My uncle’s house was in absolute darkness when I arrived; he was horrified by unnecessary expenses, and all expenses were unnecessary. The maid had a candlestick but was forbidden to light it. She held it high, as if it were actually capable of dispersing shadows in hallways crammed with the furniture and paintings that were sometimes received as payment for transport. Identical statues, set in different places around the house, gave guests the impression they were lost in a maze. We finally reached a small room at the top of some stairs. I waited until the maid was gone before I lit a candle, all the while afraid the glare would bounce from mirror to mirror until it found and woke maréchal Dalessius.
Surrounding me were things that had belonged to my dead parents, lost in the sinking of the Retz when I was a boy. The ship had earned a place in navigation history: only four days had passed from the time it was launched until it sank. Those objects, slightly damp and mostly broken, looked like wreckage from a ship. But they were the only proof-other than me-that my parents had ever existed. Looking out from a picture in a splintered frame, they were serious and distant, as if they knew what awaited them in the port and the fog.
There was barely enough space for the bed. The room was so disorganized it seemed to hide an agenda: my uncle hoped I would come face-to-face with that sad museum, shed a few easy tears, and run away never to return.
I went looking for him the next morning, afraid I might actually find him. The cook told me he had left early, long before dawn, as was his custom; now he merely watched my every move from an enormous portrait. As I devoured everything the cook set on the table-very little indeed-I studied the message for the bishop. I was tempted to open it but didn’t dare: there were so many wax seals it would have taken days to re-create them.
The bishop had retired to Arnim Palace (a Dominican abbey for the last twenty years) when he first fell ill. Certain orders were vehemently opposed to this decision: they did not want a bishop cut off from the city by high perimeter walls. The Dominicans, however, had known how to negotiate with Rome and became the protective guardians of a bishop ever more saintly and closer to death.
The estate in Arnim was also home to another famous guest: Silas Darel. Although few had seen him, and authorities within the order refused to confirm or deny his presence, it was commonly held that he lived and worked there. Pages written by his hand were highly prized rarities on the manuscript market and often fetched a higher price than works from the Venetian school of calligraphy. Rumors were rife among my colleagues: Darel was no longer able to hold a quill; he worked with transparent ink; he only wrote in blood. No one knew anything concrete about him. The Dominicans kept him closeted away, like a prisoner, in some secret room in the palace.
I presented my credentials at the door and made it clear I was no ordinary messenger; I was a court calligrapher and was to personally deliver the message to someone in a position of authority. A monk led me up stairs and down corridors to the library.
I had heard of Abbot Mazy; he had recently been involved in a controversy regarding the veracity behind the lives of saints. Mazy held that the only proof of true martyrdom was that the lesson be clear. There was no point in searching for historical truths in far-off times if the message was of no contemporary value. The story was to accurately depict events, through what the proponent of the theory called the moral consistency of the story. His opponent, a Franciscan, proposed that all martyrology be reviewed to discard any cases in which there were doubts. Mazy responded that faith should always represent an effort; there was no merit whatsoever in believing what is reasonable.
The abbot was pale and his skin so white he seemed to glow in the dark. At fifty years of age, he was at once a boy and an old man. He had lost his right hand when young, and questions about the accident only infuriated him. He was sitting at a table in the library, a long, sharp penknife, several quills, and pieces of paper in front of him. He gestured to indicate that I should open the message. I used his knife and clumsily cut my index finger.
“There’s a postscript. I always start there. People write what’s least important in the body of the letter, what’s more important they hurriedly note in the postscript, and what’s truly essential they never write at all. I see it mentions your skill as a calligrapher. Do you have work?”
“I thought I would apply at the courts.”
“Don’t sell your pen so cheaply. Did you know we have our own calligraphy school? Silas Darel is our master, but he speaks to no one: he has kept a vow of silence for the last twelve years. All he does is write, shut away in an office. Have you heard of him? He designed our script.”
We had been taught the Dominican style-too rigid for my taste-at Vidors’ School. Easily distinguished by its aversion to curves and constant pressure on the paper to achieve a sense of depth, the calligraphy wasn’t seen to flow along a page but was more like a laceration. Every dissertation on calligraphy noted how Darel’s first profession, as a headstone engraver, had influenced his art.
Legend had it that, on his deathbed, a master calligrapher (whose name no one remembered) asked Darel to carve his tombstone. When he saw Darel’s skill, the master initiated him in the mysteries of calligraphy, which dated back to the Egyptian scribes. Such knowledge had been passed from master to disciple for centuries, but only when death was near. The teachers at Vidors’ School would laugh whenever older students told this story to impress the novices.
“We sometimes take our seminarians to see Darel,” Mazy said. “After watching him for a few hours, there are those who run scared and leave the profession altogether, while others discover their destiny.”
“If you have your own calligraphers, how could someone like me be of use to you?”
“We have no shortage of calligraphers, that’s true, but they are men of God. I need someone who can do impious work.”
He took the stopper off a Rillon inkwell shaped like a snail, picked up a long quill-more flamboyant than practical-and plunged it into the black ink.
“Where does Darel work?” I asked.
“There’s an office at the end of the calligraphy hall, down a few stairs. The entire palace could be his, but he rarely leaves that room.”
“Would I be able to watch him work?”
“When the time is right. Every calligrapher must confront Darel to see whether he made the right choice.”
Abbot Mazy passed me the quill and opened his hand.
“Write your name.”
It was a moment before I understood his instructions. I took his hand, whiter than paper, and slowly, fearfully, wrote Dalessius. It looked like someone else’s name there. No ink was absorbed by the abbot’s skin, and the nib was so full that rivulets seeped out from the letters to fill the lines in his hand. As my name grew into something that resembled a drawing in a fortune-teller’s tract, I could feel the abbot’s hand tremble, as if the touch of the pen transmitted pain, pleasure, or cold. He pulled his fingers into a fist and said:
“Now I’ve got you in the palm of my hand.”
The abbot told me I had passed his test but didn’t explain what my job would be.
“Come see me in a week. I’ll have a letter of recommendation for you to start at Siccard House.”
Life at my uncle’s was increasingly unbearable. He was always at work, so I could never speak to him, but his presence was made manifest through instructions given solely to inconvenience me: every night there would be new objects in my room, blocking the way, crowding the bed up against the wall. Toys I had given up for lost years ago would come crashing down; a wooden horse knocked me on the head.
One night I found a message signed A friend of V. on my pillow, asking me to come to Les Cordeliers. I had no idea how it got there, and my apprehension only grew as I walked to the Pension d’Espagne. The door was open, but the rooming house appeared to be empty; I went from room to room, afraid I’d be mistaken for a thief, until I found a man in bed, empty beds all around him, with blankets pulled up to his nose. My obvious unease identified me as his guest, and he beckoned me in.
I sat a prudent distance away, afraid he might be hiding his face because of some illness. With the covers still over his mouth, he told me his name: Beccaria. He pronounced it decisively, as if that one word were enough to erase all fear. I had once seen a portrait of Beccaria, but I distrusted painters, so generous with the distribution of balance and beauty. In any event, the man’s face was still obscured, and I was afraid he could be an impostor. Voltaire had written a brief essay praising Beccaria’s book-Of Crimes and Punishments-but no one believed it was his. That same curse had always plagued Voltaire: his authorship was questioned whenever he signed his work, while every unsigned satire was immediately attributed to him.
“Mutual friends asked me to contact you. They’re waiting for news at the castle.”
“And I’m waiting for money. Do you have any for me?”
“I’ve got nothing to do with that. I’m simply offering to take your message to the border.”
“How do I know I can trust you? Your fame reached the farthest corners of Europe, yet here you are, in a rooming house for the poorest court workers.”
“There are spies everywhere. My enemies hire enemies who hire enemies.”
“Who are they? Are they in the priesthood?”
“I wish. My enemies are people who used to be my friends. They know me and can therefore predict my next steps. I have to become someone else in order to hide, and then I do things I detest. But only as another can I be safe.”
His accent and the blanket over his mouth made him hard to understand, but I soon gathered he was telling me the story of his life. Beccaria had never been interested in justice, the topic that had made him so famous, until one day, more out of friendship than any real interest, he joined a group of intellectuals from Milan who established a journal called Il Caffè.
“I actually liked math, but everyone around me was a writer. I never could stand to hold the pen for long; it made me sleepy. My friends, particularly the Verri brothers, worked tirelessly. I wanted to chase women, go out on the town, as we used to, but the publication was so important to them that I had to keep quiet. They were annoyed by my lack of drive, and Alessandro Verri wound up threatening me: they would kick me out if I didn’t get to work. I asked him to give me a topic to write on; he suggested justice. I recalled the walks we used to take, when we would discuss The Spirit of the Laws all night long. I decided to maintain the tone of those aimless conversations in my piece. When I started to write, I carried a list of the people executed in Milan as a sort of amulet. Every afternoon, before dipping my quill in ink, I would recite: Massimo Cardacci, hanged; Renzo Zarco, dismembered; Vittorio Lapaglia, decapitated, his remains thrown in the river; and this one hanged as well, and that one put to death on the wheel, then burned at the stake in the square. My friends would laugh whenever I read that list as if it were a spell to give me power over words, but they all encouraged me when they saw that it worked.”
Beccaria jumped out of bed and began to get dressed. He looked like a mere sketch of his own portrait: his clothes hung off him as if he had suddenly lost weight. He moved as if he were sleepwalking.
“I put the book together bit by bit, like a woman sewing a dress out of scraps of material. My friends helped me edit it and kindly gave it to a printer. Friends can be so helpful when they doubt your ability! But as soon as they know what you’re worth, they turn against you. There’s nothing worse than literary envy. The Verri brothers have slandered and hounded me ever since. Not even the Venetian Council of Ten attacked me as viciously as my old friends! They’ve accused me of being an impostor; criticized my appetite, my vulgarity; and even taken advantage of one time when I was startled by a spider to call me a coward.”
He opened the trunk and attempted to tidy things; his clothes were dirty and wrinkled, his books missing covers and falling apart.
“Write your message and I’ll deliver it,” he said more calmly now.
As Beccaria dressed, I took a quill and ink out of my bag and used the trunk as a writing surface. I started by recounting recent events and then outlined my next steps; fearing the messenger might be a spy, I spoke indirectly, using subtext and subterfuge.
Beccaria would look out the window, leap from one side of the room to the other, stop to listen to footsteps on the stairs. He saw signs of danger in everything, and his fear was so contagious it made my prose even more obscure.
“You’ve no idea how I’ve dreamed of going to Ferney. Arriving there will be like crossing the border between my past and my future. What can I take Voltaire? I was thinking about a clock.”
“Anything but. Perk up your ears, go to the theater, stop to listen to what people around you are saying, and then describe all of it, in as much detail as possible. Voltaire has received every imaginable gift, but words are all that interest him.”
My letter never reached Voltaire. Beccaria suddenly changed direction and headed for Milan. It was all the fault of a sick woman he saw on the street. He was so moved by the sight of her that he imagined his own wife ill and destitute and returned home as quickly as he could. Signora Beccaria was as healthy as ever, but her husband never traveled again. He spent the rest of his life out of the spotlight, as a teacher. He and the Verri brothers never exchanged another word. The brothers had this to say to anyone who would listen: “Piece of advice? Never help anyone out of their boredom and apathy.”
My letter lay forgotten in Beccaria’s suitcase. He discovered it years later and, guilt ridden, sent it to Ferney. It reached me after Voltaire had died, when I was organizing the archives. I had written it in one of my experimental inks, and every single word had disappeared in the intervening seventeen years. Only a few strokes remained, the heaviest ones, which now reminded me of bird tracks in the sand.
The Siccards were a family of papermakers who over the years had expanded into quills and inks. They raised their own geese, a Belgian breed with blue and gray feathers, which they hardened in glass soot heated in an iron furnace. The founder of the family business, Jean Siccard, had died two years earlier, and the business, mismanaged by his son, had been on the verge of closing. In recent months, however, the young Siccard had found his way. Now, the moment a customer walked through the door, there was an array of quills organized in large drawers, sheets of marbled paper, accounting ledgers, hand-drawn staff paper, and Chinese cartographic materials.
When I arrived, an employee was preparing an order for the courts. I showed him the letter from Abbot Mazy, and he looked at me in alarm, possibly because there were other people in the room. He motioned for me to go into the back, in more of a hurry to get rid of me than actually indicate the way. I had no idea what the letter said or what ruse the abbot had employed to get me hired at Siccard House. I went down the hall, passing an employee up to his elbows in paper pulp, and found a staircase behind a folding screen adorned with Arabic script.
A young man came out to meet me; he was wearing an ink-stained shirt marked with backwards letters so distinguishable it was as if the garment had been used for blotting paper. He skimmed the letter quickly.
“I’m Aristide Siccard, son of Jean Siccard. It was my idea to take the family business in a new direction. You couldn’t have come at a better time: one of our calligraphers is sick and another is an hour late. Our messenger can’t wait much longer.”
He led me into a small office where a woman was resting on a divan, barely covered by a blanket. She woke up, looked at me, and asked whether I minded if she slept while I worked, assuring me she could doze on her feet. Hers was the absentminded beauty of someone who has never really looked in a mirror. I was at a complete loss for words, for she had let the blanket fall and I had never seen a naked woman. My only experience came from a certain book of engravings called Aphrodite’s Garland that had passed from hand to hand through the dormitories at Vidors’ School.
Siccard brought me the inks they used (thicker than normal ink to prevent them from running on skin). Aristide began reading the text of the message aloud while I concentrated on holding my hand still. A calligrapher’s life is destined to be routine; whenever anything exceptional occurs, his hand begins to shake and all skill evaporates. Unlike every other artist, who leaves a mark and is remembered, this long, laborious wait and inability to rise to the occasion means we as calligraphers fade away and are ultimately forgotten by history.
As per Siccard’s instructions, I began with her upper back. The woman’s name was Mathilde, and that was the first thing I tried to forget. She had pulled up her hair-as black as a pool of ink-but it kept spilling down, threatening to smudge the letters. I tried to think about something else, attempted to concentrate on the message, but the rigidity of those words-administrative councils, investments in Dutch notes-was so contrary to the act of writing that it seemed to pervert the technical terms. I tried to let the light that bathed Mathilde’s body erase all thoughts. I would look at her as if she were an object, nothing more than a surface, and be somewhat successful as I wrote a t, but the curve of a capital R would start my hand trembling again.
I refused to give up and tried to recall the anatomy book that had so disturbed me when I was a student. I wanted to picture the repulsive layers of muscle and bone, but beauty triumphed over my every strategy.
I could hear the worry in Aristide’s voice and made one final attempt to improve my nearly illegible penmanship: I imagined my hand belonged to Silas Darel and was therefore immune to distraction. This thought allowed me to cover areas of a woman’s body I was seeing for the first time. It didn’t feel as though my hand was writing the message; it was more as if the words were patiently pushing my hand from letter to letter. My calligraphy looked like someone else’s, until I came to the signature, forging an unknown name that finally reflected an energy and a caution I recognized as my own.
I might not have been as inept as I remember because before she asked me to leave her to dress in peace, Mathilde looked approvingly in a full-length mirror and said:
“I never feel naked when I’m covered in writing.”
By the time I finished, my nerves were so frayed that I wandered aimlessly until I was lost on the outskirts of the city. Just when I was about to head back, I saw black smoke spiraling up from somewhere nearby. I thought a building must be on fire, but it was a court-ordered burning: books and papers were ablaze as the crowd stared intently at the smoke, as if they could read something in those swirls and lines that I was unable to see. Posted on the wall, a judicial proclamation listed the works that were being burned: it included a satire attributed to Voltaire in which he ridiculed a recent decree. The paper said nothing about the executioner who had set the pile on fire, but a sketch of a mechanical hand concluded the edict.
The watchmakers of Paris were notoriously hard to find. They never set up in a given street but traveled around the city as if it were the face of an enormous clock and they were the obedient hands. Surrounding them was an assemblage marked by time: almanac vendors, fortunetellers, and astronomers who wanted their celestial observations to be added to calendars.
I asked around for Von Knepper, whose name had appeared in the letter from Father Razin. No one knew him, but they were so completely unaware of his existence that the very possibility of him seemed to fill them with fear. I asked one after the other, receiving negatives or silence in reply, until one watchmaker furtively pointed to a woman who was displaying some books on a stone bench.
“Madame Buzot is an expert in the history of machines. She might be able to help you.”
I looked over at the woman wearing a black cloak that revealed only her hands and face, mapped with old scars. I asked the watchmaker about them: their precision betrayed a method, not simply chance or bad luck.
“Madame Buzot was the only female watchmaker in Europe. She was to replace old Van Hals, who was responsible for all the clock towers in Strasbourg. On December 31, 1750, he activated a device to stop the hour hand at precisely twelve o’clock. When Madame Buzot came to repair it, Van Hals was hiding and pulled her inside the clock, intending to kill her. She survived because the mechanism jammed. All of the clocks in Strasbourg came to a halt while she was trapped, and only when she was rescued did time start up again.”
I approached this Mme. Buzot. The books open on the bench showed detailed diagrams of cogs, springs, and gears. It was hard not to stare at her scars, but I greeted her, commented on her merchandise, and finally mentioned Von Knepper.
“You won’t find his name in any book,” she said.
“It’s not a book I’m looking for. I want to find Von Knepper.”
“If you knew what you were saying, you wouldn’t say it out loud. The makers of automatons have fallen from favor; rumor has it they never existed.”
She began to whisper in my ear. Her many years around clocks had given her words a regular beat, as if each syllable corresponded exactly to a fraction of time.
“Von Knepper was a disciple of Jacobo Fabres and worked with him until his death. Fabres taught him to build geese and flautists, but Von Knepper wanted to make the most difficult piece of all: a scribe. No one knows if he succeeded.”
“Where can I find him?”
“I’ve heard of an artisan in a dark street, not far from here, who can restore a clock figurine’s precise movements. If you buy something, I might tell you the name of that street.”
I asked the prices, but they were all too high-particularly when I had no interest in the topic. Mme. Buzot finally pulled a small book with a clock on the cover out of a bag and asked a reasonable price.
Once I had paid, the watchmaker brought her lips to my ear and told me where I might find him. I glanced at the little book as I listened: there was a drawing of a clock on each page, so if you flipped through it quickly, it looked as though the hands were moving.
Everyone around us was gone; the watchmakers had abandoned the place, as if the distant pealing of bells were a summons.
With the little book in my pocket and the street name in mind, I headed to Siccard House, as I did every other afternoon. The more dexterous I became, the more I hoped to postpone the moment when my mercurial position as a spy would force me to leave. My hand no longer trembled, and I had learned to adapt my writing ever so slightly to the pliancy of skin. There were four messengers, and they all liked to converse as they waited for us to finish. Most of all they enjoyed talking about their trips, which sometimes took them far away for weeks at a time. At first I answered in monosyllables, trying to forget the surface under my quill was a woman. Later I intrigued, then amused, and finally bored them with my knowledge of the history of calligraphy. I often think I did some of my best work there, on those words that were inevitably lost between the sheets, with soap and water, or in a sudden rain shower.
Only Mathilde still threatened my calligraphy. I envied the men she was sent to, who would watch her undress and read the message, late at night, next to a fire. I spent much more time with her than they did, but the fact that she wasn’t addressed to me put her out of my reach.
Dussel, a calligrapher from Leipzig, was even more obsessed with Mathilde. He had come to Paris after fleeing his native city, where he was wanted for destroying a printing house. Dussel had belonged to the Hammers of God, a sect that believed the printing press would prevent man from ever discovering the original language, prior to Babel. They saw the printed word as the true Tower of Babel and, using calculations that were incomprehensible to anyone else, established similarities between the types of lead used in printing and the elements the Bible said were used to build the tower.
Mathilde’s nakedness was more unsettling to Dussel because he pretended to be pure, while I couldn’t have cared less about purity. Mathilde enjoyed this power and used conversation to try and distract him from his perfectly uniform letters. No matter how tense Dussel was when he wrote (and he was often so tense he would fall unconscious when a job was done), he never made a mistake.
Dussel would avoid writing on Mathilde’s most secret places, condensing his script so as to finish before the work became unbearably indecent. Mathilde would shift imperceptibly, to force him to use more space, but he never crossed the line he had set for himself. From the office next door, I heard Mathilde issue him an even greater challenge: since the Bible was the only book young Siccard deemed edifying enough to leave in the offices, could Dussel transcribe the entire New Testament on her body?
Aristide Siccard trusted Dussel, paying him double what he paid me, even though he was no better. In Siccard’s mind, unhappiness was sensible, obsession responsible, and misery virtuous.
I had worked long enough now to report to Abbot I Mazy and provide a little false information for a bit of real money. Not one of the messages I had transcribed spoke of the bishop, but as I walked to see the abbot, I invented the words that faraway men had exchanged under cover of anonymity, women, and the night. I crossed palace halls, descended into cellars, and climbed a dank tower, patiently following directions from monks who had just seen the abbot cross palace halls, descend into cellars, and climb a dank tower. After searching for hours, exhausted, I came to a corridor. Mazy was walking toward me, his white cassock dragging on the ground.
The abbot looked at me as if he’d never seen me before. I imagined he must have spies everywhere, and it would therefore be hard to remember all of their names and faces. I told him there was talk of the bishop’s abduction, even his death, and that the rumors were insistent.
“Do they mention proof or witnesses?”
“No, Monsignor.”
“Fantasy and rumor are sins the Church has not condemned enough,” Mazy said. “Come with me and I’ll show you the bishop is alive.”
We walked down the corridor; leaves and rain blew in through the open windows. Down below was a geometric garden, where plants and shrubs surrounded deep ponds made of black stone. I asked the abbot whether they raised fish.
“There are some sea creatures that we use to make ink, which we then sell abroad. Darel advised us in this undertaking. Our botany is inspired by calligraphy as well. No strangers are allowed to walk through the garden because of all the thorns and poisons in the species we cultivate. Everything we use to write with can also be used to kill.”
We were approaching a carved door. It was being guarded by a giant of a man with hundreds of keys hanging from the belt of his green uniform. Seeing us, he nodded respectfully to Abbot Mazy and stepped aside. This set his keys jangling, like bells calling the faithful to mass.
“Signac holds all of the keys to the palace. We’ve tried to convince him to leave them behind, but he takes them wherever he goes. I trust no one more than good Signac. He’s always right where you need him, to open a door or close it forever.”
The guard reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a key tied with a red ribbon, then turned it in the lock.
“The bishop was gravely ill,” the abbot explained. “When we thought he was about to die, he had a revelation: he would be saved if he took a vow of silence. The Church was forced to renounce his voice, just when it needed it most. Since then, he has only ever communicated in writing.”
“And how long is this silence to last?”
“Until the final silence.”
Mazy opened the door onto a room made of white marble. I stood in the doorway, not daring to approach the man at the desk. He was leaning over a piece of paper, holding a pen with difficulty, as if it were intolerably heavy. I couldn’t see his face. The marble everywhere was like a prelude to the tomb. It was so cold and so white, even in the semi-darkness, that it resembled a grotto carved out of ice.
The abbot pulled back the gray drapes. Light cut a swath through the clouds and stained-glass windows, illuminating the paper. The bishop dipped his pen in the inkwell and wrote a few letters stripped of any adornment. He wrote slowly, as if all action consisted of a series of inactions.
Everything was completely still, except for the bishop’s unhurried hand.
The abbot asked me whether the bishop was alive. It was then I understood this was a test and that Mazy needed others to see what he saw. The bishop looked like a living corpse, but it was true he did move, and even more true that a reply in the negative would not please Mazy.
Without knowing if it was the truth or a lie, I replied:
“The bishop lives.”
Hunched over, the bishop’s face was still obscured. Watching people write is always a bit mysterious, as they speak of things we can’t see. The abbot gestured for me to leave and pulled the drapes closed, like a curtain coming down on the final act. Seemingly indifferent to the dark and to the performance that had ended, the bishop continued to write.
After Arnim Palace, I went to the courts to ask for Kolm, but no information was provided about executioners for fear of revenge. When I insisted, they let me leave a message in a basket. The note, proposing we meet the next day, fell in among others that looked as if they had been there for years, waiting for someone who never came. A rope was lowered down, and the basket was hung on a hook. The messages soon rose up until they disappeared into one of the upper windows.
I waited for the executioner in front of the courthouse the following day. Suddenly, I felt hands around my neck, and my feet left the ground once again. As I fought for air and recovered from his little joke, Kolm told me that someone from the hanged man’s troupe in Toulouse had insisted on accusing him. The law had more to worry about than an actor who had taken his role too far, but he had nevertheless decided to leave as a precaution.
The walking stick with the metal fist still hung off his belt. I asked whether it continued to malfunction.
“It destroys everything it touches.”
“I know someone who can fix it.”
“I’m used to it now.”
I insisted; I didn’t want to look for Von Knepper on my own.
We walked around behind a church and into a deserted cul-de-sac until we reached a green door. The owner’s name-Laghi-was engraved on the lintel. A carriage clock was visible through the window; on top of the wooden base, a Vulcan was about to let his hammer fall on an anvil. I pulled the bell, but no one came. Kolm pounded impatiently on the door.
A maid opened, said it was late and we should come back the next day. The executioner showed her the silver hand, as if it symbolized some higher authority. Mechanical artifacts held extraordinary power in that house, and the servant let us in, as if we had shown her an order signed by the king himself. We were led into a cold room that had only one chair. Kolm sat down despondently and left me on my feet to nervously pace. After we had been waiting for a while, I wandered into the next room.
Up against the wall was a chest with dozens of wide drawers, similar to the ones at Siccard House. I opened the first with some difficulty and found a variety of mechanisms and gears. Most were made of metal, but some had been carved out of glass. It was obvious that certain pieces fit together like the parts of a sentence, but no matter how long I studied and weighed those pieces in my hands, I couldn’t imagine the grammar that regulated their construction. However, just as an archaeologist may only need to know one word to then decipher an entire dead language, I found something in the third drawer that revealed the whole: sixty-five empty compartments surrounded one glass eye.
There were footsteps and the sound of keys next door. I assumed it must be M. Laghi, the owner, but saw two men come in from outside. I watched them through the half-open door. There was good reason to hide my face because one of them was familiar: the keeper of the keys from Arnim Palace. The maid stared in terror at Signac’s arms and chest. His keys jangled, a sound conveying the authority bestowed by heavy oak doors and thick iron grillwork.
“Monsieur Laghi won’t be long. You can wait for him in the carriage,” the servant said in a quavering voice.
I came out of my hiding place only after they left. Seeing the keeper of the keys had left me shaken. Kolm, on the other hand, sat dozing, completely unaware.
“Let’s leave your walking stick. We can come back for it later,” I said, anxious to leave.
The executioner jolted awake and stared at me blankly for a moment. There was no leaving then, for M. Laghi was walking toward us.
He was dressed entirely in black, as if he were going to a funeral, and in his hand was a small chest. Kolm tried to intercept him, holding up his walking stick, but Laghi barely glanced at it. The executioner, used to asserting his authority, was taken aback by the owner’s disdain. Laghi was in such a hurry, it was as if he already inhabited the future.
“What do you want? Are you with them?” he asked, gesturing to the closed door and, through it, to the abbot’s men waiting for him outside.
“I need you to fix this walking stick.”
The artisan took it dismissively. He tested it two or three times and handed it back to Kolm.
“Take it to a watchmaker. I deal with much more intricate mechanisms.”
“I want you to do it.”
Laghi felt the urge to shove the executioner and call for the men outside to come to his aid, but he hesitated-not out of cowardice but in order not to make the night ahead any more difficult than it already was. He snatched the mechanical hand from Kolm and took it with him. The executioner shuddered at being so abruptly deprived of his walking stick, as if his actual hand had been taken from him.
The house now seemed like a machine that processed people in and out at the will of some hidden design. I was hurrying to escape it when I saw a young woman looking in a mirror, at the end of the hall: she was an exact copy of the woman from Toulouse.
I ignored the maid’s shouts and approached the ghost. She looked at me with wide, staring eyes. Not knowing what sort of sin I might be committing, I kissed the automaton’s icy lips. Her teeth cut my mouth, and I was aware of the metallic taste of blood. Hearing my cry, Kolm came with his fist raised, but he lowered it immediately when he saw it was only a girl.
“There’s nothing to fear. She’s not even real,” I said.
Blood suffused the woman’s cheeks, dispersing the illusion and the pallor.
“Are you sure I’m not a woman?”
She brought her mouth toward me, and I closed my eyes, expecting to be bit again but powerless to defend myself. Her lips rested softly on mine. If she was one of Von Knepper’s creatures, then Von Knepper was a god.
“This is the second time we’ve met,” I said, “but the first time, you weren’t there.”
She gestured for me to be quiet and led me by the hand to a room piled with broken mechanical toys: Dutch dolls with springs protruding from the head or chest, a blackbird in a gold cage, a soldier missing an arm. There was also a steam-powered wooden horse, a palace being circled by the sun and the moon, and a bronze Medusa that would open her eyes and toss her mane of snakes.
“Are you Von Knepper’s daughter?”
“You shouldn’t say his name. Call him Laghi; that’s what he’s known as in Paris.”
I asked about the young woman from Toulouse.
“Is she more beautiful than me? My father made her when I was a child: she was the future image of me. Then she was sold and passed from hand to hand; the purchasers always promised to keep her but never did, as if she were cursed. Three years ago, my father lost track of her. She’s made in my image and likeness, but while I grow old and imperceptibly wear out, she’ll never change.”
“If you two were rivals, you won. There’s nothing left of her. A secret mechanism under her tongue caused her to explode.”
“What kind of tears do you cry for a dead automaton? When my father finds out, he’ll cry real tears. He always loved her better; he thought she was more human.”
“I would never mistake a frigid automaton for a woman.”
“No? You don’t even know who I am.”
She brought her hand to my face, as if she were the one wondering about me.
“Don’t tell anyone you saw her. There are no automatons in France; there never were.”
“That’s what I want to speak to your father about.”
“He won’t see you. My father’s in grave danger. He doesn’t ever let me go out; I’m like a prisoner here.”
“Then I’ve come to set you free.”
If she accepted, what would I do with her? Where would I take her? Thankfully, she declined.
“The world out there is just another jail. At least in here it’s not rainy or cold.”
I looked at the dolls and mechanical toys all around us: everything was broken, nothing worked, and those very defects seemed to be contagious, so that soon we didn’t know what to say or how to move.
I wrote of recent events and my suspicions and asked I my uncle to make sure the letter reached Ferney. My message also asked for money and instructions: I needed to know my words were being heard, that a clear mind was putting the pieces together and arranging my next steps. At the time, it was common for loose pages, found in the bookstores of Paris, to be gathered up and kept in wooden boxes until, at some point, their rightful place was found. It had recently become popular to bind these lost pages, to create a book that jumped from one topic to another. That’s how I felt: I was gathering incomprehensible pages, hoping the great reader, sitting next to a window in a parlor at Ferney, would make sense of them.
Every now and then I would hear rumors that Voltaire was in the city or that he had died, and I would wonder whether I might be working in the service of a lost cause and for no pay.
In the evenings I would watch the Laghi house, hoping to see Clarissa. I was prepared to attempt a second meeting as soon as her father went out. But when I saw Von Knepper hurry away, carrying his little chest, curiosity impelled me to follow him.
Von Knepper walked without looking back or to either side. His stride was so long I practically had to run to keep up. We crossed over the river and passed through a market, where I nearly lost him among the vendors leaving for the night. He stopped at an iron gate, and I had to step back so as not to be seen. We had come to the cemetery. The guard was expecting him and let him in without a word. I watched Von Knepper walk through the trees and the graves until he was swallowed by shadows.
I now had to choose between the graveyard and the house and decided on the latter. The maid tried to stop me at the door, but I shouted Clarissa’s name and she came to my rescue. Once again she led me to the room with the piles of broken toys, Kolm’s walking stick now among them.
“I saw your father at the cemetery. Would he be visiting your mother’s grave?”
“My mother died elsewhere, and my father never went to her grave.”
“So what is he looking for there at this time of night?”
“I don’t know. If you’re so interested in my father, why didn’t you follow him?”
“Because I wanted to come here.”
“Then enough about the cemetery. Your shoes are already caked with mud. The more you talk, the muddier things will get.”
She offered me a chair with a cracked leg, and I nearly fell off it. She sat down on a trunk. The room was nearly dark. I thought I could hear the whirring of little machines in the corners.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve spoken to anyone. My father isn’t much of a conversationalist.”
“They say he’s the greatest maker of automatons in Europe.”
“He’s made a tiger and a ballerina and won over the courts of Portugal and Russia. Sometimes I thought all the time he spent around machines allowed him to discover the secret workings of the world, and his every wish was granted. But then automatons went out of style, and now my father isn’t moved by art but by greed and fear.”
“What is he afraid of?”
“He’s afraid of Abbot Mazy and his calligrapher, who’s writing a book that never ends, using his enemies’ blood as ink.”
Darkness had filled the space as we talked, pushing us closer together. I reached to put my arm around her, in that cowardly, imperceptible way that tries not to appear deliberate. Clarissa gave no sign of approval or disapproval, and I wondered whether I might have touched her so softly she hadn’t even noticed. Emboldened by her apparent acquiescence, I moved closer still. She didn’t reject my caresses, but she didn’t return them either. The things around us gradually began to move: the Dutch dolls and the dismembered soldiers and the little Greek gods all moved. Everything moved but Clarissa, who sat perfectly upright, as if pretending to be made of stone.
Von Knepper opened the door, and I now felt as if I were caught between two wax statues. He stared at me without seeing. He had something to say-he was going to throw me out of his house, maybe even report me to the police-but it was obvious the very thought of speaking to me annoyed him. His coat was soaking wet and his boots were caked with mud. His mind was still elsewhere, out there among the graves, and not yet fully present. Now that his body was warming up, it was likely his thoughts would return, too.
“My daughter is ill,” Von Knepper said. “She often falls into this state.”
He passed his hand in front of her eyes. Clarissa didn’t move.
“Please don’t visit her again. Her attacks are brought on by strangers.”
“But I didn’t go near her.”
“You don’t need to. Her condition is very sensitive and can detect strangers before they even enter a room.”
“But you have your daughter shut up in here like a prisoner.”
“It’s her illness that imprisons her. If I were to let her lead a normal life, she’d fall into a trance and never wake up. Don’t try to understand. Go now, now that you can, now that you won’t run into anyone outside.”
I could feel an extraneous cold. It came from either the girl’s immobility or the profound impact the night had had on Von Knepper. He crossed the room and, before I knew it, threw Kolm’s walking stick at me. The metal hand closed around my throat. If it had possessed its former destructive force, it would have killed me. Instead, all I felt was a slight squeeze that would barely leave a mark.
“Tell your friend I’ve adjusted the mechanism. There’ll be no need for us to see one another again.”
Mathilde no longer had any hold over me; Clarissa filled my thoughts as my hand traced letters on a woman’s skin. It wasn’t my fantasy to write on her, but I imagined she came to my room late one rainy night, and I slowly explored a message written in an unknown language.
Kolm and I met at a tavern frequented by cemetery workers, where I gave him back his walking stick. He asked me how much it had cost; I told him a lot, but he could make it up to me with a little favor. We were free to speak here without fear of being overheard by the indiscreet or spies; gravediggers only ever talked to one another-nothing else interested them. The long isolation they were subjected to by their profession had led them to distort language and create one of their own. References to tombs, darkness, marble, or death couldn’t be interpreted literally; they could mean any number of things, depending on how they were combined. The music of that language was at times as dry and deliberate as shovelfuls of earth and at others vaguely solemn, interspersed with Latin phrases they had learned from funeral inscriptions.
After years of filthy boots walking through it, the tavern now simply had a dirt floor. All bags and tools were left at the door. Medical students would come to buy bones, and goldsmiths stolen jewelry.
To reimburse me for the repairs, I asked Kolm to find out why Von Knepper went to the cemetery. It took jug after jug of awful wine before Kolm gave in to my pestering and grudgingly agreed to help. He led me over to a red-faced man sitting alone, talking to no one. Forlorn in a corner, he was reading and rereading a thick book filled with tiny notations. He would lick his fingertip to turn the page and then point at a spot in the book, as if he had finally found the very word he’d spent years looking for. I recognized him as the guard who had opened the gate for Von Knepper.
“Remember me, Maron? It’s Kolm.”
Maron wasn’t used to social interaction and was surprised these words were addressed to him.
“I remember you. I thought you’d left us. Why’ve you come to this place full of undesirables?”
“I was looking for you.”
“Why would anyone want to see me?”
“The key to the cemetery. I want to invite my friend here to a nighttime stroll through the graves.”
“I’ve opened and closed that gate for forty years and never lent the key to anyone.”
“We’ll offer you a little something as if we believed that were true.”
Obeying the executioner’s signals, I put two, three, four coins on the table before he had me stop.
“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.
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.
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.”
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 banging 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.
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.
I went to my uncle’s and began to prepare my inks, making sure the tops were secure so as not to stain my clothes or worse. Hearing footsteps on the stairs, I thought it must be maréchal Dalessius, invigorated by the news of my imminent departure. While arrivals make some people happy, my uncle liked only departures. Then I heard the sound of keys, like bells announcing a funeral, and grew uneasy.
The giant figure of Signac filled the doorway. Even when he stood still, his keys continued to jangle, shaken by his breath or the beating of his heart. Behind him was another of the abbot’s men, as tall and thin as the dagger he was now drawing from its sheath.
Neither one bothered to beat me or threaten me. All they did was ask who had sent me. I didn’t say a word: instinct says that if we can only stay quiet enough, we’ll be forgotten in a corner. But the dagger remembered and timidly approached my neck. I knew silence was much less dangerous than the truth: they would slit my throat the minute I opened my mouth. All they were waiting for was a word, a name, a signature at the bottom of the document spelled out by my actions.
I coughed, pretending to try and find my voice, and signaled that I wanted a quill and ink. They understood my terrified gestures and were calmed, assuming that anyone willing to write would have to forego babbling and lies. I chose a purple bottle that smelled of mandrake. In his book on the power of plants, Paracelsus asserted that touching a word freshly written in this ink would kill you. According to him, some words were more susceptible to the venom than others. Instead of words, I chose punctuation: I plunged my quill into the liquid and full stop into the neck of my nearest foe.
The pain was so fierce that as he brought his hands to the wound, he cut himself with his own dagger; the thirsty metal was finally satiated. Signac lunged at me, brandishing two sharp keys, but missed. The weight of his armor slowed him down, and by this time I was at the door.
I was completely out of breath by the time I reached the Night Mail offices. Behind a dirty pane of glass, a lone man was writing names and dates and destinations in a book. I pounded on the window until he opened it. He must have noticed some resemblance to my uncle because he didn’t ask me to prove my identity, at least not right away. Glancing left and right, startling at anything that sounded like metal, I explained my emergency.
As we walked toward the back of the former salting house, the old employee told me his name was Vidt and said he had known me when I was a boy. He asked, as if in passing, what ship my parents had died on. When I gave the right answer, he quickened his pace, convinced that I was telling the truth and that he needn’t fear a reprimand from my uncle.
We crossed a warehouse filled with coffins and came to where the hearses were parked. One was just leaving, and he shouted for it to stop, ordering that another coffin be loaded.
“Who’s it for?” the coachman asked with a touch of impatience, as if there were some event in his miserable life that simply could not be delayed.
“Me,” I said.
“You look healthy enough.”
“Not for long if you don’t hurry.”
I put a coin in his hand and let money answer any questions he might have.
Vidt insisted I must look like a passenger and so powdered my face. It was a much thicker substance than the one favored by nobility and the bourgeois. I looked at my reflection in the hearse window: anyone who saw me would be certain that life had left me.
We put the coffin in the back and, not without some difficulty, I crawled inside. The coachman was kind enough to put a blanket under my head. I settled in, shut my eyes, and the coffin lid was closed.
It was the worst trip of my life, in a life of nothing but I terrible trips. Every stone on the road was a punch to my back, every corner absolute torture. Whenever the carriage stopped because of an obstacle or a checkpoint, I wondered if the price on my head might be high enough for the coachman to turn me in. But as soon as Paris was far behind, my coffin was opened to the cold morning, and the driver handed me the reins so he could get some sleep.
We came to an abandoned farm in the middle of a rainstorm. The coach was heading straight on, to the north; I was to continue to Ferney on foot. I walked beneath gray trees and crossed a stone bridge over a stream. With every step I grew weaker; I was exhausted and running a fever. The birdsong was dirgelike, making the trees and the sky even darker, pushing my destination farther away. By the time I reached the castle, I was unable to even say my own name.
I was given a bed and dry clothing, but my request to see Voltaire was ignored. That section of the castle was undergoing renovations, so I was moved, bed and all, from one place to another all night long. I went to the kitchens, the foul-smelling cellars, the halls where the clocks were tested (and where there was no way to tell the time because each one was different). Sometimes I was left with other servants who were recuperating from an illness. There was no way to obtain any information: the sick speak an incomprehensible language that no one has any interest in answering. The domestic staff who moved me were terribly somber-I wondered if it was because they didn’t know how to treat me (a little less than a gentleman, a little more than a servant) or because they knew my prognosis was uncertain-and carried my bed with funereal solemnity.
The trip wore on, the trip never ended, all through a night that stretched out through rooms and parlors, up and down stairs. Nothing stays still while a fever lasts. My travels ended at the entrance to Ferney theater, whether on orders from my employer, by chance, or by mistake I never knew. Unsteady on my feet, pale but no longer feverish, I crossed a dark room, like a sleepwalker, amid Sicilian and Japanese puppets, stuffed crows, and the copper frame for a Chinese dragon.
I pulled back the curtain and appeared on stage, like an actor who had arrived late to a performance and forgotten his lines. There was Voltaire-although at first I thought it was an actor portraying him: his decrepitude was so pronounced it suggested theatrical trickery. Others were there as well, spectators and performers, who looked at me in surprise. Once the astonishment had passed, I heard Voltaire say: “It’s my calligrapher, back from his mission.” He said it as if those words brought a long comedy to an end. I heard the applause and felt I was back, at last.