The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

by Lawrence Durrell

  “The intercapillary pressure of the blood during life is very low, and movement of the blood itself can be accomplished only by the squeeze-action of the muscles against the veins. This squeeze we imitate when it comes to voiding the body of blood. But the first really important thing is to select your drainage points and then raise and open the veins you have chosen. In them you place the largest possible drainage tube to facilitate the movement of the blood.” He illustrated this for us with the unerring skill of a seasoned darts player scoring an “outer”. The harmless simian arms of the “potentate” lay there; Goytz drew on rubber gloves (“always guard against infection” he said under his breath) and made a couple of magisterial incisions on the inside of the forearm, some way below the elbow; then, with an experience obviously born of long practice, he took an elevator and raised a dark vein, passing the instrument through it, so that it was indeed raised above the surface and ready to be tapped. This he repeated with a kindly absorption on the other arm, saying to Marchant in abstracted tones, “You see, all we know is thanks to the great anatomists; you may laugh, but Leonardo prepared specimens this way.” But something went wrong, the wounds began to bleed. “It’s nothing” he said. “You will see.” He called over some students and with them proceeded to tug the arms of his subject above his head, pulling them as far as they would go, and in such a fashion as to squeeze the maximum amount of blood out of them; meanwhile the arms were being sponged from fingertip to shoulder by the students. It was in a sense a kind of Japanese massage that the “potentate” was receiving. “Poor drainage” said Goytz “has been universally recognised as the cause of embalming failure. We use surface manipulation, vibration, even a roller-stretcher—anything to get the blood moving. After all, in terms of quantity, you can calculate that there is about seven pounds of liquid blood per hundred of body-weight; now with the best will in the world and the most up-to-date equipment (taking one gallon of blood per one single hundred and fifty pound body) we should expect to remove perhaps one half of the total quantity, certainly not more: that is to say, two quarts of blood from this hundred and fifty pound fellow here.” He tapped the potentate lightly on the forehead, demonstrating with kindliness; now he was like some champion fisherman, standing beside a huge white shark almost taller than himself, and talking modestly about the means he had employed to take it.

  “But” he went on in cautionary vein “continuous and uncontrolled drainage is one of the common causes for the situation in which the body is firm and clear and, on the face of it, well preserved when embalmed … yet” he raised a finger to the ceiling and paused dramatically “becomes soft and begins to decompose a few hours later. That is the tragedy! In other words, the embalmer’s work is really an art based on a calculated judgement of a given situation. Both under-embalming and over-embalming result from inaccurately judged drainage-control. With over-embalming you get wrinkling, leatherising and dehydration in low-resistance areas; with under-embalming you risk premature decomposition areas of high resistance. Scylla and Charybdis, my friends, that is what you might call it! Ah!” He sighed again.

  When he was in this vein—which Marchant called his “Sermon on the Mount” vein—he was irresistible, and we did everything we could to encourage him to continue. Indeed the subject was so dear to him that his features took on a rosy tinge, almost eosin-tinted with the enthusiasm he felt for “composing” his subjects. But he was also a modest man and feared to bore a non-professional audience, and so from time to time he paused, smiled vaguely and self-deprecatingly round, and gave a little sigh of apology. “Don’t stop, man” said Marchant. “This is fascinating; we are learning from you, Goytz. Don’t stop now!” The Compleat Embalmer simpered and said: “Very well. Let me then just run over the main points in regard to this Eastern Potentate. I think we will have to consider some of the main factors of cavity-embalming with him—attacking the main points of putrefaction with a trocar.”

  He snapped a finger and one of his acolytes held up for our inspection a heavy metal syringe with a sharp nozzle, looking for all the world like some article of gardening equipment; Goytz smiled. “I know” he said. “It has been often said. Yet it is the most invaluable piece of embalming equipment there is.” (The sort of thing one sees old ladies using to spray soapy water on their roses.) Goytz took it in a cherishing fashion and presented it at his subject in a manner obviously perfected by long practice. “I will just outline what must be done!” he said. “First we must penetrate at the intersection of the fifth intercostal space and the mid-axillary line; press down until with a slight puff you enter the stomach. Next we must tackle the caecum which is slightly more complicated. Direct the point one-fourth of the distance from the right anterior-superior iliac spine to the pubic symphysis; a tiny bit tricky here, you must keep the point well up near the abdominal wall until within about four inches of the right anterior-superior iliac spine, then dip the point two inches and press softly forward and … with a puff you are in the colon.” His smile was beatific, his audience rapt. He paused to blow his nose in a tissue.

  “Now” he said “there remains the urinary bladder and, most difficult of all, the right atrium of the heart.” He issued his instruction for these two delicate operations with burning enthusiasm, though his voice was modulated and serene. He took a pencil from one of his students and marked the places as he spoke on the skin of his subject. The “potentate” said nothing, though he also appeared to be listening attentively to Goytz. “Onwards until it touches the pubic bone; you will feel the slight jolt. Withdraw about half an inch and dip the point slightly and you will find yourself in the bladder. Now as for the atrium, the target is a small one; you must imagine a line drawn from the left anterior-superior iliac spine to the lobe of the right ear; keep your point firmly up against the anterior wall of the cavity until you pierce the diaphragm. Then dip down and you are in the heart.” He sighed again and looked around him benignly, apologetically.

  “You see, Marchant” he went on. “And you also have had to take such simple matters into consideration: the combined weight of the viscera in the average adult is around fifteen or twenty pounds, and since this material is so highly putrefactive a considerable amount of fluid is required to disinfect and preserve it. We generally reckon upon between twenty-four and thirty-two ounces of concentrated cavity-fluid as a mean dose. But of course cases vary. Sometimes you get blow-back from intestinal gases, specially if the subject is not too fresh, or if it has succumbed to a disease which has filled a member with some putrefactive fluid. But one can judge usually after a bit of experience.” At this moment the “potentate” gave out a noise, a strange rumbling of the stomach, for all the world as if he were hungry. Goytz smiled and raised a finger, saying: “Hark at that! The formation of gases. You must learn how to interpret the sound.” There was a slight hiss from the anus of the “potentate”, like the noise made by a torn balloon at an Xmas party. “That is normal” said Goytz. “But if things have gone too far we are frequently obliged to make an incision and snip the gut here and there with scissors in order to avoid it. It is a messy system and is better avoided if possible. But in this craft one is always up against unknown factors like freshness or serious illness; and sometimes we have to take emergency steps and use aspiration to void the chief cavities. A six-inch incision, for example, through the ventral wall, along the median lines of the abdomen between the umbilicus and the xiphoid process of the sternum…. Then clip-clip and void by aspiration; then the viscera are quickly covered with fluid, embalming powder or hardening compound. But of course the trouble with the holes you make is that they have to be sealed. Yet here we may take courage; to stitch up an embalming subject is less delicate than the stitching up of somebody alive who has been operated on. A simple sailmaker’s stitch will draw the lips together; and then you may coat it with a wax sealer as a final operation.” He paused in order to give emphasis to what must have been a staple lecture-room joke. Then he said benignly, “Your body is
as good as new.” There was a slight ripple of sycophantic laughter from his little group. One of them made an involuntary gesture of the hands as if were about to applaud, as one does at the end of a concert. Goytz nodded his thanks at the youth and went on to demonstrate the various types of suture he would use according to nature and size of the incisions made. It was of course fascinating for Marchant, who had been laying life-lines so to speak, made of almost invisible thread, through the photoelectric body of Iolanthe. How crude, compared with our work, it all seemed. Nevertheless there was an affinity of attitude. It lay in our attitude to Beauty!

  There was a long pause for breath, during which Goytz paused, as if hovering on the edge of a final peroration: but in fact he was drawing strength to deal with the trickiest part of his art, gazing down with quiet attention at the face of the “potentate”. He placed a finger reflectively on the mouth of the personage and gently eased the lip back to reveal a white wolf’s tooth before replacing it with care. Then he turned back to us and continued.

  “Now the great painter Sargent once said that the hardest thing to get right in portraiture was the mouth of his sitters. One would have thought that it was the eyes, which are so mobile and so full of variety and expression. But in fact he was right. The position of the mouth is absolutely the thing which must be right or else the whole expression goes wrong. The eyes may smile, the eyes may blaze, but if the mouth is wrong, everything is wrong, and your subject will instantly be criticised by his beloved ones as unnatural. Now if this was true for one of the greatest portraitists the world has ever known it is much truer still for the embalmer.

  “The mouth position is the most delicate of all, and is also the weakest part of the physical structure—for in death the jaw often falls, the musculature tenses or yields, the lips shrink. Here some swift action has to be taken. We must rub in our embalming cream and massage well before proceeding to the ‘set’ of the mouth. But in very many cases one has to do what we have called an ‘invisible mend’; technically speaking there are two sutures of great importance, that of the musculature and that of the mandible itself. The first is really a septum suture. A full curved needle is passed through the muscle tissue at the base of the lower gum, at the septum. The needle is kept as close to the jawbone as possible and the stitch should be quite wide. The needle is then directed upward between the upper lip and gum and brought out through the left nostril. It is then pushed through the septum of the nose into the right nostril and back down between the upper lip and gum. The loose ends are then softly pulled together to coax the jaw into position. When the operator stands at the head of the table he can hold the mandible in position with the little finger and tie the knot with the remaining fingers. But a bow knot is advisable here, as it leaves a little play for any future adjustments one might be called upon to make.

  “Of course in this domain, too, the rule of chance obtains, and very small factors play a large role; dentures, for example, or heavily retracted gums which death will shrink out of shape all too quickly; decomposition, ulceration … many imponderables with which only the skilled embalmer can cope and still remain true to his vision of reality—if I may make so bold as to call it that, for he tries to get as near to life as possible. He is an artist trying to reform the effects of death in a subject, particularly those of the rigor mortis and associated conditions. But sometimes too, in subjects which have suffered a long illness, his kind of beauty treatment is up against many of the problems faced by beautificians who have to compensate for a lifetime of sadness or selfishness or stupidity showing upon the faces of their patients.

  “I’m thinking, for example, of the facies hippocratica, so called because first described by the greatest little doctor of All Time, Hippocrates. All literatures both before and after have drawn attention to the fact that the faces of those about to pass on tend to have a sort of stamp of death about them. Of course it is almost infinitely variable according to the causes of the death, but sufficiently consistent to have been noted down. It is not just folklore, my friends, though each embalmer may cite you different characteristics of the condition. I myself would cite a sharp pinched quality of the nostrils, and a general semblance of skin-shrinkage around the temples. But of course each case is modified by circumstances; those who die in peace will not show the same signs as those who die in high emotion, shrieking, or suicides who have blown their brains out. It takes all kinds to make a world.”

  He smiled round at us in kindly and abstracted fashion, and then turned back to reflect upon the problems which his “potentate” would pose to the class. “In his case,” he said “we can congratulate ourselves on his freshness but on little else—for there is a problem or two connected with his mouth. I have asked for some photographs of him in life. His lower jaw must have protruded a good deal and I think we will have to consider a mandible suture—inserting the needle straight down between the lower lip and gum and bringing it out at the point of the chin; then reinserting the needle into the same hole but pushing it upwards behind the mandible, in order to bring it out through the floor of the mouth just beneath the tip of the tongue. The actual decision of course depends on our documentation.

  “By that,” he went on “I mean that if he has no friends and relations to mourn him here and to complain about the likeness; if he simply has to be casketed and package-shipped to Abyssinia: why then I might in the interest of pure speed resort to a more primitive method known as ‘tack-and-thread’. This is much swifter. You take a long slim carpet-tack and a tack-hammer such as picture-framers use; you drive the tack into the mandible, between the roots of the teeth. Then you drive a second into the maxilla. Then a strong piece of cord attached to the two tacks will draw the mandible into position and hold it. But the method is not foolproof, and often not professionally attractive. On the other hand I have to take into consideration other factors. For example, his own folks back home may want him gilded from head to foot, not just painted like a photographic likeness hand-tinted by however expert a hand. We must first secure the cavities while we are waiting for a word from his Embassy.” He smiled, pulling off his gloves, and prepared the air for yet another lecture-room jest. “You see,” he said “often the dead are just as choosy as the living.” This too was acknowledged with rapturous respect.

  “And now it’s past my work time” said Goytz. “So I will invite you into my study for a cup of tea.” He led us as he always did into his smart white office, the walls of which were covered with charts and graphs showing the progress of the embalming campaign. There were advertising leaflets everywhere. A trolley with freshly made tea on it stood by the desk, and this he dispensed with care. “At the moment it may seem very slack,” he said “but the build-up is impressive. I reckon within ten years everyone in this country will have taken to the idea of embalming; already the advance sales to the young with our special bonus have soared into millions. It’s become a bit of a fad, if you like, specially since that pop group launched that song ‘My mummy is a mummy’, but nevertheless the advances have been paid for on these policies, and they will have to be honoured. There is no time to be lost. We shall soon need hundreds of embalmers working through the length and breadth of the land. I have warned Julian that a special effort will be needed. Of course in my case I am concentrating on Turkey and the Middle East where totally different methods both publicitywise and sciencewise will be necessary; we can do a cheaper job, use cheaper fluids and cruder methods. More bright colours and less representational art if you follow.

  “But that too is virtually pre-sold, thanks to the brilliant campaign that the firm organised with the clergy. We offered free embalming to the Byzantine church, and after our second Greek Archbishop there was a stampede. The lying-in-state of the Archbishop of Belgrade was for the first time prolonged for weeks thanks to our up-to-date methods. Normally in those lands of the Noonday Sun the decomposition sets in all too swiftly and after three days or less even … why you can’t get near enough to show your reve
rence. Then came the Catholics; they don’t like to be left behind, and they smelt the political power behind the drive. At once they issued a special Bull authorising the embalming of everyone. It averted dangerous riots. But the last and most positive victory of all was over the Communists when we pointed out that Lenin had used our own patented cavity-fluid! Fancy! After the first suspicious hesitation Toto the dictator of Bulgaria signed a full policy, and he is next on our list.

  “So you see by the time I send out four or five fully trained embalmers to the Middle East we shall have captured the whole market to a point where it only remains to sweep up Mecca and we’re home. Then … gazing even further away to the Lands of the Lotus we might envisage Persia and India playing their little part….” Goytz was in a sort of dream as he sipped his tea and waved vaguely at these vast horizons. Marchant rubbed his hands in high delight. “Yes,” he said “you are right. Nothing will stop the march of science.” And he gave forth a characteristic titter; Goytz, still in his creative muse, smiled upon us from behind his desk. “How long” he said “before the reign of Real Beauty begins?” This was rather a harpoon for Marchant who put on a somewhat schoolmistress’ expression and said with a touch of tartness, “Our own Iolanthe won’t be long now, Goytz. Another month or two at the most.” The embalmer raised a hand in kindly benediction, and then a faint cloud passed over his serene countenance. “For me” he said “the only trouble is that Julian’s brother is not pulling his weight; something is wrong. He is ill perhaps. But at any rate he has disappointed us rather, because he won’t play any part in our scheme, or so it appears. And Julian is vexed with him. That’s all I know of the matter.” Suddenly I recalled with a start Julian saying something about Caradoc building Jocas a tomb … when was it? But the tea party went on with decorum until the duty cars arrived and we all went home for the night. Goytz shook hands with both of us and charitably invited us to come back whenever we wished.