Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) by Ranko Marinkovic

taken aback by Maestro’s interjection; he therefore went after Melkior again.
    “It’s a shame, oh sociable Eustachius,” he turned him around and spoke into his face. “It’s a shame for a Parampionic veteran such as yourself to shut himself in his secret little lab and day and night distill the extract of a most corrosive antimilitarist outlook, one which in further chemical processing might even be described as seditious.”
    “Ugo!” Melkior pleaded in a hot whisper.
    “He can be seen in broad daylight,” Ugo went on cruelly, “stepping onto the invalid’s weighing machine on the street corner with the secret mission of controlling the weight of his irreplaceable body, with particular attention to certain famous military regulations. For seven years, in his head, he has been nurturing, fertilizing, watering, weeding his sweet little cabbage patch: how to render inaccessible to the Kingdom his body, which in view of its glory is fully entitled to it, as is borne out by all of history. He has, among other things, a poem which sets it all out in a poetic manner. I must confess I don’t know its title, but it does not really need a title—if it has one at all, am I right, Eustachius?”
    “Ugo, please,” whispered Melkior, trembling, “for God’s sake stop acting like a fool!”
    “What’s the matter?” Ugo mused. “Why, the poem’s quite good. A bit old-fashioned, perhaps. Listen:
    Begone now, leave me be, ’tis solitude I need
softly to approach the grass …”
    “Stop!” Melkior shrieked in desperation and wrenched free of Ugo’s grip. “You’re not a man, you’re a cur!” he added, fending off Ugo’s hands, which were reaching to keep him there. When he closed the door from the outside, Thénardier’s bell sobbed after him.
    “Pity,” said Maestro thoughtfully. “Just when we were set up for a splendid evening. Tell you what, Ugo: why don’t U-go and u-be-gone, you goon.”

White all around … and a tinge of illness. The quiet, roomy terrace of an Alpine sanitarium for the consumptive. He did not want to say “tuberculin.” Deep down he feared the word. A view of mountain lakes and glaciers. A glass of milk on a small white table. He, reclining on a chaise longue, the chronicle of some thirty-year, three-hundred-year, three-thousand-year war in his hands. A little farther off down the terrace, also resting, a gold-haired and pale-faced one, a consumptive girl reading. … At this point somebody else would write that she was reading
The Sorrows of Young Werther
or
Adolphe
or
The Torrents of Spring;
well, just to show them make it a book by Kumičić,
Jelka’s Sprig of Basil
, or even
Chance
by the same author. The sweet banality of a delusion … The pretty golden girl brushing away a dainty tear over a passage here and there and coughing demurely. Poor thing. Everything pale, sick, sad … Banal! Intentionally banal!
    Originality almost frightened Melkior with its literary coyness. With its seductive charm that diverts from real cares and smiles in the distance and holds out a promise of surprises to come. Originality might have lifted his spirits and plucked him out of tethering reality. But it would not have been a lasting liberation, it only meant a sweet hour of forgetfulness: a bit of
Te Deum laudamus
and a whiff of incense, with cares waiting around the next corner to throttle him. Lasting liberation required banality and nothing but banality, sickly sweet, dull banality, white all around and a tinge of illness, the terrace, the glaciers, the milk, and the golden girl.
    Replete with Kumičić! With no exaltation, with no literary ambition, with no taste, without affectation, he built for himself a tableau depicting the liberation from the nightmare in a most primitive fashion, almost as a stupidity cult which Ugo would have jeered at with a vengeance if Melkior had been naïve enough to share with him his sanitarium, his
Jelka’s Sprig of Basil
, his consumptive delusion