Evangelista's Fan by Rose Tremain Read Free Book Online Page B

was red. Friday was a pallid kind of yellow.
    She dressed and put on her apron. She sat at her kitchen table drinking coffee and eating bread. She heard two women go past her window, laughing. She thought: that was the other beautiful thing that happened in the laundry – laughter.
    When the women had walked on by and all sound of them had drained away, Mercedes said aloud: ‘Now.’
    She cleared away the bread and coffee. She lit one ring of the stove and held above it the saucepan full of wax, turning it like a chef turns an omelette pan, so that the flames spread an even heat round the body of the wax. She felt it come loose from the saucepan, a solid lump. ‘Good,’ she said.
    She set out a pastry board on the table. She touched its smooth wooden surface with her hand. Louis Cabrini had been childishly fond of pastries and cakes. In her mother’s kitchen, Mercedes used to make him tarte tatin and apfelstrudel .
    She turned out the lump of wax onto the pastry board. It was yellowy in colour. The more she recycled the candles the yellower they became.
    Now she had a round dome of wax on which to begin work.
    She went to the bookcase, which was almost empty except for a green, chewed set of the collected works of Victor Hugo and an orange edition of Lettres de mon moulin by Alphonse Daudet. Next to Daudet was a book Mercedes had borrowed from the library twenty-seven years ago to teach herself about sex and had never returned, knowing perhaps that the library, never very efficient with its reminders, would close in due time. It was called Simple Anatomy of the Human Body . It contained drawings of all the major internal organs. On page fifty-nine was a picture of the male body unclothed, at which Mercedes used to stare.
    Mercedes put the book next to the pastry board, under the single light. She turned the pages until she found the drawing of the heart. The accompanying text read: ‘The human heart is small, relative to its importance. It is made up of four chambers, the right and left auricle and the right and left ventricle . . .’
    â€˜All right,’ said Mercedes.
    Using the drawing as a guide, she began to sculpt a heart out of the wax dome. She worked with a thin filleting knife and two knitting needles of different gauges.
    Her first thought as she started the sculpture was: the thing it most resembles is a fennel root and the smell of fennel resembles in its turn the smell of anisette.
    The work absorbed her. She didn’t feel tired any more. She proceeded carefully and delicately, striving for verisimilitude. She knew that this heart was larger than a heart is supposed to be and she thought, well, in Louis Cabrini’s case, it swelled with pride – pride in his beautiful wife, pride in his successful career, pride in being a Parisian, at owning a second-floor apartment, at eating in good restaurants, at buying roses at dusk to take home to his woman. Pride in leaving Leclos behind. Pride in his ability to forget the past.
    She imagined his rib-cage expanding to accommodate this swollen heart of his.
    Now and again, she made errors. Then, she had to light a match and pass it over the wax to melt it – to fill too deep an abrasion or smooth too jagged an edge. And she noticed in time that this slight re-melting of the heart gave it a more liquid, living appearance. This was very satisfactory. She began to relish it. She would strike a match and watch an ooze begin, then blow it out and slowly repair the damage she’d caused.
    It was becoming, just as she’d planned, her plaything. Except that she’d found more ways to wound it than she’d imagined. She had thought that, in the days to come, she would pierce it or cut it with something – scissors, knives, razor blades. But now she remembered that its very substance was unstable. She could make it bleed. She could make it disintegrate. It could empty itself out. And then, if she chose, she