Voltaire's Calligrapher (15 page)
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Authors: Pablo De Santis
I was assigned to take inventory. As soon as I noted things down, they would disappear, and before long almost none of the eccentricities were left. It was common to see the servants’ children out in the garden playing with a whale jawbone, a polar bear hide, or a martyr’s mummified hand.
At first, I tried to maintain a certain sense of order, but in the end
I joined the looters and hid the heart among my things. So no one would notice its absence, I put the embalmed heart of a sixteenth-century Venetian countess in its place—a gift from Voltaire’s friend, the marquis d’Argenson.
I finished the inventory one day before leaving. My handwriting was no longer what it was when I started: it was now serene and simple and made no attempt to dazzle. It was the writing of someone who knows that the words on the page hide both what’s there and what’s lost.
C
atherine the Great inherited the archives, and the secretaries and file clerks who were bound to those pages for life went with them. I didn’t want that fate and returned to Paris, with Voltaire’s heart among my belongings.
I worked in the mornings as a calligraphy expert at Siccard House (the second-floor activities had been shut down) and spent my afternoons looking for Clarissa. There was no trace of her or her father anywhere in the city. To a certain extent, I’ve never abandoned the search: even here in this faraway port, whenever newcomers have passed through France, I find them to see if they’ve heard the name Von Knepper.
I only ever came across one witness, and that witness I lost. The night before I left, I was walking along the Seine when a bearded man in rags stepped out in front of me. I had seen him from afar on other occasions: he would stop passersby, show them something he carried in a bag, and let them go. But this time he startled me: for a moment I thought he was going to kill me, so I drew my only weapon, the quill I had used to kill Silas Darel. Despite the beard
and the darkness, I recognized Mattioli, but he didn’t seem to know who I was. Showing me the contents of a bag he could barely lift, he asked:
“Have you seen this woman?”
“No,” I replied, in barely a whisper.
“It’s all over then,” the sculptor said, as if his last hope had died with me and there was no one left in the entire city to ask.
He climbed up onto the railing with a familiarity that obviated any sense of danger. Before securing the knot that tied the bag around his neck, he looked at the marble head one last time. I ran to stop him: I too wanted to kiss those icy lips. He didn’t give me a chance. Mattioli embraced the head and jumped into the dark waters. The last image of Clarissa drowned with him.
P
ABLO
D
E
S
ANTIS
was born in Buenos Aires, studied literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and subsequently worked as a journalist and comic-strip creator, becoming editor in chief of one of Argentina’s leading comic magazines. De Santis won the inaugural Premio Planeta—Casa de América de Narrativa Prize for Best Latin American Novel for
The Paris Enigma
.
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E
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ANTIS’S
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Paris Enigma
“Luminous … a tightly spun thriller…. Mr. De Santis effortlessly incorporates important historical events—the building of the tower and the World’s Fair—into his narrative, as well as capturing the turn-of-the-century uneasiness over the emergence of the machine age.”
—
Wall Street Journal
“A beguiling historical whodunit.”
—
New York Times Book Review
“A consummate crime writer…. A sophisticated whodunit.”
—
Daily News
(New York)
“Entertaining…. Musings on the art of detecting provide many of the book’s most memorable passages.”
—
Time Out
(New York)
“Discriminating general readers as well as whodunit fans will enjoy this outstanding puzzler, winner of the first Casa de América de Narrativa Prize for Best Latin American Novel…. De Santis adroitly explores such issues as the difference between image and reality while providing intelligent and entertaining discussions of alternate approaches to detection.”
—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“A complex whodunit that provokes thought as well as entertainment, on subjects from waterproof shoeshine cream to ancient Greek physics. It fires multiple, intense bursts of crime stories at the reader, some only a page or so long. And it climaxes with serial murders that tie into the building of the Eiffel Tower and the Paris World’s Fair of 1889.”
—Associated Press
“Against the backdrop of the 1889 World’s Fair, detective’s assistant Sigmundo Salvatrio travels to Paris in his master’s stead for a mysterious (natch) gathering of a collective known as the Twelve Detectives. Murder and mayhem ensue…. Colorful characters and cases create a hazy atmosphere of intelligent escapism. The real subject of the book is the mysterious, melancholic birth of modernity.”
—
Washington Post
The Paris Enigma
Originally published as
El calígrafo de Voltaire
by Ediciones Destino in 2001.
VOLTAIRE’S CALLIGRAPHER
. Copyright © 2001, 2010 by Pablo De Santis. Translation copyright © 2010 by Lisa Carter.
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EPub Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-01442-9
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-06-147988-5
10 11 12 13 14
OV/RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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