My suite of rooms is at the back of the house, four rooms in all, none of which were designed for their present purpose. What is now my bedroom—and the chamber I consider the most charming in the house—was originally a dining room used by my late father, Hursek Nicodemus Barbarossa, who did not once sit at the same table as Cesaria all the time I lived here. Such is marriage.
Adjacent to the study where I am sitting now, Nicodemus put his collection of keepsakes, a goodly portion of which was—at his request—buried with him when he died. There he kept the skull of the first horse he ever owned, along with a comprehensive and outlandish collection of sexual devices fashioned over the ages to increase the pleasure of connoisseurs. (He had a tale for every one of them: invariably hilarious.) This was not all he kept here. There was a gauntlet that had belonged to Saladin, the Moslem lover of Richard the Lionheart. There was a scroll, painted for him in China, which depicted, he once told me, the history of the world (though it seemed to my uneducated eyes simply a landscape with a serpentine river winding through it); there were dozens of representations of the male genitals—the lingam, the jade flute, Aaron’s rod (or my father’s favorite term: Il Santo Membro, the holy cock)—some of which I believe were carved or sculpted by his own priests, and therefore represent the sex that spurted me into being. Some of those objects are still here on the shelves. You may think that odd; even a little distasteful. I’m not certain I would even argue with that opinion. But he was a sexual man, and these statues, for all their crudity, embody him better than a book of his life, or a thousand photographs.
And it’s not as if they’re the only things on the shelves. Over the decades I’ve assembled here a vast library. Though I speak only English, French and a halting Italian, I read Hebrew, Latin and Greek, so my books are often antiquated, their subjects arcane. When you’ve had as much time on your hands as I’ve had, your curiosity takes obscure turns. In learned circles I’d probably be counted a world expert in a variety of subjects that no person with a real life to live—children, taxes, love—would give a fig about.
My father, were he here, would not approve of my books. He didn’t like me to read. It reminded him, he would tell me, of how he’d lost my mother. A remark, by the way, which I do not understand to this day. The only volume he encouraged me to study was the two-leaved book that opens between a woman’s legs. He kept ink, pen and paper from me when I was a child; though of course I wanted them all the more because they were forbidden me. He was determined that my real schooling be in the art and craft of horse breeding, which, after sex, was his great passion.
As a young man I traveled the world on his behalf, buying and selling horses, organizing their transportation to the stables here at L’Enfant, learning how to understand their natures as he understood them. I was good at what I did; and I enjoyed my travels. Indeed I met my late wife, Chiyojo, on one of those trips; and brought her back here to the house, intending to start a family. Those sweet ambitions were unfortunately denied me, however, by a sequence of tragedies that ended with the death of both my wife and that of Nicodemus.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was talking about this room, and what it housed during my father’s occupancy: the phalli, the scroll, the horse’s skull. What else? Let me think. There was a bell which Nicodemus claimed had been rung by a leper healed at the Crucifixion (he took the bell to his grave), and a device, no bigger than the humidor in which I keep my havanas, which plays a curious, whining music if touched, its sound so close to the human voice that it’s possible to believe, as my father insisted, that its sealed interior contains a living mechanism.
Please feel free to make of these claims what you will, by the way. Though my father has been dead almost a hundred and forty years, I’m not about to call him a liar in print. Such men as my father do not take kindly to having their stories questioned, and though he is deceased I do not entirely believe I am beyond his reach.
Anyway, it is a fine room. Obliged as I am to sit here most of the day I have become familiar with every nuance of its form and volume, and were Jefferson standing before me now I would tell him: sir, I can think of no happier prison than this; nor any more likely to inspire my slovenly mind to fly.
If I am so very happy here, sitting with a book in my hands, why, you may ask, have I decided to put pen to paper and write what will be inevitably a tragic history? Why torment myself this way, when I could wheel myself out onto the balcony and sit with a copy of St. Thomas Aquinas in my lap and watch life in the mimosas?
There are two reasons. The first is my half-sister Marietta.
It happened like this. About two weeks ago she came into my room (without knocking, as usual), partook of a glass of gin, without asking, as usual, and sitting down without invitation in what used to be my father’s chair said: “Eddie…”
She knows I hate to be called Eddie. My full name’s Edmund Maddox Barbarossa. Edmund is fine; Maddox is fine; I was even called The Ox in my younger day, and didn’t find it offensive. But Eddie? An Eddie can walk. An Eddie can make love. I’m no Eddie.
“Why do you always do that?” I asked her.
She sat back in the creaking chair and smiled mischievously, “Because it annoys you,” she replied. A typically Mariettaesque response, I may say. She can be the very soul of perversity, though to look at her you’d never think it. I won’t dote on her here (she gets far too much of that from her girlfriends), but she is a beautiful woman, by any measure. When she smiles, it’s my father’s smile; the sheer appetite in it, that’s an echo of him. In repose, she’s Cesaria’s daughter; lazy-lidded and full of quiet certitude, her gaze, if it rests on you for more than a moment, like a physical thing. She’s not a tall creature, my Marietta—a little over five feet without her boots—and now the immensity of chair she was sitting in, and the silly-sweet smile on her face, diminished her almost to a child. It wasn’t hard to imagine my father behind her, his huge arms wrapped around her, rocking her. Perhaps she imagined it too, sitting there. Perhaps it was that memory that made her say:
“Do you feel sad these days? I mean, especially sad?”
“What do you mean: especially sad?”
“Well I know how you brood in here—”
“I don’t brood.”
“You shut yourself away.”
“It’s by choice. I’m not unhappy.”
“Honestly?”
“I’ve got all I need here. My books. My music. Even if I’m desperate, I’ve got a television. I even know how to switch it on.”
“So you don’t feel sad? Ever?”
As she was pressing me so hard on the subject, I gave it a few more moments of thought. “Actually, I suppose I have had one or two bouts of melancholy recently,” I conceded. “Nothing I couldn’t shake off, but—”
“I hate this gin.”
“It’s English.”
“It’s bitter. Why do you have to have English gin? The sun went down on the Empire a long time ago.”
“I like the bitterness.”
She pulled a face. “Next time I’m in Charleston I’m going to bring you some really nice brandy,” she said.
“Brandy’s overrated,” I remarked.
“It’s good if you dissolve a little cocaine in it. Have you ever tried that? That gives it a nice kick.”
“Cocaine dissolved in brandy?”
“It goes down so smoothly, and you don’t get a nose filled with grey boogers the next morning.”
“I don’t have any need for cocaine. Marietta. I get along quite well with my gin.”
“But liquor makes you sleepy.”
“So?”
“So you won’t be able to afford so much sleepiness, once you get