Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (72 page)

“Yes indeed, Eustachius—which is why I’ve chosen you for this ceremony.”

“What accursed ceremony?” Melkior was angry. He had a flash of “revelation”: he was setting me up all along! Priming his “despair” as a trap, to have me fly into his embrace with “avowals.”

“It’s not ‘accursed,’” Maestro went serious again, “it’s a sad ceremony, perhaps even a
last tribute
to a man … or a former man.”

What’s
this
piece of buffoonery for the benefit of? Doesn’t sound like a joke … but then he’s a past master of hoaxes … Melkior was being cautious. He waited in silence.

“My laughter has misdirected your thoughts, Eustachius, which is a pity.” Maestro sat down heavily on a chair and dropped his head between his palms. (“The Great Confession posture,” thought Melkior with alarm.) “You will now find it hard to believe what I have to say, and there’s a great deal to be said.” Maestro filled his glass with brandy. Melkior also filled his (Might make it easier to listen to him). “That’s the spirit,” smiled Maestro. “Your good health, then. Only I’ll have to cut the brandy with beer, for I wouldn’t want you, sober Eustachius, to take this for drunken prattle … and also because I have … other reasons,” he added with a kind of worried hesitation. “She was married at the time to a colleague of mine, he used to work for our paper as sports editor. A young, cheerful, shallow journalist; spent more of his time at stadiums, swimming pools, playing fields, than at the office. The cult of the body. That’s how he found her, body and all—at some playing field or other, or was it at a swimming meet, breaststroke or backstroke, it now makes no difference which, but it would have been a … backstroke kind of thing, and married her … rather, he took the precious body home and put it in his bed. Like a sporting health deity,
mens sana in corpore sano
, that was a frequent tag in his athletic articles. But don’t think I hated him, honorable Eustachius … I only envied him, for reasons which are presumably still clear to you. He seemed to have a great deal of respect—you might even say liking—for me. He was forever inviting me, dragging me home for coffees, lunches, dinners, being a pest … in the beginning! But later on she joined in, and I came to look forward to visiting with them: a ‘home away from home’ (I’d become something of a household pet), not to mention the wonderful hostess, you’d think every object would like to caress her as she went by … (Melkior failed to stifle a sigh) … anyway, I got to dropping in uninvited, at all times of day, just to see her. She would receive me with childish delight, laugh at my every word, even when nothing I’d said was funny: she thought it was ‘witty’ and wished to show she had got the ‘point.’ Only later on did it dawn on me that I’d been playing the role of prattling entertainer … I was good at it then, I was inspired, made happy by her laughter, by the enjoyment of the superb body, I was seeing ‘soul’ there, would you believe it? I didn’t drink much in those days, just enough to get my tongue loosened and my fancy prancing, but even that was very genteel, always strictly within the bounds of bourgeois good manners. I tell you, I used to shave and bathe, change my shirts … I didn’t look like this at all.”

Maestro rubbed his forehead in a spasmodic gesture of despair, finished his drink and dropped his head between his hands again. He then gave a cruel and dry laugh: “Love …” he scoffed. “No one speaks to us with such feather-brained fickleness as love: it makes of us Apollos one moment and losers the next. In her company there, it seemed to me she was finding me ‘interesting’ (of course, I use that cautious term now that it’s all ‘water under the bridge’), and when she saw me out with a ‘do come again’ I felt dismissed as a servant who had done his day’s work. But I was grateful to her even for that: my love found in that invitation some ‘slyly concealed promise.’”

“Well, did you tell her eventually?” said Melkior, unable to contain himself.

His voice woke Maestro: he raised his head, looking at Melkior with a strange hatred—look who’s here!—as if he had only then remembered Melkior’s presence. He then laughed with scoffing viciousness:

“Did I tell her what, Eustachius …?” Melkior heard the implicit attribute “the Blockhead,” too. And said nothing.

“Tell her, indeed …” went on Maestro maliciously. “I didn’t have to, did I? She saw it herself … and proceeded to have fun.”

“At your expense?”

“No, at the expense of the City Savings Bank!” snapped back Maestro in irritation. “Don’t mock me, Eustachius. I may be floating in formaldehyde tomorrow,” he went on gloomily, his voice breaking with agitation. Melkior’s heart constricted. I mustn’t leave him alone tonight, even if it means sitting up until … “So please restrain, if you can, your pleasure at my disgrace. I’m sinking to lizard level under your very eyes, and all you can think of is cracking jokes!”

“My dear Maestro,” cried Melkior magnanimously, “nothing could be farther from my mind …”

“Good, because I’m not addressing what is far from your mind,” went on Maestro with kind composure, “I’m addressing your mind itself, the very center and core of your reason, capable of full understanding. Too late did I get wise to her perfidious little game, that is to say only after I’d given my hopes and fantasies free rein: well, why not? Women had been known, in certain exceptional cases, suddenly to appreciate spiritual qualities as well, perhaps for originality’s sake, or simply out of defiance … I was imagining with sweeping breadth.”

“Well, perhaps she did appreciate you?” said Melkior timidly.

“Eustachius, if you’re not making fun of me and looking only to console yourself, then I suggest you turn around and spit three times, as though a black cat had just crossed your path. Appreciate me? Ho, ho, ho …” ho-ho’d Maestro out of his poisoned gorge. “She appreciated athletes proficient in various disciplines. As I found out when it was too late. Legs, shoulders, biceps. … Even good coxswains—good in the literal sense, I mean. As to how highly I was being appreciated … or, since we’re using business terms, depreciated … well, listen and I’ll tell you. I was alone with her in their flat, on a Saturday evening, her husband had left for somewhere out in the sticks to cover a Sunday match, that was why I’d chosen that particular day. ‘Chosen’ for what? Well, I couldn’t answer that one even today and yet I still say ‘chosen.’ I had been alone with her before, late into the night, sipping a drink or two, chatting away, entertaining her, and everything had been so, well,
normal. …
But that evening some demon got hold of me: I kept feeling I had to make a move, I have no idea which way. Do something? Say something?—I don’t know, but it had me hobbled, I couldn’t move, I kept shoving my hands into my pockets, in shame, in fear, spouting drivel, lamely, being boring. Looking all the time, unblinkingly, at her knees, well-rounded, full (you’ve seen those knees!) and watching out for the moments when she crossed her legs, to slip my gaze into that holy semi-darkness … She noticed this and got going with her rotten game. She’d worked it all out while I was sitting there across from her, you’ll see.” Maestro took a sip of brandy and cleared his throat; the butt in the corner of his mouth had gone out long before and was dangling from his lip like a slimy grub. “Interesting, eh, Eustachius … (Melkior had his attention stretched from ear to ear) and instructive for the coming generations of men. She might have been in a bit of a fix herself, as you will see later, well, she could always have sent me off, asked me to leave, said she was tired … but no, she decided to play a little game. And so she did. Her legs began crossing and recrossing a bit too often as if competing, offering themselves, showing off; and meanwhile her skirt was getting shorter and shorter—she never once tugged it down over her knees as women will do in that kind of leg game when they’re being decent … I mean sincere … about seducing a man, but I was a stranger to that kind of thinking at the time—and on her face there was a nervously twinkling smile ‘brimming with desire for me.’ Well, how else was I to see it? I pounced wildly on her knees and started kissing them like a man demented; I wanted to make up for everything at once, for all the yearning, the waiting … I was going on mindlessly, grunting as I rootled in her lap like a ravenous piglet, and she was laughing quaintly, even stroking my head and scratching me exactly the way you scratch a piglet, in among the hairs … there was a lot of hair on my head in those days. … Suddenly, as if she’d made up her mind, she whispered soulfully in my ear ‘Wait, we’d better get undressed,’ and she glanced at her watch as she rose … I remembered that bit only later. She went to the bathroom to get undressed. I waited for her, naked, in the sitting-room, trembling … you can well imagine! There, I’m telling you all, Eustachius the Privileged, all, down to the very last mortifying detail, because that’s where her whorish triumph was—in those very details! She took a long time coming back, I could hear the sound of water in the bathroom, and I was trembling … I thought: why must they wash and groom so much for it … but with another part of my mind I was exulting in her wish for purity … of the first touch, my dearest, my great love. … That was what I was tremblingly muttering, straining my hearing for every sound in the house, frightened like a thief. … Suddenly I thought I heard someone inserting a key into the door from the outside! And true to form she came back running, flushed, ‘it’s
him,’
she whispered in despair. She took me by the hand and led me to the bedroom and pushed me inside a cupboard full of men’s clothes; came back again, threw my clothes in there, too, then locked me in and took the key out of the lock. And now, Eustachius, begins the cruel vaudeville …”

Maestro paused. He spat the butt to the floor and lit a fresh cigarette, which he immediately moved with his tongue to a corner of his mouth to keep it from impeding his speech.

“And the most miserable thing, honorable Eustachius, is that I’m sitting there in the wardrobe among the rags, choking from the smell of mothballs—and terrified I’ll give myself away … fearing for her sake! Word of honor, I didn’t give a thought to myself (fine, I’ll get through this … or choke to death, it doesn’t matter really)—it’s because of her that I’ve become all darkness and silence. Here they come, into the bedroom … I never move an eyebrow, I don’t breathe! But what’s this? It’s not his voice, the colleague’s, the husband’s! Then again, perhaps it’s only the acoustics of the wardrobe … anyway, there wasn’t much time for checking: they were at it before long. That’s how it was, Eustachius … me listening inside to the entire … entire charade … until the last gasp. I don’t remember what kind of sound I made, but it must have been some vengeful cry, because he jumped out of bed right away and began looking for me in the room. I then thumped an elbow against the wood, ‘here I am.’”

“What?” Melkior was flabbergasted, “weren’t you afraid?” He remembered his own “retreat” from Enka’s. … “He could have killed you there and then.”

“He could have indeed … but the desire for revenge was stronger, Eustachius. After all, a naked man in the wardrobe (and I’ll have you know I was a
man
in those days), locked in from the outside, and the key out of the lock!—what better evidence of a woman’s harlotry do you want? He started shouting (like the Moor demanding the handkerchief) ‘The key! The key! The key, you God-damned whore!’ and she kept giggling wildly in the bed for all she was worth—it was all a lark, you see. Try to picture the scene, Eustachius! At last, when he was utterly beside himself and lurched to strangle her, break open the cupboard door, she gave him the key. He pulled me out by the ear like a schoolboy. … But what happened? It wasn’t him, the husband—it was someone else, a huge fellow, an athletic superman! The revenge had misfired! Never mind me being pulled out by the ear, never mind me being naked (asthenic, intellectual build, with a bit of paunch in the bargain), never mind her laughing (and why shouldn’t she: just imagine it—two naked fools!) … the revenge, the revenge had fallen flat! God, why did I ever bellow inside that cupboard? In the end, after he’d taken a better look at me, he joined in the laughter himself. He crawled into bed next to her and the pair of them, covered, proceeded to jeer at my naked self. … In that case, I thought, miserable and bare-assed as I was, retrieving my clothes from the cupboard, in that case, the whore’s ball will come to an end one day. And I did put an end to it.”

“You got your revenge!” exclaimed Melkior aligning himself wholeheartedly with Maestro.

“You bet I did, Eustachius, of course I did! Very soon, too!”

“How did you do it?”

“Through a second vaudeville, one with a dramatic ending and this time directed by me!”

“How did you …”

“The end justified the means. Don’t hold it against me, Eustachius—I used an anonymous letter. Instead of me, it was the avenging husband who hid in the cupboard. Fully clothed, of course. And armed with a toy pistol, just to be able to throw them out into the street naked.”

Melkior was listening with a feeling of personal satisfaction: he was entirely in the “avenger’s” shoes; he didn’t even mind the “anonymous letter.”

“Surely you invented that bit?” He wished to be sure of his satisfaction.

“Do you think, Eustachius, that I could deprive myself of such an occasion to gloat? I was standing right there as Adam and Eve were evicted from the Garden of Eden … and I cackled like an infernal demon, I assure you, I howled to make it sound as malevolent as possible.”

“Did he see you?” Melkior was hankering for the details.

“The spouse? No, he slammed the gate shut as soon as they were out … it was only then that I appeared, hee, heeee …”

“Did the fellow recognize you?”

“Hah, that was the only fly in the ointment. It was not
the same fellow
, it was someone else again, a subtler type, a master of the racquet … Word has it that he’s now coaching an African ruler in the game.”

“And how did she behave?”

“Innocence incarnate. Covering her instruments with her hands … Oh, it was one of the greatest scandals of the day! You can imagine how I wrote it up for Yesterday in Town: ‘Adam and Eve Hit the Street’! The Old Man commended me. …” Melkior was not enthused by Maestro’s gloating. So this is the story of Viviana … (It was as if this were a source of “fresh relief” and “final liberation”) … unless Maestro’d invented it all? Well, hadn’t I buried her already? Oh yes,
I have buried my dead love …