Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [127]
“Oh, really?”
“I don’t know why, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking of the Elphinstone Myriorama, since last night. All these possible permutations.”
“So what? Isn’t Do All Be All the motto on your coat of arms?”
The Anarchists pretended not to pay any attention to this cryptic teasing, but Heidenstamm couldn’t help observing, “I have never heard of a case of xiphopagus twins being of different sex. It must be really interesting from an anatomical point of view.”
Gabriel looked at him coldly and answered nothing. But after a while, he whispered into Brentford’s ears, “They are more like hermaphrodites, in fact. And very playful.”
Brentford recalculated the permutations. If he sometimes found Gabriel’s pursuits to be less than tasteful, he had to admit they bore witness to a curiosity of metaphysical proportions. The previous evening must have been, he supposed, Gabriel’s own farthest north, though doubtless from Gabriel’s point of view, his true North Pole was the Ingersarvik. From there onward, he could only go south.
“You know, there’s something else I keep thinking of since last night,” Gabriel said to Brentford, more loudly this time. “That story about Father Calixte.”
“The religious fanatic? You think he preached Nixon-Knox into creating the Phantom Patrol, do you? I have come to the same conclusion myself.”
“That was rather obvious,” Gabriel said nastily. “It was something else that sprang to my mind. You remember my godfather?”
“The archbishop? The one that had you spied upon by your Eskimo maid?”
“That’s the one. He knew this Father Calixte from his days in the Marist Missions among the Inuit. Apparently, the man had made himself half-mad from privations and wanting to live like an Eskimo. He had more and more frequent visionary fits, which he thought were prophetic, and he was of course a kind of black sheep for the Church hierarchy.”
“They have eyes and they cannot see,” said, without perceptible irony, Hardenberg, who had overheard the conversation and was getting interested in it.
“Just before Calixte died,” Gabriel went on, “he asked my godfather, who had always defended him as well he could, to execute his last will. But it was a rather hard task, even for an archbishop. The most delicate provision of that will was that Calixte wanted one of his own prophecies to be carved on his tombstone, rather than some quote from the Bible. As you can imagine, the idea fared rather poorly with his superiors. Finally, a compromise was reached: it would be written in old-style French, with a lettering so ornate as to be barely legible to the average passer-by. Some years ago, I saw this tombstone, somewhere in the floor of a particularly ill-lit spot of the crypt of St. Mark’s Dream, and, according to my godfather, it read thus: “La ville sera la proie du serpent jusqu’à ce que le fils deux fois né devers le pôle arctique les en délivre.”—“The city will be prey to the Snake until a twice-born son from beyond the arctic pole delivers it.”
“And?” asked Brentford, holding back a yawn.
“Well. At the time I would have understood this rubbish as purely allegorical. The Snake of course represented evil, or else the desire to reach the Pole, which Calixte was constantly raving about. The twice-born son could be a man baptized as an adult, a convert Inuk, for instance. That would have been consistent with Calixte’s missionary work. But then, yesterday, I saw a twice-born son from beyond the arctic pole, and it just rang a sleigh bell in me.”
“The twins? Is that who you mean?” said Brentford, his eyebrows arching Gothic-style.
“Who else? Not to mention that they are the only direct matrilineal descendants of one of the Seven Sleepers, whose return in one form or another is awaited by the New Venetians. And after having spoken a little with the twins, I can tell you that they are much more than you think.”
“In what sense?” asked Hardenberg, inviting himself into the conversation.
“They have obviously undergone some sort of innate Transpherence. They are as d’Ussonville as d’Ussonville himself was. I suspected