Elizabeth Massie - Naked, on the Edge

Book of Trials, 7:23-8

Danielle stood against the rough wall, her red eyes turned furiously towards the shrouded figure on the gurney. Marie and Clarice were gone, spun away with dour exasperation, vanished through the small ceiling-high window of the cellar. Their words still echoed in the room like late-season flies caught in a bottle.

Marie: “He is not Alexandre! He is nothing. He is less than nothing.”

Clarice: “It’s done! Come with us. Sister, take my hand. It stinks in here.”

Marie: “Look if you must, gaze for a moment, but be done with it, and then come.”

Danielle had pressed her gloved hands to her ears and shook her head. “No.”

Marie snapped her fingers sharply as if Danielle were a dog to obey her mistress, and Danielle had simply said, “Leave me be.”

Marie and Clarice had done just that. They thought their companion mad, not a good thing for a creature of the night. Madness could only lead to foolishness and carelessness, and with carelessness, destruction. They had left their mad friend to her own fate.

Danielle stared at the soiled sheet, the sharp protrusions beneath the cloth where the nose and chin were, the feet. Softer mounds of the shoulders, the fisted hands, the groin. Light from lanterns, hung in this subterranean room by the men who had departed just minutes ago, sputtered from ceiling hooks. Water pipes dripped puddles onto the dirt floor. Spiders and their webs, left in corners by the hasty custodian the day before, held still as if pondering the strange and recent occurrence.

“Alexandre?” Danielle said softly, tasting the cold of her breath as it passed through her incisors and her protruding canines.

“Why can that not be you?” She took several steps forward, hesitated. So much she had witnessed in all these many years, so much terror and viciousness and death, yet this one was almost beyond her ken.

“Why can that not be you?” she repeated, then touched her own face. “Is this not me? Am I not still walking this squalid earth in the form of a young woman, though nearly 120 years of age?”

The sheet stirred slightly. Danielle gasped and put out her hand to find that it was just a current of air passing though the damp brick room, travelling from one ill-hung door to another in the opposite wall.

Was this world not filled with such as her, existing in conjunction with mortals who most often believed their own reality was the sum and total? And so what incredulous magic could not happen, and what damnable curse was impossible?

The room was hot and rancid, foul human scents coiling like smoke from the floor, the walls, the chairs, the gurney. The men who had been here just minutes ago had stunk at first of excitement, and then disgust. They claimed for themselves the crown of civility, yet winced and vomited at the result of their self-proclaimed goodness.

“Is this not me?” she repeated. “Look, Alexandre, and see that flesh which you once loved.” She shook her head, warding off the stench, then ripped her gloves from her hands and threw them to the floor. She clutched at the frilly bodice of her dress, and ripped it from neck to waist. Her dagger-sharp nails raked the white skin of her breast as she did, leaving long, bloodless skin-lips gaping silently in the air.

Cursed costume of the modern, nineteenth-century woman! Such prudes, such whores, tied up and trussed and playing at seduction with their prim dress, not knowing what it is to be wholly female! Ah, but she had known! Alexandre had known her femaleness and she his maleness, and they had reveled in the wonder of it all.

She tossed the ripped cloth aside. Then she wrenched off the rest of her garb — the leg-of-mutton sleeves, the long muslin skirt, the petticoat, cotton stockings, garters, buttoned shoes. All were hurled away. The hat, the hairpins, the ear bobs. Her auburn hair fell free about her shoulders.

Danielle closed her eyes and caressed her cold skin. She traced the length of her arms and torso, feathering the soft hairs on her chilly stomach, strumming the already healing skin-lips on her breasts.

She had been naked when they had taken away Alexandre from her the first time. Lying in a stall of the weanling barn they’d been, Danielle leaning gaily into the wiry hair of Alexandre’s chest and laughing at the prickling straw in her hair and in her back. She had picked up a yellow stem and had ticked his chin and his nose. He had kissed the straw and then her fingers. He had wrapped his arms around her waist and nestled his chin into her neck, his tongue playing easily along the tender flesh there.

“You were tender and true,” she said, her brows knotted and lips trembling. “But only one wrong laid on your head, as any human would have who has lived past infancy. How, then, did this curse come to you?”

Beneath the sheet, Alexandre did not move. Danielle took several more steps and grasped the sheet that covered her beloved.

The handsome, tattered young man arrived at Bicetre on a frosty, late March morning in 1792, appearing like a spectre beneath the shadows of the pear orchard behind Paris’s infamous hospital and prison. The sky had rained not an hour earlier, and the rain had been cold and severe, drilling chilly puddles into the ground and knocking branch tips from the naked trees. Shivering droplets hung triumphantly to the fur of the animals in the paddocks and to the emerald leaves of the boxwood shrubs that lined the narrow dirt pathways.

The brick institution of Bicetre was large, dark and filled with most unpleasant business — that of madness, of loneliness, of anger, desperation. Of screams. Of silence. Bright, curious doctors ministered to the sick. Hardened officers tended the miscreants.

In the shadow of the great place, flanking its west side, was a four-acre plot on which animals and vegetables were raised for the use of Bicetre’s personnel, patients and inmates. It was called appropriately the Little Farm. Fenced paddocks monitored the cows and sheep and pigs; in a small hutch nested chickens and pigeons. Several gardens bordered with woven vine fences offered up turnips and beans in the warmer months. A tiny grove of pear trees held sentinel near the stone wall where, beyond, the citizens of Paris pounded back and forth in the rhythm of their individual and now collective lives.

Danielle, one of three young maids employed to tend the animals and gardens, had been in the paddock on a stool, scrubbing the udder of one poorly producing cow and slapping flies from her face when she saw the man amid the naked pear trees and thought, My God, but he is beautiful! Thank you for this gift today! She left the stool and the muddy bovine for the orchard, stopping several yards away and drawing her wool shawl about her shoulders.

“Good morning,” Danielle said. “Are you lost?”

The man raised his hand in tentative greeting — a fine, strong hand it was, a working man’s hand with dark knuckle hair and calluses — and said, “Not now that I’ve beheld you.” He smiled, and Danielle could see that his teeth were fine and white. Her mother, before she had died, had told Danielle that good teeth meant a good heart.

Danielle didn’t back away nor did she turn her gaze to the ground as the finer of France’s daughters would have done in the presence of a strange man. She was not a maid in the sense the Maid of Orleans had been; Danielle had had her lovers, most of them young doctors at Bicetre and an occasional nurse, who brought her to their private offices within the heavy walls of the institution, made over her lush body on firm, practical sofas, then laughed at her and sent her back to the barn with a slap to the ass. The Revolution stated there was to be no more class distinction, and Paris had turned nearly upside down with its fervent attention to la chose publique, “public things” which had to be monitored for counter-revolutionary thought and action. Yet Danielle and her sister maids at the hospital farm found their lives little changed. The gnats and flies were as thick as before, the cows as dirty, the pears in the orchard as worm-ridden, and the doctors as lustful towards girls in maid garb.