A whistling silence vibrated the crystal chandelier in the stairway for over an hour. The nuns, seated together on a plush bench near the door, looked through the window at the back of the next house, loaded with purple clusters of Japanese lilac. It was a tense, mental silence. There were currents of silence freezing the air in the hallways, just like those sometimes emitted by the ocean, at a frequency of eight cycles per second, which irritate the hypothalamus unbearably and make entire crews of sailors hurl themselves into the sea, leaving their sponge-covered vessels drifting, sails mangled by the winds, prow and stern paced only by seagulls … In the end, after she had knocked several times in vain, Mother Fevronia was bold enough to open the door a tiny crack. She peered into the vast bedroom and yanked the door closed again, in terror. She was overcome by an uncontrollable shaking in her hips and collapsed onto her sister, who held her in her arms. Mother Fevronia never told anyone what she had seen, but in her dreams she saw them again and again, for months on end, the two men in the great bed under a cashmere canopy: Monsieur Monsú lying on his back, his arms crossed and his eyes rolled into his head, and above him, with his body on the other body, with his arms on those arms, his legs on those legs, his eyes on those eyes, his mouth against that mouth, Fra Armando making a continuous, inhuman sound, through his nostrils, and glowing in the dark, with faint needles of light.
In New Orleans, dusk is violent and translucent, the clouds turning to rags of flame over the termite-eaten wooden buildings. Above the clouds, in a Diesis of rays, in a glory and wonder that overwhelm the soul, you can see, with some frequency, visions of the Trinity surrounded by winged creatures, the seraphim, cherubim and angioletti of faith, or indecipherable allegorical scenes, as if the entire sky, ablaze with twilight, was a ceiling painted by a colossus, who drew the crepuscular light through the round window of the sun. Precisely this kind of vesperal cataclysm now arched over the city, changing the waters of the river into blood, when, after hours and hours of tense quiet, Fra Armando emerged from the death or bedchamber of The Albino. The nuns flinched violently and jumped to their feet (having completely forgotten what they’d heard and why they were waiting), and stared at the man in his violet cassock, ashen-faced and red-eyed. Exhaustion had turned the flesh of his face almost transparent, exposing his bare skeleton, and the bald skull in the middle of his tonsure showed the gently pulsing circumvolutions of his brain. The Friar threw himself onto the bench, leaning his back against the fabric walls. “He will live,” he said to himself, in a quiet voice, “I gave him another ten years.” Then he continued, more slowly: “How many I lost, God only knows.”
While the sisters went into the sleeping chamber, the priest rose, trembling, and moved toward the stairs. He descended into a deserted street. He walked like an automaton over the sonorous sidewalk, his cassock snagging the wide, fleshy ornamental plants, dogs barking at him from the yards, until he came to Canal Street and saw, alongside the high, stone buildings of the central business district, the waters of the Mississippi crowded with ships. The old streetlights came on, whose gas from another age had not been replaced with electric bulbs. Elbowed by the black people and the flock of promenading civil servants, the Friar went to the riverfront and stood before its unimaginable width. On the far-off bank he could just see Lilliputian houses, with their dozens of windows sparkling madly. Resting his elbows on a wooden rail, he eagerly breathed in the cool, salty air. It took a few minutes for Fra Armando to notice how odd the southward rushing waters looked. The twilight-colored river had turned to blood. The Friar followed the dizzying rush of lenticular red cells, the size of loaves of bread, the amoeba-like gliding of the white cells, transparent enough to show their darkened nuclei, the snaking spiral worms that must have been malaria germs, the unusual fluorescence of lymph, the currents of glucose and protein. Fascinated and deathly tired, the Friar suddenly sensed that everything was alive, that everything lives, and that the universe does not at all operate like clockwork. Instead, it is a malleable architecture like the human body, a temple of skin, a basilica of scratches, a cenotaph of snot, with no right angles or durable materials, where the person creates his dreams, thoughts, and illusions, his time and his language like a cell secretes a hair or the crystal horn of a nail. And still, the least important cell in the universal body receives, through angel hormones and neural visions, the imperious commandments of God.
Less than a week later, Monsieur Monsú reappeared at his place on Fuck Street, as even then they had started to call Bourbon. The filaments of the jellyfish that had invaded his body were gone, leaving almost unnoticeable lines on his skin, like the flowers and Art Nouveau ornaments that decorated stone buildings uptown, while the wart beside his nostril remained forever limpid and raspberry, with something inside, like a fish embryo floating in an egg, occasionally twitching its virtual tail. At night, however, the Packard would take him to the edge of town, to the lacustrine cottage of Fra Armando, in the middle of the endless swamp. The immense limousine, with chrome hubcaps and its chauffeur rigid in his place at the wheel, sat the entire night among pools of water that reflected the heaps of stars overhead, between carnivorous plants with sticky seeds and human-like tongues, until the windows turned bonbon pink, and daylight, with its gray-yellow fringe, poured over Louisiana. The lamp in the cottage never went out. Sometimes a silhouette of a man in a cassock, or a suit and lavalier, appeared at the window nearest the little bridge. Odd people of different races, hunchbacked and crippled, crossed once every few nights along the sole access to the house perched on stilts, besieged above and below by stars. One of these people might piss from the narrow deck, extendedly, black as pitch against the yellow of the dawn, splashing glittering drops of amber into the lily pond. The stench of urine hovered over the cottage, combining strangely with effluvia of myrrh and incense.
At about that time, the rumor of a demonic plot filtered into the city, first through the ebony-skinned women who sold mangos and avocados in the market, then penetrating, by way of the servants and maids, all of the neighborhoods and social strata. This plot was much stranger and more frightening than voodoo rites. It was a conspiracy between the Teacher of Justice and the Evil Priest capable of shaking the powers of heaven. Allegories as complicated as hopscotch, childishly transparent allusions wrapped in fear and hysteria, and unprovable lies layered in embellishments all took shape like a mirage mirrored in the sky over the colonial city. No one dared to follow his finger along the tangled designs of fantasy to their mundane origin, everyone talked about the fetid (assuming the spirit had nasal passages) cesspool of the cottage on the lake, everyone talked about the perverse meeting of the world’s two halves, Light and Dark, into a Gnostic globe that far exceeded critical mass, everyone moaned to imagine the devastating explosion to come. In a vacant lot full of garbage, they found a human skeleton with each bone a different color (or so claimed the seamstresses whispering into the ears of petticoated ladies). A flea-ridden stray dog was said to have given birth to two puppies, then a blue glass ball, and then two more puppies. It was said that a mulatta woke up one morning with her fingernails and toenails grown a cubit in length and curved like scythes, so that she crawled out of bed buck naked and walked on all fours like a beast, until her mother strangled her with her apron. For almost ten years, on the northern cotton fields and in basements filled with whiskey vapors (after ’33, stills were legal, and the gangster era entered its decline), people would gather — standing or squatting, smoking or downing drinks — around someone who brought news of Those Who Know, the new sect that had begun to spread through the city, following the networks of restaurants, bordellos, and obscene stores of The Albino. Those Who Know could have been anyone, whores or stevedores, high school teachers or train mechanics, so that you might sodomize the fat ass of a prostitute and have no idea what terrible sacrilege you had committed, or you might listen to the blabbering of a short, bald Figaro as his razor wandered over your soapy cheek, without knowing what amazing power his ruddy skull contained. Those Who Know were not marked by any outward sign, and thus the terror and mystery increased; each person suspected the next. The terrible part, people said, was that the old refuges of those besieged by evil — holiness, and the good and moral life — had allied themselves for the first time with the shadows, so that they might inextricably bind the world in a spider web of neither good nor evil, neither ecstasy nor horror, neither everything altogether nor the void, but Something Else, something inhuman, undemonic and undivine, incomprehensible and impalpable. It was said that they were plotting a Change. The vomiting, ejaculating, bleeding, speaking, pissing, breathing through pinched nostrils, salivating, defecating, suppurating or thinking or imagining, in any case the transpiring of a new world, or an Anti-world, or better put, something lacking both existence and a name. A new vibration, from a new instrument, spread from the cottage on stilts where the priest of all beliefs and the monster of all perversions met, night after night. Miracles that looked nothing like miracles, with neither rhyme nor reason, following an Anti-plan that might have been crafted by the frontal lobes of the cosmos, or in any case not from the middle of the skull’s walnut — an Anti-plan that blossomed, if not quite in reality, at least in the effluvia of rumors and fables. It was said that little girls in a tenement by the river had dolls that grew, each one of them, beneath their ordinary canvas dresses, hairy, living vulvae, flesh and skin, anuses and navels. The ring of a respectable matron, who fanned herself on the balcony of her house, tightened suddenly like a sphincter, severing her finger completely and then rolling into a pot of begonias. At dawn, on February 4, 1932, hundreds of people supposedly saw the old east-side cement factory that had been demolished three decades earlier, enthroned over the city on an evanescent foundation of clouds. An old Indian woman was supposed to have defecated a tapeworm with dragonfly eyes and hundreds of wriggling legs, which then scampered away, into the forest, dragging its pouches of egg sacs.