Masque (2 page)

In any case, my current habitations remind me of my childhood home. These damp vaults are rather like the basement where my mother moved my crib once the neighbours complained that my cries disrupted their business. The house my father built was tall and narrow, the walls of dark grey granite, polished to the high shine of gravestones. He meant his home to be a living monument to his skill and a permanent advertisement for his services.

The roof was tiled with slabs of greenish slate, and the windows were small and imperfectly glassed. When I was older, I replaced them as a gift for my mother. I spent a whole afternoon removing the warped and watery panes, replacing them with sheets I'd poured myself. I learned the art of glazing, sneaking every night to the factory down the street. When the time came that I had spent enough hours watching the midnight production shift pouring the sheets of reddish molten sand into the mould, I tried my hand at it myself. I waited until the Michaelmas holiday and stole the machinery (I provided my own materials, lugging bags of silicone that I'd found in the cellars among the unopened bottles of wine and the skeletons of rodents). I love the look of glass as it is being poured. It is honest, then, about itself. Cooled, it only seems a solid. It never fully hardens. Over centuries, window glass will melt.

There is no such thing as stasis.

In any case, my mother loved the finished product; windows that let the light in without warping what she saw on the street. She was so thrilled she squeezed my upper arm through the thick fabric of my jacket. I swear she almost hugged me. In any case, for once she did not shudder at my smell or flinch away from the feel of my corpselike body.

The houses on either side of ours were dedicated, in their own way, to music. Dancing girls and cabaret, absinthe and cheap champagne that the likes of those poets who styled themselves ‘Romantic' drank themselves to death in. My widowed mother hired men to refurbish the attic into a series of rooms that she furnished with sticks she'd bought from brothels, closed in raids by the province governor the previous summer. She did not sleep on them and rarely bothered to change the sheets, so she didn't have to worry about bedbugs. She made a good living, I must say, giving the drunks who seethed from her neighbours in the early morning a bed off of the streets.

For my fifth birthday she made me my first (and for a long time only) birthday present; a mask cut from a length of chamois that she bought from a glover. It was more like a loose sack with holes cut for eyes than a proper garments but it did its job well. The sight of me ceased bothering her. As I grew older, she let me come up more frequently – although once she had a steady stream of lodgers I never had the run of the attic again – my father's writing was long since buried behind plaster. I wore the mask without complaint – it was far from uncomfortable and it had a nice smell, as did the sachets of mint and violet that she sewed into my clothing. If she almost never touched me, she did love me as best as she was able, being young and easily frightened.

After a few years of proving my capacity with panes of glass and basic home repairs, she hired a blind tutor to teach me letters, music, mathematics. He would come and sit for hours in my basement room, complaining of the effect of the chill on his bones and making me memorise many disparate packets of learning. When I surpassed his ability to teach, as I soon did, I had many books close at hand and I turned to them to expand my knowledge. I read everything from Archimedes to fairy stories. As I recall, I had a special affection for
La Belle et la Bête
. My mother bought me as many books as she could afford through mail-order – often secondhand. She resold them after I had squeezed them of their nutrients, though I demanded permission to keep the fairy tales. They were a balm to me, with their stories of transformation. They provided me with a sharp and dangerous hope.

I could read as much as I liked, as long as I remained hidden. It would not have done for me to frighten the lodgers. I was happy, very happy, while I had enough books and candles. I do not believe that anyone but mother and the old tutor knew that I was still alive. The neighbours probably believed that I died in infancy. It certainly would have been safer for Mother to spread that rumour, given the prevalence of local superstition and a widespread belief in ‘changelings'.

When I turned thirteen, she sent me to school.

2.

I lived for five years with the Sisters of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. They were known locally as the ‘Grey Sisters' because of their granite-coloured habits and starched white veils that rose into peaked horns from the sides of their heads. These nuns ran a school for the troubled gifted (a category that fitted me like a glove) where they provided care for the physically weak and specialised learning for the intellectually advanced. The school was founded in 1640 near the centre of the city but disbanded after the failed revolution – the nuns hid while the trampled and impoverished citizens that they'd once fed hosted gallows-staged puppet shows with the decapitated corpses of their oppressors.

One extremely elderly lady was a novice at the time when Reason reined from her bloody throne. She sat crouched in her chair (carved from the unbroken trunk of a thorn tree) and muttered horrors to us while her rheumy green eyes blazed from the loose folds of her face.

‘You think that you've known terror, child?' Sister Mercy leaned in close to me, her nose brushing the kid mask above the place my nose was not.

I nodded at her, silent. I was conscious of the effect that my voice had on women. The mixture of attraction and repulsion that I provoked when I spoke would have been alarming to see in a nun – especially a virgin lady who had lived so long as to be nearly able to match me in ugliness.

She laughed, a sound like a frog caught in a sausage-grinder. A connoisseur of sound even then, I stored it away for future reference, to practise at my leisure. I sat on my heels, listening in the ashes of the stove.

‘Well, child, you haven't seen anything until you've seen the rotting corpse of a sixteen-year-old virgin hung from ropes hooked into her thighs, above the knees, her wrists, and the ragged stump of her neck so that she can be made to act out a play by that old rascal Robespierre. I saw this many times, starring different ladies of course. The puppets could hardly be made to last beyond a few performances. The stench would get too bad, the muscles would liquefy so that they slid from their hooks like a soft-boiled egg strung on a wire. They'd smell worse than you do, you little living corpse.'

She cackled again, scratching her scabby bald head beneath her veil.

‘I liked looking at it. Sometimes they'd be wearing their fine clothes; sleeves to the elbow, trailing lace, with those high white wigs wedged onto their neck-stumps. Sometimes they'd be naked as a sparrow and sitting close to the stage (I survived by dressing up in boys' clothes, a crime then and now). I could see straight through the hair to their never-you-mind-it. Hehehe, it was lovely. Not that you'll ever get to see one, you poor little freak. Just you wait, you'll get your architect's training, all the learning you'll want, and then my younger sisters will call in the Cardinal. He'll examine you. You'll pass, no doubt about it. And then you'll be an architect priest in the service of Blessed Pope Pius IX. The good news, my lad, is that when that happens no one will care what you look like. You'll give service to God, and that'll be more than enough for anyone.'

Eventually the old nun would tire of tormenting me with stories and fall asleep, her hairy chin pinning her breast like the church-wall illustrations of the pelican which fed its children with the blood of its heart.

I got along with the elderly, with Sister Mercy and her ilk. The other children were another matter. The boys and girls were housed in different schools. I had lived to eighteen without ever meeting a female that was not either a relative or beyond the borders of menopause. As for the boys, none of them would consent to share a room with me, not that I blamed them.

Not one of them had ever seen my face, but my limbs, my mask, were enough to frighten these ‘troubled angels'. Some of them were soft in the head and very easily frightened. Others were sharper, but they had been so steeped in superstition, so inculcated with fear, that they would not dare to approach the child they called Le Mort Viva. I did not have to live in the basement here, among the dust and the skeletons of rats, but neither was I friends with any other pupils. I had my own room, far from the others, in a high tower, girded close round with ivy. It gave me plenty of space to continue my experiments with mirrors, magic, music and glass.

The old nun was half-right, in the end. I was very well educated. The Prioress hired a specialist from the university to give me private lessons. He was the only adult male voice I ever heard behind those tall limestone walls, the only baritone among the vine-drenched walls. Most of the boys returned to their families soon after puberty, called home to resume the work of their dead fathers. Only I lingered. His laughter echoed even in rooms muffled by religious tapestry.

We sat in the library, surrounded by books bound in good leather, donated by the local wealthy in an effort to purchase entry into heaven. I was tall for my age, almost six foot, and stronger than I looked despite the skeletal appearance of my limbs. I once bent a pewter spoon in half just to see if I could. I did it easily, although the skin of my hands tore like the rind of a cheese and left greyish tatters on the handle. Sitting in the comfortable Chippendale chair (another donation from the wealthy to the poor) I could almost have passed for a man – or the remnants of one. A corpse with a face behind a shroud of goat skin.

The master, Mr Garnier, was short and nearly as bald as I am. He had a tidy, fat stomach (its roundness emphasised by a thick gold watch chain) and a white goatee beneath a cleanly shaven lip. He stood above the desk, quizzing me, ‘And what have you learned about Mr Claude Nicolas Ledoux and his Barriere des Bonshommes?'

This was almost too easy, ‘They are facades designed to imitate the perfection of the ancient Greeks – a popular current style.'

His jolly face clouded, ‘And nothing at all like these things you are drawing. Look at this filth! Naked pagan gods, goddesses with bared breasts, all these carved plants that are to be dipped in gold. The church will never sponsor it. You are a gifted lad, Erik, but like every artist you must know your audience. What exactly is this supposed to be?'

‘An opera house.' I looked at my long fingers, still scabbed from bending the spoon. The raw flesh dyed with ink. Why, I wondered, could I draw and sketch so easily and yet have so much difficulty with calligraphy?

My master was silent. He turned from my chair, towards the window. I was used to open windows, even in the cold. It was a rule, among the sisters, to maintain good ventilation when I was around.

‘You do not wish to pursue a career in the church?'

‘Not particularly. God prefers perfection, as far as I can tell. I can only give that in architecture.'

Monsieur Garnier smoothed the designs I'd drawn. His forehead wrinkled. Smoothed. He said, ‘Let me take these away for a few days. It will be a delicate manoeuvre getting you out of the door and into the world, but I may have something for you yet.'

As it turned out, I did not have very long to wait.

3.

‘It's nothing like reading about it in books, is it my lad?' Master Garnier clapped his fat hand on the blade of my shoulder. His face crumpled instantly with rank regret at the feel of my flesh through five layers of fine fabric. He was always forgetting what it was like to touch me. Once a day, at least, he would clap or cuff me when I had pleased him with my work, exactly the way the more masculine nuns would playfully strike the boys they liked best.

I cannot say how much I despised his regret. I cannot tell how much I loved my master for forgetting, so constantly, his repulsion.

‘No,' I said, leaning out across the parapet to watch as my designs blossomed in the desert, a fabulous fortress in praise of the flesh. ‘The books say nothing of the joy of this, of the pleasure that comes with forming something wonderful on paper and watching it grow to life in stone. They say nothing of the fear that some uneducated fool will foul my structure because he cannot see the logic or the cost. It is rather like that time that I composed a fugue for Sister Theresa. It was perfect in my mind, and my hands were perfect on the organ, but those idiot children marred five notes out of ten, singing flat, so that the ghost of my intentions emerged without the full force of the spirit I used to bring them into the world. I am more afraid of almost succeeding than I am of failure.

We were silent for a moment, a blast from the desert carried rough sand and the faint scent of roses from the harem. I hated the sand. It caught in the folds of the garments I wore and grazed my paper-thin cheeks, abrasions which opened into bright, weeping sores. In spite of what I knew about myself, I feared scarring. No one ever wishes to be worse than they must be.

‘Why are these emotions never written down, Master?' I turned to meet his gaze, as much of it as I could considering our adoption of the local Muslim custom. His eyes were shadowed by a small, round cap pressed into a square of fabric in red check. In our new white robes and with our covered faces it was almost possible to ignore my mask. For the first time in my life I felt almost ordinary, almost passable. I loved the feeling, and loathed it.