Where Monsters Dwell (26 page)

“What the monkey had written was only one sentence that made sense. But since then I’ve realized that it was a very good sentence. It has settled inside me. Actually, it has become something of a motto for life.”

“What did the monkey write?” asked the boy excitedly, happy to be hearing these mysterious words again.

“‘The center of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere,’” Master Alessandro recited in sonorous Greek. “Those were the monkey’s words. The scribe let me see them with my own eyes. He had hung the sheet of paper on the wall above the writing desk so everyone could see it. I had already seen the monkey write, and there was no doubt that it was in the monkey’s handwriting.”

They both sat in silence for a while.

“That’s my favorite story,” said the boy at last. Whether or not it was true, he added to himself.

The boy did not want to play that afternoon, even though the other boys outside had made a ball from a pig’s stomach and invited him to join their game. The winner would get a cup of raisins.

Instead he went off by himself to think. He wandered through the streets all the way to the market square, where rubbish still remained from yesterday’s execution. What he thought was this: Why had his mother sent him off with the beard-cutter? A devil was living inside him, she had said. Was that true? And what did it mean? Was there a devil living inside the beard-cutter too? Could the two of them ever find their fortune?

*   *   *

The corpse they had stolen the day before had already been placed on the rotating table inside the anatomical theater. The beard-cutter and Master Alessandro had discussed the matter for a long time and decided that the body was fresh enough to lie on the same cloth overnight. The master had had bad experiences with older corpses that had begun to decay. Large amounts of sticky corpse exudation, probably a mixture of the body’s four fluids, soured by the heat, had filled the room with a stench that made any lecture impossible.

The boy still believed that the sun glided across the sky, even though the master had taught him that it was otherwise.

“It is we who glide past the sun, and not the other way around,” said Alessandro, and he always added: “One day soon I’m sure that somebody will dare to write that in a book. But don’t tell it to a priest if you value your life.”

Yet the boy could not imagine that people would ever come to view it that way, no matter how wise they became. Sometimes our wisdom is greater than ourselves, he thought.

After the sun glided across the sky that day, the boy felt more and more drawn to the theater. He knew that it was locked with one of Angelo the smith’s unbreakable locks. But he also knew where the key was kept. It was in the fruit bowl in the master’s workroom.

After six hours had passed, he could not stand it any longer. He just had to look at her. There was actually nothing odd about him coming home at that hour. It was the time when even busy academics preferred to eat dinner, so there was usually food on the table. But today the servants had not prepared a meal. They told him that Alessandro and the beard-cutter were eating at a tavern in town, along with those who were going to attend today’s dissection. They would all go to the theater while the sun was still high enough in the sky to provide good light. The servants had left the boy some boiled eggs, along with smoked meat and a bowl of raw vegetables.

After eating he sneaked into the workroom and found the key in the expected hiding place. He took it with him to the backyard. None of the servants in the house paid any notice, because the boy often played down there. Sometimes he sat by the pond and gazed at the water lilies. He thought that the leaves floating on the water looked like hearts. And the carp that stuck their mouths out of the water tried to catch these hearts and tear them apart. Now he passed by the pond and walked around the new anatomical theater. The fresh lumber glistened yellow in the sun. He went over to the lock on the door. Nobody could see him from the house, because the door faced some olive trees and the red brick wall at the back of the yard. The key slipped in easily and turned.

After opening the door he paused for a moment. He stared at the damp clay ground. The stench of decay reached him all the way out here. Then he went inside and was impressed by the way the sunlight filled the whole room.

She lay on the table, illuminated by the sun, almost like a vision. He felt like he was looking at his mother. And as if enchanted, guided by powers that neither God nor the Devil controlled, he went over to the table. Her face was paler than paper. Like snow, he thought, and remembered the winters up north. White as the snow that covered the town, that dark and angular human world, every winter. That was how his mother’s face looked. Cold as winter itself was her skin. He put his hand on her cheek. Let his fingers slip down over the dry, ice-cold skin, down her neck, between her breasts and over her stomach. Below the hair was black as night, like the spaces between the trees in a forest. He stopped and stood there breathing hard. He thought about the people who had come to his mother’s bed before the beard-cutter came. Had they continued to come after he left, or was it for the sake of her son that she had welcomed them?

*   *   *

The shadow behind him seemed to slip into his thoughts, like mud into clear, cold water. He had not heard a sound, but suddenly he was aware of this shadow coming from all directions at once.

Then the beard-cutter’s hand landed on his shoulder like a hunting falcon. The boy snatched his hand away from the corpse and looked up. The beard-cutter was staring at him with an expression he had never used before. Not even when he looked at an enemy across the table in a tavern after many beers. His eyes were filled with a malevolence that the boy had never seen before, except in his dreams. It was the look of a devil.

The beard-cutter grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and squeezed hard. Holding on tight, he ushered the boy out of the theater. Outside, he let him go.

“This is not over,” he said, and slammed the door behind him.

The boy dropped to the ground, not knowing how he should feel. He thought that the beard-cutter’s ominous gaze had not surprised him as much as it should have.

After getting back onto his feet, he went and sat on the bench by the pond. Soon Master Alessandro came through the gate up by the house and walked past him. He was followed by a whole parade of students, doctors, and noblemen who wanted to watch. The master greeted the boy with a tight smile as they passed. The boy nodded, but did not smile back.

Soon everyone was inside the theater.

*   *   *

Alessandro’s property was bountiful with his own vegetable garden, a chicken yard, and a small orchard that produced olives and peaches. The house at the end of the yard was whitewashed, and between the house and the carp pond was a shed where the servants stored their tools. It took a lot of tools to keep the house and garden in order. Among other things, a tall ladder was required.

After Alessandro and his excited entourage had vanished inside the anatomical theater, the boy went to the shed and got the ladder. The ladder was big and heavy, while the boy was small and light, and it was hard to drag it along the path all the way down to the theater. It was even harder to raise the ladder and lean it against the wall of the building. But whoever wants something badly enough will get what he wants, as the beard-cutter had told the boy many times. No matter how heavy the ladder was, it had to go up. The beard-cutter’s expression may have scared him, but not enough to stop him from climbing up the ladder.

When he reached the top rung and stood on tiptoe, he was just high enough to be able to peer over the edge of the wall. He had a clear view inside.

The presentation was already under way. The boy saw at once that it was proceeding differently from other presentations he had witnessed. This time it was the doctor who wielded the knives. Alessandro himself stood leaning over the corpse and was just about to cut open the abdomen. Every successful dissection began with an incision in the belly. The master called this point just below the navel “the center of the skin.”

The boy gazed at the beard-cutter standing beside the master. He still wore a dark expression, but the boy doubted that he was thinking about what had just occurred between them. The boy had lived with him for two years now, and he knew him well. He knew what the problem was. Pride. What bothered the beard-cutter was that he had had to lend his knives to someone else. The boy saw them lying there, sharp and glistening, placed neatly and systematically on a little table covered in a white cloth, just behind the corpse. The beard-cutter’s only task today was to hand the master the knives when he asked for them. He had been reduced from a surgeon to an assistant. He got to follow the whole autopsy at close range, but the boy understood that for the beard-cutter, a dissection was not a visual experience. For him it was the feeling of cutting, the incisions, the cracking of bones. It was a tactile journey of discovery. A performance with the knives. It was the cutting into the body that actually meant something, not what was found inside. Wounded pride and envy. That was what the boy saw in the beard-cutter’s eyes as he stood obediently behind his teacher.

The dissection lasted five hours, until darkness fell. The boy had climbed down when they started in on the head and the eyes. He did not want to watch that face being destroyed. He fell asleep, dreaming of a stench that filled his nostrils.

When the door to his room was torn open that evening, it took a few moments before he grasped the reality that had descended upon him. The beard-cutter used this confusion to seize the upper hand. He bounded forward and clamped his hand over the boy’s mouth.

“What were you doing with the corpse, you little cur?” he whispered.

He could not reply. The beard-cutter was pressing his hand too tightly over his mouth.

“You’ve ruined everything. The corpse is for the knives. It is always just for the knives. You can’t touch it the way you did. What’s gotten into you? Your mother could see there’s a devil living inside you. I thought it was a guardian angel, but it turns out that your mother was right.”

The beard-cutter wrapped his free hand around the boy’s throat. The boy’s eyes grew wide, and in the dim moonlight coming through the window, he could clearly see a tear running down the beard-cutter’s cheek as his hand began to squeeze. The dizziness came first. The night filled with light before it turned blacker than ever before.

“Fortune has abandoned me again,” said the beard-cutter, somewhere in the dark.

*   *   *

The boy felt a rocking and a shaking that came and went. I am on the road to hell, he thought. Then his eyelids began to flutter. He blinked uncontrollably. When he finally stopped blinking, he lay still and was able to see. He was lying in a cart. In front of him sat the beard-cutter, holding the reins to the donkey. So we are going to hell together, he thought. But then he began to look around the dark landscape. They were riding along a cart path he recognized. This was not the road to perdition. Not exactly.

His only hope was to lie completely still and breathe as slowly and as quietly as he could. He lay like that until the cart rounded the wall at the graveyard of the innocents and swung around to the back. He remained lying there quietly while the beard-cutter dug a grave for him outside the wall. When it was deep enough, he came over to the cart and grabbed the boy by the hair. The boy clenched his teeth so he would not scream as the strong man yanked him by the hair from the cart, as if he were unloading a slaughtered animal. Then the beard-cutter’s boots rolled him along the ground, until he fell into the grave. There he lay on his back with an arm over his face. The beard-cutter was in a hurry, and began at once to shovel dirt over him. The boy counted himself lucky that it was dark, so that he could put his hand over his mouth and make a little pocket of air. Soon everything went black, and there was a terrible weight on his chest. The boy remained lying there until he heard the last shovelful of dirt land on top of him. He, too, had been given a shallow grave. He could hear the beard-cutter get into the cart and whip the donkey into motion.

When everything was quiet, the boy moved the hand covering his mouth and began to relieve some of the weight pressing down on him. He started to dig. As he did so the dirt fell in and covered his whole face. Sudden panic struck him. He was breathing in a little dirt every time he inhaled, and the mound over him was weighing more and more heavily on his chest, as if trying to squeeze the life out of him.

But he did not stop moving his hands. Panic made him dig faster and with greater frenzy. Luckily the dirt was loose and not very deep.

First he got one hand into the air, then the other, so he could dig a tunnel as he pressed his face toward the starry sky above. As fresh air came in, he could not help coughing. Bits of dirt and gravel sprayed out of his mouth, and his lungs filled greedily with fresh air with each breath he took. The prickling and numbness vanished from his limbs, and the dizziness was gone. For the first time since he had climbed down from the ladder to go to bed, he felt fully awake.

Was it all just a dream he had awakened from? Was it not dirt but Master Alessandro’s heavy wool blankets lying on top of him? He felt with his hands. No, it was dirt. This had really happened. And so unexpectedly, the way everything happened with the beard-cutter. He had fallen into disgrace, and without warning the beard-cutter had tried to kill him. The boy lay there wondering what he had done with the corpse earlier in the day that had aroused such violent wrath. He could not understand it. He had only touched the body, nothing more. He had imagined that it was his own mother, and that he might bring her back to life. If the beard-cutter had known that he missed his mother so much, maybe he would not have flown into such a rage. Or would he? The yellow bile must be to blame, the boy thought. It could not be anything else.

It had not rained much that fall, which meant the earth was dry and loose. That was what had saved him from a gruesome death. He kept digging with his hands. It took a long time to get his whole torso free, but as soon as that was done, it took hardly any time to get his legs loose. The boy who had been buried alive arose from the grave. He thought of the song the beard-cutter had been whistling the last time they were here. Was it a premonition that neither of them had registered or had the beard-cutter been planning to kill him all along?