24

Before entering into this, my twenty-fourth chapter, it occurred to me, dearest Ved—you who have so often relished the pleasures of the island’s bountiful tables—to order a meal for myself. To inspire and inspirit me, I selected a luncheon of shellfish from the House of the Edible Ark Clam’s noontime menu.

Ah! The delights of the thorny oyster, the tender reproductive organs of the sea urchin palpitating in their bristling cuirass! The evocative architecture of tritons, the flesh within the gaping aperture softened with lime juice and sweetened with fragrant herbs! A toast, dearest friend, to the molluscan universe! Let us recall that in the aborigine cosmology, the first parent was the saffron-colored hermaphrodite island scallop!

The island scallop is unlike any other I know, and more than one scholarly monograph has been devoted to it. Thorned with scarlet spines, the twelve convergent ribs are a creamy salmon color, and the inner walls a luminescent purple. Its flesh is incredibly sweet, delicate, and tender. This afternoon I was regaled by a feast in the native manner: a cold dish of crabs lightly cooked in palm oil and flavored with lime juice, red pepper paste, and freshly ground coriander; a scallop soup containing coconut milk, ginger, lemongrass, and fresh basil; spitted scallop and thimble-sized chunks of spiny lobster roasted over embers and served with a hot red pepper sauce well-flavored with crushed cashews, peanuts, and herbs.

Like so many aspects of aboriginal culture, the island cooking has refused to die. And it seems to me that despite the fact that the Ancient Ones have vanished, Birdland’s pulse is ever an erotic pulse quickened by appetite. Is it surprising that the feminine shell and phallic beak continue to be featured emblems on the national flag?

As if reading my mind, a lovely young woman who sat alone across the room devouring a platter of heart-shaped lunules raised her eyes to mine. The nature of her glance could not be misinterpreted. (The Ancient Ones believed that the capacity to look into another’s eyes and read her mind is sorcerous.) And her eyes—their slow-burning quality, their depth and intensity—revealed something else: her aborigine ancestry.

The Ancient Ones, it was said, were all wizards: shape-changers. Gazing back into the enchanting stranger’s eyes, 1 perceived a fleeting bestiary and recalled that the Old Fantasma had named one of his slaves Subtill Shift because he was a changeling. The thought came to me: perhaps I am in the presence of one of Subtill Shift’s descendants! Shyly, I bit into a scallop and, to give myself courage, recalled Nuño Alfa y Omega’s great lines:

… her eyes are moons; they orbit my soul

two lunar fish transforming.

They dart within the recesses of my bones.

Her eyes are the forests I explore

in those hours when the universe contracts

to one lucent pearl of desire.

As I set to paper these impressions—the fruits of my researches in the shape of a romance—I realize that what the poet did with so much brilliance was to seize upon and illuminate the fearless delight in the sensory world informing aboriginal life, a joyous attitude born of the conviction that the transitory world, ceaselessly renewed, is eternal.

“There is no Heaven,” the last great chief informed his persecutors before he died, “only this one life. It is a fire rekindled each time lovers embrace with hunger.”

Those artifacts the latter-day Inquisitors would destroy—which, for example, show the Primal Mother fornicating turn by turn with pelicans, parrots, and porpoises—serve to illustrate the infinite aspects of the cosmic dance. One need only look at them with open eyes to see that these lyrical objects are not “abominable visions and abject hallucinations” (Rais Secundo) or “works of obscene and unhealthful minds” (The Clean Sweepers) but revelations of cosmic unity. Writes the poet:

Arboreal, aerial goddess

riding the phallic beaks of toucans;

goddess of the waters

copulating with clams; squid woman

daughter of the sacred scallop sheathed in your codpiece of shell

more lovely than the miters of popes

the bloody crosses, the insipid wafers of popes …

(And there you have the lines that damned him!)

“The aborigine,” Secundo wrote, “hath no word for chastity, abstinence, pudicity, indecency, and yet hath sixty-nine words for fornication.” This officer of the Inquisition is remembered for an extensive treatise—over 900 pages long!—on buggery in the islands entitled One Thousand and One Beastly Practices of the Aborigines of Birdland and the Other Countries of the Favored Isles That Have Greatly Offended This Inquisitor.

And—because he had read of the marvel in a book written by a bishop who feared fornication as much as he, Secundo was notorious for wearing a paper cone on his head. Upon it he had inked an emblematic fist giving the Devil the finger!

Notice his use of the present tense: for Secundo, the Ancient Ones were still very much alive. Furthermore, he admits to uncontrollable laughter whenever he sees an erotic bas relief, a scrap of painted pottery, a piece of perforated shell.

You are aware the Ancient Ones took a singular pleasure in the cigar. They, Secundo snorts, hath no knowledge of the wheel but are the inventors of a grass nipple or teat upon with they chew. To see them set the end on fire and sucke the smoake is terrible to behold. When they sucke they look like devills: They says the smoak is magick, and with it mayke coniurations, negromancy spells, and fetche shaddowes.

Again, Phosphor sets thing straight when he informs us that at the beginning of the world, the goddess, smoking and daydreaming, produced a seminal vapor. Rising in the air, it rose to the heavens and caused the Milky Way.

As you know, the waters of Oddingselle Bay are wonderfully transparent. Sitting on a stony lip of land one can peer down into the sea and perceive wonders as in a magic glass. The phenomenon was appreciated by the ancients who, at times of the full moon, from January to June, would come here to watch the tumultuous encounters of the mature island scallop—broken free of its byssal anchors—and the starfish. The lôplôp too would gather, for on such occasions a truce reigned between humankind and feathered beast; on summer nights of celestial brilliance, the lôplôp was not hunted.

When the scallop sees or senses the approach of the starfish, it makes a face—sucking in water before clapping its shell valves together and propelling itself with commotion and noise out of harm’s way. Should a shell fall onto its back, it will somersault—a thing that caused much hilarity among the aborigines, and intense sexual arousal among the birds. Although this is a set piece entertainment, the clownish scallops and fatal stars as static in their roles as stage machinery, the choreography is irresistibly erotic.

It is here, to this rocky ledge, that I came with the lovely stranger on our first evening together. The moon was so swollen and so low that we were able to see the struggle clearly. When a scallop leapt out of the path of a prowling star and into the mortal embrace of another, Polly—yes! You had guessed it was she!—held her breath. As did I. And when the starfish coaxed the scallop’s valves apart, we exhaled simultaneously and turned to one another. I felt my byssal anchors snap as for the first time those salmon-colored lips parted and I tasted of Polly’s surprisingly cool and salty tongue. Ved: I am lost. Irretrievably. Rather, I am found!