The Architect (12 page)

Nachtman’s bizarre dreams seemed to have pushed themselves out of his cranium and grown exponentially into this dark and brooding thing that jutted up out of the earth, fed on prayers and derangement and groped at the heavens as if trying to claw out the entrails of the very gods themselves.

XXXII.

“She can serve a period of apprenticeship and then we will see,” the architect said.

“But she is a good girl. She would make a wonderful wife. Her desserts are excellent.”

“As, I said, I am willing to give her a trial.”

And so it was that Enheim’s daughter washed the feet of the architect, made him sweets, sacrificed her lips and even attempted to give him her heart, but he, who had so many of the opposite sex at his disposal, was anything but entertained—found her insipid and, in the end, determined that a marriage with the young lady would be a dull and unnecessary business.

“I think being a bachelor is my destiny,” he said to the doctor.

“But…”

“The structure needs to be completed. She would be more useful putting her hands to good use instead of baking me cookies.”

The next day Enheim informed his daughter that, at least for the present, she was to remain single.

Trudy took her father by the hand. He leaned over and kissed her forehead, caressing her young face with his thick beard. Together they gazed at the structure before them—at the workers who were in the process of finishing the great dome with the fleshcrete of their recently accepted comrades—at the works near at hand, where others were queued up to be processed, transformed into building material.

“Ah, it will not be long before it is finished,” he said.

“I am proud of you father. You have done so much.”

“I have done what I can.”

“Father, I wish to be amongst their number.”

Enheim looked at his daughter in astonishment.

“I want to give myself to the cause,” she continued.

“Absolutely not. I forbid it!”

“But why, when you have spoken of the wonderful things beyond?”

“Because, er, it would be unsuitable.”

“I cannot think of anything more suitable than for the daughter of the Commander Adeptus Magus to sacrifice her meaningless body in order to receive a body of light on the twelfth plane.”

The doctor threw up his hands in frustration.

“The answer is no,” he declared. “And that is completely final. There are enough workers willing to do this without you. Your sacrifice is not needed. Not in any way needed!”

XXXIII.

Other members, those with the oddest figures—the ugly, the ridiculous—the hunchbacks and strange gaunt giants with lantern jaws, were chosen to be the grotesques, chosen to be mounted as gargoyles on the outside walls. These he, the Knight of the Red Eagle, invested, suffocated in latex and plaster and then burned out their bodies at high temperature before immortalizing them in bronze and aluminium—frightful statues that still retained the contortions of death, the grimaces of pain. These were then mounted high up on the outside in the hundreds. There were figures which cringed and figures which threw open their arms wildly, faces distorted, with wide eyes and sickening grins. Some with outstretched hands, others shrinking away; or with mouths open, into which gutters were inserted so that when it rained, the water would spew from their orifices, so that it seemed as if those horrible beings were vomiting endless streams of mucous.

“You see, I also understand beauty,” the architect said. “Thus these human beings serve a double purpose. In a utilitarian manner, they give us the material we need to finish the structure. At the same time, they adorn it, giving it a final dazzle that would be difficult not to appreciate. We honour their sacrifice, and entomb them in the building they helped to create, where respects will be paid to their memories for a long time to come.”

To add to the wildness, the architect took goats, cows and other farm animals and did the same to them—so a sort of hideous menagerie was formed, where crude bovines sat perched at great heights and chickens, melted together in dozens, appeared like nasty cherubim on the wall arcading.

Then, to further the decoration, many strange beasts were carved in stone: Long worms with human heads; three-headed buffalos; lions with the breasts of women; and gorillas spliced with rams. A chaos of bizarre creatures crept out of the towers and facade, mutations, things that were half insect, half fish, or then again fish with legs and men with fins—an infinite variety of combinations, deformities hatched from nightmares.

XXXIV.

Dr. Enheim burst out of the little train. He rushed forward, following his belly rapidly towards the structure. Borromeo, wearing a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, feet in sturdy leather boots, was there—talking in low tones to one of the few remaining workers, one of the Company of Good Men, one of those mountains of tendons and muscle.

“Where is she? Where is Trudy?” the doctor cried out. “I have been away for a few days. A fundraiser in Zürich. And, upon returning…”

Borromeo pointed to a pile of bricks.

“But…” Enheim murmured in horror.

“I tried to dissuade her, but she was adamant,” the athlete said. “And in the end, who am I to try and block someone’s spiritual progress.”

“I am speechless.”

“I knew you would come, so I set her aside. She is here…this one on the left.”

The doctor looked at the brick. It was smaller than the others, about 20 × 12 × 6 cm, and in fact did somehow seem to be her, Trudy Enheim, and the doctor, gazing at its surface, thought he could see her soft brown eyes, which were like those of a calf, staring at him from out of its surface, and thought he could hear the thing whispering words and when he took it up, it seemed as if he were touching her small plump hands.

He stood up very straight, his beard before him like a shield. “Now, more than ever,” he said, “am I determined to see this project through to the end in a grand style.”

“Yes.”

“And I personally, with my own hands, will set this brick in place. And high, high up I will put it.”

XXXV.

Through self-depravation Maria’s luscious body had lost its contours, her cheeks had become concave, her complexion as white as snow. A pale blue tint was seen about her temples and a somewhat darker tone beneath her eyes. Yet this decay added to her beauty, made it profoundly striking, as in the paintings of female martyrs who, with red plasma spurting from open wounds, crowns of thorns and weeds resting on their heads, draw the interest of the opposite sex, who are most attracted to the female in her vulnerable state—a dependent creature that cannot run or hide, who minces forward in high-heels, her thin blood barely warming her meagre muscular tissue, her eyes glazed, languid.

She smiled often, but weakly, pathetically. She had her hair cut short, cropped it like a boy’s, so that her long white neck showed. Lost in some sort of pseudo-spiritual cloud, a cloud of incense and self-imposed hallucination, she wandered from the cemetery of her past—where the corpses of her former interests and ambitions lay mouldering—into the dark forest of love, a place in which she shivered under chilly shadows and let her skin be pierced by the eager brambles of that man who would have sooner finished off a wounded fawn than wrestled with a bear; that man who needed flesh, red meat, and was happy that it was there warm on his plate without need to hunt hard for it.

Great loves are disgustingly selfish, and leave room in the heart for none but the adored. The relationship Maria had with Nachtman was one of those bizarre anomalies of nature which would have left Darwin scratching his head.

Kissing the uneven surface of the architect’s skull, she would murmur romantic smudges calculated to titillate and then, having collapsed into his arms with an ardour truly frightening, having wrapped her lips around his nose and ears in turn, she would offer herself to him bodily, this woman who had the temperament of a disciple, was as searing as a fire-brand. These episodes, as acute as they were alarming, seemed to carry with them something of the cabaret—the disgusting entertainment of Nazi transvestites and leather clad midgets.

With his gut sticking forward and armpits exhaling effluvia, the architect accepted her love as some deity would a blood sacrifice, gurgling in his intoxication about strange dreams in which he was visited by mahatmas who instructed him on the secrets of the ancient Myceneans and Egyptians and then, wagging a tongue off which cream-coloured spittle slid, he would proceed to sample the morsels of her buffet as outside the sound of work rang on—the gruff cries of the Company of Good Men going up amongst the rattle of hydromechanical work tools.

Then what was love to this man?

It was around half past seven in the morning when she arrived at the work site. She slipped into his tent, went to the bed. A figure was there, beneath the blankets and sheets. She sat down beside it, pressed her hand close. Then it rose up, appeared out of those coverings of cotton and wool—Borromeo, glassy-eyed, muscular chest uncovered.

“Alex isn’t here,” he said in a sleepy voice. “He’s out, looking over the men no doubt.”

A moment later, outside the tent, she wiped a tear from her eye.

“I cannot blame him,” she murmured to herself. “I cannot expect a genius to be satisfied with my meagre treasures. And if he is happy, I should be. His heart is surely big enough to share and he needs a great many sensations to satisfy his regal appetite.”

XXXVI.

Summer had wilted away and now it was, once again, autumn.

The structure itself seemed to be coming to life, gorged as it was with other lives—a huge organic thing with eyes that saw and lungs that breathed. Its shape was hybrid—half animal, half vegetable—something between a gargantuan fungus and an antediluvian lizard. It was such a thing that was impossible to look at without emotion, for it represented all mankind’s strongest emotions—was a physical manifestation of fear and hope, of violent passion and sacrifice; a re-enforcement of the awesomeness of the universe—of chaos and the leech-like derangement that is integral to human nature and make this species sweep aside forests, drain oceans, commit nuclear follies, all with the utmost diligence, in the belief that such madness helps it progress.

The board members themselves were feverish, often finding it difficult to speak in full sentences or connect their thoughts. Having channelled so much of their energy, so much of themselves into that building, they had difficulty distinguishing their own selves from the stones and towers.

Maria kissed its very walls and Dr. Enheim, tossing his great belly to the ground, wet its marble floor with his tears. Nesler, whenever he had a spare moment, went to the temple that was to carry his name, that niche on the east side of the structure, and, gently whistling an air from Schubert, gazed at the place with manifest satisfaction.

As for Borromeo, he strutted from one end of the interior to the other, like a peacock, now sweeping out a corner, now polishing a part of a wall—feeling as one privileged, one who had been touched by the wings of Cassiel and seen the Seventh Heaven, who had been graced by earthquakes and hurricanes, had his strong limbs tempered by the lead and melancholy.

XXXVII.

Another winter had all but passed. A winter even milder than the previous.

Peter walked out of the building, the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, with a backpack over one shoulder. While working on the project, he had neglected his studies, in truth even despised his teachers, but now he was back at it, spending his days buried in books, immersed in theory, rather than up on that mountain top where men and machines did battle with earth and sky.

He felt intolerably lonely, had heard what had happened to Trudy, and it saddened him deeply. He tried to imagine that he might at some future time meet her. Might meet her in some other world, where their spirits, golden yellow flames, would flit about, now intertwining, now blending—giving kisses without flesh, making those strange eternal pledges that are the core of religion and love. He tried to imagine, but he could not—could, when it was night, only see in the stars flickers of light from masses of dying plasma, of hydrogen long since extinguished, and in the day, as his feet stepped one before the next, only could he see grim-faced pragmatism that cut the heads off all dreams.

He sniffed and pushed the hair back away from his eyes as he thought about it—continued his way, along the Corso Bello, the facades of the buildings hiding so many old women sunk in apricot-coloured divans mentally caressing their fossilized loves, their memories of springtime; concealing the lean forms of unemployed bachelors whose thoughts roosted in dirty corners; and also concealing stooping lunatics who shambled from side to side. So it is that, shuttered in, lives disappear unseen—buildings being places to hide from the sun and ourselves, private theatres in which we can dramatize—our audience four walls and closed windows.

The street was cobbled. A few bored shopkeepers stood outside their shops. Smoking cigarettes, eyes half-closed, scratching bellies which waited patiently for the dinner hour, when they could be stuffed full of masticated horse flesh, corn mush, cheeses which carried with them the sapidity of marigolds and fresh grass.

Peter felt a hand on his shoulder and turned around.

It was Fabrizio Fabrizi.

He had clearly slid since the young man had last seen him. His cleft chin was unshaven and his blue eyes tinged with red. He wore a pair of dirty jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up so that his forearms were exposed. As he stood before Peter, he swayed slightly, his legs not entirely sure which way the earth was.

“So how is life up there on the mountain?” he asked, a grim note to his voice, a spark of anger in his eyes.

“I don’t know. I have left the project—or, rather, been kicked off of it, as I never did put forward a resignation.”