“Not particularly,” he said, grimacing when he saw its location on the map. “That’s not the way to Chopin, is it?”
“No,” I replied. “We’d have to take a bit of a detour to see it.” I folded the map up and tucked it back in my purse. “All right, let’s go visit Freddie.”
Chopin’s grave was a rather modest white monument, with a relief of his profile carved in the front. It was covered in bouquets of flowers. We’d purchased a bunch of flowers along the way for just that reason. I cleared away the wilted blossoms from previous mourners and put them in a plastic bag to be disposed of later, then set our bunch in amongst the fresher blooms.
“Did you hear that they’re wanting to do a genetic analysis on his heart?” I asked, gazing up at the carving of the composer’s face. “Good thing someone thought to preserve it. Apparently the soil here is so acidic that it speeds up decomposition and renders the skeletal remains unfit for genetic analysis, or something like that.”
“I think I heard about that. One of his family members took his heart back to Poland, didn’t they? An… older sister, if I remember correctly?”
“Yes, that was Ludwika. Apparently, she snuck the heart over the border in urn filled with cognac, that she kept hidden beneath her cloak.”
“Clever woman,” Tadeusz said. “Why, that just about makes her an international smuggler, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I agreed, smiling. “And thanks to her, now it’s possible to sequence his genome, which should tell us once and for all whether he actually died of tuberculosis or cystic fibrosis.”
“Cystic fibrosis? What’s that?”
“It’s a genetic mutation. One of the boys in my family has it,” I told him, my smile fading away. “I… know quite a lot about it, more than I’d ever wanted to. If Chopin had it, I wonder how he could have survived until nearly forty without the benefits of modern medical care. I look at little Martin, the drainages, the chest compressions, and the amount of medicine he has to take, and it’s hard for me to imagine how he could have survived that long. But, there are apparently a great many different variations on the disease, so I suppose anything’s possible.”
“Perhaps he had a milder form?” Tadeusz suggested, clearly interested in the subject. “So what does this genetic mutation do exactly?”
“I can’t tell you, exactly,” I admitted. “I’m not an expert. I just know that it’s a gene mutation, and the most common form makes the pancreas work inefficiently. The body produces too much mucus, which causes problems all throughout the respiratory, digestive, and reproductive organs. For most adult males, it blocks the tubes that channel sperm.”
“So, it makes them infertile?”
“For most, yes.”
“So, Chopin couldn’t be the father of Marie’s child, then.”
I shrugged. “We don’t know for sure that he even had cystic fibrosis. Besides, it doesn’t make men with the disease one hundred percent infertile, and as you know, that couple of percentages can make all the difference. He could have gotten lucky.”
“What does this disease do to rest of the body?” Tadeusz asked, changing the subject.
I held up a finger and counted off the first symptom that I could remember off the top of my head. “Mucus in the lungs especially, which causes shortness of breath and a constant nagging cough. That creates a perfect breeding ground for bacteria, so they’re prone to bronchitis and pneumonia.”
“That matches his symptoms so far. What else?”
I counted off another finger. “Problems with digestion and weight gain. Sufferers tend to be very underweight for their height.”
As always, ticking the symptoms off made me more and more convinced that the diagnosis was likely to be correct.
Tadeusz nodded thoughtfully. “I read somewhere recently that Chopin was about a hundred and seventy centimeters tall, but only weighed fifty kilograms.”
“I read it was as low as forty, but that seems exaggerated to me. He would have looked like a skeleton, and he didn’t look like that in his pictures. Wait—” I glanced at Tadeusz, pleasantly surprised. “You just said, ‘I read somewhere recently.’ Have you been doing some homework?”
“Well, maybe a little.” Tadeusz admitted, looking a bit embarrassed. “I did a bit of research before I left Poland. I mean, I’m supposed to be looking into his history, so I need to know more about him, don’t you think?”
“Oh definitely!” I agreed. “It just surprised me, is all, since you didn’t mention that before you decided to show off with that nice little factoid.”
“Oh, it just worked out that way,” he said, shrugging. “Besides, you didn’t ask.”
“Well, I’m glad you’ve developed an interest in the topic. Really!” I added with emphasis. “I found a page online with a bunch of Chopin’s letters scanned in, and I’ve been getting to know him quite well from reading them. The strange part is how normal he seems.”
“You mean he didn’t waddle around sideways, like a Pharaoh, carrying a stone willow tree on his back?”
“Hah! That sounds like something you’d see on Eurovision!” I exclaimed, laughing merrily at the image his description conjured up.
“It’s the monument from the Royal Baths in Warsaw...”
“I know!” I gasped, struggling to catch my breath.
“It’s like a two-for-one sale. Free windblown willow with every Chopin purchased.”
“Stop it!” I wheezed. “I can’t breathe!”
“How do you think he managed to fit the thing in a coach?” Tadeusz mused.
I gulped down a lungful of air and forced myself to calm down. “Enough! We’re at a cemetery. We should be serious and respectful.”
“Oh, I’m serious.”
“I sure hope so.”
“Dead serious.”
“Tadeusz!”
“Sorry, sorry. Okay, tell me more about Chopin’s letters.”
For a moment, we both stayed silent, trying to pull ourselves back together
“I like letters the letters his father wrote to him,” I said eventually. “He was very serious, constantly reminding his son to take care of himself, not to wander around at night, to save his money in case he fell ill or misfortune struck. Oh, and that he should only speak kindly about others.”
“Does that mean he had a habit of speaking ill of people?” Tadeusz asked in mock surprise.
“Yes,” I answered, straight-faced, not rising to the bait of his theatrical expressions. “He got pretty offensive at times, especially for the era. In one of his letters, his father wrote something like: ‘I don’t approve of your aversion to certain persons, and I especially dislike your use of the word gnój when speaking of them.’”
“Gnój?” Tadeusz raised his eyebrows, this time surprised for real. “I wouldn’t have expected that kind of language from him.”
‘Gnój’ was a rather nasty Polish curse word, with an assortment of meanings, none of which were very nice. On the scale of offensiveness, it was pretty high up there. It was not the kind of word one would expect from a polite young gentleman in a conversation with his parents, especially in the 19th century.
“Me either. I don’t know who got on his bad side, but I suppose if he swore like that in a letter to his father then it must have been something unpleasant.”
“Gnój…” Tadeusz repeated, slowly shaking his head. “Wow…”
“What, you thought they didn’t swear back then?” I teased. “I didn’t take you for naïve. The words had to come from somewhere, just like the people.”
“True,” he agreed, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. “Anyway, getting back to cystic fibrosis: why do you think his life expectancy would have been so low? We know that he was under constant medical care.”
“Yes, ‘medical care’ by ‘doctors’ who thought the best cure for all problems was blood-letting, leeches, and insane diets. Their ‘medical care’ is probably what killed Emily, his youngest sister, at the tender a
ge of fourteen. Speaking of which – she was a talented child, too! Did you know that she wrote poems in both French and Polish, and towards the end of her life she was even working on translating a German book?”
“No way!” Tadeusz shook his head in disbelief. “At fourteen? That is impressive.”
“Isn’t it? She should have been destined for a great future – apparently she had quite the literary talent. She and Freddie even put together a household newspaper, since they shared the same sense of humor and interest in literature. True kindred spirits. Life can be so unfair.” I sighed heavily. “But, getting back to the subject. Looking at Martin, I doubt that Chopin had cystic fibrosis.”
“Why?”
“Martin’s only ten, and he’s had to use an inhalation device several times a day almost since birth. Without it, he could suffocate.” I shuddered at the memory of the sound of little Martin struggling to breathe. “He’s already got an enlarged liver. With every meal, he has to take enzymes to replace what his pancreas aren’t producing. Without them, he’d have constant diarrhea and nothing would digest properly. He’d die. If the lung problems didn’t kill him, then the exhaustion or starvation would. Frederic lived until he was thirty-nine without any of that.”
“How is he now? Martin, I mean?”
“He’s a very intelligent, precocious child. He goes to school, does karate, skis – if it weren’t for all the medication, he’d be just like any of the other kids.”
“What are his chances of recovery?”
“You can’t recover from cystic fibrosis. It’s incurable, even today. But, modern medicine can help him live a decent life. We’re primarily worried about his lungs, because that’s what kills most people with cystic fibrosis. Apparently they’ve already begun testing some kind of gene therapy that might be able to cure the disease, by replacing the faulty gene with a working one. It’s been in clinical trials for years, so we’re hoping it’s just a matter of time. If worse comes to worst, he may have to get a lung transplant. Anyway, his chances are much higher than Chopin’s would have been, nearly two hundred years ago. Right now, with modern medicine, the average life expectancy of people with cystic fibrosis is still only about thirty-seven.”
“You know a lot about this disease,” Tadeusz said.
“If someone in your family had it, you’d be interested in it too,” I replied softly.
We both fell into deep thought, staring at the monument. There was a female statue above the grave, which was supposed to represent the muse of music, Euterpe, with her head bowed in mourning. People passing by stopped at the grave, set down flowers beside ours, then checked their maps for other sights worth seeing along the way..
“Fred Chopin?!” Tadeusz exclaimed suddenly, interrupting our somber moment. I glanced at him and saw that he was only just now looking at the writing on the monument itself. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? It sounds like Fred Astaire or Fred Flintstone…”
People nearby people, probably fellow Poles by the look of them, shot startled glances at him.
“There’s a full stop after it, so it’s probably just short for Frederic,” I said in a low voice, a little relieved to have been rescued from my gloomy thoughts. “But you’re right, they could have at least bothered to carve his full name.”
“Were they trying to save money on the letters?” he asked, still looking agitated. “Were masonry services expensive back then, too?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, taking the guide out of my purse to look for an answer. “Hmm… from what it says here that the tombstone was carved by Jean-Baptiste Clésinger, the son-in-law of George Sand. I doubt it was a matter of frugality. Who knows? Maybe they didn’t like each other, and this was Clésinger’s way of getting petty revenge? He could have just made the letters smaller so that the full name would fit.”
We fell into another thoughtful silence for a while.
So, Freddie, I asked in my mind. Were you Marie’s lover?
The wind swirled through the decorative railing and knocked over our bouquet at the base of his monument.
Could you clarify that? I asked silently. Are you offended by the suggestion, or eager to confirm it?
There was no answer, of course.
Strolling through the cemetery was like walking through a huge park, which is exactly what it was - Père Lachaise was still one of the largest parks in Paris. The cobbled lanes shaded by huge old trees, the moss-covered tombs, and the lawns with neatly tended flower beds all combined to create an atmosphere of peace and tranquility.
We visited the grave of Theodore Géricault after we left Chopin’s side, to view the relief carving of his painting, The Raft of the Medusa. Above the stained relief sculpture, a statue of the painter himself rested comfortably on his elbow, paintbrush in one hand and palette in the other.
“I’m getting a little tired,” I complained. “It’s a long walk uphill. Maybe we could sit for a little?”
“My legs are feeling this walk, too,” Tadeusz admitted, slightly out of breath. “Come on, let’s look for a bench.”
We walked down the alley and up the stairs to the Monuments aux Morts, where we found some benches to sit on.
“What else do we have planned?” Tadeusz asked, stretching his legs out with a sigh of relief.
“That depends on you, dear. We haven’t seen much, and there are plenty famous people around. Edith Piaf?”
“Where is that?” he asked. I showed him on the map, and he grimaced. “Oh, no thank you. Too far away.”
“Gay-Lussac?”
He grunted in distaste. “Ugh, no. I once got a failing grade in school for not knowing his laws. Bad memories.”
“Molière? La Fontaine? Oscar Wilde? Balzac?” I listed off names. He shook his head to each one.
“Maybe next time.” He studied the map in my lap for a while, then tapped his finger on it. “Oh! The Columbarium housing the ashes of Isadora Duncan and Maria Callas. The structure itself could be very interesting.”
“All right,” I agreed. “Though, the ashes of Maria Callas aren’t actually there, it’s just a plaque with her name. In accordance with her wishes, her ashes were scattered over the Aegean Sea.”
“I don’t mind,” he said with a shrug. “I wasn’t planning to look at the urn, anyway. I just want to check out the architecture.”
“I saw a documentary about Maria Callas on television once,” I recalled with a shiver. “Apparently when they were scattering her ashes, a sudden wind kicked up and blew the ashes right back into the faces of the people scattering them.”
Tadeusz grimaced with distaste. “You sure know how to make a man change his mind. Now I’m not so sure I want to visit the memorial.”
“Oh honey, don’t be so melodramatic,” I teased. “It’s only a plaque of her name. We’re going that way anyway, since I want to show you something along the way. There’s a grave where women come at night, for one reason only…”
“What reason?” Tadeusz asked, giving me a suspicious look.
I grinned and lowered my voice. “Well, how do I phrase this… apparently, some women like to… pleasure themselves on the monument. A certain body part was depicted in a rather… flattering manner, you see…”
“What?” He laughed, shocked. “No way! This I have to see. Where is it?”
I unfolded the map again, and pointed to the spot.
“Damn, that’s far away, too,” he complained, “but I can’t miss that. You really do know all the strangest curiosities, don’t you?” He patted my knee, looking highly amused. “Luckily, not all of them are macabre, either.”
Eventually, we’d caught our breath and rested our legs, so we moved on to the grave of Victor Noir. Victor Noir, a young political journalist who had been shot the day before his wedding, in a duel. The French had hailed him as a national hero, and commissioned a bronze monument at Père Lachaise. The sculptor, Jules Dalou, had depicted Victor in a realistic fashion, lying on his back with his hat beside him,
as if he’d only been shot a moment earlier. Below his belt was a rather large protuberance, which shone like new against the green patina that covered the rest of the monument, thanks to generations of constant rubbing.
“Well, I’ll be…” Tadeusz shook his head in disbelief. “Look, the tips of his shoes are shiny, too. Can you believe it? That’s called pygmalionism, right?”
“Nah, that’s not what’s going on here.” I folded the map up and put it away for now. “I read about it on the internet. There’s a superstition that if you put a flower in his hat, kiss him on the lips, then rub his… ‘parts’, it’ll grant fertility, a great sex-life, and a husband if you want one. The superstition only says you have to rub it, but it doesn’t say with what, so some ladies get a bit, um, creative.”
We were exhausted and hungry by the time we got back to the apartment. There was still some time before dinner at Mark’s, so we decided to grab a light meal on the town to tide us over. We didn’t have to search far; the scent that wafted up from Jo Goldenberg’s restaurant downstairs made the decision for us.
We had no regrets.
A wide staircase, dark and shiny from continuous use, led us up to the first floor of the building in the Latin Quarter where Mark lived. The old-fashioned round doorbell gave off a very modern, high-pitched trill when I pushed it, which could be heard clearly through the thick doors. We heard the sound of deadbolts sliding and locks being undone, then Mark stood there smiling at us.
“Welcome!” he exclaimed, his handsome face radiating genuine joy. “I’m so glad you decided to accept our invitation. Please, come in.”
We greeted each other French-style, with a kiss on each cheek, even though neither of us were actually French. He and Tadeusz shook hands, then Tadeusz handed him a pot with a lovely blooming hibiscus.
“For your wife,” he explained.
“Oh…” Mark looked slightly embarrassed, and threw an apologetic glance my way. “I don’t have a wife…”
“I guess I misunderstood something?” Tadeusz threw me questioning glance, but I could only shrug. I wasn’t as surprised as he obviously was, though. I’d suspected for some time that Mark’s interests lay elsewhere.
Daguerreotype: The Mystery of Frédéric Chopin Page 19