Chapter 2

In which a folk biology and intellectual history of our hero is posed in a most logical of manners.

1. In his youth our hero was described as “pea-footed,” for, despite his burgeoning girth, he retained the the calfs of a comely polynesian, the ankles of a pacific courtesan; his stockings didn’t crook at the heel but simply tapered.

1.1 The derivative “pea-pedaled” arrived next.

1.11 There was a valley in the countryside where the summer vinyards grew their crops. It was known as Peape’s Dale and had the reputation of producing more raisins than wine. In the late autumn, as the vinters’ enterprises reached their full embarassment and begat a handful of public jokes, the bug began to suffer the insult of being “Peape-Daled”–that is, of a strange fertility.

1.2 It took longer for the townspeople to come to the most productive evolution of its original idea. “Pea-pod” was of course perfectly rich in metaphor, but his tinysome feet were no longer the sole target. The bug himself, in all his corpulence, became a mystical creature containing three mystical peas.

1.201 The first pea was gold, through and through. No one was sure of its power, though all agreed that its was the greatest. It was thought of as something like an unwrinkled, unskulled mind.

1.202 The second pea was dim. The quality was peculiar even within the dark cavern on his shell for it supposed that the pea ought to have been incandescent but lacked the intent and retained the nature. This pea was the largest of the three.

1.203 The third pea was dimensionless, a sizeless point which existed merely to mark the position where a more important pea should have been. Mostly it was imagined as a prick in the bug’s cloth, a tiny hole that provided a passage between the bug and some other plane.

1.2031 This was considered a weakness, but so hidden and so unique that it was well worth its vulnerability. This might have been the trapdoor of the soul, the cave of Pericletus. If found amidst its mask of leaves the hatch might be forced open and exposed.

1.21 Benito was casually aware of these theories and knew how widely they circulated throughout the countryside. He took little notice, however, of their personal relationship to himself and thought instead that they described a larger order. He listened to them as if listening to a family history and he was happier to listen abstractly and carelessly than to follow the thought and see how highly he regarded himself as his own ancestor. Nonetheless he was fascinated by his composition of peas.

1.211 He began to call them seeds.

2. In his youth, our hero’s entire body was as black as an arctic noon, except for his eyes which were tooth-white and peeled from the skin like a milky fruit.

2.1 The bug’s father and mother, the Baron and Baroness de Pascal, were lost to him the eve before winter solstice during his sixteenth year. They left to spend two weeks vacation on a passenger boat in the South China Sea. It sank silently, late at night in a calm sea.

2.11 Our hero had decided not to accompany his parents on their trip. The summer before he had begun to see himself approaching adulthood, envisaged his future as heir to baronage, and wanted to taste of his independence to come.

2.111 the weeks before any wire was sent westward, the young bug passed his days in the most carefree of airs, even to the point of forgetting to change out of his morning robe until supper. At night he entertained visitors with a prodigious tapping of bongos until the first bird-calls of morning chaperoned the guests back home.

2.2 When word did come of the ship’s mute capitulation, the young baron–for now his fate had fallen–was overwhelmed. But rather than blanch, blush, blacken, or purple at the heart-sinking news, the bug changed a different color altogether. His skin turned forevermore to burnished gold.

2.3 At first the poor child was ashamed. He wept and shook. Nature had called him out into un-mourning. He bathed in lye and stole boot polish from his father’s coachman. He did not leave the house for the better part of two years. His skin became no less gilt.

2.4 When he finally reappeared in town, it was unannounced, and, though he certainly stood out among others, he was not recognized. His eyes had lost their youthful lust; they sat in no dark setting like lusterless clouds. He appeared without pomp at the tailor’s shop where he asked for his measurements to be taken. A trunk of his father’s old suits had been brought along so that they might be refitted for his own dimensions. It was not until the bug asked that the work be charged to the family’s house account that the old man realized you the young sulker must be. “Good lord, son.”

2.41 As word spread of the young baron’s new hue, the old theory of peas passed again from lip to lip.

2.411 The first theory held that the golden first pea had burst and flooded through the entirety of his flesh.

2.412 The second theory held that the second pea had finally become luminous.

2.4121 Of those who found the dim pea burning, some thought that, in itself, the sphere cast an aranic light.

2.4122 Others believed in a colorless radiance that shone off the first pea like sunlight off the moon.

2.413 Of the theories involving solely the first two peas, the camps were further divided into those who saw this as a pubescent inevitability and those who believed in the transformation as a response to his parent’s passing. It was a contention of the bug’s moral character.

2.414 The situation was slightly different regarding the third pea, of which, due to its abstract nature, many were hesitant to make mention. Of the two theories concerning this member, the debate was between two different metaphysics.

2.4141 The spiritually minded claimed the holy ghost had crawled through the infintesimal needle-prick to come roost in the boy, fulfilling the trinity of the peas.

2.41411 This theory contained others, such as those explained in 2.4122 and 2.411, for the believers believed that the presence of the ghost did not go unnoticed by the other spheres. The action was something like the winding of a dead pocket watch, or the tuning of a long abandoned pianoforte. Gold was a sign of harmony, said the mystics.

2.4142 The second metaphysical stance took the third pea to be a seam in the otherwise seamless cloth of the bug. This seam made possible the turning inside-out of our hero, leaving him otherwise similarly composed as before.

2.41421 Unlike the other theories, this last one posed the possibility that our hero’s new brightness belied a darksome void within, a cavern upholstered of his former skin. Indeed, he seemed fragile.

2.5 After the baron’s reappearance in town, the local priest paid a visit to him at the family estate. The priest was granted a short interview after which the bug made a proposal so indecent that the priest deemed it improper to stay a moment longer.

2.51 Nevertheless the priest struck up a correspondence with the boy and began to develop a theory similar to that posed by the townspeople in 2.4141. He asked permission to write a theological piece concerning our hero’s miraculous transformation. After much hesitation, the bug consented. Even today, our hero looks back at the publication as his coming-out as worldly ornament.

3. While the tailor was still refitting his father’s suits, Benito, who was now approaching his eighteenth birthday, asked another favor. He brought in his father’s old smoking jacket, a beautifully made piece done in rich crimson satin. It was terribly soiled from all the pitiful evenings the bug sat sulking in its loose folds by the fire. He had brought it to be cleaned only; he still hoped to grow into his father’s former bulk.

3.1 “It’s rather soiled,” said the tailor.

3.2 “Do what you can.”

3.3 The tailor looked it over once more.

3.4 “To save the material’s quality, I might have to lighten it. It might come out…pink.”

3.5 “I refuse to be haunted anymore by colors. You can send it along with the suits.”

4. For his birthday, the young baron threw a black-and-white ball and invited the village. As for his own attire, he descended the stairs in the now roseated satin jacket. Everyone remarked that he looked like an elegant turkish delight.

5. A pea-footed petit four.