‘It’s nothing new. He always does that. Like me, they will come back, monsieur. You see, he has made us bare our souls. We are his adoring slaves.’
She left him then, and he heard her pick her way down to the projector. ‘Ready?’ she asked, and when he did not respond, flung on the lamp and filled the screen, deftly focusing the image only at the last.
The mask was chalk-white, unglazed and chillingly stark, the eyes gaping voids of darkness, the expression haunting.
‘It is neither of woman nor of man, monsieur, since the inner self is neither and only demands to be free.’
Kohler pulled down a lower eyelid in doubt and pinched his nose, neither gesture she could possibly have seen. ‘Next,’ he said drily.
Carlo Buemondi rilled the screen, the head so like that of Il Duce it caught the breath. There were even folds in the bald scalp, no sign of a hair, the ears large, the cheekbones wide and of peasant hill-stock, the nose robust and the lips fleshy.
‘Il Dottore,’ she said, a whisper. The Doctor …
The smock was probably pale blue and certainly covered with plaster dust. In slide after slide the professor made paper, then soaked it in water, in wine, in olive oil and paint and, after vaselining a student model from head to toe, made a papier-mache cast of a hand, a face, a body.
‘That is me,’ she said, another whisper.
The girl was naked and lying stretched flat out on a table awaiting the Vaseline. Breathing straws stuck out of her nostrils. The eyes were hidden beneath black petals of cloth that had already been sealed in place. ‘Here he is going to use the plaster, yes? Since it is much more brittle and gives the better cast when smashed.’
She had a pleasant figure, if a bit skinny. Tiny breasts and almost childlike hips and waist.
The cast was shown. Both the inside and the outside were then covered with lithographic prints of body parts: faces, hands, hair – body-hair – knees, breasts, a breast, a woman’s sex, the labia et cetera, et cetera, and penises – penises everywhere. Erect and otherwise.
‘He uses several colours,’ she said with that same sense of submissive awe. ‘At least seven or eight in the printing.’
‘Then he smashes it all up.’
‘Yes. And glues it back together or leaves it in pieces.’
‘But never in the same form, the natural form?’
‘No, never in the finished piece, since the soul, it is quite formless, isn’t that so? And the body but a vessel for it.’
No artist or connoisseur of the finer things, Kohler was baffled. The drawing, such as it was, appeared inadequate. Oh for sure a woman’s sex was hairy and one could part the lips if curious or peel back a foreskin to examine the head of a penis.
But surely the drawing should at least have approached that of Michelangelo Buonarroti? And as for the quality of the lithographs, he doubted it as well.
‘Not my kind of thing,’ he said uncomfortably.
The collage was a collection of broken casts all wired together and hanging by a frayed noose. Erection after erection stared boldly at him. Through the blinding light, hidden ears and eyes appeared – a finger, a thumb, a woman’s heel, a set of toes – he’d swear to it and got up suddenly to walk past her and up on to the stage.
She saw his shadow leap across the screen and caught her heart. ‘Delphane,’ she said, a whisper. ‘Ah, Mon Dieu, Mon Dieu, it is impossible. The likeness, it is … it is like a curse.’
Kohler traced out the oval of a woman’s eye complete with false lashes. He found a rather nice-looking nose, a lower lip, a hairy scrotum. Son of a bitch, was the bastard a pervert? Cock seemed to be it. Everywhere he looked there was some guy’s genitals. Buemondi’s? he wondered. Mirrors … had he used mirrors? ‘Art?’ he asked. ‘Is this really art?’
The lantern light made his features sharp. Angelique Girard noted the long scar on the left cheek, the sad bags under dissipated eyes, the touches of bruises from some terrible fight that had still to completely fade. The untidy growth of whiskers that made this Gestapo seem older than he was. More ravaged by time. Ah, it was so very sad to see one’s features decay so quickly.
‘You are challenged, monsieur. Is it not so, and is that therefore not what true art must always do?’
‘Perhaps, but then …’ he began, realizing he was using one of Louis’s expressions and was totally out of his depth and wishing the Frog was with him.
‘You are afraid of your own masculinity, monsieur. Though you pride yourself on it, I think you tremble inwardly at thoughts you are afraid to face.’
Quickly she showed him another slide rather than acknowledge his ‘Horseshit!’, said, ‘This is Madame Anne-Marie Buemondi, Monsieur the Inspector from Paris.’
There was no semblance of order. The white shards of the body cast had been put back together at random as by a demented hand. They didn’t even look like a human form of any kind but rather, that of a patch of broken plaster. Most of the pieces were curved either up or down, and all had been overprinted with the husband’s lithographs.
Again the bastard’s cock was there. In her broken ear, in her broken nose or eye. Not always whole, sometimes incomplete and sometimes all but absent. Erection and otherwise.
‘And this is me,’ said the girl without a trace of shyness.
Only a painted mask covered her face. All the rest was bare. She lay flat on the table again, and around her perhaps fifteen students crowded, all ages, all shapes, all naked but for their masks, all gazing down at her childlike body. Both male and female.
‘It threatens you, does it not?’ she asked, standing up beside the projector. ‘It asks you to admit your innermost desires, monsieur, to confess the truth and let your soul be free.’
‘Rape? Is that it, eh?’
‘Yes,’ she said demurely, ‘that and much worse.’
Kohler came down off the stage like a rocket. In one swift flow of motion, he switched off the lantern, collected the slides, grabbed her by the elbow and said, ‘Get moving. I want to talk to the son of a bitch! That was no more you than me. That was one of his daughters.’
She yanked herself away. ‘Which one?’ she asked, lost in the darkness but near enough. ‘Which one, my friend?’ Her voice was shrill and near to tears.
‘Look, I … I don’t know. Josianne-Michele, I think. The … the one who has the fits from time to time. The one who bit me.’
It was only then that he realized she had used the darkness to make her escape. From the upper floor, she paused to look back down through the pitch darkness at him. ‘Find out which one, Monsieur the Inspector from Paris, and you will find the killer of my lover.’
‘Where is he?’ he cried out.
‘Carlo?’ she shot back. ‘In the mud baths. Wallowing with the others. Fucking them any time he wants.’
There was only one place to hide from Munk’s Gestapo and Kohler took it. The air was full of sulphurous steam, the grotto poorly lighted and subdivided into pools with low walls of pseudo-volcanic rock between. Frescoes and wall paintings of Pompeiian brothels, he supposed, lined the place. Doric columns held up the ersatz temple roof with its fake and hidden lighting, the sun over ancient Rome.
There were perhaps forty or fifty taking the cure, both male and female. The old, the sick, the lame, the wealthy, the nubile, even children as young as ten or twelve.
No one seemed to mind the lack of privacy. It was as if the mud took care of everything and all were united in the common bond of opening the pores, loosening the joints and talking about it, among other things. Besides, in winter it was probably the warmest place in town.
He joined four others. The mud was scalding. The red ochre he’d been dusted with after coming out of the shower-bath did nothing to protect the skin from the heat. Everywhere he looked, whether male or female, partly clothed or not, there was this alarming clash of red and grey.
As he sank below the surface, a moment of panic came with thoughts of smothering, but then some not-so-young thing with stringy mouse-brown hair and chunky hips helped him to his feet and he stood knee-deep in the goo while she proceeded to do his back and shoulders. ‘Now it is your turn,’ she said. ‘Ah, don’t be afraid, my fine monsieur, I am not about to eat you!’