The Word "Desire". Rikki Ducornet

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: cobble me royally!”

      Reassured by this, We unlaced the slipper to find a little stockinged foot, deliciously damp, smelling of live oysters and raw silk. With trembling lips We caressed her toes. We heard Roseveine sigh. With a tinkle her custard spoon fell to its dish.

      “The flan is delicious,” Roseveine said to our mother, “and so is your little son.” Bending over and peering down under the table she smiled at me meltingly and with her hand caressed my cheek. For one dizzying instant she probed my ear with her little finger. “Your ear is exactly like a Bulla ampulla,” said she.

      So touched were We our eyes welled with tears. “Little husband!” cried Roseveine as We nibbled her instep, “I have fallen in love and decided to divorce Monsieur de la Roulette and—with your mother’s permission—marry”you!„

      We grabbed her calves, and our face pressed to her knees, clung there like a modest echinoderm sans the instinct to travel. For a long moment We stayed there, our thumbs pressed to the rotator bones of her ankles.

      But this charmed moment was interrupted by a roar from Père, the shrill voice of Père’s nurse, a seismic thudding that seemed endless and held us frozen in terror and surprise, and then the sudden appearance of Père himself seething with rage and nearly busting from his bathrobe and Moroccan slippers. Anchored to the doorframe and with all the strength he could muster, Père, visibly approaching exhaustion, bellowed:

      “What is that Jewess doing here?”

      Again Roseveine’s laughter percolated through the air. Standing to face him, she gathered her skirts to her bosom and spreading her legs pissed profusely, her amber water a stunning spectacle recalling the engravings We had seen of the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi and Tisisat on the Blue Nile. Not surprisingly, her piss had the smoky fragrance of Lapsang souchong. This sublimely anarchic act hurtled Père into the vortex of apoplexy; he did not survive the afternoon.

      But this she could not know. For as Père, brittle as mummy, crumbled to his knees, his hands splashing in the steaming puddle she had made, Roseveine sailed off and away, down the balcony steps, into the garden, past the stone fountain, the banks of trees, into the pergola and out the garden gate. She created a void that has never been filled, not even by the persistent memory of her laughter.

      Several months after Père’s demise, Roseveine came to visit one last time. She and her husband were about to leave France for French Canada, where they intended to form a publishing company devoted to the Natural Sciences. Their first publication would be Aster O’Phyton’s Ocean illustrated with lithographs, some of which she had brought along to show me: A Fleet of Medusae, Tubipora Musica, and one which caused us to cry out in terror but also in secret delight: A French Officer Seized by a Gigantic Cuttlefish