Human Traces Read online

  He hitched up his scarf and closed his eyes as the power of the feeling ran down his spine. When the woman reached her destination and climbed out into the snow, Henri did no more than wish her goodnight. She was not, in herself, the point; she was the sign, she was the doorway through which he would enter a grander life. He sold his medical instruments and took himself off to a seminary, having no doubt that the call had come from the God of his childhood. His father, at first appalled by his perversity, was gradually convinced of the sincerity of his feelings and was persuaded to continue a financial allowance which became, on his death, an inheritance that allowed Abbé Henri to indulge the occasional hobby, such as Jacques Rebière.

  The boy sat at his dinner table, his big eyes locked on the Curé’s, as he ate another slice of the smoky ham.

  ‘I want you to understand,’ said the Curé, ‘that the experiments I have given you are of the most elementary kind. You do know that, don’t you? These are the first steps that a child is taught to take in this subject.’

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ said Jacques, a little reluctantly, it seemed. ‘But you must admit, they are exciting. And the principles are quite new, aren’t they? And are not some of the greatest truths in the universe quite simple? The laws that describe the movements of the planets, for instance?’

  ‘They may be capable of being expressed in simple formulae, I suppose. But for how many millions of years did men gaze at the stars before they began to understand what they were? And how many false systems did they invent along the way?’

  ‘Like the ancient world with its many gods,’ said Jacques.

  ‘Precisely. Before Christ was born and the truth was shown to us.’

  There was a moment of silence in the Curé’s parlour; then they heard the wind start up again outside. The candles on the oak table flickered as a draught was driven through the closed wooden shutters.

  Abbé Henri narrowed his eyes. Jacques was a regular attender at mass, but he noticed how in their discussions he went quiet when the subject of God came up, regaining his animation only when the natural world became once more the subject of the conversation. The Curé was reluctant to let him off too lightly: piety was a small price for the boy to pay for his free schooling.

  He doubted whether Jacques could ever make a student, still less a scientist or doctor. Not only did he come from the peasantry, with no signs of intelligence in his family, but the disadvantages of his poor education were too great to overcome. And when Jacques did, through whatever untutored mechanism of mind, understand a scientific principle, he did not soberly examine it, but at once used it as a base from which to vault higher, to make further, unjustified connections. Abbé Henri thought his temperament would hold him back more surely than his intellect; but sometimes the boy really did seem to have insight; and in any case his passion, though unscientific, made him a congenial companion.

  ‘Would you like some wine? There. Pass me your glass. I’ll just give you a little. You look puzzled, Jacques.’

  ‘I was thinking of my frog. Do you think if I had touched a different part of him that he might have moved differently?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the Curé, who had had enough of frogs. ‘However, I read in a newspaper the other day that a clever young German called – if I remember rightly – Wernicke had found the part of the human brain that manages the faculty of speech. It seems curious that small regions of the brain should be held responsible for particular functions of the mind.’

  The Curé laughed, and Jacques looked at him quizzically.

  ‘A gentleman named Broca has already had the honour of having a part named after him for much the same purpose!’ said the Curé.

  ‘Have you seen a human brain?’ said Jacques.

  ‘Yes,’ said Abbé Henri. ‘As students we were required to study all aspects of anatomy. Corpses were regularly sent from the poorhouse.’

  Jacques put down his knife and fork at last, his hunger for food satisfied. His eyes burned, unblinking. ‘Were you frightened?’ he said, his stammer causing him to reiterate the beginning of the word.

  ‘Frightened? My dear boy. What of?’

  ‘Didn’t it feel as though you had this person’s life in your hands? Their thoughts?’

  ‘The corpse had no thoughts. It was dead. In any event, God teaches us that the body is distinct from the soul. The spirit had departed, only the flesh was left. “Non cogito, ergo non sum,” as Descartes might have said. Do you know about Descartes?’

  Jacques nodded eagerly. ‘You told me before. He insisted on the dual nature of mind and body. He believed the soul was lodged in a gland at the base of the brain. The . . . I forget its name.’

  ‘Pineal gland.’

  ‘He was wrong about that, was he not?’

  ‘It was not a bad speculation. He had at least observed that it was the only part of the brain without a duplicate on the other side. It was fair to assume its singularity and its central position gave it some special function. All scientists and philosophers are men of their age. Descartes was also a very imperfect Christian. But he was lucid, and he was probably right in the essentials.’

  ‘But suppose he wasn’t,’ said Jacques. ‘Suppose there is no difference between flesh and spirit.’

  ‘You know that can’t be true,’ said the Curé gently.

  ‘Father, there’s something I want to do. When I am grown up and when I know more.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘I want to bring my brother back.’

  ‘Back from where?’

  ‘From wherever he is . . . travelling. You have never met Olivier, have you?’

  ‘No.’ The Curé shook his head. He looked at Jacques’s imploring face.

  ‘People say terrible things about him. They call him a lunatic. But I know him. I remember him from when he was young. I remember our talks together. He used to laugh. He used to be reasonable. He did well in his lessons at school and he worked at the hôtel de ville. He was my friend. And he remembers.’

  ‘What does he remember?’

  ‘He remembers . . . Things from the time before I was born.’ Abbé Henri saw Jacques look down to the table where he was rubbing his hands together coarsely, as though to scour them. ‘Things I would g-give my life to find again.’

  ‘These illnesses are desperate things,’ said the Curé. ‘I know. I have visited the asylums. Perhaps your Olivier is better off at home.’

  ‘That’s what we thought. He was in the asylum for a time, butwe brought him home. Aman from the Department comes to see him every few months.’

  ‘Perhaps he is better like that.’

  ‘With the horse? He lives with the horse! My father won’t let him in the house so he lies down in his own excrement while the chickens shit on him from the rafters. Forgive me, Father.’

  Abbé Henri raised his hand. ‘If you had seen what I have seen in the asylums you might not think it so bad.’ He shook his head. ‘These are places where you feel the absence of God.’

  ‘We must not despair, Father.’

  The Curé smiled at the way the boy had assumed the priestly role. ‘I do not despair, Jacques. But the only way I can keep from that sin is by never visiting one of those places again.’

  ‘Surely there are doctors,’ said Jacques.

  ‘There are doctors, alienists, in charge of the attendants, but they are powerless. And do you know what the strangest thing is?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You would think these places could only exist after death – in hell, or in another world. Yet when you leave them, you rejoin the ordinary life of the town with its streets. It doesn’t seem right that you walk from one to the other. It doesn’t feel like a short journey you make with your feet. It feels as though you’ve passed into a different existence.’

  The next morning, Jacques woke early in his silent house. He retrieved his shirt and trousers from the floor, where he had left them the night before when he hurriedly blew out the candle on h
earing his father’s footsteps on the stairs.

  His boots were harder to find among the debris. On the bed that used to be Olivier’s were two boards on which he had pinned a collection of moths and butterflies; along the windowsill were some glass jars in which he had pickled the viscera of animals he had trapped: a rabbit’s heart, the lungs of a hare. The table was covered with pieces of copper wire, screws, clamps, two rusty sawblades and pieces of paper on which he had done anatomical drawings of mice and frogs in his careful hand (neat enough, but lacking, in his eyes, the flair of Olivier’s lovely astral diagrams).

  Jacques found his missing boot behind some books the Curé had lent him and which, for want of a shelf, he had piled on the floor. He took a leather waistcoat from a peg and tied a scarf round his neck, then pushed open the shutters on to the grey morning. His window looked over the orchard at the back of the house, beyond which he could see the soft rise of the field that led to his father’s wood. There was fencing to be done today, a task he would have enjoyed more had he been allowed a companion to hold the post as he hammered it into the ground. There was a light rain over the dense, distant trees, and a glance at the sky told him it was unlikely either to remit or grow worse. He went downstairs softly, carrying the boots, but in the parlour he found Tante Mathilde already at the table with a bowl of tea and some bread. He took two slices and put them in the pocket of a woollen jacket; from an outside store he took an apple and as many walnuts as he could find room for.

  Then he was in the cold, damp silence of the morning, with the misty rain on his cheeks, and he felt less alone. He walked to the point on the perimeter where he had left his fencing and set to work with his hands, though his mind was elsewhere. Abbé Henri said, ‘We’ll make a scientist of you yet’, but Jacques felt too diffident to inquire whether he was being playful or whether he had in mind some actual scheme.

  The smell from the wood was strong in his nostrils as he worked – the rain-washed earth, wet bark, and the suggestion on the slight breeze of something hot-blooded, feral, at its business. The earth fell from his clogged fingernails as he packed it in round the base of a fence post. Some days, at evening, he saw a badger on the other side of the wood, a big, self-conscious beast that rolled off to its sett like a round-bellied alderman after a council dinner.

  In the middle of the day, he allowed himself time off from his father’s business to go and inspect his traps. He found a weasel with dried blood round its gums; he poked it with a small stick, unwilling to put his fingers near the sharp teeth until he was sure it was dead. His stomach was rumbling. It seemed to be a condition of his life that he was hungry, all day, and that no amount of food that he could lay his hands on ever satisfied him. In the afternoon, it began to rain more persistently and he had a long walk to the house of a tenant whose barn roof needed mending. At least he was offered some preserved pork – skin and pieces of foot in a clear jelly – for his services. By the time he finished, the light was starting to go and he felt tired by his work. The rain had soaked through his clothes to the skin of his chest and shoulders, but he was so used to it that he felt no discomfort.

  In fact, he found a sort of contentment, he thought, or why else would his step be quickening as he saw the narrow line of smoke rise from the chimney of his father’s house in the distance? The light was receding into the frayed, indistinct clouds over Sainte Agnès, draining down into the dunes and low hills beyond the village, reducing the world rapidly to the sound of his feet on wet paths and the consciousness of his body’s movement.

  This is the kind of choice I have, thought Jacques, touching the bark of a dripping tree with his hand as he passed. To look down to my feet, to sense my heart’s murmur, my muscles’ damp ache or raise my eyes and see the shape of the almost invisible village and to know where it lies in the world.

  The difference between Tante Mathilde and Abbé Henri is great – like that between a woodlouse that lives beneath its log and a fox that goes over hills and fields, with eyes to see and to compare.

  But suppose that there is more to it than that. Just as Abbé Henri, with his God and his Descartes and his medical training, is the fox to poor Tante Mathilde’s woodlouse, could there not be someone who is a man to the Curé’s fox?

  And how would one become such a man? Must we wait to develop as a species, just as we have all moved on from the achievements of our naked forebears, or could it be done now, by force of will and intellect alone? Do we already possess all we need to stop feeling the world as the sound of footsteps and the ache of our backs and to look up – to the woods and the hills and the oceans that stretch out in their immensity, just waiting to be seen?

  In bed that night, Jacques pulled the blankets up round his shoulders. There was no fat on his body, where the first muscles of manhood were packed firm and taken carelessly for granted. As he lay, he knew what Olivier meant by the feeling that came into the body at this age, the sensation of permanent excitement, as though he was continually crouched at the starting line, waiting for a race to begin. He gripped the blanket in both hands and vowed never to give in to compromise and fatigue. However rocky the path, he would not look down at his feet and allow his life to contract within that view: he would keep his gaze fixed on the widest horizon. The words of the psalm they had sung in church came back to him: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills . . .’ That line would be his reminder, his coat of arms.

  He relaxed his grip on the blanket and allowed himself a silent smile. He was a practical youth who made tables and had taught himself to dissect rats; as such, he knew that there was a much more immediate problem to be solved: he must find a way to study and a means of support.

  His smile broadened in the darkness. I am too young, he thought. I am, perhaps, absurd. Now I shall sleep, and think about the fence, the roof, my mother and the chance of goose rillettes from the market.

  But then he thought again. Dear God, make me great. Make me good. Amen.

  The following evening, when Jacques returned from the woods, he heard the unusual sound of voices coming from his father’s house. They reached him as he opened the gate into the orchard and there was something in them that made him hurry. He ran round to the front of the house and let himself into the parlour.

  Grand-mère stood with her back to the scullery door, rigid, with her arms at her sides; Tante Mathilde was screaming, red-faced and tearful in the middle of the room, and at the foot of the stairs was the encrusted, tangled figure of Olivier. He held in his right hand one of the sawblades from Jacques’s table, with which he appeared to have gouged a hole in his left forearm. Blood ran in narrow streams down over his open palm and onto the floor.

  Tante Mathilde screamed incoherent abuse. ‘You madman. You wretched lunatic! What have you done to your father’s house? Kill yourself for all I care. Go on. Take the blade and cut your throat. Why don’t you? You wicked, wicked man!’

  Olivier took two paces towards her, still sawing at his arm.

  ‘Don’t bring that thing near me! Did you see that, Grand-mère? He’s trying to attack me. He wants to kill me! Jacques, do something. Get the blade off him.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Jacques. ‘He doesn’t want to hurt anyone, do you, Olivier?’ He did not want to touch his brother, but tried to catch his eye. Olivier’s gaze was turned wholly inward; Jacques had never seen him so far away.

  ‘What happened?’ said Jacques.

  Grand-mère at last gave voice. It was thin, but firm, with a strong local accent. ‘I heard a noise from my room. Upstairs. I went to look and found . . .’ She seemed to struggle for a name, ‘. . . Him . . . Olivier. He was in your room. He’d smashed everything. All the jars and everything. He’d written words on the walls. It was a mess. I told him to go back to his stable. Then he came down here and started shouting at Mathilde.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mathilde. ‘He wants to kill me, I know it. He’s always hated me. We should send him away somewhere. Get rid of him. But your father
’s too kind-hearted.’

  Jacques cautiously put his hand on Olivier’s arm. ‘What is it, Olivier? What’s the matter? You can tell me. No one’s going to hurt you. Tell me. Like old times. Like the old days when we used to talk.’

  Olivier turned to face Jacques. His tongue emerged from the hair that covered his mouth; it moved along a line where the lips must be. He swallowed and said, ‘I had to kill the spiders that were in me. They were laying eggs in my arm, under the skin. I was told to kill them.’

  ‘Where are they now, Olivier?’

  ‘I killed them, I killed them.’

  ‘I’m going to get the gendarme,’ said Tante Mathilde.

  ‘No,’ said Jacques. ‘There is no gendarme in Sainte Agnès. Anyway, Olivier is all right. You’ll be all right, won’t you, Olivier? Shall we go to the stable? And I’ll bring you something to eat. Would you like a glass of water?’

  ‘Put him in with the pig,’ said Tante Mathilde. ‘Until your father gets home. Look at him. He doesn’t know his own name.’

  ‘Olivier?’ said Jacques.

  ‘You see. He didn’t answer. And who’s this?’ She poked Jacques in the ribs. ‘Go on. Tell me. Who’s this? See! He doesn’t know his own brother.’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ said Jacques. ‘I can manage him.’ He took a pace towards Olivier, who thrust the blade out towards Jacques’s chest.

  ‘These are my instructions,’ Olivier said.

  Grand-mère edged back towards the scullery, then turned and scuttled out. They heard the door of her room slam shut and a bolt being drawn.

  ‘I’m going to get help,’ said Tante Mathilde. ‘I’m going to get him taken away from here. I’m going—’

  ‘I have an idea,’ said Jacques. ‘Why don’t we go and get the Curé? He’ll know what to do. He’s a man of God and he was a doctor before that. He knows what—’