Musings on reminders of death
One sunny winter weekend, we decided to drive to Paris for a couple of nights. Père Lachaise was our first destination, picturesque in all seasons. It is always a good time to stroll around the epitaphs of famous people.
My daughter had just started walking, and it took us a couple of hours to visit the tomb of Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde at her slow, wandering pace. She zig-zagged between tombs, oblivious in the most beautiful way, pausing to examine moss or dry leaves.
My friend Juliet found us halfway through our journey and told me of a Parisian urban legend: There was the grave of a man here whose groin protrudes, dark and slick and glazed by years of touch by the hands of women who wished to get pregnant.
I have read that he was murdered, that if you drop a flower in his hat you will have a blissful sex life, that if you kiss his lips, there where the blackened stone proves decades of yearning, you will find a beautiful lover. The tomb of Victor Noir.
The funny thing is that Nala was extremely attracted to this statue, and I had simply followed her there. Only now do I realize, going through my photos, that this is the statue Juliet was talking about.
According to Google: “if you want to get pregnant, you should touch his right foot; and if you want to have twins, you should touch his left foot. According to the myth, a baby will follow soon after and single ladies will find a husband within the year.” I refuse to be the proxy bearer of Nala’s touch, but as I read this my fears acted out as superstition so I had to find wood to knock on.
A few weeks earlier I had seen something I never thought I would see: a chopped-off human arm.
I was rehearsing an upcoming comedy show with my co-actor Andrei, after which he brought me to the Royal Art Academy of Antwerp to check out a 24-hour drawing marathon event, open to all. I’d never been there, so despite my preference for bed and my inner granny screaming to go home, my curiosity overruled.
It was 11 p.m. when we entered through a large hall that eventually led to a giant room where a naked, white-painted model rotated on a podium while hundreds of artists sketched him. I was already feeling dizzy imagining his experience when an acquaintance bumped into us and said “There’s an arm in some room over there. An actual human arm. With some skin and the nails and the collarbone. You should see it. I’m not going in there again, but you should see it.”
And so, of course, we go see it.
The first impression I had was: oooooh, looks like chicken!
Then…Oh. Looks like… chicken. It was gruesome and fascinating.
A short, dark-haired man in a white blouse said “I’m the doctor. You can ask me anything.”
While my companions leaned closer and inspected the flesh, the nails, the bright pink and red, the collarbone peaking out, I went to the doctor and asked my question. “So, whose this guy?”
“This is the arm of a man who donated his body to Arts and Science.”
“Yeah, okay, but… Does he have a story? Do you know his name? Do you know why he did this?”
I knew the Doctor would not give much away but I had to ask. He said this body had been chopped off at around seventy years old and that he was rather muscular for an old man. I was mostly curious whether my questions would awaken something in him that could make him care about what came with the arm. What it was attached to — not the physical body, but what the body may have carried; what that arm may have done in its lifetime. All the things you can do with an arm! Does it occur to doctors that history may be written in muscle tissue, even figuratively?
I repeated my questions. In retrospect I should have asked a more direct question: do the chopped parts come with a history tag? (And why shouldn’t it?)
“Well,” he smiled awkwardly, and repeated his statement like a robot, “You know, some people, that’s what they decide happens to their bodies after they die. They donate them to Arts and Science.”
I told him it was obvious that he was a doctor and I was a writer, and he laughed, so I laughed too, looking at that arm from a distance and feeling the beer (because it’s a Belgian art school, after all) snake upwards in my throat. That was my cue to leave the room.
The man may have been chopped to pieces for Art and Science but nobody will be coming to glaze it in the hopes of getting pregnant.
I often wonder what will remain after we die, if it matters, and if it does, to whom does it matter?
We remember stories. The good ones are often an embodiment of something universal, some ethereal essence that we long to have materialized into something palpable, like an urn or a grave. Victor Noir’s statue rests there, and the bronze had never been alive, but its story will last. Looking at it in my photos now, I not only think of the gruesome murder and the mystery that shrouded it, I think of all the women that have given it something with their touch. Whether it was hope or mourning, the tracks of their lives, though anonymous, have been recorded.
The flesh I saw carried no story, at least not one the doctor could give nor read from its palm, and I’m still a little disappointed by that.
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