Voltaire's Calligrapher

by Pablo De Santis

  “These could save the Calas family. Why don’t you take them to the court?”

  “Books have never saved anyone. It’s too late for them anyhow. We need a martyr: the fanatics need one, and so do we, men like you and me who don’t know what to believe in. My mother had a boil on her left leg that was already affecting her knee; she went to the funeral, prayed, and it went away. How do you explain that? Pray to the hanged man!”

  “I’d rather pray to a saint with a little more experience.”

  “Well, I’ve been blessed by him: I’ve already earned one coin, and now I’m about to earn another.”

  He held out his hand. I paid and left the ransacked house.

  The Mechanical Hand

  All around the Church of Saint Stephen, relic vendors secretly displayed their little trophies in glass jars so thick they deformed and enlarged the treasures inside. The church was full of parishioners who needed increasing amounts of incense, which created an impregnating fog. The candles cast their yellow hue on the darkness. A blackened skeleton hung down, a tag proclaiming it was property of the Toulouse school of medicine. In its right hand was a quill dipped in blood and in its left a palm leaf, symbols of the conversion the murder had prevented. Used to being a simple object of study, the skeleton seemed taken aback by such sanctification.

  I walked on to the courthouse where the Calas family was being tried. Armed guards stood at the door, and no one was allowed to enter. Conversations continued inside even though it was late; the windows above were illuminated. About a hundred people were gathered outside, circulating rumors and looking up as if the wavering light might contain a message. Everyone who came in or out of the court was accosted for news; though none replied, the crowd saw its hopes and convictions confirmed by the hush. The only person not questioned was a tall man in a cloak who seemed to impose silence from afar and whose every step was like a period at the end of an empty phrase. I heard a whisper beside me:

  “That one there cleaned the body. He used to be an executioner.”

  I followed the man in the cloak, rummaging in my bag for coins to pay for any information he could provide. He strode along briskly, and I had to run to keep pace. Windows closed and lights went out as we passed, giving the distinct impression his steps had ordered them to. I stopped next to a fountain whose waters were black: my quarry had disappeared. Before I knew it, I felt a rope around my neck and my feet were off the ground, not very high but enough that I longed to feel the earth below. The moon was reflected on the water. I struggled in vain, dancing the final jig of the hanged.

  “The last man who tried to rob me lost his right hand. I carry it in a box of salt; it brings me luck wherever I go.”

  I tried to speak but couldn’t. I reached into my pocket for a coin and let it fall on the cobblestones. My attacker dismantled the gallows, and my feet touched down once more.

  “I came to pay you, not rob you,” I said.

  “I’m not selling anything.”

  “I buy words.”

  “I don’t talk much.”

  “I heard you washed the body of Marc-Antoine Calas.”

  He wanted to know what so interested me that I was willing to pay for answers. I told him I worked for the Jesuits and that they wanted to be absolutely certain the Calas boy was a martyr. The Jesuits, I explained, were trying to speed up the canonization process for priests who had been murdered in the Orient and didn’t want any old impromptu veneration to supersede the urgent needs of the Church. I handed him another silver coin.

  The executioner spoke:

  “I attended to the body until the White Penitents took it from me. Six of them came down to the courthouse basement, showed me a piece of paper I never got to read, and carried it out in procession.”

  “Was he bruised, as if hanged by force?”

  “Not a single mark, other than a scar on his left shoulder-a very old wound.”

  We sat on the edge of the fountain.

  “I wasn’t going to kill you. It’s bad luck to kill a man on a full moon: he’ll haunt your dreams.”

  The executioner had big hands scarred by ropes and blades. I told him I knew about his former profession.

  “I’ve beheaded criminals in Paris, hanged poor wretches in Marseille, and pushed offenders off the top of a tower in Italy. They would land on marble below, and a painter would capture their final pose. But the real art is the ax: not many can cut off a head with a single blow. The rope, on the other hand, is the simplest yet least reliable of all the methods.”

  “Why? Did someone survive?”

  “Only one man lived to say ‘I was executed by Kolm.’ He paid my assistant to fray the rope so it would break when he dropped. A man can’t be hanged twice for the same crime in Marseille, so he was set free. But let’s talk about happier things.”

  Kolm worked for the courts in Toulouse, where he washed bodies in tubs of bleach water, sutured wounds, and sometimes determined cause of death. He was hired because of his experience as an executioner.

  “Do you miss your old profession?”

  “No. I got tired of being needed but despised. Take a look at this walking stick.”

  He held up a long cane made of dark wood. On the bottom was a small but perfect replica of a hand, operated by a mechanism on the silver handle.

  “I was never allowed to touch any food when I went to the market. No one would speak to me. Then I had an artisan from Nuremberg make this walking stick. At first no one had a problem greeting the silver hand, letting it pick up apples or fish. But then it started to malfunction, and now it crushes everything it touches.”

  The hand opened and closed. Kolm invited me to try it. I lifted the walking stick and, as I looked up, saw a woman standing in a window. It was the passenger we had delivered to the toy manufacturer on rue des Aveugles.

  I heard the sound of the window as it closed.

  I had no intention of saying anything but suddenly heard my voice, as if it were another’s:

  “A dead woman just closed a window.”

  “I know the dead and I know they never come back; I’d have been visited by now if they did.” Kolm looked over at the house. It was the only one that still had any lights on. A bronze bell hung out front. “There are seventeen women who work there. They might disappear during the day, but they come back to life at night.”

  His words did nothing to reassure me, and I hurried away down the deserted street. I don’t know why, but Kolm followed me, and the moon followed him.

  The Performance

  I went to see Kolm two days later, as he had promised to ask whether there were any openings at the court for a calligrapher. Kolm lived in a rooming house reserved for the brotherhood of executioners; they owned a building in every city to avoid the usual problems of lodging. Never having executed anyone, I wasn’t allowed in, but Kolm told me the rooms were decorated with axes, hoods, and belts that had belonged to legendary executioners. These made him nostalgic. I asked why he had left such a profitable profession.

  “Five years ago I helped to suppress an uprising against M. Ressing. I had cut off about ten heads when it seemed a pair of familiar eyes were staring up at me. I reached into the bloody basket and found my father’s head. We hadn’t seen one another in a long time, and I had executed him without even noticing. I know he recognized me, and yet he didn’t say a word: he wouldn’t interrupt my work. I haven’t executed anyone since. I was only able to recover my father’s head, which I put in a glass case and took to the town where he was born. There I gave him the funeral he deserved. For his epitaph I wrote: Theodor Kolm lies here. And elsewhere as well.”

  It was Sunday and Kolm’s day off. We walked until we saw a crowd beside the market: a theater company was performing The Calas Murderers.

  The actors had erected a stage in a derelict square, amid statues of sleeping horses. The Church had never been kind to actors, refusing for centuries to bury them in hallowed ground, but this company had chosen a topic of s
uch popular interest that the White Penitents had even agreed to pay for the production. That night I wrote an account of the play and sent it to Ferney:

  The Calas family is sitting at the table. A friend arrives from far away. He begins to talk about his city. After a while, he realizes they aren’t paying attention; no one is responding to his comments. The father, Jean Calas, finally interrupts him: he says they have a decision to make.

  Marc-Antoine is preparing to convert to Catholicism, the father explains. He has been shut away in his room, reading the Bible, for the past seventeen days. We’ve hidden spiders and snakes between the pages, but nothing distracts him.

  At night, the mother says, we give him candles with most of the wick removed, so they won’t last long. But he keeps reading, using mirrors to capture the moonlight. Then, on nights when there is no moon, in absolute darkness, he repeats the sacred words – words that aren’t sacred to us.

  Is there no way to convince him? the friend asks. Women? A trip?

  We’ve tried everything, the father says. Now we must sacrifice the lamb.

  But he’s our lamb, the mother says. If we wait just a little longer…

  The father says: Tomorrow he’ll sign his conversion at Saint Stephen’s, and he can finally work as a lawyer. He may take action against us, to prove his sincerity. There is no faith more dangerous than the faith of the converted.

  Where will we do it? the friend asks.

  There’s a nail upstairs, above the door, the father says. We never found any use for it, but it was too big to pull out.

  Perhaps we should wait until tomorrow, the mother says.

  The rope is impatient, the father says.

  In silence, they head upstairs. Jean Calas leads the group, rope in hand.

  Marc-Antoine is reading in bed when they interrupt him.

  We’ve come to talk to you.

  With a rope? That’s a strange conversation.

  Let’s talk about the decision you’re going to make.

  It’s too late. They’re expecting me. I renounce the Calvinist faith.

  Then there’s no other option, the father says.

  When will you do it, the son asks. I’d like to finish this paragraph about martyrdom first.

  The father tears out the page and shoves the ball of paper into his son’s mouth.

  There’s no need to read about martyrs: you’ll soon know from experience.

  The mother and the friend hold him. The father slides the noose over his head. The three of them lift him up and hang him.

  The show was so successful that indignant spectators threw rocks at the performers, mistaking them for the people they were playing.

  The head of the company, who was in the role of Jean Calas, had to shout to be heard.

  “Don’t vent your rage on us; we’re only actors. But we so believe in this play that our Marc-Antoine is a real hanged man. A mistake sent him to the gallows in Marseille, and a miracle saved him.”

  From the dais, Marc-Antoine let the public see the scars on his neck.

  “I was that man’s executioner,” Kolm whispered in my ear. “He’s the living image of my failure.”

  “What does it matter? You’re no longer in the profession.”

  We left the crowd and the shouting behind.

  “Once an executioner, always an executioner.”

  The Exam

  Kolm accompanied me to the courthouse where I would take the calligraphy exam. There were new hires every week as calligraphers left, overwhelmed by the disorganization in the courts, the contradictory orders, and the fear of poisoned ink. A legend about a cursed word circulated among the local profession: everything would be fine until that word appeared in a court document, then whoever wrote it would suffer misfortune.

  I sat the exam with twenty other young men, in a long hall on wooden benches that had been carved with penknives. You could learn better calligraphy from those furtive inscriptions than from any dissertation. I soon realized I was much slower than the others and knew I was done.

  “You can go,” the examiner said. “I don’t know why you bothered to come when your hand writes at a snail’s pace.”

  “My hand may be slow, but it knows where it’s going. Have you ever seen a snail retrace its steps to correct a mistake? Come out to the patio with me.”

  When we reached the edge of a pond, I asked his name.

  “Tellier.”

  Using an oily ink, I wrote his name on the surface of the water, but backwards, mirrored. Then, when I brought a sheet of Japanese paper to the water, his name was imprinted the right way around, with a few walnut leaves (little more than veins) as decoration. He hired me on the spot.

  I was taken to a room where I was given a blue cloak and a bronze plaque that read Calligrapher to hang around my neck.

  And so, in the coming days, I was able to wander through the archives of Languedoc, draw up documents, and take notes on the sessions being held in the Calas case. Everyone seemed bored of it already, as if the protagonists had died ages ago and judges and their clerks were sadly responsible for keeping the memory of a bygone event alive. Witnesses for the defense filed through: the Calas family had never done anyone wrong; they had nothing against Catholics; their eldest son, who lived outside Toulouse, had converted and they still sent him a monthly stipend. But they couldn’t compete with the flood of miracles brought by the prosecution: the blind could see, the crippled could walk, and incurable ills would disappear when you prayed to the hanged man.

  I wrote to tell Voltaire that the tragic day was drawing near, that the lawyer for the Calas family had managed to save the lives of the mother, the sister, and the brother, but the father was doomed. The most far-fetched of all possible versions had prevailed: Jean Calas, a sixty-three-year-old man, had slipped the noose around his son’s neck, overcome his resistance, and hung him from the door all on his own.

  My fanaticism for calligraphy soon helped me earn the trust of my superiors. I took advantage of every opportunity to declare that the printing press (ever ready to spread the worst ideas) and the Encyclopédie (its most recent work, an impious summary of the world) stripped words of all transcendental meaning. A calligrapher, on the other hand, brought the world closer; like the ancient scribes, he wrote in order to illuminate. Tellier and his subordinates were won over by my opinions. So vehemently did I defend my art using theological arguments that I wound up believing my own fabrications. Even now, as I transcribe official documents at city hall, I sometimes still repeat the words: God made the world without a printing press, by hand, letter by letter. And that thought, or at least the struggle to believe it, justifies all of the many hours.

  One afternoon Tellier had me deliver a scroll to the Dominican monastery. I took the long way in order to pass by Bell Manor. All of the inhabitants were asleep; none of the windows were open.

  A hooded monk stopped me at the monastery gate. I told him I was to deliver the documents directly to Father Razin. He looked at the bronze plaque around my neck and led me down a corridor to a set of stairs. In front of me was an ornate door, and I hesitated over whether to open it or continue downstairs. My escort had disappeared. I knocked discreetly, but no one answered: the wood was so thick the sound never reached the other side. I pushed the door just wide enough to peer in.

  Purple drapes accentuated the air of seclusion inside. Large torches cast bright light nearby, but it dissipated farther on, leaving the back of the room obscured. Five monks were bent over enormous maps and city plans. No one looked up at me. Their conversation consisted of whispers and hand gestures. They were studying lands crisscrossed by rivers and mountain ranges, cities divided into plots, and here and there they would place little lead pieces depicting crosses and pitchforks. It was as if they were caught up in an achingly slow game that had started years earlier, the rules having been lost somewhere along the way.

  An iron hand came down on my shoulder.

  “Not there,” said the monk who had l
et me in. “Downstairs.”

  He pushed me impatiently, and I nearly fell down the well-worn stairs.

  Father Razin, head of the White Penitents, the most fanatical branch of the Dominicans, was sitting behind a desk. His clawlike hand snatched the documents from me. He read them in a wink, then scrawled a few lines on a sheet of paper.

  “This wax seal had better remain intact. We’ve already lost three messengers to blunders or betrayal.”

  It was late and the courts would be empty: I would have to deliver the message the next morning. I took the letter to my room and slipped it under my pillow. The minute I did, I heard a thunderous voice from a faraway castle order me to open it.

  It was a tremendous risk, but I had worked with similar seals before. First, I used molten lead to make a mold of the seal, and then I broke it, peeling it off the page with a fine stiletto. Finally, a steam bath with eucalyptus leaves opened the letter.

  Razin’s handwriting had nearly torn the paper:

  Report to Paris regarding news in this matter. The Lord has blessed us with a rash of miracles; the name Marc-Antoine can no longer be tarnished. Our problem now is the woman Girard received from Switzerland. He is using her as an attraction at Bell Manor. No other creature of Von Knepper’s is to be allowed in the Kingdom of France. I need two men you trust. I will take care of the rest. Evil uses angelic means; good now needs diabolical means.

  I melted wax and filled the mold I had made, then replaced the seal. Once it was dry, I patiently filed it to eliminate any possible imperfection.

  Tellier’s impatience worked in my favor: he broke the seal without even looking.

  “It smells of eucalyptus” was all he said after reading the letter.