by Mark Slouka
Would that I had known then what I do now: that the heart is large, large—enough to house all manner of contradictions. That sinner and saint sleep in adjoining rooms there, and walk hand in hand through its gardens. We might have stayed. Put off our lives for an hour. Asked them, simply, to close the door.
We were what we were, after all. How absurd, it seems to me now, to want to be desired for something you’re not! Or to blame someone for wanting you for what you are, when all the world over generations of men and women have lived and died dreaming of precisely that.
And yet that is what I did. Perhaps because I didn’t want to admit who I was, would never admit the justice of it. But she was not at fault. Better, infinitely better, to blame the Maker for having made me as I was. Or Sophia, for having shown me a love I could never have, a love so all-consuming I would want it for my own.
VIII.
Paris was ending for us. We knew that. The petals had browned and dropped; the bloom was off the rose. With Ritta-Christina there to draw off the few who might still have come to see us, we watched our situation grow more desperate by the week. One day, we knew, the theatre would simply be empty. And yet we did nothing. We had not seen Dumat in weeks; apparently we had no need of a translator anymore, and as for tutoring, well, that too seemed to have ended. Days would pass without us speaking to either Hunter or Coffin, who seemed to be spending more and more of their time away from their lodgings. Often, a folded note, slipped beneath our door, would give the address and time of that evening’s performance. Nothing more. More often still, there would be no note.
And so we sat by the hearth, we talked, we read—as best we could—the English novels we had begun reading with Sophia. I had developed a strange affection for them. They had been by our bed the morning I woke still believing I would be with her in an hour’s time; they had lain on the table next to me as I had hurried my brother through breakfast, worrying we would be late. Outside on the avenue, a hard wind etched the cloaks and shawls of passersby against their owners’ backs, revealing the shape—like fingers in a wet glove—beneath the carapace of cloth. Gentlemen hurried by with their hands to their hats. Shoved along by an unseen hand, ladies in bonnets would suddenly hurry their steps, then slow.
We knew we had to do something, and yet, trapped by indecision, tired of talking endlessly about a situation that seemed to have no remedy—where could we go? whom could we turn to?—we did nothing. For four days it rained, trapping us inside. The cobbles were slick with mud, the country roads impassable. We could have taken the opportunity to speak to Hunter and Coffin, to demand what was owed us. We did not. We stayed in our rooms. Had the black boughs scraping against the outside wall been exchanged for palm fronds, we might have been back in Saigon. As soon as the rain eased we took to the fields and woodlots, once again circling the immovable core of our predicament like small muddy planets unable to escape the gravity of their situation. I can still recall the irregular orbit we walked—along broken, cracking streets, past stone walls and statuary black with rain—guided less by whimsy than by a simple lack of will, turning left or right on the basis of nothing more than the vague play of light on a warehouse wall or the suggestion of a smell—a smell like wheat and ash and wetted wool—brought in on the breeze.
We were drowning, of course. Years from home, in a foreign land, at the mercy of two men apparently intent on defrauding us of all that was rightfully ours, we were in more danger than we realized. Unable to turn to the authorities—how could we explain our case?—unlikely to receive a sympathetic audience if we had, we sensed the situation was growing desperate, yet seemed strangely unable to struggle. It was easier to do nothing. The rent on our rooms was still being paid, we told ourselves; the envelopes slipped beneath our door every two or three days still contained enough money for us to feed ourselves. To move at all might tip the balance. Nearly thirty years later a man I never met would write the words that would capture for me, as accurately as any daguerreotype, the helplessness of our lives that spring: “For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril;—nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.”
On the afternoon of April fourth, my brother and I had found ourselves in a district of Paris unfamiliar to us; a well-kept neighborhood of respectable homes and carriage houses protected by huge, muscled trees that spread their budding branches over the street. Soon enough, however, the trees began to fall back, their branches parting over our heads. The streets grew slovenly and disordered. Warehouses and vague, unnamed buildings—offices of some sort, we assumed—rose on both sides. We continued on. A thin drizzle wet our faces, then stopped. We watched a small, three-legged dog hunch-trot along the side of a wooden building, then raise its stump to the wall. It began to rain in earnest. Before us stood an imposing edifice with a huge glass dome. On either side of the entrance stood a pair of small, snarling lions, once bronze, now green with time. Gargoyles with monkey faces grinned down from the pediment, slow ropes of rain dripping from their jaws. A small sign above the portal read MUSEE DE L’HOMME ET LA NATURE.
Was it some vague, undefined curiosity or just the thickening rain that made us seek shelter there? Both, perhaps. Except for the dog, at that moment disappearing around a pile of broken bricks, the street was empty. Passing between the lions, we grasped the heavy, two-handed knobs. Nothing. We tried again, this time bracing ourselves against the left portal and pulling on the right. Slowly, the huge, intricately carved door swung open.
We found ourselves in a vast, cathedral-like hall, cavernous and still. Strangely enough, there seemed to be no one about. No lamps had been lit. No one answered our calls. We looked up. Clouds were rushing past the glass ceiling. Massive steel girders rose and arched above our heads, as if bearing the vault of heaven on their backs. We moved further in, our footsteps echoing against the marble. On either side, circular, wrought-iron stairs connected narrow wooden balconies that rose, one atop the other, nearly to the ceiling. Extending the length of the hall, each balcony contained two tiny alcoves with just enough room for a desk and a chair; the balcony walls themselves appeared to be lined with glass-fronted display cases and cabinets. From the third level up, reflecting the ceiling overhead, these appeared as long, broken strips of cloud, or, stranger still, as rows of windows onto some other, tilted sky.
At the center of the room, towering nearly to the ceiling, was a pyramid unlike anything either of us had ever seen or dreamed: a pyramid of life itself, or death, rather; tier upon tier of antelopes and zebras, foxes and wolves, yellow-tusked boars and long-tailed monkeys. Miraculously preserved, they stared out of glass eyes so liquid, so dark and lifelike, one half expected them to turn and blink at any moment. Inspired by nature’s profusion, the creators, whoever they were, had seemingly gathered specimens from all four corners of the earth. One side of the pyramid contained no fewer than thirteen reclining zebras, another a small herd of chestnut-spotted antelope with long, whorled horns. Here was an entire pride of snarling lions; here a pack of hunched and bristling wolves. Four seated leopards marked the corners, their tails turned around their frozen haunches.
We walked slowly around the base, speechless, reverent as acolytes before the altar. On and on the pyramid rose—looking up, we could make out layer upon layer of hawks and herons, badgers and hedgehogs, squirrels and cats—a dusty edifice ascending through ever-smaller increments of feather and bone to sediments of mice and voles and shrews and, finally, heaped piles of finches and warblers, bats and thrushes, small hills of sparrows. Above it all—a touch of whimsy—swallows and butterflies, apparently suspended from the ceiling by hair-thin wires, seemed to swoop and flutter against the actual sky even as, behind them, living birds separated themselves off from their stationary brethren and, tossed by the wind, disappeared from view.
The sun appeared, blazing painfully from a cabinet window on the third balcony, bat
hing the south side of the gallery in pale, wintry light. The wooden walls instantly reddened; the furred mountain before us seemed to stir slightly. So still was it that when my brother spoke, breaking the silence, I actually started. “We shouldn’t be here,” he said, uncertainly.
“Why not?” I said. “The door was open …”
“I know that.” He looked around. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant,” I said.
“I know you do.”
But we didn’t leave. No longer concerned about being discovered, or having to explain to the authorities how we came to be inside an establishment that, despite its unlocked doors, was obviously closed to the public, we began to walk around the perimeter of the room. I became aware of a strange, yellow smell, distinctly chemical yet not unpleasant. We wandered from case to case, past displays of walrus horns and monkey skulls and small, jewel like beetles on pins until we found ourselves, quite unexpectedly, by a door in the wall. The hall had grown dark again; high above our heads, rain was beating anxiously against the glass. All talk of leaving forgotten, we tried the door and, finding it unlocked, passed beneath a small, dark rectangle that suggested there had once been a sign in the wood above the portal.
The room we found ourselves in, though still of considerable size, seemed narrow and cramped in comparison to the soaring grandeur of the main hall. Ill lit by high, dusty windows, obviously unkempt, it stretched into the vague distance, crowded with a silent, hulking company of cabinets and display cases. Seeing them standing together in groups of two and three about the floor, I had the uncanny impression of having interrupted something, as though the shapes before me had only just frozen into their inanimate form. Indeed, for a moment I imagined I could still hear the dull, murmuring echo of their voices—the departing hubbub of the crowd—then all was silent.
Slowly, we walked over to the cabinet nearest to us. After a moment, we walked to the next. We couldn’t speak. It was as though our tongues had grown fat and strange in our mouths, as though our throats had decided to choke themselves off. In the first cabinet, set against a dark velvet background, were the jewel like bones of seven tiny hands. Lovingly disarticulated, delicate as shells, some showed six digits, some seven; one, spreading in a miniature fan that could fit easily inside a man’s palm, a full eight. In the second cabinet a dried flower arrangement, dove-gray and dun, flax and wheat, framed an allegorical wilderness scene. At its center, atop a craggy hill of gallstones the color of rust, was a skull. At the base, reclining like a tiny bather in the sun, was a miniature human skeleton. In the bones of its right hand it grasped the papery wing of a moth.
If this had only been all, we might still have left the Musée de L’homme et la Nature disturbed but unscathed. But it was not.
It began in the third cabinet with a two-headed kitten (the left looking off to the side, the right licking its paw with a tiny pink tongue); next to it, suspended by wires, was a stuffed viper whose body, like the trunk of a tree, had divided two-thirds of the way down its length. The fourth cabinet showed what appeared to be the skeleton of a dog with the fully formed haunches of another extending from its side. “Oh my God,” I heard my brother whisper, “what is this place?” I shook my head, unable to speak. It was then I realized he was not looking at the dog at all.
In three cabinets facing each other at oblique angles were detailed anatomical drawings—portraits, really—of twins much like ourselves and yet at the same time horribly different: men and women who had melted into one another in ways one would not have thought possible. Here, as though they had run together at great speed, two young women had been fused face to face, neck to thigh. I understood immediately: They had never been able to turn away from one another. Chin to chin for life, they had died looking into each other’s eyes. Here were two boys, reclining on their backs, whose hips had simply, unbelievably, disappeared into one another, forming one, uninterrupted midsection. Though two pairs of withered, rudimentary legs extended from their sides, they would never walk, nor would it be possible for them to see each other except by raising themselves on their elbows. Here another pair, also boys, no more than six years old, had been smashed together side to side with such power that their ribs seemed grown together, their stomachs one; though a single male organ could be seen between the central pair of legs, it seemed to belong to some third brother whose upper body had been lost in theirs.
It was the faces that held us, that kept us there for as long as they did. Faces so real, somehow, so human, it would be years before I would see their like—in the paintings of the masters, in the daguerreotypes that now and again would capture, as if by accident, the agony of our race: faces from some other, parallel world of experience, faces seemingly about to cry or absurdly smiling, ironic or ashamed, frozen in attitudes of stoicism and courage beyond my comprehension.
It was as we turned to leave that we saw him: a full-grown man—olive-skinned, almost handsome—staring out of a picture on the right-hand side of a double-door cabinet. With both hands, he was holding something that protruded directly out of his chest. Prepared though we were by this point to credit whatever our eyes showed us, it yet took a moment for us to realize that this something was another, smaller human being, or, rather, the waist and legs and feet of a human being—a half-grown child, apparently—whose upper body had seemingly been absorbed into his older brother’s.
It was not the horror of this that seared itself on my memory, nor the utter cruelty of the predicament. It was not the full-sized skeleton on the cabinet’s left side, which clearly showed that the little being had ended, as a recognizable human at any rate, at the waist; that the illusion had disintegrated into a chaos of bone—a bit of twisted spine thrusting, headless, through the brother’s ribs, a nub of an arm—only a short distance below the skin. Nor was it even the fact that this ghastly growth, this parasite (for this is what he was) had been dressed in well-fitting trousers and stockings and laced shoes. Even this I could have borne.
What I could not endure was the look on the older brother’s face: it was a look of unmistakable pride, unbowed and haughty. One strong arm reached across the little one’s thighs; the other supported him from beneath. Thus we were born, he seemed to be saying (though the other could never hear a word he said, nor think, nor breathe), and thus we will go on.
• • •
We turned and fled, past the cabinets in that ghostly anteroom, past a small wooden sign leaning sideways against the wall—GALERIE DES ANOMALIES, MONSTRES ET PRODIGES—our footsteps knocking hard and close against the stone, then fading into the vastness of the main gallery. We ran under the sound of the rain scattering itself against the glass dome and out into the thing itself, not even bothering to button our coats as our hair quickly plastered to our foreheads and our shirt fronts clung to our chests. The dog was gone. The warehouses disappeared. The streets grew tidier. The trees on either side rose and linked their branches over our heads, as though to protect us from the rain.
It took us an hour, maybe more. Did my brother know where we were going? Did I? Though neither of us said a word that entire time—not one word—I believe we both understood from the moment we turned and began to run that we really only had one place to go, which is why there were no arguments or moments of indecision as turn followed turn and the world grew familiar around us once more. Walking down her street at last was like seeing the windows of home—the same rise, the remembered trees … There was the stone fence we had cleared of snow with our hands. There we had walked arm in arm, huddled together against the cold. There was the carriage step I had lifted her onto in the midst of some joke or other (I could still remember the warmth of her breathing, the sweet weight of her body) from which she had made a pretty little speech and curtsied to her audience. My God, she had loved me. I knew that now. I could feel the rain running down my face. There was the house! After what seemed like a lifetime of wandering, foot-sore and soul-weary, sad to the core, the traveler ha
d returned.
There was no one home. No curtains in the windows. At last the door was opened by a well-dressed elderly gentleman in spectacles, wearing a hat and coat as if on his way out. It was clear immediately: She was gone! “I’m afraid Mademoiselle Marchant left Paris three days ago … A message? I’m afraid not.” Did he know when she might return? That would be impossible to say. Nor was he at liberty to say where she had gone. He had been retained for the express purpose of arranging for the removal of Mademoiselle Marchant’s things, no more.
He was not unkind. Seeing me blinking stupidly at the drops catching in my lashes, he stepped aside in the passage. We were soaked through. Would we like to step in out of the rain for a moment? He made rubbing motions, then hurried off, returning with a pair of towels. In one hand he carried a bottle; in the other, crossed stem to stem between his fingers, two small glasses. But I couldn’t drink. There was a strange pain in my chest. I looked around. There were the doors to the parlor that Claudine would swing open every morning to the light. How the sun would break in like a toppled column! There was the parlor, just as we had left it—the sofa and the armoire, the mahogany-and-horsehair chairs, the pianoforte on which she had played for us … I could hear her voice! It was impossible, impossible that she should be gone. The patterns of the rain, swimming over the furniture, made the room seem submerged.