Jansy Mello: It's still difficult to make all the connections I once entertained in relation to sibling love between Marina and Ivan, cloaks, luciferous glow-worms, horsecart/orchal orchestra, crash of cymbals/clash of symbols/, young and old Van/dreams. There's a correction to make: Ivan was not consumptive. He spat blood but he suffered from lung cancer. The mixture of old Van dreaming about his youth, quirky passages in time, metaphors and reversions (that link the first ttheatrical meeting between Baron d'O, Demon, Marina and Mascodagama) are difficult to extricate and need to be further examined.

...In token of partial reconciliation, she showed him two sturdy hooks passed into iron rings on two tulip-tree trunks between which, before she was born, another boy, also Ivan, her mother’s brother, used to sling a hammock in which he slept in midsummer when the nights became really sultry — this was the latitude of Sicily, after all.

Hammock and honey: eighty years later he could still recall with the young pang of the original joy his falling in love with Ada. Memory met imagination halfway in the hammock of his boyhood’s dawns. At ninety-four he liked retracing that first amorous summer not as a dream he had just had but as a recapitulation of consciousness...

The hammock, a comfortable oblong nest, reticulated his naked body either under the weeping cedar that sprawled over one corner of a lawn, and granted a partial shelter in case of a shower, or, on safer nights, between two tulip trees (where a former summer guest, with an opera cloak over his clammy nightshirt, had awoken once because a stink bomb had burst among the instruments in the horsecart, and striking a match, Uncle Van had seen the bright blood blotching his pillow).

Darkbloom notes: p.61. horsecart: an old anagram. It leads here to a skit on Freudian dream charades (‘symbols in an orchal orchestra’), p.62.

His nights in the hammock (where that other poor youth had cursed his blood cough and sunk back into dreams of prowling black spumas and a crash of symbols in an orchal orchestra — as suggested to him by career physicians) were now haunted not so much by the agony of his desire for Ada, as by that meaningless space overhead, underhead, everywhere

The work of a poet, and only a poet ...could have adequately described a certain macabre quiver that marked Van’s extraordinary act...a shapeless nastiness, the swoosh of nameless wings, the unendurable dilation of fever...a masked giant...erupted...A voluminous, black shaggy cloak of the burka type enveloped his silhouette inquiétante ...A black mask covered ...and to a clash of cymbals in the orchestra and a cry of terror ... Mascodagama turned over in the air and stood on his head.
...— and suddenly came apart. Van’s face, shining with sweat, grinned between the legs of the boots...The magical reversal ‘made the house gasp.’

The reference was to Ivan Durmanov: he had died of lung cancer years ago in a sanatorium (not far from Ex, somewhere in Switzerland, where Van was born eight years later). Marina often mentioned Ivan who had been a famous violinist at eighteen, but without any special show of emotion, so that Ada now noted with surprise that her mother’s heavy make-up had started to thaw under a sudden flood of tears