“The steel flower was now completely open, to expose in its center, sagging with its own weight, the throbbing brain of Fra Armando. The crowd, hungry for a miracle, looked longingly at him, like a loaf of fresh bread they hoped would be broken and set before them, so they would eat and be filled, and they would take of the broken pieces left in the baskets. Somewhere in the first rows, a scrawny woman held, with a kind of pride, a heavy glass cylinder where a yellow fetus floated, spongy and tranquil. I remembered the vial in my pocket. When I put my hand in my pocket, it was warm and hard. But I could not pull it out, because it was flesh of my flesh, my erect sex, my seed risen to the tip and ready to spurt. Did all the men in the crowd have erections? Even the boys, even the babies asleep in the floral scarves tied on their mothers’ backs? I glanced to my left, at a dwarf — sweaty, myopic, with a hideously red mouth: yes, his risen member was visible under his cotton pants. I no longer doubted this strange effect of approaching the sacred, as I knew that all the women’s and girls’ vulvas were sweetly moist. Because this happens however often we dream, regardless of the content of our dream, as though the great light of the dream were of the same nature as the smell of a cheek and the velvet of skin and the stiffness of another’s pubic hair, as though the dream were our interior partner, a woman if we are men and men if we are women: it excites us, it stirs the lubricating seminal fluids, it incites our minds with fantasies and tangles … To ejaculate in the uterus of our dream, to fecundate ourselves, like snails, to make love with ourselves between the kaolin walls of our skull — this is what we always wanted, and we have wanted it perhaps forever …
“ ‘He will be born here,’ continued the priest, ‘as here all of us are born, because here all our minds and sexes meet. Here all uteruses intersect and become one alone. The central point of our world is the central point of each of our beings. All women ever inseminated were inseminated here, just as all people, however different from each other, meet in the idea of a person. He will be born somewhere, sometime, from a concrete and living woman, but we must conceive him here, first. How could someone become a prophet, without having the model of a prophet? How could a god ever be born, if we did not know that gods existed?’
“Fra Armando turned toward the raging column of milk and sperm, whose vines rose and entwined in rapid vortexes. He spoke to it, his arms spread, in an unknown language. Sometimes, I thought I recognized the gutturals of Somalians, or Arameic glottals, the lip-smacks of the Dogons, or the fifths of the Javanese. ‘Mineymoe,’ he often shouted, like an obsessive cadence of speech, and when he uttered (barked? cursed in torture? ground his teeth?) this word, he also made a gesture with his hands, half masked by the golden ephod and the maniple that doubled his brocaded sleeves. It seemed he sank his claws into his sternum, yanked out his ribs with a demented effort and tore his heart from the roots to offer it, with incomparable terror and devotion, to the vertical Jordan. The flame ignited again, flickering and fluttering into the consistency and light of liquid gold, whipped, it seemed, by the barbarous consonants, the hisses and whoops of the great priest’s voice. Fascinated by his bizarre invocation, I had hardly noticed that the formerly still crowd had begun an agitation: one by one, a few dozen girls, naked to the waists, their hair in hundreds of braids, their pupils dilated by belladonna, came to the front, pushing their shoulders and hips past those around them. Some had their nipples pierced with glassy jade rings. Others had a violet swastika tattooed between their breasts. More than a hundred girls filled the space between the priest and the crowd. Wherever they stepped their bare feet on the gentle floor of transparent stone, they left a moist footprint, surrounded by vapor, which slowly evaporated.
“ ‘Mineymoe!’ growled the officiant for the last time, and the hundred virgins imitated, in an echo, the holy syllables. Their thick-lipped mouths, crudely tattooed to their gums with blue signs, hung open, showing their red, voluptuous tongues in all their length, under the arches of their shining teeth. It was a strange and frightening vision. With their eyes dilated and tongues stuck out to the maximum, the girls trembled. Entire groups of muscles on their thighs and arms, but also along their spines, beat with a life of their own, like the muscles of an epileptic, or a great hysterical seizure. On their muscular tongues small swellings appeared, amplifying the texture of their taste buds. They grew larger and larger, until they turned into white cysts, frightening to see, that burst one after another, drawing screams like labor pains from the martyrs’ throats. With still-wet wings, with a bead of sparkling liquid at the end of their raised proboscides, hundreds and thousands of butterflies emerged from the blisters. At first as pale as embryos, they quickly took on kaleidoscopic colors, velvety or metallic, and took flight from the rent tongues. Soon, the entire cavern teemed with them, but the largest and most beautiful, with eyes like Chinese fish and stalks fluttering a handspan past the ends of their wings, swirled lazily around the steel flower and brain at the edge of the abyss.
“ ‘Mineymoe!’ murmured the multitude, and I found myself whispering, along with them, the barbarous word. The virgins collapsed to the floor and lay like the dead. Only a shiver at times agitated their gelatinous flesh. Dozens of butterflies, with their wings full of peacock eyes or branches of coral, swarmed now onto the bare brain of Fra Armando, like a thick pollen of plush and velvet. Months before, in countless places on the earthly sphere, young girls had taken walks through fields of flowers. A large, heavy butterfly, out of nowhere, spiraled around them, and the two tumbled to the ground between marigolds and daisy chains. Then, impelled from within, as though it were winter and she wanted to catch a snowflake, the girl stuck out her little cat tongue so that the butterfly could land and caress her striated palate with its wings. The tentative steps of those six feet across the lingual mucous proved to be an unexpected pleasure, yet soon a vibrant pain took its place, because the winged beast had stuck its toothed ovipositor into the scarlet tongue’s flesh, inseminating it with eggs as small as poppy seeds. Then it took flight again and vanished, leaving the girl to sob among the flowers like one violated by a fairy-tale flyer.
“The cerebral shell of the priest began to radiate an aura of fire, which incinerated the lepidopterous wings like dry leaves. Then, like a hydrogen balloon, his pink and snotty encephalon began to rise, with the cerebrum and stem, pulling the spinal marrow out behind it, freed from the yellow canal of the vertebrae. His body, emptied of noble substance, fell to the ground like the robes of a courtesan, leaving this second, truer body to float, free and glimmering, in the thick aspic of the hall air. It hung above our heads, immobile, for as long as the unbearable torture of Cecilia lasted. For soon The Albino emerged from our group. His white Pierrot face accentuated his black features. He snapped his rawhide crop now and then against his military boots, and when he reached the crumpled body of Fra Armando, he used it to push the body over the edge, into the abyss. He turned sternly toward the crowd, advanced on the first rows, and lashed them as hard as he could, gasping, until the whip tossed squirts of blood and pieces of torn ears and fingers into the air. People shoved each other and screamed, until a large amphitheater, full of fallen bodies, flayed to the bone by rawhide, formed an arc around the Master some distance from him. The silence was total; not even the wounded, some with cut throats, others with crushed eyes, dared to moan. Frightening, in this silence, was the sound of his metal-tipped shoes on the hyaline tiles. As for the silence of the central cascade of lights, it was mystical and negative — compared to this kind of silence, the lack of any sound would have been a monstrous cacophony. It was a quiet outside of hearing, or the ear, or consciousness — it was Outside. Monsieur Monsú reflexively straightened his colonial uniform and turned toward the ivory flow. With the end of his crop, he drew a complicated, indecipherable weaving, which persisted for a second in the air, like an illusory macramé. The viscous column stopped flowing at once, and the silence, terrestrial this time and greasy, drenched us like sweat. The edges of the column were sucked slowly toward the center, until only a sphere, a pearl as large as a cathedral, remained, floating on the black abyss. The pearl collapsed rapidly, greatly increasing in density, to become in the end so spacious that its central diameter could be subtended by a person with arms and legs spread. Strange chemical processes were unleashed in the milky bead, until it changed into a tomb of blinding crystal that emitted prismatic flashes …