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

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  Amid the screaming crowd, the dying animals and trampled people, he fell to his knees. Unaware of his surroundings, all he was conscious of was the voice of his beloved reaching out to him over distances inconceivable to the human mind: I’m with you, she whispered. Always with you, until we meet again . . .

  Johannes Langhans, too, was to remember this day to the end of his life in the Age of Steam. Pushed up against a wall, he saw Barfuss’ contours clarify, as if distancing himself from his invisibility. He saw the boy’s eyes sparkle with love for the girl he’d lost: a love as great as the Creator felt for His Creation, a love for love’s sake, holding existence together, preventing the universe from losing all meaning.

  Then he disappeared, vanishing on his dwarf legs through the panic-stricken screaming crowds: happy, Langhans knew, infinitely happy that the girl had made her presence known, had banished hatred once and for all.

  MANY YEARS LATER, Hercule Barfuss would describe this event in Vienna as the watershed of his love and his life. He’d thought he had reached the end, when in reality he was on the brink of a new beginning.

  Until the end of his days he was to remember every little step that had taken him to the bear-baiting, his plans for Langhans, and how, when love at last had been avenged, he was shortly thereafter going to take his own life. That wasn’t the way it had turned out. Instead, love triumphed over hatred. Henriette had spoken to him from somewhere beyond the unknown, and this had changed him for ever. He had gone out among people again, one among others, without hate, without bitterness, as one of their kind, grateful to life, to his fate, to existence in all its infinite wealth.

  All that day he’d walked through the imperial city, along its streets, through market places, along alleys and into parks. Fully visible, without his mask, he’d walked, a deformed person, a dwarf, but proud and, beyond belief, happy. He’d noticed how people smiled at him, how he infected them with his love and his happiness in the knowledge that death isn’t the end, but the beginning of a new existence. For the first time in his life he understood what freedom implied; knowing no limits, causing people to rise high above their own earth-bound selves: it was identical with being.

  That same summer, also in Vienna, he ran into Barnaby Wilson in the market place by the Danube canal, not far from the Augarten Palace. He was in a crowd of folk on an exhibition area, watching a hot-air balloon rise skyward.

  Did you know, kind sir, that it’s the phlogistonised air that makes the object rise?

  The little cyclops was standing close by him, holding a telescope to his one eye. Hercule could hardly credit his senses. He’d thought Wilson was dead.

  No, Hercule, I survived . . . the others didn’t, but my mission, whatever it may be, is still awaiting its accomplishment.

  They went off together. The cyclops told him all about his life and plans. How Cavour’s and Garibaldi’s nationalistic ideas had taken hold of him. Since the dissolution of the roadshow he had been working for a new and better world. Socialism, he claimed, was the future; new thinkers were planning a better world: they called themselves communists. The world would become an improved place to live in, even for deaf people. In Paris, he expounded, there was a school for the deaf that was subsidised by the French state. He had been there himself and studied its methods. The teaching used a new form of sign language based on French grammar. The introduction of various forms of inflection and conjugation marks, formerly the missing link, now made it possible to develop a complete language. All the teaching was done in sign language. Hercule ought to go there, he said; their own way of communicating via thoughts was clumsy, since others found it frightening. True, the practice of burning witches at the stake had died out on the European continent, but science would never accept their way of conversing. He really ought to pay the school a visit, sooner or later he would have to learn a language that others could understand. Sign language should suit him, with his sensitive feet he could easily learn to make the signs.

  Barnaby Wilson smiled. The world, he assured Hercule, would soon be a paradise to live in. Everything was going in the right direction; progress was unstoppable. Within a few years the railway would cover the whole of Europe, linking up people in a way not formerly believed possible. Disease, cancer and the pox, as well as famine, crop failure and war would be eradicated. If only factories and manufacturing were properly managed, goods could be produced at cost price and everyone would receive according to their needs.

  In America, Wilson went on, there was a place where deaf people were in the majority and where they led their own lives in the spirit of freedom. This was on an island off the coast of Massachusetts called Martha’s Vineyard. Their society consisted almost exclusively of the deaf. They all addressed each other in sign language; even those who could hear learned to sign first. Spoken English came as a second language. Hercule ought to go to America as soon as he could save up enough for a ticket. Could Martha’s Vineyard be his special place in the world?

  They parted company that same afternoon, Wilson on his way to Sicily where he was to attend a meeting with Italian nationalists to whom he was to teach the new socialistic ideas by which they could build a better state, based on justice and basic human worth. As they said farewell, they knew it was for good.

  In September that same year Hercule Barfuss took the stagecoach to Paris. He’d decided to look in on the Institute for the Deaf in Rue des Moulins, the school Wilson had told him about.

  At that time this Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets was the world centre for methodical sign language. Hercule arrived at the end of the month with a written recommendation from Barnaby Wilson, and was immediately taken on as a student.

  It was during his stay in Paris that his lifelong conviction about the superiority of the visual teaching technique as compared to the oral was founded. In no time at all he learned French sign language, though signing with his feet complicated the grammar. All his life he would be an embittered opponent of the German School, where the emphasis was on teaching the deaf to lip-read and use their speech organs. One event in particular made a deep impression on him. Twenty years later he wrote of it:

  During one of my first lessons I witnessed the following: a teacher, trained by the grammarian Sicard, was to prove the excellence of the visual method for a representative of the French Academy of Sciences. Standing at the teacher’s desk, he dictated a text – I think it was a poem by Victor Hugo – using methodical signs for the students, who were seated in the classroom in such a way that they couldn’t see each other’s papers. There were five of them: four lads and an exceptionally beautiful girl. As the teacher dictated to them in sign language they wrote down what they “saw” him say, and this in no fewer than five languages, one for each student. The girl wrote in Latin. The boys in French, German, Italian and English. The representative for the Academy was stunned by the result. Of course he knew that sign language uses neither letters nor words, but concepts, which – on condition you know them – can be written down in whatever language you are familiar with. But what really amazed him – and me too – was the level of language education among the school’s students, far above the average at a French lycée

  It was also during his time in Paris that he began to understand that grammar is universal and can be adapted to the eye as well as to any other sense:

  The teachers, as well as the students among themselves, used depictive signs (“fire” and “horse” were the first two I picked up), signs reproducing movement, indicative and arbitrary signs. Plural was indicated by a repetition of the basic sign, the definite form was signed by a slight indication after the sign, the verbs were inflected to all the various tenses in French by the addition of different signs to the present – all of this grammatical usage I was of course already familiar with through reading, but now it took on new meaning and greatly widened my horizons. It even occurred to me that dialects could arise within sign language, and that the idiom used by non-hearers was the universal langu
age man had dreamed of since the beginning of time.

  It was in Paris, too, with the school chaplain and headmaster, he said his first prayer in sign language, the Lord’s Prayer.

  He remained at the Institute half a year. He maintained contact by corresponding with some of the teachers. The school’s destiny continued to be close to Hercule’s heart until the end of his days.

  He left in March 1838, having by then laid the foundations for a perfect understanding of sign language. Love was the fundament his life rested upon; love for the dead girl who no longer belonged to any place in particular.

  A new continent awaited him, and a new existence. In Martha’s Vineyard.

  A postscript for Miss Vogel and other initiates

  LOVE, IN EARLY Egyptian poetry, is symbolised by a peculiar three-part hieroglyph. It consists of a hoe, a mouth and a male figure holding his hand to his mouth. The first Egyptologists wondered if Pharaonic love was a kind of labour demanding tools and a gardener’s patience. Or perhaps love didn’t exist before there was a way of expressing it? Some asked themselves jokingly if love’s dwelling was in the chest? And, for fear it might fly away with a careless word, the man was holding his hand to his mouth.

  Perhaps, Miss Vogel, there was something to that point of view, since the Egyptians also happened to be the first to equate love with the heart: “My brother seduces my heart with his voice”, a poet has a woman exclaim. So love’s abode was in the heart, and the voice was the tool to unlock it. On terracotta vases and papyrus scrolls people lose their hearts, or feel them break from unrequited love, and the pain is unbearable.

  In his twilight years, when Hercule Barfuss concluded the long educational journey that had brought him all the way to the drawing rooms of the learned in America, he was to write a letter to one of his grandsons who was at that time involved in taking a licentiate examination in classical languages at Harvard:

  Hieroglyphics are, as you know, the foremost of all written languages, being capable, in one and the same symbol, of reproducing an image and expressing abstractions. Hieroglyphics are the true alphabet of the deaf.

  In one of his work journals Barfuss makes the observation that sickness as a metaphor for love first appears in the “Song of Songs”. “Refresh me with raisin cakes, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love,” cries the speaker, King David. But the theme persists like a scarlet thread throughout the history of love poetry. Together with Plato’s thoughts, it forms the basis for our experience of passion.

  In Plato’s Symposium the following story is told about love’s origins. In prehistoric times there was neither man nor woman, instead there were various blends of the two. They had two faces, four arms, four legs, four feet, and so on; they were attached back to back and therefore able to go both backwards and forwards. Some consisted of two male parts, others of two female parts, and a third group, the largest, was half-male, half-female. These four-legged primaeval beings, Plato says, were so power-mad that they constituted a threat to the gods. So Zeus decided to divide them into two, thereby diminishing their power. Thus man and woman were created.

  But once their original form had been divided, they were driven by a longing to be reunited. Thus Plato, and later on Barfuss, describes love as the desire to merge and grow together.

  “Each and every one of us is only half of what used to be a human being,” he was to write. “The pleasure of romantic love is not in itself enough to account for the strength of lovers’ feelings. Love is the search for the lost half, and the striving to merge with it. For ever.”

  For our ancestor, Miss Vogel, this was a truth whose incontestability could measure itself against the greater laws of nature. During his last year in Europe he’d heard Henriette Vogel speak to him, and this had been his life’s pivotal moment. The conviction that love continues beyond death had changed him. His hatred and lust for revenge had disappeared overnight, as had his unfathomable sorrow.

  On several occasions my father, John Barefoot, retold the story for me in sign language, using the gesture for love in which both palms of the hands are pressed lightly against the heart, and the sign for eternity, the right forefinger drawing circles horizontally from left to right. He explained that Barefoot was convinced he would meet her again in an existence beyond our earth-bound one. Nothing could shake him in this belief, and until his dying day, he lived with the conviction that love, no less than matter, is indestructible. “Just as matter can be converted into energy,” he observed, “and energy into matter, so love persists, indestructibly, throughout eternity.”

  His experience in Vienna he ascribed wholly to love as a force powerful enough to overcome death. But his certainty that he would meet his beloved again didn’t make life on earth any the less meaningful. On the contrary, he lived his remaining years to the full, as if each and every one might be his last.

  The revelation had also influenced his decision to leave Europe. In March 1838 he left Calais on a steamship bound for Liverpool, and on his arrival there booked his passage through a Belgian agent to New York. The price was thirteen pounds and included third-class board and lodging on the schooner St Mary. Like so many other travellers to the Americas, he spent the night in a hotel on Duke Street, while waiting to sail.

  On the evening of April 24, a final divine service was held on the quayside, and the day after, at dawn, the ship lifted her anchor. From where he was standing on the foredeck he saw the English port spread itself out, the last glimpse millions of people were to have of the Old World, before it was enveloped in a mist as the ship headed out across the Irish Sea.

  This was the same year the paddlewheel-driven Atlantic steamship, the Great Western, accomplished the crossing in a record-breaking fifteen days, before Samuel Cunard founded the first passenger line for regular crossings between England and the United States, before the era of mass emigration some decades later, when Iman, Dominion, National and the White-Star shipping companies all competed for the crossings of millions of Europeans leaving everything they possessed behind them in order to make a new life for themselves in “the land of opportunity”.

  But Barfuss doesn’t seem to have noticed the lack of comfort or dreariness of a crossing that took six weeks, the dead calm on the fortieth degree of latitude, the seasickness or the unpalatable food. Instead, in his diary entries made during the crossing, he writes enthusiastically about life on board. He is captivated by the sea, admires the ship’s technical equipment, its deadeyes, blocks, square topsails and their tackle, he makes sketches of masts and spars, and tries to familiarise himself with procedures involving log lines and charts and other navigational instruments.

  The schooner was a reconstructed brig, launched in Hull in the 1810s on behalf of a slave-trading company. It had four masts. The passenger count was 240. They came from all corners of Europe and comprised no fewer than seventeen different nationalities.

  In the ship’s logbook the captain wrote about an epidemic of jaundice and a few cases of scurvy among the Irish. Most of the passengers were plagued by seasickness, as well as scabies and lice. The ship’s rats behaved shamelessly and stole food from the hands of careless children.

  The men, among them Barfuss, slept in hammocks on the ‘tween deck. Astern was a department for women and families. The areas were screened off with hanging drapes.

  Barfuss seems to have made a friend in the St Mary’s carpenter. He writes about “my new-found friend Richards who has taken me under his protection and shown me around the ship”. A sailmaker, by the name of Waddington, too, seems to have taken pity on him. Perhaps they thought he was a handicapped child? Nothing is said about how people reacted to his appearance, his deafness or his eating and writing with his feet, nothing about the thoughts he picked up from his fellow travellers. Maybe they simply were all too caught up in the excitement to adhere to old patterns of behaviour?

  His longing for the new country grew with each sea mile they put behind them. He writes about the “new life” which i
s about to start, and his faith “in a better future”.

  The St Mary must have sailed before favourable east winds. In his logbook, the captain records a maximum speed of seventeen knots. Barfuss spends a lot of time on the poop, looking out at the horizon surrounding him on all sides. Of the sea he heard nothing, nor did he hear the flapping of sails and ventilators, or the wind and the sea birds that began appearing as they approached the east coast of America. But his other senses, he felt, were wide open.

  On May 27 the ship put in to New York harbour. The journey had been normal by the standards of the day. From the original figure of 240 passengers, 238 were alive. One child and three old people had died during the crossing, but a Scandinavian woman had given birth to twins. Nothing of this is mentioned in Barfuss’ notes. Nor, it’s true, is there any mention in the ship’s logbook of deformity or deafness and dumbness. Just the births and deaths. And a sailor who had been washed overboard in a storm just south of Iceland.

  When Hercule Barfuss arrived in New York the stream of immigrants had not yet reached the level that some two decades later would cause the still-young American state to set up an immigration authority. Several decades more would come and go before the buildings on Castle Garden and Ellis Island were built in order to facilitate the administration of the enormous hordes of people arriving daily in the new land. When the schooner SS St Mary cast anchor in Upper New York Bay at dawn on May 27 there were no persons in authority waiting for her passengers. The travellers were transported in small steamboats to the harbour, or, more precisely, to the small area on the southern tip of Manhattan nowadays called Battery Park.