front of everyone! Perhaps even Městrović will be there!”

Again Melkior felt the burn of the evening’s café tableau: Freddie with Viviana. “Why did Freddie go for you? Was he alone?”

“What do you mean, alone? Everyone was on his side! All the waiters, the cooks … even the cleaning lady in charge of the restrooms. Aah, if he’d been alone, then
his
nose would have looked like this!”

His nose is now grazing on her fragrances … his imagination tormented Melkior.

“I mean, did Freddie have company?” he was purposely stoking Maestro’s hatred.

“What’s the thrust of this diplomacy, Eustachius?” Maestro gave a sly wink. “Trying to set me up, eh? You know who he was sitting with, heh-heh, and that’s why you’re asking.”

Melkior felt a blush sear his face. Well, it’s a lucky thing the old boy’s so drunk … also, he was relying on the poor light of the oil lamp.

“Don’t go red, Eustachius. Or perhaps white, I can’t see in this light, but it’s just as nice. Out with the soul, that’s what I like.”

Melkior was crestfallen and silent as a sinner. Maestro sank a brandy, then poured an entire bottleful of beer down his throat. Where does he find room for it all, wondered Melkior in passing, but he was not really giving it much thought. Again he felt the disorder
inside
him. He keenly wanted to get up and leave (he’ll get me all confused), if only to go back to his room, or to walk through town in the rain, to count his steps and his thoughts … to think alone, walled in by the ramparts of his endless solitude. Maestro now appeared to him, in the dim lamplight, to be an unreal man whom he had invented and projected out before him cinema style. Maestro was still talking, but what reached Melkior was only sound in the strange acoustics of a dream; the words themselves he couldn’t follow.

“Have you ever thought about it, Eustachius?”

Melkior said nothing. He watched Maestro’s pale skull move up there, above his own head and, how strange … thoughts are happening “in there,” words emerging, moving through space and ringing in my ears, but my brain is no longer taking them in. He wanted to get up and go, but instead he stretched his legs under the table and, yawning, raised and lowered his elbows like a crowing rooster. Indifferently,
I couldn’t care less …

“I’ll brew coffee forthwith, fragile Eustachius. You’ll fall asleep at the table in the end, and we haven’t even got to
the subject.
I’m purposely beating around the bush. Do you think I give a fig about the burning of witches? Hah … although I was not speaking off the top of my head. Sometimes I think—for such is my life—that I was born conjoined to a twin. They cut us apart, but one of us had to die. It was he who died. And so, you see, he has been pestering me ever since. Dead alongside me, he keeps saying: let’s face it, you’re only half a man. That’s how I feel, Eustachius—I drag behind me a skeleton.”

The aroma of the coffee brought Melkior back to the real presence of things. He heard the oil stove hissing; he heard something about a skeleton, too. Who knows if Dom Kuzma is still among us? Ask Ugo, his mother might know … Well, what’s it to me even if he is … ? Hey, let him live … until Polyphemus the beast grabs ahold of the whole Earth …

“That goes for all of us nowadays … everyone’s dragging some sort of skeleton around,” said Melkior.

“Easy for you, youthful Eustachius, to speak in metaphors. But my dead man is no poetic image. Oh …” Maestro was about to exclaim, but suddenly changed his mind and beckoned Melkior to get up, “follow me, faithful Eustachius. Dante called Virgil ‘Maestro,’ too.”

He led Melkior to a small balcony “which looked out (Melkior was composing a description and chuckling at the way the balcony was ‘looking out’) over the empty outlying fields sunk into the dense wet night.” The freshness of the moist air caressed his cheeks; he inhaled deeply the smell of wet soil. From away in the darkness came the barking of dogs, and from somewhere near by, a strange buzzing sound, as if a mechanism were finely grinding the silence.

“Can you hear that, quiet Eustachius?” whispered Maestro in a kind of fear. His voice was trembling, but that could be merely due to his being drunk and chilled, thought Melkior. “Can you hear the
zzeee … zzeee … zzeee …
the villain’s sinister meditation! You’d say it was the night, speaking with the many voices of Nature … crickets, cicadas … but that’s not what it is, Eustachius, listen carefully. I listen to it night after night … It’s praying to the devil, its master … or, if there is no devil, it is praying to the stupid Power that shakes it—that’s why it’s buzzing so. Like a sinner set to trembling by God acting in him …”

Maestro was shaking all over with a kind of horror; the shakes broke his voice every now and then.

“Whatever are you talking about?” The terror moved over to Melkior. “Can’t you see its claws and tendrils? Look over there, in the distance.” Maestro was pointing a shaking hand into the dark. “Over there, over there, can’t you see the stripes scoring the sky, that’s its trail. It leads to the … country from whose bourn no traveler returns, as the Prince of Denmark once said.”

Only then did Melkior see it: quite near and level with Maestro’s balcony, perhaps only three or four meters away, was a transmission line. The black cords of thick, powerful cables boldly sliced the darkness. And the buzzing sound was coming from the pylon jutting up nearby, as tall as the building. Lightning must strike there often, thought Melkior.

“So what is there for you to be afraid of?” he said to Maestro as he would to a child, “it’s an electrical cable.”

“A
po-wer ca-ble,”
emphasized Maestro, “ ‘high voltage, danger of death.’ Down at the bottom of the pylon there’s a skull and crossbones as well, a courteous warning: don’t play with this. Then again, it could serve as an enticement. Imagine a shepherd, for instance. … Could it be that you’re cold, tender Eustachius? (he himself was trembling like a leaf), let’s go back in, Eustachius, let’s go back in. So the shepherd is up on a mountain, a sodomite, a dolt, living among the lightning bolts, and out of boredom he shimmies up the pylon to grab that porcelain cup, possibly to bring it as a vandal’s trophy back to his village. Or just to spite the warning, displaying some preposterous form of heroism, think I’m scared of you?—and there he is up top, a fried imbecile, his abandoned sheep bleating down below. A folk fool.”

“Why ‘folk’?” protested Melkior without enthusiasm, “a fool, an
individual
fool.”

“Oh no, dear Eustachius, a folk fool. An individual fool is Fred die for one … and let’s say Ugo, too. Or … let’s not say Ugo, he’s more of a nut case, a concept which has some charm to it. But folk stupidity is thick. It’s as if it were a general duty to be a standard folk fool to a certain ethnic degree; it’s of a piece with folk costumes and songs and dances. Folklore and ‘patrimonial treasure.’ Just take a close look at those dull, cruel, ugly (particularly ugly!) ‘folksy’ snouts. They’re all of a pattern: mouth mindlessly half-open as if they were forever listening to Latin Mass; and eyes small, cunning, ready for cheating and theft. Find me a single ‘folk belle’ if you can. Yes, you’ll only find one in the cow’s-milk cheese ad! No, no, country folk are ugly, cynical, and dirty.”

Melkior looked around the room with an ironic smile, then fixed his stare on Maestro in stubborn derision. Maestro looked over himself, confused, but his rhetorical certainty soon returned.

“Sure, I get the point—who am I to talk about tact and cleanliness? Everything about me is dirty, inside and out,” admitted Maestro contritely, even with a touch of embarrassment. “I’m immersed in filth, pure Eustachius, in every way. … But at least I don’t stink with the timeless stench of humanity, not with horse shit and animal rut the way barracks and schools stink … with that eternal soaked-in-pissedness. … My stench is the vile smell of an indomitable individual who doesn’t give a hoot for the rules of hygiene; my stench possibly contains poetic inspiration, the poetry of bohemianism, an aroma of freedom. Do you think a nicer … forgive me, but this is a necessary question … a nicer smell came from—all right, I’m not saying Baudelaire, but Verlaine, for instance? He would have stunk just as badly as I do and Louis XIV if they hadn’t kept splashing him with scents. Incidentally, my dear Eustachius,” sighed Maestro, melancholic, sluicing his throat with brandy, “there was a time when I used to shave as often as three times a day! I, too, used to yearn for things
tender, pure, white …
things like dainty arms around my neck, whispers of ‘darling’—‘dearest.’ And the rest of love’s liturgy …”

He was standing miserably in the middle of the room as if on trial. His eyes were cloudy, wet … with brandy or possibly tears, Melkior could not tell. But all this can just as well be a dreadful drunken bug’s labyrinth of cynicism into which he intends to draw me, only to laugh in my face if I start to believe him.

“So why didn’t you fall in love … back then when you used to shave three times a day?” added Melkior derisively “to be on the safe side”—he did not believe him.

“I … did love, Eustachius, I did love!” Maestro waved his arms weirdly, his head thrown tragically back in the manner of the grand pathetic school of acting (thought Melkior). “And what was it I loved? The rosebush, the twigs, the thorns! My sighs, my kisses ended up spiked on thorns, while others plucked the flower!” Maestro was all but howling by the end.

Damn this—it’s genuine! thought Melkior in fright, feeling another kind of horror. The
stench
business had had him disgusted, but at least it had been at the level of Maestro’s superior-in-its-own-way cynicism, which Melkior sometimes admired for its insolent originality, but this “laying the soul bare” turned his stomach in a completely different way. He disliked intimate confession; this one was all the more odious coming from a man with a bloodied nose who had often declared himself old enough to be Melkior’s father. There was something sad and dirty at the same time in Maestro’s avowal which made Melkior ashamed, and the shame made him avert his eyes to avoid looking at the wretch standing before him … as if he’d been declaring a homosexual love for me … ptui, damn it all!

Maestro wasn’t looking at him, either. Head turned away, swollen livid hands pressed against his chest, he was overcome by a spasm of despair,
here, judge me …
Stupid, stupid, stupid! raged Melkior.

“You despise me now, Eustachius,” spoke up Maestro timidly, in the voice of a spurned lover. “Well, I never really expected you to fall on my neck and join me in tears. Although, ahem …” he abruptly pulled free of the spasm and went on in his “old” derisive tone, “that would be like a scene from a French vaudeville. …”

“What would be like some scene from a French vaudeville?” asked Melkior, his eyes still away.

“Well—the two of us weeping in each other’s arms,” (Melkior shuddered at the thought) “and our beloved serviced—or for all we know
being
serviced—by a third, hollow Frederick! Ha-ha-ha …”

All of a sudden Maestro broke into dreadfully mocking and unbridled laughter, thumping Melkior on the shoulder —“fraternally.”

Melkior startled at the touch, at the laughter, but Maestro’s words appeared not to have reached his mind yet. He was staring at Maestro in dull amazement.