Several times, I dreamt of writing, in order at least to establish, as the reward of continued efforts, some of my observations. Yet ever since leaving school, I had completely abandoned writing. Already such a wretched scribbler, I was barely able, even if I applied myself to the task, to inscribe the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Had I had the least glimpse of hope, perhaps I would have persisted! But who would take my miserable ramblings seriously? Where was the reader who would not think me mad? Or the wise man who would not dismiss me with disdain or irony? What was the use, from now on, of devoting myself to that vain task, to that vexing torture, which is almost what it would be like for an ordinary man to have to inscribe his thoughts on a marble tablet, with a large chisel and a cyclopean hammer! My own handwriting was like a shorthand—and even then, a shorthand much faster than normal!14
Thus I had no courage at all to write, and yet I ardently hoped for I don’t know what unknown occurrence, for some fortunate and unique act of fate, to happen. It seemed to me that there must exist, in some corner of the Earth, minds that were impartial, lucid, discerning, suited to studying me, to understanding me, to drawing from me my great secret, and communicating it to others. But where are such men? What hope did I have of ever meeting them?
And I would fall back into a deep melancholy, into a desire to remain immobile, to annihilate myself. During an entire autumn, I despaired of the Universe. I languished in a vegetative state, from which I emerged only to give myself over to long moans, followed by agonizing moments of revolt.
I became thinner yet, to the point of becoming fantastical in appearance. The folks of the village called me, with irony, “den Heyligen Gheest,” the Holy Spirit. My silhouette trembled like those of young poplar trees, was as light as a reflected image, and because of this I attained the stature of giants.
Slowly, a project began to form in my mind. Insofar as my life had been sacrificed, because none of my days bore me any pleasure, and all to me was darkness and bitterness, why stagnate in inaction? Supposing that no soul existed capable of responding to mine, at least it seemed worthwhile to make the effort to convince myself of the fact. At least it seemed worthwhile to leave this gloomy land, to go find in the large cities the scientists and philosophers. Was I not myself an object of curiosity? Before calling attention to my knowledge of extrahuman phenomena, might I not stimulate the desire in people to study my person? Were not my physical attributes alone worthy of being studied, and my vision as well, and the extreme rapidity of my movements, and my strange manner of taking nourishment?15
The more I dreamt of it, the more it seemed reasonable for me to hope, and the more my resolve grew. The day came when that resolve became unshakeable, when I revealed it to my parents. Neither one of them understood much of this, but both finally gave in to my repeated entreaties: I was allowed to go to Amsterdam, with the possibility of returning home if fate were unkind to me.
I departed one morning.
VI.
From Zwartendam to Amsterdam is a hundred or so kilometers. I easily covered that distance in two hours, without other adventures than the extreme surprise of those coming and going to see me running with such speed, and several gatherings of people at the entrances to the little towns and larger villages, which I avoided. To make sure I was on the right road, I inquired two or three times of elderly people who were alone. My sense of direction, which is excellent, did the rest.
It was around nine o’clock when I reached Amsterdam. Determined, I entered the big city, I passed along the beautiful, dreamy canals, filled with pleasant merchant fleets. I did not attract as much attention as I had feared. I walked quickly, among people busy with their affairs, here and there enduring the taunts of a few young vagabonds. Nevertheless, I did not decide to stop here. I crisscrossed the city somewhat in all directions, after which I finally resolved to enter a pub, on one of the banks of the Heeren Gracht.16 The place was peaceful; the splendid canal spread before me, full of life, between shady rows of trees; and among the Moedigen I saw moving on its banks, I seemed to see some that belonged to a new species. After some hesitation, I went into the pub, and directing my question to the owner, as slowly as I was able to, I entreated him to be so kind as to direct me to a hospital.
The host gazed at me with astonishment, defiance and curiosity, took his big pipe from his mouth and put it back several times, then finally said:
“You are, no doubt, from the colonies?”
As it was perfectly useless to contradict the man, I answered:
“Yes indeed!”
He appeared delighted with his perspicacity. He asked me a new question:
“Perhaps you come from that region of Borneo which no one has ever been able to enter?”17
“Exactly!”
I spoke too rapidly: he opened his eyes wide.
“Exactly!” I repeated more slowly.
The host smiled with satisfaction:
“You speak Dutch with difficulty, true? So, it’s a hospital you’re looking for . . . probably you’re sick?”
“Yes.”
The patrons had come closer. The news spread already that I was a cannibal from Borneo; even so, I was looked upon much more with curiosity than with antipathy. People ran in from the street. I became nervous, anxious. Nonetheless, I composed myself, and I repeated, coughing:
“I am very sick!”
“It’s just like the monkeys from that country,” replied a very fat man with indulgence. . . . “Holland is killing them!”
“What strange skin,” another added.
“And how does he see?” asked a third man, pointing to my eyes.
The circle drew close, I was surrounded with a hundred curious stares, and still more people were coming into the room.
“How tall he is!”
It is true that I was a head taller than the tallest among them.
“And skinny!” . . .
“Cannibalism does not appear to give them much nourishment!”
Not all the voices were malicious. A few sympathetic individuals protected me:
“Don’t press him like that, he is sick!”
“Come on, friend, courage!” the fat man said, when he noticed my nervousness. “I will take you myself to a hospital.”
He took me by the arm; he gave himself the task of plowing through the crowd, and called out:
“Make way for a sick man.”
Dutch crowds are not very fierce: they let us pass, but they accompanied us. We went along the canal, followed by a compact crowd; and some people cried out:
“He’s a cannibal from Borneo!”
* * *
Finally we reached a hospital. It was during consultation hours. I was taken before an intern, a young man with blue glasses, who greeted me sullenly. My companion said to him:
“He is a savage from the colonies.”
“What do you mean, a savage,” the other exclaimed.
He took off his glasses to look at me. He stood for a while motionless in astonishment. Abruptly he asked me:
“Are you able to see?”
“I see very well . . .”
I had spoken too rapidly.
“It’s his accent,” the fat man said proudly. “Repeat yourself, my friend!”
I repeated myself, I made myself understood.
“Those are not the eyes of a human,” the medical student muttered. “And the complexion! . . . Is this the complexion of your race?”
Then, I said, struggling terribly to slow down my speech:
“I came here to be seen by a man of science!”
“You are not sick then?”
“No!”
“And are you from Borneo?”
“No!”
“Then where are you from?”
“From Zwartendam, near Duisburg!”
“Then why does your friend claim you are from Borneo?”
“I didn’t want to contradict him.”
“And you want to see a man of science?�
��
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To be studied.”
“To make money?”
“No, for nothing.”
“You are not poor then? A beggar?”
“No!”
“Then what drives you to want to be studied?”
“My constitution . . .”
But again, despite my efforts, I had spoken too rapidly. I had to repeat myself.
“Are you sure you can see me?” he asked, staring fixedly at me. “Your eyes seem like calluses.”
“I see very well . . .”
And, moving right and left, I picked up objects rapidly, I set them down, I tossed them in the air in order to catch them.
“This is extraordinary,” the young man exclaimed.
His voice, softened, almost friendly, filled me with hope:
“Listen,” he said finally, “I think that Dr. Van den Heuvel will be interested in your case . . . I will have someone inform him about it. You wait in the next room . . . and, by the way . . . I forgot to ask, you are not sick, in fact?”
“Not at all.”
“Good. Come . . . enter here . . . the doctor will come soon.”
I found myself seated amidst monsters preserved in alcohol: fetuses, children with bestial shapes, colossal batrachians, saurians that were vaguely anthropomorphic.
This, I thought, was the waiting room just for me! Am I not a candidate for one of these sepulchers, to be preserved in alcohol?
VII.
When Dr. Van den Heuvel appeared, I was overwhelmed with emotion: I trembled as if I saw the Promised Land, felt the joy of entering it, the fear of being banished from it. The doctor, with his large bald forehead, the penetrating gaze of an analyst, a mouth that was soft and yet displayed resoluteness, examined me in silence, and my excessive thinness, my extreme height, my darkly circled eyes, my violet complexion were causes of astonishment for him, as they were for everyone else.
“You say that you want to be studied?” he finally asked.
I answered forcefully, almost violently:
“Yes!”
He smiled approvingly, and asked me the usual question:
“Can you see well through those eyes?”
“Very well . . . I can even see through wood, through clouds . . .”
But I spoke too fast. He glanced at me with anxiety. I repeated, sweating profusely:
“I even see through wood, through clouds . . .”
“Really! That would be extraordinary . . . Then tell me, what do you see through that door . . . there?”
He showed me a blind door.
“A big glass bookcase . . . a sculpted table . . .”
“Yes, truly!” he repeated, astonished.
My chest relaxed, a deep serenity descended upon my soul.
The scientist remained silent a few seconds, then:
“You speak with great difficulty.”
“Otherwise I speak too rapidly! I cannot speak slowly.”
“Then, speak in your natural manner.”
Then I told him the story of my entry into Amsterdam. He listened with extreme attentiveness, with a sense of intelligence and observation that I had never before encountered among my fellow men. He understood nothing of what I was saying, but the analysis that followed revealed his sagacity:
“I am not mistaken . . . you utter fifteen to twenty syllables per second, that is, three to four times more than the human ear is capable of perceiving. Your voice, moreover, is much higher pitched than any human voice I have ever heard. Your gestures, excessively rapid, clearly correspond to this manner of speaking. Your metabolism on the whole probably functions much faster than ours.”
“I run,” I said, “faster than a greyhound . . . I write . . .”
“Ah!” he interrupted. “Let’s see the handwriting . . .”
I scribbled a few words on a blotter that he held out to me, the first were readable enough, the others increasingly scrambled, abbreviated:
“Perfect!” he said, and a certain pleasure mingled with his astonishment. “I believe that our meeting is most felicitous. Surely, it would be most interesting to study you . . .”
“It is my most ardent, my sole desire!”
“And mine as well . . . most surely . . . Science . . .”
He seemed preoccupied, lost in dreams; at last he said:
“If only we could find an easy means of communicating . . .”
He paced back and forth, his eyebrows knitted. All at once:
“How stupid of me! You will learn shorthand, by god! . . . Yes, Yes . . .”
A jovial expression appeared on his face:
“And, I forgot, what about the phonograph . . . the faithful confidant!18 One need only play it back more slowly than the speed at which recorded . . . It’s all settled: you will live with me during your stay in Amsterdam!”
O joy at wishes fulfilled, what sweetness not to have to spend days in vain and sterile doings! In the presence of the doctor’s intelligent personality, in this scientific milieu, I felt a delightful sense of well-being; the melancholy that beset my solitary soul, the regret that my faculties might be lost, my long suffering as pariah that crushed me for so many years, all vanished, evaporated before the sense that a new life was mine, a true life, a destiny preserved!
VIII.
The very next day the doctor made the necessary arrangements. He wrote to my parents; he found me a professor of shorthand, and procured phonographs. As he was a very rich man, and entirely devoted to science, there was no experiment he was not willing to undertake, and my sight, my hearing, my musculature, the color of my skin, were all subjected to rigorous examination, all of which made him increasingly enthusiastic, exclaiming:
“This is of the nature of prodigy!”
I understood perfectly, after the first days, just how important it was that things be done with method, from the simplest to the most complex task, from the simplest to the most astonishing abnormality. Thus I had recourse to a little maneuver, which I did not keep secret from the doctor: to reveal my faculties to him only in a gradual manner.
The speed of my perceptions and movements kept him busy at first. He was able to conclude that the subtle nature of my hearing corresponded to the rapidity of my speech. This point was proven conclusively by gradually more rigorous experiments on increasingly inaudible noises, which I imitated with ease, the voices of ten or fifteen people all talking at once, all of which I detected. The rapidity of my vision was likewise demonstrated; and comparative experiments between my ability to divide a horse’s gallop, the flight of an insect, into increments and the same thing done with stop-motion photography only confirmed the superiority of my eye. As for my perception of ordinary things, such as the simultaneous movements of a group of men, of children playing in a playground, of machines in movement, of stones thrown into the air or of little balls cast into an alleyway that were to be counted in flight—these astounded the doctor’s family and friends.
My running in the garden, my twenty-meter leaps, my ability to seize objects instantaneously, or to catch up with them, were more admired yet, less by the doctor than by his entourage. And it was an ever-renewed pleasure for the children and wife of my host, during a walk in the country, to see me outrun a horseman going at full gallop, or follow the path of some flitting sparrow: there was no purebred to which I could not give a two-thirds lead, no matter what the distance covered, or any bird I could not easily overtake.
As for the doctor, increasingly satisfied with the results of his experiments, he defined my nature in the following manner:
“A human being gifted, in all its movements, with a speed incomparably superior not only to that of other men, but even to that of all known animals. This speed, detected as much in the most tenuous parts of its organism as in its whole, makes it a being so distinct from the rest of creation that it merits all by itself to have a special designation in the hierarchy of animals. In the case of the very curi
ous makeup of its eye, as well as the violet color of its skin, one must consider these as simple indications of this special nature.”
Once my muscular system was examined, no peculiarity was found, except for my excessive thinness. Nor did my ear offer any unusual data, nor did my skin for that matter, aside from its hue. As for my hair, with its dark color of a bluish black nature, it was fine like a spider’s web, and the doctor studied it with minute care:
He laughingly said to me on occasion: “One would need to be able to dissect you!”
In this manner time passed pleasantly. I had learned very rapidly to do shorthand, thanks to the ardor of my desire and to the natural aptitude I had for this mode of rapid transcription, to which by the way I introduced a few new abbreviations. I began to take notes, which my stenographer translated; and beyond this, we had phonographs, which were built to specifications specially conceived by the doctor, and turned out to be perfectly adapted to reproducing my speech, in a slowed-down manner.
The confidence my host had in me, over time, became complete. During the first weeks, he could not help but suspect, quite naturally, that the unique nature of my faculties might go hand in hand with some form of madness, some mental derangement. This fear once overcome, our relations became completely cordial and, I believe, as captivating for the one as for the other. We analyzed the nature of my faculty of perception, in relation to a great number of substances considered to be opaque, and in relation to the dark coloration that water, glass, quartz took on for me at a certain thickness or depth. You remember that I see easily through wood, tree leaves, clouds, and many other substances, and that I see poorly the bottom of a pool of water half a meter deep, and that a windowpane, although transparent for me, is less so than for ordinary men, and somewhat dark in color. A large piece of glass appears blackish to me. The doctor took ample time to convince himself of all these unusual phenomena, astonished above all to see me pick out stars on cloudy nights.
Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind Page 16