“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?”
The man ardently delivered his entire, long-in-the-making, carefully prepared argument and fell silent. He was tired. This was perhaps the first time he had shared it with someone, with a stranger in a dark doorway, under bizarre circumstances, and was now embarrassed. Perhaps this was the first time he had doubted it, its validity, its viability in the cold world of other people’s indifference?
“You’re laughing, aren’t you?” the man spoke up from the nether darkness. “You think I worked it all out down here like a sapient reptile slithering on the ground? Or evolved a new organ for my miserable existence? Or that this is a whole new, my very own, indeed original brand of generosity? No, I’m as selfish as you, as any normal male. (He put a very heavy stress on normal). It’s out of selfishness that I’m telling you all this.”
“No, you’re not being selfish,” said Melkior without conviction, just to say something.
“Because I’m not snarling at that business up there? Why, I pine for that business up there with all my supracanine faith in absolute love. I want love, do you understand what I’m saying, love, not gnaw a bone on the ground in this dark doorway!”
An outcry de profundis. Melkior shuddered. Inside him vibrated muffled affinities with this pathetic ground-bound being who had raised high a huge sky above his head and planted in it a single star in which he had inscribed his destiny. The sky above … and Viviana shining in it. Matter of fact, my dear groundling, our love’s sky is a common or garden skirt at whose zenith twinkles a stubbornly chosen … all right, call it a star … That’s our destiny.
“You’ll help me upstairs then?” the legless man asked uncertainly.
Well, what do you know, the man won’t give it up. He wants his cantilena. All right, have it your own way.
“Of course I will. Come on.”
“Get hold of me from the back, under the armpits,” the man instructed him briskly, with a kind of joy. He even raised his arms, as if about to take off. Melkior took hold of him like someone teaching a small child to walk and brought him to the staircase. They had just begun to climb, barely clearing the first step or two, when a door upstairs opened and there was the sound of voices. Serious, grave voices.
“It’s her! Something’s wrong,” the man whispered, terrified. “Run for it, run! As far as you can!” He was hurrying Melkior as if some dreadful anger were threatening.
“I can’t just leave you on the stairs.”
“Then dump me behind the door and run!” the man cried in frightful panic. “All’s lost! God, I’m so unhappy!”
Melkior grabbed him hurriedly and carried him back to the doorway. He set him down piously behind the door like a broken saint, whispered “goodbye” and fled outside.
But did not go far. Let’s see the violin after all. He positioned himself well, facing a shop window that had a mirror set diagonally in it. He did not have long to wait. Out of the door came an indeed well-built young woman with a very pretty face. But when she stepped onto the pavement Melkior noticed the floating motion of her somehow fetching lameness. With one leg she barely touched the ground in a weightless, fairylike hover; with the other she trod firmly, with all her well-endowed corporeality. As a counterpoint.
Oh, what an instrument! sighed Melkior. Hence the ardent wish for a virtuoso upstairs. He thought of the luckless torso behind the door. Oh poor church-portal saint, not even Johann Sebastian himself could have played your life in a more charming counterpoint.
And now, where to? All the roads are blocked by heavy drifts of uncertainty. The thing to do would be to proceed from some starting point under this nocturnal star-riddled dome. Following what star? Every star is the beginning of some motion … Every thought is a star from an undiscovered constellation drowned in the infinity of time. The infinities. The conceptual confidence tricks. The metaphors. The fearful astronomy above the life of a small carnivore rolled up in a ball of yearning under his little sky of a crinoline atop which shines … Viviana. This was his destiny. Stella Viviana. And he set off, following his lost star, to wander vainly in the night.
Far off in town the cathedral clock tolls the hours. Five o’clock. But night is still strangling the city with damp and cold darkness. The long autumn night. He was freezing in the deserted arbored walk under the tall vaults of withered leaves rustling fearfully on weary trunks. He winced at the roaring of lions. The sound of the zoological tyrant’s voice drew responses from other animals, jerked awake from fearful sleep. The emperor was hungering for their flesh.
Melkior smelled the stench of the zoo. The warm furs were unrolling, the beasts were stretching, opening their jaws wide, yawning, roaring into the new day. Zoopolis was waking. And broadcasting the stench of its slavery.
This would be what prisons and barracks stink like. The katorgas. The hordes, legions, cohorts, regiments. The glorious armies that gave epochs their peculiar smells. The large-scale collective fumes, the stenches of history. Stenches Persian, stenches Alexandrine, stenches Hannibalic, stenches Caesarean, stenches Avaran, Hunnish, Tartar, Mongolian, Germanic, stenches Turkish, stenches Napoleonic, stenches Samuraic, stenches Prussian, Franz-Josephinian, Benito-Mussolinian, and stenches Adolf-Hitleran … Stenches and more stenches, as far as history reaches. Mankind has well and truly made a stink of it in troop and bowel movements. Ptui! Melkior spat on the animal stench with which history had invaded his nostrils from the zoo.