Beatrice and Virgil

by Yann Martel

  The silence in the play continued out of it. The taxidermist didn't say anything more and Henry was speechless. It wasn't just the elaborate, institutional torturing of a donkey. It was something else that arrested him, a detail about the head torturer. Beatrice described him as "a tall, raw-boned man". The second adjective was unusual enough that for a moment Henry misunderstood it; a literal and gruesome image flitted through his mind. Then he remembered its proper meaning: lean, gaunt, an absence of fleshiness. Henry dwelt on the image. A tall, raw-boned man. He glanced at the taxidermist. Perhaps it was a coincidence.

  "Well, that was disturbing," Henry finally said.

  The taxidermist did not reply.

  "Among the characters in the play, you mention a boy and his two friends. When do they appear?" Henry asked.

  "At the very end of the play."

  "There's this sudden intrusion of human characters in your animal allegory."

  "That's right." The taxidermist said nothing more, only looked out blankly.

  "What happens with the boy?"

  The taxidermist picked up some papers.

  "Virgil has just finished reading out the sewing kit as they have it so far. You remember the sewing kit?"

  "I do."

  He read:

  "They recognize the boy," the taxidermist interrupted. "The day before, in the village where they were staying, this boy had been one of the main instigators in some terrible deeds."

  "Go on," Henry said.

  The taxidermist read:

  The taxidermist fell silent. "And that's how the play ends?" Henry said. "That's how the play ends. After that, the curtain comes down."

  The taxidermist got up and walked to one of the counters. After a moment Henry followed him. The taxidermist was looking at some pages he'd neatly spread out.

  "What's this?" Henry asked.

  "A scene I'm working on."

  "What's it about?"

  "Gustav."

  "Who's Gustav?"

  "He's a dead, naked body that's been lying near Virgil and Beatrice's tree the whole time."

  "A human body? Another human?"

  "Yes."

  "Lying in the open?"

  "No, in some bushes. Virgil discovers him."

  "They don't smell his body before that?"

  "Sometimes life stinks just as much as death. They don't."

  "How do they know he's called Gustav?"

  "They don't. Virgil calls him that to give him a name."

  "Why is he naked?"

  "They figure he was told to strip and was then shot. They think the red cloth was probably his. He might have been a peddler."

  "Why do they stay? After finding a dead body, wouldn't the more natural reaction be to run away?"

  "They think of it as a place already plundered and now safe."

  "What do they do about Gustav? Do they bury him?"

  "No, they play games."

  "Games?"

  "Yes. It's another way they find of talking about the Horrors. It's in the sewing kit."

  That's right, Henry remembered: games for Gustav.

  "Isn't that an odd thing to do, to play games when there's a dead body right next to you?" Henry said.

  "They imagine that Gustav would enjoy them if he were still alive. Playing games is a way of celebrating life."

  "What kind of games?"

  "That was my question for you. I thought you might come up with a few. You seem like the playful sort."

  "What, like hide-and-seek?"

  "I was hoping for something more sophisticated."

  "You mentioned some terrible deeds instigated by the boy who kills Beatrice and Virgil."

  "Yes."

  "Beatrice and Virgil saw these deeds?"

  "Yes."

  "What did they see?"

  The taxidermist said nothing. Henry was about to repeat his question but he thought better of it. He waited. After a long while, the taxidermist spoke.

  "At first they didn't see. They heard. They were standing by the village pond among some bushes, sipping at the water's edge, when they heard screams. They looked up and saw two young women wearing long skirts and heavy peasant boots running for the pond, clutching bundles to their chests. Some men were behind them, not in hot pursuit but rather seeming to enjoy the women's flight. Terror and the grimmest determination were written on the women's faces. First one reached the pond, then the other. Both ran into it without a pause. When they were thigh-deep in the water, they dropped what they were carrying.

  "It was then that Virgil and Beatrice saw that their bundles were swaddled babies. The women pushed their babies underwater and held them there. Even after the few bubbles stopped popping at the surface, there was no hesitation on their part, no flexing of the arms. On the contrary, the women continued to move deeper into the pond, kicking at their skirts and losing and regaining their footing. The men lining the edge of the pond--there must have been ten or so--far from offering any kind of help, jeered the women on.

  "When she was certain that her baby could no longer be alive, yet still clutching it beneath the surface, one of the women, now past her waist in the black water, plunged headfirst and immediately was drowned. Neither she nor her baby broke the surface again. They both sank to the bottom. The other woman tried to do the same but could not manage it, even when it was obvious that her baby, like the other, was dead. She kept coming up for air, coughing and snorting, which provoked laughter among the men, who shouted advice on how best to drown. Whereas the first woman's death had proceeded with the swiftness of gravity, the second woman's took longer. For minutes she stood in the water, shivering and staring at its surface and looking at the men on the shore and attempting again to drown herself, all done without any show or any effort to communicate, only with the grave look of someone trying to kill herself. Her baby was gone and she was determined to follow it close behind. Finally, with a glance up to the sky, lifting the soggy mass of her baby out of the water and pressing it to her chest, the woman forcefully threw herself forward and managed to end her days. A hand clawing at the surface of the water, a muddied boot kicking up awkwardly, a bubble of skirt briefly floating--then she was gone. Ripples faded and the pond was still once more. The men cheered and moved on."

  "And Beatrice and Virgil in all this?" Henry asked quietly.

  "They neither moved nor made a sound the whole time and they remained unnoticed. As soon as the men dispersed, they fled the village. Images kept pressing upon them. Beatrice could see the face of one of the babies, the first one to be drowned, a fleeting, expressive pinkness, with a small escaped hand reaching up to its mother. Another face harried Virgil: that of a boy--he could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen years old. In his pursuit of the women, he slowed and kicked the ground in their direction, throwing up a cloud of dirt and pebbles, his kicking leg raised high in the air as he hopped on the other to a stop--this done with the easy, elastic vigour of youth, accompanied by a whoop and a holler. Then he started running after the women again. He was one of the loudest and most excited at the pond's edge."

  "And he's the one they run into a few days later?"

  "Yes, as I just read to you," the taxidermist replied.

  "It's after they flee the village that Beatrice and Virgil come to the spot where they have the conversation about a pear?"

  "That's right."

  There was silence, that silence the taxidermist was so comfortable with, in person and in his writing, that silence in which things can grow or rot.

  The taxidermist spoke first. "I need help with the games Virgil and Beatrice are going to play."

  The words games and play --but said in the gloomiest voice and with the darkest expression. Henry felt a throb in his head.

  "Tell me, the boy in your play--what happens to him after he kills Beatrice and Virgil? Is that covered in your allegory about animals?"

  "No. I stay with the animals. I don't want games that need a board or dice or anything like that
."

  Henry remembered the story the taxidermist had sent him, "The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator". Henry now understood the taxidermist's keen interest in the Flaubert story: Julian slaughters quantities of innocent animals, but it doesn't affect his salvation. The story offers redemption without remorse. That would be an attraction to a man who had something to hide.

  The grocer across the street had got it right, Henry realized: a crazy old man. Sarah, in one glance, had got it right: a creep. The waiter at the cafe had got it right. Why had he taken so long to see it? Here he was, rubbing shoulders with a stinking old Nazi collaborator, now casting himself as the great defender of the innocent. Take the dead and make them look good. How was that for murderous irrationalism neatly packaged and hidden? Taxidermy indeed. Henry now understood why all the animals in the showroom were so still: it was dread in the presence of the taxidermist. Henry shuddered. He wanted to wash his hands, his soul, of this man forever. He felt tainted by him.

  Henry looked at the taxidermist. "I'm leaving," he said.

  "Wait," the taxidermist replied.

  "What for?" Henry snapped.

  "Take my play with you." The taxidermist gathered the pages on the counter, seven or eight of them. "You can have the whole play." He went to his desk and hastily collected in his large hands all the pages lying on it. "Read it and tell me what you think."

  "I don't want your play. Keep it," Henry said.

  "Why not? It would help me."

  "I don't want to help you."

  "But I've been working on it for so long."

  "I don't care."

  Henry looked across the room at Beatrice and Virgil. He felt a pang of sadness. He wouldn't be seeing them again. Such lovely animals.

  He turned back to the taxidermist because the man was stuffing pages from his play into the pockets of Henry's jacket. Henry grabbed the pages and slammed them onto the counter.

  "I told you, I don't want your damn play. Here, have these too."

  Henry took out the parts of the play he had brought with him and threw them down. The pages fluttered in the air and skittered across the floor.

  "Well, in exchange, take this," the taxidermist said calmly.

  He turned away momentarily. When he was facing Henry again, he had a short, blunt knife in his hand. He stabbed Henry. He wasn't even hurried about it. He looked at Henry, then drove the knife into his body, just below the ribs. It took Henry a moment to realize what had happened. The pain was briefly dulled by utter disbelief. The taxidermist stabbed him a second time, but instinctively Henry put his hands in the way and they took some of the thrust.

  "What, what...?" Henry puffed.

  Henry could feel wetness beneath his shirt and there was blood all over his hands. Suddenly fear and pain shot through him electrically. A keening sound emerged from his mouth. Gripping the counter so as not to fall over, he turned and with leaden legs headed for the door of the workshop. He must have run, but it felt like a shuffle to him. With every beat of his heart his whole body was jolted and more blood poured out of him. He was petrified that the taxidermist would catch up with him and finish him off. The words "Sarah! Theo!" pulsed in his head.

  He reached the door. In turning to go through, he caught a glimpse of the taxidermist. He was walking up behind him, his face passive, the red knife still in his hand.

  Henry careened into the tigers and fell over. The pain ripping through his midriff was so intense and uncontrollable that he didn't so much get back onto his feet piecemeal as jerk himself up in one motion, as if he were a marionette pulled up by his strings. He made for the front door of the store as fast as he could. Would it be locked? The closer he got to the door, the more improbable it seemed that he would reach it. A hand would land on his shoulder. Worse, the taxidermist's blade would cut through his back.

  Henry grappled with the doorknob. The door wasn't locked. It opened slowly and heavily. Henry threw himself out of the store and staggered across the pavement onto the street. Just then a car was approaching. He stood in front of it. The car braked and he collapsed onto its warm hood. Until then he may have been grunting. Now he was screaming as loudly as he could, though he was starting to snort and cough blood through his nose and mouth. The two women in the car came out, and when they saw the state he was in, they too started to scream. The man from the grocery store rushed out. Other people started appearing, alerted by the noise. Henry was surely safe now. Murder doesn't take place in the open, in front of so many witnesses, does it?

  It was at that moment, as people blurrily crowded the edges of his vision, that Henry looked back at Okapi Taxidermy, still afraid the taxidermist might be following him. But he had stayed inside. The taxidermist was calmly looking out through the glass of the closed door, as if he were admiring the sunny day. Their eyes met. He smiled at Henry. It was a full smile that lit up his face. He had beautiful teeth. Henry barely recognized him. Was this the taxidermist's version of empty good cheer expressed in extremis? He turned and disappeared into his store, as if uninterested by the commotion at his doorstep. Henry collapsed, drowning in an internal sea of blood.

  Even before the ambulance had arrived, the flames could be seen bursting out of Okapi Taxidermy. There was little the fire brigade could do. With that much wood and dry fur and so many flammable chemicals, the store burned quick and hard. A howling inferno.

  With the taxidermist in it.

  In a healthy individual, a broken bone that has healed properly is strongest where it was once broken. You have not lost any life, Henry told himself. You will still get your fair share of years. Yet the quality of his life changed. Once you've been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness. The natural smile is taken from you and the natural pleasures you once enjoyed lose their appeal. The city was ruined for Henry. Sarah, Theo and he would leave it soon. Only, where would they settle now?

  Where would they find happiness? Where would he feel safe?

  Henry regretted not having saved Beatrice and Virgil. He missed them with an ache that made itself felt even years later. It was the same kind of pain he felt when he had to be away for any length of time from Theo, a physical hunger for presence. He chided himself. Beatrice and Virgil, they didn't exist, not really; they were only characters in a play, animals at that, and dead ones. So what did that mean, save them? They were already lost by the time he had met them. But there it was: he missed them terribly. In his mind, he saw them as they stood in the taxidermist's workshop, Virgil so, Beatrice like this--he tried to make the pictures in his mind as clear as possible. But they faded, as memories of appearance always do.

  All that remained now was their story, that incomplete story of waiting and fearing and hoping and talking. A love story, Henry concluded. Told by a madman whose mind he had never understood, but a love story nonetheless. Henry wished he had taken the taxidermist's play. That was another regret, that he had been so blinded by anger. But some stories are fated to be lost, at least in part.

  Later on, on a few occasions, Henry looked at pictures of howler monkeys, nearly always photographed high up in tropical trees, but the evident wildness of the animals made it impossible for him to see anything of Virgil in them. Donkeys, on the other hand, were another matter. Once, at a Christmas Nativity scene with live animals, as Henry got close to the donkey, it looked at him and, as if recognizing him, shook its head and twisted its ears and made a gentle snuffling sound. Of course, it was likely only hoping for a treat. Henry knew that in his mind. Nonetheless, under his breath, he said her name--"Beatrice!"--and tears welled up in his eyes. He could never again see a donkey without thinking of Beatrice and Virgil and feeling grief and misery.

  After the stabbing, Henry went about remembering and writing down exactly what had happened to him. To help his memory, he read up on taxidermy. Any bit of information that struck him as familiar, he noted; that's how he reassembled the essay the taxidermist had read to
him. In a taxidermy magazine, he found an article on the taxidermist, with precious photos; these were the foundations for the mental reconstruction of Okapi Taxidermy. The essential part of the story, the taxidermist's play, was the most difficult to re-create. The sun of faith came before the generous wind, but which came first, the black cat or the three whispered jokes? The most elusive fragments on the sewing list were those the taxidermist had never discussed, such as the song, the food dish, the shirts with an arm missing, the porcelain shoes, the float in a parade. But bit by bit, painstakingly, Henry managed to reconstruct parts of the play.

  At the hospital, as he was resting in his bed after the blood transfusions and the operation, the nurse presented him with a torn sheet of paper, crumpled and bloodied. She said it was Henry's, that he had brought it with him. Henry recognized what it was. As he turned after being stabbed, he must have laid a hand on the counter and unintentionally grabbed one of the pages from the taxidermist's play. Somewhere along the way, half of it had been torn off and lost.

  Through a handprint of blood, the words coming through the red like dark bruises on skin, Henry read the sole surviving element of the play, a fragment to do with the body Beatrice and Virgil find near the tree:

  Henry first gave to the story of his stabbing the title A 20th-Century Shirt . Then he changed it to Henry the Taxidermist . Finally he settled on a title that went to the heart of the encounter: Beatrice and Virgil . It was to Henry a factual account, a memoir. But while in the hospital, before he started writing Beatrice and Virgil , Henry wrote another text. He called it Games for Gustav . It was too short to be a novel, too disjointed to be a short story, too realistic to be a poem. Whatever it was, it was the first piece of fiction Henry had written in years.

  Games for Gustav

  * * *

  G AME N UMBER O NE

  Your ten-year-old son is speaking to you.

  He says he has found a way of obtaining some potatoes to feed your starving family.

  If he is caught, he will be killed.

  Do you let him go?

  * * *

  * * *