“ ‘Cover one eye,’ continued The Albino, ‘and see with the other: the world will look flat and wilted, like a drawing on a plate. Look with both eyes, and the hidden dimension will explode. The water will be deep and clear. One disjuncture is enough, a different angle of the two balls under the brain for the anaglyph to swell into bas-relief, hautrelief, into statues, and perhaps, if our eyes converge to the point where they can see into each other, the statue will also swell into something with multiple dimensions, an unimaginable object. Look now at this carpet of gaudy colors; this abstract leopard skin — and truly, at the distant walls of this hall, beyond the black precipice, will be painted an enormous shimmering rectangle in sapphires, emeralds, heliodors, and chrysoberyls — but look at it with dreams and distraction, taking it in at a glance, dissolving yourself in it. Your eyeballs will accentuate the convergence. The left image and the right image, phantomatically, will slide onto each other, will fit and join together, until the hologram comes to life and the wondrous chimera of the Book that contains us will be revealed in undying glory.’
“A colossal butterfly now spread its wings before us, inside a cube of blue light like an aquarium. On its purple velvet thorax glittered the brilliant tomb, suspended between heaven and earth, as though protected by the filiform legs. The vision lasted only a few minutes, until our sight grew tired and the incandescent spots became unformed again. Whither had the winged buffalo disappeared?
“In the same way, you can gaze at the gaudy spectacle of our world, the objects and deeds piled together, without reason, in heaps around you. Take each in turn and touch, smell, and think about it: useless. Chaos will constantly grow, because mystery is the father of an endless line of mysteries, and solutions are always partial and self-devouring … But think of everything at once, with a distracted and dreaming thought, until your cerebral hemispheres converge and the two slightly different images, rational and sensual, analytic and synthetic, diabolic and divine, male and female, glide onto each other. Suddenly the carpet of spots disappears and, clearly, in thousands of dimensions, we can think, for moments or millennia, of the undepictable face of Divinity. We will see then, face-to-face, what we have only glimpsed, partially, in mirrors and enigmas. Face to face: because our face is incorporated into His face. Eye to eye, because our eyeballs are in His eyes …
“Fra Armando’s brain pulsed like a pillar of fire over the people, emitting polygonal beams. Its medullar tail undulated gently, like a flagellum, in the gelatinous air of the immense, vaulted hall. A fine, fluorescent tattoo mapped out its complicated pathways of catecholaminergic, noradrenergic, and acetylcholinergic neurons: red, black, and violet lines strangely intersected and interwove. The brain began to glide slowly, propelled by spiral movements of its tail, toward the atrocious contraption that Melanie constructed with the meticulous, unconscious attention of a mantis religiosa. An operating table? electroshocks? torture? a rape machine from a libertine bolgia? Bearings and gears shone through a small window framed by hydraulic cylinders. In a bath of opalescent liquid floated a spongy fetus with wise, oriental eyes. Dental floss connected filiform electrodes to its head, and the cables were plugged into the machinery. Under a bell jar, connected also to the assemblage of switches, a leaden sibyl read from a thick book, following the black spiders of letters with an unspeakably dry finger. An appalling skinned cat, nailed to a wooden plank between two inductive bobbins, was the last organic component of the machine. A few ivory nerves had been detached dexterously from its flesh and spread on both sides of its martyred body, in a fine network, numbered and inscribed with thick, inky letters. The animal rolled its clear eyes, with vertical pupils, and now and then its whiskers twitched.
“Finishing her work, covered with yellow beads of sweat, the Magdalenian-era woman sat unmoving, like an ebony idol. She reeked of armpits and wild arum, and drew thousands of flies with metallic-green or blue-cyan thoraxes, which soon covered her like a living shirt of fluttering chainmail.
“The Albino, in his new incarnation as an underground insect, had lost his eyes, and in their place were two vague atavistic swellings under his skin of crystal scales. But the eye in his brow had lit up like a great sapphire and projected an intangible cone of light, which turned Cecilia’s chocolate skin a charming shade of blue. The nubile girl was already naked, rubbed with aloe and narcissus, painted black on her lips, nipples, and the delicate folds of her hairless pubis. Her lowered eyelids, painted with kohl and dusted with gold, projected constellations onto the colossal vault, madder than ever, creating a sweltering and luminous summer night. On her neck, on an iridium chain, was a row of seven raw emeralds, untouched by any jeweler’s tools. On each emerald, a Hebrew letter was written in reverse. Two murex shells hung on her ears, like earrings. A creamy yellow cornelian gem covered the divot of her navel. Her nails, however, were truly wondrous.
“Her hands and her feet had nails of an intense, ultramarine blue, unreal and fluid like in a dream. And each one had an image in its depths, in relief, miniscule and yet still clear, like those photographs of famous monuments (or shameless women) in optical lockets. However far you were from the black princess, you saw perfectly the Giottoesque painting in her nails, and if you concentrated on a detail (the dentil molding on a wall, the Cybele of an edge, the finial on the tip of a yellow bell, the embroidery of flowers and lizards on a vestment) you saw just as clearly the details in the details, down to the thousandth level, until, delving into the whirlpool of her polished nails, you reached the subatomic world of quarks, charms, and scents … Scenes from the New Testament were painted on her fingernails, against a naïve background of medieval palaces and sycamores: the Holy Virgin asleep in her room of bare stone walls, smiling in a dream and covering her bare shoulder, while the archangel, standing beside her bed, a three-cupped lily between its fingers, is too shy to wake her; Jesus as a child whittling a wooden cross, while all the other goatherders make whistles; him again climbing for the first time (at about seven years old) into a mandorla that will raise him to the sky, to be presented to the angels; the adolescent Jesus in the wilderness, curled up on the sand, holding a snake’s triangular head and looking into its transparent eyes; Jesus and John, sitting on a bluff, watching the Jordan reflect the twilight in its waters; the daughter of Jairus, one day after she was awoken from the dead, braiding her hair at the mirror and singing a song without words; Peter, on Mount Tabor, squinting at the crystal spacecraft and wondering where he could cut enough branches for three shelters: one for Moses, another for Elijah, and another for Jesus; the adulteress, alone in the place to which she was condemned, trying to decipher what Jesus wrote in the sand, while a white drop of seed hangs between her legs; Jesus eating in Matthew’s house with the tax collectors and the sinners, who are astonished by the triangular radiation from the temples of the Nazarene; Dismas, his arms painfully crooked on the wood of the cross, his face green with suffering, still smiling at the Marys, kneeling before the three; and trillions of stars scattered over Jerusalem, each foretelling an incredible Salvation, unintelligible, unimaginable, but true …
“In contrast, Cecilia’s toenails had illuminations from the old testament: Zipporah putting her son’s foreskin on her finger and saying proudly to the winged man, “Surely a bloody husband art thou to me!”; and the Angel of the Lord was by the threshing place of Araunah the Jebusite, arming himself with the devastating instrument and spreading plague over the people, from Dan to Beersheba; the head, legs, and hands of Isabella, in a pile of bloody tissue, and a dog with human eyes gnawing a finger with many rings; Maaseh, a sweet Philistine with silk eyelashes, embracing his wife for the last time and allowing his heart to be crushed for the Lord; Job, old and happy, fat, with his skin as pink as an infant’s, a ladybug on his finger just opening its wings to fly; a bride not even twelve years old, already decorated, holding her hand, in terror, over the place between her boyish thighs and thinking of the night to come; the Lord, on his sapphire throne over the cupola like a field of heaven, looking, with strange eyes of unearthly anatomy, over the arid landscape of Judea perishing below him; Ezekiel, in the valley of dry bones, in despair, gathering the wild lilies suddenly growing from the headbones and chestbones full of dust; Daniel, pulled from the lions’ den, still smelling days and days afterwards of the beasts’ testicles; the Day of Ire, descending unexpectedly, like a thief in the night, over the villages, vineyards and orchards, laying waste to all in an ambiguous glory …