Every Dead Thing

Rachel met us in the main hall of the Flaisance House. I guessed that she had been watching for the car. Angel lounged beside her eating a Lucky Dog, which looked like the business end of a baseball bat topped with onion, chili, and mustard.

“The FBI came,” said Rachel. “Your friend Woolrich was with them. They had a warrant. They took everything: my notes, the illustrations, everything they could find.” She led the way to her room. The walls had been stripped of their notes. Even the diagram I had drawn was gone.

“They searched our room too,” remarked Angel to Louis. “And Bird’s.” My head jerked up as I thought of the case of guns. Angel spotted the move. “We ditched them soon as your FBI friend put the stare on Louis. They’re in a storage depot on Bayonne. We both have keys.”

I noticed that Rachel seemed more irritated than upset as we followed her to her room. “Am I missing something here?”

She smiled. “I said they took everything they could find. Angel saw them coming. I hid some of the notes in the waistband of my jeans, under my shirt. Angel took care of most of the rest.”

She took a small pile of papers from under her bed and waved them with a small flourish. She kept one separate in her hand. It was folded over once.

“I think you might want to see this,” she said, handing the paper to me. I unfolded it and felt a pain in my chest.

It was an illustration of a woman seated naked on a chair. She had been split from neck to groin and the skin on each side had been pulled back so that it hung over her arms like the folds of a gown. Across her lap lay a young man, similarly opened but with a space where his stomach and other internal organs had been removed. Apart from the detail of the anatomization and the alteration in the sex of one of the victims, it resembled in its essence what had been done to Jennifer and Susan.

“It’s Estienne’s Pietà,” said Rachel. “It’s very obscure, which is why it took so long to track down. Even in its day, it was regarded as excessively explicit and, more to the point, blasphemous. It bore too much of a resemblance to the figure of the dead Christ and Mary for the liking of the church authorities. Estienne nearly burned for it.”

She took the illustration from me and looked at it sadly, then placed it on her bed with the other papers. “I know what he’s doing,” she said. “He’s creating memento mori, death’s-heads.” She sat on the edge of the bed and put her hands together beneath her chin, as if in prayer.

“He’s giving us lessons in mortality.”

IV

He had a mind to be acquainted with your inside, Crispin.

Edward Ravenscroft

The Anatomist

45

IN THE MEDICAL SCHOOL of the Complutense University of Madrid there is an anatomical museum, founded by King Carlos III. Much of its collection derives from the efforts of Dr. Julián de Velasco in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Dr. Velasco was a man who took his work seriously. He was reputed to have mummified the corpse of his own daughter, just as William Harvey was assisted in his discovery of circulation by his decision to autopsy the bodies of his own father and sister.

The long rectangular hall is arrayed with glass cases of exhibits: two giant skeletons, the wax model of a fetal head, and at one point, two figures labeled despellejados. They are the “flayed men,” who stand in dramatic poses, displaying the movement of the muscles and the tendons without the white veil of the skin to hide it from the eye of the beholder. Vesalius, Valverde, Estienne, their forebears, their peers, their successors, worked in the knowledge of this tradition. Artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci created their own écorchés, as they termed their drawings of flayed figures, basing their work on their own participation in dissections.

And the figures they created were more than merely anatomical specimens: they served, in their way, as reminders of the flawed nature of our humanity, a reminder of the body’s capacity for pain and, eventually, mortality. They warned of the futility of the pursuits of the flesh, the reality of disease and pain and death in this life, and the promise of something better in the next.

In eighteenth-century Florence, the practice of anatomical modeling reached its peak. Under the patronage of the Abbot Felice Fontana, anatomists and artists worked side by side to create natural sculptures from beeswax. Anatomists exposed the cadavers, the artists poured the liquid plaster, and molds were created. Layers of wax were placed into them, with pig fat used to alter the temperature of the wax where necessary, allowing a process of layering that reproduced the transparency of human tissue.