Little

by Edward Carey

  “You must not!”

  “Oh come, don’t be fussy. I’ve seen so many bodies. In Berne I did. I’ve seen inside bodies. Come along, Edmond, let me take a look.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I am undoing you.”

  “Oh no!”

  “I am going to remove your shirt.”

  “Oh! Please!”

  “I know all about bodies. Doctor Curtius taught me.”

  “Oh dear!”

  “Yes! See how I unbutton you!”

  “I do see it. I feel it.”

  “I am going to learn you, Edmond Picot. Every section of you.”

  “Mother! Mother might come in.”

  “She’s gone out.”

  “She may be back.”

  “There’s time, you know there is.”

  “I’m cold.”

  “Then move to the fire.”

  “How you look at me!”

  “I want to see you.”

  “How you stare!”

  “Can I touch?”

  “I should go.”

  “I see your little frame, your ribs, the life under you moving! Edmond with the human skin! You’re lovely!”

  “Marie! Marie! Stop!”

  “I want to look. Take your hands away, Edmond, I want to look!”

  “I can’t! I cannot! It’s too much to have you staring so.”

  The bell sounded. The widow and Curtius were home. Edmond rushed his shirt back over him, in such a panicking.

  “Edmond!” called the widow. “Edmond, where are you?”

  His hands were shaking terribly as he fled to her. He did not return for several days. When he did, on a pretense, he was still clearly uncomfortable.

  “Oh, you are here! I did not know you should be . . .”

  “It’s where I generally am, the kitchen.”

  “Yes, yes, for now. And perhaps you may remain thus situated, until the end of the month. Perhaps.”

  “Why a month?”

  “I do not think you shall stay much longer than a month. Mother does not like you, and Mother is used to having her way.”

  “Oh, Edmond, please, Edmond, will you help me with your mother? I don’t want to leave. There’s nowhere else for me to go.”

  “You must do everything she asks.”

  “Yes, I shall. I shall do my very best.”

  “You must not break things or move them about.”

  “I will do my best.”

  “She says you are always lurking.”

  “I do not mean to. They should pay me, Edmond. I haven’t yet been paid.”

  “Do not ask it, Marie. Do not anger them in any way.”

  “I will try. It is not always easy.”

  “You must not take off my shirt.”

  “I shan’t, Edmond, I shall never again.”

  “You are a servant.”

  I said nothing.

  “You are a servant, and I am the young master of this house.”

  I said nothing.

  “One day I shall be a tailor!”

  Nothing.

  “One day a great tailor. You a servant.”

  “Will you help me?” I asked.

  “Yes. I shall try.”

  “I do want to stay.”

  “Then you must behave.”

  I worked. I was a servant, the best servant I could ever be.

  I put myself away. I came up with the great vanishing system, in which I could retreat so deep within myself that, though I might appear still the same creature, actually I was very different. I thrust all thoughts and feelings into the depths of me, where they were safe, but in an outward way I became something like an automaton. I was wound up by their orders and performed them mechanically but perfectly. I muted myself and put on the role of servant so that I might have a chance at living. But when I was alone, when they were elsewhere, I recalled myself to me, then I was all about Marie again. Still there.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The citizen of the year 2440.

  I must talk for a moment of larger things, things of French significance. For suddenly it happened that I knew someone very famous.

  While wax busts were made and clothed, another world away so it seemed to me, the Dauphin of France was married to Marie-Antoinette of Austria. In Paris, during a mass celebration for the wedding, some prematurely ignited fireworks started a panic in which one hundred and thirty-three Parisians were crushed to death, among them many women and children. After the fatal stampede, Louis-Sébastien Mercier was in such a temper that he found it quite impossible to calm himself. Collecting all his notebooks, he saw a terrible theme running through his work, and the theme was suffering. For a few days he found it impossible to walk out in his familiar streets.

  “I hate this place now, Little, this abattoir, this cesspool. What casual monsters we are. What calamities we are capable of.”

  Having talked to my master and the widow until she barked him away, he came to me. I sat him down, gave him a glass of wine from the widow’s decanter.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Tell me all. Quickly before they call you back.”

  So he told me of crushed bodies and screams and blood. And that the king had done nothing about it. He took his shoes off and put them on the kitchen table.

  “My shoes are insulted,” he said.

  “I have just scrubbed the table,” I said.

  “Perhaps you are right to stay shut up inside.”

  “No, don’t say that.”

  “What a world it is. I want none of it.”

  “Is it? Won’t you tell me?”

  “If I could but walk the land of this wooden surface, washed and fresh, a new land, an undiscovered land. Yes, if only . . . but . . . well, why ever not? Yes, that’s it! A new home! Yes, clean! Yes, Little, with your scrubbing brush, make it shine!”

  He tore his shoes from the table and bolted from the house.

  Yearning to promenade in a happier place, Mercier set down to write a guidebook to a Paris of the future, to a problem-less, harmonious metropolis, a utopia. He would call his new book Paris in the Year 2440. He brought pages with him when he came to visit, and read them to me in the kitchen.

  “No children are ever crushed by coaches in the city of Paris in the year 2440. The king himself frequently wanders about on foot, obeying the traffic laws wherever he goes. There is no mud on the streets. The poor receive medical attention for free. In the year 2440, on the place formerly occupied by that hideous castle, the Bastille Saint-Antoine, a Temple to Clemency has been erected.”

  And eventually the book was finished and it was published.

  In the year 1770, many Parisians began to read Mercier’s book, to discover exactly what their city would be like in six hundred and seventy years’ time. Written in fury, it made its readers furious. Suddenly they found themselves living in Paris in the wrong year: they resented 1770, they preferred 2440. And so Mercier became famous.

  The widow placed Mercier’s bust in the window, with a placard reading CITIZEN OF THE YEAR 2440, for passersby to marvel at. And it was the sight of people gathered in front of the window, day after day, that gave the widow her enormous idea.

  One afternoon, the widow took Curtius and his black bag out with her on a visit to Mercier. Later that day they came back with Mercier, and also with a new plaster mold. The head in that mold was soon labeled Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I recognized this head: It was Renou, the fellow in gray who had visited us with Mercier in Berne. He’d been in hiding, but he had since returned to Paris, and now he looked very ill. The next week, the three went out again and came back with another head, this one very energetic and friendly; they labeled it Denis Diderot. Afterward came a very unhappy head called Jean Le Rond d’Alembert. These people were no doub
t very well known in the world; I knew not what they had done, only that their heads were to be celebrated.

  {Three old men variously contemplating death.}

  The widow had a huge sign made announcing whose busts were inside, and many more people came to see them. The widow nodded a great deal. My master clapped. The widow went out again, this time on her own. She was very busy.

  Then, late one evening, Edmond came to the kitchen and said that I was to go upstairs to his mother’s room and to bring wine and two glasses. He helped me to ready the tray.

  My master was seated in the widow’s own bedroom. I poured out the wine. The widow untied her bonnet, and all her great brown-russet-chestnut hair tumbled out. Curtius swallowed several times.

  “Edmond,” said the widow, “you may begin to comb me now. Henri used to comb me every night; when he died that duty fell to Edmond. Now, Doctor Curtius, please attend very carefully. I want you to understand. I want to tell you a history. Little, get out.” She called me “Little” sometimes; it pleased her.

  I did get out, but, feeling the tremendous import of the evening, I stayed just beyond the door, and heard all.

  “Attend me, please. I, Charlotte, widowed piece of womanhood that I am, mean to educate you, Doctor Curtius. We are known to each other now, we have business in common, and so I shall let myself a little down.”

  “We are known, yes! To each other!”

  “Edmond, comb, comb away. I reveal myself to you, sir, through the biography of a business. I shall talk to you of my husband.”

  “Oh, yes?” was the doleful response.

  “My Henri Picot’s parents dealt in secondhand clothes. That was the beginning. They had a little shop here in the Faubourg San-Marcel. That is the essential beginning.

  “Comb, Edmond, harder.

  “The first thing you learn about a secondhand-clothes shop is that it must be kept very dark inside. It is essential that the customers can’t quite see what’s there. It’s amazing what poor light can do for a bit of old clothing. You won’t see the stains or the loose threads, you won’t see the patchwork. His parents did not like me at first, but I stood outside and pulled people in, and on Mondays at the big secondhand-clothes market on the Place de Grève, I shouted hard and loud and the parents watched me and approved.

  “But comb, Edmond, do!

  “We sold undershirts that people had died in, panniers of prostitutes, old greasy bonnets belonging to shrunken widows who’d finally given up the ghost. Stockings very mended. Old clothes that had been used, that other bodies had pushed themselves into. There’s a shirt we had in the shop, came back to us seven times, seven different Parisian owners. Our coverings go on and on without us.

  “At our shop, we’d see people trying to climb up the slippery ladder of Paris. A market girl would put on the lace cap of a dead lawyer’s wife. Young women would strip almost to nakedness in the shop and fight each other over a petticoat. Sometimes, at night, when his parents were snoring, Henri and I would go into the store and try things on ourselves. He would dress me up as a lady.

  “Plait, Edmond, tight! Tight!

  “After a time, Henri wanted only the finer stuff. The sight of an old linen cap would upset him. He sat dreaming of gowns for rich people, of silks and satins. His parents didn’t understand; they shook him and struck him and told me to wake him up. But in the following seasons they died—one by tripping on a slick paving stone one February morning, the other in May through an infected cut got from some old clasp—and their demise laid open the possibilities, and a tailor he became. Yet this business, unlike the secondhand-clothing business, was never profitable.

  “Now listen to this, Doctor, attend particularly. Some businesses have no future and should never have been launched. Others must be prodded at the right time, or they will stagnate. We have work making busts. You are very skilled, Doctor Curtius, everyone can see that, and the work is increasing, and we might work somewhere better, particularly now we have our famous heads—not down some quiet passage, but, shall we say, upon a boulevard. We might find more heads, particular heads of great worth. Here we are at the crossroads, you and I. Picot made the change and it killed him. And now we try it on. We attempt to take two steps up society’s great ladder. And my question is this: Will you come with me?”

  “Yes, yes, I will!” There was no pause.

  “Will you hold tight and not let go?”

  “I will, I will by all means. But how, tell me, do we go about it?”

  “In short, dear doctor, I have found somewhere. It is a bigger property than perhaps we have need of, but got for a bargain. Rent for the term paid down in advance. The building is a little used, but it is sturdy enough. A business has gone under, and it makes way for us. Let us not follow it. So, Doctor Curtius, float or drown.”

  “Float! Float!”

  “Edmond, you may return my bonnet.”

  As glasses were clinked, I crept back downstairs. Where would we go, and what would happen in such new territory? Then, suddenly, I took to wondering: Would I be going too? What was to become of me? No one had mentioned me going, but then no one had said I should not, and I feared so to ask them. And so I helped with the packing up and was very useful.

  On the day the carts came, I followed them, trembling in fear of dismissal.

  The widow and my master went first.

  Followed by Edmond.

  And then I a step behind him. I was coming too. Curtius turned to look at me, a slight nod of his head, then back widow-ward. But the widow was focused elsewhere.

  “This street was not good for us, Henri,” she said to her husband’s shape upon the cart. “We’re moving on, and we’ll never look back.”

  BOOK THREE

  1771–1778

  THE MONKEY HOUSE

  Ten years of age until seventeen.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The hairy man.

  Number 20 Boulevard du Temple was a wooden building that stood beside a deep ditch and the city wall. In rather gaunt letters, it boasted of its purpose: HOUSE OF THE WORLD-FAMOUS PASCAL THE PHILOSOPHER PRIMATE—ALIVE!, AND OF HIS MANY BROTHERS and above this: HÔTEL SINGE, which meant “Town House of Monkeys.”

  It looked something like a square temple, with three columns in front and a double-door entrance. Look around the back, though, and you would discover that the entire structure was held in place by two great wooden supports—a building’s equivalent of crutches. This was to be our new home.

  Outside the Hôtel Singe, furniture had been stacked on several carts: everything from cages to boiling pans, from chairs to peculiar, unfamiliar skeletons. And on top of them all, in the cages, were three living things, with staring black eyes, cramped in their homes, with sores on their skins, and large patches of their fur missing. These were monkeys. As we drew closer to the propped-up house, they started screaming.

  Curtius marveled at them. “So long! So thin! So hairy!”

  One monkey let out a terrifying, very sorrowful, very human howl. We were each of us shaken by it, even the widow.

  “Good day to you,” said Curtius to the monkeys, lifting his tricorn.

  Into the wooden house we went.

  The ground floor was dominated by a wide hall, so empty it echoed—almost empty, I should say, for sitting on a footstool to one side was a fat man dressed peculiarly in a kind of bear costume, his whole body, except for head and hands, covered in furs patched together. Here was the bankrupt monkey keeper Bertrand le Velu, which meant “Bertrand the Hairy.” A black-suited official stood a step away from him; le Velu, it seemed, was being taken to prison for debt. In his lap was a small heap of darker fur, which was in fact Pascal the philosopher primate, dead. Orbiting Bertrand le Velu and Pascal, moving about the room taking pieces of property and stacking them near the entrance, were other men in suits.

  “These other
black animals,” the widow said, “are bailiffs. They bite.”

  As the widow signed papers with the bailiffs and a notary, the monkey keeper signaled to me, waving insistently until I approached him. He seemed most eager to talk, and he scratched himself as he chatted, on the crown of his head, under his armpits, around his behind, all in a peculiar fashion which I began to suspect he had caught from the monkeys.

  “I’ve been on and off in the monkey business since I was twelve, I don’t mind telling you. My father was a wealthy man, a merchant dealing in cinnamon and cumin, in nutmeg and in vanilla. He would bring back creatures as well as spices from his long absences. The very first was a Pan troglodytes, a chimp, that I called Florence. Florence bit my finger off here,” he said, brandishing a stump.

  “But I loved her, and I could not stop wondering at what creatures there are upon the earth. And so I collected them to me, and spent all my father’s wealth upon them. They were bought from so many different traders. I could never have enough. I’ve worked with many apes; I used to count a baboon among my friends. I prefer monkeys to humans. They’re more honest. You know where you stand with them. I’ve been marked by the monkey business. I had a snub-nosed monkey once, but it didn’t last. He was all the way from the tropics, and no bigger than that,” he said, indicating a length of about four inches. “Tiny little thing. Such a lovely littleness. That I called Emmanuel. That’s Emmanuel’s frame over there. I boiled him down myself. This is his.”

  He touched a patch of fur on his shoulder.

  “He cost two hundred livres. People loved him for his tininess—he was ill, I think, when I purchased him. But there was no one so good as Pascal, was there, my love? No one approaching you. They’re saying I killed you. Why would I kill you when I love you? When it’s you who made me famous? You do believe me. Don’t you?”

  “I am trying to, sir,” I said.

  “You quite resemble a monkey yourself, little girl. With a nose like that, with those thin arms. Such a proboscis. Given your look, perhaps you’ll understand how it was: This whole house was a place of monkeys. At one time there were over twenty of us here in this house, and only three of us human. Each had his own cage. You went from cage to cage, seeing the hôtel about its business, seeing the inhabitants asleep on their beds or combing their hair or putting on wigs or beauty spots. I had a chimp in livery delivering food on trays. What a hôtel it was! How people crowded in, how they learned about themselves by watching the monkeys. A spider monkey chewing a cigar—they’d remember that the rest of their lives. A capuchin brushing his hair with a rhinestone-studded comb? A baboon sipping wine from a decanter? What a hôtel! But it didn’t last. Some of the residents, though well fed, well cared for, died entangled in their silk sheets.”