Toxine
After months of effort I acknowledged my failure. Toxine lay unrestored. I surrendered; she had suffered my ignorance enough. I sealed the belly panel upon craftsmanship defiled by my incompetence. If her mechanical heart were to beat, it would be elsewhere, in a limbo reserved for the inorganic, an artificial paradise denied to me. All that was left was to comb her silky locks (they were real silk) and gaze upon her tirelessly until grandmother called me to bed; or else to lie by her side, she exhausted by disappointment, I by guilt. Sometimes I thought she mewled, her sphinxlike eyes burning with reproach; sometimes I thought her ruby lips trembled on the brink of resolving her riddle. But she was a tease, rewarding my devotion with silence, offering herself only to freeze at my touch. My arms about her tiny eighteen-inch waist, the red silk dress crushed beneath me, I would caress her dislocated limbs, her cracked porcelain breasts, in intimacies cold as the oncoming winter.
When snow began to fall and I took blankets to our eyrie my grandmother became anxious, especially when I caught a chill. I ignored her admonitions, her suspicious looks, and stayed faithful to Toxine. I variously explained my excursions as sorting out jumble for the school fête, or observing the stars with my telescope. My grandmother, an arthritic old woman, was unable to climb the attic stairs and could not verify these excuses.
My vigils grew prolonged. Often it was so cold I thought I might fall asleep, my head next to hers, never to wake up. It would be sweet. One night, tucked beneath several blankets, my drowsiness became irresistible. Snowflakes drifted down from the rafters, speckling her sable hair. She seemed to wear a crown of ice. Behind us, a rocking-horse broke into a canter, spurred by the north wind. A stuffed parakeet bristled. I looked into those Byzantine eyes, elliptical and grave, and in their luminous depth saw a land, a happy land, where there was neither tears nor pain. A city, with walls of porcelain and wax, descended from the sky. It was toytown, city of ceramic, bisque and cloisonné, where girls with geisha-white faces and the eyes of snow leopards danced like figurines atop a music box, danced before their master, the King of Clockwork. City of dolls, of cats, of machines. Come away, I heard her whisper, come away, O human child! I held her tight, falling over and over into a jade-green sea; but as I fell, her voice changed; it became querulous, imperative, so that, starting awake, I drew back from her and, looking up, saw the outline of my father in the dark. ‘What are you doing?’ he said.
Toxine was the creation of an unknown craftsman apprenticed to Peter Carl Fabergé. It has been speculated that he was a Frenchman who worked in Fabergé’s London studio between 1890 and 1900. Toxine was the sole evidence of his eccentric talent. To construct an android, an automaton, in the manner of Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaquet-Droz, père et fils, Frederick of Knause, and the Maillardet family, to revive and better their technique, seemed to have been his passion. But these eighteenth-century masters, who had inspired him to realize such a perverse simulacrum of the female anatomy, had not influenced his treatment of the sex’s loveliness. In demeanour, Toxine had been infected by her time: a parody of womanhood who belonged, in the history of taste, to the fin de siècle. The pale, consumptive flesh, tinderbox eyes, and red, vampiric mouth—all that high romanticism concealing the classically tempered innards—was an amalgam of certain women painted by Moreau, Toorop and Klimt. She was a swansong of the Decadence, her beauty that of innocence betrayed and of crime discovered; at once Ophelia, daughter of water and lilies, and that vicious chit, Salomé. That her pedigree had been unrecognized, and that she had remained uncatalogued for nearly seventy years, represented, for my father, a handsome and unlooked-for profit; for me, an incomparable loss.
My mother was still in New York. Dad had been alarmed at receiving a letter from my grandmother detailing his son’s increasingly odd behaviour, namely, the boy’s interludes in the attic. He had returned to investigate. And now Toxine sat in the back of our shop in the Portobello Road, lost. The night before she vanished, to be auctioned at Sotheby’s, I stepped out of bed and stole downstairs. There was much I wanted to say. I promised I would find her again, that I would bring her back and nurse her to health. ‘O Mademoiselle!’ l whispered, kissing her cheek. ‘They won’t defeat us. Not Daz, not my parents, no one. I won’t fail you again. Ever!’ Next day my father told me about the divorce.
My progress to adulthood was uneventful. Publicly, at least. Following the sale of Toxine I was placed in the care of a child psychiatrist, who, after some months, reassured my father that my fetishism—he cited, predictably, ‘domestic crisis’—would pass. It did not pass; I learned to hide it, so that from school to university my life was notorious only for being so bland. My inner life, that attic of the skull dank with dreams of mechanical girls, was uncharted. To all, I remained the ridiculous youth who spent his evenings alone with his books. No one knew what drove me to study the voluptuous laws of mechanics, what rendered me my facility with machines. But I knew: it was my guardian angel, Toxine. Nightly, she spoke to me. She said, ‘Build me flesh, a body wherein I may dwell and again be yours . . .’ My father, mindful of my supposedly cured fixation, was disturbed to see me poring over back copies of The Connoisseur. One day he discovered, at the bottom of my wardrobe, several monographs on historic automata; these, along with my hopes for a lathe, calibration instruments, or anything that might have again bruised my mind, were summarily destroyed. With the annulment of his marriage (my mother had settled in Detroit with some bastard called Hank), Dad had taken a morbid interest in my welfare. At last, either sensing my anxiety and fearing it would lead to a breakdown, or told, perhaps by a doctor, that I should be humoured, he indulged my entreaties, and a boxroom above our shop became my studio. Of course, in financing what he considered to be a therapeutic hobby, Dad never suspected the extent to which my work was Toxicological.
