Ranko Marinkovic - Cyclops

“Why did you break up, then?”

“She was too beautiful for me,” said ATMAN uncertainly, looking at Melkior with suspicion: does he know more by chance? He probably saw some tiny ironical twitch on Melkior’s face; that was why he went on straight away, though not readily: “There were certain incompatibilities in our characters … For all that we were what I may well call madly in love, I suffered. Her beauty was simply too much for me to bear. She knew it and liked to torment me. Just for fun, on a whim, as women amuse themselves. She said such things were inevitable in a happy marriage. She used to tell me about men from our circle of friends molesting her, laughing at me behind my back. … She had me at odds with everyone. I had truly become suspicious and horrible. There was a boy I beat to within an inch of his life. She had complained about him propositioning her brazenly in public, what would people think of her, and once the rumors got started I was going to end up believing them myself, no, honestly, it had gone past being a joke, after all she didn’t want me to be everyone’s laughingstock, and so on … and I went and beat the hell out of the cur, or rather the pup — he was small, frightened, and miserable.”

Poor Numbskull.

“What did you beat him with? A dog whip?” Melkior broke out in goose bumps.

“Whip nothing — I used these instruments,” he thumped his dreadful hands on the table. “She admitted later on she’d made it all up. Why? Well, she wanted me to thrash someone over her.”

“But why the young man, of all people?” asked Melkior with an internal smirk.

“Because, would you believe it, she liked him!” replied ATMAN, as if still perplexed. “He was the most polite of them all — sort of admired her from afar. That was precisely what put her in jeopardy … and she wanted to remain faithful to me. That way she averted the danger …”

Oh how very classical it all sounds, as if Racine himself had had a hand in it, gloated Melkior.

“You seem to be smirking, Mr. Melkior?” ATMAN was looking at him inquisitorially. “I know what you’re thinking. But if I’d beaten her up—’to be on the safe side’ as you like to say …”

“I didn’t say a word.”

“Oh come on now, Mr. Melkior, I can see your brain laughing in there. But if I’d beaten her up I would’ve had to claim what I could never prove. Coco never has proof. It would all have been reduced to the classical ‘He said — She said …’ and so on to eternity. I didn’t want to live under such conditions, did I? I’m a practical man, I wanted to go on living with her. Shall we have another round? Sir, same again please.”

Poor ATMAN, thought Melkior in a moment of weakness. He watched the palmist twiddle his shot glass around and around in his long, hard hands, studying it carefully as though something were being revealed to him in the simple optics of the smudged glass. His eyes had come fearfully close to each other with a kind of grave concern, nearly fusing into a single Polyphemic Cyclopean eye. Who is this man to whom I gave the chiromantic name ATMAN as a joke? Once again Melkior felt a kind of queasiness at the question.

“It goes without saying, Mr. Melkior,” spoke up ATMAN, still peering with concern into the empty glass he was rolling between his hands, “after all you have learned about my sen-ti-mental life, that you should raise the question (please don’t protest, I can see it in your eyes for all that I’m not looking at you): how is it that I dare again … you know.”

“No I don’t.”

“Oh, don’t lie, Mr. Melkior, we understand each other only too well. I know I’m not at all … oh hell, it’s hard to say bad things about oneself … well, not particularly attractive to women. No, no, I do have a mirror, you know. It breaks my heart to look at my reflection. Funny how the eyes mostly look at themselves in the mirror. Now what’s there for my eyes to see in themselves? If only they could see my heartbreak! That, and my fear of the image of my hideousness, the miserable insecurity before women’s critical eyes! But not a bit of it! When I’m on the job they quake at my gaze, like trapped birds … and that’s all the com-pen-sation I get. But they then see me not as a male but as a god charting their destiny. She asked you — remember? — what com-pen-sation meant. Now when she wants to unsettle me she stares with her beautiful eyes at my simian ones … and that, it appears, is Destiny’s way of warning me. But I defy it, you see … I fight back.”

And Melkior again felt sorry for ATMAN.

“No, honestly, there is something evil in my eyes, as if they were forever scheming to commit a crime,” went on ATMAN in desperate lamentation. “I’ve noticed you, too, avoid looking into my eyes — you’re afraid of offending me. This kind of eyes, naturally enough, are to be found in apes and owls … and born criminals. On account of them (and my hands, of course) your Don Fernando would immediately sentence me to death ‘to be on the safe side,’ according to his theory of killing. Then again, who knows, perhaps I really am dangerous. Don Fernando may be right, perhaps I really ought to be put to death … ‘to be on the safe side’; what do you think?” grinned ATMAN provocatively.

“You’re talking gibberish, Mr. Adam; what on earth do you mean by the ‘theory of killing’?” Melkior was alarmed: where the hell did he get that from?

“Why, it’s Don Fernando’s theory. Hasn’t he set it out for you? I don’t believe he hasn’t — he takes you for one of …”

“I know nothing of it.”

“Nothing, you say?” smiled ATMAN suspiciously. “Truth to tell, Don Fernando’s thinking is not entirely insane. Many an innocent man would go to the wall, but quite a few of the ‘dangerous’ ones would be eliminated as well. Through … what’s the word for doing something to forestall an evil? Acting … how?”

“Preventively.”

“That’s it — through preventive killing. According to Don Fernando, that was — pre-ven-tively — how Hitler should have been done in, while he was still walking the Earth as a private citizen. As well as the others Don Fernando suspects — they ought to be done in, all of them …”

“Where did you get this all from? Did he tell you?”

“Of course he did … not me, we haven’t met, but someone else. Perhaps an ‘executioner’ who … Because now he’s looking for ‘executioners,’ naturally — he doesn’t want to dirty his hands. And of course he’s looking for them among desperadoes who no longer care whether they live or die — they’ve already sold their body to the Faculty of Medicine.”

Maestro! it dawned on Melkior, Maestro told him all this in his cups. But could it be that Don Fernando had settled on Maestro? … no, Melkior couldn’t bring himself to believe it.

“Very strange, is it not, Mr. Melkior, to sentence a man to death because of his ‘appearance’?” ATMAN propped his chin on both palms and trained his terrible and (somehow) dirty gaze on Melkior: “I know I’ve been blacklisted on account of the look in my eyes, take a look, Mr. Melkior,” he pointed both his index fingers at his eyes, “only the ‘executioner’ is missing, ha-ha … The man who was subjected to the prop-a-ganda did not take the ‘preventive killing’ theory seriously. He is, well, an irresponsible, crack-brained man. He promised to go through with it, for a joke (he doesn’t care, he’s going to kill himself anyway), only to sit down with the ‘victim’ and have a good laugh at the customer, ha-ha-ha … All right, but it wasn’t merely ‘we had a chuckle — end of story,’ oh no!” finished ATMAN in a somehow threatening way, yet laughing still.