Masque

by Bethany Pope

  She cackled again, scratching her scabby bald head beneath her veil.

  ‘I liked looking at it. Sometimes they’d be wearing their fine clothes; sleeves to the elbow, trailing lace, with those high white wigs wedged onto their neck-stumps. Sometimes they’d be naked as a sparrow and sitting close to the stage (I survived by dressing up in boys’ clothes, a crime then and now). I could see straight through the hair to their never-you-mind-it. Hehehe, it was lovely. Not that you’ll ever get to see one, you poor little freak. Just you wait, you’ll get your architect’s training, all the learning you’ll want, and then my younger sisters will call in the Cardinal. He’ll examine you. You’ll pass, no doubt about it. And then you’ll be an architect priest in the service of Blessed Pope Pius IX. The good news, my lad, is that when that happens no one will care what you look like. You’ll give service to God, and that’ll be more than enough for anyone.’

  Eventually the old nun would tire of tormenting me with stories and fall asleep, her hairy chin pinning her breast like the church-wall illustrations of the pelican which fed its children with the blood of its heart.

  I got along with the elderly, with Sister Mercy and her ilk. The other children were another matter. The boys and girls were housed in different schools. I had lived to eighteen without ever meeting a female that was not either a relative or beyond the borders of menopause. As for the boys, none of them would consent to share a room with me, not that I blamed them.

  Not one of them had ever seen my face, but my limbs, my mask, were enough to frighten these ‘troubled angels’. Some of them were soft in the head and very easily frightened. Others were sharper, but they had been so steeped in superstition, so inculcated with fear, that they would not dare to approach the child they called Le Mort Viva. I did not have to live in the basement here, among the dust and the skeletons of rats, but neither was I friends with any other pupils. I had my own room, far from the others, in a high tower, girded close round with ivy. It gave me plenty of space to continue my experiments with mirrors, magic, music and glass.

  The old nun was half-right, in the end. I was very well educated. The Prioress hired a specialist from the university to give me private lessons. He was the only adult male voice I ever heard behind those tall limestone walls, the only baritone among the vine-drenched walls. Most of the boys returned to their families soon after puberty, called home to resume the work of their dead fathers. Only I lingered. His laughter echoed even in rooms muffled by religious tapestry.

  We sat in the library, surrounded by books bound in good leather, donated by the local wealthy in an effort to purchase entry into heaven. I was tall for my age, almost six foot, and stronger than I looked despite the skeletal appearance of my limbs. I once bent a pewter spoon in half just to see if I could. I did it easily, although the skin of my hands tore like the rind of a cheese and left greyish tatters on the handle. Sitting in the comfortable Chippendale chair (another donation from the wealthy to the poor) I could almost have passed for a man – or the remnants of one. A corpse with a face behind a shroud of goat skin.

  The master, Mr Garnier, was short and nearly as bald as I am. He had a tidy, fat stomach (its roundness emphasised by a thick gold watch chain) and a white goatee beneath a cleanly shaven lip. He stood above the desk, quizzing me, ‘And what have you learned about Mr Claude Nicolas Ledoux and his Barriere des Bonshommes?’

  This was almost too easy, ‘They are facades designed to imitate the perfection of the ancient Greeks – a popular current style.’

  His jolly face clouded, ‘And nothing at all like these things you are drawing. Look at this filth! Naked pagan gods, goddesses with bared breasts, all these carved plants that are to be dipped in gold. The church will never sponsor it. You are a gifted lad, Erik, but like every artist you must know your audience. What exactly is this supposed to be?’

  ‘An opera house.’ I looked at my long fingers, still scabbed from bending the spoon. The raw flesh dyed with ink. Why, I wondered, could I draw and sketch so easily and yet have so much difficulty with calligraphy?

  My master was silent. He turned from my chair, towards the window. I was used to open windows, even in the cold. It was a rule, among the sisters, to maintain good ventilation when I was around.

  ‘You do not wish to pursue a career in the church?’

  ‘Not particularly. God prefers perfection, as far as I can tell. I can only give that in architecture.’

  Monsieur Garnier smoothed the designs I’d drawn. His forehead wrinkled. Smoothed. He said, ‘Let me take these away for a few days. It will be a delicate manoeuvre getting you out of the door and into the world, but I may have something for you yet.’

  As it turned out, I did not have very long to wait.

  3.

  ‘It’s nothing like reading about it in books, is it my lad?’ Master Garnier clapped his fat hand on the blade of my shoulder. His face crumpled instantly with rank regret at the feel of my flesh through five layers of fine fabric. He was always forgetting what it was like to touch me. Once a day, at least, he would clap or cuff me when I had pleased him with my work, exactly the way the more masculine nuns would playfully strike the boys they liked best.

  I cannot say how much I despised his regret. I cannot tell how much I loved my master for forgetting, so constantly, his repulsion.

  ‘No,’ I said, leaning out across the parapet to watch as my designs blossomed in the desert, a fabulous fortress in praise of the flesh. ‘The books say nothing of the joy of this, of the pleasure that comes with forming something wonderful on paper and watching it grow to life in stone. They say nothing of the fear that some uneducated fool will foul my structure because he cannot see the logic or the cost. It is rather like that time that I composed a fugue for Sister Theresa. It was perfect in my mind, and my hands were perfect on the organ, but those idiot children marred five notes out of ten, singing flat, so that the ghost of my intentions emerged without the full force of the spirit I used to bring them into the world. I am more afraid of almost succeeding than I am of failure.

  We were silent for a moment, a blast from the desert carried rough sand and the faint scent of roses from the harem. I hated the sand. It caught in the folds of the garments I wore and grazed my paper-thin cheeks, abrasions which opened into bright, weeping sores. In spite of what I knew about myself, I feared scarring. No one ever wishes to be worse than they must be.

  ‘Why are these emotions never written down, Master?’ I turned to meet his gaze, as much of it as I could considering our adoption of the local Muslim custom. His eyes were shadowed by a small, round cap pressed into a square of fabric in red check. In our new white robes and with our covered faces it was almost possible to ignore my mask. For the first time in my life I felt almost ordinary, almost passable. I loved the feeling, and loathed it.

  His round, wrinkled face crumpled into a smile at that question.

  ‘Erik, you are young after all, in spite of your work. There is a paradox in every vein of art I’ve found, that makes it nearly impossible for a genius to grow in reputation, in their own lifetime, at least, without pretending to ordinary people that anyone could make the miracles they do.’ His hand went out for my shoulder again. This time he forced it to remain there, though his fingers trembled. In my soul, I thanked him for the effort.

  ‘Politics, my boy. Some of the greatest enemies to the arts are in the arts themselves. They are the gatekeepers you must bow to in order to progress and make your great work in spite of them, and right before their faces.’

  I could feel his fingers thrumming, his very tendons desiring flight. He forced our connection, continuing, ‘The greater the genius, the deeper the bow they expect. My boy, they will try to make you grovel.’

  I patted his hand, thanking him, disgusting him, releasing him at once. Oh what, I thought, would they think of me in the harem? I rather expected that inside those smooth pink-marble walls it would be very like the nunnery; with perhaps fewer garments. The air was
perfumed, but a room full of women must be as bad, in this heat, as a room full of cats. I must say that Persia gave me beautiful dreams.

  ‘I have grovelled enough and been hidden enough, for one lifetime. It is dishonest to bow before the middling. A mercy to them, perhaps, like my mask, but a lie even so. I won’t do it.’

  ‘Well, my boy, no one is asking you to, yet.’ His smile was strained and his hands kept wiping at the hem of his robe. He thought I didn’t notice. ‘Come. Let’s get down there and do what we are paid for. Make sure that horrid foreman is not stealing more cement.’

  ‘Ug, how I loathe him. I would happily kill him for cutting corners on that fountain. And those looks he gives me!’ I grinned, nearly lipless, luckily invisible, ‘And they say that I have got an evil face.’

  We took the winding stair down to the street. I approved of the gilt wood and lush carvings of stylised, almost feminine animals lining the banister. My fingers traced the outlines of lionesses, graceful, dashing gazelles.

  RAOUL

  1.

  I’m not used to failure yet, or to the complexity of fulfilment and desire. I never knew that I could get something I thought I wanted, be satisfied with it for a while, and then discover that the chocolate was bitter beneath the bright foil. Perhaps my brother should have denied me more often; perhaps he should have allowed the nurse who played the role of my mother sometimes, to inhabit that state more fully, to allow both ‘Yes’ and ‘No’.

  It has only just occurred to me that all three of us grew up with one dead parent. We’ve all lived with ghosts. My father survived, just barely, until I was sixteen. I was a late arrival; the product of a third wife, a pretty young thing purchased from her parents to warm the bed of a man sixty years her senior. I was the unexpected pregnancy which killed her. She wasn’t bought for breeding. Her narrow pelvis could not spread. It is difficult to know that your first act on earth slaughtered your mother.

  Now we all are orphans.

  Still, it was a happy childhood. I lived with my nurse on the Brittany coast while my brother lorded it over Paris, preserving our fortune by investing in shipping and pretending to philanthropy by spreading coppers to the arts. I knew, even then, that he had a mistress, a dancer. Well, he was forty years old and unmarried. He needed distraction.

  I was well educated in the subjects I loved: art, music and seafaring. Maths and history fell by the wayside. I rarely made it all the way through novels. I have since learned that because authors put what they know in their books, and since only so many things can happen to us (humanity is limited), a novel could have told me the story I would live before it happened. I would have known the structure of the terror anyway, known how to act to save her. I might have discovered what she was. At least, if I’d still failed, I wouldn’t have had to meet it as though I’d invented the emotions I suffered.

  I have slogged my way through many stories since; I have the time after all. I keep seeing her, my perfect image of her, dressed in the robes of Persephone, lodged in the underworld, her lips bleeding pomegranate seeds which glisten in the gloaming dark.

  I remember the first time I saw her. We were almost still children, exactly the same age: fourteen and a day. She was a wild, ragged thing, swathed in white silk that had been quite fine the week before when her patron, the Countess, purchased it in Paris. Heaven only knows how she soiled it so quickly. It would be very like Christine to drench herself in delicate silk and then go rolling down the sand dunes to play in the waves.

  Her father, the genius, was standing beside the Countess (she shaded him with her pink lace parasol – I think she was a little in love with him) playing gypsy reels on his lovely honey-coloured violin. It sang nearly as sweetly as Christine did, dancing there, dark as Salomé, twirling her red brocade scarf like an airy harem veil.

  The old man was tall, a little stooped, his hair slate grey. He played with his eyes closed, his spare body swaying, seduced by the music. The Countess was taller than he was. Slim. Blonde. About thirty-five years old. She stared hard at Christine, her blue eyes cold, glistening, her red lips parted. Moist.

  I don’t remember what the girl was singing, only that it was beautiful, as irresistible as a hook in the mouth of a carp. I don’t remember what she said to me after her scarf flew, red as a blood-gout, into the cold sea and I struck out into it, soaked to the skin in the freezing water. I remember the shape of her warm mouth as she spoke, twisting the sea-water out of the silk. I remember that her voice was silver. It did not matter what she said. To me, it was an invitation. I had earned her.

  2.

  I experienced her intensely for one week, I got to know the Countess and her frail father (even then it was obvious that he was not long for the earth), they always made me welcome in their large, immaculate home. The downstairs was decorated in the English Georgian fashion, all neo-classical pillars, ceilings lined with plaster laurel leaves, open-beaked eagles, the walls painted light blue, green, stark white. I wouldn’t say I knew Christine.

  This is not to say that she was not kind to me, or friendly. She may have even genuinely liked me. Certainly she acted as though she did. She couldn’t have been miserable all that time we spent together in the attic among the bare dressmakers’ dummies, headless as ghouls, all those veiled mirrors and obsolete furniture, all those soft, shrouded lurkers, listening as her father told us stories in his strange northern accent. Little Lottie and the Angel of Music.

  I can hear him speaking now. A sweet voice that could be made rough or childlike depending on his need and the thrust of the story. He sat on an old leather trunk, pony-skin I believe, with patches of piebald fur missing. His large, precise hands moved as he spoke, as though he were conducting the narrative. Occasionally he scratched his moustache to hide a kind, sly smile.

  ‘Little Lottie lived dreaming. The old fools in her village thought that she was a bad girl because she spent all her time singing, and some of the things that she sang were not very “proper”, though they were all true.’

  He stroked his daughter’s hair with one huge hand, catching his fingers in her chocolate curls. The other hand he rested on my knee. I took this as a sign of his unconscious approval. I thought he thought that I was very fine. Probably he thought that I was a fool. All I wanted in the whole world was to lay my hands in those curls of hers, lose my nails in that dark river of hair. I thought she owed me that, at least, for rescuing her scarf, for condescending to adore her. I was very young.

  The old man continued, ‘Her father loved her very much and, since he was an artist himself, he knew that it is an easy lie of the common folk that artists have no morality. They have their own morality. They are dedicated to their truth, to portraying it as beautifully and powerfully as possible, even when it makes the small folk uncomfortable.

  ‘Little Lottie lived a long time with her father in their safe little house at the edge of the forest. They were happy a long time, but happiness is not real if it lasts forever, and one day little Lottie woke to find her father burning in a fever, coughing blood into a rag.’ The old man coughed here, wetly, into his handkerchief. I didn’t know then that he was not acting.

  ‘Before he died, he comforted the daughter he loved more than his own life. He said “Darling, do not be afraid. After I have made my home in heaven I will ask God the Father to send down to Earth the Angel of Music. He will sing to you in my voice and your art will improve until it glows from you like flame”.’

  ‘What happened then, Father?’ Christine looked much younger than fourteen, leaning forward to him, her delicate hands digging into his knees, her eyes wide, gleaming with the sheen of tears.

  The old man bent and kissed her once on her furrowed forehead, a move I longed to make myself. I would have killed to taste the salt of her skin.

  He said, ‘He died, daughter. It was very hard for Lottie, then. She grieved. But in time he kept his word. The Angel came. She sang better than she ever had before. She sang so well, in fact, that her peo
ple brought her to Paris and she became the greatest diva ever to sing in that great city. She ruled the stage for many years, and lived happily, so happily, ever after.’

  And with that he ended the story. I went home, to my real home. It was time to take my place with my brother, learning the business. It was years before I learned what life gave Christine. I loved her image, faithfully, from a great distance. I never thought to write to her. In any case, it would not have been proper. At the time she was a member of the serving classes, though daughter of a great musician.

  3.

  Six years passed before I saw her again, my angel, my Christine. I never expected our reunion to come about in the way it did. My brother Philippe had been a patron of the Paris Opera since 1870 (the very year I met Christine). He continued his patronage when the opera company moved into the newly completed Palais Garnier after a long-delayed construction, interrupted by the famous siege of Paris. During that time of unrest and confusion several of the architects working under Garnier vanished in circumstances that, given the war, were not very mysterious. They seemed much more violent later, those deaths, those hangings. When the dust settled and the torn corpses were cleared from the streets, the group of architects that attended the Master was found to have been reduced to one – Charles Garnier himself. It was no great loss, he said. The three whose bodies were found were hardly better than incompetent. The sole exception was the Mussliman whose corpse they never found, a man who had apparently travelled from the courts of the Shah in darkest Persia. The man who always wore a long-sleeved cashmere kaftan and his head draped with a keffiyeh that covered most of his oddly smooth face. My brother said that his loss was the only one Garnier really felt, and that the old architect grieved that they never found the body. He was, Garnier said, the only one with any real skill. My brother commented that Garnier’s grief seemed oddly pronounced, as though he had lost a son and not an assistant.