The Anatomy Lesson (10 page)

Tulp objects, I understand, not to the specific theory William Harvey presents on the pumping of blood through the heart but to the very notion of exploring the heart’s precise function. I do not quite understand the logic of this. There are those, of course, who still consider the heart to be the locus of either the mortal or immortal soul, and perhaps his objection to Harvey’s work stems from the fear that we would disturb that image of such a sacred organ. It seems to me quite clear that the heart has a mechanical function within the body, and one that relates in some way to the revitalizing of the blood. When blood leaves the heart it does not have the same qualities as it did when it entered. It is hotter, more rarefied, and more agitated. Are medical men afraid that the heart could no longer be the seat of the soul if it had a mechanical function?

I have my concerns about Harvey’s conclusions, because his observations on the heart’s movements differ substantially from the evidence I have accumulated during vivisections of live dogs. Yet Harvey deserves the highest possible praise for making such a valuable discovery about the pumping of this organ.

I may have something to learn from this Tulpius—and to discover our differences so that I might articulate my opposing
position more forcefully—and at the moment some firsthand observation of a human anatomy may yield greater insights than my own amateur animal anatomies.

By the by, have I mentioned that they sell the bull’s full hindquarters here, so it is possible to trace the veins and arteries directly from the feet all the way to the intestines? I find myself thrilled to discover it, and cannot wait until I have cleared a place in my lodgings to move ahead with my studies.

Many times I have sung the praises of Amsterdam as the perfect urban retreat, and how preferable it is to Paris or Rome, because everyone here is so engaged in trade that they ignore you quite entirely. It was not even a year ago that I boasted to Jean-Louis de Balzac that I could live here all my life without ever being noticed by a soul. However, time has worn out my anonymity and I have begun to be noticed … indeed, I have begun to have certain social obligations from which I cannot seem to extricate myself.

So, there it is: I will have to postpone my Deventer excursion once again. I remain here in my lodgings at the Oud Prins and I will share with you some new chapters from my “World” as soon as I have them.

Your true and loving friend,
René Descartes

I never knew there were so much empty space out there between Leiden and other parts. I always figured one town ended and another began just across a dike or dam.

Mother talked sometimes about the lonesome stretches she’d walk when she went studding her bull, but they must’ve been lonelier than I ever imagined because there were nothing out there but fields and sky and crows. At least, that’s all you could see from the barge that took us across the Haarlemmermeer to Amsterdam.

That breeze on the boat were something, though. When it rushed across my face, I thought, There’s more in the world, more than cruelty and meanness. Adriaen told me once that he’d been on a galley. He were to row for eight years with other convicts for the admiralty of Rotterdam. That sounded important, but he said the admiralty were no better than them slave traders and it were his job to row them. I never knew how he got off that ship, but I thought about where it would have taken him. I thought, maybe, even on a
boat like that, there were that breeze. If he felt that, I bet he smiled. That made me feel better, so I held my belly and thought on how Carel should get to feel that breeze someday.

The boy the father sent with me were a frail, ash-colored thing. He said his name were Guus. He reminded me of Adriaen when he were young: stringy and loose limbed. He might have been one of them boys throwing stones in the morning, though. When he came to me, he looked like he were sent to meet a ghost or a hobgoblin. Maybe he’d heard what they all cried. Maybe he had ideas about me.

I took his hand and I held it between my two hands and closed my eyes. I said, “Thank you, young man, for not being fearful. You are a good boy. We’ll take care of each other.”

He smiled weakly.

When we were close to land, the barge were drawn along the edge of the canal with a horse on land to pull it. But soon as we go out into the open water, they let the horses loose and the barge went to sailing. They hauled up the sheets and the wind flapped up against them, and you could see the strength of it, hard and fast, tipping our boat sometimes till it scared me. A ghostly power, that breeze. Nothing you could touch, but the force of it were something.

When the boat were out there in the
meer
, every once in a while the boy would look up and ask a question: “How long you lived in Leiden?” “How’d you meet that convict?” “Do you know how to read?” “What’s it feel like to have a baby inside you?”

I took his hand and put it to my belly. We waited until the babe kicked. The boy jumped back when Carel moved. Then he laughed. We both did. Funny, how you can laugh at any time, any place, even through the worst of it.

“Did you get a baby from a spell?” he asked me then.

“No, I got it from a man,” I told him.

“That man we’re going for in Amsterdam?”

“Yes.”

Guus took a step away from me. “They said he murdered someone.”

“He didn’t murder anyone. He only tried to steal a man’s coat.”

He looked confused. “But didn’t he have his own coat?”

“I don’t know,” I said, to be honest. “Sometimes he had a cloak. Sometimes he were just in his jerkin. He had things sometimes and then he lost them. He weren’t good with keeping things.”

Guus thought about this. “He can have my coat,” he said. “I’m never cold.”

“That would be very nice of you.”

He looked proud to have said it.

After that, he were less afraid of me. He called me “ma’am.”

The night before the stones came, I had a dream that we were climbing a tree with our newborn. Me and Adriaen. The babe in one of my hands. I were to make an apple tart for springtime and we were going all together to pick the apples from the tree in the yard. When I climbed, Adriaen lifted the babe into the branches, because he said the babe would only be safe up top. I were trying to grab an apple off one limb and trying to reach for the babe at the same time, and I got unsteady because of my reaching and I broke the limbs off below. Adriaen were on his way up and instead he fell forward, so we fell together and we fell far, we fell for a long time. In the dream I were calm about it, not screaming, but afraid for the babe.

Finally we hit a branch and landed in a giant nest, but it were thick with thorns and we were both cut and bruised and crying. The
babe weren’t with us anymore. He floated up to the top of the tree when we started falling, and as we went lower, he went higher, and finally we saw him up there, settled on a perch as calm as a lamb. Adriaen and I stayed in our nest and he held me and we watched our babe up in the high branches of the tree above us. I saw Adriaen’s belly and felt where he’d been branded, and it weren’t any of the shapes I knew. It were a bird this time, with wild many-colored feathers. I traced my name in that brand and my finger were a flame.

I thought about what I could say to the magistrate to make him grant a pardon. I did not know what my words would be to a magistrate. I’m just a poor woman with a broken mill and I’m tireder now than ever with the babe’s heaviness.

I did not know if Father van Thijn’s note would help. Except that they were calling him murderer and I knew that weren’t Adriaen. The father knew it, too, even if he didn’t say it. Adriaen were not soft or gentlehearted, but he didn’t have that meanness. I knew all he stole and how he stole it. He were not shy to talk about his ways of thieving. He were proud of his way. He said he were always kind to men even when he were thieving from them. And if he were caught, he said he always showed respect to his jailors. He didn’t mind what they did to him, no matter how much they did to him, he seemed to think it were coming to him. That were the way it all worked for Adriaen. He did his misdeeds because it were how he lived; they gave him his whips and brands because it were his comeuppance. But hanging? For murder? No, no. That weren’t him.

Maybe I would’ve said this to the magistrate: Adriaen loved people. He talked to everyone like he never met a stranger. What were
his were theirs; what were theirs, his; and if he liked something, he didn’t mind to take it. But he never kept much very long and never had much from thieving. A gully knife for eating and a set of leatherworking tools his father gave him. That’s all I ever know he had. He loved his vagabond life, too. He liked to warm his hands by a crackling canal-side fire with the other mendicants. He thought the wind were a song in his ear.

I knew him as a boy and I knew him as a man. We grew up in houses side by side on the Rhine. He were a sweet, spindly-legged boy. He looked after me when my father went drunk to the hayloft. I looked after him when his father went wild with his fists. He left Leiden when they lost the shop and spent years wandering.

When he came back to Leiden after all them years traveling, he were the tiredest man I ever saw, my Adriaen. It weren’t just in his eyes but everywhere, like he’d been a sail on a high seas trading ship, where pirates climbed aboard and slashed. That were how he were when he came back to me after all them years wandering. He went out and got himself tired.

His body weren’t beautiful no more, neither. But each of them flogging scars and brandings were evidence of the life he’d lived, and when we were in bed I used to touch them and trace my finger from one to the next like they were a map of his travels. That back of his were like the sloping hills of our marshland, and each long scar a canal, a passageway to his salvation. He let me touch them, though the skin were sensitive there, and I don’t think he let anyone else do that, ever.

I listened and I heard about where he’d been. It weren’t nice what he said, sometimes, but them words were a deep lake you walk into and stay in the bottom muck, your feet held in its murky sink, somehow just swaying. What I mean is, it weren’t ugly down there
inside Adriaen, just dark and different. I could stay there in that place for a long time without feeling any ways bad about anything.