Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Ranko Marinković

  The red-haired Asclepian is there, too, disguised as Sartorius the Critic, smirking smugly: “Look who’s claiming to be free of the influence of Dostoyevsky! Rotten lies, lies, lies …”

  Cut to:

  The wharf of a small seaside town. Barges and fishing boats alongside. On the shore, wine barrels and drying fishing nets. And no one in sight. An indefinite time of day, morning or noon, there is no way of telling which, the hands are missing from the church spire clock. Its face is rusty.

  You are alone (… alone, alone, all, all alone, comes the echo of the ancient Mariner’s voice). You have an empty ink bottle in hand and it suddenly occurs to you to rinse it in the sea. You descend two steps, nearer to the water, you kneel … but the ink bottle no longer matters. You take out a knife, a big pocket knife, you open it and, grabbing your hair with your left hand, you slice your head off with a natural and easy stroke. A simple business, like killing a chicken. Next you rinse your head instead of the ink bottle: up-down, splash-splash. A clear picture of decapitation: a body minus a head, the head in your hands, its eyes open and indifferent. Suddenly your head slips out of your hands and floats away in the water. You cannot reach it. You call out to it, entreating it to come back, but it only looks at you—a long, hurt look—then smiles sadly and closes its eyes as if in sudden pain. You try to draw it near using a stick; it only spins like a pumpkin and will not come nearer to you. It then gives you a desperately painful, farewell look and says sorrowfully (but seeming to blame you for its sorrow): “Goodbye, I’m off,” and you hear it sob. Then it takes a deep dive and disappears.

  A feeble-minded man is standing behind you on the shore, grinning idiotically as he watches you. When the head dives he said, “You could’ve given it to me. My old lady’s sister, the deaf one, is dead.”

  “The deaf one” was what Melkior heard when he opened his eyes. What’s this? he said aloud.

  The light is on in the room. “Who’s there?” he asks the room.

  The room is silent. It diverts his gaze from itself, directing it downward, at the bed, at himself, his legs, his belly, his chest, and closer and closer still … it would show him his head, too.

  The Gaze is frightened. It has discovered you on the bed, fully dressed and with your shoes on, and is now watching you in amazement, as it would watch a stranger, a discovery.

  You show it your arms, by turns. The Gaze watches them, unmoved, “The arms” being its sole, indifferent comment. It has no interest in arms. It shortens its range, searching for a target closer to. It closes and crosses, peering at the nose from both sides at once, like Picasso. That is the closest object it can see—the nose. It defines the nose in passing: a bilateral something jutting out into space and dividing the visible world in two, into the left and the right. But the Gaze wants the head, the solution to the conundrum, the answer to this night, to his dream of decapitation.

  The Gaze wants itself, its very self, it wants to see its own self. And to admire itself, a narcissist, stupid, shortsighted, blind to anything that is not It, a Sharp Gaze, a pure, eighteen-carat Gaze.

  The Gaze would look at itself, full face and profile, to examine its breadth of field, its acuity, to discover its face from a novel, as yet unfamiliar vantage point. It would penetrate its self, dive into its past, into its ancient, Proterozoic origin, into times when it still touched the world warily, with pseudopods and tendrils.

  The Gaze has an intrepid desire to see itself.

  But you are put off by the audacity. Who knows what may lurk inside? Perhaps an entrance to an entirely new, undiscovered hell from which there is no return? The disappearance into one’s own eyes and entry into an endless ordeal?

  You are afraid of your own self lying on the bed. Fully dressed, with your shoes on. (They say sleeping with your shoes on gives you bad dreams.) But who turned the light on? He could have sworn that, this morning, when he’d gone up to his room, he’d taken off the sodden clothes and muddy shoes, put on his pajamas, slid under the blanket, and turned off the light! And proceeded to reflect in bed: Love? how unexplained it all still is! Is it the Song of Songs, Cleopatra, Beatrice, Laura, Phaedra, Don Juan, Werther, Stendhal, or Casanova? What is love?

  He remembers quite clearly: first he threw himself on the sofa, rain-soaked and tired as he was, and browsed through Stendhal’s On Love and then, eyes closed, pondered many inexplicable points about beauty and suffering in love. “How fair and how pleasant art thou, Oh love, for delights! This thy stature is like to the palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes. Thou art beautiful, Oh my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners. Solomon had the vineyard at Baalhamon …” “Minus dormit et edit quem amoris cogitatio vexat,” says De amore, by André le Chapelain of Avignon. All those sad, empty days, all those sleepless nights, all the fear, anxiety, pining, misery, folly! All the suffering. All the blood for the sake of love’s “delights”! All the hearts aflutter! All the heads cut off!

  La douce pensée

  Qu’amour souvent me donne!

  wrote the poor page Guillaume de Cabstaing of Provence in the twelfth century, moments before his lord, Monseigneur Raymond de Roussillon, cut off his head and pulled the heart out from his chest, had it cooked, and then made his wife, the page’s lover, eat it. He then asked her if the heart she had just eaten had been to her taste—and showed her Guillaume’s head. It was so delicious, she replied, that no other food or drink would ever erase the taste of Guillaume’s heart. Whereupon she leapt from the window to her death, the hapless Madame Marguerite.

  He got up and opened the window. Below him was a three-story wet, dark depth.

  Well? Should I jump? How do they jump using a parachute?—And he conjured up a breakneck aeronautical grand slalom. The parachute fails to open …

  But this: lying on the bed fully dressed, with the light on in the room! And dreaming, in the light, of cutting off your own head! In the light, that’s the most frightening thing about it!

  No, I was attempting to operate on myself last night … Perhaps I also got up, turned the light on, dressed, went out, perhaps? The tram? No, the tram happened earlier. It’s all hazy, disjointed. Say something, you sightless things! You, too, flaming minister!—he said to the lightbulb. The lightbulb below the ceiling shone indifferently, mute, deaf, it just shone on without a word. The sole witness watching from above, the sole, sighted witness.

  Perhaps I was trying to kill myself?

  He remembered the paper-knife and began to quake. Where’s the knife?

  A great deal depends on that. Must be over there, on the desk. To think that people wish you a good night in the evening!

  The knife was on the desk, thrust to the hilt in a thick volume that had only half its pages cut. The book lay on its side, helpless, stabbed. This disturbed him even more. Stabbed! Who had plunged the knife so brutally into its gut? (It was Wells’s A Short History of the World. Poor Short!) He carefully removed the knife from History’s belly.

  I must have been using the damned thing last night after all! The thought would not go away. Enka’s gift, silver-plated, for his birthday the previous year.

  He went across to the mirror and was alarmed by him there on the other side eyeing him so weirdly. Look how hard he stares! He means to frighten … But he noticed that the other is also frightened, looking out with mistrust … No, honestly, man does not trust man, not even in a mirror!

  Well, what about it, friend? What would we look like with no head? He took hold of his head by the hair with his left hand and very cautiously slid the knife across his windpipe with his right. Glugkhrhhh … went the windpipe, slit. He then held his head in both hands and turned it this way and that as if it had really been severed. What an odd feeling, holding a human head in one’s hands!

  Then again, it could have been like this: some important, urgent thoughts had swarmed into the anteroom of sleep, knocking, shouting, alerting you, demanding to be immediately received and heard. But kind Sleep,
to protect you from the heralds of bad news, simply took away your head and went whispering to your body: you have nothing to think with, you have no head. Sleep on.

  Sleep on indeed, with a knife only a few feet away from your sleep, plunged into History’s guts!

  Your word for KNIFE is NOž, pronounced NOZHHH. The zh is the terrible bladelike edge of the word. It contains the zhhhh needed for the slitting of throats. In other languages the knife could be an instrument used to sharpen pencils, slice apples … but nož is all about slaughter, murder most foul. The Croatian word for dagger is bodež, if you strip the zh from bodež—you get bode, a silly harmless pricking, the paltry sting of a mischievous thorn, a tack sticking up from the seat of a chair. Words like howling—lavež, thief—lupež, or a house afire—požar—all of them are bloodcurdling things of the night and you don’t dare lie in bed at night and go to sleep for fear of them.

  So you think: what am I to do with the nož? You are actually afraid to go to sleep with it near you. So you try to work something out: wrap it up well, in a whole newspaper, tie it up firmly with string, lock it in a drawer, lock the drawer key in the wardrobe, take the wardrobe key to the kitchen and lock it … somewhere, go back to the room, lock the room, throw the room key out the window. Too complicated. Foolish, too. It can all be undone by working backward.

  What is he to do? He sits on the bed with the paper-knife in his hand, it is night, all sensible people are asleep, and there he is, fearful of dozing off lest he cut his own throat in his sleep. And he thinks with rancor: dogs are muzzled, windows barred, wherever you look there are railings, pillars, locks, red lights, lighthouses, signals, warnings BEWARE OF THE DOG! LEVEL CROSSING! DO NOT LEAN OUT THE WINDOW! HIGH VOLTAGE! (Maestro laughing) POISON! and they alarm you with the skull and crossbones the better to protect you; experts on the railways, on the sea and in the air, experts in police departments protect you and your two shoes from burglars and collectivists, in every capital city there is an expert safeguarding you from sudden attack by means of treaties, alliances, and friendships, and generally protecting your interests abroad. Spiritual leaders protect your soul; statesmen, your body. In fact they vie—nay, quarrel—with each other over who will protect you best, and consequently give you wafts of incense and sprinkles of holy water for the benefit of your soul; and for the benefit of your body they surround you with powerful security measures: the League of Nations, the Non-Aggression and Mutual Assistance Pact, the Maginot Line, the Siegfried Line, guns, tanks, submarines, bombers, rifles, mines, bayonets, pistols—in a word, an impregnable circle of fire and steel, and they tell you: you’re safe in here, don’t do anything ridiculous like feeling despair. We’re here, you can sleep in peace.

  Sleep in peace … Sorry, gentlemen, a bit of a misunderstanding here. I naturally am safe by your side—I mean, under your wise and powerful aegis. And I’m afraid of no one as long as you are here. But when I go to sleep you’re no longer at my side and I’m alone and mindless like an idiot. Can’t you see the dreams I have? How can I sleep? Inside your safe circle of fire, treaties, and bayonets—don’t be surprised—I’m very poorly protected from myself! I panic like a scorpion.

  There’s nothing I can do about it—I am a scorpion. And if you don’t let me out, I fear I will give myself a lethal injection, just like a scorpion, in despair!

  He thought he ought to go back to bed after all. But what was the use, given that van der Lube would appear immediately, crazed by the terrible death he had experienced, and mutter madly, “Give me back my head, you thieves, give me back my head, my head, my head …”

  Melkior leaned against the windowpane. The barracks were still asleep. The guard had crawled into the sentry box like a dog and was dozing on his feet inside, troubled by soldierly dreams. In the house next door lived a young woman in the last stage of pregnancy. What is she going to have? A daughter. Then she would be impressing upon the girl, in later years, that the wife holds up three corners of the house and the husband only the fourth. (If a bomb hit a house who held up the corners?) If she had a son, his father would worry about his FUTURE, which might well exceed three months. He would buy him a spring-action toy rifle and some tin soldiers, give the lad something to play with. The boy would guard their house all day long, like that soldier was guarding his barracks across the street, and would shoot at the unarmed enemy children on the block. And in the evening, when his father returned from work, he would shoot at him, “Bang! Daddy, I’ve killed you. Lie down, Daddy, you’re dead.” Daddy was worried and grave, he didn’t even notice the child’s game. He had a newspaper in hand, an extra-late addition. The boy was angry at Daddy’s refusal to lie down when dead, and shot him again with murderous rage, Bang! but Daddy did not fall. The boy flung himself to the floor in desperation, pounding it with his fists, weeping over the disregard for the rules of his game. “Humor the child a bit, can’t you,” his mother cut in. “What, and die to please him?” His father was not in the mood for joking. “It’s only a game. Don’t be a spoilsport.” “We’ll be playing the game for keeps soon enough,” his father said anxiously. The boy had been eavesdropping slyly and redoubled his screams on realizing the failure of his mother’s intercession. In the end his father spanked him and sent him to bed. Lying in bed, he sobbed, offended, in the dark. Later on, half asleep, he heard his father and mother talking quietly in bed, his mother crying and his father tossing and turning, saying, “If only it weren’t for the boy.” And the boy thought: “It’s me Daddy’s talking about, he’s sorry I’m alive. All right then, I’ll kill myself in the coal shed first thing in the morning” and envisaged dropping a stone down the gun barrel and shooting himself in the eye.

  Leaning on the window, engaged with the little drama, he had not noticed the arrival of the dawn. A gray cloud in the middle of the sky was going faintly pink: from its height it had caught sight of the sun below the horizon.

  In the distance, engines whistled, early trains departed.

  Melkior greeted the morning from his window. “Good morning, Morning! Welcome! Hey, I’m alive!” But this was only a moment of welcome. “Aah, I’m alive … so what?” and he was again gripped by a dull and despairing dread, feeling a strange and repulsive anxiety all over his body.

  The landlady was up. He could hear her tottering and tramping in the dawn’s half-light, still woozy from sleep. She purposely banged an elbow on his door and muttered, “Up and moving all night …”

  Melkior felt the cold metal of the knife in his hand and gave a shiver of strange revulsion. He stepped quickly out onto the landing and went into the landlady’s flat. He found her in front of the bathroom door, tousled, limp, sodden with sleep.

  “Up all night again, were you?” she gathered her housecoat at her chest, concealing her un-maternal and still ambitious breasts.

  “Would you please take this knife, Madam?”

  Fully dressed, pale, thick blue rings around eyes. She watches him with what is almost fear.

  “What’s the matter, Mr. Melkior? Why do you want me to take the knife?”

  “I have bad dreams when it is near me.”

  “Ah, I dream of those damned knives myself. Snakes, too.” But she took the knife with a kind of passion. Melkior noticed it.

  “Why don’t you remarry, Madam? It’s not too late for you at all.”

  “What about you? Why don’t you get married?” she retorted with fresh matutinal coquetry.

  On his way back to his room Melkior thought of Viviana. Of Enka, too, in passing. Her knife. She does not have knives stuck into her belly in her sleep like the poor landlady. Her dreams are like a cat’s—nocturnal mouse-hunting.

  A bird piped up in a park near by: chee-chee-caw … chee-chee-caw …

  “Chi-chi-kov … Chi-chi-kov …” replied Melkior with literary sarcasm. “Dead Souls. And so to bed, with our own soul dead”—this he was barely able to say as he toppled on the bed, dead with exhaustion and lack of sleep.

  “They have these bi
nges night after night. He’s clearly drunk. He didn’t even take off his clothes.”

  “Never mind, don’t wake him. We’ll just leave my things and go.”

  He heard the voices above, but couldn’t open his eyes. A tremendous fatigue sat heavy on his eyelids and kept his consciousness in a state of listless floating on the surface of a very shallow sleep. From time to time he felt contact with wakefulness underneath, as if his sleep were bobbing in a shallow and scraping the bottom. He made out “he’s drunk”—that was Pupo speaking; “never mind” was someone else, a stranger. But he thought he was dreaming, so he let himself sink into his stupor like a drunkard, using the voices to put together a small sketch:

  “Binges for flowers, thank you, thank you,” says the old lady pianist over his bed. Pupo tries to drag her away, “He didn’t even take his clothes off”; she struggles with him, “Never mind, don’t wake him.” But there is a third person here, someone invisible, important, “We’ll just leave my things and go.” And everyone leaves.

  Melkior was suddenly frightened at the prospect of being left; he jumped to his feet: “Wait! No, wait! Right away … I’ll get undressed right away.” … But his eyes were still closed. “He’s dreaming,” said a strange voice. But Melkior was awake already, it was just that his eyes were still glued shut by thick, greasy sleep.

  Nevertheless he padded with extraordinary certainty over to the glass carafe with water in it, poured some into his cupped palm, and splashed his eyes. Yes, there were Pupo and a stranger, standing next to his bed, beaming at him.

  “I’m so sorry, I’ve … I didn’t sleep all night.” He was making excuses to the stranger. “His kind are early risers,” he thought.