But what about our party of travelers? As Phosphor’s mule passed through Fantasma’s gate and stumbled forth upon the cobbled way, the terrific implications of what he was about to do overwhelmed his brain. It came to him that he must thrust a series of stanzas in assonance into the very entrails of his epic—stanzas comprised of wind zones and ocean currents, the names of inland waters, descriptions of useful products, of the climate, too; and volcanoes and river systems. He would determine and disclose the action of waves upon the sandstone coasts, the temperatures of subterranean lakes. He would chronicle the premonitory signs of earthquakes, the force of waves, the height of tides, the sound of winds, the smell of medicinal springs. He would evoke caverns lucent of carbonate of lime, whirlpools and waterspouts; rainbows, meteors, mirages, and will-o’-the-wisps. Not only would he be his island’s first poet laureate and photographer, he would be its first geographer and cartographer! His endeavor was greater than epic: it was encyclopedic!
And all this in honor of Professor Tardanza’s daughter. He imagined her stupefication the moment he would lay the entire island at her feet. (No wonder, dear Ved, that Ombos refers to Nuño Alfa y Omega as “Birdland’s Diderot.”)
But, from the start, Fogginius proved himself highly disruptive of projects grounded in revery. Only Fantasma—whom the scholar continued to fascinate and whose tuft of red hair now blazed an incongruous trail—was not put out of temper. Fogginius was forever dismounting to investigate a donkey’s dropping, to badger a nursing mother for a little milk, to scrape the foam from the mouth of a soldier’s horse, to examine the hindmost part of Phosphor’s mule in order to fix his mind on the eye of the wind and hence foretell the weather.
When at last they had left the trees along the town road behind them and were embraced by a savage path enfevered by scarlet oleander, the saint took it into his crazed head that he would enliven the aboriginal way and astonish his companions with the knowledge he had accumulated over the years. True to himself, he did not ask if they might prefer to enjoy the beauties of the day in silence, but, setting his mouth in motion, began to discourse, unstoppable, on miracula: double eggs and bezoars and hair balls; how once he had found a minuscule and thinking brain within a cherry stone, and where one could procure cutlery for dwarfs and giants.
Just then Professor Tardanza and his daughter appeared riding together in the opposite direction. They had been gathering flowering branches in the woods, and the young girl, astride a horse the color of butter, was wreathed in blossoms. So tightly was the poet’s heart squeezed with longing that had it been a lime, seeds would have bulleted from his ears.
When the girl and her father rode past, Phosphor offered his most lovesick look, a look of such intensity that had Fogginius remained silent she might have been moved. But the scholar opened his trap:
“The best remedy against lightning is to wear one’s turds—dried and sewn with a piece of silk—against the heart. The turd is dry, corrupt, combustible, commemorative, and at best, cumuliform—”
Professor Tardanza did not nod, nor tip his hat, but spurred his own horse on, frowning, as if to say: I do not approve of the company you keep.
“That girl who just passed!” Fogginius spluttered with ill-founded enthusiasm, “has offended some pagan deity and is being transformed to shrubbery before our eyes! Soon she will tumble from her steed and take root by the wayside I would never have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes!” For an instant he shut up, marveling.
But Phosphor did not hear him. He who never prayed was praying that a meteor would strike Fogginius dead where he sat. And although they had only just left the city of Pope Publius behind and had been journeying but an hour, Phosphor was submerged in weariness.
The day died. Fogginius was silent only when catching his breath. When the party stopped and Clay set about to roast those things he had brained for their supper, Fogginius described procedures for the procuration of corpses, both fresh and moldering, and methods of dissection both ancient and new—thereby vanquishing everyone’s appetite but his own. Cracking a baked egg against his bony knee, he entertained them with a catalog of distinctions between angels, archangels, and archons, and wondered if all had microscopic or telescopic vision, or both—or neither, but instead of a type surnatural and thus inconceivable.
As Fogginius spoke and Fantasma listened in rapture, Phosphor pondered why his master cherished the saint’s advice and admired his mind so much that he—who was going broke—had been paying him to think. With much gnashing of teeth, Phosphor recalled his stepfather’s incessant punishments, the insane blandishments that had rained unfailingly down upon him when he was a boy: the times he had been constrained to wear a live lizard in his breeches, to chew sand, to eat a stew of snails cooked in their own glue. Kicking out the fire, Clay too fantasized of reducing the saint to a pulp. Pulco, however, appeared content as he cleared the supper things and scrubbed a pan—he had plugged his ears with a paste of bread, moistened with saliva.
“The black man is black”—detonating, Fogginius threw himself upon his hammock—“because he burns from within with such intensity all his whiteness has been consumed. The red man burns with less heat; the yellow—” Suddenly the world was silent.
Silent. As if a great lid of lead had been lowered from the top of the sky. Fogginius had fallen asleep, as had small Pulco and the mules. This silence was so exquisite and so dense that the poet attempted to capture it in verse. He wrote:
A silence like a blotter soft and thick
Soaks up the forest’s ink
Allowing me to dream and think
Phosphor put down his pen and, gazing up at the wheeling sky, invoked in one breath the Mother of Heaven, Venus, and Professor Tardanza’s daughter. Within moments he was fast asleep—as were the others, strung from trees like figs. In his dream, Phosphor saw Professor Tardanza’s daughter threading toward him as naked as a thing of Eden. Opening his arms to receive her, he pushed his feet deep into the nebulous mud upon which he was precariously standing, to keep from falling.
She was hot. Before he touched her, he could feel how the air about her burned: she was poised at the center of a mandorla of fire. But just as he would embrace her, his rival Enrique Saladrigas slipped between them, and Phosphor was eclipsed by a body twice as tall and twice as broad as he. In despair he battered at his rival’s back with both his fists and at the buttocks that now pressed against his face so that he could barely breathe. A terrific stench was upon the poet now, and the more he battered Saladrigas, the greater his rival grew.
And Phosphor was in the embrace of an outsize octopus; its antediluvian face pressed down upon his own. With a cry the poet tore his mouth from the creature’s beak, and looking to the sky saw with clarity, luminous against the ink of night, the constellation of the skeleton.
The poet screamed. Waking, he found that something still pinned him down. It was Fogginius. Fogginius, whose dreadful testicles, so like the desiccated things he chose to carry close to his heart to conjure evil fortune, forced the poet’s lips. Revulsed nearly to madness, Phosphor bit the saint fiercely, and Fogginius, leaping to the ground, began to shout. With loathing and amazement, and just as the sun appeared foaming upon the horizon, Phosphor listened to the saint’s breathless explanation:
“A cure! For rheumatism! To sit upon a poet’s face at dawn!” And: “I am cured!” Fogginius tottered and lurched about in the morning dew, arousing the many green apes drowsing in the tree-tops. Hurled into consciousness, they responded by screeching, precipitating a million birds into the scarlet sky—those birds that in distant days before pesticides filled the woods with their hot, palpitating bodies, their voices like bells, the philosophical stones of their eggs.