God's Fool (19 page)

“I must speak frankly, my friends, as a man speaks to his fellows.” He sighed, then looked directly in our eyes for the first time that afternoon. “You are no longer boys. I know that.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “I know that in the privacy of your thoughts, you imagine things—all manner of things—that bring you pleasure and make you ashamed, and this is as it should be.” I could feel Eng shift uncomfortably.

Dumat cleared his throat. “What you cannot be expected to know, however, is that the members of the fairer sex—and I speak now of well-born women as well as their less fortunate sisters—not only share your thoughts but, in some circumstances, under certain peculiar conditions, turn what is natural and wholesome into something twisted and rank. In these cases, the seed, if I may, instead of emerging from corruption, instead of leaving its base origin and blossoming, in the fullness of time, into the love sanctioned by God and man alike, grows morbid and rots.

“I say again: You cannot be expected to know this. No one can hold you accountable, at your age, for failing to imagine the strange spears that can spring from this corrupted soil, the odd suckers and stipula that can grow on the fairest flower.” Here again Dumat paused for a moment and looked at the ground to our right, a look of genuine sadness on his face, then rallied to the task. “But you
must
know. You must know, my friends—and I wish to merciful God there were someone else to tell you this—because your gift is of that class of things that, on occasion, and when encountered by an unhealthy soul, can corrupt the seed in its bed.”

“I don’t understand.” Increasingly agitated, my brother had suddenly sat up straighter on the divan. These were the first words, beyond
a simple yes or no, I had heard him utter in days. “I don’t understand what it is you are …”

“Simply this: that there are certain women in the world who—”

“Are you referring to Mademoiselle Marchant?”

“I am speaking in general …”

“Because Mademoiselle Marchant—”

“My dear friend, calm yourself. I do not know Mademoiselle Marchant. I am speaking in general terms only. How these general truths apply to specific cases or particular individuals, that I cannot say.”

“Because my brother and I will not have you speak badly of her. Do you hear? We will not have it.”

My throat tightened suddenly; I resisted the temptation to look over at him. Dumat was waving both hands as though clearing a window just in front of his face. “You misunderstand me. Please. I had no intention of casting aspersions on—”

“What did you want to tell us, Monsieur Dumat?” I said quietly. Out of the corner of my eye I could see my brother glance at me in surprise. I did not look at him.

Dumat gave me a curt, tight nod. “No more than this: That there are in this world certain unfortunate women, certainly deserving of our pity, in whom the principle of attraction has been corrupted; turned, as it were, against itself. They are drawn by what repels them.” Again Dumat’s voice began to rise, as though beyond his control. “They seek out the morbid, the sick, even the cruel, in precisely the same way their healthy sisters seek out what is honorable and whole. They are a horror, an abomination, and yet, though they themselves often recognize the perversity of their natures, this perversity, this corruption, by Nature’s cunning, is often very nearly invisible from without. Like the viper, whose coloration allows it to blend with the fallen leaves in which it lies, this taint is indistinguishable from the surrounding beauty in which—”

“No more!” We stood up abruptly. I had had enough.

“Please, my friends, you must believe—”

“That will do, sir. We will not listen to another word. Not another word.”

“You are making a mistake. I say this only to spare you—”

But we were already walking toward the door. Dumat’s voice pursued us into the hall: “You
will
listen. You must! It is not … I am not the only one who knows this. It is common knowledge. Only you in your innocence could truly believe that this … Please … Let me explain … Wait!”

We were halfway down the hall when he began to read. He must have had the volume there all along, that damnable page marked and waiting for its moment. “If you won’t listen to me,” he cried after us as we mounted the stairs, his voice, vaguely demonic now, echoing against the walls, “then at least listen to Monsieur Hugo, who lets her speak for herself.” We rushed on. “ ‘I love you,’ ” he screamed up the winding stair, “ ‘I love you not only because you are deformed, but because you are low.’ Are you listening?” I thought I heard a page turn, a sound like a slap. “ ‘A lover despised, mocked, grotesque, hideous’ ”—we were running down the hallway now—“ ‘exposed to laughter on that pillory called the stage’ ”—there was our door!—“ ‘has an extraordinary attraction to me. It is a taste of the fruit of hell.’ ”

Fumbling with the key as though an actual fiend were at our heels, I managed to find the lock just as Dumat read the lines that would continue to sound—alchemically changed to a woman’s voice, wondering and cruel—years after our door had crashed shut like a full stop on a sentence: “ ‘I am in love with a nightmare. You are the incarnation of infernal mirth.’ ”

VII.

Even the seasons, that year, seemed beset by doubt: days of softening, restless wind followed by nights frozen fast as death. In the mornings, against the gray sky, the coal smoke rose like a forest of columns from the roofs of the city and the streets tinkled with broken glass. Bowed down by the course of events, strangely torpid, my brother and I took to wandering about the streets of the city, drifting farther and farther afield each day as though hoping, by this symbolic leave taking, to somehow effect our actual escape. As if by simply walking far enough we might snap the bonds that held us.

How far did we wander those days? Ten miles? Twenty? On the days when we had an evening performance to attend, we would wind our way back to our lodgings by nightfall; on days we had none we would stay out late—till midnight or later—for it was only after dark, when the carriages had disappeared and the streets had grown silent, that we felt free. Once or twice we found ourselves in her neighborhood.

The branching of trees, the deepening blue of the evening … it might have been beautiful. But the mind, like the contents of a street peddler’s cart, reflects its owner’s preoccupations. We saw the bones beneath the faces of the sweepers, heard the consumptives’ scraping cough, like coal scuttles on brick, smelled the perfume of the slaughterhouses when the spring wind was from the south.

•     •     •

My brother attempted to speak to me shortly after our episode with Dumat. “You must not listen,” he blurted out suddenly, breaking a long silence. We were walking along a country lane lined with cherry trees just leafing into bloom. From a distance, against the dark fields, the orchards appeared touched with mold. A wet wind pushed at our faces. “You have to not listen,” he said again, looking at me. I was reminded of a worried snail, testing the air with its roots.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“Dumat. You have to not listen to him. You have to go on as if he hadn’t spoken at all.”

I snorted. “Why would I listen to him?”

“Because you did.”

“I don’t even—”

“I know,” he said quietly. “I can tell.”

“Tell what?” I laughed.

“All right. Suit yourself.”

“No, tell me. What can you tell?”

He said nothing.

“Are you warning me, or yourself?” He walked on, back in his shell. I flicked him again, just to make sure. “It seems to me you could use some of your own advice, brother.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t.”

He was absolutely right, of course. His advice, though much too late, was both generous and wise. Dumat, who no longer appeared at our lodgings, had done his work. Though I didn’t believe him, neither could I prove him wrong. “A lover despised, mocked, grotesque …” I had known the pillory of the stage. Did I believe that Sophia Marchant had loved me because I was hideous? That she had run her hand along my side that dark afternoon in her drawing room, allowed her fingers to explore where the base of my bridge rose from my ribs, because my condition attracted her? I did not. Could I say with absolute certainty
that it was
not
so? I could not. I was, after all, who I was: a penniless foreigner, a boy, neither handsome nor distinguished. I had been declared a freak, the mere sight of whom could damage the unborn in the womb. More than this, and making any natural union between us an impossibility, I was already indissolubly joined to another. And yet she had risked so much, so recklessly. Why? Why? “I am in love with a nightmare.” Could I say with absolute certainty that somewhere deep in her inmost soul she was not drawn to me the way fingers are drawn to a scab, or eyes to a wound? “You are the incarnation of infernal mirth.” I could not.

And so we walked. At night, back in our lodgings, though hardly able to stand, I walked the same route again in my dreams: There again was the crow, screaming something from the top of a linden; there was the street sweeper with the patch over his eye; there was the river, strangely silent, its shifting whirlpools sucking at the air. The black dog we had seen disappear stiff-legged into a whorl in the current appeared on the opposite shore. I had to get to him. He reminded me of something. I wanted to gather him in my arms. And then we were sitting next to one another in a room at dusk, her head resting on my shoulder. I could feel her warmth through my clothes. I had been told I was dying. I wanted to tell her, but knew the moment I spoke it would be true. And so on, and so on, down streets strangely empty of carriages and horses, past darkened buildings in which no lamp had been lit, by stubbled fields in which the same distant figure labored behind a plow as though condemned to plow the same furrow, keep open the wound, day after day and night after night in my dreams.

But all was not a loss. Though speaking little French, we learned a great deal on those long walks through Paris and its immediate environs. We discovered, for example, that the horns of slaughtered bullocks were turned into “tortoiseshell” combs, the bones of their legs into toothbrush handles and dominoes. The gathered blood went to the sugar refiners; the fat, for lamps, or soap. There was something horribly fascinating
in this. Again and again we found ourselves walking in the direction of Montfaucon. It was as though we couldn’t stop ourselves. Seeing us, the workers would quickly gather about, jabbering and staring (most had heard of us, many had seen us on the stage), until someone in a position of authority noticed the disruption and came to see what was happening. Ordering the others back to their places, he would then, often as not, offer us a guided tour.

Most of what we saw was forgotten. Some was not. I remember, for some reason, the slim figure of an artist, seated against a pile of bales, sketching the flaying of a horse. A romantic character, dark-haired and mustached, he worked at a furious pace, intent on capturing the waves of exposed muscle before they too went under the knife. At Montfaucon one cold day we watched a gaunt jobber whose face seemed permanently darkened by shadow, and whose work it was to gather the entrails for the feeding of pigs and poultry, reach into a mass of steaming offal and draw out the intestinal canal of a freshly slaughtered mare. Wrapping it like a long, dark rope open-palm-to-elbow, he made thirteen full revolutions before the tail end emerged out of the pile at his feet and snaked up his leg.

The skin, we were made to understand, would be sold to a tanner; the tendons, fresh or dried, to the gluemakers. Even the putrid flesh would be used. Covered with a pile of hay or straw, it would soon attract flies; within a week it would be rich with maggots. These would then be gathered and sold as food for domestic fowls, or as baits for fish. Nor was this all. We had noticed, no doubt, the unfortunate number of rats. Once a fortnight, we were told, the carcass of a horse was placed in a room with special openings in the walls and floor designed to allow the rats free access. At night, these openings were closed, trapping the rats inside, and the ferrets released. In one room, over a period of less than four weeks, they had killed more than sixteen thousand rats. Our guide smiled happily. “Think of it, monsieur,” he said, addressing me. “The furriers in Paris pay four francs for one hundred skins. And it costs us nothing!”

Why did we go? And why did we return, though the smell that lingered
in our clothing alone was almost enough to make us ill? Feeling corrupted inside, did I search out corruption in the hope of finding some kind of equilibrium? Or did I seek out the rough precincts of death intending to split myself against its hardness, to rub my nose against it until, like a serpent scraping and scraping against the edges of rocks, I felt the old skin sliding back across my eyes and crawled, reborn, from out of myself? And what of my brother? Did he say nothing because he felt some responsibility, some complicity for my state, or did he, too, feel some small measure of attraction for that fallen place?

It was in this state of mind, at any rate, that we found ourselves one evening in a deserted, ill-lighted district extending along the edge of a small canal. There seemed to be hardly anyone about. We walked on, watching our step, for the stones of the street were in ill repair. Now and again a man emerged from the darkness of the side streets and hurried by. We heard what sounded like a woman’s laugh, or a quick, gasping cry, then a man’s voice yelling something we could not understand. Here and there, high above the street, a candle flickered in a dark window.

But let me be clear. We were hardly so naive as not to know where we had found ourselves. We had spent years, after all, in the company of older men. From the banks of the Meklong to the decks of the
Sachem
we had listened to their tales, grinned knowingly at their jokes. And yet who could be surprised, given the difficulties presented by our condition, that at the age of twenty we still knew nothing? It was an ignorance my brother—though no less driven than I, to judge by the frequency of his late-night whimperings and shudderings—bore with maddening fortitude. He had always been more reticent, more constricted; it was only after our experience with the concubines in the Royal Palace, however, that his natural timidity had flared into morbid shyness.