In silence we watched a barge glide seaward on the gold and mauve water, tumbling curled shavings of foam from its stern.
‘That’s some view you have,’ Carol remarked, turning to me with a smile.
As she looked at me, the firm, clear outline of her beautiful face was lit by the trapezoid of dark yellow light coming in through the window.
I had the sense of being inscribed on, etched into, by the sight.
The battered suitcase containing my father’s papers was now back in the hall closet. Even though I had gone to the trouble of bringing it out here to the States, I had always felt an odd, almost narcotic weariness at the thought of going through its contents. But whatever obscure private taboo that weariness represented, it was overruled now by a sense of urgent practical necessity.
What first caught my eye when I opened the suitcase had nothing to do with my father: bristling all over the piles of manuscript were brightly colored little arrow-shaped clips that Carol had used to mark passages she wanted to return to.
She always studded whatever she was reading with these things: they were part of her permanent retinue of physical objects, like her tortoiseshell comb or her italic-nibbed silver pen. They were the first things of hers I had seen in months; the first physical evidence that she had once shared my life in this apartment, and the sight of them had a powerful effect on me. She had left something of herself behind after all! Red, green, yellow, blue… they teemed under my eyes like shiny winged insects. I felt simultaneously the sharp anguish of her loss, and the passionate warmth that even a passing thought of her had always been capable of arousing in me. It would have been easy to spend the rest of the evening sitting there adrift on these bits of plastic, thinking about her, and I had to make a deliberate effort to turn my attention instead to the immense piles of yellowed manuscript into which they had been inserted.
Letting Carol’s markers guide me through the pages, I read with a kind of detached attentiveness, noting the quirks of my father’s mind, the strengths and weaknesses of his thought processes, the turns of phrase he favored, with guarded pleasure and even an occasional moment of wry self-recognition. He was evidently nervous of advancing an argument without first marshaling an army of authorities to support him, then further reinforcing it with an array of obscure technical terms and foreign phrases – insecurities I had noticed in my own work. And like me, he had a preference for lateral, associative movement over the forward march of sequential narrative, which was no doubt one reason why he had never completed his work. Fragments of chapters ramified into multiple digressions that subdivided into footnotes that, like the cells of regenerative limbs, miraculously grew into chapters in their own right.
At one point Carol’s markers became much more densely clustered. My own interest sharpened in sympathy. Here was a passage on the prevalence of poisoning in the courts of the Borgias and the Burgundians. A lengthy disquisition followed, on the widely held belief in the efficacy of animal horns as antidotes and prophylactics. Stag horns, rams’ horns, hart-shorn; hollowed as goblets, shaved, powdered, dissolved in water or wine, worn as amulets; horns of the antelope, the rhinoceros, the Plate River pyrassouppi, were listed and discussed, their lore and applications summarised, all in a frenzy of deferential nods to Lucretius, Odell Shepard, the Pharmacopoeia Medico-Chymica, while the little sharp arrows of Carol’s attention rained down on almost every line.
Of all the horns, I read, the alicorn was universally deemed the most powerful. Alicorn? Ah, the horn of the unicorn.
I knew that Carol had gone back to the manuscript a couple of years after first reading it, when she began her book on the medieval cult of the Virgin Mary. She had wanted to check what my father had had to say about the myth of the unicorn hunt, where the creature is lured into captivity by a virgin, before being killed.
‘The creature never lived,’ wrote my father in an extended footnote, ‘yet there is an abundance of evidence for it, and for several centuries the leading minds of their day believed in its existence. Cuvier and Livingstone were among those still prepared to countenance the possibility of an animal with a single horn in its forehead, as late as the nineteenth century. True Unicorn Horn (verum cornu monocerotis) not only had the power to cleanse sullied waters, but was also said to sweat in the presence of poison. For this reason it was worth ten times its weight in gold…’
I had the sense now that I was getting somewhere, as far as tracking down the source of my anonymous note. I was aware, too, without quite knowing why, that far from reassuring me, this was making me feel distinctly uncomfortable.
‘Two explanations exist’, the footnote continued: ‘for the medicinal action of the horn. Polar opposites, they go to the heart not only of the principal paradox in early theories of healing, but also of the ambivalent nature of the unicorn itself. Teeth, hooves, and especially horns, were believed to concentrate the essences of the creatures they came from. In the case of the single horn of a unicorn, this concentrate would of course be twice as strong as in, say, the twinned antlers of a stag.
Depending on whether an authority believed the essence of a unicorn to be benign or evil, its effect would be explained either by the doctrine of allopathy, where a virtuous substance is thought to counteract a venomous one, or else by the doctrine of homeopathy, which declares that ‘Like Cures Like’ (Similia similibus curantur), and that the only way to detect or disarm a poison is to place it in the diminishing context of something even more poisonous than itself.
Allegorists wishing to see the unicorn as a symbol of Christ, naturally adhered to the allopathic doctrine, which held that the horn was the ultimate pure substance. The Christianised Greek Bestiary, for example, gives an explicitly religious version of the Cleansing of the Waters, or ‘Water Conning’, illustrated in the second of the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters Museum in New York, asserting that the creature makes the sign of the cross over the water with his horn before dipping it in.
Homeopathists, on the other hand, regard the horn as the ultimate toxic substance, believing that it sweats in the presence of other poisons because of a desire to mingle with its own kind. The pharmacist Laurent Catelan, noting that horned animals like to eat poisonous substances of all kinds, deduced that a powerful toxic residue of these substances must be stored in their horns.
Far from Christlike, the unicorn of this school is an aggressive, highly unsociable monster. In pictures of Noah’s Ark or Adam naming the Beasts, it usually has the distinction of being the only creature without a mate. Aelian is alone among the more reputable authorities in mentioning the existence of female unicorns. ‘The males fight not just among themselves,’ he declares, ‘but they war against the females too, pushing the struggle to the death.’ Maddened by the enormous pain caused by the toxins distilled in his horn, the unicorn – ‘this ryght cruell beast’ as John of Trevisa calls him – ‘fyghtyth ofte with the Elyphaunt and woundyth & styketh him in the wombe.’ Atrocissimum est Monoceros begins Julius Solinus’s description, put into English by Arthur Golding: ‘But the cruellest is the Unicorn, a monster that belloweth horriblie…’