Voltaire's Calligrapher

by Pablo De Santis

  “And we’ll give you one more if you let us take a look at that book.”

  Maron pocketed the coins. Unlike every other man there, his hands were clean and white, not a mark of any kind. He spoke in a low voice:

  “Just a quick look. Don’t get it dirty.”

  Kolm took the book and handed it to me. I was initially confused and flipped through the pages, more to pretend I knew what Kolm wanted than to look for anything specific. He whispered that I should pay attention to the most recent burials. Next to each name was a grave site. I studied each line, searching for the lie that twists the stroke, sends it off course, and then forces it back to its original form but only with extreme effort. Kolm thought we should keep Von Knepper’s name out of it, in case Maron went behind our backs. It was best if our purpose remain hidden.

  The letter S in the name Sarras almost seemed to vibrate, calling attention to its deceit.

  We took the key, returned the book, and stood in front of the cemetery gates a little while later, well after midnight.

  Kolm refused to go in with me.

  “I’m an executioner. My deal with death ends under this arch.”

  He stayed to keep watch.

  I walked past the headstones to where the monuments were erected. It was like being a stranger in a new land, and I tried to form a picture of the place, but the moonlight seemed to move things around. I read the inscriptions, looking for the name Sarras. The path led me to the back, where the oldest tombs were, most of them virtually in ruins, and there, at last, I found it.

  On top of a small marble palace, an archangel threatened visitors with a broken sword. The rusty lock had been broken long ago. The cold, nauseating air nearly made me stumble and fall down the stairs that led inside.

  Using my lamp, I lit candles that on previous nights had spilled down over coffins and altars. Not even in bright daylight would the sight before me have made sense. One of my teachers at Vidors’ School, an optician named Mialot, used to give us an exercise: he would show us blurred lines in which a message would be revealed after a while. It wasn’t concentration that let you see the hidden words but a certain inattention achieved only after a great deal of effort. Once the mystery had been solved, it was hard to believe you hadn’t seen the writing all along.

  The bishop was sitting in a high-backed chair that resembled a throne. He was being supported by ropes that came down from the ceiling and made him look like a marionette. I’ve finally found the automaton, I thought. Who could mistake that for a real man? He was surrounded by enormous blocks of ice, brought down from the mountains who knows how. The candlelight seemed to imbue him with an extraordinary sense of dignity; the bishop looked like an underground monarch, capable of governing from the beyond. Anyone looking at those ropes would think they weren’t holding him up but were instead how he controlled his administration’s strategies and actions.

  One by one, the candle stubs were extinguished in pools of their own melted wax. When nothing but the light from my lamp remained, I noticed the shadow of another intruder on the wall.

  Taps on the Window

  I had no weapon but my iron lamp and held it up toward the stranger to defend myself if he tried to prevent my escape. He was alone and stood perfectly still, as if trying to go unnoticed. Water from the blocks of ice was soaking the soles of my boots and came right up to my foe’s feet. He approached slowly, taking care not to slip and fall.

  The hood fell back and revealed Clarissa’s face. It was one of those moments when you know the world is as it should be, believe everything is good, and trust you will always be safe. In between half-spoken words, gulps of air, and incomprehensible gestures, I managed to ask her what she was doing there.

  “I wanted to see how my father spends his nights. Evidently he’s tired of learning from the living and now takes lessons from the dead.”

  The bishop glowered at our hugs and kisses, perhaps worried the heat we were radiating would melt the blocks and cause him to fall.

  A gust of wind extinguished the last flame, and the bishop was left alone in the dark. His performance would go on to the very end, when his head would drop, his arms would fall, and he would abandon what was left of his dignity and collapse with the ice floe. I pulled the iron door closed, and we walked toward the exit.

  “What will you do, now that you know the truth about your father’s work?”

  “Better yet: What will the truth do with me?”

  The tombs looked like forgotten pieces in a bygone game. I asked Clarissa if her condition really did turn her into an automaton.

  “That’s just my father’s imagination. He thinks his inventions and I are related, that we share family traits.”

  “But the other night I saw you completely immobile, as if you were asleep.”

  “Doesn’t everyone fall absolutely still, as if struck by lightning?” she asked. I was unable to reply when she kissed me. “Who could mistake me for an automaton?”

  Kolm was waiting for us outside the gate but left before we got there, flicking his hand in a gesture of exhaustion, reprimand, boredom. We hurried back to Clarissa’s. Though we had witnessed something momentous, we spoke of inconsequential things-the silly conversations sweethearts have. A light was still on when we arrived.

  “My father only ever works at night. One day he’ll go blind.”

  I didn’t even glance at the inventor’s window; he meant nothing to me right then. I was saying good-bye to Clarissa without knowing for how long. She was part of a mechanism of appearances and disappearances whose frequency I couldn’t predict.

  Late every night thereafter, I would tap lightly on Clarissa’s window, hoping she would open it, but she never came. Perhaps she was sleeping so soundly that nothing could wake her; perhaps her father had discovered her late night excursion and kept her locked away in a room with no windows. The house was dark, except for Von Knepper’s study. Night after night, I stayed away from his window. Then, when I had grown tired of waiting or perhaps because I had decided it was the last night I would keep watch, I peered in through a crack.

  All four walls and several easels were covered in meticulous sketches of the bishop’s face, neck, and hands in various positions. The drawings were perfect, but the model had imbued them with a truth the artist hadn’t noticed: every detail-the shape of his ears, the corner of his mouth, the emptiness in his eyes-betrayed the lines of death.

  The window suddenly opened and Von Knepper’s face appeared before me, looking pleased rather than angry, as if, on identical nights, he had kept watch hoping to find me.

  Fabres’ Disciple

  Come in,” Von Knepper said. “Let’s speak one last time.”

  He led me through rooms in shadow to the only one with any light. It was clear from the number of bolts that I was lucky enough to be invited into a place that was off-limits to others. Sketches of the bishop’s hands and face were now all around me, as if the figure of the dead man, multiplied so many times, had taken over the room. It was like being inside the bishop’s body. Von Knepper had me sit on a hard wooden chair, the one he used when working, and poured me a glass of cognac.

  “I was seventeen when I began as Fabres’ disciple. I learned everything from him, but while my creatures were imperfect, his seemed alive. The differences weren’t visible to just anyone; it was in the subtleties a mother uses to tell one twin from another. I couldn’t seem to duplicate a human’s unconscious movement. My creatures were too self-absorbed.

  “I did have a few successes and even managed to present one of my scribes before the czar. It was to write out a text consisting of one hundred and nine words in praise of the sovereign, but a faulty adjustment made it knock over the inkwell, and the only praise was an ink stain that spread out endlessly. If I was forgiven, it was only because a wise man believed the accident was a sign of the empire’s unlimited expansion.

  “After that, I put scribes aside and went back to birds and ballerinas and mechanical jungles.
As perfect as those toys were, my real ambition lay elsewhere. Those of us who practice this sorcery are obsessed with scribes. The stiller my creatures were, the more alive they seemed. Whenever they moved, a lifelessness would fall over them, dimming the light in their porcelain eyes, reducing them to but a ghost of a ghost.

  “Only some of what we know as automaton makers is ever passed on to our disciples. The real secrets take years to come to light and may only come postmortem, like an ambiguous will that can never be clarified. When the disciple is twice what his master was, when the same thirst, the same resentment, the same hate toward the same enemies has rubbed off on him, when somehow he is now the other, only then does he learn the truth. Fabres, who taught me everything, also hid everything from me. When I approached his deathbed to hear the last line in the book he had patiently written on me, all he said was ‘You and I are automatons. What need does the world have of us?’ And then he died.

  “While his other disciples eagerly awaited the reading of the will-which defrauded us all-I hoped for a letter, a paper folded in two, a new type of gear, or the drawings for a mechanism that would allow me to follow his trail once again. Instead, I received a book called De Progressione Diódica, a dissertation on the system that reduces all numbers to one and zero. I wasn’t particularly fond of math. I thought about selling the book, but it had been damaged and rebound. It was no longer of any value.

  “Months later, one of my cats knocked the book off the top shelf, and it fell on my inkwell, spilling it. That called to mind the scribe that had betrayed me in front of the czar. I flipped through the book without reading it, remembering every second of my failure instead. Sometimes that happens; we don’t see the printed word but only what our mind quickly scrawls across someone else’s pages. The morning light fell straight on the book, and I noticed a faint annotation, then another, and another. My master had used the margins to pencil in his spidery inscriptions.”

  Von Knepper had already filled my glass three times. I no longer had the strength to even stand. Everything around me blurred together, as if nothing wanted to be separate from anything else. Sober-sober not only that night but always and forever-Von Knepper continued to speak without looking at me. Like an actor, his eyes were fixed on an imaginary spectator, to prevent the audience from distracting him from his lines.

  “It took me two weeks to decipher those words and the next few years to turn those ideas into reality. I learned to encode iron plates with the orders automatons need, so all you have to do is change the plate to give them new instructions.”

  He handed me one; it contained a series of perforations that created a pattern I couldn’t interpret.

  “There are words hidden in those holes, and now my creatures seem as alive as Fabres’. But I’ve reached a point my master never dreamed of: my creature has taken the place of a man.”

  “I saw the bishop a few days ago. He was still working in the dark.”

  “That’s no longer necessary. Now anyone who sees him up close, in good light, will think he’s a real man. My visits to the burial chamber are over. My automaton is more authentic than the ailing bishop, who didn’t even look like himself anymore.”

  “Now that your work is done, how can you be sure they won’t kill you?”

  “The machine needs constant adjustments. I’m the only one who can change the instructions, and I’ll make sure no one else knows how. I’m safe.”

  I had finished the last drop of cognac and was beginning to realize the danger each word entailed. I wanted to ask Von Knepper why he had told me the truth, what he wanted from me. In a fit of optimism, I decided he might have something to offer me. My eyes fell shut for a few seconds, despite my fear. When I opened them, I heard Von Knepper answer the question I had never asked:

  “There’s no need to hide anything from a dead man.”

  Mathilde’s Foot

  Von Knepper seemed a little embarrassed by the chain of betrayals that would lead to my death.

  “My daughter told me about you and your visit to the cemetery. Don’t blame her; she wanted me to know she’d gone out, that she could lead a normal life. The poor thing has been so cloistered in our world, she believes these nightly forays are normal. When I found out, I told Abbot Mazy of your recent actions. They don’t know your name, but they know to look for one of Clarissa’s suitors. Why get you killed? That wouldn’t make me happy.”

  “What can I do to save myself?”

  “Leave Paris and my daughter. It’s love that causes her condition. I have to protect her from love.”

  “That’s impossible. I can go, but someone else will come along, or Clarissa will decide to live her own life.”

  “Anything could happen. My profession has taught me a lesson in humility: even the most perfect machines fail, and mechanisms that seem infallible stop working for no apparent reason. No one has yet invented a perpetuum mobile.”

  “Let me see her one last time.”

  “Last times never accomplish anything.”

  “I want to tell her that if I go, it’s not of my own free will.”

  “She knows. Clarissa knows why you’re fleeing. I’ve told her about your colleague, the abbot’s calligrapher. Although that might not be such a bad end: your blood could become his ink.”

  “That’s just part of the legend around Silas Darel.”

  “I saw it with my own eyes: the mute calligrapher, the thick book, the red ink. Your name and mine are written there, as well as everything we do, maybe even what we’re saying now.”

  With a wave of his hand, Von Knepper threw me out of his study and his world. He hurried to slide the bolts shut, as if locking me in a prison made of cities and countries and continents.

  I left the house wondering just how grave the danger was. It was a restless night, every sound heralding the abbot’s men coming for me. The next morning I set out for Siccard House to collect my pay and thus have the means to leave Paris. I walked hand in hand with fear: I would look from side to side and see a foe in every face. It didn’t have to be a uniform or a cassock to scare me; an old woman’s glance out of the corner of her eye, a hungry dog following on my heels, a boy waving a wooden sword was enough.

  Several customers were waiting for their merchandise at Siccard House: an usher, the legal sheets bearing the watermark of blind justice; a priest, a sheaf of parchment; a musician, staff paper tied with blue ribbon. The trafficking of messenger women had served as veiled publicity for the legal, public face of young Siccard’s business. I ran into him on the second floor, always industrious and in a hurry, as if fearing his dead father might suddenly appear and demand to see the balance sheet. He asked me about Dussel, but I had nothing to tell him. Dussel and I never spoke; he rushed home after work every day, though no one was ever waiting for him in his rented room. Before heading into the office at the end of the hall, where Juliette was waiting for me, I asked Siccard for the last few days’ pay.

  “Can’t you wait until next week?”

  “No. I have an urgent expense.”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “It has to be today. The shop downstairs is full of customers. One of them will pay in cash.”

  We were repeating a little scene that dated back to the start of the business itself, long before he was born. Young Siccard always paid, but he felt morally obliged to resist a little. That’s what his father had done for decades. Aristide walked away with his head bowed, as if he’d been hurt by my words. I went into the last office, said hello to the messenger, and was starting to prepare my inks when Juliette interrupted me.

  “The message is for you today.”

  She undressed with professional leisureliness. I began by looking for the signature and found the initial V on a perfect thigh. Tired of my distant exploits and cryptic messages, my employer was calling me back to Ferney. I would finally leave fear behind and fulfill my calligraphic destiny, that blank page.

  I never did read the final lines. There was ban
ging on the adjacent door and the sound of splintering wood, then Siccard’s scream, or rather his moan, because he tried to scream but couldn’t. I went out into the hall, and Dussel came charging at me, his shirt stiff with dried blood. I thought he’d been hurt and tried to stop him, but he broke free of my grasp and ran toward the stairs. That was the last time I saw him; as usual, he was rushing nowhere.

  I looked into the office, impelled by the curiosity that arrives before fear. Siccard had knelt down in front of Mathilde’s dead body. Her throat had been slit. For a moment it seemed as if she were covered in ants; tiny letters filled every inch of white skin, including her lips and eyelids, even the spiral of her ears. Customers were coming up the stairs, drawn by the screams and the blood.

  Under normal circumstances I would have fallen to my knees, but terror had numbed me to pain or surprise. If I wanted to escape the abbot’s men, I would have to leave before the police arrived to interrogate the employees-those on and off the books. Siccard was still holding the bills he had set aside for me. Wordlessly, I tore them from his grasp. He accepted without protest, as if his hands were no longer his own.

  Before I set off running, I covered Mathilde’s body with a blanket. Only the sole of her foot was left bare. Siccard took it in his hands and gently turned it from side to side, as if afraid he might break it. Then, in a quiet voice, for all of us who were there (for the others who had suddenly fallen silent, as well as for me as I made my way out), he read the final lines from the Book of Revelation.

  Flight

  I had the money in my hands, and I would leave Paris as soon as I gathered my things. Apart from losing my pursuers, I needed distance from Siccard House. As big as Paris may have been, Mathilde’s body lay in the office right next door.