Galatea In The Barricades
by Lara Alonso Corona
By the autumn of 1787 the head was completely finished, down to the white of the eyes, down to the artificial taste buds. It was nothing less than the masterwork of its creator, a renowned scientist and shining star in the firmament of this enlightened era of Parisian progress.
Michel, wearing the stiff servant’s uniform, had just entered the service of the inventor but had very little interest in men made of clock gears and copper bones and the wonders of new science. Michel was interested in how much food he could pilfer from the palace kitchen without being fired. He was interested in finding out if that amount was enough to subsist on, for the servant’s salary was certainly not.
He was cleaning the master’s study that day, with his habit of biting his lower lip every time the luxury of the rich inflamed both his spirit of justice and his personal resentment, when a voice addressed him.
“Hello?”
“What the hell—?” He cried out. “Did you want to frighten me to death?”
A shudder ran through the mechanical brain inside the head. This being that had entered the room in cleaning apparel was small and looked malnourished. The head feared a fright might damage its soft organic mechanisms irreparably.
“Oh no, I don’t want to cause your death. By fright or otherwise.”
Michel took a couple of steps in the direction of the voice, examining its owner.
“Just a head? Is that all?”
A head. Resting on one of the shelves of the master of the house, his precious library, thick volumes on each side (about who knows what subject, for Michel never learned to read.). It was an artificial head, of course, and Michel had already heard the buzz in the cafés about a new species, created by science: the automatons, with the appearance of a man and the heart of a clock.
This head looked like a man’s head, and a very attractive one at that, with piercing clear eyes and the mannerof face Michel always hoped to find when he went down to the rue Montorgeuil or the Tuileries, the kind for which Michel would risk being arrested as a sodomite by an undercover copper.
“A head, that’s all,” replied the strange interlocutor. His vaguely masculine voice had only a slight metallic aftertaste that lingered in the air like the flavour of wine. Otherwise it was in perfect mimicry of a human being’s.
“So this is what the master does cooped up all day in his studio… Well, then, my name is Michel. I’m the one who cleans the place. And you? What are you called?”
Something in the head’s internal mechanisms pushed his eyebrows higher than normal.
“Called? What is called? I don’t have something like that.”
The head observed the intruder (or not-intruder, cleaning gave him legitimacy, did it not? he would have to ask his creator later) and something in his face wrinkled like the parchment notes which do not please the inventor, on which he does violence and turns into geometric shapes very different from the original.
“That’s too bad, you have to give names to all people, you know, to everybody. Even to cats. They are not people, but in a way they are. My mother didn’t name me until I was two years old, because I was born such a sickly weakling that she didn’t expect me to survive more than a few weeks. Then she died when I was three, how ironic.”
“I don’t think I was ever born,” the head commented. “I was simply not here, and the next moment… I was.”
“That’s also a birth. Everyone has their own way of doing things, don’t let it bother you. Oh, look, you can smile. That is quite the feat.”
“Is it? I’m not sure what I did to smile.”
“Anyway, you should ask that crazy old man your name. And stop distracting me! I’m already behind in my chores, and if they fire this time for sure I’ll starve to death.”
“No! Don’t die, Michel!”
The servant could hardly contain his laughter. He suspected that explaining to the head what had caused his laughter would take several minutes he could not presently spare). But what a curious person, this head! What a person, in fact. Michel considered that this was perhaps the first thing the aristocracy had ever done right in its entire history.
The head told its creator about the encounter with the servant. And why not? The genius was his father, his master, his world. The head felt a new expression run through its gears and cause an uneasy sensation inside his metallic skull: his words had enraged the inventor. He could tell.
“What is my name?” The head asked.
“You have no name. You are simply mine.”
“Michel told me that all people should have names. And that cats are people.”
“Never talk to Michel again. Or any other servant. You must only talk to me,” his creator ordered him.
“Why?” asked the head. He always wanted to know and wondered if that was what the word disobedience meant.
“Because others may contaminate you.”
“Contaminate?”
“Never mind. Do as I tell you,” said the renowned scientist.
It seemed to the head that he ended too many conversations with that sentence when the head would have liked to keep talking. Talking was all it could do, as a head.
“Are you going to contaminate me?”
“Shit!” Michel shouted, startled out of his chores. “Where…?”
“Under the veil.”
Michel put down the rag with which he was cleaning the inventor’s table and first checked that the head was not in the place it had been yesterday. This time the voice came from the couch, a luxurious thing with green cloth and gold embroidery. It looked like a new piece. On it sat a round lump under a muslin cloth.
“Hello,” he greeted the head after releasing it from the veil. The mechanical eyes of the automaton made the subtlest of noises as its irises changed size to adjust to the light. Up close the head looked more and less human than Michel had previously sensed. The hair was top quality, coppery brown, and the cheeks copied that hint of carmine that invited pinching. But the eyebrows were exaggerated and of coarse material, the nose of statuesque elegance, and the eyes otherworldly and guileless.
“Are you going to contaminate me?”
Michel let out a snort. The accusation was not unfamiliar to him.
“Contaminate you, that’s a good one. But Yes, your inventor would see it that way. A rat like me would contaminate you.”
“Rat?”
“Someone from the lower depths. A life worth very little.”
“Is my life worth something?”
“Of course,” Michel told him. “All those gears… the metal they’re made of, they must be worth a fortune. Your wig of human hair. The paint on your skin. You must be worth a lot.”
“Is a person worth the materials they are made of?”
Michel had already thought about this, quite often and deeply. He had thought about it for years and years before he met the mechanical head.
“No. A person is worth what he can work for those who do not need to work. I am worth as much as the comfort your creator has decided the cleaning of the house is worth. The comfort of not cleaning it himself.”
“And is that a good thing?”
“Of course not,” Michel hastened to correct him. This tension in his jaw was familiar, but the artificial head was not to blame. As far as Michel knew, this automaton was as trapped and as much an aristocrat’s plaything as the starving masses Michel belonged to. He was not even allowed a body to run away with. “Of course it is not good. And we are going to change it soon.”
“We?”
The servant ran his hand through his hair, already messy from the day’s work. The head’s extrapolating inner gears told him that his dark locks resembled the word “softness,” although he still didn’t understand what it meant. Their nameless color, too, was pleasing to his mechanical eyes.
“Don’t distract me,” Michel complained. “We were talking about your name. Your creator can’t refuse to give you one.”
“Only creators can give you a name?”
“Shit, you’re as inquisitive as you are handsome. No, I guess anyone can give names to others.”
“Can you give it to me?”
“Me? Who the hell am I to give you a name?”
“You’re Michel.”
Michel leaned against the back of the sofa, closing his eyes for a moment. How strange, how entertaining, how fucking frustrating, it was to interact with this head.
“Can I name myself?” asked the head.
Now this was exciting.
“Very good idea, head! We are about to see the birth of a new world. You can do whatever the hell you want.”
“May I be called Rat?”
From the servant came a noise the head had never heard before, that its creator never made when he was in the studio. It was deeper than Michel’s normal voice, and at the same time it reminded the head of the bells of a nearby church.
“I can’t stop you,” the servant told him. “Well, then, Rat. Maybe you should keep this a secret from your master.”
And so, that evening, the clockwork engine inside the head, inside Rat, acquired a new ability: the ability to keep secrets.
By the new year, Rat already had a torso, two arms, and now asingle hand, as his creator’s goal had always been to make as close a simulacrum of a human being as possible. Rat knew, since his birth, that his task was to imitate humans as best he could.
“Do you feel anything?” Michel asked when he saw the new limb.
“Anything?”
“I thought you had grown out of that habit of yours, answering everything with a question.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize for that. I was asking if your artificial skin feels anything when touched.”
“Yes, it does have the capacity to feel. Although I don’t know if my feeling is the same as what you mean by feeling, so I don’t know if I’m answering the question accurately.”
Michel shrugged his shoulders.
“That makes sense. Can I touch your hand?”
“Can you…?” Rat stopped before he finished forming the question. He understood it. But he didn’t understand it. Not the literal meaning, that was clear; he didn’t understand why Michel was asking it. Rat’s creator never asked for permission before touching his artificial skin. He never asked before he took Rat’s head and carried it back and forth, or opened the hinge of his face, splitting it in two, or stuck his fingers inside his skull to improve this or change that, to put oil in the gears or test what happened if he broke one of them on purpose. I have to find out how tough you are, explained his creator after breaking Rat’s left elbow. And now Michel was asking if he could touch him. Rat did not understand anything. But he did know the answer.
“You can touch me.”
The servant took the automaton’s hand in his own, very carefully, as if it were a bird he did not want to frighten into flight. Michel looked astonished, but not as the inventor’s guests were astonished when they entered the studio to check the creative progress of the “fabulous automaton”, the “wonder of the century”. This is how they spoke of Rat, because none of these curious people arriving in pearl-colored carriages speak to Rat, only of him. No, that was not the same as Michel’s amazement now.
On his part, Michel was thinking that the skin of the automaton was not like that of a reptile, as he had imagined, whose sudden appearance announced the coming of summer on the walls of his house. It would not have repulsed him, of course (at this point nothing inhuman in Rat could repulse Michel), but that was what he had expected from touching him. It was more like touching silk, like touching a hand wrapped in the finest of gloves, made of the richest of fabrics.
“What do you feel?” he asked. “Regarding what it is for you to feel.”
Rat tilted his head slightly to one side, that endearing gesture Michel knew all too well, indicating that the automaton was processing a possible response through its mechanisms. As an experiment (and out of self-indulgence) Michel stroked the artificial knuckle with his thumb.
“I feel: temperature, friction. I like it.”
“You like it, huh?”
“Yes, most of what I feel now is precisely that. That I like it.”
The human then made a very strange gesture, which Rat had never before contemplated from his discussion partner. Michel leaned over, bending his knees a little, not letting go of Rat’s hand but raising it next to his own, and pressing his lips on the back of the automaton’s palm. His circuits repeated a recent activity, but more acute, sharper: temperature, friction, I like it.
“What is that?”
Rat felt a tremendous curiosity for such an incomprehensible action.
“That…” Michel told him, “is what I would do if I were a pompous posh noble seeking to win your regard.”
“But you are not a pompous posh noble. Nor do you want to be.”
“No.”
“And besides, you already have my regard.”
The servant let Rat’s hand slowly slip from between his fingers, until it returned to the initial position at the automaton’s side. Inside Rat’s skull his gears transmitted something that felt like pain, but that was also strangely soft: lack of temperature, lack of friction, lack of I like it.
“Oh, Rat, one day you’re going to get me in trouble.”
“I do not want to get you in trouble.”
“Yes, that is part of the problem.”
“Normally you speak very clearly, Michel, but sometimes I don’t understand you at all.”
“I know. But now I have to clean some. Who is going to put up with all your questions if I lose my job?”
For Rat that possibility was the opposite of the gear turning that said “I like it“, so he shut up and let Michel get on with cleaning the studio.
He had learned to keep secrets, and what had happened that afternoon with his new limb and Michel’s hand and lips constituted a good reason to activate that function but somehow the scientist could sense what had happened. How? Perhaps Michel had left some mark on the skin of Rat’s hand, one that only he could not see but his creator could. That was why he was his creator, Rat supposed. Because he could tell these things.
“Don’t let anyone but me touch you,” said the genius inventor.
“Why?”
“They might hurt you.”
At that moment the clockwork mechanism that had become Rat learned a very useful trick: keeping his thoughts to himself. He did not understand how this new ability developed, only that it had. Perhaps its creator was an even better inventor than he supposed. The fact is that the machine thought: Michel would never hurt me. But he only thought it, and did not say it. He thought: Creator, you and your tools and your constant experiments have hurt me many times.
“All right,” he said, his head, now atop a half-constructed body. “I will not let anyone but you touch me.”
An even more useful, even newer trick: lying.
A month later, Rat had two hands and the big general cleanup had begun in the inventor’s dilapidated palace: Michel was chasing specks of slippery dust like a hunter after his prey. The servant was sweating and finally took a break inside the scientist’s study, which always maintained a pleasant temperature thanks to the heavy curtains that barred anyone from seeing what was going on inside.
“Can we do it the other way around?” asked Rat as soon as he entered.
“The other way around?”
They were sitting on the couch of gold threads. Well, Michel was sitting. Rat’s creator had left himleaning against the backrest, since the automaton still had no lower limbs to do the thing called sitting.
“I touch you, as you did my hand. But not your hand. Can I touch your face?”
“Oh, Rat.” The servant let out a sigh at the words.
It was not the first time the automaton had heard that tone.
“What does it mean, when you pronounce my name like that?”
“It means you can touch me,” Michel clarified. “It means you can ask anything you want of me.”
Michel’s face was damp with sweat. It had the curious property of numbing the mechanism inside Rat’s brain that counted seconds and minutes, and so he spent many of those —seconds and minutes— running his fingertips over that forehead,those cheeks. The curve of the servant’s chin became something like the word “favorite” to Rat. Michel closed his eyes when the automaton’s index finger reached the corner of his lips, and the cleaning was finished very, very late at the palace that afternoon.
The next time Michel saw him, weeks of hard cleaning later, Rat was back to being just a head, just like when they’d first met. It was a horrifying sight for the young servant, as if his own limbs had been removed.
“What happened?”
“It’s a punishment,” the automaton answered with terrible simplicity.
“A punishment for what?”
“He didn’t say. I don’t know.”
But Michel knew.
Once the punishment period was over the genius inventor finally showed his automaton to King Louis.
Once this solitary punishment period was over the genius inventor finally showed his automaton to King Louis in a private showing in the Room Abundance, among the silver vases and medallions.
The first sophisticated motor action that Rat had to practice to perfection with his whole body was how to pour liquid from a tin coffee pot into a porcelain cup. Even Michel marveled at the precision of his hands, the confidence his new legs gave him, and the delicacy of his waist as he bent over the table. But then he realized the meaning of the gesture.
“He has you playing servant? Fuck, isn’t it enough with the flesh and blood ones? What greed.”
“It was the king’s idea,” Rat told him.
“Right, right, you’re now hobnobbing with royalty.”
“One single visit cannot be described as hobnobbing“.
“The gentleman is being contentious today,” Michel scoffed. He gestured to Rat not to worry, he was just joking. “Go on, go on. It was the king’s idea…”
“The king told my creator that I was an amusing novelty but that I wouldn’t be of much use unless I was taught to wait on guests at the table. And then he ordered my creator to do exactly that, under punishment of exile to Troyes.”
Michel felt like kicking something or throwing off all the papers on the desk in the study. But what good would that do? Michel himself would have to pick up the mess.
“The nobles are inexcusable,” he mumbled, but the automaton had excellent ears that could not miss a word. “They have only one good idea in their pathetic lives. For once they create something that’s good for the world, and what’s their big plan? Put him to work, work, work. They only think of one thing. Make your own coffee, sir!”
Rat felt the folds of the fur covering his face wrinkle slightly.
“Have I offended you, Michel?”
The servant stopped dead in his tracks, abandoning his nervous pacing back and forth across the room. He raised his head and looked at the automaton as if it had said something tremendously incomprehensible.
“No, Rat, it wasn’t you. Never you, do you understand?”
But for the moment Rat did not understand. You could say he didn’t fully understand until a couple of years later.
“You know, they’ve locked the studio,” Gabrielle, the kitchen helper, said to the cook. Michel had gone downstairs to see if he could steal some leftovers for breakfast when he overheard her speaking. Today it was time to go upstairs to clean the roof, and he was expecting a long, hard day. He knew that, in any case, he would not do this task to his master’s satisfaction, since the scientist had been nagging him all week for no apparent reason. The exhaustion of these days made him struggle longer than usual to understand the conversation that was going on in front of him.
“That’s just as well and about time too,” answered the cook, a hateful manwho never helped other servants, as if he was somehow above his class; Michel couldn’t stand that kind of attitude. “We don’t have to worry about that monster running around loose, now that he has been given legs.”
“Monster?” Michel repeated.
“What do you call something that looks like a man but is made of clock parts?”
“Well, I feel sorry for it,” the kitchen helper replied. “It never knew a mother and besides… all day long up there, alone, with no one talk to.”
I didn’t really know a mother either, Michel thought then. And he is not alone up there with no one to talk to, he has me. Rat deserved many things in this life, but Michel was convinced that pity was not one of them.
But the kitchen staff had been right: the master had locked his study, and no one was allowed in, not even to clean it. Michel imagined that now Rat could do the cleaning himself, and his blood boiled thinking that he was spending his time and his circuits and his beautiful mind tidying the shelves for his shitty creator.
Michel knew that the automaton could hear him perfectly well, even through the heavy studio door. He sat, exhausted, with the back of his head resting on the wood, and felt more tired than if he had cleaned the whole building by himself.
“He cannot keep you locked up here. You’re not an animal, or a child who’s been up to mischief. Although, in fact, naughty children shouldn’t be locked up either.”
“You are so wise, Michel,” could be heard through the door.
The servant could only burst out laughing.
“Of all the things I’ve been called in life… Wise… I never imagined….”
“He’s going to fire you,” the automaton cut off his laughter, or rather cut it with his tone. “I heard him. This week. He doesn’t want you cleaning the palace anymore.”
Michel leaned even closer against the door and took a long breath.
“I had a feeling it was coming.”
“Will you starve to death?”
The automaton sounded more disheartened than Michel had ever heard any human sound.
“No, don’t worry. I won’t die of hunger.”
Perhaps of grief, he was tempted to add. But that would hurt the automaton. No, Michel had to survive. There was work to do. The world would not be turned upside down by itself. And now Michel had one more reason to want to.
“Hey, Rat.”
“Yes?”
“You’re already good at keeping secrets, I know. Can you keep one more?”
“Of course. Which secret?”
“Don’t tell your creator that I promised you… I’d come back for you.”
It took Michel much longer than he expected to keep his promise. More than a year. It can be said that the Revolution got in the way of his plans, but in reality it was the Revolution that helped to realize them. The inventor’s former servant participated in the 14th of July, and was part of several local assemblies. He never stopped thinking about his small and personal goal, among so many great and noble aims. They were not in opposition at all: the inventor’s cruelty, like his lavish porcelain crockery, required a punishment. More than a punishment: a remedy.
And so it was, in the fall of 1790, Michel burst into his former place of employment with a dozen fellow freedom fighters, armed with weapons he had requested from the Assembly, justifying in writing (someone transcribed his words, although the Revolution had begun to teach him the alphabet) an attack on a minor aristocrat. But the renowned inventor had met the traitor king on several occasions and the luxury of his palace was justification enough to intervene. Michel didn’t have issue making his case.
Once they broke down the front door, he knew there was something strange in the air.
The silence, for example.
Everything was as he remembered it from those months in the master’s service, but he did not remember such stillness.
They had come armed, but Michel was surprised they had yet to encounter any guards: every Parisian nobleman had a posse of at least three to protect them. It was the latest fashion.
Of the servants, only the kitchen maid remained in the palace, curled up and trembling in a corner of the pantry.
“Gabrielle?”
The girl babbled something, some barely connected words.
“It has killed them… the cook warned us… it let the servants flee first… but… the master… oh the master!”
Michel tried to help the girl to sit up, but she refused.
With some trepidation, (why was everything so quiet?) he climbed the stairs to the study, gesturing to his companions to continue searching elsewhere in the house for the guards.
He opened the door, a still familiar weight pressing against his hand.
The two figures within seemed trapped in a painting, motionless and flat.
For one of them, immobility was a natural state, for the other it was not.
Michel had only seen the owner of the palace twice. The third time he was already a corpse. For some reason, the first thing Michel noticed about the scene was the coffee cup next to the old man’s limp hand.
“Arsenic,” the automaton said before Michel could ask, as if he still knew what his old companion was thinking. “He uses it as rat poison. Ironic, is it not? He always insisted that I make the coffee for him. He said that only I could make it to his liking. It took me a long time to realize that wasn’t as much of a compliment as it had first seemed.”
“Why…?” Michel had barely finished asking, and he regretted such a petty question. What do you mean, why? Rat had plenty of reasons to kill his creator. It must have been difficult to choose just one.
“He was afraid I was going to join the Revolution. He wanted to take my body away again.”
“Oh, Rat.”
The automaton tilted his head. Michel remembered the tenderness in that gesture very well.
“I have missed hearing that. Oh, this is something new in the circuits, that missing sensation, I didn’t know I could— I’ve taken coffee to the guards as well. I thought I’d save you the trial.”
That explained the absence of armed protection around the palace.
“You wanted to help us?”
“Do you find that so odd? You, the one who contaminated me?”
Michel smiled the kind of smile that hadn’t appeared on his face for over a year.
“I see you’re still full of questions.”
“I still need to learn, that is all.”
The former-servant, now-revolutionary, offered his hand to the automaton. Giving permission, asking for permission. Always.
“Come. You’re one of us,” he said. The automaton thought that word incredibly beautiful. “I’m sure there’s a clockmaker in our ranks who’ll mend you if you get sick.”
Rat moved his hand towards the person who had answered so many of his questions, who had raised so many doubts in exchange.
Yes, he remembered this part.
He remembered it well.
He hadn’t felt it in almost two years, but he had never forgotten the sensation.
Temperature.
Friction.
I like it.
Lara Alonso Corona (they/them) is a queer writer from the north of Spain. They studied Film and TV before making the decision to write in a second language and move to London. Their fiction has appeared in venues like Literary Orphans, Whiskey Island, Betty Fedora and the Pilot Press anthology on queer sickness, among others. They are the current reviews editor at the literary magazine Minor Literature(s). They now live in Madrid.
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