She turned half around to go out. Before leaving the bedroom she turned her head and added, with a coquettish wink, losing the imperative tone from her voice, “If you don’t find anyone there to help you out, don’t worry. When you come back we’ll explain everything.”
I did return, of course, as soon as I had the medicine prepared. Isabelle took it on herself to explain to me what a woman’s body is like. I will not say that this was all to my pleasure. I had to do what up until then had only been done to me; I discovered this when Isabelle swiftly ran her hands around inside my clothing and settled my own bewildered hands comfortably on her back and especially her breasts, provoking a trembling in me that was radically different from the one which another breast had brought about in my palm; and so very radically different was it that in some obscure way it was the same. An erection came on, the which having happened to me previously only when I was alone, and without my desiring it I found myself inside her body. I moved my loins the same way le Nègre Miel had moved his against me, and I was unable to avoid thinking of him and breaking out in tears at the same time my perplexed penis burst out inside Isabelle. No, it was not pleasant. I felt that my tears were joined to the pink river born of those sheets, and I thought of the priest who had taught me to read and who had been the first to make use of my body, and I recalled the pain.… Everything at once, while I was still emptying myself inside Isabelle, and yet at the same moment too I was thinking that my aversion to women did not include her, yes, I thought of her again … thinking that her body could never discharge this evil-smelling red tide, thinking that no one was using her now, thinking how many men had used her in the past, thinking that she and I together would do the ceremony of the flesh in some other way, and I began that very moment to construct the erotic cult for her, a new secret ritual that I would be able to share only with her, and which, as it turned out, fell apart again without my noticing.
I found how to administer l’herbe folle as needed, because their life together as well as the moon inclined the women of The House to menstruate on the same days; and after making mistakes the first few times, I discovered what to give them to prevent their colic and painful hemorrhages as well as their inflammations, although I never was a house regular, as le Nègre Miel had been in his day, because I was not a surgeon while on land but only practiced my trade while on the freebooters’ expeditions, although, like le Nègre Miel, I did leave a portion of my scarce seed there in The House, when not inside a man (to tell the truth, it only took a few times for me to empty myself), and I learned to bring on (Isabelle also remembered the name of that remedy) the Red Flag in those who were afraid of becoming pregnant and thought they were overdue; and after I took charge until, like a new Sodom, Port Royal was swept from the face of the earth by a gigantic wave — so eager to eradicate the perpetual carousal and other vices from the coast of a clean, radiant, translucent sea — there was not a single offspring conceived in The House.
FOUR
It may be that at one time curiosity had burned brightly in Pineau; what I was seeing now was that Pineau did not have the urgency that the ardor of a live curiosity provokes, for it was in all calmness that Pineau slowly and gradually extracted information from me: yet most of the time asking much more than I was able to answer him concerning le Nègre Miel’s arts, and often not wanting to know anything about what I was familiar with. The book he claimed to have found in me had only a few pages fully written out, in most cases they being unfinished or smudged. What I felt is that I was rather more like the shadow of what le Nègre Miel had known in his day, with many of its features unreadable in me, but perhaps what Pineau wanted to make me feel was that le Nègre Miel’s wisdom, being in itself truncated or incomplete, was often illegible to his eyes. But what is quite certain is that for each bit of knowledge Pineau obtained from me, he paid me back with hundreds. He put into my hands the treatise Briefve collection de l’administration anatomique by Ambroise Paré, and when he practiced his trade in front of me, I had to bring him the dressings I had prepared with the very hands that were holding Paré’s book, bring him the scissors, the knives I had sharpened, the chisels and scalpels, and then I cleaned the blood from the table where he had operated. He explained to me that Paré had abolished the custom of treating gunshot wounds with boiling oil; and that he had been the first to practice the substitution of white-hot iron for closing off arteries during an amputation, yet he would never grant me to apply any of le Nègre Miel’s remedies on his operating table, not even the ones I knew for decreasing the blood flow from a wound, making pain disappear, making someone sleep, reducing anger, making the heart beat faster … Why did he not permit me to do so? What reason, I wondered, did he have for wanting le Nègre Miel’s knowledge, if not to use it? I asked him and he did not answer me, he who talked so much and seemed so anxious to teach me, as if wanting the heir to le Nègre Miel’s knowledge to forget all of it, overwhelming my faculties in learning the rudiments of being a surgeon’s assistant and following his procedures, taking care of the kitchen, of the small vegetable plot we had behind the cabin, cleaning the blood spots from his clothing (I am a surgeon, not a buccaneer!), and what most appealed to me, accompanying him on his excursions around the island, for which he always had time except just after the return of some expedition; that was when the badly wounded or poorly cared-for came back from their battles, after having been so inadequately treated by the impromptu barbers they took on board with them. To my great displeasure, I saw for the first time the surgeon opening the skin and laying back the muscles, raking around among the organs looking for a lost bullet. More easily would any pirate become accustomed to the blood, he being impelled by the excitement of the struggle, fighting to save his own skin, than I, peppered by Pineau’s words, which would seem to harden when he would strike up against a bone or be struggling against a muscle that resisted him (Surgery makes a man master of himself; or, A surgeon should defend the freedom of man or his freedom of religion and thought)! To my astonished ears his warm, beautiful words would become firmer when bathed in the whining of the sick man or the spurting of blood or the leg that was finally removed and laid alongside the evil-smelling torso of the patient who seemed to be coming undone in the blood jetting from him! Surgery is the art that a man practices on his brothers’ bodies in order to make the evil more bearable; surgery makes whoever practices it humble (squish, squash, squish, I would hear the knife going into the muscle — squish — and now it no longer resisted him) because in it the man joins (Pineau was putting his hand then into the broken flesh) the impossible battle against death, and that is a battle that ennobles (he would remove his hand from within, tugging) because the enemy always conquers, sooner or later, but always; our lives are made out of the deaths of others, an insensible life remains within the dead material and, joined together again in the stomachs of living beings, it resumes sensual and intellectual life; medicine is the reconciliation of discordant elements; illness is the discordance of elements infused into the living body; our faculties are four in number: memory and intellect, appetite and concupiscence. The first two belong to our rational mind, the others to the senses. The greatest good is wisdom, the greatest evil is physical suffering. The noblest part of the soul is wisdom, the most shameful part of the body is pain. While he was practicing as a surgeon, his intelligence sharpened and he thought with great clarity: mounting to heights that I did not comprehend. Did he not speak of the soul and its highest ideals while struggling amid the darkness the flesh encloses, while dirtying himself in the swamp of the body’s filth? The distractions that voraciously surround our intelligence when it wishes to make an appearance were here filtered out by the abject aroma of flesh open to the knife, so that Pineau’s intelligence appeared then as splendid, with nothing attempting to check it, absolutely free while his hands were tugging at tendons, trying to control arteries, holding up a palpitating kidney shattered by a clap of gunpowder … His words were hard, like walls, like a staircase, hard because they were so true!