Wonder (10 page)

When he came home, Alice smelled on his breath the brandy he’d drunk with her and her perfume on his fingers, in his hair, on his long legs and in his arms. It seemed to her that if she looked long enough she could distinguish the other woman’s reflection in Baptiste’s gaze. But she kept her eyes closed and waited until he was asleep to tiptoe out of the trailer and to soap and rinse herself thoroughly.

Baptiste began to attend performances in order to admire Stella at the same time as hundreds, as thousands, of others, feeling a mixture of jealousy and pride at sharing her that way.

The heat inside the big top was infernal; under the ceiling of light bulbs, faces were gleaming, red and stupefied, their open black mouths jagged with stumps of teeth. One could hear gulps and cries of rapture at the arrival in the ring of leather-clad lion tamers, strapped into chains, led by Hector who held a trident like an ancient gladiator or some even older and more formidable Roman demigod. From the ring came smells of sweat, straw, excrement, and chalk dust.

The crowd marvelled noisily at the intelligence of the horse-mathematicians as well as at the intrepidity of the lion tamers. They shivered as they looked up at the tightrope walkers hanging from their thin trapezes, following with their eyes one who was advancing slowly on a wire, on his chin a stem holding a full cup of tea. But these exploits were too far removed from everyday life to stir in the audience anything but a fleeting and superficial emotion. Laughter was at its peak when the clowns, after a few pirouettes and harmless capers, chose a whipping boy among themselves, going at him fiercely, tripping and sidestepping him over and over until he dropped onto the sand, pretending to help him get up the better to trample him, their monstrously bright red lips on faces painted white opening grotesque grins all the way to their ears.

The spectators recognized themselves finally in both the torturer and the victim and instinctively chose their
side. Their laughter rose up, like the snickering of hyenas.

These poor people came to the circus to be filled with wonder; to play at being afraid without having to pit themselves against the danger; to forget for a few hours, a few minutes, an existence that was unbearable or simply dull and hopeless; mainly though they came for the privilege of pointing to and laughing at the bad luck of others more unfortunate than themselves. Of filling their eyes with those freaks of nature observed from a distance, one hand over their mouth as if to stifle a cry. They shuddered, with horror in some cases, but also with curiosity and excitement and with a kind of brief joy they hardly ever experienced, because for one of the rare times in their lives, they were on the right side of things: on the side of those who laughed instead of the laughingstock; on the side of the winners, the virtuous, those who were backed up by the fearsome strength of the majority. Like a powder trail through the crowd, their laughter spread, swelled, and nourished one another. Between this laughter and cries of fright or hatred there was little difference, and anyone who photographed those contorted faces, mouths wide open, eyes screwed up, would have found it hard to tell if they were grimacing in pleasure, in pain, or both. A crowd is never so ugly as when it is laughing.

“R
UN AWAY WITH ME
,”
SAID
B
APTISTE, LYING
on his back with Stella’s head on his shoulder, her long honey-coloured hair spread over the black flesh where scars formed pink twists and turns.

Her laugh was crystalline and hard.

“Where to?”

“An-anywhere.”

“Why do people always talk about going away and don’t care where they arrive or when?”

He felt that she wasn’t asking the question of him, so he didn’t answer. They were lying on a rough woollen blanket, in a clearing some distance from the camp. The sky was speckled with stars, joined now and then by blinking fireflies. The nearby forest was teeming with mysterious sounds.

“Where are you from?” he asked, because he had just realized that he knew nothing about her.

“From the greyest village in the world, a little dump in Texas, and it’s the last place I would want to go back to.
What about you? Do you dream about going back to where you grew up?”

“Where I grew up doesn’t exist anymore,” he said in a neutral tone.

There could be no reply to that remark. Her finger traced his jaw and his lips. He wanted her again and it was like a raging thirst; he wished he could drink up the night.

“Come away with me,” he said, taking her in his arms.

She broke away, raised herself up on an elbow, stared at him and said, seriously this time:

“My life is here, with the horses and Richard – and you. If you want.”

It was perfectly normal to come after the horses, for she treasured them more than the pupil of her eye, but coming after Rochester was a bitter blow. A fist tightened in his chest and he wondered if this was what jealousy felt like. Then all at once he understood: he hadn’t escaped the Apocalypse; he had succumbed to it like all the others, and this was his punishment.

E
LIE HAD SEEN FOR WEEKS NOW THAT HIS
mother had been looking haggard, red-eyed, that she startled at the slightest sound and was always checking over her shoulder as if expecting that at any moment a storm would break and beat down on her.

Having seen her happy these past months, he could recognize the opposite of happiness, even though he didn’t know the cause. The night before, he’d overheard a conversation that broke off abruptly when he approached; Alice had been talking about “that siren, that witch, that goddamn creature who’s cast a spell over you,” in a voice that didn’t sound like hers. Baptiste, helpless before her, flipped his hand as if to chase away an insect. He looked guilty but also, strangely, almost happy, as if he were inhabited by a flame that could finally blaze openly.

The heat was overwhelming beneath the heavy cotton sheet of the tent where the manatee was housed. As soon as he entered, sweat began to bead on Baptiste’s face, to run onto his neck. Blocks of ice in one corner were supposed to cool the air; he could feel their cold when he moved his arm over them. The ice was melting practically before his eyes, creating a puddle that ran out of the tent in rivulets. He placed his hand, fingers spread, on the translucent surface that was dented and cracked by the heat. At first soothing under his palm, the cold quickly became a bite, then an unbearable burn, but Baptiste forced himself to leave his hand there, and it gradually became numb. When he finally removed it, it seemed no longer to belong to him.

Leaning over the tank of cloudy water, he stuck his fingers into the tepid liquid, which felt scalding to him. He peered at his reflection, at a series of waves that became more marked when the manatee rose to the surface, nostrils closed, velvet eyes wide open as if to greet him. He held out his hand to touch the smooth skin of the creature, which slipped away with a fluid movement of its flippers, then rested his forehead on his folded arms and closed his eyes. After a moment he had the impression that his numb fingers could feel the presence of the manatee, which had silently swum closer again.

In the entrance, a black silhouette against the blinding
light, Elie, who had come to feed the animal, backed up stealthily, heart pounding, careful not to make a sound, and went instead to brush Numa the lion.

He will come back at nightfall, holding tightly in his hand the lighter that will all at once seem infinitely heavy. He will arrange bales of hay in the four corners of the tent, soaked in alcohol he has stolen from the warehouse. Then, with a flick he will lift the lid, turn the small wheel with his thumb, and with a steady hand he will light, one by one, the bales of hay and they will catch fire with a sound like a deep sigh.

Flames rise up in the night, yellow and purple against the black of the sky, the way they appear on the sheet used as a backdrop for Baptiste’s act. Sparks blown by the wind soon catch the nearby tents, which are ablaze in an instant. Half-clothed people come running from all sides to get the terrified animals out, and for a moment the scene looks like a phantasmagoria or a carnival. Fire crackles, growls, and spreads in long narrow tongues that unfurl their hundred forked points. The tent where the horses are kept burns from the ground to its frail canvas roof; a stallion, panicking, tears a cloth partition with his teeth and finds the open air. Still blinded by the smoke he runs straight ahead, as if guided by an invisible rider, his
blazing mane following him like the tail of a demon comet, along his way knocking over the buckets of water being passed from hand to hand and two stagehands who tried to stop him. His fire-rimmed silhouette finally disappears into the darkness. They will search at dawn for hours, finding neither him nor his remains. The other horses, paralyzed by fear, are motionless as statues, necks strained, nostrils quivering, wild eyes rolling. Numa the lion gets quietly out of his cage, its door left ajar, and walks away, supreme; he won’t be seen again either, and Rochester, not really wanting to tell the world that a wild animal has escaped from his menagerie, will be silent about the disappearance when police and firefighters come to question him. Everywhere, animals emerge from their dreamless sleep, adding their shrieks to the whimpers of those that are burning and soon a cacophony of men’s cries of rage, women’s howling, animals’ moaning rises up. Flames climb, dancing like long tresses, just as in the past, deep down in the water, weeds were rocked by the undertow. The fire’s reddish glow can be seen from afar, a monstrous imitation of the rising sun, a circle of light glowing like the gilded halos of saints that used to adorn the walls of the cathedral of Saint-Pierre, but now rest jumbled together under the rubble.

Baptiste, distraught, watches as fire devours the world.

N
O ONE KNOWS IF THE MANATEE DIED BECAUSE
of the heat or was stifled by the dense smoke, but once the flames were under control, the creature was found floating underwater, inert, its white skin as warm as a human’s.

Almost at once, Elie’s lighter was discovered in the smoking ash. The boy had dropped it as soon as the last bale of hay was on fire, as if he’d wanted to be sure that it would be easily found. Grasping it delicately with a handkerchief, Jemma brandished it high in the air, asking in a strong voice if anyone recognized it. Alice gulped and Baptiste stepped up like a sleepwalker, saying, “It’s mine.”

Aside from the dead manatee, the stallion, and Numa the lion who’d mysteriously vanished into thin air, two bears had suffocated and three horses were injured so badly that one had to be shot immediately while the other two looked on, long legs wobbling, hair burned, flesh blackened.

In the crowd of faces – hostile, shocked, or stunned – Baptiste tries in vain to find Stella. Around the horse
lying on the sand, limbs still shuddering, a puddle of blood is spreading, drawing under the animal a red and liquid shadow. Nearby, buckets of water are being thrown on the crackling flames still crawling through the grass. In the air drifts a smell that Baptiste recognizes but can’t name. Then he spots her, unmoving as a pillar of salt. On her face, worse than hatred, terror, or disgust, he sees sad satisfaction at having been right, suspicion rewarded. While the police are handcuffing him, Alice and Stella make the same move: each places her hands on her belly as if to protect something precious or to hide a source of shame. And then he is taken away and soon it is all as remote, as unreal, as the city buried under the fire of its mountain.

T
HE DUNGEON IS ICY, AS IF ALL THE HEAT ON
earth has been taken away, as if it has never known the light of the sun. Curled up on the cement floor, Baptiste hears cries and insults bursting out of the other cells, joining together to form an incomprehensible din.

A guard advances like an automaton, his heavy black shoes beating time like a lugubrious drum, and stops in front of the metal gate.

Automatically, Baptiste stuffs his hand in his pocket and takes out the copper ball he has carried with him everywhere since his first day with the circus. The sphere slips between his fingers and he watches, doing nothing to hold on to it, as it seems suspended between heaven and earth for a second that never ends.

“Baptiste Cyparis?” asks the guard.

The ball has touched the ground, it rolls down the corridor, disappears.

“No. You’re mistaken. My name is Numa, Numa Lazarus,” Baptiste says without stuttering.