From Birdland

Rikki Ducornet

Department of English
University of Denver

 

They set off in the early morning beneath an auspicious sky stubbled with clouds. From the start Fogginius the Saint took it into his crazed head that he would enliven the aboriginal road and astonish his companions with the knowledge he had accumulated over the years. True to himself he did not ask if they might prefer to enjoy the beauties of the day in silence or in song, in quiet talk among themselves or in dreaming (and the poet Picotazo, as he left behind the city where his beloved breathed, was delighting in acute melancholy). After much hacking Fogginius cleared his throat and spitting into a cluster of blossoming bougainvillea began:

 

‘Let us suppose that upon waking in the night I trod upon a nail. The nail cruelly pierces my flesh, causing me to hop about sobbing unrestrainedly in pain. Here is the cure: take up the nail and kiss it tenderly. I bind it to my foot with a piece of nicely rotted string. Should there be a moon, I lie upon the ground with the wounded foot pointing to Heaven, a turd stuck to the toe. Within three hours, if no owl passes and nothing disturbs the silence with a scream, the wound will cease to fester. Better still, should a star stumble from the sky, the foot and the body attached to it will be invigorated beyond belief

 

For a brief moment Fogginius was silent. The others, greatly relieved and thinking he was done, grunted with satisfaction. This flattered the Saint and he continued:

 

‘Now, let us suppose that I am eating a fish and I choke on a bone. At once, without thought to economy or appearances, and no matter who is in the room–be he a humbug or God Himself–the fish’s bones, sucked clean of meat, must be placed upon my head. To assure that such a misadventure not repeat itself, my toe nails must be trimmed at once and added to the pile.’

 

Just then Professor Tardanza and his daughter appeared riding together in the opposite direction. They had been gathering flowering branches in the woods, and the young girl, astride a horse the color of butter, was wreathed in blossoms. So tightly was the poet’s heart squeezed in the fist of love, that had it been an orange, seeds would have bulleted from his ears.

 

When the girl and her father rode past the poet and the Saint, Picotazo offered his most lovesick look, a look of such intensity that if Fogginius had remained silent, she might have been moved. But the scholar opened his trap:

 

‘The best remedy for lightning is to wear one’s turds–dried and sewn within a piece of silk–against the heart. The turd is dry, corrupt, combustible, commemorative and, at best, cumuliform–‘

 

Professor Tardanza did not nod, nor tip his hat, but spurred his own horse on, frowning, as if to say: I do not approve the company you keep. His daughter kept her eyes upon the path, and bit her lower lip to keep herself from laughing.

 

‘That girl who just passed! Fogginius spluttered with ill- founded enthusiasm, ‘has offended some pagan deity and is being transformed to shrubbery before our eyes! Soon she will tumble from her steed and take root by the wayside…I would never have believed it, had I not seen it with my own eyes!’ For an instant he shut up, marvelling.

 

But the poet Picotazo did not hear him. He was too deep in thought. He was thinking how much he hated Fogginius and how he longed to see him dead. He wished a meteor would strike him where he sat. And although they had only just left the city of Pope Publius behind and had been journeying but twenty minutes, the poet was submerged in weariness. The day died, Fogginius the Saint silent only when catching his breath. When the party stopped and Bulto set about to roast those things he had brained for their supper, Fogginius described procedures for the procuration of corpses both fresh and moldering and methods of dissection both ancient and new–thereby destroying everyone’s appetite but his own. Cracking a baked egg against his bony knee, he entertained them with a catalog of distinctions between angels, archangels and archons, their attributes and attitudes and advantages, and the manner in which the Manicheans invoked all three; and wondered if angels had microscopic or telescopic vision, or both, or neither–but instead a type sur-natural and so inconceivable.

 

As Fogginius spoke, Senor Fantasma seriously pondered why he had, until now, cherished the Saint’s advice and admired his mind so much he had been paying him to think. Nuno, too, with much gnashing of teeth, recalled his stepfather’s incessant punishments, the insane blandishments which had rained unfailingly upon him when he was a boy, the times he had been constrained to wear a live lizard in his breeches, to chew sand, to eat a stew of snails cooked in their own glue. Kicking in the fire, Bulto fantasized reducing the Saint to a pulp; Pulco alone appeared content as he cleared the supper things and scrubbed a pan–he had plugged his ears with a paste of bread moistened with saliva.

 

‘The black man is black–‘ detonating, Fogginius threw himself upon his hammock, ‘–because his soul is an inferno, a fiery pit. He burns from within and with such intensity, all his whiteness has been consumed. The red man burns with less heat; the yellow–‘ Suddenly the world was silent.

 

Silent. As if a great lid of lead had been lowered from the top of the sky. Fogginius had fallen asleep, as had small Pulco, and the mules. This silence was so exquisite and so dense, that the poet attempted to seize it in verse. He wrote:

 

A silence like a blotter soft and thick
Soaks up the forest's ink
Allowing me to dream and think.

 

Picotazo put down his pen, and gazing up at the wheeling sky invoked in one breath the Mother of Heaven and Professor Tardanza’s daughter. Within moments he was fast asleep–as were the others, and all strung from trees like fruit damned with dreams. In his dream, Picotazo saw Professor Tardanza’s daughter threading towards him as naked as a thing of Eden. But, although she moved swiftly, she was forever far away, as if she were walking in place, or he retreating.

 

And then, impossibly, she stood before him. Opening his arms to receive her, Picotazo pushed his feet deep into the nebulous mud upon which he was precariously standing, to keep from falling. She was hot; before he touched her, he could feel how the air about her burned: she was poised at the center of a mandorla of fire. But just as he would embrace her, his rival Enrique Saladrigas slipped between them, and Picotazo was eclipsed by a body twice as tall and twice as broad as he. In despair he battered at his rival’s back with both his fists and at the buttocks which now pressed against his face so that he could barely breathe. A terrific stench was upon the poet now, who–the more he battled Saladrigas, the greater his rival grew.

 

And Picotazo was in the embrace of an outsize octopus; its antediluvian face pressed down upon his own. With a cry the poet tore his mouth from the creature’s beak, and looking to the sky saw with clarity, luminous against the ink of night, a constellation. With certainty he recognized the constellation of the skeleton. And he thought: I shall die!

 

The poet screamed. Waking he found that something still pinned him down. It was Fogginius. Fogginius whose dreadful testicles, so like the desiccated things he chose to carry close to his heart to conjure evil fortune, forced the poet’s lips. Revulsed nearly to madness, Picotazo bit the Saint fiercely, and Fogginius, leaping to the ground,began to shout. With loathing and amazement, and just as the sun appeared foaming upon the horizon, Picotazo listened to the Saint’s breathless explanation:

 

‘A cure! For rheumatism! To sit upon a poet’s face at dawn.’ And: ‘I am cured!’ Fogginius tottered and lurched about in the morning dew, arousing the many green apes which lived in the treetops. Hurled into consciousness, they responded by screeching, precipitating a billion birds into the scarlet sky– those birds which, in distant days, filled the woods with their hot, palpitating bodies, their voices like bells, the philosophical stones of their eggs.

 

***

 

Picotazo’s chronic melancholia had deepened to despondency. His dream’s sad implication, the rude awakening–illuminated the comfortless state of his love life. Looking back in time to the moment when with a lingering moan love had first flowered in his breast, reviewing each affair up to the present, he thought that never, not once, had he won his heart’s desire, known a maiden’s timid tremor, the delights of reciprocal attraction. His attempted courtships had always fallen short of their mark. Monsters of will, his mistresses had always chosen him. From the first kiss, disappointment had flagged the poet down.

 

With a shudder, Picotazo recalled the titanic vigor of his mistress’ constitutions, their iron clad affection, the stern, fixed stare of their lust, the fearfully earnest letters he received with terror; how faithfully they punished his evasions, the silent thunderbolts of their angry looks, the purposed damage they invariably inflicted upon his reputation when, at last, he made his escape.

 

The second day of their journey, Picotazo made a vow. If upon his return he could not within a week win the professor’s daughter, he would devote himself, soul and body, to poetry. He imagined himself dry and desiccated and hollow–like a pod devoid of seed–but with a great, burning body of work growing beneath his frantic pen. He would devote himself tirelessly to the epic at hand. A monument of buried pain, he would be famous beyond belief, so famous that a day would not go by without Professor Tardanza’s daughter hearing his name. In school, her children would be made to memorize his verse; the Queen of Spain Herself would visit Birdland only to hold Picotazo’s hand: ‘…whose poems are the lubrications for life’s frictions!’

 

But here his revery takes a perilous turn. It seems the Queen cannot, will not, let go the poet’s frail hand. Dreadfully Sovereign, as stern and fixed as a polar cap and the sacredness of Law, she ignores his mute appeal, she treads upon his feet, barks in his ear that the poet is a cog of God–and with a seismic shudder insists that he be equal to her Great Occasion.

 

***

 

Late that afternoon, the road–in truth a protohistoric path, torturous and precipitous–vanished altogether. Spying a dejection in the grass, Fogginius dismounted to see whither it pointed. The turd led them to the lip of a chasm at the foot of which the sea had hollowed a whirlpool, an eager mouth, the poet thought, entreating them, in a savage tongue, to leap.

 

Too tired to turn back, they set themselves down for an early supper. As Bulto built a fire and little Pulco set to dressing the small birds the thug had throttled en route, Nuno unpacked his tripod and his black box to seize the whirlpool forever with silver nitrate on glass. Picotazo kept far from the land’s edge; the sight of so deep a pit flooded his soul’s chambers with dread.

 

It was decided that while waiting for their food they would play a game of lotto; from his saddlebags Bulto pulled the box of painted cards which showed all manner of things: flying fish, the fortifications of Pope Publius, the garrote, the guanaba and the coconut; a poultry seller, a water peddlar, a milkman and his mules; the pyramid of Cheops; the Holy Mother,the twelve apostles, the stations of the cross; a fig, a banana and a parakeet–a game so subverted by Fogginius that by the time it was over, tempers were badly frayed. The cards called forth all sorts of associations and Fogginius could not help but recall recipes and riddles and curious customs and ceremonial sacrifices; the witch trials raging in Europe, red hens and peacock’s eyes, tigers ravening in woods, miasmatic infections, focusing instruments and paradoxes; how so and so had found gold in a graveyard which looked exactly like human teeth, and how the monks of India smear their faces with dung.

 

Picotazo, who, as Pulco, had taken to living with bread in his ears, missed all of this; he did not hear when Nuno cried completo! and so could not know that the game was over. This caused confusion, a quarrel and a string of complaints during which Nuno accused the poet of cheating and incivility. Oblivious to the upset he had himself caused, Fogginius gaily pointed out the prodigious vegetative power of the wood, naming the many purges and poisons he recognized–‘

 

‘To stick in your epic, dear poet!’ he beamed at Picotazo, ‘Proof that I have liberally forgiven you the nasty bite you gave me this morning.’

 

Then, grabbing Senor Fantasma by the sleeve, he postulated that the chimerical unhealthiness of the climate, its fickle temperatures and the spontaneous alterations of its air convinced him they would be assailed that night by uncommon swarms of flies, gnats, moths, animaculae and other calamities invisible to the naked eye.

 

‘We must sleep under nets else be plagued by troublesome bites, inflammations, noxious exhalations and velocity of the blood.’ He assured Fantasma that he had brought with him ‘mercurial purges,a gargle of borax, Armenian bole in vinegar and fungal ash. However, he would hate to have to part with any of it so soon. He insisted upon the nets else they all harvest fatality. As for himself, he would not sleep unless a net was provided; nor did he wish to see his poor friend Picotazo assailed by vampire moths. It is fortunate that Fogginius was nearly blind, for Senor Fantasma was able to provide him with a fictive net. This Pulco draped over and above the Saint who– prostrate and tightly bandaged in his blanket–was ready to sleep. Fogginius promised in a soft gurgle that he would not stir the whole night through–else tear the precious net.

 

As Fogginius trumpeted and wheezed, the company sat together plotting how they might rid themselves of the Saint who had turned out to be an intolerable burden. Little Pulco, himself asleep, did not hear Bulto’s offer to toss Fogginius into the precipice. Fantasma proposed poison but then retracted–fearing reprisals from the ancient’s ghost. Nuno, hating violence, revealed the central role Fogginius had played in his life and asked for mercy.

 

‘I’ll find a way to gag him,’ he promised. I might manage to convince him that to use the vocal chords is unnatural–the proof being that his throat is always sore–and create for his own use a language of sand, of straw, of dust motes. I’ll invent something–a muffler, a word snare, a stifler; somehow or other I’ll knot the old stinker’s tongue.’

 

Elsewhere, Picotazo, his ears stuffed with wild parsley, lay gazing at the sky. The world, he assured himself, was an instrument made not for pain but pleasure–else why would He have bothered? The thought was reassuring.

 

You are a moonbeam, he wrote to the phantom in his head, my resurrection, my future life.

 

But then, sensing something large sliding beneath his hammock, he was reminded that if God was anything, he was paradoxically strange.

 

Long after midnight the poet fell asleep–a leaky vessel upon an agitated ocean.

 

***

 

For two days, Fango Fantasma had been silent. Indeed, Fogginius’ conversation was so congested, infrangible and dense that had he wanted to, Fantasma would have been hard pressed to stick a word in, even edgewise. However, Fantasma shared Picotazo’s baleful propensity and was not eager to talk. He had taken to staring at his own reflection in a pocket mirror–not from vanity as might be supposed–but to reassure himself that he was still there. The farther away he came from familiar things, the more fragmented and permeable he felt himself to be–and the more haunted. The woods, the sea, the sky, the relic path under his mule’s vanishing feet appeared to percolate to transparency.

 

Fantasma’s unstable state of mind had been precipitated by a worsening pecuniary crisis. For several years he had hounded the papal authorities for permission to import Afrikans to work his mines and plantations. When at last his wish bad been granted, he spent the lion’s part of his languishing fortune to build and equip a ship, which, upon its return from Afrika, its cargo chained and bolted to the hold, had been spirited away, volatilized, sublimated–perhaps by those evil spirits which had plagued his line for three generations. It seemed to Fantasma, as the very clouds appeared to plot against him overhead, that he and his family had always been the playthings of necromancers.

 

The Saint had once told Senior Fantasma that in a distant region of the world, at its very edge–which was razor-sharp and swept with cruel winds–lived a people born riddled with holes like sieves. This peculiar race amused themselves by plugging their perforations with sod and seeding them with roses, club mosses and horsetails. Each spring flowers would grow, blossom and blaze. At the world’s end, courtship rituals included dances of gyring shrubs.

 

‘More often than not the wedding night ends in disaster,’ Fogginius told Fantasma,’ for in their frenzied embrace, the lovers–decked from head to foot in thorny briars–tear one another to shreds.’

 

‘Such is the way of love–‘ Picotazo, eavesdropping, was cut to the quick by the story. He made up a little list of rhymes to keep for later: thorn/sworn, latch/patch, furr/burr, thistle/whistle.

 

***

 

This night Fantasma felt like a sieve man; he felt that his substance was seeping out through the pores of his skin. To make matters worse, their finger of rock above the whirlpool–if certified by an auspicious dropping–was possibly haunted. Certain signs–caricatural boles and an abandoned wasp’s nest– implied that they had tied their hammocks between what had once been sacred trees.

 

As their fire died, Fantasma stretched out, and pulling on his fingers one by one until they popped, raised his knees to his chest and grabbed his parts. He thought about Nuno’s black box which would bring him power. He imagined himself enthroned upon a velvet chair, turning a crank which would yield up the island image after image.

 

Too agitated to sleep, Fantasma told himself the story of the nun who had neglected to cross herself before eating a banana. How, thereafter, a demon had sat behind her navel peering out at the world as through a porthole. That failing, he attempted to bring to mind the tender moments of his infancy–but could only recall those family stories which, since cognizance, profoundly distressed him. Stories of those unstable ghosts taking root, tall as trees, in the dining room, causing the roast beef to explode; hovering near the birthing chair whenever a Fantasma was born, to snap up the umbilical cord the instant it was cut. So that it was generally supposed one day the Fantasmas would all be itinerant ghosts with no worldly ties.

 

And then Fantasma thought he heard his own cord, and the cords of his forefathers being pulled along the ground. He moaned and clutched his balls in terror; above the roar of the whirlpool, he heard one thousand phantoms stepping among the stones.

 

Fantasma shivered. A clammy air rose from the ground; it mouthed his bones and caused his teeth to hammer. When the moon’s thin wafer pulled itself up over the horizon, he peered timidly out from under his blanket, thinking to catch a glimpse of the ghosts which–he could hear them distinctly–were spooking the campsite. What he saw caused him to scream with such conviction the others were wrenched from sleep to see that the world beneath was no longer solid but palpitating with hundreds of thousands of frogs which had once assured the wood’s sacred character. The indigenous population had called the place above the whirlpool Tlock. Indeed, as the frogs advanced snapping gnats with eager tongues, the party heard distinctly the percussive sound of their feasting: Tlock,tlock,tlock.

 

Transfixed with terror, Tango Fantasma sailed that amphibious sea howling as Bulto, more naked than any ape, waded among the little green bodies, battering them with a club. Nuno sat transfixed, Pulco wept and Fogginius beat the air and cried:

 

‘The magic is severe! My net’s dissolved!’ And then: ‘A dream! A dream and an oracle! We must count them!’ The Saint dropped to the ground, and fumbling among the frogs, raved: ‘Beings fallen from the sky! Bulto! Desist! You are smattering the brains of rational angels!’

 

They finished the night, prostrate but wakeful. It seemed to them that the entire cosmos reeked of mildew, stagnant pools, the shit of fish, the saliva of snakes and the sulphurous flatulence of Saints. Sometime before dawn the frogs vanished into thin air–supporting Fogginius’ thesis.

 

Several hundred years ago, on an island the aborigines had named Birdland, the mendicant scholar Fogginius was roused from the depths of nightmare by a hellish bawling.

 

Fogginius leapt up from his bed–in truth a worn, woolen cape sewn into a sack and stuffed with shredded shirts–and threw aside his door, or rather, the crusted board which kept the wild hogs from relieving themselves in his rooms. There upon the overturned kettle he used as a threshold, lay an abandoned human infant, soiled and with crossed eyes.

 

Fogginius washed the brat, stared fiercely into its transverse gaze, and in the manner of the times, swaddled it so tightly that it could not thrash but only howl–as helpless as a sausage damned with a thwarted consciousness. This done he christened it: Nuno Alpha y Omega.

 

***

 

Fogginius was disliked. A deaf man who the scholar had cured of a coughing fit by stuffing his ears with breadcrumbs and parsley daily damned him; another whose bee hives Fogginius had smeared with dung, hated and feared him. Nevertheless, up until the arrival of Professor Tardanza from Cordova, and the maturity of Picotazo the poet, he was the only scholar in Birdland, and his the island’s only library–a wormy collection of parchment-bound books stuffing a zinc-lined trunk not large enough to bathe in. The books had been packed along with that woolen cape and those night shirts which, a full three decades later, served the saint as mattress.

 

In his youth, Fogginius had been enthralled by Birdland’s unique bestiary. The island claimed a purple bat, whistling wart-hogs, miniature crocodiles and large albino spiders sporting pink whiskers. After many years of trial and error, Fogginius had taught himself the ambiguous art of taxidermy and so was able to save the skins of most anything he chose, although he was not an artist and was incapable of reconstructing any creature convincingly.

 

For example, Fogginius’ snakes did not diminish towards the tail as is customary, but instead they grew progressively fatter. So zealous was the scholar and so thorough, that all the snakes, bats, moles and mice, ant bears, crocodiles and parrots within ten kilometers of his hovel had utterly vanished by the time our story begins. Only their skins remained–thousands upon thousands of them–decomposing in sisal sacks and crowding the shadows of the room Fogginius used as library, laboratory, kitchen and bed chamber, and which the rats used as a larder. He saw to his personal needs after dark beside the path which led to a little chapel–no more in his keeping (for word of other excesses had reached his Queen). Because Fogginius cured his skins with grease, the salted livers of cats, the ashes of wild hog testicles and vinegar, his place and person smelled unlike any other. And once, perhaps in jest, perhaps the result of rare and hermetic readings, Fogginius had suggested that the saviour was a false prophet, a magician engendered by the planet Mars. He was fortunate to have escaped with his life. A new priest– Fogginius despised him–was sent to oversee the cosmic affairs of Birdland.

 

***

 

The city in which Fogginius lived had been named Pope Publius by a bishop in absentia. Its houses were of local pudding stone and coral, and well over a century old. Each had been fitted with heavy doors, high balconies and iron-barred windows–for in its early years the island had been plagued by pirates. The shops– generously fitted with closets, storage bins and shelvings, were now, for the most part, empty of everything but lizards. If Pope Publius had been prosperous for several decades, it no longer was–although one rich man remained in the city’s finest house, its spiral stairs listing and his mahogany columns riddled by carpenter ants. The walls were of imported marble, and the windows of Venetian glass.

 

This palace belonged to Senor Fantasma whose grandfather had been among the first to take possession of the island. Now that his inherited wealth was running out, Senor Fantasma was waiting for a shipload of Afrikans–for whom he had negotiated with the papal authorities for nearly a decade–to replace the volatilized aborigines.

 

Very little is known about the original population of Birdland–only that it dwelled in great baskets. As the climate of the island was extremely mild, the natives had no need of smokeholes. They cooked their meals outside in a common courtyard, fenced in by the outsize shells of clams and cockles. The small hole at the top of their huts was an eye through which they could be perceived by their curiously indelicate gods; it served no other purpose.

 

The aborigines were sculptors, and the mountains truffled with engravings of frogs and copulations and birdmen. They also hung huge quantities of seashells from the rafters of their basket-houses. Once, during a violent storm, these shells created a noise which so enraged Fantasma’s ancestor that he set an entire village on fire–clearing it of men and women and children and structures and domestic animals–thus making room for Pope Publius. By the time Fogginius arrived, a decade or so later, everything the indigenous population had claimed as ‘objects of memory’–an ancient clump of tufted parrot trees, a swarm of aerial orchids resembling yellow bees, a mango grove and several cultivated gardens–were gone.

 

Strangely, the ensuing generations of Fantasmas were ruled by an obsessive terror that something should escape them. As if that initial conflagration lingered as a fever within the brains of those to follow. This and more: both succeeding generations had a terror of shells and bones and the sound of hollow things knocking together, or clanging, or ringing upon the air. For this reason the chapel of Pope Publius was the only one in Christendom which had never been fitted out with a bell. (Because Old Fantasma had paid for the chapel’s construction, the Designated Powers were willing to overlook this aberration.)

 

It has been said that Birdland was haunted by the spirits or ghosts of those the Old Fantasma had wronged; that these spirits had escaped through the cyclopean eyes of the basket dwellings; that these itinerant spirits or ghosts materialized at the foot of a bed, in a chimney or in a high tree, in the privy; rode upon the wind as pollen and seeds, were precipitated during the chiming of a clock, or slept within a bottle of ink, or an imperfectly sealed letter–in other words, manifest so often that if they were not fixed residents, it was common enough to see them or to meet someone who had. So that when they did appear they created no surprise. Only Senor Fantasma went wild when haunted.

 

And it was said that during the construction of Pope Publius, these spirits or ghosts manifested themselves so fearlessly that Senor Fantasma’s grandmother was constantly enraged by their incessant interruptions, and drivelled on and on to anyone who would listen that although she would not allow cigars into the house, a particularly obnoxious phantom insisted on smoking a monstrous, black one in her very own boudoir. She described him: naked and fiercely hot, his shadowy particulars tattooing the walls as he galloped back and forth upon her bed’s counterpane in the moonlight, blowing smoke rings around her trembling nose and causing her love birds to throw themselves to their cage’s floor in paroxysms of emphysemic terror. To keep the infection from entering into the hollow recesses of her head, the old biddy went about her business in a veil. For a time it was feared that she had been impregnated by the smoke from the naked ghost’s cigar, but chamomile and patience proved the old lady suffered gas.

 

What is curious is that these were the only spirits to haunt the island. No one ever saw Senor Fantasma’s ancestors sitting in trees or smoking. Fogginius–who eagerly took down testimony from whoever would give it–and more testimony from schoolboys than one would think possible–explained the phenomena thus: heathens cannot enter heaven and must remain behind to haunt their former homes, whereas the Old Fantasmas were all Christian and had been seized by heaven whole. But Fogginius feared that if the Afrikans–for whom the entire island waited with hope and misgiving–were not baptized, their spirits, too, would flood the island–making it inhospitable.

 

***

 

Such was the world into which little Nuno Alpha y Omega had plummeted. The population of Birdland was no more than one thousand and one souls, and it would have been easy enough to discover the babe’s mother and bring her to reason. But this never occurred to Fogginius. He believed that–as worms in cheese–the infant had generated spontaneously upon his door’s stoop.

 

Nuno’s first spoken word was: why. He had pointed to the sun and asked of his stepfather, Why. Until then he had uttered only Fa-Fa. Other than that he had felt no need to speak, and instead with fascination watched the riot of activity within the scholar’s hovel, prodded through the havoc of pelts, skins, and keeping mediums–and attempted to make sense out of the weird stories Fa-Fa told him, those gorgeous lies he believed: that the world was flat and the excrement of bears so potent one whiff could kill an elephant. Nuno was from the start a dreamy child and already at the age of three, when he asked the question Why, he had noticed that in finite quantities the atmosphere is transparent–more transparent, even, than water– but that in vast quantities, as in the sky, it was a beautiful blue. Damned with crossed eyes, Nuno was blessed with acute perceptions. Fogginius was aware that the child was no fool, so that when he saw him pointing at the sun and heard the terrible question Why, he knew, deep within his heart, that to answer: Because God, would not give satisfaction. He loved little Nuno deeply and dared not disappoint him. And so he proposed a list, which the longer it grew, the longer it became; a list, which, like the snake biting its tail, went on forever:

 

‘Yes!’ Fogginius startled the infant by leaping to his feet, ‘Yes! The sun! Why? And why the moon? And the rain which falls upon our heads? And why do we have heads? And eyes placed at the top of them? Why don’t we wear our eyes–as some fishes do–upon our undersides? Why not wear an eye between our buttocks and our anus above our nose? And why, dearest little Nuno–I have often pondered this–do all the animals have faces? Turtles do, and butterflies, and ants! Why life, little one? And, O! And, O! Why, above all, death?’ Fogginius covered his own face then with his hands, and to the child’s dismay began to weep. Nuno never forgot the upset his simple question had caused and as he stood blinking and confused, close to tears himself, he vowed that he would never ask such a question out loud again. But it was too late, the cat was out of the bag. Wiping his nose with his stinking fingers, Fogginius went on:

 

‘Why calamities?’ His voice was hoarse. ‘And evil natures? Black choler, pestilence and the planets which rotate about the polar star? Why danger and distress? Gall, vinegar and presages of future things? Alarming flames, little Alpha, omens, anise- seeds, imprecations and enchantments? Frogs’ mouths? Falling stars? Asparagus? Eclipses? Why do birds have beaks? And if the soul disembarks at death, why must the corporal rind stay behind to corrupt the earth? And why am I so melancholy?’ Again the scholar sobbed. Little Nuno, struck with terror, sobbed too.

 

Little Nuno was locked inside the scholar’s sea trunk often and the injustice caused his back to hump. His body knobbed in one tight fetal knot, he clenched his teeth with rage for years until a rat poked its tongue into the greasy keyhole and a beam of light pierced the gloom.

 

Nuno amused himself by looking at his thumb, first with one eye and then with the other. The thumb appeared to jump from left to right and from right to left. Many hours later, when Fogginius remembered to let the boy out, Nuno tried his small experiment with the back of his stepfather’s head. He noticed how it, too, jumped, and how flat it looked. One-eyed he navigated the room and attempted to dip his pen into the inkpot. Tipping the pot over and onto his knees, he found himself lifted into the air by an ear and once more tossed into the trunk where he played the same game with the root of his nose. It perplexed him to discover that he seemed to have two noses. Seizing them with his fingers he was reassured.

 

Except for the tiny beam of light which collided with the back wall, the trunk was perfectly dark. Having napped now, rolled into a ball and blinking, Nuno was startled to see a projected image of the room’s one lopsided window and of Fogginius suspended before it upside down. The effect was as terrifying as it was magical.

 

For weeks thereafter, Nuno taunted his stepfather so that he would be punished and forced to crouch alone in the dark. An inventive child, he pocketed a lens from the scholar’s misplaced spectacles and held it to the keyhole. The image of Fogginius suspended upside down was so sharply reproduced that illumined by intuition, Nuno realized the magician was not the sordid scholar bent with pitiful patience over a heap of parrots he had reduced to trash with a savage and religious passion, but the sun itself. The sorcerer was light–not Fogginius who, if he was capable of talking from dawn to dusk, could not fry a proper egg.

 

Fogginius came to wonder at the eagerness with which his stepson climbed into the trunk. It came to him that the boy used its pinching privacy for purposes unclean and so severely thrashed him. But although he cried out for mercy, Nuno forgot his pain because it had come to him that he must make a miniature model of the trunk in order to discover the secret laws of holes and beams of light.

 

‘Just as my master thrashes and contains me when angry,’ the child reasoned, ‘and just as thunder causes it to rain, so it is possible that light reflects images.

 

Once Fogginius had hobbled off in his fetid rags to hunt the skins of a scarce species of violet stoat, Nuno made himself a box, pierced it with a hole, inserted, with some fuss and bother, a tube of black paper, capped it with the lens from Fogginius’ spectacles, placed a mirror inside and lastly, after much tinkering, and in an inventive fever, dropped a pane of glass into the back. Light from the little window entered through the lens, was reflected by the mirror onto the glass, which, when manipulated, produced an image of the room in sharp focus. Toying thus, Nuno stood for hours until, seeing Fogginius’ face staring at him from within the box, he was thrust back into the real with a shriek. But instead of thrashing him, Fogginius embraced his stepson.

 

‘You have invented the camera obscura!’ he cried, and bursting with pride, congratulated him. Nuno was disappointed to learn that the black box was not his own invention. But when Fogginius told him that painters used it to trace figures on paper, Nuno declared fearlessly:

 

‘A poor use for it! I would fix the image and thus do away with painters!’

 

‘Fix it! Fix it!’ The scholar slapped his stepson twice most viciously upon each ear. ‘I’ll fix you! Would you thus steal the world from God?’ Lifting the box above his head he sent it crashing into the deeper shadows of the room, exterminating, as he did so, an entire litter of newborn rats.

 

Fogginius was a compulsive describer of climates, and he was also a pamphleteer, his passion for the genre fired by bitterness and the conviction that certain winds were beneficial, moons ominous, the female pudenda perilous (a fear he shared with the poet, Picotazo). Fogginius was a man bereft of humor.

 

For a typical day in Pope Publius, in the month of July, 1650, Fogginius’ journal reads: Bad air. A break in the moon’s halo. By means of which we shall have a wind.

 

Trained by a Jesuit theologian also named Fogginius, Fogginius once sold his shoes and his books to buy a small, red topaz because his master had assured him that if reduced to powder, the stone would produce a white milk. Fogginius had also proved to his own satisfaction that the moon’s influence was moist by sleeping beneath it upon a high hill and awaking with a head cold so severe it almost killed him. He had ingested the dung of a sheep for a week, because an irresistible voice had told him that the thing must be done else the moon fall into the sea.

 

‘The moon’s nature,’ Fogginius wrote in a pamphlet which was published in Spain several years before his departure for the island, ‘is ethereal, aerial and aquatic.’ He was successful in his attempt to capture lunar water by leaving little dishes out on the balcony nights when the moon was full. Fogginius sold this dew to a young woman whose underarm hair was so meager it compromised her sexual attractiveness. The hair grew to such profusion that she was not married afterall, but made her living by sitting on a little gold chair on market days and raising her arms for the highest bidder. Later she returned to Spain to continue a career which, one hopes, fulfilled her wildest expectations.

 

***

 

Fogginius was a follower of Lacantius who ridiculed the theory of the antipodes. Fogginius believed the world was flat, a belief that remained unshaken despite his voyage from the Old to the New World. When as a young man his stepson, Nuno Alpha y Omega ran away with pirates and was swept by fierce winds to the Polar Circle where he and the entire crew were appalled by an astronomic night six months long, the stepson came to question the stepfather–now so gaga as to suggest to young mothers that they cure their infants’ sties by rubbing their eyes with the freshly decapitated bodies of flies. Coming into maturity, Nuno refuted Fogginius as ‘a mere dogmatizer’ and ‘God’s prattling ape.’ For Nuno had come to question more than his father; he had come to question God. Home again, he could no longer bear the company of Fogginius. So enraged, so disgusted was he by the codger’s lunacies, his vanity and his incessant pontifications, and of the thrashings with which the old fool continued to threaten his son, that Nuno became an adamant atheist, a materialist who believed only in what he could see, shunning all things which smacked of mystery, wanting, above all, to profit by the real and to understand the mechanisms which–as do the hidden gears of a music box–cause the world to spin.

 

In the early years of his solitude and independence, Nuno supported himself by making photogenic drawings of leaves and flowers and the wings of butterflies. These he sold in the market as amulets and, because he was a cynic, as ‘the miraculous impressions of the thoughts of kings and angels.’ Then, by means of a piece of glass painted over with tar and placed in his camera obscura, he was able, centuries before the world at large would learn of such a thing, to capture an instant in time. This first successful experiment plunged him into a chronic fever from which he never entirely recovered. His next attempt was to create an image in three dimensions. Nuno Alpha y Omega’s ocularscope was not only the first stereoscope in Pope Publius, but the first one in the universe. Thanks to this wonderful machine, a city which exists no more, a world still even to sublimity, is contained as if by magic on flat pieces of glass.

 

Nuno’s first images were of the natural world. He would capture the exotic fauna of his native island just as Fogginius had done except that in the process nothing would die. Today, as I sit in the National Museum of Pope Publius, an unusual edifice built entirely of coral, and peer into the ocularscope‘s twin lenses, the fugitive forms of Nuno’s Birdland appear seized in silver before me. Fugitive more than adequately describes this island which, formed of mandrapore, cuttlebone and sea lime ceaselessly changes shape. If it were not for the sea wall which circumvents it, pieces of the island would be swept away in times of tumultuous weather. I have here before me the imposing forms of sea turtles sleeping by the hundreds on the beach, portraits of the powerful, the beautiful, the lean and lost; lush landscapes, the elegant facade of a rich man’s house; the image of a partial eclipse of the sun as seen imprinted on a garden path through the intercesses of the leaves of a lemon tree–a multitude of crescents as numerous as ants; and all the phases of the moon, phases, Fogginius might have said, of the same riddle.

 

***

 

Curiosities of Nuno Alpha y Omega’s island: sea cows which sailors once took for sirens. A scarlet shell sporting a white horn so poisonous that one need but see it to die. The mountains are truffled with enchanting caves, the skies with birds–many of which are mute. (But the lizards of Birdland whistle, and the beetles tick like clocks.)

 

According to Fogginius’ meteorological journal which lies open before me, verminous and yet for the most part intact, the summer of 1660 was so hot the hens laid hard-boiled eggs.