The Chemistry of Tears

by Peter Carey

  The first inn was hospitable although not clean. I called for candles and wrote to Percy, telling him all about the clever crippled boy, his luminous invention, the adventure that would take me into Ali Baba’s cave. By previous arrangement I sent this letter to my friend George Binns who had agreed to come and read to Percy on Saturday and Thursday afternoons.

  On the second day we journeyed deep into the Schwarzwald. The forest road was picturesque, although very steep. All was particularly un-Grimm. Everywhere was beauty and delight—dark green forests, bright meadows, the well-kept gardens, an extraordinary abundance of mountain streams, brooks and rills, not to mention the quaint houses with their heavy overhanging roofs, bright rows of glittering windows, carved verandahs, and their inmates—a distinct and peculiar race of people—the women with bodices and bright skirts, aprons, neat little pointed caps from which dropped those massive plaits it was their husbands’ privilege to see set free. I wished I were once again a husband in that private sense.

  So, sad sometimes, often lonely too, but never in my entire life had I essayed a real adventure and I thought a great deal about my automaton and how, before it had been brought to life, it had already proved its power to realign the stars.

  The swaying coach continued upwards until the sunlight showed that melancholy whiteness distinctive of the very highest altitudes. Then we were in country which forbade all growth except of grass and shrubs. Silence reigned upon the roof and I began to fear that the landscape of our destination might be in no way like that of the journey. Now the grass was blighted. We were in a land of peat, although as far as I could see the inhabitants had found no use for it. The timber houses were bleached like bones. And in the queer white light I became my own worst enemy, my own best hope, one of those unstable Brandlings who would always be in the market for a miracle.

  IT WAS ONCE SAID: “Brandling would see the glass half full even when it lay in shards around his feet.” Ha ha, indeed. But has no one bothered to observe that the optimistic view is commonly correct? That is why our fearful prayers are so often “answered.” That is why, when we descend from one of life’s barren mountain tops, we almost always enter a pleasant valley where there is an inn, very clean and white-washed, its window boxes filled with flowers in bloom.

  And to that inn I surely came, and my natural “naïve” spirits were immediately restored. And from that inn’s airy stables the wall-eyed coachman would soon set off, carrying my trunk on his broad back. First, however, he joined us around a bowl of moist ham hocks and mugs of creamy beer. There were no fearful intimations, no mortal shadows; every leaf of privet was bright and green and barbered.

  Not even the weight of a Harris tweed suit could distract one from the pretty harvest scene through which our little party strolled and stumbled. And who could not be affected by the mood of one’s companions, particularly the boy who ran and limped and gambolled and called to the harvesters? They knew him—Carl.

  We were now on our way to the place where a powerful cure might be constructed. I was a-tingle with impatience yet also, paradoxically, much elevated by the delays. Who would not be happy to see a much-loved boy have his weight guessed? When he performed a clever tumble, he never once pitied himself his crippled leg. Yes, I felt the absence of my own son—an awful ache—but only love provides the lucky man such symptoms.

  As for the German mother? Who would ever imagine that distant figure in the wheat field to have poor hard hands, red elbows, and a mouth that did not dare hope for very much at all?

  In the winter (as was apparently well known to everyone but me) the Furtwangen men all worked on their cuckoo clocks, and in the summer they laboured beside their wives. They were Alemannians and Celts and they were large and strong and showed a bright and cheerful speech and temperament. I liked them even when they clearly did not give a fig for me.

  Our path soon joined a brook and young Carl paused by the muddy bank to once more display his wooden trick; the leap of red and yellow produced the desired effect; the performer said goodbye; and we followed the brook as it traversed two pathless valleys and a cool ravine where the black needles of the tall silver firs massed in whole mountains or sometimes mingled with the brighter green of oak and beech. A narrow path then led us down a cliff at which point the gentle stream soon revealed its secret nature as a roaring beast, rushing, and foaming, and hurling itself into a deep cleft, where it spun the high wheel of a mill. From here we followed steps cut in the living rock.

  At the top we found the mill stretching itself across the plateau, a muddle of high-pitched deep-eaved roofs. The air was unseasonably damp here, and green and mouldy. On the shadowed fascias were visible many carvings, a clear evocation of the cuckoo clock and, in this sense, encouraging to the seeker.

  “Sumpy,” the boy cried.

  Although it was now early summer and therefore past the season for logs to be floated to the bigger rivers, we found abandoned fir trunks stacked untidily. In the deep shadow between mill and dwelling everything was sour and damp. Piles of old grey sawdust and freshly murdered logs sometimes blocked the path. Copper cables, like guy ropes, ran from the peak of the mill house to the surrounding earth at which point they were enclosed in wooden boxes. Not everyone, I realize, would be comforted by this unscientific mess, but to me it was further evidence that my thieves might be angels in disguise.

  “Sumpy, Sumpy.” The boy’s eyes were bright with expectation. I thought, how wise I had been to accept this new adventure. I felt like G. L. Sanderson:

  When life was all but over,

  so this silver seam began.

  We opened a bright black door and, without so much as an elephant’s foot or coat rack to prevent our immediate arrival at the heart of things, stepped inside a cavernous kitchen with a low ceiling and small deep windows. It was the middle of the afternoon but two candles and a lamp were already burning. Various pots steamed on the stove and I detected the very welcome aroma of baking apples.

  “Sumpy!”

  At a large square table beneath a window, sat two men, one as small as a pixie and the other—well, it was, of course, the big thick-necked fellow from the hotel, he who espoused the romantic doctrine of the Karlsruhe wheel. That improbable creature, with his bumpy bald head gleaming in the candlelight, was the object of Carl’s love. I adjusted. It was my character to do so.

  Then off, hey, ho, and up the stairs, the pair of them, man and boy, in a great rush together, like chums reunited at the start of term.

  No one had cared to introduce me to the delicate man in lederhosen, so I did the honours myself. I presumed him a clockmaker, and his high-pitched precise way of speaking was exactly what one might expect—one does not anticipate wonders to be made by men with gardener’s hands. He said his name was Arnaud.

  Henry, I thought, you have arrived at a place you could never have pictured. I began to mentally compose another letter to my son.

  A balmy breeze flowed through the open shutters. One could hear the hissing of the apples, the persistent river, the unrelenting echoing conversation between Herr Sumper and the adoring child.

  The coachman delivered my trunk somewhere or other. I tipped him and he set off. Frau Helga busied herself around the kitchen and I sat at table to play host to myself.

  The small Huguenot—as he let himself be known—spoke an excellent English in which he informed me that a fierce and peculiar race of men lived in these mountains. If he thought to frighten me, he did not succeed. Fierce and peculiar was what the doctor ordered. For now, however, the air smelled of chaff and mellow pipe tobacco.

  It was a good half hour before Herr Sumper and Carl descended the stairs, hand in hand, clearly happy to be reunited.

  “Well, Herr Brandling,” said Herr Sumper finally, “you and I have a spot of business to discuss.”

  Spot of business, spot of business. How strange to find the cockney intonation pleasing. I asked the German why he spoke my mother tongue this way, and I do not doubt he an
swered me sincerely but he was already charging back up the stairs.

  When I caught up with him he was striding along a windowless corridor. The floor inclined downwards like the murderous chute of the Brandling Railway Co.’s gravel crusher but if this was an omen I was very far from seeing it. At the lower end awaited my true destination, a sturdy pine door fastened with three quite different locks. Of course, of course, it must be locked. I would be the last to disagree.

  With a fortune of one’s own, I belatedly realized, a chap could travel into any realm he dreamed. How peculiar I never thought of this before. Here I was—inside the sanctus sanctorum, the vision made concrete, and every small detail of the workshop’s physical existence, its concrete fact, stood at the service of Hippocrates. I saw machines, of course, as I had dreamed, but I had never had the wit to anticipate that the workshop might somehow hang above a wild chasm whose stream would provide the engines’ motive force. Everything was exceptionally clean and ordered, a number of shining lathes, for instance, one quite large, the others of the size traditionally used by clockmakers. The smallest lathe had a canvas belt attached to a spinning cylinder and this, in turn, was connected by a wider belt to the spring-wheel of the sawmill.

  To my ear, we were behind a waterfall, against a rock.

  I called out to say that Vaucanson had invented a lathe almost identical to this pygmy version.

  Herr Sumper glared at me.

  I thought, my goodness, do not offend him now.

  Then, in an instant, as if his own drive belt had slipped onto a faster wheel, he was grinning and gesturing at the wall behind my back.

  “This is the only Vaucanson we need.”

  And, you have guessed already—here were the Two Friends’ plans, tacked onto the wall.

  In the roar of water I heard the voices of my father and brother, in chorus, shouting that I must not give family money to this rogue.

  But I was not their creature. And when Herr Sumper showed me exactly how much he would require for materials, I was so far removed from Low Hall that I praised the thoroughness of a shopping list I could not read. Confused and jubilant in the roar of water, I paid him every Gulden and Vereinsthaler he required.

  With each coin I placed inside his deeply lined palm I was closer to the object that the supercilious Masini had called the “clockwork Grail.” So let it be a grail. I emptied my purse. And it was triumph I felt as I strode back up the sloping chute, thence to a half-way landing where I was to make my bed. With what joy I entered my lodging, so SPARTAN, so much superior to my own home which had been redecorated by the youngest daughter of a family of brewers. God forgive me, that is an ugly unworthy way to think. It is enough to say that henceforth I would require no oils, no pastels, no Turkey rug, no artistic clutter, no dresser, no cupboard, no commode, only this extraordinary fretwork bed and a series of ten black wooden pegs—I counted—driven in a line across one wall.

  I swung open the shutters and what a violent shock it was after the gloomy green light of the kitchen—the azure sky, the dry goat paths like chalk lines through the landscape, the bluish granite which contained the stream, the harvesters still swinging sweetly on their scythes as if it required no effort in the world.

  I asked my clockmaker, “When will it be done?”

  But he had already vanished. I descended the stair with some happy trepidation, grasping the rail in order not to fall.

  More candles had been lit and the males were at table, the boy’s hair filled with golden flame.

  “Are you hungry, Herr Brandling?” Sumper asked.

  “Make no fuss on my account,” I said.

  Frau Helga, however, was stoking the firebox with crackling yellow wood. Her face was very red.

  Herr Sumper’s countenance, in contrast, was cool. He nodded that I should be seated next to him.

  “How long will it take?” I asked.

  He placed his considerable hand upon my own as if that sign could be an answer.

  I told him: “In England we would say, time is of the essence.”

  “You are, as they also say in England, ‘in good hands.’ ”

  “Indeed, but surely you have some idea how long those hands will take to do their job.”

  “I have a very definite idea,” he said, accepting a dripping green wine bottle from the child. He boxed the boy gently across the head and the latter squeaked happily and ducked away. “I have a very definite idea that you will achieve your heart’s desire.”

  “Vaucanson’s duck.”

  “Your heart’s desire,” he said.

  He was slippery, of course. I watched as he shared the wine, giving the boy a thimbleful before emptying a good half bottle into his stein.

  “And what is my heart’s desire?”

  “Why, the same as mine,” he said and poured for me.

  “Spargelzeit,” said he.

  “Spargelzeit,” I said, and raised my glass.

  “In English,” said the precise little Arnaud, who had been left to fill his own glass, “you might translate Spargel as edible ivory.”

  “Königsgemüse,” said the musical boy, and happily suffered being squashed against the clockmaker’s massive chest.

  “It is the King’s vegetable,” announced Frau Helga placing in front of me a plate of white asparagus and small unpeeled potatoes.

  So Spargelzeit was not a toast. Far from it—a curse—I cannot swallow egg whites, liver, brains, cod, eel, anything soft and slimy. If they had given me a plate of maggots it would have been the same.

  My companions at Furtwangen were hogging in, sighing and making very personal noises. Frau Helga, in particular, was so emotionally affected by this spectral Spargel that she made me quite embarrassed.

  I selected a small unskinned potato and scraped the sauce away.

  “Eat up,” instructed Herr Sumper, picking up the long white vegetable, the secret organ of a ghost which he sucked into the maw beneath the bush of upper lip. “We have yet to agree on what you will pay for board. But at this meal you are our honoured guest.”

  The potato tasted of wet jute. The asparagus lay before me naked. I cut its tip off and washed it down with wine.

  Sumper narrowed his eyes.

  “You like it?”

  “Immensely.”

  He considered me closely.

  “You don’t know how to taste it,” said Herr Sumper. “I can read your thoughts.”

  I did not comment. He winked at the boy, who squealed with laughter. I was not sorry when Frau Helga slapped his leg. I thrust my plate away from me.

  “The more for us,” he said, dividing my meal between the other diners. When the gluttons had eaten my meal, Sumper wiped his mouth and spoke to Carl behind the napkin.

  Immediately the boy sprang from his chair and up the stairs. To work, I thought. I put aside my pride and followed him.

  There is nothing better to soothe the stomach acids than the company of an artisan when he is at his careful labour. When my wife’s first “portrait” had commenced, I would often walk into the village to the workshop of my widowed friend George Binns, whose father had been the clockmaker to Her Majesty the Queen. There amidst all the quiet ticking I found some peace. So I expected it would be in Furtwangen. The child slipped through the workshop door but a large hand restrained my shoulder.

  “You are the patron,” said Herr Sumper, dancing me around then blocking my path through his doorway. “I am the artist.”

  Well, of course this was preposterous. He was not an artist, he was a clockmaker. I had already endured a surfeit of Artist in the place from which I had been sent away. I thought, you damned rascal. It would serve you right if I was sick all over you.

  “I cannot work with you at my shoulder.”

  So I must eat insults too.

  “I wish to assist,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I have brought you this.”

  He placed in my hand the sort of ruined book you find in barrow carts, its pages fr
eckled brown, its boards bowed.

  “It is The Life of Benvenuto Cellini. In English. This book will teach you how artists suffer from their patrons and will instruct you on how to play the important role you have chosen for yourself. By the time you have read it, I will be able to tell you when the work will be complete.”

  Thus did I abase myself to achieve my end and I, Henry Brandling, not only permitted a foreign tradesman to pretend he was an artist, but allowed myself to be sent to bed without a decent meal.

  NO SLEEP, MY MIND a carousel of memory. For instance: the night before my departure from home I informed Percy that I might not return until Christmas. “How lovely, Papa,” he said. “What a Christmas we will have.”

  Round and round I saw it once again, our conversation then, the following morning when I bade my brave red-eyed boy goodbye. I should never have mentioned Christmas. I had been too whimsical. But I could not say to him: your True Friend’s heart is bursting. I did not know the terms wherein I might be permitted to return.

  “Goodbye, silly Papa,” he had said.

  I thought, who told you that? I kissed him twice. I could not be certain I would see him in this world again.

  In Furtwangen my allotted room was filled with the roar of water, endless torrent, the drowned squealing of a silly turning wheel.

  Hour after horrid hour I thought of the nights when his mother and I were first married, till death us do part, I never doubted it, round and round, and how she shuddered beneath my human weight. Hard heavy man, she called me recklessly, round and round.