“Oh, the registration … Thank you, the landlady took care of it, she went this morning. …” Melkior was still standing in front of them, motionless, as if movement hurt.
“But we’re holding up the gentleman,” she mediated, “perhaps he has …”
“No, no, I haven’t,” Melkior said hastily and looked up at her, the accursed beauty. She wants to get rid of me. “I merely came out for my walk, as convalescents like to say,” and he tried to smile at her but barely managed to bring it off.
“Patients on the mend,” ATMAN translated for her acidly.
“And you, Mac, you take me for such a fool!” she said in serious anger.
“Come on, Mic, I only meant this was not the best kind of air for a walk such as that,” and he peeked confidentially up at the building above. “The atmosphere’s rather … errr …” (he could not seem to find the right word), “wouldn’t you say?”
“The atmosphere … what a load of rubbish. Why don’t you come right out and say let’s all of us take a nice walk somewhere.” She was warming to the idea in the usual feminine way. “The Botanical Gardens, for instance. We’ll read the Latin names for the plants. There are ever such lovely names there.”
“Yes, that’s where many have come up with names for their daughters,” laughed ATMAN. “The Botanical Gardens are for pregnant women and jilted students to stroll in. Come to think of it, Mr. Melkior can come up with pretty names, too. Viviana, would that be a plant?”
“No, I don’t believe it is,” snapped Melkior churlishly. He feared ATMAN was springing another of his traps and thought he’d like to get away.
“Going to leave us again, are you?” asked Viviana coquettishly. “Like you left me this morning in the middle of the street …”
“Did Ugo find you? I met him afterward, he was very sorry he’d overslept your date.” Melkior said this deliberately, but in a completely innocent way, like a small child innocuously prattling cheery information. He was getting his own back at her.
“Date? Hah! The things people make up!”
He saw he had elicited a profound hatred: she was giving him the same look she had given him that night at the Give’nTake when she was with Freddie. The same splotches had broken out on her face, too. Sunspots! A storm is brewing … He therefore set his legs in motion, said goodbye and disappeared around the nearest corner without bothering about the direction.
The Quisisana was crowded and the air inside thick and noxious. The smells of fried onions, black coffee, and human fumes. Melkior felt sick from the medley dropping to his stomach via the nose. That’s from hunger. He blocked the spasm and hastily inserted some small change in the automat, which congenially offered him a sandwich. He downed it in two bites. The piece of pickle instantly calmed the sickly roiling of his insides. He inserted another coin or two: the miniature lift dropped to the floor below and the open door (here you are, sir!) revealed a sardine’s tail between yellow figure eights of mayonnaise, both covered by a disk of salami and a thin triangle of riddled cheese. This “still life” received different treatment: he ground it methodically with his teeth, letting the hungry mouth caress its fill of yearned-for love. And the mouth seemed to whisper its ahhs and ohhs in a vulgarly sentimental way, exactly as in a genuine orgasm. The stomach, for its part, gratefully acknowledged the divine poetry from up above and went about its business humming contentedly. Flooded subsequently by a beer shower it gurgled delightedly, overjoyed. And burped “thanks.”
Up above, Lord Melkior was already perched godlike on thick clouds of smoke and, in an Olympian mood, allowing voices into his pampered presence.
“Peculiar, very peculiar indeed,” said a tall man gloomily bent over an unfolded sheet of newspaper on which he was eating something. His short interlocutor was standing on tiptoe with an important air, displaying full comprehension of what he was being told. “Even when contemplating the crucial decision to take their own life, people can be quite peculiar,” went on Gloom & Doom, and Shorty raised and lowered himself twice in agreement. “Some have been known to invest remarkable effort in their suicide. The most bizarre suicide of our times was certainly that of a very rich Texan farmer. One day, while flying over his house in an old farming-cum-produce-transport aeroplane, he leaped out, impaling himself upon the pointed stakes that supported the fencing around his farmhouse. The impact drove the stakes straight through him, for he landed flat, back first. Apparently he had settled on the spot in advance.
“But the most romantic of all was the suicide of a certain Frenchwoman. She checked into a hotel, asking for the room in which she had first slept with her lover, who had subsequently left her. For five days she brought armfuls of fragrant flowers to the room, sleeping meanwhile elsewhere. On the sixth night she locked herself in, never to come out again. She was found two days later in her bed, covered with flowers—dead, of course. Suffocated by the flowers. How about that?”
“Yes,” said Shorty, self-important. “Some even drive nails into their skulls!” “Right, right, right!” responded Gloom & Doom with curious elation. “They even choose which sort of nail in advance! Not just any nail—it’s got to be a particular sort of nail … The selection sometimes takes years.”
“Right,” said Shorty with gusto. He liked the level of the conversation—he obviously enjoyed a discussion of psychology.
“Take for instance the Chinese immigrant somewhere in Australia …”
“Where do you get it all from?” Shorty was clearly envious.
“I follow it in the papers. I take an interest in these things,” replied Gloom & Doom with a modest smile. “The Chinaman spent a year building an extremely elegant, polished gallows replete with ornament and artistic detail. Everyone wondered at the idea of building the curious structure, but his sole reply to all questions was the well-known gentle Chinese smile. Once he had decided the gallows was finished he hanged himself on it.”
“Did you ever hear,” Shorty barged in, “about the man who opened graves and tied green ribbons around the cadavers’ big toes? He was wanted by Scotland Yard,” he finished triumphantly.
“I know, I read about it,” Gloom & Doom took it up delightedly. “Tell me more.”
“Oh, well, seeing that you know already …”
“Never mind, I like hearing about it again! Thing is, though, he tied yellow ribbons to some, but the reason for this has remained a mystery. He has evaded arrest to this day.”
“Yes,” Shorty drew himself up importantly (a man in the know), “it was thought at first there might be something anti-Semitic afoot, but that notion was given up eventually. … Very few got the yellow ribbon, only three or four. A mystery.” Shorty sank into deep thought.
“Because he can’t have done it for no reason—I mean he must have had a purpose,” prodded Gloom & Doom to keep the conversation from petering out. “It’s no picnic, opening graves, it is hard work, physically speaking.”
“Quite so.” Shorty was still worriedly absent and far off in his thoughts.
Ugo would have stepped in by now, thought Melkior on his apathetic way out. What little food he had thrown to his beast had sunk him into a kind of limp stupor; he no longer had the stamina to look for his guest and had left everything to fate.
Fate will have her way with the castaways. You don’t know what to do with them. And you no longer wish to be involved. They bore you. They will nevertheless try to talk the old seaman into …
“If only he had the sense to escape!” pronounces the captain.
“Why should he bother?” smiles the first mate. “They’re not going to eat him, he’s fine—eating, sleeping, and idling away the hours. Anyway, where would he run?”
“Where? What a silly question!” says the captain angrily. “Seawards, of course, to reach the mainland. There’s bound to be a passing ship—he could hail our … Come on, man, don’t tell me you wouldn’t like to be rescued!”
“Aah,” says the first mate, waving an indifferent hand and sinki
ng back into his morose thoughts.
“I for one am very keen on getting rescued,” joins in the doctor, “but I still can’t see why the old fellow should risk anything for our sake. Even supposing no risk were involved, why should he lift a finger? What did we ever do for him? You in particular, Captain. Even if the rescue ship were to sail by, he would simply deny any knowledge of us. And he would be right.”
“That sort of idea could spring only from that sort of mind!”
“There are other ideas in this sort of mind, Captain. Listen, supposing the old boy rescued us—what could he expect in our civilized world?”
“Our eternal gratitude!” cries the chief engineer. “Here, I pledge …”
“… to find him a place in a home for the elderly?”
“… that we shall all chip in to provide a decent lifetime pension for him.”
“Ahh,” the doctor dismisses this with a contemptuous wave, “that’s all conjecture as far as he’s concerned, that pension of yours. He’s got a better one right here. To top it all off, he filled his pipe today with some pungent dried leaves; says they’re finer than tobacco. …”
“While you still haven’t found the leaves you promised me,” whispers the first mate in the doctor’s ear in a trembling, spent voice seething with reproach. The doctor casts an angry look at the whinger and makes no reply.
“All the same, why do you keep rejecting stubbornly, indeed maliciously, the captain’s idea that the old man might try to get out to sea?” asks the chief engineer piteously. “I should think the suggestion ought to be coming from you. He listens to what you say.”
“Sure I will,” agrees the doctor suddenly. But everyone immediately suspects there is something behind it.
The night appeared to descend all at once, with no dusk. The sun went down behind the dome of the First City Bank, cast a final handful of red around the city’s uppermost windowpanes, and instantly wrapped itself up in the black fur coat of a thick cloud rising out of the west.
Melkior looked at the cloud as if at a kind of promise: a change would come from there. Rain, he said in an inspired way like a slightly mad poet fond of precipitation and wet pavements. Melkior disliked wet pavements; he liked the sun overhead and short noonday shadows beneath. But the fickle autumn sun promised a false warmth concealing the icy truth approaching ever faster and ever more inexorably. What’s the idea of the sun hammering into my head the beauties of golden autumn and feeding my eyes with flashes of false promise? Lulling me to sleep with a hope of happy dawns and days replete with small pleasures and nights of endearing fantasies! Let the clouds gather, let the rain fall, let it be night at once! Melkior protested loudly (inside), shouting against the sun. He shook himself dry like a wet dog, cleansing himself of his illusions.
MAAR suddenly flashed on above his head. The mighty MAAR was pushing back the night, showering the sparks of its promises on all sides. Tungsram, Singer, Bayer, Bata, Flit … began their cunning game: they had stretched their spun-light spider’s web high above the city and were snaring the eager attention of the onlookers. They sifted out the grains of gold from the huge mass of useless silt … and there shone Tungsram, Radion warbled (washes by itself), and Remington the Emperor grew. While down below, in the doorway, the blind veteran of the glorious battles described above mumbled his endless prayer: shoelaces, black, yellow … the colors for which he had lost his eyesight.
London in Flames! We’ll Fight Alone, Says Churchill! London Burning! Latest edition! bellowed the news vendor to outshout MAAR’s mighty acoustics.
“That’s what they’re calling us up for,” Melkior heard a voice at his side. “As if we were firemen.”
The man was alone. He was watching MAAR’s magic tricks sadly, as though bidding farewell to something. An orderly city dweller with modest habits. Judging by his appearance, he needed neither the Singer nor the Remington, but he enjoyed watching the luxury of pretty things in the “free cinema,” the guileless play of light, during his evening stroll. This, too, was going to be taken from him by … them over there.
We’ll Fight, Says Churchill!
“So fight,” muttered the man cholerically. “You cooked this up yourselves … years ago, at Versailles. Now you can eat it—piping hot!” said he with a gloating laugh.
Melkior felt like slapping the man’s face. Instead he stepped very convincingly with all his (admittedly modest) weight on one of the “implacable” fellow’s big toes. And said “Oh, so sorry” to him with an expression of the most sincere regret. Don Fernando’s prescription for “murderers in trams,” he thought, and this fellow does have an evil look in his eyes.
“Sorry, hell!” screamed Mr. Trodden Underfoot. “Go back to tending your goats if you haven’t learned how to walk in a city!”
“Goats?” The insult shot through Melkior’s body with lightning speed. He turned to face the city dweller in confused indecision and, trembling all over, repeated, “Goats?”
“Yes, goats!” said the city dweller definitively, ready to take him on.
A circle of curiosity seekers instantly formed around. “What’s this about?” one of them asked his neighbor. The man gave an indifferent shrug. “Any fighting yet?” asked Curious. “Not yet,” replied Indifferent. “What did the fellow say to him?”—this from Curious. “Nothing much. Goats or something.” “Meaning what? Something political?” “Could be.”
Melkior was unhappy … and afraid. What the hell had he got involved for? Everyone around was against him, they knew he’d done it on purpose. … He had a feeling of miserable solitude … and thought of Ugo. How he would have worked wonders in a trice, won over the lot of them, how everyone would take a shine to him. Ugo, Ugo, he cried wistfully, like the captive Croesus of the moralizing legend.
“Leave it to me. Gangway!” he suddenly heard a voice from heaven, the angelic voice of Ugo. “I said gangway!” and there he was within the circle, stern and purposeful. Eyebrows gathered in an awesome frown, he drilled Mr. Trodden Underfoot with a tracer-bullet look.
“So you’re the one, eh? … Well, well …” nodding victoriously.
“I didn’t do anything …”
“… worthwhile! Not that you ever did.” Ugo appeared to mean business.
“… but don’t tread on me!” the city dweller was offering resistance in retreat.
“Oh, you’d prefer us kissing you on the lips? Judas!”
The last word had the effect of a spreading stench: the circle began breaking up, crumbling, dissipating. Everyone was trying to sink back as soon as possible into the innocent mass of people charmed by MAAR’s capers, to camouflage themselves with carefree civic loyalty.
But Ugo was not falling for it. He knew there were at least twenty eyes following the denouement within the abandoned triangle, wishing to read THE END in large capitals at the close of the film. The soccer fans seeing the match through until the referee’s last whistle. He therefore went on with his game.
“Follow me,” he whispered sternly to the petrified city dweller, plucking one of his overcoat buttons. “You come, too, Eustachius.”
“Oh, so you …” stammered the fear-frozen prisoner.
“… know each other? You bet! You’re in luck though: I’m feeling a bit indulgent today—it’s my mother’s birthday. Come along, come along. Follow us!”
The city dweller was making his docile way in the wake of his destiny, following Ugo’s restless head of hair, the black star of his undoing. Ugo knew it. He suddenly pulled Melkior into the thickest of the crowd, bent his head down as if his neck had been broken and said to him: “Head down! Turn off the beacon and our prisoner will run aground.” And sure enough they presently heard the man’s forlorn supplication: “I’m over here, sir. Where are you, sir? I’m over here.”
“Search on, you pest, just you search on! Let’s play hide and seek, shall we, Eustachius?” They stepped into a doorway and lit cigarettes. “So how did you make contact with the enemy?”
�
��I stepped on his foot.”
“God, don’t tell me you did that on purpose!”
“I did,” admitted Melkior boastfully: he wanted to show off for Ugo.
“You are a piece of work!” Ugo was glad of the feat. Melkior felt a stupid kind of glee.
“He was exulting about London being bombed, the dolt,” he hastened to consolidate his merit. “He gloated out loud about London burning.”
“Oh, you did it for London?” Ugo was disappointed. “I did have a hunch it wasn’t an acte gratuit. Aah, if I’d left you to the mercy of the violence lover it would’ve been no more than you deserved. Will you look at him—he’s sniffing the air in the street: looking for his master.” Indeed, the city dweller was anxiously peering this way and that, looking into the faces of passersby like a dog that has lost a scent.
“I bet he’ll be off on his own to report himself to the police. Conscience? No. All he wants is to sleep in peace tonight, even if it’s on straw. I think he’s been sufficiently punished. Let’s get out of here.”
Melkior remembered his guest and felt what is generally described as a stab of conscience. He felt guilty in advance of any possible … Perhaps the man was already back there and ATMAN was dialing a number: Hello, have I got a bird for you. Yes, a redwing, I think you’ll be interested. … He was overcome by an odd kind of anxiety at evil forebodings and suddenly tugged himself free of Ugo’s arm.
“Where will you be a bit later? I’ve got to dash over to my place now.”
“To look at the ceiling? Take me along. We’ll look at it together.”
“No, really I must. I won’t be long. Where can I find you?”
“Nowhere. I’m coming with you. Where can I go now, on my pitiful own? It’s too early for the Give’nTake … or anything else.”
“But I might be as long as half an hour …”
Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Page 34