Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Ranko Marinković

  “There, he, too, is a man, the Mawnen fellow. You can hear him braying, struggling for his existence. He, too, to use your words, is capable of feeling. If you were to come up to him and pull his ear (just look at those ears!) he would try to hit you, perhaps even kill you, for offending him. Because he has his pride. In other words, he feels his value. He is a value, by his standards, he, Mr. Mawnen. A human value. While Michelangelo’s David in Florence, a fine figure of a nude young man (and incidentally, a masterpiece of human anatomy), large, self-assured, and proud, full of strength and daring, is not a man. He’s not capable of ‘feeling.’ He’s of stone. He isn’t even ‘human’ enough to be able to utter the nonsense word Mawnen which that little freak over there is able to say. And yet David is a value, an enormous, unique value … or perhaps he isn’t, perhaps you disagree—you said just now you didn’t care for ‘arty rocks’?”

  “I didn’t mean anything in particular, I meant it conditionally …”

  “And I say, even ‘conditionally,’ that all the Mr. Mawnens in the world, however many there may be, and I’m sure they run into the hundreds of thousands, are not worth David’s left leg. And yet, listen to what I’m going to ask you, ‘conditionally’: supposing that saving David from destruction required the life of a single Mr. Mawnen, of our Mr. Mawnen over there, for instance, would you approve of the sacrifice?”

  “That’s a typically ‘Russian’ pointless question. A piece of pure Dostoyevskyism,” muttered Don Fernando with intellectual disgust.

  “Even granted it’s ‘Dostoyevskyism,’ the question is there, regardless of who posed it or why. Never mind, you needn’t answer it yourself, let’s ask the others, the ‘common people,’ ‘your’ people, the ‘passersby.’ Hardly anyone would approve. Not even you yourself, in particular view of your disregard for ‘arty rocks.’ Were we to show them our wretched news vendor sniffling on that corner over there and tell them, We’re going to pounce upon him: right, go die for David (David who? I don’t know him!), all of ‘humane’ mankind would rise most resolutely against the very idea of such a price being payable for the salvation of a ‘man of stone.’ All of a sudden all of mankind becomes ‘uncultured.’ Forgetting the unique, irredeemable value of Michelangelo’s sculpture and throwing itself with the full force of unbridled philanthropy at the little man of a news vendor. Raising him to the point of being an extraordinary, ‘human’ value, which of course not even Mr. Mawnen himself can properly understand. He becomes an exceptional, indeed legendary person (many a Mr. Mawnen has gone down in history that way), a kind of saint and martyr. And why is all that? Only because Mr. Mawnen is ‘capable of feeling.’ The mere elementary sensitivity sets that hideous body above a genius’s unique and unrepeatable work. Because Mr. Mawnen has an epidermis capable of feeling pain, while David is unfeeling stone. Therefore long live the epidermis, death to ‘stone’!”

  “This is a conclusion in favor of the epidermis and generally in favor of the sensitive-living, stupid, and mindless, ‘valueless,’ ugly tissue of a freak who has picked up a handful of attributes along the way which under very superficial conventions are granted to man, too. The David is also a synthesis of attributes, which, by somewhat more cautious conventions, have turned stone into a ‘man.’ They both exist in some way. Don’t you feel that the Siamese concrescence of those two existences, no matter how it might intentionally be arranged to suit my purpose, is a question of existence in general? The question of who and what should go on living. Chang or Eng? But how is one to decide—that is to say, by what standards?”

  “But I can’t wait until the standards have been agreed upon—I must live now. I must act, I must continually make decisions.”

  “Well, whom do you find for: David or the news vendor?” Melkior slipped the question in with derisive curiosity.

  “Sometimes for David, sometimes for the news vendor,” replied Don Fernando at once, without pausing to think.

  “Depending on the circumstances, is that it?”

  “Of course. It’s easy to find for David. What he stands for can never be a threat. But that which can be conceived by the news vendor, the news vendor idea, the freak idea …”

  “But I’m not talking about an idea, I’m talking about this here flesh-and-blood news vendor, that nose and those ears, do you understand, the man who’s selling Mawnen …”

  “That’s just what I mean—if those noses and ears, if hundreds of thousands, if millions of those Mawnens usurped the right to assess all values, if they established themselves above us as the masters of our lives …”

  “That’s impossible,” Melkior interrupted him halfheartedly, merely for the sake of contradiction; he did not believe it impossible himself. He meant to provoke Don Fernando.

  “Impossible?” asked Don Fernando in an almost offended tone. “Impossible to find such an idea for freaks (and I’m not talking about only physical deformities here) which will draw everyone like flies to vomit? (After all, haven’t they already been drawn in?) Impossible to tell them: you have been chosen to live! Destroy and slaughter anyone who is not like you! In the name of your superiority! You are the chosen species! My dear chap, do you think they won’t form an alliance? You bet they’ll form one, because they have something in common. Each one of them has an epithet—like those notorious rulers The Lame, The Stupid, The Beardless—implanted deep in their flesh and bones, where it humiliates and offends them, and that’s what binds them together. And what’s going to bind together the so-called normal people? The proud, pure, strong Davids? They have nothing in common, no shared trait, no grounds for ‘brotherhood.’ They have no attributes, they’re ‘only human.’ Each one of them is normal and good and honest and handsome in his own way and knows of none other. Each one of them is a discrete individual, a solitary contemplative monad, and in between them there is an uncommunicative and desperately senseless void. The strength of the freaks is that they are organized and dynamic, because there is something that binds and propels them, and so they bring us down piecemeal, finding us unprepared, in an hour of weakness, in ‘prayer,’ that is to say in an hour of sensitive poetic contemplation, in hours of wonderment and love’s rapture.”

  “There are other, more robust raptures, more than ‘sensitive,’ amounting to a force, a mighty force indeed! One capable of standing up to …” Melkior was speaking with the conviction of personal experience: he had in mind the Stranger in his room.

  “Where are they? Show me!” shouted Don Fernando, irate. “Show me these ‘robust raptures’! Haven’t they left us high and dry? Have they not ‘signed a pact’? They’ve given the murderers the green light!”

  “The question is, for how long?”

  “Until you and I bite the dust!” Don Fernando gave a malicious laugh.

  “So you really are afraid?” Melkior looked at his face: it was red with anger.

  “Have I ever hidden that? I told you just now I’m afraid. Yes, I fear for my hide, and very ‘selfishly’ at that. More selfishly than even you, because I aim to defend my hide! Not protect it—defend it, by all and any means, whatever you choose to call them! Who’s the ‘robust rapture’—somebody at a secret meeting selling me the idea that ‘individual terrorism is no solution’? What is the solution then —those two ‘historical’ signatures on that pact of Hitler’s? When I’ve been betrayed and brought to despair, I act desperate, damn it. What do I care now for Michelangelo or your casuistic problems: David or the news vendor? to hell with both! I call for terrorism, for extermination of tomorrow’s murderers in our midst. That’s why I wanted to publish the article. …”

  Don Fernando had grown tired. He sensed his failure to convince his man. I spoke badly, in haste, in rage, helter-skelter … he thought angrily.

  “I’ll make this into a novel one day … if I have the chance,” he said after a longish silence. “I didn’t explain the main thing well enough—what it is like when your teeth really chatter …”

  He fell silent, somehow sa
pped and empty. He looked straight ahead in solitary disappointment, gloomy. He kept taking off his hat and waving it strangely about in an unconscious gesture as if shooing away invisible bats: the bitter thoughts were still buzzing around him, preventing him from getting his face to resume its small superior smile behind which he normally hid the false divinity of his inaccessibility. But there he was—he had thrown the tabernacle wide open, the divine bird had flown the coop! What was there left to hide? He hated Melkior for his own failure.

  Hell, was he being serious about “preventive killing”? Melkior was suddenly offended by a fresh thought: the man wants a Smerdyakov! An executioner! That’s why he’s been telling me all this! He doesn’t want to get his hands dirty. He, the founder of “new values”! The intellectual instigator … acting from the rear. He thinks I, a desperate man, would …

  Melkior shuddered. He looked “up” at Don Fernando’s face (for all that they were of an equal height Don Fernando’s head had always seemed to him to be “up above”) and saw the likable mask, but the eyes … the eyes radiated a dark, evil look. Why, he’s a murderer, he thought fearfully, a murderer by his own definition. With his personal safety guaranteed. “To provoke the killer … to jerk his murderous wishes awake.” Is that having your teeth chatter? … And there I was this morning defying a tram! What a delusion!

  Melkior laughed, commiserating.

  “Imagine a man on tram tracks …” but Don Fernando had left him without a word. He had set off, with his long hurried stride, through an alley lined with trees which had majestically woven their branches into a triumphal arch … This is how rulers are saluted, said Melkior with an affronted sneer. That head deserves it, and he turned unconsciously to follow the needle of his love’s compass, toward the Theater Café. It’s not too early, she might have come out by now …

  Restless is the autumn air … restless is the autumn air … he kept repeating stupidly, suddenly saddened to the bone.

  Coming from afar was the news vendor’s pitiful, nasal voice Mawnen ooze, Mawnen ooze, as if the man were begging for mercy. Don Fernando’s already grabbed hold of the man’s ear, thought Melkior, and is dragging him off to hold him accountable. For Michelangelo’s David. You’re one of the crowd of nasty little men who’ll draw together around the heap of vomit! One of the chosen freaks just off the leash. “Kill, slaughter, is that it? You’re one of them! You hideous little creep!” The poor man has no inkling of his hide being (theoretically!) at stake.

  Mawnen ooze …

  Quiet, you wretch! Don Fernando Karamazov walks the streets dreaming of his “preventive murder” theory. Looking for a Smerdyakov, an executioner. To murder you—or Hitler, it’s not yet clear which. But one of you has got to confirm the theory; that much is clear. People of all countries, dehumanize. Preventively. Whatever the cost. Tragedy is no more. It has been abolished by skepticism.

  He was parodying Don Fernando’s thoughts with malicious glee. Bitter.

  The day was absurdly clear and warm; a capricious October scherzo, as if summer were coming back. Melkior walked toward the Theater Café slowing the eagerness of his search: I won’t find her. He feared her absence as if it were an attack from ambush. The terrace was lively and noisy—no Viviana.

  He poked his head into the café proper: the emptiness grinned at him hopelessly. But from one of the corners cawed Maestro’s brandy-inflamed gorge:

  “O, Eustachius the Outpoured! You’re like water for watering flowers. But in this flower garden there is no Lily, or Ljerka, stemming from Lilium candidum or white lily. The lily hasn’t opened its petals yet, the white flower’s still sleeping. Come closer that I might kiss, or rather lick slick, your feet which brought you here.”

  He was well and truly drunk. His head was a fit-to-burst red and his eyes had a madman’s glaze. Sitting at his table were several junior reporters from the office; among them Freddie, sporting an offended smile. He was not, as even Melkior could see, at the center of attention; this was in fact why he was angry and offended. “Let’s have your opinion, Eustachius the Metaphysical, for this is indeed a metaphysical point. I keep saying so to our protagonist but he will only give me a derisive smirk, as you can see there on his physical physiognomy—he doesn’t even know what metaphysics is. We’re just talking about the fate of various tiny animals, metaphysically. I don’t see why people shouldn’t talk metaphysically about the fate of tiny animals. A worm in an apple, for instance. Living alone like a curmudgeon, a hypocritical hermit in a solid full universe. Board and lodging, possibly with a bit of light entertainment thrown in—vermicular masturbation, for all we know. Happiness we can’t even begin to fathom. Yes, but how long can it last? Until some god or other feels like an apple. Tooth or knife, it makes no difference which, rending and laying waste to the vermicular world like dreadful inexorable fate. Reaching the worm, tearing it in half … Or not reaching it, huh? That is the question. To be or not to be—for a worm. That is beneath a Hamlet—am I right, oh Exalted One?” and Maestro squinted derisively at Freddie. He then spoke to Melkior, pointing his cigarette at the actor: “Pestering them up at the theater to cast him as Hamlet, but he hasn’t even read that bit about the worms mediating between king and beggar, or rather the beggar’s bowels; he skipped it, it was so yuck! He only reads the soliloquies. You, Frederick, are as hollow as a bamboo stalk.”

  Freddie swung a fist at Maestro, but the reporters grabbed and held his arm midair. He was pale and trembling. So Maestro’s protasis had been going on for some time then, thought Melkior with pleasure. I hated him a minute ago in conversation with Don Fernando; he was now wondering at it, was even ready to defend him from Freddie if necessary.

  “Let go of me!” mumbled Freddie, his mouth full of holy anger. But nobody was holding him any more: the reporters were sitting so closely on either side of him (in front of him the table, behind him the wall) that he couldn’t get up. To make things worse, the reporters were laughing.

  “So Brutus raised his little paw against Caesar? Ho-ho,” said Maestro coolly, like a celebrity after a failed attempt on his life. “By the way, speaking of paws, apropos there’s an anecdote about a wolf. Shall I tell it? But mark you, children, it’s not Little Red Riding Hood.”

  “Tell us, tell us!” clamored all. Only Freddie was staring sullenly at the floor.

  “What about you, Eustachius the Patient?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Apparently there were some foresters walking through a forest—naturally enough, it being their trade. We walk in various ellipses and spirals, which is our trade … and a digression in this narrative, isn’t it? There were wolves in the forest, and the foresters were afraid, of course. But one of them said, ‘Don’t be afraid, I’ve got a handsaw,’ and they relaxed again. It did occur to them that a handsaw was hardly of any use with a wolf; then again, they thought, the man surely knew what he was talking about. And so on they went without fear. Suddenly a wolf appeared out of nowhere and went for them. They cried, ‘Oh God, we’re done for!’ But the one with the handsaw said again, ‘Don’t be afraid, brethren and fellow-citizens,’ went right up to the wolf, grabbed hold of one of its legs, and zip, zip, zip, sawed it off. He was, as could have been gathered by now, a cunning and nasty man, was that forester-sawyer: he threw the sawn-off leg into a church, through a window which happened to be open because the sexton was dusting the saints off for the Easter holidays. And the wolf whined and whined, helpless; I ask you, what can a wolf do if he’s got only three legs, not to mention the pain. He had no idea where his fourth leg had gone as he hadn’t seen where the forester threw it—it never occurred to him, of course, that the leg might have been in the church. Even if it had, he couldn’t have gone in, not being baptized … Inside, the sexton suddenly saw the freshly sawn-off leg, still bleeding, in front of the altar, and thought one of the Elect had just finished his duel with Satan and sent his trophy to the Lord, throwing it at His most holy feet. Full of the fear of God, the sexton took the leg to
the priest as one better at understanding this kind of thing. But the priest only turned the leg this way and that and couldn’t understand a thing. It was a miracle all right, but one he could make no sense of. He found no holy mark on the leg except for the blood and the nasty wound, so he sent the leg on to the bishop in town. The bishop, the canons, and all the religious teachers examined it closely for three days, but came up with no acceptable explanation for the miracle, so they had the leg well salted and sent it to Rome to the Supreme See. Over there, the cardinals and prelates, the learned Jesuits, and the most excellent of theologians got together and started leafing through the ancient books, patristic and gnostic, Tertullian’s, Origena’s, and Augustine’s —even some Aryan and heretical writings—to explain the missive of the leg one way or another. After many sessions of councils and cardinals’ collegia and Jesuit secret seminaries and Dominican plots (they wanted to profit from the event by inserting one of their people into a secret congregation), the learned fathers came to the seemingly unanimous conclusion that it was indeed a paw of Satan’s, severed in a holy duel with a heavenly saint, most probably Saint George, who had had long-standing accounts to settle with the unregenerate bandit. The way the flesh was fringed around the cut was proof enough that it had been Saint George’s work—he wielded a truly vicious battle-ax. Our poor wolf’s leg was added to the collection of dogmatic evidence of Satan’s existence and the Lord’s power over him. As for the wolf itself, it’s probably even now hobbling about the forest cursing its short temper, as this happened quite recently, only three years ago, in the mountains of Guadarama, in Spain.”