Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Ranko Marinković

  “Would you be a dear and walk me part of the way, Mr. Melkior?” The idea was to crush Mr. Adam. One, she had no further use for him that day; and two, he had been behaving maliciously. She was teaching him a lesson.

  “All right, Mic,” he jumped up cracking his knuckles, “would you like me to tell you the whole truth?” There was a momentary flicker in his close-set eyes, something like a wish for tremendous revenge. But a smile broke over his features and showed large spaced-out teeth—Chinese, thought Melkior.

  This brought her back to the sofa with a bump. Her eyes were fixed on the cloud above her. She was expecting a stroke of lightning. But the cloud acquired a golden rim as the sun and the skies smiled.

  “You interrupted me,” he said sweetly, his mouth full of foaming kindness. “Somebody gave me a … a nudge under the table and I woke up too early. I haven’t finished, Mic.”

  He had instantly cut short her wedding feast in the far-off glass castle. Horrified, she watched the Demiurge’s skittish teeth with which he was about to slash the throat of the promised happiness. She was imploring No with all her body, No, Mac, have mercy. She saw breakdown, loss, finito. Oh how hard it was to find this damned Happiness!

  “Because I still have a few things to tell you about what I saw …”

  “No, Mac, please! Don’t spoil it for me … don’t spoil …” She burst into sobs before ATMAN the Terrible, looking at him eagerly, tearfully, with those very eyes he had intended to display for Melkior’s benefit. Indeed he signaled Melkior to have a look.

  The poor girl. Melkior was about to give her a protecting hug but her eyes sent him back to the position of the defeated. Her eyes! How right was ATMAN-Nero, the poet of those tears. He marveled at ATMAN’S cruelty.

  “How about a read from your palm? … So I can tell you how it all will turn out in the end?” He reached for her hand. She hid both behind her back. “Come on, it’s not so bad.” He was smiling up there, ATMAN the savage god, all-powerful. Flickering in his hands was a wretched little longing for Happiness.

  Melkior stood. She gave him an imploring look; she was about to stop him, but the words died on her lips. ATMAN paid him no heed-he was alone with her, he had simply excluded Melkior. He’d invited me in to take part in the maneuvers, Melkior concluded, and muttered some sort of goodbye as a brief prayer to ward off a spell. Out on the stairs, taking two steps at a time, he fled, wounded, to his room.

  You’ll get them tomorrow, your betel leaves, the redheaded devil promises the first mate, the Nirvana angel. Tomorrow, opium paradise. He will be content with betel limbo, anything to avoid being cut to pieces with the crystal-sharp geometry of certainty wielded by the night’s logic. He who has walked all the way down the Master’s Eightfold Path is now offered a betel leaf by the redheaded Asclepian scoundrel to cover his shameful fear of oblivion. Oh Purna, why don’t I have your spiritual strength in this wilderness? You, too, are leaving for wild parts inhabited by what might be cannibals, like this savage archipelago of mine. The Master warned you:

  Purna, those are a fierce people, cruel, hasty in anger, wild, violent. If they hurl evil and abusive words in your face, if they oppose you in anger, what will you think?

  If they hurl evil and abusive words in my face, I shall think, Those must be good people, for they hurl bad words at me but do not strike me or throw stones at me.

  But if they strike you and throw stones at you, what will you think then?

  I shall think, Those must be good people, lovable people, for they are not thrashing me with rods or swords.

  But if they thrash you with a rod and a sword?

  Those are good people, I shall think, lovable people, who thrash me with a rod and a sword but do not take my life.

  But what if they do take your life?

  Those are good people, I shall think, lovable people, who with so little pain rid me of a body full of filth.

  Good, Purna, said Master Gautama, then you can go to those barbarians. Go, Purna, and, being liberated, liberate them; in being comforted, comfort them. When you reach Nirvana, help others reach it, too.

  Oh Great Gautama, how am I to break free of the accursed wish for existence? I know the sacred truth about pain, but I love my pain. Pain tells me, “I exist, and as long as I exist so shall you. I am your eye, your hand, your bowels, your umbilical cord that mother bound you with to life. When I am not there, you live only to await me with your body, your thought, your destiny. I am your being, I am your self-awareness, I am you. Do you want joy, laughter, pleasure? I shall give them to you. I give the day, for I am the night, I give the light, for I am the darkness, I give love, for I am death. I am everything.” Give me pain, Oh Great Gautama!

  For everything is so clearly meant to torment existence. The causality chains, the conceptual crosswords, the syllogistic snares. The Ars Magna, Lulus’s mind-dimming invention, the idiotic code of reason. The Ars Combinatoria, a cardsharper’s trick. The conniver, the broker, the fence, the pimp Terminus Medius, the con man with a fake identity, with a twofold role—now subject S, now predicate P, now you see me, now you don’t—the magician, the charlatan, the lover of the two notorious whores—the Premises—the mysterious character M, the anonymous father of the imbecilic son known as Conclusio. Not to mention the grandfathers—Principles and the aunts—the Categories! Ten aunts all told!

  Oh, Aristotle, Aristotle! sighs the first mate. He feels horribly the identity of his body through the advance on the pain of his soon-to-come transsubstantiation into cannibal meal and muck while the Stagirite invites him to kiss the Identity Principle before the transmutation mystery, so as not to pass into a new substance in mere terms of bodily pain, by way only of the senses, the way cattle do. Consciousness ought to know that a body dumped into the cauldron by the cannibals is not just a sum of sensations, a chaos of pains, a slimy lump of fear; this is the very it itself— it the theoretical Consciousness, ever present in its continuity, it the logical self which may, if it so chooses, deduce a syllogism according to the immaculate BARBARA the scholastic virgin: Every man is mortal—I am a man—I am mortal.

  This charlatan-magician-mystifier is called Man. What, then, is Man? Man is Terminus M, the middle term in the syllogism of death. I am the Subject, my Predicate is the boiling cauldron, my flesh, the cannibals’ teeth, and, under a banana tree, a freshly hatched, still steaming banana. That is my Nirvana, Oh Gautama!

  He felt his body in his stomach with a Puritan wish to vomit. Autophagy: quite a good word, he thought, you can enjoy it cooked or raw.

  Who wants to go on living here? Everyone. Everyone who tonight would suck up their own blubber, gnaw off their own flesh, swallow up all that is bodily and phenomenal about their persons, leaving only the pure being an sich, mouthless and gulletless (they will have eaten up their own selves beforehand), an elusive, inedible, conscious Monad provided with Arielian powers of revenge: all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful. All this, of course, only for the duration, until the danger passes. Whereupon kindly restore my body, my mouth and gullet and bowels and all the rest of things bowelly, bowel-conduitly and bowel-pleasing; kindly restore all the blisses, all the treasures and pleasures of Myself the Phenomenon. That was the deal. Oh yes, that was how it stood! Here, I just thought of something—how about being reincarnated as a reptile, a crocodile, eh? Yum-yum, eating cannibals on the phenomenal level, your mind an sich living in ideas all the while? What a samsara!

  Now to extend the circle of pleasures to include snoring. The old seaman is releasing what you might call historical fatigue. Sucking in strength from the tropical night, sleep, peace, charging his batteries for the morrow. Who knows what tomorrow may bring?

  “Give him a nudge, Doctor, wake him up!” comes the captain’s imperious voice.

  “First of all, why me?” hisses the Asclepian through a malicious snicker.

  “Secondly, why wake up someone who may be enjoying a peaceful night’s sleep for the first time in his life? And thirdly, the bridge
went down with the good ship Menelaus. We are but different dishes on the local menu depending on which way our hosts’ tastes run and that is all the difference between us.”

  “Don’t forget you’re still under my command. In a time of war, I might add. This means I have additional authority. You know the penalty for insubordination in wartime, do you not?”

  “In wartime? Whom are we at war with?”

  “Out here, we are a part of our country under wartime mobilization. We have been captured by the enemy and have POW status.”

  “Out here we are a part of nature in nature, sir—if I can still call you sir. What enemy do you have in mind? These are the Friendly Islands and we are the food for our friends, Mr. Morsel. We are the provisions.”

  The first mate laughed mordantly in his part of the dark. The agent and the chief engineer fell to lashing at the doctor with unrestrained hatred. Your very skin shows you’re not one of us, God Himself has excluded you, marked you with your bedbug stench, they spoke into the darkness to the doctor and only regretted being unable to see his face. But it was just as well for them not to have seen it. His face was awash with satisfaction: keep talking, keep talking, you chosen lot, you clean lot, you beautiful lot! You tasty, fragrant, aromatic gourmet meals. You tasty treats! Blessed be thou, my primordial Stench! To me art thou like to the turtle’s armor, the hedgehog’s spine, the snail’s shell, the hare’s speed, the bear’s paw, the buffalo’s horn, the lion’s strength, the snake’s venom, the fox’s cunning, the bird’s wing, the cuttlefish’s ink, the salamander’s hid-eousness. There are anteaters, fly-eating swallows, chameleons, spiders, all kinds of insectivores, but there are no eaters of bedbugs. I am a bedbug among humans! A foul bedbug, the nocturnal prowler of your vigils, the vampire of your fevers, the tormentor of your insomnias. I crawl all over your pretty dreams and suck your pure, wholesome, sweet blood. Oh you archbishops of beauty, the hour of revenge is upon us!

  “Wake him!” bellows the captain in the end, for the old seaman’s snoring is nearly furious.

  “How on earth can you sleep like that, man?” the chief engineer reproaches him gently after giving him a good shake.

  “What else am I to do, sir? It’s night …” the seaman says innocently.

  “Yes, but you are snoring!” yells the captain.

  “Oh really? Sorry, skipper, I wasn’t aware,” the seaman apologizes in earnest. “I must be keeping you up. People do tell me I make an unholy ruckus. Never heard it myself, but the boys in the crew, they often told me I roared. I’ve been stuck with it since my youth. Even had my nose operated on, they cut out half a pound of flesh, broadened the nostrils and all—well, it was for naught, I went on roaring like before. I always snore, gentlemen, when I sleep on my back. There’s nothing for it. All you can do is turn me on my side.”

  “That’s not the point, blast it!” flares the captain. “What I mean is, how can you snore like that, do you understand me, as if you haven’t a care in the world?”

  “I don’t rightly know, sir. I expect it comes to me natural. At any rate, it’s not on purpose, I swear on my …”

  “Oh, the blessed fool,” sighs the captain.

  “Could be, sir,” the seaman sighs, too, sincerely. “As for my snoring, you just flip me on my side, if you don’t mind, and it’ll stop right there. If I could hear it I’d stop it myself. Thing is, you can’t hear yourself. Funny, isn’t it? Everyone can hear it, everybody gets woken up—except your man. Funny.” And the old fellow laughs artlessly at his discovery. “Everyone but the damned snore artist,” he repeats to himself, finding it amusing. And he drops off to sleep again. With a chuckle.

  “God, he’s laughing again!” rages the captain. “Can’t you get it through your thick skull, idiot, that those blacks are going to boil you and devour you just as the devils boil and devour sinners in Hell? That it may well happen tomorrow? And you are chuckling away instead of giving it a thought!”

  “What’s the use of my thinking, sir? I know I’m a great sinner, so if these devils over here eat me up, at least those devils down there won’t. Shame about the head cook though. He was a good man. He would’ve gone to heaven if these fellows here hadn’t eaten him. No, honestly—it was bloody unfair, eating such a man. Such a nice man. Many’s the time—I’ll say it now—many’s the time he let me have leftovers from the officers’ mess. Have a nibble, old-timer, tasty stuff. Very tasty indeed, sir, very tasty indeed, thank you very much, sir, for being so kind. Not to mention where he was quite the joker, sir, our Mr. Head Cook! One day I was standing at …”

  “Look at him—wants to tell anecdotes to pass the time,” mutters the captain.

  The old seaman sees that nobody is listening, turns over on his side, and falls contentedly asleep in an instant.

  The next day a feeble hope is timidly born inside the castaways that things might take a proverbial turn for the better. No cannibal lunch is in the offing. What was the cook’s stake the day before is now covered with smoking green branches—to repel poisonous insects, thinks the Asclepian, a wise measure. If only the cook remembered to make a religious speech in front of the cauldron, he would be proclaimed a saint, or at least a martyr in a hundred years’ time; his name would be mentioned in all the cathedrals in Christendom. As it turns out, all that is left behind him are the swollen bellies from the Menelaus earnestly cursing him for having so painstakingly fattened them with death. No preparations for anything like a feast are under way in the village. The natives dawdle idly around the huts, stepping out of the way of naked women who slap them jokingly on their shiny black behinds. Mothers suckle their young with dull indifference, some of them catering to two at a time, one at each breast. The bigger children enviously watch the feeding of the tiny sucklings and divert milk drops with a finger from the greedy little mugs, licking their sticky sweetened fingers with gusto. A monkey whom a boy has singed with a flaming twig screams piteously in the forest. Presently his entire tribe joins him in a screeching show of solidarity, protesting in an angry chorus. Then the whole forest puts up a horrible howl. The offended monkey folk. The cannibals scoff at the impotent simian rage, hurling provocative counterhowls back. At this the monkeys’ screeching turns into a kind of general weeping in recognition of their impotence and defeat. And once again peace reigns in the jungle.

  Several natives armed with blowpipes take the castaways out of the hut and into the forest. The four naked swells from the Menelaus, using their hands as fig leaves, go through the village past the naked women with their eyes downcast in a gentlemanly manner, dying of shame. Only the first mate holds his uncaring favorite in the pedagogical embrace of his long white fingers as if teaching it elementary skills. A poor pupil, certain to flunk the easiest of tests. But that is not the point: it is just that the first mate is defying the elements. He is making humor of his misery, i.e., of the best raw material of all. But the product remains limited to personal use only as nobody else partakes of it or indeed notices it at all. Not that he minds: he keeps holding his rudder for his own account, grinning squeamishly.

  Alongside the naked men walk the two clothed (inedible) oldsters. The old seaman displayed a most brachiate curiosity, casting quick glances at the sky and his surroundings, the trees, the huts, the men, women, and children, harkening to the birdsong, the roar of the wild beasts, the sound of the wind in the treetops, and suddenly says with satisfaction, “By gum, this place don’t look half bad.” The doctor walks slightly apart from the group, as he has walked all his life. But with a difference! This time it is he who stands out, fully dressed, dandified even, aware of his terrible superiority, which he patiently flaunts to the shitty Nakeds. To that herd of stupid cattle which is shyly covering their genitals with the sorry dignity of former human convention. Stuff and nonsense! As if they’ve discovered a milder version of this damned mess! As if their sadly pendulous noses are going to shock anyone! Cause a revolt of public decency? Impinge on the moral sensitivity of those ladies walking about nak
ed themselves who pay no attention whatsoever to the presence here of this naked, exciting masculinity?

  But as soon as they set foot in the forest the first mate lets drop his wrinkled saint and starts furiously examining the flora, biting into fruits, nibbling leaves, branches, roots. Then, half out of his mind, he suddenly swings around to the doctor.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Show me the tree of knowledge!”

  “Ah,” the doctor remembers, “yes, you’re after your alkaloids. I hope we’ll be able to find something for you. Piper Bette leaves, for instance. Only I don’t know what the trunk looks like. But I do know the Areca Catechu palm. I’ve seen it before. Its nuts contain a high percentage of alkaloids as well. The thing’s quite tall though, and betel nuts grow at the top, you’ll have to climb.”

  “Trying to scare me?” laughs the first mate. “Climbing is a seaman’s skill I still haven’t forgotten.”

  “I daresay. Only will these people allow you to climb that high?”

  “Well, where could I possibly flee to? The sky?”

  “Don’t ask me—ask them. However,” the redheaded Asclepian adds slyly, “I happen to know a man whom they would allow to climb.”

  “You?” said the first mate, looking him up and down with derision. “You would climb?”

  “I wouldn’t know how. I’ve never been good at the simian skills. But they wouldn’t stop the old salt.”

  “You mean they’re not going to … to cook him?” says the first mate with envy. “They’ll spare you, too,” he adds with some hesitation. “I don’t resent it, believe me. That is to say, I don’t care. Will you just look at our crew scarfing down bananas?”

  “Yes, I am looking. Carbohydrates and albumens. They’ll be pummeling their bellies mea culpa tonight.”

  Indeed, the captain, the chief engineer, and the agent are greedily busy peeling bananas. Four-petaled peels fly about them like spent shells. Hunger has pushed aside all their awed nocturnal thoughts; they are feeding mindlessly, almost idiotically, no longer giving any thought to the death that looms so near—worse, so horrible. But all of a sudden, after a young cannibal throws down before them a fresh lot of bananas, coconuts, pineapples, mangoes, sugarcane marrow, and stickily sweet pink Indian figs, the captain seems to have had a brainstorm. He smacks his convex and surely intelligent brow hard: