Mutants (9 page)

Jules Janin never wrote his novel of Ritta and Christina Parodi’s unlived lives. But he did leave an outline of what he had in mind. No translation could do justice to the turbulence of his prose, but a paraphrase gives an idea. In Janin’s world, far from being born to poverty (after all, ‘
la misère gâte tout ce qu’elle touche
’), the two girls are rather well off. They also, inexplicably, have different-coloured hair. Christina, who is blonde, strong and noble, watches tenderly over her weaker, slightly sinister sibling, who is, inevitably, the brunette. All is harmonious, but suddenly seventeen springs have passed and,
arrive l’Amour
, in the shape of a bashful Werther who loves, and is loved by, only one of them – Christina, of course. Ah, the paradox! Two women, one heart, one lover; it is too tragic for words. Ritta sickens, and a mighty struggle between life and death ensues, as when
un guerrier est frappé à mort
. The sisters expire and we leave them having, as Janin puts it, ‘arrived at new terrors, unknown emotions’, and a sense of relief that he never wrote the full version.

The reality was, of course, quite different. When Serres had done with Ritta and Christina he not only kept the skeleton but quite a few other body-parts as well. An old catalogue of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle lists, in a copperplate hand, separate entries for the infants’ brains (Cat. No. 1303 and 1304), eyes (1306, 1307), tongues (1308, 1309) and various other bits and pieces. Most of these specimens now seem to be lost, though it is possible that they will one day surface from the museum’s underground vaults. Ritta and Christina’s skeleton, however, is
still around – as is the painted plaster-cast of their body. Both are on display in the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy, a steel-vaulted structure with an interior like a beaux-arts cathedral that stands only a few hundred metres from the amphitheatre where the sisters were first dissected.

A Gallery of Comparative Anatomy may seem like an odd place to exhibit the remains of two small girls. Nearly all of the hundreds of other skeletons there belong to animals, arranged by order, family, genus and species. Yet, from one point of view, there could hardly be a better place for them. The gallery represents the cumulative effort of France’s greatest naturalists to impose order upon the natural world; to put each species where it should be; to make sense of them. For Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire the study of congenital deformity was, in the first instance, much in this spirit – a matter of locating conjoined twins in the order of things. In a gesture that Geoffroy would have loved, Ritta and Christina’s remains share an exhibition case with a pair of piglets and pair of chicks that are conjoined much as they were. Such specimens were, to him, pickled proof that deformity is not arbitrary, a caprice of nature, a cosmic joke, but rather the consequence of natural forces that could be understood. ‘There are no monsters,’ he asserted, ‘and nature is one.’ In the way of French aphorisms, this is a little cryptic. But if you stand in front of the display case containing what is left of Ritta and Christina Parodi and look at the pink plaster-cast of the body with its two blonde heads and four blue eyes, it’s easy to see what he meant.

[O
N FIRST PARTS
]

I
N 189O THE CITIZENS OF AMSTERDAM
bought Willem Vrolik’s anatomical collection for the sum of twelve thousand guilders. It contained 5103 specimens, among them such rarities as the skull of a Sumatran prince named Depati-toetoep-hoera who had rebelled, apparently with little success, against his colonial masters. There was also a two-tusked Narwhal skull that had once belonged to the Danish royal family, an ethnographic collection of human crania, and the remains of 360 people displaying various congenital afflictions. Some of the specimens were adult skeletons, but most were infants preserved in alcohol or formaldehyde.

The Vrolik is just one of the great teratological collections that were built up during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. London’s Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospital has the
Gordon collection, while the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons has the Hunterian; Philadelphia has the Mütter; Paris the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle as well as the Orfila and the Dupuytren. Vrolik’s collection, which was given to the medical faculty of the University of Amsterdam, now occupies a sleek gallery in a modern biomedical complex on the outskirts of the city. What makes it unusual, if not unique, is that where most teratological collections are closed to all but doctors and scientists, the curators of the Vrolik have opened their collection to the public. In a fine display of Dutch rationalism they have decided that all who wish to do so should be allowed to see the worst for themselves.

C
YCLOPIA
. S
TILLBORN INFANT
, F
IRME
, I
TALY
(1624). F
ROM
Fortunio Liceti 1634
De monstrorum natura caussis et differentiis.

And the worst is terrible indeed. Arrayed in cabinets, Vrolik’s specimens are really quite horrifying. The gaping mouths, sightless eyes, opened skulls, split abdomens and fused or missing limbs seem to be the consequence of an uncontainable fury, as if some unseen Herod has perpetrated a latter-day slaughter of the innocents. Many of the infants that Vrolik collected were stillborn. A neonate’s skeleton with a melon-like forehead is a case of thanatophoric dysplasia; another whose stunted limbs press against the walls of the jar in which he is kept has Blomstrand’s chondrodysplasia. There is a cabinet containing children with acute failures in neural tube fusion. Their backs are cleaved open and their brains spill from their skulls. Across the gallery is a series of conjoined twins, one of which has a parasitic twin almost as large as himself protruding from the roof of his mouth. And next to them is a specimen labelled ‘Acardia amorphus’, a skin-covered sphere with nothing
to hint at the child it almost became except for a small umbilical cord, a bit of intestine, and the rudiments of a vertebral column. Until one has walked around a collection such as the Vrolik’s it is difficult to appreciate the limits of human form. The only visual referent that suggests itself are the demonic creatures that caper across the canvases of Hieronymus Bosch – another Dutchman – that now hang in the Prado. Of course, there is a difference in meaning. Where Bosch’s grotesques serve to warn errant humanity of the fate that awaits it in the afterlife, Vrolik’s are presented with clinical detachment, cleansed of moral value. And that, perhaps, suggests the best description of the Museum Vrolik. It is a
Last Judgement
for the scientific age.

THE CYCLOPS

Of Willem Vrolik’s published writings, the greatest is a full folio work that he published between 1844 and 1849 called
Tabulae ad illustrandam embryogenesin hominis et mammalium tarn naturalem quam abnormem
(Plates demonstrating normal and abnormal development in man and mammals). The teratological lithographs that it contains are of a beauty and veracity that have never been surpassed. The richest plates are those devoted to foetuses, human and animal, that have, instead of two eyes, only one – a single eye located in the middle of their foreheads. By the time Vrolik came to write the
Tabulae
he had been studying this condition for over ten years, had already published a major monograph on it, and had assembled a collection of twenty-four
specimens – eight piglets, ten lambs, five humans and a kitten –that displayed this disorder in varying degrees of severity. Following Geoffroy he gave the condition a name that recalled one of the more terrible creatures in the Greek cosmology: the Cyclops.

Hesiod says that there were three Cyclopes – Brontes, Steropes and Arges – and that they were the offspring of Uranus and Gaia. They were gigantic, monstrous craftsmen who in some accounts made Zeus’ thunderbolts, in others, the walls of Mycenae. The Cyclopes of the
Odyssey
are more human and more numerous than those of the
Theogony
, but their single eye is still a mark of savagery. Homer calls them ‘lawless’. Polyphemus is more lawless than most: he has a taste for human flesh and dashes out the brains of Ulysses’ companions ‘as though they had been puppies’ before eating them raw. Homer does not identify the island where the renegade Cyclops lived, but Ovid put him on the slopes of Etna in Sicily and gave him an affecting, if homicidal, passion for the nymph Galatea. Painted on vases, cast in bronze or carved in marble, Polyphemus was depicted by the Greeks throwing boulders or else reeling in agony as Ulysses drives a burning stick into his single eye.

Many teratologists have linked the deformity to the myth. They argue that the iconographic model for the semi-divine monster was a human infant. Certainly the model, if it ever existed, must have been only faintly remembered. Differences in size and vigour aside, even the earliest representations of
Polyphemus put his single eye where you would expect it, above his nose. But the single eye of a cyclopic infant invariably lies beneath its nose – or what is left of it. Others have argued, more or less plausibly, that the Cyclopes were inspired by the semi-fossilised remains of dwarf elephants that litter the Mediterranean islands.

Whatever its origins, Homer to Vrolik, the iconography of the Cyclops shows a clear evolutionary lineage. Homer’s Polyphemus is monstrous; Ovid’s is too, although he is also a sentimentalist. But within sixty years of the poet’s death in 17 ad, the Cyclops would appear in a different guise. It would become a race of beings that had ontological status, supported by the authority of travellers and philosophers. In 77 ad Pliny the Elder finished his encyclopaedic
Historia naturalis
. Drawing on earlier Greek writers like Megasthenes, who around 303 bc travelled as an ambassador to India in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquests, Pliny peopled India and Ethiopia (the two were barely distinguished) with a host of fabulous races. There were the Sciapodes, who had a single enormous foot which they used as a sort of umbrella; dwarfish Pygmies; dog-headed Cynocephali; headless people with eyes between their shoulderblades; people with eight fingers and toes on each hand; people who lived for a thousand years; people with enormous ears; and people with tails. And then there were the single-eyed people: Pliny calls them the Arimaspeans and says that they fight with griffins over gold.

This was the beginning of a tradition of fabulous races that persisted for about fifteen centuries. By the third century ad,
Christian writers had adopted the tradition; by the fifth century, St Augustine is wondering whether these races are descended from Adam. In the Middle Ages, the Cyclopes appears essentially unaltered from antiquity in manuscripts of wonder-books such as Thomas a Cantimpré’s
De Naturis Rerum
which was
composed around 1240. In the fourteenth century, their biblical parentage is settled: they are the deformed descendants of Cain and Ham. Around the same time they appear in illuminations of Marco Polo’s travels (the Italian unaccountably fails to mention their existence); in the early 1500s one appears on the wall of a Danish church dressed in the striped pantaloons, floppy hat and leather purse of a late-medieval Baltic dandy. With time, the Cyclops becomes smaller, tamer and moves closer to home.

C
YCLOPS WOOING
G
ALATEA
. F
ROM
B
LAISE
DE
V
IGENèRE
1624

Les images Philostratus.

The first illustration of a cyclopic child, as distinct from a Cyclops, was given by Fortunio Liceti. In the 1634 edition of his
De monstrorum
he describes an infant girl who was born in Firme, Italy, in 1624 and who, he says, had a well-organised body but a head of horrible aspect. In the middle of her face, in place of a nose, there was a mass of skin that resembled a penis or a pear. Below this was a square-shaped piece of reddish skin on which one could see two very close-set eyes like the eyes of a chicken. Although the child died at birth she is depicted with the proportions of a robust ten-year-old, a legacy of the giants that preceded her.