The Word

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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 navigate waterfalls and rapids without taking in water.

      And 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

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