“Don’t worry,” you tell her, trying to forget his laughter, the knowing way he leered at you. “He won’t go to the prof.”
The rest of the lab passes in a blur of activity. The heart is excised, not without difficulty, and then the other lung. The superior and inferior venae cavae are located, but other structures, like the oblique pericardial sinus, a space below the heart bounded by five vessels, elude you. Fréd doesn’t return. As you are passing around the heart, the prof comes over, but it’s not to take the body away. As you expected, Fréd didn’t say anything.
The prof is a short, wispy man with a burgeoning calvity and nicotine-stained teeth. All of his power and authority emanate from his hands. A practicing anesthetist, he is often late coming from the surgery wing of the university hospital. Like Blaise, he doesn’t wear gloves, and you’ve seen him reach into cadavers with his stumpy fingers, not afraid of what he might dig out. He takes the heart to the sink and runs water through the ventricles to demonstrate the mechanism of the semilunar valves, whose function is to keep the blood flowing in one direction. To you, their geometrical perfection is as beautiful as Vesalius’s description in the fifth book of the Fabrica.
Afterwards, you are putting the heart back in its place, between the lungs, when you notice what appear to be abrasions near the clavicular line. It’s the lack of bruising, and the general discoloration of the skin, that made them hard to see. You look closer and discover other marks, barely visible to the eye. Some of them, you can’t help noticing, disappear beneath the gauze enveloping the head.
* * *
For the next several days you don’t leave your apartment, going through your notes on Hortense de Gaulejac. In the past, you’ve turned to her when you couldn’t sleep at night, or when the pressure of exams threatened to get the better of you. She is also how you avoid things, your way of killing the hours. Sometimes she appears in your dreams, dressed as she is in the portrait by Alexandre Roslin, all dark velours and gilded hemlines. Almost everything you know about her comes from the medical library’s manuscript collection and a multi-volume work, Other Notable Historical Women, 422–1800, unearthed one solitary afternoon in the archives of the BNF, where the only extant copy is on microfilm.
In addition to anatomy, Hortense conducted studies on the nature of putrefaction, before Pasteur’s discovery of micro-organisms rendered her work all but irrelevant. Among the substances that she watched putrefy in the course of her experiments are fruits (pears and apples in particular), wet tree leaves, pinecones, various meats, fish, eggs, mushrooms, insects, snakes, birds and even a human body that she was able to procure, on more than one occasion, through a surgeon who admired her work (and her person—alas, it wasn’t mutual). You’ve often pictured her in her modest workshop in Congis-sur-Thérouanne surrounded by dead bodies and rotting flesh.
“Rot is like a contagious skin disease,” she writes in one of her notebooks, “caused by humidity and stillness of air. It starts with isolated growths of minuscule, moss-like gray tufts. In time, the skin begins to change; once brilliant and smooth, it becomes dull and starts to shrivel as the vegetation spreads. Soon the entire outer layer is taken over, its original color destroyed, as the vegetation, penetrating deeper, reaches the pedicle. By now the propagation is more rapid, the rot passing from one zone to another, indistinctly, until the whole of the fruit has been devoured…”
It is not known what her findings were, exactly—she was not a specialist in the material like Marie d’Arconville—though her unpublished posthumous papers have led you to think that the essay on putrefaction by the Scottish anthropologist Bruce Monro—anonymously translated into French—is entirely her work. You’ve been compiling a list that you started in Arles, of articles, drawings and books she may have had a part in or authored herself.
One such drawing—you find it, at last, among your notes—comes from Jean-Marc Bourgereau’s study on the manipulation of cadaver bodies, De l’utilisation des noeuds coulants ou desserrés dans la manipulation des corps pour dissection. (You made a copy of it using the library’s scanner.) The woodcut depicts a rope passing underneath the jaw and across the zygomatic arches to the top of the head and knotted in such a way that it functions as a pulley, allowing the cadaver to be raised or lowered, turned over or under, as needed. A version of the method was used by Vesalius himself in his public dissection of the Swiss murderer Karrer von Gebweiler at the University of Basel in 1543.
* * *
“You look terrible,” Bérengère says when she sees you. Her expression is pitying. Already, you regret letting her in.
“I ran into one of your classmates this afternoon,” she goes on. “She said that you weren’t at the TD. She really seemed worried about you. Noémie, is it?”
“Aurélie.”
“Right, right.” Bérengère starts to shoulder off her coat, and you observe her taking in the papers strewn about on the floor, the books scattered everywhere, the abandoned plates of food. “She said that you made one of your classmates quit the class.” Bérengère gives you a look, eyebrows raised. “What’s going on? Are you avoiding me?”
“As you can see, I’ve been busy.”
“I called you several times.”
“I’m sorry,” you say, pretending to study the notes in front of you. “I must not have heard the phone.” And then, because you can’t help yourself, you ask, “How is your friend with the scarf?”
“What? Oh. Him. A former client…”
You sense her coming closer and resist the urge to look up from the sentence you’ve been reading in a loop.
“… I took notes for him, a cinema-studies course at Censier.” Her scent—the familiar harshness, the faint tang of cigarettes—reaches you. “If you’re cross with me,” she goes on, in a different tone, “I’d appreciate you saying so.”
“I’m not cross, but I need to know. About the art student.”
Puzzled silence, at first. Then:
“The necrophile? Is that what this is about?”
You put down the notes and look directly at her. The hollow between her left and right clavicles, where the skin shines as if polished, is covered with light freckles. Directly above it is the hyoid, connected to the body solely by ligament and muscle without direct articulation to another bone.
“You didn’t recognize him at the café.”
Bérengère shakes her head. “Should I have? You don’t really think…?”
She thinks about it for a moment.
“To be honest, I can’t even remember what he looked like. Did he recognize me?”
“I don’t know,” you say, which is the truth, and she looks both relieved and, it seems to you, a little disappointed.
As she’s leaving, she looks back at you from the open doorway. She seems about to say something, before finally changing her mind.
The red and blue serpents of her tattoo appear to pulse faintly in the light of the corridor. To you, they always represented blood flowing in both directions, to and from the heart, like love being given and received.
You didn’t tell her that you’re going to the dissection room tonight. It’s not as though you owe her an explanation.
So why do you feel guilty about it?
* * *
The lights are on, but there’s no one in sight. You walk past the rows of cadavers, your footfalls abnormally loud against the tiles. At a glance, the bodies appear untouched, not yet cut open, but it’s an illusion, of course. Closer scrutiny reveals the incision lines, the telltale flaps of skin covering up organs, and muscles stuffed hastily back inside by students eager to leave. As you approach the table where she lies, you realize that you’re holding your breath.
The gauze, when you pull on it, gives way easily, as though it had only hastily been wrapped the last time. You stop and look around the room. You are alone. No one but you and her. You remove the remaining length of gauze, then take a step back.
Her eyes are open. Her mouth is open. Lips. To
ngue. Teeth. Small, even rows discolored by the formaldehyde. She appears slightly surprised at finding herself on a stainless-steel table in the fifth-floor dissection room of the main building at René Descartes. A filmy layer covers her gaze like a cataract, a secondary effect of the embalming fluid in her veins, which has replaced the blood that once ran through them. Surprisingly, her hair is intact, as if she died only yesterday. For the first time, you see that the body you are dissecting belongs to a female of Asian extraction. Up to this point, you assumed she was European. Or, more precisely, you didn’t think about it at all.
You know nothing about her, though you’ve held her heart and lungs in your hands, made numerous diagrams in your lab notebook. Her internal organs are almost as familiar to you as the shape of your hands or your reflection in a mirror. You know her heart infinitely better than your own, which you will never see, much less touch. All the same, you have never felt it, this heart of hers, beat even once.
Behind you. You hear something and turn around. The individual lights over the other cadavers are dark, and of the ones at the farthest tables you can make out only a dim outline. You don’t immediately notice the human shape, which at first you took for one of the coffins leaning against the wall. He must have been standing there, watching you, all this time.
“The preserving agents weren’t applied properly during the embalming,” he says. “The absence of formalin in her veins is what gave her body the appearance, if not of life, then of something else altogether. You know what I mean, don’t you? It’s funny, but after a while I even grew to like the smell that bothered Fréd so much…” He starts unhurriedly towards you. “Once the stomach is opened, the odor will become a lot worse. They will have no choice but to take her away.”
As you watch him make his way between the tables, you are reminded of the first day of lab when he left the dissection room. You see him again: putting down the scalpel, murmuring, I’m sorry. The words weren’t for any of you; he was talking to her.
“Sooner or later,” Blaise says, “I knew you’d come.”
“I only came to look over some things,” you say, and he smiles, faintly.
“Thank you. For what you did in lab.”
“I didn’t do it for you.”
“No, you did it”—he nods at the gauze in your hands—“because you’ve started to have feelings for her.”
For some reason, you find yourself thinking about Bérengère, and the way she looked back at you from the doorway before leaving.
“I haven’t been able to forgive myself for taking a saw to her,” he goes on. “I tell myself that she can’t feel it, but…”
You remember the marks, as though from knotted ropes used as pulleys, reminiscent of Bourgereau’s sliding-knot method.
“It was you. You put her on her stomach the first day of lab, before any of us got to the dissection room, didn’t you? You knew her. That’s the real reason you’re in the anatomy course.”
Blaise reaches over and takes the gauze from you. “I didn’t want the others to see her yet. I wanted her to myself … a little while longer.”
He meets your gaze, and for a moment it’s as if he has opened you up, taken you apart and put you back together, piece by piece. Then the moment passes. You watch him cover her up again. Afterwards, you stand there with him, contemplating the body, whose face is once again hidden.
“If you want,” he says, “I can tell you who she was.”
* * *
Blaise lives in a garret studio near the Gare du Nord, a busy little street on the edge of the Indian quarter. There is only one window—a small swivel frame giving onto the neighboring rooftops—propped open to let in the night air. You hear the distant roar of a motor, a gust of laughter from the street below. On the floor are plastic cartons filled with hardback sleeves, the kind used to carry sketches. The walls are covered not with anatomical drawings but ideograms—Japanese or Chinese, you can’t tell—and in the brushstrokes you almost recognize the curve of a shoulder, a bent elbow, an ear … The shriek of a kettle brings you to yourself. Blaise is standing before the stove, his back to the room. You return to the calligraphies, which share the wall with pencil and charcoal drawings of insects, mostly scarabs and moths. All of them appear to be dead, all of them except one. Your gaze is drawn to the insect shaped like a glowing pill capsule.
“Fireflies are one of the few insects not repelled by the solvents in embalming fluid,” Blaise says, behind you. He hands you a steaming cup. “Oolong,” he murmurs.
You ask him if she was here, in this apartment, and he nods, a faraway look in his eyes.
The thought of standing where she stood, of seeing what she saw, sends a shiver through you. “How did she die?”
It seems like he’s not going to answer, but then he looks at you and says, “She killed herself.”
You should leave. You have no business here. But you don’t leave. To show him you’re fine, you take a sip, swallowing the hot, bitter taste, not taking your eyes off him. You are wondering if he might have put something in the tea when he says, “Her name was Fumiko. We were in the same drawing class. One day, she asked me to draw her hands.”
On reflex, you look down at his hands, then back up at his face. You feel a queasiness in your chest. “Her hands,” you repeat, buying yourself time. “Did you draw them?”
“I drew every part of her body. I got to know her as no one else has, or ever will. Not even her mother. If I close my eyes, I can reconstruct her entire body, every square centimeter of it, from memory.”
You are close enough to smell the soap he uses, or his aftershave. A masculine odor. You take a step backwards, and in doing so bump into one of the cartons, knocking it over. Immediately, Blaise is down on his knees, picking up the hardback sleeves scattered at your feet. At the sight of the loose-leaf sheets, your pulse quickens. He selects a portfolio and spreads it open right there on the floor. After a moment, you sit down next to him. He starts to go through the drawings, wordlessly, as though you weren’t there. Many are rough sketches, barely begun before they were interrupted, abandoned. One, the silhouette of a hand, looks like it was traced around her real hand. “The hand is typical of the mind,” your prof said to the class on the first day. “The material will of the immaterial spirit.” Blaise doesn’t stop you when you lean over and place your own hand—with a dull slap—over the drawing, obscuring the original outline. You look up, daring him to do something, say something.
Blaise makes as if to reach for your hand—perhaps to lift it off the paper—and, reflexively, you can’t help but recoil. In silence, the two of you stare at each other. You are aware of your heart beating inside your chest. Abruptly, he excuses himself. A moment later, you hear him in the bathroom running the tap. This is as good a time as any to make your exit, but you remain sitting where you are, unable to decide if the outline in front of you is really of her hand. You try to imagine the hand of the cadaver in the dissection lab superimposed over it. You are not sure how many drawings you leaf through—of hands, shoulder blades, napes of necks, hollows of hips—before it dawns on you that the bodies you are seeing no longer belong to a single person. The lines are more precisely defined, like anatomy notes, though nothing is labeled. The bodies are from different women of varying ages and builds—only women, no men, as though he never drew them. As though he was practicing. You are not sure if they are all from the same class, or from several classes over multiple semesters. The last drawing you come to makes you cry out. As with all the others, he didn’t draw the head, but the pose, the proportions, the curves—you’re sure it’s Bérengère you’re looking at, her nakedness you are seeing. The same nakedness you’ve thought about but never fully glimpsed outside of your most troubled fantasies. Bérengère, or her headless body anyway, split open down the middle like a book, each layer of fascia and muscle peeled back, revealing the organs, wet and red and alive. That’s when you realize that you can no longer hear the water through the bathroom door.
You wait, but Blaise doesn’t come out, and you are convinced that he is standing on the other side of the door, listening. You finally call out his name, then say, “I know it was you in my courtyard the other night. You followed me home, didn’t you?”
No answer.
“Did she really kill herself?”
You hear the lock turn and the door opens slightly. You see him, or his eye, peering at you through the gap. The eye is red, as though from crying. Behind him, you see something floating inside a shallow tray. Something dark and fragile and slender.
“I didn’t kill her,” he says. “I was in love with her.”
“OK,” you say.
“If you thought I had something to do with her death, why did you come back here with me?”
“I don’t know.” Perhaps he was right. Perhaps you really were in love with Fumiko, or with her body, her most secret organs. She let you know her in a way that no one else ever has or ever will, in a way that you will never know yourself.
“What are you doing with that?” he asks, and you look down to find that you are still holding the drawing of Bérengère.
“One of the models you drew, I know her. This is her.” Or you think it is. After all, you’ve never seen her without her clothes.
“Take it,” he says. “I have others.”
“Hey, wait,” you start to say, but he’s shut the door again. From the other side, you hear him cough, a small, forlorn sound. For a moment longer you stand there, then go to put the drawing back where you found it, with the other headless corpses. A pair of slippers in the corner, too small to belong to Blaise, catches your eye. Staring at the foot-shaped outline left on the rubbery surface, you try to imagine her in the apartment, the muffled sound of her footfalls as she wanders from room to room in the half-darkness. But like the beat of her imaginary heart, it sounds wrong to you. It is not your Fumiko, the one whose body you are dissecting at the moment. Tomorrow, during lab, this is what you will do: Starting at the base of the thorax, you will make a long, clean incision down the midline, then another incision perpendicular to it, through the pubis. Then you will open the abdominal skin, like a book, to reveal a layer of fascia covering the abdominal muscles.
Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost Page 6
