by Edward Carey
We left the house. We had, Curtius supposed, several hours before our escape would be noticed. We went directly to the hotel where the coach picked up its passengers. How long the coach took to arrive; how Curtius kept his head pointed downward. But at last the horn sounded, and Mother’s trunk and Curtius’ leather bag were taken up. Our seats were on top of the coach. Finally the horses began to pull. Curtius was in tears again.
Half an hour later we left the city gates. Good-bye to my lost mother; I was going like Father before me out into the world, into those uncertain places where, among other possibilities, you could have your jaw taken from you.
Berne went farther and farther away.
It would never be coming back.
BOOK TWO
1769–1771
A DEAD TAILOR’S
Until I reach ten years of age.
CHAPTER NINE
The newest children.
Along the way, Doctor Curtius was mostly very silent. He pulled his coat up around him and tried very hard not to look out. At Neuchâtel he changed all his money from Berne thalers to French livres. We swapped coaches before crossing into France. At Dijon we stopped for the night. Since there was one bed in the tiny room Curtius rented, I slept at the end of it. Curtius pulled his knees up to his chest, but often while asleep he involuntarily attempted to straighten himself, and I, awake and anxious, would see the great galleons of his feet rushing toward me, causing waves in the sheets. The following night, at Auxerre, my master called out in his sleep, naming body parts.
The next day we arrived at last.
Paris at first was a smell to me, a stale smell living upon the left shoe of a gentleman called Louis-Sébastien Mercier. Then, as we approached the actual city on top of the coach, Paris was a great mist of dirty yellow seen from a distance: a canker in the sky breaking the winter air, something huge, just out of sight, breathing.
Everything grew darker as Paris drew closer, shades of dirt accumulating in the air. At last we reached the customs gates on the verge of the city proper. Right in front of us was a thirty-foot-high obstruction, a great, forbidding arch. The customs men, unhappy fellows in green coats, appeared. We were instructed gruffly to get down. Cold hands moved about us. All bags and trunks were taken off the coach, opened and searched. Curtius whispered that he would probably be dead any minute. I trembled in fear that we would be separated, for if that happened, how would I ever find him again? Everything was examined. Curtius’ wax head of me was passed from one official to another and shaken, until with reluctance the object was proclaimed legal. Our papers were stamped and finally we were waved along. Through the arch the coach went, passing on its way a vast gray block of misery that I would come to learn was the prison fortress known as the Bastille.
As I counted off crooked whitewashed houses, the smell of the city came back to me. I suppose it was the same smell that had resided on Monsieur Mercier’s left shoe, only here, at its source, it was far more powerful. I thought I might choke upon it. All around the carriage people darted in and out, locals as muddy as the streets beneath us, yelling at the top of their voices. We arrived finally at a large square. A ladder was banged against the side of the coach for the roof passengers, and Curtius unsteadily descended, his back unable for the moment to straighten, his lower body exceedingly numb. I went down after him. My eight-year-old feet touched the city of Paris for the first time and were, from those very first steps, dirtied by it. I kept very close to him, grasping for a portion of his clothing.
“So,” Curtius said in a whisper when at last he had his breath, “hullo to you, Paris. I’m Curtius, Philip Wilhelm Mathias. I’m here. I’m here.” Looking at me for agreement, he added, “Here we are, Marie.”
“Paris,” I said.
Paris continued without obvious astonishment. “This is the address,” he said, taking out Mercier’s much-troubled piece of paper.
People knocked into us, a whole gallery of Parisian visages, and none of them kindly. Red noses, yellow eyes, brown teeth, bewigged, shaven-headed, male, female, wrinkled, smooth, and all busy and all finding us inconveniently in their way. Curtius at last managed to show a porter Mercier’s address, and the porter, an unhappy youth with a mealy face, took the several coins Curtius proffered, speaking impatiently all the time, though I understood not a word of it, and filled his barrow quickly with our belongings.
At last, through busy, furious streets, we found Mercier’s house. Curtius used the knocker such a deal, but there was no answer. The porter was quick enough to leave us there with our luggage. We sat on the doorstep to wait. Two hours or three or four went by, during which Curtius wondered what was happening in Berne now, and whether the hospital was perhaps not such a bad place after all, and that perhaps the laundries were not so miserable, not really if you considered it, and that people working there were not absolutely guaranteed to catch the diseases they scrubbed from the linens. For my part, I wondered what happened to people here if they slept rough upon the streets.
Then at last came the sound of shoes approaching, tapping and clinking, and then they stopped. A voice spoke in French. I looked up and beheld Louis-Sébastien Mercier dressed in shoes no longer concealed in cloth bags but out in the open for all to see, very muddy. Fortunately, he remembered his German.
“Berne, isn’t it? What are you doing here? This is my home.”
“You told me,” said Curtius, “that I should come to Paris. It’s a very long way, sir, a long way indeed.”
“Did I? How nice that people listen. And you are visiting for a few days?”
“I’ve run away, sir,” said Curtius, “no going back.”
“That’s a long time then, isn’t it? Do you want me to write about you? What shall you do to make it worthwhile?”
“I do—that is, I did, in Berne—heads.”
“Yes you did! And you’ve come here to make heads. Only this time Parisian heads: heads that count. You might, for example, consider mine.”
“I do prefer heads,” said Curtius.
“Any lodgings?” asked Mercier. Curtius shook his head. “Take my advice, it’s best to have lodgings. Money?”
“I make heads. I’m very good at it.”
“So you say. And you have brought this child with you, this . . . little bold face, little loud features.”
“Marie, she is called.”
“She’s a little exclamation. A little protest. A little insult. In any case, a little something. Yes, I prefer Little. Little is what I name her.”
“She is mine.”
“Is she?”
“Oh yes, certainly!”
“You had better succeed then, because if you don’t there shall be two failed starving people, not one.”
“I had to bring her.”
“Did you? An act of kindness, was it?”
“She should have surely perished in the hospital laundries.” Would I have perished, I wondered, deep in the sheets? And then what new future was this we had bumped into? How long was its rope?
“She would have been fed there, I suppose,” said Mercier. “There would have been work.”
“You said I should come here. I’ve nowhere else to go.”
“Yes, you do. You certainly do.”
Mercier told Curtius he was a very careless individual but perhaps quite heroic after all, and that though Paris might seem packed to the brim, it actually had holes in it here and there, many little gaps that were not yet taken up, where a person might live with his servant, perhaps even happily. These places even sometimes drew attention to themselves by little pieces of paper stuck onto exterior doors and walls. Mercier proceeded to list for Curtius places that were available for rent. He could lodge with a tanner just by the river, though the place was somewhat noxious; one tenant had been found a few years back, dead in his sleep and strangely colored. Curtius did not like the sound of that. Having such a medical background, Mercier ventured, perhaps he might consider the second-floor rooms of a barber-surg
eon. No, Curtius insisted, nothing connected in any way to medicine, he was done with that occupation for good and all. For the same reason he refused accommodation with a pill-molder, a cutler, an elixir wholesaler, and an undertaker. At last Mercier proposed accommodation belonging to a woman, a widow whose husband had been in the tailoring line. There was a son too, who was being trained in the same business.
“A woman?” asked Curtius.
“There is an abundance of such creatures in Paris.”
“But I have nothing to do with women.”
“What about Little here?”
“I don’t think she can be counted, can she? She’s just Marie, she’s hardly frightening. Sometimes I forget she is even female at all; she seems to have no clear sex really, or one entirely of her own: male, female, Marie. She’s my Marie.”
I was his; I knew that; nothing else mattered.
“And really,” concluded Curtius, “after all, that’s enough company for me. No, I do not have business with womankind, I do not.”
“Do you want my help?” asked Mercier. “Or shall I go into my home now and close the door?”
“Yes, yes, please! I need your help. A woman, then, a woman!”
“A tailor’s widow.”
“There we are, then. Yes.”
“Good. It is decided. I shall call for a cart.”
“Oh, God.”
“Life,” explained Mercier, “can be said to start for you now, now that you’ve found Paris. What passed before doesn’t count. Look at you, the newest children in the overstuffed toy shop! I’m sure you don’t yet understand the objects, or the playfellows; well, there’s plenty of time for that. Come, let us advance.”
Another cart was found, and more money laid out. Mercier rushed us through the crooked streets until at last we reached the place.
Somewhere toward the shrunken middle of the Rue du Petit Moine in the Faubourg San-Marcel was a grim house with a word painted on buckled boards suspended from rusting wires. The word of this house was TAILLEUR. In all the windows greasy black material hung; all was parceled up in darkness. Here a tailor had died. Mercier reached for the door. As he pushed it open a bell attached to it sounded twice, a loud noise in all that hush. It was a sad sound, two dolorous clangs, that seemed to say, That. Hurts. I would come to know that bell, its mottled, calcified clapper like the twin of a kidney stone Curtius had kept in Berne.
At last someone came to the door. It was a boy with no particular distinguishing features, a pale blank face: here must be the widow’s son. Mercier spoke to him, and after a moment his plain face barely nodded and he turned around and went back into the darkness. We followed him into the passageway. Sorrow had choked the house; no sound came, only the quiet whispering of Mercier’s clothes as he moved forward, his shoes silent upon the blanketed floor. All was dark and musty. Not only the windows were covered in black material but it seemed every object, all shrouded over, no corner to be found in the whole place. We went through rooms at the back, feeling our way along dark walls, until we arrived in one where a single candle threw meager light on many bolts of dark cloth. When the son advanced toward one heap of cloth, this heap moved slightly and a hand came out from it and tenderly touched the plain boy and I saw that the plain boy most likely called this heap Mother and that this particular pile of material contained inside it a female human, a widowed one, which now turned around.
Charlotte, the Widow Picot, wore a great black bonnet. Her face was clamped between the surfaces of hard mourning material, though two strands of hair had crept out in rebellion to frame her large cheeks. Her complexion was ruddy; she had sizable lips and deep dark eyes. There remained about her face the tiniest trace of girl, so that you could just imagine her in younger days, before adulthood had begun to work its stamp on her. She was not unattractive, but it seemed that worry sat upon what handsomeness there was.
Mercier explained to her that we had come to rent a room.
“Heads,” stammered Curtius to Mercier for translation. “I’m in the business of making heads.”
I was instructed to unwrap the wax head of me and hold it up beside my own. I closed my eyes to increase the effect. There was an unhappy noise. Then the widow exclaimed, and Mercier translated: “But they are the same!”
“Yes, oh yes,” said Curtius, very proud, clapping.
“How did you do that?” she asked.
“It is my business.”
“And you can do it with anyone,” she demanded, “or just with her?”
“Anyone, anything,” my master said, “provided there are surfaces.”
“You earn your money making heads?” said the widow, through Mercier.
“It is to be hoped.”
“She insists,” said Mercier, “it would not be right to make such things in your bedroom. Rules of the house. You shall rent a working room from her.”
The widow pointed at me. Mercier explained that I was Curtius’ assistant. To this she said, “We used to have a servant. But she had to return to her people in the country.”
“I light the fires,” I volunteered. “I know all the instruments, I grind colors, I—”
“It will be very nice,” the widow interrupted, “to have a servant again. Paulette always used to sleep in the box room by the kitchen. Would this be agreeable?”
Curtius thought it would. An additional fee would be levied.
“Can she cook?” the widow asked.
Curtius admitted that I cooked for him and even accounted me very good, which made me smile very broadly and keep smiling long after when they were discussing very different things.
“Welcome to the House of Picot,” the widow said. “You will find us a very tender people, very heartfelt, very sore with grief. Do not be rough with us. We hurt very easily. We weep at almost anything, our skins are so thin, my son, Edmond, and me.” I had forgotten about the son; he had been standing there all along, pale and blank. “Do treat us with kindness.”
“Oh! Certainly!” said Curtius.
Then she put out her hand. I think for a brief moment Curtius was in a panic that he was meant to kiss it, but then Mercier explained: “Money.” Curtius had come to rent a single room from this woman, and within ten minutes she had him renting three.
“One last thing,” said the widow, “your papers, please. I shall look after them.”
“My papers?”
“As a guarantee against fleeing should the rent come overdue.”
He handed our papers over. I was not certain that was right. I thought surely they were ours to keep.
The widow took her son aside and a moment later I heard the bell: the quiet boy had gone out. Now she lit us into her various chambers. Here were her workbenches, her tools, the spools of thread, her tailor’s chalk shaped like flat pebbles. Amidst all these objects, upon the floor, upon the worktables was a tailor’s world, a world neat and in its place. Many scissors. Tools for pricking and shearing, tools to scrape cloth, a great variety of needles; there were irons and awls; there were spindles and measures.
“I think I understand,” Curtius whispered. “I am not unsympathetic.”
There were four tailor’s dummies, which were objects made in the shape of people though lacking any heads or arms or legs. There were three further pretend people, which, unlike the tailor’s dummies, had limbs and heads. They had legs that ended in stockinged tapered feet, and hands that on closer inspection were mere flappers roughly in a hand’s shape, mittens more than hands. Two were female, one male, each possessing the same bland face, a rough nose, eyes hinted at only by the shadow of the brow, lips that were only thin red lines sewn with thread, that could never open. Not real people, then, but cloth-made people sewn and stuffed with wadding. These were shop dolls, to be placed in shop windows wearing clothes for sale. It seemed possible at first that there was quite a populace in the widow’s house, but after a moment it became clear that her workshop contained the most unconvincing companions.
The wi
dow pointed to a corner, where lingered a human-shaped object covered in dark cloth. “Henri Picot,” she whispered.
“Beneath this cape,” Mercier translated for the widow, “is a tailor’s dummy constructed to precisely the shape of this lady’s late husband. It was the first tailor’s dummy that she and her husband made together, and it is very sacred to her. She insists you are never to touch this. She is most pressing on this matter.” Here, then, the widow’s grief was particularly centered, as if the object beneath the covering were the widow’s suffering heart.
We were taken to the kitchen at the back. I was motioned to come forward, where I was introduced to the stove and the logs and the coal room, to pots and pans, to cutting boards, to hooks and upon them utensils.
“I shall cook your meals here, sir?”
“I suppose, Marie, yes.”
The widow opened a small door off the kitchen. In the darkness was a room, very small and damp. There was a pallet with a straw mattress. There was no window. Curtius glanced bleakly at the widow, then back at me. “A room, Marie. Very good. You shall sleep here.”
“Yes, sir. Sir, might I not sleep in your workshop?”
Curtius relayed the question back to the widow. She shook her head.
“I suppose,” said Curtius, “such things are not the custom in Paris. It is well to do as the Parisians do.”
Curtius’ bedroom was upstairs, two windows and a dark bed with a sagging mattress that had surely held many extinguished Picots before Curtius would add his long shallow dent to it.
