The Character of Rain

by Amélie Nothomb

  There are those who have not been subjected to the laws of evolutionary development. These are the clinical vegetables. The specialists fret over them. Yet they are what we want to be. They are experiencing life as it would have been lived but for a fateful accident.

  AN ORDINARY DAY. The parents were acting like parents, the other children were behaving like children, and the Tube was wrapped up in its cylindrical existence.

  Nonetheless, this day would be the most important day of its life, then disappear without a trace, just as there apparently are no remains of that day when a human being rose to his feet for the first time, nor the day when he first grasped what death truly meant. The pivotal events in mankind’s history happen without notice.

  Anyway, on this ordinary day, the walls of the house suddenly echoed with screams. Terrified, the mother and the nanny ran from room to room in search of its source. Had a monkey gotten loose? Had someone escaped from an insane asylum?

  The last place the mother looked was her room. What she saw froze her in her tracks. The Plant was sitting up in its crib, howling as only a two-year-old child can howl.

  The mother approached the crib, trying to reconcile this ear-splitting spectacle with the image of what, for two long years, had been the embodiment of placidity. The Plant’s eyes had always been opened wide and staring fixedly, their gray-green color therefore easy to identify; now its pupils were entirely black, black as a scorched field.

  What force had been so powerful as to turn those pale eyes into coals? What dreadful thing could have happened to it?

  The only clear thing was that the child was furious— seized up in a fabulous fit of rage.

  Fascinated, the mother took her child in her arms, but the child kicked wildly and she put it straight back down.

  She ran through the house, yelling, “The Plant isn’t a plant!” She called to her husband. He ran to their room. The brother and sister were invited in to witness the splendor of such divine fury.

  After a while, the child stopped howling, though its eyes remained menacingly dark. Seething with anger, it regarded the humanity assembled around it. Then, exhausted, it lay down and fell asleep.

  The family began to applaud. They were overjoyed. The child had at long last come to life.

  THE SPECIALISTS COULDN’T explain this sudden rebirth. It was as if, they said, the child needed two full years of extrauterine womblike existence to become operational.

  As for the rage, the only explanation advanced was that it was the product of a mental event. Something had happened in its brain, something it couldn’t accommodate, and instantaneously the gray matter had been shaken out of its slumber. Neural messages had begun coursing through the nervous system. The body started to move.

  Great empires can collapse for reasons that initially seem perfectly incomprehensible.

  Children as still as statues can suddenly turn into braying beasts. The most surprising thing was how much this delighted the family.

  Sic transit tubi gloria.

  The father couldn’t get over his excitement. He felt as if he had a newborn. He called his mother, who lived in Brussels.

  "The Plant woke up! Get on a plane and come right away!"

  The grandmother replied that she would need to have a couple of suits made before coming all the way to Japan, which is where her son and his family were living. She was a most elegant woman. The suits would take at least a month or two.

  In the meantime, the parents began to miss their Plant. Having awoken in a rage, their child had remained constantly enraged. The mother or the nanny nearly had to throw a bottle into its crib, then back away quickly before getting whacked. There were moments—sometimes lasting for hours—when the child was calm, but these were pre-storm calms. They would take advantage of one of these quiet moments and take the child out into the yard, where it sat on the grass, contemplating the toys placed around it.

  God—no longer “the Tube” or “the Plant,” it was still the center of the universe—would slowly grow upset, realizing that these toys existed outside of it, that their existence was not dependent. This caused profound displeasure.

  Nonetheless, it had not escaped God’s notice that those around it produced precise, articulated sounds with their mouths, and that somehow these sounds enabled them to control objects, to annex them.

  It wanted to do that. Was it not a divine prerogative to name all things in the universe? God therefore designated an object with its finger and opened its mouth to speak, but the sounds that came out were incoherent. God was the first to find this surprising; it felt completely capable of speech. The surprise diminished, replaced by feelings of humiliation and outrage. Then the screaming started.

  The meaning of its screaming was as follows:

  They move their lips and words come out. God moves its lips and all that comes out is noise. This is not fair It will yell and scream until noise turns into language.

  Here was how the mother interpreted what was happening:

  Acting like a baby at the age of two isn’t normal. The child must sense that she is late to develop and that’s why she gets mad.

  The mother’s conclusion was false. God did not believe God to be late. To say such a thing suggested a comparison, and God wouldn’t submit to comparisons. It sensed within itself enormous power, and was frustrated to discover that it was incapable of exercising that power. The mouth betrayed it. The lips weren’t up to the task.

  The mother approached the child, speaking in a loud voice that stretched out every syllable:

  "Paaaapaaaa! Maaaamaaaa!"

  God was infuriated that anyone would propose imitating such inanities. Did the mother not know she was dealing with a master of language, one who would never debase itself by repeating “mama” and “papa"? In response to the mother’s overtures the child launched into full-throated howling more hideous than ever.

  Little by little the parents began to talk openly about what the child had been like before. Was this really such an improvement? Once they had had a child who was mysteriously and wonderfully placid, and now they had a pit bull pup on their hands.

  "Do you remember how pretty the Plant was? Those large peaceful eyes.”

  "We slept so well in those days.”

  There was no more rest for the parents. God was an insomniac, sleeping barely an hour or two a night. When it wasn’t sleeping, it was screaming.

  "That’s enough!” the father would shout at the crib. “We know you spent two years snoozing. That’s not a reason to keep us up!"

  God behaved like Louis XIV: unable to tolerate the idea that anyone would sleep when it wasn’t, eat when it wasn’t, or talk when it couldn’t. This last one really got it spitting mad.

  The specialists were no more successful at explaining this behavior than they had been before. “Pathological apathy” became “pathological irritability” without any hard proof. In the end, they fell back upon common sense:

  “She’s compensating for the two years she missed. She’ll quiet down eventually.”

  If I haven’t thrown her out the window by then, thought the exasperated mother.

  WITH TIME THE GRANDMOTHER’S SUITS Were made. She packed them into a suitcase, went to the hairdresser’s, and took a plane from Brussels to Osaka. In those days the flight took twenty hours.

  The parents were waiting at the airport. They hadn’t seen her in three years. She embraced her son, congratulated her daughter-in-law, and pronounced Japan wonderful.

  On the drive into the mountains the parents talked about the children. The two older ones were marvelous; the youngest was a problem. “It’s almost more than we can take,” they admitted. The grandmother assured them that everything would work out.

  Their house enchanted her. “It’s so Japanese!” she exclaimed, looking at the tatami room and the garden, which, though this was February, was filled with plum trees in bloom.

  The grandmother hadn’t seen the children in three years, and was delighted
to find that the little boy was already seven and the little girl five. She then asked to be introduced to the third child, whom she had never seen at all.

  The parents were hesitant to lead her into the monster’s lair. “It’s on the second floor, the first room on the left. You can’t miss it.” They could already hear raucous howls. The grandmother took something out of her travel bag and marched stalwartly into the arena.

  TWO AND A HALF YEARS. Cries, rage, hate. The world was beyond the hands and voice of God. Encircled by bars, it wanted to destroy everything and couldn’t, so it took revenge out on the sheet and blankets, hammering at them with its heels.

  God knew by heart the cracks in the ceiling. They were its only companions, and it was at them that it screamed abuse. The ceiling seemed unaffected, and this infuriated God all the more.

  Suddenly its field of vision was filled with an unfamiliar face. An adult, of the same kind as the mother, from the look of her. After the moment of surprise had passed, God expressed its displeasure with a bloodcurdling yowl.

  The face smiled. God knew what she was trying to do. Pacify it. This would not work. It bared its teeth.

  The face let some words drop from its mouth. God slapped them away.

  God knew that subsequently this adult would extend her hand. Adults always approached its face with their fingers. It prepared to bite.

  And indeed the hand approached, but it was holding something unexpected—something unknown— in its fingers. A white stick. God had not seen such a thing before and forgot about biting.

  “This,” said the grandmother to the child, “is white chocolate from Belgium.”

  The only word that God recognized was “white.” Walls were white, milk was white. The others were obscure—"chocolate” and “Belgium.” Pondering these indecipherable sounds, it realized that the stick was near its mouth.

  "It’s for eating,” said the voice.

  "Eating.” A known word. Something it did often. Eating was the bottle, carrot puree with small bits of meat, crushed banana with chunks of apple.

  Eating involved familiar smells. The odor of this white stick was unrecognizable—but better than soap and applesauce. God was afraid and tempted at the same time. It made a grimace of disgust yet salivated with desire.

  In a leap of faith God took this new thing with its teeth, and was going to bite down hard except doing so turned out not to be necessary, for the strange white substance melted on the tongue, and instantly took command of the mouth.

  Sweetness rose to God’s head and tore at its brain, forcing out a voice it had never before heard:

  It is I! I’m talking! I’m not an “it” I’m a “me”! You can no longer say “it” when you talk about yourself. You have to say “me.” And I am your best friend. I’m the one who gives you pleasure.

  And thus it was that I was born in Japan at the age of two and a half, in February of 1970, in the province of Kansai, in the village of Shukugawa, under the benevolent gaze of my paternal grandmother, and by the grace of her white chocolate.

  The voice has never died since that day, and it still speaks in my head.

  Yum, that’s good. It’s sweet and smooth, and I want more of it.

  I took another bite of the white stick and moaned.

  Pleasure is a wonderful thing, for it has taught me that I am me. Me: where pleasure is. Pleasure is me. Wherever there is pleasure there is me. No pleasure without me. No me without pleasure!

  Mouthful by mouthful, the stick disappeared. The voice inside my head started to shout louder and louder.

  Hooray for me! I am as powerful as the sweetness that I can taste and which I invented. Without me, this chocolate would be nothing. But when you put it in my mouth it becomes pleasure. It needs me.

  This thought was translated in my head by shattering explosions of delight. I opened my enormous eyes and kicked my legs, but this time in glee. Images, sensations, thoughts were impressing themselves on my brain, which retained every detail.

  Piece by piece the chocolate became part of me. I grew dimly aware that at the end of this delectable thing of infinite sweetness was a hand, and that at the end of this hand was a person, and that this person was smiling. The voice inside me spoke again.

  I don’t know who you are, but because you brought me something wonderful to eat you must be kind.

  The two arms attached to the hands lifted me out of my crib and bore me aloft.

  MY PARENTS WERE STUNNED to see my grandmother arrive, still smiling, carrying a docile and contented child in her arms.

  "I’d like to introduce you to my new friend,” she announced with triumph.

  I let myself be passed from arm to arm. My mother and father couldn’t believe my metamorphosis—and were both thrilled and irritated. They asked my grandmother how she had performed this miracle.

  My grandmother didn’t tell them about the white chocolate. She preferred that it remain her secret. The parents wondered whether she had performed some kind of exorcism. None of them could have guessed that I knew exactly what had happened.

  Bees feed honey to larvae to give them an appetite for life. Pureed carrots with small bits of meat wouldn’t have worked. My mother had her theories about sugar, which, she felt, was responsible for most of the world’s ills. Yet this “poison” (as she termed it) had made her third child fit for society.

  I knew myself, and I soon discovered that life was a vale of tears in which one was forced to eat pureed carrots with small bits of meat. It was such a disappointment. Why go to all the trouble of being born if not to experience pleasure? Adults have access to all kinds of wonderful things, but for children the only true pleasure lies in eating. That is the key that opens doors.

  My grandmother had filled my mouth with sugar, and suddenly the feral creature that I was understood that there was some justification to boredom, that the body and the spirit existed to exult in pleasures, and that there was no reason to despise the world nor oneself for joining it. Pleasure used its occasion to name its instrument: it called it “me”—a name I have kept all these years.

  There has always been a large group of imbeciles opposing sensuality to intelligence. They inhabit a vicious circle: they deny themselves any extravagance to exalt their intellect, and the result is they diminish their intellect. They grow more and more dull, which leads them to become more and more convinced they are brilliant. There is no greater purpose for stupidity than to believe itself brilliant.

  Pleasure renders us humble, admiring of the thing that has made pleasure possible. It awakens the spirit and pushes it to both greater heights and greater depths. The magical thing is that the idea of pleasure by itself will suffice. From the very second pleasure exists for us, existence is salvaged. Self-denial condemns itself to celebrating only its own nothingness.

  There are people who boast of having done without some luxury for twenty-five years. There are fools who glory in never having listened to music, or read a book, or seen a movie. There are those who seek praise for their chastity. Such vanity is necessary. It provides them with the only pleasure they get from being alive.

  BY GIVING ME AN IDENTITY, the white chocolate had also provided me, as I’ve said, with a memory. I remember everything after February of 1970. There isn’t any point to remembering that which has no connection to pleasure. Memory is one of luxury’s most indispensable allies.

  A statement of those proportions—"I remember everything after February of 1970"—stands little chance of being believed. I don’t particularly care. It can’t be either proved or disproved, so I’m less and less interested in being believed.

  Of course, I don’t remember all my parents’ worries, or every conversation they had with their friends, or much of that sort. But I have forgotten nothing essential: the greenness of the lake in which I learned to swim, the smell of the garden, the taste of the plum wine I sipped when no one was watching.

  Before the white chocolate, I remember nothing, and am forced to rely on w
hat others tell me, then filter their recollections through my mind. But after the white chocolate, everything I know I remember firsthand—the same hand writing this.

  I BECAME THE KIND OF CHILD that parents dream of. I was alert but judicious, silent but present, funny but thoughtful, high-spirited but attentive, obedient but independent.

  My grandmother and her goodies remained in Japan for only a month, but this was long enough. The very idea of pleasure had set me into motion. My father and mother were greatly relieved. Having had a vegetable for two years and a wild beast for six months, they finally had a child who was more or less normal. They started calling me by my first name.

  What was necessary now was to make up for lost time (though I didn’t think I had lost it). At two and a half a human must walk and talk. I started by walking, which is how things generally happen. There isn’t any magic to it. You stand up, let yourself pitch forward, place your weight on one foot, then on the other.

  There was undeniable value to walking. It afforded a far better view of things than did crawling. Walking inevitably led to running, and running was a wonderful discovery, for it made evasion possible. One could make off with some forbidden object without being seen. Running allowed naughtiness to go unpunished. It was the operative verb for highway robbers and warriors and heroes.

  Talking, on the other hand, posed certain problems of etiquette. Which word should I utter first? I could easily have chosen “ice cream” or “peepee,” or something as beautiful as “tire” or “Scotch,” but none of these seemed quite right.

  Parents are vulnerable creatures; they need to hear the old standbys to make them feel secure. Secrecy was also imperative. I didn’t want to say anything that would give too much away. Therefore, with a solemn and dignified bearing, I said out loud for the first time one of the sounds inside my head.