There's one other occupant of the place that I think I should mention, and that's Cesaria's personal servant. How she came to have him as her bosom companion will be the subject of a later passage, so I'll leave the details until then. Let me say only this: he is, in my opinion, the saddest soul in the house. And when you consider the sum of sorrow under this roof, that's no little claim.
Anyway, I don't want to get mired in melancholy. Let's move on.
Having listed the human, or almost human, occupants of L'Enfant, I should make mention perhaps of the animals. An estate of this size is of course home to innumerable wild species. There are foxes, skunks and possums, there are feral cats (escapees from domestic servitude somewhere in Rollins County), and a number of dogs who make their home in the thicket. The trees are busy with birds night and day, and every now and then an alligator wanders up from the swamp and suns itself on the lawn.
All this is predictable enough. But there are two species whose presence here is rather less likely. The first was imported by Marietta, who took it into her head some years back to raise three hyena pups. How she came by them I don't recall (if she ever told me); I only know she wearied of surrogate motherhood quickly enough, and turned them loose. They bred, mcestuously of course, and now there's quite a pack of them out there. The other oddities here are my stepmother's pride and joy: the porcupines. She's kept them as pets since first occupying the house, and they've prospered. They live inside, where they roam unfettered and unchallenged, though they prefer on the whole to stay upstairs, close to their mistress.
We had horses, of course, in my father's day-the stables were palatially appointed-but none of them survived an hour beyond his passing. Even if they'd had choice in the matter (which they didn't), they were too loyal to live once he'd gone; too noble. I doubt the same could be said of any of the other species. They grudgingly coexist with us while we're here, but I doubt there would be much grieving among them if we all departed. Nor do I imagine they'd long respect the sanctity of the house. In a week or two they'd have taken up residence: hyenas in the library, alligators in the cellar, foxes running riot under the great dome. Sometimes I wonder if they're not eyeing it already; planning for the day when it's theirs to shit on from roof to foundations.
My suite of rooms is at the back of the house, four rooms in all, none of which were designed for their present purpose. What is now my bedroom-and the chamber I consider the most charming in the house-was originally a dining room used by my late father, Hursek Nicodemus Barbarossa, who did not once sit at the same table as Cesaria all the time I lived here. Such is marriage.
Adjacent to the study where I am sitting now, Nicodemus put his collection of keepsakes, a goodly portion of which was-at his request-buried with him when he died. There he kept the skull of the first horse he ever owned, along with a comprehensive and outlandish collection of sexual devices fashioned over the ages to increase the pleasure of connoisseurs. (He had a tale for every one of them: invariably hilarious.) This was not all he kept here. There was a gauntlet that had belonged to Saladin, the Moslem lover of Richard the Lionheart. There was a scroll, painted for him in China, which depicted, he once told me, the history of the world (though it seemed to my uneducated eyes simply a landscape with a serpentine river winding through it); there were dozens of representations of the male genitals-the lingam, the jade flute, Aaron's rod (or my father's favorite term: Il Santo Membra, the holy cock)-some of which I believe were carved or sculpted by his own priests, and therefore represent the sex that spurted me into being. Some of those objects are still here on the shelves. You may think that odd; even a little distasteful. I'm not certain I would even argue with that opinion. But he was a sexual man, and these statues, for all their crudity, embody him better than a book of his life, or a thousand photographs.
And it's not as if they're the only things on the shelves.
Over the decades I've assembled here a vast library.
Though I speak only English, French and a halting Italian,
I read Hebrew, Latin and Greek, so my books are often antiquated, their subjects arcane. When you've had as much time on your hands as I've had, your curiosity takes obscure turns. In learned circles I'd probably be counted a world expert in a variety of subjects that no person with a real life to live-children, taxes, love-would give a fig about.
My father, were he here, would not approve of my books. He didn't like me to read. It reminded him, he would tell me, of how he'd lost my mother. A remark, by the way, which I do not understand to this day. The only volume he encouraged me to study was the two-leaved book that opens between a woman's legs. He kept ink, pen and paper from me when I was a child; though of course I wanted them all the more because they were forbidden me. He was determined that my real schooling be in the art and craft of horse breeding, which, after sex, was his great passion.
As a young man I traveled the world on his behalf, buying and selling horses, organizing their transportation to the stables here at L'Enfant, learning how to understand their natures as he understood them. I was good at what I did; and I enjoyed my travels. Indeed I met my late wife, Chiyojo, on one of those trips; and brought her back here to the house, intending to start a family. Those sweet ambitions were unfortunately denied me, however, by a sequence of tragedies that ended with the death of both my wife and that of Nicodemus.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I was talking about this room, and what it housed during my father's occupancy: the phalli, the scroll, the horse's skull. What else? Let me think. There was a bell which Nicodemus claimed had been rung by a leper healed at the Crucifixion (he took the bell to his grave), and a device, no bigger than the humidor in which I keep my havanas, which plays a curious, whining music if touched, its sound so close to the human voice that it's possible to believe, as my father insisted, that its sealed interior contains a living mechanism.
Please feel free to make of these claims what you will, by the way. Though my father has been dead almost a hundred and forty years, I'm not about to call him a liar in print. Such men as my father do not take kindly to having their stories questioned, and though he is deceased I do not entirely believe I am beyond his reach.
Anyway, it is a fine room. Obliged as I am to sit here most of the day I have become familiar with every nuance of its form and volume, and were Jefferson standing before me now I would tell him: sir, I can think of no happier prison than this; nor any more likely to inspire my slovenly mind to fly.
If I am so very happy here, sitting with a book in my hands, why, you may ask, have I decided to put pen to paper and write what will be inevitably a tragic history? Why torment myself this way, when I could wheel myself out onto the balcony and sit with a copy of St. Thomas Aquinas in my lap and watch life in the mimosas?
There are two reasons. The first is my half-sister Marietta.
It happened like this. About two weeks ago she came into my room (without knocking, as usual), partook of a glass of gin, without asking, as usual, and sitting down without invitation in what used to be my father's chair said: "Eddie…"