For our purposes, however, it is enough to know that once C fully lost his ability to read, he never recovered it. I won’t even bother telling you about his first appointment with his doctor. What concerns us here is C’s adventure that day after he decided that all he needed was a good, brisk walk around the square to clear his confused mind.
Back in 1981, when I was a student studying in Paris, I used to make my way to the Place des Vosges to get away from the bustle of the city. I remember how the streams of clear water gushed from the mouths of stone lions in the central fountain, and the groomed lawns bordered by metal wickets looked as perfect as if they’d been painted green. Linden trees grew in stately rows. An artificial hush seemed to mute the noise of traffic on the adjacent streets, as if a volume dial had been adjusted.
It was a warm spring that year, and I would sit on a bench and enjoy the sunlight on my face. One day, I fell into conversation with an old woman who was feeding crumbs to the pigeons. She saw my backpack and identified me as an American. She asked if I liked Paris. I said I liked it very much. She asked if I liked the Place des Vosges. I said I thought it was beautiful. Though the sky was clear, the woman wore a tan raincoat that was oversized on her small frame. Her cheeks had the deep creases of boots that had gone unworn for decades. She was eager to talk, and I was glad to have the chance to practice my French. When she asked, out of the blue, if I believed in ghosts, I said, “Oui, madame,” just to play along.
And so it was from this old woman that I learned something about the bloody history of the Place des Vosges. Long ago, she explained to me as she tore off pinches of bread to toss to the birds, the large square was occupied by the Palais des Tournelles, named for numerous turrets that decorated its rim. It was here, in the courtyard of the palace, that Henri II was wounded in a tilting match with the Duke of Montgomery, whose spear splintered against the king’s visor, sending shards through his eyes and into his brain. The king suffered for eleven days in painful agony before finally dying. In mourning, his wife, Catherine de’ Medici, ordered the palace to be destroyed.
This is where a ghost enters the story: the old woman claimed the Place des Vosges was haunted by Henri II. I asked her whether she had ever seen the king herself. “Bien sûr!” she said. It was impossible to predict when he would make an appearance. Some said he came on the nights when Venus was closest to earth while others maintained that he could be seen during a lunar eclipse, or on the anniversary of his death, or birth, or marriage. He would appear in his armor suit walking slowly across the grass to the fountain. He would remove his helmet with his broken visor and dip his hands into the water being spit out by one of the stone lions. He would wash the blood from his face, then he would put his helmet back on and walk away.
The old woman was fourteen years old when she had first seen the king on her way home from a tavern where she worked sweeping the floors. She had seen him three times since then. With a theatrical grimace, she tried to convey how frightening he was to behold. When her lips peeled back, I saw that she was missing several upper molars.
I didn’t bother to wait around to see if the ghost of Henri II would make his entrance that evening. It had become increasingly obvious to me that the woman was suffering from senility. I could only hope that she was receiving adequate care. As for me, though I appreciate a good ghost story, I thought I could tell the difference between fiction and fact—until I stumbled across the story of C.
My sense of C is that he was even more of a skeptic than yours truly. He must certainly have been aware of the square’s history, but superstition made him impatient. And though he was a dutiful Catholic and went to confession once a week, he much preferred forms of knowledge that could be verified. When in doubt, he would always side with duplicable proof. As for human attempts to expose the secrets of mortality, he believed that the truth was visible in every corpse: you could see just by looking at a man without a heartbeat that death was the end of life. There was no world elsewhere. C was convinced that heaven and hell existed only as imagined places. His pragmatic mind had no room for phantoms.
The fog that had settled over the city of Paris the day C lost his ability to read was so dense, and the winter dusk had come so early, that he could barely make out the outlines of the tall buildings across the square. He felt the unnerving sensation of being lost, though he knew exactly where he was. He resisted the urge to grab the arm of a woman who was walking ahead of him along the gravel path. Feathers sticking up from the bulb of her hat shook in the swirling mist. C gasped, mistaking the feathers for a live bird. He took a few steps backward and would have stumbled, but luckily his hand found the iron handle of a bench. He lowered himself onto the seat. With a few deep breaths, he was able to calm his agitation.
The quiet of the square had a restorative effect, and he began to appreciate the effect of the fog on the scenery. It would have been fine weather for spectral illusions. C smiled at the thought. Of course he’d heard the silly stories about Henri II. He enjoyed the feeling of superiority that overcame him when he considered how susceptible other people were to superstition, how easily they would mistake a tree trunk, blurred by the heavy cloud, for the ghost of a dead king.
He tipped his head back and closed his eyes. Voices of passersby seemed to come from far away. He could almost fancy that he was at the seashore. He found himself remembering the sensation he’d loved so much when he was a young boy and let the gentle waves wash the sand over his toes.
A nearby cough had the startling effect of shattering glass. C blinked. That’s when he noticed the man at the opposite end of the bench. He didn’t know how long the man had been there—probably he had just arrived. He wore an old-fashioned sack suit with a tailcoat that was unbuttoned, revealing a plaid vest and the froth of a white ruffled shirt. His black cravat was tied in a bow and brushed against the rough curls of his white beard. He had a pencil out and was writing on a piece of paper. His expression had the fixed aspect of a statue and gave little indication of his thoughts. From C’s perspective, there was an air of loneliness about the man, a perfuse, sad loneliness that kept him helplessly sealed off from the rest of humanity.
C tried not to stare. There was something familiar about the stranger; a moment of reflection brought clear identification as C recognized his former neighbor, Victor Hugo. Victor Hugo!
But that was impossible—Victor Hugo was dead. He had been dead for two years. C had been inconvenienced by the author’s huge funeral procession in front of the Panthéon.
Oh, but it was him, there was no denying. Victor Hugo, buried in a tomb he shared with Zola and Dumas, was sitting beside C on an iron bench in the Place des Vosges. C was overtaken by a clarity of mind that came in stark contrast to the confusion he’d experienced earlier. He could no longer find meaning in printed words, but he could see reality for what it was.
Hugo brought the back of his hand to his mouth and coughed again. He was old and haggard, but his poor health couldn’t stop him from scribbling on the paper. C felt a wave of pity for Hugo and wanted to reach out to him and tell him … what? What could he possibly say? He searched his memory for a passage from one of Hugo’s verses. Instead, a scene from the famous early novel about the hunchback came to mind. He remembered the passage almost word for word. He remembered how Djali, the little pet goat of La Esmeralda, gets his horns tangled in the folds of a noblewoman’s dress. C’s heart ached as he thought of all the ugly, contemptuous aristocrats mocking La Esmeralda, calling her a witch and ordering her to make the goat perform a feat of magic.
C wasn’t prone to sentimentality, but who could resist when the actors on the page were so vividly rendered? It occurred to him that he had judged Hugo’s work too harshly through the years. His inclination to find faults had dominated his reading experience. He realized that in his urge to be critical, he had missed the sheer, absorbing pleasure of Hugo’s books. Why, he had only to gaze at the sad, decrepit ghost beside him and realize that the stories he’d lef
t behind would survive the eroding effects of time. Centuries would pass, and the books would continue to be read … though not by C, since C could no longer read.4
Awareness filled him with horror. He would never again be able to read about La Esmeralda disentangling Djali’s horns from Madame Aloïse’s dress! He didn’t need a doctor to examine him to conclude with absolute certainty that his impairment was permanent. Printed words forever on would be impenetrable. If he wanted to read, he would have to be read to. It wasn’t the same when the words were spoken aloud. No, it wasn’t at all the same as digesting words visually and letting them transport him far from his armchair into a world illuminated by the light of his solitary consciousness. He had failed to fully savor the distinct satisfaction that comes with reading selflessly, propelled by selfless interest. All through his adult life, when his intellect was at its sharpest, he had positioned himself in competition with the books in his library. Now it was too late to start over. He had missed his chance.
Casting a sorrowful glance at C, Victor Hugo stood, fluffed out the tails of his coat, and walked away. C resisted calling out to him. He watched silently as the ghost dissolved in the mist. After Victor Hugo had disappeared entirely, C bravely fought against despair and invited a return of cold common sense. He told himself that he had imagined the whole encounter. There had been no ghost. He said it over and over to himself: There had been no ghost!
He would have been persuaded if he hadn’t seen, beside him on the bench, the piece of paper Victor Hugo had left behind. C was reluctant to pick it up. It would cause him too much distress, since he wouldn’t be able to read what Hugo had written. It would only be painful to peruse the scrawl of ink and fail to make sense of it. Hugo had probably written something brilliant; C would never know. He would leave the paper there. He would not allow himself to be tormented. But an unusual curiosity overtook him, and he gingerly lifted a corner of the paper.
It took extra scrutiny in the dim light to realize he was looking not at words but at a drawing. At first it seemed a busy patterned design, flowers tumbling behind a web, but with further consideration he came to see the circles, one dark, one hollow, that represented eyes, and a grim, skewed oval of a mouth lined with monstrous teeth, and wisps of a beard trailing like Medusa’s snakes. C finally recognized in the image the shape of a ghostly face, dissolving into a net of lines, as if printed on lace.
Victor Hugo had left behind a drawing. This was his gift to C, who from that day on could no longer read but could still see with perfect clarity. In the picture Victor Hugo had made in C’s presence, C saw the self-portrait of the very ghost with whom he had shared the bench. It did not take much effort to see that the illustration succeeded in capturing all the mysterious brilliance of the artist on a single sheet of paper. He was filled with admiration and at the same time he perceived in the image the full imaginative depths he’d missed in the previous years. It felt as if he were looking through ice at a spectacular underwater garden.
The effect of the drawing was so disorienting that in the days to come C would put it in a drawer, out of sight. Anyway, medical examinations and experimental treatments would keep him so busy he wouldn’t have time for anything else. He decided that rather than leave the drawing to languish in his desk, he would donate it to the city of Paris. When the Victor Hugo Museum was established on the Place des Vosges in 1902, it would be displayed among the author’s papers in a second-floor gallery. It remains there to this day. I know, for I have seen it myself.
______________
1I came across the story of C when I was browsing at a used bookstore in Ithaca. I read the case history while standing in the aisle. Stupidly, I left without purchasing the book. When I returned for it later, the book was gone. I don’t recall the title. C’s story, however, left an indelible impression in my mind.
2The book C was reading consisted of late chapters extracted from Edward Gibbon’s classic work and republished in a pocket edition titled simply The Crusades. I have checked the quotes for accuracy.
3One study has gone so far as to suggest that the recent dramatic uptick in this phenomenon is due to the simplification of writing necessitated by mobile devices. Smaller screens demand a smaller vocabulary, increasing both our exposure to a smaller number of words and the concurrent increase in semantic satiation. See Leonardo, T.; Pissoralüpa, S.; Merendeskewski, J. M. 2018. Neurosemantic Frequency Patterning in ERP DHA Measured Outcomes. The Journal of Neuromorphological Studies. 1752(2–3):132–145.
4C was probably wrong about the survival of Victor Hugo’s books. Predictive patterns based on data by Leonardo et al. (ibid.) indicate that by the year 2150, the majority of the human species will be illiterate.
Idylls of Curiosity
Catherine Imbriglio
IN CASE YOU’VE NEVER WONDERED ABOUT THE MATHEMATICS OF THE VISUAL
A worry, the determining factors in a worry. A plot of land. A meadow. How do you quantify a meadow. A meadow coalesces when overlapping plates regulate the size of a ghost admitting hole.
How is our blood pressure this morning, how many giraffes are pictured on the mug, look closely at their intertwined figures: are they tumbling or might they be copulating, how long did you say a moon needs to be fêted, have you heard from any hecklers lately, do they have probable cause for calling me sexually confused.
I wore this black little number, this is Ella Fitzgerald doing a Gershwin number, if you want to buy fish, the sign says take a number, this number is a retribution number, this number is a catfish number, this number is like an overheard “some people number,” viz., “some people can’t smell shit when it is right under their nose.”
A splash. What are the factors of a splash. A splash is a product in a set of infinitely porous numbers. Is the way you heard multiplied by what you heard. Some days I hear the splash as the product of a church shooting. Some days I hear the splash as a wound-up ghost that has just unfurled.
If you are a curlicue number, you are an open-source number; if you are a fluted number, you are a grooved-coin number; if you are a closed-in number, you are a place to hide number; if you want a place to hide, you are like a nursehound number; if you are a nursehound number, you are an edible bottom-dwelling number; if you are the prey of the nursehound, you may be in for a shark number; if you “only eat Rhode Island chowder,” you may be a homegrown number; if you are a homegrown number, you may be a statistically meaningless number; if you are a statistically meaningless number, you can be a naughty number; if you are a number without sin, wait until you cast the first stone.
When is the best time to pick corn, how many minutes should you cook it, do you start the cooking in cold water or do you wait until the water is boiling; if you are a retribution number, you are a billable number; if you are a billable number, how many ears did you pick and here’s how much you owe; if you are obsessed with corn particulars, you are not a take what comes number; if you are not a take what comes number, how many generations of ghosts would it please you to grow.
—For Marjorie Milligan, in memoriam
(LIKE TALKING TO YOURSELF) WORD PROBLEM
How many times do you get up during the night, how much safety is there in numbers, how many stars would you give the stars in our galaxy, how many times must I remind you not to leave the front door open, how long were you up broom-chasing the bat around the room.
If poetic can be a pejorative, so can calculating, if permanence is an interesting analytic problem, so is impermanence, if mistakes often say more about intrinsic difficulties in a problem and less about fallibility, how would you rate success in becoming imperfectly clear.
How much longer must I wait for a doctor to see me, how long will you be a dodger of persuasive questions, how many times must they report a similar shooting, how much snow was predicted for this past season, how many times have I looked up the number of flats in the F Minor scale.
If I say this is your last chance would you like me to mean it, which
follow-up opinions on the initial opinion deserve a like sign, would you give me thumbs-up for the word ordinals in this sequence, do you still suppose the ability to lie indicates psychological maturity, are you still fond of eating fashionable kale.
Quick, how many great-great-grandmothers does a person have, how many couples have remained childless, how many of your teeth have gone missing; how many times do I have to tell you, Woman-in-Row-34, stop talking on your cell phone for all of us to hear.
What is a problem set, what is the set of problem children, what is the set of animals who can do mimicry, how much of our liking is “statistical correctness,” how many stars are there in the universe, how many times has the likely number fallen on deaf ears.
ALL BETS ARE OFF ALGORITHM
Pretend nobody sees you, or maybe nobody does see you, assume your tripping then falling, nobody witnessed, pray the heckler doesn’t sniff out your risk aversions, kid yourself that opaqueness is a sycamore to hide behind, all to flesh out the in-betweens of your shadow flicker, such that sleep is in, cordgrass on the rise, the size of your universe more than the sum of a dawdling x plus y: (x) how long until the moon and ghost of yourself come round to one another, (y) how long until you are given in consequence to the great blue heron with the prying eyes.
The problem is, the problem was.
A horseshoe crab, a slide rule, a sinking in the mud. Those involuntary muscles around the mouth. A fateful merger like the one with the great blue heron we have been holding off.
Shall we sleep tonight, will we be thrilled with the sheep we have counted, will we be thrilled if on the dream stage our social inhibitions have started fooling around.
The (un)expected frequency of coincidence. Words you mean and don’t mean at the same time. Tide tabler. Wheelhouse. A gambling on correlation as far away as the heckler will allow.
A Cabinet of Curiosity Page 13
