Mister Memory Read online

  Morel notes that even the warder’s thick accent was not enough to signal that anything was amiss, and he bowls in straight away to confound his prisoner with his discovery.

  ‘Aha!’ he says, ‘I have you!’

  What can Marcel do but confess? He tells the doctor that yes, this is how it’s always been. For the rest of their time together the doctor falls into deeper and deeper despondency. The genius has been unmasked at last. He is fallible, there is a flaw, and what an enormous flaw it is, in Marcel’s memory.

  The doctor listens glumly as Marcel tries to explain about faces, how they all are different, because they move all the time, because from day to day they are not the same colour, or temperament, that hair has changed, and so on. Morel barely listens. He was chasing the idea of perfection, and that noble goal has just been removed. Yes, Marcel is still remarkable, but Morel was after a bigger prize than the merely remarkable. He was chasing the unbelievable. How is he to create his great reputation on anything less? He considers that thought for a moment, because something is bothering him. It takes him a long while to work out what it is: that the desire to achieve immortality in the scientific world is no longer quite as strong as it was before. It’s been replaced, in part, by an irritating notion that he actually wants to help Marcel get better.

  Overnight, however, something occurs to him. He wakes in his solitary rooms at the far side of the hospital in the middle of the night, and sits up in bed.

  ‘He remembers each face!’ he declares, by which he means that Marcel remembers each individual face as an individual face.

  Next morning, he puts this theory to Marcel, with great excitement.

  Marcel looks at him and says rather bluntly, ‘Yes, that’s what I told you yesterday.’

  ‘Yes, yes, my boy, but listen: is it the case that since you can remember each individual face, you are in some way unable to connect them all together? That you cannot conceive they all come from the same person?’

  Marcel sighs. And nods, yes, that is the case.

  ‘But why,’ asks Morel, more to himself than to Marcel, ‘should you be unaware that one group of facial memories, mine for example, are closer in similarity than those of another group, those of Dr Martin, for example? Or that photographer, Buguet?’

  Marcel doesn’t really know, and says so.

  ‘Perhaps they are more similar to you,’ he offers, ‘but not to me.’

  He shrugs, but Morel isn’t listening too closely now. He is elated.

  ‘There is no lacuna!’ he announces happily. ‘I thought we had found a gap in your talents, my boy. But we have not. This problem you have with recognising faces is not a gap in the strength of your memory; it is created by it. It is because you remember too well that you cannot know whose face is whose.’

  Marcel says nothing. He doesn’t particularly care about any of this; it’s something he’s lived with his whole life. And he is not especially enjoying the daily attention of being Morel’s star pupil.

  ‘How are you getting along, anyway?’ Morel enquires eventually.

  Marcel gazes at the floor. ‘When will I be released?’ he asks.

  It is the first time he has asked such a question, and Morel takes that in itself to be a good sign.

  ‘You wish to leave?’

  Marcel shrugs.

  If he does want to leave, it does not seem to be a burning desire.

  Morel rolls his head from side to side, something he does when he’s unsure.

  ‘You are a menace to society. You murdered your wife, did you not? In a fit of rage. The Préfecture has decided to incarcerate you here, and since it has, it would be a question of our finding you safe to release back into the world. I notice you have been reading? Newspapers are not really allowed in here, you know, but I gather you have been reading through old ones. Are you looking for something? No? Just something to pass the time, perhaps. Well, I see no harm in it, you have to keep that mind of yours exercised, do you not?’

  Marcel stares at the floor. He is not listening. In his mind he is replaying the moment he killed his wife, for perhaps the ten thousandth time. It haunts him badly, what he did, and as Morel has noted before, Marcel’s prison is not one made with walls and bars.

  The doctor has not been idle; he did not make a vow lightly to Marcel that he would help him, and he has been studying the rarest of sources for any clue upon the subject of the hypermnesiac. That is what he tells himself: that he is trying to help Marcel, and it is partially true, although he also realises that if he does still want to make his reputation with the case (he had already sounded the words Morel’s syndrome often enough in his head to have begun to expect to find it in the literature he is now reading) then he will need to verify that no one in living memory has written the subject up already.

  He doubts it. From the reading he has done so far, he has found plenty on the subject of amnesia, and next to nothing on its other extremity. The most promising, and simultaneously heart-stopping work was that written some twenty-five years previously by Ribot. In the Sorbonne library, Morel worked his way through Ribot’s stolid and yet utterly limp prose, finding a chapter at last entitled ‘EXALTATIONS OF MEMORY, or HYPERMNESIA’.

  Damn it, thought Morel, so the word has been coined already. Hypermnesia. Never mind, it was an obvious enough thought. Let’s see what the fool has to say.

  He did so. For the most part, the chapter covered what Ribot terms ‘partial hypermnesia’, and cited cases such as the boy who fractured his skull at the age of four, about which he remembered nothing until, at the age of fifteen, he was struck with a fever, as a result of which the full and complete circumstances of his childhood fracture returned to him. Or, another case: an old forester from Poland, who had lived in France almost all his life, and who for thirty or forty years had heard not a word of Polish to the point where he could not speak his native tongue, suddenly had the gift of Polish language restored during an attack of anaesthesia brought about by a fall.

  Morel found himself wanting to dig Ribot up so he can insult him to his face, for nonsense such as this: Hypermnesia of this kind is the necessary correlative of partial amnesia, it proves once more and in another way that the memory is made up of memories.

  The memory is made of memories?

  Oh genius, thought Morel. And there was more: the mechanism of this metamorphosis being inscrutable, there is no reason why we should dwell upon it here.

  In the library that afternoon, Morel started to sense that Ribot dwelt on nothing because, in fact, he knew nothing. Of cases of what he called General Excitation of Memory, he listed only more pale and ridiculous examples: the railway worker who, being nearly hit by a train, reported that his entire life passed before his eyes; or a near-drowned person with the same experience to relate.

  The doctor found himself growing ever more happily indignant with his predecessor’s flaccid work. He started muttering and pointing at sections of the text and snorting, so much that he drew the attention of other occupants of the library. But if he seemed angry, he was far from it. He was delighted that the only thing he’d found so far with anything to say on the subject of hypermnesia had, in truth, nothing to say at all.

  Morel’s syndrome, Morel’s syndrome. It sounded very, very good to the doctor as he made his way back to the Salpêtrière.

  In the cell, Marcel’s tiny prison, the two men sit in their reveries. The old doctor suddenly snaps out of his and something inaudible escapes his lips; he turns to look at Marcel, who is sitting exactly where he left him, minutes ago, before the doctor began his own small reminiscence.

  It gives him the tiniest insight into what Marcel’s whole life must be like. At any moment, any thought can trigger a thousand memories and each one of those memories a thousand more. Morel envisages a labyrinth, a maze of infinity, and finally understands what he is up against. If he is to help Marcel, he has to help him stop going into the maze. It is that which disables him, so often, so intensely, so deeply: these w
anderings in the lost pathways of his mind.

  A square of light starts to slide along the floor, and, after a while, up the wall; a late burst of sun on a cold autumn day. Twenty minutes later, by Morel’s watch, it shines on to Marcel’s face, into his eyes. He doesn’t move. He hasn’t moved in all that time. Morel puts his watch away, standing.

  The only real way to help Marcel, the doctor suddenly realises with a start, would be to do the unthinkable, the extraordinary. The impossible, perhaps. To Morel, it would also be undesirable, and so he keeps the idea to himself – that the only true way to help Marcel would be to help him learn how to forget.

  MEMENTO MORI

  Since its invention, and rapid development, photography has been put to every conceivable use. In Paris, as elsewhere in the world, this means it has been employed in some of the less-spoken-of areas of human life, two in particular. The two subjects of which we speak here, sex and death, are said by many to be the two greatest mysteries of existence. Strange, then, that for the most part we talk about them as little as possible in polite company. But times come and go and, like fashions, what may not be spoken about a little less one day is spoken about a little more openly the next.

  As Petit makes his way up to Pigalle again, crossing the Place Blanche, the city around him has seen a slight waning in its appetite for a relationship with death. The height of the expression of mourning and the Victorian death cult have started to ease, yet this is still a time in which affairs connected to death are somewhat more elaborated upon. Photography knows this, and quickly attached itself to death.

  Baraduc was one of the men who made it that way. He began his career at a tender age, learning the ropes of his craft from his father. They ran a small but reasonably healthy trade by offering photographic services to the bereaved. Originally, this meant only the making of death mask photographs; a subtle business that required more than just skill with the photographic arts. In order to make the subject suitable, the mortician’s skill in make-up and dressing were invaluable; the correct choice of flowers, a new pillow perhaps: these were all details that Baraduc and his father were happy to supply, and if they did not come cheaply, so much the better. No one was going to quibble about cost at a time like that. So they took their photographs of the recently deceased, looking for all the world as if they slept. Sometimes, in fact, it was even possible to take the portraits with the subjects’ eyes open, and if luck was on their side, they could produce a photograph of the loved one as if in life.

  As a few years passed, the younger Baraduc told his father about a new fashion for deathbed photography. In America, he said, and elsewhere, they take the photos of the dead before they actually die. That, his father said, was a smart idea. They could beat their competitors to the job. So they branched out into pre-mortem photography: reproductions of the terminally ill, making one last effort to sit upright in bed, and produce a smile if possible. And then, very soon, rest. The younger Baraduc was gifted at this work; his special touch was the placement of red flowers in the portrait. These he would paint in by hand, painstakingly, on the black and white print, something that his customers would marvel at. The finest he ever achieved: a string of red rosebuds across the chest of a tiny girl who had died before her first birthday; her eyes open, her little fist clenched by her cheek as if in thought, the rosebuds, bright red, symbolising both death and unfulfilled promise.

  So business was good, but still Baraduc the younger was not satisfied. He wondered aloud to his father one day about all the clients they were missing. When his father asked who he meant, Baraduc explained that far too many potential customers were being buried before anyone thought to have their likeness recorded. Supposing, he said, they could photograph people from beyond the grave?

  That, his father said, was a terrible idea, and sounded blasphemous too. He scowled, and Baraduc didn’t mention it again, although he knew there were charlatans who claimed to be able to contact the deceased and made good money doing so, very good money, in séances in the drawing rooms of polite Parisian society. If these mediums, who he knew were fraudulent, could make such claims, why should he not go one better and produce photographs of deceased spirits? In secret, he experimented with a variety of techniques: methods such as the double exposure, such as the retouching of the negative plate. He worked and perfected his art, and was about to have a second attempt at convincing his father that this was a powerful money-making idea, when his father upped and died. So much the better, Baraduc decided, as he took his own father’s death mask one afternoon. I can go it alone, now, and we will see what we will see.

  What he saw was that there was, as he suspected, a very good line to be had in spirit photography, but he needed an accomplice to make it work. There, in his studio in Pigalle, he had the perfect set-up, and he brought his wife in on the secret. She had been working long and poorly paid hours as a blanchisseuse and was only too happy to try her hand at something new. And she was very good at it indeed; sitting in the antechamber of Baraduc’s studio with the deceased, listening and sympathising, prompting and eliciting, until Baraduc himself, ear-wigging from next door, could pull out the most suitable of his stock portraits. Young or old, thin or corpulent, dark hair or light, and so on. After a while he even developed a system of composite facial features; this nose on this shape face, those eyes and these ears. Once they’d been put through his system of processing, it would all be very much the same. And then, as Madame Baraduc explained in mystical tones the delicate nature of their work, her husband would set to in the darkroom, preparing a plate to be reinserted into the camera when it was time to take the portrait itself. The bereaved would be brought into the studio and placed in a large wing chair, suitably formal and sombre. Instructed to focus his or her mind upon the relative, Baraduc would open his lens to the plate for a second time, thus superimposing the living person on an admittedly blurry image of the deceased lurking in the shadows behind the chair. And if the likeness of the dead was not that clear, or that accurate, no one said anything. Anyway, who can say how death will change us? All their clients went away in tearful wonder at what had occurred, clutching the print to their chest in fond recollection, all of them until that cunning little devil who turned out to work for the Chief of Police, the one with the uncle who wasn’t only not dead, but hadn’t ever existed.

  It was while Baraduc was serving his shortish term in prison that he decided what to do upon his release. In the meantime, his wife left him for the proprietor of a café down by the opera house. But so much the better, Baraduc thought, for what he had in mind, because she would never have approved of his next scheme. This was to transfer the art of photography from one of the main pillars of human interest and fear to the other: namely, sex.

  Times being what they were, and Paris being what it is, the licentious was only ever just beneath the surface anyway. Especially in Pigalle, where he found he could pay a prostitute a remarkably small sum of money to take her clothes off and have her photograph taken. An image that he could then reproduce and sell as many times as he liked. The girls he worked with didn’t seem to understand this at first, and business had never been better. At first he worked within the law as much as he could; there was decent money to be made in photographs that were merely risqué. But it was a fine line between the risqué and the illegal, a line that, after a while, Baraduc decided to stampede right across, once he saw how much more money he could make with the genuinely obscene.

  It was funny, he found, underneath the hood of his camera, peering at the image before him, upside down, of two people having sex. A man and a woman, two women, two men, three women and one man. It made little difference to him. At first, he was moved by some of the acts that occurred on his couch, and frequently felt a strong desire to participate. In those days, he found it best to take the edge off his desire by participating in some quick and frantic activity of his own, with one of his previous prints to aid him, before the models arrived. Later, the whole business became so ban
al that he could contemplate the most extreme sexual acts without wondering about anything other than whether he had his focal length correct, and if there were perhaps a better way of arranging the pot plants in the foreground.

  And once again business was good, until the brigade des moeurs, the vice squad, came to call and he found himself in prison once more.

  WHAT THE CAMERA SAW

  That is Baraduc’s history. Petit knows a little of it. He has been doing some reading, down there in the police archives, though it still gives him the shudders to descend the staircase into the basement, remembering his month of ‘hard labour’ re-cataloguing ancient crimes: the deeds of long-dead Communards and executed anarchists. He’s been doing his reading on Baraduc for the simple purpose of knowing his enemy: what it might be useful to know, what could be used against him, if need be. What he, Petit, wants, is more information. Although he can’t prove it, he is sure that Baraduc knows the names of the men Ondine used to entertain. Petit can guess who one of them was, but he’d like to hear it from someone else’s mouth, because then, well, then, perhaps there is more to Ondine’s murder than at first appears.

  Petit is working on a number of matters as September drifts along, and in time, vanishes from the calendar. October arrives, and still Petit has nothing to show for his efforts. By now, the cool mornings have even been superseded by ones of frost, frost on the parapets of the bridges across the Seine, on the iron railings of the Tuileries, on the lawns of the Jardin du Luxembourg. It is cold everywhere, and he shudders at the thought that winter might have already come before autumn has had a chance to say anything. The journey up to his apartment on the top floor of the Rue Laplace requires climbing twelve flights of stairs, two per floor. The balustrade is of heavy wood, covered with peeling layers of light blue paint, and even that is cold, and seems to suck the heat from his hand as he makes his way up.