Alvin Journeyman: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume IV (48 page)

“How would you know, when you
aren’t
here all the time? By night I pass back and forth between the grand salons of the cream of society and the finest brothels ever created by the scum of the earth. And in the mornings, when you’re taking emperor lessons from M. Bonaparte, I hole up in my miserable poet’s garret—where my mother’s housekeeper brings me fresh bread every day, so don’t weep for me yet, not until I get syphilis or tuberculosis—and I write furiously, filling page after page with scintillating prose. I tried my hand at poetry once, a long play, but I discovered that by imitating Racine, one learns primarily to become as tedious as Racine, and by studying
Molière, one learns that Molière was a lofty genius not to be trifled with by pathetic young imitators.”

“I haven’t read either of them,” said Calvin. In truth he had never heard of either one and only deduced that they were dramatists from the context.

“Nor have you read my work, because in fact it is not yet genius, it is merely journeyman work. In fact I fear sometimes that I have the ambition of a genius, the eye and ear of a genius, and the talent of a chimneysweep. I go down into the filthy world, I come up black, I scatter the ashes and cinders of my research onto white papers, but what have I got? Paper with black marks all over it.” Suddenly he gripped Calvin’s shirtfront and pulled him down until they were eye to eye. “I would cut off my leg to have a talent like yours. To be able to see
inside
the body and heal or harm, give pain or relieve it. I would cut off both legs.” Then he let go of Calvin’s shirt. “Of course, I wouldn’t give up my more fragile parts, for that would be too great a disappointment to my dear Lady de Berny. You will be discreet, of course, and when you gossip about my affair with her you will never admit you heard about it from me.”

“Are you really jealous of me?” asked Calvin.

“Only when I am in my right mind,” said Honoré, “which is rare enough that you don’t yet interfere with my happiness. You are not yet one of the major irritations of my life. My mother, now—I spent my early childhood pining for some show of love from her, some gentle touch of affection, and instead was always greeted with coldness and reproof. Nothing I did pleased her. I thought, for many years, that it was because I was a bad son. Then, suddenly, I realized that it was because she was a bad mother! It wasn’t me she hated, it was my father. So one year when I was away at school, she took a lover—and she chose well, he is a very fine man whom I respect greatly—and got herself impregnated and gave birth to a monster.”

“Deformed?” asked Calvin, curious.

“Only morally. Otherwise he is quite attractive, and my
mother dotes on him. Every time I see her fawning on him, praising him, laughing at his clever little antics, I long to do as Joseph’s brothers did and put him in a pit, only
I
would never be softhearted enough to pull him out and sell him into mere slavery. He will also probably be tall and she will see to it he has full access to her fortune, unlike myself, who am forced to live on the pittance my father can give me, the advances I can extort from my publishers, and the generous impulses of the women for whom I am the god of love. After careful contemplation, I have come to the conclusion that Cain, like Prometheus, was one of the great benefactors of humankind, for which of course he must be endlessly tortured by God, or at least given a very ugly pimple in his forehead. For it was Gain who taught us that some brothers simply cannot be endured, and the only solution is to kill them or have them killed. Being a man of lazy disposition, I lean toward the latter course. Also one cannot wear fine clothes in prison, and after one is guillotined for murder, one’s collars never stay on properly; they’re always sliding off to one side or the other. So I’ll either hire it done or see to it he gets employed in some miserable clerical post in a faroff colony. I have in mind Reunion in the Indian Ocean; my only objection is that its dot on the globe is large enough that Henry may not be able to see the entire circumference of his island home at once. I want him to feel himself in prison every waking moment. I suppose that is uncharitable of me.”

Uncharitable? Calvin laughed in delight, and regaled Honoré in turn with tales of his own horrible brother. “Well, then,” said Honoré, “you must destroy him, of course. What are you doing here in Paris, with a great project like that in hand!”

“I’m learning from Napoleon how to rule over men. So that when my brother builds his Crystal City, I can take it away from him.”

“Take it away! Such shallow aims,” said Honoré. “What good is taking it away?”

“Because he built it,” said Calvin, “or he
will
build it, and then he’ll have to see me rule over all that he built.”

“You think this because you are a nasty person by nature, Calvin, and you don’t understand nice people. To you, the end of existence is to control things, and so you will never build anything, but rather will try to take control of what is already in existence. Your brother, though, is by nature a Maker, as you explain it; therefore he cares nothing about who rules, but only about what exists. So if you take away the rule of the Crystal City—when he builds it—you have accomplished nothing, for he will still rejoice that the thing exists at all, regardless of who rules it. No, there is nothing else for you to do but let the city rise to its peak—and then tear it down into such a useless heap of rubble that it can never rise again.”

Calvin was troubled. He had never thought this way, and it didn’t feel good to him. “Honoré, you’re joking, I’m sure.
You
make things—your novels, at least.”

“And if you hated me, you wouldn’t just take away my royalties—my creditors do that already, thank you very much. No, you would take my very books, steal the copyright, and then revise them and revise them until nothing of truth or beauty or, more to the point, my genius remained in them, and then you would continue to publish them under my name, causing me to be shamed with every copy sold. People would read and say, ‘Honoré de Balzac, such a fool!’ That is how you would destroy me.”

“I’m not a character in one of your novels.”

“More’s the pity. You would speak more interesting dialogue if you were.”

“So you think I’m wasting my time here?”

“I think you’re
about
to waste your time. Napoleon is no fool. He’s never going to give you tools powerful enough to challenge his own. So leave!”

“How can I leave, when he depends on me to keep his gout from hurting? I’d never make it to the border.”

“Then heal the gout the way you used to heal those poor
beggars—that was a cruel thing for you to do, by the way, a miserable selfish thing, for how did you think they were going to feed their children without some suppurating wound to excite pity in passersby and eke out a few sous from them? Those of us who were aware of your one-man messianic mission had to go about after you, cutting off the legs of your victims so they’d be able to continue to earn their livelihood.”

Calvin was appalled. “How could you do such a thing!”

Honoré roared with laughter. “I’m joking, you poor literal-minded American simpleton!”

“I can’t heal the gout,” said Calvin, coming back to the subject that interested him: his own future.

“Why not?”

“I’ve been trying to figure out how diseases are caused. Injuries are easy. Infections are, too. If you concentrate, anyway. Diseases have taken me weeks. They seem to be caused by tiny creatures, so small I can’t see them individually, only
en masse.
Those I can destroy easily enough, and cure the disease, or at least knock it back a little and give the body a chance to defeat it on its own. But not all diseases are caused by those tiny beasts. Gout baffles me completely. I have no idea what causes it, and therefore I can’t cure it.”

Honoré shook his oversized head. “Calvin, you have such native talents, but they have been bestowed unworthily upon you. When I say you must heal Napoleon, of course I don’t care whether you actually cure the gout. It isn’t the gout that bothers him. It’s the
pain
of the gout. And you already cure that every day! So cure it once and for all, thank Napoleon kindly for his lessons, and get out of France as quickly as possible! Have done with it! Get back about your life’s work! I’ll tell you what—I’ll even pay your passage to America. No, I’ll do more. I’ll come with you to America, and add the study of that astonishingly crude and vigorous people to my vast store of knowledge about humankind. With your talent and my genius, what is there we couldn’t accomplish?”

“Nothing,” said Calvin happily.

He was especially happy because not five minutes before, Calvin had decided that he wanted Honoré to accompany him to America, and so by the tiniest of gestures, by certain looks and signs that Honoré was never aware of, he caused the young novelist to like him, to be excited by the work that Calvin had to do, and to want so much to be a part of it that he would come home to America with him. Best of all, Calvin had brought it off so skillfully that Honoré obviously had no idea that he had been manipulated into it.

In the meantime, Honoré’s idea of curing Napoleon’s pain once and for all appealed to him. That place in the brain where pain resided still waited for him. Only instead of stimulating it, all he had to do was cauterize it. It would not only cure Napoleon’s gout, but would also cure all other pains he might feel in the future.

So, having thought of it, having decided to do it, that night Calvin acted. And in the morning, when he presented himself to the Emperor, he saw at once that the Emperor knew what he had done.

“I cut myself this morning, sharpening a pen,” said Napoleon. “I only knew it when I saw the blood. I felt no pain at all.”

“Excellent,” said Calvin. “I finally found the way to end your pain from gout once and for all. It involved cutting off
all
pain for the rest of your life, but it’s hard to imagine you’d mind.”

Napoleon looked away. “It was hard for Midas to imagine that he would not want
everything
he touched to turn to gold. I might have bled to death because I felt no pain.”

“Are you rebuking me?” said Calvin. “I give you a gift that millions of people pray for—to live a life without pain—and you’re rebuking me? You’re the Emperor—assign a servant to watch you day and night in order to make sure you don’t unwittingly bleed to death.”

“This is permanent?” asked Napoleon.

“I can’t cure the gout—the disease is too subtle for me. I never pretended to be perfect. But the pain I could cure, and
so I did. I cured it now and forever. If I did wrong, I’ll restore the pain to you as best I can. It won’t be a pleasant operation, but I think I can get the balance back to about what it was before. Intermittent, wasn’t it? A month of gout, and then a week without it, and then another month?”

“You’ve grown saucy.”

“No sir, I merely speak French better, so my native sauciness can emerge more clearly.”

“What’s to stop me from throwing you out, then? Or having you killed, now that I don’t need you anymore?”

“Nothing has ever stopped you from doing those things,” said Calvin. “But you don’t needlessly kill people, and as for throwing me out—well, why go to the trouble? I’m ready to leave. I’m homesick for America. My family is there.”

Napoleon nodded. “I see. You decided to leave, and then finally cured my pain.”

“My beloved Emperor, you wrong me,” said Calvin. “I found I could cure you, and then decided to leave.”

“I still have much to teach you.”

“And I have much to learn. But I fear I’m not clever enough to learn from you—the last several weeks you have taught me and taught me, and yet I keep feeling as if I have learned nothing new. I’m simply not a clever enough pupil to master your lessons. Why should I stay?”

Napoleon smiled. “Well done. Very well done. If I weren’t Napoleon, you would have won me over completely. In fact, I would probably be paying your passage to America.”

“I was hoping you would, anyway, in gratitude for a painfree life.”

“Emperors can’t afford to have petty emotions like gratitude. If I pay your passage it’s not because I’m grateful to you, it’s because I think my purpose will be better served with you gone and alive than with you, say, here and alive or, perhaps, here and dead, or the most difficult possibility, gone and dead.” Napoleon smiled.

Calvin smiled back. They understood each other, the Emperor
and the young Maker. They had used each other and now were done with each other and would cast each other aside—but with style.

“I’ll take the train to the coast this very day, begging your consent, sir.”

“My consent! You have more than my consent! My servants have already packed your bags and they are doubtless at the station as we speak.” Napoleon grinned, touched his forelock in an imaginary salute, and then watched as Calvin rushed from the room.

Calvin the American Maker and Honoré Balzac the annoyingly ambitious young writer, both gone from the country in the same day. And the pain of the gout now gone from him.

I’ll have to be careful getting into the bath. I might scald myself to death without knowing it. I’ll have to get someone else to climb into the water before me. I think I know just the young servant girl who should do it. I’ll have to have her scrubbed first, so she doesn’t foul the water for me. It will be interesting to see how much of the pleasure of the bath came from the slight pain of hot water. And was pain a part of sexual pleasure? It would be infuriating if the boy had interfered with
that.
Napoleon would have to have him hunted down and killed, if the boy had ruined that sport for him.

It didn’t take long for the ballots to be counted in Hatrack River—by nine
P.M.
Friday, the elections clerk announced a decisive victory countywide for Tippy-Canoe, old Red Hand Harrison. Some had been drinking all through the election day; now the likker began to flow in earnest. Being a county seat, Hatrack drew plenty of farmers from the hinterland and smaller villages, for whom Hatrack was the nearest metropolis, having near a thousand people now; it was swollen to twice that number by ten in the evening. As word came in from each of the neighboring counties and from some across river that Tippy-Canoe was winning there, too, guns were shot off and so were
mouths, which led to fisticuffs and a lot of traffic into and out of the jail.