He palpated my abdomen, and determined from the shiny, pale lines that branded my skin where it had stretched, and from the dark rawness of my nipples, that I was a new mother. I was employed, he decided, with work unsatisfying to me. I hadn’t really wanted to die, those bruises told him as much, and was probably downtrodden by the baby or a lack of love or too much of its unhealthy sort. With a cold sponge and a bowl of warm, soapy water, he washed the bloody foam from my chin and neck, inspected my fingernails.
Being the fresh specimen that my corpse was, Laurent Tardieu knew that any number of the anatomy labs in Paris would pay a good few francs for it, and he considered this option carefully, as his daughter was engaged to be married and the money would have helped a great deal. But there was something about me that intrigued him. He wanted to give me a chance to be found, and presumed that even after a few days in the viewing salon, and with enough care, my body would still be worth a small sum.
He laid my arms across my chest, and covered my body from the chin down with a linen drape. He could barely believe I’d drowned as my face wasn’t bloated, nor my skin sullied. My high cheekbones and the shadows cast by the dim electric light gave the impression that I was smiling, and in that smile Laurent Tardieu sensed a secret, a hint of wisdom, or, more accurately, cynicism. It was this that prompted him to send his courier out with a letter for his nephew, an apprentice mouleur who worked in a model shop on the Left Bank that produced, among other things, death masks. His nephew had been failing to impress his master mouleurs and, though I wasn’t any sort of important person at all, Laurent Tardieu knew instinctively that my face – the smile, the beguilement, the youthfulness – was a good candidate for a striking mask. He also knew that, with every hour that passed, as the fluids in my body pooled with gravity, my face would sink deeper and deeper into the grotesque. He implored his courier to be quick.
39
Anouk
Toronto, 2000
Stories were easy enough to find in Toronto. And living with Nora after Red died, for the few months Anouk did live with Nora, hadn’t been so bad. There were trips to Dundas Street and Spadina Avenue on Sundays for dim sum. Coming home and snoozing together, while on TV the Blue Jays hit fly balls and spat brown geysers of chewing tobacco on to the dugout floor. The distant thwop of a baseball and the soporific voices of sports commentators.
There was the city dirt and the choke of exhaust and drivers getting nippy with each other. There was the woman with no teeth and eyes like snakebites who’d taken root in a pile of greasy sleeping bags in the recess of a garage door on Kingston Road. There were sleek glass buildings fingering the sky, buildings that burned at sunset, and there was the endless throng of Yonge Street, the head shops, Korean restaurants and Polish bakeries, and big trucks idling at red lights, and redundant corner stores and bargain book stores and squeegee kids in dirty sneakers, and hot chicken wings served with blue-cheese dip and celery sticks in wax-papered baskets at outdoor tables under the dapple of urban poplars, and in the parks downtown, amidst all of it, in the parks downtown, there were the tai chi people. Men and women, mostly Chinese, mostly old. In any weather. Swaying and firmly rooted like trees. There were open-air movies on towering inflatable screens in local parks on a summer Saturday night. Secret wine and takeaway pizza on picnic blankets. Toronto was good.
A white lilac tree grew in a neighbour’s front yard, across the street from Nora’s house. In the spring, Anouk and Nora made a stealth trip in the dark with sharp scissors and pilfered a few sprigs. Put them in a vase in the kitchen, and the whole house smelled of lilac until the blossoms browned and dropped to the table.
Anouk was writing regularly and waiting tables in a pizza restaurant, so less than a year after Red died, she moved into a basement apartment, not far from Nora. There were a few boys, or men. There were a few men. Once, possibly, love. He had these Van Gogh sworls of hair on the back of his neck that destroyed her. Or it could have been his eyes, the colour of dark sand at the bottom of the river, spurring dangerous thoughts of leeches and cold water, or something that would disperse in a puff if you tried to capture it in your hand. But also silky, silty, invitingly soft between the toes.
The first time she took him home he wanted to learn about cystic fibrosis, so she told him. Told him about her medical regime and told him about the diabetes she was sure to develop because her scarred pancreas was unable to produce insulin. She told him about the depression she sometimes suffered due to the strong steroids she took. She told him about how, when she was young, she didn’t think she could die from it, and she told him about how it felt when she realized she would.
This was her first sex. When he pulled off his jeans a clutch of coins fell from his pocket and rolled loudly across the floor, and then he kissed the soft lobe of her ear and stroked her hair. From upstairs, from the family who lived upstairs, the bump of some heavy thing falling. Small feet pattered in retreat and someone yelled. There was crying and the tunnel voices of TV.
After, he said to her, with his head resting on her chest: ‘Your lungs may be shit but your heart is strong as fuck.’
Anyway. It probably wasn’t love.
Here was Anouk now, hurrying down Bay Street to the Queens Quay ferry terminal on a Tuesday morning, late for the 8 a.m. Toronto Islands ferry. By the skin of her teeth she made it, bought a ticket and hopped through the rolling gates to the boat just before they shut.
The foot-passenger ferry, open-aired and bullish, looked like something out of another century. Heavily varnished wooden deck and ironwork painted navy blue. Sturdy lines and miles of pop rivets.
The ferry ploughed through the inner harbour and she stood on the deck, leaned over the wooden railing and watched the downtown skyline retreat. The air smelled of gasoline and suntan lotion, wood varnish and dead freshwater fish. A small sailboat bobbed across the froth of the ferry’s wake, barely enough wind to fill its mainsail. The ferry completed its fifteen-minute crossing and the passengers gathered at the box-nosed stern, crowding on to the wide staircase that led from the upper deck to the gangway. Anouk sat on a double-sided bench while everyone got off, waiting for the stairs to clear. Above her head, hundreds of faded orange lifejackets strapped to the inner roof, the kind that slipped over the head, the kind that resembled old locks.
She came slowly off the ferry, distancing herself from the crowd. She wanted to feel as if she were alone. She wanted to cross time. She followed a wide, tree-lined path past a small amusement park, just visible through the trees – the circus peak of the merry-go-round, the flume tower – and soon came to a low stone, arched bridge that crossed over an inlet. To the left of the bridge, a docked enclosure of water where pedal boats shaped like swans were corralled together against the bank and held in place by a floating tether. A gust of wind travelled up the Long Pond inlet from the harbour, scribbling the water into darker blue as it came, like the shadow of some great whale moving under the surface. When the wind hit the plastic swans they came alive, clacked their wings together, jostled for space.
Eventually she came to the beach on the far side of the island, where a stone breakwater thirty metres out from shore created a quiet cove. One girl playing in the sand in a red bathing suit. Bucket. Spade. Beyond the breakwater, Lake Ontario opened up and rolled unimpeded to the horizon. Anouk walked westwards along the beach, then came up off the pebbly sand on to another path. Soon, she left the water and walked through an area thick with buckthorn and elm, with scattered houses mostly hidden by trees. Up ahead, the island school, a long, low building. Children from the city went there during school months to study subjects like bird watching and orienteering, pinhole photography, pond life and stars.
Further on, she came to the lighthouse at Gibraltar Point and in front of it stood Lucas, the man she had come to see. The founder of the school; an expert on the history of the island. She was writing a piece for a travel magazine and was here to talk
to him about the formation of the islands, about how they began much further east along the lake as sand and rock from the Scarborough Bluffs, sand and rock that eroded and was carried west by the water and deposited here. A warren of shifting sandbars and wetlands. Now connected by bridges and carriageways built a hundred and seventy years before.
Lucas was short, bald and fit, relaxed in a pair of cut-off denim shorts and flip-flops. They shook hands and walked west along Hanlan’s Point Beach, towards the island airport, and Lucas told Anouk a ghost story – Victorian, spooky – about a girl who’d come to work as a chambermaid at the Hanlan Hotel, a hundred years before, and had been killed accidentally over a petty theft.
They walked slowly up the beach, and Lucas showed Anouk where the old resort hotel, now decades gone, used to store its bathing machines; squat, caboose-like structures on wheels. Private changing rooms for swimmers.
‘They’d drag the machines out to the water by horse so the swimmers could get in straight from the cabins,’ Lucas told her. ‘Mainly they were used by women; they’d swim behind the cabins, so that they were hidden from other people on the beach.’
Anouk remembered the Mennonite farm, her father, blue duck eggs. The stroke of leather boots on a dry, wooden floor. Here was time, folding over on itself. Now, on the beach, she imagined hooves grinding over stones and sand, wood and iron wheels creaking and straining. A thick-clothed bathing suit, down to the ankles and up to the chin. The self-conscious laughter of women swimming carefully so as not to wet their hair. She could hear it.
‘The girl who was killed, the chambermaid, she was caught stealing from one of the hotel guests,’ said Lucas. ‘I’ll show you something at the lighthouse.’
They turned around and, with the airport at their backs, cut across the point.
‘Story goes, she was caught with something like two or three coins. Not a lot. She’s put under guard until the York police can pick her up, but at some point in the night she escapes, gets chased by the island constable to the top of the lighthouse, and there’s a scuffle. She ends up getting tossed down the stairs.’
‘Shit.’
‘Neck breaks, she dies, leaving a bloody handprint on the twenty-third step. No matter how often they scrub it, bleach it, whatever, the handprint won’t go away. It’s still there.’
‘Get outta town.’
‘I’ll show you.’
It was a few degrees cooler inside the lighthouse, and it smelled of mud and wet stone, like a cellar. Anouk followed Lucas up the spiral stairs, which disappeared like a lick with the curved wall of the tower. Going slowly, respectful of the legend, Anouk counted each step.
‘It must have been dark that night,’ she said.
‘Yes, it would have been very dark.’
‘There must have been torches.’
‘Imagine that light jittering on the walls,’ he said.
The staircase was narrow, turning into itself at each shallow step. Light from above, from the nest, cascaded down the close walls. Lucas jumped up a few steps then stopped and turned. He pointed to the step just level with Anouk’s face. ‘Do you see it?’
She leaned towards the step, propping her weight against the outside wall, which was smooth and cool against her shoulder. On the step, the suggestion of three splayed fingers and a horseshoe wedge of palm, a crescent tip of thumb. Tea-brown, grabbing the edge of the step. Obviously paint.
‘We take the school kids up here with flashlights at night,’ said Lucas. ‘Scare the living shit out of them. They love it.’
‘Do they believe it?’
‘Sure. More fun if you believe it.’
40
L’Inconnue
Paris, 1899
Laurent tardieu’s nephew, the young mouleur, arrived at the morgue directly after his breakfast, and was indeed impressed with his uncle’s judgement of the contours and plumpness of my cold, dead face. They both agreed that I had been decent-looking in life, and that now, the face of my corpse provided an ideal model for a death mask that might just help the nephew make his name at last.
So. In an examination room in the morgue on the south-eastern tip of the Île de la Cité, my body was prepared. The young mouleur handled my corpse carefully, using a bolt of linen to prop my head in a line of equilibrium with the rest of my body. This step was necessary to avoid displacement of my skin and facial muscles, which had relaxed to putty. With needle and thread he sewed shut my mouth and eyes, then spent a moment in silence resting his hands gently on my shoulders, trying to get a sense of my true expression. Already the fiction, the myth, was taking shape. Solidifying before the plaster had even been applied. He and Laurent Tardieu both saw a victim. Feeble. Scorned and wet.
The mouleur took a comb to my hair and styled it in the conventional way, parted in the middle across my forehead like drapes tied back from a window. He was careful not to touch my face, careful not to distort the features. Any rearrangement would be irrevocable, and I. Would be lost. He believed that he could capture something of who I had been, but frankly, how could he? Regardless, he had to work quickly, to complete the job before rigor mortis set in, as a mould taken from hardened flesh would not be as good as one taken from soft. He had been taught that upon death, the smile of the soul was released, but that it would only remain until the mortis. After that, nothing of the living remained in the face of the dead.
He painted my hair with a lubricant so that the plaster wouldn’t adhere to it, but left my skin as it was; coated already with enough of its own natural oil. He then placed thin, damp paper at my neck and up behind my ears, as a barrier to form the outer limit of the mask. While he was doing this, Laurent Tardieu assisted him by preparing the plaster in a large bowl, a lime powder solution the consistency of soup. This the mouleur ladled over my face, the thickness of a few millimetres. This was the moment I. Became separate from the story.
Deep in concentration, the mouleur laid down a thick linen thread, starting from the top of the mould, above my forehead, drawing a path along the middle of my face: the bridge of my nose, the divot under my nose, my mouth, chin, neck. Another layer of a more solid plaster, much like pulp, was then laid over the first, providing a firm outer shell. Before both layers of the plaster set, the thread was drawn away, dividing the whole into two halves.
Once the outer layer hardened, the halved mould was eased apart slowly, and carefully lifted away from my head. If the whole thing were to fall apart, it would have happened at this point, as the seal between my face and the plaster was airtight and difficult to break. My face would have no longer been viable and I would have been rolled out to the viewing salon, rotting with the others and then forgotten. But he managed this delicate step without so much as a crack.
The young mouleur was finished with the skin and bones of me. He concentrated now on the cast, clamping the two halves of the mould together, creating the negative aspect of the mask. An empty cavern carved in the precise contours of my dead face. My nose, cheeks, lips and eyes, eyelashes resting, all concave, yet like an optical illusion, appeared in relief. The mouleur, with Laurent Tardieu standing at his shoulder, admired his own work. With the two halves connected, he could see that the seam between them was undetectable. There were no air bubbles, the finish smooth. The eyelashes were slightly clumped but that sort of thing was expected and, otherwise, he deemed this to be a perfect impression of me. In fact, these were the very words he said to Laurent Tardieu when he kissed both the pathologist’s cheeks in gratitude: ‘This is a perfect impression.’ And Laurent Tardieu enthusiastically agreed. But. To impress is to imitate, and so it was never perfect. It was never me.
He cushioned the mould with hay in a wooden crate and covered the top of the crate with an ill-fitting lid, then packed his tools into a leather sack. He carried everything outside, joined by Laurent Tardieu, and set the crate on the pavement where people were already lining up for the v
iewing salon. Both men pinched tobacco from Laurent’s stash and lit their pipes, and watched as more people crossed the bridges from the left and right banks to join the queue. A pack of skinny, dirty boys came running and spinning one another like tops from the direction of the Pont de l’Archevêché. One of them hurdled the mouleur’s crate, knocking the lid askew and sending the crate skidding. Fists raised, the young mouleur yelled after him and was told, in so many words, to go fuck himself.
As the pipes were smoked down to ash, the mouleur tried to convince his uncle to join him for a coffee in his favourite cafe, not five minutes away on Rue Beautreillis, but Laurent Tardieu declined, deciding instead to ready my corpse for the day’s first viewing. The mouleur’s last words to his uncle as he heaved his bag of tools on to his back and collected his crate: ‘Do you ever rid yourself of the smell, Uncle?’
Laurent Tardieu’s wry answer: ‘What smell?’
* * *
Laurent returned to where he’d left me alone, stripped a few strands of plaster from my hair, and washed the skin that had been crusted with white when the cast was set. With the help of a porter, he moved me on to a wheeled gurney and covered the lower half of my body with a linen sheet. The clothes I had been wearing, still damp with the memory of the river, were laid gently across my legs. I was pushed down a long corridor and through a set of double doors into the viewing salon.
Two rows of six marble slabs, black marble, seven of them already occupied. Five men, two women. Low-hanging lamps over the bodies and also over each, ice-cold water dribbled from swan-necked faucets, an effort to slow the process of decay. On the back wall, their clothing hung from metal hooks, wilted and empty. Jackets, waistcoats, leather belts. Woollen cummerbunds, breeches and blouses and dresses and trousers – a form of identification to speak for bodies that had become distorted beyond obvious recognition.
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