Little

by Edward Carey

  He pointed to a patch of his left elbow.

  “A baby rhesus monkey was found drowned in a porcelain potty.”

  He rubbed a portion of his chest.

  “A Barbary ape hung himself from a bell cord. I couldn’t sustain it; I had to let my staff go. One day the chandelier fell down, singeing the fur of the liveried chimp and cutting into him.”

  He touched the fur of his right arm.

  “The monkeys began to riot. They wouldn’t calm. But still then I had Pascal. Greatest of primates. You should have seen him in his smoking jacket, wearing his little cap with the gold tassel. I couldn’t always control them; sometimes they got the better of me. Such a hôtel, my hôtel, not a full hôtel, for sure. Admittedly, the upstairs meaner rooms were empty by then.”

  He smoothed the fur on several portions of his body.

  “People would still come to see Pascal sipping cognac. But things got muddier. Muddier and muddier still. They said they could hear me every night shouting at you, Pascal—that every night they were disturbed by my shouting and your screaming. And now you don’t make a sound. They’ve taken everyone away. They say I hit you! I never hit you. Why should I hit you when I love you? And then on Wednesday I go to the cage and there you are in the corner, all lonely and still.”

  He was silent then, stroking the monkey’s corpse.

  After a while I said, “Thank you very much, sir, for telling me.”

  He stroked on.

  “Excuse me, sir?” I said. “May I touch him?”

  “You want to?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “Then you shall, spirit, and free of charge.”

  I took Pascal’s right hand. It was very elongated and black, with sharp claws, longer than mine, but thinner and cold and very stiff.

  “I’m sorry he died,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, “such sorrow.”

  “Sir!” I called to Curtius in our own language, breaking out of myself. “Sir, shall we draw him together?”

  “What an idea,” my master replied. He was smiling; I could see his teeth.

  “In French,” the widow said, “in French please. Doctor Curtius, we should understand each other, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, certainly, Widow Picot.”

  “Then let us, from this moment, always and only speak in French.”

  My master said, merely, “’rench.”

  “Pascal was a genius,” Bertrand whispered to me. “I’ll never see his like again. What am I going to do now?” he asked, taking hold of my free hand, the other still holding on to Pascal’s. “What’s going to happen to me? What shall we do, my love, my little man? I’m stuck.”

  He looked at the widow, then asked me, “Is she in charge?”

  “She thinks she is,” I whispered.

  “Excuse me, madame,” he said with great urgency. “Do you have any animals? I’m very good with animals.”

  The widow turned to the bailiffs. “This house is ours now. You must vacate. Little, come away before you catch something that further impedes your usefulness. How typical of you to seek such company.”

  “Can I help you with any animals you have?” Bertrand called. “I’m gentle. I’m very, very gentle, I’m . . .” and here Bertrand le Velu could contain himself no longer. He let go of my hand, and I let go of Pascal’s, and he brought the dead monkey to his face and sobbed into his fur. As he was escorted out, he called, “I wear all my memories, so I never forget a thing. I’m dressed in memory. I’m dressed in all my friends. They’re always close. They keep me warm. What a fine hat you’ll be, Pascal, a very fine hat, and how I’ll love you always.”

  The shrieks began again outside and slowly died away and we were left alone.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Monkey House.

  What an emptiness it was. I didn’t think it suited us at all; I thought the widow must have been terribly mistaken. She had struck out too far. There were only four of us to fill this space, us four and traces of what had lived there before. It may once have been a celebrated attraction, a highly visited place, but disease and death had soured this house of natural miracles. People had apparently lost their taste for monkeys, as if they’d collectively made up their minds that they no longer believed in them. But the monkeys, though absent, would never be forgotten to us.

  It was not just the leaflets littering the floors that boasted Les Singes à Paris. Up and down the narrow stairs, along the bumpy passageways, the walls were marked by scratches and rips. The stairs themselves had been gnawed. It was, all in all, a partially eaten place, a nibbled house, a very chewed residence.

  “This is our new home?” Edmond asked nervously.

  “A monkey house, that’s what it is,” my master said. Monkey House, no matter that it had once been a small hotel and before that a café with gambling tables, no matter that it was to be a house of wax personages, the Monkey House was what it was always called.

  “Little,” said the widow, “be useful, unpack. Get to it.”

  I carried our boxes and sacks upstairs. Painted on the doors of the first-floor cage-rooms—a few of their metal bars remaining—were the names of the former occupants: MARIE-CLAUDE, FRÉDÉRIQUE, CATHERINE ET SIMON, DOMINIQUE, LAZARE, AUGUSTINE, AUGUSTIN, NICOLAS ET MARIE-ANGE, CLAUDIA ET ARNAUD, GRAND JEAN, PAULINE, ELOISE ET ABELARD. By each of the names was a small drawing of the animal or animals that used to be nearby, so that people climbing the stairs and peering into those rooms would know what to look for under the blankets, behind the curtains, over the lintels.

  The widow took for her bedroom a chamber with CATHERINE ET SIMON on the door, once the home of howler monkeys. For Edmond she chose a little room to the left of hers, the former residence of a spider monkey named PAULINE. Curtius’ room was to the right of the widow’s, the former home of a hundred-pound baboon called LAZARE from eastern Africa, captured when already mature. His obituary, written by Bertrand, was posted by this door: Lazare had died at thirty-five, after swallowing a silver rattle.

  The widow told Edmond to carry his father’s shape up the stairs and place him on the landing just outside her door, facing the banister, as if he might wish to lean over and have a look down into the hall. The dark sheet was removed; in this new house, he was to be on display.

  “Here you are, Henri,” she said. “From here you can see almost everything. We are very proud. We do so well. I shall hide you no longer; I want you to see how we come along. Indeed, I declare you!”

  “Excuse me, sir,” I asked my master, “where am I to sleep?”

  The widow responded by marching me back down the stairs.

  “Kitchen,” said the widow. “In the kitchen. Out of the public eye.”

  It was a black and damaged room, floorboards scraped, walls scorched by flames from the fireplace, as if the room itself had been cooked.

  “You shall have your pallet here, and be most comfortable. It’s at the back of the house, closest to the boulevard ditch. It should fit you very well.”

  “It is a very unhappy room, I think.”

  “No doubt it is you that makes it so.”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “You’ll be in here, mostly, not out there. We shall have a very new public, and when the public is present in the great hall, then shall you keep yourself shut up in here.”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “But now you must tidy this place, this mansion of ours.”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “So get along!”

  Well then, the broom.

  “We shall call the business the Cabinet of Doctor Curtius,” announced the widow in the hall. “The words Widow and Picot shall not draw people; they have an everyday ring about them. But Doctor and Curtius have a certain sound.”

  “Do they?” said my master. “A certain sound!”

/>   “And should our venture fail, I shall need to find another employment and we need not both be condemned for our failure. I am a widow, you are a man.”

  “I see. Yes. A widow, a man. Yes, that is how it is.”

  “But most of all,” she added, not without unhappiness, “a woman’s name does not encourage. Women are not supposed to have businesses. Of course, Doctor, we shall not fail.”

  The house needed such a deal of cleaning that all four of us went about it at first, mopping and sweeping. After several hours it looked really very little better, but Curtius was coughing uncontrollably and had to be taken out. The widow and her son would promenade with him; I should stay behind and carry on the work.

  “Hello,” I quietly said to it after they left. The response was creaks and scratching. I closed my eyes and felt them moving then—all the unhappy spirits of dead monkeys, running at me, swinging for me, curling up their lips, showing me their teeth.

  “I’m not frightened.”

  The house clicked. Something fell within the walls.

  “You’re a very grand place, I know.”

  Something upstairs groaned.

  “I’m going to live here. I’ve come to live here.”

  Dust seemed to gather up and whirl about me.

  “Do your worst, why don’t you? I’ve nowhere else to go. I’m staying. I mean to work you, house, until we are friendly.”

  A crack then, a crack that started small but grew in noise until it was a long shriek. It was the crutches, I thought, the crutches outside adjusting to the new weight of me.

  “Please,” I said, “let us come to an understanding.”

  A scurry upstairs as if someone or something were running along the landing, though when I went up nobody was there. It wasn’t right, I thought, to leave me alone in such a place, with all those afternoon spirits itching to attack.

  “Very well then!” I called to the house. “Do go ahead and crush a child. Here I stand. Go on, I’ll not fight you!”

  A door swung open. No one came out. No one was there.

  “I know you’re unhappy, but come let’s talk to one another and feel at home together. So it’s true, you have swallowed me! And I mean, O big house, to nurture you, to be wholesome to your great insides. To fill you up! Even me, your supper! Little chitterling that I am, small beer. I’ll tell you everything. I give myself to you.”

  I cannot say whether it was my fanciful thinking or not, but the house seemed to breathe a little then, and let me touch it without unhappiness and learn its every corner. This was where I lived now, inside the beast, and I would make it the best of all possible beasts.

  As I swept, as I spoke to the place and told it who I was and what I had learned and how much I wished to work with my master again and how good was his work and how Edmond had shown me his doll, and that though he might seem a very quiet fellow, still he was company and that the house should be good to him, though he could be self-important he was actually not unpleasant, with his freckles about his nose, and his white chest. The mother, though, I told the house, do feel free to trip her feet, to gnaw at her in her sleep, and make her as miserable as such a fine and glorious abode can.

  As I spilled all to the large place, as I felt less frightened and more at home, there came a dull murmur, a storm approaching from a distance. I thought at first it was a great colony of the dead monkey-folk come to visit me, but then I understood these were new sounds, not from the nervous house but from beyond. From the boulevard outside.

  It was the noise of shutters opening. Of door bolts being pulled across. Of wooden planks being laid down in the mud. A flame whooshing into life. Then a sound like the clearing of a hundred throats, and a murmuring of a hundred voices slowly rising in volume, as if the Boulevard du Temple itself were being wound up by those voices, stoked into life, until there was no quiet anymore, no pause to interrupt the great noise that spread over everything and was amplified alarmingly inside the empty container of the Monkey House. The Boulevard du Temple, the entertainment district of Paris, a living and painted creature, was waking up.

  I ran upstairs. From a window I watched the boulevard swelling with people, from the repairer of broken china to the rat catcher, from the water carrier to the sedan-chair carrier, from the feather merchant to the brick maker, people of Paris were coming in. Here opposites mixed: flour-covered wigmaker’s assistants walked beside coal carriers thick with black dust. And among them were the boulevard people, shouting: itinerant musicians, men with puppets, toy sellers, actors in bright costumes, a man walking a great bear, blind men playing fiddles, children singing, old men dancing, flame swallowers, sword swallowers, a great circus of extraordinary people. Oh, here was living!

  The noise of the boulevard echoed so loudly inside the Monkey House that I did not hear the doors open below, nor the widow enter the building until she was upon me. I was roughly instructed to return to the main hall and there to keep brushing until the hideous animal smell was gone. But that smell would never entirely leave us.

  When it was time to sleep, the widow, summoning monkey shadows all around her, took the light upstairs and with it Edmond and my master. In the darkness I heard shouting and weeping and laughter coming from the boulevard. Many of the noises seemed to originate from the house directly opposite, labeled THE CELESTIAL BED and in slightly smaller letters Doctor James Graham (Late of London). Peeping through a shutter, I saw people arrive there late with lanterns: sometimes couples, sometimes single men.

  Twice in the night, the doors of the Monkey House were noisily rattled from the outside by unseen hands. I tried very hard not to sleep, for my fear was up again and I was not certain it was altogether safe to surrender to sleep in such a place, but eventually, exhausted, I closed my eyes. I dreamed of a monkey sitting on a kitchen chair, rocking back and forth, staring at me with huge eyes. As I sat up in bed, in terror, I saw that someone indeed was there.

  It was Edmond.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Voices in the night.

  Mother’s asleep,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “The doctor’s asleep.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is very late, Edmond, or very early.”

  “He calls out in his sleep, Curtius does.”

  “Yes, I know that well enough.”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “No.”

  “Can you sleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought perhaps I might come here to see how you are.”

  “Well, here I am.”

  “In truth, I was frightened. Mother would hardly let me go into her room for comfort. She’d call me childish. And I wouldn’t want to go into the doctor’s. I was scared, you see, of the house, of what’s beyond it. Mostly of the house. I miss home. I don’t think this place can ever be home; I can’t see how it could be. I fear this house could be the death of me. Are there ghosts, do you think?”

  “Any number of them,” I said.

  “I thought there were. I could hear them scratching.”

  “I know them very well—they came to me, you see. I have seen them moving about in the darkness; I have heard them whispering. Just this afternoon when you went outside and left me here alone, they came upon me—and in a rush!”

  “No!”

  “Oh yes! And they nibbled at me and stroked me and were about to eat me whole when—”

  “When?”

  “—when I talked to them and gave them harsh words and I think we are friends now.”

  “May I be friends with them too?”

  “They might not have you.”

  “Why not?”

  “They are very moody.”

  “I am moody too.”

  “Not like them.”

  “Are they very furious?”

  “You will have to be brave.” />
  “Yes. I will be.”

  “Very brave!”

  “I will.”

  “Then perhaps, in time, I may introduce them to you.”

  “I think I should much rather they left me alone.”

  “Don’t say that—don’t ever say that. You shall make them mad.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “See that?”

  “What?”

  “There was one just now! He stood just before you, with long teeth and claws, but seeing me he darted off again.”

  “Truly? I didn’t see him.”

  “Yet he was there.”

  “You’re trying to frighten me.”

  “I am not.”

  “I’m going back to bed,” he said sullenly.

  “Edmond, wait, you do not have to.”

  “I think I’d better. Mother might hear us. She wouldn’t like it.”

  “You’ll be all on your own.”

  “Yes, but if Mother heard us.”

  “Of course you must always follow your mother’s wishes.”

  “No, that’s not true. But I feel less scared now. Having seen you, though you tried to fright me. Still. May I come, Little—”

  “Marie!”