Thursday, August 30, 2018

Hunchback Assistant Tells All


In honor of Mary Shelley's birthday, this long-lost letter in verse to the author of Frankenstein.

HUNCHBACK ASSISTANT TELLS ALL

by Brett Rutherford



 1
My dear Mrs. Shelley —
won’t do — she’s neither ‘mine’ nor dear

To Mary —
sounds like a dedication
when nothing of that sort’s intended

Madame
so cool, polite and very French,
that will do.

Madame —
No doubt you suspect, if you have not heard
of the sensation caused by your romance,
newly translated to our Alpine tongues.
Neither the French nor the German booksellers
can keep enough of Frankenstein,
or The Modern Prometheus.
The bookbinders are up all night
preparing the slender volumes
for the fainting sight of the ladies.
Nothing else is spoken of, and little else read
at our little University.
I have studied your book, Madame Shelley,
and being more intimate than you
— or anyone else yet living —
with the facts in the case of Frankenstein,
I must hasten to write you,
that you might correct the grievous oversight
of omitting my role—my pivotal role
in the great endeavors,
the tragic conflagration.

I am Fritz,
poor old one-eyed, limping Fritz
the hump-backed,
unbaptized son of a priest and a nun,
a throwaway
raised by gypsies.
I will spare you nothing,
for only the sum of what I am
can justify what I was
to Victor, his bride and his monster.

2
You never mention me, Mrs. Shelley,
but I was there from the start.
I saw him at the medical school.
I always went to the dissections
(I have, you see, insatiable interest
in human anatomy.)
I loved to watch those perfect bodies,
naked and cold,
white as marble statues,
opened and disassembled
by the knowing hands of the surgeons.
I took my pad and crayon with me,
drew every line and contour—
the man’s bold lines,
the woman’s curved exterior—
the coiled horrors within,
the entrails unraveling,
the mysteries of the ensorcelled brain!

Then suddenly I noticed him.
His jet-black hair, eyebrows of Jove,
his burning eyes intent upon the scalpel and saw,
absorbing each surgical thrust.
I saw him and knew,
knew from the start as one soul knows another,
that he perceived beyond life and death.
He saw me drawing, and nodded, and smiled.

From that day forward I drew only him,
intent no more upon the surgery,
I sought to capture the fire of his pupils,
the furrow on his brow
as some doubt troubled him,
the gesture his hand made
when his mind made one
great thought from two
of a professor’s ideas.
Cupping a handful of gelatin,
gray and convoluted,
the lecturer shrugged and dropped it,
“Is this the seat of knowledge?—this organ?—
Is this the soul writ here in nerves and ganglia?
No one knows.”

The orbs of Frankenstein replied
“I am the one who will know.”

Hunched in the darkest nook
of the students’ wine cellars
I heard him complain,
“It’s not enough to watch
those well-rehearsed dissections.
If only I had a cadaver—
one of my own—
I must know the inner workings of life!”

How could I bear to hear him suffer,
he who should want nothing?
That night I robbed a mausoleum—
a rich man’s grave easy to plunder,
a simple job of claw and crowbar,
a lumpy sack and a handcart.
I dumped the sack before his door and knocked.
He came in nightshirt, candle in hand,
looked down at me in startlement.
“For you,” I said. “Your own
c—-c——ca—-cadaver,” I stammered.

He did not seem surprised. He took
one end of the heavy burden, let me
come in with the rest of it.
“It’s very fresh,” I assured him.
“He was only interred just yesterday.”

I waited. He stared at me.
“How much do you want?” he asked.
“Oh, nothing!” I answered.
“You must want something for this!”
“I want...I want.” I could not say it.
“Tell me.” He looked a little kind, then.
I think he understood.
“I want to serve you,” I told him.
“Serve you...always.”

3
We worked on happily —
my shovel and cart,
his saw and scalpel.
We found a more remote
and spacious laboratory,
paid for with gold
(how I laughed
as I melted each crucifix,
stripped village churches
of their gilded adornments!)
I turned the wheels
that made small lightning
leap over the ceiling vault.
I bellowed the gas
that lightning condensed
into the glowing elixir
that made life scream
into inanimate matter.

Our workroom was madhouse—
old vellum books and amulets
heaped up with bones of animals,
crystal and astrolabe,
the surgeon’s shining tools,
the charnel pit
of amputated limbs.

In madness we succeeded.
We howled
as tissues dead or rotting
quivered and multiplied,
as hands flew off
in every direction,
eyes rolled
and irises dilated
in lidless horror,
brains roiled
in their captive tanks,
their spine stems twitching
with inexpressible longings.

Then we threw all
into a vat of acid.
“These are but preludes,”
he confided to me.
“What next?” I asked.
“Shall we raise the dead?”

“No, Fritz, I have no use
for the rotting dead. Most men
are little more than animated meat,
unfit for the one life given them.

“We shall make a being new,
a manufactured man.
So raptured was he,
that saying this,
he fell down senseless.

I put him in bed,
undressed his senseless form,
stroked the white limbs
no scalpel had scarred,
then limped to my corner
where I slept like a dog,
like some great hound
who had found his god.

4
Then she came — Elizabeth.
At first I hated her.
Her finery mocked me, her manners
impeccable, her accent just so.
Though he had never mentioned her,
they were betrothed, in love
since childhood, it seems.

Daily she came for tea,
tried to win me over
with pastries and gingerbread,
plied Victor for news
of his abandoned studies.
As one upon another
each Ingolstadt don
came up for our mockery
(except our idol Waldman)
her awe increased.

I liked her laughter,
the way blond hair exploded
when she threw off her bonnet,
the Alpine sky in her eyes.
Yet I hated to watch
her chaste little kisses
that fell on Victor’s blushing cheeks,
they way their hands
would find each other.
One day we were alone.
I had to make excuses
while Victor dissected
a youthful suicide
we’d fished from a stream,
his copy of Werther
still in his pocket.

Then she told me
she was an orphan too,
her name not Frankenstein
like those who raised her
as Victor’s “cousin,”
but Lavenza.
Frau Frankenstein had found her,
one of five babies in a hovel,
kept by peasants
to whom she’d be
a careworn Cinderella.
She was a fairy child,
raised by the Frankensteins
on music and poetry.

She knew nothing of what we did.
The sight of blood, the surgeon’s saw
would fill her with horror.
How could she hope to companion
this man who walked with gods?

And then it happened.
She touched me.
A passing thing, really.
A piece of gingerbread
from palm to palm,
but then she lingered,
pressed fingers against
my inner palm.
“You are so loyal to Victor,”
she said,
“so you shall be dear to me.”
She never flinched
at my twisted visage.
Her eyes saw past
the hump and its shadow.

Dear to her! Dear to her!
That night I scaled
the boarding house wall,
watched from a tree
as she undressed,
then drank some warm milk
at her bedside.
I watched in slice of moonlight,
her breasts and bosom
in lonely heaving,
her legs this way and that.
Had Victor ever lain with her?
Might I, “dear friend?”

Next night the milk
was tinged with laudanum.
I crept beneath
her silken beddings,
buried my face
in her virgin globes—
oh, I was light upon her,
like the fairies she dreamt of.
Once she cried out,
“Oh, Victor!”

I stole away,
the scent of her golden nape,
those wondrous nipples
with me always.

5
Next night more laudanum
was in Victor’s red wine,
cheap vintage we bought
to celebrate the surgery
by which the suicide’s heart
now beat in a headless torso.

I carried him to bed,
removed the blood-stained smock,
sponged off his fevered brow,
watched him in candlelight
as his features softened,
his eyelids fluttering
in pulse of dream-state.
I lay beside him,
touching, oh! everywhere.
Twice he cried out;
once, he held me
without awakening.

I crept away in bliss,
mad as a moth in a lamp shop.
Now, when they talk of marriage
it is a happy thought.
I can be wed to both of them
as long as the laudanum holds out.

6
Damn the chemist! The sleeping draught
wore off at the worst of times.
The master knows all. He woke from his sleep
as I perched at the foot of his bed.
My nakedness repelled him. He hurled
me out of his window into a haycart,
damned me, warned me never
to return to my room in the cellar.
What could I do? To whom could I go?
I took a whip from the half-wrecked cart,
climbed up the stairs to the empty laboratory.

He would need me when he ascended.
A storm was coming soon. The lifeless shell
up there was nearly ready for animation.
I would hand him the whip.
I’d beg him to punish me, hurt me,
but let me stay for the great work.
I wanted to see his eyes
as his being stood before him,
hear his cry of god-defying blasphemy
as man took control,
and named the day of dead’s arising.

7
My god and punisher returned.
He found the whip, and used it.
For days I lay not moving,
my lacerating flesh alive,
my blood congealing
to the scabs I was proud to wear,
the stripes of his forgiveness.

He sent me out on a sacred quest:
a pair of kidneys but hours dead,
a male, with everything intact.
I understood what was needed.
As I prowled the street for drunkards
I conceived a monstrous jest.

Our being must be superlative,
and I knew just the man.
Jean-Christophe Weiss was the talk
of every student in the beer hall.
He boasted of his conquests,
how women fainted
beneath his exertions.
The Ingolstadt brothel would not admit him
unless he paid a triple rate.
Mothers warned daughers to turn away
when his languid gaze caught them.
Their faces reddened as he shopped the stalls,
one hand on an apple or a load of bread,
the other lifting a veil, or a skirt.
It was said that certain widows
happily opened their doors to him.
One night he leaped from the balcony
of the nunnery of St. Genevieve’s
and what happened there
not one of the sisters would tell.

I did not wait long to find him.
Like me, he knew how
to evade the curfew.
I caught him emerging
from a certain garden gate
(a house with three comely daughters).
One blow to the head
with my crowbar,
then into the sack he went.)

The surgery was flawless.
Once more I watched
as disconnected tissues,
loose veins and nerves
like roots from a flowerpot
quivered, electrified,
sought one another
like amorous eels
and connected,
how the rent flesh closed
beneath the sutures:
weeks of healing
completed in minutes!

If Victor recognized
the organs’ donor,
he never showed it.
I know he looked
again and again

as our pefect being’s
perfect manhood
rose and fell
rose and fell,
as vein and synapse
made their connections.

“Cover him!”
he said at last.
“My God,
what a monster!”

8

“The kites, Fritz! The kites!”

With these words all
was forgiven — he needed me.
The howling storm raged.
Day became night as roiling thunderheads
collided like contending Titans,
black rams butt-heading the Alps
and one another.
The rain came down
in undulating sheets, blown
this way, that way.
Right over us, two airborne lakes
smashed one upon another’s cheek
and fell, exploding. Roulades
of thunder echoed everywhere.
Streams became torrents, meres rose
and swallowed astonished sheep and cattle.
As every shutter in Ingolstadt
clamped shut, we knew the day
was ours. No one would see
the sloping roof of our old mill tower
slide open to the elements,
or how the scaffolding rose up,
and I within it, high as the steeples.
From safe within my insulated cage
I unfurled the kites on their copper wires.
Up they went, hurled eastward,
then back again in gales contrary,
till they soared taut and defiant,
o’erarching the blackened granite hill
whose woods surrounded our workplace.

I did not fear the lightning.
I sang to it, danced it down.
“Strike! Strike!” I screamed.
“Come now, ye flames of Heaven!
Waste not your energy
on those pitiful pines.
I am the bait,
so come for me —
I am King of the Gargoyles —
I am deformity incarnate —
blasphemer since infancy —
robber of graves and churches —
rapist and fornicator!”
I was the spider, the wires
my webs to lure God down.

It came! I howled
as the great light jabbed toward me,
revelled in the thunder’s drum,
exulting as the kites survived
lash after lash, boom upon boom.
Blue, green and amber sparks
spun, danced and plummeted.

I could not see below,
but I knew what was happening:
how Victor captured it all below
in those vast and hungry capacitors,
how the hot wires sparked and smoked
as the current transferred
to the vat of green elixir
in which our creature bathed —
how all its flesh, unable to die
(and yet thus far without the will
to live) would join the ranks of creation.

How long I played there,
tempting with soliloquies
the angry sky,
how long the kites
drew power downward
till they fell in tatters
I cannot tell.
I was deafened and nearly blind
when the master drew me down.
He led me to my corner,
said I would see in a while.

My ears already made out
the master’s song of victory
as he cried out “It’s alive!
It’s alive!”

He robbed the gods
of more than fire or gold —
my master, Frankenstein,
the modern Prometheus!



--From my book, Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poems.




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SUBJECTS: Frankenstein, hunchback, Mary Shelley, Fritz


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