Wonder (20 page)

The way into the ruins was via a shaft similar to the one at the mouth of a mine but that, instead of leading to veins of precious metals or deposits of rare minerals, gave access to a vanished time from which one brought back up intact – nearly alive still – remains twenty centuries old, as fishermen bring their nets to the surface in the morning full of shining fish.

The men worked day and night in galleries where air and light were equally rare. The city once buried by fire was now ruled by cold that made the workers’ and peasants’ teeth chatter, accustomed as they were to the sun of Naples. After several hours their eyes would grow used to the dark that was pierced here and there by lamps, but they went on coughing long after returning to the surface. Blowing their noses on their shirtsleeves, they saw there fine, black soot that might have just emerged from the mouth of the volcano.

—

Nearly every possible object of daily life, from plates to jewels to bakers’ implements to those of the ladies of the night, had been exhumed from the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum. All that was missing, cruelly, were the men, the women, the children who had lived within those walls, the merchants and priestesses, thieves and fishermen, magistrates, and slaves.

No more than a hundred and fifty years ago, Giuseppe Fiorelli had dreamed up a way to rescue them from the buried city, along with their dogs, cats, and hens, the rats that haunted their granaries and the carp that were served at their tables, all fragile chains of carbon shattered by gases, mummified in lava, and fallen into dust over the centuries.

It was a simple matter of pouring plaster into hollows that corresponded in every respect to the shape of the creature immobilized for all eternity in its setting of petrified magma. This produced silhouettes always different, each one unique, inverted replicas with exactly the outward appearance of a living being, formed around the very absence of that which had given them birth.

On some of these casts can be seen the facial features, the expressions – horrified, serene, indifferent, dumbfounded, resigned – of the inhabitants of Pompeii at the very moment when Vesuvius erupted. Those individuals, eternally paralyzed in the abandonment of sleep
or in the urgency of flight, all seem to offer a silent warning. Some raise their arms towards the sky whence comes death, while others huddle, trying to protect what they hold most dear: their child or their gold. Others still are petrified in a desperate and unmoving race, like the white-faced mimes and Pierrots who can be seen at street corners, where they hold the same pose for hours, waiting for the toss of a coin.

There are at least a thousand active volcanoes on earth and probably more under the sea; at any moment twenty or so are erupting.

The southernmost volcano still active on the planet is called Mount Erebus. It was baptized (like its brother, now extinct, Mount Terror) in honour of the two ships commanded by Sir James Ross who, assisted by Francis Crozier, discovered them in 1841 during a long voyage of Antarctic exploration intended to reconnoitre and study earth’s magnetism. For the ancient Greeks, Erebus, the incarnation of darkness, was the brother of Night. Of their union were born Aether (Light) and Hemera (Day), who in turn gave birth to Thalassa, the Sea.

Mounts Terror and Erebus rise like ships run aground on Ross Island, in the sea of the same name (both testify
to a certain lack of imagination – or perhaps to an incorrigible narcissism on the captain’s part). Francis Crozier received no similar honour but some hundred years later, his name was given to a lunar crater near the Sea of Fertility, which may once have housed a volcano.

Still, it seems that most of the cirques and craters that pit the surface of the Moon were not caused by volcanoes but have been hollowed out by asteroids that have crashed on the surface: by a fire that came not from inside, but from outside.

T
HE AIR HAS A SWEETNESS THAT WASN
’
T THERE
the day before, suggesting winter is nearing its end. Above the roofs glides a bluish mist that gives the impression the sky has leaned over the earth for a moment to see what was going on there.

The path where the snow melts by day and freezes every night gleams in the sun like a skating rink. Cautious, Vladimir and Estragon zigzag through the trees in places where the hard surface still provides some purchase. Damocles sprawls full length, paws spread wide like Bambi’s, once, then twice, and pulls himself up, moaning indignantly. For months he will hold on to his fear of shiny surfaces and refuse to set foot on a polished marble floor. Mornings, as on every river, minuscule twigs, bits of dried leaves, red maple keys are adrift, sailing down the current to the bottom of the mountain.

Once tea has been served and the first mouthful drunk, he points with his chin at the dogs chasing each other in what is left of the melting snow.

“Are they all yours?”

“No. Just one.”

“Which?”

“Guess.”

The two Labradors, one blond, the other chocolate, the first an exact copy of the second, run in circles, sending up sprays of wet snow behind their stubby legs. Now and then one produces a high-pitched yelp to which the other replies in the same tone. A little behind them, a long basset hound is busy digging a muddy hole into which he disappears almost completely and from which emerge briefly just one clawed foot and one ear.

He hesitates, continues his examination.

A pointer with a silvery coat carefully sniffs the trunk of a tree, walks around it with dainty, measured steps. She twitches when she hears a branch snap nearby as a squirrel steps on it, turns to show two round eyes, their metallic colour exactly the same as that of the short silky hair on her face.

“Juliette,” she introduces her. “And this,” – points to the hole where a white paintbrush wriggles at the end of a black tail – “is Doormat. Over there, Vladimir and Estragon. These are Lili and Damocles,” she says finally, indicating a bichon frise with a black nose, wearing a red coat with her little white feet sticking out of it, who has just yanked a stick from the mouth of an enormous
animal who lets out a heartrending sigh, then lies down and covers his eyes with an immense paw as if he wants to say that he’s had enough of this cruel life.

“Lili?” he asks, looking at the elongated shape, the long paws drawn up to the body in an unnatural posture one might see on an animal stuffed by a taxidermist who works too fast or is a poor observer.

“That’s Damocles,” she corrects him.

Hearing his name, the animal looks up and frowns attentively. The bichon, meanwhile, is energetically gnawing her loot.

“What kind is it?”

“A mix of Great Dane, Irish wolfhound, Rhodesian ridgeback, and Neapolitan mastiff,” she replies.

Observing it more closely, zone by zone one might say, he does see in the animal the powerful frame of the Great Dane, the huge head and jaws of the mastiff, the strange backbone that gives its name to the ridgeback, and a rough goatee he must have inherited from his Irish ancestors. But there’s also some camel in this dog, and some dragon, and probably some hippogryph too.

“What does he weigh?” he inquires, deciding to start with the easiest question.

“I don’t know. When he was around eight months old he broke the veterinarian’s scale. At the time he weighed seventy-five kilos.”

“How old is he now?”

“Three.”

“Interesting.”

Vladimir and Estragon, the two stocky, cheerful Labradors, belong to a university professor who doesn’t care for walking and is only too happy to let someone else spend her days chasing the dogs to make them use up some of the energy they would otherwise expend in mad pursuit of each other, claws clicking on the polished floors of his duplex. Actually, the professor in question isn’t all that fond of animals; the labs were bought at the entreaties of an old girlfriend, twenty years younger, who for a while had threatened to want a child, a vague desire he’d skilfully deflected and at the same time fulfilled with a gift of two adorable little balls of fur with curls at their necks, in a basket.

As she was intending to name them Nougat and Nutella, he’d had to intervene and give them names he wouldn’t blush to pronounce on those rare occasions when he was the one who must round them up. For as long as the relationship lasted, Marie-Lune – another ridiculous name, but in that case there was nothing he could do – had been happy to take responsibility for the
dogs, looking after their slightest needs. She walked them morning, noon, and night, fed them the finest organic kibble enriched with omega-3 – “those dogs eat better than we do,” he invariably complained when paying the astronomical pet shop bills, words that she heard, rightly, more as a criticism of her own mediocre culinary skills than of the sums invested in dog food – scrupulously took them to the vet every year for treatments against fleas and heartworm, took them as well every two months to the grooming parlour from which they came home with claws clipped and buffed, scented with an eau de toilette that, she explained to him very seriously, had been blended specially for canines and was called
Oh my dog!

When she announced she was leaving him – having presumably found a man who didn’t grind his teeth when the words
start a family
came up, a hunch that was confirmed a few months later when he ran into her on the street, very pregnant and absolutely radiant – he was surprised that she had stubbornly refused to take the dogs. It would have been too painful, she’d explained at first, to have before her eyes all the time a souvenir, a witness of their relationship; then, as he seemed unconvinced, she had declared once and for all that the dogs needed a house and a garden, that they would be miserably unhappy in a small, second-floor apartment in Plateau Mont-Royal and that she couldn’t bring herself to torture them
like that. Before this double argument that was based on both her happiness and that of Vladimir and Estragon (thank God he’d been firm; at least he wasn’t stuck with Nougat and Nutella), he could only accept. And look for someone to walk the dogs.

Lili belongs to a woman with an unpronounceable name, whom she’d privately christened “Lili Lady” and addressed simply as “Madame.” Lili Lady lives on the ground floor of a three-storey brick house, she has silvery white hair like snow in moonlight, small blue eyes that recently have become cloudy. She occasionally has trouble recognizing her dog-walker, calling her sometimes “Anna” and sometimes “Martha.” Often the old lady invites her in and offers her cookies from an old tin box that smells musty. She accepts politely, slips the cookies into her pockets, and later gives them to Damocles, who sniffs them cautiously before swallowing them in a mouthful.

Lili Lady’s apartment is cluttered with all kinds of objects – small china figurines of shepherdesses or pipers, jardinières in which spider plants with yellow leaves are withering, throws covering the arms and backs of easy chairs, decorative plates hanging on the kitchen wall next to old black-and-white photos of unsmiling people looking straight at the lens. There are several examples of everything: cheap rugs scattered on the beige carpet; three
TV
sets lined up in order of size in the imitation oak cabinet in the living room; down to the rolls of paper towels that she glimpses in the kitchen when Lili Lady, who insists on making tea, looks for the kettle. The air smells faintly of roses, dust, and wet wool. Damocles and Lili are stretched out full-length between kitchen and living room, the curly little white dog between the enormous paws of the mastodon.

One day while Lili Lady makes tea, she gets up to look at the books that form an odd collection around the
TV
sets. Most are in English, a few – knitting instructions and a dictionary – in French, and a dozen others in a language so strange she can’t even recognize the characters. She thinks they are novels but she couldn’t say why; the covers have no illustrations. She opens one, leafs through it: it is printed from right to left, from top to bottom. Suddenly a cuckoo can be heard, sounding the half-hour.

“Do you take sugar, Anna dear?” asks Lili Lady from the kitchen, over the gurgling of the kettle.