Little: A Novel

by Edward Carey

  I was to look after him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I become a teacher.

  I, the kitchen thing, creature of grease and soot, spirit of steam and flame; I, dirty drudge with the black, stained fingers: I was the one. I was to look after this new person. There were rules to be learned. He must not be in the great hall during business hours. He, like me, belonged to the back rooms. And so my days became occupied with a wonderful parenthood. My child, my difficult charge, took all my patience and care and love. I spoiled him perhaps, fed him sweetmeats, but I was stern with him also. I raised my voice, I wagged my finger. He lashed out, but I took breath and went straight back into the battle. How Edmond fussed over my scratches! I saw him once in the distant hall, looking into the kitchen, putting his hand to his mouth in horror.

  I was domesticating a wild thing, and it kept me busy. Jacques must urinate and defecate in the chamber pot; it took him months to learn. There’d be a smell, I’d find a puddle and a stool, and howling Jacques would rush out of doors.

  Perhaps I overdid it a little. Perhaps, overflowing with parenthood, I could not see clearly; perhaps I made him out more feral than he really was. He knew how to talk, of course; he did not have to be taught words, though I sometimes forgot this, and in his misery as I groomed him and broke him in, he would call out names of people. He might howl Yves Sicre, for example; he might lessen his discomfiture by snapping Jean-Paul Clémonçon; he might thump the ground repeating the name Anne-Jerome de Marciac-Lanville. And just uttering these names—names he’d heard upon the boulevard, I presumed—did seem to hush him a little. He learned not to whine and grow quite so agitated whenever a female customer entered the Monkey House. But he must, the widow instructed, he must protect everything that belonged to the Monkey House.

  Jacques’ face perfectly described his thoughts: sad, angry, frightened, happy, all would show openly upon his face. He was, unlike wax, the poorest of actors; he could be no one but himself, he was stuck with himself, and that was at times a very desperate and troubling state to inhabit.

  After Jacques began to sleep inside, I think he came to be frightened of the outside. It didn’t happen immediately; it crept up upon him. He grew a little fatter, grew accustomed to the warmth of indoors. As we sat together in the kitchen, I told him of my mother and father, of my life before I came to Paris; if I didn’t tell him, I had begun to wonder, how could I ever be sure it had all happened? If I didn’t tell the story it might dry up and I would be left short and grimy of the kitchen. Slowly he breathed it all in. And one afternoon, his mouth opened and the words came out.

  Jacques Beauvisage had stories of his own.

  “Bernard Balliac cut his wife. Into pieces. Fed them to a dog!”

  I heard these words, these clear signs of intelligence. I leaned forward, listening attentively. After a long while he spoke again.

  “Butcher Olivier axed up his family. His wife. His children, two. Sold them for pig food. Pig food was too rich for pigs, pigs took sick. Law called.”

  I kept very quiet. He went on. Small blurted words, his messages of thanks to me.

  “Isabelle Torisset and Pascal Fissot lay together in bed. But someone was with them there already. Her husband, Maurice! Maurice was a cripple. Three’s a crowd, so they do say. They took him to the top of the house where there were birds on the flat roof in a big cage, a building downriver, nearby the granaries. They put the husband in the cage. And the husband was pecked apart by birds but found, months after. Alive! Bony! Unlike the lovers! They were soon dead! Hanged on Place de Grève! Public! I saw it!”

  What a breakthrough that was! How my teaching and instincts were confirmed that night! For then, as if all victories had come at once, he started to share with me his own passion, which before he had kept only to himself. Jacques, I discovered, was a great memorizer of Parisian crimes and murders. We sat in the kitchen together and Jacques in his growl let out small, bloody, miserable tales of unfortunate people leaving life in a hurry. One after the other I heard them, deep into the night, delivered with increasing confidence. Tell us another story, Jacques, tell us another. I couldn’t go to sleep without one. Under his tutelage I became very knowledgeable of appalling acts.

  He told me of his life too. I begged it out of him: “Jacques, tell me. Do!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Jacques Beauvisage, an account of himself.

  I seen hangings, but not murders. I should like to grow up one day to see a good murder. A bloody one. I missed a throat cutting on the boulevard by only a few minutes. Saw the blood, even the bleeding, but not the cutting itself.”

  “How old are you, Jacques?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. What d’you think?”

  “I think perhaps something like twenty? I don’t know. More than fifteen? I can’t say.”

  “Nor can I. Well and what then?”

  “Where were you born?”

  “Here. Paris.”

  “Who was your father?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Your mother?”

  “No, don’t know.”

  “What do you know then, my pet?” I gently persisted.

  “You sound like an old granny.”

  “Tell me, what happened to you?”

  “I was left at the foundling hospital, Rue Saint-Honoré. That’s sure. There they named me, nuns did. I was never pretty, so they say. I am big of face, and been made bigger no doubt by my living. Called me Jacques, which I go by, and Beauvisage on account of my good looks.”

  “What was it like? At the foundling.”

  “I lived. I ate. There wasn’t much food, so I took some from others who weren’t strong enough to fight for it. So then maybe they starved; that’s how it was. I was loud and did hit and was not always to be ordered. I hit one nun, and I hurt another with my shouting; she went deaf they say. Children died, ’specially in winter. I didn’t. Couldn’t kill me. Haven’t yet, least is. Was ill one winter, thought I’d gone, lay in the ditch by the wall day after day, buried in filth. Came back, though, sat up, ate some, shat some, up again. Better and better.”

  “And after the orphanage?”

  “I was taken. Audinot, the theater manager, he always comes and takes some, four or five a year, to be on the stage in his Ambigu-Comique.”

  “Yes, I know him. We have his head here!”

  Jacques spat. “All the performers there are children and are took from orphanages because they’re cheap, he doesn’t have to pay for them—he’s paid to take them away. I played there, mostly wild animals. I was well known, people came just to see me, but they didn’t like to come in the front seats when I was on, on account of I might come down off the stage and hit them. I have a temper, better now a bit, but then I’d hit a person just because I could, and Audinot would scream at me, and he feared very much I might have at him too. I had a good girl at the Ambigu, that was Henriette Peret, and we knew each other a lot and she was the first for me. But she got ill on me, and then she died on me, and I got so angry I hit about everything and threatened to kill Audinot and so he got his heavy men on me and then broke me all over and shoved me out. That was when I was in the ditch and thought that was my last resting. But at last I got up again. So then. I hung around with dogs mainly and they kept by me and were company, but we fight so. And do frighten. Been with them can’t say how long, seasons on seasons. I nearly become a dog, I think. But then comes Curtius and you, who is an old woman and a child both at once, who makes me talk again. And so here I am again. Among the people, or a single person, small and busy. I’m every day on the boulevard except when there’s a hanging; then I do go to the Place de Grève. Those are the good days. I like me a good hanging, very good for me.”

  After he had begun telling me his own tale, I cleaned Jacques with a kinder touch. I convinced him to sit in the tin bath, and there I made him look more and more like a person every day. There was a man under that grime, a rough-looking one with appalling te
eth, who laughed at the most inappropriate things; a clumsy youth, a thuggish one, but one who, in the midst of his miserable tales, had a certain beauty about him. There were so many scars upon his skin from burns, from rips, from being cut, from self-scratching. I asked about the marks, one after another, and sitting in the bathtub, he nonchalantly told me one by one. “That from the theater, Master Audinot with a spike. I was littler—he shouldn’t try it later. That one from Black Dog. That one I did to test a knife, I stole it, very good knife. Very.” Under the widow’s instruction, Edmond made him a woolen suit of double weave so that it might last longer, each seam stitched four times, but Jacques tore it soon enough and so a new tougher outfit was made for him of leather.

  Jacques’ tales were so good that they could not be kept in the kitchen; they very soon spread themselves about the house. Like those monkey phantasms, they began to make their presence known in the upstairs room. Though the widow and my master had not listened to them exactly, still those stories began to enter them, finding a way through their nostrils in their sleep. Why else could my master be heard in the night walking back and forth in his room? Why else did the widow always wake in such black moods?

  He was such a very different creature from me, Jacques was, that I was like some innocent learning the world. The pupil became the teacher, telling me, in his way, what it was to be alive and how many ways there were to die. It was as if I had had almost no real contact with life before he came along to me, as if I’d heard only rumors, small whisperings of what human beings could do. I was a toy doll from a nursery, being instructed by a rat. Afterward, when Jacques dozed after a telling, I would visit the wax populace in the hall, still a child no matter what he called me, but shedding that childhood as I walked among the counterfeit humans.

  One early evening, I was clearing away the plates in the dining room before the visitors were let in when I observed Edmond sitting there, avoiding my looks. He’d been so distant since Jacques’ coming.

  “Jacques knows such stories,” I spouted at him.

  “What?” asked the widow. “Did you speak?”

  “Jacques Beauvisage knows such wonderful stories. You should hear them.”

  “Get out,” said the widow.

  “Stories?” my master said. “What stories?”

  “They are Paris stories, sir, all of them.” I cleared my throat. “Of murders, of killings. He knows them all. They are very extraordinary, sir. They must belong to heads we don’t know. Certainly I’ve never seen the faces of men and women that have done such things.”

  To my delight, Curtius asked me to send him up. My master and the widow would listen to these stories. I expected to hear my master clapping very soon, but what I heard was shouting from the widow. She boxed his ears; Jacques came down miserable.

  When I went upstairs, the widow scolded me. “You bring such ugliness into my house. This is a place of fine faces, of beauty and accomplishment, not the dirt you know. You’d have us in the gutter. Don’t get too comfortable here.” She glanced down at the floor, spotted a speck of dirt. “Look out there—mud!”

  Later, my master tried to scold Jacques. “Bad boy, a very bad boy.” But his face did not seem to fit his words. To me he said only, “What wonderful work, Marie, how he thrives! What excellent care you take of him. I do thank you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Which contains an outing of great significance.

  What news, what news I have, Curtius, dear Widow,” said Mercier to my master and the widow as he burst into the Monkey House, full of joy.

  “News, no doubt,” said the widow, “that shall involve the drinking of our wine to ease its telling.”

  “I shall not say no!” cooed Mercier.

  “You never do,” said the widow, and nodded to me.

  I brought the wine as fast as I could.

  “Well, then,” said the widow, “if you are sufficiently primed.”

  “The year 1774 began with headaches,” Mercier began.

  “God save us,” groaned the lady, “we know the date.”

  “As January progressed,” continued Mercier, undeterred, “so came body pains and fever. February arrived with a rash. In March the red spots called and wouldn’t leave; they began to spread themselves everywhere about. By April the smell was undeniable; by mid-April the spots became lesions that soon filled with watery pus; by the end of April the lesions had crusty scabs. On the eighth May the lesions began to hemorrhage, on the ninth the holy men were crammed in, on the tenth May 1774, Louis XV, King of France by the Grace of God, has died of smallpox. Better times are here, Doctor Curtius, Widow Picot! Little too! Even your new hound! France is great again. Long live the new king, and long live the new queen! In Versailles, parliament has been recalled! Now may Paris be saved!”

  “The king is dead,” said the widow, clearly shocked.

  “Dead and rotting,” replied Mercier. “It is younger bodies that concern us now.”

  But after all the talk of newness came restlessness. Soon Mercier came back, rushing around the Monkey House in agony, shaking his head. The city had changed its ruler, but his presence was impossible to detect. When nothing new was apparent, when all was business as usual, spirits broke; there was rioting on the streets; people were killed. Shrieking crowds passed by outside, shaking the Monkey House. Jacques wanted to go out, but the widow would not let him, so he spent his days whining at the door. The riot was contained, arrests were made, punishments decided. Jacques screamed hideously that he needed to watch the punishments, and kept screaming until Curtius promised to take him early next morning. The widow refused to let my master out alone, so would accompany him, and Edmond, she instructed, would accompany her. To a hanging. I was to stay behind and watch the house.

  They were such different people, the ones going out of the Monkey House, from the ones coming back. Jacques brought me a souvenir. It was a doll, not particularly well made, roughly in the shape of a man but without arms, only dangling legs. It wore no clothes and had no face drawn onto its head, no hair either. It was made of simple cloth in a single color, stuffed with dried corn. It came with a piece of looped string tied around the neck. Jacques told me that dolls like this one were always sold at the hangings, for people to hold and dangle in the direction of the scaffold. When the body fell and twitched and writhed, his movements matched those of the dolls held by strings in people’s hands, the legs of the dying man like the cloth legs of the hanging dolls, kicked and pitched, desperately seeking land.

  “Charles Lesquillier!” proclaimed Jacques. “Stole bread!”

  Curtius was crying as I took his coat. “Stopped! Right before me. As I watched.”

  The widow was in a haze of reminiscence. “I have not seen a hanging since I went with Henri. We used to go together. In happier days.”

  Edmond was shaking, and even paler than usual. He stumbled rather in the hall, and then dropped down to the ground. The widow screamed. Jacques carried him upstairs; a doctor was called for. When I, barefoot, braved the stairs that night, the widow was asleep in a chair by his bed, but Edmond was awake and looking at me. I saw he was crying. But I could not speak to him, only, fearfully, return kitchenward.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Our first murderer.

  The dispossessed were everywhere about Paris. They were daily growing in number, said Mercier, with no one to help them. Our neighbor Monsieur Pillet, of the chess café, lost his job and his house and his chess pieces. Many others followed. The widow wrote down the names of casualties, a list of those who had failed, and pinned it up in the workshop.

  PERSON

  BUSINESS

  FATE

  Marchand, Pierre

  café for speakers of Latin

  bailiffs, prison

  Roland, Michel

  pies

  burned, hospital, death

  Arlin, Georgette

  silhouettes

  beggary, madhouse

  Dixmier, Alain, Hortens
e

  conjurers

  suicide, first him then her

  Pillet, Alain

  chess café

  choked on bishop

  As Edmond recovered from the hanging, he was not allowed downstairs but kept in his room around soft objects. I think that, having seen that death, he had felt a little of it enter into him, a crumb of it somehow inhaled, and he must thoroughly fight it off. I had horrible notions he would die too.

  One murder followed upon another. It was as if we had picked up a new language to which we’d previously been deaf. Now that we spoke murder, we heard it everywhere. And there, as if conjured by our conversations, was suddenly an enormous new one, a black new history with so much marrow in its bone. In our house it was of course Jacques who let this story in: the unpleasant history of Antoine-François Desrues.

  “He poisoned with arsenic!” crowed Jacques. “Arsenic in drinking chocolate! First a mother drank it, down she goes! Bang on the floor! He pulled her old body into a trunk and buried her in a rented cellar. What a fellow! What days we live in! And that’s not it yet. For then the mother’s son comes calling and out comes the chocolate again and down goes the son. Bang on the floor! And this time he’s put in the type of trunk they call a coffin and buried in a false grave. And then? The father comes and guess, guess?”

  “Chocolate? Bang on the floor?”

  “No, no, Marie, no, I’m sorry, but no. When the father comes he brings the police too, and it must be that Desrues did not have enough chocolate for all of them, and they, suspicious, sent out posters all over the walls of Paris, and the landlady of the rented cellar recognized Desrues’ likeness, and she screamed and she screamed. And then they dug up the cellar, and what do you think, Marie?”