Cyclopsiary

                  CYCLOPSIARY

By Pietro Passalacqua

The sun circling around this lush country rose this daybreak, as inveigling as ever, over the population it holds in its rays like mice under the laboratory lamp ; quite early, it began heating the valley with overbrimming dollops of thick tropical light, seeming to energise the macaws that travelled from palm to palm in the city's surviving patches of dwindling greenery ; but each sun in this particular country, whose crude violence has reached mythical proportions, though it start off its citizens with promises of paradise and voluptuously paradisiacal women, always carries a razored sting in its tail ; and today, this roulette sting is going to fall, in true Caracas style, on poor Professor Márquez and his entire family, before it sets beyond the massive mountain chain that enfolds the precarious valley. For the moment, though, its nurturing incandescence, fragile as a soap bubble, bathes the university's windows with hope.

"Cyclops stands for shameless barbarity ; for everything un-Greek and uncivilized, Professor" husky Señorita Calypso Chrysolampros answers, while the male students subreptitiously ogle her divine foxiness with muffled grunts, the girls with irises that are gleaming daggers. Professor Márquez thinks Calypso an odd name for a modern Caracas girl, but, still, her grandparents are bona fide Greeks, right off the immigration boat at a time when everyone was coming to Venezuela, the promised land, and not fleeing from it the way they are today like from a cataclysm – now there's another Greek name.

Professor Alberto Márquez, Homerist extraordinaire, Cambridge classics graduate with a masters in Golden-Century Spanish from Salamanca, and local correspondent for the Times as well as columnist for the Times Literary Supplement, shuffles his lanky frame along the rostrum in his signature-wrinkled brown linen suit and mustard bow-tie, pauses and strokes his discreet goatee, warmly meditating upon this foxy Greek nymph just spoken, his musings following one upon the other like waves that feel as though they're lapping suntruck sands, intent upon this latter-day enchantress of cedar and cypress fragrances who lives in that seafront wood-and-stone, many-gabled house, into whose bedroom, where she waits, -- through a maze of fountained gardens, corridors and passages, and unbeknown to her parents -- he has sneaked in so well.

His roving eyes briefly but proudly linger on her tumble of honey-highlighted chestnut tresses, her lips sticked a modest carnelian over which plays the pale blue chalcedony of her oval eyes ; Calypso, his Greek muse, always sitting front row, flaunting the gym-sculpted convexity of her thighs, especially now when the sunlight slants in and licks them with a caramel glow. Thank the Gods that forever live happily in Olympus for having stocked Venezuela with such a plethora, such an international blend, of divine beauties ; but no thanks to the too-mortal, lethal and socialist governments of the last half century who have so corroded the quality of life that most of these beauties have gone to adorn the shores of more prosperous and stable -- or at least, less disastrous -- countries. And thank the Merciful Gods too for leaving Calypso here, till now anyway, a sensuality in whose vision one could somewhat palliate this Godforsaken country's many sorrows.

"Acutely answered, Señorita Chrysolampros" Alberto says, doing his professional best to dissemble his bumbling adoration of her, mindful of appearances, yet drowsily floating in her mist of briny wood that seems to haunt him still from three nights ago -- that delicious base note of cedar...juniper... Guerlain? "And now who in our distinguished classroom can tell us just what specific trait it was that made Cyclops so barbaric -- his hamartia, properly speaking?"

A forest of hands rises up to take on the intellectual challenge, eager voices speaking in turn as the professor acknowledges them, nodding here, acquiescing there, sometimes tilting his head with a doubtful grimace, about how cave-dwelling Cyclops lived –- if such subfusc savagery could be called a living –- as a naked, beastly, smelly, lice-laden brute, a cantankerous hermit boiling with arrogant violence ; yes, he had willingly and sacrilegiously broken the divine rules of hospitality by arrogantly deriding his travel-weary guests when they were so needy of comfort and, instead of offering them rest and a meal, he turned them into one, chomping off their heads like a praying mantis.