The Cape Doctor

by E. J. Levy

  Seventh Table—Represents Abdomen of a woman opened in the sixth or seventh month of pregnancy. I found it beautiful. The plump ribbons of intestines festooning the uterine bulge, the glimpse of her full left breast, barely covered by cloth.

  Eighth Table stopped my heart. A child, drawn from life, perfect in form and every feature, still in its shell of flesh.

  Ninth Table—Uterus in 8th or 9th Month of Pregnancy (containing the foetus intangled in the Funis). Hair on its head, body plump and perfect as Michelangelo’s babe in its round frame, its neck and upper arm snaked by dark umbilicus—the source and sustenance of its life, its undoing. It had strangled in the womb.

  Tenth Table—Two infants lay cradled in the uterus. Two perfectly formed infants curled in the cave of their mother’s womb, curved like the Chinese symbol for yin and yang; the child to the left raised its head toward the mother’s heart, breach; the child to the right had its head facing down, its head pointed toward the cervical opening, preparing to enter the world of men, though neither would. Its right hand held up to its lips, as if to say unspeakable, or as if urging discretion. In eternal slumber, cords garlanding their limbs, strangled by the very thing that gave them life. Forever twinned, forever entwined, seemingly at peace. I thought of Romulus and Remus, stillborn.

  I put the book aside. Leaned back against the sturdy leather of the chair. I could hear a clock tick on the mantel. Hear hoof falls in the street and the clatter of wheels on cobblestones.

  When I returned to the book, I turned its pages like a dreamer reviewing a dream. The dream of the body.

  When General Mirandus came in, just before evening, he shouted for Sarah, and she shouted back as she came out to embrace him, the children in her arms; there was none of the formality my parents had insisted upon, as if the forms could improve our fortunes. He kissed Sarah and she spoke to him quietly, and I saw him glance through the library door, where I sat at the desk watching them. I looked away.

  He stepped into the library and for an instant I feared that he would be angry that I had taken up his costly book, but he smiled.

  “You have good taste. There are only six dozen copies of Smellie’s atlas, and I have one.”

  “It’s wonderful,” I said.

  “Like me,” he said.

  Mirandus was an epidemic of a man. The handsome man from Caracas would later be known throughout the Americas as “Il Precursor,” his ideas having inspired Bolívar’s eventual liberation of those American colonies from Spain. But for me he was the precursor in another way, the first man I loved before I met the only man I would. His appeal among women was like contagion; no one was immune. Not even I, a girl of nine when we’d first met two years before. Catherine the Great, he once told me over dinner, had begged him to remain in St. Petersburg. He had declined. “Her bed was warm, but the winters too cold,” he said, lifting his glass to inspect the claret’s color in the light. The scandalous novelist Madame de Staël had been his lover as well.

  Sarah would press her lips together tightly when he told these stories, which she said she’d heard too often (“I could recite them by heart, like a rosary”), and excused herself; she had made a certain peace with his charm, it seemed, but that did not mean she was immune to pain.

  It was hard to tell in those first few months in London if I was falling in love with the general or with his library or with his life; the excitement that I felt each afternoon when I heard his feet on the boards outside the library, when he entered the room—my mouth dry, my stomach tight, my laugh too easy and high, as it would later be when I learned to drink champagne—confused and delighted me; certainly our afternoons closeted together for an hour before dinner were among the loveliest, most memorable hours I spent in London.

  “Have you read all these books?” I asked that first afternoon.

  He laughed. “The majority. There are one or two I’ve only skimmed.”

  “Then why keep them?”

  “It is a pleasure to possess beautiful things,” he said. “Is it not?”

  I shrugged. “It must be marvelous to be a clever man,” I said.

  “Do you think so?”

  I nodded, not taking my eyes off the books.

  “And how is it to be a clever girl?”

  “I’ve noticed that wit is rarely mistaken for virtue in a girl.”

  “Some mistake it.”

  I went back to walking the room, dragging my fingers idly along the spines.

  “You are fond of reading?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve read little. Our father considers it a waste of time.”

  “To read?”

  “To educate daughters.”

  “He taught you Latin.”

  “He taught our brother. I was merely present for the lesson.”

  “You are a quick study, then.”

  “You’re the first to suggest it, sir.” I sensed that I had disappointed him with my answers. I knew I must not disappoint; our lives depended on pleasing this man. “Our father had no objection to our reading books, provided they contained no useful knowledge at all.”

  He laughed. “Tell me about what you’ve read.” He came over and sat on the edge of the desk.

  I was embarrassed to have read so little by the advanced age of eleven. “Novels mostly,” I said. I hadn’t the courage to name them, such books as The Monk or Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, which I felt sure would not do me credit.

  “And have you enjoyed them?”

  “Stories are like dreams,” I said. “They all but vanish from memory upon their ending.”

  “Not all,” said the general. “I shall guide you.”

  True to his word, he set me a course of reading, which I’d follow over the next three years—Shakespeare’s history plays and Petrarch’s Africa, Milton’s long poem and Rousseau’s scandalous Confessions, Dante and Ariosto and the work of the general’s friends Thomas Paine and Jeremy Bentham and the late Mrs. Wollstonecraft, as well as Euclid’s Elements and Newton’s Principia. On Saturdays we would read together Plato’s accounts of his teacher, Socrates, and Aristotle’s theories in Greek and would have continued the lesson on Sundays, had my mother’s devotion to Mass not taken precedence.

  Most days I would arrive early and have a cup of milky tea with Sarah and the children and then read in the library until the sun was low and the room dim, and he would come in and walk me home—discussing, as we went, what I had read that day.

  It was a course of reading calculated less to provide an understanding of any particular field—his was not the pedant’s predilection for linear progression—his selections seemed governed by another principle altogether, that of pleasure, both mine and his, selecting works that had inspired his curiosity and enthusiasm to see what might whet my own.

  The general was utterly unlike my brother’s tutors in mathematics and history who had visited our home, myopic men whose bodies seemed to have been diminished with their minds’ increase—delicate men around whom the very air seemed dimmer. They had made education appear a poor prospect, unromantic in the extreme. But Mirandus, as his surname promised, was a marvel and made education the most intoxicating of adventures, as good or better than the travel he’d made in ships when he sailed to Madrid from Venezuela as a young man, the women he’d bedded, the prisons he’d escaped. Books picked the lock that opened everything—all the greatest minds of history—and which no one could ever take from us.

  Waiting for execution in France after the Revolution (which he had supported until it turned against the vulnerable), he claimed to have recited from memory Voltaire’s Candide and so charmed his gaolers that they had helped him escape—though I suspected bribes had inspired them as much as literature.

  I often learned more in our discussions than in my reading. He brought out points I’d overlooked, details I had not noticed, and sometimes—to my delight—I would notice things that he had not. I would raise a point or make an observation that surprised him,
and his surprise seemed to give us both great pleasure.

  I remember most particularly one evening, strolling through Hyde Park—the light lingering as it does in late spring, as if loath to end the day as I was, the air a deep indigo—as I told him how the whole of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was like Mark Antony’s funeral oration, the author appearing to praise what he actually condemned.

  He seemed puzzled. “Say more.”

  “Well, the men possess authority in the play, but he gives to women the command of wisdom, which men like Brutus and Caesar are too vain or foolish to heed. Had either man listened to his wife, they’d not have killed their king…”

  “Emperor,” he corrected, gently.

  “The point is, the play seems to be a peen—” I hesitated over the word. “A pain—”

  “A paean,” he said.

  “Yes, right, a paean to a powerful ruler in the face of fractious mobs, but really you could see it as a challenge to the foolishness of men, even powerful men, who ignore the wisdom of their women.”

  “Mrs. Wollstonecraft would have delighted in you,” he said, resting a hand on my shoulder with a gentle pressure, as if I were a cane.

  “But don’t you think it’s curious?”

  “It was written for a queen,” he said.

  “So artists are to be mere flatterers of those who pay their wages?”

  “You sound like your uncle,” he said. “He believed the artist should be supported by society in order to transform it, free of the taint of personal patronage.” A flock of dandified young men strolled past, like peacocks. “What do you think?” he asked, pausing in our walk.

  This was where my education began, in that single question, the expectation that through effort and sound reading—through the proper balance of sensibility and reason, founded on sound principle—I might forge an answer for myself; we each might. A democracy of thought.

  “Perhaps my uncle was right,” I said.

  “Perhaps he was.”

  The ardor I discovered for learning that spring—and in the years that followed—was a kind of love I’d never known, and one a lesser man might easily have mistaken for another sort of passion. He could have ruined me, twisting my admiration into something smaller, more private. To his credit, he did not. Perhaps Sarah intervened on my behalf? Or perhaps fate did. Whatever the cause, I was left free to focus my ardor on the library. When Mirandus spoke of my joining him in Venezuela, one evening when I’d stayed to dinner, I sensed a proposal in his words, a veiled promise, but in his house I was treated only as a daughter—that is, until I became a son.

  I was turning the pages of a novel by Richardson one afternoon that first spring when something fluttered to the desk in front of me. I feared I’d torn the page; I looked down at the blotter and saw nothing there, save for a single thread, a hair, pale as gold wire, the length of a joint on my finger, wavy as a river seen from a hill, a hair no head had ever worn. I recognized it instantly. I laughed to see it, at the incongruity.

  How had such a hair found its way to the pages of a novel? I thought to ask Sarah about it, but thought better of it. If it were hers, it would seem I had been spying. If it weren’t hers, it would be worse. I thought to leave it on the blotter, but I feared he might think I’d left it there. I didn’t know if I should place it in the book, if that was indeed where it belonged.

  I was pondering options for its disposal when I heard boot falls outside the door. I pinched the hair up and dropped it into the pocket of my dress.

  Only later, when I discovered other hairs placed among the pages of other books—some blond, some black, one red—did I understand it was a collection, like a reliquary in the religion of desire, of the body. I thought of what he’d said the day I first arrived, how it was a pleasure to possess beautiful things. I looked for a pattern in their placement. I wanted to ask him whose they were. If he knew, if he recalled each woman by her hair. I never asked.

  I feared the general would find me out that day, as he thumbed through the book on the desk; did I imagine it or did he look concerned, searching for what was missing? We conversed as usual about what I’d read, but when I left, I took the pocketed souvenir with me. For years I kept it sewn into the hem of a handkerchief like a charm; later I placed it in my own copy of The Metamorphoses. I thought the old Roman would have approved.

  A few months after my studies began, the general sailed for America to gather support for his efforts to liberate Venezuela from Spain. He would meet with the American presidents Jefferson and Madison; en route he would design the Venezuelan flag. My mother seemed relieved to have him gone. While he was away for those eighteen months, I missed him—our conversations and his encouragement—but I felt more at ease, alone with Sarah and the children. My schedule remained unchanged. I liked to imagine my presence was a comfort to Sarah. Certainly we grew more intimate, as the weeks and months passed, alone together, as if we were our own small family. I knew she missed the general, as she called him; I wondered if she feared she might lose him.

  “Do you not wish to marry the general?” I asked Sarah one afternoon in the garden as we took our tea.

  “Why?” she laughed. “Do you?”

  “What a question,” I blushed. “I’m a child.”

  “And I am not,” she said. “I am not chattel to be bought and sold by men. We do not need the state to ratify our affections.” It sounded as if she were quoting someone.

  “But it would make your life more secure, surely, and your children’s.”

  “No life is secure, child; you know that. Did marriage protect your mother?”

  She set down her teacup. “When people promise security, they are usually scheming to take something away.”

  Perhaps I looked alarmed, for she stretched out a hand and covered mine on the table. “The only security is to be found in yourself.”

  “What of love?”

  “Ah, that’s the least secure of all, but we can’t live without it, can we?” She looked out over the garden, the doors swung open to let in the late-summer breeze. She rose and stepped into the light.

  For a time, several happy years, our lives were stable again, lodged in a house just north of Fitzroy Square, not far from the general’s, sustained by a generous subscription raised on our behalf by my uncle’s friend Lord Basken. A loyal patron of my uncle’s to the end, Lord Basken had proposed after my uncle’s death to pull together a volume of his drawings and essays whose sale might support poor Perry’s indigent relations—by which he meant us. My mother was aghast at the prospect, but we had few others. And it bought us time.

  When the general returned from his travels on New Year’s Day, 1808, a year and a half after he’d left, the house was often mobbed by guests. They came like crows. Noisy. Preening. Rancorous. Young Mr. Simón Bolívar. Mr. Jeremy Bentham, who looked like an egg with a wig. The rooms filled with heady talk of politics and revolution. General Mirandus let me linger and listen, or at least he did not put me out. I stretched out quietly behind a sofa or sat silent in a chair with a book, so I might overhear. I did not speak, but I grew accustomed to the arguments of men, words like cards thrown down in whist, the pleasures of debate, and of winning.

  Mr. Bentham’s visits were especially lively and loud, reaching a volume that made young Fernando cry but delighted me. Bentham was always invoking some principle he had invented, as when he railed against what he called “deep play”—when one risks greatly for uncertain gain. He believed it best to maximize pleasure in life. He and the general debated the point one evening over dinner, after Bentham had called for a prohibition on the “evils of deep play.” The general claimed the theory was mistaken because it ignored the pleasure that comes of acting on principle, even for uncertain reward:

  “The individual may fail,” Mirandus said, “but the collective gain thereby, and human happiness thus be increased, not lessened.”

  But both men missed the mark, I thought. To risk everything for uncertain gain is a gam
ble women know well; mothers engage in it every day in the birthing of a child. To prohibit it would be to outlaw childbirth, and love itself, and every foolish necessary self-sacrifice in its name.

  I said so. They stared at me, as if I were a talking dog, shocked that I’d spoken, before they broke into applause.

  Mr. Bentham was the most thoughtful man about his own death that I ever met. When he told us that he intended to be publicly autopsied, the general cautioned he take care it not be vivisection, given all the enemies he’d acquired. Bentham gave his high-pitched laugh and waved away the threat, eager to tell us about his latest plan: he’d decided that his corpse should be taken apart for public study, then reassembled for public display, like a vase. He wanted to be mummified and rolled out at the university on special occasions. (He was.)

  The idea of the body as an object of inquiry, impersonal, delighted him. And me.

  The only visitor I did not like was the young Mr. Simón Bolívar, a frequent guest. Handsome and brilliant as Bolívar was, I did not trust his silence, his quiet voice, his watchful attention. I did not trust him. Perhaps it was rivalry; we were both Mirandus’s protégés, after a fashion. He seemed to be calculating advantage in every exchange, tallying losses and wins in the room. Careful that he would win.

  After the general’s return from the Americas, I noticed another shift in the house. How the general’s eyes lingered on me, how he gently rested his hand on mine as I translated from the Greek, how he wrapped my hand in the crook of his arm when we walked home each early evening. I noticed, too, that Sarah seemed less pleased to see me. She was irritable with Leandro, and stormed out one morning when the boys were fighting with no more explanation than “Jesus wept.” And one morning when I arrived early, Sarah did not greet me at all but the maid, so I slipped into the library and took my seat only to hear a fearful thud upstairs and shouting.