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 undignified, and he never drew an ear again. But Dom Kuzma’s hand eventually reached him nevertheless. After the physical pain subsided he felt ashamed before the catechist, he claimed his part of the guilt. Shame made him stop going to school, lest he meet Dom Kuzma again. Which he did not … until tonight. (But in such pathetic shape!)
Dom Kuzma brought too much passion to his struggle to prevail. What he did was senseless, even mad; he seemed to want to wipe all those provocative “ears” around him with his bare hands (or, slaps). He went in for mindless collective face slapping in his classes, for purely preventive reasons. His vengeful fervor, brandishing a heavy hand, reached everywhere, like God’s punishment.
Vengefully, he gave every pupil a zoological nickname. Or two, in tandem. He used the names of curious animals so that he could ridicule a person, to provoke laughter. … But there was no laughter, only the low cunning of children: how to weather the blows.
Dom Kuzma spied a bumpkin sitting at his desk and, wiping his avian nose on his sleeve, the thatch of his hair overgrowing his neck and (remarkably large) ears:
“What is hope? … you there, Andean Condor!”
The ornithological individual felt the two bright swords of Dom Kuzma’s gaze on his avian countenance and promptly identified with that large predatory bird of the Andes.
“Ho- … hope is … hope is when …”
“Come here, I’ll whisper it … in your ear.”
The Condor approached the lectern, hand on ear (as though unsure of his hearing), but Dom Kuzma smacked him on the other ear with his meaty hand. A boy with a funny nose, which gave him a permanent grin, instinctively flinched at the blow to the Condor’s ear. That is why Dom Kuzma chose him:
“And what is love, you … Duckbilled Platypus?”
“L-love … love is … when …”
“… when you get one across that snotty duckbill,” Dom Kuzma finished for him, while the Platypus’s nose made a wet and hollow sound under the blow, letting out a trickle of blood as proof of its virginity.
“Now then. I want you, Seal Penguinsky, to tell him what love is.” It was a shortish attentive boy who could not open his mouth for terror. His large eyes suspiciously followed the movement of Dom Kuzma’s hands: he was mustering all his scanty cunning to dodge the blow. … But it suddenly happened that the boy resolutely raised his head and fixed an impertinent stare on Dom Kuzma’s ear. The ear was clearly ashamed at the stare. It began to change color, going pale, reddening, more and more violently, angrily red, into scarlet, purple, the colors of a stormy sky. Thunder and lightning were imminent. The entire class dropped their eyes, hugged their desks, they knew what was coming next. In their minds they were each drawing a terrible, vengeful, murderous ear: everyone knew, now, what was behind the ear-drawing craze. … But the ear began to darken into a leaden blue-gray, to a gloomy indigo: the rage had died inside it, leaving only dead, beaten blood. Dom Kuzma let his hands drop to his sides, turned around, and went out of the classroom.
Melkior nearly applauded. What an example of human greatness! He felt curiously unburdened of a grueling thought about Dom Kuzma: all the cruelty of the man’s fate was revealed to him in an instant, dimly and darkly. It was indeed the first time that the word had made itself known inside him; soundlessly he said Fate and felt moved almost to tears.
“And God saith …,” Dom Kuzma was saying majestically; he was creating the world before their very eyes. “And there was light!” Again saith the Lord … but Adam and Eve ate the apple and God banished them from Paradise. Dom Kuzma was personally banishing them from the classroom, pointing his forefinger at the door. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread! And that was where human suffering began. Cain slew his brother Abel; Absalom rebelled against his father David; Jacob fled from his brother Esau and his brothers sold his son Joseph to the Egyptians; Potiphar’s wife tempting Joseph; Joseph testing his brothers; Benjamin. The three young men in the fiery furnace; Daniel in the lion’s den; Jonah in the whale’s belly; David slaying Goliath; the terrible story of Samson who slew thousands upon thousands of Philistines with an ass’s jaw but was subdued by a fallen woman who delivered him to the mercy of his enemies. At the point where the accursed Delilah was shearing Samson’s hair Dom Kuzma’s face was transformed, his words hobbled by bitterness, his eyes veiled with sorrow. Melkior pictured Dom Kuzma standing shorn and blinded in the center of the Philistine temple, his ears protruding in solitude among the pillars. … But then Samson, in desperation, called unto the Lord and said, Oh Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, Oh God, that I may be at once avenged on the Philistines for my two eyes. And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the other with his left. And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people who were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.