The great painting that had barely fit in The Albino’s car now dominated the circular hall. It was the only decoration on the back wall, opening like a window onto a scene of fantasy. The picture, after witnessing centuries pass, had acquired a dull sheen, radiating loneliness and melancholy. It showed gigantic palaces of rosy marble, their façades packed with colonnades and statues, rising, shining like mirrors, from the blinding evanescence of green, clear seas that sparkled under the abstract sun of a perfect dawn. Ships, loaded with barrels and anchored at the shore, seemed like part of the same shell of smoky glass as the dementedly ornamented buildings, and they had the most moving sculptures black gall could imagine: hate, ecstasy, evil, stupidity, illumination, Christian piety, scorn … endogenous aggressiveness, grotesquely unleashed, like a monkey with electrodes on his skull triggering the hippocampus … palaces of insanity and wisdom emerging, vertical, fragile, from the green, limitless ocean. There were no human beings anywhere. In the lower right corner, there was a signature in black ink: Desiderio Monsú. The spectral vision seemed to spread beyond the painting’s frame, and the bejowled mestizos, with enormous rings on their fingers, sweaty from their armpits to their waists, could sometimes make themselves believe that this place where they looked at those women’s pink bottoms, shimmying obscenely in front of them, being mounted by hairy men with bovine balls, was nothing other than a pavilion of pleasure or torture, a grotto of hell or heaven, surrounded by that unearthly scene, spread as far as imagination could extend. Then, a sudden nausea washed over their internal organs, and mad with the sadness of being merely human, and not gods or nightmarish demons, they would empty their glasses of whisky, tequila, or absinthe without a breath, hold out their hands and dampen their fingers between the thighs of the redheads and black women, and collapse with their heads onto tables of woven bamboo …
For ten years, The Albino bought up whole streets in the French Quarter: bars, jazz clubs, restaurants where crawfish were prepared in eighty ways, with ten varieties of Béarnaise, bordellos and Mardi Gras souvenir shops, tobacconists and palm-shaded residences … Fashion boutiques and barges in the port and prostitutes with branded buttocks now wore his insignia: a calligraphic M with a certain imperial refinement, barely distinguishable within a spiderweb of volutes. This same sumptuous M, as though in precious stones, was engraved into the side window of his black Packard, chauffeured by an Indonesian who brought him to and from the Monsú.
When The Albino entered one afternoon through the place’s hinged, crystal door, protected from the waves of rain that crashed onto the sidewalk by the black umbrella of his chauffeur, who was soaked instantly by the clouds breaking over New Orleans, the doorman, a prematurely gray black man in a purple livery, kept his eyes on his master’s face, forgetting his words of greeting as much as his customary bow. That cost him his job, and, at dusk, he enriched the alligator feed in the Louisiana swamp. But how could the poor man not stare, when he saw that, alongside his master’s flat, African nostrils, the wart, always dark brown and big as a pea, had become suddenly, overnight, raspberry-colored, clear and bright as a giant sturgeon’s egg. Red, pearly veins, like roots, started at the shining bead (where something throbbed like a wadded-up embryo), spread across the bridge of his nose and under the taut skin of his cheeks, and continued to grow in the days and weeks that followed, enveloping him in a web of capillaries, even in the pupils of his eyes, his gums, and the entirety of his lingual mucous. In The Albino’s eyeballs, the doctor with the silver saucer on his forehead saw, hanging from the fibrous peduncle, a kind of crustacean slowly moving its feathered antennae and odd masticatory apparatuses in the vitreous fluid. Pains like unimaginable atrocities of war accompanied this spread of the bizarre parasite through the body of Monsieur Monsú. Blind and racked with spasms, as though he had tetanus, the owner of twenty-five percent of the French Quarter was been abandoned by his doctors after months of torture, and left to scream like someone being skinned alive. He lay naked on his bed in his ivy-covered house in the select north-city neighborhood, watched over by two frightened nuns from the Catholic Mission. The pearl beside his nostril had grown as big as a grape, and in its hyaline shell were vague webs of blood. The wiry lines, flexible and absorbent, spread under his skin everywhere, to his fingers and testicles and toes, and wrapped them in networks, like tangles of hair.
This is how Fra Armando found him when he arrived in his familiar Cabriolet to give him last rites. The nuns had decided to do their duty to the end, although nobody in the city could have said what god The Albino might worship. The priest, called in such haste that he still had, between his gold-crowned molars and the flabby wall of his cheek, a little, bloody wad of bread, climbed the colonial building’s stairs two at a time. On the landing, he spit the bread into a polished spittoon in the curve of the wood-carved staircase, where the paneling made of four precious woods met a large painting, an imitation of Degas’ dancer tying her shoes. That morning, he had taken part in a shamanic ceremony, in which he had healed a dying man by sucking the illness from his body and presenting it to him in the form of a ball of bread filled with blood. He had just put the revolting maple wood mask back on its hook and was preparing a second group of feathers in his jaw when Sister Fevronia called him to the phone. Now the Friar, who mysteriously had avoided meeting The Albino before this moment, was seized by an illuminated nervousness. The spectrum of belief in New Orleans — which, in the somber penumbra of his room, he had often imagined as a marvelous, multicolor orchid, its petals separate yet united in the sacred ovarian globe — had contracted, suffered fires and mutations, regressions and metastic developments, since the arrival of Monsieur Monsú. Heresies and crimes, conversions and sudden apostasy, apparently spread in seemingly ordinary statistical patterns — these proved something else to the one who sensed the religious ferment of his community in every pore. On the edge of the field of prismatic forces, a great glacial continent had suddenly appeared — a black iceberg, foreign and irreducible, over which, as in Ezekiel’s vision, The Albino reigned, sweating black flames and shrouded to the waist in a metal resembling chrysolite.
When he entered the room, the priest encountered the large, milk-white, starched sails that covered the nuns’ heads. Fevronia was as beautiful as a sculpture in porcelain, and just as fragile. Her brown eyes were like two glassy shells, wide apart and staring into space. Caterina was taller and prim, with azure eyes. When you saw them coming down the path, framed by agaves and enormous cacti and the Louisiana sky, her whitewashed face looked like a mask, and it seemed the same triumphant sky around her face also shone through her eyeholes. Now, though, their eyes looked at the floor, because Monsieur Monsú had died. “Too late, Friar,” whispered Caterina, “you are too late.” But a sensation of power, like a sunrise, grew inside the priest, along with a soulful impatience. The Friar suddenly felt that a god resided within him. “Out,” he said quietly to the nuns, who slid away and shut the door in its mahogany frame. A chorus of angels, sculpted on the back of the door, turned their round mouths and pious eyes toward the sky.