by Mark Slouka
There is a violence in leaving, even when it is necessary or kindly meant. We tear ourselves loose like a plant from a pot. One good yank and there we are, lying on our side in the shade of the wall, a mass of hairy, painful roots still shaped to the shape of the world we knew.
Perhaps we’ll root again. Perhaps a voice will become our new ground, or a face, or the view from a carriage at a particular crossroads. More likely we’ll lie there like geraniums on a broken slate, quietly fuming that the pot should go on without us. There’s nothing like leaving for acquainting us with our own unimportance, for collapsing the bladder of our self-esteem. Unless we’re young, that is, in which case the bladder may simply inflate with the romance of our leaving, and float us right over the spears of regret.
So it was with us. We spent little time mourning the world we had left. I was not yet the connoisseur of loss I would become with age; my brother, though distressingly sober for seventeen, could still respond to the world with enthusiasm and joy. And the storm, I suppose, had already imposed a leave taking of sorts; by the time we arrived in Bangkok to ask Robert Hunter’s forgiveness, the world we had known was no longer there. Siam had left us before we left it.
And yet, God knows, there would have been enough to regret had we had the heart for it. We didn’t. Running about the sun-warm decks of the Sachem, we were living emblems of the fact that youth and mourning, like the lion and the lamb, were never meant to lie together; that the former, without much hesitation, will quite naturally devour the latter, woolly head to cloven hoof, then sleep the sleep of the innocent. And besides, no sadness was possible here. The huge sky would not permit it. It wheeled about our heads all day, building towering columns and ranges of cloud. We would spend hours standing in the nodding bow, listening to the water hiss against the keel, or climb high up the mast just for the pleasure of feeling the stately sway of the world—like the movement of an inverted pendulum—move through us. From above, the ship looked small and hard and beautiful, a single bolt holding down the vast shimmering cloth of the ocean.
How impossible it seems to me now that those two boys were us. That there should have been a time before Montfaucon, before Paris, before Jack Black and the room in Frying Pan Alley. Before Sophia. Looking back on us, it seems to me we were somehow pregnant with our own lives. We must have sensed them, felt them moving: the worlds we would bring into being; the language we would come to inhabit for the rest of our days.
PART THREE
I.
We had been an oddity, a phenomenon, an act of God. We had entertained kings and councillors. We had been a marvel of nature, a prophecy, an emblem shaped, like river clay, to the needs of others. And yet, through it all, we had remained exactly who we were, familiar to ourselves. It was the West that made us freaks.
It was the mirror of the crowds—the spittle on the lips, the roar of revulsion, the frantic, almost desperate reaction to a simple back flip or handstand—that did the bulk of the work. We had never seen such hunger. Night after night they came, filling the halls with the smell of ale and human sweat, determined, like children poking a stick into the carcass of a dog, to be afraid. To dirty themselves. And we let them. We were their sin and we were their absolution. A bargain at five or six shillings a head.
Nor was it just the common folk—the shop owners and the cloth merchants and their like—who needed us. In salons and drawing rooms from Brussels to Boston, the wish to be appalled, though partially masked by the accoutrements of class, was shamefully visible. At the palace of the Tuileries (no doubt in the same room where, two years later, little Charlie Stratton—pardon me, General Tom Thumb—would pop out of a pie during a performance of Le Petit Poucet and slide through the legs of a group of chorus girls), a lovely young lady hardly older than ourselves, dressed in a deep blue damask gown, suddenly put her hand to her mouth as though she were about to be sick and burst into a fit of sustained giggling so severe that she had to be led away to recover in another room. I had been looking at her neck, at a thin blue vein that trembled, like something struggling to break free, just below the skin.
It would be some time before Professor Dumat, something of an expert on the subject of monstres et prodiges, would explain to us that, etymologically speaking, we were ludicrous rather than terrifying, that all freaks of nature such as ourselves traced their lineage to a single chuckling ancestor. We and our kind, he said, pausing to take a sip of wine, were lusus naturae—jokes of nature. He smiled. Perhaps the young lady had known Latin.
We did very well, my brother and I. Very well indeed. Robert Hunter’s trade in opium, I suspect, had acquainted him with the imp of the perverse who resides, all velvet stroke and thorny goads, in all of us; who whispers to us to go ahead, to touch what we would not touch, to go where we would not go. Though ignorant of Latin, he was fluent in the language of shillings and francs; understood, as few men I have known, the grammar of human shame. Desire and fear, to Hunter, were not verbs but nouns, things to be sold like a tippet of fur or a set of butcher’s steels; they were subject and object, interchangeable but linked; he was the verb that gave them relation, that brought them to life. Or, rather, we were.
None of this was new, of course. The world we discovered in Belfast and Dublin, Paris and Pamplona, had preceded us, had always been there, waiting, as it were, for our arrival. Keeping itself entertained in any way it could. We simply stepped into the places already reserved for us. We were the guardians of the damned in hell, the grinning gargoyles chained to the pediment. We were the monster in the looking glass, the rustle in the wilderness of realities.
And more. For Ambroise Paré, from whose sixteenth-century work the good Professor Dumat read to us at length, we had been evidence of the glory of God. And proof of his wrath. A corruption of the seed; a plant twisted by the smallness of the womb. A product of interference by demons or devils. Or the artifice of wandering beggars. You say I am being unfair? That things had surely changed since the days of Pare’s speculations? That science and reason had lit the lamp, banished our fears, et cetera, et cetera? I say nothing had changed since Paré’s contemporary to the north allowed Trinculo, dreaming of showing Caliban to the masses, to speak the simple truth: “When they will not give a do it to relieve a lame beggar, they will give ten to see a dead Indian.” Just so. Hunter was our Presbyterian Trinculo, you see, transported to 1829. There were lame beggars aplenty to be had, as many or more as in the days when the Bard leapt the slag heaps on the way to the Globe. And we? We were the dead Indian, of course, who for a time drew them in from salon and straw yard alike, who let them finger the crinkled parchment of his drying flesh—so exotic! so red! so very much like theirs and yet not! not!—while discreetly lightening their purses.
No, if science and reason had accomplished anything, I thought, it was to make us less ashamed of poking our fingers in the wound. Whereas before we might have shivered at the sight of the extra finger, the humped spine, the male root growing from female flesh, now we could measure and describe, draw and dissect it in the name of science. Whereas before we might have gawked at the freaks who vied for our attention and our money, now we could catalogue and collect them, Latinize and label them like carnivores’ teeth in locking cabinets or malignant tumors in bell jars. And perhaps this was progress.
I could never believe it. We had merely replaced one form of cruelty with another more brazen, a form no more capable of seeing the heartbreak behind the horror, yet less willing to be appalled by its own curiosities. Indeed, for some (invariably the whole and healthy) the bent limb was preferable to the straight. To the learned gentlemen of the Baltimore Medical and Surgical Journal (what would our education have been without the help of Professor Dumat?) civilization had so blinded us to the beauty of corruption that the collector had to look abroad, among ruder people, to find the treasures he sought. “For the truth is that the practiced eye kindles at the sight of a remarkable excrescence as the traveler’s does at that of lofty mountains or colossa
l edifices; a monstrous birth, a syphilitic tongue, any and all expressions of the pathological sublime, will captivate and engage us (intellectually and, yes, gentle reader, aesthetically) more than any summer’s peach. And yet we in the West, sadly, nip the most promising growths of disease in the bud; morbid growths stand no better chance among us than apples in a schoolhouse yard; they are all picked off long before they are ripe.”
Even at our age, the lesson was not lost on us: adulation and revulsion could spring from the same source; excessive praise walked hand in hand with untempered condemnation. And drop by drop this thimbleful of arsenic poisoned our hearts, confused our sight. Slowly, imperceptibly, like twin shoots under a glass bowl, we began to twist and curve, to adjust ourselves to our new sky and its smooth, invisible logic. We began, for the first and only time in our lives, to grow monstrous, to the point that when true adoration crossed our path—no, not our path, my path—for the first and only time in our lives, I mistook it for its corrupted twin, and let it pass me by.
II.
She was thirty-one years old. A widow of means. A mature beauty whose charms could eclipse the newly minted radiance of women half her age (and tie the tongues of their escorts); whose less-than-perfect fingers, placed ever so lightly on an arm in praise or teasing censure, could confuse the young and remind the old of who they once had been. A woman of intelligence and playful humor, she had a touch of melancholy about her that added depth and color to all her more obvious qualities, a silence so genuine and unaffected, so apart, it quickly earned her the hatred of half the women she met.
Would they have hated her less, I wonder, had they known that what appeared to them as confidence was actually an almost complete lack of self-regard, that what seemed conceit was in fact nothing more than an absence of vanity? Or did they know this already, and hate her precisely because of it, because they understood, instinctively, how attractive a quality this could be to men of all ages and fortunes who, sensing that vacuum, would helplessly seek to fill it with themselves? But it hardly matters. Suffice it to say that before her much-discussed engagement to Guillaume Pluvier (the famously handsome patron of the arts whose father, Bernard Pluvier, had been with Napoleon in Italy) Sophia Marchant had been considered among the most desirable women in Paris. After her engagement, the wags would add, she was more desirable still.
Begin with the music then: the quadrilles and the waltzes playing from the other room, the busy hubbub of human voices, the small cymbals of glass touching glass. Below these, the creak of floorboards and the hiss of flames in the hearth. Deeper still, the distant clatter of wheel and hoof, the shake of bells, the muffled shout.
Snow was falling on the rue Saint-Antoine the evening we met. I remember noticing it, like something alive, moving between the heavy blue curtains of the drawing room; and seeing our chance, we ducked along the thicket of spotted lilies nodding in the mirror, past the flames burning in the piano’s wood, and pushed aside the cloth. Our first snow. The stones of the road were already marbled with it; the south-facing edges of carriages and fences, paling quickly. Snow was catching in the tangled manes of the horses standing side by side in their traces, still as confectioners’ offerings in a window display.
“You have not seen snow before, I think?” said a soft female voice behind us, and suddenly it is as though I were standing again by that window, feeling the chill coming through the glass, and Emmanuel Dumat, our tutor and translator, were once again hurrying to our side, having momentarily lost sight of his charges and then noticed who it was that had boldly (and not untypically) decided to introduce herself to us. “You have not seen snow before, I think?” How like her, really, to sweep aside all convention, to cut like a knife (but gently, so gently) through the dead layers of expected things to a warmth, an intimacy of tone, as though the two of you were lovers at dusk in a dark room, looking out on the falling world through the same small window. She was right. I had not seen snow before. There were so many things I had not seen.
By the time we had turned ourselves about, my brother walking backward as I pivoted in place, wheel rim and spoke, Dumat was there, bowing, introducing, explaining: “Permettez-moi … de vous presenter …”
She stopped him with a smile. “I am very grateful, monsieur, but I believe these gentlemen and I would prefer struggling along on our own.” She extended her hand to my brother. “Sophia Marchant.”
A decade younger than anyone else present, lost in a sea of tailored waistcoats and silk cravats, Eng and I had been entertaining the company (in pairs and small groups) with a small, harmless act that seemed, somehow, to be expected of us. We had stumbled onto the idea quite accidentally when, at the beginning of the evening, a young woman had offered my brother her hand and I, unaware, had reached for it first. The group had laughed at this apparent competition between us, and as our host took us around, always accompanied by Dumat, we quite naturally, and almost unconsciously, expanded on our early success. Feigning innocence, pretending to be unaware of what all the laughter could be about, I would now snatch at any feminine hand that came our way and bring it to my lips, murmuring “enchanté,” my eyes closed as if—like a Hottentot at a symphony—I found it all simply too intoxicating, too wonderful, while my brother, playing the role of the frustrated second, would shake his head and mumble imprecations or, better still, pretend to jerk me slightly just as my lips were about to touch the soft white skin of my latest enchantress.
None of that was possible now. I let my brother take her hand, then kissed it in turn.
“I saw you looking out the window,” she said. “I did not know it was snowing.”
“I have never seen … snow, before,” I answered, since she seemed to be speaking to me.
“It is very beautiful?” she said, looking over my shoulder.
“It is,” I said, unable to turn around. “Very beautiful.”
She was quiet for a moment, setting the world to her own time. Far off, I could see her bare back and auburn hair in the mirror; behind her, the blue wall of the curtain, the fissure of falling snow. “As a little girl I should put out the lamp and sit by a window and watch the snow fall.” She paused, then looked around the room, where a number of faces, having turned in our direction, now attempted to look away without calling attention to themselves. She seemed not to have noticed. “What can they be thinking, missing this?” she said quietly, and then, turning to Dumat, still hanging about with his hands clasped behind his back like a child afraid of spilling something: “Tell us, Monsieur Dumat, what do you think they are saying that is so very important? No, don’t tell us. It would be too distressing. We do not want to know. Do you not agree?” she said, looking at me.
“I do,” I said. “It would make us all very sad.”
She laughed, turned to Dumat. “You see, monsieur? We speak English très bien. Together, I think, the three of us make almost one English person.”
“Not so many, I think,” said my brother, her warmth having thawed his natural reticence.
“Then we must practice until we are at least two English people.”
Dumat smiled, sensitive enough to know when he was not wanted. “I will leave you to your English, my friends.” He bowed. “Mademoiselle.”
We watched him walk away, his hands still clinging to one another like lovers conspiring behind his back, his head and torso turning, first left, then right, as if welded from the same recalcitrant block of steel.
She waited until he’d crossed a third of the floor before she turned and looked at me, her eyes moving over my face with a familiarity neither brazen nor discomfiting, studying me as though we had known each other long ago and parted, and she was now trying to recall the features that had once been so familiar. It lasted only a moment before she looked directly into my eyes and smiled—almost as if, indeed, she had recognized me.
“Hello,” she said quietly.
“Hello,” I answered.
How strange that I should hardly remember her anymore
, and yet the loss of her, the absence I felt when she had gone, should remain vivid these sixty years and more. Like a live coal thrown on the winter ice, she burned through and was gone, leaving only a dark hole, gulping at the water beneath. What did we talk about that night? It hardly matters. Snow, I suppose. And Paris. She insisted we have a glass of wine. Others joined us briefly, drifted away. We talked about going out for a walk, sweeping clean the straight, snowy ranges piling up on the fences, building a snowman, but didn’t. She found my brother funnier than she did me—not surprisingly, for Eng, with his dry delivery and slightly bewildered expression, could be very amusing and, like any man, appreciated a good audience. I didn’t mind. I could afford to be generous. During the course of the evening—so unobtrusively, so gradually that to this day I am unconvinced she herself was aware of it—she had aligned herself with me, turning her body so that, if not quite parallel, together we formed a wide angle on the world.
Was I nineteen? Indeed I was. Was I young and impressionable? Yes and yes again. Had the wine (and the snow and the lilies and the Persian patterns of the carpets) gone to my head? No doubt they had. And yet I did not behave like a fool. I did not grow embarrassingly loquacious, or spill my wine on the parquet floor. I did not grow taciturn and silent at some perceived shift of affections. There was no need. A great calm seemed to have settled over me. And though it is true that I wondered, more than once that evening, what was happening to me, it is equally true that what I saw and felt was as incontrovertible as the descending snow. There it was. The horses shivered themselves black, the music stopped and began again, the sleeve of her dress brushed past my arm, and then, as unbelievably as if a butterfly had suddenly settled on one of the lilies reflected in the glass, returned.