Free The Cannibal by John Hawkes Page B

lose him. It all started as simply as the appearance of
     Ernie’s dangerous, unpleasant face. When the people found out, the people of Bosnia,
     Austria, and the Hapsburg monarchy, they caused a silent, spreading,impersonal commotion over the body of Ferdinand.
    “Thank you,” said Stella.
    “Oh, I’ll be around.” She did not turn to watch Cromwell go back to the
     carriage.
    The University was black, impressive, most of its archives and bare rooms
     encased in a drawn restless wine-stupor, part of its jagged, face grey, menacing, piled
     backwards on itself in chaotic slumber. The rain came down in broken sheets covering first
     one roof, then a ledge, then splashing against a swinging door, sluicing down the crumbling
     channels, smothering dust-filled caves crawling with larvae. The center of revolution, dogma
     and defeat, it drew the city into its walls with a crushing will; and behind its ancient and
     topheavy porticos and crags, behind small windows and breathing flues, lodged the
     uninhibited, the young, the old. Ernie crossed a hollow court, dodged down ecclesiastical
     alleys past flowing fonts, made his way past stone connecting arches and hybrid walls,
     hastened beyond a mausoleum of brain to where the stone eruption gave way to a wooden comb
     of corridors. Resolved to upset his dying fall, he finally lunged at a solid door, smelled
     the dank unvarying stench of huddled students and counted forward five doors while the
     summer rain rolled thickly down the stained windows, and his footfalls still called back
     from the stone. The door was covered with the prints of ancient nervous fingers, was damp
     with the palms that had slipped in and out for centuries. Heavy furniture and eaten rug,
     iron candle holders and unused loving chair, were pushed into dust-covered heaps lining
     three walls, leaving thescarred floor a wide cold arena, colorless
     beneath the only lamp that burned in the University, peopled by the only waking men. They
     slouched, sleepless, like a band of raiders in a thick wood, drinking a colorless water that
     caused the lungs to heave, the skin to burn, that brought violent images before the eyes.
     The single light threw stiff unyielding shadows on the horse-collared masks, on the molding
     chest mats, protective of bowels, front and loins, covered with dry rust and rattling
     buckles, grey wire-like stuffing from rough slashes.
    The Baron, older in time, more vicious and less proud with his bastard
     Spanish-German head thrust back and upwards at the agony-carved rafters, more hot and
     princely and dog-like under his eyes and stripped arms, waited until precisely the proper
     moment when the eyes found their two-sided common target, when the arena drifted with
     unraked ashes, to slip to his knees and draw as in sleep a weapon from the debris. The
     onlookers let the liquor trickle down their nostrils, coughed, rubbed their collars, stared
     with their mouths open in hate. These were the agates that could not grow.
    In the first moment their bodies lost form, clashing like roosters with
     spiked heels, aiming at brief exposed patches of white, striking for scarecrow targets. They
     struck at the
Physik
of limbs. In the second moment, the arena stained with drops
     of ink, walls resounding with blows, they aimed at the perilous eyes and ears, the delicate
     tendons of the neck, fingers, stabbing at the
Kultur
of sense, and a blade-tip sang
     past his lower lip, splitting the skin the length of his under jaw. In the third moment they
     found the groin, and he felt a pain from the accidentalflat of the blade
     that traveled from the abdomen to his throat in a brief spasm, the original
Unlust
.
     He stooped, and the bell of the saber rang through the ashes, dropped to the floor in a
     finished scoop. Then gradually he began to fall from a high, blunted indefinable space where
     the Hero’s words:
love, Stella, Ernst, lust, tonight, leader, land
revolved out of
     relation, until he