by Prime Books
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Caro in Carno
Helen Marshall | 6933 words
“That is not dead which can eternal lie . . . ”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Nameless City”
My name is Caroline Eve Arkwright and I am thirteen years old. I prefer to be called Caro over Caroline and I don’t like the name Eve at all. I’ve insisted to Nan that I be called Caro because I’ve recently begun to learn my Latin declensions: caro, carnis, which means flesh, the body, and low passions. I don’t know much about low passions but I’m much more knowledgeable when it comes to flesh and the body. The body is the house in which the soul lives; and so I myself am like a house and I’m also the person living inside the house. This presents a conundrum, which I like very much. How can I be both a house and the occupant? Nan will not answer me. Nan has never enjoyed conundrums as much as I do.
Nan and I’ve always lived in the house and Nan tells me this is how it must always be. Our house isn’t like the houses in the village, Nan has told me, for it is caro, carnis as well. It is a big house. How shall I describe it? The walls are white, like the chalk cliff, but even more beautiful than that for they shine different colors in the light and are perfectly smooth. The floor is curved as well. From the outside the house appears as a giant hole opened in the cliff, but on the inside it has a series of chambers or cubicula, which spiral inward, each smaller than the last and curved as well. The house then is an orbis, which means ring, disk, coil —but most of all— world. I’ve spent many hours exploring the house but I’ve never gone beyond the eleventh chamber.
The village sits atop the cliff, not so close by, for the villagers are afraid of the ground giving way as it did once before. Their houses, which I’ve seen for myself, are neither orbes nor carnes but rather saxa, which is stones, and quadrata, which is squares. They have wooden roofs. They have windows in the attics with lights that come on and go off when I pass them. The people inside are caro or rather caro in saxo, but I am Caro in carno.
The way to the village is dangerous. The cliff is sheer and there are all sorts of other seashells and such visible there. None are as large as my house. The view of the ocean from the steps is very beautiful but if I’m not careful I could fall. Nan says this is what happened to Mother and Father, that they were not careful enough and so they fell. I don’t know if this is true but I’ve chosen to believe it. We must all choose to believe something, mustn’t we, even if it’s bad? Nan is too old to make the journey now and so I must make it alone. I try not to look down. Below me is mors, mortis which does not mean fall but death.
It’s my job to collect supplies from the village. Mostly this means onions and potatoes and flour and sometimes a pound of sugar and two pounds of coffee but these last are only for special occasions. I’ve been instructed to touch neither fish nor fowl, nothing that has lived and nothing that has died. I find these instructions somewhat confusing. Both the onions and the potatoes have lived, as I understand it, but Nan is firm that it’s not the same sort of living. She says this is an issue of vocabulary but I confess I’ve not pressed it farther. Without onions and potatoes our cellar would be very bare! But it does seem to me that there ought to be a word that says more than mors, mortis to denote the different kinds of death such as death by falling or death by disease. This could be done of course with the addition of further words but it would be much more elegant if one word encompassed all these meanings. Perhaps there’s such a word in Greek or Egyptian or one of the many other languages I shall learn but I’ve not come across it yet.
In the village is a grocer who weighs the sugar and the coffee. In return I must give him a small pouch filled with salt that we scrape from the walls of the house. I’ve been told to watch him very carefully. Sometimes, Nan says, he likes to put his thumb on the scale. If he puts his thumb on the scale, then either I must make a second trip to the village before the appointed time or else we must make do without sugar or coffee. The grocer has a boy who counts out the onions and the potatoes but Nan says I must not look on him lest I fall into caro, carnis, that is low passions.
Which is quite hard for he’s very handsome.
“Good morning, Caroline Eve Arkwright,” he’s accustomed to say to me. I think he likes that I have three names for no one else in the village seems to have more than one. He’s called Tom, which, I think, is an excellent name. “How are you today?”
“I’m doing very well, thank you.”
“And how many potatoes will that be? The usual number?”
“Yes, please.”
“Not one more? Aren’t you a growing girl? It seems to me that you’re growing day by day!” Tom’s always saying something like this. I can’t tell if he’s mocking me. Although I think Tom is handsome, I keep close to my heart what Nan has said about the people from the village.
“The usual number, please, just as we have agreed. No more and no less!”
“Not an apple for the way back?” This is tempting. I’ve always thought that apples look very beautiful. They come in all sorts of different colurs. But I know that I must refuse.
But I don’t refuse, not yet. “Do the different colors have different tastes?”
Tom looks at me for longer than I’m used to and I find that I’m blushing. Sometimes I feel so ignorant around him and this is one of those times.
“This one,” he says at last, “tastes green. And this one? Red. Red is the best taste, don’t you think?”
“I’ve never tasted red.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“Would you like to?”
Tom polishes the apple very carefully on his sleeve. Now the skin is red and gleaming. But he has a look in his eyes like perhaps he’s mocking me. Perhaps he’ll take the apple away if I ask him for it.
I can’t help myself. I take the apple from him. It feels very smooth. It is a beautiful feeling to hold that apple. I think, I can hold this but I must not eat it. Tom smiles as he watches me holding the apple and I smile at Tom. The skin of the apple reflects both of our smiles, like two crescent moons. But then Tom stops smiling and I’m left to wonder if I’ve done something wrong, if I should not have taken the apple, if he’ll take this as a sign that the contract is voided.
“My mother’ll be coming to you,” Tom says after a little while. “Will you take care of her properly? Do you promise?”
I’ve seen Tom’s mother before. Her hair is light and yellow and it drapes like silk all the way down her back. Sometimes she measures out the coffee and the sugar for me and she has never, not once, put her thumb on the scales. It makes me sad that his mother will be coming to me soon. I can see that it makes Tom sad as well. I touch his hand, very gently, in case he pulls it away but he doesn’t and so we stand like that together for some minutes.
“Thank you for the apple,” I tell him shyly. But I don’t put in my satchel. Instead I leave it on the porch of the grocer’s shop. I know now I should not have taken it. No more and no less!
But sometimes caro is no friend to Caro.
There is a large hoist at the top of the chalk cliff, which swings out over the ocean below. The supplies from the village are much too difficult to manage on the steps, and so I load them onto the platform beneath the lifting hook. Once I’ve lowered them to the house, Nan will carry them inside. Nan says that the villagers used to lower the supplies themselves once, but after Mother and Father died, they wouldn’t do it anymore. So now Nan or I must go to remind them, and since Nan can’t go anymore, it must be me. But this is good, Nan tells me, because the villagers ought to become accustomed to me. They do not suffer strangers very easily.
Nan is waiting for me at the bottom of the steps. She worries for me when I make the climb even though I’m always very careful. She has prepared coffee for me and so we sit together in the vestibulum, the largest of the chambers, where the mouth opens out toward the ocean. This is my favorite place because the noise of the waves is very soothing. Part of the cli
ff has fallen away on one side of the vestibulum and so the floor sticks out, smooth and gently crenellated, just like my lower lip if I’m sulking. Underneath this lip is the best place for gathering salt, though it can be got from further in the house as well, only with more difficulty. The floor isn’t very curved here. It is easier for Nan.
“The grocer’s mother will be coming to us soon,” I tell Nan.
“How do you know, Caroline?”
“Caro,” I remind her. She’s always forgetting
“How do you know, Caro?”
“The grocer’s boy told me so.”
“Well.” And after a time: “We will greet her when she comes. Are you ready? How are your Latin declensions progressing?”
“ Optime, ” I tell her.
“Then perhaps you ought to join me when we greet her.”
I don’t like this very much but there is nothing I can say. I shall try to do my best for Tom and his mother. I shall try to greet her properly.
Several weeks pass before Tom’s mother comes to visit, which is later than I expected. It’s almost time for me to return to the village again. It’s the sound of the winch that tells me she’s coming. Outside the noise isn’t so loud but when I’m inside the house the noises become louder and louder and louder, even as the chambers become smaller and smaller and smaller. Sometimes I think that if I were to come to the end of the house then the noise would be so deafening I’d die!
I run through the chambers as quickly as I can, but carefully too, for the floors are more curved where I’ve been working. Nan keeps our library far away from the vestibulum where the salt and rain would destroy our books. As it is, they aren’t in very good condition and the oldest of them have fallen to pieces. If I had string, I’d mend them, but we don’t have very much string, so the best I can do is to wrap them in strips of my old shifts. As Nan says, waste not, want not! And if we’re to want for nothing, then we must waste nothing.
The noise of the winch echoes like a screech as I make my way through the deep passages to the outermost chamber. My feet hitting the floor make a bum, bum, bum sound. When I reach the vestibulum, Nan has already begun to remove Tom’s mother from the platform. She’s covered in a pale blue blanket but I can see the edge of her hair draped over the heartwood.
“What is the word for death?” Nan asks me.
“ Mors, mortis, ” I tell her.
“Can you conjugate it fully as a verb?” Nan unhooks the platform from the lifting hook and I help settle it down. The platform is set on wheels so it can be more easily maneuvered into the house with us.
“ Morior, which is I die, and then moriris, which is you die, and then moritur, which is she dies —”
“And if it is in the perfect tense?”
“—then it would be moriturus est, which is she has died. ”
“Very good, Caroline.”
“Caro,” I remind her.
“Very good, Caro,” she says. “Now what does it mean that the grocer’s mother has died?”
This is more difficult for it goes beyond knowing the pattern of words to knowing the meaning of words. And I’ve only just begun this, but I will try. If Nan corrects me then I shall be wiser than before at any rate.
“ Mori is a word used by the ancients to indicate the passage of a creature from one state into another. It’s something like transire, which is to go across but it isn’t about movement outside or over but rather movement inside.”
I’m very proud of this description. I look at Nan very closely to see if it has satisfied her but she’s busy with maneuvering the platform onto the rails that run lengthwise down the center of every chamber.
“This won’t last much longer,” says Nan as the wheels of the platform sing out an unpleasant note. She’s right. One of the wheels has gone wobbly and so the load is badly balanced. When it tips, Tom’s mother begins to slide toward the edge. I lay my hands upon the long folds of cloth in which she’s swaddled. The blanket is more brittle than I had supposed and much more coarse. At last, Nan turns back to me. “That’s a very good description of mori. ”
“I’ve a question,” I tell her. “If mori means an inward movement, is it very like somniare, which is to dream ? That’s like an inward movement too, isn’t it?”
“What do you dream about, darling?” She’s not looking at me but rather at Tom’s mother underneath the blanket.
“Sometimes I have a dream that I’m dead, or that death is a thing very close to me, but it isn’t so much a passage as . . . a breath, which is, I suppose, a movement of the air from inside to outside, and so it is like a passage.”
“And how do you know that you are dead?”
“Because a great voice whispers it to me. Moriris. You are dead.”
Now Nan looks at me very closely and I can see a strange yellowish cast to her eyes, which seem folded in dark and heavy flesh. “Each of those things is very like death, but it isn’t the same thing.”
“I’ve another question,” I tell her, “must all caro, carnis suffer from death?”
“All things suffer from death except salt.” She eyes me warily.
“Why not salt?”
“Salt has never lived.”
“I’ve another question,” I tell her, “if all caro, carnis must suffer from death and I am caro and this house is caro, does that mean that I’ve suffered from death and this house has suffered from death?”
Nan clucks again with her tongue, which is the sound she makes when she’s thinking.
“When your mother and father died, did you suffer?”
I think about this for a moment. I don’t remember Mother and Father very well. It has been Nan for so long that it may as well have been Nan ab aeterno, which is forever, like the salt. But then I think of the dream I’ve been having, and how the breath is very warm on my face and how it smells very nice and the dream whispers I am your mother but for some reason this isn’t a happy thought but a sad thought.
“I think I did,” I tell Nan.
“Then you have suffered from death.”
I can tell that Nan’s being wily with me. She has only answered a question very like my question but not my question at all.
The path through the house is long. There aren’t any branches in the path, no need to navigate—only the task of setting one foot in front of the other. We pass through the domus, which includes the pantry, and the sitting room, and the bedrooms, each one marginally smaller than the last.
“Would you come along the rest of the way with me, dear?” Nan asks in a kindly voice, for I’ve begun to fall behind her. I’ve never gone beyond the eleventh chamber before and the prospect of further travel frightens me a little although I can’t rightly say why. And Nan has never asked me to before. In fact, she often distracts me from the thought, saying I must learn the Latin, and then the Greek, and then the Egyptian afterward. Perhaps I’m progressing beyond her expectations.
Or perhaps it is something else. The grocer’s mother was much younger than Nan is now, and I’ve seen the hump growing upon her back. The way it twists her spine.
“Don’t fret, Caroline—”
“Caro,” I remind her.
“—I shall manage well enough without you, I suppose. The grocer’s wife isn’t so large as some of the others. But am I warm enough, do you think? It gets so very cold . . . ”
Nan glances down at the grocer’s wife, and, for a moment, I’m a little frightened that she’ll snatch the sheets away. Her hands are trembling.
“Take my shawl, Nan, I won’t need it. Not today. The weather hasn’t turned yet.”
“That’s nice, dear,” she murmurs as I tuck my shawl around her shoulders. She pats my arm very gently.
The days pass easily after that, almost indistinguishable from one another. Soon I’ve produced passable translations of Apuleius, Pseudo-Quintilian, Marcellus Empiricus, and Pliny the Elder—and then Nan tells me it is time to return to the village again.
The weather’s bee
n growing colder and darker and so I must begin the climb early in the morning as soon as there is light. To avoid thinking of the fall, I repeat to myself another conundrum: If when I dream I can see figments, then is it possible those figments may also dream? And if so, isn’t it possible that I’m a figment of another’s dreams? This is very like the problem Plato proposed to Glaucon about the prisoners who saw shadows upon the wall of the cave for the shadows are very much like dreams. And yet Plato never asked if the shadows themselves perceive—but it’s certainly possible that they did!
I feel quite clever in coming up with this conundrum. I wonder if, perhaps, no one else in the world has ever thought this particular thought before.
“Hello, miss,” says Tom as he begins to count out my share of potatoes. He has on a black jacket, which I’ve never seen before. I confess it shows off his broad shoulders rather well. He has slim black trousers too and black shoes that shine as if he has polished them with his sleeve.
“You look uncommonly fine today, Tom,” I say to him with my best smile. “I would not have taken you for the grocer’s boy at all, but rather for a prince or perhaps for a duke!”
“That’s very kind of you to say, miss.”
It’s the second time he has said that to me. And, indeed, he has said nothing about my best smile. Perhaps he’s in a mood, and I may draw him out of it.
“May I ask you a question, Tom?”
“If you’d like.”
“It’s a problem, really, a very difficult one. One that takes ages and ages to solve. But I’ll tell you my conundrum because—” And now I feel quite shy I’ve begun this line of talk with him. “—because you yourself made me think of it.”