God's Fool (14 page)

I remember the three of them standing back between the hills of crates and yellowed rope; the air was barnacled, sharp with resin and salt, and they looked very small to me, as though time, anticipating itself, had already begun its work. Coffin was shouting something from the captain’s deck. Small, oily birds were floating in the narrow crack between the groaning continents of hull and pier. And I remember Eng saying, as quietly as though the rubbing of wood and the tightening of ropes had somehow forced his unwilling thoughts to the surface, “Thank God we’re together, brother.”

“Little choice there,” I smiled, afraid that his fear would encourage
my own. We both stared straight ahead as the ship began to move. Raising my arm to wave, I scared a gull standing on the rail. I could see the two children leaning into our mother’s waist from either side, her brown, familiar arms like a pair of bandoliers tight across their chests.

We were never to see them again.

VII.

We never meant to go. We would have stayed, begun again. At seventeen life is endless.

But in 1839, from a shack on the hill above the Meklong River, three hundred pounds appeared an enormous sum; magnified by our losses—by the smell of the dead daily unburied by the rain, by the small swift streams cutting channels in the dirt beneath our beds—it was undeniable. With her grasp on the things she loved sufficiently loosened by fate, our mother gathered up what little strength she had left and sent us away. And we went. I don’t blame her.

There is a violence in leaving, even when it is necessary or kindly meant. We tear ourselves loose like a plant from a pot. One good yank and there we are, lying on our side in the shade of the wall, a mass of hairy, painful roots still shaped to the shape of the world we knew.

Perhaps we’ll root again. Perhaps a voice will become our new ground, or a face, or the view from a carriage at a particular crossroads. More likely we’ll lie there like geraniums on a broken slate, quietly fuming that the pot should go on without us. There’s nothing like leaving for acquainting us with our own unimportance, for collapsing the bladder of our self-esteem. Unless we’re young, that is, in which case the bladder may simply inflate with the romance of our leaving, and float us right over the spears of regret.

So it was with us. We spent little time mourning the world we had left. I was not yet the connoisseur of loss I would become with age; my brother, though distressingly sober for seventeen, could still respond to the world with enthusiasm and joy. And the storm, I suppose, had already imposed a leave taking of sorts; by the time we arrived in Bangkok to ask Robert Hunter’s forgiveness, the world we had known was no longer there. Siam had left us before we left it.

And yet, God knows, there would have been enough to regret had we had the heart for it. We didn’t. Running about the sun-warm decks of the
Sachem
, we were living emblems of the fact that youth and mourning, like the lion and the lamb, were never meant to lie together; that the former, without much hesitation, will quite naturally devour the latter, woolly head to cloven hoof, then sleep the sleep of the innocent. And besides, no sadness was possible here. The huge sky would not permit it. It wheeled about our heads all day, building towering columns and ranges of cloud. We would spend hours standing in the nodding bow, listening to the water hiss against the keel, or climb high up the mast just for the pleasure of feeling the stately sway of the world—like the movement of an inverted pendulum—move through us. From above, the ship looked small and hard and beautiful, a single bolt holding down the vast shimmering cloth of the ocean.

How impossible it seems to me now that those two boys were us. That there should have been a time before Montfaucon, before Paris, before Jack Black and the room in Frying Pan Alley. Before Sophia. Looking back on us, it seems to me we were somehow pregnant with our own lives. We must have sensed them, felt them moving: the worlds we would bring into being; the language we would come to inhabit for the rest of our days.

PART THREE

I.

We had been an oddity, a phenomenon, an act of God. We had entertained kings and councillors. We had been a marvel of nature, a prophecy, an emblem shaped, like river clay, to the needs of others. And yet, through it all, we had remained exactly who we were, familiar to ourselves. It was the West that made us freaks.

It was the mirror of the crowds—the spittle on the lips, the roar of revulsion, the frantic, almost desperate reaction to a simple back flip or handstand—that did the bulk of the work. We had never seen such hunger. Night after night they came, filling the halls with the smell of ale and human sweat, determined, like children poking a stick into the carcass of a dog, to be afraid. To dirty themselves. And we let them. We were their sin and we were their absolution. A bargain at five or six shillings a head.

Nor was it just the common folk—the shop owners and the cloth merchants and their like—who needed us. In salons and drawing rooms from Brussels to Boston, the wish to be appalled, though partially masked by the accoutrements of class, was shamefully visible. At the palace of the Tuileries (no doubt in the same room where, two years later, little Charlie Stratton—pardon me,
General
Tom Thumb—would pop out of a pie during a performance of
Le Petit Poucet
and slide through the legs of a group of chorus girls), a lovely young lady hardly
older than ourselves, dressed in a deep blue damask gown, suddenly put her hand to her mouth as though she were about to be sick and burst into a fit of sustained giggling so severe that she had to be led away to recover in another room. I had been looking at her neck, at a thin blue vein that trembled, like something struggling to break free, just below the skin.

It would be some time before Professor Dumat, something of an expert on the subject of
monstres et prodiges
, would explain to us that, etymologically speaking, we were ludicrous rather than terrifying, that all freaks of nature such as ourselves traced their lineage to a single chuckling ancestor. We and our kind, he said, pausing to take a sip of wine, were
lusus naturae
—jokes of nature. He smiled. Perhaps the young lady had known Latin.

We did very well, my brother and I. Very well indeed. Robert Hunter’s trade in opium, I suspect, had acquainted him with the imp of the perverse who resides, all velvet stroke and thorny goads, in all of us; who whispers to us to go ahead, to touch what we would not touch, to go where we would not go. Though ignorant of Latin, he was fluent in the language of shillings and francs; understood, as few men I have known, the grammar of human shame. Desire and fear, to Hunter, were not verbs but nouns, things to be sold like a tippet of fur or a set of butcher’s steels; they were subject and object, interchangeable but linked;
he
was the verb that gave them relation, that brought them to life. Or, rather, we were.

None of this was new, of course. The world we discovered in Belfast and Dublin, Paris and Pamplona, had preceded us, had always been there, waiting, as it were, for our arrival. Keeping itself entertained in any way it could. We simply stepped into the places already reserved for us. We were the guardians of the damned in hell, the grinning gargoyles chained to the pediment. We were the monster in the looking glass, the rustle in the wilderness of realities.

And more. For Ambroise Paré, from whose sixteenth-century work the good Professor Dumat read to us at length, we had been evidence of
the glory of God. And proof of his wrath. A corruption of the seed; a plant twisted by the smallness of the womb. A product of interference by demons or devils. Or the artifice of wandering beggars. You say I am being unfair? That things had surely changed since the days of Pare’s speculations? That science and reason had lit the lamp, banished our fears, et cetera, et cetera? I say nothing had changed since Paré’s contemporary to the north allowed Trinculo, dreaming of showing Caliban to the masses, to speak the simple truth: “When they will not give a do it to relieve a lame beggar, they will give ten to see a dead Indian.” Just so. Hunter was our Presbyterian Trinculo, you see, transported to 1829. There were lame beggars aplenty to be had, as many or more as in the days when the Bard leapt the slag heaps on the way to the Globe. And we? We were the dead Indian, of course, who for a time drew them in from salon and straw yard alike, who let them finger the crinkled parchment of his drying flesh—so exotic! so red! so very much like theirs and yet not! not!—while discreetly lightening their purses.

No, if science and reason had accomplished anything, I thought, it was to make us less ashamed of poking our fingers in the wound. Whereas before we might have shivered at the sight of the extra finger, the humped spine, the male root growing from female flesh, now we could measure and describe, draw and dissect it in the name of science. Whereas before we might have gawked at the freaks who vied for our attention and our money, now we could catalogue and collect them, Latinize and label them like carnivores’ teeth in locking cabinets or malignant tumors in bell jars. And perhaps this
was
progress.

I could never believe it. We had merely replaced one form of cruelty with another more brazen, a form no more capable of seeing the heartbreak behind the horror, yet less willing to be appalled by its own curiosities. Indeed, for some (invariably the whole and healthy) the bent limb was preferable to the straight. To the learned gentlemen of the
Baltimore Medical and Surgical Journal
(what would our education have been without the help of Professor Dumat?) civilization had so blinded us to the beauty of corruption that the collector had to look abroad, among ruder people, to find the treasures he sought. “For the truth is
that the practiced eye kindles at the sight of a remarkable excrescence as the traveler’s does at that of lofty mountains or colossal edifices; a monstrous birth, a syphilitic tongue, any and all expressions of the pathological sublime, will captivate and engage us (intellectually and, yes, gentle reader, aesthetically) more than any summer’s peach. And yet we in the West, sadly, nip the most promising growths of disease in the bud; morbid growths stand no better chance among us than apples in a schoolhouse yard; they are all picked off long before they are ripe.”

Even at our age, the lesson was not lost on us: adulation and revulsion could spring from the same source; excessive praise walked hand in hand with untempered condemnation. And drop by drop this thimbleful of arsenic poisoned our hearts, confused our sight. Slowly, imperceptibly, like twin shoots under a glass bowl, we began to twist and curve, to adjust ourselves to our new sky and its smooth, invisible logic. We began, for the first and only time in our lives, to grow monstrous, to the point that when true adoration crossed our path—no, not
our
path,
my
path—for the first and only time in our lives, I mistook it for its corrupted twin, and let it pass me by.

II.

She was thirty-one years old. A widow of means. A mature beauty whose charms could eclipse the newly minted radiance of women half her age (and tie the tongues of their escorts); whose less-than-perfect fingers, placed ever so lightly on an arm in praise or teasing censure, could confuse the young and remind the old of who they once had been. A woman of intelligence and playful humor, she had a touch of melancholy about her that added depth and color to all her more obvious qualities, a silence so genuine and unaffected, so apart, it quickly earned her the hatred of half the women she met.

Would they have hated her less, I wonder, had they known that what appeared to them as confidence was actually an almost complete lack of self-regard, that what seemed conceit was in fact nothing more than an absence of vanity? Or did they know this already, and hate her precisely because of it, because they understood, instinctively, how attractive a quality this could be to men of all ages and fortunes who, sensing that vacuum, would helplessly seek to fill it with themselves? But it hardly matters. Suffice it to say that before her much-discussed engagement to Guillaume Pluvier (the famously handsome patron of the arts whose father, Bernard Pluvier, had been with Napoleon in Italy) Sophia Marchant had been considered among the most desirable women in
Paris.
After
her engagement, the wags would add, she was more desirable still.

Begin with the music then: the quadrilles and the waltzes playing from the other room, the busy hubbub of human voices, the small cymbals of glass touching glass. Below these, the creak of floorboards and the hiss of flames in the hearth. Deeper still, the distant clatter of wheel and hoof, the shake of bells, the muffled shout.

Snow was falling on the rue Saint-Antoine the evening we met. I remember noticing it, like something alive, moving between the heavy blue curtains of the drawing room; and seeing our chance, we ducked along the thicket of spotted lilies nodding in the mirror, past the flames burning in the piano’s wood, and pushed aside the cloth. Our first snow. The stones of the road were already marbled with it; the south-facing edges of carriages and fences, paling quickly. Snow was catching in the tangled manes of the horses standing side by side in their traces, still as confectioners’ offerings in a window display.

“You have not seen snow before, I think?” said a soft female voice behind us, and suddenly it is as though I were standing again by that window, feeling the chill coming through the glass, and Emmanuel Dumat, our tutor and translator, were once again hurrying to our side, having momentarily lost sight of his charges and then noticed who it was that had boldly (and not untypically) decided to introduce herself to us. “You have not seen snow before, I think?” How like her, really, to sweep aside all convention, to cut like a knife (but gently, so gently) through the dead layers of expected things to a warmth, an intimacy of tone, as though the two of you were lovers at dusk in a dark room, looking out on the falling world through the same small window. She was right. I had not seen snow before. There were so many things I had not seen.