Ranko Marinkovic - Cyclops

It flattered him. He pulled his legs out of his trousers with the smile of a general heading for an easy victory. Calm; no haste. His innate neatness nearly made him fold them. He threw them across the chair for all its pull. He might change his mind after all, the enemy will ask to be defeated. She’ll be asking me to mount her, she’ll get down like a hen, humbly. Viviana? Just another bird … in the bush.

“Come here, my little sparrow …” he said to her throwing himself carelessly on the bed.

“Small, aren’t I? A teeny-weeny sparrow?” But she was acting more like a little bitch. “You like me for being small? Tell me, Kio! Tell me! You like me? Small, yours, all of me … yours … Kio!”

Desdemona and Cassio … Did they have this kind of thing going? Maestro believes they did, with her, on her. The Venetians. Sweet Desdemona, let us be wary, let us hide our loves! Should I ask her for a handkerchief of Coco’s? He is even now holding somebody’s heart in his hand, up at the clinic. Massaging it, saving a life. “Dear heart,” meaning her, this one here, little Enka, dear heart.

That was how Melkior carried on with her, nose above the deluge. He was able to think, to listen (as he had done recently) to the radio announcing the murder of Trotsky (stabbed in the head with an ice pick), to watch things being quiet in the room. The witnesses. The trousers across the chair, legs splayed, running; the jacket extending a sleeve to reach for a silver fifty-dinar piece lying on the floor, having dropped from a pocket. He had been hurrying after all. He laughed at the sleeve’s fussy-miserly gesture: it would finish by sucking the coin up. A little something for Four Eyes.

“Stop laughing, you tormentor!” Enka managed to surface for an instant and sank into the silt again, as Maestro would have put it.

Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore! But who can ever prove it? Extract a grain of truth from the silt, thou cruel Moor. Would not this one, too, be able to sing the willow tree song tonight? And to die innocent for all the world. And the world is her world. A happy marriage, for all the world, a love match. I love you, you love me … A parasitic opera: ivy all over Shakespeare.

He had his “erotic rheostat” turned on. Those were his words for the resistance he offered his pleasure, the search for disturbing thoughts, the toying with the small, small ones. …

Steady on, children, the world is too small for the lot of you. All right, I expect some room could be found for the little girls … but the little boys? Not so fast, youngsters! Where do you think you’re going? To the barracks? To the wars? Here, look at that eager-beaver little general! Carlo Buonaparte inadvertently sired Napoleon at twenty-three, he was four years my junior. Who knows what hydrocephalic essayist could now be conceived if I were not at the helm? And he laughed dryly: heh, heh.

“You are definitely crazy today!” said Enka crisply, soberly, firmly down on earth.

This third “you’re crazy” was final. She sat up and spitefully began to smooth her hair. He turned on his back without a word. He wore a cold, distant smile. He fell to fingering her vertebrae one by one. She felt it on the tips of his fingers — they were indifferent through satiety. She shook them off with hostility, let go of me. He then suddenly hugged her tight and pressed her down on her back. And took her furiously and candidly, no longer thinking about anything.

They were lying on their backs and sharing a cigarette. She had her head on his bicep, he was toying with her breast: the tiny raspberry had swollen angrily under his teasing. A trivial conversation.

“And why did you laugh that silly laugh?”

“Offended are we? It’s how I always act … when he’s in.”

“Not to mention ‘the fourth ape this morning’ … I’m that fourth ape! You purposely said it with the phone still on, you wanted me to hear I was the fourth ape.”

“I wanted him to see …”

“To see what? That I’m an ape? I can see that myself.”

“To see that I was speaking without hanging up first, that I didn’t care if he heard what I said …”

“That you didn’t care if he heard, or rather if I heard, that I was an ape?”

“Not you, he.”

“The ‘he’ is me.”

“Not at all. I wanted him , Coco, to hear …”

“That I’m an ape? You could have hung up, he would’ve heard you anyway. But then I wouldn’t have!”

“Oh, you’re horrible! You’ve got me all confused … You are an ape!” She was angry. “He’s my husband! He’s a man doing a serious job and I don’t propose to torment him with suspicions. Human lives depend on him, he must have inner peace. I love him and respect him. Don’t laugh, you demon, I do love him. He’s a nice man, hard-working and intelligent.”

“And you love and respect him. My God, what a lucky man he is!”

“He is indeed! And you can shove your cynicism. Ours is a happy marriage.”

“A love match.”

“It’s too much for your piggy little mind to grasp, isn’t it? I wouldn’t give up this happiness for anything in the world! His happiness! And his contentment, his peace of mind. If for no other reason than because — and I know you’ll give another of your ape grins at this — because I like people and you despise them. One twitch of his hand could mean the end of someone’s life. And what harm could your scribbling do? Getting a beating, like the one that … that actor was going to give you. Everyone respects him. I’m honored to be his wife.”

Hell and damnation, she means it! She does believe it all, this Iagoan Desdemona! Now what do you make of it? Come on, psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, endocrinologists, criminologists, sophists, sadists, casuists, Jesuits, diplomats, gnostics, mystics, dialecticians, occultists, moralists, veterinarians, dustmen, firemen … what do you make of it? Oh great ATMAN, you know what to make of it. You … and Shakespeare! Of that mental ileus, that Luciferian theology, that whorish moral science, that garbage salad, that sweetmeat made from one’s own intestinal content. “Her honor is an essence that’s not seen; they have it very oft that have it not.”

He repeated the quotation aloud.

“What was that?” she said suspiciously.

“Shakespeare. Iago talking to Othello about Desdemona.”

“I get it,” she said angrily. “It means I have no honor. You could have been a bit more decent about it.”

He laughed from deep inside his lungs, a forced, nervous laugh. This was the moment to slap her face and put an end to the whole affair. But he knew he would regret it the very next day. Not on her account; on his own. He needed her just as she was, paradoxical, mendacious, gifted for corruption of any kind. She provided him with an excuse for his lost state, with a kind of dirty bath for his leprous feeling. The leper. Pile on the filth all around! Oh, to get lost in dirt like a revolting insect living in dung. Maestro: the Crazy Bug.

And yet he was disgusted with Maestro the Bug.

He knew he was lying. It was all an exercise in mimicry performed by a mind horrified at the quicksands into which it was about to be pushed. And the mind was unable to flee, still believing this was a dream, a bad, terrible, infantile dream involving monsters with two pincerlike fingers for hands approaching to embrace you—“I’m your Daddy, my boy.” And when his mind awoke to a new day it found it simply unbelievable that people might not walk the streets so privately, that the crippled weighing-machine man might not slurp soup from his lunch bucket in the doorway at noon, that news vendors might not shout “War’s Worst Raid On London.” That someone down in the street might say in dead earnest, “This is no exercise, this is the real thing. I heard it with my own ears over the wireless.” And what of that mountain whiteness of the sanitarium for innocent diseases then, what of the dreams under the shelter of the melancholy white flag with the magic red cross on it, above which, high up among the clouds, pilots smiled like angels? Milk brothers and sisters, reclining on the terrace under the glaciers, thermometer under tongue, leafing through breviaries of love in postprandial contemplations. She is now Viviana. Not Francesca, not Beatrice or Laura or Isolde or Héloïse or Virginie; she is Viviana, a name which …