by Edward Carey
When I came to the atelier the next morning, I found Curtius in the doorway. I told him what had happened and he was sorry for me, but he reminded me that I had recently been reprimanded for a similar act, and also that we lived in Widow Picot’s house and that every room was in fact hers.
“Our objects are vulnerable,” I said. “There are people who yearn for them.”
Curtius muttered a little about things in Paris being so different from those in Berne, which should have alarmed me, should have prepared me. And then it came: he asked me to cook not just for himself but for the widow and her son. The workshop door opened fully; the widow had been seated inside all along.
“It is not right,” Curtius told me, “for such a lady to be always in the kitchen. Have you seen her hands? They are delicate but punished.”
“I am familiar with them,” I said. “One of them struck me.”
“She showed them to me. They are very painful hands.”
“That is certain, sir.”
“In fact, I should not mind casting them. She has been so good, I should like to be good in return. Everything is so strange in Paris, and she sets me on the right path. I do need guidance sometimes. I easily turn and get lost.”
“I cook for you, sir. I work for you.”
“Yes, Marie, and you are essential and in every way a blessing. But now when you cook for me, for us, just make a little more.”
“But I am your assistant.”
“That is right.”
“And not hers.”
“But I am asking you. And what I ask you should do.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You mustn’t look so upset, no tears, you mustn’t, it hurts me here.” He pressed his hand over his chest and its vital muscle.
“Yes, sir.”
So I had less time in the atelier, less time with Doctor Curtius—who seemed not to notice, for the less time I passed in the atelier, the more time the Picots were there. The widow began to bring her tailoring work in, and Edmond did likewise.
In the kitchen, one day, I chose a plate, a very nice glazed one with a delft blue pattern—I picked it out particularly—then lifted it high and let it go. An accident, I said.
“Be more careful,” Curtius said. He could never abide carelessness with objects.
“Shall I not draw for you, sir? What shall I draw?”
“Don’t draw just now; sweep up the pieces. Marie, the widow says if you break anything more you shall be beaten.”
I slipped further and further into the role of household servant. The widow came to me, walking about me with down-turned lips, and with her plump digits and a wooden ruler she measured me. The reason for this I soon discovered: she had taken out her former servant Paulette’s clothing, cut into it with her large tailoring scissors, and like a butcher severed off pieces of material until what was left assumed my shape. I was to wear a prickly black dress and also a secondhand white bonnet, with someone else’s greasy hairs still attached. She told me to change. I went into my room and closed the door.
All the household was there to see the transformation when I emerged, dressed as a serving girl. The widow nodded, her equivalent of Curtius’ clap. Edmond looked but revealed nothing.
“The widow says you are very lucky to have such clothes,” Curtius told me. “How beautifully she has made them for you. Say thank you.”
“I am very lucky, sir? These clothes itch—may I take them off?”
I may not. They rubbed at my skin, wearing sore patches into my neck and shoulders. They were made of mourning; the widow’s gloom had dyed them. I breathed less well in them, and in them I was inclined to melancholy thoughts. I wondered if she hadn’t used her own hairs to stitch them up, if I was wearing widow now. I tried to make my master understand how wrong all this was, but when he looked at me he saw only the widow. The whole city was widow for him now.
Doctor Curtius, out of sorts with dispossession and gratitude, had failed to grasp the significance of my metamorphosis. He had not seen that what had just happened was a shifting of ownership, a possession changing hands. I was rendered a household servant, learning words that were useful to servants, such small vocabulary, and Curtius did nothing to stop it. Adults, I understood, have many faults, they are not perfect—even though they have lived longer, even though they offer themselves as examples to children. They are larger, that is certain, and size has an unearned authority. But they are easily influenced, and they can be easily swayed. He was already lost to her by then. Some hair of the widow, I thought, some fraction of her, had found its way into his lungs.
She cajoled him to be washed, the dirty man, and made him new clothes and burned the old ones. How he stroked these new coverings. She had him shaved, his hair cut away, and then she wigged him. She was making him acceptable, in her eyes. And how did my poor master react to these assaults? I spied him in his room, crop-skulled and shivering in new underclothes, but holding a wig upon his fingertips, commenting, not without pride: “I’d recognize you anywhere. You’re Doctor Curtius’ short-tail bagwig.”
With this new wig he could be just anyone, any Parisian. To me, it seemed like all the Curtius was being pulled out of him.
Curtius was being managed by the widow now, just as he had been managed before by the surgeon Hoffmann. Only the surgeon had allowed him far more freedom, had never had him stripped and shaved. Still he grinned all the while at the widow, the dear man.
My studies with Curtius grew limited, then all but dwindled out. Before, when I asked him to tell me about the body, he would sit me down and explain at great length. Now he said only, “Later, Marie, later.” “Might I draw?” I asked. “There’s no time,” he said. If I drew, I asked him, would he look at my drawings? “Marie,” he said, “you are making too much noise, the widow as you can see is napping in the chair there, please don’t wake her.”
So I took paper from the widow’s rooms—sheets of old yellowing paper she wasn’t using—and practiced my drawing. I found her pencils too, and took them for my own. I drew every day without fail. I would remember what I had seen during the day, store it in my head, and relive it on paper at night. I would not stop; I would draw everything. Each drawing I made, each line, was a little proof of me.
Doctor Curtius went out often with the widow, who was eager to show him Paris, but Paris to me was only a dead tailor’s house; it was only the market nearby, and the well, and the laundry women coming once a month. One day, as I was coming back from the market, I saw a mound in a ditch, some heap of rubbish, but when I came closer I saw hair upon one end. A head, a female human head, gray and fallen in, a body lying dead in the street and all the people walking by it and paying it no heed. A person all stopped, collapsed and ignored, a person of indeterminate age that had once dressed itself and been among us. This is Paris, I thought: dead people punctuating the streets, and no one to care for them. The thought chased me home.
The body was gone next time I went by, a strange horrid little patch where she had been. What were the rules of Paris? Were there any?
{I have substituted a dead rat for the dead woman.}
On those brief occasions when Monsieur Mercier came in to talk to me, I received some schooling in the subject.
“I do love Paris so,” Mercier told me, “but in truth, Little, I fear for it terribly. It is getting too, too big. It can’t be stopped.”
Each time he came, I asked him to tell me where he had walked, and he would. I listened carefully and imagined myself busy about the streets. Seeing me concentrate so intently, he spent more time with me, took me on longer walks as we sat in the kitchen. I held his hand, I closed my eyes, and together we went traveling.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Paris: a tour given by Louis-Sébastien Mercier.
We are at the river now, Little. Are you here? Yes you are, right beside me. This crowded bri
dge is Paris’s vital organ, the very heart of the city. It pumps not blood but people. Pumps them all around the city. Throws them off the bridge with more energy than they had when they came onto it. This is the Pont Neuf, biggest bridge of Paris. On this bridge you will find everything: the beautiful, the ugly, the young, the old, the wretched, murderers, saints, givers, takers, geniuses, charlatans, babies, and skeletons all mixed up together. Here creatures are born and taken away, here lifesaving operations are carried out, and life-taking ones too. On this bridge, throughout the day, are the ever-changing tides of song peddlers. Many of these singers are somewhat lacking in something: eyesight, limbs, sense, for example. They take their place and sing out, bawdy songs, slow songs, songs to make you cry, songs to whip you up into a dance, songs to give you peace, songs to take you to war. These song sellers are all around Paris, it is a singing city, but the Pont Neuf is their capital. They control the volume of the bridge, and the bridge controls the volume of the city.
“On we go through the Place Dauphine. Bear right now, Little, around the sad buildings of the Palais de la Cité; there’s the top of Sainte-Chapelle in their midst, the great glass jewel case. Now, eyes front, Notre-Dame looms up ahead, but come with me this way. Into these unhappy structures, past a portal of misery. This is our next stop. Come in. Do.
“Welcome to the shame of Paris. Officially termed: Hôtel-Dieu, the House of God. Also known as: Death Hole. Here priests and nuns run about, ordering diseases from one bed to the next, marshaling illnesses incorrectly, spreading infections as they attempt to spread God. This is what the poor of Paris fear: these damp walls. This is what the poor of the city say to each other: I shall end in the hospital, just like my father. The Hôtel-Dieu will not turn them away. This is where poor people come to die. Despair, despair, despair, and follow me. There are generally six thousand patients here, though it varies with the season of course, there are dying seasons in Paris. Six thousand patients but only one thousand, two hundred beds. No matter what your ailment, you will be thrown into a bed with someone who has a far different and possibly very infectious illness: your bedfellow most likely will kill you. They carry out the dead in carts in the earliest hint of the morning or the darkest minutes of the night, so that no one can see the daily harvest. Buildings of the Sunken Spirit! Do not breathe too deeply, for the air around these buildings has an evil, angry nature, made worse by the river, which makes everything heavy and damp. There’s not a corner of dryness in this entire hospital. Forgive me now, for this building needs to be kicked. I kick it every time I pass with these beloved shoes, they’re quite used to it by now. It scuffs the leather a little and bruises my toes, but even so this building must be kicked. There are many such buildings across Paris that need kicking.
“Come, there’s something else you should see. Here in this small courtyard, where the air you breathe has been long forgotten by everywhere else, you see flush against a dripping, moss-covered wall, a small hut. A sty, perhaps, something fit for a pig. Or a kennel for an unloved dog. This is what I found on one of my walks. Please be quiet. Look in. Now I must whisper. Inside this tiny wooden cage is one of this place’s patients. A boy wrapped in a soiled rag, shivering, mumbling away to himself. A child with a massive head. The child, you see, is so thin, but that great head pushes the eyes apart, the cheeks two globes in themselves, the whole a great dome of swelling. A hydrocephalic child, stagnating in the dark, nibbling eagerly on a bone long picked clean of nourishment. See the sign around his neck: DO NOT FEED. You must forgive me now, for being overcome with allegory. I call this child France. His real name, I believe, has been lost. France, you understand, is a rickety child whose every nourishment goes only to the head, leaving the body weak and emaciated. Each time he eats only his head grows, never his body. And he can’t stop eating. He’s always so very hungry. France’s head grows and starves his body. How long, do you think, can he live? How long do you think will our country survive? Sssh now, come away. It’s time to move on. Don’t linger there. There’s nothing you can do for him. He’s only excited because he thinks you might feed him. He doesn’t care for people, only for food. Come, from this dark and cramped hovel, we’ll climb up into the air, climb as high as we can go. I’ll make you two hundred and seven feet taller, and then, when we’ve no higher to climb, we’ll look down on it all.
“So. Notre-Dame. Here is time, Little, carved in stone. Greatest monument of our city, most famous of edifices. Wisest and most complicated of buildings. Or, do you not think, with her flying buttresses coming out from her sides and behind like so many arched legs, that she resembles a great spider athwart this thick and complicated web of Paris, fed by her visitors who leave small coins of charity? She is, after all, the first object worthy of note in this monstrous mess. Let us ascend the spiral stairs of this monolith. I shall go ahead, I shall advance before you around each corner.
“Can you hear my voice echoing now, Little? Sometimes closer, sometimes farther away? The stairs here grow narrower, ’round and ’round, up and up, to such a height. You can catch glimpses of the city through slit windows, diminishing, growing farther away, as we climb. Can you hear my breathing now, my beloved shoes clacking against the stone steps? And the steps turn grudgingly now, they have built up a rhythm and want to go on ascending forever, but one last twist and we have reached the top of the North Tower.
“So. Here it is. Paris, as it looks from the top of the tower. What can I tell you? This: Paris is situated in the middle of the Île-de-France, on the banks of the Seine. It is forty-eight degrees and a half and three minutes north latitude, east of London. Two miles in breadth, six miles in circumference. You will observe that the city is near perfectly round. Have a look, do please, there it is. Paris, formerly called Lutetia—which means, you will be unsurprised to learn, the City of Mud. Or, we might call it: Subterranean Town. Or perhaps: Labyrinth of Shadows. Or even: the Universe Abridged. It’s all there, look at it, alive and moving. You can see palaces—there’s the Palais des Tuileries. You can see hospitals—there’s the Dôme des Invalides. You can see theaters—there’s the Comédie-Française. You can see prisons—behind us the monstrous oblong of the Bastille.
“But what do they all mean? How can you ever learn it, how can you ever read it, this great mess of roofs, this great confusion of buildings and of people, this melting pot, this great sink down which everything is poured, eight hundred and ten streets, twenty-three thousand houses, home to seven hundred thousand people? All kept inside the city by lock and key—you can’t get out without permission—and all of them, or most of them, trying to live, wanting the best for themselves in this home, this world of Paris!
“And yet! Alas! Listen to me carefully, Little. I have come to understand the awful truth: Paris is suffocating. It can’t go on, it can’t breathe, it gasps but no air reaches its bloody lungs. You want to ask a question, Little, I can see you do. Everyone does. You want to know how anyone can endure this place, this vile home, capital of misery. You want to know how people can breathe this poison air each day. Why people dwell in such urinous pools, why people choose such an excrementitious location, why people whose eyes can still register light lock themselves voluntarily in this darkest of abysses. Well, I’ll tell you, it’s very simple: habit. The Parisian connects himself to all these evils, because this place, putrid and corrupt, is the hell we call home. And we would never leave it, for despite everything, we love it. We love it. I love it.
“Here ends my tour. Now I slip off a shoe and pass it around. All gratuities gratefully received. You have no money, Little? Then give me a kiss, odd child of Paris that you are.”
And I would kiss him on the cheek, and off he would go, leaving me behind in the kitchen, eyes closed, imagining myself floating about the city.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I am shut out.
In the evening I drew the heads of the fish I had bought in the day. Everything was to be drawn, and my piles of yell
owing paper dwindled. The drawings themselves I rolled up and hid at the back of a kitchen drawer. At night I would creep into the atelier and draw Curtius’ heads of Paris. By now my own head, modeled in Berne, had been taken off the shelf, wrapped in cloth, and tucked away in a cupboard. I sat with those new wax personalities, and I felt they were very happy to have me there. They longed to speak, I thought, but were not quite able. There is a melancholy to wax heads: they were never born, they capture life, but life shrugs away from them. In the quietest moments, I whispered to these half-personalities: “I’ll sit with you,” I said. “Are you frightened of the dark? Don’t be.”
Living inside the dead tailor’s house in those days, you could just hear it, barely audible at first: the sound of a distant ticking, of cogs creaking, the noises of a great machine beginning to live. And you would have to have great faith to hear those sounds, for all there was then was a widow and her measuring son, a thin foreign doctor and his little servant girl, and a house in mourning. It was a small business then, nothing likely to attract attention, very unassuming. People find such varied ways of getting on. There were many thousands of private concerns operating throughout the city. On the Rue des Chiens, so I learned from Mercier, a father and son blew glass eyes; Curtius began to use these for his wax heads. On the Quai des Morfondus, a man dealt in secondhand wigs; Curtius bought these for his wax heads. On the Rue Censier, there was a small school for making artificial flowers, founded by a matron from Toulouse; the widow used these to decorate Curtius’ atelier, now rechristened the sitting room. And on the Rue du Petit Moine, a small private business consisted of making busts of small-time Parisian businessmen out of wax. People find such varied ways of getting on.
Months passed. The widow worked on clothes for the busts. Once, when I was polishing the tools, I saw the widow take up a bust while she was talking. After a while she set it down again, but not with precision, so that it rocked back and forth a little. Curtius looked at the bobbing head and shouted—O marvelous noise!—