by Mark Slouka
“No more!” We stood up abruptly. I had had enough.
“Please, my friends, you must believe—”
“That will do, sir. We will not listen to another word. Not another word.”
“You are making a mistake. I say this only to spare you—”
But we were already walking toward the door. Dumat’s voice pursued us into the hall: “You will listen. You must! It is not … I am not the only one who knows this. It is common knowledge. Only you in your innocence could truly believe that this … Please … Let me explain … Wait!”
We were halfway down the hall when he began to read. He must have had the volume there all along, that damnable page marked and waiting for its moment. “If you won’t listen to me,” he cried after us as we mounted the stairs, his voice, vaguely demonic now, echoing against the walls, “then at least listen to Monsieur Hugo, who lets her speak for herself.” We rushed on. “ ‘I love you,’ ” he screamed up the winding stair, “ ‘I love you not only because you are deformed, but because you are low.’ Are you listening?” I thought I heard a page turn, a sound like a slap. “ ‘A lover despised, mocked, grotesque, hideous’ ”—we were running down the hallway now—“ ‘exposed to laughter on that pillory called the stage’ ”—there was our door!—“ ‘has an extraordinary attraction to me. It is a taste of the fruit of hell.’ ”
Fumbling with the key as though an actual fiend were at our heels, I managed to find the lock just as Dumat read the lines that would continue to sound—alchemically changed to a woman’s voice, wondering and cruel—years after our door had crashed shut like a full stop on a sentence: “ ‘I am in love with a nightmare. You are the incarnation of infernal mirth.’ ”
VII.
Even the seasons, that year, seemed beset by doubt: days of softening, restless wind followed by nights frozen fast as death. In the mornings, against the gray sky, the coal smoke rose like a forest of columns from the roofs of the city and the streets tinkled with broken glass. Bowed down by the course of events, strangely torpid, my brother and I took to wandering about the streets of the city, drifting farther and farther afield each day as though hoping, by this symbolic leave taking, to somehow effect our actual escape. As if by simply walking far enough we might snap the bonds that held us.
How far did we wander those days? Ten miles? Twenty? On the days when we had an evening performance to attend, we would wind our way back to our lodgings by nightfall; on days we had none we would stay out late—till midnight or later—for it was only after dark, when the carriages had disappeared and the streets had grown silent, that we felt free. Once or twice we found ourselves in her neighborhood.
The branching of trees, the deepening blue of the evening … it might have been beautiful. But the mind, like the contents of a street peddler’s cart, reflects its owner’s preoccupations. We saw the bones beneath the faces of the sweepers, heard the consumptives’ scraping cough, like coal scuttles on brick, smelled the perfume of the slaughterhouses when the spring wind was from the south.
• • •
My brother attempted to speak to me shortly after our episode with Dumat. “You must not listen,” he blurted out suddenly, breaking a long silence. We were walking along a country lane lined with cherry trees just leafing into bloom. From a distance, against the dark fields, the orchards appeared touched with mold. A wet wind pushed at our faces. “You have to not listen,” he said again, looking at me. I was reminded of a worried snail, testing the air with its roots.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“Dumat. You have to not listen to him. You have to go on as if he hadn’t spoken at all.”
I snorted. “Why would I listen to him?”
“Because you did.”
“I don’t even—”
“I know,” he said quietly. “I can tell.”
“Tell what?” I laughed.
“All right. Suit yourself.”
“No, tell me. What can you tell?”
He said nothing.
“Are you warning me, or yourself?” He walked on, back in his shell. I flicked him again, just to make sure. “It seems to me you could use some of your own advice, brother.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Don’t worry. I don’t.”
He was absolutely right, of course. His advice, though much too late, was both generous and wise. Dumat, who no longer appeared at our lodgings, had done his work. Though I didn’t believe him, neither could I prove him wrong. “A lover despised, mocked, grotesque …” I had known the pillory of the stage. Did I believe that Sophia Marchant had loved me because I was hideous? That she had run her hand along my side that dark afternoon in her drawing room, allowed her fingers to explore where the base of my bridge rose from my ribs, because my condition attracted her? I did not. Could I say with absolute certainty that it was not so? I could not. I was, after all, who I was: a penniless foreigner, a boy, neither handsome nor distinguished. I had been declared a freak, the mere sight of whom could damage the unborn in the womb. More than this, and making any natural union between us an impossibility, I was already indissolubly joined to another. And yet she had risked so much, so recklessly. Why? Why? “I am in love with a nightmare.” Could I say with absolute certainty that somewhere deep in her inmost soul she was not drawn to me the way fingers are drawn to a scab, or eyes to a wound? “You are the incarnation of infernal mirth.” I could not.
And so we walked. At night, back in our lodgings, though hardly able to stand, I walked the same route again in my dreams: There again was the crow, screaming something from the top of a linden; there was the street sweeper with the patch over his eye; there was the river, strangely silent, its shifting whirlpools sucking at the air. The black dog we had seen disappear stiff-legged into a whorl in the current appeared on the opposite shore. I had to get to him. He reminded me of something. I wanted to gather him in my arms. And then we were sitting next to one another in a room at dusk, her head resting on my shoulder. I could feel her warmth through my clothes. I had been told I was dying. I wanted to tell her, but knew the moment I spoke it would be true. And so on, and so on, down streets strangely empty of carriages and horses, past darkened buildings in which no lamp had been lit, by stubbled fields in which the same distant figure labored behind a plow as though condemned to plow the same furrow, keep open the wound, day after day and night after night in my dreams.
But all was not a loss. Though speaking little French, we learned a great deal on those long walks through Paris and its immediate environs. We discovered, for example, that the horns of slaughtered bullocks were turned into “tortoiseshell” combs, the bones of their legs into toothbrush handles and dominoes. The gathered blood went to the sugar refiners; the fat, for lamps, or soap. There was something horribly fascinating in this. Again and again we found ourselves walking in the direction of Montfaucon. It was as though we couldn’t stop ourselves. Seeing us, the workers would quickly gather about, jabbering and staring (most had heard of us, many had seen us on the stage), until someone in a position of authority noticed the disruption and came to see what was happening. Ordering the others back to their places, he would then, often as not, offer us a guided tour.
Most of what we saw was forgotten. Some was not. I remember, for some reason, the slim figure of an artist, seated against a pile of bales, sketching the flaying of a horse. A romantic character, dark-haired and mustached, he worked at a furious pace, intent on capturing the waves of exposed muscle before they too went under the knife. At Montfaucon one cold day we watched a gaunt jobber whose face seemed permanently darkened by shadow, and whose work it was to gather the entrails for the feeding of pigs and poultry, reach into a mass of steaming offal and draw out the intestinal canal of a freshly slaughtered mare. Wrapping it like a long, dark rope open-palm-to-elbow, he made thirteen full revolutions before the tail end emerged out of the pile at his feet and snaked up his leg.
The skin, we were made to understand,
would be sold to a tanner; the tendons, fresh or dried, to the gluemakers. Even the putrid flesh would be used. Covered with a pile of hay or straw, it would soon attract flies; within a week it would be rich with maggots. These would then be gathered and sold as food for domestic fowls, or as baits for fish. Nor was this all. We had noticed, no doubt, the unfortunate number of rats. Once a fortnight, we were told, the carcass of a horse was placed in a room with special openings in the walls and floor designed to allow the rats free access. At night, these openings were closed, trapping the rats inside, and the ferrets released. In one room, over a period of less than four weeks, they had killed more than sixteen thousand rats. Our guide smiled happily. “Think of it, monsieur,” he said, addressing me. “The furriers in Paris pay four francs for one hundred skins. And it costs us nothing!”
Why did we go? And why did we return, though the smell that lingered in our clothing alone was almost enough to make us ill? Feeling corrupted inside, did I search out corruption in the hope of finding some kind of equilibrium? Or did I seek out the rough precincts of death intending to split myself against its hardness, to rub my nose against it until, like a serpent scraping and scraping against the edges of rocks, I felt the old skin sliding back across my eyes and crawled, reborn, from out of myself? And what of my brother? Did he say nothing because he felt some responsibility, some complicity for my state, or did he, too, feel some small measure of attraction for that fallen place?
It was in this state of mind, at any rate, that we found ourselves one evening in a deserted, ill-lighted district extending along the edge of a small canal. There seemed to be hardly anyone about. We walked on, watching our step, for the stones of the street were in ill repair. Now and again a man emerged from the darkness of the side streets and hurried by. We heard what sounded like a woman’s laugh, or a quick, gasping cry, then a man’s voice yelling something we could not understand. Here and there, high above the street, a candle flickered in a dark window.
But let me be clear. We were hardly so naive as not to know where we had found ourselves. We had spent years, after all, in the company of older men. From the banks of the Meklong to the decks of the Sachem we had listened to their tales, grinned knowingly at their jokes. And yet who could be surprised, given the difficulties presented by our condition, that at the age of twenty we still knew nothing? It was an ignorance my brother—though no less driven than I, to judge by the frequency of his late-night whimperings and shudderings—bore with maddening fortitude. He had always been more reticent, more constricted; it was only after our experience with the concubines in the Royal Palace, however, that his natural timidity had flared into morbid shyness.
At times it seemed he would be willing to endure the burden of our innocence forever. Not that I was uniformly willing to shed it. When Coffin, only a week earlier, had hinted about the possibility of finding female companionship for us—hoping, in this crude way, to compensate us for our recent troubles—we had both turned down his offer. My brother, you see, was afraid, hence the tone of offended dignity, the vehement denials of any need or desire. And I? I was in love.
Perhaps we were simply tired that night. Or perhaps, given the strange, dreamlike existence we had been leading, what happened that night seemed no more or less real than a painter sketching a flayed horse, or the dreamed warmth of Sophia’s hip against my side, the rustling slip of her dress. Perhaps. More likely modesty and love, undermined by pain, simply went down under the gentle pressure of opportunity, the sweet tyranny of the moment.
What was she like? She was pretty enough, with pale round arms and calves and a wealth of creamy bosom that she framed in lace like a painting of a winter scene. Ten years older than us, perhaps more, she had none of the dissipated look of so many of her sisters; slightly plump, with knowing eyes and a fine, slim neck like the stem on a cherry, she seemed to have escaped many of the ravages of her trade. We knew none of this at first. We couldn’t see her. It was her voice, which addressed us from the dark of a shuttered storefront, that made us slow our step: low, almost coarse, it had about it a warmth, a teasing humor, that bespoke both curiosity and acceptance.
In spite of ourselves, we stopped, cringing inwardly at what we knew was to come—the involuntary backward step, the hand over the mouth, the small gasp of shock. No doubt she had thought we were two men walking side by side. Yet when she saw how things were with us, she seemed neither terrified nor unduly surprised. She had heard of us, apparently. A friend had seen us, she explained, painting a stage with her hands, then curtsying nicely to the canal by way of explanation. “Let’s go,” said my brother.
“Je suis Corinne,” she said, touching a spot directly below her throat, watching us.
“Chang,” I said, indicating myself.
“Chang,” she repeated.
“And this is my—”
“Let’s go,” said my brother.
“This is Eng,” I said, pointing.
“Enchantée,” she said, looking at him.
“I said let’s go.”
“No.”
Stepping forward suddenly she placed her hand directly against our bridge. My brother flinched as if he had just been bitten by a wasp, jerking me violently to the left. “Don’t …” he began, and then, to me: “Come on!” Before we could move she reached up and touched the back of her gloved fingers to the side of his face, then laid them against his mouth. “Shhhh,” she whispered. I could hear the canal gurgling quietly to itself in the darkness. A short cry came from somewhere above our heads. She smiled and rolled her eyes.
It would speak better for me if I could say that I struggled and argued with myself as we followed her up the narrow stairs and watched her slip the key into the lock. But alas, that was not the case. I felt dazed, drunk. I felt no remorse for what I was about to do at all. I drank in the slow shift of her skirts as she walked up the steps ahead of us, counted the dark curls that had escaped her pin. If I thought of anything at all, it was that there had been no talk of money. “We have four francs,” Eng whispered to me when, with a quick smile and an explanation we couldn’t understand, she stepped out into the hall, leaving us alone in the small, neat room. For a moment we both thought of escaping the way we had come. Before we could come to a decision, she was back.
Ah, the shamelessness of the innocent! Having no experience, we assumed that whatever came to pass was simply the way of things, and therefore watched, amazed but not surprised, as she first undressed us, slowly, tenderly—only the quickening rate of her breathing giving away her emotions—then unlaced and unbound herself, layer by layer, until she lay before us on the bed, shockingly naked, white as an almond slipped from its skin.
She seemed fascinated by our arms, our hips, by the muscled smoothness of our bridge, running her hands over us as though to confirm what her eyes showed. Nothing surprised her. Whatever we assayed, she understood. When, wondering, unable to resist, I touched the taut softness of her breast with my fingers, she slipped her hand behind my head and gently pressed me down, then pushed herself between my lips. When she felt my brother, in an agony of shame, helplessly pressing himself against her side, she took him gently in her hand and caressed him, all the while gentling him like a nervous horse. And when, with a strange groan, he suddenly spilled his seed across her hip and stomach, she laughed with pleasure and kissed him full on the mouth.
We had climbed, with some awkwardness, onto the bed with her. Trying as best I could to support my weight on my arms I hovered above her body, my brother, forever next to me, pressed tight against her side. Still kissing him, her arm around his neck, she reached around my back and quickly, firmly, pressed me down and into her.
The rest—the increasingly unbridled urgings of her hips, the strangled music of her cries, the reception of my crisis by the expectant, frozen look on her features—all this was a blur to me. I could feel the ecstatic rubbing of her hands across our bridge and then it was there—announced by a quick gasp, a receiving stillness—and
for the space of a few moments the two of us joined in the sweet, sudden breaking of walls that had stood too long. Lost in that lovely wreckage, I could feel her placing a necklace of kisses along my collarbone.
But all was not done. Disturbed by the activities, my brother, it seemed, had been resurrected. Hardly had I returned to myself before I felt her gently easing me to the side. Unprotesting, I slipped off, thereby pulling my brother onto her. This, it seemed, was precisely what she had intended. Still half dazed, running my hand almost absentmindedly along her side, I watched as, raising her hips slightly and guiding his luckless explorations with her hand, she proceeded to give him the exact duplicate of what she had just given me. It was a gift my brother, no longer protesting, quite enthusiastically accepted—a fact I would have occasion to remind him of, more than once, in the years to come.
• • •
Do I blame us for the pleasure we took that evening? No, I do not. Life offered itself, and knowing that, for such as ourselves, another opportunity might never come, we took it. Do I blame her for tainting it? For wanting us because we were the way we were? Because the fact of our doubleness excited her? No, I do not.
I do not blame her even though at some point that night, hearing an odd scuffling as of mice in the walls, I looked up and found the doorway full of wondering women’s faces and understood why she had stepped into the hallway when we had first arrived. Yet again we had been seen as nothing more than freaks on a stage. Thrusting her away, ignoring her frantic entreaties and explanations, we lurched out of bed—boys that we were—and ran half-dressed down those narrow stairs and out into the darkness, where, catching my toe on an upturned stone, I tripped, bringing us crashing heavily to the cobbles.