Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Ranko Marinković

  “Oh no! Not your ancestors. That’s his zoological genealogy, you see,” Ugo explained to the Give’nTake at large. “But enough of personal family trees …”

  “It’s not personal!” Maestro rasped, offended. “It’s a treatise on the origin of species of nobility, based on Darwin’s theory and broken down by the branches of the tree of life. When Yorick put his skull in the gravedigger’s hands and when the man passed the skull on to Hamlet in turn, what did Hamlet say of Alexander the Great, eh? You don’t know? Sit down, you dolt, you’ll fail the course! You are as witless as the Prussian clay that filled the brilliant skull of Immanuel Kant! Back to your seat!”

  “But Maestro …” pleaded Ugo.

  “I do not want to know!”

  “Please, sir, I’ll be prepared next time, sir,” Ugo lowered his eyes in shame.

  “Report to me when you are.”

  The skinny student, Chicory’s ministrant, had taken the matter seriously and was grabbing the chance to distinguish himself:

  “I know,” he said, his eyes shining in triumph.

  “What is it you know, my young friend?”

  “What Hamlet said about Alexander.”

  “Oh, really? Read about it in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, did you? You shouted Open Sesame and the gate of entire human knowledge opened before you? Or is it that you have moved beyond human knowledge? Is it that you possess centipedal knowledge as well? Think I’m being insulting? That the centipede is mindless? And I say unto you, verily, verily I say unto you, that nobody knows how the centipede walks using a hundred legs all at once. Not even Lunacharsky could do that. Whereas the centipede does, you see. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be able to walk at all. Or do you think yourself cleverer than Lunacharsky?”

  Chicory Hasdrubalson pled mercy for his ministrant. But Maestro was fully sozzled and denied the plea for pardon.

  “You think mec-ha-nisms and objects are the answer? Elec-tricities, high voltage … Well, did Montezuma have mechanisms? The hell he did, and yet he made chocolate! Licking your chops are you now? Loving Montezuma like Saint Nick now? For his chocolate? But what’s the point of me telling you about ancient civilizations, you dense … I don’t know what. You can tell your father you’re a completely failed product.”

  “I forbid you to insult me!” flared the student and stood up … but could not think of a reason for standing and sat down again.

  “There you are, Chicory, he forbids. Therefore we shall never insult him again. Never ever shall we insult him again!”

  “Damn right you won’t!” said the student in a voice collapsing with anger. “I’ll never sit with you again!”

  “And you say this to me who has loved you like a father?” cried Maestro nearly in tears. “You ungrateful brat!”

  Melkior liked the show of Maestro’s noble nature, he nudged the student in a plea to relent, to make up. … Maestro didn’t mean it like that, he’s a good man at heart. … In the end the student flashed a conciliatory smile; he thought he had got his satisfaction. All the same he would not look at Maestro; he kept glancing at his mentor Hasdrubalson, seeking advice or possibly refuge.

  “Well, what are you waiting for, mediate, Chicory the Inexorable!” cried Ugo from the other end of the table. “Can’t you see your help is expected?”

  Chicory blinked undecidedly, his cheeks twitching in nervousness, while all the others smiled slyly into their hands.

  “Well, Maestro is no Turkish potentate,” said Chicory, “you can always speak to him directly.”

  “As far as I’m concerned …” said the student like a young lover in a Renaissance comedy, in the reconciliation scene.

  “There, my boy: peace.” Maestro offered his index finger and the student eagerly took the entire hand. “You give him a finger and he takes the whole …” Maestro quipped. “No, not like that: you put your index finger on top of mine and it’s peace, peace everlasting …”

  And so they did: index finger to index finger, and their two hands flew off like birds linked by a kiss. And Maestro kissed him on the cheek, paternally.

  And the student returned the kiss.

  “And now, my boy, tell us what you were going to say,” Maestro said with much kindness. “What did Hamlet say of Alexander the Great?”

  The cheeks of everyone at the table were bulging; Ugo was on the point of bursting, but the student noticed nothing, he was intent on airing his knowledge:

  “He said we could trace in our imagination the dust of Alexander and finally find it corking a beer barrel.”

  There was a blast of long-brewing laughter. The student had walked straight into it …

  “What are you laughing at, you morons?” said Maestro in mock anger. “He got it right, didn’t he? Plugging a beer barrel, right? Alexander the Great as the great plugger, that’s the point, isn’t it, my boy?”

  But the student had already jumped to his feet and fled. They shouted after him, “Come back, it was only a joke!” Chicory actually ran after him, but it was no use, the insult had been too great.

  From all around came loud applause and shouts of “Bravo!”; at the bar, Thénardier’s two assistants gave Maestro ovations, banging on glass, crazed with mirth. Ugo leaned across the table and showered Maestro with congratulations and even kisses on his greasy and moldy head.

  “What a show!” marveled Ugo. “The doctor subtilis! Not even Saint Thomas Aquinas could have played it in so refined a …”

  “Thomas Aquinas was doctor angelicus,” Maestro pontificated, “sed tu es doctor asinus! You ignorant ass! All of you have driven that bright child away, and he had so much more to tell us! Now you’re driving away my dear Eustachius. You’re right, blessed Eustachius, this is insufferable, they are behaving like high school youngsters at a school dance. Go if you like, I will not take it amiss.”

  Melkior had indeed begun to fidget on his chair: he was about to leave.

  He, too, had been hoodwinked. He had been taken in by Maestro’s “show of benevolence,” he’d helped to “set up” the student. … The boy is now roaming the streets, bitterly regretting his gullibility. Why didn’t I belt the man one right away? No, I had to swallow his “peace-peace everlasting” rubbish, ha, ha … He mocked himself and loathed the world. The poison had taken effect …

  Before Melkior could so much as come unstuck from his chair, Ugo grabbed him by the neck. “Ah, sacré bleu!” he cried, as if he had nabbed a spy behind a door.

  “Let go of me! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Doing?” Ugo smirked, not letting go. “Nothing, this is expressing my will by the use of force. Violence! You’ve been studying us all night like a shrink with a pack of pickled peckers! Well, that doesn’t fly! Sit right back down and ask forgiveness from the magistral personage of this symposium of Concretist poetry! You’d ignore creativity, would you?”

  “I’ve been listening attentively,” stammered Melkior. “But now I must be off, I’ve got work to do.”

  “Work!” Ugo pulled a pious face. “Did you hear, Oh ye faithful, that most sacred of words? Approach and prostrate yourselves! The Lord our God Himself invented it and said to Adam (after that ploy with the apple), ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’ He stuck a fig leaf on him and booted him from Paradise. That was the end of easy living in the bosom of the Earth. Time to work. And then our forefather, whom this did irk, invented the famous ode to work: cabbages are tasty cabbages are yummy, grow ye cabbages and never go ye hungry. Therefore, brethren, grow ye cabbages and fear not.”

  “As did your esteemed father—he raised a genuinely exemplary head of cabbage!” Maestro put in.

  “Thank you for the compliment,” Ugo bowed. But he was taken aback by Maestro’s interjection; he therefore went after Melkior again.

  “It’s a shame, oh sociable Eustachius,” he turned him around and spoke into his face. “It’s a shame for a Parampionic veteran such as yourself to shut himself in his secret little lab and
day and night distill the extract of a most corrosive antimilitarist outlook, one which in further chemical processing might even be described as seditious.”

  “Ugo!” Melkior pleaded in a hot whisper.

  “He can be seen in broad daylight,” Ugo went on cruelly, “stepping onto the invalid’s weighing machine on the street corner with the secret mission of controlling the weight of his irreplaceable body, with particular attention to certain famous military regulations. For seven years, in his head, he has been nurturing, fertilizing, watering, weeding his sweet little cabbage patch: how to render inaccessible to the Kingdom his body, which in view of its glory is fully entitled to it, as is borne out by all of history. He has, among other things, a poem which sets it all out in a poetic manner. I must confess I don’t know its title, but it does not really need a title—if it has one at all, am I right, Eustachius?”

  “Ugo, please,” whispered Melkior, trembling, “for God’s sake stop acting like a fool!”

  “What’s the matter?” Ugo mused. “Why, the poem’s quite good. A bit old-fashioned, perhaps. Listen:

  Begone now, leave me be, ’tis solitude I need

  softly to approach the grass …”

  “Stop!” Melkior shrieked in desperation and wrenched free of Ugo’s grip. “You’re not a man, you’re a cur!” he added, fending off Ugo’s hands, which were reaching to keep him there. When he closed the door from the outside, Thénardier’s bell sobbed after him.

  “Pity,” said Maestro thoughtfully. “Just when we were set up for a splendid evening. Tell you what, Ugo: why don’t U-go and u-be-gone, you goon.”

  White all around … and a tinge of illness. The quiet, roomy terrace of an Alpine sanitarium for the consumptive. He did not want to say “tuberculin.” Deep down he feared the word. A view of mountain lakes and glaciers. A glass of milk on a small white table. He, reclining on a chaise longue, the chronicle of some thirty-year, three-hundred-year, three-thousand-year war in his hands. A little farther off down the terrace, also resting, a gold-haired and pale-faced one, a consumptive girl reading. … At this point somebody else would write that she was reading The Sorrows of Young Werther or Adolphe or The Torrents of Spring; well, just to show them make it a book by Kumičić, Jelka’s Sprig of Basil, or even Chance by the same author. The sweet banality of a delusion … The pretty golden girl brushing away a dainty tear over a passage here and there and coughing demurely. Poor thing. Everything pale, sick, sad … Banal! Intentionally banal!

  Originality almost frightened Melkior with its literary coyness. With its seductive charm that diverts from real cares and smiles in the distance and holds out a promise of surprises to come. Originality might have lifted his spirits and plucked him out of tethering reality. But it would not have been a lasting liberation, it only meant a sweet hour of forgetfulness: a bit of Te Deum laudamus and a whiff of incense, with cares waiting around the next corner to throttle him. Lasting liberation required banality and nothing but banality, sickly sweet, dull banality, white all around and a tinge of illness, the terrace, the glaciers, the milk, and the golden girl.

  Replete with Kumičić! With no exaltation, with no literary ambition, with no taste, without affectation, he built for himself a tableau depicting the liberation from the nightmare in a most primitive fashion, almost as a stupidity cult which Ugo would have jeered at with a vengeance if Melkior had been naïve enough to share with him his sanitarium, his Jelka’s Sprig of Basil, his consumptive delusion with a view of Alpine lakes.

  And yet the shabby picture postcard gave him the strength to carry on down the road he had taken, offering a way out of an absurdity that threatened to swallow him whole.

  He followed the screaming ambulances hurtling down the streets with their cargo of the diseased, the down-and-out, the victims of traffic accidents, the suicides, with engaged, almost envious eyes, and the hearses he all but cursed. He watched the bodies walking past his and compared those puny, no-account, gnomelike beings with his own health, strength, stamina, with his ability to perform anything that might be called Duty which could lay claim to his body. Give me a body, says Duty, and I will show you its strength.

  His life was afraid of the life force within him. Here, look, all these moving, masticating, shouting, laughing organisms may have a fault in them, a crack, a tiny hole down which all the laughter and noise will seep away; there are all manner of stones, blockages, ulcers, caverns, all kinds of rheumatism, sciatica, deafness, disjunction, mutilation, right index finger missing, flat feet. The idiot! Long live the idiot! That is the safest kind of mimicry life can offer a being of its creation. From his vantage point the idiot watches history run its course without the danger of getting caught up in the action, just as we cry as we watch a film playing in the cinema. We mourn fictitious travails, while it’s only an idiot who laughs at genuine deaths. He jeers at life from his safe vantage point, taking his revenge for being rejected, smug at being spared. Life has chosen Intelligence for its games, it does not use idiots to make history. It has chosen geniuses for grand words on the cross, at the guillotine, at the gallows, facing the barrels of guns, in front of nations cheering the Brutuses and Caesars alike. An idiot ceded the cup of poison to Socrates. An idiot ceded to Danton the glory of being decapitated by history. (And then made it up to him by producing a marble bust of his head and raising it on a square as an example for future generations.) Whereas the idiot wears his head with a strange grimace of disgust, as if he had long since understood everything, sneered derisively, and stopped time in the rigid folds of his mindless face. Long live the idiot!

  Melkior tortured himself with bitter, sardonic thoughts. As if he were ranting at a vast power—a god or a force like the collective mind of all men—he spoke like a lawyer and demagogue, preached with prophetic pathos, in the voice of a supplicant, he sought impact-making figures of speech, paradoxes, drastic examples, he championed “his cause.”

  And saintlike, mortified his flesh. Tortured it with hunger, wore it down with vigils, never for a moment let it be. Burdened it with fabricated, superfluous worries, invented tasks in bed at night: one grain of wheat on square one, two on square two, four on square three, eight on square four, sixteen on square five, thirty-two on square six, sixty-four on square seven, a hundred and twenty-eight on square eight, two hundred and fifty-six on square nine, five hundred and twelve on square ten, a thousand and twenty-four on square eleven, two thousand and forty-eight on square twelve, four thousand and ninety-six on square thirteen, eight thousand one hundred and ninety-two on square fourteen, sixteen thousand three hundred and eighty-four on square fifteen, thirty-two thousand seven hundred and sixty-eight on square sixteen, sixty-five thousand five hundred and thirty-six on square seventeen, a hundred and thirty-one thousand and seventy-two on square eighteen, two hundred and sixty-two thousand one hundred and forty-four on square nineteen. … The number grew at a dizzying rate! He had only wanted to play a little game with arithmetic, and it came out a nightmare! Where was it all leading to, and what was the point? Through a small, innocent act of doubling, through the truly paltry mediation of the so beloved, popular, ordinary, friendly, familial, lovers’ number—the number two—grew an endless monster, the inconceivable body of infinity, as terrible as fear, as vast as eternity.

  That, too, was a form of torture: infinity and eternity. For we have become accustomed to seeing things tamed by forms, harnessed to our limited needs, cut up into mouthfuls to fit our appetite. Things in costume, clean-shaven, groomed for parade, for show; the humiliation of matter, being reduced to a prop, a camera, a razor, a brush.

  And things are weirdly superior and heedless. Undimensional. Infinite. And all the symbols that have grown above things—like clouds condensing into being above endless waters—roam inside our heads in the guise of thoughts, worries, wishes, daydreams. Tortures.

  Melkior entered his torture chamber with delight. But there was no joy to his delight, only calculation. He took pleasure in reckoning that in t
he twists and turns among which he ran, in the labyrinths around which he raced blithely shouting at the top of his lungs, “I’ve disappeared, I’m not here,” he would really and truly disappear from the sight of the absurdity that lay in wait for him. That he would be invisible and elude those huge, hairy, greasy fingers getting closer to him whenever his thought faltered, whenever he forgot himself and surrendered to pleasure.

  Over there, around the corner, is where he lives: a room with its own access overlooking the parade ground of the 35th Regiment barracks from across the street. And over here, before the corner, is the Cozy Corner, a small bar or café which Ugo calls a bistro. That is where Melkior drops in of an evening on his way home to “have a drink.” The Cozy Corner is run by a German family: a small pink pot-bellied father, his face certain of the importance of his existence, a long and lean mother speaking Croatian-German in a good-natured, comical way, a plump pale daughter, Else, who looked as if she recently quit a convent, shielding her femininity from male lust and dropping her gaze when serving the tables (as if she were serving at an altar), and the son, Kurt, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and with a large blonde head. Cozy Corner was the local watering hole for the sergeants from the barracks of the 35th; Melkior often wondered why only sergeants, it may be that the establishment was the right match for their rank, or some such thing.

  Melkior entered and was greeted by three members of the German family (the father was seldom seen, he was always off on his business rounds), but the mother’s greeting rang out, “Goot eefnink.”

  The sergeants had taken the four sides of one table; on a corner chair sat demure Else, twiddling her fingers in her lap, her eyes downcast, naturally. Kurt was serving another table: a giant and a little old man in a white linen suit left over from summer. A half-pint each.

  Two tables were free. Melkior sat down at the one farther away from the sergeants’ table, sensibly, out of reach of the mothball smell of the army. Kurt was a deft waiter; he described himself as a waiter although he was a student of engineering. He served Melkior with one of “their own” special sausages and asked permission to join him.