Pygmalion

The artist is always at the mercy of his muse.

Content warning: it’s horrible.

Rome, 1872.

“It is very beautiful,” remarked the girl. Phillipe stood back and allowed her to admire it. His heart thudded in his chest as he wiped the sweat from his brow. “What is her name?” she asked. 

“I don’t know yet.” 

“Venus?” 

“She could be,” he mused. “But she is not finished yet.” 

“Oh. I suppose she is not, no.” The girl looked up at the uncarved eyes and lids. They remained cold, rounded stone for the time being. “Venus is all I can think of when I look at her.”

He pondered for a moment, holding his finger to his mouth. His eyes, greedy and hateful, were fixed on the peasant girl.

Her hair was covered modestly and she wore an apron over her threadbare wool dress, but when she bent to look closely at the sculpture, he could see that she had full, rounded hips. When she turned to look up at him, her eyes were large and seductive. He felt that her face, although softly angled and angelic, was flawed by her voluptuous lips that curved upward as she smiled meekly. He thought that she was a whore. 

He had invited her upstairs to his apartment to see his work and she had accepted his invitation without hesitation. For this, he hated her. He had thought however, that she had the most beautiful eyes that he had ever seen.  

She worked in the flower shop downstairs and had spoken to Phillipe only briefly. He was the young, handsome French art student who had come to learn about classical art in her city. She would look up at him in awe as he talked about his work. He would talk to her because she smelled of perfume. French lavender. She smelled of home. 

When he had finished making love to her, he tied his belt around her neck and pulled it. He kept pulling until her large, helpless eyes bulged and she ceased to fight him any more. He sat on the edge of the bed, panting. Her eyes stared up at the ceiling, forever fixed as they were in their last moment. 

She lay limp and lifeless, an arm draped over the bed with a delicate, small hand, open at the feet of the sculpture she had called Venus. 

That night, he chiselled away into the early hours with inhuman focus and determination. 

The eyes were almost done.

She would be finished. She would be his. 

He worked until the candlelight was overpowered by the arrival of the summer dawn.  The market beneath his room bustled into life as it had done every day before. The peasants beneath his feet bumbled along with their daily toil. Much to his irritation, they sang and hummed in their blissful ignorance of the art being created above their heads. Phillipe hated them all. Somewhere in the distance, a bell tolled. 

Haggard and wild eyed, he chipped and smoothed more marble with agonising perfection until he would allow himself to go to his seminar. 

By the time he was done, she was looking right at him. “Galatea,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion. He kissed her cold, marble lips and caressed her still, hard breasts. His fingers traced the outline of her spine down to her tailbone. He felt the curve of her thighs and buttocks and forced himself up against her. “Galatea,” he said again. 

That night, he made a wish. 

That night, they found the bodies of the other girls.  

That night, the Carabinieri wanted to speak with the tenant above the flower shop.

A stable boy and a hansom driver who lived on the same street had last seen the flower girl with Phillipe. They had seen young Bianca with the art student. The foreign boy. 

When they broke down the door of his apartment, they found the artist where they had hoped to find him. He was at home. 

He lay on the naked floorboards, misshapen and twisted like an uprooted tree weathered by a violent storm. His arms, legs and neck were broken. The bruises were fresh and black. A dark dent had been made in his windpipe: a thumb impression on either side of his Adam's apple. 

They looked upon his mangled corpse in horror. In the artist’s left hand, his manhood rested in his open palm. Beside it lay a bloodied chisel and a hammer. 

The men gasped at the sight of the grimace on his face. His eyes were looking upward, swollen with terror. They could not see what he had been looking at, for his eyes were fixed on the platform where– unbeknown to them– there had once stood a sculpture that Bianca had named Venus.