Naturally the object of this interest had not himself been consulted, and in any case Hercule was so absorbed in his newfound freedom that nothing else interested him.
That night when the monastery had been stormed by the Silesian peasantry he – for the first time – had come to appreciate the full extent of his gift. He had stirred up people’s minds to such a degree they’d taken him for a miracle worker; and only pure luck and Julian Schuster’s intervention, pacifying the agitated mob with threats and promises, had prevented them from tearing him to pieces. This had placed him doubly in the elderly priest’s debt.
Their journey to Rome had taken over a month; firstly through the German countries by mail coach, then on foot and by sleigh over the Alps, and finally astride the mules provided by the Jesuit houses along the pilgrim route into Italy.
Hercule was a beginner in the refugium of existence. His whole life had been spent behind locked doors, so he knew little of the outside world. Nor had he grown a centimetre taller since his eighth birthday. But he’d matured, until he seemed to be four times his real age. From his chin sprouted a goatee beard and on his cheeks grew lynx-like side whiskers. At the same time his cranium had lost the little tuft of hair it had once had. But the thick fur on his neck and back was still there, as were the cleft, snakelike tongue and the monstrous cavity in the middle of his face that could scare the living daylights even out of a rabble of soldiers, and which would pursue them in their nightmares to the end of their days. Unchanged too were his dwarf legs, his arms that resembled parboiled roots from some rare medicinal plant. With these attributes, and from the rustling suit of pleated linen the brethren had sewn for him before he’d left on his journey, it was hardly surprising if he’d been an object for all eyes, drawn everyone’s attention.
One Sunday afternoon after Mass at Innsbruck he had played a piano with his bare feet in an inn, and so stirred up the music-loving landlord’s feelings that he’d wept like a child. Chins dropped when people saw him scratch a louse bite with the tip of his shoe or, seated on the floor, fasten the top button of his ruffled shirt with one foot while holding up a mirror and critically looking at himself with the other. On one occasion even the horses had turned pale in wonder as he, standing on one leg, had helped the coachman change the canisters, and while silently whispering to them in animal language, had groomed their tails with the other foot.
Probably the journey would have been easier had he – precisely as the voice on the Piazza Navona would later reproach him for not doing – worn a mask. It happened that children burst into tears at the mere sight of him, and on more than one occasion Julian Schuster had had to muster up all his authority for them to be allowed to spend the night at some hostel whose very pigsty the landlord declared to be full, though actually terrified of bringing down God’s wrath for putting up what they were sure was a child of Satan, one thereto “rigged out in carnival costume”.
Accusations of this kind weren’t new to Hercule. But not until the autumn of his years, when wisdom had taught him to brace himself against all manner of insults, would their poison cease to hurt him. Meanwhile, he stored it up, until he could no longer stand being consumed by it.
In one Tyrolean village they had visited the market and almost been lynched while waiting for the coachman to repair two broken wheels. It was early morning and a pregnant woman at one of the flower stalls had let out a shriek at the sight of our hero and fallen senseless to the ground in a shower of pine needles from a funeral wreath. Folk had come running from all directions and soon Schuster and Barfuss were surrounded by menacing villagers accusing them of putting the Evil Eye on an unborn child. One market salesman claimed the fruit in his baskets had turned rotten at the very moment the stagecoach had drawn up on the highway, and another that he’d had dreams auguring a divine visitation on the region. Once again it had been Schuster who’d saved them by displaying the elegant missive he’d received, impressively sealed and stamped with seven authoritative stamps after leaving Cardinal Rivero at the Jesuit Congregation, declaring this boy to be a famous miracle worker under papal protection. Only then, and most dubiously, had the crowd withdrawn.
Apart from these mishaps the journey had gone better than expected, without their being confronted by any of the ever more brutal highwaymen typical of that time and who were seldom known to spare their victims, even less so if they turned out to be ecclesiastics. They’d crossed the Alps in a snowstorm of Olympian force no less fierce than the one that had ravaged Königsberg the night Hercule had been born. A rumour would reach them that it had cost twenty-four pilgrims their lives when their horses had panicked at the wind’s terrible howling and taken nine sledges with them over a precipice. When they arrived in the Po plain it was summer again and at each roadside altar Julian Schuster had fallen to his knees and kissed the little statues of the Blessed Virgin.
The only really black cloud had been the Jesuit’s waning spirits. He had seemed happy enough during the journey’s first weeks. He’d been positively affected by a badly needed waft of the adventurous years of his youth as he had struck up aquaintance with other travellers, played cards with the coachmen and drunk cider in the taverns, where he was surprised to hear the same old travellers’ yarns he’d heard in his youth. In a word, he had enjoyed this escape from monastic routines and from feeling stifled by incense, from the refectory’s sepulchral silence, from Abbot Kippenberg’s air of misunderstood sainthood, and, not least, by the doomsday atmosphere that had prevailed in the monastery since Hercule’s arrival.
But gradually, as they neared their destination, his spirits had failed him and his joviality given way to worry.
Ever since the night when he had received conclusive proof of his protégé’s gift, Schuster had begun to see the boy through a new and sharper lens. Instinct told him the boy’s powers were not demonic, but something else, something inexplicable. Allowing for his still being confused, he’d taken care not to frighten him.
Rightly. Marked by his experiences, it was taking Hercule time to overcome his feelings of mistrust. Not until the fourth week of the journey did he begin speaking to his friend with the aid of his strange gift. At first not often, but gradually, as Schuster won his confidence more. And though he was never to confide in him to the extent he deserved, he became more and more candid.
Hercule knew what he owed Schuster. And it pained him to see his saviour fretting, plagued by misgivings that in short measure had come to command his entire life, the only life he knew, and question every choice he’d ever made, to become the person he now was. A terrible fate for a man who’d spent a lifetime in the services of the brethren. The fact was, Schuster had started to doubt the existence of a God who rarely heeded prayer, so seldom in fact that when it did happen, it seemed more like a stroke of luck. Schuster had come to doubt the value of a monastic life and suspected Fate of really having had another life in store for him, of which it had already written out the score, though by some stroke of ill luck, and because he had heeded the call of his heart, he had condemned himself to suffering, and been fooled into choosing another path. Tormented by a celibacy he was too old to revoke, he was haunted by the voices of children and grandchildren he’d never had, by the happy laughter of a family in whose bosom he would never grow old, unquestioned patriarch of the family estate between Jerez and Seville, whose monastic substitute seemed ever more hollow and poverty-stricken. As they’d approached the Holy City he was also filled with another, more diffuse, cause for concern, whose motives, since they were unknown to him, escaped not only our hero but also Schuster himself. The priest’s apprehensions had hourly grown stronger as they had drawn nearer to the city. So obviously beset was he by these worries that on the evening they arrived in Rome at the assembly’s seat of honour at the Borgo Santo Spirito, Hercule had half expected Schuster to break down and weep.
It was in this mood they had settled into their quarters – a guest room in an annexe to the brethren’s Hospital del Santo Spirito
, a humble chamber in the quarters closest to St Peter’s Church, furnished like a monastery cell, its only window looking out on to a backyard in everlasting shadow.
In the daytime Schuster had disappeared to attend meetings. After spending hours with clerical officials in the Vatican offices, he would return late at night, depressed and restless. Hercule could awake to find him lying sleepless on his bunk, staring at a damp spot on the ceiling. Not until dawn did sleep take him by surprise amid his guilty feelings at not being able to gather his thoughts into a prayer.
Of the plans Abbot Kippenberg had made over their heads, Hercule still knew nothing. But Schuster, with antennae honed by a long and dangerous life, seemed to intuit them. Hercule, on the contrary, was still swept up by the joie de vivre that had finally liberated him, and by the belief that, if he was patient enough, he would sooner or later find his Henriette.
That afternoon it was with a child’s curiosity about existence and a feeling of invulnerability that he went to the Piazza Navona, where the Holy St Agnes had once prayed for her persecutors. It was there the phantom voice, for a reason he still didn’t understand, had started speaking to him.
Driven by an overwhelming curiosity, Hercule had followed on through alleys of the Ponte Parlone quarter. Dusk was falling. Far away over the Alban hills a storm was brewing as they passed through passages so narrow and so densely crowded that their inhabitants had ceased to interest themselves in each other’s secrets. Zigzagging through the trade quarters, they passed butchers’ shops and tanneries, taverns where drunks were playing cards, prostitutes on the lookout for the night’s first customers. Agile as a cat, the boy he was following had slipped through the throngs, climbing over sleeping drunks, slinking in between carriage wheels and mules and pushing on ahead in so matter-offact a manner that the city could well have been a part of his own clothing. Twice Hercule lost sight of him, but at the very moment he’d given up hope of again seeing his guide, he found him waiting at the next street corner.
At the Piazza Farnese their path was barred by a funeral procession. Hercule was just about to catch up with his diminutive cicerone when the latter suddenly raised his hand in a gesture that told him not to come close and in his mind whispered very clearly to him: Keep your distance, it isn’t good for creatures like us to draw too much attention to ourselves!
He obeyed, but without understanding why this rule should make them play cat-and-mouse like this.
They went on along the wall until they got to the Jewish ghetto, whose gates were guarded by soldiers, its inhabitants being forbidden to leave the area after sundown. Turning left at the via Giulia, they followed the Tiber’s bank with its shellfish stalls, its lotteries, its invalids and ragamuffins holding out their begging bowls to passers-by, and so carried on eastwards until they got to the Forum.
Here, among the ruins of ancient Rome, cows were grazing, shepherds lay sleeping on the plinths of Corinthian columns, and an unnatural fog hung over everything, as if in a painting by some befuddled artist. Darkness fell abruptly. Once more, by the remains of an antique villa below the Palatine Hill, the other boy stopped to wait for him. They were alone now, no-one else was in sight, and he beckoned to Hercule to follow. Thrown aside on the floor of what had once been a mosaic-inlaid patio of a consular palace lay the cover from a well. His guide disappeared into the darkness and Hercule heard him say: Creatures like us are better off underground. Don’t be afraid . . . follow me . . . but keep close, or you’ll be lost.
Later he was to realise that it was down into Rome’s catacombs they’d climbed, though at the time he had supposed them to be a widely ramified, multi-layered cellar. He was astonished by the maze, corridors going off to right and left, the smell of thousand-year-old mildew and woodlice fleeing at the sound of footfall. The boy had lit a lantern, and Hercule followed without asking any questions.
At one point in these subterranean halls, where the dead exhaled hoarse whispers in Latin and the ghosts of Roman soldiers roamed in hope of finding a way out, they came to a crypt filled with human bones. Cowled skeletons stretched out bony hands to them, clung to yellowing scythes fitted together of vertebrae; held out worm-eaten hourglasses fashioned from infants’ collarbones. All this reminded Hercule of his own mortality; he would never find his way out again if he lost sight of his guide. Chandeliers made of human jawbones hung from the ceiling, enormous ornaments likewise made of vertebrae covered the walls, reassembled skeletons of children rested peacefully under the vaults of prehistoric thigh bones.
Delving ever deeper into this labyrinth they took a left turn, then a right, until after wandering for half an hour along humid tunnels filled with mysterious shadows cast by non-existent creatures, and where times and epochs criss-crossed in utmost confusion, Hercule found himself standing in a hall illuminated by oil lamps. When his eyes had adjusted to this sudden gleam, Hercule saw that he was standing in the midst of a troupe of extraordinary-looking people.
We’re all monsters, his enigmatic cicerone whispered inside him. And with a theatrical gesture, as if on stage in front of a many-headed audience, removed his mask.
It wasn’t a boy who faced them after all. It was a full-grown man, albeit of exceedingly short stature. And Hercule understood immediately why he wore a mask. Right in the middle of this little man’s forehead was one single eye, as on the mythological cyclops.
The man who had led the way down through Rome’s meandering catacombs really was a cyclops. His name was Barnaby Wilson. The single eye in the centre of his forehead was a result of some congenital human deformity, not a result of being descended from the monsters who ate humans for breakfast in Homer’s verses. A native of the Welsh village of Llanerchymedd, Wilson, since losing his family at the age of seven in the great Cardiff fire, had been blown like a leaf in the winds of fortune, hither and thither throughout Europe. Just now he was the leader of one of Italy’s more obscure variety shows, a travelling troupe of more than thirty people who kept starvation at bay by exhibiting their hideous abnormalities for money.
In his later years Hercule would write about Wilson in connection with the unification of Italy; a period when Wilson acted as counsellor to Garibaldi himself, a position that suited him perfectly, since he, possessing as he did an inexplicable foreknowledge of the enemy’s secret plans, was able to disclose them even before they’d had time to be dispatched by courier. But all that was much later on, and at the time when Hercule first made his aquaintance Wilson was fully occupied with his travelling show.
What Hercule witnessed that evening in Rome moved him deeply, inasmuch as he for some reason had always lived in the belief that he was unique, alone not only with his gift, but also in his appearance. Judging by people’s reactions to him, he’d had no reason to believe otherwise than that such misfortune really was his alone. Never before had he met another real-life monster, but all this changed in the lamplight as one by one he was introduced to Barnaby Wilson’s protégés.
They surpassed anything Hercule could ever have imagined. There was a hermaphrodite, inspiringly named Gandalalfo Bonaparte and said to be Emperor Napoleon’s bastard child, and a girl with yellow curls named Miranda Bellaflor, in whose mouth four tongues vied for space. There were the twins Louis and Louise who had been joined at the waist since birth, who always spoke simultaneously and were often at furious odds with each other. And then, of course, there was Barnaby Wilson himself, the cyclops who, like Hercule, was endowed with the gift of mind-reading.
There were quite a few in the group who possessed unusual and unexplained talents and who, with the passage of time, had added greatly to the troupe’s reputation as it travelled throughout Italy from one market place to the next. Leon Montebianco, for example, was said to see as far back in history as ten thousand years and thus was able to search for the lost city of Troy. His testimony had proved to be so exact that on the one occasion when the German geographer-to-be Schliemann witnessed, as a child, a performance, he’d taken him at his word,
and half a century later, after only a single thrust of his spade into an insignificant hill by the Hellespont, had discovered the site as predicted by Montebianco. There was Signora Ramona who every month since her fifteenth birthday had taught herself to speak a new language fluently, and was therefore able to write love letters in 116 known languages. There was the woman who could turn any type of base material into gold, and the Turkish poet whose single leg was covered in a scorching hot snakeskin, so hot you could light your cigar on it! Another member of this company was the Provençal dwarf Lucretius III, self-taught master of the art of handling a magic lantern, who by using a complex system of mirrors could display the most lifelike phantasmagoria of famous historical figures. But all these people’s gifts, Barnaby Wilson explained with great authority, were no more than nature’s compensation for their physical defects.
Years later, looking back on that night and at its subsequent tragic epilogue in Genoa, Hercule would understand that for the first time in his life he had come home. These were his fellow beings, brothers and sisters whose misfortunes were only relative and inspired in each other a melancholy sense of affinity. They too had been sacrificed on nature’s callous altar and existed for no weightier reason than as a warning to an age that believed the seed could be accursed for seven generations should some forefather have signed a contract with the powers of darkness.
As the hours went by, Barnaby Wilson told him about his wards, about their experiences of life on the outskirts of human existence; about their humiliations, sufferings and persecutions, about lunatic asylums; but also of the happiness they had found in one another, and of the fantastic laurels they had won by placing their gifts at the disposal of his travelling company.
Inspired by their story, Hercule gave a complete account of his own life. In the telepathic manner commanded by both of them from earliest childhood, he told Wilson of his childhood, his years in the asylum, his stay in the Jesuit monastery and everything that had happened there; about the peasants who’d taken him for a miracle worker and the monks who had suddenly been beset by doubt; in short, all the events that, in accordance with life’s implacable consequences and its refusal to state any alternatives, had brought him to Rome. And, not least, he told of Henriette Vogel, the girl-child he hadn’t seen since their eleventh year of life, but who had not been out of his thoughts for a single moment, who gave his life true meaning, who was the alphabet of his dreams and the meridian of his longing.
The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred Page 10
