17

As the dust of the road thickened to mud—for the rainy season had just begun—Señor Fantasma and his party continued on through uncharted country—a steaming breach in which midges and serpents proliferated. Armed with a large stick, little Pulco beat the path as Yahoo Clay fired musket balls into the undergrowth with the intention to destroy whatever happened to be there.

“It is a thing paradoxically strange,” Fogginius panted, nearly in tears, “that the Holy Father, adorably great and wise, has provided the world with nuisances. You ask why,” Fogginius continued to himself (for the others had secured their ears with bread), “why God, in all His Rectorial Supereminence and Capacity, wormholed these woods with perils and pests. Listen well; here is the answer:

“Firstly, by creating things noxious, hideous, and wild, God reveals that His capacities are infinite, and that He will not be bound by beauty, nor by common sense. He chooses to be illogical and create things with stingers and fangs, the color green, mucosities, the polar regions, ejaculations, the disfigured races of fishes, fevers, frenzies, and rotten eggs—why? To keep us on our toes! Anxiety is the Sublime Educator! Anxiety, fellow pilgrims, is the Gateway to Grace. Anxiety and … Terror!”

Lost in thought, Señor Fantasma, his sable eyes ignited by greed, appreciated an imposing number of rare cabinet woods thickening in the gloom, and he imagined his retinue swelled by a multitude of vassals wielding saws and hatchets.

“I am pondering,” Fogginius said, as if reading Fantasma’s thoughts, “how many Africans with hatchets it would take to raze this pernicious place of nastiness.” But Phosphor, dreaming of love, was enthralled by the forest’s flaming beauty. He noted with delight parrots the size of thumbs and the color of old orange peel, conversing—he was certain—in their multitudes among roses as large as his own palpitating heart.

I am now penetrating, he scribbled with inky fingers on a stained scrap of parchment, with joy and terror, the Eternal Feminine: moist, mossy, hidden, nameless. I hurry into darkness. In the margin he penned nameless/darkness. The rhyme would serve him later.

That afternoon the forest gave way to stunted pineapples swarming with wasps. They came to a perniciously weeded meadow stretching to the land’s end—a jumbled embankment of volcanic rubble, black sand, and foaming sea. In the center of the meadow a gigantic bobadilla—named after the first European to see one—scintillated in the sun and bathed the scorched grasses in promising shadows.

Fantasma, whose stomach had been growling for an hour, ordered his man Yahoo to wade into the bay—but a league away—to gather sea cucumbers for soup, and spiny lobsters, and the pink ovaries of sea urchins to be prepared with the simples Fogginius would gather and Pulco would season with pepper, vinegar, and oil.

“Take these to the bobadilla you see yonder,” Fantasma said. “There we will be waiting.”

“Beware of mirages in the air,” Fogginius extolled the thug as he set off, “and prickly things underfoot. Come, my little paradise,” he called to Pulco, “let us gather greens together.” But little Pulco began to cry and refused to follow the saint “who,” he confided to Phosphor, “would gather greens in my bum.”

“Well, then,” Phosphor proposed, “run after Yahoo Clay and help him pry some mussels from the rocks.”

“My greens aren’t safe with him neither.” Pulco refused to budge.

“You follow Yahoo Clay!” Fantasma barked, and offered to give Pulco a kick. “Else I split you in two. Since when do children have voices?” Crestfallen, the boy followed the monster, but at a distance, and dragging his feet.

Clucking to their mules, Phosphor and Fantasma descended an incline tufted with scree, and approaching the bobadilla saw that its branches were hung with a startling collection of barber’s basins. A path appeared—smoothly laid and imbedded with minute white and yellow stones Fantasma recognized at once to be teeth. He feared they had entered a country of cannibals and was about to turn and flee when a barber, his bald head waxed to a high shine, leapt down from the tree in his apron.

“Welcome to the only arboreal barbershop in the universe,” he bowed, “which is also a shrine to our Holy Mother.” A second look revealed the tree was hung with votive presents as well as basins: canes and crutches, hearing trumpets, tin ears, wax hearts, tin buttocks, viscera of brass. Candles stuck to dirty saucers burned in such profusion in the lurid, teeming tree that the air smelled of hot tallow. A plain wooden chair had been secured between the branches; it faced a large mirror, above which balanced a Virgin of painted lead. She swung on a pivot in the breeze, twinkling in and out of the leaves much as a figure on a beloved barometer Phosphor had left behind on a shelf. He found himself wistfully dreaming of home when, with surprise, he noticed the Virgin held no infant in her arms but instead a formidable pair of pliers.

“… And I pull teeth.” The barber beamed and pointed to the path.

The sun was bright, the meadow cheerful, the barber engaging. While Fogginius busied himself among the bushes and as Phosphor uncorked his ink, Señor Fantasma climbed into the tree.

“My head and beard do prosecute me,” he complained, “so I beg you to begin at once with an energetic lathering and scraping.” As the barber prepared to refresh his face, Fantasma asked him to tell the story of how he came to set up shop in such an unlikely place. “My ears have been cruelly belabored by the saint you can perceive yonder gathering lettuce. So potent are his words that they melt wax; it is impossible to escape him. I would have you purge his babble with your own.”

“It is well that you ask me to lather you up and to speak simultaneously,” said the barber, “as I can speak only when my hands are occupied. I speak to the rhythm of my scissors and my razor; I speak to the rhythm of scrapings and sudsings; and should you need a tooth pulled, I’ll speak to the rhythm of my pliers.”

“I like that!” cried the poet from under the tree, “and I’ve written it down.”

“You have seen the pathway paved with molars,” the barber went on; “the idea was not mine but the Virgin Mary’s, come to me in a dream.”

“I’ve no tooth to be pulled,” said Fantasma with haste. “But my head and beard are driving me insane.”

“I prefer to be paid before I begin,” the barber said, “for although you look a gentleman, Señor, you might be something else.”

“Well spoken!” the poet marveled beneath the tree. “I am writing everything down.”

“You will be paid,” said Fantasma, “if only you will rid me of the itch that has plagued me ever since I slept in a sacred place, and banish a saint’s banter from a brain sorely craving entertainment.”

The barber wrapped Fantasma’s face in a steaming towel and prepared a generous amount of lavender-scented lather. Looking up, Phosphor marveled at all the wonderful little apparatuses installed in the tree: a small dung-fueled stove for the heating of water, a towel rack, a shelf for jars, another for brushes, scissors, and combs. Hoops of brass held bottles of soap and hair oil with French names: L’abbé Fiard, L’arc en Ciel, La Verité Universelle. Soon Fantasma’s face vanished in suds, and Phosphor, delighting in the cloudless sky and limpid atmosphere, took out his tripod and his black box and seized the barber, the fantastic tree, and a soapy Fantasma riding a branch—forever.

“Many, many years ago,” the barber began, “the coastal regions of Birdland teemed with an oversize clam-digging bird named—”

“The lôplôp!” Phosphor scribbled madly.

“When I was a young man,” the barber continued as Fantasma’s head cooked in its towel, “I decided—and my decision was precipitated by vanity—to hunt the coast until I might find a tribe of those creatures that, by the time I was full grown, had become exceedingly rare. I had been told by a Moorish sailor that his queen was partial to rare things and had devoted an entire palace to the dead bodies of precious animals. I stalked the coast for many seasons, but the birds—being reasonable—had come to fear mankind and kept to themselves, never walking about except by night. At last, after months of searching, I saw a family sitting together on the rocks. They were facing out to sea and had their backs to me; so still were they that had not one of them begun to sing, I should have missed them. But moved by the beautiful moon and the mournful sound of the waves, and perhaps in remembrance of those distant days when the lôplôps were rulers of the island, long before any one of them had been made into a blanket, its great beak torn from its head to be used as a dish, the lôplôp lifted its face and sang a song that did little to move me. Thinking only of the excellent price its pelt would bring, I crept behind a rock and with my musket fired into the lot of them and watched as they fell with a thunderous thud; listened as they wept, bleeding to death on the sand.

“I approached to see the havoc I had done firsthand when a curiously melodious entreaty poured forth from the impressive beak of a bird I had wounded, but not mortally. It knelt before me in the most human way imaginable, and as its fellows gasped for air, the last lôplôp begged for its life. Deeply impressed, I wondered that a feathered monster should touch my heart. I recalled those stories continuing to circulate among us: how the aborigines refused to eat the lôplôp’s flesh because, they said, ‘The lôplôp begs for mercy like a man.’

“The more I listened, the more repentant did I become, suffering an acute spiritual subtraction and regretting my evil deed. Listening to that bird’s dirge, I realized the gravity of my act. The creature on its knees was the last of its line. But at that moment was produced a miracle: the creature, so like an animated wig, appeared to vacillate, to evaporate, to radiate! The beak vanished and in its place I saw a woman’s face, her flowing hair, and then her body—slender and gracious and draped in sky blue veils. I recognized the Holy Mother and, falling at her feet, begged forgiveness. I promised her that should the creature I had harmed survive, I would thereafter care for it; that I should revere it as my educator; that as penance I should become that most ridiculous thing—a barber, and in a secluded place where I could spend the greater part of my time in prayer and devote myself to the well-being of the innocent creature I had impoverished irretrievably. Then, as the vision dissipated, the lôplôp sang again and I, first digging in the sand with my musket for a clam to offer it, after threw the weapon in the sea. Then, stalking up from the water’s edge I reached this meadow and this tree. It glowed in the moonlight and it seemed like the Holy Mother was sitting in a barber chair on the branch where you sit. Thus I installed myself, and each day I walk down to the coast to converse with the last lôplôp (for I have mastered the creature’s tongue), to brush its coat and polish its beak, to pray beside it (for I have taught it to pray) and to meditate upon the evil of the world.”

Throughout this speech the barber had busied himself with Fantasma’s head, so that once the tale was over, it appeared to solidify like a planet in gas. Phosphor, perceiving this, wondered if there were not a poetry of soap and hot water, and taking note that soap rhymes with hope, saw how hopeful Fantasma looked, how new—as if he had just been born.

“This is a holy tree,” the barber continued, “by the pope’s testicles I vouch for its sacred character, and by these many votive gifts you may see hanging from its branches. Once a cripple hobbled all the way from Pope Publius on crutches, only to jig all the way home again; and these are his crutches, hanging beside the braids of a maiden who, cured of vanity, bade me cut them off at the root, as she desired to enter the Order of Rosy Water upon her return to the city.”

Just then Yahoo Clay appeared carrying a wildly gesticulating lobster in each hand; the pockets of his breeches bulged with shellfish. Little Pulco walked behind him with a pail of sea urchins hanging from the crook of his elbow and juggling with two hands a stupendous sole so heavy he could barely manage to carry it. Soon thereafter, Fogginius stumbled forth with several coconut cabbages, and within the hour the party was feasting beneath the tree, “the largest,” Fogginius informed them, “in the world. For whilst the thug scaled the fish and gutted it, and dropped the lobsters in bouillon, I measured the trunk on my knees. Here,” he continued, “we have at hand multiple examples of the visage of God: the tree, graceful and munificent; the cabbages, things peculiar-looking beyond belief and yet, when dressed, making for a king’s salad; and the sole, a thing unshapely, weird, ludicrous, flat as a pancake with one blind, one beetling eye—and yet, how well-suited to our appetites! Sweet, flavorful, and firm!” As the saint spoke with his mouth full, the others took care to sit as far away from him as possible.

“Words have antiseptic properties,” Fogginius belched, well pleased with his meal; “words are a puissant purge. See Yahoo Clay there,” he pointed him out to the barber; “the wretch appeared to me in a climax of moral and physical feebleness that, prodded by impulsiveness, he had inflicted upon his own fickle person. I saved him with simples and cured him with conversation. With prodigiously clever arguments, I convinced him to abandon all lusts and instabilities, and when he pretended to sleep I prodded him and cried: ‘Just as words are fixed to the air and sponges to the floor of the sea, so the human brain is fixed to words, and words shall prove your cure.’ Is it not so, Clay? Tell the Druid” (for this is what he thought the barber to be) “how I talked you back to life!”

But all the while Fogginius spoke, Yahoo Clay had inched away, and having found a comfortable branch was sprawled on the verge of sleep. The others, too, had vanished, so that Fogginius, finding himself alone, was left to wonder upon mutabilities and at the transience of all things, including picnics. Having no one to talk to, he soon grew sleepy. Tumbling to the ground, he rolled himself up in his cloak and, tucked between two roots, he snored.

Sometime deep in the night, Phosphor awoke from a beautiful dream: he had returned to Pope Publius alone, not on a mule but a sprightly dappled horse, its mane threaded with silver bells. The sound of the bells filled the air as the poet entered the central plaza; everywhere he saw paper flags and festive banners and tables set with cakes and flasks of wine. Hearing a familiar voice call his name, Phosphor looked up and saw Professor Tardanza, merry and smiling, wave to him from a festooned balcony.

Suddenly Professor Tardanza’s daughter was trotting beside him; together they rode to the marble steps of the cathedral. As Professor Tardanza’s daughter was dressed from head to foot in a profusion of white lace, Phosphor knew this was their wedding day. They halted, and the poet leapt from his steed, lightly, hovering for a moment in the air above the ground, so that the throng that had followed them applauded. Taking his bride into his arms, Phosphor floated into the cathedral where the priest, who was Professor Tardanza, waited for them wearing a wig of butterflies. With surprise, Phosphor saw that everyone in the cathedral looked like Professor Tardanza: men, women, and children all had his face. Expressing his confusion to his bride, she laughed and said, “Yes! And look! They are all reading your book!” He saw then that each held a small volume of verse and muttered, “The volume is very slim!” “Ah,” she replied, “only because each contains but one stanza.” Her laughter filled his ears. “Have you forgotten? Your poem is far too long to fit into one volume! A library is under construction to house it; already it is the largest edifice in Birdland—look!” He turned and out the door could see, rising in the distance, a tower of many colors reaching for the sky. And as he looked, bursting with joy and pride, Professor Tardanza’s daughter threw back her lovely head and began to sing the epithalamium Professor Tardanza had written to celebrate his daughter’s marriage to the prestigious inventor and poet—to celebrate their love, the epic poem, the tower that (as they looked on) was thickening and rising higher and higher as though it would pierce the eye of God. The dreamer’s blood was racing; Phosphor awakened with a pounding heart, the sound of his beloved’s voice filling his ears; awoke to that voice—and it was amazing: he could still hear its sweetness palpable on the air.

An outsize yellow moon illuminated the sky. It looked like a barber’s basin of hammered gold, and the poet, trembling with something akin to awe, slipped from his hammock, pulled on his boots, and, half naked, set off to discover the origin of that glorious sound washing across the thorny meadow, coming from the sea. His heart raced; he recalled the silver-tongued songs of the sirens and their dangers, but he could not stop himself. Love, he thought with feeling, is nearly always fatal.

The tenant of a lunar world animated by desire, Phosphor flew to the distant rocks marking the shore. When he reached the first high boulder, panting with delight, the sweetness of that mysterious song muddled his senses and he stumbled and fell to his knees. Truly it was the most gorgeous, the most melic sound he had ever heard. He searched for words, for rhymes, and could find none. He could recall only shipwrecks caused by voices near coral reefs, how pilots, bewitched, navigated directly into the embrace of death. But then, as he made his way around a great black boulder of volcanic glass, the song twisted, knotted, became supplication; the unknown voice seemed to be pleading for something; the poet thought: pleading for its life! Leaping to the beach, Phosphor saw a struggle in the shallow water, saw Yahoo Clay doing battle with—but what in the name of merciful haven was it? A nightmare? A mare-headed woman dressed in fleece? A bird-woman! Prodigiously beaked! Yahoo Clay was battering the body of a fallen lôplôp with his club; the brute was clubbing the mythical beast to death; the last of the lôplôps was being mashed to a pulp! Through the hammering of his own blood in his brains the poet could hear the creature’s skull crack and, beneath a second blow, shatter. He saw the sand soak up the lôplôp’s blood.

Later, after day had broken, a weird thing occurred. As Phosphor, Fantasma, and the barber dug a deep pit in which to bury the headless, naked body (the barber had kept its skin for sentimental reasons), Phosphor unearthed a massive stone head that had lain there for centuries, perhaps. It was the howling head of a woman, her scalp a thrashing web of snakes: it was a Birdlandian Medusa, its features aborigine and stark. She appeared to be sticking her tongue out at Phosphor—at least, that is how the poet saw her—and if the sight of the lôplôp’s murder had submerged him in acute distress, this second vision of horror within the hour precipitated the poet headfirst into a deeper despondency than he had ever known. To make matters worse, Clay, whom Fantasma had violently thrashed for killing their host’s charge, was holding his own bleeding head with his hands and bellowing his despair all along the beach. Phosphor feared the sound would drive him mad.

The loss of the lôplôp’s voice was for the poet a terrible loss. It coincided with the ruination of a dream, and convinced him that his love for Professor Tardanza’s daughter was hopeless. And it was a terrible loss for the barber too, whose existence was now devoid of meaning.

“To care for the last lôplôp,” he confided to Phosphor as they sat together on a slab of volcanic glass overlooking the foaming sea, “imbued my days with sacred purpose. Life, at best, is unstable and fantastic and, for those of my profession, singularly absurd.”

“Come, come!” Phosphor attempted to cheer him.

“Hair is dead,” the barber insisted. “I might as well trim the nails of parakeets, or polish the scales of fish. I scrape it off, I cut it off, I pluck it from the ears—and still it grows back.”

“It is alive!” the poet said.

“Only at the roots, which, unlike those of lust, cannot be contained.”

“Ah!” said the poet. “Lust. Contained?”

“In youth one must occupy the mind,” the barber told him, “else lose it to love. Long ago when I was spurned by a wench I wanted, I holed myself up in my room and wrote a complete History of Wiggery. I came to dream that one day I would be the world’s supplier of ecclesiastical wigs. I designed a magnificent papal wig—”

“And so it was!” Fogginius had discovered them; spiderlike he scaled a rock and panting cried: “Eve’s apple was a fig!”

“I was telling the poet how I once designed a papal wig!” the barber shouted: “A PAPAL WIG!”

“Nor do I”—his bones popping, the saint embraced the barber warmly—“give a fig for papality!” And seeing that both the poet and the barber looked at him oddly, he explained: “They took away my church, you see, because I asked the one question they could not answer: What are the moral advantages of kneeling before an image on a stick? Dead meat on a stick! One might as well worship shish kebabs! For this they called me a ‘contaminating power’! Chased me from a chapel I’d built of coral—pink and white! Replaced me with a spineless mollusk green as infancy!”

“Once,” the barber attempted to ignore him, “I designed a pubigerous wig in the shape of the Tower of Babel. I sent it to the pope for his birthday. The idea was that coming and going, and without uttering a word, the pope would deliver a Holy Message!”

“And what might that have been?” the poet asked.

“That man’s ambitions are inflated.”

“Kind of you to ask!” Fogginius beamed. “No one else has. But, sad to say, I am not better and continue to suffer. Our servant, Yahoo Clay, cannot cook to save his life.”

“I invented a wig,” the barber continued, “to be put on in haste should an angel spontaneously appear. A wig in the shape of a dove to be slipped on the head in a wink!”

“On the brink? Did you say on the brink? Are things as bad as that?” Fogginius scolded: “Come now. The world’s still in its infancy.”

“This peruke,” the barber continued, “felicitated intercourse between worlds. It contained an echo chamber so that God’s deep silence might reverberate about the pope’s skull to tone and temper his mind. This was a winter wig, to keep the cranium safe from chills. It protected the brains from atmosphere, and the sound of the rabble crouching and hacking in their yards.”

“The sound?” the poet wondered.

“Ear flaps. Providing protection from wind and the hum of many voices filling the air.”

“If you wish to,” Fogginius said grandly, stroking his greasy head with both hands, “you may wash my hair. One should try anything once, and I know you are sad today. If it will cheer you, well then, have your way with me!” And, horribly, he winked.

“A crested wig so vast,” the barber was wildly gesturing, “that it could contain a dwarf who, sitting on the pope’s head and looking out the back through cunningly concealed windows, might warn of tyranny from behind.”

“—And maybe trim the sides a little, too …” Fogginius agreed. “But not too much.”

“I invented a villous wig”—the barber looked at the saint’s skull with misgiving—“scented with vanilla to flavor a pontiff’s mind with peace. A wig so gigantic that in a crowded room God might at once recognize His primate. A wig for summer containing a hollow filled with cool air; a winter wig sustaining a perpetual compost to keep a cardinal’s head warm as toast; an acoustical wig in which a bishop might hear the whispers of his conscience and the aerial orchestras of angels. A wig honeycombed with absences in which to stock a priest’s gospelings. A wig of nettles—”

“Clearly as many camels as needles!” Fogginius shouted. “Does that answer your question?”

“I made wigs until a tax was levied on hair, false or true, and I could no longer afford to ply my trade, although my last attempts included poison ivy to be sold to the senile and the insane.”

“To what purpose?” asked the poet.

“To quicken them, you see. Lastly I created a garniture of rose leaves for the privacy of the bath. A wig conserves and secures character,” the barber sighed, “and so it is a noble thing.”

“The day I am a published and celebrated poet,” Phosphor said to him, for he was deeply moved, “I will have you make a wig for me!”

“A wig for a poet?” Dejected, the barber pondered awhile. “What could it possibly look like?”

“Macaroni!” cried Fogginius. Both the poet and the barber wondered why.