The Painted Girls (27 page)
Authors: Cathy Marie Buchanan
“Antoinette, sweet child.” Her grip is like a vise. “You’ve got a heart big enough to cure what ails Marie.”
The lines of her brow are erased, her cheeks lifted up the tiniest little bit, her lips pulled into the most tender of smiles.
DEGAS AND THE SIXTH EXPOSITION OF THE INDEPENDENT ARTISTS
Although the catalogue lists only eight entries for Degas, the artist shows additional works, brought in yet again at the last minute. The statuette he first promised last year is again listed in this year’s catalogue but has not arrived. The glass case meant to shelter the statuette stands empty, waiting. This vitrine, Monsieur Degas, is not enough for me!
He offers exposition-goers portraits, scenes of the stage, laundresses, nudes, and a study of criminal man. In this remarkable study, employing only the meager tool of pastel, Degas captures Émile Abadie and Michel Knobloch—their wan and troubling faces, taken in the dull light of the criminal court. Only a keen observer could portray with such singular physiological sureness the animal foreheads and jaws, kindle the flickering glimmers in the dead eyes, render the yellow-green flesh on which is imprinted all the bruises, all the stains of vice. In titling the piece
Criminal Physiognomies
, Monsieur Degas makes clear his intent. A masterwork of observation, the study is informed by the findings of science in regard to innate criminality. Émile Zola, with his argument for a scientific literature, one where the inescapable forces of heredity and environment determine human character, has met his match among the painters.
I
walk the pavements I have walked a hundred times before: the rue Blanche to the rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, where I make a habit of turning to see the église de la Sainte-Trinité. Sometimes I bother walking to the far side of the church and looking up at the statue called
Temperance
. Everyone says the main figure, who is lifting a fruit out of the reach of the babies at her feet, was chiseled to appear just like the Empress Eugénie. And those times when I have looked at the fat thighs of the babies, their rounded bellies, their grabbing hands, I have seen the empress as a mother, teaching her little ones about gluttony. But today, rather than seeking that lesson being taught, I turn away. Today I would find only a stingy mother protecting the bit of fruit she wants for herself.
Usually I pass through the Opéra’s back gate, but today I continue past. Out front I look up at the writhing, naked flesh of the stone dancers on the eastern side. Antoinette saw pleasure, bliss. Not me, though, not now. The dancers’ faces radiate wickedness, call out to passersby in the street, “Look, here. Glimpse what is to be found inside.”
From the boulevard des Capucines, I will turn into the rue Cambon, a quiet street linking the grand boulevards to the Jardin des Tuileries, a street with little balconies held up by the fanciest of stone scrolls and not a single shutter with peeling paint or hanging lopsided from a hinge. In the rue Cambon, outside the grand door of Monsieur Lefebvre’s apartment house, I will suck in my lip and ring the bell, calling the concierge, like I have so many Tuesdays before heading to Madame Dominique’s class. Just thinking about it, I feel a flutter in my belly, bats opening up wings. I was told to stay away. But this morning I opened up our lodging room door to Monsieur LeBlanc’s great belly. I thought about the small bottle of absinthe, bought with my earnings, how already it was gone, but there was no remorse about eight sous spent, not when Monsieur LeBlanc is owed for a full month.
Maman was already off to the washhouse and so it was just me and Charlotte, left there trembling when he was gone. “It’s going to be all right,” she said. “Tomorrow Antoinette gets home.”
“Like I said, she isn’t coming back.”
“Well, she is.”
On such a morning I did not have the strength to explain. Instead I thought about lying down, the emptiness of sleep, but already I spread my fingers wide under Maman’s mattress and her bottle was not there. Charlotte slipped her hand into my own, and when I looked, she smiled up at me, the put-on smile of a ballet girl patting another’s back in a wing. It does not help, this small girl’s efforts to keep me from wallowing upon our mattress. Yesterday she left the small stub of a candle on my satchel as a gift. And last week when she came home from her morning class at the Opéra to find me still lying there, staring at the ceiling—the water stains, the lath where the plaster had fallen away—she crawled under the linens. My head was aching and cobwebby, and she put her fingers in my hair, like Antoinette used to do. “Don’t,” I said, and she took her hand away.
“Do you want to hear how Madame Théodore’s petticoat fell onto the floor?”
“No.”
“Are you sick, Marie?”
I felt I could heave into a bucket, like my tongue was made of paste. “No.”
“Maman feels better after taking a bit of water.” She got up, dipped a cup into the zinc bucket and held the water out to me.
I took the water because there was pleading in her eyes and wondered when it was Charlotte turned kind. I put the cup to my lips, but for me there was no comfort in water slipping down into my throat. Still it was clear as glass, even in my cobwebby head, about allowing a boy to go to the guillotine for nothing more than telling a lie. I was the one who set loose the blade, and only absinthe took the clearness away. Only absinthe let me forget.
S
tanding there in the doorway, listening to Monsieur LeBlanc huffing and puffing his way down the narrow stairs, Charlotte gave my hand a little squeeze. “I was saving it for a surprise,” she said, “with Antoinette coming home tomorrow and everything.” Her face grew hopeful. “Saving what?”
“Yesterday Monsieur Mérante came into the practice room in the middle of the barre and called out a chain of leaps and pirouettes. He made us line up, and I waited like everyone else.” She gave a smile like an imp’s. “We showed him one at a time. Then he said, ‘A cartwheel’ and pointed to me, and I made one, and he pointed again. ‘Our new acrobat,’ is what he said.”
She bounced on her toes, and her hands were knotted tight together in front of her chest. I knew what was coming, that she got a part in
Le Tribut de Zamora.
But I did not muster the will to put my arms around her shoulders and pull her in tight.
She made a little jig. “Jocelyn, another petit rat, she was the acrobat, but she got the white pox. Her fever broke, but she’s spotted worse than a Dalmatian dog.”
I took her face in my hands and in a hard voice said, “Stroke of luck,” which was not nice or even true, not when she was always pushing our little dining table to the corner of the room to clear a path for a string of piqué pirouettes.
“Tomorrow I debut.” She made a little curtsey. “Antoinette can come, and I get three francs for leaping across the stage.” She left her arms opened up wide, embracing all the goodness she found in the world. I would go to Monsieur Lefebvre, collect my thirty francs. A chain of steps repeated a hundred times grows to be as easy as breathing air.
My last time calling at his apartment, even in the doorway I knew the visit would be different from the rest. He stood there, crossing and uncrossing his arms, looking me up and down, instead of moving aside to let me in. “A glass of wine?” he said after a while and stepped out of the way. “Or have you already had enough?” He did not say it nicely, like there was a chance of him pouring me a drop, but I was not fearful, no. Absinthe made me a little brave.
I walked toward the screen, careful to keep down whatever drunkenness he had seen, but before I was even halfway there, he grabbed my arm and pulled me the couple of steps to the sofa. He shoved me onto it, and then he was on top of me, grinding his hardness into my thigh and digging his chin into my shoulder and kneading whatever flesh he could clutch through my blouse. The whole time he was saying “whore” and “drunken whore” and “Jezebel” through clamped-shut teeth.
I did not open up my mouth to say, “Stop, Monsieur Lefebvre. Stop,” or knot my legs together or wedge my hands over my breast. I swallowed the promise of everlasting damnation of the soul and thought about the day Marie the First made me flinch from his finger on my naked spine in Monsieur Degas’s workshop. Was it the trick of a wicked angel lying in wait, working to gain my trust? I had not said the Act of Contrition in a hundred years, but still a line about the perfection we were to seek swam up into my head: “This day I shall try to imitate Thee; to be mild, chaste, devoted, patient, and charitable.” But I was none of those things. I knew it in my heart, and Marie the First knew it, too. By his moaning I could tell that with a slow count to twenty he would be done, and it came into my mind that this was easier than posing and waiting and wondering how it was that time was so slow to pass. When I got to eight, his head lifted away from my shoulder, and his face twisted into ugliness, and then he went limp, his whole body. I pushed him to the side and wriggled out from underneath.
Right away he stood up and turned his back, shoving into his trousers the shirttails that had come loose. Then he took my allowance from the drawer. “Enough of you, your scheming,” he said, pitching three ten-franc notes to my feet. “Just stay away.” His voice broke, and it was at that moment the harsh tang of fear, like the skin of a walnut, came into my mouth.
C
lose to the corner where I will turn onto Monsieur Lefebvre’s fancy street, my feet grow sluggish. So what if I collect enough to pay the rent owed? I put off by a week or a month or a year the misery steamrolling my way. Cesare Lombroso and the rest measuring the heads of the criminals in the jails and the skulls of the ones that already visited the guillotine, they would say, “Go ahead. Get your thirty francs. Keep yourself warm another few nights. But it won’t change a single thing. Still you have the face of an ape.” Of course I struck the match. Of course I have blood on my hands, absinthe on my tongue, Monsieur Lefebvre’s pawing hands on my skin. But is it the same for Charlotte? Was wretchedness coming to her, same as it came to Gervaise, no matter that she scrubbed linens like a slave, no matter that she saved close to every sou, tried to become what she was not. Charlotte was born of the same stock as me, as Antoinette, with her own apish looks, her fate of becoming a thieving coquette already jailed for stealing seven hundred francs. Charlotte knows the same reeking courtyard, the same foul gutters, the same slummy corner of Montmartre where we put down our heads at night. The same selfish mother, who does not bother with me, does not bother with her. Monsieur Zola would say Charlotte does not have a lick of a chance. But he would not have taken into account her face like a cherub’s, her rosebud lips, her dainty chin. There is no mark of a beast, and Cesare Lombroso would agree. He would say there was no feature hinting at a criminal life for Charlotte. I push a leaden foot out in front.
Ahead of me a gentleman, escorting a lady with a lavish bustle of indigo silk, drops her arm. He opens the door of a plain building with windows running across the front. She dips her tiny, perfect chin as she passes inside. The door falls closed, and the six posters covering it up, all exactly the same, catch my eye. The gentleman, his lady in her indigo silk, are visiting the sixth exposition of the independent artists, the show where Monsieur Degas said he would put on display his statuette of me.
It was Monsieur Lefebvre I was thinking of this morning when I put on my grey silk and only the smallest smear of tinted pomade. But now a tiny sliver of me latches on to the idea that, dressed up like a lady, I was meant to come upon the exposition in the boulevard des Capucines. I follow the pair down a corridor leading to a series of small rooms with low ceilings and walls crammed with pictures, some hung so low even a child would have to stoop to get a look. In the corner, a gentleman with hair bristling from his ears looks up from a small notepad, letting me know I am interrupting his peace. The light is poor and with my eyes still adjusting from the day outside, it takes a minute to figure out the exposition is no different from the one I already saw. Absinthe drinkers in a café—tattered clothes, unkempt beards, sunken eyes. A naked woman sewing on a bed—rumpled linens, sagging breasts, hands red with work. One signed by Raffaëlli, the other by Gauguin.
The woman in the indigo silk steps back from the wall to get a better look, and with the room so cramped, her bustle brushes up against the wall behind. The gentleman with the ear hair clicks his tongue. She looks across the room, doubtful, to her gentleman, and he makes the face of a boy bewildered about tying up his shoes.
Upon entering the fourth, a room with yellow walls, I see the statuette, like before, in Monsieur Degas’s workshop, except that the girl, who is me, is inside a vitrine. My immediate thought is that the vitrine is not right, not with the way it makes the statuette look like a specimen, something for scientists. There are three other people in the room: an old man with a woman, who has to be his daughter or his nurse, and a man with a cravat knotted with one tail long and the other short and paint staining the beds of his fingernails. With him studying the statuette and rubbing the scruff of his chin, I turn to the wall at his back, hiding my face. Hanging there are a dozen pictures belonging to Monsieur Degas. A singer at a café concert, one with a vulgar face, leaning over, her open mouth and plunging neckline taunting the men crowding the stage. A woman, bent over a hot iron. Another woman, this time, lumpy and naked, scratching at her backside in what has to be the salon of a brothel. Each is caught being who she is in everyday life. I look hard at the woman scratching away. She is exactly herself in the picture, not some other woman, one made up by the men usually visiting her.
I look over my shoulder. The man with dirty fingernails is still transfixed, still stroking his bit of scruff. He moves in a slow circle, taking in the statuette from in front and behind. Between his eyebrows is the crevice that comes with concentrating hard, but nothing says what he thinks of the wax girl. His back toward me, he folds his arms, spreads his feet, settling in. I take the chance to look past him to the wax face, the face that is mine. I see a girl, who is not pretty, looking forward, a girl a little bold.
The transfixed man goes back to circling, and I turn back to the wall, this time to a pastel. I let out a little gasp to see Émile Abadie alongside Michel Knobloch, each caught in profile in the prisoners’ box at the court. The boys in the picture, by their looks, anyone would say they are beasts. No one would guess a mistake was made. But I know.
It was not easy walking home the day of the trial. A lady dropped her gentleman’s arm and twisted around, gawking at my face as she passed. The eyes of a maître d’ out front of a café landed upon my muzzle and, too quick, glanced away. Same for an old woman, sweeping the street. A boy stuck out his tongue on catching sight of me. I walked with my face tilted toward the ground after that, turned my head away from anyone coming toward me in the street. I told myself I would go to Abadie’s attorney, explain about the calendar, do what I should have done before. Then I told myself it would not do a speck of good, because I knew I would not go, and how else was I to continue on, knowing I did not have the bravery, the heart, the goodness to seek out Monsieur Danet? I stopped on the Pont Neuf, leaned out over the stone wall of a little balcony jutting from the bridge. The light was soft and yellow, and the Seine was like a ribbon of golden green. I leaned out further, hips against the stone wall. I let my feet come up from the sidewalk beneath, balancing, until a gentleman put his hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s colder than it looks.” I sprung to standing straight. “Go get yourself a cup of chocolate.” He held out a one-franc coin, and I snatched. Up ahead, on the right bank of the river, I could see a café. With its view of the Seine, it would not be cheap. Still, a full franc was more than enough for a glass of absinthe.
