I kick off my boots in the kitchen. I walk through the vast and silent house, I climb the meaningless staircase, I go into my room and strip naked, smelling the rain and the dead dog’s urine as I pull my T-shirt off over my head. I shower.
Standing wrapped in a towel, I pull open the top drawer of my dresser. I look down at the tank tops and soft flannel pants. I think about putting them on and crawling into my bed. Pulling my comforter up over my head. But it’s early, though it feels too late by far, and I am not tired. I close the drawer.
When I was fourteen, after we’d finished touring Rome, with me still hung over from the wine my mother wouldn’t talk about serving me, we had taken a train to Florence. It was, my mother said, her favorite city in Italy.
It felt more like a real place where people could actually live. It was still old, but without the giant ancient stuff like the Colosseum and Pantheon and Vatican City, there was room to breathe. In Rome, there were too many wars, too many stories, too many bodies stacked one atop another to ever disentangle.
The saints followed me to Florence, of course, the whole long line of them. But they were quiet, and they were beginning to feel as much a part of me as my shadow, and just as harmless.
Mom took me to La Specola, the oldest public museum in Europe.
“Look,” she said.
The saints looked with me. The floor was made of worn bricks set on an angle in a crisscross pattern. The windows were covered with dark green curtains, the kind you might find in a restaurant, and they were pulled tight to protect the displays. Weird florescent tubes lined the ceiling, flooding the room in harsh white light. Every wall was covered with framed pictures and specimens, all anatomical. Beneath the pictures were wooden shelves painted the same shade of green as the curtains. They were full of glass boxes. Each box held a disembodied part—feet and organs and hands—but my focus was drawn to three long glass cases in the center of the room.
The cases themselves were beautiful, raised hip high on delicately turned wooden legs. They weren’t just cases, though; they were coffins. In each of them was a tufted mattress—the ones on the ends, purple, the one in the middle, white. Upon each mattress was an artistically rumpled sheet, and upon each sheet was a woman’s naked body.
“Are they real?” I whispered, as if I might wake them. But even if they had been real, they could not have been alive, not even in a Snow White trance, for their skin was flayed open, chest to pubic bones, and their guts spilled out, as artistically rumpled as the sheets.
“They’re art,” Mom said. “Wax sculptures.”
I circled the figures. Rapunzel-long hair flowed from their heads, this one dark and loose, that one twisted into blond braids. Their cheeks and lips flushed red with life; their glass eyes, blue and green and brown, looked up at me or maybe just beyond my shoulder, to the saints who followed me. They had jewels fastened around their throats, woven in their hair. Each reclining model held her right leg slightly bent, curved alluringly. Each model grasped at her sheet. Each model’s head tipped up and back.
“But what are they?” I asked again.
“They’re the Dissected Graces.”
I had no idea what that meant, but it made perfect sense.
“They’re anatomical models, of sorts,” Mom said. “They were sculpted by Clemente Susini. The idea was that medical students could study these instead of corpses. They wouldn’t rot, they didn’t stink, and, of course, they were beautiful. A perfect woman. These three are a set—Le Grazie Smontate, or The Dissected Graces. You’ll notice,” she went on, circling the middle coffin, “that they look almost alive. The color of their skin. Their expressions.”
“Their coffins look like beds,” I said, “the way their heads are on pillows.”
“Yes,” Mom said. “Look at the way they’re posed. Everything is purposeful, Nina. There are no accidents.”
I saw their open hands, their gently curved fingers. I saw their soft thighs, the hair curled between them.
“If they were just for learning about the body, they wouldn’t need long hair and jewelry,” I said.
“Right,” Mom answered. She sounded pleased, like I was a dog who had performed its trick just right. “But here we have the intersection of love and death again. Of beauty”—she gestured to the figure’s sweet face—“and gore.” Her hand pointed down to the flayed-open chest, the erupting intestines.
“Eros and Thanatos,” I murmured.
“Exactly.” Mom tapped the top of the glass coffin.
One figure, the one with long blonde hair, some of it braided, some of it loose, looked like the sculpture of Saint Teresa. Her legs seemed to writhe, either in pleasure or pain, and her hands clutched the sheet beneath her. Her head was tossed back, shoulders thrust forward, and the shiny worms of her waxy guts framed the deepest center of her.
“She doesn’t look dead,” I said, “but she doesn’t look alive, either.”
“Look at this one’s nipple,” Mom said, and I turned my attention to where she pointed. This figure’s chest was splayed open, the breasts flipped almost upside down, like open doors. I felt Saint Agatha twitch behind me with recognition of her twin. “See the color of it? The shape of it? Try to believe that’s not sexual.”
I stood next to my mother and stared through the glass at the beauty and the gore. The men who crafted these figures must have worked from real-life models. The corpses that had posed for them . . . what had happened to them, to those women? How had they died? How had they lived? Who posed their flesh and their guts so the artists could create these sculptures?
I wanted to ask about the women, but if I did, I suspected that I would cry, and that my mother would not approve. So I kept my focus on the sculptures. On the art.
“What are they made of, exactly?”
“Beeswax and animal fat,” Mom said. “The same things we use in makeup today.”
That couldn’t be true. God, could it?
Once upon a time, there was a rich and noble family from Catania. The family’s great wealth meant that they owned great swaths of land and many houses. They were thankful for their fortune and prayed diligently to the Christian god.
And they were grateful, too, for their beautiful daughter, Agatha, who, as the seasons changed, changed with them, growing in her beauty from a girl to a young woman. Her braids of blond hair were long enough to dust the ground when she knelt in prayer, which she did daily, as her faith was strong and passionate.
She grew in grace and purity until, at the age of fifteen, she declared to her family her intention to dedicate her virginity to God and remain His consecrated servant.