26

The poet and his bride retired to a secluded corner of the garden. The moon was hornless, and Extravaganza eager. At mass a week earlier, she had caught a glimpse of two lovers crouching behind an immense black basin of holy water, greedily kissing. Seeing this, however furtively, she had felt a drunken fire strike her womb. As the lovers gnawed at each other’s lips, her own teeth ached, and the dark room, smelling of candle grease and unwashed choirboys, now smelled of limes and freshly husked oysters—the astonishing scent of her own desire.

It was then that Extravaganza wondered why her wedded state was so very like the other—indeed, her life was unchanged, the only difference being that a large bed had replaced the small one of her infancy, and that she no longer slept alone. Although she might as well have—for the poet crept in beside her long after she had fallen into a deep, dreamless void. Sleep claimed her until morning when the downstairs maid, bristling with ill temper, roused them both for breakfast by rattling crockery and stomping on the floor.

Shyly, after mass, Extravaganza had asked her mother what it was that brought men and women together, and what obscure acts were performed when they were alone—was it a species of worship? And were children really cunningly fashioned sugarloaves brought to life by a bishop in a bakery—as she had been taught—or was the mystery of origins somehow far more marvelous? But her mother would not answer, and growing darker, collapsed deeper into the rhomboidal impenetrability that characterized her even on the best of days. It was the cook who, in no uncertain terms, laid it all out before her in the shape of stories plebian and poetical altogether, stories of her own courtship, the love affairs of all her friends; she described in detail everything Extravaganza could, should expect of her young husband. That night Extravaganza reread the poet’s letters, and this time burned—for certain allusions, unintentional perhaps, but born of the author’s own secret desires, were now clear.

As it turned out, Extravaganza was not so much dumb as untried, and that long evening alone with the letters, and the vital vision of the numinous kiss she had seen, awakened an inexorable longing. It dissipated the vague veil hanging over her mind, clouding that organ and weakening it; a longing that informed and animated her soul ever after.

Until then, Extravaganza had been submerged in the sugar icing of a tradition ruinous to the clairvoyance of girls; she had been, like so many of her kind, purposely benumbed. Her tutor, Enrique Saladrigas, had taught her to read both Latin and Spanish, but her own mother had forbidden her access to her father’s library. (Saladrigas had been sent packing the very day Phosphor saw him and his beloved riding together—for having had the good sense to tell the girl that the eggs of birds are not put into nests by the hand of the infant Jesus.)

If Extravaganza’s mother—little more than an amorphous lump given form and substance by corsets—could do nothing for her, her father dared not do too much. In some listing chamber of his soul he feared that a curious child, a fearless child, might one day question his authority. Nevertheless, it greatly distressed him that no one in his family dreamed. Tardanza was troubled by an inkling that he and his family were monstrous somehow, their inability unforgivable. Secretly he delved into the sacred books of the cabala and they informed his worst fears: An unacknowledged dream is an unopened letter. He had taken to sleeping with his feet in a tub of chopped liver.

That night in the garden, Phosphor proved a potent lover, solicitous and tender. The famished virgin’s sweet embrace brought to mind new honey, freshly baked bread, the ocean summer storms, deep-sea diving, mango harvests, soft-boiled eggs, caviar, pears cooked in wine, black earth, salted herring, vanilla, blossoming nasturtiums, avocados, and the velvet of new antlers. Phosphor forgot himself entirely, forgot his history, forgot the world and thought only of climbing that enchanted precipice of barely cool lava, new moss, and sea foam leading to a pulsing, ovular star burning with such intensity that he kept his eyes tightly shut all the while—else be blinded. Just as he reached that star and seized it hungrily with both his fists, Extravaganza cried out in a voice so altered and arcane his heart was lost, recovered in its entirety, and lost again—this time irretrievably. And as that cry reverberated for an instant in their corner of the spinning world, the moon, illumined by the eye of love, shone brighter, leaving in its wake a fleece of clouds. Beneath those clouds, intertwined, both Phosphor and his bride were already dreaming. So that the next morning at breakfast, Extravaganza, twigs in her hair and her head as cluttered as any collector’s cabinet, could say: “Father! I have dreamed!”

It was true that Extravaganza was somehow transformed. Her father looked at her, perhaps for the first time, with curiosity. But when he asked her to describe her dream, she could only blush and shake her head. You will not be surprised to learn that she had dreamed of love.

“My dream is mine, Papa,” she said, her face strangely diffused with a lunar light; “I cannot share it with anyone.” And the poet—had he dreamed as well? He had: a dream of a sexual extravagance so acute he was, as he recalled it now, still shaken. He had dreamed of his own member; dreamed that it had grown the size of a large man, a royal personage sporting a great candy crown of sugarplums and spun sugar; that this phallus-person had stood before him and, bowing, introduced himself.

“I dreamed of candy,” the poet said, “and about a king. I cannot recall the rest.”

Dearest Ved—Having now read all of the poet’s vast opus, I can with certitude say this: When Phosphor made love to Extravaganza, the vortex of his cowardice, the gaping maw of his alarm vanished, and it was as if he had come into the world fearless, staff in hand. In Extravaganza’s arms, his torment was melted down and reduced to a sweet honey that she extracted fearlessly. Her tender body gave itself utterly and unabashedly; being simple and having no notion of evil, she was an Edenic animal seized by heat. Her eyes and cunt wept with happiness; her breasts filled the poet’s mouth like those magical fruits that are renewed as they are eaten. The feast was an eternal feast, or so it seemed, and the nights they spent together, all too swiftly done, somehow sprawled into infinity, abolishing not only terror but self and time.

Because it seemed to Extravaganza that, in the poet’s embrace, her body dissolved and reorganized into infinite series of animate and inanimate things—sea urchins and clamshell rattles, ivory clappers, ferns and fishskin drums—once she had surfaced from the oceans, lakes, burrows, nests, marshes, mud, sand pits, oyster-beds, and whirlpools of love, she battled bewilderment, unsure of where she was and, for that matter, what she was. Standing stark naked and quivering before her mirror, and slapping her sweet ass with her open palms, she would cry, as if surprised: “I am a human female!”

The poet entered into a loving and living dream; it claimed him, even when awake. All day long Phosphor was haunted by the nights, which, as the seasons progressed, hung strung together like amber beads on a golden wire. These he gnawed and worried in his mind. Dazzled by love, Phosphor’s cock and his heart had become one and the same animal.

These were blissful days and weeks—the most delightful of their lives. Phosphor, himself transformed, abandoned his epic—a pretentious and patriotic work—to devote himself to an inspired poetic revery on the nature of sensual love. Convinced that he had entered the secret chamber of an occulted mystery, he took it upon himself to reveal the prodigy to the vast world. His verse was a steaming milk, a wizard’s ink—and it rained upon the page, page after page. As Extravaganza slept, or sucked a plum, or beside the open window combed her hair—which, free of ribbons, tumbled to her toes—Phosphor described in amorous detail love’s multiplicitous vocabularies of salutations and smiling receptions, overturning the natural realm in order to ambush the metaphorical creatures that would do desire justice; for example, the Gazelle (or When the Beloved Attempts to Flee the Arrow), the Lion (or Embracing, the Lovers are Encircled by an Invisible Yet Palpable Mane of Fire). And because he had not forgotten how a fish had unlocked his once solitary heart, Phosphor called his favorite embrace (although hard-pressed to name a favorite, as in bed with Extravaganza each act of love precipitated and included all the others)—that embrace during which the female, mounted from behind and knowing that the molten ring of her delight has moored her lover utterly, brings her thighs together as best she can, and the male, pushing his way in even deeper—as if that were possible—clutches his mistress’ breasts to further anchor himself—this position the poet called the Carp.

After a convoluted correspondence with the university rector and the chief librarian, Phosphor was given permission to contemplate—in the company of a Consultant to the Holy Office of the Inquisition—an ancient manuscript from India proposing entire zodiacs of love in the shapes of copulating animals and mythic beings: blue gods and mortal women, black and white; red goddesses and mortal men, white and black. As the poet contemplated the book in a fever, the Consultant groaned and agitated his censer.

In the fragrant mornings, the garden ablaze with butterflies, parrots rioting in the trees, Phosphor would return to work:

My beloved’s body is a delirious moon

A garden where foxes* paw and suck the grapes.

Her body is a vine plundered by foxes,

A tempest in a forest, a rain of black honey.

Her body is my darkness, total, luminous.

Her body is a rose of beaten gold;

It burns against my heart.

Extravaganza was dreaming and nothing could stop her; enchantment bubbled forth to inundate her soul with an effervescent water. Rather than eat breakfast, the lovers lay together until late, their tongues touching—and she would whisper the tumult of visions that, flooding the night, had submerged her. The poet listened to her eagerly, his cock throbbing between the buttocks of his beloved, his fingers lovingly investigating her wet fur.

Often, as she would describe some astonishing dream of thunderstorms and weirdly horned and pelted animals, or floating cities constructed of mother-of-pearl and brass, or harems wherein all the houris had the faces of ibises or tigresses, yet were in all their other parts human and sweetly formed, the poet would grasp his bride by the thighs and pull her to him. Compliant, already yielding, she would yield further, and for a time the telling of the dream would cease. Then, save for the sound of their breathing and the acute hammering of their blood, and the creaking and thudding of their windswept vessel, their chamber would fall silent.

Once, Extravaganza awoke wildly laughing. As she explained to Phosphor, in her dream she had seen the face of God. She recognized the nose at once—it was her lover’s cock; the apples of His cheeks, Phosphor’s balls. The Lord’s beard, hairs upon hairs, curls upon curls, and the place from which He spoke and breathed the breath of life was her own splendid cunt.

• * Says Ombos: There are no foxes in Birdland. This is, evidently, a reference to Pliny.