Ranko Marinkovic - Cyclops

ATMAN is offended. But he is immediately rewarded by the sympathies of all those present, which after all is what he was after. The effect is complete: everyone despises Melkior and takes no pains to hide it.

But nobody notices the disappearance of the subject. Four Eyes, possibly at some secret sign from the palmist, has lost himself — simply melted away like a specter. And later on, when his disappearance is noticed, nobody believes any longer that he was there at all. They even believe that the snoring was produced by ATMAN and that the entire incident at the staircase was merely a nocturnal magic trick to surprise them, and they are grateful to him for it. They disperse with smiles, marveling at the artifice.

ATMAN, too, has made for his room downstairs, but Melkior stops him. “Just a moment, Mr. Adam.”

Turning toward Melkior, ATMAN smiles innocently.

“What was the idea of all this business with Four Eyes tonight?”

“Four Eyes? What Four Eyes?”

“Four Eyes the drunkard. You brought him here and arranged this monkey business with him. We’re alone, you can speak freely.”

“Hypnosis is monkey business? Is that the way for a psychologist to talk? You saw that nobody else understood anything. They just marveled. But you, Mr. Melkior …!”

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” says Melkior almost threateningly. “Why did you bring Four Eyes here?”

“Here, you even know his name! Yet you pretended not to know him.”

“Just tell me why you brought him here.”

“Why ask me? He’s your friend, ‘Votre ami,’ am I right?”

“I heard four feet when you were going up the stairs …”

“Well, well, you are good at colorful insults! What a clever way of calling me a jackass! Four legs, huh? There, there, don’t be afraid. You don’t have to be literary about it — insult me directly. I won’t sue you.”

“I’m … I’m going to …”

“Kill me?” the palmist whispers sensuously, squinching an eye. He is offering his cheek to Melkior’s blow wholeheartedly, almost politely. It is as if he asks for nothing but being strangled by Melkior forthwith.

He is standing dreadfully close. Melkior feels some maddened cat move inside him because of that nose, those ears, those cheeks … But the eyes, the palmist’s eyes, set so close to each other under the straight line of the eyebrows, watch him from under a mask, as if through slits, with a different look, one that does not go with his words. With a distant, threatening look that “knows all” and means business.

His beast takes fright, bends its spine, curls into a cuddly ball, meows ingratiatingly.

“Why do you follow me around?” he asks of the palmist in an almost supplicating whisper, despondently.

The palmist’s eyes go mellow again, come closer, amicably, intimately touching Melkior’s with a sort of kindness.

“Tut, tut, Mr. Melkior,” ATMAN was shaking his head, “what an idea! Follow? Me follow you? Isn’t it in fact you who are the follower of certain interesting persons?”

“Follower? Of what persons?”

“Follower is a deliberately chosen word to underline a certain little idea. Follower of interesting, truly interesting persons, Mr. Melkior. I repeat — interesting.”

“You remind me of a fishmonger in my hometown. He would invent things all day long at the fish market and confound people. He ‘knew all.’”

“The fishmonger may have invented things; I do not. Try to remember, Mr. Melkior … today, this afternoon …” The palmist squinches an eye again, derisively. Then Melkior remembers. Prompted by the squinch, perhaps. He had indeed followed Dom Kuzma. So …

“So you were following me this afternoon as well?”

“Hah, you think I have nothing better to do? You’ve lost a great deal of weight lately. Do you weigh yourself every day or just now and then?”

“What concern is that of yours, damn you?” shouts Melkior, quite furious now.

“I wonder myself. What concern is it of mine? Well, I am concerned — not so much with your person as with your error. Your erroneous reckoning, that is. Circulus vitiosus , is that right? Because what’s the use of a life that you are bound to lose in another way — to disease, I mean? You saw the catechist. But he had been mortifying his body for different reasons. And even he changed his mind. He would now like to live. Too late. He had been renouncing life through penitence, whereas you, contrariwise, want to live. Which is why you’re killing yourself. I perceive the absurdity of it, that is what I have long meant to tell you.”

“I’m not killing myself in any way. This is just another of your ridiculous conjectures.”

But Melkior suddenly realizes he is defending himself, retreating. Why on earth is he letting the cad meddle in his affairs in the first place?

“And stop speculating about my private life!” he says vigorously and somehow definitively.

“Why, Mr. Melkior, it’s not your private life I’m speculating about. It’s the problem itself, the very interesting problem of saving one’s life from one peril — a grave and dreadful peril, granted — at the price of bringing on another peril which is no less grave or dreadful. You are not aware of the latter peril now — you are overpossessed by the fear of the former. I can understand a prisoner mortifying and thinning his body in order to fit it through a hole. His object is right there: getting through, and after the hole come recuperation and fattening. But what’s your hole? Where’s the hole you wish to fit through?”

“Leave me alone!” cries Melkior in desperation. “Anyway, good night.” He turned around and was about to leave, but ATMAN stabs his back with a pointing finger.

“Are you quite sure it will be a good night, Mr. Melkior?” and gives him an insolent grin.

Melkior looks at him with impotent scorn. He is on the verge of riposting, but the staircase lights go off. What can he say to him now in the dark?

The palmist’s nearness makes him shudder. Instinctively he stretches out his arms and touches ATMAN, who is coming near step by tiny step with an accelerating hiss of “kill … kill … kill …” He pushed him back hard, in terror, and begins a panicky grope for a wall to cover his back. And fumbles for the switch with all ten fingers to turn on the lights. But the switch is gone. The wall is gone, too. Nowhere around him is there a single solid object to protect him, anything firm, secure, anything but emptiness and dark. And ATMAN is gone, too. There is only his laughter from some strange, sobbing distance ha-ha-ha. And repeated striking sounds, a bang, shouts. As if someone is calling out to him in French. And the light suddenly comes on.

He opened his eyes. The light was on in his room. How long had he been asleep? Snoring? What snoring? He had been hearing himself snore. Something struck his window again. A pebble. And someone shouting in the street, “Mon ami, mon ami!”

He went over to the window. Ugo was gesticulating in the middle of the street. Drunk, of course. Melkior opened the window.

“Elle m’aime, elle m’aime!” Ugo was shouting from down there, sending him kisses blown with both hands. “Elle m’aime, mon cher, elle m’aime, Melchior!”

Melkior’s heart sank. Elle l’aime! Well, let ATMAN hear it, too.

“But who? Qui est celle qui vous aime?” Let it be all spelled out to “him below.”

“She, la Grande!” Ugo shouted dementedly. “Tell you all about it tomorrow. Ah, l’amour! À demain, mon cher. Good night, Oh noble and wise one. Ah, l’amour!”

And off went Ugo, declaiming Baudelaire in some version of his own, with much pathos, assuredly with tears in his eyes: à la très belle, à la très bonne, à la très chère … qui remplit tout mon coeur, tout mon coeur… salut à l’immortalité …