“Now that you mention it, did you ever discuss this with Pupo?”
“With Pupo? Discuss what with him?” said Don Fernando in surprise.
“Why, this business of … of individual terror … and assassinations.”
“Why with Pupo? Is he an expert on such things? He believes the man who bashed Trotsky’s head in with an ice pick was a Mexican anarchist acting on his own initiative, that Tukhachevsky was spying for the Nazis, and so on … he believes a lot of things. He is of course against ‘individual terror.’ ‘That’s anarcho-individualism,’ and he immediately reaches for the corresponding pigeonhole. Pupo’s a sort of monk himself, but one who keeps an eye on his career — in fact, a defrocked priest who goes on believing through inertia, but in rather a Jesuit way. I’ve nothing to discuss with him.”
“So I’m honored with this discussion?” smiled Melkior.
“You are a sensitive individual capable of feeling a thought. Not merely thinking (perhaps thinking even less), but also feeling a thought, which means keeping it constantly in your mind like private torment. The Heautontimoroumenos, murderer and victim in one and the same person, knife and wound, a vampire of your own heart, as Baudelaire put it. Your thought torments you with fear, I know it and appreciate it, because few people are capable of it, particularly in the way you are — and those drunken imbeciles at the Give’nTake mock you for it. I don’t mock you, because fear is thought (and vice versa), and I should like to join you at this point, if I may. Our fear is the sensitivity of the thought with which we perceive the terrible future of our existence. (Not that the human future has ever been anything but dreadful.) Your fear is not insane, your quaking is not inane as a Quaker’s, and yet there is in you (and this is where I leave you) a maniacal need to study the fear, to explore all its tonalities and tastes, from bitter to sweet. Sweet in particular. For there is a kind of pleasure in the sensation of fear (I remember it from childhood), a possibility of some obscure inner florescence taking place, of some strange solitary ripening going on to produce the black fruit of a particularly bitter wisdom. You have made yourself a home in there and you no longer search for a way out of the mousetrap — you have found your ‘accursed’ freedom inside. ‘Accursed’ because you exercise it in the pathetic manner of a prisoner for life who has found a ‘great’ pastime: drying his straw mattress straw by straw on the single ray of sun that falls into his cell …”
“Straw is, as we know, hollow. Are you sure it’s in my mattress and not your head?” Melkior took offense and rejoindered rudely, which made Don Fernando flush pink.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it so offensively. I meant to say that fear has tricked your imagination, but it came out all wrong. That bit about the prisoner was particularly bad. Fear has hidden its hideous face, which the wise man finds is beneath him to contemplate and generally beneath the accomplished man to address. That is why I meant to say that your fear was highly refined, all the richer for the beauties of your unconventional character, brought to virtuoso level, as it were, like the subtlest of vibratos on a violin string (this with reference to trembling), elevated to the point of the highest — indeed musical — sensitivity, ceasing to be a miserable human condition and becoming a work of some crazed art instead. Your alchemy has transmuted that filth into gold. That’s why I admire … Forgive me for calling it crazed — after all, any art is crazed in a certain way … that’s why I admire your heroism, for you know how to suffer. My fear is different. I don’t want to suffer. I’m afraid of what tomorrow may bring, as it may well bring it tomorrow, and there’s no rhetoric in it. I’m simply afraid for myself, for my pitiful life, like any ant that feels a storm brewing, and I have no particular ‘spiritual values’ in mind. I don’t care what happens to paintings, to books, to arty rocks. I simply fear, henlike, for my unprotected head, which in my hour of fear is my greatest cultural value, for it’s the only head that cares for me. To sum up, then: my fear is no violin vibrato, no vibrato at all, for that matter; there’s no subtlety to it, no art, no beauty — it’s intolerant, harsh, and aggressive. I don’t propose to ‘suffer for beauty,’ I don’t propose to cultivate fear like a poisonous flower garden. I’m less of a hero than you. I can’t support fear — that’s why I want to remove it from my life, like hundreds of millions of like-minded people.”
“But how are you going to remove it?” asked Melkior with grave concern. “And who are your like-minded people?”
“Common people, that’s who. Perhaps these very passersby around us. They all want to get where they’re going, to eat their lunch or kiss their wife, without the feeling of pressure in their mind, without a nightmare on their soul, with joy and certainty as if they will live forever. And that’s reason enough for me to consider them ‘my people’; they may not know it, but they belong to the large community of enemies of fear.”
“How can you be sure they’re ‘your people’? They may just as well be on the other side, they may be in favor of fear, which such ‘passersby’ usually refer to as order. They are in favor of order under the knout, and you offer them your concept of freedom, which is disorder and anarchy in their eyes.”
“What? Surely this is disorder, this general anxiety and uncertainty?”
“Anxiety and uncertainty for you, ‘the enemy.’ In their view, it’s no more than you deserve: you aim to bring down their ideals, kill off the leaders they worship precisely because they inspire fear. They want fear.”
“I’m not relying on those trained monkeys!” barked Don Fernando furiously.
“Whom are you relying on, then?”
“On men! On free, proud men who feel their human value, their dignity—”
“Again, this is a question of standards: what is human value?”
“Standards …” Don Fernando was smiling quaintly, in a “last straw” sort of way, like someone tried to the very limit of his patience. “I know just where to claim my right to the discovery of new value and I reject any attempt to drag in standards as a piece of bothersome claptrap! I have no time to waste on procedural ins and outs, the only thing that matters is value, and I have a perfectly clear idea of what it is!”
“So let’s get on with the shooting, poisoning, setting of time bombs, bashing people’s heads in with ice picks? And all that on I-know-who’s-worthless grounds. Here take a look at the little man on the corner — that’s right, the one selling newspapers.”
The news vendor was crying the third edition of the Morning News. He was indeed a little man, as Melkior put it — ageless, scaled down, as if he had been built with an eye to skimping on material, his arms and legs short, his head small and narrow, but with a hunk of trumpety nose protruding from it, along with two large and floppy ears topped by a vendor’s cap like an upside-down pot, showing a logo for the Morning News. He was trumpeting through his nose, in a snot-ridden and tearful voice, as if begging alms, “Mawnen Ooze! Mawnen Ooze!”
“There, he, too, is a man, the Mawnen fellow. You can hear him braying, struggling for his existence. He, too, to use your words, is capable of feeling. If you were to come up to him and pull his ear (just look at those ears!) he would try to hit you, perhaps even kill you, for offending him. Because he has his pride. In other words, he feels his value. He is a value, by his standards, he, Mr. Mawnen. A human value. While Michelangelo’s David in Florence, a fine figure of a nude young man (and incidentally, a masterpiece of human anatomy), large, self-assured, and proud, full of strength and daring, is not a man. He’s not capable of ‘feeling.’ He’s of stone. He isn’t even ‘human’ enough to be able to utter the nonsense word Mawnen which that little freak over there is able to say. And yet David is a value, an enormous, unique value … or perhaps he isn’t, perhaps you disagree — you said just now you didn’t care for ‘arty rocks’?”