IX
Margaret died on August 28th. A man working for the florist next door, worried by the stillness of the flat, finally summoned an inspector from the neighbouring police station. The policeman, Absan by name, had the door forced on September 2nd. Margaret was lying on the matrimonial bed, her face already fallen in. Her death was registered under the name Fanny by the florist’s man, who did not know her well, and by Inspector Absan, who did not know her at all. As to the other Fanny—or the other Margaret—she had disappeared without trace, and the efforts made to find her by those who loved her were without success.
III
THE STORY OF MARGARET
THE HAND THAT SEES
Mme Cholmondeley
MME CHOLMONDELEY is the most remarkable of my patients. A woman of great beauty, at the age of twenty-seven she was injured in her right eye by the oldest of her sons, then still a small child. The wound turned septic. The eye was lost; and by a cruel mischance the infection was transmitted—through the optic nerve, we think—to the left eye, which had to be removed too. Following very precise instructions from her husband, we made two artificial eyes according to the techniques of Messrs Boissonneau and Son, of whom in many ways I am the heir. These pieces of enamel reproduce with great accuracy the colour and shape of the eyes of Mme Cholmondeley, whose first name is Angela—Angela Cholmondeley, née Messer. The instructions, unfortunately, were given from memory and using as a model the eyes of the patient’s oldest daughter, which the father guaranteed were almost identical with those of her mother.
The other day walking in the Tuileries with Margaret, I met Mme Cholmondeley accompanied by two children, one of whom, I think, was the involuntary cause of his mother’s misfortune. M Cholmondeley was holding his wife’s arm, and she as she walked was balancing in her free hand a white umbrella—or perhaps, I’m not sure, it was pale blue. M Cholmondeley, whom I don’t pretend to know socially—such are the rules of us makers of artificial eyes—M Cholmondeley did not greet me either, though in the intimacy of the workshop he pays me the highest compliments on my workmanship. Margaret pulled me by the sleeve in her childlike way.
‘That woman—’ she said to me, ‘—did you see her? She was staring at you. What beautiful eyes she has.’ To this I could not reply with what I knew of Mme C’s fine stare.
Margaret cannot for a moment imagine what an eye-socket looks like when, by accident or disease, it has lost its eyeball. She knows my profession, of course, but in the innocence of her mind she does not picture its strange details. She is still a child, snatched by Mme Boissonneau junior from the claws of a depraved mother. Oh, I who know Margaret better than anyone, I am sure she would rather have died than follow the example of her mother who, wicked as she was, had given her at the outset some instinct of religion. Margaret is someone whose devotion passes understanding. We have in the bedroom a small altar before which she prays night and morning.
I do not know why, but the fixed regard of Mme C sent through my body, while we were in the park, a burning desire to find myself instantly in our bedroom, and to have before my eyes Margaret’s lovely back, her neck bent, kneeling at prayer in her night dress. The idea of entering her at that moment when she is full of her God enchants me, and I often dwell upon it until the day when she tells me, in a voice not altogether her own, that I ought to put aside such thoughts. Has she caught my look, reflected, perhaps, in the silver-gilt cross that dominated the altar, and has she in her innocence read in it my thoughts?
I placed my hands on her shoulders. ‘What is it, dearest Maggie, that I should put aside?’
Her face was wet with tears.
I might say that I am better acquainted with the body of Mme Cholmondeley, in whose injured sockets I have several times already, under the anxious gaze of her husband, inserted eyes I have made (I say ‘several times’ because these eyes become worn and need changing) than with that of my own wife, who does not allow me to approach her except in the dark, and to whom my caresses bring tears, though she says she loves me, and loves me with all her heart.
The first time she came to the Boissonneau establishment Mme C was wearing a brown silk dress and had on her head a straw bonnet to which was attached a thick veil that concealed the sad spectacle of her eyeless lids. To tell the whole story, Mme C fainted when we wanted to examine the eye sockets, and I saw her naked bust, her desperate husband having unfastened dress, bodice and undervest.
Margaret
Margaret was thirteen when I met her, and I must confess that I have no other recollection but that of a child with a rosy face who said not a word but kept blinking her eyes so much that I thought her sick. Already devout, she went to church three times a day accompanied by Mme Boissonneau junior, the wife of my master, who had taken her under her protection. I often used to meet them, Mme Boissonneau nearly always wearing a veil with her hat, though she is a good looking woman, and Margaret with a bare head and a dreamy, almost mindless stare. Later—one or two years having passed, I don’t recall—she spoke to me. It was in the gardens of the Champs-Elysées, and I saw that she was beautiful, to my eyes at least, and that I should have to share her with Our Lord Jesus. Margaret never comes to the workshop in the Rue Vivienne; unlike Mme Boissonneau junior, she is made to feel unwell by the work on the eyes. Mme Boissonneau, in contrast, does not disdain to help us when the need is felt. I did not see Margaret except at the Boissonneau house, and then had only the briefest glimpses. Not that Mme Boissonneau was a stern sort of woman; but she was afraid that in Margaret the vicious proclivities of her mother might one day manifest themselves. So for a long time Margaret ate with the children, and up to the age of eighteen she did not appear until after the liqueurs, when she would sing while one of my master’s daughters accompanied her on the piano. She was of the same age, hardly younger, this other girl, but she might have been made of glass or mist, I never saw her. Margaret’s singing was neither very loud nor very true; she had the slightly drawling and affected voice of her mother, whom I met after we became engaged. There was some reluctance to let me see her, this Mme Cooper, as she liked to be called. She lived in a mezzanine flat in the Rue de Bonne-Nouvelle, and described herself as being of independent means. She was a small woman with a round face and an ample bosom; she dressed in a quiet grey silk, and her only real attraction was a pair of very blue eyes, which Margaret did not inherit.
‘They tell me that you are marrying the girl I gave for adoption to these manufacturers of eyes, and that you yourself are one of them?’
The walls of her sitting room were hung with paper the colour of blood; one crucifix hung over the mantelpiece, another between the windows which looked out onto a courtyard cluttered with old furniture.
‘I shall not embarrass the girl you are marrying by coming to your wedding, Monsieur,’ the Cooper woman continued. ‘But come near so that I can look at you.’ And she made me sit close to her and looked deeply into my eyes.
‘You will do harm to her, Monsieur,’ she said, placing on the centre of my forehead the index and middle fingers of her left hand.
I do not know what insight this woman had into souls. I did not go back to see her again before my marriage, even though an urge to do so came to me once or twice. As to her morals: I believe that despite the crucifixes and her advanced age she still lived on her charms.
Margaret, whom her mother had given to the Boissonneau family when she was only eight years old, tells me that her mother had come from Ireland accompanied by an American; he had died, according to my naive wife, before being able to marry Mme Cooper, and that was the cause of her fall.
‘My mother will not go to heaven,’ Margaret often says, and she prays whenever she can for the salvation of her soul.
Yet Margaret carried on the inside of her thighs and under her left arm little round marks where her mother burned her as a punishment, using a spoon she had placed in the fire.
‘Punishing you for what, my poor innocent child?’
&n
bsp; When I put this question, Margaret lowers her eyes and says with a blush that she doesn’t remember. The love of Christ, she adds, has ‘come back into her through these wounds.’
My Childhood
I have sometimes had this thought, that I share with the Cooper woman a strange resemblance: that the two of us came from a very dark world and that it may well be that she and I both passed too quickly into the light. I should have preferred not to have any recollection of the mountains where I was born. They are black, and smell of dead flesh and burnt wood. It is possible that one of my earliest memories is that of the carcass of a ram, its belly torn open by crows and vultures, carrion birds which I and other children from the village drove away with stones. It is possible also that this memory is of a dream, for when I think back it seems to me that the vulture, when struck full on the head, stood up like a human being and disclosed under its great wings the breasts and round thighs of a woman. The sky above our mountains suddenly out of a burning blue caused little flames to flicker up on our lips; soon we were dead, at the feet of this female griffin. Another memory, more reliable, is that of my parents’ house, a forge on the road to the abbey, and a sunny afternoon I spent playing with a puppy that one of my uncles had given to my brother Jean-Baptiste. Also a harvest procession, led by the priest who was followed by a cohort of children; the huge cross he was carrying flashed in the sky as though to cut it in pieces. Nevertheless I am never sure of my memory; what I think to have been the case is sometimes no more than an illusion. It is so with an evening I passed with my godfather at Bonifacio a few days before embarking for Marseilles and leaving my native country never to return. I walked until late in the day with him on the seashore, the eve of my departure. It was a Sunday. Armand Filippi, my godfather, who was also some sort of cousin of my mother, had obtained a place for me at the Lycée Thiers, at Marseilles, through his brother who was vice-principal there and with whom I lodged for two years before leaving for Paris, my baccalaureate in my pocket. I do not know how to describe the effect upon me, after the mountains and the sad years of my boarding at Ajaccio, of the blazing white beaches where my godfather that evening showed me the women fishing for eels, their legs and arms bared, pulling out of the sand the long fish which they threw living into baskets. Sand lilies were growing on the rocks all along the beach. Armand Filippi made one of the fishwives prepare two eels; she cut off their heads while they were alive, and sliced them up on a flat stone. We ate them cooked over a wood fire on the beach.
‘Godson,’ Armand Filippi asked me that evening, ‘are you a virgin? What career have you in mind?’
I was indeed a virgin, and I imagined myself becoming a doctor.
Mme Cholmondeley
Mme Cholmondeley came back to see us for her fourth refitting, according to our register of appointments, on July 17th, 18—. The previous evening Mme Boissonneau had informed me that Margaret was pregnant—she herself was unwilling to speak to me of such things. At that time, influenced, no doubt, by her increasing devotion, I kept having a terrifying dream of a dead priest whose body, so swollen that its bones were bursting out of the skin, was putrefying on the beach, a fat jelly-fish draped in black. My godfather, Armand Filippi, identified this corpse as that of a parish priest whom he had killed, he confessed with tears, in order to rob him. I ought to say that M Filippi had died in 1879, leaving me a sum of money that enabled me to buy our home in the Rue Brey. This dream of the dead priest, as I called it, so troubled me that it almost spoilt the pleasure that I took in attending on Mme C with her enamel eyes. An unforeseen circumstance, however, soon made me forget the dead Filippi and his imagined crimes. Mme C, contrary to her usual custom, had come accompanied not by her husband but by a woman of ripe years, with a good simple face, who had become one of her devoted companions, reading aloud to her, no doubt, and taking her to concerts, to her dressmaker, and to Mass. But this woman did not stay in the workshop while I changed Mme C’s eyes.
‘I should rather, my dear, that you waited for me in comfort, and knew nothing of this piece of juggling,’ Mme C asked her: kind Mme C.
But what can she really know of the effect on people of her perfect face when it is deprived of its eyes? What images of her beauty arise in the clouded darkness of her thought?
‘My husband,’ she says to me while I am preparing my instruments, ‘has gone off to the Caribbean to inspect a property left to us by my uncle. What use is it, Monsieur? We already have so much.’
She did not say another word for the rest of the sitting. She breathed slowly, her nostrils flared, her hands joined on the stomach. What terrible, inexhaustible bliss, to be able to see this woman without being seen. And to slide under her eyelids the metal eyes in the enamel of which I am reflected, avid and miniscule, in the black depths of pupils that cannot move!
‘It is done, Madam,’ I tell her in expressionless tones, not daring to touch her for fear of betraying myself. I open the door and call in her patient friend. I have stored up in a box four pairs of eyes already used by Mme C: the secretions of her sockets, the tears of a year.
My Dreams: The War
What am I to say? In Paris I was unable to become a doctor. For those studies you need an intelligence and an appetite for hard work with which I was not endowed, also a material support of which I was very swiftly deprived; M Filippi, my stern benefactor, saying he had no desire to encourage me in idleness. After two years in medical school I should have had to find a way of earning my bread; but the war with Prussia sent me down other paths. As a medical orderly all I saw of fighting was wounds, severed limbs, bellies slit open, men starving and sick whose plight left me in the end insensitive. Altogether, it is hunger that I recall most often (for I too experienced it) and the sight I had at Morsbronn of a naked man, his skin bright red, following the soldiers with his hands covering his ears. Still, it was at the war that I met my compatriot Alexander Borgo who, in 1872, got me to enter the firm of M Boissonneau; the same year my father died and my brother Jean-Baptiste joined me in Paris.
Mme Cholmondeley
The memory of Mme C’s visit causes in me fits of increasingly deep musing, to such a point that at certain moments in the day, particularly when I am at my work table, colouring an eye, a curtain of thick velvet descends, not on my outer senses—I can still see and hear—but on my soul, withdrawing it from the contemplation of what surrounds it. To tell the truth I have the feeling at these moments that, despite the distance which separates us in the ordinary way and which I cannot measure with exactitude, I am visiting the consciousness . . . no, the very mind of Mme C. I have only to lay down the paint-brush, close my eyes, and I hear another world. The sounds of the workshop are still there, but I am at the same time in the centre of Mme C, in her chest, in her bowels, I lodge myself there with an unspeakable joy, and I experience with her in the same bewildering shadows the manifestations of the world outside her, the deep grave voice of her husband, the happy ebullience of her children, their loving hands upon her cheek, her bosom, her stomach.
Margaret, of course, is completely unaware of these transports. Here I am, I think to myself, inside Mme C in the same way in which our child is inside Margaret, but with the difference that I can hear and understand what goes on around Mme C, and besides I am so happily at home in her that I should like never to go out. Whereas seeing Maggie so enlarged gives me horrible presentiments. Come the night, I see our little one floating limp on a tide of blood that pours from Maggie’s gaping vagina. Or that the child is going to be born already old, shrunken and wrinkled. At other times I imagine that with his nails he is labouring in the dark to tear open the flesh that holds him prisoner, and that, once freed, he will strangle us and make off over the roofs. The times I spend in the workshop in painting, in burying myself in Mme C, draw me happily away from these imbecile fears.
M C has returned from the Antilles. At times it is his voice that I hear, without finding it very reassuring. His fingers grasp the wrists of the exquisite
Mme C; and there are other movements, much more tender, which my fantasy makes me spy upon, at night, when the innocent and gravid Margaret is lying beside me. And why, Margaret, why will you not let me enter into you, why will you not allow me the place that you give your child and your God? But what does it matter, after all, since here I am, whenever I wish, the intimate of Mme C?
Birth of the Infants Marie and Padoue
I was at the workshop, and my hands were working on eyes, though my spirit was bathing in Mme C, when Margaret was seized with the pangs of labour. A messenger brought me the news, and I stopped at the Café-de l’Arc before going back into our house, not that I was not eager to see my wife and our first born child in her arms, but, to be honest, I had an indescribable fear of the strange appearance the child was bound to have. At the café after my drink I had three visions of it: a little round creature with a gilt forehead, resembling a Chinese idol; an eel with a human face sliding through green water; a child already grown, dancing on its mother’s stomach. The alcohol that had aroused these images gave me a certain courage. The nurselings that I was surprised to see beside my wife had nothing odd about them except that they were two in number. They were marvellously healthy; only their cries, loud and unceasing, tore me away from Mme C.
Darkscapes Page 12