by Edward Carey
“I shall be very happy here,” said Curtius, though something in his face seemed full of terror.
The bell rang. The son had returned; he had been sent out for provisions; we were to have a meal together. Mercier agreed to stay. The House of Picot had a very dark dining room, and now the widow and her son, Mercier, and Curtius sat down to some cold meat and cheese. As I prepared to join them, however, the widow broke in loudly.
Servants in Paris, it seemed, did not dine with their masters.
“It is not the Parisian way,” Mercier said. “Little, I believe you shall be eating in the kitchen.”
I looked at Curtius.
“I have so much to learn,” he said.
“The foreigner,” Mercier agreed, “is a friendless, ignorant, inconsequential thing, forever asking to be knocked down. Shut up in his rented room, he peers out at the world of Paris and discerns nothing. All foreigners must learn French or be forever shut out.”
“Then I should like to learn French,” announced Curtius.
Mercier agreed to find him a teacher. The widow spoke again, and though I knew little French myself, this time I understood her: “Why does that person yet remain?” I went to the kitchen then and ate as I should always: alone at the kitchen table. Later on, the blank-faced son showed me where the water was stored and where the bucket of wood ash was for scrubbing, and then I was left to clear away the plates—not only Curtius’ but the entire table. Later still, Curtius came in to see me. “I shall start French lessons tomorrow. The widow has agreed to help me with my French—a very capable woman she is—for a little remuneration. Mercier will come tomorrow for a sitting. Marie, all is well with you?” But he left no gap for an answer. “We have arrived. Paris, Marie, Paris.”
My room, with the door closed, was dark and airless. I took out my things: Father’s jawplate, Mother’s Bible, Marta. When I lay still, I thought I could hear the damp walls weeping.
CHAPTER TEN
Second heads.
The first head we made in Paris was Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s. Mercier explained that there was no real need for him to pay Curtius, since he considered he was doing him a favor, as showing his head around to future clients was the best possible way to explain Curtius’ great gift. “It is all very well,” he said, “to show off the head of Little, but, you must admit, no matter how lifelike the portrait, no matter how affectionate, still it remains a portrait of an odd-faced child. What you need is a face with some fat upon it, and mine,” he said, pinching his own cheeks, “is just such a one.” It was indeed a face with fat, that much was true. Mercier insisted that Curtius cast not just his head and neck but a portion of his chest too: a proper bust, he said, as if to suggest that an ordinary man might be compared to the philosophers of antiquity, that man might be contemplated merely for being a man, that we might learn to look better. This change in our work did indeed make the sculpture look more finished, less as if it were missing its body. Moving his hand about his own wax face, Mercier said, “What a map! What terrain! All the sixteen quarters of my head, and here,” he said, tapping his nose, “my Notre-Dame.”
Mercier showed Curtius where in the city he might find supplies. I did not go with them. The widow had asked if I might help her, and Curtius said that I might. She pointed to the kitchen floor and the mop, then nodded and smiled and left the room.
“I do like most of all, sir,” I said later, “to be your assistant.”
“Oh, yes,” he agreed.
“I have been trained, sir, to be your assistant.”
“Yes, of course. But we must help out the poor widowed woman. She is suffering so. Marie, may I tell you a little story? I believe it is like this: Once upon a time there was a lonely bone, and it was day after day by itself only. And then suddenly another bone appeared and then another . . .”
“What bones are these that you’re talking of, sir?”
“Which particular bones?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well. Let us see. The spine, perhaps. Ribs. It does not matter.”
“It does not matter which bones, sir? You say that?”
“I cannot tell which, exactly. It is all such fresh territory for me. I never knew any woman before, you see, there never were any. And now perhaps we have newer bones, and it is possible that slowly a creature is being built. What creature it is I cannot say. But these new bones, they fit, they do fit, but it takes some getting used to. Growing pains certainly, one must allow for that, ball-and-socket chafing together. Bound to hurt a little at first, bound to.”
My day was portioned out between Curtius and the widow, between atelier and kitchen. She wanted me to sweep and polish other rooms too. For as long as possible I pretended I had no understanding. I hid behind my German language, allowed her to pantomime what she wished me to do. She pointed to the grimy windows, cloth in hand; I bowed and waited for her to leave, then turned and headed back to Curtius and his tools.
We had only a few customers to start with: friends of Mercier, small businessmen. The first was Mercier’s cobbler, to whom Mercier had shown his own portrait bust. Initially Monsieur Orsand could not see the point of a wax bust—he was all about the lowest ends of the body and had little interest in the top—but he agreed to have his taken so long as it cost him very little. With the head in the window, he soon found, he was noticed above other cobblers; he stood out; he was different. People felt they could trust that head with their feet.
After that, our bell began to sound. Mercier brought more businessmen to the workshop. I laid tools ready on the table, lit the fire, ground the pigments. Last of all, the wax was taken out—always Curtius’ business—and with the wax in his hands he was home and happy and himself. With wax he could begin to make sense of Paris.
Soon the bell made far more noise for Curtius than for the widow, as if she had fallen out of favor with the thing. With my cleaning duties came a necessary freedom of the house, so I wandered from room to room downstairs, familiarizing myself with everything. When I was confident in being alone I opened drawers and cupboards, finding mostly empty spaces or mouse droppings. But I had to be careful as I entered a room, for sometimes, after I’d been looking about, I would find that Edmond, the widow’s son, had been there all along, standing in a corner or sitting still, his blank face fixed upon me. Most often he appeared in the room beside the dummy of his dead father, which prevented me from looking underneath the covering.
Once my eyes had become accustomed to the dimness of the house, I could move about in the dark and learn where everything was, and I began to see more clearly. Under the grief, I could see now, something else was hiding. The grief could disguise this other thing if you were making a short visit, or if your eyesight was poor, or if you only entered certain rooms, such as the dining room or the front room, where the shop dolls were wearing the widow’s tailored clothes. And yet this other thing was surely there: It had gnawed at the curtains, had chipped the pottery, had cracked the windows, had worn away the sheets; it would not light candles in the darkness and left the cupboards bare. This other thing was poverty. The widow’s business was failing. Edmond had been sent out to get food that first evening we arrived because there was no food in the house; only after Curtius had paid them did they have money.
Upon a certain evening, I found myself staring at the black cloth that covered the dead tailor Henri Picot’s shape. No one else was in the room, I made quite certain. The forbidden object was directly in front of me. I was going to have a very quick look. I lifted the cloth away. Here was the shape of a paunchy human male; old wood and wilting canvas were the substance of the widow’s dead husband. The fabric of the dummy’s chest was no longer tightly tacked around its frame but sagged inward, its woodwork chipped and worn. I imagined Henri Picot, when he was substantial, to have been a faint gentleman of impeccable manners, a middle-aged tailor who married a young plump woman and stitched her dresses and must have known his way around female tailoring, for shortly afterward,
before his life was suddenly halted, he fathered her a son. I understood that the man called Henri Picot had factually existed, but I could picture him only as the elderly dummy before me that evening, only as a slightly more complete version of that dummy, with a cloth head and a body of gray faded material and loose stitching, with pale buttons perhaps for eyes, a little moth-eaten man.
I was about to return the black cloth when suddenly there was noise. The widow was there. She had crept into the room, her movements muffled by her mourning weeds.
What fury, what rapping of the head, and screams, hers and mine. As if I’d exhumed her poor husband. As if I’d stared upon the actual private corpse.
Curtius came rushing in. “Marie, my fault,” he said when he understood the disaster. “Marie, I am to blame. I should have beaten you, I suppose. I should probably have beaten you once a week. I was often beaten. My father and his exactness, you see. I said to myself when the surgeon left you with me in Berne, I said children must be disciplined—I remembered that much—and yet I did nothing about it.”
The red-faced widow nodded energetically, but when Curtius finished his dreadful words she must have thought them insufficient, for she approached me again and slapped me hard across the face.
What noise that contact had; what sound sprung from the violence of her skin as it visited itself briefly and with considerable impact upon mine. I was shocked and hurt, hurt and furious, and I waited for Curtius to strike her back on my behalf. To scream at the widow, to rage and anger at her.
But he did nothing.
“Sir,” I cried. “Sir!”
He looked surprised and unhappy, but he did nothing other than to whisper, “Ah. Marie. Please, dear widow, not to?”
But that was nothing at all and followed only by my master biting his own knuckles. Which was also nothing. It was a most terrible nothing, an abominable nothing, for in that nothing the widow understood that she had complete power over me.
The cloth was returned to the private dummy; Henri Picot could sleep his dead sleep once more. I was hurriedly returned to my room; the door closed upon me with no candle; I heard the door of the workshop opening and Curtius and the widow going inside. I was left alone with my swollen cheek.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A terrible progress.
There had never been a woman in Curtius’ life before. His mother had died in childbirth; his arrival had meant her departure. But now there was a woman, and he was most struck by her presence. He allowed her very quickly to make decisions for him. He stood still as she picked crumbs from his jacket.
Yet Curtius was ascendant. His workshop was very quickly the greatest room in the house. People came and found sociability and conversation and Mercier laughing. The room held Curtius and his wax; it boasted colors. Happiness was only in that one small district of the house. Who could resist such a place? Not the widow: she found herself visiting the workshop often, watching Curtius, studying his methods, sometimes bringing him wine though he had not asked for it and sitting beside him to study the heads being made. When she left, I noticed, she often left behind one or two hairs in the atelier. I thought of those hairs as spies; whenever I found them I picked them up and put them in the fire. The widow and I were fighting over Curtius; she wished for his complete attention, and I was in her way, and she meant to put me out.
Sometimes, when I returned to the atelier from the kitchen, I discovered that the widow had moved in during my absence. Soon she started to bring glasses of wine for Curtius’ customers. After the wine she brought small things for the customers to eat. Curtius did nothing to stop her; he was flattered by it all—worse, he thanked her—and all the while crumbs fell upon the floor, crunching underfoot when stepped upon, and had to be removed by fingernails or with a knife. But most of all it was she who troubled: a woman and her mourning cloth, her smells and hairs and little ways of doing things, smacking her lips together, smoothing down her dress at the knees with her hands, sitting there, uninvited. A woman.
She sat there and watched Curtius and his business; she watched wax busts. And then, at last, she made her move. One afternoon, the widow suddenly stood up and marched out of the atelier. A short while later, she came back with a jacket from her store. She held up the jacket, shook it in front of Curtius’ face, and pointed to a bust, which was that of a chandler. Curtius, horrified, said nothing. Then she took hold of the bust and proceeded to dress it. The bust was hollow, and in the hollow she stuffed the back of the jacket, the part that was not necessary for display. Then she set it upright, so that the shoulders of the jacket formed the shoulders of a man. The chandler was dressed.
Silence.
Curtius’ chest hunched; I thought he was toppling forward. Then he drew his long arms inward and there was a very small and completely silent joining of hands together, twice. To the uninitiated it may have appeared that he was secretly squashing something small, a fly perhaps, a frog, a snail, a kitten, whereas actually he was clapping.
View a person without clothes, and that person could be anyone from any time, great or insignificant. The human body has changed very little over hundreds of years; no matter what you put over it, underneath it still looks the same. Clothe that person, however, and you pin him down. Curtius smiled at the clothed bust. When he smiled, people often looked the other way, for it was a rather unnerving smile, an enormous dear smile that showed entirely his bad teeth, which had gaps between them; it was a smile unlike any other. Most people have many different examples of smiles on which to base their own, but Curtius’ smile was grown up in isolation, practiced in Welserstrasse to an audience of wax body parts. How should the widow react to such a display? She watched it without looking away, and, forming a conclusion, she nodded. Then she held out her hand.
She wanted paying.
He paid her.
That was only the beginning of it. As if it were not enough that there was a woman with us in the atelier, her son placed his chair in a corner and took up residence. Curtius said nothing. In his corner Edmond would take buttons out and study them very carefully, both sides, then line them up upon his thighs, his face barely changing expression.
“Don’t touch anything in here,” I told the boy, though he could not understand my foreigner’s tongue. “He mustn’t touch anything, sir. You should tell him.”
“He’s just sitting there, Marie.”
“Hasn’t he his own business?”
“Will you light the fire now?”
“How do you say ‘Don’t touch’ in French?”
Curtius told me, and I repeated it many times. Each time I looked up from my work, the pale boy was seated in his corner with his buttons, looking at me, not Curtius, and I would tell him again not to touch. Only when his mother came in did my instructions cease.
That night, when I went to bed, I discovered something terrible.
I had left my doll Marta upon the chair in my room, sitting up, but when I returned she was lying down. Marta is capable of a great many things, she is loyal and always very welcoming, but if she is sitting she stays sitting. She does not lie down; she waits for me to lie her down. Someone had been in my room. I could see no hairs on my bed or on the floor, and so I concluded it was the son who had been there. I held Marta so close. I took her apart and wiped every single piece of her before putting her together again.
It was the first in a series of disasters.
When I came to the atelier the next morning, I found Curtius in the doorway. I told him what had happened and he was sorry for me, but he reminded me that I had recently been reprimanded for a similar act, and also that we lived in Widow Picot’s house and that every room was in fact hers.
“Our objects are vulnerable,” I said. “There are people who yearn for them.”
Curtius muttered a little about things in Paris being so different from those in Berne, which should have alarmed me, should have prepared me. And then it came: he asked me to cook not just for himself but for the widow and her son
. The workshop door opened fully; the widow had been seated inside all along.
“It is not right,” Curtius told me, “for such a lady to be always in the kitchen. Have you seen her hands? They are delicate but punished.”
“I am familiar with them,” I said. “One of them struck me.”
“She showed them to me. They are very painful hands.”
“That is certain, sir.”
“In fact, I should not mind casting them. She has been so good, I should like to be good in return. Everything is so strange in Paris, and she sets me on the right path. I do need guidance sometimes. I easily turn and get lost.”
“I cook for you, sir. I work for you.”
“Yes, Marie, and you are essential and in every way a blessing. But now when you cook for me, for us, just make a little more.”
“But I am your assistant.”
“That is right.”
“And not hers.”
“But I am asking you. And what I ask you should do.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You mustn’t look so upset, no tears, you mustn’t, it hurts me here.” He pressed his hand over his chest and its vital muscle.
“Yes, sir.”
So I had less time in the atelier, less time with Doctor Curtius—who seemed not to notice, for the less time I passed in the atelier, the more time the Picots were there. The widow began to bring her tailoring work in, and Edmond did likewise.
In the kitchen, one day, I chose a plate, a very nice glazed one with a delft blue pattern—I picked it out particularly—then lifted it high and let it go. An accident, I said.
“Be more careful,” Curtius said. He could never abide carelessness with objects.
“Shall I not draw for you, sir? What shall I draw?”
“Don’t draw just now; sweep up the pieces. Marie, the widow says if you break anything more you shall be beaten.”
