Voltaire's Calligrapher (4 page)

“The last man who tried to rob me lost his right hand. I carry it in a box of salt; it brings me luck wherever I go.”

I tried to speak but couldn’t. I reached into my pocket for a coin and let it fall on the cobblestones. My attacker dismantled the gallows, and my feet touched down once more.

“I came to pay you, not rob you,” I said.

“I’m not selling anything.”

“I buy words.”

“I don’t talk much.”

“I heard you washed the body of Marc-Antoine Calas.”

He wanted to know what so interested me that I was willing to pay for answers. I told him I worked for the Jesuits and that they wanted to be absolutely certain the Calas boy was a martyr. The Jesuits, I explained, were trying to speed up the canonization process for priests who had been murdered in the Orient and didn’t want any old impromptu veneration to supersede the urgent needs of the Church. I handed him another silver coin.

The executioner spoke:

“I attended to the body until the White Penitents took it from me. Six of them came down to the courthouse basement, showed me a piece of paper I never got to read, and carried it out in procession.”

“Was he bruised, as if hanged by force?”

“Not a single mark, other than a scar on his left shoulder—a very old wound.”

We sat on the edge of the fountain.

“I wasn’t going to kill you. It’s bad luck to kill a man on a full moon: he’ll haunt your dreams.”

The executioner had big hands scarred by ropes and blades. I told him I knew about his former profession.

“I’ve beheaded criminals in Paris, hanged poor wretches in Marseille, and pushed offenders off the top of a tower in Italy. They would land on marble below, and a painter would capture their final pose. But the real art is the ax: not many can cut off a head with a single blow. The rope, on the other hand, is the simplest yet least reliable of all the methods.”

“Why? Did someone survive?”

“Only one man lived to say ‘I was executed by Kolm.’ He paid my assistant to fray the rope so it would break when he dropped. A man can’t be hanged twice for the same crime in Marseille, so he was set free. But let’s talk about happier things.”

Kolm worked for the courts in Toulouse, where he washed bodies in tubs of bleach water, sutured wounds, and sometimes determined cause of death. He was hired because of his experience as an executioner.

“Do you miss your old profession?”

“No. I got tired of being needed but despised. Take a look at this walking stick.”

He held up a long cane made of dark wood. On the bottom was
a small but perfect replica of a hand, operated by a mechanism on the silver handle.

“I was never allowed to touch any food when I went to the market. No one would speak to me. Then I had an artisan from Nuremberg make this walking stick. At first no one had a problem greeting the silver hand, letting it pick up apples or fish. But then it started to malfunction, and now it crushes everything it touches.”

The hand opened and closed. Kolm invited me to try it. I lifted the walking stick and, as I looked up, saw a woman standing in a window. It was the passenger we had delivered to the toy manufacturer on rue des Aveugles.

I heard the sound of the window as it closed.

I had no intention of saying anything but suddenly heard my voice, as if it were another’s:

“A dead woman just closed a window.”

“I know the dead and I know they never come back; I’d have been visited by now if they did.” Kolm looked over at the house. It was the only one that still had any lights on. A bronze bell hung out front. “There are seventeen women who work there. They might disappear during the day, but they come back to life at night.”

His words did nothing to reassure me, and I hurried away down the deserted street. I don’t know why, but Kolm followed me, and the moon followed him.

I
went to see Kolm two days later, as he had promised to ask whether there were any openings at the court for a calligrapher. Kolm lived in a rooming house reserved for the brotherhood of executioners; they owned a building in every city to avoid the usual problems of lodging. Never having executed anyone, I wasn’t allowed in, but Kolm told me the rooms were decorated with axes, hoods, and belts that had belonged to legendary executioners. These made him nostalgic. I asked why he had left such a profitable profession.

“Five years ago I helped to suppress an uprising against M. Ressing. I had cut off about ten heads when it seemed a pair of familiar eyes were staring up at me. I reached into the bloody basket and found my father’s head. We hadn’t seen one another in a long time, and I had executed him without even noticing. I know he recognized me, and yet he didn’t say a word: he wouldn’t interrupt my work. I haven’t executed anyone since. I was only able to recover my father’s head, which I put in a glass case and took to the town where he was born. There I gave him the funeral he deserved. For his epitaph I wrote:
Theodor Kolm lies here. And elsewhere as well.”

It was Sunday and Kolm’s day off. We walked until we saw a crowd beside the market: a theater company was performing
The Calas Murderers
.

The actors had erected a stage in a derelict square, amid statues of sleeping horses. The Church had never been kind to actors, refusing for centuries to bury them in hallowed ground, but this company had chosen a topic of such popular interest that the White Penitents had even agreed to pay for the production. That night I wrote an account of the play and sent it to Ferney:

The show was so successful that indignant spectators threw rocks at the performers, mistaking them for the people they were playing.

The head of the company, who was in the role of Jean Calas, had to shout to be heard.

“Don’t vent your rage on us; we’re only actors. But we so believe
in this play that our Marc-Antoine is a real hanged man. A mistake sent him to the gallows in Marseille, and a miracle saved him.”

From the dais, Marc-Antoine let the public see the scars on his neck.

“I was that man’s executioner,” Kolm whispered in my ear. “He’s the living image of my failure.”

“What does it matter? You’re no longer in the profession.”

We left the crowd and the shouting behind.

“Once an executioner, always an executioner.”

K
olm accompanied me to the courthouse where I would take the calligraphy exam. There were new hires every week as calligraphers left, overwhelmed by the disorganization in the courts, the contradictory orders, and the fear of poisoned ink. A legend about a cursed word circulated among the local profession: everything would be fine until that word appeared in a court document, then whoever wrote it would suffer misfortune.

I sat the exam with twenty other young men, in a long hall on wooden benches that had been carved with penknives. You could learn better calligraphy from those furtive inscriptions than from any dissertation. I soon realized I was much slower than the others and knew I was done.

“You can go,” the examiner said. “I don’t know why you bothered to come when your hand writes at a snail’s pace.”

“My hand may be slow, but it knows where it’s going. Have you ever seen a snail retrace its steps to correct a mistake? Come out to the patio with me.”

When we reached the edge of a pond, I asked his name.

“Tellier.”

Using an oily ink, I wrote his name on the surface of the water, but backwards, mirrored. Then, when I brought a sheet of Japanese paper to the water, his name was imprinted the right way around, with a few walnut leaves (little more than veins) as decoration. He hired me on the spot.

I was taken to a room where I was given a blue cloak and a bronze plaque that read
Calligrapher
to hang around my neck.

And so, in the coming days, I was able to wander through the archives of Languedoc, draw up documents, and take notes on the sessions being held in the Calas case. Everyone seemed bored of it already, as if the protagonists had died ages ago and judges and their clerks were sadly responsible for keeping the memory of a bygone event alive. Witnesses for the defense filed through: the Calas family had never done anyone wrong; they had nothing against Catholics; their eldest son, who lived outside Toulouse, had converted and they still sent him a monthly stipend. But they couldn’t compete with the flood of miracles brought by the prosecution: the blind could see, the crippled could walk, and incurable ills would disappear when you prayed to the hanged man.

I wrote to tell Voltaire that the tragic day was drawing near, that the lawyer for the Calas family had managed to save the lives of the mother, the sister, and the brother, but the father was doomed. The most far-fetched of all possible versions had prevailed: Jean Calas, a sixty-three-year-old man, had slipped the noose around his son’s neck, overcome his resistance, and hung him from the door all on his own.

My fanaticism for calligraphy soon helped me earn the trust of my superiors. I took advantage of every opportunity to declare that the printing press (ever ready to spread the worst ideas) and the
Encyclopédie
(its most recent work, an impious summary of the world) stripped words of all transcendental meaning. A calligrapher,
on the other hand, brought the world closer; like the ancient scribes, he wrote in order to illuminate. Tellier and his subordinates were won over by my opinions. So vehemently did I defend my art using theological arguments that I wound up believing my own fabrications. Even now, as I transcribe official documents at city hall, I sometimes still repeat the words: God made the world without a printing press, by hand, letter by letter. And that thought, or at least the struggle to believe it, justifies all of the many hours.

One afternoon Tellier had me deliver a scroll to the Dominican monastery. I took the long way in order to pass by Bell Manor. All of the inhabitants were asleep; none of the windows were open.

A hooded monk stopped me at the monastery gate. I told him I was to deliver the documents directly to Father Razin. He looked at the bronze plaque around my neck and led me down a corridor to a set of stairs. In front of me was an ornate door, and I hesitated over whether to open it or continue downstairs. My escort had disappeared. I knocked discreetly, but no one answered: the wood was so thick the sound never reached the other side. I pushed the door just wide enough to peer in.

Purple drapes accentuated the air of seclusion inside. Large torches cast bright light nearby, but it dissipated farther on, leaving the back of the room obscured. Five monks were bent over enormous maps and city plans. No one looked up at me. Their conversation consisted of whispers and hand gestures. They were studying lands crisscrossed by rivers and mountain ranges, cities divided into plots, and here and there they would place little lead pieces depicting crosses and pitchforks. It was as if they were caught up in an achingly slow game that had started years earlier, the rules having been lost somewhere along the way.

An iron hand came down on my shoulder.

“Not there,” said the monk who had let me in. “Downstairs.”

He pushed me impatiently, and I nearly fell down the well-worn stairs.

Father Razin, head of the White Penitents, the most fanatical branch of the Dominicans, was sitting behind a desk. His clawlike hand snatched the documents from me. He read them in a wink, then scrawled a few lines on a sheet of paper.