Maestro spread his arms wide, asking his question around the empty bar room in a kind of despair.
Thénardier, arranging bottles along his altar aided by his two ministrants, tittered hee-hee-hee, savoring his morning fun with pleasure.
“Let’s have the poison, you bloody sophist! And stop smirking! Margaritas ante porcos,” he communicated to Melkior, shaking his head resignedly. “It was the likes of him who gave the hemlock to Socrates. And what will they give me? The juice. Electricity. Ho, ho, ho,” Maestro launched into a fit of mad, frenetic laughter. “Power transmission line … ho, ho, ho … at high voltage … ho, ho, ho. Oh yes, at high voltage, right enough. Attention! Mortal danger! And on the pylons, ever see it? They’ve painted the old skull and crossbones, as on a bottle of poison. As at a chemist’s: I would like a pylonful of high voltage please. I have a mind to kill, ho, ho, ho …”
“Nevertheless, mankind has greatly benefited from electricity,” said Melkior mechanically, just to assert his presence. So she did let Ugo … He may have been going home to sleep afterward. He was late going back, he had been with her.
“Mankind? What mankind?” Maestro was aroused in earnest. “There are lots of different mankinds. Were not the ancient Greeks mankind? In what way did Aristotle suffer by having no electricity? He did know about rubbing amber, but he held that in utter contempt. Rubbing indeed. He had more important things to think about than rubbing. Would Dante have written better poetry under a frosted-glass bulb? If Leonardo had needed any electricity he certainly would have set some wheels spinning to get the sparks flying. He built all kinds of machinery, his designs have survived, he’d have found it a cinch to … And yet he painted that perfidious smiling femina, heh-heh … Smiling there, the little beast of a female … I have her back at home, a first-class reproduction, you’ll see it when you come by. Ah, you’ve never been to my place, now have you? You’ve definitely got to come by one day … What am I saying, one day? You’ve simply got to come for a bit of peaceful conversation. It’s essential. Only I think you ought to know I have no electricity. High voltage runs outside past my house, a long-distance trans-mis-sion line even, right under my window, with the old oil lamp guttering inside! Ha-ha, how do you like that? I ignore the terrible force coursing past. Be on your way, you potent nonsense, and leave me be, I have no use for you!”
“So, Maestro, do you hate all forms of energy or just electricity?” Maestro seemed to have sensed the irony in the question: he gave Melkior a suspicious look with one eye — the other being filled with a smoke-induced tear — and replied disdainfully:
“I hate nothing. I merely reject the superfluous.”
“And yet you use the electric tram!”
“Never!” flared Maestro, hurt. “I walk a full hour to the office. I walk and think. After all, human thought came into being on the foot. The ancient Greeks thought in the street. The peripatetics walked. As people talk, so they walk — that’s my theory, if you don’t find it off-putting. Let the linguists and … whatever those experts are called, hang themselves if they haven’t perceived such a glaring fact. What is speech if not thought? The man whose clogs sink into mud with his every step speaks differently from a man who walks on blacktop. The highlander’s words are as hard as the stone he treads on. Fast walkers are fast speakers; those who drag their feet drag their words as well. The quantities of certain lowlands, the accents of hard, uneven surfaces. Speech has all the relief of the ground underfoot, the tempo of motion in space. The rhythm and the melody of walking. People walk in major or minor key. That’s how they speak, too: brightly or glumly.”
“What about you? Do you walk in major or minor?”
“Minor. Some speeches are gloomy even if they’re about a cheerful subject. I know how I speak. If it were written down you would call it banter. But you’ve got to hear me say it. Which is why I prefer speech to writing. Oral literature.”
“You are a speaker. That, too, is an art form.”
“Because I’m an infantryman. Not in the military sense, of course. Professional soldiers march even as they speak. As for military commands, are they still human speech? You haven’t done your National Service yet, have you? A command consists, my dear sir, of two parts: the preparatory and the executive. Such as ‘Forwarrr … dmarch!’ ‘Dmarch!’ is the executive part. And what is ‘dmarch’? Eh? ‘Forwarrr’ is supposed to stir a special spirit in your bottom; next, ‘dmarch’ gives each soldier a kick in the backside as an initial impulse for getting a move on. Your illustrious behind will go through it in the fullness of time and you’ll remember me then, if for no other reason.”
“Octopus, polyp, cephalopod, vacuum cleaner,” he went on in a kind tone to address Thénardier, who was doing some accounts at the bar, scratching his pelican chin worriedly with a pencil.
“Yes, philosopher Ugly Nose?” responded Thénardier without raising his head from his accounts.
“Listen, you headless cod, raise what you haven’t got when speaking to me. Serve your customers. Shot to shot …”
“No, Maestro. That’s enough for me,” parried Melkior. He had long resolved to get up and was only waiting for a convenient break to flee from Maestro’s thrall. He had to find a phone now, he had to ring Enka. She knows I’m going to ring her. She’s waiting.
“Eustachius the Kind, drop them,” said Maestro all of a sudden, sounding conspiratorial. “You are a man apart.”
“Drop whom?” Melkior pulled free of Enka’s close embrace.
“Them. Ugo and the others. Superficial cads, clowns.” And he went on in a whisper, “As for her, she’ll come crawling to you. She’ll be asking you to mount her, she’ll get down humbly like a hen. I know her. Be a rooster. Head high. Proud.”
“She doesn’t interest me, Maestro. What makes you think I’d …?”
“Come off it, Eustachius! You are consumed by vanity. You keep making comparisons: ‘what’s Ugo got that I …’ And she is beautiful.”
“Yes, so she is. But I don’t care whose she may be.”
“You’re lying, Eustachius, but that doesn’t matter. The hell with her. We could find a better place to talk, you and I, somewhere quiet. We are people who still have something to say. What else have we got left but to talk to each other? Setting our thoughts flowing from one head to another, as it were, letting our minds fertilize each other …”
Maestro’s voice quavered with an odd tenderness over the last few words. Melkior did not dare look at his face: it was bound to have on it that humbly pleading look, the painful expression of unrestrained, miserable sincerity as the very words melt in the throat with the pleasure of abasement.
“Don’t frown. Forgive me, Eustachius,” Maestro all but sobbed. “Did I touch some soft spot of yours? Never mind. I can risk it. I no longer have anything to lose — I no longer have anything. Even this body’s not mine — I’ve sold my cadaver to the Faculty of Medicine. And drank up the proceeds long ago. I’m a man who has consumed his own dead body — I cannot be bothered by the fine points.”
Then suddenly, as though he had been set aglow by an idea, his eyes took on a weird gleam and a smile — superior, triumphant — spread over his face. There appeared spiteful glee.