by Bethany Pope
I wondered if such miracles could happen in reverse, like writing reflected in a glass. I wondered if a voice I loved, a soul I clung to, could sing to me from another throat.
So yes, we were intimate, sometimes unintentionally. Yes, I did love him, what I knew of him. His shadows. His scraps. I loved what he did for me. My love was innocent then, at least of touch. It felt so good to have someone who could be proud of me. But my invisible Master could be strange, too. When I began scooping roles he promised always to watch me perform from the best box in the house. He used those carnival tricks to secure the plush darkness, those wonderful acoustics for himself, without wasting a dime beyond his always generous twenty-franc tip to Meg’s mother, Madame Giry, who was in charge of seating and survived on her tips.
According to Madame Giry he made the walls weep blood (like something from one of the Countess’ countless gothic novels) and, in time, the musicians who hit their notes flat and the clumsiest dancers suddenly began disappearing. I heard Little Meg and La Sorelli cracking dark jokes about carrying knots made out of segments of hangman’s rope to ward off murderous ghosts.
They might not have been murders, I thought, not all of them. The house inspector rarely found bodies. Besides, what kind of killer targets the untalented?
But he was strange after the offensive members had been cut off. He would laugh more, during our lessons. Mad, joyful laughter that seemed to leap from flame to flame between the fixtures I kept gleaming with an oil-soaked rag. If he did not kill them himself, God owed him a favour.
Things continued in this vein for several months, before the Comte’s little brother, the boy from the beach, crashed into my rooms and unsettled what I took for my happiness.
ERIK
4.
Master Garnier and I made it across the manicured courtyard (lush palms, figs, that troublesome fountain with the spouting dolphins that I had designed so well then watched that idiot of a foreman destroy with his heavy hand at plumbing) to the building site. We arrived at the same moment that the half-naked labourers were completing their midday meal of fried, spiced dough balls and ground chickpeas. My master went to rouse them from their meal while I walked back to the site. The foreman, as usual, was nowhere in sight.
We had been working in this sandy patch of earth for nine months and the struggle to see my structure rise from my perfectly planned designs was more than tedious. I’d had no idea, in the beginning, how many things could run foul in such a job of construction.
Yesterday, for example, the labourer who looked like he had taken a year-long break between changing loincloths (their stench was terrible – even to me) dropped a sculpture I’d made at the Shah’s special request; a figure of a woman done in soft lead, whose face belonged to the ruler’s favourite concubine. I had to guess at the body, but I had captured the face perfectly. I found out, much later, that he had broken several strong local taboos allowing me, an unrelated male (even such a specimen of the gender as I am) to look upon a woman he owned. I based the naked body (it was too erotic to be termed a ‘nude’) on the rather fleshy Eve I saw in Master Garnier’s miniature reproduction of the Sistine Chapel. To me, the shoulders seemed like they would better fit a cricketer, but the Shah had revealed to me that he liked his women large.
In any case, it was a beautiful piece of sculpture. I meant to mount it to the top pillar in the new main bathhouse. The coolie was supposed to be securing it to the waiting marble base. I rather suspect that he dropped it on purpose, in protest at my (not the Shah’s) display of bad taste and general immorality. This assumption was not baseless – I had caught him, several times, peering between the curtains that served as doors in my rooms. Perhaps he thought the strange white devil would have a demon’s face. He wouldn’t be far wrong.
The painted lead deformed as he dropped it, the fine face flattened out until it resembled a mask more of horror than lust. I could not repair it. I’d lost the original wax likeness when I cast the metal. I resigned myself to risking the Shah’s displeasure by asking for another forbidden audience with his lady, in his chambers.
I could happily have slaughtered that idiot, morally pretentious coolie. I was busily, half-seriously, contemplating my options for corpse-disposal while my eyes stared at the divot her face had dug in the delicate imported tile. I have the gift of partitioning thoughts and while I was picturing the various torments that I could give to the goon who ruined my sculpture another part of my mind worried about how I could possibly repair that harsh crack in the floor. I gave equal weight to both problems and I had found some fitting solutions when suddenly a breeze blew through the half-completed walls and sent sand seeping through the seams of my mask. This was too much! The pain was intolerable, adding another layer of irritating grit to my already pus-blooming cheeks.
I had to take the mask off, cleanse myself before I bled through the kid skin and my weakness was made visible to all.
Luckily I was alone, I thought, in the bathhouse. The pools had not been filled as yet, but there was water everywhere in pitchers and half of the mirrors I’d made were already mounted on the walls. I took my opportunity.
My foreman took his.
My mask slid off like a glove, issuing a small shower of sand, revealing the bandages that I had earlier applied. I was busily unwinding the gauze, my vision totally blocked, when I felt four hands grasp me by the arms and shoulders.
‘Faugh!’ I heard a voice I knew, speaking in Arabic, a language I’d learned on the six-month journey to the palace, ‘It’s like grasping at a rotted toad.’
The hands clamped all the tighter for wanting to let go. I tried to scream, only to feel my mouth filled with wood, a bar to bite down on. My foreman spoke in rough accents, ‘I know, my friend, but think of the gold.’
I tried to fight as they peeled away the last of my gauze. I am very strong, much stronger than I look, but they had me securely. I was helpless as they saw my shame.
‘My god, it’s a living corpse. You were right about the stench … this jinn will bring us better than a few old coppers.’
My former foreman smiled with his toothless gums, ripping my robes to reveal my poor flesh, so that he held my naked form. ‘Yes, but first we must get it to our buyers. I can’t do that, if I have to look at it.’
Had I been free, I would have bitten his nose off. At least I had the teeth to do the job. It might have improved his disposition.
That was when they bundled my stripped body into that burlap sack. The rough fibres peeled my skin like an onion so that the fabric felt slicked with my brownish-red blood. I began to feel myself letting go of myself and found a brief relief in madness.
5.
I do not know how long the journey lasted, the days slid into one another, differentiated only by subtle differences in light and motion (the movement of the sack I was suspended in seemed to slow in darkness – it never stilled). The heat was unmitigated. I cannot describe what it was like to be suspended for so long in that scabbed chrysalis. My skin has always been delicate, fragile; it scraped off in strips like the half-solid rind that forms on cool cream soup. Days of beating sun spoiled the tatters so that I smelled like the corpse of the evil king in the Book of Judges who Ehud stabbed through the bowels. Say what you will about those Sisters, my time with the nuns proved useful in the end – if only through providing me with metaphors.
My mouth dried, my eyes ached, parching in my skull; they felt raw and dry through closed lids. My temples throbbed and my throat ached with the acid residue of vomit. I only lived because some member of the party at whose mercy I was travelling decided that it would be more profitable to deliver living cargo to their clients, and not a desiccated mummy. Once a day I felt the joy of water as someone poured a bucket of brackish washing water over the burlap which encased me. This action also provided me with my first clue about my method of transport. The stench of wet camel is unmistakable.
I do not know if I was still held captive by my foreman and his
coolie; I suspect not. They would want to clear themselves of suspicion – Garnier, at least, would be looking for me. The Shah might seek me out as well. He would not wish to leave his stately pleasure drome in unfinished ruins. No one else could satisfactorily complete it. No, the foreman probably sold me on that very evening, allowing a travelling merchant to take a cut of his profit in return for allowing him to show himself bright and early at the work site, clearing himself of suspicion and adding his regular pay-cheque to his other illicit takings.
In any case, the foreman was not present when the journey ended. I felt myself lifted from the camel, still encased in the sack. I heard a rough voice, bellowing curses in Spanish, saying, ‘Ay Dios Mio, what a stench! Are you sure it is not dead? We don’t pay for corpses, Mr Chinky.’
Another voice, disgruntled, answered. ‘If you don’t believe me, give it a kick. It will whimper for you.’
I knew enough to wriggle before the Spaniard took him up on it. I moved very lightly, knowing well enough by then that I was no butterfly, that this pupa could never be shed by my own power. My strength was greatly reduced by starvation.
I had the dubious pleasure of listening to their laughter, and hear the familiar clink of gold as someone exchanged my body for his coins. I heard the grunts and sputters of a camel being mounted, heard the crash of whip on hide, and then I was dragged, mercifully, out of the beating sun and into some shade.
‘Let’s see what I’ve bought, then.’ The Spaniard knelt above my bag; I felt his shadow severing the light. ‘Don’t move more than you must, or I’ll add to your ugliness with my blade.’
He drew a section of the burlap taut and pierced it with a long, curved knife. It was the first solid thing that I had seen in several days. It looked so beautiful, so powerful, shining. I imprinted on it like a duck fresh from the egg. He widened the hole, using his enormous rough hands to tear the slit. I spared a thought of pity for his wife, his animals.
He drew me out by the shoulders, cursing and gagging as he freed my bloody body from the sack. ‘Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros, pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte.’ He left my body on a pile of straw and turned away to vomit, looking at me long enough to say, ‘I was not cheated. Creature, you live, and you’re guaranteed to terrify the marks.’
I was too weak and angry to reply to this. It was all I could do to lie gasping in the straw. I felt like a fish, dying in a creel among the dried waterweed. Luckily, he did not appear to need any help in conversation. He continued, brushing my blood on to his poorly cured leather trousers and using those same filthy fingers to straighten his vest, ‘The only question, as I see it, is are you too ugly? Will you fascinate as well as horrify?’
I glared at him, noticing for the first time that the straw I lay on was piled in the centre of a garish-painted tiger cage. I was already a captive. He was standing now, supporting his bearish bulk on one of the rusted iron bars. He nudged me with the cracked toe of his black boot. ‘You are always naked? Do you ever wear clothes?’
I pushed myself up on to my elbows. It was all I could manage. Almost all. I spoke to him in my own language, ‘I have been accustomed to fine garments, Monsieur. I regret that you do not see me at my best at this moment.’
‘It speaks. French! And in an educated accent.’ His grin was wide, leering. ‘Your garments (as you say) will hardly be fine here, but I will see that you have something to cover yourself with. After all, there will be ladies in our audience. Some of them young, and too innocent to be traumatised by that thing between your legs.’ He stooped to look closer. Had I any strength, I would happily have killed him. ‘One part of you is man, at least.’
He laughed again, spat over his left shoulder. On his way out the door I asked for food to eat, water to drink and wash myself with.
‘You will have food enough, I’m sure. I sell vegetables and other things for the crowd to throw, and as for water, I will bring some. You may wash, or drink. Really, I hope that you will drink. A wild man, a primordial monster, should stink a little.’
He was as good as his word. That night the gates of the carnival opened and the crowds came in. I endured a hell that I never thought that I could speak of. It cost me something to survive as long as I did, something valuable that I am sure I will never recover. I was lucky to escape with my mind.
It was seven years before I met my master again, though I had long since finished thinking of him in those terms. He wandered, by chance, into the carnival as we cruised the coast of Nice after a four-year tour of Italy. Wandering through the lines of cages, jostled by the crowds, he recognised my voice at once. I was sitting in a pile of dross on the floor of my cage (it had never been cleaned, there were bones everywhere) dressed in a tattered brown loincloth. It had once been white. My face was exposed, but Monsieur Garnier had never been made to look at it. He would have had no reason to recognise me if I had been silent. I had not seen myself in years, but when I could think lucidly I felt the scars and pustules and knew that I was worse.
I was singing a song that the nuns had taught me long ago, ‘Au clair de la lune mon ami Pierrot prête-moi ta plume pour écrire un mot ma chandelle est mort. Je n’ai plus de feu ouvre-moi ta porte pour l’amour de Dieu.’
‘Erik?’ I looked up into his fat, wide-eyed face. I did not know him, but the word he spoke itched at my brain like a phrase in a forgotten language. ‘Erik? My God, lad, is it you?’
I could not move; such shame filled me, such deep terror. I sat there, trembling in filth. He spoke to me softly, until I calmed enough to remember my life and tell him of my troubles, of my betrayal at the hands of our former foreman. It all returned to me as I spoke, along with a rising sensation of resentment that he, of all people, should find me like this! I was silent, my song departed.
Knowing that our time was brief, I hurried in my narrative, speaking as clearly as I could, clutching the bars with my hands which he touched, once, giving as much comfort as he could stand. He knew that it hurt me terribly to speak. Still, his eyes slid from my face.
I was used to baring my visage to the air, I knew how terrible it was, how the youngest children cried at the sight of it while the adolescents hurled their gobs of wilted lettuce wrapped around round apples of horse dung. How the men came from farms and dockyards to compare the hard part-healed lesions on my face to particular pieces of female anatomy. I was used to the way the young women either covered their nostrils with squares of perfumed silk and hurried past, or gawped up at me like over-bred hens drowning in a rainstorm, beginning to laugh after the horror-blanche had fled their faces and the nervous laughter bubbled up.
I’d made a lot of money for my owner. His investment paid off.
Garnier left quickly, almost as soon as I had finished speaking, after slipping me a knife so that I might slice free my wire-bound fingers. My hands were always fastened to make eating more difficult and increase the spectacle of my ‘act’. The padlocks on the door were filled with lead solder; when Garnier returned that night he brought a pair of strong bolt-cutters that sliced the lead like butter. We escaped without incident, disturbing neither dogs nor big the bull elephant that slept in its chains, and I spent the remainder of the year recovering in the sane, ivy-covered villa where Garnier rested between projects. I made a new mask, acquired new bearings, planned. There were vineyards on the property and I walked them, pacing the rows in my new tailored suits, learning the craft. At night I caught up on my music composition and architectural studies. The lush rococo forms I favoured were coming into vogue and I knew that with the right commission I could earn a lot of money while fulfilling a long-held, treasured dream combining both my prime interests. I took up boating for a while, early in the morning. I loved it then, when the world was quiet. I developed a taste for the sea.
6.
It seems to the world that politics and art are joined masters. Certainly, if one wishes to advance in the world, one must be seen to bow to convention. I will not bow,
and my face was not made to wear a simper, so it would seem that my desires were doomed to be thwarted. This was not so. I paid a steep price to survive my life in the cage. Something vital was burnt out of me (and I was only half-human to begin with – I have not much spare) but something also was gained. My will was hardened. Even Monsieur Garnier acknowledged this change in me and expressed it in our relations. The former-Master became my mask, facing the world with his form and voice but strictly adhering to my decisions.
When Emperor Napoleon III decided that he wished to commission a new opera house he cleared 12,000 square metres of land on the site of his own choosing, in a green space, surrounded by many ancient, graceful trees and a few modern buildings. The Emperor himself opened the floor to submissions from architects, deciding who won on the strength of the plans. Of course I sent him my design. The signature said ‘Charles Garnier’ in his own fine copperplate hand, but the drawings were mine. He was known, after all, and much more affable in conversation. He presented the blueprints before the throne.
There was never a question that we would be victorious. The Empress, I heard, had something to say about it. Charles reported to me that she greeted him in the gilded reception hall, saying, ‘What is this? It’s not a style; it’s neither Louis Quatorze, nor Louis Quinze, nor Louis Seize!’
Always the politician, knowing that our sponsor was within earshot, my master grinned down at her (the lady was buried beneath a wig that would have fitted out fifteen bald brunette maidens) and said, ‘Why Ma’am, it’s Napoléon Trois, and you’re complaining?!’ Oh how I laughed to hear that!