And thus it was that the exhausted pilgrim found shelter at last, swathed in the woolen blanket, the first thing he has stolen since those fateful grapes that landed him in the late Melampo's terrible brass-studded collar all those decades ago, and nested in sawdust and woodchips, his natural element — being, that is, the son of a carpenter. Melampetta immediately set to mothering him, digging a warm hole for him, feeling his pulse and touching his forehead with her dry nose, tucking rags and papers around him, stirring up a smoldering fire in a rusty oil drum, ignoring his protests and brewing him up some kind of pottage, scolding Alidoro for not taking proper care of him and directing the old dog in the construction of their little shelter against the winter storm, quoting various authors on the subjects of architecture, calefaction, climatology as related to nuclear accidents and flea sprays, and the general unpredictability of fate. "One never knows," she sighs, gazing down on him in wonder, "what might happen in this curious world," which is something his father might have said, though she attributes it to Alexander the Great at the time of his circumcision.
"The Great Dane, no doubt," growls Alidoro drily, smashing up the beach chair to add to the pile of firewood. "What good does it do to put up all these walls? It's windier inside here than out!"
"Sarcasm and parody," sighs Melampetta, "the final recourse of the mental defective. You can see, sir, what I've had to suffer all my life in this sunken and benighted haunt of farts and lechers. How I envy you your life in the real world!"
In spite of all he's had to eat and drink, the soup — which Melampetta, as she tips it down him, compares to the curative "hand of a saint, such as that of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the Thaumaturge of the West, for example, or six-fingered Simon Magus, or Hermes Trismegistus who once lanced a boil with a mere spoonful of puree of mashed peas" — does indeed taste good, soothing lips, tongue, throat, and belly in its healing passage. The fire is crackling away in the old barrel now, turning it a glowing translucent red in spots and casting a soporific dance of light against the corrugated roof overhead. He is warm and sleepy and his bed of sawdust and wood chips is cozy and sentimentally familiar, for in such did he sleep as an urchin in a corner of his father's workshop. Alidoro, with a gaping yawn, has settled down beside him, jaws on paws. Everywhere there is a deep and heavy silence like a down quilt being laid over him. But
"I–I can't sleep. I'm sorry — it's my my clothes "
"Are they too tight, comrade? I thought you'd be warmer "
"No, they "
"He shat in them," Alidoro explains.
"Ah, well, why didn't you say so? All the time I thought this was your contribution to the unsavory atmosphere, old gutter-guts, ambulant orchard of dungballs and dingleberries that you are. Don't you know, as demonstrated by our spiritual but restless father Marx in the full blush of his prickly Grundrisse, that he who lies down in his own shit wakes up a sight for psoriasis? So what are you waiting for? We've had to listen to your drivel all night, let's put it to some practical use. For, as Jesus once preached to Mary Magdalene whilst she was anointing his bum, thereby freeing herself from at least seven nasty boogers: 'Blessed are the arse-wipers, Maggie, for they shall behold the Eye of God!' So let's make with the holy water, drizzle-chops, out with the tongue and into the pasta, as they say, for one must taste sorrow to appreciate happiness, and, once the bib's on, one might as well lick the plate clean!"
"All my life," the old professor whispers abashedly as Alidoro rises with a weary grunt and commences to peel the blanket away, "I have searched for meaning and dignity, striving to be true to to her vision of me." He shudders, though not from the cold. He is anticipating their horror at what they are about to find. "But I have been so so lonely "
"Her — ?" mutters the old mastiff, tugging his shoes off him.
He hesitates. He feels emptied out, shrunken, and more vulnerable and exposed than at any time since that half-remembered day when he first took rude shape under his father's knife and chisel. It is as though his insides and outsides were changing places, leaving his heart quite literally on his sleeve, and much worse besides, yet another bitter pill. "The the Blue-Haired Fairy," he gasps, flushed with shame.
"Tell us about it," murmurs Melampetta soothingly, unbuttoning his clothes. "Make a clean breast of it, if you'll pardon the expression, empty the sack, let it all hang out, flat-footed, hair down, and no bones. Let it fly, sir. Trot it out. Spit the toad, as Saint Tryphone of Bythinia once said to the demon-possessed daughter of Emperor Gordianus, thereby bringing on the most awesome eructation and setting the bells to ringing." She licks him gently behind the ear. "Tell us about your life, old gentleman. Tell us about the Blue-Haired Fairy "
7. A STRANGE BIRTH
"Men, if lucky," he is quoting himself now, dredging up from what's left (not much) of his enfeebled memory this seminal line from his current work-in-progress, or once in progress, now perhaps arrested and lost forever, for he could never, not even with a final massive exertion of his notorious will, reconstruct the whole of it, not even with the magical assistance of that enigmatic creature upon whose intervention his own quotidian progress, also perhaps about to be arrested forever, has depended throughout his long career, a career and a dependency he has just, in his gathering (and altogether agreeable) stupor, been elucidating, or trying to, and which, by means of this allusive proposition which lies at the heart of the Mamma papers (if he can remember it), he is now attempting to sum up, "are graced in their lifetime by one intense insight that changes everything. Mine was the discovery that the Blue-Haired Fairy was pretending not to be dead, but to be alive, that in fact it was not she who had given me a place in the world, you see, but I who had called her into being. Grasping this seeming paradox altered my life forever "
"Seeming — ?" growls Alidoro indignantly, lapping his thighs, while Melampetta licks at his right nipple. "If Mela and me aren't the real thing, old comrade, then you've beshit yourself with zabaglione!"
"Oh, I do love paradoxes," Melampetta murmurs between strokes of her long wet tongue. It feels like oiled ebony paper, gently applied. She moves into the thoracic cavity now, pushing provocatively at his knobby sternum, then works her way slowly down the hollow between his ribs past his diaphragm toward what others, having one of the things, would call their navel. "It's like being in heat in a hailstorm, a kind of — slurp! slop! — ungratifiable arousal, as though the point of it all were not larking or litters but — thlupp! — mere longing itself. I believe it was Saint Catherine of the Festering Stigmata who wrote in one of her — sklorrp! — letters with respect to her peculiar inconvenience of having to menstruate out of a rip in her left — tbwerpl shloop! — side that paradox was like a half-laid egg, speaking theologically of course, as the pious lady was always wont to — ffrup! flawp! — do, even when the curse was on her and — sluck! — bespattering her farthingales." She pauses to lick at her own coat a moment as though to wipe her tongue there, before returning to his abdomen, now tingling with the chill of her evaporating saliva. Alidoro, having nosed his thighs apart, is pressing toward his knees, panting heavily. "But this is a strange birth indeed," adds Melampetta. "A son pregnant with his own mother!"