Ranko Marinkovic - Cyclops

They course through our veins like poison — a melancholy, moody flow. We yearn for an ending, any ending, for a finality, any finality, for somewhere to stop, to lie down peacefully, on our backs, to watch the branches sway with the wind, to help the ants in their small lives. We shamble like sick dogs along the fences of the happiness of other people, other people’s laughter. We give an occasional bark alone in the night. We watch warily, cross-eyed, both sides of life, we are careful. Poisoned. Crippled by missing the warmth of touch, the fragrance of flowers, by missing springtimes, mornings, awakenings, the meaning of walking, of motion …

Where to? Poisoned. Poisoned. Poisoned.

And then … we take them like a shot of cognac at the bar, hastily, in from the cold, strangers, aloof, accidental passengers through all those distant, random, other people’s lives. Indifferent. Locked. Cynical. That is the end.

Oh Maestro, you rhapsody of filth!

And yet he is making for the Café, hoping unconsciously … No! Hoping consciously, indeed aspiring, to meet her. To find out, somehow to read in her person “the night before” … and all the rest of love’s hieroglyphs inscribed on her by all the various pharaohs in all the nights of her dirty history. Damned Sphinx!

“Perhaps even …” Perhaps even a whore, is what he wanted to say? Ugo knows something about her, something nasty, something you don’t tell about the woman whom you … whom you … whom you … he kept repeating in his mind while his thoughts floundered elsewhere, enraged, mad. Is she … that kind of woman? Or did he mean something else? She doesn’t work for a living, what does she live on? Gentlemen friends? But if she’s not that kind of woman, if she isn’t a … Oh, Manon! Yet another name for her.

He was approaching the Café. There were guests on the terrace, loud, vivacious. Having preprandial cognacs. Journalists. Waiting for proofs of their papers. In one of the groups, Maestro, mind-blowingly drunk, reciting “I have been on a cloud o’er the sea …”

She’s not there. She’s not inside either. Now then … Now then, the thing to do is abandon my self. Leave it here in the Café to wait for her. While I go to … go to … Go where, miserable, alone, without my self? But I’ll find her! I’ve got to see her today, have to think of a way …

He realized he was singing nonsense in his head. What sorrow! To sing my sorrow. Or to have lunch? He felt hunger in his entire body. It was Enka’s doing. All your doing, baby, billing and cooing, baby. Maybe. Then, to his body: No way. You’re not getting anything to eat, not as long as the reason’s valid, and I want you to remember it. Be patient and … disintegrate, melt into air, into thin air. I let you have a sausage at Kurt’s last night, didn’t I? I’m speaking to you as if you were a dog. Forgive me, poor body. The fault is not thine. The fault is not mine. You know, bud , Pechárek’sh going to eat ush up if we gain weight. Off to the barracksh with you, he’ll shay. And den to Hishtory’zh cauldron where the fate of dish faderland izh being cooked.

Those words aroused reflexes in the stomach. It gave an angry rumble. Don’t be a fool, stomach, we’re in danger! What if someone heard you? They would say, Poor father, such a willful child! Did Pestalozzi live in vain? Moderation, moderation, as the Greeks taught. Epicurus, you say? He was not referring to food only! And you do get “the rest,” according to your just desserts. Be a Stoic. Renunciation, my boy, that’s the yardstick of true greatness. Dom Kuzma was a giant of a man, sobbed Melkior-the-body, and look at him now! What do you think you’re doing? Taking you to be weighed, that’s what I’m doing, you greedy bastard! You’ll be the death of me yet! replied Melkior-the-mind and resolutely led his beast to the invalid’s weighing machine.

The man was holding a pot between his knees and using his spoon to dunk the bits of bread he had dropped into his soup. Sitting beside him on the small bench was an old woman with a basket: the other pot contained meat and potatoes fried with onions. There was a smell of food. Melkior’s stomach reared in anger, only to subside into hopeless whimpers like a puppy being punished.

When Melkior stepped onto the machine the old woman stood up to attend to him. The invalid didn’t even look up. Tant mieux. He was slurping his soup with gusto and … leave me be.

“Sixty-two,” pronounced the old woman in a businesslike, even mildly unpleasant tone, having cursorily read Melkior’s weight from the calibrating bar.

“You didn’t round it off, did you? That was a bit quick.”

“No haste, no rounding off!” said the old woman sharply, so much so that the invalid looked up, ready to defend the quality of his service. “That’s what it showed, no two ways about it!”

The invalid nodded with satisfaction and went back to his meal. Approving of his wife’s resoluteness.

“But I couldn’t have gained that much overnight, could I?” I’m turning into a Dom Kuzma, noted Melkior, and he felt something akin to shame.

“You can put on up to eight hundred grams, you know,” said the invalid with professional patience through a sizeable bite he was pleasurably preparing in his filled-to-capacity mouth. “You’re forgetting the eating, sir. You have dinner, you have lunch, well, it all adds up, and the machine only shows your weight, whatever the freight.”

There it was, the “freight-weight” again. The firm’s slogan.

He paid and went down the street, worrying. Say what you like, I would have to weigh less following the simplest bookkeeping logic. There have been outlays, damn it! fumed the unhappy proprietor of a fresh two hundred and forty grams. And no receipts at all, no dinner or lunch, no food or drink.

Lunch, dinner: what pedestrian explanations. No, no, there is definitely a mystery to this weight business, a whim of physics. Exactitude? Exactitude my foot! There are deviations, exceptions, paradoxes, in the laws of physics. Water gains volume by freezing, said Melkior, triumphing over physics. He tried to recall another example. In vain. Perhaps there is no other. After all, weight is gravity. Newton’s law: mass attraction. Does the Earth attract me more strongly today as a result? The mass of Melkior Tresić is today drawn more strongly to the mass of the Earth, if you please. By two hundred and forty grams. Exactly. On the other hand, mightn’t the Earth have gained weight from some sort of cosmic nourishment and consequently exerted a greater pull? Who knows what stellar spaces Mother Earth traipses about in, what galactic feasts she fattens at. Finally to descend, having eaten and drunk her fill, to attract my underfed self. Will you just look at her? Metamorphoses!

A new law on the invalid’s machine: Earth attracts the starving body of Melkior Tresić with a force that is directly proportional to his army weight and inversely proportional to his resistance. The war being W, a constant. Constantina.

Constance! Could that be Viviana’s true name? He subsequently found he liked the meaning of the word very much. More so than the word itself. An ugly name, really, but its heart was in the right place …

He walked with a queer feeling of weight inside. This was a disruption to his ever-scrupulously-tidy mind. It was as if someone had brought a foreign piece of furniture into his familiar, private domestic realm of peace. Apparently he couldn’t accommodate, he couldn’t accept the change without frowning and resisting. Normally, when he was left alone with himself he was able to resume his train of thought as if it were an interrupted game of chess, with the situation precisely defined; but now somebody had been tampering with the chess pieces, changing their positions, leaving a muddle behind. … He could not abide disorder. Everything inside and around him had to be in its place. Defined, arranged to a certain logic, a system of his for classifying things by value, importance — a subjective, ridiculous hierarchy that made no crucial, objective sense. But it was so important to him that he was apt to climb back up to his third floor just to take out a book and put it “in its proper place” because … There was no because, it simply had to be that way for some reason he couldn’t explain.