Baptiste, distraught, watches as fire devours the world.
NO ONE KNOWS IF THE MANATEE DIED BECAUSE of the heat or was stifled by the dense smoke, but once the flames were under control, the creature was found floating underwater, inert, its white skin as warm as a human’s.
Almost at once, Elie’s lighter was discovered in the smoking ash. The boy had dropped it as soon as the last bale of hay was on fire, as if he’d wanted to be sure that it would be easily found. Grasping it delicately with a handkerchief, Jemma brandished it high in the air, asking in a strong voice if anyone recognized it. Alice gulped and Baptiste stepped up like a sleepwalker, saying, “It’s mine.”
Aside from the dead manatee, the stallion, and Numa the lion who’d mysteriously vanished into thin air, two bears had suffocated and three horses were injured so badly that one had to be shot immediately while the other two looked on, long legs wobbling, hair burned, flesh blackened.
In the crowd of faces – hostile, shocked, or stunned – Baptiste tries in vain to find Stella. Around the horse lying on the sand, limbs still shuddering, a puddle of blood is spreading, drawing under the animal a red and liquid shadow. Nearby, buckets of water are being thrown on the crackling flames still crawling through the grass. In the air drifts a smell that Baptiste recognizes but can’t name. Then he spots her, unmoving as a pillar of salt. On her face, worse than hatred, terror, or disgust, he sees sad satisfaction at having been right, suspicion rewarded. While the police are handcuffing him, Alice and Stella make the same move: each places her hands on her belly as if to protect something precious or to hide a source of shame. And then he is taken away and soon it is all as remote, as unreal, as the city buried under the fire of its mountain.
THE DUNGEON IS ICY, AS IF ALL THE HEAT ON earth has been taken away, as if it has never known the light of the sun. Curled up on the cement floor, Baptiste hears cries and insults bursting out of the other cells, joining together to form an incomprehensible din.
A guard advances like an automaton, his heavy black shoes beating time like a lugubrious drum, and stops in front of the metal gate.
Automatically, Baptiste stuffs his hand in his pocket and takes out the copper ball he has carried with him everywhere since his first day with the circus. The sphere slips between his fingers and he watches, doing nothing to hold on to it, as it seems suspended between heaven and earth for a second that never ends.
“Baptiste Cyparis?” asks the guard.
The ball has touched the ground, it rolls down the corridor, disappears.
“No. You’re mistaken. My name is Numa, Numa Lazarus,” Baptiste says without stuttering.
AS A CHILD, AUGUSTUS EDWARD HOUGH LOVE was not so much precocious as different. And to tell the truth, just a bit unsettling. He said his first word at around the same age as his brothers and sisters, but while the older siblings had mumbled the traditional “papa” and “mama,” Edward trumpeted a resounding and perfectly clear “fourteen.” That was how the story, not totally false but not rigorously true either, that he’d learned to count before he could speak entered the family mythology, a legend his mother kept alive with pride tempered with perplexity.
During the months following that first and founding exclamation, he refused to express himself in any way but by numbers, assigning to each of them one or more meanings known, alas, only to himself.
These seemed to vary according to where the numbers fit in the complicated design the child worked out the way others built towers with their wooden blocks. When finally he agreed to enrich his speech with some nouns and verbs, he continued to show a preference for numbers, pronouncing them slowly, rolling them around in his mouth with delight.
He went through several enigmatic phases when he applied himself to creating series that would allow him to organize the world to his own satisfaction. Going out to the garden to make sure he wasn’t doing anything he shouldn’t, the nurse would find him sitting quietly in the grass in his short pants, legs stretched out on either side of a pile of loot made up of bird feathers, pebbles, lumps of coal, an old bolt, a piece of shoelace, and what looked very much like a dried-up rabbit’s turd, objects with nothing in common except that they were all as black as ink. Another day, he got it in his head to pick up everything round that he could find – including coins his father had left on his chest of drawers and the hoop from his sister’s crinoline, scissored out of its envelope of cloth, feats that sentenced him to bed without supper, thus depriving him of the opportunity to add plate, bowl, and saucer to his collection.
Unlike so many little boys, Edward didn’t tear open the objects to see how they were made. Rather he would press his ear against anything that interested him, as if he were trying to locate its breathing or its intimate palpitation.
His mother, seeing him motionless like that for the first time, his head against the belly of a rag doll, thought to herself that maybe he had the soul of a physician – after all, that is not an occupation to be sniffed at. When she found him a week later in the same absorbed posture but this time with his temple pressed against a big stone at the back of the garden, she didn’t know what to think.
“Edward, what are you doing there?” she asked impatiently.
“Listening,” he replied in a low voice, as if to avoid startling a bird.
“Listening to what?”
“To what’s underneath.”
She went on, determined to get to the bottom of it. “Underneath what?”
He replied, as if it were the most normal thing in the world: “Underneath the rock.”
She did not let go, presenting in a tone of cold observation: “Edward, what’s underneath the rock is earth.”
Now it was the little boy’s turn to ask: “And under that?”
“Under what?” Her impatience was growing in spite of herself.
“Under the earth,” the child reminded her.
She wondered how the devil her son could have become so obstinate. “Under the earth, young man, there is more earth.”
Then, to cut short this discussion that was obviously going nowhere and from which she had no hope of emerging victorious or even of learning more about this small individual to whom she had given birth, she added sharply: “And earth is dirty. Look at yourself. Now hurry and change or you’ll be late for tea.”
No doubt it was best, all things considered, that little Augustus Edward did not dream of becoming a disciple of Asclepius, for he was so awkward he was often a threat to himself and others. During the first ten years of his life he:
– nearly drowned at the age of nine when he fell head first into the duck pond. It must be said that he was busy just then reading De motu corporum in girum by Sir Isaac Newton and that, face buried in the large volume that he was struggling to keep at eye-level, he had been advancing mechanically across the back garden, not watching where he was going. (Incidentally, he nearly drowned a second time when, after a gardener had fished him out in extremis, he released a desperate cry and dove back down to look for the book, which, as per the Archimedes Principle – an object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object – had sunk straight to the bottom.)
– had four fingers run over as he was attempting to measure the circumference of a wagon wheel in motion.
– dyed his younger sister’s hair an ugly shade of green when trying to give her the blonde tresses she’d been dreaming of, using a concoction he’d prepared from various ingredients only some of which were edible.
– sprained his left ankle at least three times and his right ankle once on the stairs that he climbed up and down absentmindedly, chanting his sums to the sound of his steps on the marble.
– prepared in the kitchen a mauve mixture that seethed and fumed before producing an abundant foam the dog had the misfortune to taste; the animal spent two days between life and death and afterwards stubbornly refused to place even one paw in the accursed room.
&
nbsp; – almost lost an eye while performing before his mother’s dressing table mirror a mysterious experiment in optics that involved a pocket handkerchief, two silver spoons, and an oil lamp; he nearly set fire to the family manor into the bargain.
There was a time when he counted everything: the number of times he ran the comb through his crow-black hair every morning; the number of peas on his plate; the number of flagstones in the main foyer (this operation presented an extra challenge, for those that ran along the walls had been cut and he had to reconcile the fractions); the number of footsteps between the house and the duck pond and between pond and chapel. Then he tackled some more difficult matters, endeavouring to estimate with complex formulas how many hairs there were on the dog and pieces of gravel on the paths in the garden, eventually spending weeks with his nose to the sky trying to calculate the quantity of stars in the firmament. Around the same time he began to suffer from migraines.
Even once he’d given up his mania for counting everything to grapple with problems both more wide-ranging and more difficult, at moments of nervous tension, worry, or doubt he kept up the habit of reciting to himself long series of figures that made sense only to him, and that he seemed to invent even as he calculated, chanting:
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233 …
1 4 1 5 9 2 6 5 3 5 8 9 7 9 3 …
… or in a case of extreme distress:
6, 28, 496, 8128, 33 550 336, 8 589 869 056, 137 438 691 328 …
The entire Love family got its first strong inkling of its youngest son’s remarkable skill at dinner one evening in April, 1894, when he was twelve years old. On the menu there was mutton, a meat Edward hated because he thought it tasted like wool and he stuffed his portion in his pockets so that later he could give it to the dog.
Theresa Love shared the latest news about the household with her husband, the colonel. He listened abstractedly, having no interest in a visit by a fabric merchant – she had acquired more than ten metres of Italian silk which would be used to make new drapes for the small study – and even less in discussions with the gardener on the location of various roses – a bush supposed to produce red flowers having been covered instead with yellow buds the summer before, so that this spring an entire bed had to be reorganized. She was now at matters of household management, which were still submitted to the head of the household so he could ratify his wife’s decisions. He did so methodically, only too happy that she was taking charge of it all, although he nevertheless insisted on having the last word.
“Mary asked for Saturday off to attend the wedding of one of her sisters in Yorkshire,” said Mrs. Love. “I told her, ‘You poor dear, I don’t know how many sisters you have, but if they all decide to marry one after another, each in a more out-of-the-way place than the one before, you’d be well advised to buckle your suitcase for good.’ Just think, she’s been with us barely eighteen months and already she’s been away twice for some such nonsense. I hope she realizes she can’t take advantage of our kindness.”
“Twenty-two,” Edward said in a low voice.
“What’s he muttering?” roared the colonel, determined to make a man of this slender and withdrawn son. “Speak up, boy.”
“It’s not eighteen months that Mary’s been with us, it’s twenty-two.”
“That doesn’t matter,” continued Theresa who didn’t intend to get flustered over such a minor detail.
The colonel, who valued precision in all matters, congratulated Edward, surprising everyone because children were not supposed to join in adults’ conversation.
“Well done, son! Twenty-two months. No matter what the circumstances, accuracy is essential.”
“Actually,” Edward went on, slightly encouraged, “she joined our staff exactly twenty one months, three weeks, and five days ago, but I thought it best to round it out.”
Around the table, everyone had stopped chewing. The mutton was congealing on their plates. Wanting to dispel the uneasiness he’d provoked, Edward added affably:
“It was a Monday.”
Once the initial surprise was over, the colonel was favourably impressed by such an unusual talent. He sent for calendars of the preceding years, then the twenty-two volumes of the nineteenth edition of the Encyclopaædia Britannica thus far available and questioned his last-born son until the lad’s mouth was dry, his head spinning. Not once, however, did the child make a mistake. Without hesitation he could state on what day the Battle of Agincourt had started, on what days Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I had died, on what day Christopher Columbus had first set foot on American soil, and even, after a very brief pause, on what day Our Lord was born (Saturday), though that was impossible to confirm.
When they finally got up from the table, the sun had long since disappeared behind the hills. Edward realized then that he had not been able to say the one thing that had struck him as important, the very reason he’d spoken up: both of Mary’s absences were not for her sisters’ weddings but for their funerals.
The Love boys’ private tutor was a thin, melancholy, feverish young man who spent his days writing fiery missives to the woman who had left him for a young man who was not just rich but – supreme outrage – horribly handsome. For the most part then, Edward and his brothers were left to themselves, their teacher content to set before them volumes from the manor’s library or his own collection, paper, and pens, and to give them some perfunctory instructions. After that, with his bulging forehead resting on his fine and trembling fingers, he began to search for an adjective to rhyme with cruel.
Thus Edward learned Greek and Latin almost on his own, deciphering the original text of the Iliad side by side with the Latin version by Lorenzo Valla and the English translation made by William Cowper. Later, he took a certain pleasure in the plays of Seneca until the day his brother Philip informed him that nothing in those works had really occurred.
Accustomed to finding in books a kind of harmony that too often the world seemed to lack, Edward first thought that his brother was joking. Going back to his reading however, he couldn’t drive doubt from his mind. What if Achilles and Ulysses had never existed? If Phaedra and Hippolytus were merely chimeras?
“Sir?” he asked faintly.
The slender, pale young man, surprised, lifted his eyes from the page he’d been hunched over all morning.
“What is it, Edward?”
“Sir, Phaedra is true though, isn’t it?”
A blush coloured the tutor’s cheeks. He imagined for an instant the fascinating and fertile discussions he’d dreamed of when accepting the position – Oh, how his life had changed since then! Oh, the cruelty! – on the nature of truth and lies and about the uneasy position between them occupied by literature, even Greek literature. That thought was driven away at once, however, by the image of his beloved in another man’s arms, and he gave up on exploring the subject more deeply for the benefit of the young pupil staring at him, round eyes filled with worried expectation, while his older brother, sitting a little farther away, was having a quiet laugh.
“No, Edward, it’s not true,” he replied bluntly.
“But …” the boy started to say.
“It’s not true,” the teacher hammered out his words. “I’ll have you know that just because words are said or even written, it doesn’t mean they’re true.” Then, in a tone of voice he’d have used to reprimand a particularly insolent pupil: “Let that be a lesson to you, young man.” Then he began to search for an adjective that rhymed with treacherous.
Edward, sheepish, closed Seneca and never opened it again. As of that day he limited himself to books of algebra, arithmetic, and trigonometry, which he was certain could not lie to him.
Edward was awkward and ill-at-ease around other children and adults: the latter regarded him with the brief and superficial attention paid to a phenomenon such as a potato that resembled a human face, or a strongman on display at a fair, the former banned him systematically from their games with the visceral instinct p
eculiar to all young animals that allows them immediately to distinguish the one in a crowd who is different from the others. He was, however, absolutely at home in the land of mathematics. The quiet purity of numbers, their reassuring predictability, their sensible and sober elegance combined with the infinite possibilities they gradually revealed – like a horizon line that seems very close but moves away when one approaches it – everything that formed the very essence of geometry, algebra, and arithmetic occupied and kept his mind alive, offering him at once a refuge and a journey that was constantly renewed.
Around the age when young boys ordinarily stopped wanting to join in their sisters’ games, insisted on having long trousers made to replace their short pants, and started eyeing the youngest and most winsome servants, Edward turned in on himself even more, if such a thing were possible. He went on sharing meals with the family but did so grudgingly and with such stubborn silence that his mother, exasperated, finally excused him, as long as he condescended to sit at the table and appear civil whenever there were guests.
For one autumn and one winter he lived at night, spending solitary hours watching the course of the stars, transcribing it at dawn on large sheets of paper that he then covered with notes and observations. He became engrossed for weeks at a time in endless equations, enjoying nothing so much as shedding light on their fundamental and radiant simplicity, covering entire pages with his delicate writing, with the d, the q, and the b resembling notes escaped from a symphony, while the g, the j, and the y suggested flowering trees in the spring. Often, he would fill a piece of paper, turn it over to write on the back between lines already drawn, then furiously crumple it and start afresh at once, never wearying or losing heart, convinced that one day what he was looking for would turn up. He would fumble in the darkness that most often bathed his mind, but where now and then a brief and searing illumination gave him a glimpse of what he’d worked on for weeks without knowing it, which had now appeared to him fully formed, like a bird emerging from its shell.
Wonder Page 8