Siccard House
The Siccards were a family of papermakers who over the years had expanded into quills and inks. They raised their own geese, a Belgian breed with blue and gray feathers, which they hardened in glass soot heated in an iron furnace. The founder of the family business, Jean Siccard, had died two years earlier, and the business, mismanaged by his son, had been on the verge of closing. In recent months, however, the young Siccard had found his way. Now, the moment a customer walked through the door, there was an array of quills organized in large drawers, sheets of marbled paper, accounting ledgers, hand-drawn staff paper, and Chinese cartographic materials.
When I arrived, an employee was preparing an order for the courts. I showed him the letter from Abbot Mazy, and he looked at me in alarm, possibly because there were other people in the room. He motioned for me to go into the back, in more of a hurry to get rid of me than actually indicate the way. I had no idea what the letter said or what ruse the abbot had employed to get me hired at Siccard House. I went down the hall, passing an employee up to his elbows in paper pulp, and found a staircase behind a folding screen adorned with Arabic script.
A young man came out to meet me; he was wearing an ink-stained shirt marked with backwards letters so distinguishable it was as if the garment had been used for blotting paper. He skimmed the letter quickly.
“I’m Aristide Siccard, son of Jean Siccard. It was my idea to take the family business in a new direction. You couldn’t have come at a better time: one of our calligraphers is sick and another is an hour late. Our messenger can’t wait much longer.”
He led me into a small office where a woman was resting on a divan, barely covered by a blanket. She woke up, looked at me, and asked whether I minded if she slept while I worked, assuring me she could doze on her feet. Hers was the absentminded beauty of someone who has never really looked in a mirror. I was at a complete loss for words, for she had let the blanket fall and I had never seen a naked woman. My only experience came from a certain book of engravings called Aphrodite’s Garland that had passed from hand to hand through the dormitories at Vidors’ School.
Siccard brought me the inks they used (thicker than normal ink to prevent them from running on skin). Aristide began reading the text of the message aloud while I concentrated on holding my hand still. A calligrapher’s life is destined to be routine; whenever anything exceptional occurs, his hand begins to shake and all skill evaporates. Unlike every other artist, who leaves a mark and is remembered, this long, laborious wait and inability to rise to the occasion means we as calligraphers fade away and are ultimately forgotten by history.
As per Siccard’s instructions, I began with her upper back. The woman’s name was Mathilde, and that was the first thing I tried to forget. She had pulled up her hair—as black as a pool of ink—but it kept spilling down, threatening to smudge the letters. I tried to think about something else, attempted to concentrate on the message, but the rigidity of those words—administrative councils, investments in Dutch notes—was so contrary to the act of writing that it seemed to pervert the technical terms. I tried to let the light that bathed Mathilde’s body erase all thoughts. I would look at her as if she were an object, nothing more than a surface, and be somewhat successful as I wrote a t, but the curve of a capital R would start my hand trembling again.
I refused to give up and tried to recall the anatomy book that had so disturbed me when I was a student. I wanted to picture the repulsive layers of muscle and bone, but beauty triumphed over my every strategy.
I could hear the worry in Aristide’s voice and made one final attempt to improve my nearly illegible penmanship: I imagined my hand belonged to Silas Darel and was therefore immune to distraction. This thought allowed me to cover areas of a woman’s body I was seeing for the first time. It didn’t feel as though my hand was writing the message; it was more as if the words were patiently pushing my hand from letter to letter. My calligraphy looked like someone else’s, until I came to the signature, forging an unknown name that finally reflected an energy and a caution I recognized as my own.
I might not have been as inept as I remember because before she asked me to leave her to dress in peace, Mathilde looked approvingly in a full-length mirror and said:
“I never feel naked when I’m covered in writing.”
By the time I finished, my nerves were so frayed that I wandered aimlessly until I was lost on the outskirts of the city. Just when I was about to head back, I saw black smoke spiraling up from somewhere nearby. I thought a building must be on fire, but it was a court-ordered burning: books and papers were ablaze as the crowd stared intently at the smoke, as if they could read something in those swirls and lines that I was unable to see. Posted on the wall, a judicial proclamation listed the works that were being burned: it included a satire attributed to Voltaire in which he ridiculed a recent decree. The paper said nothing about the executioner who had set the pile on fire, but a sketch of a mechanical hand concluded the edict.