After a long journey back to the place where Pulco had left the poet, he found him hanging by his ankles from a guanabana tree. Once Pulco had managed to liberate him and Phosphor had regained consciousness, the poet explained that he had thus strung himself up because he expected the increased pressure of blood on the brain to intensify his imaginative capacities. Because he could not offer Professor Tardanza’s daughter real orchids—being so far away—he had attempted in this manner to offer her the orchids of his longing. But within minutes he had passed out and he had no idea how long he had been hanging upside down. As his clothes were badly soiled with bird droppings and a lizard had taken up residency in the leg of his breeches, the poet supposed he had not been conscious for three days at least. He was very thin and his beard had grown upwards towards his ears. It seemed to Pulco that the poet’s face was longer than ever and supposed his sojourn in the air had somehow stretched it. I believe at that moment, Pulco may have had an intimation of gravity.*
Despite exhaustion, Pulco bathed and shaved the poet, then cooked a rice gruel for them both. Restored, they sat together quietly at the fireside, and only then did the boy notice the small heap of bones and ashes a vole returned to tentatively again and again—all that remained of Fogginius the saint.
“That little gnarled bit is the root of his tongue,” Phosphor told Pulco, pointing. “His brain and all the other organs have atomized.” Pulco nodded. Such a thing could no longer surprise him.
“I saw a field of bones,” he said to Phosphor; “a field of bones; a field of stones; a field of fire.”
“I like that!” the poet said, looking at Pulco with astonishment. “May I put it in my poem? It would work well with a thought that came to me:
“Man is but a particle of soot in the eye of Time.”
Pulco knew enough to nod appreciatively.
“Man is but a particle of soot in the eye of Time,
A teardrop in the brine of Infinity.
“Or it could be Eternity … Infinity, Eternity. Eternity, Infinity … or maybe: Eternal Acrimony.
“A drop in the bucket of Eternal Acrimony.
“Or even Infinite Acrimony.”
For a time Pulco listened as the poet fussed, wondering why he had not asked about Professor Tardanza’s daughter. Had all that blood that had gone to his head addled his brain? At last he spoke up.
“Master,” said Pulco, “your request has been granted. I have spoken to Professor Tardanza. I have seen his daughter.”
The poet moaned. “Granted,” he whispered. “Seen her.”
“She was asleep,” said Pulco. “And she was … undressed. She is ever so beautiful.”
“Undressed!” Phosphor looked perplexed, but then he beamed. “How thoughtful of her father, come to think of it,” he decided. “After all, now we know she has no unsightly moles. No extra nipples.”
“She appeared to blush,” said Pulco. “She was very pink.” The boy, fiercely blushing now himself, whispered, “Master?”
“Yes?”
“There is one thing … she doesn’t dream!”
“Doesn’t dream!” Phosphor was ecstatic. “A woman who doesn’t dream!”
At this moment Fantasma stumbled forth from the brambles and vines, studded with thorns, visibly bruised and enraged. He had lost his musket and his clothes were mostly gone.
“I have had enough!” he announced. “If I can little stomach the company of men, the forest is far worse. There really is nothing there I want. And if the coastal waters here are empty of sirens, they are thick with sharks. My ancestors subjugated this island,” he reminded them, “and yet out there in the thick of things … all that … generative functioning, I feared at any moment I would be devoured and digested.”* He stood now beside their little fire and they could see that he was covered with swellings.
“Bees,” he explained, “the size of hummingbirds.” Fantasma’s head was smeared with something indescribable. “An egg.” Gingerly he touched what was left of his hair with bloodied fingers. “Christianity is annulled here,” he brooded. “’Tis a hellish place wherein an ape can hurl an egg at a man and go unpunished.”
Phosphor listened intently. Rarely had he heard Fantasma say so much. This ranting delighted him; it meant Fantasma too was ready to return to the city. The next thing Fantasma said was:
“Let us return to Pope Publius. We shall devote ourselves to an Entire Itinerary of the Civilized World as Perceived by Fango Fantasma. We shall create a Theory and Practice of Order. We shall meditate upon Harmony in the shape of my beautiful house. Its gracious quadrangular rooms! Why didn’t I think of this sooner?” he wondered aloud. “Why did I inflict this detour in chaos upon myself!’” And he punched himself so soundly in the nose that Pulco and Phosphor heard the cartilage crack.
“My house!” Fantasma continued, sobbing, the gears of his mind moving faster than they ever had before, “is smack in the center of the visible universe. Fogginius—Fogginius! Where the devil is he?—told me. It has a left side and a right side and a roof that does not leak! It contains venerable objects that all have names—unlike … unlike …” again he appeared to crush some living thing to dust beneath his boot, “this open sewer …” his nose was bleeding now, “this cunt! Toothed and tusked!
“My house!” Fantasma was dying of nostalgia, “how I miss its measurable rooms! We shall ascertain their length and width and height. We shall number every nail and every fork and spoon!” He thought silently for a moment, then said: “The entire Fantasma estate cataloged for the sake of history and harmony! Ah!” He noticed now that little Pulco was asleep at Phosphor’s feet. “The little messenger is back!” He gave the boy a kick. “Rise up!” he barked, “and find Fogginius. Pack the mules. Prepare breakfast. Polish my boots. We are going home.”
“Sir,” Pulco pleaded, weeping with fatigue, “I have only just returned from the city and am so sorely tired. And I cannot wake the saint, for he is dead.”
Phosphor looked at Pulco then, perhaps for the first time. He saw how tired he was, how threadbare; that his feet were bleeding, his ribs heaving, his eyes circled by dark rings.
“I too would rest,” Phosphor said, “and you, Señor, must bathe those bites and bandage your face and spend the night in sleep. You are a good child,” he then turned to Pulco; “I am profoundly grateful. Vanity has blinded me, I see that now, and passion too. He deserves to sleep,” Phosphor said to Fantasma, “and also to think. And—why not?—to play. This little boy,” he continued, gazing fondly upon little Pulco, who was more bewildered than pleased and weeping with exhaustion, “has assured me the hand of Professor Tardanza’s daughter. I am to marry upon our return!”
Fantasma stood agitated and uncomprehending. “His body!” he cried. “What has become of the holy remains?”
“This is all that is left.” Phosphor dropped the corrugated residue into Fantasma’s hand. “Time and Mother Nature saw to the rest.” Fantasma’s expression was one of horror.
“It is a vestige of his tongue,” Phosphor explained, “which never ceased to wag.”
“A miracle!” Fantasma looked at the thing with awe. “I shall have a reliquary made for it. A reliquary and a chapel. God is great!” Fantasma marveled. “The proof is here.” In the moonlight, the nugget gleamed convincingly.
Meanwhile, at this very instant, Rais Secundo, Insomniac, Grand Inquisitor, and Ecclesiastical Judge, is contemplating a curiosity that has come into his hands—it is not clear how: an ocularscopic slide of glass upon which Cosima, twinned, stands clad scantily, the soft sphere of a breast and the smooth sphere of a knee gleaming like planets in a mysterious light that can only be called supernatural. These illuminations bring nothing so much to mind as fruit; the child is sweeter than a handful of ripe figs.
So hot is this image of Cosima that the old investigator’s vestments, lastingly damp, have dried to the brittleness of antique parchment. A dwarfed cactus abandoned between two bald walls suddenly decides to flower. The blossom is scarlet, fleshy, and strange.
His mind fizzing and popping like carbonated water, the Inquisitor bolts the door to his chamber in the tower, scatters a moat of holy salt around the base of his chair, and sits ready for sudden attack, knowing that despite all precautions, a demoness of Cosima’s evident capacities may, straddling a broom, a straw, a fingerbone, the pistil of a flower, enter through his window as smoothly as a worm enters an apple.
Jangling with keys, Secundo—on fire, the little image winking in his lap—lifts his robes and, grabbing his purple member, as gnarled as a dry lump of ginger, ejaculates into the flames of a public execution, comes in rooms full of wizards wearing peaked caps, ejaculates into the mouth of a witch, into the cup of the Holy Grail; ejaculates into the wounds of the Christ, comes in the hair of witches, comes in rooms carpeted with the flayed skins of choirboys, comes beneath the bloated feet of a hanging man, is embraced by apes and green monkeys, ejaculates into the Pope’s miter; ejaculates into the anus of the Pope.