“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.
In a shop window, an elegantly dressed mannequin was in a discreetly balletic stance, a sly expression. Embarrassed at being watched by all and sundry. Melkior gave her a long, hard look. She dropped her eyes in shame. She would have fled if she could. Well, Melkior said to her, that’s what you’re there for, miss — to be looked at. He was trying to imagine her naked. I may have seen you naked, come to that. Many a time had he watched the mannequins at night being changed in shop windows behind carelessly drawn gray curtains. Like in a charmed brothel, those stiff, waxen anemic naked ladies with the faces of virgins. The Pompeiian Lupanar after Vesuvius erupted. He was trying to imagine her naked: the gray fabric flowing down her narrow, curved hips, fitting closely in front over the daintily convex delicate breasts. Tits, he said, because he had stripped her naked. He found himself weirdly lusting after the dainty dead girl. And the painful source of lustful restlessness was surfacing gradually as a fear of the similarity of that waist, those (slender) long legs, the narrow hips, those breasts, that fetching motion frozen in mid-stride, those slim, long fingers which she held slightly splayed like a bather going in for a dip. Look — all of it was actually moving in the window: the legs were beginning to walk, the hips to sway, the arms to swing; all of a sudden Viviana emerged from the mannequin! He thought he had gone mad. But no, it was Viviana moving in the window. She was crossing the street. He drew into himself, staring alarmed at her reflection in the glass. The sun was beaming down all over her, she was carrying radiance. He was already blinded by the terrible glare, and his eyes no longer saw anything. But he sensed with his whole body the approach of the fateful star from the mind-numbing skies of chance. He was being demolished inside by a dreadful disorder in his body and mind and thought. He could make nothing of his entire self except for a chaotic sense of awe. Could chance be so cruel as to catch him totally unprepared? He was aware of his long nose and moronically grinning face. And his arms: long, ponderous. He tucked his hands into his pockets. He felt relieved after this little act of tidying up. After achieving a clearer, better defined, more masculine image of a blasé gad about town with his hands in his pockets, an aimless, boredom-driven stroller. The difference that hands in pockets made! It was a great discovery of salvation, as if a comet were approaching. He was ready for a collision of worlds.