God's Fool (21 page)

We walked slowly around the base, speechless, reverent as acolytes before the altar. On and on the pyramid rose—looking up, we could make out layer upon layer of hawks and herons, badgers and hedgehogs, squirrels and cats—a dusty edifice ascending through ever-smaller increments of feather and bone to sediments of mice and voles and shrews and, finally, heaped piles of finches and warblers, bats and thrushes, small hills of sparrows. Above it all—a touch of whimsy—swallows and butterflies, apparently suspended from the ceiling by hair-thin wires, seemed to swoop and flutter against the actual sky even as, behind them, living birds separated themselves off from their stationary brethren and, tossed by the wind, disappeared from view.

The sun appeared, blazing painfully from a cabinet window on the third balcony, bathing the south side of the gallery in pale, wintry light. The wooden walls instantly reddened; the furred mountain before us
seemed to stir slightly. So still was it that when my brother spoke, breaking the silence, I actually started. “We shouldn’t be here,” he said, uncertainly.

“Why not?” I said. “The door was open …”

“I know that.” He looked around. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant,” I said.

“I know you do.”

But we didn’t leave. No longer concerned about being discovered, or having to explain to the authorities how we came to be inside an establishment that, despite its unlocked doors, was obviously closed to the public, we began to walk around the perimeter of the room. I became aware of a strange, yellow smell, distinctly chemical yet not unpleasant. We wandered from case to case, past displays of walrus horns and monkey skulls and small, jewel like beetles on pins until we found ourselves, quite unexpectedly, by a door in the wall. The hall had grown dark again; high above our heads, rain was beating anxiously against the glass. All talk of leaving forgotten, we tried the door and, finding it unlocked, passed beneath a small, dark rectangle that suggested there had once been a sign in the wood above the portal.

The room we found ourselves in, though still of considerable size, seemed narrow and cramped in comparison to the soaring grandeur of the main hall. Ill lit by high, dusty windows, obviously unkempt, it stretched into the vague distance, crowded with a silent, hulking company of cabinets and display cases. Seeing them standing together in groups of two and three about the floor, I had the uncanny impression of having interrupted something, as though the shapes before me had only just frozen into their inanimate form. Indeed, for a moment I imagined I could still hear the dull, murmuring echo of their voices—the departing hubbub of the crowd—then all was silent.

Slowly, we walked over to the cabinet nearest to us. After a moment, we walked to the next. We couldn’t speak. It was as though our tongues had grown fat and strange in our mouths, as though our throats had decided to choke themselves off. In the first cabinet, set against a dark
velvet background, were the jewel like bones of seven tiny hands. Lovingly disarticulated, delicate as shells, some showed six digits, some seven; one, spreading in a miniature fan that could fit easily inside a man’s palm, a full eight. In the second cabinet a dried flower arrangement, dove-gray and dun, flax and wheat, framed an allegorical wilderness scene. At its center, atop a craggy hill of gallstones the color of rust, was a skull. At the base, reclining like a tiny bather in the sun, was a miniature human skeleton. In the bones of its right hand it grasped the papery wing of a moth.

If this had only been all, we might still have left the Musée de L’homme et la Nature disturbed but unscathed. But it was not.

It began in the third cabinet with a two-headed kitten (the left looking off to the side, the right licking its paw with a tiny pink tongue); next to it, suspended by wires, was a stuffed viper whose body, like the trunk of a tree, had divided two-thirds of the way down its length. The fourth cabinet showed what appeared to be the skeleton of a dog with the fully formed haunches of another extending from its side. “Oh my God,” I heard my brother whisper, “what
is
this place?” I shook my head, unable to speak. It was then I realized he was not looking at the dog at all.

In three cabinets facing each other at oblique angles were detailed anatomical drawings—portraits, really—of twins much like ourselves and yet at the same time horribly different: men and women who had melted into one another in ways one would not have thought possible. Here, as though they had run together at great speed, two young women had been fused face to face, neck to thigh. I understood immediately: They had never been able to turn away from one another. Chin to chin for life, they had died looking into each other’s eyes. Here were two boys, reclining on their backs, whose hips had simply, unbelievably, disappeared into one another, forming one, uninterrupted midsection. Though two pairs of withered, rudimentary legs extended from their sides, they would never walk, nor would it be possible for them to see each other except by raising themselves on their elbows. Here another pair, also boys, no more than six years old, had been smashed together side to side with such power that their ribs seemed grown together, their
stomachs one; though a single male organ could be seen between the central pair of legs, it seemed to belong to some third brother whose upper body had been lost in theirs.

It was the faces that held us, that kept us there for as long as they did. Faces so real, somehow, so human, it would be years before I would see their like—in the paintings of the masters, in the daguerreotypes that now and again would capture, as if by accident, the agony of our race: faces from some other, parallel world of experience, faces seemingly about to cry or absurdly smiling, ironic or ashamed, frozen in attitudes of stoicism and courage beyond my comprehension.

It was as we turned to leave that we saw him: a full-grown man—olive-skinned, almost handsome—staring out of a picture on the right-hand side of a double-door cabinet. With both hands, he was holding something that protruded directly out of his chest. Prepared though we were by this point to credit whatever our eyes showed us, it yet took a moment for us to realize that this something was another, smaller human being, or, rather, the waist and legs and feet of a human being—a half-grown child, apparently—whose upper body had seemingly been absorbed into his older brother’s.

It was not the horror of this that seared itself on my memory, nor the utter cruelty of the predicament. It was not the full-sized skeleton on the cabinet’s left side, which clearly showed that the little being had ended, as a recognizable human at any rate, at the waist; that the illusion had disintegrated into a chaos of bone—a bit of twisted spine thrusting, headless, through the brother’s ribs, a nub of an arm—only a short distance below the skin. Nor was it even the fact that this ghastly growth, this parasite (for this is what he was) had been dressed in well-fitting trousers and stockings and laced shoes. Even this I could have borne.

What I could not endure was the look on the older brother’s face: it was a look of unmistakable pride, unbowed and haughty. One strong arm reached across the little one’s thighs; the other supported him from beneath. Thus we were born, he seemed to be saying (though the other could never hear a word he said, nor think, nor breathe), and thus we will go on.

•     •     •

We turned and fled, past the cabinets in that ghostly anteroom, past a small wooden sign leaning sideways against the wall—
GALERIE DES ANOMALIES, MONSTRES ET PRODIGES
—our footsteps knocking hard and close against the stone, then fading into the vastness of the main gallery. We ran under the sound of the rain scattering itself against the glass dome and out into the thing itself, not even bothering to button our coats as our hair quickly plastered to our foreheads and our shirt fronts clung to our chests. The dog was gone. The warehouses disappeared. The streets grew tidier. The trees on either side rose and linked their branches over our heads, as though to protect us from the rain.

It took us an hour, maybe more. Did my brother know where we were going? Did I? Though neither of us said a word that entire time—not one word—I believe we both understood from the moment we turned and began to run that we really only had one place to go, which is why there were no arguments or moments of indecision as turn followed turn and the world grew familiar around us once more. Walking down her street at last was like seeing the windows of home—the same rise, the remembered trees … There was the stone fence we had cleared of snow with our hands. There we had walked arm in arm, huddled together against the cold. There was the carriage step I had lifted her onto in the midst of some joke or other (I could still remember the warmth of her breathing, the sweet weight of her body) from which she had made a pretty little speech and curtsied to her audience. My God, she had loved me. I knew that now. I could feel the rain running down my face. There was the house! After what seemed like a lifetime of wandering, foot-sore and soul-weary, sad to the core, the traveler had returned.

There was no one home. No curtains in the windows. At last the door was opened by a well-dressed elderly gentleman in spectacles, wearing a hat and coat as if on his way out. It was clear immediately: She was gone! “I’m afraid Mademoiselle Marchant left Paris three days ago … A message? I’m afraid not.” Did he know when she might return? That would be impossible to say. Nor was he at liberty to say where she had
gone. He had been retained for the express purpose of arranging for the removal of Mademoiselle Marchant’s things, no more.

He was not unkind. Seeing me blinking stupidly at the drops catching in my lashes, he stepped aside in the passage. We were soaked through. Would we like to step in out of the rain for a moment? He made rubbing motions, then hurried off, returning with a pair of towels. In one hand he carried a bottle; in the other, crossed stem to stem between his fingers, two small glasses. But I couldn’t drink. There was a strange pain in my chest. I looked around. There were the doors to the parlor that Claudine would swing open every morning to the light. How the sun would break in like a toppled column! There was the parlor, just as we had left it—the sofa and the armoire, the mahogany-and-horsehair chairs, the pianoforte on which she had played for us … I could hear her voice! It was impossible, impossible that she should be gone. The patterns of the rain, swimming over the furniture, made the room seem submerged.

And then, as though the weeks and months since I had seen her had suddenly come together and overwhelmed me, I began to cry. I didn’t make a scene. I just stood there like an idiot, my jaw clenched and the tears streaming out of my eyes and dribbling of my chin. When I asked, absurdly, whether we might have a moment alone in the drawing room, the man looked at me a moment, his head tipped slightly to the side, his lips pursed, then nodded and stepped out, closing the doors behind him.

She was there. I could smell her, hear her. I could feel her touch on my arm. I had never felt this kind of pain. It was as though my chest were caving in, crumbling inward like walls of sand under a rising tide. And then—I’m not ashamed to admit it—I walked around that parlor (a small madness) and kissed the things that had known her, one by one: the arms of the sofa and the pillows on which her head had rested, the book on the spindle-legged table which she had been reading, the silver candlestick holder she had bought in Spain. My brother said not a word, following me from point to point in that dark, watery room, kneeling quietly beside me while I kneeled before the sofa like a suitor proposing
to a ghost and then (out of some misplaced rapture, some terrible lack of her), pressed the red, embroidered cushion she had always held on her lap like a lover to my face.

I don’t know how long he had been in the doorway before we noticed him. We thanked him and turned to leave. “You are very welcome,” he said, his voice somehow gentler than before. He looked at me as we stood by the door. I had regained something of my composure. “I am sorry Mademoiselle Marchant was not here,” he said quietly. “I am sure she will be sorry she missed you.”

A kindness. We walked back into the rain, back to our lodgings. A week later, when Coffin and Hunter made the decision for us, we left Paris for London without an argument. We were never to see that city again.

For thirty years I asked anyone I met who had traveled to France if they had heard her name. But the moment had come and gone, and the years had buried us both.

IX.

We returned to London, once again enduring the long hours in the company of our unscrupulous guardians as we had on our arrival in Europe. Ah, but things had changed, this time around. Our companions, no longer flush with our early success, spoke hardly a word. The prevailing mood was one of sullen desperation; poverty fluttered along behind us like a rag caught in the carriage door.

Reflecting our straitened means, the wayside inns had grown small and grim in the six months since we had passed. Broken-roofed and silent at dusk, these places often had such a desolate air about them that it was only by the smell of the pigsties that we knew they had not been abandoned altogether. Clay-colored water stood in the rectangles of turned earth on either side of the walk. Two or three mossed and cracking steps and a short length of tilting rail (invariably peeling of fin sharp flakes of rust) led to the knockerless door.

It would be answered, night after night, by the same shapeless old codger in a hairy cap. There he would be, complete to the hanging flaps of skin, the wattled neck, the mouth, wrinkled and soft as a fallen apple, chewing on itself, working, working … Raising the lantern to reveal our faces, he would stare at us for a long moment through watery eyes as though trying to decide whether the reaper, perhaps, had begun doing his work by committee, then, turning about by degrees, lead the
way to a dusty railing hung with a pewter pot or dinner rag and up a creaking set of stairs.

Low, damp ceilings, tallow-stained walls decorated with small paintings invariably depicting some cheering scene from the Scriptures, a hearth that gave off volumes of smoke but no heat or light to speak of … these were the rooms to which we retired, night after night, after a meal of cold mutton and bread in a cellarlike room by the kitchen. And there they would be to welcome us: Abraham with the knife poised over the panicked Isaac; Lot’s wife forever turning, freezing into stone. With little else to look at, we would study them by the light of the candle: Isaac’s mouth, round and black like a hole in the canvas; Abraham’s bristling beard and horrible, canary-yellow robe; the rent in the sky through which, presumably, God’s voice was about to speak, staying the father’s hand. Lot hurried on with his companions, looking disconcertingly like a peddler in disguise; behind him, sowed by angels, the plain blossomed with fire.