He bowed himself away from us both, murmuring, “Lady Wellingford, such a delight,” while Mrs. Gallimar sat unsmiling and annoyed. I thought as I made my own farewells that for a woman of Mrs. Gallimar’s disposition Roland Mirabeau would not be an amusing companion on a lengthy voyage.
[“I had hoped to get to know her,” I said to Israfel. We sat across from one another in my house on the Street of Immaculate Intentions. We were drinking tea.
“She looks at you and is afraid,” he replied. “She senses your interest in her and is put off by it. Your acquaintance is too new. You have offered her your friendship too soon.”
“I shall persevere,” I told him severely. “Too soon or not, she will need me.”]
18
Aboard the Stugos Queen, I put on my cloak and went into Nacifia to see all those things Mrs. Gallimar had recommended I see. If we left upon the morrow, there might be no other opportunity to investigate the city.
I went first to the Cathedral of Helpful Amphibians, which was beautiful, outside and in. Though the materials were not ones Gaudi could have used, the place reminded me somewhat of pictures I had seen in the twentieth of a Gaudi cathedral. I sat down near one of the pillars, crystal carved into the likeness of a jet of water, leaping toward the sky. The whole cathedral was a fountain in stone. It was lit from high green windows with a dim, liquescent light, and in the side chapels statues of the helpful creatures sprawled or lay or climbed, each after its own nature.
I took off my cloak for coolness sake when I sat down. It was not long thereafter that I was surprised by a voice behind me saying, “Is there anything I can do for you, daughter, or are you merely sightseeing?”
“Ah … Father,” I murmured, turning about so I could see him. “Sightseeing. Yes.”
“You’re the lady rescued from the sandbank,” he smiled at me as he came to sit beside me. “What do you think of our cathedral.”
“It’s very beautiful,” I said honestly.
He nodded in agreement, beaming at the pillars.
“At home,” I said, struggling for truth without complication. “At home we would think it strange to dedicate a cathedral to … ah … amphibians.”
He seemed slightly startled. “What would you dedicate a cathedral to?”
“A martyr, perhaps,” I suggested. “An angel?”
“Were they made by the Creator?” he asked.
I nodded that they were.
“Well, so are these,” he said with some asperity, gesturing around him. “Are some parts of creation more worthy than others in your homeland?”
I told him yes, that in my homeland (thinking of the twentieth and twenty-first) only humans were worthy of anything at all. All else was disposable.
He shook his head over me, speechless, his old face suddenly lined with horror. He made a gesture in my direction, which I recognized as being one of aversion, one of fear.
“I didn’t say I believed that,” I cried.
He made the gesture again, and tottered away into a side chapel where I could see him kneeling at the altar of St. Frog, murmuring in a heartbroken tone. I slipped on my cloak once more, saddened by his rejection.
My next stop was at the clownery, where I wandered invisibly down long hallways, watching the inhabitants at their work or play or whatever it was they were doing. One inmate was packing cockroaches, one hundred to the bag. I do not think the insects were dead, though they were very quiet. Another inmate was constructing a large bust of the Viceroy, so the label said, out of what appeared and smelled to be dung. A third inmate, with the aid of a tall ladder, was writing her autobiography on the walls of the place. She had covered four stories of one stairwell and had extended her tale out into the reception area, where two walls were already covered with obscenities. I followed her story back in time until I reached a door to the roof, where a group of attendants were having morning coffee. Even read in reverse, it had been a novel of violence, abuse, incest, and horror.
I stood on the roof listening to the attendants, who were mostly interested in discussing the fine points of their latest soccer series. When I went down the stairs again, the walls were clean. Another inmate with bucket and brush was washing them, as he sang a lovelorn lament. The inmate with the bags of insects had given them to someone else, who was letting them go. The sculptor was asleep in the shade of his gigantic construction, while six or seven others carried the substance of it away in wheelbarrows. Each madness had been unmaddened.
I made my way next to the macabre heights of Mont Osso Negro where the citadel stood. I had a mind to look upon the Viceroy of this place. I found him striding through arched corridors in search of his daughter Constanzia, whom, as his bellows of rage and accusation testified, he suspected of dalliance with the young men of the garrison. Before his iron-booted feet, legions of scrub women scattered to one side or the other, squawking like chickens, except for one aged crone who scuttered along beside the Viceroy on all fours, attempting to slosh soapy water in his path while muttering, “Beast. Hideous beast. Inhuman dog. Ingrate,” calumniations of which the Viceroy took no notice. His long, white face was set in an expression of obdurate annoyance, one, I was to learn, of his two customary expressions, the other being a vacuous stare of terminal ennui.
When his invective became boringly repetitious, I left off following him and went in search of Constanzia herself, a quest which the boots made simple. She was hidden in one corner of the long, vaulted library loft, reading a leather-bound volume with the word “Forbidden” stamped on its
