Four of these people had been pulled from the river, the other three found alone on the streets. I was laid out next to a young man whose bloated body had been found butting up against the middle arch of the Viaduc d’Auteuil, the bridge that crossed the Seine at the fortification wall on the western edge of the city. This day would be his last in the viewing salon. His eyelids, lips and nose were gone, eaten by fish and crabs. The skin had come off his hands like gloves and his gut was bovine, stretched to its limit. His testicles had swollen to three times their normal size and his tongue, tumescent and grotesque, had forced its way through the opening of his lipless mouth, and hung, defeated, like a mouse dead in a trap. Inside, his organs were already putrefying, dissolving into soup. Later that day he would be buried in the cemetery beyond the fortification walls with all the other unclaimed, in a grave unmarked.
On my other side, a woman in her sixties who had been discovered in a dirty, rarely used passage in Montparnasse, her neck bruised black from strangulation. Dents in the fingers of both hands where once there were rings. Hers was an unusual scenario in that she had been well dressed and well fed, unlikely to be without relations in Paris. But as yet, three days on the slab, no one had come to claim her. The bruising on her neck had spread like a storm cloud, rolling up into her jowls and down across her shoulders. Her skin was waxy and grey, and her lips drawn back to reveal several missing teeth. Her head was tilted back and slightly to the side, as if she were trying to detect the notes of distant, familiar music.
The coat in which she was discovered, a cornflower blue, was decorated at the collar and cuffs with a fine embroidery in white thread, the pattern so delicate you wouldn’t notice the stitching unless it had been pointed out to you. The coat hung behind her, a loyal sentry.
Next to them, I looked like a pretty doll in the window of a grand magasin.
My muscles, my bones. My hair, skin, fingers, heart, kidneys, spleen. My lungs. My airless lungs. My cartilage, tendons, bowels, liver, my traumatized uterus, fallopian tubes, labia, clitoris. The small black mole between my breasts, once kissed by Axelle. My lips, my nipples, my eyelashes. The hairs in my nose, the cilia in my inner ears, my trachea, my tongue, appendix, intestines, anus, stomach, teeth. My blood and my water. My water. This body was either bound for the anatomist’s scalpel, or this body would be buried and all its parts devoured and digested and liquefied by a billion living things until there were only bones.
* * *
A heavy green curtain dressed the glass that stood between the dead and the people who came to view the dead. This was pulled back perhaps minutes after I was deposited on the slab and my clothing hung up behind me, and very soon they came. They pressed their warm noses to the glass, and their eyes were wet with pity or revulsion or both. Not one of us lying there had died peacefully, and we each were the last word of a story that must have been gruesome or, at least, sensational. They came for free theatre but what they got was posthumous physiology. Missing limbs. Exposed bones. Bodies marbled white and wine-black because the blood had stopped circulating, then pooled and coagulated. What they saw were fingers the same as their own fingers that once struggled with a buckle or held a pen or scraped a spot of dirt from a mirror.
One visitor, a woman exquisitely dressed, stood stricken and pale with her hand to her neck, as if reassuring herself of her own pulse. She took no notice of the grubby boy who pushed in front of her, mingling his filth with her skirts, or of the errand girls standing next to her who gaped at the male genitals, or of the flâneur positioned just behind her, a regular to the morgue, who was getting hot in the pants. Every constituent of Paris was represented and there wasn’t a moment the viewing salon was not packed. A child was held aloft to be given a better vantage point. A man in clay-smeared corduroy munched on a slab of cake he’d bought from a vendor just before coming in. He hadn’t even planned on visiting that day; had stopped in on a whim, on his way home from work.
And then. Axelle. She appeared at the glass like a beautiful, rare fish in a tank. She wore the same coat she had been wearing the last time I saw her, and the same hat with the lilac ribbon. Standing beside her, a woman I didn’t know. This woman, pretty in the typical way, was one of the other girls who modelled the dresses for rich women. Axelle and her typically pretty friend both looked bored. My love saw my body but she did not see me, and so I. Remained unidentified.
* * *
The Mouleur Statuaire was located on the Left Bank along Quai Saint-Bernard, not a long walk from the morgue. The day was sunny and crisp. The sky was a brilliant, boundless blue and the leaves on the plane trees bright yellow and chattering like canaries. The young mouleur was grateful to be walking in such fine weather, but he was eager to get back to the atelier to show off the best cast he had ever taken.
The premises were made up of a collection of small stone buildings set around a central cobbled courtyard. Headless, unfinished plaster statues, moulds for statues and cornicing, plinths, rosettes and garden tools were all stacked together against the walls that lined the yard. Everything was coated in yellowish powder, including a three-legged mutt who spent most of his time asleep under an outdoor table.
First for the mouleur, a bowl of coffee and a fist of crusty bread ripped from a loaf in the kitchenette. Dropping a trail of crumbs and slopping coffee across the floor as he walked and ate, he gestured, with a lift of his eyebrows, a half-hearted apology to the simple-minded girl who stood by the door with her broom, clearly put out but too feeble to say so. He went back through the courtyard, dipping his bread in the coffee and sidestepping a mob of cantankerous chickens, and into the main workshop. Inside, the walls and every surface, every tool, encrusted with powder. A long, waist-high workbench ran the length of the room, and at this bench a senior mouleur was bent to his work, wearing a stiff leather apron. His bald, liver-spotted head bobbed over a series of statuettes of some saint. On the table in front of him, a small hammer and set of chisels, speckled with dried plaster. Tools also hung from nails on the walls, and shelves that looked ready to fall were stacked with moulds and mixing bowls, sacks of pulverized lime and gypsum, broken chunks of statues and masks. On the back wall hung masks of the dead, mostly people unknown, the death masks having been commissioned by their families, but also a few notable poets, painters and long-dead members of the aristocracy. In the centre of the wall loomed the long and narrow face of Napoleon, his countenance sombre and authoritative, even in death.
A pall of plaster dust in the air. The old man at work on the statuettes whistled something sporty and out of tune. The young mouleur placed the crate on the table, opposite his companion, letting it fall a touch more heavily than necessary. The old man looked up, one red-rimmed eye squinting against the rise of swirling dust that the crate had disturbed. He very slowly scratched the side of his large nose with his crooked little finger, a finger disfigured in youth having been smashed with a hammer. The young mouleur shifted the lid from the crate and lifted out the mould, putting it on the table face down, rough-side up. It looked like something dredged from the bottom of the sea. A limpet, or an oversized oyster shell. He collected his apron from where it hung and crossed the leather straps behind his back and tied them snugly in the front, one eye on the old man, who was now concentrating again on his statuettes. From one of the shelves, the young mouleur selected a wooden bowl and set of paddle-like spoons, and carried these over to a large cask in the corner of the room. He scooped from the cask three heaping ladles of gypsum powder into the bowl, the gypsum having been mined from the quarries in Montmartre, crushed on site and dehydrated in a nearby factory. He brought the bowl back over to the table and turned the mould right-side up, and gazed into the recessed image of my face. He eyed the old man.
‘Very fresh corpse today,’ he said, rubbing his thumbs into the depressions my cheeks had made. ‘I believe I captured this one perfectly.’
‘Hm.’
The mouleur tilted
the mould towards the old man. ‘Would you like to see?’
With a fine, stone-handled pick, the old man continued to scratch at a detail in the draping on a single statuette. He snorted. Eventually, he set down his tool very carefully and looked at the young mouleur. Bearing his weight with both hands on the table, he slowly, with much creaking, leaned across to peer inside the mould. His expression did not change. ‘Is she anyone?’ he asked.
‘No. But wait. This will be special.’
‘Is this what you’re meant to be doing today?’
This was not what the young mouleur was meant to be doing that day. His list of jobs was long and tedious. But nonetheless he proceeded with the mould. First, with a clean rag, he applied a thin coat of oil to the inside surface. He then added water to the gypsum powder and stirred the mixture to a thin soup, its colour a pale, pollen-yellow. Working quickly, he tipped the plaster into the mould and then, cradling it between his forearms, he rotated the mould in all directions to drive out any air bubbles and ensure that the plaster coated the mould evenly as it thickened. He continued this motion until the plaster was dry enough that it wouldn’t sag when he set the mould down. He quickly scraped the remaining plaster out of the bowl, now thick as butter, prepared another gypsum mixture, and repeated the same process. This was done three times before he propped the mould between two blocks of wood so that it would set evenly.
He walked back across the courtyard to the kitchenette and brewed another pot of coffee, ripped more bread from the loaf. He sat on a sunny bench in the courtyard and stretched out his legs, crossing his boots over the cobbles. He dipped the bread into his coffee and lit his pipe, while in the workshop, the mask was setting beautifully. A whole century was coming to an end, and there would not be many more days as mild and satisfying as this one.
After a few hours and the completion of some of his other, more mundane tasks, the young mouleur deemed it time to separate the mask from the mould. The old man had moved off somewhere for a smoke or a sleep in the sun, and so the workshop was empty. How the mouleur wished for an audience. Even the dog was nowhere to be found, nor the simple-minded girl and her broom, nor any of the other artisans. So he set about his work silently, first unclamping the two halves of the mould. With hammer and chisel, he carefully broke the back seal along the top edges, then gently prised each half of the mould, one at a time, away from the mask.
And there it was. I. Balanced in the young mouleur’s chalky, work-rough hands. Not I. Nothing to do with me.
His pride was fit to pop the buttons from his shirt. And the mask was impressive. Smooth and detailed, nuanced, blemish-free. So lifelike, in fact, that decades later, people who knew about this sort of thing would be sceptical about whether or not I had been dead when the cast was taken. They were adamant that, if indeed dead, I couldn’t have drowned. Drowning victims were never discovered right away. Drowning victims sank like rocks. And they didn’t rise to the surface again until enough gases had built up in their rotting bodies to render them buoyant. This was not the face of someone who had spent days or weeks submerged, drifting along the silt and mud of the river bottom, swelling, peeling, feeding fish and crustaceans.
The young mouleur clamped the mould together again and laid it back in its crate, and propped the mask against the crate so that anyone who came into the room might stop to admire it. Soon after, the old man walked in, glanced at the mask but said nothing, and instructed the young mouleur to pack up the statuettes in preparation for delivery to the artist’s studio, where they would be polished and painted.
* * *
I attracted a lot of attention in the morgue. Too pretty to be dead, people said. There had to be some scandal. By the end of the first day, Laurent Tardieu had to concede his plans to sell my body to a laboratory. The gendarmes had shown some interest, and they demanded I stay on the slab for as long as possible. The price, literally for my head, would not be worth the trouble.
Laurent did his best to preserve my body, sewing the splits together and applying powder to my face as it became more and more discoloured, trying to maintain my identity as he was certain someone would show up to claim me. But after nine days, my body more closely resembled a stuffed pig than a pretty doll. Abdomen bloated, skin waxy and white. My eyeballs had dried out and my face, first bloated but then drained, was pinched, all life gone and the skin sucked into the angles of the skull.
On a Wednesday morning, bright and cold, my body was buried alongside two other unclaimed corpses, in the corner of a cemetery reserved for souls such as ours. Swaddled in cheap muslin, my remains were placed in a pine box that was lowered by rope and pulley into the ground. By the graveside: a pair of dirt-encrusted fossoyeurs leaning over their dirt-encrusted shovels, a handful of porters from the morgue (there to carry the coffins), the morgue clerk, and a priest in a black cassock with a battered bible and somnolent tone. There the company stood, together alone, while a couple of rooks made a nuisance of themselves in the lower branches of an acacia tree. There was just enough wind to pick up the bright- yellow leaves on the ground and send them tumbling past the men’s boots, and over the root-rough edges of the graves into the stillness and beyond. The pulleys whined and the ropes creaked and jacked against the pine box that contained my body, a satisfying and resonant sound. The box reached the bottom of the dark hole and, while the priest hummed the rites with great disinterest, the fossoyeurs, in deft and fluid movements, shovelled in the rich, black earth. The dirt landed at first with a percussive clop, which then softened to a crumbling, the weight on the coffin lid growing heavier and heavier still – everlasting.
Later, a moon three-quarters full. Autumn moon. White-blue light and long shadows. Three new mounds of dirt marked at their heads by small, unadorned wooden crosses. Beneath one of those mounds, I. Under all that indiscriminate weight, a cheaply made pine box containing my skin my blood my lungs et cetera.
And. That part about Axelle seeing me in the morgue? Wasn’t true.
She was never there.
41
Anouk
Toronto, 2015
Anouk sat alone in an unremarkable waiting room at the CF clinic, Sunnybrook Hospital. Her lungs felt like the barrel of a cement truck. She’d been coughing continuously for a week and her ribs felt bruised. She ignored the messages pinging on her phone from her mother, and also from a magazine editor who was expecting three thousand words on a Toronto artisan who had trained in Belgium as a master cheesemaker. She’d interviewed the artisan the week before and now all she had to do was write the thing, and she liked to think it was her fatigue that was stopping her, but it wasn’t. It was because the article was about cheese. And compared to everything else, compared to a pair of lungs that were on the brink, she didn’t care about cheese.
She was a collector of stories without a story to tell.
She got up from her chair and went to the small, hermetically sealed window and leaned on the sill, rearranged her scarf around her neck. Chicken neck. Everything now felt scrawny; she’d lost fifteen pounds over the last few months and was always cold. Far below, between the hospital and the lakeshore, an artery of cars coursed east–west on the Queen Elizabeth Way. A white-and-green commuter train trundled past. Trees swayed. Cables and wires criss-crossed a sky that was a brilliant and searing autumn blue; the lake was a sparkling rich navy, choppy under the midday sun. All that life out there and not a sound of it passed through the window into this room.
This would be the third time Anouk needed intravenous antibiotics over the past year. The treatment would be like a deep-cleaning for the lungs, flowing into the tributaries and creeks that her oral medications couldn’t reach. She waited now for a specialist who would insert a large catheter into a vein in her arm.
What did she have to say about cheese. For the last two years her ability to find stories she wanted to tell was waning, along with her energy. She was thirty-eight years old, and h
aving to live again with Nora because she wasn’t making enough money to live on her own. That’s how they talked about it – she and her mother – their story was one of finance, not of ill health. Because she had by now developed diabetes, and the IV treatments were playing with her memory, making it hard to keep track of other medications along with the blood sugar and all the rest of it. What seemed to be a beginning felt a lot like an end.
Anouk pressed her nose to the glass, which smelled of dust, and said to the treetops, said to the cars, said to a flap of small black birds tumbling bungling by: ‘Cheese.’
Soon after, a light knock at the door. A specialist nurse Anouk hadn’t met before peeked her head in and invited Anouk to another room, where she was asked to lie on an examination bed. Next to the bed, a trolley with several drawers. On top of the trolley, a metal tray of sterile instruments and tubing and all the detritus needed to insert the catheter that would be threaded through a vein in her arm and travel all the way to her heart. Anouk could tell by the way the nurse practitioner handled the components that she knew what she was doing. Sometimes, these people weren’t so confident, and their hands shook. They dropped things. Sometimes they would pick up one piece of kit and put it down before finding the right one, or they would make bad jokes or ask about where she had been on holiday, and in their eyes Anouk could see the need for her to make them feel okay, because they knew, after all, that it was really she, Anouk, who was the expert in the room.
Coming Up for Air Page 25