by S. T. Joshi
He turned to the next room, his entrance again blocked by a waist-high fence and, spellbound, stared at the figures, willing them to move, although he knew they could not. He felt an intimacy with the formerly living, home for him in a deep sense, and could not tear his eyes from the garbed figures. He wandered back and forth before the rooms, lost in time and space, studying each monk, the supine, the standing, the sitting, their positioning and gestures, memorizing the browned flesh stretched over cheek and jaw and forehead until each face was imprinted in his memory, their hands and feet, their postures, back and forth, identifying every monk in his mind: The Silent One; The Reader; The Heavy One; The Sad Monk; The One Who Could Not Fully Submit . . . until the priest cleared his throat.
“We are nearly finished,” Marielle called sweetly, first in English, then French, and if the priest knew either language, he did not let on.
This was Joe’s signal to hurry and snap photos, and he removed the pen from his shirt pocket and a small book, pretending to jot notes while he took photos of these beautiful beings.
He exited the crypt with heavy sadness, as if leaving close friends or family whom he might never see again. Marielle, by contrast, was happy, talkative, discussing the artistic bone creations, and he found himself tuning her out. It was only later, after a late supper and to bed early because they were headed north to Ferentillo in the morning, that he lay in the quiet darkness apart from her too-warm body and wondered about why this was so, why this desiccated flesh appealed to him, excited him, made him want to be close, to touch, though he had not often been so close. But one time, in southern Peru, when they had been in the Camarones Valley, he had found part of the face of a Chinchorro mummy that must be five thousand years old. It was one of the few times he had been up close and personal with a mummy and had felt the parchment-like skin of this ancient being, caressing the millennia-old flesh that ultimately reached the most ancient part of himself, leaving behind the alienated being that took pride of place within him.
The Chinchorra were artificial mummies, the organs removed as with the Egyptian mummies that came two thousand years later. He preferred the naturally preserved and knew that the Capuchin monks whom he had seen here in Roma, as well as those in the enormous and overwhelming Catacombe dei Cappuccini in Palermo that housed about a thousand mummies dating from 1599, both religious and secular, were all ‘natural’ mummifications. It was the tufaceous rock, or porous limestone in the soil, which had done the work in nine months, the time it takes to birth a baby, he thought.
There were other natural mummies, of course, and he had seen almost all that had been discovered, including the 108 in the Museo de las Momias in Guanajuato, Mexico, exhumed from their graves in the adjacent cemetery; the bog people resurrected from the peat bogs of Northern Europe, preserved by the acidic water, low temperature, and lack of oxygen; the thirteenth- century Maronite villagers found in a low-humidity grotto in the Kadisha Valley, Lebanon, the soil free of decay-causing organisms; the thousand tombs housing mummies in the Astana graves at Xinijang, China, preserved by the arid air; ‘Ötzi,’ the 5,300-year-old Neolithic mummified man found in the ice-bound Italian Alps and housed at the south Tyrol Museum of Archeology, which they had visited just two weeks before . . .
When he thought about it, he became grim with the knowledge that he had now seen every known mummy that it was possible to see, even using his academic credentials to request study of those that were not available to the general public. Ferentillo was their last stop. And then . . . then what would he do? Go back to his regular life, crammed with students asking questions he had heard a million times, dealing with poorly thought-out papers, the obligatory wine and cheese soirées, the faculty meetings and politics that bored him to death, all of it miring life in mundanity, which he considered worse than death. How could he go back to his ‘life’? He needed this connection. He could not survive without it.
The following morning they took a train and a bus, and then walked two miles through a sun-soaked valley to the sleepy village of Ferentillo and had to wait for the Chiesa di S. Stefano to reopen after lunch. They sat in the sun, watching two slowmoving cats wander up the steep path toward where they sat at the church’s doorway.
“You seem pensive,” Marielle said, petting one of the cats.
“Do you regret going home?”
“Yes. Don’t you?”
“Not so much this time. I have what I need.”
Joe knew she was referring to the bones she found on this trip, enough to complete her project. He, though, did not share her sense of completion. For him, the mummies would always be elsewhere, never with him, where he needed and wanted them to be. And now that he was about to have seen them all, he felt at a loss.
Marielle reached over and placed her hand on his. “Today is a special day, mon cher,” she said. “You are finished, too, non?”
He said nothing. What was there to say? She was right; his quest, as much as hers, was over. He felt emptiness swell within him that until now he had been able to keep at bay.
Once the crypt beneath the church reopened and they were inside, Marielle immediately headed to a small back room and listened to the caretaker talk about how the mummies and particularly the shelves of skulls had been found. This crypt had only been partially excavated, and there was much more work to do, digging back into the rock to find what could be fifty times as many mummies, but there were no plans in the near future for that work.
Joe only half listened until the caretaker said, “ . . . mushrooms in the soil preserved them . . .” This is what he already knew—what, here in Italy, seemed to have been responsible for most of the natural mummification.
He wandered the main crypt area, only a half-dozen tall glass and wood cases, one or more mummies within each, dressed, undressed, the sheets of glass keeping them temperature-controlled, keeping him from them.
He studied a mummy family, man, woman, infant. Then what might have been a field worker, shreds of a shirt and cap still adhering to the body. A young couple was preserved side by side, the woman’s long braided hair hanging over one shoulder the way Marielle sometimes fixed hers. These mummies were pale in comparison to those in Roma, their features closer to what they would have looked like alive, and he presumed that the soil that had created the conditions for preservation were responsible for this.
Since arriving in Italy and discovering that the soil combined with various fungi had been the source of drying out a human body in as short a time as four months, his ideas for his own project had shifted 180 degrees. He wanted to explore the possibilities of this fungal soil and consequently touted his academic credentials to allow for the collection of samples he could send home from various locations, where permitted. Unlike the Capuchins in Roma and Palermo, here he received permission to collect soil samples for study, which is what he now did. He opened his metallic samples case and filled two dozen large wide-mouthed Teflon-coated glass containers with the dirt by the stone wall at the back of this crypt, which would be less contaminated by human presence, although not many visitors made it to this hard-to-reach town. In Palermo, he had taken soil samples from inside a well near the crypt. The oldest mummy, an early Capuchin monk, had died in a well. His disinterred remains had mummified and Joe had been privileged to view Brother Silvestro.
When he and Marielle were finished with the crypt, they headed back to Roma for their flight home the following day. Joe thought about all the places he had been, the mummies he had seen, and the scope and breadth of memory filled the emptiness within, at least temporarily. If only he could hold onto that feeling! If only his life could brim with mummies and the connection he felt to these beings, so real to him, alive to his senses, his way of thinking, connected to his soul . . . If only . . .
Montréal winter met their arrival home. Joe thought that this frigid cold must be similar to what had preserved Ötzi in the Alps for millennia.
But
their apartment was comforting, overflowing with sculptures Marielle had constructed, early ones created from animal bones. Since her retirement, the artwork was formed exclusively from human bones she had rescued from everywhere they had traveled. The Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora near Prague had supplied a few. Many were from odd cemeteries, like Cimetière Notre-Dame-de-Belmont in Québéc City, which has a junkyard adjacent where workers tossed old gravestones, coffin pieces, and human remains from abandoned graves so the plots could be reused. Once Marielle had crawled into a dumpster against the fence of the Lafayette Cemetery in New Orleans and managed to smuggle home inside voodoo dolls the bones she found there. “So much for perpetual care!” she’d said, but these were all terrific finds that bumped up her work several notches.
Joe had no material from a mummy other than the four-inch square of skin he had smuggled out of Peru. But he did have soil, collected everywhere, searching always for that elusive combination of ingredients that caused natural mummification.
He experimented on dead birds he found in parks, mainly pigeons, and occasionally a larger animal, like a cat. Once he’d come across a dog that had been hit by a car. The soil from Italy showed more promise and, over the months of the cold weather, in his climate-controlled lab at the back of the apartment, he had managed to mummify a dead mouse.
During those same frozen months, Marielle finished her sculpture, the 206 bones threaded with forty-gauge wire, thin enough to appear invisible, creating a strangely disjointed figure but lovely in its own right, perpetually in motion, and Marielle was ecstatic. Weeping, she admitted, “I have not the words in any language, mon amour. I feel my life is now complete.”
Joe debated what to do to move his own project along. He knew what he wanted to do, but the climate outside his special room did not inspire this, at least not yet. And like the weather, preservation could not be hurried.
On a day after winter had given way to spring and summer felt within reach, Marielle’s spirit seemed to wither before his eyes. She was even more of an introvert than he, and spent hours alone with La Femme, as she called the skeleton she had constructed, whispering to her creation.
Her depression deepened until physical symptoms appeared. “Should you see someone?” he asked, but she did not trust doctors and he knew what her answer would be.
“I will drink my tisane.”
He made her pots of tea throughout the day, the herbs she had drunk all her life, declaring that they would cure anything. But this time, they did not.
“Do not worry, Joseph. Life ends for us all, and I know my time is near. I wish to die as I have lived. You know that, you know me, and you will respect my wishes?”
“Yes, of course,” he assured her, and did not argue about it; they had discussed their plans so many times. Joe believed that they had been fortunate to find each other; their passions dovetailed. And while he felt closer to Marielle than to any other living being, still, he felt closer to the preserved dead. He caressed her face, a face he had known and loved for twenty years. Her skin was sallow and dry, the fat and muscle beneath shrunken, and he did not mind this at all; it reminded him of the mummies, and he wished he did not but he preferred her this way.
At the end, Marielle suffered to some extent, but there were drugs for pain relief that he had gotten from his doctor ostensibly for himself, but really for her, and without asking, he crushed the precious blue pills into the tea she drank religiously but eventually could barely swallow.
Joe sat with her, her skin parchment, her eyes, when they opened, glitteringly bright, though sunk into the hollows of her eye sockets. “Remember your promise,” she whispered.
She stared at him until he nodded, gently squeezing her arid hand, then her eyes closed, her lips parted, and a sigh like a spirit left her body.
That night, Joe drove to the Cimetière Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, to the isolated crypt they had built together a dozen years ago, a small affair, nothing like the elaborate houses of the dead that had been constructed amidst the common graves a century or more ago, or the modern monoliths lacking grace and beauty. Theirs was only wide enough to house two coffins, side by side, with a narrow passage between and a door not four feet from the foot end.
Joe carried her in, her body paper light, naked, washed at home, brought here to her final resting place, and lay her in the open coffin devoid of silks and satins and fancy pillows for the dead. These two caskets were plain affairs, built by Joe of local hardwood, made to measure in length and width, only deep enough so the lids could close if need be.
Rigor mortis had claimed her, and while it would pass in a few hours, he wanted to position her right away and struggled with the locked muscles until he was satisfied. Then he sat on the edge of the other coffin, the one measured for his body, touching her now-cool skin.
“Forgive me, Marielle. I know this is not everything you requested. You wanted to be interred here without embalming, and I’ve done that for you. You wanted your body to decompose over time until only your bones are left.” He paused. “I’m sorry.”
He had placed her on soil he’d collected from around the world and now emptied buckets of tufaceous fungal dirt on top of her, submerging her limbs, her torso, surrounding her head, leaving only one hand and her moon-face exposed, reminding him of the hooded Capuchin mummies.
Finally, he left her to do the things he needed to do to finish up a life. Joe had a sister out west with whom he hadn’t had contact in over a decade. Unlike him, Marielle had no living relatives and, being a hermit by nature, no close friends. Her pension, as with his salary, was a direct deposit into their bank account, bills paid automatically. The condo ran on its own steam and the neighbors, well, they hardly saw them and rarely spoke.
As he returned the rental car, he thought that with some luck, no one would think to check the crypt.
Two months! he mused, taking the bus in the middle of the night, climbing the cemetery’s fence, moving in his dark clothing through these moonless grounds toward the crypt backed up against the forest, which he unlocked, entered, and relocked from inside. Not much time for preservation. He had brought a single candle, which he lit and glued with candle wax to the top of the skull of La Femme, which now stood undulating in the corner as if guarding her creator.
He so wanted to move the soil away and examine Marielle’s body, but that made no sense. A little more than a week wasn’t enough time for the drying process to get underway. It would take the full two months of a sweltering summer, and he just hoped there would be an Indian summer this year, extended heat. All the elements were right—the heat, the soil, the fungus— but the time was so short! Well, there was nothing much he could do about that.
Her face looked excruciatingly sweet to him, even more shrunken, skin stretching tight across facial bones already. There was a noxious odor of the gases and other excretions of death, but he didn’t mind because it would eventually evaporate and the end result was what mattered.
He covered her face with half of the remaining fungus-embedded soil he had brought here when he’d had the car and had also created the bed of soil in both coffins. Then he undressed and lay in his casket, strapping down his ankles, thighs, stomach, and one wrist.
It was cooler in the crypt, but still hot from the day’s blazing sun and humidity. Thirty or more Celsius in the day, twenty-eight at night. Not the dry heat of Italy, but maybe it would be all right. He swallowed most of the water in the large water bottle he’d brought along, then took her marble-like hand in his and thought about the process.
Over the last days of Marielle’s life he had fed her tea that contained half a cap of Amanita bisporigera—Destroying Angel—a poisonous mushroom that grew abundantly in the forest behind their crypt. This small amount had caused pain but did its work quickly on an immune system defeated by depression; a body with his constitution would suffer much longer and the effects would be more extreme. That’s why he had eat
en a cap and also dosed his water with two caps, chopped fine in the blender until they were miniscule grains containing the amatoxins. He could already feel the poisonous effects.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her again, “but I need you . . . this way.”
Before he lost the ability to act, he needed to spread the remaining fungal soil from Ferentillo over his body and face. He reached down between the coffins for the container, and accidently knocked it over!
Powerful stomach cramps hit, and he knew vomiting and diarrhea would follow quickly; delirium was creeping through his mind. Horrified, he no longer possessed the strength and coordination to free himself and re-collect the soil. All he could manage was to tighten the strap holding his neck in place, sensing the convulsions about to begin. He again reached for her hand, caressing the cool, dry skin, intertwining their fingers, struggling for consciousness amidst the sharp agony racking his body, suddenly shocked by the clear thought: this would not, could not work!
“Flesh and bones!” he cried. She would be the flesh, but he would become bones!
Tears streamed from his eyes that he did not understand. But one thing he was certain of: he had never felt so close to her.
The Sculptures in the House
John D. Haefele
Iwas a Pinckney too, but my uncle Edward could boast of his straight descent from those famous Federalist-Pinckneys who fought in the Revolutionary War and then later shaped the Constitution. But when Edward Pinckney became a recluse, his claim, though undeniably true, lost much of its luster, and by the time the old man disappeared we all thought he had proved it was nothing at all to brag about.
I suppose that helps explain why strange disappearances enthrall me today, though not Uncle Ed’s mystery by itself— oh, God, no! After all, he was in his nineties. But I don’t mean abductions either, nothing related to UFOs. Those, even if they harbor some truth, mean little to one who cares nothing for the sky, who they say earth-gazes while he walks, keeping his eyes to the ground, but who I admit always hears more than he sees on the occasions he goes out. Indeed, I am always listening; I listen into the Earth.