"Please, come inside! You can't see anything from out here. There's nothing to be afraid of. My creatures are all far less dangerous than any you could meet outside. They're beautiful and well-behaved and pretty as pictures.
I obeyed, mesmerized. He stepped aside to let me pass. "Look! Modern-day mummies! New mummies! You won't find these anywhere else. I'm the exclusive distributor."
"But," I ventured, "what about…I mean, that-"
I pointed at the human mummy, for indeed a young woman was on display between an ocelot and a baboon. Her mask lay on a table nearby.
"What about it? Oh, yes, quite. Rest assured, it's all perfectly legal, all the papers are in order. Really-no Joke!"
She gazed at me, the lamp from the window flickering in her glass eves.
"Is she for sale?" I asked.
"Everything you see is for sale, sir. Of course, she's my finest specimen, and her price, well…Take a closer look, and tell me if you've ever seen anything like it."
I turned back to the mummy.
"If I may, sir, her eyes! Look into her eyes."
The mummy's glass stare had such depth and humanity I found myself more flustered than if I'd been faced with a living person.
"Aha!" exclaimed the owner. He put his hand on my forearm then, a hand white as a stripped root. "You felt it too, then! Her stare is an enigma… or rather, a work of art! Have you ever heard of the glassmaker Leonello Guardicci?"
I said I hadn't.
"He created these wonders," the taxidermist continued, pointing at the mummy's right eye. It was so convincing I expected to see it flinch when the shopkeeper grazed it with his fingernail. Despite myself, I turned away.
"Don't do that. It makes me uncomfortable."
"You're too sensitive. It's only glass. A colored marble carefully inset-by a great artist, I'll give you that!"
"It's not just the color," I protested. "It's..
I fell silent. The shopkeeper nodded, as though I'd finished my thought.
"It's a very beautiful thing indeed. A very beautiful thing! A charming subject, consummate craftsmanship. Such skill is costly. The mummy, too, of course-and then those eves. I dare say, Leonello Guardicci's masterpiece!"
I gave the old man all the money I had on me as a deposit. Ever the professional, he made out a receipt and wrote my name on a tag he tucked into a bandage, right over the mummy's heart: she had been reserved.
I'll admit I was upset the next morning when I remembered my twilight stroll and what had happened. A mummy probably isn't the most essential thing you can buy these days. My apartment was cramped: three tiny rooms already crammed with books and musical instruments. After some thought, I decided to give up what now seemed an extravagance.
I could simply have never contacted the taxidermist again, but instead a trivial concern guided my steps back to his shop: I was willing to pay a penalty, but I didn't like the thought of losing my entire deposit.
I was expecting a niggling exchange. To my deep relief, the shopkeeper made no objection. So I'd changed my mind? It happened. And I wanted to recover part of my deposit? He retained such a tiny amount that I almost felt offended for his sake. It must've shown, for he smiled assuagingly.
"A piece like that isn't an easy sell, but I'm not worried," he said. "She'll be someone's, someday. Just not yours."
In such delicate transactions, a customer's most intimate sensibilities come into play and reveal themselves. Just what was this crude profiteer trying to say? That I was too crass a soul? What did he know? I thought myself worthy of owning such a singular object, at once macabre and sophisticated, almost immaterial. I wasn't merely making a bid on the semblance of a few fleshly remains, but on the glints and echoes of a life cut short. This mouth had laughed and sung, these lips whispered sweet nothings in a darkened bedroom, these hands drawn hopscotch courts, cradled dolls, set balls in flight… I was buying all that and more. I'd changed my mind again, this time once and for all. As the owner of that magical gaze for which the whole mummy was a reliquary, I'd be able to draw on its treasury of impressions and emotions whenever I wished from now on.
I wrote a check for the remainder. The shopkeeper made me out a receipt in due form, accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.
"Hold on to this, for insurance purposes, in the event-fire, theft, nothing's safe. These days, everything disappears or goes up in smoke. Make sure you're insured," he sighed. "I assume you haven't yet decided where you'll display it?
"Not too cold, and not too hot. Watch out for dust and dampness. Leave her mask on as much as possible; it protects her," he said before calling a cab.
When I got home half an hour later, I congratulated myself on the lightness of my precious burden. The elevator was quite old and didn't go very fast. I had time to look myself over in the mirror on the back wall. What was the proper demeanor to assume in an elevator with the mummy of a young woman in one's arms? I reached the eighth floor without finding an answer to this no doubt frivolous question.
My feelings for the mummy whose "proud owner" I'd become followed a predictable course. First, passion: I sometimes stopped in the middle of my work to gaze on her fondly. As a translator, I was lucky enough to work from home. I'd set her across from my desk. My apartment was mostly filled with books and a collection of musical instruments I've since then scattered. I am not a musician. The cases fascinated me more than the instruments themselves. For me, the cases of musical instruments were great brown or blackish shells that harbor strange creatures in their fluffy, satiny, or felt-lined insides. Walking-stick-thin or beetle-round, wooden or metal, matte or glossy, inlaid mandolin, stiff flute, or austere violin, most musical instruments looked like insects, and like them had carapaces bristling with antennae, mandibles, rostra.
I collected instruments in their cases because for me their charm resided mainly in the perfect complementarity of container and content, and the contrast of materials and colors. Contemplating the nickeled keys of a clarinet, set in ebony sections nestled in their padded blue sateen dwellings, or the gleaming body of a concert guitar in plush garnet, inspired feelings of luxury if not lust in me.
How long do we remain aware of the presence of someone or something beside us? Perhaps it's scandalous, in a way, to equate the two… but what of it? At the time I was greatly inclined to prefer objects, which reassured me, to people, who often frightened me. I was what one called a confirmed bachelor, hardened in his lonely ways. Hardened: well on the way to drying out and becoming a fossil, an object. That was my life when the mummy, and then Delia, came and turned it upside down. But I'm getting ahead of myself I should tell this story calmly, carefully. It matters little that I should seem at that moment a confirmed young bachelor, prematurely pickled at age thirty-five in his habits and collections.
Sooner or later we wind up tiring of objects as we do people-we lose interest-because other objects, or people, have in turn entered our lives, pushing earlier ones aside. Perhaps what matters most to us in all the world can be safely banished to the very depths of our being. But should disaster threaten our inner attic, it is the one thing we try to save, without regard for all the rest.
My initial wonder dulled as weeks, then months, went by. After so constantly occupying my thoughts, the mummy began to blend into its surroundings in my cramped apartment. My gaze strayed over my possessions and only rarely picked it out; it was just another furnishing.
Then, suddenly… A man who hears a strange voice singing or humming in the night faces a choice: disbelief, rapture, or terror. Should the phenomenon persist, disbelief goes away by itself. Then the choice between rapture and terror becomes one of temperament. One can also waver a long time between the two, to feel them both at once. When this happened to me, I was charmed by what I heard, and at the same time terrified that I was going mad. No one could be singing in my bedroom at that hour, it had to be in my head. ,The first time I clung to the idea that it was a dream, just a dream, a rather poetic one at that. The late hour and the fact that I was in bed supported this theory so well that I managed to fall back asleep, dodging the essential question: Who was singing?