Masque (5 page)

Do not expect to see me when you get there. It is no insult to you, dear child, to say that you are not ready to perceive me in the flesh.

Until we meet again, I remain your

Guardian Spirit

On Monday night I mounted the flies, trailing the lace hem of my second best frock in the dust. I expected, knowing the habits of Mr Bouquet, a filthy slurry of rat dung and chicken bones. Instead, like a miracle, the scaffold was laid with a thick Persian carpet. There were silk cushions to rest on in between scales, a music stand laden with notations, a carafe of honey-sweetened water. The whole space was bathed in light from five hand-shaped candelabra. They were the gilt props from
The Haunted Manor
, painted plaster, but the effect was regal enough.

We worked hard for many hours, though I did not realise how long until after. Time passed like a dream. It was very strange, for me, at first. His angelic voice seemed to spring from three steps before me, but I seemed to feel a pair of eyes on my spine. I soon grew used to it. I came to love my lessons.

We met there for many months, until my first non-chorus singing role when I was issued a room of my own. He decorated. The rugs appeared, the cushions, and also a small music box, mounted with a leaden monkey in red silk robes. It played the cymbals when I wound the key embedded in its stiff spine.

The tag around its neck read, in his spidery hand, ‘For a good daughter'.

Our lessons continued.

6.

We rarely conversed, hardly ever spoke of anything personal. He was very careful about that, whenever I would press for details about his life, if he had one, outside of my training he would state that he was working hard, making something for me. If I pressed any further the lesson would end in cold silence, and there I would be, sitting alone before the candle-lit mirror. He had a wonderful trick of making it seem as though my own reflection were speaking from that simple, frameless bit of glass. I knew, of course, that he was really somewhere behind me, but he asked me never to seek for him and I respected that. I was getting a great deal out of these lessons and I wanted them to continue. It took months for him to even tell me his name. He never let it slip until he met me underground. He preferred ‘Master'. As my teacher, it was his right and perfectly proper.

And yes (let me be honest now, if only to myself, to this book) his voice did sometimes sound very like my father's. Usually when he let something about his carefully papered-over past slip. A mention of his childhood with the nuns, made while explaining to me the importance of empathy in storytelling (and singing is storytelling) or a few words about his hatred of carnivals – a funny trait, I thought, for an accomplished ventriloquist – would roughen his voice. More often he sounded, frankly, as though he had swallowed Father's ancient violin. It stirred me in a way I found delicious and disturbing. His voice made me think of that story my father told me, of the daughter who sang so beautifully and died so young. Her father grieved so hard for her that God took pity and placed her voice into his fiddle so that every time he played, she sang for him.

I wondered if such miracles could happen in reverse, like writing reflected in a glass. I wondered if a voice I loved, a soul I clung to, could sing to me from another throat.

So yes, we were intimate, sometimes unintentionally. Yes, I did love him, what I knew of him. His shadows. His scraps. I loved what he did for me. My love was innocent then, at least of touch. It felt so good to have someone who could be proud of me. But my invisible Master could be strange, too. When I began scooping roles he promised always to watch me perform from the best box in the house. He used those carnival tricks to secure the plush darkness, those wonderful acoustics for himself, without wasting a dime beyond his always generous twenty-franc tip to Meg's mother, Madame Giry, who was in charge of seating and survived on her tips.

According to Madame Giry he made the walls weep blood (like something from one of the Countess' countless gothic novels) and, in time, the musicians who hit their notes flat and the clumsiest dancers suddenly began disappearing. I heard Little Meg and La Sorelli cracking dark jokes about carrying knots made out of segments of hangman's rope to ward off murderous ghosts.

They might not have been murders, I thought, not all of them. The house inspector rarely found bodies. Besides, what kind of killer targets the untalented?

But he was strange after the offensive members had been cut off. He would laugh more, during our lessons. Mad, joyful laughter that seemed to leap from flame to flame between the fixtures I kept gleaming with an oil-soaked rag. If he did not kill them himself, God owed him a favour.

Things continued in this vein for several months, before the Comte's little brother, the boy from the beach, crashed into my rooms and unsettled what I took for my happiness.

ERIK

4.

Master Garnier and I made it across the manicured courtyard (lush palms, figs, that troublesome fountain with the spouting dolphins that I had designed so well then watched that idiot of a foreman destroy with his heavy hand at plumbing) to the building site. We arrived at the same moment that the half-naked labourers were completing their midday meal of fried, spiced dough balls and ground chickpeas. My master went to rouse them from their meal while I walked back to the site. The foreman, as usual, was nowhere in sight.

We had been working in this sandy patch of earth for nine months and the struggle to see my structure rise from my perfectly planned designs was more than tedious. I'd had no idea, in the beginning, how many things could run foul in such a job of construction.

Yesterday, for example, the labourer who looked like he had taken a year-long break between changing loincloths (their stench was terrible – even to me) dropped a sculpture I'd made at the Shah's special request; a figure of a woman done in soft lead, whose face belonged to the ruler's favourite concubine. I had to guess at the body, but I had captured the face perfectly. I found out, much later, that he had broken several strong local taboos allowing me, an unrelated male (even such a specimen of the gender as I am) to look upon a woman he owned. I based the naked body (it was too erotic to be termed a ‘nude') on the rather fleshy Eve I saw in Master Garnier's miniature reproduction of the Sistine Chapel. To me, the shoulders seemed like they would better fit a cricketer, but the Shah had revealed to me that he liked his women large.

In any case, it was a beautiful piece of sculpture. I meant to mount it to the top pillar in the new main bathhouse. The coolie was supposed to be securing it to the waiting marble base. I rather suspect that he dropped it on purpose, in protest at my (not the Shah's) display of bad taste and general immorality. This assumption was not baseless – I had caught him, several times, peering between the curtains that served as doors in my rooms. Perhaps he thought the strange white devil would have a demon's face. He wouldn't be far wrong.

The painted lead deformed as he dropped it, the fine face flattened out until it resembled a mask more of horror than lust. I could not repair it. I'd lost the original wax likeness when I cast the metal. I resigned myself to risking the Shah's displeasure by asking for another forbidden audience with his lady, in his chambers.

I could happily have slaughtered that idiot, morally pretentious coolie. I was busily, half-seriously, contemplating my options for corpse-disposal while my eyes stared at the divot her face had dug in the delicate imported tile. I have the gift of partitioning thoughts and while I was picturing the various torments that I could give to the goon who ruined my sculpture another part of my mind worried about how I could possibly repair that harsh crack in the floor. I gave equal weight to both problems and I had found some fitting solutions when suddenly a breeze blew through the half-completed walls and sent sand seeping through the seams of my mask. This was too much! The pain was intolerable, adding another layer of irritating grit to my already pus-blooming cheeks.

I had to take the mask off, cleanse myself before I bled through the kid skin and my weakness was made visible to all.

Luckily I was alone, I thought, in the bathhouse. The pools had not been filled as yet, but there was water everywhere in pitchers and half of the mirrors I'd made were already mounted on the walls. I took my opportunity.

My foreman took his.

My mask slid off like a glove, issuing a small shower of sand, revealing the bandages that I had earlier applied. I was busily unwinding the gauze, my vision totally blocked, when I felt four hands grasp me by the arms and shoulders.

‘Faugh!' I heard a voice I knew, speaking in Arabic, a language I'd learned on the six-month journey to the palace, ‘It's like grasping at a rotted toad.'

The hands clamped all the tighter for wanting to let go. I tried to scream, only to feel my mouth filled with wood, a bar to bite down on. My foreman spoke in rough accents, ‘I know, my friend, but think of the gold.'

I tried to fight as they peeled away the last of my gauze. I am very strong, much stronger than I look, but they had me securely. I was helpless as they saw my shame.

‘My god, it's a living corpse. You were right about the stench … this jinn will bring us better than a few old coppers.'

My former foreman smiled with his toothless gums, ripping my robes to reveal my poor flesh, so that he held my naked form. ‘Yes, but first we must get it to our buyers. I can't do that, if I have to look at it.'

Had I been free, I would have bitten his nose off. At least I had the teeth to do the job. It might have improved his disposition.

That was when they bundled my stripped body into that burlap sack. The rough fibres peeled my skin like an onion so that the fabric felt slicked with my brownish-red blood. I began to feel myself letting go of myself and found a brief relief in madness.

5.

I do not know how long the journey lasted, the days slid into one another, differentiated only by subtle differences in light and motion (the movement of the sack I was suspended in seemed to slow in darkness – it never stilled). The heat was unmitigated. I cannot describe what it was like to be suspended for so long in that scabbed chrysalis. My skin has always been delicate, fragile; it scraped off in strips like the half-solid rind that forms on cool cream soup. Days of beating sun spoiled the tatters so that I smelled like the corpse of the evil king in the Book of Judges who Ehud stabbed through the bowels. Say what you will about those Sisters, my time with the nuns proved useful in the end – if only through providing me with metaphors.

My mouth dried, my eyes ached, parching in my skull; they felt raw and dry through closed lids. My temples throbbed and my throat ached with the acid residue of vomit. I only lived because some member of the party at whose mercy I was travelling decided that it would be more profitable to deliver living cargo to their clients, and not a desiccated mummy. Once a day I felt the joy of water as someone poured a bucket of brackish washing water over the burlap which encased me. This action also provided me with my first clue about my method of transport. The stench of wet camel is unmistakable.

I do not know if I was still held captive by my foreman and his coolie; I suspect not. They would want to clear themselves of suspicion – Garnier, at least, would be looking for me. The Shah might seek me out as well. He would not wish to leave his stately pleasure drome in unfinished ruins. No one else could satisfactorily complete it. No, the foreman probably sold me on that very evening, allowing a travelling merchant to take a cut of his profit in return for allowing him to show himself bright and early at the work site, clearing himself of suspicion and adding his regular pay-cheque to his other illicit takings.

In any case, the foreman was not present when the journey ended. I felt myself lifted from the camel, still encased in the sack. I heard a rough voice, bellowing curses in Spanish, saying, ‘Ay Dios Mio, what a stench! Are you sure it is not dead? We don't pay for corpses, Mr Chinky.'

Another voice, disgruntled, answered. ‘If you don't believe me, give it a kick. It will whimper for you.'

I knew enough to wriggle before the Spaniard took him up on it. I moved very lightly, knowing well enough by then that I was no butterfly, that this pupa could never be shed by my own power. My strength was greatly reduced by starvation.

I had the dubious pleasure of listening to their laughter, and hear the familiar clink of gold as someone exchanged my body for his coins. I heard the grunts and sputters of a camel being mounted, heard the crash of whip on hide, and then I was dragged, mercifully, out of the beating sun and into some shade.

‘Let's see what I've bought, then.' The Spaniard knelt above my bag; I felt his shadow severing the light. ‘Don't move more than you must, or I'll add to your ugliness with my blade.'

He drew a section of the burlap taut and pierced it with a long, curved knife. It was the first solid thing that I had seen in several days. It looked so beautiful, so powerful, shining. I imprinted on it like a duck fresh from the egg. He widened the hole, using his enormous rough hands to tear the slit. I spared a thought of pity for his wife, his animals.

He drew me out by the shoulders, cursing and gagging as he freed my bloody body from the sack.
‘Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros, pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte.'
He left my body on a pile of straw and turned away to vomit, looking at me long enough to say, ‘I was not cheated. Creature, you live, and you're guaranteed to terrify the marks.'