Wonder

by Dominique Fortier

  When he went back to his compartment, Qiu was asleep, head nodding in time to the bumps, while Quan, eyes wide open, was gazing out at the night falling beyond the windows, drowning the fields in a bluish twilight that was gradually spreading to the cars. At the sight of them, at once identical and different, the same but given over to contrary states, Baptiste recalled the carnival masks, some of which, from a single physiognomy, expressed fury while on others could be read mirth or sorrow. And then, as the train was speeding towards the gold of the setting sun and plunging into the night. He did not take long to doze off to the muffled sound of wheels on rails and lulled by the swaying motion that reminded him of the sea.

  THE BIG TOP WHERE THE MAIN SHOW WAS TAKING place was itself an attraction because it was the most enormous tent ever made. This marvel was illuminated by more than a thousand electric bulbs – three employees had just one task, to check them every day, one at a time, to replace any that were burned out, and to make sure there were always enough spare bulbs. These were carefully wrapped in straw, like eggs, then lined up in wooden crates that almost filled an entire train car. On flat ground, the tent was visible for kilometres around, like a glittering ocean liner on the plain or some monstrous star fallen to earth.

  The performances were introduced by lavish scenes from antiquity and biblical times: the Exodus from Egypt, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Wedding Feast at Cana – these religious tableaux needed dozens, even hundreds of extras, essentially interchangeable and for the most part staying a few weeks or months with the circus before leaving to try their luck elsewhere. They travelled together, piled into the most uncomfortable cars, slept crammed into tents they pitched themselves, preparing their own meals outside on small fires that glowed in the night.

  Next came the presentation of the Phenomena – the publicity talked sometimes about Monsters, other times about Marvels – that Barnum & Bailey collected the way others accumulate butterflies or rare coins. The Phenomena received a different treatment from that of the extras, nearly as good as that enjoyed by the performers and the tamers. The two groups, however, were carefully kept apart and Baptiste, the bearded lady, and the other oddities of nature were always relegated to the periphery of the camp, not far from the animals.

  Clowns, strongmen, acrobats, magicians, wild animals and tamers, elephants and horses were the first real act, sharing the ring in a dangerous ballet; hardly a week went by without complaints of squashed feet, broken hands, or dislocated knees, not to mention the fact that one night, a lion they’d forgotten to feed took a mouthful from the thigh of a horse. Both animals had to be put down before the eyes of the horrified crowd.

  Whenever they arrived in a new town or village, while the workers, the stagehands and some of the extras were unloading the wagons and pitching tents and the big top, the procession swung into action, going down the main street to the sound of the brass band under the dazzled eyes of children and those – suspicious but bright with curiosity – of the housewives and passersby who soon flooded into the streets. The procession obviously gave only a general idea of the wonders of the Greatest Show on Earth that the spectators would discover later on, in return for a slight admission fee.

  As he was one of the star attractions, Baptiste did not take part in this promotional parade; there was simply an announcement that visitors would have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see with their own eyes “The Most Amazing Man in the World, Sole Survivor of the Worst Calamity to Strike the Planet, A Man Whose Name is Written in Letters of Fire” and, to kindle the crowd’s curiosity even more, pictures of erupting volcanoes and devastated cities were held aloft. Baptiste would use that time to say hello to Numa, who always greeted him with half-closed eyes and a husky growl, and to the white manatee, to whom he fed lettuce or spinach swiped from the kitchen, which the animal chewed with a melancholy air.

  He rarely joined the other Phenomena, some of whom had regarded him with suspicion from the very first day, as if afraid Baptiste would try to steal their places or oust them from the top of the bill. It’s true that the tent where they performed had some of the longest lines, and that shortly after his arrival, the incredible “Vegetable Man,” that incomparable artist (who had the remarkable ability to carve, at lightning speed, carrots, potatoes, and humble parsnips into exquisite flowers, ships with sails unfurled, birds whose finest feathers could be seen), had been dismissed. But it was also being whispered that the Vegetable Man had threatened Rochester with the knife that never left his hand and that, with disastrous foolhardiness, he’d even dared to carve a turnip into an unflattering caricature of Mr. Bailey himself, who did not take such matters lightly.

  In the middle of this ill-assorted crowd that made up the circus, one part of which was always the same while the other part changed practically from city to city, Baptiste was just as alone as he’d been on his island on the day after the eighth of May. Aside from the few words exchanged every month with Rochester when the latter handed over his pay, in cash, careful to separate the bills before letting them go, his only real conversations were with Elie, Numa the lion, and the manatee. Perhaps because it was so implacably alone of its species, Baptiste had never realized the creature didn’t have a name.

  ONE AFTERNOON, ELIE TOOK HIM TO MEET HIS mother. Alice was frail, blonde, and grew red as a poppy almost as soon as she caught sight of Baptiste, whom her son had invited for tea. He heard her scold the boy after she’d pulled him hastily into the tent: “I meant a friend your own age, you dolt!” But she reappeared shortly, carrying a teapot and three cups, one of which wasn’t chipped at all.

  “Sir, I’m delighted,” she said softly to Baptiste who held her hand in his cautiously, afraid of crushing her fingers. Above her upper lip was a thin white scar as fine as a thread, which seemed to pull her mouth up very slightly when she smiled, as she did often and ingenuously.

  “I would like you to know, this is the first time my son has brought one of his friends home.” She broke off, looked around, and moved her hand a little, as if to excuse herself, repeating: “Well, home, in a manner of speaking.…” Baptiste realized then that the tent was not uniformly grey but had been patched with countless pieces, some of a solid hue, others with faded patterns; all had, from exposure to the elements, become various tones of beige and grey and dirty white reminiscent of the colour of rain clouds.

  The three drank their tea sitting on the grass while the sun went down slowly and moved behind the horizon, plunging the camp into a bluish dimness. They were still there when the first stars appeared. At a gesture from Alice, Baptiste picked up the sleeping Elie and placed him on a pallet spread with a woolen blanket inside the tent. The moon was high in the sky now, round and chalky like a clown’s mask. Alice shivered and Baptiste put his arm around the woman’s shoulders to warm her.

  Quite naturally they became a family, something none of them had ever known, as Alice was an orphan, a child of the circus, while Elie didn’t have a father, though spiteful women – one of whom, Jemma, was particularly energetic – claimed that the boy displayed an amazing resemblance to Hector, the wild-animal trainer.

  Alice and Elie left their tent for Baptiste’s trailer which, strangely, seemed bigger to him once the mother and son had moved in. Soon they settled into a routine, punctuated by the circus’s continual moves, the incessant chaos of the tents being pitched and struck, the almost daily performances, the successive crowds of onlookers and the landscapes they never had a chance to explore and that simply formed a changing backdrop.

  They married without delay. Elie served as Baptiste’s best man, standing very erect, nearly paralyzed by the solemnity of the event, and Ilsa as Alice’s maid of honour. The ceremony, presided over by Rochester, was held outside the big top at dawn, before the procession.

  “But Rochester isn’t a priest,” Alice had fretted.

  Baptiste had shrugged: “I’m not crazy about priests anyway.”

  She was pretty in the white dress Ilsa had lent h
er, which the two had spent the night altering to fit Alice’s narrow shoulders and slender bosom. Elie had braided a crown of daisies for his mother. She had slipped it onto her forehead; now and then it dropped tiny red ants that she squashed between thumb and forefinger. Baptiste donned the black suit he put on every night when it was time to play the Survivor of the Apocalypse, and he couldn’t help feeling a little as if he were doing a performance.

  Before them was gathered a small group of no more than fifteen, Jemma having mounted a genuine cabal against this union of a man black as ebony and a woman white as milk, which she described as “an aberration of nature” without noticing that all those to whom she was presenting her argument could have been described in the same way.

  The ceremony was brief. There was a document to sign that no one bothered to look at too closely, then champagne to open; but it was not yet noon, the drink was slightly warm and most of the flutes remained half-full after the guests drank the toasts, as they left to get ready for the parade.

  Baptiste, Alice, and Elie were now by themselves, all dressed up, in front of the big top where technicians and stagehands were going in and out while the sun beat down. Baptiste was sweating in his black suit; the daisies on Alice’s brow were starting to wither, giving off a mild acid smell. She took off the wreath, its imprint staying behind on her like an invisible headband, and it immediately came apart in her fingers. She dove to the ground to try making a bouquet with the scattered flowers, but could retrieve only three slightly bent stems that had at their tips just a yellow heart, as round as an eye. The white petals strewn on the ground suggested tiny boats adrift on the blackness of their shadows, which had shrunk and now were little more than small puddles of darkness at their feet.

  FOR ELIE’S ELEVENTH BIRTHDAY, ALICE HAD planned to make a spice cake as she did every year, but Elie had begged that instead they order from the kitchen of the Palace, where they stayed when the circus was in San Francisco, a cake made by the chef himself, its name on the menu the night before looking deliciously mysterious: devil’s food cake.

  The room they’d been assigned was not particularly grand but it was roomier than the trailer they still occupied when they stopped in small towns. A bed with an eiderdown embroidered in burgundy and mustard brown had pride of place in the middle of the room, which contained as well a dressing table with an oval mirror. Baptiste, unaccustomed to looking at his own reflection, always took a moment to recognize himself in it. There was a small sofa and a folding bed for Elie to sleep on, all the furniture sitting on a thick carpet that muffled the slightest sound. Some gilt-framed prints showing Roman ruins bathed in sunlight hung on walls covered with striped wallpaper.

  A rare luxury, the three had supper in the hotel restaurant, an immense dining room that had a dozen huge chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, where liveried waiters snaked their way through the tables carrying plates covered with silver domes. Most tables were occupied by circus people. The few other diners looked with stupefaction first at Jemma, who walked with the help of two canes, then at Ilsa, the bottom part of her face modestly covered with a scarf but the abundant growth on her chin still visible; and at Qui and Quan, who each surveyed the room from his own side. As for Baptiste, he was still stunned to see how much attention was being paid to him in the midst of so many more spectacular Phenomena. The people of the fine city of San Francisco were not however in the habit of welcoming dark-skinned people in hotel dining rooms, and the whispers that had greeted Jemma’s arrival were transformed into noisy comments when he took his seat with Elie and Alice and laid his black hand on the young woman’s white arm.

  “I didn’t think it was this kind of establishment,” remarked a long-faced woman to his left, who started to get up but stopped when Hector entered the room with a martial tread, running his conqueror’s eyes over the guests.

  The soup was tepid, the roast beef overcooked, and in general the dishes lacked salt, but Elie, unaccustomed to such a feast, devoured everything put in front of him, while Alice was careful to pick up her fork delicately in her right hand once she’d cut her meat with her knife and to dab her lips with her starched serviette after each mouthful. Baptiste could see the husband of the angular woman – who was now twisting her neck to get a look at Bailey at the other end of the hall – out of the corner of his eye. He thought the man looked like Louis XVIII but couldn’t remember where he might have seen the face of the French monarch.

  Back in their room, the cake was waiting for them, sitting prominently on the dressing table, a dozen slender candles stuck into the white icing. Delighted, Elie turned towards Alice and in a voice that held both reproach and relief, exclaimed:

  “I thought you’d forgotten!”

  Her only reply was to tousle his hair. He grabbed the knife beside the plates but she stopped him from cutting into the cake right away.

  “It’s you who forgot something,” she reminded him softly as she took a small box wrapped in white paper from her purse. “First, you have to blow out the candles.”

  He seized the box and opened it cautiously: inside, on a cushion of sky-blue satin, lay a heavy, finely worked silver lighter with, in the middle of some complicated arabesques, a stylized E and C intertwined.

  “They’re your initials now,” she explained, while Elie turned the object over in his fingers, fiddling with the cover which opened and closed with a snap, making the roller, its circumference marked with minute grooves, spin until a spark shot up and then a bluish flame. He lit the candles one by one. She urged him:

  “Make a wish.”

  He looked around at the warm, rich, golden room, his mother and Baptiste smiling, and he knew that all he wanted was for things to go on as they were at this moment. He closed his eyes, breathed, opened his eyes: the twelve flames were out, the blackened wicks of the candles now gave off only some weak smoke. The twelve flames.

  “There was one too many!” he exclaimed, alarmed, reaching for the offending candle. “Does that mean my wish won’t come true?”

  Alice and Baptiste had a good laugh.

  “No,” his mother reassured him. “On the contrary, it means that your wish will be good for two years.”

  But Elie, unconvinced, looked hard at both of them, sensing a lie.

  “I’ve got something for you too,” said Baptiste, thrusting his arm under the bed and taking out a long, wide box wrapped in newspaper, which the boy tore eagerly, revealing a cardboard carton with a coloured illustration of a long train travelling on shining rails through an emerald-green landscape. Overjoyed, Elie spent the next minutes gazing at the various components of the train, properly stowed in their compartments from which he dared not take them. As well as the gleaming locomotive there were eight iron cars, five of them closed, with windows, steps, and wheels in every respect like those on real trains, along with enough lengths of straight rails and curved ones to form, once fitted together, a good-sized ring in the middle of the bedroom rug.

  The locomotive started slowly, then speeded up, advancing with a powerful clickety-clack, nearly leaving the track on a curve, just barely landing on its wheels to work up speed again, only to go off the rails for good at the next turn, followed by its cars whose wheels went on turning, pointlessly, long after.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Baptiste, “we’ll try again in a while.”

  Elie cut the cake after he’d uprooted the eleven remaining candles, tears of wax congealed along the narrow stems, discovering under the white icing a bright red pastry he refused to eat. For long minutes he kept using his lighter to light again the shortest candle and snuff it by pinching the wick between thumb and forefinger. Floating in the air was the odour of ozone, metallic and acid, like the smell after lightning has struck.

  IN CERTAIN DUSTY VILLAGES IN THE MIDDLE of the United States, the populace had never seen a black man except in a print or a photo – and those were mostly of convicts, who had expressions so sinister that honest people thus informed about the unfortunat
e characteristics of the race were determined to be wary of any man whose skin was the colour of coffee.

  One night when he was standing, arms folded and one foot slightly forward (a pose he’d borrowed from the lion tamers), in front of a ragged piece of canvas bearing a painting of Mount Pelée erupting, throwing into the sky flaming stones and a fountain of black smoke, Baptiste overheard a conversation between a little girl with blonde curls and her mother, who wore a hat with a broad wingspan that in all likelihood had cost the life of more than one bird and made it impossible to see her face. It was obvious that the lady was a person of some importance in the small town, perhaps the mayor’s wife, for the rest of the audience held themselves back respectfully and sent in her direction looks at once curious and cowed.

  “Mama,” asked the child in a high little voice, “why is that man black?”

  Baptiste could see that the people around the lady with the hat were holding their breath as she replied calmly:

  “Because he was burned, my pet. As you can see, he was in a fire so he’s as black as coal. Now come along, sweetheart, do you want to see the hippopotamus?”

  Another night, there were an elderly man and woman dressed all in black who could have been man and wife or brother and sister, so much did they resemble one another, in their bearing more than their features. The two shared the same stiff posture and an identical look of disapproval, with pinched nostrils and mouth. They called Baptiste sotto voce “Satan’s lackey,” whispering that if he had survived on Judgment Day it was because God in His infinite wisdom had not wanted him in His kingdom and, continuing more and more loudly, declaring that the colour of his skin was the reflection of his black soul.