And you thought I couldn’t be happy?
Fishermen’s leavings fed my brood. Fish guts. In spring the scent of poplar and lime, a melody to the nose drifting in, a welcome interloper interloping with the scent of my familiars.
The stink of cat, Paul called it, touching down on visits between global flittings to and fro. Did he bring souvenirs for you? I thought not. But for me, hearing of Monsieur’s antics — his latest, pulling strings to cancel support for the lovers’ triangle I was making — our brother pulled strings of his own. A champion for my work!
Toiling in secrecy I’d perfected a three-figure group, showing mortal man in the clutches of a hag while a nymph in youth’s prime reached for him. As you see, ma petite, youth is sometimes wasted on the young, and beauty reduced to begging. My nymph watched the man turn his back on her, death’s harpy swooping in to claim what was rightfully hers. Life’s way. The piece was all the more gripping for being true.
My only jibe at its culprit was to render it with grace; but, catching wind of this — did even the birds act as spies? — the evil one, ever the narcissist, took the piece as a slur and short-circuited plans of its purchase as fast as his hateful agent friend proposed them. Needless to say this made me all the more wary and vigilant about protecting the work closest to my heart.
Paul convinced the government, the very ones who refused to hear my complaints against their bumbling agent, to give me another chance. How I wish that our brother had gone the extra mile and permitted himself to sit for me.
By then I was embroiled with Perseus, carving my hero wielding his shield and his gruesome trophy, Medusa’s head. A motif that Monsieur, with his penchant for bodiless noggins — for carving my head on a block and calling it Thought — would have loved.
No money for models, so for Medusa’s face I modelled the mirror’s flash of myself. In carving this nightmare, was my motive pre-emptive? Was I lopping off my own head before the enemy could, denying him the pleasure?
If only Criteur had been up to posing as my warrior son-of-a-god. I tried to coerce him but he refused. Just as well. Time is money and money is time. Both eluded me.
Living on pommes purée without butter or cream, I slaved at a new version of my threesome-gone-wrong. Showed Age herself, the winged grim reaper, severing Man’s grip on Youth. The hausfrau, the little ball of hate that was Monsieur, and beautiful me cut adrift. Its urgency was everything. It aired our dirty laundry.
A different agent sent to consider purchase had demanded that its plaster be warehoused — on Monsieur’s premises! How transparent! A gift of a chance for the evil one to destroy it.
“Maturity,” I called the piece. L’ge Mûr. Which means what, my dear? Knowing better. Knowing better than to let those who would bury you win. That’s what.
Oddly, the agent relented. When the money came I threw a party for our brother, home from his posting in China, and a few of his friends. Stringing up paper lanterns, I bought a good Bourgogne and a red silk dress embroidered with flowers à la japonisme. I wore it with my face powdered white, white as a geisha’s. Vanity, you say — to impress a bunch of writers?
Of those invited only a few appeared. I’d even asked Papa and Maman, but do you think they came? Even Criteur stayed away, and you, ma petite, you … But Paul was undaunted, raising his mustard-pot-for-a-glass, toasting my coup d’état. “You shouldn’t be surprised by good fortune. Now that the government supports you, others will.” He denied his own influence, whispering, “Don’t thank me, thank God. My dear sister, to everything is a purpose, all part of His plan.”
Beaming at the faces round the table, all three of them, I said, “Let’s hope Monsieur’s not included in it.”
“That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, ma soeur.”
After downing my wine, all too soon the others threw on their coats. Writers as faint- and fickle-hearted as painters — what a breed! My earnings gobbled up in one fell swoop.
And our brother? “We know you like your solitude,” he said, excusing them.
***
IF THE REST of the world had been so obliging and left me to my work … But the evil one’s cricket friends kept interrupting, always interrupting. Using my poverty to make themselves look good. They broadcast my hardship all across Paris, as dignifying as lifting a woman’s skirt to show her goodies! It wasn’t pity I wanted but the pay any worker deserves.
Their “charity” attracted the further attentions of Monsieur Sylvestre, the government toad who’d rejected my Waltz. He kept pestering to see Maman et Enfant, no doubt working on the enemy’s behalf since Monsieur had first spied it.
Inspired by you, I chose a bold tact. During Sylvestre’s visit I whisked off the dustsheet. Your figures were achingly incomplete yet so close to being finished, the blankness of your faces gaping back.
“Look! Can’t you see I’ve lost interest? Are you deaf or just stupid? The way things are going I’m afraid the piece will stay this way.” I hoped, seeing this, he would give up and go away till the work had found its true home or I could demand its figureless price.
But his eyes brightened. His cheeks bulged with greed, his porcine grin flush with naked opportunism. “Brilliant, brilliant!” He bowed and scraped, oily enough to slip through the floorboards, blathering. “The possibilities! Fill in the blanks. Imagine the features you could add! Personalized! One size fits all. What mother, grandmother, sister, auntie wouldn’t love a statue of herself with a tyke? Though you might make the maman more appealing — a bit of a hard-looking stick she is.” Nerve heaped on nerve, the gall to crown it: “Once you’ve got the prototype, I’ll be most honoured to market your efforts.”
Why did you keep quiet? Because you were there, somewhere, lurking — being shy? I could’ve used your help, your defence, as I could’ve used Criteur’s.
He had a huge laugh about it later. “The ass! And how does the man propose to cast these confections? With interchangeable faces! Genius. Such genius puts to shame the integrity of a Eugène Blot, say. A decent man like that.”
I found his sarcasm contagious. “Sylvestre would have me painting souvenir plates!”
At least Criteur saw it my way. But he was cannier than either of us. “Just a matter of time before Monsieur’s dealers strong-arm the piece from you. You know the man wants what he wants.”
***
THE EVIL ONE might have left Paris but the Paris papers still trumpeted his triumphs. The review that hooked my attention, bait to a hungry trout, was enough to turn my stomach. The Hand of God, my tormentor’s work was entitled. How apropos. The fawning crickets, doubtless part of his gang, chirred with glee at the Great One’s modelling of an oversized hand “in perfect proportion.” (“Such delicacy! Such strength! So lifelike!”)
I didn’t need Criteur to remind me of the hands I’d made for Monsieur, countless ones swallowed up in his great inventory.
Held in its “sensitive, all-encompassing palm,” one cricket rambled, was a “clod of earth” containing a “fully formed yet embryonic Adam and Eve, less in their nascent state than in the throes of their Fall.” Enough to make your skin crawl, this word-picture — to such a degree, alas, that the piece screamed to be seen.
Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Perhaps if I’d listened better to our brother’s prayer …
I picked a time when Bing’s gallery, that elegant little place not too far from Blot’s, was likely to be empty. Anyone who was anyone showed there. Not that I was overly worried about my dress; you wouldn’t have cared, so why would I?
There, there, just inside doors of bevelled glass, stood the Hand itself on a breast-high plinth. In its palm cavorted The First Couple after sharing the forbidden fruit, entangled in an after-sex tumble. The smarmiest thing I have ever seen, bar none — all the gamier, as Debussy might’ve put it, for its scale. The hand’s huge gleaming fingers, the figures’ overripeness. Exhibitionism at its finest. As steamy and lurid as the guts my cats helped
themselves to on the quay, if marble can be either. Who knows what man my persecutor had in mind shaping Adam? Eve’s resemblance to his Danaïd — to me — made me heartsick, queasy.
Its profanity didn’t end there. I recognized the overblown, oversized hand subbing for the Creator’s. It was more than obvious. So obscenely sure of itself, it was a replica of the fleshy one that had touched, stroked and brought me to and away from myself, and wrought such misery. In his head the Master had replaced God, stooping to the depths and rising to the heights of smugness! A grasping, thieving smugness — revealed in a hand whose maquette I’d likely modelled and he’d usurped to mock me. Paul would’ve called it blasphemous.
It was too much to stomach, forcing me out into the street where I hurled up whatever food I’d managed to scrounge that day.
***
THE EGO THAT thinks itself omnipotent, C, threatens all in its path. The innocent victim and enabler of evil-at-large, I saw myself under siege, caught in a war. What could I do but watch my back?
Even an incomplete work was unsafe. I swaddled the statue of you and Maman in a rug, hid it under some rags in my wardrobe. Luckily I hadn’t made it life-size.
Sylvestre returned by the week. “All you need to do is sign it over. Once you have, I’ll do everything in my power to see other pieces bought.” Appealing to my vanity, as if I had any, he suggested the perfect home for Perseus was the government’s Luxembourg Palace — naturally — where the rodent Monsieur placed his work.
I’ll credit you this, C. Even at your most defiant you were never so devious or transparent.
“Don’t believe a word he says,” counselled Criteur. My devoted praticien. If only he’d had a model’s physique and could’ve sat! But a diet of starch puts dough on the bones.
Watching Cléome and the other cats gorge themselves, we eyed their treats like children eyeing a chocolatier’s. In broad daylight I ventured down the steep stone steps to the quay and cast a line, a length of twine and a hook. My catch? A shoe — a cumbersome man’s size forty-two.
“What good is that,” Criteur complained, “unless I lost a foot?”
“Stop it!” I had far less patience with him than with you, and greater worries than filling my belly or finding footwear. No matter how secure a sanctuary, evil can creep in. It has ways. Nowhere is quite safe, even with shutters bolted, furniture shoved against doors.
My rooms backed onto a courtyard, one where children played. Dangling strings, they teased my pride, my little lions. Think of my feelings for you, growing up! I would never suspect innocent tykes of evil, of being accomplices. Certainly not accomplices to our Monsieur.
But then Cléome disappeared. Lured by these children — how else to explain it?
Night after night I combed the streets, calling her name. Not one to mince words, Criteur said, “What’s one cat when you’ve got eight?” The last thing I’d expected, or needed, was being blindsided by another “friend”! Preferring their company to his, I ordered him out.
That other treacherous one — who knows what gods were at play? — unveiled a work of his, years in the making, and had it rejected! Teach me to resist temptation! Wanting, needing to twist the knife, I sent congratulations “on his fine accomplishment.” The stupidest thing I could’ve done, for he wrote back, snivelling, “grieving” my absence — a grief that was larded with insults: “Perhaps Mademoiselle’s imagination plays tricks? Maybe she could try being nicer to those nice to her?”
I found Cléome’s body underneath Pont Marie, a stone’s throw from the flat. She’d been in the river for some time, her splendid coat eaten away. A wizened eyeless stare, jaw in a horrid grimace. Only a moron wouldn’t guess she’d been poisoned.
Now I’m not saying a child did it. Of course not, not at all. Only one creature capable of such a deed — you’d have agreed, if you’d cared enough to be there when I buried her. Such evil doesn’t just grow overnight, C. You know all too well how it feels losing a pet. Because of that I remain, in spite of everything, yours.
XX
23
… IN THE PRACTICE OF MY CALLING …
DORM LAVATORY MONTDEVERGUES ASYLUM
03H30
Finding no solace in smoking, I hid the uncorked wine in my towel and scurried down the corridor. No taste for it, however, as I half-filled the tub and locked the door. Tepid water was better than none at all. I scoured myself, as if this might clear away my slippage. Lying back I let my ear canals fill, the lovely hardness of porcelain at my occiput. A person can drown in an inch of water — the slight twist of my head is all it would take, God forbid.
Someone banged on the door, would I be much longer? The loo was hardly a spa such as at Vichy, a place to soothe away worries; it was more what you’d expect to find in the basement of some old gym.
“The one upstairs is free!” I yelled. Whoever she was went away. A warm bath replicates the womb’s comforts, the gentlest hydrotherapy. But the bath only made me think of things I’d rather forget. Adolescence. The village where I grew up. A family that hid their retarded daughter, who’d get loose and swing on the swing in their garden, pumping her legs fit to shoot through the sky.
When I’d found myself out of sorts, my worst fear — besides what would happen to me — was that the baby would be like her, or mongoloid, or harelipped, or missing parts. Deformity almost de rigueur, one might think, glossing an obstetrics text. A relief, such as it was, when the nuns said the child was normal.
Then I thought of a poster pasted up all over Lyon of a little girl playing with dolls. On it was the government’s slogan, Maintenant un jeu, plus tard une mission. All that poster sought was free brawn for the Boche’s factories — in order to save whose skin? Our Pétain would have everyone be a walking uterus, loving babies as he does — as long as they aren’t Jewish or over sixteen or have minds of their own.
Well, I’d done my part before turning seventeen. The sisters arranged the adoption. I never held the baby, saw its face no longer than it took to notice that it was slightly bluish. Infant cyanosis, I suspect. The nuns insisted it was healthy and even saved a wisp of its hair. His hair. A boy, but at the time mostly a weight I was glad to be free of, the worst that could befall a girl — worse in some eyes, like my father’s, than getting lues. His silence was just one of my punishments, compounded by the consolation he found in the bottle after losing my mother.
The boy — the donor of the cigarette case and more — said he was sorry I had no mother. He wasn’t completely unappealing. I remember his eyes, their watery green in the light under the trees. He’d brought cheese from his mother’s pantry. Tiny black ants crawled over the rind and wasps circled; while swatting them away his hand fell where it shouldn’t’ve. “Your papa’s not a bad man. But I see where you’d find it hard.” The kindest thing he had to say. “Will you teach or nurse the sick?” people asked, some time after, but before the Maréchal declared nursing second only to motherhood in virtue and value. I hadn’t minded a bit giving my life to giving needles, dressing wounds, draining incisions. “You have a gift for it,” the nuns said, Sister Ursula the loudest of all.
Someone tapped at the door. The tapping became a pummelling. “Really — really, whoever’s in there, I have to go!”
In a couple of hours, all will start up again. Shut-eye for the lucky. “Won’t be a second,” I yelled. “Just drying off.”
***
20H05. AN UNEVENTFUL day. Head was surprised but clearly relieved to have me turn up on the dot as usual. “No rest for the wicked, Poitier?” But she wasn’t letting me off the hook, her gaze as penetrating as a proctologist’s headlamp’s. “The problem remains, Mademoiselle’s letters getting out. With the change in Admin you can be sure there’ll be action taken. You realize the light you’ve put yourself in — put us in. After last night, we’re all under scrutiny.”
No mention of the deceased’s name, the bloodied scissors at her feet. Her file’s transfer to Admin was expedited and that,
sadly, was that.
I consulted my patient’s chart, was about to go and examine her. Bedsores, I thought. Decubitus ulcers, yes yes yes, pressure wounds.
“This breach of trust, of security,” Head continued. “How dare you make anything more difficult in such times?”
Malnutrition, I thought. Dehydration, poor hygiene, topped off by immobility.
Head looked at me strangely. “What happens happens, Nurse. We may be their keepers, but we can’t watch them every second. The place would fall down around our ears.” Her tone was almost warm, not unsympathetic. A gentler way of saying that it was tempting fate to interfere. To intervene. Almost but not quite as brutal as telling someone, Talk to Cadieu, take an Aspirin and try not to hang yourself in the morning.
Sleep deprivation no doubt had me confused.
“Poitier?” Head said. But I was thinking: Stage I, intact skin with localized redness warm to the touch.
“Do I make myself clear?”
Stage II: shallow ulcer with pinkish-red wound, intact or ruptured blister.
“Are you listening?”
Sores that aren’t skin tears, adhesive tape burns, macerations or excoriations.
“Nurse!”
Stage III: full-thickness tissue loss, subcutaneous fat visible, but bone, tendon, muscle unexposed.
“If Monsieur Directeur knows of your insubordination, you will be subject to instant dismissal.”
Stage IV: full-thickness tissue loss with exposed bone, tendon or muscle visible or directly palpable. The skeleton as poles propping up a leaky tent.
“Yes. I mean — I’m sorry,” I said. “If having Mademoiselle’s best interests at heart means I’ve done something wrong, what choice have I but to pay the price?”
These Good Hands Page 22