Wonder

by Dominique Fortier

  “How dare they,” the man went on in a tone of boisterous lamentation, “present to us here one of those infidels from a land where they know not God? How dare they corrupt our innocent youth?”

  Looking around him, Baptiste observed that the audience was made up of farmers, small merchants, and housewives, all of them well over forty. Brushing aside that detail, he wanted anyway to defend the honour of his island, but when he opened his mouth the man’s companion broke into a series of strident Amens that drowned out any rectification. In the crowd people began to cross themselves and look worriedly towards the ceiling of the tent, as if they were expecting an answer to come from there.

  Profoundly embarrassed, at a loss for what to do, Baptiste tried to attract the attention the workers at the tent entrance, but for the time being they were too engrossed in conversation to realize that he needed help.

  The man was still howling what Baptiste took to be passages from the Book of Revelation; a woman flung herself to her knees, two others burst into sobs, a fourth began to ululate. Wanting to calm the hysteria that threatened to settle in for good, Baptiste, unable to think of anything else, began to recite in a loud, clear voice the Lord’s Prayer, the first prayer he’d learned as a child, the one that Father Blanchot had made him repeat most often as penance and the only one he remembered in its entirety. As Baptiste was saying it in French, however, the old man, who had never heard the language, began to shout that “the monster is casting an evil spell, calling on the demons from Hell from whence he came in their own vile language.” He was spraying saliva everywhere, its trajectory seeming to imitate that of the projectiles spat from the mouth of the volcano frozen behind Baptiste in a spectacular and unchanging fury.

  Finally realizing that something was wrong, the ticket sellers rushed into the tent and tried to escort the man to the exit, but he struggled so hard that, while the woman with him was shrieking that people were trying to murder them, they came to blows. After just a few seconds the brawl became widespread.

  Taking advantage of the chaos, Baptiste pulled with all his might on a small tear in the canvas between the volcano and the sea, enlarging it enough to stick his head and shoulders into it. He raised one foot very high, then the other, and disappeared through the sky studded with stars and blazing embers.

  Then a strange thing happened to Baptiste. After he had miraculously escaped the deadly fire that had wiped out everything and everyone he knew, after people had come from the United States to invite him to join the Greatest Show on Earth – for which he was being handsomely paid – after he had found the family he’d stopped looking for long ago, then this strange thing happened: he suddenly felt as if his life was finished, over, consumed, and for the first time he knew what fear felt like.

  He began to suffer long bouts of insomnia. He would wake up in the depths of night, shift Alice’s arm from where it weighed heavily on his chest, get up, and dress in the shirt and trousers he had been wearing the day of his arrival. He had others now, more than enough to change every day of the week if he felt the urge. Sometimes when he opened the cupboard where they were hanging, he would stand for a moment, disconcerted before such pointless abundance, after which he invariably reached out for the more familiar old rags. Then he would leave as cautiously as he had slipped out of his cell a year before, and walk alone on the deserted site given over now to the dark.

  The first time she had seen him don his clothes slowly, mechanically, to leave in the middle of the night, Alice had gotten up and called softly:

  “Baptiste, you’re a somnambulist.”

  “What?” He had never heard that word.

  “You’re walking in your sleep, come back to bed.” And standing next to him she had tried to lead him. He’d freed himself with an absentminded movement. It was exactly what he had experienced for weeks now and hadn’t been able to name: the impression that he was walking in a dream, or under water, day and night but particularly in the daytime.

  “H-how do I stop?”

  “Stop what?”

  “Sleepwalking. How can I stop?”

  “There’s just one way. To wake up.”

  That was useless: wasn’t he already awake? A moment later she asked, to be quite sure:

  “Are you asleep?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied in all honesty, and went out.

  From then on Alice, whom the slightest movement would waken, got up when he’d gone out the door and watched him move away, her forehead against the cold window.

  Seeing them all side by side: the mountain of quivering rolls of fat that was Jemma, whose every movement reverberated at length in her white, turquoise-veined flesh, the way a pebble dropped into water gently traces circles that subside as they move away from the centre; the body shared by Qiu and Quan, their two heads, each on its own shoulders, two oranges on a table; the short silhouettes of the midget couple, child-sized but with adult heads, with hair in their ears and hairy genitals in their underwear, who waved their little limbs the way some fish out of water comically twitch their fins; the graceful, perfect figure of Ilsa – until she turned around to show her sow bear’s face, which seemed at first to be a joke in bad taste on such a delicate neck; the muscular mass of Ulrich the strongman, whose biceps and triceps bulged under his skin like foreign bodies slipped in between flesh and bone; at the sight of them, hideous and fascinating, Baptiste felt as if he were advancing in a waking nightmare. His life since Mount Pelée seemed to him to be unfolding in a kind of half-sleep where objects, though endowed with their familiar outlines, put up no resistance and allowed themselves to be passed through when he held out a hand to catch them. He took from this insubstantiality the sense that he himself was unreal. Maybe he was still stretched out on the ground in the Saint-Pierre dungeon and all this was just a dream.

  MONTHS LATER BAPTISTE, ALONE IN A CELL again, would recall the afternoon when he’d seen her for the first time, suspended between two horses galloping around the track, raising clouds of golden dust that floated a few inches above the black and glossy backs. She had left the first and had not yet grabbed the mane of the second, so when he thought of her he would always have this image: she was flying.

  Hair as shiny as the croup of the horses who obeyed the slightest click of her tongue; red lips; wasp-waisted in her sequined costume that reflected the light from the electric bulbs, she was alone with the stallions under the big top. She had headed for Baptiste without hesitating, as if they already knew each other. Above her lips sparkled tiny beads of sweat he longed to lick with the despair of the thirsty man who sticks his tongue out when he feels on his forehead the first drops of rain.

  “Are you the Apocalypse?” she asked, examining him from head to toe with no animosity but no warmth either, rather with a kind of detached curiosity.

  Sorry not to be more spectacular, he could only utter painfully:

  “Y-y-yes.”

  “What was it like?”

  “I-I don’t know. Hot. And then … I passed out.”

  Briskly, she unlaced her fine leather boots and pulled them off like the peel of a fruit, revealing white feet with seashell nails. Continuing on her way barefoot, she let the boots fall in the sand where Baptiste bent over humbly to pick them up, quickening his pace as she was walked away without looking over her shoulder, sure he was following her. He’d had the impression that he was waking from a dream.

  With the tips of her white fingers she traced a path down his back where the tangle of scars formed something like a crown of thorns. She had removed his shirt without a word, they had loved one another standing, leaning against one of the posts that held up the tent where the manatee was lapping the lukewarm water in its basin. Then she had gently turned Baptiste over and written on his burnt skin a message that seemed to be engraved in his flesh more deeply than the wound left there by the blazing mountain, like an invocation.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No,” he lied. But it was only a half-lie, for to f
eel her fingers on his shoulders, her breath on his neck, he would have suffered a thousand other pains.

  Stella lived with Rochester and he shouldn’t expect that the events of the afternoon would ever happen again, she explained coldly as she straightened her costume with its shiny sequins. But of course it did happen again: when night had fallen and only the animals were awake, pacing their cages in circles; during the parade when only workers and extras remained on the circus site; in the train car where Stella travelled alone when James Bailey had sent Rochester to recruit some unknown prodigy or new monstrosity.

  When he came home, Alice smelled on his breath the brandy he’d drunk with her and her perfume on his fingers, in his hair, on his long legs and in his arms. It seemed to her that if she looked long enough she could distinguish the other woman’s reflection in Baptiste’s gaze. But she kept her eyes closed and waited until he was asleep to tiptoe out of the trailer and to soap and rinse herself thoroughly.

  Baptiste began to attend performances in order to admire Stella at the same time as hundreds, as thousands, of others, feeling a mixture of jealousy and pride at sharing her that way.

  The heat inside the big top was infernal; under the ceiling of light bulbs, faces were gleaming, red and stupefied, their open black mouths jagged with stumps of teeth. One could hear gulps and cries of rapture at the arrival in the ring of leather-clad lion tamers, strapped into chains, led by Hector who held a trident like an ancient gladiator or some even older and more formidable Roman demigod. From the ring came smells of sweat, straw, excrement, and chalk dust.

  The crowd marvelled noisily at the intelligence of the horse-mathematicians as well as at the intrepidity of the lion tamers. They shivered as they looked up at the tightrope walkers hanging from their thin trapezes, following with their eyes one who was advancing slowly on a wire, on his chin a stem holding a full cup of tea. But these exploits were too far removed from everyday life to stir in the audience anything but a fleeting and superficial emotion. Laughter was at its peak when the clowns, after a few pirouettes and harmless capers, chose a whipping boy among themselves, going at him fiercely, tripping and sidestepping him over and over until he dropped onto the sand, pretending to help him get up the better to trample him, their monstrously bright red lips on faces painted white opening grotesque grins all the way to their ears.

  The spectators recognized themselves finally in both the torturer and the victim and instinctively chose their side. Their laughter rose up, like the snickering of hyenas.

  These poor people came to the circus to be filled with wonder; to play at being afraid without having to pit themselves against the danger; to forget for a few hours, a few minutes, an existence that was unbearable or simply dull and hopeless; mainly though they came for the privilege of pointing to and laughing at the bad luck of others more unfortunate than themselves. Of filling their eyes with those freaks of nature observed from a distance, one hand over their mouth as if to stifle a cry. They shuddered, with horror in some cases, but also with curiosity and excitement and with a kind of brief joy they hardly ever experienced, because for one of the rare times in their lives, they were on the right side of things: on the side of those who laughed instead of the laughingstock; on the side of the winners, the virtuous, those who were backed up by the fearsome strength of the majority. Like a powder trail through the crowd, their laughter spread, swelled, and nourished one another. Between this laughter and cries of fright or hatred there was little difference, and anyone who photographed those contorted faces, mouths wide open, eyes screwed up, would have found it hard to tell if they were grimacing in pleasure, in pain, or both. A crowd is never so ugly as when it is laughing.

  “RUN AWAY WITH ME,” SAID BAPTISTE, LYING on his back with Stella’s head on his shoulder, her long honey-coloured hair spread over the black flesh where scars formed pink twists and turns.

  Her laugh was crystalline and hard.

  “Where to?”

  “An-anywhere.”

  “Why do people always talk about going away and don’t care where they arrive or when?”

  He felt that she wasn’t asking the question of him, so he didn’t answer. They were lying on a rough woollen blanket, in a clearing some distance from the camp. The sky was speckled with stars, joined now and then by blinking fireflies. The nearby forest was teeming with mysterious sounds.

  “Where are you from?” he asked, because he had just realized that he knew nothing about her.

  “From the greyest village in the world, a little dump in Texas, and it’s the last place I would want to go back to. What about you? Do you dream about going back to where you grew up?”

  “Where I grew up doesn’t exist anymore,” he said in a neutral tone.

  There could be no reply to that remark. Her finger traced his jaw and his lips. He wanted her again and it was like a raging thirst; he wished he could drink up the night.

  “Come away with me,” he said, taking her in his arms.

  She broke away, raised herself up on an elbow, stared at him and said, seriously this time:

  “My life is here, with the horses and Richard – and you. If you want.”

  It was perfectly normal to come after the horses, for she treasured them more than the pupil of her eye, but coming after Rochester was a bitter blow. A fist tightened in his chest and he wondered if this was what jealousy felt like. Then all at once he understood: he hadn’t escaped the Apocalypse; he had succumbed to it like all the others, and this was his punishment.

  ELIE HAD SEEN FOR WEEKS NOW THAT HIS mother had been looking haggard, red-eyed, that she startled at the slightest sound and was always checking over her shoulder as if expecting that at any moment a storm would break and beat down on her.

  Having seen her happy these past months, he could recognize the opposite of happiness, even though he didn’t know the cause. The night before, he’d overheard a conversation that broke off abruptly when he approached; Alice had been talking about “that siren, that witch, that goddamn creature who’s cast a spell over you,” in a voice that didn’t sound like hers. Baptiste, helpless before her, flipped his hand as if to chase away an insect. He looked guilty but also, strangely, almost happy, as if he were inhabited by a flame that could finally blaze openly.

  The heat was overwhelming beneath the heavy cotton sheet of the tent where the manatee was housed. As soon as he entered, sweat began to bead on Baptiste’s face, to run onto his neck. Blocks of ice in one corner were supposed to cool the air; he could feel their cold when he moved his arm over them. The ice was melting practically before his eyes, creating a puddle that ran out of the tent in rivulets. He placed his hand, fingers spread, on the translucent surface that was dented and cracked by the heat. At first soothing under his palm, the cold quickly became a bite, then an unbearable burn, but Baptiste forced himself to leave his hand there, and it gradually became numb. When he finally removed it, it seemed no longer to belong to him.

  Leaning over the tank of cloudy water, he stuck his fingers into the tepid liquid, which felt scalding to him. He peered at his reflection, at a series of waves that became more marked when the manatee rose to the surface, nostrils closed, velvet eyes wide open as if to greet him. He held out his hand to touch the smooth skin of the creature, which slipped away with a fluid movement of its flippers, then rested his forehead on his folded arms and closed his eyes. After a moment he had the impression that his numb fingers could feel the presence of the manatee, which had silently swum closer again.

  In the entrance, a black silhouette against the blinding light, Elie, who had come to feed the animal, backed up stealthily, heart pounding, careful not to make a sound, and went instead to brush Numa the lion.

  He will come back at nightfall, holding tightly in his hand the lighter that will all at once seem infinitely heavy. He will arrange bales of hay in the four corners of the tent, soaked in alcohol he has stolen from the warehouse. Then, with a flick he will lift the lid, turn the small wheel with
his thumb, and with a steady hand he will light, one by one, the bales of hay and they will catch fire with a sound like a deep sigh.

  Flames rise up in the night, yellow and purple against the black of the sky, the way they appear on the sheet used as a backdrop for Baptiste’s act. Sparks blown by the wind soon catch the nearby tents, which are ablaze in an instant. Half-clothed people come running from all sides to get the terrified animals out, and for a moment the scene looks like a phantasmagoria or a carnival. Fire crackles, growls, and spreads in long narrow tongues that unfurl their hundred forked points. The tent where the horses are kept burns from the ground to its frail canvas roof; a stallion, panicking, tears a cloth partition with his teeth and finds the open air. Still blinded by the smoke he runs straight ahead, as if guided by an invisible rider, his blazing mane following him like the tail of a demon comet, along his way knocking over the buckets of water being passed from hand to hand and two stagehands who tried to stop him. His fire-rimmed silhouette finally disappears into the darkness. They will search at dawn for hours, finding neither him nor his remains. The other horses, paralyzed by fear, are motionless as statues, necks strained, nostrils quivering, wild eyes rolling. Numa the lion gets quietly out of his cage, its door left ajar, and walks away, supreme; he won’t be seen again either, and Rochester, not really wanting to tell the world that a wild animal has escaped from his menagerie, will be silent about the disappearance when police and firefighters come to question him. Everywhere, animals emerge from their dreamless sleep, adding their shrieks to the whimpers of those that are burning and soon a cacophony of men’s cries of rage, women’s howling, animals’ moaning rises up. Flames climb, dancing like long tresses, just as in the past, deep down in the water, weeds were rocked by the undertow. The fire’s reddish glow can be seen from afar, a monstrous imitation of the rising sun, a circle of light glowing like the gilded halos of saints that used to adorn the walls of the cathedral of Saint-Pierre, but now rest jumbled together under the rubble.