“How can you tell?”
“Aah, he’s one dirty old man, is Mr. Kalisto! I’m ashamed even to tell you how I know. Can you imagine what it must be, to make me ashamed?” Melkior was laughing. He was amused by the naughtiness of Mr. Kalisto-the-moralisto.
“Do you know what he does down there?” Ugo was clearly troubled by his father’s sexual roguery. “He listens for sounds from the Ladies! The walls are thin, you can pick up an auditory signal or two from a female organism. Pathetic. But that’s what he goes down there for: an aphrodisiac for a spot of how’s your father with Deaf Daisy. That’s how I know he’s off to meet her. Ptui!” and Ugo spat in genuine disgust.
Melkior remembered Maestro: the whole business was nothing more than old men urinating. Tepid waters gurgling, false signals sent.
“Are you sure you didn’t make any of this up?”
“Make it up? He told me himself, in a state of cruel bliss, how you could hear it aaall through that waaall …” Ugo imitated him with disgusted hatred.
“Now then, this hat … What can I expect from Kikinis for it? Not even ten bucks. And not a single hole in it, as you’ll see.”
He unwrapped the hat from the newspaper and turned it to the sun.
Both their gazes dipped under the brim encountering the sight of a dark night sky thickly strewn with first, second, and third-magnitude stars.
“You can clearly see the Big Dipper, Andromeda, and Betelgeuse Alpha. Happy viewing!” Ugo was watching the constellations with an astronomer’s concern, in dead earnest. “Moth-made galaxies, soup-strainer constellations. A miniature astronomy overhead. Oh well. At least we discovered the starry sky above us and the moral law within us, like old Immanuel of Königsberg. Let us therefore follow our Polar Star like the Argonauts, let us harken to the voice of the categorical imperative within us!”
So speaking, in a kind of rapture, he entered the spacious hall of the Main Post Office, with Melkior hurrying along at his heels.
“What are we doing here?” he tried to pull him back. There were a lot of people about, businesslike, patient, as well as short-tempered, addressers. He feared Ugo’s excesses.
“I’m looking for a dome to present with the sky,” said Ugo, burning with the urge to do a good deed. “Not to worry, it’s all according to Kant: Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will … how does it go on? Give me a clue — you’re a Kantian, aren’t you? Categorically, imperatively! Caution, the Earth is about to quake, consider lines of retreat.”
He selected an exemplary yellowish bald pate of a hurried-looking addresser and placed his old riddled hat on it with a quick, imperceptible motion. He then casually spoke to Melkior as if asking for a point of information.
“Alea jacta est!” he whispered hurriedly. “The Earth is already quaking with injured pride. This means war. Flee to Switzerland, quick!” Melkior did not hesitate: he almost ran for the exit. This is sheer madness, those people in there are going to kill him …
He just had the time to hear a “Who put this thing on my head?” coming from behind him and then it was, Run for it, run, run! The fear down his back. Knifed in the back, just like that, on account of such a rascal. Death At Main Post Office. Innocent Victim Of Misunderstanding. All over, before the war even broke out. A farewell to arms.
Yes, somebody could really take me for a … seeing that I’m … er, running away … He only calmed down outside, on the opposite pavement.
Ugo’s acte gratuit. Been reading Gide recently, imitating Lafcadio. He always imitates people. Characters in novels. The ape. He’s going to tell about it tonight (to Her). The thought hurts. Still, must admit it takes guts. Takes brass nerve to cut such silly capers. Daring. For example:
An old man, dignified, rugged, a rock, features showing the greatest greatness — a Goethe, in a word — coughs in the street (such things do happen) and spits into his handkerchief, forcefully, quite in keeping with his station, and peers — with scientific interest, as it were — into his all-important gob of phlegm.
“Well? Looks lovely, doesn’t it?” Melkior loosed his acte gratuit and went momentarily deaf, like someone whose rifle had gone off by accident in his hands.
“Im-pertinent cad!” gurgled the rock through his catarrhs, and passersby agreed with him, silently.
“Gratuit,” ejaculated Melkior mechanically, by way of explanation to those who had turned around after him. And he blushed, miserably.
No, I’m no good at that sort of thing. No good at all, really …
“… that it should become a universal law. I remembered it looking at the ungrateful sky-carrier. I’m thinking of the tiny suns that will shine on his bald pate when he goes out again. The bastard. That very hat would have cost him thirty dinars at Kikinis. But he still wanted to fight me.”
Ugo was regretting the gift.
“We should have looked at it not against the sun but in the dark. And then gone to Kikinis the astrologer. He would have shelled out ten dinars for it, at the very least. We played at being anonymous benefactors and eccentrics, Kantian philistines, victims of the categorical imperative — phooey! When we could have used the ten dindin-din to giventake till lunchtime. A fatal mistake!”
They walked in silence. Melkior was deliberately steering the stroll toward the Theater Café. Toward Viviana. But how is it, if he was with her last night, how is it that they have arranged nothing? Oh but they have. For tonight.
Under cover of darkness. He’s avoiding his fiancée. Let us hide our loves. They’ll get married after he’s done his National Service. And a war. They’ll have children. War orphans: enormous heads, large eyes, tiny skeletons, ribs, kneecaps … “Have you made your last wish, Eustache? Here comes Scarpia.”
Melkior said nothing: his jaw had gone stiff. He had a dreadful fear of the police. The Platonic Politeia.
The man was limping toward them on uneven legs, but with a “Make way!” face. Uniformed, gilded …
“E lucevan’ le stele …” Ugo burst into song while the man was still quite some way off, following his progress. But just as the man came in line with them he elocuted in the manner of the ancient, pathos-ridden school of acting: “There is something rotten in the state of Denmark.”
Scarpia paused in the arsis (on the longer leg) with the thought “Should I take this as …?” and while he was making up his mind Ugo pulled Melkior around the corner. Any port in a storm.
“It would have been an uneven struggle. Don’t be ashamed of the retreat. The day of reckoning is at hand. The exact date is known to don Fernando, they told it to him at the Corso.”
“Don Fernando” rang inside Melkior like an alarm bell, like the fear of being seen with Ugo in street excesses. Don Fernando was a profound mystery, a myth, a “something else.” The approach to problems. The responsible care for mankind. No less.
“Who told him?” The mood for joking fizzled out in Melkior.
“The bearded bods. The sternfaces. At least, not bearded, these days they’re clean-shaven; let’s say the morose, the men with the furrowed brows. All in the name of mankind.”
“While you … you don’t give a tinker’s for mankind?” asked Melkior, suspiciously, even with a shade of moral contempt.
“Frankly … no!” whispered Ugo repentantly, while at the same time swelling with incipient laughter. “Somehow I don’t seem to care for it at all. While mankind, I know, suffers horribly because of me. Heh, heh … I’m an ingrate, mon ami, and a bad one at that.”