O
ne night while I was poking around under BARGAINS, I noticed a crude hole in the masonry where a large black pipe came out of the wall. It snaked across the floor and slithered into the opposite wall under RESTROOM. There were no shelves against that wall, just a door, and that was always closed. I poked my nose into the hole and sniffed. It smelled of rats. The pipe entered the wall and then turned and ran straight up. Though it was a very big pipe, it did not entirely fill the hole that had been made for it, and the masonry all around it was rough and jagged. I had a lot of curiosity in those days, and the smell was reassuring, though it was not exactly like the rat smells I was used to. It was sadder than those.
Bracing my back against the pipe, I placed my feet against the side of the hole and hauled myself up using the jagged bits of masonry as toeholds. It was a fairly easy climb. At the top, at a level corresponding to the baseboards on the first floor, the tunnel branched. One path went on up along the pipe, while others snaked left and right along the base of the wall between the plaster laths and the exterior masonry. That night I went left. The next night I went right. And in a week I had a map of the whole system in my head. The building was veined with tunnels, a regular honeycomb, a twisting, back-looping warren. If I were not in such a hurry - there is almost no more time - I could at this point launch into an interminable description of the whole tunnel system, which obviously had been constructed by the cooperative labor of thousands of rats long before my time, generations of them grinding their incisors to stubs just so I, Firmin, could one day travel undetected to every point in the building. I could break your ears talking about shafts, chutes, scopes, and drifts, about the difference between a raise and a winze, and if anybody was still awake I could put him to sleep with glory holes, scrapers, dippers, man-ladders, and footwalls. If you enjoy that sort of description, you should get a book on mining.
At first I expected to bump into other rats at every turn, the builders of this cavernous city, but I never did. I eventually came to think of them as ‘erstwhile.’ I never found any food either. And maybe that is why there were no more rats. Before the shop became a bookstore, perhaps it had been a grocery store or a bakery. Now there was nothing to eat but paper. Yet my patient exploration, night after night, of what seemed like miles of tunnel finally brought rewards that were to me superior to any food. You have to keep in mind that these intramural shafts were totally dark. I have excellent night vision, but there I had to feel my way by smell and touch. It was slow, tedious work, and it was several days before I stumbled upon a chute that took me directly up into the ceiling over the main room of the shop. The building, like most buildings in that part of town, was very old, without insulation in the ceiling, and the space between each pair of joists formed a long open chamber, incredibly hot and dusty. My dogged forebears had gnawed neat circular holes in the joists, and by means of these holes I was able to clamber from chamber to chamber. I was working my way in the direction of the street, exploring each chamber thoroughly with feet and nose before moving on to the next, when I came upon something so unexpected it set me back on my heels. After more than a week of nights spent groping in inky blackness, here suddenly were rays of light streaming up through the floor from the shop below. At some point long ago someone - not a rat - had cut a large round hole in the shop ceiling for a light fixture, which had then been installed slightly off center, leaving a narrow crescent-shaped opening along its rim. Peering cautiously through this crack I looked down into the room below.
Directly beneath me stood a large cluttered desk and a chair with a red cushion. This desk and chair were where Norman sat, or would sit. I still did not know Norman - for some time yet he was to sit in my mind simply as the Owner of the Desk - but the clutter on the desk, the upright steel spike stacked to its tip with a ragged foliage of impaled receipts, the shiny arms of the chair, and of course the red cushion itself with its buttocks-shaped depression in the center, possessed an aura of seriousness and dignity that, considering my background, I found perfectly irresistible.
This ceiling crack, shaped like a C for Confidential, became one of my favorite spots. It was a window on the human world, my first window. In that way it was like a book - you could look through it into worlds that were not your own. I called it the Balloon, because that was the feeling I got looking down, as if I were floating above the room in a balloon. A few days later I discovered a second very good place all the way at the other end of the ceiling in the direction of the alley. This one was a jagged hole in the plaster where a makeshift partition met the ceiling. I could lower myself through this hole and down onto the top of one of the tall glass-fronted cabinets where Norman kept the rare books, and from there I commanded a magnificent view of the main room of the shop, including the front door and Norman’s desk and chair. I named it the Balcony. (Today the words
balcony
and
balloon
, dactyl and iamb, have become fused end to end to form a kind of cradle, or a sad little boat. Sometimes I climb in the boat and float around. Or I lie in the cradle and rock and suck my toe.) I later learned that this room, which at the time seemed to me practically oceanic in its vastness, was in fact only one small piece of the operation. Norman had room upon room. At some point long before my time he had acquired the two shops next door to the original bookstore and had knocked holes in the connecting walls. Passing through narrow doorways, so narrow people had to take turns going through or else walk sideways and rub stomachs, you entered the rooms one after another, and they were full of books too. I used to think that all those rooms connected by little doorways were like something a giant rat would build, and I enjoyed that thought once, before Norman let me down.
Sometimes the books were arranged under signs, but sometimes they were just anywhere and everywhere. After I understood people better, I realized that this incredible disorder was one of the things that they loved about Pembroke Books. They did not come there just to buy a book, plunk down some cash and scram. They hung around. They called it browsing, but it was more like excavation or mining. I was surprised they didn’t come in with shovels. They dug for treasures with bare hands, up to their armpits sometimes, and when they hauled some literary nugget from a mound of dross, they were much happier than if they had just walked in and bought it. In that way shopping at Pembroke was like reading: you never knew what you might encounter on the next page - the next shelf, stack, or box - and that was part of the pleasure of it. And that was part of the pleasure of the tunnels too - you could never be sure what was around the next turn, at the bottom of the next shaft.
Even during those first heady weeks of exploration, I did not neglect my education. I never went into the tunnels without first spending a few hours with my books. And I made tremendous progress. I was soon able to comprehend even so-called difficult novels, mostly Russian and French, and was making headway in simple works of philosophy and business administration. It is clear to me now, from my subsequent researches, that such accomplishments were possible, organically speaking, only on the basis of a steady growth in my frontal and temporal lobes, accompanied, I surmise, by a tremendous swelling of the angular gyrus. Reasoning backward from effect to cause, I feel justified in assuming that my cranium also conceals beneath its humdrum exterior an exceptional lateral elongation of Wernicke’s area, a deformation that is normally associated with precocious verbal skills, though it is also, I concede, present in certain rare forms of idiocy. I attribute this unusual growth to a stimulating environment, though no doubt diet was a factor as well. It had, however, an unfortunate side effect in that my head grew so heavy I had difficulty holding it up. The cerebral muscularity, you see, was not accompanied by a corresponding corporal robustness. I was still distressingly runty. I was a pip-squeak, a shrimp.
It is practically an axiom in psychiatry that precocious intellect combined with physical weakness can give rise to many unpleasant character traits - avarice, delusions of grandeur, and obsessive masturbation, to name just a few. And indeed it is because certain so-called experts possess, via the most rudimentary handbooks, such a ready-made insight into the very depths of my character that all my life I have taken pains to avoid them - I am referring to psychiatrists. This aversion is only natural, I think, when you consider that among other lamentable effects occasioned by my condition one invariably finds a near-pathological need to hide or, that failing, to wear masks.
The combination of a heavy head and weak limbs forced me to adopt a ponderous gait, and while later in life I fancied that this lent me a methodical and dignified air, at the time it only made me seem all the more freakish. I could not help wagging my enormous head from side to side as I walked, or lumbered, which gave me a rather bovine appearance. And front-loaded as I was, I had a strong tendency to pitch forward onto my face, to the great amusement of others.
Such ponderousness, so grotesque in a creature of my stature, was particularly unfortunate at this period, when I had reached a stage of life that called for maximum alacrity. While nothing in the behavior of my siblings suggested that their brains were expanding, their masticatory apparatuses had undergone considerable development, as I could testify from many painful nips. I chewed on paper, they chewed on me. The asymmetry was nasty. All of us were ready for solid food. We were all in fact ready to throw in the towel on family life, and Mama discerned this through her vapors at last. Our flashing incisors must have seemed to her like glimmers of light at the end of the long maternal tunnel. Lured by that light she rose to the task of teaching us to get by without her, setting us up so she could split and go off and lead the life of a swinger again.
Our education was simple and practical. Two by two we tagged along behind Mama on her trips up top, where we were expected to learn by observing her technique. There was not going to be any more easy slurp and guzzle: from now on we would confront an entirely new style of existence. Anthropologists regard hunting and gathering as the most primitive stage of civilization, but ours was even lower than that. Call it scrounging and scraping. It was almost entirely night work. The basic positions were crouch, skulk, and hunker. The sustaining moves were creep, scurry, and dart. When my turn came I was paired with Luweena. I was pleased with this, since she had always treated me with indifference, offering me neither nips nor drubs, which was all to the good, since she was of large athletic build and once during a melee had bitten off most of Shunt’s ear. I had always been aware - and wary - of her build, but that night, just as we were starting out, I noticed for the first time how furry she was behind. It was not only her teeth that were growing. Preoccupied as I was with my explorations, I had let this new development slip up on me, but now the view of her furry cheeks bobbing in front of me became utterly distracting, and I felt toward her a sudden violent anger.
With Mama in the lead we crept under the cellar door and out into the world. I had thought of myself as being better prepared than any of the others for what we would encounter outside. It was I after all who had spent many hours sitting in my Balcony gazing out across the shop toward the front window. I had seen something of the world in that window - people and cars passing and part of the building across the street. Once I saw a policeman on a horse, and once it rained. But stepping out into the night street behind Luweena and Mama I knew right away that my picture of the world, limited and rectangular as it was, bore scarcely any resemblance to the enormity of the thing itself. I felt like an earthling stepping out onto the surface of Jupiter. We stepped out onto a hard black desert. The streetlight directly above us hung like a sun in a black sky. From somewhere, perhaps the streetlight, came a faint high-pitched scream that was painful to the ears and in the long run maddening in its persistence. On both sides, crumbling four-story buildings loomed like the walls of a vast canyon. Even at that early stage of my education I had read enough to formulate ‘vast canyon of loneliness.’ I formulated it and shivered. Now and then a car passed with blazing eyes, and the floor of the desert shook. It was very cold, and something like an icy comb was running through our fur. It was wind. Luweena, of course, with her more limited background, ought to have been even more amazed than I was. I would have expected her to cringe or at least gape in wonder or be in some way flabbergasted, and I was shocked to see her just sniff the air and trot off after Mama as though she regarded walking on Jupiter as a perfectly normal thing to do. As for me, I was still sheltered by my relative ignorance, and only a vague disquiet gnawed at the margins of my mind.
We went in single file, moving fast and staying as close to the buildings as we could, up Cornhill and then down a narrow alley. I brought up the rear. The alley was dark and had the same smell as under RESTROOM, but stronger. There must have been some kind of food there, for I could hear Mama and Luweena crunching on something in the darkness up ahead. They didn’t share, and when I came up all I found was a piece of lettuce. It tasted like
Jane Eyre
. We came out of the alley on Hanover Street, directly across from the bright blaze of the Casino Theater. On a jutting marquee, in yellow lights that ran round and round, were the words GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS and BEST IN BOSTON. Beneath the marquee, on either side of a glass ticket window, were life-sized black-and-white photos of what I have since learned to identify as good-looking women. They were not wearing any clothes except for high-heeled shoes and diamond tiaras in their hair, while two long black rectangles blocked out their breasts and the tops of their thighs. One woman had light hair and one had dark hair. They each had one foot lifted. Caught by the camera in the midst of dancing, they floated frozen in midstep: the stroke of the shutter had severed them from time like a guillotine. Mama and Luweena had paid them no attention at all. They had gone instead right up to the theater door under EXIT and were now busy stuffing their cheeks full of the popcorn someone had spilled there. Luweena clearly had a natural gift for scrounging and scraping. I did not even try to join them this time. I just stood there looking up at the posters, one foot in the air. Despite my wide reading, even my digestion of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
I had only a pale intellectual’s grasp of this aspect of the world. I had not actually
experienced
anything like it before. Now, looking back over my life, I can see that this moment, when I stood gaping at those almost naked creatures, those angels, marked what biographers like to call a turning point. I shall do the same and say that on November 26, 1960, in front of the Casino Theater on a side street off Boston’s Scollay Square, my life path turned. But of course I did not know that yet. At that point I did not even know I was in Boston.