Authors: Sam Savage

Tags: #Rats, #Fantasy Fiction, #Fiction, #Books and Reading, #Fantasy, #General

Firmin (3 page)

BOOK: Firmin

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I have not been able to get around much in the so-called real world, but I have done a lot of traveling in my head, riding my thoughts this way and that. Once on one of these trips I met a man in a bar who told me a story about when he was a small boy in Berlin, Germany, right at the end of the war. That would be the Second World War. The whole city had just been bombed to smithereens, so it looked a lot like Scollay Square is going to look a little later in this story, and it was winter and cold and there was nothing to eat. His house, what was left of it, was very dark and cold, so this little boy spent most of his time sitting on the sidewalk in the shelter of a sunlit wall where it was a little warmer. He sat there for hours every day and dreamed about food. The street in front of his house had a big hole in it where a bomb had fallen. People had partially filled it in, but it was still a hole, and one day a truck loaded with coal came rolling down the street. The driver didn’t see the crater in time and the truck hit it,
kerbang
. There was a tremendous jolt and a lot of coal fell off the truck. But the truck did not stop. It went on around the turn, and for a moment there was just this empty sunlit street littered with coal. One small piece had rolled over right next to the little boy’s foot. And then all of a sudden, as if on cue, doors flew open up and down the street, and men and women, mostly women, came rushing out. The little boy looked on in amazement as they started snatching up the pieces of coal, gathering them in their aprons and baskets and even fighting over them. He put his foot on top of the little piece that lay on the ground beside him, and later, when the people had all gone back inside, he slipped it into his pocket. From the behavior of the women he could tell it was something very valuable, though he had no idea what it was. Then he went around the corner and took it out of his pocket and tried to eat it.

And in Africa during famines the starving children eat dirt. If you are hungry enough, you will eat anything. Just the act of chewing and swallowing something, even if it does not nourish the body, nourishes your dreams. And dreams of food are just like other dreams - you can live on them till you die.

In the basement of the bookshop where we lived there was not any coal and there was not any real dirt. There was plenty of dust, but you can’t eat dust. It sticks to the roof of your mouth and is impossible to swallow. Paper, on the other hand, I discovered early on, has a wonderful consistency and in some cases an agreeable taste. You can masticate a hunk of it for hours if you want, like gum. Shoved off to the side by my muscular siblings, biding my time while trying to fill the gnawing hollow in my gut with vast imaginary repasts, I started chewing on the confetti at my feet.

Despite the fact that I was barely out of my infancy, I think it fair to call this moment the beginning of the end for me. Like many things that start as small, illicit pleasures, paper chewing soon became a habit, with its own imperative, and then an addiction, a mortal hunger whose satisfaction was so delightful that I would often hesitate to pounce on the first free tit. I would instead stand there chewing until the wad in my mouth had softened to a delectable paste that I could mash against the roof of my mouth or mold into interesting shapes with my tongue and safely swallow. Unfortunately, the chewed paper left a sticky coating on my mouth and tongue that lasted for hours and caused me to smack my lips in a truly unpleasant manner.

I started slowly, with a nibble here and there, but in next to no time I was on a roll, and in just a few days I had managed to tuck away so much of the communal bed that patches of bare concrete were showing through. This caused no end of bad feelings between me and the others and even earned me a few sharp drubbings, but I did not let that stop me. I can be very determined when I put my mind to it.

In the end, to stop the bickering, Mama had to go out and drag back a few more pages of the Great Book. We were getting pretty big now, so we all joined in the shredding party. Squeaking with delight, we ripped and tore with a vengeance. There is nothing like destruction for creating a warm sense of camaraderie, and for a few minutes there in the rough-and-tumble of it all we actually felt like a big happy family. When people ask me to recount something from my childhood, I always trot that one out, just to show that we were normal.

Needless to say, the arrival of all this fresh paper that no one had ever shat or pissed on did nothing to tame my appetite, and I must have put away whole chapters by the time I was old enough to toddle on wobbly fours out of our dark corner and into the flickering bigness. I am convinced that these masticated pages furnished the nutritional foundation for - and perhaps even directly caused - what I with modesty shall call my unusual mental development. Imagine: the history of the world in four parts, fragments of philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, astronomy, astrology, hundreds of rivers, popular songs, the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Book of the Dead, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, hundreds of insects, street signs, advertisements, Kant, Hegel, Swedenborg, comic strips, nursery rhymes, London and Thessalonica, Sodom and Gomorrah, the history of literature, the history of Ireland, accusations of unspeakable crimes, confessions, denials, thousands of puns, dozens of languages, recipes, dirty jokes, illnesses, childbirths, executions - all this and more I took into my body. Took it in, I admit, before I was ready. I have a vivid, even visceral, recollection of my young self curled up in a dark corner on a bed of shredded paper (my future meals), clutching a grotesquely distended abdomen and groaning with pain. Oh, such pain! - the long crescendoing cramps burrowing and twisting as they gnawed their way through my shuddering bowels. I still find it amazing that this repeated agony did not put me off paper chewing forever. But of course it did not. I had only to wait for the pain to pass before beginning anew, and sometimes I could not wait even that long.

Do I hear snickering? I suppose you see this as merely a rather vulgar case of addiction or perhaps as the pitiable symptoms of a classic obsessive-compulsive disorder, and no doubt you are correct. Yet the concept of addiction is not rich enough,
deep
enough, to describe this hunger. I would rather call it
love
. Inchoate perhaps, perverted even, unrequited surely, but love all same. Here was the crude glutinous beginning of the passion that has dominated my life, some would say ruined it, and I would not necessarily disagree. Had I been more astute I might have been able to see the dreadful abdominal pain that followed the exercise of this passion in its infantile form as a warning, an augury of the interminable sufferings that seem always to accompany love.

Eaten daily - or in my case almost constantly, if one includes the subsequent smacking at the sticky after-coating - even the most delectable dish eventually cloys. I am ashamed to say it, but as time went on the Great Book slid ineluctably down the scale of charms toward insipidity, grew increasingly tasteless, boring, scarcely more than cardboard really. I needed a change of diet. And besides, I had grown weary of drubbings.

So one day I decided to give my family a break and carry my chewings out into the stacks. It was Sunday morning the first time I ventured out. The shop above was closed, and there was almost no traffic in the Square to add its distant harmony to the blended snores of my stupefied family. Slipping down the passageway that led from our homey corner and out into the flickering big room, nose to the floor, the first thing I came across, sprawled open on the cement, was the Great Book itself, or what was left of it. I recognized it instantly by its smell. Inhaled in this concentrated, multifoliate form, hundreds of pages packed densely together, it made me a little queasy.
The Impact of Genius
. I looked up at the remaining books in the low shelf from which Mama had dragged this one and found that I could make out the titles quite easily. Obviously even at that early age I was already suffering from the catastrophic gift of lexical hypertrophy, which has since done so much to mar the smooth course of what might otherwise have been a perfectly ordinary life. Above this group of shelves was a handwritten paper sign bearing the word FICTION and a crude blue arrow pointing straight downward. As I explored the room further in the days and weeks that followed I came across other signs saying HISTORY, RELIGION, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE, BARGAINS, and RESTROOM.

I regard this period as the decisive beginning of my education, even though the craving that was driving me out from my cozy corner and into the big world was not yet a hunger for knowledge. I began with the closest shelves, the ones under FICTION, licking, nibbling, savoring, and finally eating, sometimes around the edges, but usually, whenever I could pry the covers open, straight through the middle like a drill. My favorites were the Modern Library editions, and I always chose one of those when I could, perhaps because of their logo - a runner with a torch. At times I have thought of myself as a Runner with a Torch. And oh, what books I discovered during those first intoxicating days! Even today the mere recitation of the titles brings tears to my eyes. Recite them, then, say them slowly aloud and let them break your heart.
Oliver Twist. Huckleberry Finn. The Great Gatsby. Dead Souls. Middlemarch. Alice in Wonderland. Fathers and Sons. The Grapes of Wrath. The Way of All Flesh. An American Tragedy. Peter Pan. The Red and the Black. Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

My devourings at first were crude, orgiastic, unfocused, piggy - a mouthful of Faulkner was a mouthful of Flaubert as far as I was concerned - though I soon began to notice subtle differences. I noticed first that each book had a different flavor - sweet, bitter, sour, bittersweet, rancid, salty, tart. I also noticed that each flavor - and, as time passed and my senses grew more acute, the flavor of each page, each sentence, and finally each word - brought with it an array of images, representations in the mind of things I knew nothing about from my very limited experiences in the so-called real world: skyscrapers, harbors, horses, cannibals, a flowering tree, an unmade bed, a drowned woman, a flying boy, a severed head, field hands looking up at the sound of an idiot howling, a train whistle, a river, a raft, sun slanting through a forest of birches, a hand caressing a naked thigh, a jungle hut, a dying monk.

At first I just ate, happily gnawing and chewing, guided by the dictates of taste. But soon I began to read here and there around the edges of my meals. And as time passed I read more and chewed less until finally I was spending almost all my waking hours reading and chewed only on the margins. And oh, how I then regretted those dreadful holes! In some cases, where there were no other copies, I have had to wait years to fill the gaps. I am not proud of this.

Now, buffeted and stunned by life, I look back at my childhood in the hope of finding there some confirmation of my worth, some sign that I was destined at least for a time to be something other than a dilettante and a buffoon, that I was defeated by inexorable circumstance and not by a flaw within. Let them say, ‘Hard luck, Firmin,’ and not, ‘We could have told you so.’ I scrunch up my eyes and point my telescope, but, alas, it picks out no divine afflatus, magnifies not even a few sparks of genius, discovers nothing but an eating disorder. Instead of telescopes, the doctors will haul out their stethoscopes, their electroencephalograms, their polygraphs, all in support of the crushing diagnosis: a routine case of biblio-bulimia. And the worst of it is,
they will be right
. And in the face of this essential rightness, the demeaning obviousness of their crushing judgment -
crushing
is a word I like using - I want to cry out at myself like old Ezra Pound locked in his rat’s cage in Pisa, ‘Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.’ Pound was a Big One.

But enough of this. The small creature I was back then had as yet no inkling of such agonies. Back then, perched on the lowest rung of the ladder of life, I was still the Sabbath child, bonny and blithe, and those were happy days in the bookshop. Or, I should say, happy nights and Sundays, since I did not dare venture out into that flickering vastness during the hours when people were in the store. From our dim basement covert we could hear the murmur of voices and the creak of footsteps on the ceiling. Hear them and tremble. Sometimes the footsteps would leave the ceiling and come down the wooden stairs into the basement. Usually this descent was followed by a period of silence, but sometimes it would be followed by gruntings and growlings, even inexplicable explosions, and these frightened us terribly. After that would come the noise of rushing water, and then footsteps on the stairs again. The footsteps going up were never as loud as the ones coming down.

Chapter 3