A case of curiosities

by Kurzweil, Allen

  Claude said nothing. He just rubbed his bandaged hand.

  "Does it itch? If it does, I suggest you try using a nutmeg grater. Come down here and I'll show you. Then you can draw for me." Claude refused. "Stop all this self-pity and draw," the Abbe said. A piece of demi-royal materialized, and Claude was once again at the side of the rotund seigneur, seduced by his kind voice and tender touch. And, of course, by the sugar. He still refused to pick up a pencil.

  "There is a myth, Claude, that hands are destiny. This is nonsense. Take Old Antoine, he's the finest watch-finisher in the valley. Have you seen his miserable extremities? Yet he can patch together the most delicate timepiece. Or take the Genevan miniaturist whose palsy forces him to paint by holding a brush in his rotted teeth, a technique developed after experimenting with the brush in his nose. Or Rumphius the mala-cologist. He completed the plates of his Thesaurus Cocblearum unaided. Not bad for a crippled blind man. And then there's Diirer; his Praying Hands almost make me a believer. You know, he suffered terrible warts."

  None of this made much sense to Claude, but he appreciated the attention. After a little more cajoling, he gave in to the Abbe's request.

  "What should I draw for you?" he asked, adding the appropriate titles of deference.

  "It is for you that you must draw. Perhaps a hand, Claude. Your hand."

  Ten minutes later, Claude's deformity had drawn itself. The moment was one of unrecognized importance. Like the young writer who writes about writers, or the singer who sings of song, Claude confirmed the nature of his talents in an indulgent but necessary exercise. With that, the Abbe felt he could leave, and so, after a few inquiries about Madame Page's mushrooms, he did. Claude accompanied him as far as the Red Dog, where the boy sought the comfort of the crowd. "Remember, I shall see you session day," the Abbe said before Claude disappeared into the tavern.

  During the winter months, when the coach road was closed by the snows, the population of Tournay had only one spot to which and from which it shuttled. That spot was the Red Dog, a tavern known throughout the valley for the mediocrity of its wine. Denied fresh air since the Vengeful Widow arrived, the Red Dog reeked of empty wine casks and unwashed patrons.

  Claude's hand soon dominated the tavern talk. He showed the stump to all who were interested. Did the patrons find it tragic? They did not. Was Claude worthy of pity? He was not. To be sure, there was sadness at the loss of the diversion, but few were surprised that "the King would visit no more." Other villagers confessed they had also received the surgeon.

  "So Staemphli got his hands on yours, did he? So!" Gaston the tavernkeeper said. "You're not that bad off. Take a look at what he took from me." The tavernkeeper lifted a pant leg to show off a scar of impressive dimensions, a reminder of a removed callus. Other displays followed. Rochat the baker was missing an ear of uncommon shape; Golay the farmer was "short some leg" after the surgeon had tended to a harmless boil. In each instance, Staemphli had stated that it was Duty—a quality to which so many Calvinists seem predestined—that brought him from Geneva. Gaston knew better. "Says he's doing important work, he says. But he's just bottling us bit by bit." The tavernkeeper sucked a salted pea from a gap in his teeth. "He's got a house filled with . . . us."

  Therese, the Red Dog cook and Gaston's occasional bed partner, turned to Claude as she worked a drop-handle cleaver bolted to a tabletop. "You should have come to me," she said, cutting a slice of thick brown bread. The patrons laughed.

  "To the gallows for the regicide," Gaston said, a reference to the mole's once-royal quality. "Let us do to the surgeon what he has done to us." But the good humor was brief. It ended when a shepherd recalled his son's death from an operation for a stone. The patrons teditected theit glances downwatd to tankards and cups. Claude left feeling renewed sortow.

  This sorrow was overshadowed by a gift that artived near the end of his recuperation. Brought by a slow-moving member of the mansion-house staff, it proclaimed once again the Abbe's generous nature. Claude was envied by his sistets even befote he untied the string; after observing the contents, they wete livid. The package contained two quires of tracing papet, some Dutch double elephant, sticks of India ink, tablets of mineral blue, sepia and Cassel earth, bladder green, and gamboge. But the real prize was a sketch folder that tied shut with two ribbons of crimson silk. It accommodated the copybook, and a set of pencils as well. For a boy accustomed to ragged scraps and ink made from chimney soot, it was a gift worthy of a Tutkish treasure palace.

  Between the covers, he found a terse note barely legible: "Remember Diirer." Madame Page added an assignment to the inscription. "You will show your thanks to the Abbe by giving him one of your fine drawings at the next session day. Perhaps a sketch of the mansion house." Then she drifted into provetb.

  Spring arrived AS suddenly as the winter that preceded it. The snows melted, and the stink of man and beast was flushed from the dwellings of Tournay. Armpits thick with eighteenth-century sweat were cleansed with refreshing eighteenth-century water. Ears were scraped clean. Hair, matted from months of inattention, was teased apart. The body louse, the tick, the chigger, the bedbug were all pursued with earnest energy. The site of these ablutions: the communal soap house on the east bank of the Tournay river. The children who were either too young or too sick to help with the agricultural responsibilities that coincided with the thaw were deposited around the banks, under the gaze of the returning larks. The adjacent pastures offered countless opportunities denied during the long wintet months. Cowpats granted the more imaginative childten houts of diversion. The duller boys and girls tested their relative skills in stone-throwing, early training for a ritualized competition that would bring the men together in adulthood, the annual boulder toss. Others played a game of tag, hitting each other with great and gratuitous force. The Page sisters squatted near a pool of water. Fidelite directed Evangeline to trace the digestive tract of a frog with a hollow stalk of marsh grass. When that proved unrevealing, she ordered Evangeline to feed the frog a worm, slowly. Then the sisters set out to find a cat with which to continue their food-chain tortures.

  Claude kept to himself, his hand and heart still tender. He sat on a clump of damp ground and riffled through the copybook that was sheathed in his new sketch folder. An image forced up a recollection of his father. At the same riverbank, Michel Page had launched a clog boat for his son. He had placed in it a single passenger, a bewildered salamander found under a rock. Claude put down the sketch folder and turned over a few large stones. He inspected the abandoned tunnel of a mole and studied the dank goings-on of bugs that scuttled, flexed, spiraled. He stopped the subterranean investigations and hiked to an outcropping above the mansion house. He decided to draw what his mother insisted he draw, and what until now he had put off. He framed his field of vision to include two farmers, aged brothers of the Golay tribe, who were forever fencing—in the agricultural sense of the term. Claude blocked out their dispute on the merits of horse-hoed root crops. He locked his jaws. The muscles of his face constricted toward his nose—up from the mouth and down from the brow—as he made a sketch of the Abbe's property.

  Even for the architectural historian, the mansion house of Tournay would be difficult to classify. Since 1497, if one trusts the date carved above the keystone, it had been the most significant edifice in the valley. Though the original building betrayed an unyielding commitment to the right angle, subsequent construction by a dozen proprietors had softened the initial rigor. Beyond the main structure stood various outbuildings: a misplaced cow barn of experimental design, a duckless duck pond, an observatory. A large dovecote balanced out the turret that rose at the back. The turret, with its cone of tiles, barely fit into Claude's drawing.

  The only apparent order in the design of the property was an orchard edged in hardy thyme. Fruit trees were espaliered some thirty feet apart. A pruning hook had brought even the most inaccessible branches under control.

  After the Abbe purchased the property, he applied hi
s own haphazard sensibility. He had new windows cut and bricked up others. He installed an iron lightning pole that rose one hundred Paris feet in the air. According to the gamekeeper, an extremely reliable source, it came from London. Given the scale that Claude employed for his drawing, the pole reached far beyond the edge of the Dutch double elephant. At first, this troubled the young draftsman. He resolved to affix another piece of paper, making the sketch L-shaped. But then, when the glue came undone, he decided that he liked the incomplete image better. It would force the viewer to imagine what existed beyond the frame.

  On the first Tuesday of each quarter, peasants rich and poor, clerics corrupt and less corrupt, and tradesmen of diverse endeavors assembled in the great hall of the mansion house. Some came to pay rents. Some came to pay respects. A few paid both. Most paid neither.

  The families that dominated the tax rolls — Rochats, Pages, and Golays—congregated among themselves, clarifying by their proximity the legacies of incest. The mood was what the mood is so often among such crowds — confused. Two or three babies cried quietly. A mother, suckled dry by her irritable charge, gave it a slap, which intensified the child's vocal discontent.

  The Abbe stared out at the clusters of rural humanity from under the gray thatching of his brows. Taking in the earnest countenances of the men, hats in hand, and the women bonneted with lace, he dispensed to each a smile and nod of benign understanding. This changed when he looked upon a contingent of Discalced Carmelites, smug in their brown-and-white habits. He wondered aloud if they had affected ramrod postures to stretch that much closer to God. The more impious villagers allowed themselves a chuckle. Spurred on, the Abbe mumbled a Latin ribaldry on the fondling of rosaries, but this, mercifully, was either not heard or not understood by the temporary occupants of the great hall.

  "Great hall" was a misnomer. It may have been large, but it was by no means great. It was, in fact, an abandoned tennis court, a permanent reminder of a previous count's singular passion. That former count had given his workmen De Garsault's L'Art du Paumier-Racquetier and said "Build!" So they built. Then he brought Charniers, Bergeron, and Masson, the three great players at the time, to the mansion house for private lessons. He said, "Play!" So they played. When the old count's legs gave out, he watched from the dedans, and after he died, he left a large sum to Masson. Masson deserved it; he could stand in a barrel to receive a serve, could jump in and out during the volley—and win by fifteen.

  The court markings had worn away and the net had disappeared by the time the Abbe took possession of the property. The room, because of its former function, was barren of architectural ornament. It had none of the heraldic hangings usually associated with great halls. No crossed halberds, no armorial crests, not a blazon blazing. The only garlands were the clumps of dust hanging from the cracked penthouse that ran against two walls. (Actually, there was a crest of sorts. The former count had stenciled the arms of the tennis guild: sable, a tennis racquet proper; in a cross four tennis balls of the same.)

  The great hall contained just two pieces of furniture—a table and a curious chair. When the Abbe moved to the mansion house, he could have afforded a bureau plat or something with delicate tortoise inlay at which to conduct his business. Instead, he contented himself with a massive barn door propped up on two empty brandy casks.

  The Abbe greeted the session with mixed feelings. Part of him recoiled at the administrative burden. He was required to arbitrate local rights, confront the accountant's assessment of diminishing income, and withstand the criticism of the community's religious leaders. And yet there was another part of him that was excited by the day's unpredictable offerings.

  Fortunately, the local fights were relatively pacific when judged against the brutal events taking place in some of the neighboring parishes. The Abbe's inattention to the opportunities granted by his title, as well as his outright oddness, mollified much of the community. Seizures of grain, forced illuminations, and popular invasions of forbidden fields almost never disrupted Tournay during the Abbe's tenure. In fact, in the matter of trespass, the Abbe almost encouraged it by paying handsomely for the anomalies of nature the peasantry could uncover in his pasturage.

  When Gaston's brother Jacques burned the tax collector in effigy, the Abbe's only criticism was that use of damp hay instead of dry diminished the truly incendiary impact of the protest. And when a local beekeeper supplied the same collector's carriage with one of his nastier swarms, the Abbe all but thanked him for a chance to test a newly concocted salve for beestings.

  The session began with requests linked to the aftermath of the Vengeful Widow. Gaston asked for a subsidy to have new latches forged for the Red Dog's shutters. He was turned down. A washerwoman brought up a dispute over a heating bill. Her adversary, a charcoal burner, offered his own version of events. The Abbe settled the bickering by replacing the charcoal with a cartload of wood from his own forests.

  "A full cartload?" The accountant's voice emerged from the sidelines. Petulance was detectable.

  "No. I do not think a full cartload appropriate." The Abbe wanted to put the accountant in his place. "Make it two/' The accountant went over to the Abbe and pressed the matter privately. After considerable discussion, the Abbe said, "Very well, one cartload it is." The accountant, who clearly held sway, then submitted the paver's estimates on necessary road repairs, itemizing each cost, including the tolls for the transport of the rolled stone. He ignored the Abbe's impatience and noted that the marsh was still in need of draining, that the intendant would arrive in four weeks to collect funds for real and imagined wars waged far from Tournay's borders, and that the bankers in Geneva wanted confirmation of contracts undertaken. The Abbe said, "Just pay what needs to be paid."

  The accountant sucked his teeth in frustration and noted the sanctioned expenditures. "We must be careful, sit. Investment demands return, after all." While he backed away to the sidelines to consult his profit tables, the Abbe continued his task of mediation, interceding in squabbles between husband and wife, bourgeois and natif, trying his best to settle the more complicated disputes involving competing versions of God. It was this last discordance that always gave him the most trouble. The Abbe was never too responsive in issues of faith. Absent from the great hall—absent, in fact, from the Abbe's world—was God in any recognizable form. This by itself would have enraged the more devout elements of the community. The Abbe made matters worse by being downright combative. His attitude found its clearest expression in the great hall's second piece of furniture, which stood beside the table. Even Pastor Bourget, who at times laughed at the ritual indulgence of the Papists, was ruffled by the Abbe's chair. To the Catholics—the Carmelites, especially—it was outright blasphemy.

  The Abbe had constructed the chair from a confessional booth he had cut down and affixed, through ingenious if mischievous rabbeting, to a fancifully engraved coffin. The carpentry allowed its occupant to sit, legs outstretched, protected on three sides. He justified the impiety by saying it kept away the crosscurrents of the Vengeful Widow. But he had had it built, truth be told, to thumb his nose at the religious representatives who stood before him: the assorted Calvinists, Capuchins, Sisters of Charity, Ursulines, and, of course, Carmelites.

  A particularly strong-willed member of the last group, Sister Constance, moved to the coffin-confessional to present her petitions, a richly documented cahier of complaints. The Abbe skimmed it and said, "Have you done nothing in the last three months but itemize your dissatisfactions? You treat the written word as if it were penance." He then appeased her by allocating the tongues of all slaughtered cattle to the parish house.

  The Calvinists, though fewer in number, were equally disgruntled by the Abbe, who was forever denying them funds they felt predestined to receive. They stood opposite the Catholics, on the other side of the pass line, near the tennis-court grille. Bourget, the Reform pastor, asked to have the temple's bell clapper repaired. Father Gamot piped in with a request for a relic.

/>   "This is not Geneva," the Abbe told the Calvinist. "And this is not Rome," he told the Catholic. "This is Toumay, and here we must live with the resources we have. Find help from your flock. Which brings me to the part of my authority that interests me most. Where is the cowherd?" He dismissed the complaining church fathers and announced that he would receive obligations, payment of which could be made in coin or kind. The Abbe, as one might expect, was partial to the latter.

  "What have you brought?" he asked a cowherd who stood before him.

  "The water you requested."

  "From?"

  "From the pasturage beyond Bretem's wood."

  "Ah yes. Bring it here, bring it here. Henri!" The Abbe shouted for his storekeeper. "Henri, bring a cruet." The slow-moving fellow who had delivered the gift to the Page cottage made his way to the table. The Abbe poked his hand out of the coffin-confessional and grabbed the vessel, filled it with the liquid from the cowherd's wineskin, stoppled it, and scribbled a tag.

  Old Antoine, the watch-finisher, came next. He offered a variation on a good cylinder escapement. The Abbe, again tremendously pleased, accepted it in lieu of a year's rent. One by one, the locals moved to the table and added their unexpected finds: speckled eggs for the Abbe's vitelline investigations, a pannier filled with cut and bundled ilex wood no thicker than a finger, a boar's head, an unusually shaped bird's nest, the leg of a fallow deer, a female stickleback big with spawn and packed in wet moss. The largest offering was not placed on the table. It brayed in the corner and then urinated prodigiously, to the general amusement of those present. Throughout the procession, the Abbe responded with offerings of his own. He gave away jarred orangemusks, which are neither oranges nor musks but a kind of pear sweeter than most others. He kept a store of them in the bottom of his unique chair.