Wonder (16 page)

“Listen. Did you hear it?” asked Garance softly.

It was a game they played. Amid the crowd milling at a busy intersection in the heart of London; in the library reading room; on the pond where they sometimes went boating, she forced him to stop and prick up his ear. The first times, taken aback, he could only answer her question in all honesty: “Hundreds of wheels on the paving stones and a neighing horse,” or “A number of birds.” Garance had patiently peeled away, one by one, the strata of sound covering the unique and nearly imperceptible one (a merchant offering her flowers amid the din of cars and horses, buzzing bees imprisoned behind a display window, an unlucky angler cursing between his teeth, and even – or so she swore – the quiet laugh of the fish that got away) which she wanted to give him as if she had
just made it appear, like a magician pulling a rabbit from his hat.

There were few sounds in Pompeii. A lone nightingale produced a few trills, then was quiet, as if confused by its own lyrical flights; a lizard ran to take refuge under a stone; cicadas filled the air with their metallic chirring that blended into the background; a breath of wind passed over the city, light as the inhalation of a sleeping child. Lying on the bed of stone, Edward heard none of them, however; the sounds had disappeared as soon as they entered the square house. He closed his eyes, listened as best he could. He could distinguish nothing now but the subdued throbbing of his blood against his eardrums.

“What do you hear?” asked Garance.

“Nothing,” he admitted.

She smiled.

“Exactly.”

She fell asleep almost at once and he watched over her until the close of day.

When they got up again, the city had come to life. At the eastern end, where the streets that came out of the earth suddenly stopped, continuing only under layers of rock, gypsies had set up camp and their music rose in the night. Clapping their hands, men and women sitting around a big crackling fire intoned chants that Edward and Garance could understand only partially, where the
subject was sun and exile. Among the gypsies, Edward noticed the mysterious man with ebony skin. He wasn’t singing. In the middle of the group, eyes half-closed, he was smiling gently as he watched the dancing flames. Over sleeping Pompeii fine white ashes fell.

The next day, when they were at their breakfast table looking out on the now-familiar silhouette of Vesuvius, for the first time seeing its slopes covered with snow, Edward touched on their departure. He had thought that Garance might want to extend their stay but she gave him her agreement almost absentmindedly.

He was pouring tea, reflecting out loud that he would go down to the port after breakfast to see if there might be a ship bound for Marseille over the next few days, when Garance abruptly pushed back her chair and dashed to the bedroom, one hand over her mouth. Worried, Edward followed and saw her rush into the lavatory. He heard sounds of water. Back on the balcony, he examined the table. Perhaps Garance could no longer tolerate the mere sight of coloured food?

When she reappeared, dabbing at her eyes, he helped her sit down and offered her a cup of cold milk. Droplets of sweat stood out on her forehead and her hands trembled very slightly when she brought the white liquid to her lips.

“Garance, are you unwell?” he asked anxiously. “Is something wrong?” Then, suddenly alarmed at the thought she could be suffering from some serious illness she’d hidden from him, he pleaded: “You must tell me, I beg you …”

Her sky-blue eyes looked deeply into his, then she announced in a voice that was also trembling a little:

“I’m not sick, Edward, I’m pregnant.”

He stopped breathing for a moment that seemed to him to last a century, in the course of which he saw the horizon start dancing until it was nearly diagonal, then lie down again after performing several leaps. Then he stood up, knocking over the jar of jam, which left a red stain on the white tablecloth, and took Garance in his arms. She was crying, but it was with happiness.

Over the next few days, on banknotes and in the margins of books on which he could never concentrate, on bills, tickets, the slightest scrap of paper that turned up and, if none appeared, with his fingertip in the dust covering a piece of furniture or the condensation on a window pane, he wrote the same impossible and miraculous equation:

They went back to London without delay. Edward wouldn’t allow Garance to tire herself by carrying anything, even her parasol, which he held over her curly head the way slaves in the past would fan their queen with big palm fronds. Back on Alderney Street, she resumed her music but now whenever he went into the drawing room, Edward could hear her softly explaining its subtleties to an invisible presence.

Meanwhile, he ordered from the Sorbonne dusty tomes by abbé Pierre Bertholon de Saint-Lazare who, along with his research into the electricity of plants, meteors, and the human body, had worked out an unusual theory about the forces that sustain earth’s core, going so far as to suggest that if one planted metal rods at a certain depth, they would work like lightning rods and prevent the earthquakes that disturb the subterranean world from spreading by forcing them to concentrate on one precise point. But the abbé was on the wrong track, Edward was sure of it.

He plunged back into the quarrel that two centuries earlier had pitted the Saturnists against the Plutonists, the first reckoning that volcanic eruptions were due to the explosion of coal buried in the earth, which caught fire when pyrite came in contact with water, while the second were of the opinion that at the centre of the planet was a mass of matter in fusion which shot up sporadically
through crater chimneys, some massive, some insignificant. But in these models, Edward saw mainly the gaps it was up to him to fill in.

Questions occurred to him all at once, ones he would never have imagined springing from mathematics, as they were absolutely foreign to geometry and even to arithmetic. They dealt with the shape and weight of continents; the movement and action of the tides; the properties of matter when subjected to those forces, the most important being no doubt elasticity. This he set out to study methodically, as he always did, by reviewing the work of his forerunners, only to arrive at a distressing conclusion. The totality of the thinking on the problems of elasticity up to the end of the year 1820 could be summed up as follows: an inadequate theory of inflexion, an erroneous theory of torsion, an unproven theory about the vibration of plates.

In a flash, while he was crossing the street, brushing his teeth, or lacing his shoes, everything would fit together. The thorniest problems would be solved as if by magic, with a symmetry and harmony that seemed themselves to be proof of the validity of a theory in which all the elements came together. Those elements formed an infinitely complex whole with thousands of facets – but then the whole would break up like the image in a kaleidoscope, as if he had rotated the ring
and scattered the spangles just as he thought he could finally grasp them. The impression disappeared; he tried in vain to recapture some traces scattered just outside his consciousness; but at least he knew that the Solution was within reach.

Garance, walking pigeon-toed now, taking tiny measured steps, was every day becoming fleshier and enjoying it. One evening, standing in profile next to the globe, her belly matching its curve nearly perfectly, she exclaimed in a voice half-jocular, half-horrified: “I look like a boa that’s swallowed a balloon!”

Soon after that she became a watermelon, then a hot-air balloon, and in the end she no longer said anything, herself astonished to feel the foreign life swelling inside her.

She felt the first pains late one afternoon, but she waited an hour after night had fallen before finally allowing Edward to fetch the midwife who had gone that morning to deliver her own sister-in-law at the other end of town, which was why no one answered his repeated thumps on her door.

He had left Garance in the charge of a neighbour more nervous than she was, who kept repeating as Edward
explained the situation: “Ah, my God! We need boiling water,” wringing her hands and contorting her face.

From the midwife’s house he raced out in search of Doctor Whitfield, a prominent physician who lived not far away in a charming townhouse of golden stones. A butler opened the door to a breathless Edward, who could only say: “My wife …” The servant came back shortly, accompanied by the doctor still holding his table napkin. He looked the sweating, gasping Edward up and down, his gaze combining suspicion and boredom, as if the visitor were a travelling salesman. In the background could be heard laughter and the clink of cutlery.

“My wife,” repeated Edward, unable to go on.

“Yes, young man, your wife …,” encouraged Doctor Whitfield, his expression now reassuring and professional.

“She’s going to … give birth …” Edward finally managed to get out as he tried to seize the doctor by the arm and oblige him to get moving.

“And is she sick?” asked the good doctor.

Edward stopped, taken aback.

“No, but she’s about to give birth,” he repeated, afraid the doctor had misunderstood him.

“That’s very good, my lad. I congratulate you on this happy event. Now run and fetch the midwife, don’t waste any time. Good luck,” he added as he turned around.

“You don’t understand!” Edward cried out, words
that made the doctor frown, for he didn’t care to be shown such lack of respect – and what’s more, under his own roof. The butler shuddered inwardly, unconsciously straightening himself, stiff as the silver-knobbed canes in an urn by the door.

“The midwife isn’t in! You have to come with me.”

Now the distraught maniac was trying to tell him what to do. With all the haughtiness at his command, Doctor Whitfield, private physician to several eminent members of Parliament, asked:

“Is the lady one of my patients, Mister … Mister?”

“Love,” said Edward.

“Love,” the physician repeated, as if some error in taste had just been confirmed, one he had suspected from the outset. “Very well, is Mrs. Love a patient of mine?”

“No,” confessed Edward, who would never have even thought of lying.

“I see. I’m sure the dear lady, who is in perfect health, will have no trouble giving birth. Hurry back to her, I say, and give her my congratulations. Go, now. I wish you a pleasant evening.”

Edward had already turned on his heels. He broke into a run. In the sky the moon, slender as a scythe, was covered with clouds, and a cold rain started to fall.

The neighbour had filled the kettle but seemed not to know what to do with it, or with the two full basins
steaming on the stove. Garance was upstairs in their bedroom, her moans seeping through the closed door. Not daring to knock, Edward started to pace the landing, where his shoes left traces of mud.

A few seconds or an hour later, he couldn’t have said, a scream ripped through the air and he finally opened the door to see Garance half sitting in the bed amid bloodstained sheets, her skin whiter than the pillows she was leaning against, her hair spread around her head like the rays of a star. She looked at him, unseeing. In a corner, the neighbour was wringing her hands again. In a voice he didn’t recognize, Edward ordered her to run to a doctor, any doctor, and to bring him back by force if she had to. He searched his pockets and held out the handful of crumpled bills he found there.

There was a kind of stillness after she left. Edward knelt by his wife and cautiously touched her skin, soaked in sweat and cold as marble. He thought he saw her smile, then came another shriek, mingled with another lament.

He himself welcomed his daughter into the world, used his penknife to cut the purple cord that joined her to her mother, dried her as best he could, then stood up, euphoric, when Garance, after a brief silence, began to moan again. Panicking, Edward repeated mechanically the same movements for the son he’d just been given, laying
him down with his sister, two small perfect, wailing beings, on the breast of his wife, who had stopped breathing.

The room, the window, the sky and the stars beyond pitched like a rudderless boat and drifted off. Edward staggered, bumped into the chest of drawers, fell to his knees. As if the law of gravity had briefly ceased to exist, he saw, slowly, dizzily, the copper balls exit the dragons’ jaws to crash into the open mouths, black and monstrous, of the starving frogs. They fell two by two until the last one, an orphan who’d lost its partner, this final phantom sphere seeming to remain suspended for all eternity. They had been together for three years, eight months, one week, and two days.