We invented an airborne domicile with an inflatable roof made of a balloon in the shape of a gently convex mattress that would both keep the domicile pleasantly shaded and protected from the rain, as well as provide nesting places for birds. This domicile looks like a low-flying cloud and its inhabitants dwell far from inquisitous and nefarious eyes. It may be anchored above rain forests and so serve as a platform from which to discover the leafy theater below—animated by birds and butterflies and men: agile tribes who leap from tree to tree with their babes and their pantries strapped to their backs.
At eleven o’clock, Roseveine de la Roulette came to visit, bringing with her a charming collection of shells kept in a large box fitted with drawers. This was carried from her carriage to the summer porch by our man Lagrange. Throughout refreshments We eyed the cabinet with curiosity until, having delicately licked the sugar from her lips, her bodice quivering under the impulse of satisfied gourmandise, Roseveine took my hand in hers and led me to the mysterious object of my desire. With soft fingers she pulled the first drawer open and revealed a collection of Turbo shells, “stalwart bodies,” said she, “that cannot be torn from the rocks, not even by the strongest hands, nor in the roughest weather.” Lifting out a full-bellied, canary yellow specimen, she dropped it in our lap, where it appeared to melt like a knob of butter. She next took up a gold-mouthed Turbo; its interior was the color of egg yolk. That morning We were allowed to hold in both our trembling hands a Turbo marbled green, its nacre shining like the white of a young and healthy eye; a green Imperial parrot Turbo from the China seas; and a violently violet Turbo from New Zealand. Already flushed with excitement, We nearly wept when, the shells returned to their cabinet, Roseveine, her little nails glistening like an intimate nacre, opened a second drawer and initiated us into another world of wonders: spurred Imperators studded with spines, a Delphinula sphaerula as tusked as a tribe of elephants, a tiny trellised sundial from the coastal seas of Tranquebar.
The morning was spelled by Turritella—so like the horns of unicorns—a fantastical harvest of spotted cowries brooding in their cotton wool like the eggs of dragons. The day proved mild, the sun filtered by the lime trees, the air palpable with the sound of bees and Roseveine’s silvery laughter. When she was not handing us a shell, she was proffering bonbons in silver paper and although We were but six, we shuddered with rapture, thinking how wonderful it was to share the world with women!
Mère had lunch brought to the porch and because We were so well behaved and Père hours away, his thoughts far from us and ours from him, We were allowed to stay, to continue to hold the shells Roseveine proffered one by one. Enraptured We listened as she, caressing our curls, described the eyes of the cuttlefish “like brown silk shot with threads of gold”; told how she wrote all her correspondence in an ink found in the ink bags of fossil cuttlefish and sent to her from Oxford, England, by a natural historian who wrote books under the pseudonym Aster O’Phyton. This ink needed only to be reduced to a powder and mixed with water to produce a sepia of the best quality. What had precipitated such instantaneous death and fossilization that the ink sacs had not ruptured or rotted? We wished such a calamity upon Pére. How We should have loved to see him reduced to stone! And when Roseveine described the kraken, its arms the size of mizzenmasts, its suckers the size of pot lids, raking sailors from ships and shell collectors from the coastal rocks, again We imagined Pere’s instantaneous ruin. However, such revengeful thoughts caused us pain. It was impossible for the Butcher of Madagascar to fall in pieces at our feet: those pieces would reanimate and flourish! Instead of one, a thousand thousand would surge forth and more: a Butcher for each second of the day! For a moment the sky darkened; I heard a beak snapping in the air, a beak studded with an infinite set of teeth. But then Roseveine took up a pearl. It sparkled in her palm like a tiny, pristine world and caused us to smile once again.
Before she left, Roseveine gave us a Voluta imperialis so monumental, so sturdy We declared We should very much like to live in it. For at once We intuited: Within such a chamber We might forget that moments are extinguished as they happen, that Time is a famished mouth crushing everything that falls into it (and sooner or later everything falls into it!). Already We dreamed of drifting within the smooth coils of a boy-sized shell, of distilling nacre from the blood-soaked air of the paternal Domicile, of living and sleeping in a shallow, navigable room, and of marrying the transmarine Roseveine. We proposed right away and she, bubbly with laughter, drew us to her bosom and kissing our ear murmured: “Sweetheart, I am old enough to be your mother!” (I believe she was but twenty-five at the time.) Her smell of ambergris was new to me and our infant birdling rose for one thrilling instant and briefly piped—for what exactly? We could not have told you.
That night, and once We were adrift in our little bed, a bed in the shape of a scallop, and, thanks to a tantrum, suspended from the ceiling so that it could be reached only by a rope ladder, Roseveine’s green turban, her horned Murex and shimmering Tritons, her true labyrinths and false cornucopias, swiftly, silently orbiting in our mind’s eye, We began to dream our Dreamful Architecture of Unfulfilled Desire, which, in time, evolved into the Ideal Architecture of Fulfilled Desire: the prodigious marriage of aesthetics, chemistry, and psychiatry. As snug as a cephalopod in its retreat, our ladder coiled at our feet, We began to seriously investigate the Domicile as a Sanctuary in which to float far from the blustering winds of patriarchy, the sounds of bells, of kitchen chatter, the horrible ring of the telephone recently installed.
The Voluta pressed to our lips, the words We had heard for the first time tumbled about in our brain like bits of green glass at the bottom of the sea: coral zone, coralline, littoral; annelids, ammonites, and zoophytes . . . Yes, these lovely words and also certain phrases she had whispered into our eager ear such as obscure crevices and lonely places; deep waters, the sand under stones; muddy bottoms, the Sea of Aral, stalk-eyed crustacea, gardens in penumbra, rafts of tropical debris; the herring fleet at Wick Bay, tiger cowrie . . .
We were roused in the middle of the night by Père who in his pain and fever imagined himself in the thick of the wars in which he was such a devastating player; the years in Madagascar when from Majunga to Tananarive, the roots of trees were gorged with blood and all the earth blackened by the dead. His pain was great; he could not move his bloated legs but only thrash his arms and hack at the air with his sword and shout: “I am the Kingdom and the Glory!” We could not help but hear him and, plunging beneath the covers, weep. It came to us that the world is far too corrupt to have given occasion to the gentle mollusk, and imagined it an asteroid fallen from some other universe.
Because of Père’s incapacity—he kept to his bed as though fixed there with glue—Mère invited Roseveine to luncheon the following week. Père, propped up with pillows, was polishing the pistols that had served him in the wars, all the while shouting at phantom whores and soldiers. From time to time his voice floated out to the porch where We sat in the shade of the lindens served by the maid nearly doubled over with suppressed laughter. Indeed it seemed a daring thing to be making merry on the porch with a woman whose company Père had forbidden, whilst Père, confined to his chamber, engaged in phantasmagorical fornication and war.
We were served an ethereal lunch: a salad of nasturtiums, squash blossoms made into beignets, an orange-flavored flan—the whole washed down with rare Chinese tea. Whenever Père’s ranting would reach us, Roseveine bubbled over with laughter. On one of these occasions We took the liberty to slip from our chair and, concealed by the tablecloth, to take one of Roseveine’s slippered feet in our hands.
“And what are you up to, little husband?” said she, gently teasing. “Playing at cobbler?”
“Yes!” We replied, although it was a lie. “That is what We are doing. We are playing at cobbler!”
“A royal cobbler, apparently,” she said laughing to our mother, “who refers to himself with a royal We! But I would have it no other way,” said she. “In other words, if I am to be cobbled, well then:
