Inigo is the quintessential, playfully lusty satyr. The ultimate hedonist, he is rarely sober, and always on the prowl for women. With his outsized appetites, which he freely indulges, he is a healthy and well-adjusted example of his race, which exists for no other purpose than to wallow in pleasure.
Of the four follets who have made Grotte Cachée their home, Inigo is the one who least resembles an ordinary human—if one knows where to look. Beneath his mop of curly black hair lurks a pair of stumpy horns less than an inch high, and his ears are ever so slightly pointed. He used to sport a tail, but he had that surgically removed in 1847 (after chloroform came on the scene) because it was difficult to hide beneath trousers. His only other distinctly satyric attribute would be his oversized genitalia—and, of course, the satyriasis to use it to its fullest advantage. Being so well-endowed can also makes dressing somewhat difficult for Inigo, but he has never proposed surgery to remedy that particular "problem." Being of Minoan origin, he lacks the goatlike legs and hooves that one associates with the later Roman satyrs.
Inigo was born in 1756 BC on the Aegean island cluster that is now called Santorini. At the time of his birth, there was a magnificent acropolis on a small island in the middle of Santorini's central lagoon, and this is where he lived. His Minoan name—Santorini having been part of Crete's Bronze-age Minoan culture—was Inignacios. In 1623 BC, Santorini was devastated by the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history.
The resultant tsunamis ravaged nearby Crete and spelled the end of the remarkably advanced and fascinating Minoan civilization. Some 1,200 years later, Plato heard an Egyptian tale of a legendary island civilization that had been swallowed by the sea. When he recorded his own interpretation of the story in Timaeus and Critias, he called the fabled "Kepchu" Atlantis. Myth is history in a masquerade costume. Peel away the fantastical façade, and you will always find a core of truth.
With Santorini destroyed, Inigo made his home in the city of Mycenae in the Pelopennesus. For the next millennium, he traveled extensively throughout Europe and Asia Minor, while keeping Mycenae as his home base. Having a remarkable facility with languages, he acquired a repertoire of numerous foreign tongues, which he spoke like a native.
In 602 BC, he moved to Rome, where his name was Latinized to Ignatius. When the Gauls sacked that city in 390 BC, Inigo knew it was time to "get out of Dodge," as he puts it. He wandered about for some years before settling in sunny, idyllic Aquitania, the part of southwestern France known today as Gascony. The Aquitanian Basques altered his name once more, to Inigo. In the fifth decade BC, this region was conquered by the Romans, who soon recognized the happy-go-lucky satyr for what he was. In 14BC, a sculptor convinced him to come to Grotte Cachée to pose for the erotic statues in the Roman bathhouse. He never left.
Inigo still loves to travel. When he's in Paris, he stays in a house that was purchased for the follets in 1420, and which is still standing. In 1842, at Inigo's urging, a townhouse was purchased in the area of New York City known as Greenwich Village. Inigo makes frequent trips to New York, where he likes to club-hop and visit friends, the vast majority of whom have no idea that he is a supposedly fictional mythological being. He speaks English with the accent of an American from the northeast, so he blends in perfectly.
No trend comes along that Inigo doesn't embrace. He has his 60-inch flat-screen TV, his iPod, his Blackberry, his GPS, and his Wi-Fi laptop. He emails and instant messages; he even has a MySpace page and a Blog. Elic has referred to Inigo as "the incubus wearing the lampshade at the party," which sums him up fairly well, I think.
From the Histoire Secrète de Grotte Cachée by Adrien Morel,
translated by Emmett Archer
Portraits of Inigo
The erotic bathhouse statues aren't the only works of art that Inigo has posed for. He's been a sought-after artist's model for most of his life. Here are a few of the paintings and sculptures that bear his likeness--although in most of the nudes, his "heroic dimensions" have been reduced in size for the sake of "realism." We've even managed to scare up a couple of snapshots, although like all the follets, he tries to avoid being photographed. These pictures and more are on his MySpace page.
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