Baptiste began to search in the rubble, in the pebbles, the dusty shreds of fabric and crumbled cobblestones where insects with countless legs and glossy undersides scuttled, seeming to emerge from the depths of the earth. All at once he spotted the iridescent lustre of a rounded white surface. Incredulous, he bent down, picked up the tiny smooth object, and did not realize until he brought it near to his face that he was holding not the lost pearl but a human tooth.
That day he stopped scrutinizing the ground when he was walking and went home keeping his eyes stubbornly raised towards the sky.
It was weeks before Baptiste reached out for the mirror the nurse had offered him every day to see for himself the marks left on his body by Mount Pelée’s anger. He discovered then that his eyes weren’t entirely black as he’d always been told and had thought he could confirm by looking at his reflection in the translucent surface of a shop window, or when he checked furtively in the silvering of the gilt mirrors in the La Chevrotière villa: in the pupil of his left eye, sparkling like a fragment of star, was a flake the green of the sea on a fine April day.
Though his face had miraculously been spared, his chest and back were now one big scar. He could not have said whether it was a single injury with countless branches or a thousand burns that had joined and crisscrossed, tracing on his abdomen a labyrinth of cracked and blistered flesh. Where there had been smooth black skin, there was now, spread out like some monstrous nest of vipers, a thousand-branched gash that henceforth was part of him and of which each avenue traced by suffering led ineluctably to horror. The anxious nurse at his side half expected that he would drop the mirror as the wounded so often did when they discovered a body foreign to them, but he did nothing of the kind. Baptiste, impassive, studied minutely every square centimetre of the twists and turns of this new landscape carved on him by Mount Pelée’s fires as if he were looking for a path.
Often his words had to cross a similar maze; he would hesitate for a long time before speaking and once he’d started, he would interrupt himself midway, knowing what he was about to say but unable to say it, as if the refractory word, endowed suddenly with a will of its own, were scoffing at him just beyond his reach. The slightest thing distracted him – a falling leaf, a singing bird – and he was filled with a kind of stupefaction that made him stop what he was doing. It seemed that after contemplating the world with the certainty of never seeing it again, he was now condemned to rediscover every fragment of it with the boundless, nearly painful amazement of a first time eternally started afresh.
He was sitting one evening, motionless, looking out to sea, when a man in a suit and patent leather shoes, carrying a bowler hat, silently approached him in the sand. Darkness was taking over the beach; it seemed to be rising up from the island and into the sky where purple, crimson and charcoal-grey veils pierced with scarlet were dancing. The man came up behind him and inquired:
“Are you Baptiste Cyparis?”
It was the name he’d given to his rescuers and he hadn’t felt a need to change it.
“Y-yes.”
“The Baptiste Cyparis who survived the eruption of Mount Pelée?”
Still looking out to sea, Baptiste confirmed: “I’m the only one,” without specifying whether he meant the only one with the name or that no other man had emerged unscathed from the disaster.
The new arrival held out a visiting card and Baptiste examined it with some surprise. Realizing that Baptiste might not be able to read, the man introduced himself, smiling broadly as if he were announcing some good news:
“My name is Richard Rochester. I am the first recruiting officer for Mister James Bailey, of whom you have undoubtedly heard.”
Baptiste just stared at him in an oddly empty way.
“Mr. Bailey runs a circus, the Barnum & Bailey,” he went on, “the biggest one in the world, and the most famous. And he would like you to be part of it.”
“A circus?” Baptiste repeated.
Determined not to make any assumptions, Rochester began patiently to explain:
“A travelling exhibition as well as a show, under a big top, where people come to admire natural wonders, phenomena, and marvels: a man so strong he can twist steel; a woman so heavy that four men can’t to lift her; twins welded together; a bearded lady; horses that can add and subtract; a two-headed sheep—”
“I’m very fond of animals,” Baptiste interrupted, as if he had just realized it now. “Maybe I could look after the horses …”
“No, that’s not what Mr. Bailey had in mind …”
“Well, then,” he suggested, feeling his chin, “a bearded man?”
Rochester seemed to hesitate between laughter and incredulity.
“No, nothing like that. You. Just you: Baptiste Cyparis, the Man who Survived the Eruption of Pelée Mountain. The Man who Lived through Doomsday.”
“B-but,” Baptiste stammered, “I’m not like your strongman or your horses … I … I don’t know how to do anything,” he confessed.
“Doesn’t matter,” said the other man. “Let us worry about that.”
“But … Do you think that people will come just to see me?”
“Trust me, they’ll come.”
Baptiste replied in a low voice, struggling to get the words out:
“All … All right.” As Rochester walked away, he stayed there gazing at the sky. All that could now be seen was a thin red strip glowing above the waves.
FOR LONG JOURNEYS, THE CIRCUS HAD A SPECIALLY outfitted train where acrobats, animal tamers, and phenomena each had their own car, as did the lions, the horses, and even the few aquatic animals that were transported in tanks. For shorter trips, however, they would still form a caravan of dozens of trailers crisscrossing the roads of the United States of America.
The trailer assigned to Baptiste was hardly bigger than the dungeon where he had spent those twenty days that had felt like a century and, like the stone prison, it had a curved vaulted ceiling. At the back was a narrow berth; the centre of the space was occupied by a small, one-legged table fastened to the wall, with an upright chair on either side, all resting on a carpet showing signs of wear. On the opposite wall, next to a faded postcard of the Bay of Naples, stood a shallow cupboard where he discovered, left behind by the previous occupant, a shard of blue-and-white porcelain and a copper ball the size of a quail’s egg, amazingly heavy, that he dropped into his pocket before hanging his only clean shirt and trousers in the wardrobe.
On the first night, despite the coolness he lay down on top of the covers, put his head on the pillow, and looked up at the curved ceiling. The roof seemed to be descending slowly towards him while the walls were coming closer, pressing so tightly as to keep him from breathing. He sat up, gasping, and went out into the pitch-black night. From some of the trailers he heard laughter. The windows in a few formed luminous rectangles in the dark where now and then a silhouette passed, as in a shadow theatre.
Cries he did not recognize rose in the night, the animals keeping up a mysterious conversation in their cages. In the distance rang the sounds of the hammers, mallets, and saws of people who would work till morning putting up the big top. Baptiste lay down under the trailer, between the two sets of wheels, with only his head sticking out. In the sky so many stars were blinking it seemed as if some bright dust were being blown by a capricious wind. He startled when he caught a glimpse of the moon appearing from behind a cloud: it was not the moon that lay like a cradle in the sky above his island but a new moon standing up straight, like a knife glistening with spectral brightness in the dark.
When he woke in the wan light of dawn, his face was damp. Stretching his numb limbs, he saw that each blade of grass surrounding him was likewise covered with fine droplets. When he stuck out his tongue to catch the dew pearling on his cheek, it tasted of salt.
On the day after Baptiste’s arrival, Rochester took him around the tents and trailers to introduce him to their occupants, pointing out, most often needlessly, a talent or a disti
nctive feature which in certain cases it would have been more tactful not to mention.
At that time of day everyone was washing and getting ready for late afternoon when men, women, and animals would parade through the small town, accompanied by the brass band, to announce the performances and exhibitions to be featured over the next few days. The trailers and tents seemed to have been pitched at random in the enormous field, some in groups of three or four to form a tight circle like the covered wagons of the settlers heading west at the same time, others on their own, backs turned to the rest. To move from one to the other required a thousand detours among posts where clothes were hung to dry, dogs stretched out on the ground, basins full of water, chests, and valises overflowing with costumes worn out from travel.
“This is Ilsa, our bearded lady,” announced Rochester, pointing to a woman in her thirties with very gentle eyes, the lower half of her face indeed covered by a curly, silky-looking beard. She was on the steps of a gaily coloured trailer, busy mending something.
The heat was already overwhelming, although the sun was still low in the sky, and a thin vapour seemed to rise from the earth, shimmering in the distance. Ilsa cooled herself by waving a fan painted with birds of paradise.
“And Qiu and Quan, or Quan and Qiu, I never know which is which, but it doesn’t really matter because it’s unlikely we’ll meet one without the other, isn’t that so, boys?” Rochester went on, speaking to two Asian men, small in stature, sitting on a bench outside their tent, who had between them two heads and four legs but just two arms and a shared torso. It wasn’t clear if they had understood what Rochester had said but each one, with a hesitant smile, waved to Baptiste, who returned their greeting. They stayed like that for a moment, arms raised, each the inverted image of the other.
Rochester had already moved on.
“And here is Jemma,” he continued without stopping, half-opening the flap of a tent to show a mass of flesh glistening in the darkness; Baptiste couldn’t tell if it was a back or a belly. The mountain straightened up, pivoted painfully (so it was a back, but hunched over, which explained the difficulty) and shot an unkind glance at Baptiste, then asked, as if he couldn’t hear:
“And what can this one do?” Without waiting for an answer, she added, in case a doubt persisted: “I don’t like that face. Something fishy about it.”
“Don’t ask what he can do, Jemma, but what he has done. I’ll have you know that Baptiste here survived the Apocalypse.”
“Is that all?” asked the woman, unimpressed, wiping her damp forehead, then spitting on the ground before resuming the task of putting on her stockings.
The tour continued and Baptiste’s uneasiness grew. It seemed to him that whether from interest or perversity, Barnum & Bailey had assembled some monstrous zoo of which, in spite of himself, he was now part. Not knowing how to articulate his distress, he finally asked Rochester:
“Th-the people travelling with the circus … Are they all … I mean …”
“Yes?”
The other man looked at him as if determined to let him get out of it alone. Baptiste repeated: “Are we all … m-monsters?”
He thought he saw a flash of pity in the gaze of the manager, who spoke more softly now:
“Mr. Bailey prefers to say phenomena, or even wonders. One thing is certain, you are all, from the first to the last, absolutely unique. But the circus also uses performers whose talents are less … how to put it? … less obvious at first sight – and of course animals, which are accommodated elsewhere.”
That first morning, Baptiste saw a strongman, an elastic woman, a pair of midgets, a giant, and the skinniest man in the world, all of whom had the same colourless gaze, as if a part of them were worn out from being looked at too much.
As soon as they’d finished visiting the tents that housed the marvels, Baptiste wanted to know where the animals were kept, then went off by himself to meet the enormous hippopotamus, some white Bengal tigers, the lonely giraffe, and the counting horses.
He finally stopped in front of the lion’s cage, staring at the occupant who gave him a fraternal and tired look. “Bonjour, my name is Baptiste,” he said in a low voice. The animal swished the air with his tail and opened his mouth wide to yawn, revealing two impressive, though greyish, rows of teeth. “And mine is Elie,” replied the lion politely. Baptiste could not have said what surprised him most: that the animal had spoken or that he’d done so in such a thin little voice.
But from behind the wild creature appeared shortly a little blonde head, which went on: “And that one’s Numa. He looks scary, but he’s very gentle.” As if to contradict him, the animal let out a lengthy growl and shook his rusty mane. Elie went back to brushing the drab coat and the lion creased his eyes and curled his chops in contentment. The boy couldn’t have been more than twelve; his movements were confident and precise, his figure slight. As for the lion, he looked shabby; the skin of his elbows was bare, and his coat came away in clumps as the boy brushed him. One eye was festering and from it oozed a greenish, slimy secretion. The animal raised one tremendous paw to rub it, reopening a wound on his brow that looked as though it never had a chance to heal.
“Are you a tamer?” asked Baptiste.
“No,” replied Elie, laughing, but clearly flattered to have been taken for one of those broad-shouldered men the slightest crack of whose whip aroused sighs and fluttering eyelashes from the female spectators. “I just brush him and feed him every day. With Josephine and Matilda,” he said, pointing at cages farther away; in one could be seen the giraffe’s long neck, her small horned head inspecting the landscape, and in the other the grey mass of the hippopotamus.
Elie emerged from the lion’s cage so fast that for a moment, Baptiste thought he’d slipped between the bars, but the young lad closed a small door behind him, bolted it carefully, and suggested: “Come here, if you want I’ll show you my favourite.” He led Baptiste to a tent off to the side, above which had been hung a large white canopy that offered some shade. Nonetheless the heat inside was nearly suffocating; in the dim light a swarm of invisible flies was buzzing, while on the sand floor stood a big metal tank filled with water. They approached it and when Baptiste leaned over, he saw a creature unlike any he had ever seen, scarcely bigger than a woman, its tapering, graceful form ending in a flat tail, its body white as milk. It was looking at him with velvety little eyes set in a round and prettily mustached face. Baptiste, stupefied, held its gaze while it rose slowly to the surface as if to have a better look at him, appearing at once curious and infinitely sad.
“Is … is that a mermaid?” he asked.
“A manatee,” Elie corrected him.
The manatee’s head was now out of the water and in its round eyes Baptiste could see his own trembling silhouette leaning forward.
BAPTISTE RAN INTO THE RENOWNED JAMES BAILEY only once during the time he was with the circus – by chance, in the train taking them from New York to Chicago. Having arrived a short time before, Baptiste was not yet altogether used to the gasping steel monster, something he’d never seen before he set foot on the mainland and still boarded with a kind of wonder, along with a hint of mistrust. The first time he embarked on it he’d had the impression he was penetrating the entrails of a gigantic metal snake.
Trains often travelled at night and it only added to the strangeness of the journey to speed through a darkness so complete it seemed nearly solid, pierced here and there by the flickering lights of a far-off village, the yellow lamps of small country stations illuminating the deserted platforms. Baptiste sometimes felt that the train was standing still while the landscape was unfolding on the other side of the broad picture windows, like a roll of film – another marvel he’d discovered on North American soil – image by image, in the window frame.
That night, driven by a call of nature, he ventured outside the compartment he shared with Qiu and Quan and explored the rattling narrow corridor. On one side, windows looked onto fields where now and then a far
m stood out, or a herd of placid cows, or an occasional thicket of trees; on the other side were doors, all alike, but he thought he remembered that the second-last was the WC. Opening it, he found instead Rochester sitting on a crimson velvet seat next to a slender man whose white shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbows. His head was bald on top, a deficiency compensated for by a short beard; he had a straight nose, and determined features.
Photos and prints were spread on a table in front of them. Baptiste could see a five-legged calf and an odd creature with a hairy muzzle, scales all over its body, and big flippers.
The two men looked up, surprised, when they spotted Baptiste, who stammered:
“Ex-excuse me, I got lost …”
Rochester broke in, fitting onto his face the smile he’d worn the first time they had met, which for the most part, he only took off at bedtime, the way others place their false teeth in a glass on their bedside table.
“James, let me introduce Baptiste Cyparis, whom I’m sure you remember.”
“Of course,” repeated Bailey absentmindedly, extending to Baptiste a stubby-fingered hand. His gaze was both piercing and dreamy. “Delighted to make your acquaintance, Basil.”
Rochester gave a little cough, but Baptiste murmured: “That’s all right,” and they left it there.
Bailey had nimbly covered the prints with an open newspaper that he now stared at as if he wanted to be sure they wouldn’t disappear by magic.
“Can I be of any help to you, dear friend?” Rochester asked Baptiste, who was standing stupidly in the doorway, not knowing how to take his leave.
Intimidated, he said the first thing that came into his mind, which turned out to be the truth.
“Can you tell me where the WC is?”
Bailey raised an eyebrow but Rochester, still grinning broadly, provided the information requested as kindly as a tourist guide questioned about the age of the Sphinx or the height of the Eiffel Tower. Terribly embarrassed, Baptiste thanked him, closed the door and never again set eyes on James Bailey, of whose collection he was one of the rarest gems.
Wonder Page 5
