Nunquam (The Revolt of Aphrodite) by Lawrence Durrell

Author:Lawrence Durrell [Durrell, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-06-11T21:00:00+00:00

IV

Perhaps the most cogent reason for our habit of walking down the corridor into the embalming studio was that we wished to compare what we were building with what they were preserving with such care. There was not much trade in their business—somehow embalming had not really caught on, even among publishers. Nevertheless that mere trickle of corpses provided Cyrus P. Goytz with a theatre of operations in which he could train staff. He was an endearing man with a face like a spade and a swarthy skin which occasionally flushed in a dull way when a pupil made a mistake. He was clad in black to lecture, which he did with his hands clasped in front of his stomach. A big smooth minatory-looking man, dressed in such heavy materials that he looked not unlike one of his own products—drained of all blood, like a kosher dish, and not as if he had just been warmly sacrificed on the altars of gluttony. He wore a very obviously short-cut wig which gave his face a curious expression of transience—again like his subjects, who apparently began to melt after about a month. But he was a pet Goytz, the soul of patience, and (so they said) the best embalmer in the universe. On New Year’s Eve, at staff parties, he had been known to take out a glass eye and show it to everyone on the palm of his hand. In the evenings he played the violin to timid little Mrs. Goytz (who looked like a taxidermic waterfowl) in a semi-detached at Sidcup. He was spearheading the firm’s embalming attack on the Middle East.

But this was not all; it was really his homely philosophy which gave us so much pleasure; he was so full of a benign desire to spread light and goodwill, dispel the clouds of gloom—or whatever misgivings his students might have about an avocation so, well … unusual. “Contrary to what many might assume,” he might say, taking up his penguin-like stance with hands joined in front “a corpse can prove a friendly, even a companionable thing—while it is relatively fresh, I mean.” This sort of thing Marchant used to treasure, and whisper it into Iolanthe’s ear as we knelt beside her, working on the eyes. The embalmers, by the way, worked to music—mostly the strains of In a Monastery Garden played in a reverent sort of way by a Palm Court Orchestra. Goytz kept it low so that the sound of his voice was not drowned as he instructed his students in the use of the trocar or the siphon pump which drained the bodies on the slabs. He was such a kindly man that he could even pretend to take a mild teasing from Marchant—as when the latter suggested that the appropriate motto for his little parlour should be “The More the Messier or the Nausea the Better”.

His specimens, though, had rather a different feeling about them; they were vulnerable, you see, the decay could be contained but only for a while.

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