Sylva

by Jean Bruller

  During those few weeks I had kept Sylva, I must confess, more or less locked up in the house. The forest stroll had turned out too badly to encourage me to try new experiments. Moreover, Sylva at home no longer showed the animal boredom that had once made her yawn to distraction. Her games were more varied. The objects no longer represented mere quarry, Sylva began to have some intelligent relationships with them. It amused her less to scatter the contents of the needlework box; instead she tried to add to it things that did not belong there—my tooth paste or my cigars, for instance—which incidentally did not improve Nanny’s mood. Sylva also began to rummage in the cupboards or the sideboard, not without causing many a catastrophe. Occasionally some utensil would intrigue her for a long while and she would seek to use it for all sorts of purposes. Nevertheless, we did not restrain her, for this increase in her curiosity for “things” which her mind was obviously beginning to grasp as “objects” (and such a sudden and swift increase, at that) seemed to us extremely promising.

  And, indeed, she greatly surprised us one day in this connection: the fancy took her to fashion an object herself! Nanny and I had to admit it, Sylva had discovered the notion of the tool. Oh, I don’t want to exaggerate. It was still a very rudimentary, very imperfect tool, and put to a rather comical use. But the idea of a tool was there all right.

  We had noticed for some time that she was collecting a kind of hoard, as is common with many children and a few animals—magpies, squirrels, polecats. A hoard made up of various rubbish such as corks, bits of bark, old nails, scraps of silver paper. One fine morning we caught her before the cheval glass combing her hair with a very peculiar-looking instrument. At a closer glance, it turned out to be the backbone of a lemon sole, probably pinched from the garbage can, and she had covered the half of it which she was holding in her fingers with a folded piece of cardboard. However silly and imperfect this implement was, it nevertheless testified to a convergence of observation and reflection that was very much above the mind of a fox or even an ape. The mere idea of converting a fishbone for use as a comb was an “invention” that required certain mental qualities, whose emergence in Sylva, as can be imagined, excited us to a high degree.

  Nor did she stop there. After thus discovering the tool, she discovered the magic object. Here too I shall try not to exaggerate. According to Dr. Sullivan, it was an extraordinary jump, a jump of tens of thousands of years and, he said, its having happened without our help was due to a quite extraordinary chance. That may be so. Personally I consider that such a chance, in some form or other, was bound to happen some day, and it was unlikely that it should fail to bear fruit in a mind on the march such as Sylva’s. But let others be the judge.

  We generally kept Sylva away from the garden, which was too vast to be easily and effectively fenced in; but we did not, for all that, deprive her of fresh air and exercise or of the rustic pleasures that appealed to her nature. The farmyard is extremely large and surrounded by buildings on all sides, and Sylva would spend long hours there whenever the weather was fine, amidst the chickens, ducks, turkeys and rabbits.

  The first few times she had been frightened of the dogs. Even though they were chained up, a bark or a growl was enough to put her to flight. She would go and cower behind some barrels or a cart, and stay there shaking for a long time. One day, however, she lost her fear in rather strange circumstances.

  I have said that the two dogs—strong, brawny mastiffs—though tied up all day and ferocious-looking, were actually the most harmless creatures alive. I could not have borne to keep vicious ones about. They were only dangerous to nightly prowlers carrying a sack or a stick. Although they would shake their chains with alarming fervor, they were in fact merely impatient to play; and as soon as they were set free, whoever was about had to beware of one thing only, and that was the too exuberant tokens of their gratitude.

  Whenever they saw Sylva playing and running around amid the poultry, they just could not keep still. She had a way of scaring the whole barnyard and transforming it into a deafening aviary of squawks and snowy down that made them marvel with excitement. Their delight knew no bounds. I can’t say the same of the farmer and his folk. They would glare at this daily pandemonium with every sign of a most sullen disapproval. They claimed that if it went on, Sylva would cause the hens to stop laying, make the turkeys succumb to blood pressure, and jeopardize the whole poultry breeding.

  “She’ll turn all your fowl into walking skeletons, the poor thing will,” they said, for they blamed not the “backward” child but me—and my unjustifiable leniency which, in their eyes, was past comprehension.

  The fact was that Sylva was not content to chase and scare birds and rabbits. Now and then she would grab hold of one. She would suddenly swoop on a fowl with such force that anybody else would have had bruised elbows and knees. Her astonishing litheness spared her such consequences. For a few seconds there would be a turmoil of feathers, shrill squawks and flapping wings, then she would jump to her feet with her quarry clasped against her and dart off to some shed into which she would disappear. Later the corpse of her victim would be found there, showing the symbolic tooth marks of an animal that kills without hunger.

  (In the end I found a remedy for these murders by forcing Sylva to eat the birds she had killed. I would wait until she had finished her ordinary meal, which was always very abundant, and under the threat of the stick and despite her heaving stomach she then had to devour her victim from head to tail. With the result that she quite soon stopped killing birds and rabbits and was content to keep them tightly clasped in her arms for a long moment. This produced an unexpected result: prompted by this gesture of motherly tenderness, she took an affectionate liking to these animals, and instead of killing them began to rock them as a child rocks its teddy bear.)

  Now on that particular day, while the farmyard was echoing with frightened clucking, one of the dogs somehow managed to get loose by shaking his chain. Sylva, seeing him rush up to her, mingled her shrieks with those of the fowl and tried to run away. Bumped into a rabbit as panic-stricken as herself. Stumbled and fell flat against a chopping block. Tried to retrieve herself by catching hold of an object that protruded over the rim of the block. This object was a long, two-pronged boring bit, used to drill holes in barrels. Sylva straightened up, holding it tight with all the strength that her terror gave her, as if seizing her last chance. Whereupon she saw the dog before her, yelping with fright, his tail between his legs, decamping so fast that the soles of his feet kept kicking his hindquarters. Sylva had not seen the volley of stones with which one of the farm boys had pelted the animal in order to scare it away from her, so a strange confusion must have occurred in her little head. A strange correlation between this reversal of the situation, the headlong flight and the object to which she had clung like a drowning man and which she was still clutching for dear life.

  At all events when, after remaining trembling and rooted to the spot for quite a time, she saw the dog, who had first sheltered behind a barrel and was now, with his courage returning, coming back toward her, shyly wagging an anxious tail, Sylva stopped clutching the saving bit with both hands and, instead, brandished it in front of her. The dog stopped irresolutely. When he started moving again, it was with hanging head and sidling body, in the time-honored attitude of dogs uncertain of the welcome they will get. Sylva, hanging onto her bit, did not budge. The dog took the last steps almost on his belly. And stayed there at Sylva’s feet, waiting to be punished or fondled at her choice.

  When she bent down he rolled over on his back, his legs limply bent, offering his defenseless underside to her blows. Sylva lowered the hand that was holding the bit and placed the prongs on the frail, disarmed belly, and thus they remained for a long moment, like St. George and his dragon, in the silence of the reassured farmyard, where rabbits and feathered fowl had distractedly returned to their occupations.

  Sylva straightened up at last and the dog immediately got to his feet, licked her hand with
a brief flick of his tongue as if hurriedly discharging a duty, and threw himself among the chickens and turkeys with joyous barks, turning around toward Sylva as if to say: “Coming?” And indeed Sylva ran after him and, between the two of them, they had soon transformed the yard once more into a flying merry-go-around, such as it had never been before. And suddenly, amidst the uproar, I saw Sylva laugh.

  It was the first time, and it was a laugh if you cared to call it that, a yapping less close to laughter than to a cry. Her mouth was wide open, not so much in width as in height, and what came cascading out of it might just as well have been screams of fright. Yet there was no doubt that she was laughing, and even violently. So much so that (yielding once more to the deceptive ease of ingenious explanations) I could not help working out new theories on the nature of laughter.

  According to a certain Irish philosopher whom the French have annexed and whose name is Bergson, laughter is supposed to be a social defense against the individual’s possible degradation to the level of an automaton: “Something mechanical clapped onto something alive.” I had always considered that this was indeed probable but insufficient, since it leaves out of account the very form of laughter, that strange eruption of spasmodic gasps. Another Frenchman who also had a great fancy for what are called “rational” systems and concepts, Monsieur Valery—a rather distinguished gentleman with the face of an old woman furrowed with a thousand wrinkles, who came to talk to us at the Athenaeum about the death of civilizations some two or three years ago—explains in one of his books that laughter is a refusal to think, that the soul gets rid of a picture which seems to it inferior to the dignity of its own function, just as the stomach gets rid of things for which it won’t bear the responsibility, and by the same means of a brutal convulsion.

  This certainly accounts for the convulsion but is far from comprising all the occasions that make us laugh. Whereas, when I witnessed Sylva in the throes of her first outburst, still so close to fright, I could see very well that it had sprung from that very fright which had suddenly been transformed into joy: a needless alarm that frees itself in this reflex, in this brutal, jolting release from stress which, in a great burst of elation, puts the nerves, frozen with fear, back into service—as a dog warms himself by shivering when coming out of the water.

  As a matter of fact I wrote on this point to Valery, who did not answer, and to Bergson, who was good enough to reply. He objected that in our civilized societies fright as a rule is absent from the causes that make us laugh. That did not seem convincing to me: we no longer have hair on our bodies either, but we still have goose flesh! Similarly, we continue to laugh in any situation which reminds us, if only symbolically or by dim recollection, of atavistic terrors that suddenly give way.

  Bergson replied again, this time with a little sharpness in his terms, that according to my theory animals ought to laugh for the same reasons. This last objection impressed me all the more, as the very first laugh Sylva had given had also struck me as a definitely human manifestation. Fright, joy and “brutal convulsion” must therefore be components of a system—even though very primitive—of thought. I promised myself that I would think about it; but my natural mistrust of ideas (and of other people’s more especially) or my laziness in this respect often distracts me from keeping this kind of promise, and that is what happened in this case.

  When Sylva and Baron (for that was the dog’s name) had turned the farmyard upside down together, I considered it time to step in. I called the mastiff, took him back to his chain, ordered him to be calm and silent. Sylva had followed us. I saw that she had not let go of the swallow-tailed bit. She sat down with crossed legs close to the dog, who in turn sat down near her. And for the rest of the morning they continued to watch together, untiringly, the hustle and bustle on the farm. From time to time, Baron turned toward Sylva and gave her face a big lick with his tongue; Sylva let him and, from that day onward, they became a pair of inseparable friends.

  At dinner, Sylva persisted in keeping closely gripped in her right hand what must be called her lucky charm. This obstinacy put the dignity of her table manners to a severe test. She spilled her soup and, unable to cut her meat singlehanded, tried to seize it with her fingers. Nanny had to cut it for her as for a baby.

  That night we noticed that she had gone to bed with her talisman half stuffed under the pillow. Mrs. Bumley, who is a Papist, suggested replacing it by a crucifix of the same size. If she wants to believe in the power of objects, she said, let us at least encourage her to believe in a worthy symbol which might later come to mean something to her. But in the morning Sylva flung the crucifix away in a temper; and we had to restore to her an object that was no doubt ludicrous but all the more irreplaceable for having been invested by herself with those imaginary powers.

  Chapter 25

  EVEN if I wished to weary the reader by recounting every day in detail, I should not be able to do so. Few indeed were the days that were marked by a novelty sufficiently striking to be remembered, such as the discovery of an apple on a painting, the magic power of an iron bit. These were rare islands scattered on an ocean of uniform habits, and as a rule nothing heralded them from afar although I patiently kept my field glass fixed.

  Of course each day brought some imperceptible progress, the sum total of which after a certain while might seem appreciable; but bedmaking, shoe shining, mashing potatoes or shaking out the salad continued to form part of her training rather than of education proper. The only kinds of progress that mattered were those subtler ones that left a mark on her nature, those that made her more human, removed her further from animality, and this type of progress always occurred in the form of an unforeseen leap, a leap which, seen from the outside, sometimes seemed quite dazzling.

  What most surprised me was that this leap did not appear to happen in the very field where it seemed to me one would have been entitled to expect it first: that of speech. For though her vocabulary increased, and even quite considerably, it only increased in quantity. There would sometimes be a running fire of questions and answers, but only if they kept to an absolutely practical and down-to-earth level. Any abstract idea still seemed to be quite inaccessible to her. As soon as one overstepped these limits, she fell silent, grew indifferent, staring straight in front of her with those curious, almond-shaped eyes that assumed their catlike fixity.

  There was only one domain in which a certain capacity for abstract thought seemed to develop in her mind, and that was the visual one. It had already been the sight of herself in the mirror that had given her the first shock, the first fatal wrench: the one that severs us from the rest of things and makes of every human being a solitary monad. Later she had recognized various fruits in a still life. Since then she had taken pleasure in searching for them all over the place: in front of anything round—a ball, a skein of wool, even a curtain ring or an egg—and also before a shadow, a stain on the wall. She would say, “An apple!” or else, “A cherry!” (according to the size) and point at the stain or the object with obvious satisfaction.

  Nanny gave proof of untiring patience and showed her all kinds of pictures, although she failed most of the time. Sylva recognized only a few objects, the most usual ones or those of the simplest shape, such as a chair, a saucepan. She never recognized a living being.

  And when she did recognize the picture of an animal for the first time, her reaction was so surprising that we were hesitant at first to guess its true origin. It was only a word, a phrase of Sylva’s, which I shall relate presently, that put us on the right track and made us realize that what had so far prevented her from identifying a man or a beast in a picture was their immobility. For a fox, a living creature is not an object but movement accompanied by smell. With the result that when she did recognize a dog’s likeness that lacked both one and the other, it was due, quite paradoxically, to its very immobility; and that is why this recognition produced a shock of such violence in her that she almost had a nervous breakdown. For the dog looked like Baro
n, and Baron meanwhile had died.

  He had died in a stupid way: by strangling himself with his chain. I suppose that during the night he must have caught a rat between his paws and, turning around in circles to prevent it from escaping, had suddenly found himself choking and by dint of struggling had strangled himself in the end. He had probably not even been able to bark, for nobody had heard him. And the other dog must have been asleep. It was Sylva, come to greet her friend as she did every morning, who had found him stiff against the wall, with lolling tongue, and dead for several hours.

  She had not called out, but Fanny saw her from her window trying over and over again to put the dog upright on his legs. Fanny gave us the warning and we arrived at a run. I uncoiled the chain and sounded the dog’s chest to see if there was anything still to be done. But the dog unfortunately was rigid and spread a sickly smell which was not yet the smell of putrefaction but a mixture of cold, stale fur and flesh.

  Nanny wanted to pull Sylva away, but she resisted obdurately—no visible sign of emotion or grief, but simply a kind of vegetable stubbornness, an obstinate inertia. She wanted to stay there, it seemed, and that was all. I went to fetch a farm hand, and together we carried Baron away in a piece of canvas to bury him. And as was to be feared, Sylva followed us in silence, close on our heels.

  Were we going to dig the grave in front of her? In the ensuing indecision I did what one usually does: put it off till a later moment. We left Baron at the foot of a tree. I was hoping that Sylva, so easily distracted, might eventually forget about him. But for more than an hour she kept up her pathetic efforts to put him on his legs again. In the end I made up my mind. I went back with the farm boy and dug the hole. We put Baron in the bottom of it. Sylva looked on without saying anything.

  Her eyes were slit and fixed.

  I wondered what she would do when we threw in the earth. She did not protest. She remained there, motionless, during the whole operation and when it was over, she let herself be taken away, this time unresistingly. She lunched as usual and with a healthy appetite.