20

On the second day, Pulco, who had not slept the night before, fearing the speaking serpents and silent dogs and scarlet flowers shaped like human hands Fogginius had once evoked in order to instruct him, came upon a barren stretch of land staggered with mounds and littered with rubble. His mule advanced tentatively, as though wading through eggs, and Pulco was submerged by the uncanny conviction that a rock was looking at him. To conjure his terror, he spoke out loud: Tricks of light and shadow, recalling how Phosphor had once demonstrated how the eye can deceive the mind. Phosphor had penned little images for Pulco: of a vanishing amphora made of two faces in profile; anamorphic skulls and ships, and, once, naked figures embracing. Little Pulco had, at once, copied these, demonstrating to the surprise of both that his own hand was surer than his master’s. But now the rock continued to fix him with its one venomous eye, and as the boy progressed across that haunted swath stretching before him like a ruined city, another eye appeared from yet another lump. At that instant the moon tore free from the clouds that had held it fast, and Pulco looked on transfixed with terror as the entire landscape crumbled and reassembled into animated life. Everywhere eyes, feet, and fists generated spontaneously. A mysterious face winked at him from the summit of a fissured boulder, and a phallus pointing skyward designated a fiery red triangle: flamingos winging their way to sea. For the first time in his young life it occurred to Pulco that there were other islands—for the birds atomized above the horizon and all that evening did not reappear.

Fixing the distance into which the birds had vanished, Pulco was soon embraced by the familiar and extravagant vegetation. And that night as he fell asleep pressed to the mule’s hot body, he said out loud, to test the possibility: There are other islands.

Late the following day, as the sea was set on fire along the western rim, Pulco saw a sinister commotion in the air: a wheel of vultures orbited the masts of a gutted ship seized by coastal rocks. The wreck vomited a stench so acute the mule, usually docile, began to scream. Pulco recognized the slave galley belonging to Señor Fantasma. As soon as he was able, he got down from his mule and defecated into the greater eye of an anthill to exorcise the smell of death lingering near him.

That evening, Pulco entered Pope Publius. Famished, weary, and sad, he and his mule made their way to Professor Tardanza’s gate. Wonderful aromas flooded the courtyard and as Pulco reached the servant’s entrance his knees shook. For many long minutes he hammered the door impatiently with his filthy fists until the ivy-covered wall beside him swung open on rusty hinges and the cook appeared, wielding a spoon the size of an oar.

“A letter!” Pulco shouted, leaping back and using it to shield his face. “From the poet, Nuño Alfa y Omega!” He peered out from behind the letter and saw that the cook had not raised her spoon against him but was, instead, leaning on it. “To Professor Tardanza,” he repeated. Shyly, he smiled.

To his delight, Pulco was both relieved of the letter and invited into the kitchen where the servants were eating together: the cook, the housemaid, an itinerant laundress, and the cook’s sister-in-law. The delectable smells proved misleading, for all were eating porridge and, indeed, Pulco’s bowl was no better. Seeing his disappointment, the cook explained that this was a porridge of Professor Tardanza’s invention made of four different grains, including birdseed, and that if it did not taste very good, it was sure to make him immortal. If the professor and his family had dined on roasted birds, roasted peppers, roasted corn on the cob, and fried bananas, it was only because they needed to raise the temperatures of their brains prior to sleeping: the professor hoped to investigate his family’s dreams. So far his attempts had proved fruitless: none of the Tardanzas dreamed. The cook informed Pulco that she dreamed incessantly, as did her sister-in-law. Their dreams were far too humble to interest Professor Tardanza, although on Thursday the cook had dreamed of a treasure of golden eggs and the map that led to it.

For dessert they shared a steamed pudding of fourteen different sorts of husks. After supper Pulco was given a bath in a great copper cauldron. As the housemaid and the cook’s sister-in-law looked the other way, the cook—far too ugly to cause any embarrassment—scrubbed Pulco free of grit, lice, scabs, and fleas.

“Poor child!” she cried as she soaped his head for the third time. “Your masters are barbarians!”

She also washed his clothes, dried them before the fire, and mended them. Once the boy was presentable, she sent him to an antechamber where a number of Professor Tardanza’s students were waiting.

Because he was shy, Pulco turned his gaze to the ceiling, which opened out to an oval expanse of pale blue sky—although he knew it was near midnight and could not be morning. The blue oval was orbited by angels; their plump buttocks hung suspended overhead like ripening peaches. Turning his eyes to the wall, he saw a niche just large enough to contain one brimming glass of amber-colored wine, a handful of cherries, and a cookie spangled with sugar. Reaching out, Pulco’s hand hit the wall; the niche, just as the ceiling, was a beautifully painted illusion. As he passed his hand across the smooth surface, his heart fluttered madly.

“Don’t be fooled by the bag of money hanging in the water closet,” one of the students addressed him. “The peg it hangs from is equally fake.”

Weak with amazement, Pulco sat gaping in his chair. Sometimes he stared at the ceiling, sometimes at the niche. Soon the students’ voices disturbed his thoughts and he found himself listening to them intently. Their conversation was incomprehensible, although Pulco was later able to reconstruct it in part for Phosphor. For example, he would recall the subjects of several animated arguments: whether or not gravity exists in Paradise; if, in the hands of the Creator, air is malleable; if the brain ceases to function in deep sleep and which organ produces dreams: the liver, the heart, the brain, or the eye. They also discussed at length, and in hushed voices, an experiment that had recently been performed by Professor Tardanza: he had managed to capture the nightmare of an insane woman by means of a glass melon bell held in place above her head. A vapor had collected within the bell and was precipitated into a cruet. Heated gently for seven days, the nightmare coagulated and turned the color of strong tea. Having received a drop of this infusion in their water dish, twelve parakeets died.

Another student had brought along a list of objects he had dreamed over the past six months, as well as the frequency with which he had dreamed them:

nests: 64

bushes: 40

thistles: 75

brambles: 9

cuttlefish: 2

sea urchins: 20

epidemics: 9

clothes brushes: 89

fur: 1

rabid dogs: 1

As the students began a long discussion on the manner in which the Great Flood had transformed the original configuration of the world, and little Pulco, his belly full of macerating grains and husks, was nodding off to sleep, the housemaid called him to come forth and to meet, at last, Professor Tardanza.

The walls of Professor Tardanza’s study were burning with maps of those islands the boy had intuited but, because he was unschooled, could not see; a geographical alphabet he could not read. These maps caused the walls to splinter into elements his active imagination put form to: here a boot, there a bull’s head, a donkey, a slab of cheese. He saw an open book, a hook, an overturned vase of flowers. His own island, shaped like a green egg, hung behind Professor Tardanza, who was standing and whose beard was so shiny and pointed it looked sharp enough to slice meat. His eyes, too, were intensely piercing, and Pulco thought they could see through his flesh to his very bones. He protected his thrashing heart with his hand and looked down at his own impeccable feet with surprise.

“Name?” Professor Tardanza’s voice was unaccountably shrill. The boy hesitated. His name circled the room twice, hitting the walls and ceilings with its wings before perching once again in Pulco’s mind.

“Pulco.”

“Are you certain?” Pulco’s name tumbled from its perch. He attempted to speak and found he could not. Professor Tardanza was now standing very close to Pulco. His hair, his clothes smelled of gravy and caramel.

“Profession?”

Two large tears spilled from Pulco’s eyes.

“Courier!” Professor Tardanza answered for him. “It means you deliver letters! Letters of consequence, even! Philosophical letters! Missives of love! Do you know how to read?”

Pulco shook his head sadly. Tears fell from his face to his feet. He watched them dissolve between his big and little toes.

“Furthermore, you deliver them on blind faith! You deliver them unread. How do you know,” and he rattled the poet’s parchment in Pulco’s face, “that it is not here written: Take this boy, tie him to a post, and thrash him till he’s purple?”

Pulco gasped.

“This letter,” Tardanza continued, “could very well say:

Roast this boy in a very slow oven and feed him to the archbishop’s pigs! This letter,” slowly, methodically, he began to crush it in his fist, “is rubbish. But no matter. We will give the dreamer what he wants, and we will hope he gets nothing less than what he deserves.” Grabbing Pulco by the ear, he pulled him from the room. “You will take with you what you are about to see,” Tardanza continued, “and deliver it to Nuño Alfa y Omega the poet. You are a bright boy—yes! Yes! I can tell by the depth of your eyes. Terrified, uneducated, but intelligent.” Taking up an oil lamp, he nudged Pulco down a corridor painted to look like a forest full of parrots. Turning a corner, they came to a room flooded with candlelight. At the threshold, Pulco rubbed his eyes with disbelief, for there upon a white counterpane, blushing, yet seemingly asleep, lay Professor Tardanza’s daughter. She was entirely naked. Pulco knew that she was real because she breathed, and because her body gave off a scent of freshly sliced apples. Little Pulco, only nine, felt the milk teeth of first desire nibble at his tender prick.

“Tell the poet that just as you see her here, my daughter, Extravaganza, is his.” Somehow Professor Tardanza had shut the door and Pulco found himself staring at a knot in the wood the shape and size of his own open mouth. As they retraced their steps down the corridor, Pulco thought he discerned muffled laughter like little bells.

“She is beautiful,” Tardanza sighed, “but like her mother and myself, she cannot dream. Is it true that your master, Nuño Alfa y Omega the cripple, dreams?”

“He …” Pulco gathered his wits together—no simple task, for like moths they were hurling their fragile selves against the burning glass of Tardanza’s lamp. “He …” Pulco sputtered, floundered, and then began again, scowling with the effort. “He dreams of her. He dreams of her … all the time.”

That night the child slept fitfully beside the kitchen hearth. He dreamed of pantries filled with fictive things to eat: turkey, oysters, moons of orange cheese. In the morning, having filled himself with guava paste and an entire pan of sweet rolls, it came to him that before taking his message to his master, he must quickly go to Fantasma’s house for news of Cosima. But, vast as he knew the house was, sprawling and substantial, it had vanished. Its disappearance was impossible, uncanny. Pulco recognized a path’s turning, a tree, a certain wall; he recognized the avenue of palms, the fabulous front gate of tortured iron, but beyond saw nothing—only a wasted space that, greening, became gardens, overgrown yet familiar, and further—Fantasma’s abandoned bananas.

The riddle was so excessive that Pulco simply spurred his mule and set off the way he had come, taking care to avoid, by several leagues, the stinking galley. His passage was noted by Birdland’s own Officer of the Inquistion, Rais Secundo, who, perched in a tree, was marveling at what he assumed to be a demonic intervention.

But Pulco could not circumvent that cataclysmic and lunar terrain where he had wandered, so full of terror, only days before. He reached it towards evening, when the shadows etched the land fantastically, and moving among them, fingered, as it were, by darkness and by light, he suddenly recognized the formless, transitory nature of the world; recognized for one fleeting and exceptional instant that he was himself a fragment, a shadow, and a seeming; that those tumbled geometries, so like the splintered alphabets of some gigantic fallen frieze, mirrored, somehow, his own bones, his own inarticulate thoughts.

The experience, as instantaneous as it was profound, left him shaken and thoughtful. From that moment, little Pulco had eyes with which to recognize that Fantasma’s attempt to seize the mutable world was doomed. As if to punctuate this momentous discovery with an exclamation point of fire, the sky, until then milky, cracked at the seams an electrical red.