In the village of Thürmsdorf in Saxon Switzerland, half an hour by foot or twelve minutes by horse across the hills from Festung Königstein, or Fortress King’s Stone, is a little cacahuatl shop. You can go there still today.
Half an hour away from that theobroma cacao shop by horse or by llama (if you’re a small child, which Doktor Doktor Bombastus Paracelsus had been once upon a time) is the Wismut mine. Wismut of course means bismuth, a fairly innocuous element, with the atomic number 83, in the nitrogen group. What’s not of course is that they aren’t really mining bismuth, but mining uranium. By they of course I mean August the Cold.
Next to the cacahuatl shop is the beautiful Schloß Thürmsdorf, a little charming castle or manor house with a lovely garden. In that lovely garden is a lovely statue, Adoration by Stephan Sinding. And that is why the little cacahuatl shop is called Adoratio.
I have not been there but Doktor Doktor Bombastus Paracelsus has, when he was a child, on the back of a rather large llama riding up from the banks of the Elbe, passing Robert Sterl’s atelier, across from where little Theophrastus Bombast used to go on holiday in the Swiss House beneath the Bastei with his father Wilhelm Bombast von Hohenheim, after the early death of his mother, who had been a bonded servant at Kloster Einsiedel in Switzerland. His mother’s peasant bondage was only not passed down to Paracelsus because of his father’s status.
At this moment Doktor Doktor Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, known far and wide, then and now as Paracelsus, was remembering his mother, the holidays his father and he took to escape her memory, and the hot drinking cacahuatl that came thickly out of the cacahuatl pot into his trembleuse after a long llama ride up the low sandstone mountains, where he had watched the stone crushers at work.
At this moment Doktor Doktor Paracelsus was pouring Huohu the Cathayan firefox a trembleuseful of cacahuatl out of a beautiful Meissener porzellan jug.
“If only Janosch A. Prufrock were here instead of out on the Ostsee. He would like to sit here with us over a pot of theobroma cacao, I’m sure. Did I ever tell you about his father?”