M’sieur Pierre rolled up his right sleeve. There appeared a tattoo. Under the wonderfully white skin his muscle bulged and rolled. He assumed a firm stance, grasped the chair with one hand, turned it upside down and slowly began lifting it. Swaying from the effort, he held it for a moment high above his head and slowly lowered it. This was only a preliminary.
Concealing his labored respiration, he wiped his hands long and carefully with a red handkerchief, while the spider, as the youngest member of the circus family, performed a simple trick above his web.
Throwing him the handkerchief, M’sieur Pierre shouted a French exclamation and suddenly was standing on his hands.
His spherical head gradually became suffused with beautiful rosy blood; his left trouser leg slid down, exposing his ankle; his upside-down eyes—as happens with anyone in this position—looked like the eyes of an octopus.
“How about that?” he asked, bouncing back onto his feet and readjusting his clothes. From the corridor came a tumult of applause, and then, separately, the clown began to clap, loose-jointedly, as he walked—before beaning himself on the barrier.
“Well?” repeated M’sieur Pierre. “How’s that for strength? And will my agility do? Or haven’t you seen enough yet?”
In one leap M’sieur Pierre hopped up on the table, stood on his hands, and grasped the back of the chair in his teeth. The music paused breathlessly. M’sieur Pierre was lifting the chair, clenched firmly between his teeth; his tensed muscles were quivering; his jaw was creaking.
The door softly swung open, and there entered—in jack boots, with a whip, powdered and spotlit with blinding violet light—the circus director. “Sensational! A unique performance!” he whispered, and, taking off his top hat, he sat down by Cincinnatus.
Something gave, and M’sieur Pierre, releasing the chair from his mouth, turned a somersault and was again standing on the floor.
Apparently, however, not everything was well. He at once covered his mouth with his handkerchief, glanced quickly under the table, then inspected the chair, and suddenly seeing what he sought, attempted, with a subdued oath, to yank off the back of the chair his hinged denture, which was embedded there. Magnificently displaying all its teeth, it held on with a bulldog grip. Whereupon, without losing his head, M’sieur Pierre embraced the chair and departed with it.
Rodrig Ivanovich, who had noticed nothing, was applauding wildly. The arena, however, remained empty. He cast a suspicious look at Cincinnatus, clapped some more, but without the former ardor, gave a little start and, in obvious distress, left the box.
And thus the performance ended.
Chapter Eleven
Now newspapers were no longer brought to the cell: having noticed that everything that might have any connection with the execution was clipped out, Cincinnatus himself had declined to receive them. Breakfast had grown simpler: instead of chocolate—albeit weak chocolate—he would receive some slop with a flotilla of tea leaves; the toast was so hard he could not bite through it. Rodion made no secret of the fact that he had grown bored with serving the silent and fastidious prisoner.
He would deliberately busy himself for a longer and longer time in the cell. His flame-red beard, the imbecile azure of his eyes, his leather apron, his clawlike hands—all this accumulated through repetition to form such a depressing, tedious impression that Cincinnatus would turn away toward the wall while the cleaning was in progress.
And that is how it was this day—only the return of the chair, with the deep imprints of bulldog teeth on the top edge of its straight back, served as a distinguishing feature for the day’s beginning. Together with the chair Rodion brought a note from M’sieur Pierre; a fleecily curling script, elegant punctuation marks, signature like a seven-veil dance. In jocular and kindly words his neighbor thanked him for yesterday’s friendly chat and expressed hope that it would be repeated shortly. “Let me assure you,” thus ended the note, “that I am physically very, very strong [twice underlined with a ruler], and if you are still not convinced of this, I shall be honored some time to show you certain further interesting [underlined] demonstrations of agility and astounding muscular development.”
After this, for two hours, with imperceptible intervals of mournful torpor, Cincinnatus, now pinching at his mustache, now flipping the pages of a book, walked about the cell. He had by now made a completely precise study of it—he knew it much better than, for instance, the room where he had lived for many years.
This is how matters stood with the walls: their number was unalterably four; they were painted a uniform yellow; but, because of the shadow covering it, the basic hue seemed dark and smooth, claylike as it were, in comparison with that shifting spot where the bright ochre reflection of the window spent the day: here, in the light, all the small protuberances of the thick yellow paint were in evidence-even the wavy curve of the tracings left by the joint passage of brush hairs—and there was the familiar scratch which the precious parallelogram of sunlight would reach at ten in the morning.
A creeping, heel-clutching chill rose from the dusky stone floor; an underdeveloped, mean little echo inhabited some part of the slightly concave ceiling, with a light (wire-enclosed) in its center—no, that is, not quite in the center: a flaw that agonizingly irritated the eye—and, in this sense, no less agonizing was the unsuccessful attempt to paint over the iron door.
Of the three items of furniture—cot, table, chair—only the last was movable. The spider also moved. Up above, where the sloping window recess began, the well-nourished black beastie had found points of support for a first-rate web with the same resourcefulness as Marthe displayed when she would find, in what seemed the most unsuitable corner, a place and a method for hanging out laundry to dry. Its paws folded so that the furry elbows stuck out at the sides, it would gaze with round hazel eyes at the hand with the pencil extended toward it, and would begin to back away, without taking its eyes off it. It was most eager however, to take a fly, or a moth from the large fingers of Rodion—and now, for example, in the southwest part of the web there hung a butterfly’s orphaned hind wing, cherry-red, with a silky shading, and with blue lozenges along its crenelated edge. It stirred slightly in a delicate draft.
The inscriptions on the walls had by now been wiped away. The list of rules likewise had disappeared. Also taken away—or perhaps broken—was the classic pitcher with spelaean water in its resonant depths. All was bare, redoubtable, and cold in this chamber where the prisonlike character was suppressed by the neutrality of a waiting room—whether office, hospital or some other kind—when it is already getting to be evening, and one hears only the humming in one’s ears … and the horror of this waiting was somehow connected with the incorrectly located center of the ceiling.
Library volumes, in black shoe-leatherlike bindings, lay on the table, which had been covered for some time already with a checkered oilcloth. The pencil, which had lost its slender length and was well chewed, rested on violently scribbled pages, stacked windmill fashion. Here also had been thrown a letter to Marthe, completed by Cincinnatus the day before, that is, the day after the interview: but he could not make up his mind to send it, and had therefore let it lie a while, as though expecting from the thing itself that fruition which his irresolute thoughts, in need of another climate, simply could not achieve.
The subject will now be the precious quality of Cincinnatus; his fleshy incompleteness; the fact that the greater part of him was in a quite different place, while only an insignificant portion of it was wandering, perplexed, here—a poor, vague Cincinnatus, a comparatively stupid Cincinnatus, trusting, feeble and foolish as people are in their sleep. But even during this sleep—still, still—his real life showed through too much.
Cincinnatus’s face, grown transparently pallid, with fuzz on its sunken cheeks and a mustache with such a delicate hair texture that it seemed to be actually a bit of disheveled sunlight on his upper lip; Cincinnatus’s face, small and still young despite all the torments, with gliding eyes, eerie eyes of changeable shade, was, in regard to its expression, something absolutely inadmissible by the standards of his surroundings, especially now, when he had ceased to dissemble. The open shirt, the black dressing grown that kept flying open, the oversize slippers on his slender feet, the philosopher’s skullcap on the top of his head and the ripple (there was a draft coming from somewhere after all!) running through the transparent hair on his temples completed a picture, the full indecency of which it is difficult to put into words—produced as it was of a thousand barely noticeable, overlapping trifles: of the light outline of his lips, seemingly not quite fully drawn but touched by a master of masters; of the fluttering movements of his empty, not-yet-shaded-in hands; of the dispersing and again gathering rays in his animated eyes; but even all of this, analyzed and studied, still could not fully explain Cincinnatus: it was as if one side of his being slid into another dimension, as all the complexity of a tree’s foliage passes from shade into radiance, so that you cannot distinguish just where begins the submergence into the shimmer of a different element. It seemed as though at any moment, in the course of his movements about the limited space of the haphazardly invented cell, Cincinnatus would step in such a way as
