4

Ved—the previous descriptions of Phosphor’s evocative ocularscopic plates and the revelation of his precipitous invention have me eager to indulge in an “illustrative digression,” that is to say, a digression in your manner:

As you know, each day aboriginal reliquiae come to light, the most marvelous to date being the cave paintings at Barren Bottoms. I believe there exists a connection between Phosphor’s discovery of the capacity of light to steal from reality and produce counterfeits in the form of photographs, and the real seized by the mind of the artist and reproduced by memory upon the walls of a cave—which is another sort of black box. And I wonder: Is the cave an emblem of the mind? An illustration of how memory functions? I am suggesting that the painted cave is a representation of the thinking mind, the imagining, the dreaming mind.

Now, all this could be seen as mere idle conjecture except for this: two eyes have been carved above the entrance. And punctuating the vast series of acutely animate creatures are carefully rendered phosphenes of the sort one need only rub one’s eyes to see dancing—where? In the mind’s eye! Yes—the cave, I am certain, is intended to convey the imagining mind. One enters into it as into a head, a brain, an ideal universe.

In Islam, as you know, to imitate the real is heretical—a mockery of Allah’s divine capacities. Was this beautiful place a sacred or a subversive space? (I believe it is sacred and delight in its copulating animals and men. The “Sweepers,” appalled by its unabashed ribaldry, are circulating a petition to have the cave filled in.)

I have begun to speak of Señor Fantasma—that nefarious individual is essential to our tale. In the museum’s historical wing, a painting dating from the forties and clearly influenced by the surrealists, shows him as the beggar he was to become, and wearing a tin nose. His ancestor, the Old Fantasma, stands dressed in Spanish armor before a blazing fire of shells. His skin is pronouncedly blue: as the story goes, he had once thrown himself into a vat of indigo dye—acting out the delirious wish to enter bodily into a process that was making him rich. If it would not have killed him, surely he would have bathed in molten gold. (One of the most unsettling paintings in the entire museum is Bekassim Ortega’s Visitation—surely you remember it? It shows the aborigines of Birdland standing naked on the beach as inexorably the waves carry the Old Fantasma—standing like a lump of tar in his boat, his features a burning sulphur—to shore. A lethal meteor, he is about to hit the island. The aborigines, seized by an inquisitive stupor, stand feral and untamed—already lost. Their own fires are extinguished and the great pots in which they distill fragrant leaves—their only garment was perfume—are cold, no longer steaming.)

Now back to the grandson: a third portrait—that of the young Fantasma before his ruin—shows a bean pole with flaring nostrils and a beard so black it might have been painted on with ink. It was said that his eyes were sharp enough to bore a hole through a privy wall, or to cause a small dog to wet the ground, yet, paradoxically, his eyes are here unfocused. A despot, Fantasma harbored confusion. Apparently he had no lips; perhaps he has pressed them so tightly shut they have vanished.

Profoundly fearful, Fantasma slept in a marble bed beneath which a stone lion crouched, scowling. (This bed is visible on the museum’s second floor landing, as is Fantasma’s prie-dieu, washstand, and saddletree. The stone lion, like all the rest, has vanished.)

It is said that from time to time Fantasma’s face twisted in a grimace of terror. And that whenever this happened, he looked very like the figure that to this day crouches in the nave of the cathedral grasping both buttocks and revealing the howling face of a sinner about to be voided. (Of the cathedral, little else is worth noting. Nearly four hundred years old, having badly suffered in the earthquake of 1760, it is close to collapse.)

Finally, of Fantasma, a chronicler of the times wrote in the satirical gazette The Pope’s Nose:

Tymes Fantasma’s frighte is suche he trembles on his skinnye legges as doth an ass in fever.