It is our hope that, should the brain be of ideal conformation, Dr. Aromal will oversee a lithographic series, printed on Arches and prefaced by Aromal’s inquiry and our brief paper: “The Brain as the Blueprint of a Transcendent Architecture.”
There is no doubt in our mind that it was Père’s description of the assassination of the sea tortoise that so addled us initially. The tortoise, its legs caught in a noose, wheels about the boat as gulls circle overhead shrilly piping. When the tortoise is exhausted, a boy (or several, depending on the turtle’s size) dives into the water and, seizing it, rolls it into the boat, where it is stunned with a hammer and kept helpless on its back.
Already a fire is smoking up the beach. Hauled to shore, the tortoise is thrust into a pit where, thrashing, he is roasted alive under a heap of burning embers. Père insisted on the quality of the meat—especially the flesh beneath the breastplate. He made this joke: “The tortoise carries his stewpot and coffin on his back. He is called tortoise,” Père continued, “because he twists about as he bakes.”
We were perhaps five at the time and found the tale odious; that a creature could be cooked alive in its own shell seemed especially wicked. We were devastated by the realization that living things were killed to be cooked and eaten, that the ribs of the lamb served as a rack for the meat. “It is the leg bone,” Père joked as he carved the Sunday roast, “that gives the dish its shape.” Pitiless Père! As he described the turtle feast on the beach, We squirmed on his lap and looked helplessly on as Death entered the room and the parlor was metamorphosed into a furnished tomb. The turtle’s anguish, the disgrace of its end, gyred in our little head. Seeing how frightened We were, how agitated, how pale, Père held us fast and insisted on describing a market on the Madagascar coast where one may see, set out on their backs on large tables, living turtles cut from their shells and lying in pools of blood. This blood is scooped up by female butchers (also intimately described; Père had never forgotten the ladies of Madagascar) and sold to clients who, having brought their own bowls, drink the fresh blood then and there. Hearing this We began to squeal but still Père was not done; to tell the truth he had only just begun. (Where was Mère? In the kitchen overseeing the jam-making. This story takes place in berry season.)
Turtle meat is—as you have ascertained—prized in Madagascar, and now that the turtle is free of its shell and bellowing, a steak is cut from its breast and then another; the entrails sliced away, the feet sold next and the liver. Soon all that remains are its lungs, heart, and head. O horror! The turtle’s eyes are still blinking, its beak opening and closing. And as if this were not enough to keep a child from sleeping for the rest of his days, Père now recalled the head of a decapitated prisoner he had seen when he was himself a little boy, rolling onto a cobbled courtyard before being picked up and dropped into a basket. “Its eyes were open wide,” Père said, “and its lips were flecked with foam. Had it been able to speak, it would have cursed the day of its birth.”
Despite his firm grasp, We leapt from Père’s knees as though they were red-hot and We hit the ceiling, screaming. This was the first time We blew our stack, and Mère came running with her spoon, her lips sticky with jam. We were on the carpet now, spinning like a top. Père gave us a terrific kick to shut us up and We—reduced to a quivering jelly—were hauled off to our room by Père—thundering like Jehovah, Mère behind weeping, her spoon in the air like a wand, the cook after, and last of all our nurse sniveling into her skirts. As soon as We reached the nursery, We threw ourself under the bed and refused to budge; anyone who attempted to pull us out was bitten. Père insisted We be “let to rot.”
It was there, under the bed in the nursery, that little by little We recovered from nervous exhaustion and began to dream of impervious integuments; it was there that our thoughts began to spin like the revolutions of an axle box, preparing the way for our ultimate discovery: the Domicile as Time-Absorbing Cuticle.
Because We proved incapable of formal schooling, We were tutored in the nursery by Monsieur Tardy-Cul, who, whenever We proved testy, warned us that Père had threatened to boil us like a soup bone and who made us wear a heavy wool bonnet with ears even in August, causing our brain to quicken vertiginously and deepening the condition Dr. Aromal diagnosed as delirious, brought on by our terror of being devoured by the man the natives of Madagascar called the Meat Grinder. (At this stage, fearing that Père might poison our porridge, We insisted on a food taster, having learned about them in our expurgated Arabian Nights, which Tardy-Cul read with an ill-tempered lisp. We also asked for a bodyguard, for We feared if he could not manage to poison us, Père would come upon us as We slept to crush our kidneys with a hammer, or—should he be unable to break the door—send a cobra down the nursery chimney.) We lived in constant fear that at any moment Père would seize us, tear us apart, shove us into his monstrous mouth, grind us to a pulp, swallow us, digest us, and shit us into our very own chamber pot. (We now know that in his accelerating decrepitude Père had forgotten us entirely, consumed by the memories of his exploits in Madagascar: sexual, military, and gastronomic.) The more We were degraded by our tutor and his threats, the greater did Père grow in our mind. Soon there was not an inch in which Père did not crouch fully armed with kitchen knife, cooking pot, and Appetite.
After an epileptic crisis caused by Tardy-Cul’s tale of Bruce in Ethiopia who, when looking for the source of the Nile, stood by aghast as sirloins were cut from living cows and eaten raw and fuming, We were rid of Tardy-Cul forever, and all manner of Tardy-Culs thereafter; and, following a minor upset over a governess’s tortoiseshell comb, allowed to school ourselves in the tranquil cove of Mère’s chamber as she knitted mufflers for the poor and prayed for our health, and where We learned the niceties of class systems, domestic gardens, the names of the colonies, their imports and exports, and, by drawing up lists, to write in a gorgeous hand:
One afternoon Mère told us a charming little anecdote that was to be the key to our vision which has ceaselessly inspired us and which prepared us for what was to follow: the visit of Madame Roseveine de la Roulette. Mère told Madame de la Roulette’s own story about a hermit crab who, having outgrown his own shell, found an ivory pipe washed to shore and, trying it on for size, took it for domicile. From then on the crab could be seen making its way along the beach, a scrap of seaweed clinging to the stem like a flag. The story made us laugh until We wept; Mère and We made merry deep into the afternoon.
All things of importance have a tendency to inscribe themselves on the sensile pages of our vivid histories. One glorious morning Père was trundled off to Angers to be treated for phlebitis, colitis, laryngitis, and gouty arthritis. As he was not expected to return before evening, Madame de la Roulette was invited for a morning’s visit. Because Père hated her for some reason, We were sworn to silence, delighting in a secret with both Mère and the maid, who was very gay and winked whenever she caught our eye, quivering with laughter like a greased eel. All this created an atmosphere of expectation so that the morning of the Great Adventure, and even before it began, We invented what We came to call our Dreamful Architecture. With colored pencils We sketched three worldly domiciles in which We could imagine dwelling in safety and peace.
That morning We imagined a summer domicile of sweet grasses, sprinkled with good earth and watered daily. This domicile is cooled by the natural process of evaporation, a process demonstrated to us by Tardy-Cul and which until that moment We had deemed of no interest whatsoever. By summer’s end this domicile could be harvested. It came to us to suggest to Heads of State that such dwellings be manufactured en masse for the rustics of tropical climes.
We next imagined a spherical domicile of padded India rubber so buoyant it could travel the rivers of the world sans dommage aucune; for example, its front portal snugly shut, this domicile could
