Ranko Marinkovic - Cyclops

“Let go of me!” mumbled Freddie, his mouth full of holy anger. But nobody was holding him any more: the reporters were sitting so closely on either side of him (in front of him the table, behind him the wall) that he couldn’t get up. To make things worse, the reporters were laughing.

“So Brutus raised his little paw against Caesar? Ho-ho,” said Maestro coolly, like a celebrity after a failed attempt on his life. “By the way, speaking of paws, apropos there’s an anecdote about a wolf. Shall I tell it? But mark you, children, it’s not Little Red Riding Hood.”

“Tell us, tell us!” clamored all. Only Freddie was staring sullenly at the floor.

“What about you, Eustachius the Patient?”

“Go ahead.”

“Apparently there were some foresters walking through a forest — naturally enough, it being their trade. We walk in various ellipses and spirals, which is our trade … and a digression in this narrative, isn’t it? There were wolves in the forest, and the foresters were afraid, of course. But one of them said, ‘Don’t be afraid, I’ve got a handsaw,’ and they relaxed again. It did occur to them that a handsaw was hardly of any use with a wolf; then again, they thought, the man surely knew what he was talking about. And so on they went without fear. Suddenly a wolf appeared out of nowhere and went for them. They cried, ‘Oh God, we’re done for!’ But the one with the handsaw said again, ‘Don’t be afraid, brethren and fellow-citizens,’ went right up to the wolf, grabbed hold of one of its legs, and zip, zip, zip, sawed it off. He was, as could have been gathered by now, a cunning and nasty man, was that forester-sawyer: he threw the sawn-off leg into a church, through a window which happened to be open because the sexton was dusting the saints off for the Easter holidays. And the wolf whined and whined, helpless; I ask you, what can a wolf do if he’s got only three legs, not to mention the pain. He had no idea where his fourth leg had gone as he hadn’t seen where the forester threw it — it never occurred to him, of course, that the leg might have been in the church. Even if it had, he couldn’t have gone in, not being baptized … Inside, the sexton suddenly saw the freshly sawn-off leg, still bleeding, in front of the altar, and thought one of the Elect had just finished his duel with Satan and sent his trophy to the Lord, throwing it at His most holy feet. Full of the fear of God, the sexton took the leg to the priest as one better at understanding this kind of thing. But the priest only turned the leg this way and that and couldn’t understand a thing. It was a miracle all right, but one he could make no sense of. He found no holy mark on the leg except for the blood and the nasty wound, so he sent the leg on to the bishop in town. The bishop, the canons, and all the religious teachers examined it closely for three days, but came up with no acceptable explanation for the miracle, so they had the leg well salted and sent it to Rome to the Supreme See. Over there, the cardinals and prelates, the learned Jesuits, and the most excellent of theologians got together and started leafing through the ancient books, patristic and gnostic, Tertullian’s, Origena’s, and Augustine’s — even some Aryan and heretical writings — to explain the missive of the leg one way or another. After many sessions of councils and cardinals’ collegia and Jesuit secret seminaries and Dominican plots (they wanted to profit from the event by inserting one of their people into a secret congregation), the learned fathers came to the seemingly unanimous conclusion that it was indeed a paw of Satan’s, severed in a holy duel with a heavenly saint, most probably Saint George, who had had long-standing accounts to settle with the unregenerate bandit. The way the flesh was fringed around the cut was proof enough that it had been Saint George’s work — he wielded a truly vicious battle-ax. Our poor wolf’s leg was added to the collection of dogmatic evidence of Satan’s existence and the Lord’s power over him. As for the wolf itself, it’s probably even now hobbling about the forest cursing its short temper, as this happened quite recently, only three years ago, in the mountains of Guadarama, in Spain.”

“Nonsense!” Freddie forced the word through his teeth in unrestrained intellectual disgust as the reporters’ cheeks puffed up with choked back laughter in expectation of Maestro’s rejoinder.

“Nonsense, Frederick, that the Jesuits took a leg for a leg?” asked Maestro patiently.

“The whole story’s nonsense!” said Freddie with undiminished disgust. “That bit about the sawing is the biggest idiocy of the lot. The church, too … How can there be a church in the middle of a forest?” He was trying to show he was nobody’s fool.

The reporters exploded with laughter. Melkior laughed, too, but in a private, separate way, because he was only standing by their table and did not seem entitled to full participation. But Freddie chose none other than Melkior’s “separate” laughter for venting his anger. In addition this was an opportune occasion, there were old scores to settle …

“Look who’s laughing!” he looked Melkior up and down from below. “Plucked a feather from a hen’s bum and took it up to scribble, the hack!”

Melkior said nothing, but he was no longer laughing. He felt the color draining from his face and anger raging in his bloodstream, bestial, murderous. Don Fernando flashed for an instant in his memory: I now have an evil look in my eyes. He failed to decide right away to spin on his heel and leave, and made an immediate note of the mistake. Now he had to stay on, even if only a moment longer.

“All our means of expression come from one bum or another, Frederick,” said Maestro, coughing hoarsely. “Eustachius’s quill, as you have observed, is from a hen’s, and your speaking trumpet is from a human’s. You’re at a higher evolutionary level, no offense meant.”

Right. Melkior’s side had won and he could now leave. It was another blow dealt to the adversary: departing with a triumphant smile.

Maestro shouted something after him, he required his presence still.

“Frederick, you exude the reek of cretinism,” was the last he could hear from behind, as bait for his return.

Where to? Perhaps chance would toss him some small pleasure. To run into Viviana. He had still believed it possible this morning, for love will cultivate just such a religion: that of chance which sometimes transforms the world in an instant, granting the desperate man a rare boon.

He watched the shop windows. He saw nothing but himself. A narcissist projection, he thought. He winked conspiratorially at his reflection in the window, noticing only some instants later that a shop girl who was arranging something in the window had smiled at him from inside. He looked back without breaking his stride: she was still gazing at him, with the same smile on her face. Pretty. There was a chance. The possibility of starting something new. If he now returned and signaled to her: I’ll be waiting on the corner at noon. He would gesture at his watch, count to twelve on his fingers, nod toward the corner, she would give a slight nod, coquettishly lowering her eyelids; she’d agree, happily. Or she would stick her tongue out: take that, you creep! What do you take me for? I’m not that kind of girl. I’m not for sale. They get better offers. Freddie’s hatred is terrible. Murderous. For the sake of twelve female fans. Apostles. Fallen for him. The fallen angels. Is this the region, this the soil, the clime? Everything has its own devil. On top of us and inside us. The patron devil of motion and function. The devil has now set my legs in motion, taking me … where? Well, he will have seen to that.