Milady Filacia

1: Silver

After Orlando was castrated, our village fell into a nervous stupor. When the sun came up after a moonless night the girls didn't seem so delicious, and the next night seemed darker. Children walked through the weed-lined gravel roads arm-in-arm, peeking over their shoulders with every second step. The forest was thicker, and all the berries reeked of poison; our niche on the curve-side of the universe became an evil hyperbole rot with the human-shaped shadows of cherry laurels.

At the sweep of the moon, a nasty topic clenched the village between searing iron bars: rape. Rape was the infidelity of humankind and the sinful temptation of men. Our priest put it this way: Orlando was damned to rot in the flaming tongues of Hell, and until then live the rest of his days without the sloppy pleasures of his sexuality. Little me didn't understand why Orlando was chopped, but saw his mangled detached member laying like a dead pink slug on the sandstone veranda. After it was all cleaned away and the young man was exiled from the village, it took a week of mum's shaky lectures for me to know that rape came from sex and self-loathing men. It took another week for me to know what sex was.

In the wake of the chopping, an Englishman named Andrew Hound arrived with a briefcase, a brown suit and a hundred unpublished mathematical theses. He stayed with the repairman, who ran a metal workshop around the wooded corner, in a cozy stucco attic with bent bars for windows and doorways too small for him to slide beneath. His species was a dwindling one, Andrew told us at tea. He told us the reason he didn't idolize Andrew Wyles was because he thought he was too emotional. He also told us he was in the process of making the greatest mathematical discovery the world had ever seen. 

"Are you?" my mum asked, genuinely intrigued. "What sort of discovery is this?"

"It has to do with Feigenbaum constants and absorption laws," Andrew said flippantly, twisting the stem off a small apple. "That's why I need these six months in this hidden village. I can better make my discoveries in foreign solitude."

"As long as you mention my name when you're famous," mum said, tapping her cigarette on the edge of our glass table, "stay as long as you'd like."

I learned that the longer Andrew Hound stayed in Agathina the more the whispers germinated. Petra, the plump old woman who owned the goats, spread her windy seed from ear to agreeing ear, speaking of a bad character, and of the unpunctuality of English men, and his blatant unwillingness to comply. Her seeds were cultivated and planted in fertile soil, but the fruits from the sprouting branches weren't ripe enough yet to fall. So Andrew Hound's existence was caught in the net of a musty limbo, as he took the feather bullets of dirty glances with a splayed chest and a confident smile, strutting along the shady river path telling an innocent kitchen maid about his countless accolades. 

"He's oblivious," mum said after the sixth week. "I doubt he's solving anything cooped up in Benvolio's attic. Big bright smile." she crossed her arms and smoked, watching Mr Hound ride his bicycle into our back lawn. "Wonderful day, Miss Gracious," Andrew piped, striding through the grass towards us. "I'd come up with the most exquisite equation last night. I doubt it will propel this whole discovery process along, but smart men need mental breaks every now and again."

"How lovely," cooed mum, handing her cigarette to my dad. "Do, take your time, take your time. Your presence here brings so many smiles."

Andrew Hound spent many birthdays in Agathina, having the kitchen maid bake him many extravagant cakes that went up in flames. "My discovery is coming along," he reassured us every six months. "Nearly there now." Hound was near to giving up, some of the village women whispered, not near to coining the greatest mathematical discovery the world had ever seen. After the third year, Mr Hound moved out of the repairman's attic and into a tiled cottage with the kitchen maid, and when he learned that she was infertile they adopted a child named Silver. That was when the whispers stopped.