“And I’m waiting for money. Do you have any for me?”
“I’ve got nothing to do with that. I’m simply offering to take your message to the border.”
“How do I know I can trust you? Your fame reached the farthest corners of Europe, yet here you are, in a rooming house for the poorest court workers.”
“There are spies everywhere. My enemies hire enemies who hire enemies.”
“Who are they? Are they in the priesthood?”
“I wish. My enemies are people who used to be my friends. They know me and can therefore predict my next steps. I have to become someone else in order to hide, and then I do things I detest. But only as another can I be safe.”
His accent and the blanket over his mouth made him hard to understand, but I soon gathered he was telling me the story of his life. Beccaria had never been interested in justice, the topic that had made him so famous, until one day, more out of friendship than any real interest, he joined a group of intellectuals from Milan who established a journal called Il
“I actually liked math, but everyone around me was a writer. I never could stand to hold the pen for long; it made me sleepy. My friends, particularly the Verri brothers, worked tirelessly. I wanted to chase women, go out on the town, as we used to, but the publication was so important to them that I had to keep quiet. They were annoyed by my lack of drive, and Alessandro Verri wound up threatening me: they would kick me out if I didn’t get to work. I asked him to give me a topic to write on; he suggested justice. I recalled the walks we used to take, when we would discuss
Beccaria jumped out of bed and began to get dressed. He looked like a mere sketch of his own portrait: his clothes hung off him as if he had suddenly lost weight. He moved as if he were sleepwalking.
“I put the book together bit by bit, like a woman sewing a dress out of scraps of material. My friends helped me edit it and kindly gave it to a printer. Friends can be so helpful when they doubt your ability! But as soon as they know what you’re worth, they turn against you. There’s nothing worse than literary envy. The Verri brothers have slandered and hounded me ever since. Not even the Venetian Council of Ten attacked me as viciously as my old friends! They’ve accused me of being an impostor; criticized my appetite, my vulgarity; and even taken advantage of one time when I was startled by a spider to call me a coward.”
He opened the trunk and attempted to tidy things; his clothes were dirty and wrinkled, his books missing covers and falling apart.
“Write your message and I’ll deliver it,” he said more calmly now.
As Beccaria dressed, I took a quill and ink out of my bag and used the trunk as a writing surface. I started by recounting recent events and then outlined my next steps; fearing the messenger might be a spy, I spoke indirectly, using subtext and subterfuge.
Beccaria would look out the window, leap from one side of the room to the other, stop to listen to footsteps on the stairs. He saw signs of danger in everything, and his fear was so contagious it made my prose even more obscure.
“You’ve no idea how I’ve dreamed of going to Ferney. Arriving there will be like crossing the border between my past and my future. What can I take Voltaire? I was thinking about a clock.”
“Anything but. Perk up your ears, go to the theater, stop to listen to what people around you are saying, and then describe all of it, in as much detail as possible. Voltaire has received every imaginable gift, but words are all that interest him.”
My letter never reached Voltaire. Beccaria suddenly changed direction and headed for Milan. It was all the fault of a sick woman he saw on the street. He was so moved by the sight of her that he imagined his own wife ill and destitute and returned home as quickly as he could. Signora Beccaria was as healthy as ever, but her husband never traveled again. He spent the rest of his life out of the spotlight, as a teacher. He and the Verri brothers never exchanged another word. The brothers had this to say to anyone who would listen: “Piece of advice? Never help anyone out of their boredom and apathy.”
My letter lay forgotten in Beccaria’s suitcase. He discovered it years later and, guilt ridden, sent it to Ferney. It reached me after Voltaire had died, when I was organizing the archives. I had written it in one of my experimental inks, and every single word had disappeared in the intervening seventeen years. Only a few strokes remained, the heaviest ones, which now reminded me of bird tracks in the sand.
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
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
I refused to give up and tried to recall the anatomy book that had so disturbed me when I was a student. I
