The Sensualist

by Barbara Hodgson

  She had spent the last night at her hotel inspecting the booklet lodged inside the plaque on the lid of the box. There were twelve pages, each spread with a drawing on the left and a page of braille on the right. The first spread showed cut-aways of fingers and masses of nerves; the second, engravings of the eyes from all angles; the third, a descriptively repulsive examination of the nose, nasal passages, and sinuses; the fourth, relatively benign diagrams of the workings of the ear; and the final one, the fifth, a truly revolting representation of the tongue and taste buds. The back page was blank. Suddenly it dawned on her that this group of illustrations represented the five senses and she chastised herself for taking so long to comprehend it. Was this the secret that Rosa was hinting about? If so, what was so secret about it? She replaced the booklet, and turned her attention to the book inside the box itself.

  The book was a rich, eclectic, but seriously haphazard collection of anatomical illustrations through the ages. Some were reproductions of early woodcuts, others were of more recent engravings. In all they represented the entire history of the art form, at least up to the turn of this century. Helen was more confused than ever.

  Her fever had gone away, but her relief was short lived as the burning, arid agony was replaced with an annoying ache behind her eyes. She placed cold wet face cloths over her eyes at intervals, tried keeping the light in the room low, even tried the light bright; nothing seemed to help. The anguish came from a new-found acuity—her vision had cleared up remarkably. It had always been fine for reading, although lately type danced on the page rather more often than usual. What was really worrisome was the rate that her distance vision had deteriorated. She had bought glasses for driving five years earlier and now, if she didn’t wear them for walking, could not count on seeing more than a half a city block. She was aware that without them she walked with her nose in the air, her eyes half shut in a squint that helped her vision not one bit. Vain and forgetful, she rarely wore the glasses.

  Which was worse—the sudden return of piercing clarity or the steady downward slide into misty myopia? Helen wasn’t sure, but she knew she just didn’t want to see everything around her, didn’t want to have to acknowledge the complex layers and obligations. Comfortable in her nearsightedness, she’d had more sight than she needed for her world of two-dimensional images.

  That night she finished her letter to Martin and immediately began the next one. In addition to the details of meeting Rosa and the box, her first letter had contained details of her trip—the cost of the tickets, the time it took to get from one place to another. And then, remembering that Martin liked to discuss eating, she had commented on how good she found the food—if he ever read this letter that would surprise him. The second letter was a great deal more difficult. She began by telling him that she would be moving into the house of a seventy-year-old art collector. As she paused to consider how to phrase just why she was doing this, she realized that she really had no idea. It just seemed so natural. The money, too. She’d save so much money. Okay, so it seemed natural to her to be able to save on hotel bills, to work with a celebrated collector, to have the run of his library. What was in it for him? She wore out his patience, she knew that, with her parochial education; on the other hand, her missing husband entertained him; she didn’t flaunt her youth, yet her youth was a respite from the cares of being old; and she intrigued him, with her endless questions about Vesalius. He didn’t like the questions, that was evident, but he was intrigued. Or something. She scratched out all references to Friedrich Anselm and moved on to asking Martin why he hadn’t read her letters, why they accumulated in mocking piles. Then she tore the page out of her notebook and tossed it out. This tirade would have to be written at another time.

  In any case, she had moved out of the hotel and taken up residence in one of the guest rooms on the second floor of his flat. From the window of her room she could look down at the skylight of the study, and if the light was right she could see vague outlines of the books and paintings within. When she had arrived Anselm had asked her if he could run his fingers across her face, to feel what she looked like. As the dry tips traversed her eyelids, nose, chin, brows, he moved his lips. Silently reading the thoughts that had settled onto her face? He said aloud, “You know, Rosa won’t visit you here. She dislikes my habits.”

  What could she say? Her relief was profound. Although she hadn’t admitted it to herself, she felt a desperate need to keep her body together. Of the physical discomforts that had lingered from the train; the tangible one, the cold, was pretty much gone; the intangible one, the phantom girth, still surfaced occasionally. She ‘d catch herself apologizing to non-existent passersby for bumping into them; scouring mirrors, trying to find reflections of herself, not the stranger who resembled her; threatening to tear apart clothing to relieve the ballooning pressure. Yes, three weeks without Rosa, if she could trust Anselm; that was what she needed.

  Helen’s days were spent alternatively visiting the newspaper and other galleries suggested by the editor of the paper. She also began cataloguing Anselm’s drawings and engravings that had been stored in large cabinets located behind his desk in the study. She would pull out a drawing, painstakingly record its description, including medium, artist, size, and condition, in a massive, musty ledger that left its fingerprints on her clothes. She would then take the drawing over to Anselm, describe it to him, and watch while he punched the corner with braille. If the drawing were already framed he would take a label, punch the patterns into it and then affix it to the bottom right hand corner of the frame. Sometimes he would work rapidly and make few perforations, at other times he would take a considerable length of time, and the braille would extend the entire width of the drawing’s surface.

  Many of the woodcuts and engravings hanging on his walls were reproduced in her boxed book. This wasn’t such a coincidence, she told herself, considering that Anselm’s room, even more than her book, was truly a chronicle of the genre. She would spend evenings alone in her room, going through the book and visualizing just where in the room, on which wall, that particular piece of art might be. She had worked her way through the first half of the book and hadn’t found one image that she couldn’t place, except for the Vesalius woodcut. But then, that hadn’t been bound into the book; it was an afterthought.

  During her perusals of the study she soon noticed that all of the frames carried similar labels, all done on paper that blended perfectly with the frames. One had to look closely to see that they were there at all. She would run her fingers over the perforated surfaces, at the same time studying the pictures. The braille-like markings held meanings that Anselm would not discuss.

  She had access to all of the books: volumes and volumes on anatomy, osteology, physical anthropology, natural history, and medicine. Heavy, dusty books in English, French, Italian, German, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, and Chinese. Handwritten, discolored, and frail manuscripts from the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the Omayyad rule, the T’ang dynasty.

  She discovered the means up to the balcony she ‘d noticed on her first visit. Anselm had refused to tell her, not because he didn’t want her up there but because he was teasing her. It was through one of the corner bookcases. The door, disguised in paint as the backs of books, hid a tortuously narrow spiral staircase. The discovery was a delight; Helen had spent that entire morning creating a hundred excuses for going up and down, exhilarating herself in the dizzying ascent and descent.

  “May I photograph these?” she asked one day, indicating the entire room with the sweep of her arm.

  “No, I’m sorry, Helen. That won’t be possible,” came Anselm’s reply.

  “It’s your decision,” she said, disappointed. “But why not?”

  “Because there are two kinds of photographers in the world. There are photographers whose photographs mean nothing and there are photographers whose photographs mean everything. If you are the former you would do no harm; you would only be wasting your own film. If you are the lat
ter then my entire collection is at risk. I know what kind of photographer I am, but I am afraid I can’t take the chance to find out what kind of photographer you are.”

  “What kind of photographer are you?” she asked, frustrated but tantalized.

  “My photographs mean everything,” said Anselm. “You may think that sounds dramatic, but it’s true. Everything that I have ever photographed has been hurt or destroyed soon after. The need to exist disappeared upon being photographed.”

  “That’s silly,” she mocked, “photography isn’t that powerful. I would expect more from a man with your education and sophistication.” She hadn’t meant to press the issue; she seemed to have a pretty good record of his collection in her book, but she felt that he was baiting her.

  Anselm got up out of his chair and walked over to one of the shelves. He opened up the door and pulled out a leather-bound binder. “I haven’t shown anyone this album for years,” he said as he returned to his desk.

  She sat down beside him and looked down at the open book. He ran his hand along the page—she noticed the now-familiar punctures on the page—and spoke about the people in the first picture. An elderly couple, his grandparents, rigidly clinging to each other as if in dread of the shutter’s snap, dead only two weeks after the photograph was taken. The next picture, a building, had burst into flames two days later. He turned the page. The first picture on the left, a woman, diagnosed with chronic syphilis the day after the picture was taken, now in a mental asylum; the next, a picture of a boy and a dog, both dead only hours later, run over by a horse and cart. And so it went, on and on. The album was a page by page lament of disease, death, and disaster. “You’ll note that they are not particularly powerful photographs from an aesthetic standpoint: the compositions are stiff, there seems to be little rapport with the subject, my lighting is adequate but hardly inspired. The aesthetics are irrelevant; the only thing that matters is the outcome. This was why I turned to collecting bodies as art,” Anselm declared, stabbing with the tip of his index finger a yellowed, dog-eared photograph of a young woman. Helen’s heart stopped beating.

  Anselm’s voice droned on. “I had to stop participating in their destruction.”

  She grabbed the book away from him and, with a concentration so fierce that the image must have imprinted itself upon her very soul, recognized her own face in the picture.

  “And now you see why I can’t let you photograph all of this,” his hands embraced the room, his voice cut through the fog of her panic. “No one ever has.”

  She looked at him as if he were mad. The face in the photograph wasn’t hers, and yet it was. It wasn’t her time, this wasn’t her place, how could it be her? “Who is this?” she managed to ask.

  “Who? Oh, her. You don’t recognize her, I imagine. That’s Rosa.”

  Helen set the album back down on the table and watched aghast as Anselm stroked the faded surface of the print with the same care and concentration that he had shown when he had read her face.

  CHAPTER 9

  HERR THÜRING

  The face in the album was an unbearable burden. She couldn’t tell Anselm, and he couldn’t see. Every moment in the study was a challenge and a reproof, so although her work with him fell into a comforting, lulling rhythm, she sought escape and pleasure: trivial, indulgent pleasure, pleasures for her eyes and nerves—she spent her afternoons in coffee houses, consuming the sweets she had always rejected.

  After trying out a number of coffee houses, Helen gravitated towards one about a block from Anselm’s house. It was very fin-desiècle, she decided, without really understanding the attributes that made it so. The interior was large, yet dusky and intimate, framed with mirrors lining the walls, leading from the tops of the backs of high banquettes up to the 16-foot high ceilings. The light came from tall arched windows at the front of the café and from ornate glass-shaded lamps hanging from the beautifully painted ceiling. An oak newspaper stand greeted the customers as they came in, the journals theirs to take and to read for as long as they liked. The waiters were quite French in style—her only real European comparison—wearing stiffly starched white shirts, black vests and trousers, and long white aprons. Because the café always bustled, they never seemed to take a break, but they always had time to stop and welcome each customer courteously.

  Although coffee houses were expensive, and this one was no exception, Helen couldn’t imagine a faster way to work herself into Viennese life. She tried something different every day, each day ecstatic over her choice and dreamily inclined to order that particular item always for the rest of her life: flaky pastries filled with intensely rich custards and creams; fresh croissants with feathery bodies and crispy, buttery fingers; cakes with the smoothest icing, each slice a work of art. The waiters, to a man, when urged to make the choice for her, would describe their favorites caressingly—their ingredients, their special demands (stirred only clockwise, except when it rains; slow, low temperatures in an oven lined with porcelain; butter only from the Regensfelter farm) as if enumerating the talents and features of their dearest lovers. The obvious enjoyment shown on the faces of the other patrons, too, encouraged her to indulge her newfound pleasure in the texture of food.

  One of the waiters, smitten by her—an untimely foreigner drifting through like the snows—had, during rare quiet moments, coaxed her into revealing some of the details of her stay in Vienna. He was especially beguiled by her search for Martin and asked often how it was going. She had briefly described to him her involvement with the murder at the Josephinum. His face went blank. “The museum,” she added. His face remained blank. “You must know, the medical museum with the wax models of bodies.”

  The waiter grimaced and pulled his head back, sticking his chin down into his collar. His disgust could be no plainer. “How could you?” he asked.

  “Why? It’s a fascinating place.”

  “They should arrest everyone who works there.”

  “But why? It’s a museum!”

  “Do you not know how they got their specimens?” he whispered.

  “Yes, I do,” she answered, whispering back. Then readjusting to normal volume, “they are wax copies commissioned by your very own Emperor Joseph from a Florentine artist named Paolo Mascagni.”

  “That’s what they want you to think,” he said cannily.

  “Okay, then, how did they get them?”

  “They flayed people alive and dipped them in wax to preserve them!”

  Helen was staggered. The waiter’s voice had risen and a number of people put down their forks or their cups and looked at him. He bowed to them apologetically and lowered his voice again. “And that is how they got their specimens. That is why they look so lifelike.”

  “That’s what happened to the director,” she resumed her whisper.

  “You see, I’m right. It’s the truth.”

  One day, arriving at the coffee house later than usual, she saw one of the waiters hesitate and start to say something as she sat down at the table. But he shrugged his shoulders and came over to take her order. She pulled out her books and a catalogue from Florence’s Museo de Specola that she had grabbed from Anselm’s study. Reading it was tough going, however, and she found her attention wandering from time to time. The waiter brought her coffee and a lovely creation called Beugeln, a puff pastry shaped into a cornet and filled with cream, so she put the book to the side on top of the others, propped it open with the sugar bowl, and continued to try to read while eating. As she nibbled, she became aware of someone standing at the front of the table. Looking up at him, taking in the fine cloth of a gentleman’s suit, her glance traveled up to the face of a distinguished, clean-shaven, and slightly overweight man in his fifties.

  “I am very sorry to disturb you, but may I join you at this table?” He gestured to the room, indicating that all of the tables were taken.

  “Yes, please,” said Helen, shifting her chair and busily moving her cutlery, plates, and papers.

  “Please do
n’t bother to rearrange your things,” he said. “My coffee will not take up so much space,” he nodded to the waiter who saluted with a light brushing of his index finger along his temple. A cup of coffee with a chocolate on the side quickly appeared, and while the waiter and the man were engaged in an exchange of pleasantries, Helen returned to her book, taking little sips of coffee and scooping fragments of cream, letting them rest in her mouth as long as possible.

  “Pardon me,” interrupted the man again. Helen looked up at him, her fork suspended in midair. “They have many of those things here, every day; you don’t have to eat as though this were the last one.” His face was sincere, but his smiling eyes gave him away. Helen blushed and burst out laughing.

  “What are you reading, if you don’t mind me asking?” he asked.

  “Just a catalogue about a museum,” she answered, flipping the pages—a self-conscious gesture.