Excerpt from A Thousand Deaths Plus One by Sergio Ramirez

   
I seem to be crossing an endless waste, going some place I know not where. I am at once the desert, the traveler, and the camel.
                           -- Flaubert to George Sand, July 20, 1873

Darkness had now fallen and I was obliged to move closer to the fluorescent tube installed under the bookstall’s eaves, when I discovered a snapshot of a nude which was not feminine in the least, and which was the Before to the Afterward of the cover photograph that showed Turgenev’s body on his bed at Les Frênes. One explained the other, and their relevance was mutual. At the foot of this other one was this description: The Russian writer Ivan Turgenev after being embalmed (flexible negative treated with gelatin).

The body rests on what looks like a joiner’s work bench, enveloped in a troubled light that comes from a clerestory window above. This doesn’t look like the dissection room of a hospital but rather one of the shed-like service buildings at Les Frênes, a stable perhaps, or an equipment room, with stucco walls blackened by candle smoke. There is a pail at the foot of the bench that might be used for milking, or might be there to receive the viscera from the cadaver. But that isn’t all. At one side, barely offering her profile to the camera, Pauline García-Viardot is staring at the body with religious fervor, her shoulders thrown forward—don’t forget that Ernesta Grisi found consolation in calling her “the hunchback”—and dressed severely in mourning, with a veil thrown over her face.

This is a furtive visit by Pauline to that shed after the embalmer has finished his work, as furtive as the presence of the photographer, who took the snapshot from outside, through the window. He would have been carrying his brass suitcases full of equipment along the path among the ash trees and had sat down on one of them to rest near the shed when his attention was caught by the banging of the shutters loose in the wind, and he looked in. There was Turgenev, naked on the workbench, and Pauline in her pose of motionless contemplation. He hastened to get his portable camera out of its bag, took the picture while scarcely poking his head in, and disappeared immediately from the window frame, fearful of having been betrayed by the sound of the camera’s shutter. Then he went on his way carrying his equipment cases toward the dacha to wait there for the body, now dressed, to be moved to the bed, and to go ahead with fulfilling the assignment from the Revue des Deux Mondes that had brought him to Les Frênes.

The naked body, which in the contrast of the dimly illuminated snapshot looks as white as if it were a leper’s cadaver, barely fits on the work bench where it lies exposed, just as in that other one, fully dressed, it scarcely fits on the bed. And the feet jut out in the foreground of this one too, freed of those seven-league-boots and looking as though they belong to the old Slavic king placidly asleep after a wild night of feverish love, his beard and hair in disarray, his legs still firm, his broad chest covered with a light snow-colored down, the two dark nipples like eyes still alert, and the abdomen flat without a hint of that senile obscenity that is a flaccid belly, swollen with fat. The Slavic monarch seems to be enjoying the majesty of his repose, unaware of his nakedness, and Pauline could be taken for the servant girl who doesn’t dare to wake him, her protuberant eyes fixed on his sex that rises from the furry mat of his pubic region like the pestle belonging to a pharmacist’s mortar.

But all this serene harmony is shattered by the clumsy seam that is marked by long stitches from sternum to stomach. After performing a radical evisceration, necessary because a long journey by train all the way to St. Petersburg awaits the body, the embalmer has injected two liters of formol into his veins and has filled with tow the cavities that used to hold his soft organs before concluding by sewing up the lengthy incision with horse hair.

Flaubert’s hypocritical rule asserts that one should not become involved, Du Camp says again after Primoli separates himself from Castellón, raising his arms as if asking for peace. Thirsty for new experiences, you can go off to Upper Egypt to observe the hunting expeditions for blacks and elephants, but only as an observer whose emotions cannot deflect you from your mission to see. The blacks, the elephants are simply motifs, pretexts of a nature that is rich in varieties of cruelty and the marvelous, destined for the eye. A ten-year-old slave, for example, whose owners, a pair of Christian merchants about to board ship in Beirut, have put her into the water to scrub her skin with sand until she begins to bleed. In the dawn’s light, all that is visible among the waves is the girl’s naked body and the thick copper ring around her neck, scarlet blood on ebony black. But the fact is, Primoli argues, that the artist is a pathologist who must preserve the dried-up pieces in the formol-filled flasks of his memory; any other way would be to take on the role of redeemer. They can be stripping the skin off your own mother, your own daughter, but your duty is to register the fact.

Perhaps (Castellón would probably say now) after having taken the photograph of the naked body, being neutral consists in seeing one’s own self as an object, even at the moment when the syphilitic digs around in the vagina of a prostitute before penetrating her, fingers that are moved only in order to learn about the sensations of the touching but as if they were not one’s own, this artist who may infect another body with his own but does not infect the page nor the negative.

And the knife that cuts both ways, one way for beauty, the other for repulsiveness, the ornament and the ulcer, the fragrance of orange blossoms together with the stench of cadavers, the caterpillar on the flowered branch—but the two edges are in harmony within the whole that is the knife itself, a single instrument that serves to flay flesh and cut out viscera and at the same time to pry the precious stone from its mounting, to separate the pearl from the oyster, to cut the rose from its stalk. Beauty is always contaminated; nothing occurs separately.