Sylva

by Jean Bruller

  Nor was I altogether wrong. For Sylva awoke to this revelation not by recognizing herself at last but because, on the contrary, she suddenly no longer found her image in it. Nanny’s persistence had been greater than mine, and despite the recurrent failure she would make her pupil sit down, every day, morning and evening, in front of her own reflection. This made me think of Trotty, my parents’ fox terrier. When I was a child, I used to hold him up to the wardrobe mirror so that he should see himself; and he too, after sniffing it, would become annoyed and wriggle in my arms until I let him go. Sylva, as the little fox she was, acted just like him: she would tear herself impatiently out of Nanny’s arms, and curl up on the floor by the bed, yawn, close her eyes and fall asleep. It seemed, oddly enough, that far from increasing her familiarity with mirrors, these daily attempts increasingly irritated her.

  “Leave her alone,” I would say to Nanny, myself exasperated by my discouragement. But Nanny was as obdurate as her pupil.

  Then one evening, as I was sitting before the dressing-table in my room, filing my fingernails before going to bed, I saw Sylva come in, probably to kiss me good night after her fashion, as she did every night. I perceived her in the mirror, for my easy chair had its back to the door. Its back was tall and stood between Sylva and me so that she too could see only my reflection in the glass. The result was that she walked toward me, not where I really was, out of her sight, but where she saw me—the cheval glass. Thus she had first to pass close to my chair.

  And so, for an instant, she saw us in the mirror, herself and me, side by side.

  What did she think as she discovered this feminine shape next to “Bonny”? She stood motionless and began to snarl as she had done when she first saw me with Dorothy. She snarled for some time at her own immobile image next to mine, then she began to move. She walked to the looking glass, and her reflection, moving toward her, growled ever more strongly. And suddenly she pounced on the intruder. The result was a great racket of broken glass and Sylva, flabbergasted, sitting amid the splinters on the ground.

  I saw at once that she was not hurt, but also that she was staring at all those pieces with the keenest surprise. She looked at her hand lying on a splinter of glass, withdrew it, put it back, withdrew it again, moving her fingers a little, must have seen her fingers move in the broken shards, rose quickly as if frightened, ran to where she thought she had seen me, stopped dead when she no longer saw me, turned back toward the cheval glass which was now merely an empty frame, gropingly touched (if one can say so) the emptiness inside with her hand, gave a start, ran behind it as if in a panic, suddenly saw me in the frame on the side where she was not expecting me, gave a cry, and fled into her room.

  I had watched the whole scene without stirring or speaking, too curious to see what would happen. Nothing more did happen, as a matter of fact. Sylva did not reappear. I picked up the pieces and took them down to the dustbin, mounted the stairs again to go to bed, once more disappointed by this persistent lack of comprehension. I put out the light and tried to sleep.

  I could not manage to fall asleep and my idle thoughts soon left my disappointing vixen to return to Dorothy. It was like that almost every night since her last visit. What was the matter with the young woman? What had happened between this last time and the one before? That wan complexion, those tired features. Had these changes something to do with me? But her father’s tone had been so startled and almost sarcastic when he said, “You, my poor boy!” Ought I to be relieved or offended by it? Did I love her or didn’t I? Everybody knows how one’s thoughts turn in circles in one’s half-sleep, and incessantly return to their point of departure. They prevent you from falling asleep but don’t progress an inch. That’s what happened this night too, and I was dozing fitfully.

  And then, like a shock, I sensed a presence in the room. I heard nothing. Not a sound. But opening my eyes, I saw a shadow quite close to me, motionless at my bedside. The moon was shining into the room through the slatted shutters, shedding a milky, tiger-striped light, and the silhouette leaned slowly forward amid those bars of moving shadows. I pretended to be asleep but through my eyelashes I could see Sylva’s face approaching mine, and that face—there is no other word for it—was observing, scrutinizing mine. As she had never done before. As if she were trying to discover in it something unknown. With such an unwonted insistence that I hardly dared to breathe while, oddly enough, the doctor’s words came back to me, urging me to think of the invisible work which day after day was accomplished in this blank brain—what junctions, he said, what concatenations of frustrated impressions, forgotten emotions, lost visions, what dim associations, what sudden flashes… And then Sylva left my side, returned to the cheval glass, looked at it, doggedly groped in the empty space.

  With a twinge of my heart, I thought I understood what was happening. I arose, took her in my arms. She allowed herself obediently to be led into the bathroom. Before the big wall mirror, I put on the light and for a moment—very brief or very long, I don’t know—she looked at herself at my side. Her eyes slowly widened. Was she going to recognize herself at last? But how could she, since she had never yet seen herself? And indeed, as always, she began to wriggle to escape me. I sought to hold her back, but then, in an upsurge of fear or rage, she bit my hand with a sort of dull bark, short as a cry, and I let her go, annoyed. But… what’s that? What’s she doing? For the first time for many a week, she huddled up between the wall and the little bow-fronted chest of drawers, where she remained trembling as she used to, her dilated eyes clinging to me.

  I approached her; she did not move. I squatted down next to her. I pressed her to my shoulder. She did not protest. She was shaking. I murmured quite close to her ear, “Come… come now… what’s the matter?” But I knew, I knew too well that neither her vocabulary nor her embryonic intelligence would enable my vixen to answer such a question. However, she turned a stricken face toward mine. And meanwhile her hand rose with unsteady, almost frightened slowness, moved gropingly for a moment over her body, over the soft curve of her breast. And then her fingers began to climb along the slender, supple throat, like a quivering spider. They hesitated on her cheeks, her chin, her ears, her nose—a blind man’s exploring fingers gently deciphering a face. She thus deciphered it slowly and fearfully—discovered it or verified it?—and at last, at last she murmured, in a very small voice, in the tone of a question she might put to me in a quite small, anguished voice:

  “Syl… va?”

  For the very first time she was stammering her own name, and her hand, her fingers became motionless. And she waited, pressed more tightly against me, visibly expecting me to answer, “Why yes, my little Sylva, it’s you, of course…” and indeed that’s what I said. I said it very softly and then she was clinging to my chest with the abruptness of a child who feels the ground giving way under its feet, and I decided to push her a little. I got up and dragged her once more toward the bathroom. But she resisted, and I had the greatest trouble in making her move forward. She protested, “No! No!” in a stifled tone of dread, and I began to get irritated, to think that she was really too stupid. Why, what a to-do about recognizing oneself in a mirror! What an idiotic fear! In a moment she would be amused by it, would laugh with pleasure.

  As if in response to my unspoken thoughts, she seemed momentarily to yield, but then, stepping closer, she suddenly dived, slipped between my hands, escaped me, ran toward the door, left, slamming it behind her, and I heard her dashing along the corridor and clambering up the stairs that led to the attic.

  Should I go after her or not? Was I wrong to force her? But, for heaven’s sake, what a bizarre idea, to be frightened to death by one’s own likeness! I decided to let her sulk if she felt like it, and returned to bed.

  But sleep evaded me more than ever, and strangely, I become more stirred, more intrigued by my vixen’s behavior than I had ever been before. Gradually, in this state of semiconsciousness in which I hovered once again, it seemed to me that I could guess or
understand her better, that I could better identify myself with her, with what she felt. Or rather, I imagined what she had been, half an hour ago: an unconscious, carefree little being, absent from itself, who, as Dr. Sullivan had said, lived and acted without even knowing that it existed, without really distinguishing itself from the rest of things.

  Ever since childhood, we ourselves have been accustomed to, been trained to, see ourselves and distinguish ourselves in this way, and this separateness is so natural to us that we never think of it. But a fox! Had I ever figured to myself what it could be like to discover suddenly that one is isolated, separated, exiled from tutelary nature with whom one had hitherto formed one warmth, one breath, one flesh? And I imagined too for the first time the dreadful revelation it must have been for our distant Neanderthal ancestors, for those bearded, shaggy primates who had no mirrors, to become self-conscious, who had to discover themselves in the eyes of others, in their shouts, their threats, their gesticulations and their hostility—and who discovered themselves as they were—fragile and naked and solitary, with nothing but their own strength in the midst of frightening forests…

  At that moment, as if to illustrate those barbaric imaginings, an earsplitting pandemonium broke out. I sat up. The din started again a little farther away, with a noise of broken glass. I jumped out of bed and dashed into the corridor, where I found the two wall mirrors in pieces. At the same instant, the racket broke out downstairs, coming from the living room. Then from the hall. Then from the study. Nanny, in turn, popped out of her room, in dressing gown and curlers.

  “It’s Sylva smashing the mirrors!” I shouted and hurled myself down the stairs.

  But downstairs, there was no one in sight. Walking on shattered glass, I passed through the three downstairs rooms; not one mirror was whole. I walked up the other flight of stairs. Nothing. Not a sound. The door to Sylva’s room stood open. I walked in and found Nanny, motionless, looking at the bed. My vixen was lying on it, face downward, but bunched up, her head dug deep under the pillow and bolster—like a rabbit seeking refuge in its warren, like a terrorized child trying to return to the dark, reassuring, consoling warmth, to the lethe, the nepenthe, the primeval oblivion of the maternal womb… Had I not measured it before, then I could now measure at this sight alone what it must have meant for her, as for Neanderthal man, to realize with terror, to realize for the first time, for the first, decisive, irremediable time, with inexpressible terror, that the one who was here, face downward and bunched up, shaking under her pillow, and who had recognized herself in a mirror a moment ago, that this thing was she, that it was Sylva; and that this Sylva was therefore a separate thing from all others, a thing quite alone and apart which existed, which could not stop itself existing even by breaking all the mirrors; that this thing, this Sylva, was she, and that she thus existed—irremediably.

  Part Two

  But this man is an anachronism, for he dates from before the Iron Age, and even the Stone Age. Think of it, he stands at the beginnings of the history of man…

  Rudyard Kipling, “In the Rukh”

  Chapter 21

  THE days that followed that surprising night seemed to me disappointing. Though I lay in bed open-eyed till the morning, it was now with impatience. In fact I was expecting miracles. Sylva had passed a borderline, I was certain of it. She had stepped into the true land of Man; I would now witness vast and rapid changes.

  The first to throw cold water on my enthusiasm was Nanny. When I found her downstairs at breakfast, she seemed rested and was calmly buttering her toast. I said:

  “You were able to sleep? I spent a sleepless night.”

  “On account of the broken mirrors? Is it such a big sum?”

  “Who’s talking of mirrors? I don’t care a rap. But the fact that Sylva… Goodness!” I cried. “That seems to leave you quite cold! The fact that she recognized herself and got scared—don’t you understand what all this means?”

  “Nothing proves yet that she did recognize herself,” Nanny said cautiously. “You’re rather jumping to conclusions.”

  “Well, what else can have scared her so?”

  “I don’t know, it’s a bit early to say.”

  “But it’s as plain as a pikestaff!” I said, trying as well as I could to restrain a mounting exasperation. “She has at last grasped that she exists, and that is a hell of a discovery for a fox, don’t you think? So she’s frightened by it, she has the wind up—what could be more natural?—and this anguish of hers is the first evidence she gives us of a reflective intelligence, the first trace of a cogito. It’s a sensational departure!”

  “She may have been scared by anything,” said Nanny with a gentle obstinacy that put me beside myself, “something very simple and very ordinary which you, not being a fox, are quite unable to imagine. One has never seen a child, even the most backward one, take fright at a mirror. On the contrary, he usually claps his hands with joy and is delighted to recognize himself.”

  “That’s just it!” I retorted. “That’s what I’m saying. Wasn’t that what we expected to happen when Sylva recognized herself? And isn’t it very singular that she didn’t act like that but rather took fright?”

  “That’s why I keep thinking that she did not recognize herself,” Nanny persisted doggedly, chewing her buttered toast with her head above her breakfast cup, for she had the bad habit of “dunking.”

  “We’ll probably find out some day or other what frightened her, and we’ll be amazed what a commonplace thing it was.”

  In spite of my excitement I could not help thinking that the cautious Nanny’s remarks were nothing if not reasonable. So much so that in the afternoon I drove over to Dr. Sullivan in quest of comfort. I was not disappointed. He was absolutely enthusiastic.

  “What did I tell you? What did I tell you?” he said over and over again, leaning against the oaken mantelpiece in the familiar prophetic attitude.

  “So you think that she has taken a decisive step?”

  “Without a shadow of doubt. Your Nanny is just a fool, with her backward children. Sylva is nothing of the kind, she’s a creature who dates from before prehistory—yes, that’s what she is! Of course, I wouldn’t have thought, either, before you told me, that the first reaction of such a creature to such a discovery would be sheer panic and fright. But if you give it a little thought, you easily understand that this was quite inevitable.”

  “What’s going to happen now,” I asked, “according to you? What’ll be the next stage?”

  He raised his long arms as if taking heaven for witness.

  “Can’t say, old man, I’m not a diviner! On the contrary, I’m waiting to learn from her how things happened in the dim brains of the first men.”

  “Unfortunately, those things took a few thousand years to happen… If we have to wait all that long…”

  “Naturally, nothing proves that Sylva will pass the various stages at breakneck speed and nonstop. Still, she’s just done it, and what with her environment and the aid you give her, we may hope that she’ll continue.”

  “Yes, but how can we be of assistance if we don’t know a word of the syllabus?”

  “Oh,” said the doctor, “you’ll see all right how things will shape. I suppose that now that she has discovered herself she’ll start putting questions. You’ve got your work cut out.”

  “Dorothy isn’t in?” I blurted out, for her continued absence was beginning to surprise me.

  The doctor’s face literally changed, as if this sudden question had taken him by surprise. His cheeks had turned crimson on either side of the big, fat nose which, having blushed more faintly, bore an irresistible resemblance to the beak of a frightened toucan.

  “I believe she’s got a headache,” he said.

  I didn’t believe a word of it.

  “May I at least say hello to her?”

  “Do excuse her,” he said quickly. “I think she’s gone to lie down.”

  “Doctor,” I said reproachfully, “you aren�
�t forthright with me. Have I made a faux pas somewhere? Why does Dorothy refuse to see me? It seemed to me a few days ago…”

  He interrupted me in a most comical way: by blowing his nose. He shook his curly wreath of foam while producing from his nose a thunderous snort.

  “No, no,” he answered into his handkerchief. “She doesn’t refuse. It has nothing to do with you, I assure you. Don’t question me,” he went on, folding the handkerchief. “We’re going through a trying time. It’s a consequence of her life in London… She’ll talk to you about it herself later. Later,” he repeated, holding out the palms of his hands as if begging for alms. “Right?” he said insistently with an engaging and rather pathetic smile, so that there was nothing to do but smile back and put my palms into his.

  “You know my friendship for you. I don’t need to tell you…”

  “I know, I know I can count on you. Just now you could be of no help. Oh!” he corrected himself precipitately. “Don’t make me say more than I’ve said! It’s nothing serious. It’ll pass. It’s a trying time. Everything will be all right later on.”

  I was not, however, more than half reassured when I left him. What had he meant by twice repeating “a trying time”? I was not at all certain that Dorothy’s attitude had really nothing to do with me.