by Edward Carey
I slipped further and further into the role of household servant. The widow came to me, walking about me with down-turned lips, and with her plump digits and a wooden ruler she measured me. The reason for this I soon discovered: she had taken out her former servant Paulette’s clothing, cut into it with her large tailoring scissors, and like a butcher severed off pieces of material until what was left assumed my shape. I was to wear a prickly black dress and also a secondhand white bonnet, with someone else’s greasy hairs still attached. She told me to change. I went into my room and closed the door.
All the household was there to see the transformation when I emerged, dressed as a serving girl. The widow nodded, her equivalent of Curtius’ clap. Edmond looked but revealed nothing.
“The widow says you are very lucky to have such clothes,” Curtius told me. “How beautifully she has made them for you. Say thank you.”
“I am very lucky, sir? These clothes itch—may I take them off?”
I may not. They rubbed at my skin, wearing sore patches into my neck and shoulders. They were made of mourning; the widow’s gloom had dyed them. I breathed less well in them, and in them I was inclined to melancholy thoughts. I wondered if she hadn’t used her own hairs to stitch them up, if I was wearing widow now. I tried to make my master understand how wrong all this was, but when he looked at me he saw only the widow. The whole city was widow for him now.
Doctor Curtius, out of sorts with dispossession and gratitude, had failed to grasp the significance of my metamorphosis. He had not seen that what had just happened was a shifting of ownership, a possession changing hands. I was rendered a household servant, learning words that were useful to servants, such small vocabulary, and Curtius did nothing to stop it. Adults, I understood, have many faults, they are not perfect—even though they have lived longer, even though they offer themselves as examples to children. They are larger, that is certain, and size has an unearned authority. But they are easily influenced, and they can be easily swayed. He was already lost to her by then. Some hair of the widow, I thought, some fraction of her, had found its way into his lungs.
She cajoled him to be washed, the dirty man, and made him new clothes and burned the old ones. How he stroked these new coverings. She had him shaved, his hair cut away, and then she wigged him. She was making him acceptable, in her eyes. And how did my poor master react to these assaults? I spied him in his room, crop-skulled and shivering in new underclothes, but holding a wig upon his fingertips, commenting, not without pride: “I’d recognize you anywhere. You’re Doctor Curtius’ short-tail bagwig.”
With this new wig he could be just anyone, any Parisian. To me, it seemed like all the Curtius was being pulled out of him.
Curtius was being managed by the widow now, just as he had been managed before by the surgeon Hoffmann. Only the surgeon had allowed him far more freedom, had never had him stripped and shaved. Still he grinned all the while at the widow, the dear man.
My studies with Curtius grew limited, then all but dwindled out. Before, when I asked him to tell me about the body, he would sit me down and explain at great length. Now he said only, “Later, Marie, later.” “Might I draw?” I asked. “There’s no time,” he said. If I drew, I asked him, would he look at my drawings? “Marie,” he said, “you are making too much noise, the widow as you can see is napping in the chair there, please don’t wake her.”
So I took paper from the widow’s rooms—sheets of old yellowing paper she wasn’t using—and practiced my drawing. I found her pencils too, and took them for my own. I drew every day without fail. I would remember what I had seen during the day, store it in my head, and relive it on paper at night. I would not stop; I would draw everything. Each drawing I made, each line, was a little proof of me.
Doctor Curtius went out often with the widow, who was eager to show him Paris, but Paris to me was only a dead tailor’s house; it was only the market nearby, and the well, and the laundry women coming once a month. One day, as I was coming back from the market, I saw a mound in a ditch, some heap of rubbish, but when I came closer I saw hair upon one end. A head, a female human head, gray and fallen in, a body lying dead in the street and all the people walking by it and paying it no heed. A person all stopped, collapsed and ignored, a person of indeterminate age that had once dressed itself and been among us. This is Paris, I thought: dead people punctuating the streets, and no one to care for them. The thought chased me home.
The body was gone next time I went by, a strange horrid little patch where she had been. What were the rules of Paris? Were there any?
{I have substituted a dead rat for the dead woman.}
On those brief occasions when Monsieur Mercier came in to talk to me, I received some schooling in the subject.
“I do love Paris so,” Mercier told me, “but in truth, Little, I fear for it terribly. It is getting too, too big. It can’t be stopped.”
Each time he came, I asked him to tell me where he had walked, and he would. I listened carefully and imagined myself busy about the streets. Seeing me concentrate so intently, he spent more time with me, took me on longer walks as we sat in the kitchen. I held his hand, I closed my eyes, and together we went traveling.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Paris: a tour given by Louis-Sébastien Mercier.
We are at the river now, Little. Are you here? Yes you are, right beside me. This crowded bridge is Paris’s vital organ, the very heart of the city. It pumps not blood but people. Pumps them all around the city. Throws them off the bridge with more energy than they had when they came onto it. This is the Pont Neuf, biggest bridge of Paris. On this bridge you will find everything: the beautiful, the ugly, the young, the old, the wretched, murderers, saints, givers, takers, geniuses, charlatans, babies, and skeletons all mixed up together. Here creatures are born and taken away, here lifesaving operations are carried out, and life-taking ones too. On this bridge, throughout the day, are the ever-changing tides of song peddlers. Many of these singers are somewhat lacking in something: eyesight, limbs, sense, for example. They take their place and sing out, bawdy songs, slow songs, songs to make you cry, songs to whip you up into a dance, songs to give you peace, songs to take you to war. These song sellers are all around Paris, it is a singing city, but the Pont Neuf is their capital. They control the volume of the bridge, and the bridge controls the volume of the city.
“On we go through the Place Dauphine. Bear right now, Little, around the sad buildings of the Palais de la Cité; there’s the top of Sainte-Chapelle in their midst, the great glass jewel case. Now, eyes front, Notre-Dame looms up ahead, but come with me this way. Into these unhappy structures, past a portal of misery. This is our next stop. Come in. Do.
“Welcome to the shame of Paris. Officially termed: Hôtel-Dieu, the House of God. Also known as: Death Hole. Here priests and nuns run about, ordering diseases from one bed to the next, marshaling illnesses incorrectly, spreading infections as they attempt to spread God. This is what the poor of Paris fear: these damp walls. This is what the poor of the city say to each other: I shall end in the hospital, just like my father. The Hôtel-Dieu will not turn them away. This is where poor people come to die. Despair, despair, despair, and follow me. There are generally six thousand patients here, though it varies with the season of course, there are dying seasons in Paris. Six thousand patients but only one thousand, two hundred beds. No matter what your ailment, you will be thrown into a bed with someone who has a far different and possibly very infectious illness: your bedfellow most likely will kill you. They carry out the dead in carts in the earliest hint of the morning or the darkest minutes of the night, so that no one can see the daily harvest. Buildings of the Sunken Spirit! Do not breathe too deeply, for the air around these buildings has an evil, angry nature, made worse by the river, which makes everything heavy and damp. There’s not a corner of dryness in this entire hospital. Forgive me now, for this building needs to be kicked. I kick it every time I pass with these beloved shoes, they’re quite
used to it by now. It scuffs the leather a little and bruises my toes, but even so this building must be kicked. There are many such buildings across Paris that need kicking.
“Come, there’s something else you should see. Here in this small courtyard, where the air you breathe has been long forgotten by everywhere else, you see flush against a dripping, moss-covered wall, a small hut. A sty, perhaps, something fit for a pig. Or a kennel for an unloved dog. This is what I found on one of my walks. Please be quiet. Look in. Now I must whisper. Inside this tiny wooden cage is one of this place’s patients. A boy wrapped in a soiled rag, shivering, mumbling away to himself. A child with a massive head. The child, you see, is so thin, but that great head pushes the eyes apart, the cheeks two globes in themselves, the whole a great dome of swelling. A hydrocephalic child, stagnating in the dark, nibbling eagerly on a bone long picked clean of nourishment. See the sign around his neck: DO NOT FEED. You must forgive me now, for being overcome with allegory. I call this child France. His real name, I believe, has been lost. France, you understand, is a rickety child whose every nourishment goes only to the head, leaving the body weak and emaciated. Each time he eats only his head grows, never his body. And he can’t stop eating. He’s always so very hungry. France’s head grows and starves his body. How long, do you think, can he live? How long do you think will our country survive? Sssh now, come away. It’s time to move on. Don’t linger there. There’s nothing you can do for him. He’s only excited because he thinks you might feed him. He doesn’t care for people, only for food. Come, from this dark and cramped hovel, we’ll climb up into the air, climb as high as we can go. I’ll make you two hundred and seven feet taller, and then, when we’ve no higher to climb, we’ll look down on it all.
“So. Notre-Dame. Here is time, Little, carved in stone. Greatest monument of our city, most famous of edifices. Wisest and most complicated of buildings. Or, do you not think, with her flying buttresses coming out from her sides and behind like so many arched legs, that she resembles a great spider athwart this thick and complicated web of Paris, fed by her visitors who leave small coins of charity? She is, after all, the first object worthy of note in this monstrous mess. Let us ascend the spiral stairs of this monolith. I shall go ahead, I shall advance before you around each corner.
“Can you hear my voice echoing now, Little? Sometimes closer, sometimes farther away? The stairs here grow narrower, ’round and ’round, up and up, to such a height. You can catch glimpses of the city through slit windows, diminishing, growing farther away, as we climb. Can you hear my breathing now, my beloved shoes clacking against the stone steps? And the steps turn grudgingly now, they have built up a rhythm and want to go on ascending forever, but one last twist and we have reached the top of the North Tower.
“So. Here it is. Paris, as it looks from the top of the tower. What can I tell you? This: Paris is situated in the middle of the Île-de-France, on the banks of the Seine. It is forty-eight degrees and a half and three minutes north latitude, east of London. Two miles in breadth, six miles in circumference. You will observe that the city is near perfectly round. Have a look, do please, there it is. Paris, formerly called Lutetia—which means, you will be unsurprised to learn, the City of Mud. Or, we might call it: Subterranean Town. Or perhaps: Labyrinth of Shadows. Or even: the Universe Abridged. It’s all there, look at it, alive and moving. You can see palaces—there’s the Palais des Tuileries. You can see hospitals—there’s the Dôme des Invalides. You can see theaters—there’s the Comédie-Française. You can see prisons—behind us the monstrous oblong of the Bastille.
“But what do they all mean? How can you ever learn it, how can you ever read it, this great mess of roofs, this great confusion of buildings and of people, this melting pot, this great sink down which everything is poured, eight hundred and ten streets, twenty-three thousand houses, home to seven hundred thousand people? All kept inside the city by lock and key—you can’t get out without permission—and all of them, or most of them, trying to live, wanting the best for themselves in this home, this world of Paris!
“And yet! Alas! Listen to me carefully, Little. I have come to understand the awful truth: Paris is suffocating. It can’t go on, it can’t breathe, it gasps but no air reaches its bloody lungs. You want to ask a question, Little, I can see you do. Everyone does. You want to know how anyone can endure this place, this vile home, capital of misery. You want to know how people can breathe this poison air each day. Why people dwell in such urinous pools, why people choose such an excrementitious location, why people whose eyes can still register light lock themselves voluntarily in this darkest of abysses. Well, I’ll tell you, it’s very simple: habit. The Parisian connects himself to all these evils, because this place, putrid and corrupt, is the hell we call home. And we would never leave it, for despite everything, we love it. We love it. I love it.
“Here ends my tour. Now I slip off a shoe and pass it around. All gratuities gratefully received. You have no money, Little? Then give me a kiss, odd child of Paris that you are.”
And I would kiss him on the cheek, and off he would go, leaving me behind in the kitchen, eyes closed, imagining myself floating about the city.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I am shut out.
In the evening I drew the heads of the fish I had bought in the day. Everything was to be drawn, and my piles of yellowing paper dwindled. The drawings themselves I rolled up and hid at the back of a kitchen drawer. At night I would creep into the atelier and draw Curtius’ heads of Paris. By now my own head, modeled in Berne, had been taken off the shelf, wrapped in cloth, and tucked away in a cupboard. I sat with those new wax personalities, and I felt they were very happy to have me there. They longed to speak, I thought, but were not quite able. There is a melancholy to wax heads: they were never born, they capture life, but life shrugs away from them. In the quietest moments, I whispered to these half-personalities: “I’ll sit with you,” I said. “Are you frightened of the dark? Don’t be.”
Living inside the dead tailor’s house in those days, you could just hear it, barely audible at first: the sound of a distant ticking, of cogs creaking, the noises of a great machine beginning to live. And you would have to have great faith to hear those sounds, for all there was then was a widow and her measuring son, a thin foreign doctor and his little servant girl, and a house in mourning. It was a small business then, nothing likely to attract attention, very unassuming. People find such varied ways of getting on. There were many thousands of private concerns operating throughout the city. On the Rue des Chiens, so I learned from Mercier, a father and son blew glass eyes; Curtius began to use these for his wax heads. On the Quai des Morfondus, a man dealt in secondhand wigs; Curtius bought these for his wax heads. On the Rue Censier, there was a small school for making artificial flowers, founded by a matron from Toulouse; the widow used these to decorate Curtius’ atelier, now rechristened the sitting room. And on the Rue du Petit Moine, a small private business consisted of making busts of small-time Parisian businessmen out of wax. People find such varied ways of getting on.
Months passed. The widow worked on clothes for the busts. Once, when I was polishing the tools, I saw the widow take up a bust while she was talking. After a while she set it down again, but not with precision, so that it rocked back and forth a little. Curtius looked at the bobbing head and shouted—O marvelous noise!—
“To hand it so! As if it were a butcher’s thing!”
That’s Doctor Curtius, I thought, there he is again! But instantly he looked appalled at himself. The widow was silent; she did not understand him, but she had heard his anger, and then, suddenly, she was in tears. At the sight of this Curtius teared too, until the room was filled with a general wailing. What sorrow on her face, what a choking up, the son immediately to her side. The tailor had been dead mere weeks, I reminded myself; it was a very fresh grief and it held her still very hard. She never showed herself again like that, but in that moment there it was: a human being, trying to
survive.
Then, as she dabbed her face with her handkerchief, the widow looked around and caught me observing her, and in that instant she knew I understood what I’d just seen. The mouth turned down a little, in a look of absolute recognition, and I knew I’d made myself a greater enemy. I’d comprehended her vulnerability.
Afterward, the widow never handled a head with indifference. At first she just moved more carefully, but as time went on, I admit, her work began to show some tenderness. She seemed to register how Curtius cared, how concerned he was for all the chins and ears, how he sympathized with every fold of flesh. Curtius was in love with eyelids and lips; he would swoon over an eyebrow, fidget in excitement at a mole or dimple. If a subject had two or three small hairs beneath his nose missed by the barber, Curtius would ensure that they were a part of the finished head. It did not matter if the head he was making had burst corpuscles around the nose, or pores so large they could be seen several paces off; it didn’t matter if the head was wall-eyed, or the skin was so shiny that the wax must be varnished to suggest patches of sweat: whoever came to him, Curtius loved. And of all the faces it was the widow’s that he saw most, and in that familiarity grew an interest.
All of this, the widow watched and learned.
And as she learned, I regret to report, possessions got very muddled. Returning to the workshop whenever I could, I discovered new and terrible progressions. Her tools, for one, had joined his upon the table. To begin with they kept to one side, but later I saw those different tools, his and hers, moving closer and becoming acquainted. Once I saw the widow reach out and take a hold of Doctor Curtius’ trocar, the trocar with the straight shank, which was designed to penetrate the skin to evacuate deep abscesses, but was used very successfully by Curtius for making passages in wax ears. The widow took this object up and used it to penetrate calico. But that was not all: incredibly, Curtius sometimes borrowed the widow’s narrow buttonhole hooks and used them to draw out nostrils. And so, it will be understood, I had to take action before it was too late.
