Ranko Marinkovic - Cyclops

“I think my concert’s over, too,” said Pupo in a near-whisper, glancing at his watch. “Some in the audience are quite musical. I’ll go, you stay. I’ll call on you tomorrow. How long will you be in?”

“Until nine, without fail.”

Pupo took his hand and gave it two hard squeezes without a word.

Businesslike. He had clinched a deal.

Expeditious, practical, cold. He was left there like a girl deceived. Call you tomorrow — the time-honored telegraphic goodbye after a tryst. That was how he customarily took leave of Enka — I’ll call you — and regretted it afterwards, in the street. Some other words were called for, after all, but he would always store them away “for later.” Then it would be another I’ll call you , he would again see the disappointment in her eyes but he was unable to tell her anything else, anything binding, committing, anything with a promise of a closer liaison. Let’s make it quite clear: this thing between us has gone as deep as it ever will. No tears, please. So it was with Enka. The polyvalent element, capable of forming many amorous bondings.

As for Pupo … Melkior felt he was retreating after a failed attempt at conquest. The conquest of Viviana. He was now accepting a comparison he had rejected as being out of place. As, hah, one unworthy … of Pupo. Where am I to spend the rest of this miserable evening? He began rummaging among the options. The Give’nTake he threw the farthest away. Home? … and find ATMAN lying in ambush on his landing to see the flower from this afternoon’s garden. Ring Enka? Perhaps Coco was on night duty … in the morgue, with the heart which had died that morning in hand … like a canary. That option he also … eliminated, cautiously. He knew he was going to wander off somewhere following his footsteps, pining for Viviana. A quiet place with well-behaved waiters. There’ll have to be poetry whispered … October’s gentle breath. He smiled, but sweetened the bitterness using Ugo’s tra-la-la-tra-la-la sonnet. With well-behaved waiters? The neon letters of the different Café signs lit up in turns. But he kept wrestling with the Give’nTake. Leave me alone, damn you! Like the shadow of a huge vulture the Give’nTake kept flying over the sweet flickering of Viviana’s name in a distant darkness. The thing to do would be to explore all the dark recesses of this night, strain the ocean to catch the plankton glowing in those two … Vivianic eyes. What was now the use of this entire superfluous night-cloaked space? The thing to do was walk all over the night, from end to end, peer into every dark corner, interrogate every owl, nighthawk, mouse, cat, whore, and thief, walk from bark to bark down to the farthest reaches of the night … Oh, where did they hide her? Gilda! Pietà, signori, prego Pietà. And tomorrow morning Duke Ugo would burst into song questa o quella per me pari sono … Tears welled in his eyes … and he let them flow. In the dense darkness of an old doorway Melkior succumbed to sobs. Oh God how unhappy I am!

“You and I both,” responded the darkness with a sigh. Embarrassment lashed Melkior. He turned toward the darkness enraged, irate:

“Who’s there?” he bellowed into the dark. “Speak up! Who are you?”

“Go ahead, sir, hit me.” Creeping toward him was something four-legged, crawling, down on the ground, on the uneven tiles, rattling huge hooves, armor, fearful machinery. A talking turtle.

“I’m down here, sir, at your feet,” grunted the being on the floor.

“What do you want?”

“You could help me without undue trouble to yourself.”

“Where are you? Stand up. Who are you?”

“Half a man, that’s my name … and my entire biography.”

“Are you drunk? Rolling on the ground like that?”

“I’m not rolling on the ground. I have no legs,” enunciated the man in a low, penitently shamed voice, like someone making a terrible avowal.

Melkior was horrified. He bent over pointlessly with the naïve intention of lifting the man, getting him to stand up straight, restoring his dignity. To stand him up on what? To elevate him to what dignity?

“What can I do for you then?” he asked politely.

“I didn’t tell you that to make you change your tone,” said the legless man with some arrogance. “You can go on despising me if you like. What I have in mind is nothing to do with that kind of mercy. I need your help in a specific matter, that’s all.”

“In what matter?”

“The stairs are too high for me to climb — my legs are cut off almost at the hip …”

“And you want me to …? But can’t you use your arms?”

“I could, but the steps are wooden, there would be the rattle of my hooves and the rest of my harness. She would recognize it. I walk about the house on all fours, she’s familiar with the sound. I say she — I mean my wife. I’m sure you’ll have guessed it by now, I might as well empty out the sack of my misfortune: she’s upstairs in a man’s flat. Her lover’s,” he added in pain.

“Are you sure?” Melkior felt like breaking into a kind of laughter.

“I’ve been lying in wait for her, here in the dark. She’s just walked in.”

“So what do you propose to do upstairs? Strangle her?”

“I couldn’t reach her neck,” the legless man joked grimly. “No, it’s nothing of the kind,” he went on in a serious tone. “I want you to help me upstairs without making a sound. His door is right at the top of the staircase. You needn’t feel any revulsion about touching me, in terms of cleanliness I mean. I’m clean, for all that I crawl along on the ground. She takes care of me, keeps me clean and neat. I’m an intellectual and a man of taste. I’m not poor either. I’m even wearing a new suit — half a suit, that is — complete with white shirt and a tie. You can’t see it in the dark, but you can take my word for it.”

“I believe you,” muttered Melkior. He was already feeling the urge to turn around and run for it. “Why are you going upstairs?”

“To listen in,” the legless man said greedily. “I want to hear her love, frank and true. I’ve never experienced that nor ever will … do you get my drift? I fear it’s not easy to explain to you people up there, you who are upstanding and whole. But I had a hope when I heard you. … Forgive me if it sounds offensive, but I said to myself, This one just might …”

“But you’d suffer all the worse when you hear them …”

“No, no, not at all!” the legless man interrupted instantly. “Try to put yourself in the position of half a man such as myself who loves a complete and quite shapely woman, a woman neither old nor ugly. I’ve no time to explain why she married me — it’s a long story. The point is, she’s my wife, a girl who married me for love. For my love of course. Because her love is something different, something that will never really blend, combine, commingle with mine. It will never fuse with mine into a single amorous entity which would completely engulf (after all, how could it, with me?) our separate selves, so that you could not tell the one from …”

“That, my dear fellow, never happens with any woman’s love,” muttered Melkior knowledgeably.

“Oh come on now! For an instant at least, for a brief moment of total self oblivion! That’s what I’m after. To hear her call to him, say his name … see? … speak that name with a wild yearning for union, melting, vanishing. That’s what I want to hear from her!”

“With another man?”

“What of it — she’s mine!” the poor man protested in surprise. “Don’t I myself sometimes get carried away by a piece of music, so much so that it’s a kind of mental orgasm (I’m very fond of music); well, couldn’t I, too, experience orgasm with another? With music, that is, in this case? And am I not then in a more exalted mode of being, a finer one, as it were? I’m talking about qualities, not about a commonplace (indeed a common) activity. It’s nothing to do with me, I don’t even think about it. When I listen to the violin in a Beethoven concerto (say the one in D major) do I think about a horse’s tail scraping upon sheep’s gut? I know those are the means, the indispensable means, for providing these wonderful harmonies, but it’s the harmonies that excite me, not the guts. But let’s face it, the guts are necessary. The guts of an anonymous sheep, at that. And the tail of some stupid nag — which indeed may not have been stupid at all, but that’s beside the point. Why should I be thinking about the horse upstairs (who for all I know may not literally be a horse), about the tails and bowels, about the scrapings and blowings and … the dirty business in general, if I want to listen to the love cantilena of a violin that has never sounded properly in my arms? All it has ever done was scrape, scrape, scrape … producing no music, that’s my stinking lot! I’m not a player, whereas he may even be a virtuoso. It takes an entire body, an entire man — which I am not. There you are, the tail and the guts are a must after all. … Am I to hate Menuhin for it?”