Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Read Free Page A

his neck, the man had cast only a passing, sadly indifferent glance up at MAAR’s magic tricks as he squeezed through the throng. Then his spirits soared with a “true glow” when Melkior found a way (and how Christian a way!) of being charitable to the blind man. “When giving alms, no need to make a show of it.” He patted Melkior on the shoulder and, giving him an approving smile, dipped into the crowd again. Melkior only managed to catch a glimpse of his head, wrinkled, sad, wrung between the hands of some terrible misfortune, and a pair of large ears thereupon, jutting grimly out on either side. He was astounded by how oddly large they were, so similar to a very familiar and well-remembered pair. … But back in those days the head had been ruddy and full, young and terrifying, with those selfsame batwing ears amid waves of thick hair which protected them from ridicule.
    “That pale scrawny neck!” cried Melkior in a low voice, “is it possible?”
    After him, then! He had to see those ears again!
    But who is to know whether or not ears have a hiding place for their memories? A secret spring-catch drawer from which at night, when they burrow into solitude, they take out trinkets to caress and sob over?
    Melkior launched into a romantic tale about the mysterious soul of a priest roaming through the urban hustle and bustle seeking peace and salvation. … But the romantic tale is something else. … Those ears carry with them a different secret, one that darkened his entire childhood. He still wears the catechistic slaps, riddlelike, on his cheeks. And all that subsequently befell Dom Kuzma was cobbled together by his imagination into a story of a man apart. He was even ready to proclaim Dom Kuzma a martyr, for all that the martyr had whacked a pair of red-hot slaps on his darling cheeks. (The older ladies used to say at the time how “that child” had such darling cheeks—and they would kiss him, even nibble at his cheeks, the old maids.)
    All the pupils in Melkior’s school, including the tiny first-graders who didn’t even know how to write an
i
, knew how to draw an ear. They all, everywhere and at every opportunity, drew ears. Ears on the blackboard, on the classroom desktop, on the floor, on the roadbed, on fences, on walls, on any wall near which they happened to have a piece of charcoal handy. All the books, the notebooks, were doodled over with ears. Ears on agave leaves, on the beach sand. There sprang into being a secret sect of otosists, aurists, ear maniacs, in hoc signo vinces. Ears everywhere, like early-Christian fish. A large, huge, outsize ear on any potatolike head. The head did not matter, what mattered was the ear … to draw it as well as possible. To master the technique and the cliché. The older lads did the Charleston in trendy bell-bottomed trousers; the small boys drew ears fanatically. They did not know why it had to be the ear. Their parents, their teachers, asked, “Why ears?” “Everyone is drawing them,” the child would reply, puzzled that this, too, should be forbidden. “An epidemic,” people shrugged, “the measles.” And the local gendarmerie post received a telegram from higher up: had the phenomenon anything to do with the Communists?
    The silly puerile manias. Collecting stamps was all right—adults did it, too, philatelists, postal-oriented thinkers. But carob beans!—that was for seminarians (the independent faction). Melkior had kilos of the things. He threw the lot away when sock knitting caught on. The socks naturally never reached the length of the heel; the boys were ignorant of either the utility or the futility of work.
    The ear-drawing was an outburst and it spread like the plague. Later on, measures were taken (by the educational authorities), but they served only to fan the epidemic: they helped to reveal the meaning of
The Ear
… which previously no one might have divined.
    When he learned the reason Melkior thought it seriously insulting and