10

Unaware that the moon had waned to a cuticle, Fogginius insisted Clay walk every evening for one hour beneath its beneficial radiance. One night, as Clay wheezed among the coconuts, Phosphor, Fogginius, and Fantasma sat together in heated discussion on the balcony: How would the completed ocularscopic theatrum mundi be classified within its viewing box? For example, should women be viewed with mammals of all sorts, or confined to districts, or according to age or beauty? Could the image of Señora Portaequipajes stooped scowling over a slop pail be viewed an instant after the beautiful Cosima in her bath? What were the philosophical, the cosmical implications of such a juxtaposition? And what of statuary? And did the eggs of hens belong with eggcups or with barnyard scenes (including cows) or in a gastronomical series? Were musical instruments a species of furniture? Phosphor was no longer listening. Instead, he wondered: Could sound also be seized on glass?

At that moment, Cosme appeared in a cinnamon tree high above them. Leaping to the balcony and executing a mock salute, he informed Señor Fantasma that Cosima was big with child. Fantasma paled, reddened, paled again, and thinking to buy him, tossed Cosme a purse, which the actor caught in his teeth with prodigious alacrity.

Then, stuffing it down a codpiece bursting with pilfered eggs—hard-boiled—and grinning ear to ear, Cosme announced that the priest would arrive instantaneously.

Fantasma declared the thing impossible—he could not, he refused to marry an infant. And reaching for a blacking brush that earlier had served Fogginius in a lengthy demonstration upon the nature and function of levers, he bounded to his feet and made to crack open the actor’s skull.

All this time Cosima had been hiding behind the balcony door. She now appeared holding a belly as round as a terrestrial globe. Indeed, had Professor Tardanza been there, he would surely have recognized the form of an object that had vanished from his rooms but a week before, along with a pair of newly varnished boots.

Illumined by a lantern, Cosima stood defiantly before them, her eyes both wet with tears and very black. Standing there in her frail bones and ruddy cheeks, she looked so lovely that had Fantasma a heart in his breast and not a desiccated turd, it would have melted. Yet, because the babe was clearly incubating, its mother’s eyes flashing, its grandfather executing cartwheels on the balustrades, and the priest, his mouth sweetened with kitchen crumbs, now floating across the floor in their direction—the thing was done. And so swiftly that Fantasma was forever convinced he had been screwed by sorcerers and charlatans—which, undoubtedly, was true.

Later Cosima was given a bath by the cook and taken to her master’s bed. Shortly thereafter, Fantasma was heard to cry out—in pain or pleasure, no one could say. He wandered down to breakfast, his pride badly shaken; apparently the night before, when he had reached for Cosima’s breasts, she had bitten his hand.

When Fogginius, plagued by perpetual fog, stumbled into the kitchen wanting butter (for a blister occasioned by the harness he wore to keep his intestines from dropping out of his anus) and collided with the ripe melon of Cosima’s fictive belly, he insisted she follow a cure for rotundular air.

Bewildered, Cosima looked on as Fogginius took up a mortar and pestle and proceeded to manufacture pills. It is fortunate that the sage did not harm her: Cosima thrived upon the ashes of asps, calf fat, and beeswax.

In the early part of the day, as the kitchen filled with light and the smells of baking, Cosima combed out Pulco’s matted hair and told him stories. She inquired after Pulco’s parents, but Pulco was a thing of spontaneous generation: he had materialized on Phosphor’s stoop just as Phosphor had upon Fogginius’.

Cosima was sweet-smelling, and Pulco basked in her heat as long as she allowed it, for Cosima was like a beach of hot sand. Her stories were often interrupted by Fogginius, who always seemed to know when people were listening with delight to someone else. One imagines:

“Once upon a time,” Cosima begins, her arms cradling Pulco to her curiously resonant rotundity, “the garden was full of elves so small that if you put one hundred of them in a saucer and asked them to sing, they’d make less noise than a pinch of salt sprinkled on an onion.”

Fogginius appears brandishing an evil-looking appurtenance he has found growing in the kitchen garden and that everyone else recognizes is asparagus. Sharking out Cosima’s story and elbowing his way past the cook, he cries:

“Ignorant child! You have confused elves with angels, which everyone knows can ambulate by the thousands up and down the anus of a camel—forgive me but the minions of God are everywhere, even in the droppings of hens, and there’s no telling where they will show up next beating their blue wings, their blue drums, and blowing their blue horns! Had we ears we could hear them whispering within the spheres dung bugs push about. Don’t listen to the wench!” Fogginius pulls Pulco from Cosima’s lap by the ear: “She’ll fill your head with foo-fah! The truth is that elves and fairies, goblins and such, are flimflammery!”

The cook, feeling pity for the saint’s captive audience, brings them sweets in a little dish glazed green.

“Now, there are multiplicitous ways to tell an angel from a devil:”—Fogginius gathers steam—“when a devil steps into water, he ignites. An egg boiled in this water will explode. But should an angel settle on water he will glide like a swan. One of the great delights of Paradise is to see the angels gliding.…”

Once, after dark, Cosima set up a magic lantern and showed Pulco the glass slides she had herself painted under Phosphor’s direction with stains made of colored wax: butterflies and pigs with wings and scenes of an imagined Orient and other things Phosphor had described for her, such as the serpent Apophis, the giant Typhon, the cosmic egg, and the Speaking Tree; and also the landscapes of her own dreams in which the moon was swallowed by the smoking mouth of a volcano before being spat out again.

To Cosima’s surprise, little Pulco was terrified. He believed that the kitchen wall would remember those dancing shadows, would somehow engender them later in the deep of night when he would be alone sleeping beside the hearth. Cosima asked the cook: why was little Pulco so frightened? Sullen and stammering, the cook explained that ever since Señor Fantasma had taken little Pulco to the garden shed, where he had kept him for well over an hour, Pulco was frightened of the dark.