by Edward Carey
He put his lips on mine, very dry lips at first, and then he kissed me on my cheeks and my neck. Edmond made a sighing noise as if he were very sleepy, and then I was gently pushed onto my back and then he continued kissing from the neck downward, his lips not so dry now. There was a gentle kissing on my shoulder. I felt him descending still farther, and he arrived shortly after at my breasts, which were touched by his fingers and then kissed. “Your back arched,” he whispered then. “You gasped!”
Very shortly afterward, Edmond Henri Picot pushed himself into me, and filled me, and I was held and rocked. I closed my eyes, and in the darkness there was Edmond again.
“I am Edmond Henri Picot,” he said, “and you are Marie Grosholtz, known as Little, and that is just how it ought to be, and should have been a long, long time ago.”
And so. Once there was an impenetrable girl called Marie Grosholtz, until one afternoon she was cracked open and another Marie Grosholtz was discovered beneath, a painful skinless person, who was existing just beneath the surface. And would not be covered up anymore.
That was living. That was such living. I was in love.
In love with Edmond.
Afterward, we both of us felt our yearnings, at many odd moments, to slip across the boulevard and bring ourselves together upon Doctor Graham’s broken bed. Sometimes we were in such a rush for it that I would remain in my dress and Edmond would trip over his fallen breeches and his stockings, all wrinkled around his feet. And it did not matter that we were the only genuine thing in that abandoned property, we made it live again. For me, for my life, it was this body of all bodies, the one that was Edmond Henri Picot, that was mine. I became the greatest expert of Edmond Henri Picot and was enormously proud of my scholarship. We truly fitted together, ulna to radius, fibula to tibia. And always, at the end, there was Edmond, staring at me so intently, laying his head upon my chest.
This life, I thought, goes on and keeps surprising.
This little box, this chapter, ends here, sealed tight from those others that surround it, so that those other people of different chapters may not come in here and disturb, so that its vault may be sealed up, never spilling beyond its boundaries but kept tight shut and precious, and Godly and triumphant, and wonderful too. But remain only itself. Wax, also, is privacy. Wax seals letters. Wax keeps all the world’s words where they should be, until the right hands come to let them out.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Sixth heads.
In the line for bread, I said to some confused stranger, “Edmond Picot’s unpeeled me.” Walking home, I stopped an old man to announce with joy, “I am unbuttoned!” I told a young mother, “I am loved! I am!” Those were our days, Edmond’s and mine, with occasional interruptions from my master. When we were not considering ourselves, when we had my master’s company, we looked about us and considered everyday things—windows and shutters, lintels, doors and their handles—and were grateful for them. Buildings kept upright, so that we might live inside them. We said our good mornings and good evenings to each other. These days we sat at table not in the dining room, for we had seen a rat opening a cupboard there, but in the old kitchen. A setting for the widow was always laid. Children played outside on the broken paving stones, their sounds disturbing our brittle home.
The wax population grew dusty. The king’s severed head remained made of air. When we visited the figures, removing certain among them that were no longer safe to display, our feet left tracks in dust. So many likenesses had become dangerous. You must not have a face that resembles Mirabeau; you must not have a Lafayette; there must be no evidence that such a person ever had a face. The royal family—most of all the royal family—were not to be at your home, not at dinner, not even in a cage.
Like her king, the queen was executed; we stayed inside that day, though we still heard the cheers. But Elisabeth was still alive, kept prisoner in the temple. And I knew I must not visit her, for such a thing would threaten all our lives. I satisfied myself by walking by the building once a week. I must wait, I thought. They’ll be satisfied now they’ve taken the queen. They’ll be quite full up now.
Our footprints in the dust of the great hall resembled a history of the French people, as we dragged the forbidden ones into back rooms and there undressed them—first of their clothes, then of their heads. The bodies remained in one piece; only the heads were dangerous. We lifted the forbidden heads, Edmond and I, high above our shoulders and then we hurled them to the floor, smashed them one by one, until they all were mixed in together. Edmond handed me the heads of the royal family. It was my privilege since I had made them. And down they tumbled. A nose of the queen muddled up with the ear of her husband or the chin of her brother-in-law, or with a piece of Mirabeau’s pitted cheek, or Bailly’s empty eye sockets. (Eyes were saved because they could be used again.) We walked upon all those yesterday heads, crunching them underfoot, then swept up all those fractions and dropped them, every last crumb, in our great brass bowl. Then we lit the fire and melted them all together.
Once they had liquefied, and we’d put out the fire, Curtius stood over the bowl with great dignity to perform the rite. Putting his hands over the cooling substance, feeling its last heat, he muttered:
“Man that is born of wax hath but a short time to live.”
Half an hour later, we upturned the big pan and, with a little help from a palette knife, freed the contents. With a thump it fell upon the table, a large half-sphere of melted time, utterly illegible. Heads lost. Surfaces forgotten.
I sat down next to my master, quiet now. The widow was sleeping upstairs.
“So much work,” I said.
“Some fine work, some not so fine.”
“All gone. Lost forever.”
“And yet,” he said.
“And yet, sir?”
“We have the molds. Not quite forgotten after all. Only invisible.”
There we were, Edmond and I, holding hands in the back rooms of the Great Monkey House. There was Doctor Curtius, busying himself around the Widow Picot, whose merest noise would prompt him to marvel: “Listen to her! What spirit!”
But our life could not continue undisturbed. Late one night, near midnight—we had been asleep—a sound rang through the hall. We barely understood it at first; we had forgotten what it was.
Someone was ringing Henri Picot’s bell.
Ten men. Coming past the rusting fence, banging upon IN, banging upon OUT.
“They won’t go away,” I said. “I’ll tell them we’re closed.”
“I can’t go down,” said Curtius. “I mustn’t leave her.”
“Perhaps they’ve come for the king at last.”
I went down. Edmond came too.
“Is it only you?” they asked.
“Yes,” I said quickly, “just us here.”
“Where’s the master?”
“Not available,” I said.
“Do you have equipment?”
“Do you mean for casting?” I asked, surprised. “Yes?”
They said we had better come at once, that we should bring our equipment. They took us across the river. Hurry, hurry, they said. To a small house with a great crowding around it. People weeping. Our escort pushed us through. We went up to the first-floor apartment, where we were led along a corridor filled with men all gathered around a single woman in a striped dress, slightly ripped, whom they would not let go.
“What has she done?” I asked.
“Murder,” was the reply.
We were ushered into a crowded bedroom. The crowd parted, revealing a man upon the bed, naked save for an old dressing gown, a sort of white turban wrapped around his head. The face was moon-shaped and very pitted, the large eyelids were not quite closed, the wide mouth was open, the tongue sticking out a little of a corner, the skin was diseased, sores, scabs, broken wheals. There was a great hole in the chest, a deep, dark mouth; you could see right down its throat. The man had begun to congeal; the liquids inside had steadied and starte
d their darkening.
“Are you all right, Edmond?” I asked.
“Yes, thank you, Marie,” he said. “Do not worry about me. I’m very strong. I’m made of tough stuff. You tell me what to do, and I’ll be doing it right beside you. There, I quite surprise myself! There, I looked at him again. A dead, murdered man.”
A deafening roar outside: the girl from the corridor had been taken down.
Beside the body stood a tall curly-headed man with a sketchbook. He put his pencil down and turned toward us. I’d thought him very beautiful at first, but when he turned I saw his left cheek: a swollen, twisted thing, a bit like the widow’s, that stretched the left side of his mouth into a gash. He spoke in strange, stammering words.
“Whaa-whoooo?” he asked.
“We are from Curtius’,” I said. “We have been trained. I’ve done heads before, dead ones, living ones. Edmond Picot does the bodies.”
“Currrrtiasss?”
“Could not come.”
“Mussht make the whole b-bady in wacks.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “We can do that.”
“And kwuck!”
“Yes, sir, right away.”
“It phades, the bady. It is ratting.”
“Yes, indeed, it has certainly begun to decompose.”
“And I musht pain it.”
“Paint it, sir?”
“Pain the mardured heerow fah the Cunnnvunshan.”
“You are a painter, sir?”
“I yam Daffeeeeed.”
He was. Jacques-Louis David. The painter.
“Oh yes, sir?” I had never heard of him. “And who, if I may ask, is the unfortunate victim?”
“MARRAAAAHHHH!”
He was Doctor Jean-Paul Marat. Seething Doctor Marat, who daily called for more people to be guillotined so that the country might be saved. Rabid Doctor Marat, who called himself the Rage of the People. Ailing Doctor Marat—his illness no doubt increasing his temper—who, while sitting in his slipper bath to cool his infected skin, had had a bread knife put through his left lung, his aorta, and into his left ventricle.
We must be quick, we must be careful, we must preserve the horrible body.
We were the first at Marat, first of many. We took casts, Edmond and I, busy together. Only the head and a portion of the chest; the rest was too delicate. Marat’s face was caving in, his eyes as murky as oyster flesh. When we had our casts, other men opened the body up; they threw some pieces out, but were more careful with others, wrapping them in dampened cloths. It was their job, these men with their vinegar and arsenic and mercurial salt, with their needles and thread, to prepare the body for a state funeral. They took his heart, his real heart, and put it in a porphyry urn. We took his head, its plaster cast, and brought it home, with orders to bring the death mask to David at once.
“We’ll do this together, Edmond,” I said as we hurried home. “Everything together. I shall need your help.”
“Of course,” he said. “I know that.”
First we swept the floor of the large workshop. Then we scrubbed the table and polished the instruments. We laid everything out: measures, plaster dust, soft soap. Only when all was neat and ready did we bring the plaster mold onto the table.
Curtius came down. “What is this?”
“It’s a head,” I said.
“Business?” he asked, shocked. “Is it business?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, “a little business.”
“No, no more. The shop is shut.”
“We must, sir. We have been ordered.”
“Who is it?”
“Someone has been murdered.”
“No more death. Just life now. I want everyone living. Mustn’t touch death. Might spread.” With shaking hands he gave me the key to the wax cupboard. “Take it. I’m done with it. I must go back. Don’t wake Charlotte, she’s sleeping. I must go back.”
Our first casting of the plaster death mask was placed in the window of Marat’s apartment, looking down on the street for all the hundreds of mourners.
“Yasssh! Yassh!” said David when I delivered it. “Grayed paytreeottt!”
Great patriot, he called me.
In two days we were able to substitute the death mask for a bust of the murdered man. David instructed us to make a full body in wax of Marat for public display. The actual body was rapidly decomposing in the summer heat and the huge funeral preparations were not yet ready.
“Hish hall baddyyy, harry, do pleeesh harry!”
We went back home, and to work, the two of us. The wax Marat came in twelve different sections. Where it had been impossible for us to take a cast of his actual flesh—chest, shoulders, back of the neck and head—we had had to reconstruct a replica of clay, relying on my notes and Edmond’s measurements taken at the source. We must fit the death mask onto the clay body and then make fresh molds of the whole; from those new molds would come the wax figure. We added the dyes to the Chinese wax, carefully turning it in a water bath, heating it to the right temperature, and pouring it slowly into the molds. Then we freed the wax and joined all together, then painted the sores, adding small flakes of wax for the broken scabs.
“You’re making too much noise,” Curtius said.
But we barely spoke a word, Edmond and I. Locked in our work.
On the third day of Marat’s death, the fifteenth of July, when I came to David to report on our progress, the corpus Marat had turned green. On the fifth day, the heavy exhausting weather broke, rain fell, and the girl who had murdered him was executed. On the sixth day, the body of Doctor Jean-Paul Marat was at last removed from his home and taken to the Church of Cordeliers to lie in state. The fatal wound was on show. People got up close so that they might look in, and the body was constantly sprayed with perfumes. All was venerated. On the seventh day, our wax Marat was ready and was taken to the Convention itself. Our Marat in his death-breath, the figure in the slipper bath with a knife in his breast, in an agony of frozen movement. You could put your hands out and touch him. Marat not smelling, not decomposing, fresh and shining slightly. It would remain there until David finished a vast painting of the man dead in his bath, a martyr, a saint, a god.
“Thennk yoooou, cittttissunns,” David said, tears running down that twisted cheek.
People longed for souvenirs of the murdered man. Where could such things be got? They saw the death mask in the window. Where could one of those be had?
Without exactly meaning to, we had become the principal source of Marat.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
A new business.
In those weeks, in those months, we found we had stumbled into a most successful cottage industry. We made plaster heads of the radical Marat: in the morning Marat, throughout the day only Marat, into the night just Marat. We put a message beneath the words IN and OUT:
FOR MARAT
PLEASE CALL AROUND BACK
“Now, Edmond,” I said, “it is for us to manage this business.”
“We are the ones?”
“Only us. Curtius devotes himself to the widow. It’s for us to do it.”
“How we come on, Marie, you and I!”
We heaved the ticket desk around the back, and Edmond and I sat there together taking the money: seventy assignats per Marat head. In those days I discovered what it was to be totally with another person, to share days and space and bodies, to sit tight together at a bench, hands touching under the desk. We were a shop frozen in time, paused, hovering for months, above the thirteenth of July, 1793, the day of Marat’s death.
“Just one head?” asked Doctor Curtius. “Only one?”
“Yes, sir, just one.”
“But can it be right? One head. What if it’s the wrong one?”
“I don’t understand it either, sir. It does seem strange. But we have always been a Monkey House filled with the most popular of people, and today they come for Marat.”
The cloth Edmond was larger now than he had ever been, wound round with bril
liant colors, threads of turquoise and vermilion and magenta, small patches of lavender and indigo and sienna, all plucked from his mother’s abandoned workshop. The cloth Edmond was as bold and brilliant and handsome as the flesh Edmond was formerly reserved and aloof and plain.
“I measured your Marta,” he said.
“Go on, Edmond,” I said.
“I remember that.”
“What else?”
“I visited you at night. I’ve thought of it so often.”
“Yes, oh yes.”
It might have been the unaccustomed sound of Edmond talking so much. It might have been the people calling for Marat heads. Or perhaps it was the constant presence of Curtius about the bed, his adoration and attention, his thousand tales of the human body. Whatever the cause, something began to stir inside the remainder of the Widow Picot.
Doctor Curtius said she was making more noises, that he’d seen her looking at the walls and not the ceiling. Poor Doctor Curtius, we said to each other, poor man, she looks just the same, he’s so fond. But one morning when Edmond went in to see her, her eyes moved from the ceiling to the wall, and then—he swore it—they fixed upon him, and once they were on him they did not leave him. He went to one side of the room, they followed. He went to the other, they followed. Edmond screamed. We came running.
“Look! Look!”
By the time we had arrived, she was asleep again. But the next day, when I came in, Curtius was talking to her, and her sounds had some new intelligence to them.
“Wuuuuuuur,” she said.
Come again.
“Wuuuuuuuuurrrrr,” she said.
“Oh, yes we were, we were indeed,” he said, “but not any longer.”
“Work, Widow Picot?” I asked. “Do you mean work?”
“Wuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrr,” she said.
I brought her some old clothes, some old staff uniforms, and she struggled to hold on to them. When I pressed the old material to her cheek, she started crying. The widow was trying to come back—perhaps not all of her, but a part. We heaved her out of the bed. We put her in a barrow and pushed her around the upstairs rooms. We gave her things to play with; often she threw them to the floor, as if for the pleasure of watching us fetch them back. One morning Doctor Curtius leaned over her and, with a quick swipe of scalpel, severed the cord of her cap. The cap fell away, but the hair did not. A smell was instantly in the room. There was too much privacy in that smell. A vast hair knot of brown and gray and white, not pleasant colors, but colors of neglect. The widow’s hair had grown solid, it had turned almost into bone. Curtius hummed, hovering above it with an ivory comb, not knowing where to strike first. He tried here and there, put the teeth in, pulled a little, and the widow’s whole head went back. Edmond watched in trauma. Next Curtius took up a pair of long-necked clamps with two forked heads, designed for surgery of the uterus; with this he managed to puzzle out some of the hair, to unravel some of those old plaits. Some of the hair then fell away of its own accord. How Curtius trembled when he held the widow’s terrible tangled, thick, matted, strangled, bumpy, fettered, time-gnawed, rat-tailed, stale, and lifeless hair in his hands. While her cap was off, all her love was out again, and how strange the love had grown; what a feeble, rickety, odd person that love was. Curtius attempted to straighten it all out.