The Green Muse (14 page)

 

I
N A DIM,
recessed entryway only a few blocks away from where we had found the last body (which had turned out to be that of a M. Reventin, a mid-­level banking executive with a wife and five children), was the naked body of a very young woman. She lay straight on her back on the hard cobblestones, her hands prayerful at her breasts, her legs soldier-­ straight, with the feet perfectly tilted together at the toes.

In the semi-­darkness of my dark room I remembered how I had knelt in the damp. It was too familiar: The only difference was her nudity, which I had hastened to cover with the sheet I always carry in the event of such a need.

The girl had probably been a prostitute. The neighborhood was notoriously bad, worse even than Belleville. Of course, Mme. DuPrey had been murdered in the same neighborhood, but this girl was so young, and had been enticed or threatened into a doorway.

I was sure that pleasure, and only pleasure, had been the motive for this killing. There had been no reason, no sense to leaving her body displayed as it was. But I began to change my opinion as I developed her photographs and begin to gain at least a rudimentary understanding of this crime.

This girl had been dead so little time that I guessed her expression to be genuine: She had died both surprised and furious. There were numerous cuts to both her hands and her left arm; her right hand was unmarred, and I felt the sharp sting of tears to see a small knife lying some two feet to the right of the body. I had seen it at the scene, but I seldom let myself feel at the scene. Now I wanted to take my mind off the pain of watching that tiny knife swim into view, lying so pathetically on the cobblestones away from the body, so obviously too little, too late. She did not look older than eighteen; why was she out alone, with no one nearby to protect her? I knew this to be a sentimental question devoid of sense, but I found myself becoming angered nevertheless.

Had I eaten today? Normally I could hold myself at arm's length or longer than that, if that was what it took to get the job done. But tonight I had no screen between myself and the suffering of others; I had no skin. Sometimes I became so immersed in my work that I actually forgot to eat, and I knew that such enthusiasm was not a credit to me but only youthful exuberance and the basics of an impractical nature made manifest. Maybe Capt. Bezier was right and I was a poet at heart: Only a poet would be so foolish as not to eat! But no, I had had at least a good breakfast and a substantial dinner today. My pain was the manifestation of a sensitivity I could no more change than I could the color of my eyes or hair. In any event, I wished, for the first time in my career, that I had chosen to aim only for success as a portrait photographer. But then I resolved to redouble my efforts to understand and help to solve the murder of the poor girl in front of me.

I gently released the other photographic papers from their glass plates even as I bathed the first in the solution I had mixed. I would add a toner, either of gold or selenium, after I was finished, in order to stabilize against fading. As my hands performed the familiar actions I wondered what this victim had been to her murderer. Capt. Bezier says that the identity of the victim gives us the identity of the killer every time. This girl: What had she been to him? Because I was certain the murderer was male. My poor victim was not a small girl, she was big-­boned and strong, and she had been fighting for her life. All her cuts seemed to have been delivered by someone of more than average height; it is a pity that I have seen so many knife wounds working for Capt. Bezier that I can guess at the height of the murderer from the angle of the cuts.

Certainly her belongings had been stolen, but that did not necessitate stripping the body. Perhaps she had been violated, either in life or after, but that too was unlikely, given that the traffic in the area that time of night was not so sparse as to leave time for more than killing, then stripping and positioning the body.

I applied the toner and began cleaning up my workspace.

No time to do more than kill, strip, and position: So simply murdering a woman was not the motive. Violating a woman was not the motive. The last body I had photographed had been male, and not stripped, but still positioned in exactly the same way. So was that the motive? To position bodies? No; There was one thing more the two had had in common: Neither had been found with any identification. So the motive had been to position bodies that could not immediately be identified. It did not matter whether the victim was a man or a woman, only that he or she be taken off-­guard. I was more than ever convinced the crime was committed by not one but two ­people. Yes, the victim was almost certainly a prostitute, so a man could easily approach and kill her, he did not need help with that, but the body would have had to be stripped quickly and effectively, more effectively, I imagined, than the man who had murdered her could do without assistance, as I was convinced he had probably been hurt by my poor victim's little knife. Or perhaps I just hoped he had.

A woman. For the first victim, a woman to lure him, a man to kill him. For the second, a man to lure and kill, a woman to assist in the part that made no sense. Why position the bodies in such a way? And why remove all identification?

I took one last look at my lady's face, snuffed the candle, and turned to leave the room. As I closed the door and made ready for bed, I thought I knew the answer to at least the second question. But it likely would make no difference what I knew or thought I knew. Capt. Bezier did listen to me sometimes. But this, I feared, would be impossible for a man like him to accept.

I knew I owed it to both victims; but I knew in my heart that it was the face of the girl that would prompt whatever effort I put forth with Capt. Bezier. As she had prompted all my musings here tonight, watching her pain come alive in the darkroom.

Two bodies positioned the same way. Stripped of identification, their logical destination would be the Paris Morgue. A museum of the dead, I had said to Capt. Bezier. Where the public was invited to view the bodies, as art is viewed in a museum. Who creates material for museums? Artists. Who would create material for the Paris Morgue? Artists of death.

As I lay sleepless, looking at the full moon out the window, I thought again: artists of death.
I will not fail you,
I thought, even as my thoughts began to drift.
Life failed you many times, that much is clear, but I will not fail you.

 

T
HE
GIRL WAS
a sensation at the Morgue. She hadn't been beautiful in life, but she was beautiful in death. Naked, covered only in a white sheet. V and I had taken her clothing, and her cheap rings, and dropped them in the Seine, although my memory of that was vague, clouded by more than absinthe and adrenaline. I had not asked V if she had taken the knife, because I knew she thought I had; perhaps I had. My arm in its sling attracted no attention, because how could anyone know that she had cut her attacker? As I waited outside the Morgue it seemed as if my white sling were a shroud. Since I had killed the girl I had been unable to feel anything. I felt dead. Even V seemed only half-­real, insubstantial as a remembered dream even as I held her in my arms.

I stood on line smelling the orange peel V was scraping delicately against her teeth, catching sugar on her tongue. I had drunk absinthe with my morning tea, and the air felt like wet flower petals against my skin. The smell of citrus was a golden halo around V's head. She really didn't seem to care about all the ­people on line, about what they were going to see. About what we were going to see. I could feel V's heart beating; I could feel the girl's blood sliding down my arm like flower petals. V's blood pulsed slowly, like a ticking clock. When a little girl ran up to me and said, “What's your name, Mister?” I shrieked. V put her hand on my arm, like the landing of a bird. The little girl's mother came and pulled the child away, with many apologies.

The line moved forward with a lurch, and next I knew I was standing in front of the glass wall of her tomb. She reclined, her head against the back of a slanted board, covered in white. Her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly open. How had death made her so lovely? I became aware of all the activity in that vast arena; a moment ago that girl and I had been alone. In the dark, in the recess of a dirty doorway.

The crowd moved and pulsed around me like a single creature, voracious, unconscious. I saw that V was not looking at the dead girl at all. She was watching the crowd. The dead girl was nothing to her: The crowd was her creation. It was an animal that ate with its eyes and knew nothing, a creature whose appetite V whetted with death and watched now as it stuffed and sated itself on death. The women drew closer to their men, they took their arms. Their eyes glowed, and the men took advantage of their fear, which looked like lust, to put their arms around their waists, to touch their skin through silk or cotton. As I had touched Tabby's sweet curve, even as I killed her.

My love watched with her cat's eyes and Mona Lisa smile. I knew the kind of sex that we would have at home. But I was the one who had killed. Even V did not know that I had kissed this dead body. I took V's hand; I looked at her lovely face. She was rapt, she had found her heaven. She smiled without really looking at me.

Seeing her pleasure took away everything—­the blood, the thud of the dying body, the pain in my arm and shoulder. I hadn't realized until that moment how afraid I had been of that girl and her knife and her desperate determination to live. Looking at her now I loved her a little: I had loved her a little while she was trying to stop me from killing her. V turned her smile full on me, and I realized that she knew, knew it all, everything I was thinking and had thought.

“Perhaps I should have let you have her,” she whispered to me now, rising on her toes to reach my ear. The crowd made a murmur like a cat's growl at my back.

“No,” I said aloud. “I like it better this way.” The man next to me jostled my wounded arm as a way of getting me to move. I didn't want to say good-­bye to Tabby; it was like leaving a lover. V knew I'd lied, and she liked that, although I didn't know why.

“We have seen enough,” she said, and we moved on into the rippling fur of the crowd.

 

A
PPARENT
LY ONE CAN
find at least the semblance of normalcy under almost any circumstances, provided a predictable routine is established. I wake in the morning aware that I am in Paris; and then the dreary knowledge of how far I am from the reality of my dreams sets in, sudden and heavy, and for a moment I am incapacitated by grief and cannot move. But every morning a pair of mourning doves croons outside my window, and each time their crooning soothes me, and I am myself again. I am in Paris, and although it is not the Paris I imagined, my life is neither truly difficult nor even too dull. I am, after all, one of the hysterics the great Dr. Charcot has chosen to be, perhaps, a regular performer on a stage of which I know both more and less than I would like. Surely I am not to be trotted out, over and over, on the stage of the Amphitheatre as though I were a new patient each time. But I have been given a journal; I have been given ink. Rewards for a future of good behavior, I know that. And I know that Dr. Charcot favors some patients over others.

Oh, I am incorrigible! To even hope to be favored! What would Maman think? But dear Maman is not here, and even if she were she could not comprehend what my life is now, nor what it is doing to me: A subtle shift and change is occurring even now in my character, in my heart and my soul, and I do not yet know where it will lead. But I am, for better or worse, full of anticipation. I long to find out what this new life will bring.

They make you endure a great deal here in the interest of getting well. I know I ought not complain, but, oh, it is difficult to be grateful! I am suffering from green disease. I wish I could convince the great doctor that all I am suffering from is being in love. All! Does Louis even know where I am? It is doubtful, for what family would advertise their daughter's being taken to the madhouse? And so Louis must think that I just left, without a good-­bye. For him it is over already, and I am trapped here knowing that. Knowing that he leaves his shop each night and goes home to his fat wife and thinks of me, I know, less and less. Because my candle always burned more brightly than his. Always. I did not know it then. I know it now.

Did Louis ever love me? Perhaps I was just one more girl awestruck by his accomplishments, his erudition, his delicate hands and poet's eyes. Perhaps I was the girl he will long for forever. I can believe anything, since I cannot know.

But there is little here to keep my mind on the present. I should like hard work now, to be waking early to milk and care for the cows, to be maintaining the vegetable garden with my mother in the afternoons after my mending, to be cleaning out the chicken coop. I would like to work my body to exhaustion, that my mind might do its healing while I was thus occupied.

But I have been told that such a sickness as I have is best treated with rest. Rest for the body as well as the mind. I am left a long time in my room. And oh, irony of ironies, the very vice the discovery of which sent me to this place, that very evil sometimes comes to torment me where I lay healing in my bed. It is as if my body, with its own wisdom, feels that self-­pollution is a valid, in fact, the valid means of dispersing the humors that combine to cause my sleeplessness and despair. And oh, that no one ever sees this journal! For I have given in to this impulse more than once, and to my everlasting shame have found it to be of more help than all the hydrobaths in Paris.

But I have not written about the water cure, as I set out to do. Nor of my peculiar diet, specially chosen to suit my circumstances. Every afternoon I am taken for cool, short baths, including local effusions, which means they drip or spray water on particular parts of my body, and the water is always ice. I am dipped wearing only my shift into a chipped tub set in the middle of the room, and afterward subjected to vigorous friction, applied by two disinterested female attendants. Before I am even dry I must put on my clothing and go out, weather permitting, for my exercises. Such silly things to call being rubbed with some towels and taking a brisk walk!

Adelaide tells me that one of the major symptoms of green disease is an overly pale complexion. Her skin is perfect porcelain. I have heard that a girl can catch a good husband for herself just on the strength of such skin. I do hope they cannot cure her skin! My own is brown whatever the season; I have asked Adelaide if my face is dark and she says no quite emphatically, but my arms are still as brown as they always were at home.

I am fed a strict vegetarian diet, which at least includes yogurt and cheeses, else I would become far too thin. I am told that I have a poverty of the blood, and that iron in particular is to be avoided, and I am given a dreadful concoction to drink every morning that Adelaide swears is sheep's blood and cod liver oil.

Adelaide knows all about it. She seems to feel no shame at all at suffering from chlorosis: She has told me proudly, more than once, that green disease is caused by disappointment in love only. She has not guessed my secret vice. I even suspect she would not care! I do not know what I would do without Adelaide.

My schedule and Adelaide's coincide a great deal, as do those of all the more-­favored hysterics, so we take our exercise walks at the same time in the largest courtyard.

I am told that the hospital houses almost exclusively those who cannot afford to be housed elsewhere. Adelaide says that the exceptions are those who promise well as hysterics, although what she can mean by that I really still do not know, and I will not tell her how desperately I want to know. Adelaide does not always answer my questions, having jumped so far ahead of my original thought by the time I can formulate one that she has sometimes quite lost me. Her quickness of mind is nothing short of astonishing, and it is a pity to see it wasted here.

Oh, I sound so bitter when I write about La Salpêtrière! I cannot forget that first, interminable walk to the Amphitheatre. I was barely conscious, I was so afraid. I was afraid all the time, then. Of the locked door of my room, of the attendants, of the silence. I was afraid of the view outside my window; I was particularly afraid of Rosalie, who often screams obscenities regarding the Magdalene.

I can almost laugh at Rosalie already, although of course I pity her terribly; but her imprecations no longer make me want to cry myself. Of course Adelaide thinks me silly for both fear and pity; she cries out like Rosalie but makes it about cows and chickens! The first time I was appalled, but I soon realized that although she is a skilled mimic, Adelaide is incapable of actual malice, or even of thinking truly evil thoughts of others. It is just that her natural exuberance carries her away.

And I realize that she is continually trying to calm me, seeing in me a spirit more delicate than her own, and therefore in more need of reassurance. And truly, I do become more comfortable here day by day, although that thought is not comforting in the least.

Y
ESTERDA
Y
I
STOOD
uncertain at the entrance to the courtyard. The courtyard is approximately fifty feet square. There is a high stone wall, with forget-­me-­nots and Johnny-­jump-­ups in the chinks. There are flagstones, large and unevenly placed. There are huge old rosebushes, ten feet high and full of deadwood, spanning the walls on two sides. There is a short flight of stone steps leading up to a stout oaken door that does not ever open; it looks as though no one has even tried to open it in decades. I do not know how old La Salpêtrière is: This courtyard could be a hundred years old, or as old as the fairy tale it seems to be part of; it is a place most unreal. There is even a swing, held upright by wooden posts, that sits square in the middle of the courtyard, and strange it is indeed to see grown women sitting and swinging like little children, without modesty or restraint. I sometimes wonder if I will try it myself one day; I would like to!

Women wander about in undisciplined order, standing, sitting, staring. or sometimes even spinning wherever they happen to be. Rosalie goes to the same corner every day and has the same conversation with the bees that buzz about the rosebush growing there. There is the young woman who does not speak, the one I felt so bad for frightening; her name is Lucille, and it is she who spins, sometimes for minutes and minutes and minutes, a look of vacant joy on her child's face. I am the one who stands, for the most part: I look at the sky. I look at the sky and sometimes I do not think a single thing for what seems like hours.

Yesterday I walked straight over to the small patch of pansies that grows against the wall. If I were on the lane outside my home I would have picked one and examined the stripes on the petal: seven for consistent love; nine, a changing heart. Thick lines to the right, prosperity. I stood, and the lane and the girl that stood on the lane were equally distant from me, and I knelt and picked a petal without even noting the color. And stood in the sun afraid to look at it.

Then Adelaide comes bounding out into the courtyard like the only living thing here, and I am Augustine again, and I have a friend to talk with.

“Augustine”! Adelaide never seems sad anymore when I see her. “What are you doing?” she asked, and I almost cried, I almost laughed: “What am I doing? What would you have me do, Adelaide, in this place?” I asked her, but she was not affronted in the least.

“I would learn to dance,” she said. “Dr. Charcot would like for you to learn to dance. I heard him talking.”

“Whatever are you saying, Adelaide?” I was frightened to think of Dr. Charcot talking about me; I was afraid to think of being so much in his mind that he would speak of me.

“I heard him talking to one of the other doctors,” said Adelaide.

I felt the petal damp in my hand. What did they say? I felt my pulse quicken and the familiar globe rise in my throat.

“He said that you showed great promise. Oh, look over the wall. There's a storm coming.”

“Adelaide, please tell me. At what do I show great promise?”

She turned with one arm still in the air, raised toward the lowering clouds that had not yet covered the sun.

“At performing! They did not say that, of course. But that is what they meant. ‘She shows great promise in the area of hysterical posturing.' ”

I had to smile at how well she captured the doctor's sententious drawl. But my palms were sweating now, and there were sudden dancing lights at the periphery of my vision.

“I do not know what you mean, Adelaide. What is this posturing he spoke of? How can I show promise at something when I do not even know what it is?” I could hear my voice rising in panic. Adelaide put her hand on my arm, and my heart, which had been beating so out of time, halted, for so long that I thought it might never start up again, then I was simply breathing, and Adelaide's hand was on my arm.

“He thinks you make a fine hysteric, that is all. I would take advantage of that if I were you. A girl could go very far in this place if she is a fine hysteric. I haven't the talent for it. I've tried, but my arms will not stay as I arrange them, and I will smile at the wrong moment. But you, he said you were ‘naturally' . . . what was it? ‘Naturally expressive.' What else? Hmm. ‘With exemplary extension of the extremities!' That was it. Exemplary extension of the extremities.”

“But Adelaide, what on earth does that mean?”

“I have no idea, my darling.” And she was gone, running like a schoolgirl back inside as the clouds crept over the wall.

I looked down at my palm. The petal was bent but not broken. And I counted five veins across its purple width: five lines radiating out from the center: hope founded on fear.

A
FEW DAYS
later I spoke with Adelaide about our conversation in the courtyard. I knew she had what I needed to know: She had, after all, posed for Dr. Charcot. We were sitting in the Day Hall, the courtyard being lashed by summer rain. Lucille had screamed upon being told she could not go out today, and been taken away in fetters. So I was sad, and the warmth of the fire (for it is always, always cold in here) seemed as far away as freedom. But Adelaide could never bear to see me without a smile.

“If you want to convince the Good Doctor that you are a bona fide hysteric, you must have a story, Augustine,” she told me intently, grasping my hand softly and whispering, although the attendants were across the room and paying no attention whatsoever to us. “My parents may not have known the extent of my involvement with François, but I made certain the Good Doctor did! Drama is necessary if you are to succeed in this place. And I tell you, you will succeed! I will see to it. I have told you, the hysterics receive compensation—­not in money, certainly, but do you think I could charm the attendants into giving me books if I could not pose? I mean, of course I could, but would the Good Doctor allow it? No, he would not. You can get your own books; you can get pudding! You can get a journal.” I had not told her that I had already received a journal and been assured books, as well as visitors. I knew that Adelaide had suffered the ordeal of the Amphitheatre just as I had, and that for it she had received no books, no journal, no pudding. She had worked hard to gain Dr. Charcot's favor, and I would never hurt so dear a friend with such unnecessary knowledge.

“So,” she said, leaning forward conspiratorially. “What shall it be?” She must have seen something in my face, but fortunately she did not recognize it for what it was. “I know!” she exclaimed. “A rape!”

“Adelaide!”

“Oh, all right. You were seduced by your cousin. I know he plied you with drink. You did not know what it was! Because it was absinthe. The Green Fairy. Yes, absinthe. Do you know how it is mixed and drunk?”

I did. I had read about it. So, it seemed, had Adelaide.

“He put extra sugar in it. It is so bitter without a lot of sugar, no matter how cold the water or fine the make of the liquor.”