“What?” Melkior choked on his mouthful in nausea; he suddenly felt the bedbug smell all around him.
“Well,” went on Maestro with a lovable nastiness, “perhaps I’ve got some fratricidal bugs in my blood, heh-heh. … I’m sure people have been gossiping to you about that: I’m a microbe breeding ground, Wassermann with three crosses. Those three crosses are a Golgotha, a small, personal, and very intimate Golgotha. They believe that one day, or night, I’m going to fall apart, disintegrate, melt into a poisonous gas, colorless, tasteless, and … well, not odorless certainly, there will be odor … that of brandy, of course. So mind how you go, adorable Eustachius!” Maestro poured himself half a glass of brandy and took a goodly sip, but with a sensible smile, like someone stoking his greediness, then tilted the bottom up and knocked back the rest. “Right. This is to preserve my spoor — or breath, it makes no difference which.”
“Didn’t you switch to beer?” asked Melkior.
“Oh yes, for nightly practice,” Maestro gave a mysterious smile. “I’ve got a whole crateful over there,” he pointed at the corner of the room, where necks of beer bottles were indeed sticking out from a crate.
“Practice? What sort of practice?”
“Ballistic. Can’t you see the shells ready for action?”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You will, good Eustachius, if my ballistic arc reaches eternity, ha-ha,” he was laughing, but the laughter congealed on his lips, some dark rictus was strangling his gaiety.
Cold horror licked Melkior again.
“Don’t laugh like that!”
“How else should I laugh, Eustachius extraordinaire? Prescribe a manner, I can’t laugh any other way.” He went across to the crate, took out two bottles of beer: “Good thing you reminded me,” he tilted the bottle and drained it with extraordinary skill. “Glug-glug-glug and it’s done, in one go, without a pause for breath,” he boasted and turned the empty bottle upside down, “like a waterspout.”
“I think I’ll be off now,” said Melkior standing up. “What is it you were wanting to bring me here for?”
“Why it’s been ages, Eustachius the Incorruptible, since I asked you to come around for a talk! But no, you’re not at all easy to catch! I had to use my bloodied nose for bait, that’s the kind of fish you are! And now you won’t even let me laugh. …”
“So, go ahead and laugh,” said Melkior, laughing.
“Yes, but only in a way you approve of. You want it to be tasteful, to be according to Bergson, your nerves can’t take it any other way, you’re very choosy. Hah, if only I could do it her way,” he tilted his head in the direction of the wall, “if only I had that force of derision! And you never even glanced her way.” Maestro held the candle aloft, illumining a darkened, soot-covered Gioconda on the wall.
Melkior barely turned his head. He had come to feel unbearably irritated, he wanted to leave.
“How long has it been hanging there?” he said casually. “It’s all black from the fumes.”
“From the infernal fumes is what you mean, all blackened from hell itself! For this is the hell of my life, and she sits there smiling above the hell, the damned femina!”
Maestro had got quite agitated, he was speaking with hatred of the picture.
Melkior chuckled at the unexpected outburst of rage.
“No, that’s not funny, Eustachius the Heartless!” Maestro rebuked him gravely. “I’m not talking about the picture. I hung it there myself, of course. But what’s a picture? just a symbol, a breath, of art — indeed a poor job of printing — but she herself, the femina, I did not hang her up so she would sit smiling above my life! She sneaked in on her own and parked herself there. … We all know it, she has parked herself in the lives of us all, and all we do is laugh at each other. What’s the matter, exalted Eustachius — not laughing anymore?”
Melkior had indeed grown serious. Maestro’s sarcastically scowling face was quite near his, plashing it with brandy breath. In a daze, like someone about to faint, he sat back down and made no reply. Inside him Viviana revived, a painfully wanton, loud image of lust.
“What, shall we have ourselves castrated, virile Eustachius, out of the pride and nobility of the male spirit? Well, what if all our power is implanted right down there, in that trouble spot, in that masculine humiliation? Who’s going to risk it, lovely Eustachius? One stands to lose all. Becoming a eunuch, yuk-yuk-yuk … an all around progeny-free creature, a belly with a chassis of loose flesh.” Maestro was being torn by an ugly forced laugh which made spittle spray from his grimy black teeth. “Here, I’m laughing, with your permission, most illustrious Eustachius, if that can be … if that’s what …”
He’s lost his train of thought, mused Melkior with pleasure, he’s drunk again. Or is it the “fratricidal bugs” hacking away in there …
“… what her smile is?” Maestro was having trouble pulling his thoughts together. “Why hers? Is it on that little minx, groomed to be bait to lecherous lust (do you notice the Shakespearean style here, Eustachius?) that there should twinkle such a manifestation of the mocking spirit? Only a Voltaire could be so derisive. But who gave a femina the male right of derision? — that is the question, most wise Eustachius! She who cries out so blatantly with this or that side of her flesh (and most delicate flesh it is — let us bow before the curves!) has all of a sudden wrapped herself — that is to say, enveloped that exclamatory flesh — in some kind of inscrutability, in the mythical veil of the eternal feminine, and proceeded to mock male mankind from within. O, Leonardo, I’m not forgiving you for that!” exclaimed Maestro in bitter resentment. “Unless … unless he was wanting to do some mocking himself, using the little minx to have a laugh at his own expense. … Well, never mind, Master Genius can well allow himself that.”
At this Maestro drained another bottle of beer.
“Would you like one, too, Eustachius, seeing that you don’t seem to go for my cocoa? Here, look, it’s brewery sealed, hermetically indeed … cap and all …”
“No, thank you. I say, why do you so hate women?”
“Stuff and nonsense, Eustachius. And besides, the words ‘you hate women’ are a woman’s way of putting it, and that I do hate. Me hate women? That’s like telling me I hate brandy. But we’re not going to go hiding the truth for the sake of our untameable sympathies, are we? Science is science. You’re a progressive man, Eustachius, and naturally a humane one. In the name of science and humanity you frown on witch hunts. You’re horrified at the notion, right? You can’t see how people could have believed that a woman had hopped onto a broomstick and flown off for a rendezvous with the devil. Heh-heh, that’s where your science shows a measure of naïveté—in thinking they believed it. The big-nosed scholars with their caps over their ears and their hands tucked into their wide sleeves, and in there, their fingers crossed … you think they believed in witches?”
“Many people believed, the backward masses … Martin Luther, for one, believed in the ‘Devil’s whores,’ as did Keppler himself. A cousin of his was burned as a witch, his mother was persecuted …”
“There, you see — the great Keppler, too!” took up Maestro with delight. “They burned his cousin and the genius took fright! Eh? Now do you think, Eustachius, that cousin wasn’t a little whore? And Frau Keppler a nasty old harridan … hairy wart on chin? Even now they would be calling her a witch.”
“And you would have her burned?” Ugo’s fiancée: hairy wart on chin, romping, a witch — to the stake! To the stake! Ugo would be bringing armfuls of dry twigs, auto-da-fé, a blow for freedom, a blow for freedom! Now, what about Enka? Well, Enka, too, would …