City of Wisdom and Blood

by Robert Merle

  “From where?”

  “Behind the yew, in front of you. To the left. I saw a face white as linen.” I could feel his hand trembling on my arm. Amazing to say, Merdanson was shaking with fear! I couldn’t believe my eyes.

  “Friends,” I whispered, “keep working. I’m going to take a look.”

  Leaning back on the tombstone behind me as if I were tired, I put my shovel down and drew my dagger from its sheath, and headed around behind the tomb on padded feet. Then, I bent over and crawled towards the yew tree, my weapon in my hand. I thought my heart was going to jump right out of my chest and my mouth was dry as a bone, unsure whether the spy was man or spirit. Reader, neither the butcher-baron of la Lendrevie, nor the highwaymen of the Corbières, nor Espoumel with his knife, nor Caudebec with his dagger rattled me as much as this white face half hidden among the black branches of the yew tree, the way it appeared to be floating a few feet above the ground.

  But when I got right up close to the yew, I could see a very small form leaning against the tree, and, gathering all my strength, I leapt on it and knocked it to the ground without encountering any resistance whatsoever. I remained huddled on top of my prey, panting for breath, and gradually felt reassured since the person I’d subdued was warm (and therefore not a ghost) and, what’s more, a girl.

  At this moment, the moon reappeared from behind some clouds, and I saw that it was a girl of about eighteen, very pale indeed. But, though she could hardly see me since I was wearing a mask, she nevertheless looked at me with her big black eyes with such adoration that I was astonished.

  “Oh, Maître Léonard,” she cooed. “Oh, my handsome billy goat! Oh, beloved Monseigneur! Finally! My grandmother told me I’d find you in this cemetery, where I’ve come every night for a year to give myself to your rut.”

  “My what? Who are you?”

  “You know very well: Ermandine Mangane!” she said. “For having faithfully served your infernal orders, my entire family, except my grandmother and me, were burnt at the stake a year ago.”

  “So they didn’t burn you?”

  “If Monseigneur remembers, it was on Monseigneur’s orders that I pretended to be deaf, dumb and crazy and thereby escaped.”

  “So you’re the last of the Manganes.”

  “I won’t be the last, Monseigneur, when you’ve done your work on me and put your fruit in me. The Mangane family will be reborn as ministers of your cult and will go on serving you for ever.” And she laughed. “Imagine, Monseigneur, that at first I thought you and your servants were grave-robbers, but when you leapt upon me, I felt your claws beneath those gloves.”

  “My claws!” I thought. “Oh, the power of the imagination!”

  “Child,” I said, “tonight, what you ask is impossible! Come back tomorrow at midnight.”

  “Aha!” she trumpeted. “I knew it was you! The prediction said that you would try to get away twice.”

  “Leave!” I ordered. “I demand it.” And getting up, I let go of her. But she held on to me with a degree of strength I wouldn’t have imagined possible from such frail arms.

  “The prediction’s come true!” she exclaimed, holding me close. “You’ve tried to send me away twice!”

  “Wench,” I asked, “how did you get in here?”

  “Over the wall, with a rope.”

  “What about the traps?”

  “I know them all.”

  “Wench, if I grant your request, will you leave without turning round one single time so that you don’t see my infernal mysteries?”

  “I promise to obey, my Great Goat!”

  “Wait for me here. I must say a word to my servants.”

  I left her and, returning to the grave of the whore, I called Merdanson and Carajac over and whispered, “It’s the last of the Mangane family. She thinks I’m the Devil, whom she calls the Great Goat, or Maître Léonard, and demands that I impregnate her.”

  “Go ahead!” said Carajac.

  “I’m ashamed to, the wench thinks I’m the Devil!”

  “Go ahead!” said Merdanson. “One woman’s as good as the next. Witch or no, her sex runs from top to bottom and never from right to left.”

  “Go ahead!” repeated Carajac. “We don’t want this crazy bitch getting in the way here. It would be too dangerous. Screw her and get rid of her.”

  “But she’s a creature of the Devil!” I said, still troubled by the prospect.

  “Screw her and pray!” said Merdanson. “Your prayer will steal her fruit from Satan.”

  I made up my mind, and, going back to the wench, I took her in my arms and, though I found the idea repulsive, wanted to lay her on the grass, and though the moon was but a sliver, could see that she began to glow with a strange brilliance.

  “No, no!” said the girl, her eyes shining. “There’s a place better than this!” And taking me by the hand, she led me to a sort of mausoleum closed by an iron gate, which did not stop her, for she took a key from her pocket, opened the gate and locked herself in the tiny chapel with me.

  “Here! Under this stone,” she said, tapping the stone with her foot, a savage fire in her black eyes, “lies the Grand Inquisitor who had the Mangane family burnt at the stake. Sometime later, suffering from an ulcer, he bought some pills from an itinerant charlatan, one of your devils, Monseigneur, and died two months later after agonies much more atrocious than the flames. So it’s here on the tomb of our enemy that I want to be impregnated.”

  I couldn’t utter a word, so frozen was I by her words and by the unnatural light of the moon. However, without releasing my hand, the girl stretched out on the tombstone and pulled me down on top of her—again with a degree of strength that astonished me—and I found myself lying beside her while she undressed in the blink of an eye. Her skin was brown and her flesh so round and sweet as to damn you. Alas, I don’t use this word lightly, for as busy as I was, not in caressing her but in quietly praying to God (who was already punishing me for profaning the graves of the whore and her orphan), I remained stretched out beside her like a log, without a gesture or a peep, half dead with terror, and attentive only to the moans that seemed to be emanating from under the stone where we lay.

  “Ah,” said the girl looking at me with her black eyes, whose brilliance in the pale moonlight was almost unbearable, “Monseigneur disdains mortal women, I see, and prefers his games with the succubi in his infernal empire. No matter, sorceress that I am—before becoming Lilith in your kingdom after my death—I am not without my powers over the body of a man, which you’ve chosen to appear in. Monseigneur, may I use the arts I have learnt on your adored person?”

  “Certainly,” I said, though my will had no role in my answer, for I continued to pray desperately, for I’d heard the moans from underneath the stone where I lay, which completely froze my bones from my neck to my heels.

  But as soon as I had pronounced, in spite of myself, my acquiescence, I felt the girl unhooking my doublet and I was suddenly surrounded by a hot breath of wind. And losing irreparably the words of my prayer and my hearing and any thought of the terrible moans from beneath me, I felt myself floating backwards through the warm air, my body lulled by a thousand little breezes. These pleasures left me so little clear awareness that I’ll wager that the girl must have been giving me certain strange and demonic caresses which would have revived the most deficient of men; and even supposing I’d dare try to remember them (which sometimes tempts me) I would never dare describe them without blushing, even these many years later—caresses that no woman born of woman ever gave since. Even then, having become a man again by the magic of her ministrations, and vibrating with desire from head to toe, I did not dare move. Seeing which, the witch straddled me in a frenetic dance and, eyes wild and mouth open, drew from me amidst savage cries the seed she was after. “Oh,” I thought, when, with the end of our sensual journey, I regained consciousness, “may God keep this infernal womb from ever bearing fruit!”

  When I stood up, the girl threw hersel
f at my feet and began kissing them, then my knees in adoration of her master.

  “Wench,” I said, “you got what you asked for. Get out of here and don’t come back.”

  “As you wish, Maître Léonard,” she replied, her eyes, as she unlocked the gate, brimming with happiness at the thought that she would perpetuate her family. But she complied with my commands, as I verified by following her back through the cemetery. When I rejoined my companions, I discovered they’d made good progress and had entirely uncovered the body of the woman, who was sewn into her shroud.

  “My friend,” whispered Merdanson, “by St Vitus’s belly! Where’s the justice in all this? Some fornicate while others do the work.”

  “Ah, Merdanson,” I replied with an involuntary shudder, “it’s not funny. I wish I’d been a thousand leagues from here.”

  “Never would have guessed by the way you were howling!”

  “I was howling?”

  “Like a demon.”

  I shivered again at this, since I hadn’t heard myself make any noise and was noticing that the moon on my left no longer had the same strange brilliance that had lit the face of the witch when she straddled me.

  “My friend,” Merdanson continued, while Carajac stood by, his two hands on the handle of this shovel, silent, as usual, and looking very unhappy, “since you like fondling women’s parts so much that you’re willing to do it with a witch, or succubus or whatever, on a gravestone, get down in that grave and slip this rope under the wench’s shoulders, and the other under her legs so we can pull her out of there. It’s time for you to do a little work.”

  And with another curse, he added a joke that was so dirty and unpleasant that I won’t repeat it here. Certainly, Merdanson meant no offence; he was just foul-mouthed, not heartless. For my part, I was disappointed to see my companions get so upset about something they’d just urged me to do, but I simply shut my mouth and started to climb down into the grave. My foot slipped, however, and I found myself prostrate on top of the corpse of the poor wench, whose body was all stiff and cold. “Ah!” I thought (and I nearly threw up, beneath Merdanson’s jeers). “Anything’s better than death!” May Christ pardon me, but I preferred the witch and her hellish heat to this! But I got up, still feeling sick, and, placing my feet on either side of the corpse, slid the ropes under her, as Merdanson had suggested, which wasn’t easy, since the woman was tall and heavy, and already stiff with the irrefragable rigidity of death.

  It would have taken four strong men pulling on the ropes from both sides to get her out of there. We were but three, and would have been unable to finish the job had not Carajac had the idea of tying one of the ropes to the iron gate of a nearby monument. And so all three, sweating and panting, managed to hoist her out onto the mud. This done, with the aid of the one of the blankets and the two staves we’d brought, Carajac fashioned a kind of stretcher, on which we placed the body.

  The exhuming of the child was much easier since it was buried in a very shallow grave, and was so light that Carajac could throw it over his shoulder. Merdanson and I grabbed the handles of the stretcher and we carried the two bodies to Cabassus’s lodgings.

  Cabassus, seeing the light from our dark lantern, had lit several candles we’d brought, and set them on planks stuck in the fissures between the rough stones of his walls. Five others he placed in a candelabra he’d no doubt pinched from the Virgin in some chapel or other, and that one of us would hold over the table, which he’d not only cleared but actually washed. We lay the body of the whore on this table, and Carajac stood the stiffened body of the orphan against the wall in a corner of the room. I held the candelabra above the dead woman while Merdanson, scalpel in hand, cut the threads of the shroud, which enclosed it from head to foot. But he had the patience to cut it only where it was knotted, so that we could resew it afterwards and return the poor wench to her grave.

  “Ah,” said Merdanson when we’d removed the shroud, and the white, frozen body lay uncovered before us, “by the belly of St Vitus, what a beautiful big woman she was! Friends, look at her shoulders, her large breasts, her graceful stomach, her wide hips and those long shapely legs that she spread every day to offer her little onion for her clients’ pleasure! By the belly of St Vitus, ’tis a pity she’s not still alive and warm! I wouldn’t use my scalpel to explore her! What a gorgeous young woman! What a waste! She was so healthy, strapping and vigorous! Cabassus, do you know how she rendered her last breath?”

  “She died in childbirth yesterday,” replied the priest in his falsetto voice. “Bled to death.”

  “And the baby?”

  “Stillborn, thank God.” But he added quickly, which he did every time the word God passed his lips: “Who doesn’t exist.”

  “Well, now,” said Merdanson, “where shall we start?”

  “With her chest,” said Carajac. “I’m very eager to explore the heart, the canals that irrigate it and lead away from it.”

  “No, no!” I argued. “Let’s start with the genitalia. The three cadavers that we dissected at the college were males, including the monkey. And since, happily, we have a wench here, let’s begin with what makes her a wench.”

  “Siorac’s right,” agreed Merdanson, “and as for the heart, before we put her back in the ground, we can remove it and give it to Carajac to work on it at leisure in his lodgings.”

  Carajac seemed quite happy with this solution.

  “Siorac,” said Merdanson, “hold the light so I can see properly to cut into her flesh. I’m going to open up the seat of man’s pleasure, and from there explore up into the womb and the ovaries.”

  Merdanson had just received his baccalaureate in medicine with high praise from both Saporta and d’Assas, who had presided over his examination (which was very lucky since Dr Bazin had it in for him, knowing that his student referred to him as “the foetus”). Merdanson’s success on his exams was poetic justice, for, other than his indiscretions with the whores on the rue des Étuves, whom he visited regularly, being hurried and coarse in his appetites, and lacking in any patience whatsoever when it came to paying compliments to his women (an art he took to be a waste of time and not always very successful), and other than his gluttonous pleasure in food and drink, which he wolfed down noisily, his great, fierce and unique love was medicine, for the advancement of which he would have given his soul, or at least his life. What’s more, he was a good enough Huguenot, but, like me, belonged more to a political party than to a church, and would much rather have missed a service than a medical dissection.

  I had just finished my first year and Carajac the same, which meant that we left the scalpel work to our elder, who, having already dissected all the little animals that fell into his hands, was very adroit with this tool. He was also very good at discussing what he saw and I was sorry not to be able to take notes, since my job was to hold the candelabra over his head. Carajac, his sleeves rolled up, stood ready to help with pulling the flesh apart, while Cabassus stood quietly (for once!) on a chair behind Merdanson, absorbed in his admiration of our work—since it was not about God but about the material world—and watching our dissection of the whore with seemingly religious respect.

  “I observe,” said Merdanson, without any of the coarseness that habitually punctuated his discourse, “that the womb is still very swollen, seeing that the delivery was yesterday. I observe, too, that it was a difficult birth; the vagina displays many deep wounds inflicted by the maladroit and criminal midwife, who was evidently using pincers, and not only killed the child but perforated the womb and peritoneum, causing the bleeding which killed the poor woman. And finally, it’s clear that the womb is single, as Vesalius demonstrated, and not double, as Galen claimed.”

  “So Galen was wrong!” cried Cabassus rubbing his hands with glee, so great was his hatred of the ancients and of all authority.

  “But,” I laughed, “there are still doctors in our college, Dr Pinarelle, among others, who would rather be wrong with Galen than right with Vesal
ius.”

  “That’s abominable!” growled Cabassus. “To have eyes and see not!”

  But he said no more, since Merdanson was uncovering the Fallopian tubes and an ovary and was explaining their functions. I thought to myself what a delicate marvel a woman’s fecundation was, proving, all by herself, the existence of a Creator, who alone in His divine wisdom could have imagined this simple yet extremely subtle mechanism. But I kept these thoughts to myself so as not to set Cabassus off again on his strident negations.

  When he’d finished with the genitalia, Merdanson opened her chest to remove the heart, and, as he did this, he said, “Do you realize, Carajac, that Aristotle thought the heart was a hot organ with three cavities?”

  “Hah!” opined Cabassus, plunged in the delight of proving that the master his Church so venerated had fallen so low in this mistake.

  “I did not know that,” said Carajac.

  “Aristotle also believed that it was in the heart that blood was formed.”

  “Ha ha!” sniggered Cabassus.

  “Aristotle also believed—listen to this, my friends!—that, as the heart was a hot organ, it tended to overheat and so the lungs functioned as bellows whose job was to send cold air to cool it off.”

  Here Cabassus broke out in a belly laugh and shook so hard that he very nearly fell off the chair he was perched on.

  “As for Galen,” Merdanson continued, rolling up his sleeves in order to pull from the thoracic cavity the heart, which he’d separated from its arteries, “as for Galen, he claimed that the cardiacal cavities communicated with each other through pores.”

  “And he was wrong?” asked Cabassus, who began rubbing his hands together again in his pleasure at seeing so many ancient authorities openly defeated and undone.

  “My friends, he was wrong. Vesalius showed in his De humani corporis fabrica that the cardiacal cavities have no communication between them. Carajac,” he continued, “here’s the heart of the poor woman. When she was alive, it beat for more than one man to the rhythm of her little ‘onion’.” (But he said this out of pity rather than as a crude joke.) “Take good care of it.”