The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  At a given signal, from out of the murky tent opening by the ticket window, to the genuine alarm of the public and the feigned alarm of Barnaby Wilson, now materialised a thirty-foot monster squirting fire to the accompaniment of the circus’s ill-tuned brass band: the so-called Giraffe, so imaginatively described by the circus director a moment before.

  The audience withdrew in alarm, but just as panic threatened to break out, the scene changed into a phantasmagoria of Marat’s dreary bathroom with that famous revolutionary floating lifeless in an enamelled hip bath full of water.

  “Ladies and gentleman,” shouted Barnaby Wilson. “For a mere two centesimi the dead will rise again and archangels appear in reality . . .”

  A new murmur went through the audience as Lucretius showed another spectacle, this time representing a deathly pale Robespierre who, a flintlock pistol in his hand, took a couple of steps towards the circus director and looked as if he was going to shoot him in the back. But at a sign from Wilson, Robespierre turned into a centaur and galloped back into the tent, to the accompaniment of two evil-sounding explosions from the phlogistonist Bruno von Salza’s powder-stained tent.

  “Have no fear, ladies and gentlemen,” continued the smiling Wilson, “for two centesimi we promise you something more. You will be protected against any designs the ghosts may have on you.”

  One last presentation remained before the circus opened its ticket office to receive, this evening as on all previous evenings, hundreds of the curious to fill to the last seat its tent outside Nice. In the tent opening through which the centaur had disappeared stood an exceedingly pitiable being, scarcely three foot tall with a misshapen, outsized head disfigured by stony calluses. Stripped to the waist he let the audience take a good look at his furry back, at the little foreshortened arms that resembled roots, the cavities in his skin and the bones and joints protruding criss-cross from his skeleton as if imprisoned in his body and struggling to escape. He was dressed in knee-length socks, a kilt from the Scottish Highlands, and his face was covered by a colourful Venetian-style cat mask.

  “Allow me to present our latest attraction,” Wilson said in a voice scarcely able to conceal his personal pride at this sensation which, in only a few months, had beaten all conceivable attendance records along the Ligurian coast. “Sir Hercules from the little known Barefoot clan, the monster from the Scottish Highlands who recites the Bible as fluently as a priest and can read your innermost thoughts!”

  All that spring the Scottish mind-reader Hercules Barefoot, not knowing that the Cardinal’s men were on his heels, had been fulfilling his duties as the circus’s chief attraction. His telepathic powers were enabling him to reveal the colour of a lady’s underwear, pull cards out of a tarot pack at will, treat the audience to mnemonic numbers that could only be explained by some dubious alliance with the supernatural, declare people’s most intimate secrets and describe homes he’d never set foot in.

  On a French clavichord he also played operatic airs that volunteers in the audience had been exhorted to hum under their breath – while Sir Hercules, to be on the safe side, though Barnaby Wilson had solomnly sworn he’d been deaf and dumb since birth, had put rubber plugs into his ear cavities and got down into a locked beer barrel, all to dispel any suspicion of fraud.

  He also treated them to yet another sensation, playing with his feet, so vividly that the audience’s collective longing materialised in the notes before dissolving in a tremolo of unrelieved yearnings that fell over them like a tearful cloudburst which all could feel but none could see.

  On the circus poster that to Wilson’s undisguised delight filled the tent to its last standing room seven days a week wherever they went, he was shown in his carnival mask, grasping a magician’s wand between two toes.

  His act was always the last to come on – after Lucretius III’s Jacobin phantasmagories, after Leopold the Savage’s breakneck trapeze acts, after Leon Montebianco’s tales from a fabulous past, and after the Turkish poet who, scorning all pain like a fakir, had invited a member of the audience to use his scorching hot legs to light his cigar. At that point Barnaby Wilson, clad in a conjuror’s coat spangled with the signs of the zodiac, would step into the ring and hold a brief discourse on the inner world of the deaf; about their sight, sharper than on those of us who can see; about their fantastic ability to lip-read and about Sir Edmund Booth’s vision of the deaf and dumb one day having a state of their own in America.

  It was to America Hercule had told Wilson he was headed when they had bumped into each other in a Liverpool pub. Hercule had a ticket to America in his back pocket and, at fourpence a sentence, had been just about to read the secret thoughts of a dressmaker’s assistant. Only through a great effort and several hours’ persuasion did Wilson induce him to postpone his voyage and instead take on a job with the circus where he could show off his wonderful gift in public, Wilson alleged to the crowd.

  After his soliloquy Wilson would bow, the lights would dim and Lyra the Infant Harpist, climbing on to a stool that came up to her chest, stroked the strings of a harp five times as large as herself, causing the astounded audience to fall silent. When the lights went up again, Sir Hercules stood in the centre of the ring holding a pack of cards between his toes.

  This was the beginning of a circus number that made the public suspect that higher powers were having an influence on show business. A trifle shyly the masked thought-reader would go up to someone in the front row, and Barnaby Wilson, two paces behind him, asked that person to take a card out of the pack, carefully remember its number and suit and replace it while Sir Hercules shut his eyes. After this the mind-reader would lean forward, put the pack on a small jacaranda table, straighten himself and turn the cards over, one by one, with his sensitive toes. Finally, with a movement as agile as it was nonchalant, he would hold aloft the correct one. This trick didn’t arouse much enthusiasm in an audience still assimilating the Ligurian omnivore’s ability to swallow coins of various denominations and spit them out again in any order he was asked to, or to Lucretius III’s last phantasmagoria, so true to life, of the astounding Giraffe. What followed, on the other hand, aroused wonder even in the most confirmed sceptic.

  Wilson asked someone in the audience to think of something, anything at all, an object, another person, a scent, a taste, a joke he’d heard, and to concentrate on this thought.

  “I shall now permit Sir Hercules to use his clairvoyant powers to transfer this thought to me,” he went on in his childish voice, with a sweeping gesture of his coat.

  An intense silence descended on the ring. The Scottish mind-reader seemed to focus entirely on the chosen member of the audience, nodding to himself, as if memorising everything he could pick up on his magical wavelength, before turning to Barnaby with a humble bow.

  The ringmaster, apparently affected by the tension, trembled and shuddered. Not until about a minute later did he raise his hand as if signalling that the message had been transmitted. Whereupon he turned to the volunteer and exclaimed, “Sir Hercules has transferred your innermost thoughts to me, as angels do!” And instantly announced what it was the selected person had just been thinking about. His fiancée, his daily bread, his hardships or his aches and pains. Nine times out of ten the volunteer – astoundingly – confirmed it. Or, in other cases, put up such a display of obstinate denial of his shameful secret that the audience, which only moments ago had been massively sceptical, saw quite clearly that Wilson was in fact telling the simple truth.

  Sometimes he would have someone turn a book’s pages at random, select a sentence and read it silently to himself before Sir Hercules transferred it telepathically. Similarly, he read off selected passages from the Bible, a psalm someone was reciting to themselves, a shopkeeper’s receipt, or the precise contents of a fifty-yearold love letter on the person of an old crone in the audience. There was talk of a possible connection with the so-called heliograph that Hermann Bioly was demonstrating nearby in his studio. But others maintained the w
hole thing was a put-up job from start to finish, and that the audience volunteers were in fact being paid to feign or simulate their shame. Rumours spread that evil forces were at work, and in several of the villages where the circus pitched its tents the priest forbade his congregation to visit it.

  Another of the acts that caused certain complications concerned what the audience carried about their persons. Wilson asked a volunteer to think of what he had in his trouser pocket or in his bag; instantly, using his toes, the kilted Scottish mind-reader set about chalking up the objects’ names on a blackboard. More than once this sibylline tour de force gave rise to embarrassing situations when Sir Hercules showed up a piece of stolen silver in a policeman’s pocket, pornographic cards in the brim of a chaplain’s hat, or a bunch of billets-doux from a married woman, hidden in the knapsack of her blushing sixteen-year-old lover, who also, as it happened, was the nephew of her husband, the town mayor.

  Usually he rounded off his act with a triumphant flourish on the French clavichord. In his unsatisfied longing for Henriette Vogel his renderings of the pieces Wilson had asked the audience to hum under their breaths (whether a lively quadrille or a bombastic march tune from the soul of an English colonel who was passing through the town) always sounded like love lyrics transposed as music, and unleashed in the audience such a surge of emotion that several men who had come to the show were moved to propose to their beloveds.

  But by then the crowds were in ecstasy, and no-one was listening to Barnaby Wilson’s concluding words about Lamarck’s theories of humans having the same origins as animals, and that everyone could become a mind-reader if they wanted to, this having been at some point in the past the only means of communication before spoken language had been developed.

  Meanwhile, Sir Hercules had left the ring, eager to get to his evening lesson in Wilson’s caravan.

  Barnaby Wilson’s inexhaustible knowledge of the world’s mysteries had brought the two together as teacher and pupil. For Hercule the little cyclops with whom he shared his gift became a ticket of admission to everything he had ever wanted to know. He could listen for hours on end to the extraordinary things Wilson, without even opening his mouth, would tell him about, or read from one of his encyclopedias in four languages. The circus director was familiar with every intellectual tradition and every historical epoch; with technology no less than philosophy, with prose as much as poetry. But his predilection was for scientific speculation, especially if he thought it could improve the human condition. Surrounded by folios, tomes, books, sensational articles cut out of gazettes and gazette posters, in an ocean of circus tickets, plans, maps, letters from fans and heliograph portraits of his artistes, Wilson also told him about the ideas of Saint-Simon and Jeremy Bentham. To the minds of these thinkers, he explained, everyone was of equal value, the rich should give to the poor, there were no rulers, and if there were, they’d been chosen by the people. A woman was worth no less than a man, children were never beaten, and a heavy scent of blossoms was settling over the earth, just as in the dawn of Creation.

  Wilson also gave him an emotive account of the ideas of Charles Fourier, the great visionary from Lyons, who had predicted an ideal world that would last for eighty thousand years, eight thousand of which were to be the perfectly harmonious era when mankind would live in peace and the deformed never suffer humiliations; when the North Pole would become milder than Mediterranean beaches. Then, Wilson assured him, the ocean would lose its saline quality and the lakes would fill with lemonade. In this ideal world, which, according to all known calculations, would actually fall within their own lifetimes, there would be thirty-seven million poets on a level with Homer, nine million mathematicians to match the great Isaac Newton and seven million dramatists worthy to bear the name Molière. Fourier’s theories, Wilson thought, were of a lucidity of which history knew no parallel. Incorruptible in their stringency, they were divided up in an exemplary way into such sub-headings as Prelude, C#-lude, Citer-pause, Trance-Appendix and, not least, the daring Utter-lounge which with breakneck logic showed how in the future mankind would attain to immortality by taking reserve organs from animals. It was the best of all conceivable worlds, he assured him. People lived in phalangesteries, exactly 1652 persons in each, lived off the earth’s produce, shared all property and held deliberations in the village market place.

  Forgetful of time and space, Barnaby Wilson went on embroidering his dream of a happier world, of Robert Owen’s model factories in Scotland, of the socialist villages in Auvergne and the Bourbonnais, where the master’s theories were already being put into practice; told Hercule about the Luddite revolt in England, where factory slaves together, sad to say, with eminent poets had trashed the machines they supposed to have been invented merely in order to render them superfluous, though this, the master assured him, was not the case. On the contrary, these machines held the key to a happier future by increasing prosperity and leisure time. The little cyclops spoke at length of the steam cars which, each containing a family, would soon run without need of rails, along paved streets, on endless Sunday outings to the mountains of Savoy. He described the fantastic animals in the African savannahs, which he was planning to gather into a menagerie next season and where the main attraction would be a striped horse called a zebra. He told of the houses of ice which undaunted explorers had recently discovered on the northernmost Atlantic islands, and the gigantic pyramids which giants had built in olden times on the banks of the Nile.

  Further, he lost himself in thoughts about Maupertuis’ theories of natural selection and Buffon’s hypothesis of the creation of the world, so blasphemous it could only be whispered into people’s ears where no priests could be listening, or else transmitted telepathically. Wilson explained to an astonished Hercule Barfuss that the earth was ever so much older than the six thousand years the Wernerians had worked out with the help of the Bible. It was at least 75,000 years old, and Buffon, what was more, had provided evidence that man and ape had the same forefather, thus proving unequivocally that animals too have souls and that a man’s diet should therefore consist entirely of vegetables.

  In a caravan beside his own Wilson had also installed a laboratory for his numerous experiments with elements and automata. In this temple of scientific whims was an indescribable muddle of barometers, theodolites, reagent test tubes, dismantled machinery, horologia, stellar charts and clockwork dolls that could walk and talk. There were even copies of Leibniz’s and Pascal’s adding machines, as well as designs for Babbage’s famous differential and analytical automaton, precursors of late-twentieth-century computers.

  In a drawing made in his twilight years, Hercule would show Wilson in his laboratory, clad in a heat-insulating suit, puffing on his long Turkish hookah, a pendulum swinging from his other hand – a significant drawing of this brooding circus director whose zest for experiment knew no bounds.

  In the past, Wilson had made serious attempts to construct a perpetuum mobile built on the same principles as a musical box. Moreover he had laid the foundations for a steam kitchen and was secretly polishing up an invention intended to illuminate the entire circus area with the aid of hundreds of Leyden jars connected to glass filaments. He would go on to make successful experiments with hot-air balloons, as well as inventing, quite by accident, dynamite, a formula he promptly destroyed when he realised its potential uses for warfare and bloodshed.

  Hercule was dizzy with admiration. It was with a child’s open mind he listened to his tutor, and this with only one ulterior motive: that education and these inventions were to be the path that should lead him to love’s goal.

  Henriette Vogel was still the centre of Hercule’s life. It was for her sake he had withstood all those hardships, for her he had survived the attempts on his life, and it was for her he was searching as untiringly as any convert persisted in his new faith. In each village the circus came to he was on the lookout for her, always searching in the memories of people he ran into. He refused to accept his poor prospe
cts, disdained the ever weakening odds, merely raising his eyebrows in reply to anyone who commiserated with him on his search, as if at a joke in extremely bad taste.

  On the rare occasions when, even so, doubt beset him, it would be Barnaby Wilson who relit the flame of hope. For over and above his interest in modern science he too nurtured the cult of love inspired by the courtly poets. Love, he used to say, was not just the meaning of life, to the extent that it had spread its tentacles through existence, that it was the very precondition for the sun to rise and the stars to keep their positions in the sky. Proof of which he would declare was to be found in the works of the divinely inspired poets.

  Many years later, Hercule Barfuss would remember Wilson as his saviour; for this was truly the right medicine. The poetry books he borrowed from him had opened the door to a world where love could be enjoyed undiluted.

  He was flabbergasted that poets should be able to chisel out the most beautiful words from verbal granite, and in passing could fill even the spaces between the lines with meaning. He swallowed their poems whole, without a thought as to how he could digest them; sucked them dry of all content, ruminated fanatically on them, swallowed them again, and tenderised them in the seven stomachs of his own languishings. Heine he learned by heart, fell sick of Keatsian and Byronic fever, and read Jean-Paul’s novels with a sense of their lifting the veils to show a glimpse of paradise. On Wilson’s advice he devoted a month to the libertarian von Kleist, and passed a harrowing night of love with Novalis. He suffered with Schiller, shuddered with Hoffmann, and was amazed at how de Musset could so convert pain into words that it turned into its opposite and became pleasurable beyond all reason. In Goethe’s verses he discovered an excitement words could not explain, or only in the empty interstices where love lay in ambush, in the guise of glossy paper. He wept buckets with Hölderlin, sighed with the Schlegel brothers and rejoiced ecstatically with Pushkin. Formed a lifelong alliance with Lamartine, and was so overwhelmed by emotions by Leopardi that it put him in bed for a fortnight with a migraine.