Wonder (6 page)

The distant rumbling that has not been silent for a week and has become so familiar it has become a new kind of silence, all at once seems to explode. A blast shakes the stone walls and even the ground where Baptiste is lying. A few seconds later, the room is filled with an even denser cloud smelling of sulphur, which catches at his throat and keeps him from breathing. He takes off his tattered vest and ties it around his head. With the fabric covering his nose and mouth, he manages to take short breaths. With cautious steps he approaches the tiny window and jumps
up with all his strength, trying to see outside. He finally is able to clutch the bars, but immediately cries out, gazes at his palms where already blisters filled with brackish water are forming. He cannot give a meaning to the images glimpsed: blackened shapes stretched out or standing; trees with leaves of fire; apocalyptic visions that he persuades himself are the fruit of his imagination, thrown into turmoil by thirst and fear. The air becomes more and more rare inside the stone walls, which are as hot to the touch as his burning forehead. He tries in vain to get away from the source of the danger by curling up in a corner of the room, hugging his legs with his arms and trembling. He senses that death is near, that it might already be there.

Then, without wanting to, almost as if he were looking from a distance at the actions of a man who looks like him, he realizes that he is taking off his pants, which he observes for a moment before urinating on them. The cloudy stream appears to be as viscous as the unbreathable air that fills the dungeon. This strange man with his own features takes the soaking trousers and fits them as best he can between the bars of the window to keep the smoke and dust from getting in. Baptiste follows his movements, vaguely interested, admiring even, as if the stranger were more and more alien to him. Then he drops his head and closes his eyes.

—

Behind his eyelids dances the sea that was always the same and every day different. Sometimes swollen by storms, its waves like shifting mountains hemmed with lead-coloured foam; at other times slack and smooth as a sheet of ice, its surface pierced now and then by a seabird diving head first, wings folded, then reappearing with a wriggling fish in its beak, a mirror in which were reflected motionless inverted ships, sails furled, masts pointed towards the centre of the earth; shimmering green and blue, like the feathers of some wild parrot that must be approached with great care. At certain hours, before a storm, it became drained of all colour and all substance until it was no more than a shadow sea, its yellowish glimmers reminiscent of the overripe flesh of mangoes. On those days more than others, he couldn’t tell whether the clouds were lending their colour to the ocean or the water was dictating its mood to the sky, the grey of both merging to draw a horizon that seemed to unite, not separate them. Then that line disappeared as well and there was no longer anything in him or around him but fog.

When he opens his eyes a few hours later, he knows in a flash that the end of the world has come and that he has been forgotten.

W
HEN HE WAS HALF-DRAGGED, HALF-CARRIED
from the dungeon that had nearly been his tomb, Baptiste, dazzled, had to protect his eyes from the overly bright light assaulting him. The landscape revealed itself little by little, outlines blurred and hazy at first, then more and more precise – unbearable.

It was not an apocalyptic landscape he was crossing but the landscape of the day after the apocalypse, once the destruction has been accomplished. Of the houses, streets, city that he’d known there remained nothing but heaps of rubble and ash pierced by charred beams like grim gallows. One half of a miraculously preserved sign, of which the other part had been blown away by the blast of the volcano, announced, incomprehensible and pathetic:

Smoke was rising everywhere from the ruins carrying with it an indescribable stench. The odour of scorched
wood could not entirely mask the smell of sulphur, which was in turn dominated by a third, repulsive smell, that of burned flesh.

Baptiste choked, coughed, tried to say: “Take me back inside,” but was only able to produce a series of guttural sounds that could have expressed pain as much as gratitude.

“Sssh,” advised one of the men holding him by the elbow, “don’t try to talk. You had an amazing stroke of luck, do you know that? We’ve been looking for three days and you’re the first we’ve found.”

“Th-the first prisoner?” Baptiste managed to ask, almost inaudibly.

There was a moment when the two men flanking him exchanged a look but said nothing. Then the taller replied:

“No. The first and only one in town.”

A
NURSE CAME MORNING AND NIGHT TO CHANGE
his dressings, give him something to drink, and feed him, like a bird, a few mouthfuls of puréed fruit that he had trouble swallowing. He felt as if his throat were still constricted by the smoke and the red-hot cinders.

In the darkness he could see dragons spitting fire, hideous sea serpents snapping up the ships in the depths of the ocean, so he slept as little as possible and was careful always to have a lamp lit beside him. After some twenty days he was able to stand up and take a few steps, leaning on the doctor’s arm, then sit for half an hour in the armchair by the open window and look at the sky, no longer masked by the crenellated foliage of the palm trees. Then he started taking short walks alone in the deserted city and he felt for his massacred, charred, petrified, suppurating island a love such as he had never experienced when it was verdant and sweetly scented.

In some places nothing indicated the presence of dwellings, shops, or even streets; everywhere the ground
was covered with a thick layer of ill-assorted debris coated with a fine dust in which his feet left a solitary, labyrinthine trail. Unconsciously he bent down now and then to pick up – as he had once picked up shells and agates – a fountain pen monogrammed in gold, a mother-of-pearl button, a marble that in the heat had assumed the shape of a bean.

Absurdly, some papers had survived the holocaust that had turned wood, fabric, even the bricks of the buildings to ashes, and Baptiste was soon sifting through the ruins that on June 15 were still smoking, finding sheets of paper flying in the wind or stuck between a charred shoe and a cash register with its keys welded together. He assembled a bouquet of pages that grew thicker every day. Monsieur Hugo’s Cosette and the Thénardier couple rubbed shoulders with a list of vegetable seeds adapted to a tropical climate, followed by a baptismal register written on a larger sheet of the creamy white stationery reserved for the administration, and then, on a page with ragged edges, something in incomprehensible letters that might have been Greek, expenditures for the month of March by the Hôtel Excelsior, and the final pages of the Apocalypse of Saint John, on which could still be read, in small, thick letters:
And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire
.

Leafing through the bundle of papers, some with scorched edges, others a nearly immaculate white, some
still bearing the threads of their unstitched binding like the scar from a poorly sutured wound, he felt he was contemplating the history of his island, broken open, interrupted, in its middle, forever incomplete yet over now.

Some men, fewer women, were pacing the rubble in search not of survivors – they knew now that one individual, only one, had made it through the firestorm, and his name was actually becoming famous – but of traces of those they had loved and lost, searching the ruins in the hope of finding a photo, a button, a pipe testifying to the existence of the dead. They ignored one another, sometimes brushed up against each other seemingly unaware, each one carrying on a quest that he knew was hopeless; sad, slow-moving rubbish collectors who seemed like ghosts back from the kingdom of the dead.

Black birds from who knows where were also pecking through the debris with strident cries; searching among the stones and sometimes rising up with a heavy flapping of wings, holding in their beaks some rosy morsel. They were known as birds of misfortune, not because they had announced the calamity – like their more graceful cousins they had deserted Saint-Pierre weeks before the eruption – but because they ate so heartily.

Baptiste’s steps brought him back despite himself to the stone dungeon where he had thought he would perish
and to which he owed his life. The small structure now stood alone in the middle of a large field of pulverized and blackened rubble. He paced the periphery, eyes to the ground, unable to admit to himself that he was trying to find the pearl from which he hadn’t been separated since childhood and that had become his talisman. His memories grew confused and when he tried to sort them out they got away from him, as if he was trying to grasp a mass of spindrift. It seemed to him then that he’d had the pearl with him in the dungeon, but as soon as he tried to clarify that idea – had he at some point slipped it into his shirt pocket or the seam of his trousers, or had he stored it carefully under his tongue as he often did? – a thousand other possibilities came along and blurred it. The pearl had been stolen from him in the communal cell on the night of his arrest several weeks earlier; he had dropped it on the ground in his impatience to escape that last night; or had he, in a moment of panic when he was not entirely master of his movements, buried it in a corner of the dungeon to protect it against whatever might happen to him? How could he find out?

Baptiste began to search in the rubble, in the pebbles, the dusty shreds of fabric and crumbled cobblestones where insects with countless legs and glossy undersides scuttled, seeming to emerge from the depths of the earth. All at once he spotted the iridescent lustre of a rounded
white surface. Incredulous, he bent down, picked up the tiny smooth object, and did not realize until he brought it near to his face that he was holding not the lost pearl but a human tooth.

That day he stopped scrutinizing the ground when he was walking and went home keeping his eyes stubbornly raised towards the sky.

It was weeks before Baptiste reached out for the mirror the nurse had offered him every day to see for himself the marks left on his body by Mount Pelée’s anger. He discovered then that his eyes weren’t entirely black as he’d always been told and had thought he could confirm by looking at his reflection in the translucent surface of a shop window, or when he checked furtively in the silvering of the gilt mirrors in the La Chevrotière villa: in the pupil of his left eye, sparkling like a fragment of star, was a flake the green of the sea on a fine April day.

Though his face had miraculously been spared, his chest and back were now one big scar. He could not have said whether it was a single injury with countless branches or a thousand burns that had joined and crisscrossed, tracing on his abdomen a labyrinth of cracked and blistered flesh. Where there had been smooth black skin, there was now, spread out like some monstrous nest of vipers, a thousand-branched gash that
henceforth was part of him and of which each avenue traced by suffering led ineluctably to horror. The anxious nurse at his side half expected that he would drop the mirror as the wounded so often did when they discovered a body foreign to them, but he did nothing of the kind. Baptiste, impassive, studied minutely every square centimetre of the twists and turns of this new landscape carved on him by Mount Pelée’s fires as if he were looking for a path.

Often his words had to cross a similar maze; he would hesitate for a long time before speaking and once he’d started, he would interrupt himself midway, knowing what he was about to say but unable to say it, as if the refractory word, endowed suddenly with a will of its own, were scoffing at him just beyond his reach. The slightest thing distracted him – a falling leaf, a singing bird – and he was filled with a kind of stupefaction that made him stop what he was doing. It seemed that after contemplating the world with the certainty of never seeing it again, he was now condemned to rediscover every fragment of it with the boundless, nearly painful amazement of a first time eternally started afresh.

He was sitting one evening, motionless, looking out to sea, when a man in a suit and patent leather shoes, carrying a bowler hat, silently approached him in the sand.
Darkness was taking over the beach; it seemed to be rising up from the island and into the sky where purple, crimson and charcoal-grey veils pierced with scarlet were dancing. The man came up behind him and inquired:

“Are you Baptiste Cyparis?”

It was the name he’d given to his rescuers and he hadn’t felt a need to change it.

“Y-yes.”

“The Baptiste Cyparis who survived the eruption of Mount Pelée?”

Still looking out to sea, Baptiste confirmed: “I’m the only one,” without specifying whether he meant the only one with the name or that no other man had emerged unscathed from the disaster.

The new arrival held out a visiting card and Baptiste examined it with some surprise. Realizing that Baptiste might not be able to read, the man introduced himself, smiling broadly as if he were announcing some good news:

“My name is Richard Rochester. I am the first recruiting officer for Mister James Bailey, of whom you have undoubtedly heard.”

Baptiste just stared at him in an oddly empty way.

“Mr. Bailey runs a circus, the Barnum & Bailey,” he went on, “the biggest one in the world, and the most famous. And he would like you to be part of it.”

“A circus?” Baptiste repeated.

Determined not to make any assumptions, Rochester began patiently to explain:

“A travelling exhibition as well as a show, under a big top, where people come to admire natural wonders, phenomena, and marvels: a man so strong he can twist steel; a woman so heavy that four men can’t to lift her; twins welded together; a bearded lady; horses that can add and subtract; a two-headed sheep—”

“I’m very fond of animals,” Baptiste interrupted, as if he had just realized it now. “Maybe I could look after the horses …”