The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (5 page)

She would boast that there was no desire in this world her girls couldn’t satisfy, and in more serious moments would even intimate that society held no other institution so useful to it as the brothel, adducing as evidence the half-dozen attempted suicides her girls were said to have averted at the last moment with their irresistibly seductive arts. Or again, all those men who, broken down by life’s adversities, had turned up at six in the afternoon with what little was left of their lost fortunes, their souls in a sorry state of dissolution, and left at midnight, laughing and ready to tackle whatever trials the morrow may bring. Even cases where marriages on the brink of the abyss had been saved she would cite to support her line of reasoning, for many a husband, at least in her imagination, had found relief on her girls’ bosoms and been so thoroughly re-educated lovewise that they’d been able to inject new life into a marital bed dead as the timber it was made of, creating a sensation in better halves who had ceased to love them a quarter of a century ago.

In a word, she said that the shipwrecked heart did not exist that hadn’t taken refuge in her house. Only one thing irritated her – that she could not open an institution where the town’s ladies might be similarly served by young men wise to their hearts’ anguish and clairvoyant of their desires, thus sagely realising that not for another century would the time be ripe for such an experiment.

It was in this peculiar environment that the boy grew up. On the night he was born to an accompaniment of church bells and whirling snowflakes most doubted he would live to see his first dawn, but even those who had turned their compassion into doubt saw their merciful hopes dashed. He had obstinately refused to surrender to death.

What few knew, but some suspected, was that some individuals are born with a will to live so strong it can defy the laws of nature. Not merely did the boy survive the dawn, but the following day, week and month too, until there could be no doubt of his intention to survive, if not his entire childhood, then at the very least his first year. And this he did, but under such torments as could have broken the most hardened of hearts.

From the first day he was fever-ridden. Pains in his malformed body made him shudder until loss of consciousness freed him of them. In the third month, weakened by his duel with death’s emissaries, he was assailed by a suppurating pox that burst and left scars, disfiguring the few square centimetres of his body which until then had seemed normal. Armed only with an iron will he defied death in battles that lasted for weeks at a time, and when the pains retreated, he smiled a smile that brought tears to the girls’ eyes.

For four weeks he struggled against a brain fever and won right at the finishing line, when his temperature, which had reached forty-three degrees, at long last began to subside. He clung to life like a capsized sailor to a raft, without compass or chart. All with only one aim – to ride out the storms and survive at all costs. The stunted arms were racked by growing pains. The deformed parts of the ill-grown skeleton threatened to puncture him from within. Yet he refused to surrender to the pains. After sanguinary civil wars with legions of bacteria the sores in the cloven face healed. Not until his first birthday would the monstrous orifice cease to suppurate and give off a stink of crude vulcanised rubber that would make a corpse gasp for breath. Though his guardians did not quite understand it at the time, this was in fact the final battle. Death, to its own amazement, was forced to lower its ensign and, having spent all its powder on a single adversary far more obstinate than anyone could have guessed, sail away to new shores.

Two weeks after this decisive victory the boy was christened. It was done in a simple ceremony under the auspices of a Polish chaplain in the same room where first he had looked out on the world. By then no-one could recall the mother’s Slavonic surname, nor whether she’d expressed any wish as to what her child’s name should be. But Madam Schall, who had a weakness for heroic deeds and a penchant for antiquity, decided he should be called Hercule, spelled the French way; and said that, in view of the nature of his hands, it was obvious he would have to do most things with his feet, and so bound him to that role with the surname Barfuss, which is German for Barefoot. This improvised sacrament not withstanding, he was registered under these heroic-sounding names with the Prussian tax collector, as an orphan adhering to the Catholic faith, under Madam Schall’s guardianship. From that time forward life had acknowledged him.

No-one could have believed that under such circumstances Hercule Barfuss could develop like a normal boy. Yet he did. The girls thought that he must be at the mercy of his handicaps, that a person with such a physiognomy must be a little retarded. He also seemed to be deaf and dumb, for during his first two years of life he never reacted to sounds or voices. Half-hearted efforts were made using the so-called Büchner staves. Long auditory pipes were thrust into his sealed auditory channels to amplify sounds; but no-one ever saw him react or heard him utter anything more than a sob or a whine when overcome by the pain. Yet these fears, too, were frustrated, as death’s designs on him had been. Behind the corrosive façade lay a lucid intelligence.

When he was older Hercule seemed to understand everything that was said to him, which was at first taken for a miracle, but afterwards explained away by saying he didn’t wholly lack hearing, despite the lack of conchae.

It was hard to find any other explanation. When asked to sit still, for instance, he obeyed without hesitation. When urged to go to sleep, he closed his eyes. And when asked a question he would sometimes, if not always, respond with a nod or a shake of his head. The girls supposed he must somehow be able to lip-read, or that their voices’ vibrations must somehow be forming intelligible sentences within him. Very few of them ever suspected he could read their thoughts.

Later on, when he had learned to interpret the girls’ gestures, of which some had been taken from a book by Wilhelm Kerger, the famous teacher of the deaf and dumb, he also learned to read and write, not only in German but also in French. Then Madam Schall, out of a sentimentality for her own past, had taken on a governess for him. But by that time no-one gave his silence a thought. When he wanted to communicate something important he would quite simply write it down on a slip of paper, and the circumstance of his never speaking fell, as it were, out of the picture.

Clever as he was at compensating for his supposed deafness, Hercule became just as smart at compensating for his other handicaps. For lack of properly formed arms and hands, he became quite remarkable at using his feet instead, thus living up to his surname. Over time he became a veritable orthopaedic conjurer, until in the end there was no task an ordinary person carries out with his fingers Hercule couldn’t do with his sensitive toes.

Aged one he could walk. At three he could use a knife and fork. At four he could open doors. At six he could force all kinds of locks and at seven was able to write. Later he would learn to play the organ with his masterly feet, though this takes us far on into our story.

The woman who looked after Hercule Barfuss up to his second birthday was called Magdalena Holt. Living on the Danish island of Bornholm at the time of Hercule’s birth, she had been in dire straits, and was obliged to place her own six-month-old boy in an orphanage and take work at Madam Schall’s establishment not to starve. She cared for Hercule as if he was her own son, transferred all her pent-up maternal feelings on to him, badly chipped at the edges though he was. When he was in agony she wept with him. When feverish spasms wracked him, she was indefatigably at his side in an almost saintly way. It was she who wet nursed him, not from the breast, his mouth being what it was, but from a bottle of her own milk. It was she who tended his sores, eased his pains and rocked him to sleep. It was also she who first became aware of his unique gift.

This gift, supernatural if one dare call it that, did not always function, and during his first years of life Hercule was too small to understand it himself. When gradually he did become aware of it, he would learn not only to master it, but also instinctively to conceal it, for his own self-preservation.

The first time Magdalena Holt experienced the way he could rummage around a person’s mind was one afternoon about a year after his birth. At that moment she was sitting on a stool in the servants’ room with the little boy in her arms, feeding him from a bottle she had just filled to the brim from her breasts’ immense reservoir. Suddenly, he stopped drinking and stared at her. Unnerved, she met his eyes.

It wasn’t the gaze of a child, but of a whole destiny. And suddenly she knew, with the same dizzy feeling that had assailed Dr Götz, that the boy could see through her.

It was as if he had stepped inside her and revealed to her her own long-forgotten longings. Afterwards she would remember it as if he could read not only her conscious thoughts but also her subconscious ones, thus revealing her to herself in her soul’s mirror. What the boy first evoked in her was a feeling of disorientation, a queer, colourless mist that gradually assumed the shape of images, or rather whole sequences of them. On this inner canvas she was amazed to see painted a little row of fishing huts on her native island – with thatched roofs and whitewashed walls – and herself walking arm in arm with a man she recognised, a relative. Only then did she understand, with a violent contraction of the roots of her heart, that she had loved this man all her life, but never dared admit it. In the same instant she knew she must one day go back and marry him and fetch her son from the orphanage, and so make up the sum of her happiness. All this she knew with such certainty that for a moment she thought she had lost her mind. She had always looked on the man as any other relative, or so she thought. He was a skinny fellow with a slight squint and freckles who stammered. In his youth he had been a common seaman aboard English warships. Now she realised with a lucidity that threatened to burst her apart that she had loved him above all else ever since she was a little girl, but, aware that her love was forbidden, she had banished it to the cellar of her unconscious, tried to efface it altogether so as to believe she had outwitted it. Or else, if ever it had peered out, she had taken it for something else. Yet with undiminished strength it had gone on living, even though she’d had a child with another man, a drunken good-for-nothing who left her when she got in trouble. With a shudder she accepted all she now saw inside herself – the hallucinations which, aided by the boy, laid bare her most secret yearnings – to be true. In this knowledge there was as much terror as joy. Then in a trice he vanished from that place inside her where she had clearly felt him to be. Looking down she saw he was asleep in her arms.

Years later Magdalena Holt, knowing her experience that winter day was the simple truth, a distillation of her own longings, would turn it into reality. She never told a soul, but until the day she left the brothel she saw the boy through different eyes and would be grateful to him for the rest of her life.

Fancying there was some connection between her strange experience and the boy’s appetite, she became particularly observant when giving him the bottle. More often than not when she tried to catch his attention by passing a finger to and fro before his eyes he would lift up his deformed face, but nothing remarkable would happen. And indeed, she would only be exposed to his gift on three more occasions, the last time in association with a catastrophe.

The second time, too, was when she was giving him his milk. Suddenly, with a gaze as ancient as bedrock, he looked up at her, and again she felt how he stirred her thoughts, all the while making a slight gurgling sound, which she understood to be the beginnings of speech.

Out of the sludge of oblivion her forgotten desires again began to rise up, faintly at first, then ever more pictorially, until once again they appeared as a vision in her mind.

She saw herself sitting bent over a thick volume with a magnifying glass in her hand. On the table lay a quill pen and an ink pot. She realised she herself had made the ink from camphor and pulverised oak apples. This too was an old dream that had been put to flight by life’s realities. A dream of looking for God. In the autumn of her years she would be re-baptised by a wandering Mennonite, and devote the last years of her widowhood to studying the Scriptures. At the time of this vision, though, the idea seemed to her ridiculous, it then being many years since she had closed her heart to any belief in God.

On the third occasion – the most banal, but which she would always remember as the first time she heard the boy actually speaking inside her – Hercule had just learned to walk. It was a Sunday afternoon in springtime when the girls had a day off. Unobserved he had wandered perilously close to the waterlily pond with the spouting nymphs, which Madam Schall, after several years of the accounts looking increasingly healthy, had installed in a corner of the garden. Magdalena spotted him just as he was standing on the brink, delightedly flapping his little stumps of arms, entranced by the Chinese goldfish popping up to the surface for a nip of air, and was waving to Henriette Vogel, the girl who was born the same night as himself and from whom he never wanted to be away. Terrified he would fall in, Magdalena ran over and grabbed him, frightening him and making him cry.

Rocking him in her arms, she felt how the fur on his back stood on end, how his body trembled, how his tears wetted her stay-less bodice. She stroked the huge, grotesque head that swayed so clumsily on its neck she was fearful he might one day suffocate. Whereupon it happened again, without him even looking at her. Taking his stance right in the middle of her anxious stream of consciousness, he said very clearly and in a sort of ghost voice:
Put me down!

Which she did, more out of shock than because of the force of his command; and instinctively she replied, in her thoughts:
What did you say?