“Come,” Sabine said. “If this is the new arrangement, you should know what needs to be done.”
We stepped into the sunshine and took off down the road. Sabine withdrew a novel from her basket and read as we walked. I could not see the cover, but when I tried to read the words she twitched and turned the book so I could not see. We didn’t speak until we arrived at the pharmacist’s, and Sabine located a blue bottle on the shelf. She shook it a little and held it up to the light.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Recette secrète,” she said.
“What?”
“Just some nonsense, but Maxa gets what she desires.” She closed the bottle in her fist. Her expression was flat and cross. “Maxa watches you,” she said. “She watches you like a cat watches a bird.”
“Jealously?”
She snorted. “Hungrily.”
Back at the theater, Sabine lifted Maxa’s feet up onto the cot and then dragged her torso upright against the wall. She slapped her lightly on the cheek, and Maxa moaned piteously. Sabine handed me the bottle. I poured out the liquid with a trembling hand and laid the spoon against Maxa’s tongue. She bit the metal and swallowed listlessly. Her eyes fluttered open, and I felt like I was at the edge of the mouth of a cave, with every intention of jumping in.
* * *
After I’d helped Maxa prepare for the night’s performance, I was allowed to sit in the audience, though not to occupy a paying chair. I thought I would become tired or bored of the same rotating sets of plays every night, but I could not stop watching Maxa. She exhibited control over every twitch. She never laughed when she might have laughed, never put a crack in the tension.
Every night, Maxa screamed onstage. Her scream was a magnificent thing, a resonating animal that climbed out of her throat and gamboled around the room. Some nights, if the room was particularly hot, I swore I could see the ribbons of her voice emanating from her. She screamed as she was raped and strangled, disemboweled, stabbed. She screamed as she was consumed by wildcats, shot in the gut, shot in the head (here, accompanied by an uncanny whistling sound, as if the scream were coming through the newly created orifice). She screamed as she was beaten, lit on fire. Audience members would stagger into the street to vomit, and at the end of the night the cobblestone street was studded with glistening puddles.
There were always a few doctors in the audience, sitting at the end of their rows. They were necessary, as fainting of audience members was also a regular occurrence. Mostly men, which caused a great deal of snickering and speculation among us.
The prevailing theory for this fact was that women were always afraid and covering their eyes, and men watched what they could not—and then found themselves unable to bear it. But Maxa knew the truth, and told me the reason for the fainting. Most men, she said, would only see bodily fluids when they caught their ejaculate in their hands, or if their life ended at the wrong end of a brawl. But for women, gore was a unit of measurement: monthly cycles, the egg-white slip of arousal, the blood of virginity stolen through force of hand or the force of law, childbirth, fists splitting the skin of the skull, the leak of milk, tears.
(I once saw a woman in the street who had been knocked about by a lover, or perhaps a customer. Her eye socket looked crushed; the new shape of her head made my stomach curdle. She was weeping, but the salt tears were pink. She wiped them from her filthy face and looked at them on her hand: the color of a rare diamond. “Even my tears bleed,” she said, and staggered down the street.)
“Men occupy terra firma because they are like stones. Women seep because they occupy the filmy gauze between the world of the living and the dead,” Maxa said. She was always saying stuff like that. But after watching her perform every night, I began to believe it.
* * *
Weeks and months, Maxa died again and again. One of them, in the early spring—death by slicing with a trick razor—was among the most dramatic I’d ever seen. I had watched the rehearsals but could not wait to see the final effect. Louis’s forehead gleamed with sweat beneath the stage lights. He was more scared than Maxa, I realized. But then again, that was easy—Maxa wasn’t afraid at all.
From behind the curtain, I glanced out into the audience. When I squinted, I could see that their collective foreheads were hazy with filth. When the curtains kissed, I glanced out again, and realized that all of their foreheads were crossed with soot—it was Mercredi des Cendres.
I watched Louis slash thin lines across Maxa’s breasts, blood seeping down her white slip. She shrieked in pain, her eyes glittering with pleasure. Then he drove the razor into her side. A stream of blood left her, as though he’d punctured a wine cask. The dagger’s blade, I knew, sank easily into its handle, and the blood I had mixed and warmed myself, but the effect was alarming nonetheless.
When the play ended, the audience went to their feet, and would not stop clapping until Camille told them to leave.
Backstage, Sabine staggered beneath the weight of her water bucket. She came up behind Maxa. The thin metal handle drew a white stripe across her red hand.
“I want Bess to wash me,” Maxa said.
Sabine flinched and then dropped the bucket to the floor. Water sloshed on the wood and drew up what was dried there. I barely heard her receding footsteps.
Maxa slumped into her chair. In her hand, she held her removed eye. I knelt before her and took it—a piece of chicken fat bound in twine and dipped in the carmine and glycerine, because the butcher had no beef eyes for us today—and set it wetly upon the vanity. I knew that the dark dip in her face was merely paint, but still when I approached it with a damp rag I felt something sour swell up inside me.
Maxa lifted her legs and balanced the balls of her feet on another chair. The fake blood had left dark lines down her body.
I rubbed the cleft behind her knee, not wanting to pull on the hair. She watched me, her lips pursed a little as if she wanted to moan but needed to stop herself. My rag felt like a living thing, a snake warmed by sunlight.
“My uncle was a garlic farmer,” Maxa said, closing her eyes. “Hardneck garlic. Have you had it?”
“No,” I said, wringing out the rag in a bucket.
“It’s wild and peppery—the best you can have. My parents sent me there one summer when they worried the city was too wild for me. I would sit in the field and listen to the garlic grow. It sounded like a chorus of insects. I could hear a crackling, like onion skin. The air was green and sharp. They—they had such soft voices.”
Though outside the audience was talking, laughing, their voices were muted, as though the room was a womb.
“My uncle would harvest them and dry them braided together and hanging in bundles from the ceiling. The roots were like little hairs, and the bulbs were purple as a man’s eggs.” She laughed a little. “My uncle would scold me, but sometimes I’d pull a clove and eat it raw. It tasted like…” Her mouth parted in memory, and in her mouth her tongue glistened like an oyster. “It tasted like a spell. When I got back, my father said I looked changed, and I think I was. I think the garlic tipped something in me. Kindling for a fire a long time coming.”
“Where is your father?” I asked.
Maxa opened her eyes, and her leg twitched beyond my grasp. She ran her hand along her thigh and stared at the pinkish water on her fingertips.
“Where is your father?” she replied.
I did not know what to say. She leaned down and took my chin in her hand.
“What was he? Maghrébin? Your skin is gold in this light.”
I flinched. “I don’t know,” I said. Maxa looked at my face like she wanted to bite it. Instead, she stood and examined herself. She seemed pleased. She walked behind me and gripped my shoulders in her powerful hands, and I felt blood rushing into the muscles that had been like stone. She worked her way around my flesh as if it were a spirit board, and her fingers were on the planchette, torturing answers and poems out of my pain. I writhed and twitched beneath her. “Thank you
,” I whispered, but she was already turning away.
* * *
Maxa’s flat was a few streets over from the Grand-Guignol, on the hill, in a rickety tenement at the top of a narrow staircase. She did not answer the door when I knocked, but the knob turned with no resistance.
Somehow, I had imagined a room bathed in light—a kind of temple. But it was closer to a courtesan’s boudoir. At one corner of the room was a beautiful divan, with plush gold-and-red brocade and a single, sensuous loop of an armrest. The walls were hung with posters from the Grand-Guignol, a daguerreotype of a woman I did not recognize.
The shelf was piled with books, a tiny brass pot, a horsehair brush. An articulated mouse skeleton in a bell jar. Her bed was covered in a fur blanket, on which was draped a massive wolfhound. The dog glanced at me and growled a little, the muscles tensing and releasing in liquid bursts beneath her hide, but Maxa made a barely audible shush, and she fell silent, her gaze fixed on Maxa’s form.
“This is Athéna,” she said, gesturing to the creature. “Hello, my little Bess,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here. I need to eat and bathe.”
When she let her robe drop to the floor, I finally saw the body that I’d only caught glimpses of. Her thighs were round, and the hair between her legs a rusty brown, through which the slit of her sex was visible. Her stomach had a low pooch, like she was early with child, and her breasts were small as apples. Thin white scars clustered near the clefts of her.
I drew a bath for her, and after she lowered her body into the water, I cut her meat pie into chunks and blew on them until they were cool. She wanted no metal, so I fed her by hand. Her mouth was warm and tight. She was careful not to bite but used the edges of her teeth to pull the meat from my fingers.
She let me sleep at her feet, near Athéna. Curled there, I felt the jabs of her feet as she got comfortable, sought pockets of warmth.
In my dreams, she walked down the streets of Paris on a winter night, and I followed behind. Green, waxy scapes pushed from between the fine hairs of her mink coat, and when the wind blew they rustled and, with a creak, reached farther out. Her body blotted out the moon. She was an ambulatory garden, a beacon in a dead season, life where life should not grow.
* * *
Spring came. One morning, Maxa woke me from my cot by yanking my hair. “I need you,” she said. “There’s a car outside.” As I stood, she undressed me—removing my nightgown and digging around in my trunk for a day dress. I stood shivering, my arms crossed over my breasts. When she’d finished, she unknotted my braid and gathered my hair into a soft chignon at the base of my neck.
In the car, our knees came together, bone knocking against bone.
“Have you ever had your fortune told, Bess?” Maxa asked me.
I shook my head.
“I hadn’t, either, until I came to Paris. As a girl I had a doll who meant to tell little girls’ fortunes. She had a skirt made of slips of paper, and you would ask a question and open her skirts and there would be answers waiting for you. I consulted her daily. Once, I asked her if I was meant to be upon the stage, and when I unfolded the slip it said that I should give up, as evidenced by my doubt. So I shredded her little skirt until there was nothing left.”
I felt a terrible itch at my neck and reached behind to scratch it. My nails dug into the soft give of my skin, and I drew blood. Maxa leaned in and examined my fingers, dipping her own into the gore and examining what she found there.
“Many years ago, I visited a woman who told me many things that would eventually come to pass. But what happened past those events, she said, was shrouded in mist, and I needed to return to her once I met a mulâtresse.”
The car stopped at Rue Vieille du Temple, and Maxa paid and stepped out to the street. I followed her down the road, where carts stood pitched against buildings and people of all types stood at low tables covered in fabric.
Maxa did not slow down at their tables; instead, she went to a particular door and knocked. A young girl answered. She tilted her head suspiciously up at Maxa, but Maxa handed her a small green stone, which she examined briefly. She shouted something in a language I did not understand into the house, and from its depths a voice answered back. Maxa pushed past the girl, who pocketed the stone and smiled at me, as if we shared a secret.
The room the girl led us to was dark and narrow, cluttered with bric-a-brac and a narrow table. The woman who sat at the table was young—perhaps the girl’s mother—and she sat in front of a brass bowl and a glass pitcher filled with water.
“You’ve come back,” she said.
Maxa gestured toward me. “I want the mist cleared,” she said. I sat in a chair in the corner of the room. A thin white cat leapt easily into my lap despite her ancient gait and rolled her skull against my breastbone.
The woman looked at me, her expression unreadable. Then she tilted her pitcher toward us and filled the bowl with water. She waited for it to settle, and then withdrew a vial from her sleeve. A single drop of oil struck the surface, and after a moment it spread outward. She cupped her hands around the bowl’s edge and gazed deeply into it.
I looked over at Maxa. Her face had lost its lazy, indolent softness; she was alert, tense, her lower lip pinched beneath her tooth. The woman looked up at me again, and then returned her gaze to the water. “You are a conduit for violence, but not a host. It passes through you,” she said.
“Is that all?”
“You will die a violent death.”
I saw Maxa gather the red tablecloth in her hands and feared she would yank the bowl and table over.
“Maxa,” I said. “She’s just a foolish woman.”
The woman’s eyes snapped at me, and then drifted back down to her bowl.
“What do you see in there, about my friend?” Maxa asked.
The woman shook her head. Maxa dug into her glove and removed another franc. The woman slipped it into her purse and gazed back down.
“On a distant shore, your lover will find you,” she said. She looked back at me. “What are you?” she asked me, and I had no answer.
* * *
Back in her flat, Maxa seemed agitated. She spun around pinching the air as though reaching for something, and then finally alighted upon a black box on her vanity. When she opened it up, I saw soft spheres resting in between crumpled cloth. She removed one and held it up.
“A fig,” she said, “all the way from Spain.” She handed it to me. It was warm and dense and heavy, and a milky drop of nectar clung to the fruit’s opening.
“Where did you get these?” I asked.
“Oh, an admirer left them for me after a show,” she said. “Eat!”
I did not know whether to bite or split, but Maxa bit into hers, and I did as well. In the bite, I could see hundreds of tiny seeds, shadowed and clustered like orphans at an open door. I pushed into the opening with my finger, and the fruit clung to me like rugae drawing me in.
“It’s the flower,” she said. “It’s grown inward, see? It is less beautiful but much sweeter for the effort. I’m told wasps crawl into its depths and die.”
The fruit slid down my throat, but I could not bring myself to take another bite.
* * *
I do not know when I first understood that Marcel was Maxa’s lover; she never talked about him. Marcel was a queer figure, always fluttering and talking, the opposite of Maxa’s languid substance. He was mealy and pale and perpetually damp, something one might uncover by inverting a stone in a garden. His hair was his only redeeming feature, long and soft. But I noticed that Maxa’s chin twitched downward in his presence, and his never did. I did not like how he touched her, as if he owned her from her skin inward, the way he tangled his fingers in her hair and pulled as if drawing on a leash and pinched her breasts and thighs as though testing her tenderness.
He did not like me, either. He called me Maxa’s little Arab, her whore, her vase de nuit. One evening, after the two of them had polished off a bottle of Arrouya noir, he
put his cigarette out in my skirts. I yelped and leapt up from the divan, shaking the material so it did not catch on fire. From beneath heavy lids, Maxa watched this performance without comment, even when I looked at her for guidance. Then she yawned, her tongue black with wine.
Only the next day did she take me out to buy me a new skirt and laughed as if we were dearest and oldest friends catching up after an absence.
It was Marcel’s idea to take us both to see La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. It was brand-new, and nearly impossible to attend, but Marcel knew a man who knew a stagehand.
Maxa brought me to her apartment for preparation. The dress she’d found was short, heavy with silver beads, beautiful despite being shapeless. When I reached out to run my fingers through the fringe, Maxa slapped my hand away. “Hair first,” she said, pushing me down in her chair.
Maxa let my hair down and tried to take a brush to it. The brush caught, resisted. She instead ran her fingers through from root to tip, lightly tugging at the snarls and knots. “There’s no reason to let it be like this,” she told me.
In the mirror, my hair made me look indescribably young. I looked away. “It’s always been this way,” I said.
“We should change that, Bess.”
“Why do you call me Bess?” I said.
She lifted my hair up like a curtain and let it drop over my shoulders. I thought she would refuse to answer, but when she spoke her voice curved with a smile.
“Have you read ‘The Highwayman’?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“A lover read it to me,” she said. “He brought it from Scotland.” She fondled the curls that gathered around my ears. “A landlord’s daughter falls in love with a brigand, and he is betrayed to soldiers.”
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