Where Monsters Dwell (25 page)

The boy had not been allowed to attend that evening. He was disappointed, because it was his last chance to see the monkeys. But it was during this dissection that the master had a sudden epiphany. It was well-known that Galen had performed his dissections on animals. Yet on that night the master had realized that monkeys had a completely different anatomy from us. They could not be used as a model for understanding human beings. This was the insight that occurred to him. The boy saw the change in him; he saw that the master sometimes wanted to shout it from the lectern. “It’s monkeys that have rectums, not humans.” But he did not say it. He continued to develop his ideas in secret, sharing them only with a close circle, which included colleagues, students he trusted implicitly, and the beard-cutter. The boy also heard him speak of these ideas a few times. In the biggest medical schools in the Christian world, students were being taught that the human body was like that of an ape. At a number of universities it was considered sacrilege, yes, even pure heresy, to present any theories other than Galen’s. His teachings about the anatomy of a human being were the only accepted ones. Anyone who attempted to obtain tangible proof of other ideas might find himself burned at the stake for heresy.

That is not how things were in Padua, which was under the wise protection of Venice. The laws of the mighty trading city stipulated, on the contrary, that every active physician was duty-bound to attend the autopsy of at least one executed prisoner annually. In Padua at least two anatomical presentations were given each year. Master Alessandro lectured at many of them, and at the last of these autopsies, which took place at the home of a nobleman, it was the beard-cutter, the master’s new, trusted assistant, who had wielded the knives.

During these public dissections the master kept a good distance from the corpse. His role was to stand at the lectern and expound his ideas. The boy knew that it was precisely this situation that had created the deep schism in the master’s mind. Because at the lectern it was Galen who was the expert, while at the corpse it was the eyes of the witness. The beard-cutter could freely see what Galen had never seen, while the master’s eyes were locked solidly on the old physician’s writings, like a captive held imprisoned by the text.

But for every public dissection, at least five unofficial ones were performed. The boy had personally witnessed some of them in Master Alessandro’s loft, with body parts he had personally helped to procure. It was during these dissections that the master could allow himself to wield the scalpel. It was here he had begun to see with his own eyes, feel with his own fingers, smell with his own nose, discover how infinitely little we knew about ourselves.

His suspicion that there were serious errors in Galen’s teachings had slowly become a certainty. So when he finally dissected the three rabid monkeys, he understood what the biggest mistake was. Compared to animals, human beings are superior not only by virtue of their merits or their spirits. Human organs are also superior. Certain aspects of the human body were beyond anything that could be learned from dissecting an ape.

Tomorrow it was going to happen—what the master wanted, but had not dared. He had invited only those closest to him, and for the first time he was going to wield the knives himself during a dissection with an audience. This was no officially sanctioned dissection. They would have to obtain the corpse themselves.

The anatomical theater was his own invention. He had long yearned for a stage like this. The solution had come to him gradually, conjuring up images, small sketches, in his mind. Eventually he was able to draw the whole thing on paper and take his drawings to Alfonso, the master builder.

He had had the theater built in the backyard of his house in Padua. It consisted of three rows of benches in a round amphitheater. The rows were built at a steep angle above one another, in order to make the line of sight as short as possible, even from the top row. The theater was built without a roof, so that daylight could enhance the view. In the middle was a rotary table, where the corpse would be placed. The whole structure was built out of wood. But as the master said, “A structure like this should be built out of stone. It should be erected on the best site in the city and should accommodate hundreds of viewers. An anatomical theater should not be hidden away in a backyard.”

Alessandro took off his cloak and looked at the beard-cutter and the boy. Peace had returned to his countenance. His intelligent eyes were once again the way the boy remembered them.

“Alfonso finished his work last night,” he said. “Now all we need is a corpse. We’ll have it at sundown.”

*   *   *

Located outside the city walls of Padua, a short distance along the road to Venice, was what the local populace called with dark ambivalence “the cemetery of the innocents.” This was no ordinary cemetery but a piece of land surrounded by a stone wall. This was the final resting place for the poor souls who succumbed to the plague in the years when it so ravaged the land that the churchyards closer to town could not hold all the victims. Here were also buried those who had been executed and committed suicide, as well as others whose souls, for some reason, had been condemned to eternal perdition.

For anyone who needed a human corpse, this was the place to look. The graves here were shallow, the guards negligent, and the markers only sporadic. The boy had been out here before with the beard-cutter. Master Alessandro owed much of his knowledge to this place.

They were not always lucky enough to find a whole body. But the master’s thirst for learning was great and could be satisfied by bones devoid of flesh, connected only by sinews, perhaps with a muscle or two still in place. The beard-cutter and the boy had rocked parts of skeletons loose from corpses in various stages of decay, and once they got hold of a shoulder blade, an arm, and a hand missing the fingers, as well as a foot. When the master saw this, they were sent back to secure the thorax. The next day they carted the skeleton piece by piece back to Alessandro via various detours to the city, so that the master at last had an almost intact skeleton.

*   *   *

The two of them sat on the wall that surrounded the graveyard of the innocents, as the sun slipped down behind them, each with a spade dangling alongside their legs. The beard-cutter was whistling a tune they had learned in Germany, about a ne’er-do-well who fell asleep out of indolence, only to awaken and find himself buried alive. The boy was listening to the sounds of the night.

Then they heard the cart come clattering up to the gate at one corner of the wall. They saw the hasps of the gate move. Both of them hopped down outside the wall and stood there. As the sun disappeared completely and darkness fell, they heard the people who were working inside. They were talking about the execution.

A serving girl had been convicted of murdering her own child, conceived out of wedlock. The rumors said that the son of her master, a rich local merchant, had gotten her pregnant. True or not, she had been hanged from the gallows in the market square that afternoon, and now two grave diggers stood chatting over her corpse as they dug a grave that matched the shallowness of their work ethic. It did not take them long, and the last part of their conversation revolved mostly around the wife of one of the grave diggers, who had apparently purchased an excellent rooster at the market. The question now was whether to employ it for cockfighting or stud service.

When the diggers finally ended their chatter and their gloomy work, the two outside the wall heard the gate close and the cart drive off into the dark of the night.

The wall had not been made to keep grave robbers out; it was barely taller than the beard-cutter. Its purpose was to ensure that people outside wouldn’t have to see inside. The two climbed over the wall easily and found the spot where the two diggers had covered over the corpse. They knew they would not have to dig very deep to find what they were looking for, and after only a dozen spadefuls, they struck firm flesh.

The beard-cutter commanded the boy to kneel down and do the rest of the job with his bare hands. He began at the end where he thought the head would be. After pushing away the loose dirt, a chalk-white face appeared. The open eyes were filled with black earth. The skin was smooth and cold. The hair was black and merged with the surrounding darkness. The boy put a hand under the neck of the corpse and raised her head. He sat for a while holding the head in his hands, as if wanting to say something to the girl. He stared at the pale blue lips for a long time. Suddenly he was filled with a sorrow he had never before felt in the presence of a corpse.

“What are you doing? Keep digging.” The beard-cutter’s voice behind him was impatient.

The boy did as he was told. He removed the dirt from the chest, stomach, pelvis, and legs. Then they lifted her out of the grave.

To get the body over the wall, the beard-cutter stood on the outside and pulled on a rope fastened under her arms, while the boy pushed at her feet. They finally got her over the wall and into the cart. They tied her firmly in place. Before they whipped the donkey into motion, they placed a cloth over the corpse. As the beard-cutter covered her face, the boy noticed something. She looked like his mother up in Trondheim. He stopped, wondering if the beard-cutter had noticed this, too.

*   *   *

The next morning the boy took a bath in Master Alessandro’s tub and rubbed his skin with the best olive oil. After he had dried himself off and put on clean clothes, he was allowed to enter Master Alessandro’s studio. They sat down in two soft chairs with a table between them. The boy was still thinking of the merchant’s monkeys, and remembered that Alessandro had several stories about monkeys.

“Could you tell me about the monkey in Alexandria?” He leaned forward to take an apple.

“Ah, the monkey in Alexandria,” said the master, rubbing his hand over his clean-shaven chin. The beard-cutter had done a good job that morning, and the master had no more beard than the boy. The master took a dried fig and studied it closely before he put it in his mouth. The boy watched him with silent admiration. Everything the master did looked so profound, as if the slightest hand gesture expressed thoughts that the boy could not begin to understand. But one day I will, he thought. One day I’ll be able to think such thoughts myself. He admired the master. Not that he didn’t look up to the beard-cutter, but the beard-cutter frightened him. He had seen his temper flare many times in the German taverns. The beard-cutter excused himself by explaining that he had too much yellow bile in his body, and sometimes he would go on a cure consisting of white bread and herbs to combat these sudden attacks of rage. But even that didn’t help. The weekend after such a diet he would have another outburst. But he had never laid a hand on the boy.

It was not only the beard-cutter’s brutality the boy feared. He had also seen him with other boys his age. Sometimes they had taken two rooms in the inn, so that the boy had a room to himself, while the beard-cutter took another boy to his own room. The beard-cutter had never touched the boy; he was the beard-cutter’s lucky charm. They both knew that. But what would happen after they found their fortune? Would he still be able to trust him? He didn’t know.

He knew that he could trust Master Alessandro. But it was not the master’s heart that he trusted, even though he believed the doctor had warm feelings for him. It was his mind. Someone who let his mind be master of the other organs in his body was a reliable person. He could trust Master Alessandro the way he could trust an argument he knew was valid.

“You like that story about the monkey in Alexandria, don’t you?”

The boy nodded.

“You’re right to do so,” said the master. “There’s a strange sort of wisdom in that story. I met that monkey myself. The monkey in Alexandria. The monkey who could write all the letters of the Greek alphabet. I’d probably been staying a week or so in the faded grandeur of that city. The city that had once housed all the knowledge in the world. I had spoken with the city’s doctors, who excelled in many fields and spoke excellent Greek, even though they were all Arabs and Jews. It was from one of them that I heard about a first-class craftsman and merchant who was called Kinshar the Scribe. He was originally from Baghdad but lived in Alexandria. This scribe was said to own books that had come from the time before the fire destroyed the famous ancient library. And you know me,” said the master, in a way that made the boy feel proud. He did know him.

“I simply had to meet this scribe. I got a messenger to set up a meeting with him a few days later. Unfortunately, the books turned out to be a disappointment. They were all newer copies, none of them older than a couple of decades. But I did buy some fine copies of Archimedes that I didn’t own, and which I thought might at least contain some of Archimedes’ own words. The visit to the merchant was not time wasted, however. He showed me around his scriptorium, which was one of the finest I’ve ever seen in all my long journeys. A dozen men worked there, and they produced just as many books as my friend Manutius, the printer in the city.”

The boy knew that “the city” Master Alessandro referred to was Venice.

“But the only reason why I will never forget my visit to Kinshar the Scribe was his foremost scribe, a monkey they called Alexander.”

“A monkey?” the boy said with a laugh, as if he had not heard the story ten times before.

“Yes, precisely, a monkey,” said Alessandro, popping another fig into his own laughing mouth. He went on, “This monkey was not just any old monkey. This monkey could write. The animal could hold a pen, and on large sheets of paper, he could write heavy, ugly letters one after the other in a row. He knew all the letters in the Greek alphabet, and he put them down on paper as if they were words and sentences. Yes, he had even learned to put spaces in between the words now and then. He didn’t know punctuation, so there was some distance between periods and commas. As for Manutius’s brilliant new invention, the semicolon, even the scribes down there had not yet heard of it. Nevertheless, that monkey could write. But because he was an animal, even a drunk dock worker from Genoa could think more clearly than he could, and he had no idea what he was writing. He simply put down one letter after another in a wild and random order. Still, he sat there every day writing, serving almost as a model for the other scribes. One day a miracle occurred. Or at least it was what Kinshar the Scribe convinced me must inevitably happen, for, as he said, if you set enough monkeys to writing a sequence of letters long enough, sooner or later one of them will write something that makes sense. If you have an infinite number of monkeys writing down an infinite number of letters, then at some point in the insanity you will end up with a reproduction of the works of Plato or Horace. A dizzying thought.