The weeks passed. Clay gathered strength for the voyage by curing the soles of his feet with parakeet droppings as Fogginius prescribed; Phosphor screwed spectacles together and polished an adjustable case for the world’s first collapsible camera and, made fearless by Cosima’s proximity, attempted to acquire an audience with Professor Tardanza’s daughter:
Should you be so generous as to indulge my small wish, 1 would happily recite a short piece from an expanding work which it is my intention to make longer than Homer’s and more to the point. Spanish has the most beautiful words of any language! For example: pulpo, atizador, calamidad … the most beautiful, yes! And the most terrible!
The letter was returned unopened. Phosphor was ready to abandon everything, to hurl himself from the highest palm he could find, except that having approached a good-sized tree, and having embraced it with the idea of scaling it, he realized that, although he had seen it done, he had never attempted to climb one himself. Taking a footpath to the crest of a cliff, and looking down at the sea, he considered leaping to the beach below, but recalling the crabs that scuttled back and forth in their own mysterious frenzy of motion, it came to him that a poet’s corpse could be badly mutilated and he did not want Professor Tardanza’s beautiful daughter to look at his corpse and sicken.
If he were to die a poet’s death, to lie entire and pale in a beautiful coffin—that might move her to tears. He imagines her bosom heaving in its lace nest from which she pulls an egg—no! a piece of parchment—a poem! And clutching it with tear-soaked fists sobs: Aie, aie, aie! Too late!
Panting in the clutches of an erotic melancholy so intense he could barely breathe, Phosphor pulled an inkpot from his spattered vest, a pen, a roll of parchment, and with bitterness and jealous lust recalled what he had seen that very morning: Professor Tardanza’s daughter walking among the trees of the plaza on the arm of a handsome brute named Enrique Saladrigas, a student of Tardanza’s and—the pain was great—a poet, too.
Choosing a flat, scarred rock overlooking the sea, Phosphor straddled it with a sigh, and, clutching his ink-pot, began to weep. He was undone as much by heresy as by love. Because the woman of his dreams ignored him and worse: that morning when he had unwittingly passed her and Saladrigas in the shadows of the trees (where in the name of Hell was her duenna?) he had badly fumbled, dropped his hat, and stepped on it. When with a pounding heart he had, so needlessly, excused himself, she had laughed! Her terrible laughter still reverberated in his ears; it rattled and thundered in his brain like the body of a vampire eager to leave its coffin, and it made him wonder if there was any sense to the vast universe at all.
Pressing his parchment to the stone, he dipped his pen into the ink and wrote:
Now it is strange how one can see things from afar and be affected. To be a fantastical eye, like a bird on a stalk.
Next he wrote down those things he saw before him: spiral cliffs and jagged rocks; sink holes and knobs. He wrote:
His beard as unbridled as his heart.
He wrote down a word he liked: malaria.
Here he was, a cripple and cross-eyed too, yet clean-featured, his hair and eye both raven black; of sharp wit and disputatious mind, of mild manners, regular in his habits; of good conscience, enamored of the world and its mysteries, regular in his bodily functions; a great inventor, the poet of his age, of fiery heart and an exasperated consciousness, a planet yearning after a planet. If he had believed in God, he might have wondered why his Maker had bothered to make him if only to leave him, as it were, unmade.
Blotting his tear-soaked face with his fist, Nuño Alfa y Omega, known as Phosphor, dipped his pen into the little pot of ink he carried with him everywhere and wrote
ONE LAST POEM TO PROFESSOR TARDANZA’S DAUGHTER:
Your laughter piping through my head
utter strangeness piping through my head
I dare to think I would be better dead
To, at your little dovelike feet,
lie not a little dead …
But before he could complete the poem, he saw Pulco come running toward him down the rocky path. Señor Fantasma would wait no longer. Fogginius had prophesied an auspicious day, and their master was projecting an imminent departure! His little face screwed by the urgency of his mission, Pulco told the poet that he must pack his mule.
The dark thoughts dissipated; the girl’s laughter vanished from the poet’s brain. At last he would set out upon the Great Work: the entire island caged like a bird and like a blossom held in glass seized within his verse forever and ever.