Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Ranko Marinković

  He was priming the oil stove while he spoke. First he warmed it using denatured alcohol, then he pumped air in. The stove suddenly hissed, having gone out, releasing puffs of gaseous petroleum. The room filled at once with a heavy, stuffy smell.

  Melkior coughed. He was breathing with difficulty, choking. He remembered Nettle’s stable and feared he might faint.

  “Might we open …” he mouthed in what was nearly his last gasp.

  “Why should we, Eustachius the Welcome?” wondered Maestro carrying a lit match across the room. The match went out halfway across. He went back and struck a fresh one, which also went out en route; meanwhile the primus stove was eagerly hissing as it released petroleum stench.

  “It’s been airing all day, I’ve only just closed the window,” said Maestro carrying yet another match across the room. It, too, went out, of course. But he was not at all miffed—he went back to strike another one … Melkior followed the insecure little flame with anxiety. …

  “Why don’t you strike a match there by the Primus instead of carrying it over?” he said in near-irritation.

  “Ah, seeing to that, too, are you?” Maestro resented interference in his habits. “The matches are duds. Incidentally, it’s not really much of an invention: carrying a flame on top of a toothpick! Kitchen Prometheanship!” The “Prometheanship” was what he snuffed the fresh match with: he had blasted out the word with such seething scorn and the tiny flame passed away like a premature baby.

  “Everything smells of petroleum in here. …” grumbled Melkior.

  “Everything?” asked Maestro with curious irony. “Ahh, Eustachius the Sensitive, you’re acting like a royal personage visiting a poor subject. Hold your royal nose for an instant … there, it’s lit!”

  “And your cursed nose is ripe for a splash. Have you got a mirror?”

  “So that’s what it is! You’re afraid of me … bloody as I am? What a physiognomy, eh? No, I’ve gone without a mirror for two decades, give or take. Since … the days of the Charleston. Why do I need one? To study the reflection of my beauty?”

  “Why should I be afraid of you?” and yet an icy snake slithered up Melkior’s back, why was he out looking for me tonight?

  “Just saying,” laughed Maestro and the swollen red nose made his smile mournful, clownish. “Children are afraid of ugly faces. I’m fond of you, Eustachius the Artless, and … perhaps for that very reason … am giving you a wee bit of a scare, boo. …”

  Maestro grimaced with his hideous face and bloody swollen nose at Melkior, like someone trying to scare a child. Melkior cringed with disgust and looked away.

  “Oh, don’t be angry, it’s only my little joke,” Maestro abruptly went serious. “It’s beside the point anyway. I didn’t invite you up here to show you the silly faces I can make. I say … that electric chair thingy in America—is it true the electricity kills the man instantly, or … does he remain alive for some time after all—perhaps a minute or even two?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Melkior giving him a surprised look. “What’s that to you now?”

  “I read about someone having been brought back to life, no less than seven minutes after the jolt. As soon as they got him off the chair the doctor opened his chest and massaged his heart. He lived for a long time in Mexico afterward. His lawyer had it all arranged, bought ‘the body.’ So it appears all is not lost after the jolt, you can go on living … provided someone turns their hand to it, right, Eustachius?”

  “Could be … I don’t know,” replied Melkior, bored, “I haven’t read about it …”

  “Well, I have. And I won’t have anyone saying Tesla knows all about electricity! He knows how to make calculations and build motors, but it takes dying, dying from it, Eustachius, to understand the filth!”

  Maestro was speaking in the middle of the room with prophetic awe, his arms raised evangelistically.

  “Well, you won’t be put in the electric chair,” Melkior tossed off sarcastically, “here we hang people.”

  “Even that is more dignified … being strangled by your own weight! I could also understand being drowned like a pup, but being force-fed with electricity …”

  “Who on earth is force-feeding you, man? What’s the matter with you?” laughed Melkior nervously. No, honestly, what the hell was the matter with him tonight?

  “You’re right, man, nobody is force-feeding me,” said Maestro thoughtfully and went back to the oil stove. “Do you like your cocoa strong, Eustachius the Kind?”

  “I don’t like it at all,” replied Melkior, boorish.

  “Well, I’m making you some as promised, Eustachius the Unkind. Now why are you going all principled on me all of a sudden?”

  “All right, I’ll have some,” Melkior relented. In point of fact he felt he could do with a hot drink; indeed the aroma of cocoa had aroused his appetite, too.

  Maestro went about serving his guest with joy:

  “Here you are, my dear Eustachius. I’ve got some biscuits in the box as well. It’s all hermetically sealed, don’t feel squeamish. No insect could penetrate in there. Not even the positively most cunning among them—the bedbug, as suffering mankind knows all too well. But I’m free of them, they suddenly disappeared, oh, something like three years ago. Too frightened to go on living with me. … Or is it that I was too much for them?”

  “What?” Melkior choked on his mouthful in nausea; he suddenly felt the bedbug smell all around him.

  “Well,” went on Maestro with a lovable nastiness, “perhaps I’ve got some fratricidal bugs in my blood, heh-heh. … I’m sure people have been gossiping to you about that: I’m a microbe breeding ground, Wassermann with three crosses. Those three crosses are a Golgotha, a small, personal, and very intimate Golgotha. They believe that one day, or night, I’m going to fall apart, disintegrate, melt into a poisonous gas, colorless, tasteless, and … well, not odorless certainly, there will be odor … that of brandy, of course. So mind how you go, adorable Eustachius!” Maestro poured himself half a glass of brandy and took a goodly sip, but with a sensible smile, like someone stoking his greediness, then tilted the bottom up and knocked back the rest. “Right. This is to preserve my spoor—or breath, it makes no difference which.”

  “Didn’t you switch to beer?” asked Melkior.

  “Oh yes, for nightly practice,” Maestro gave a mysterious smile. “I’ve got a whole crateful over there,” he pointed at the corner of the room, where necks of beer bottles were indeed sticking out from a crate.

  “Practice? What sort of practice?”

  “Ballistic. Can’t you see the shells ready for action?”

  “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You will, good Eustachius, if my ballistic arc reaches eternity, ha-ha,” he was laughing, but the laughter congealed on his lips, some dark rictus was strangling his gaiety.

  Cold horror licked Melkior again.

  “Don’t laugh like that!”

  “How else should I laugh, Eustachius extraordinaire? Prescribe a manner, I can’t laugh any other way.” He went across to the crate, took out two bottles of beer: “Good thing you reminded me,” he tilted the bottle and drained it with extraordinary skill. “Glug-glug-glug and it’s done, in one go, without a pause for breath,” he boasted and turned the empty bottle upside down, “like a waterspout.”

  “I think I’ll be off now,” said Melkior standing up. “What is it you were wanting to bring me here for?”

  “Why it’s been ages, Eustachius the Incorruptible, since I asked you to come around for a talk! But no, you’re not at all easy to catch! I had to use my bloodied nose for bait, that’s the kind of fish you are! And now you won’t even let me laugh. …”

  “So, go ahead and laugh,” said Melkior, laughing.

  “Yes, but only in a way you approve of. You want it to be tasteful, to be according to Bergson, your nerves can’t take it any other way, you’re very choosy. Hah, if only I could do it her way,” he tilted his head in
the direction of the wall, “if only I had that force of derision! And you never even glanced her way.” Maestro held the candle aloft, illumining a darkened, soot-covered Gioconda on the wall.

  Melkior barely turned his head. He had come to feel unbearably irritated, he wanted to leave.

  “How long has it been hanging there?” he said casually. “It’s all black from the fumes.”

  “From the infernal fumes is what you mean, all blackened from hell itself! For this is the hell of my life, and she sits there smiling above the hell, the damned femina!”

  Maestro had got quite agitated, he was speaking with hatred of the picture.

  Melkior chuckled at the unexpected outburst of rage.

  “No, that’s not funny, Eustachius the Heartless!” Maestro rebuked him gravely. “I’m not talking about the picture. I hung it there myself, of course. But what’s a picture? just a symbol, a breath, of art—indeed a poor job of printing—but she herself, the femina, I did not hang her up so she would sit smiling above my life! She sneaked in on her own and parked herself there. … We all know it, she has parked herself in the lives of us all, and all we do is laugh at each other. What’s the matter, exalted Eustachius—not laughing anymore?”

  Melkior had indeed grown serious. Maestro’s sarcastically scowling face was quite near his, plashing it with brandy breath. In a daze, like someone about to faint, he sat back down and made no reply. Inside him Viviana revived, a painfully wanton, loud image of lust.

  “What, shall we have ourselves castrated, virile Eustachius, out of the pride and nobility of the male spirit? Well, what if all our power is implanted right down there, in that trouble spot, in that masculine humiliation? Who’s going to risk it, lovely Eustachius? One stands to lose all. Becoming a eunuch, yuk-yuk-yuk … an all around progeny-free creature, a belly with a chassis of loose flesh.” Maestro was being torn by an ugly forced laugh which made spittle spray from his grimy black teeth. “Here, I’m laughing, with your permission, most illustrious Eustachius, if that can be … if that’s what …”

  He’s lost his train of thought, mused Melkior with pleasure, he’s drunk again. Or is it the “fratricidal bugs” hacking away in there …

  “… what her smile is?” Maestro was having trouble pulling his thoughts together. “Why hers? Is it on that little minx, groomed to be bait to lecherous lust (do you notice the Shakespearean style here, Eustachius?) that there should twinkle such a manifestation of the mocking spirit? Only a Voltaire could be so derisive. But who gave a femina the male right of derision?—that is the question, most wise Eustachius! She who cries out so blatantly with this or that side of her flesh (and most delicate flesh it is—let us bow before the curves!) has all of a sudden wrapped herself—that is to say, enveloped that exclamatory flesh—in some kind of inscrutability, in the mythical veil of the eternal feminine, and proceeded to mock male mankind from within. O, Leonardo, I’m not forgiving you for that!” exclaimed Maestro in bitter resentment. “Unless … unless he was wanting to do some mocking himself, using the little minx to have a laugh at his own expense. … Well, never mind, Master Genius can well allow himself that.”

  At this Maestro drained another bottle of beer.

  “Would you like one, too, Eustachius, seeing that you don’t seem to go for my cocoa? Here, look, it’s brewery sealed, hermetically indeed … cap and all …”

  “No, thank you. I say, why do you so hate women?”

  “Stuff and nonsense, Eustachius. And besides, the words ‘you hate women’ are a woman’s way of putting it, and that I do hate. Me hate women? That’s like telling me I hate brandy. But we’re not going to go hiding the truth for the sake of our untameable sympathies, are we? Science is science. You’re a progressive man, Eustachius, and naturally a humane one. In the name of science and humanity you frown on witch hunts. You’re horrified at the notion, right? You can’t see how people could have believed that a woman had hopped onto a broomstick and flown off for a rendezvous with the devil. Heh-heh, that’s where your science shows a measure of naïveté—in thinking they believed it. The big-nosed scholars with their caps over their ears and their hands tucked into their wide sleeves, and in there, their fingers crossed … you think they believed in witches?”

  “Many people believed, the backward masses … Martin Luther, for one, believed in the ‘Devil’s whores,’ as did Keppler himself. A cousin of his was burned as a witch, his mother was persecuted …”

  “There, you see—the great Keppler, too!” took up Maestro with delight. “They burned his cousin and the genius took fright! Eh? Now do you think, Eustachius, that cousin wasn’t a little whore? And Frau Keppler a nasty old harridan … hairy wart on chin? Even now they would be calling her a witch.”

  “And you would have her burned?” Ugo’s fiancée: hairy wart on chin, romping, a witch—to the stake! To the stake! Ugo would be bringing armfuls of dry twigs, auto-da-fé, a blow for freedom, a blow for freedom! Now, what about Enka? Well, Enka, too, would …

  “Madam Keppler? I don’t know, she wouldn’t have been so amusing. But the little cousin … heh-heh, now she would’ve made a tasty roast duckling … Don’t be horrified, I’m only teasing, you’re egging me on … Seriously now, they had found how to get rid of the women, because these females were really dangerous—never mind whether they were witches or not. Some innocent ones died, too, of course, but which of them, tell me honestly, which of them was completely innocent? Which of them would not have let the devil mount her … if only out of curiosity? According to the Malleus maleficarum they would dance around him kissing him on the bum while he, the swine, farted with relish, ha-ha!” Maestro had clearly brought the scene to life in his mind and was enjoying himself devilishly.

  “I don’t believe, sweet Eustachius, that there have been no bitter mouthfuls in your love’s flask. Indeed you may have had your fill of that very bitterness, the bitterest of all, the one that forever poisons the heart. You see (I’m giving an example to clarify my views, even though they may disgust you—what do I care?) the whole world mourns for Desdemona—but not I. If she’d been completely innocent she would’ve tickled her husband’s armpit when he came in to strangle her. Why didn’t she tickle him, eh? I may be the only one in the world who thinks she was strangled fully in accordance with the rules of masculine prevention. You haven’t yet, you little whore, but you will … if I don’t strangle you first. For the time being I persist in you, Desdemona, shot to shot you have knocked again—shots twain (look, rhyming verse!), you’re still drunk … but we know all too well, glorious Eustachius, how long their inebriation lasts; so make with the prevention—klklkl! (Maestro made a strangling gesture) and be done with it. And rest assured you won’t have made a mistake.”

  A weird thought tickled Melkior hard.

  “You must have discussed this long and loud with Don Fernando?”

  “Discussed what?”

  “Why … preventive action.”

  “Could be, I don’t know really … He wants to save mankind, no less, and I want mankind to leave off.”

  “To be destroyed … by war?”

  “Nonsense, sensible Eustachius! Wars nurture it, multiply it. War is a sign of rage. I want a peaceful liquidation, a sort of bankruptcy—everyone realizing the deal’s off … and joining the ranks of eunuchs. Infertile women no longer give birth to living dolls; as for everything else, let microbes devour the lot. Let them eat all the books and the museums, the cities and the machines, they’ll devour each other in the end … only the Spirit will remain to move upon the face of the waters as in the opening chapter of Genesis.”

  “But what’s the point of all that?”

  “What’s the point of all this, life-saving Eustachius? Perhaps you’re hiding meaning in your pocket? So, show it to me!”

  Maestro bared his teeth at Melkior like a dog at a helpless man, feeling the advantage. Melkior was alarmed: he may go for me next with those teeth …

  “Don’t fear, Eustachius,”
laughed Maestro quite mildly, “we won’t start with you. We’ll start somewhere much closer, heh-heh, much, much closer … Here, see for yourself—no books. I’ve gone without long since. I gave them to someone downstairs—a Russian, a count, a general, a relative of the Grand Prince. Not to read though—he’s even forgotten his Russian—but … he cuts and pastes paper silhouettes and presses them with books. That’s how the general makes his living, in noble penury, in rags worn with dignity. Here’s another use for books—to press the imagination of the Grand Prince’s relative. Habent sua fata libelli.”

  ATMAN never returned the Adler book, remembered Melkior with regret, which presumably reflected in some feature of his face.

  “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?”