The iron, once smelted, was cast into panels and wrought into ornate bars. And the doors revealed themselves: huge monstrosities, each embossed with a knocker such as a titan might use—giant rings which themselves were half the height of a man. The hinges were each about a meter high, and the panels were decorated with cast scenes of bulls fighting, women dancing, men tossing spears, while the mullions were in the form of great serpents which twined themselves around bizarre trees which, bare of branch, were shocks of sharp, geometrical patterns, clusters of knotted thunder bolts.
XXVI.
It was early evening in late November when Peter called on Trudy, rang the bell of Enheim’s lakeside villa in Lugano. She came to the door, but did not invite him in.
“I cannot speak to you,” she said.
“But why not?”
“I do not think it would be approved of.”
“So you too hate me!”
“I cannot like you if you are disapproved of by the Society as a whole. My life is, after all, not my own.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. And for you, your only hope is to throw yourself at the feet of the architect, the good Herr Nachtman, and beg forgiveness. Otherwise you are lost.”
“But I did nothing wrong, so how can I ask forgiveness?”
“You are not willing to examine yourself—to look at your soul. You are too proud. You do not have faith in those with more knowledge than yourself and, without faith, deliverance from materiality and ignorance is impossible.”
“I won’t ask for forgiveness.”
She pressed her lips tightly together.
“Trudy…”
“Goodbye Peter,” she said hurriedly, and shut the door.
Peter turned and walked away, turned towards the city centre, hands in pockets, legs leading him forward, more by their own volition than his. He walked along the Viale Castagnola, past the Società Navigazione, and then on, past the park, leafless trees looking stark and hundred-year old pines, cone shaped, thrusting themselves high up and sniffing at the fading light of dusk.
He then entered the city centre, walked by a giant block of marble, a grid of large plate glass windows lit in neon, totally incongruous amidst the surrounding eighteenth century buildings. In the daytime one could look in and see the office workers at work—an unfortunate trend in European architecture: the office worker as caged animal†.
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Elegant looking women tripped along in high heels. Grave looking men with gelled hair and black overcoats marched forward, smoking cigarettes, letting their loud voices be sucked up by mobile phones to be transmitted across land and sea. Every being was full of their own importance and strode over the earth like gods—a mass of delusion, blindness, the intoxication of streets and essentially boxlike constructions with roofs and windows, the madness of men as they surge together, like braids of worms agitated with life, thrilled by their own quivering muscles and their ability to make gurgling noises.
The bars were full of people having aperitivos: leaning against counters, sipping white wine, Campari and soda, drinking beer out of thin, cone-shaped glasses, munching on finger-sandwiches and doing their ritualistic mating dance, of which lubricating their digestive tracts, grinning like clowns, was of primary importance.
For some reason, all this life filled Peter with ineffable sadness—as if he were watching condemned men eat their last meals before their veins were pumped full of poison. The faces seemed like so many masks which hid desiccated skulls and the laughter seemed like the futile squeak of door hinges.
He hurried on, walked along Via Nassa, through the arcades, and recalled how this area had once been where fishermen lived. Now it was a long array of jewellery shops and expensive boutiques. Silver, gold and diamonds sparkled in the windows. Fibreglass mannequins found themselves bound in expensive and rather ugly clothing. Apricot foulards and blue polyvinyl chloride pants which would cling to the skin.
In one particularly elegant shop, a watch designed by a prominent Swiss architect was on display—a giant hunk of silver, grotesque—and an extravagant price tag hung limply to one side, seeming pale and debauched.
He gazed on this piece of equivocal jewellery and thought of Nachtman’s words. Indeed, the art of architecture had been in a large way debased. The man had been right about that. But for all the high-minded talk he had spewed forth, it seemed to Peter that that strange man himself, with his ample belly and ape-like arms, was lampooning the great art, turning it into a nauseous joke of more than elephantine proportion.
When the god is taken from its pedestal, there is nowhere to put it but in the latrine. If Peter would not worship Nachtman, he would despise him. There was no place for an in-between.
It was now dark. The light had completely abandoned the day.
Finally he arrived at the chiesa. The building, probably the oldest in that area of town, was a true breath of fresh air. Its simple lines calmed him. Yes, he thought to himself, this was architecture. Simplicity, without need of pretence. It was a strange object, sitting amidst that nest of banks and jewellery shops along the lake—pushed against by a giant hotel to one side.
The front, with its large oak door and two round windows, reminded him vaguely of a Zuni ceremonial mask, seemed to be connected to some remote and much more sympathetic past.
To the side of the church there was a long series of steps, which led up the side of the hill, flanked by an abandoned tram-line.
“I must talk to Aunt Maria,” he told himself.
The steps seemed endless. He was hardly in good shape and half-way up stopped and turned, panting for breath, could feel his underarms and shallow chest exuding moisture.
His eyes wandered instinctively over to that mountain. He could make out the lights burning up there—for a portion of the work continued, even at night. He lowered his gaze, let it rest on the lake where the lights of the city were reflected on the surface of the water. A veritable rainbow of greens, yellows and whites glistening on that vast black sheet.
He turned, climbed the rest of the way up the steps, walked on and was soon ringing his aunt’s doorbell.
She answered, was dressed in a flowing gown of blue cotton. Ghostlike, with nothing but a hesitant whisper on her lips, she let him enter.
The place was illumined solely with candles, the wax of which let off an unpleasant aroma, the light of which cast bizarre shadows.
Maria had redecorated the place. Now bad paintings of eyes and pyramids hung from the walls and pseudo-Egyptian statuettes cluttered the mantelpiece and lurched up from the coffee table. Prominent in the living room was a large photo of Körn—one taken about 1920, which showed him with wild eyes, a bowler hat and the beard of a pharaoh. Next to it, a picture of almost equal size of Nachtman was exposed—a pyriform nose which stood before a muddy complexion; a head negligently dressed in wispy white hair.
Without warmth, she offered her nephew a seat.
“It has been some time since you have paid me a visit,” she said dully.
“And you wish I had?”
“I did not say that. I was only stating a historical fact.”
“So, you have no regrets?”
“I regret that you were so unkind. Not to me. I don’t care about that. But to Herr Nachtman, who always treated you in such a fatherly way.”
Peter smiled somewhat bitterly, and then, after sweeping his hair back and sitting thoughtful for a moment:
“Aunt Maria, I need to talk to you.”
“I thought that is what you were doing.”
“I fear that the Society is going too far…trusting this man too much.”
“But you yourself said that you thought he was the greatest architect that ever lived!”
“And so he is. But he is also…insane.”
“Peter, he is the man I love. He is a sorcerer! He is as profound as Jesus, as wise as Parshvanatha!�
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“I think he is dangerous.”
“Which makes him all the more exciting. You are only bitter because he has, quite rightly, expelled you from the works. And now you come here…”
“Aunt, you should break with him.”
“Never. He is the only real man I have ever known. You are only a child and are still ignorant…of the functioning of a woman’s heart. And are surely jealous. Because he is a genius, and you…”
Peter bit his bottom lip. And then said: “So be it. If you want to destroy yourself, then I cannot stop you.”
Maria stood up very erect. She had obviously been stung by his words.
“Destroy myself?” she hissed. “Do you know what stupid things you are saying? Who are you to lecture anyone? It was you who first introduced me to Herr Nachtman. It was you who first brought him to the Society…You were always so forward-thinking, open-minded. And now listen to you. You talk like an old man. Though you are young, you are completely without spirit—an insect and a coward who does not believe in God! Yes, get out of here, go and bury yourself in the earth—and don’t come to me anymore.”
XXVII.
The scene was something that could have only been painted by a Breughel or a Bosch. The scale of the structure dwarfed the workers, made them appear less significant than insects—ants or skipping fleas. Dozens of comedio-tragedies were being played out at every moment. A man let out a violent scream, his leg crushed to pudding by a large block of granite. Men scaled ladders, sat perched atop half-built walls, held hammers, hoisted loads. Olaf Lidskog, the old Swedish millionaire, could be seen high up on the walls, his beard being swept about by the wind. With his thin frame and wild eyes, he seemed like some holy man—some ascetic undergoing a bizarre penance as a few flakes of snow drifted down from the sky.
It was so much trouble for the workers to get to the top that, once there, they had to stay for as long as possible, eating their lunch and dinner and often even sleeping in small hammocks in that precarious position, suspended hundreds of meters in the air. Of course falls were not in the least bit unusual, occurring on an almost daily basis. Mutilated corpses had to be scraped from the earth with such regularity that there was even a special work unit set with the task and those who perished in such a manner were referred to as martyrs and it was said that their souls graduated instantly to the twelfth plane where an extraordinary place was reserved for them and they were given audience with certain advanced spirits.
Once prominent businessmen were reduced to unshaven, dirty, half naked specimens. Beautiful women saw their breasts dry up. Men were broken, women crushed. And yet, thanks in part to those disciplinary measures previously mentioned, not a complaint was now heard. These disciples of the great philosophy accepted the hardship with joy, convinced that their beings were being cleansed, that they were mounting, together with the structure itself, ever higher into the realms of spiritualism.
The building itself seemed no longer a place to worship God, but seemed a god itself, around the heights of which the tails of clouds wrapped themselves.
Some said at night they saw it moving, writhing like a snake, puffing like an angry bull. Others said that they had seen angels with long forked tails flying about the incomplete dome and the thing seemed to look over the land with a mighty eye.
It seemed certain that it was possessed, endowed with malicious genius—an insatiate hunger. Its belly seemed to rumble and claws to reach out and grab those around; it would bite off their heads and gorge itself on their blood. Its walls seemed alive, the entrance a huge hungry mouth and at night, when lights were lit inside so work therein could continue, the windows indeed were like so many eyes—an enormous owl with countless heads.
XXVIII.
Nachtman became a sort of cult figure. The project was no longer simply the construction of a building, but rather the construction of a portal which would lead to other spheres—to ethereal lands where vulgar thoughts went not and people lived in flowers, drank the nectar of stars and spent their time performing ecstatic rituals of the spirit.
Claiming that he had been promoted by the astral body of Körn which had visited him in the night, along with other cosmic authorities, the architect declared himself an Ipsissimus, a grand master, and indeed no one dared contradict him. On the contrary, Enheim, the great spiritual scientist himself, after consulting the stream of cosmic consciousness of the Goddess of the City of Erech and meditating on various luminous particles, gave him a ritual coronation which consisted of mulberries and oil of hyssop being smeared over his chest while the four-thousand ritual syllables were chanted. And, finally, a helmet crowned with peacock feathers was placed on his head.
“I, Commander Adeptus Magus, the Lightbearer,” Enheim pronounced gravely, the words flowing from the depths of his beard like commandments from on high, “who am in possession of the knowledge of the most remote times, have received messages from the Blue Star, giving me full and unabated permission for today’s coronation. Henceforth, your spiritual name will be Brother XII and you will be known as an agent of the Supreme Self.
The architect smiled broadly and hugged all around him, pressing them to his great belly with an admirable semblance of love. That night he drank heavily of brandy and in the days that followed regurgitated every mystical utterance he had ever heard, let out a stream of plagiarisms† gleaned from a remarkably wide variety of religious texts—passages gutted of all meaning which he laced together and hung all around him—garlands of hypocrisy that sweated elixated fruits and which he admixed with architectural terms, building palaces of grand phrases which left his audience in awe—believing this rubbish to be gold, believing this charlatan to be the one true messenger as he spoke of metaphysical bungalows and pneumatic turrets, of extramundane high-rises where the soul might ascend and supersensible dungeons done in whiplash curves where the disobedient would plunge to be skewered and roasted on spits.
†…beyond the scourges over my thoughts which are like planed columns, clinging to knowledge of the truth…
Through a sort of mass hypnotism, all obeyed him who was referred to as Brother XII blindly. He had a private cook, a man from Bavaria, who was able to work miracles with a sauce pan and prepared him liver of burbot and omelets of ambergris, partridges stuffed with frankincense and batter-fried eel larvae. Designated colony females, married or single, were to mate with Brother XII up to nine times, and roll with him on beds of verbena—an activity which Maria herself fully approved of, convinced as she was of the architect’s saintly qualities. And indeed his spectacular vices had something grand about them—something truly supramundane which recalled those ancient Roman emperors who claimed themselves to be descendents of gods and spat upon morality and temperance alike as with drunken laughter they set men aflame, dined off the naked backs of prostitutes and demanded obedience from both moon and sun, shoving stars into the facial orifices of their lovers while reciting long and dreary poems that put their page boys to sleep.
Sometimes he would stroll about in a long white gown humming the refrain from Übere Gotthard flüget Bräme. He drank expensive whisky by the gallon and ate the genital glands of sea anemones stewed in white wine. He seemed to relish his role as mystic and, claiming himself to be the embodiment of transcendent reality, declared that he was the Knight of the Red Eagle, Grand Inquisitor Commander, who would lead people to fabulous lands.
“Listen to me my friends,” he said to the disciples. “I am your guardian angel and will guide you straight up there to the sky, to the ethereal dimensions. We are building something more than just a shield from rain and sun. We are building a ladder on which to climb to the stars. This is the tabernacle—you have arrived!”
Maria kissed his every part, and Nachtman, thinking to make her a worthy queen, fashioned her Madame Why, Inspectress of Rights and Degrees, and she would go about in a dress dripping with fringe, followed by an elite group of her Sisters of Future Well-being, who attended to her every want. She fum
igated the building site regularly with lichen and cassia bark and dispensed oils of cardamom and evening primrose in abundance.
Enheim, propelled forward on this tide of the occult, braided his beard and wore a burnoose and walked about with a rope around his waist like a Capuchin monk, lending his voice to the adherents, offering words of encouragement to those sons and daughters of men as they struggled against hunger and huddled at night around fires of twigs.
He and the architect threw off all modesty, proclaiming themselves geniuses, emissaries of both space and time. Enheim, in the end, had gladly let himself be cast in a slightly subordinate position, for even there the heights he stood at were dizzying, the rarefied atmosphere of power intoxicating.
Nachtman mounted the podium of supremacy with the naturalness of a king, usurping the individuality of those around him with a kind of stolid glee, a greediness as profound as the universe itself—vast and seemingly endless.
Enheim, concerned about the well-being of his daughter, put forward the possibility of a marriage agreement with the architect.
“But a man likes to maintain his freedom,” the latter said.
“Yes, but you are no longer young. It is time that you thought of settling down.”
“She likes older men, does she?”
“She needs a man who is spiritually developed.”
“Well, I’ll think about it,” Nachtman said, caressing the tip of his bulbous nose with one finger.
XXIX.
It was August and the heat extreme. The sun shone, hot, violent—shooting its rays to the earth like arrows. The mountain seemed as if it had been shoved in some great inferno and enveloped in flames. Several of the workers had died of heat stroke. Tongues hung from open mouths and naked torsos glistened with sweat.
Due to the fact that there were so many perspiring men, an unpleasant odour filled the air, like that of rotten fruit. Flies buzzed lazily about, sometimes falling exhausted to the earth where their wings and labella agitated disagreeably. Birds were just about cooked in their nests and moles and other burrowing creatures dug themselves deep underground.
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