Wonder (9 page)

“They’re your initials now,” she explained, while Elie turned the object over in his fingers, fiddling with the cover which opened and closed with a snap, making the roller, its circumference marked with minute grooves, spin until a spark shot up and then a bluish flame. He lit the candles one by one. She urged him:

“Make a wish.”

He looked around at the warm, rich, golden room, his mother and Baptiste smiling, and he knew that all he wanted was for things to go on as they were at this moment. He closed his eyes, breathed, opened his eyes: the twelve flames were out, the blackened wicks of the candles now gave off only some weak smoke. The
twelve
flames.

“There was one too many!” he exclaimed, alarmed, reaching for the offending candle. “Does that mean my wish won’t come true?”

Alice and Baptiste had a good laugh.

“No,” his mother reassured him. “On the contrary, it means that your wish will be good for two years.”

But Elie, unconvinced, looked hard at both of them, sensing a lie.

“I’ve got something for you too,” said Baptiste, thrusting his arm under the bed and taking out a long, wide box wrapped in newspaper, which the boy tore eagerly, revealing a cardboard carton with a coloured illustration of a long train travelling on shining rails through an
emerald-green landscape. Overjoyed, Elie spent the next minutes gazing at the various components of the train, properly stowed in their compartments from which he dared not take them. As well as the gleaming locomotive there were eight iron cars, five of them closed, with windows, steps, and wheels in every respect like those on real trains, along with enough lengths of straight rails and curved ones to form, once fitted together, a good-sized ring in the middle of the bedroom rug.

The locomotive started slowly, then speeded up, advancing with a powerful clickety-clack, nearly leaving the track on a curve, just barely landing on its wheels to work up speed again, only to go off the rails for good at the next turn, followed by its cars whose wheels went on turning, pointlessly, long after.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Baptiste, “we’ll try again in a while.”

Elie cut the cake after he’d uprooted the eleven remaining candles, tears of wax congealed along the narrow stems, discovering under the white icing a bright red pastry he refused to eat. For long minutes he kept using his lighter to light again the shortest candle and snuff it by pinching the wick between thumb and forefinger. Floating in the air was the odour of ozone, metallic and acid, like the smell after lightning has struck.

I
N CERTAIN DUSTY VILLAGES IN THE MIDDLE
of the United States, the populace had never seen a black man except in a print or a photo – and those were mostly of convicts, who had expressions so sinister that honest people thus informed about the unfortunate characteristics of the race were determined to be wary of any man whose skin was the colour of coffee.

One night when he was standing, arms folded and one foot slightly forward (a pose he’d borrowed from the lion tamers), in front of a ragged piece of canvas bearing a painting of Mount Pelée erupting, throwing into the sky flaming stones and a fountain of black smoke, Baptiste overheard a conversation between a little girl with blonde curls and her mother, who wore a hat with a broad wingspan that in all likelihood had cost the life of more than one bird and made it impossible to see her face. It was obvious that the lady was a person of some importance in the small town, perhaps the mayor’s wife, for the rest of the audience held themselves back
respectfully and sent in her direction looks at once curious and cowed.

“Mama,” asked the child in a high little voice, “why is that man black?”

Baptiste could see that the people around the lady with the hat were holding their breath as she replied calmly:

“Because he was burned, my pet. As you can see, he was in a fire so he’s as black as coal. Now come along, sweetheart, do you want to see the hippopotamus?”

Another night, there were an elderly man and woman dressed all in black who could have been man and wife or brother and sister, so much did they resemble one another, in their bearing more than their features. The two shared the same stiff posture and an identical look of disapproval, with pinched nostrils and mouth. They called Baptiste
sotto voce
“Satan’s lackey,” whispering that if he had survived on Judgment Day it was because God in His infinite wisdom had not wanted him in His kingdom and, continuing more and more loudly, declaring that the colour of his skin was the reflection of his black soul.

“How dare they,” the man went on in a tone of boisterous lamentation, “present to us here one of those infidels from a land where they know not God? How dare they corrupt our innocent youth?”

Looking around him, Baptiste observed that the audience was made up of farmers, small merchants, and housewives, all of them well over forty. Brushing aside that detail, he wanted anyway to defend the honour of his island, but when he opened his mouth the man’s companion broke into a series of strident
Amens
that drowned out any rectification. In the crowd people began to cross themselves and look worriedly towards the ceiling of the tent, as if they were expecting an answer to come from there.

Profoundly embarrassed, at a loss for what to do, Baptiste tried to attract the attention the workers at the tent entrance, but for the time being they were too engrossed in conversation to realize that he needed help.

The man was still howling what Baptiste took to be passages from the Book of Revelation; a woman flung herself to her knees, two others burst into sobs, a fourth began to ululate. Wanting to calm the hysteria that threatened to settle in for good, Baptiste, unable to think of anything else, began to recite in a loud, clear voice the Lord’s Prayer, the first prayer he’d learned as a child, the one that Father Blanchot had made him repeat most often as penance and the only one he remembered in its entirety. As Baptiste was saying it in French, however, the old man, who had never heard the language, began to shout that “the monster is casting an evil spell, calling on the demons from Hell from whence he came in their own
vile language.” He was spraying saliva everywhere, its trajectory seeming to imitate that of the projectiles spat from the mouth of the volcano frozen behind Baptiste in a spectacular and unchanging fury.

Finally realizing that something was wrong, the ticket sellers rushed into the tent and tried to escort the man to the exit, but he struggled so hard that, while the woman with him was shrieking that people were trying to murder them, they came to blows. After just a few seconds the brawl became widespread.

Taking advantage of the chaos, Baptiste pulled with all his might on a small tear in the canvas between the volcano and the sea, enlarging it enough to stick his head and shoulders into it. He raised one foot very high, then the other, and disappeared through the sky studded with stars and blazing embers.

Then a strange thing happened to Baptiste. After he had miraculously escaped the deadly fire that had wiped out everything and everyone he knew, after people had come from the United States to invite him to join the Greatest Show on Earth – for which he was being handsomely paid – after he had found the family he’d stopped looking for long ago, then this strange thing happened: he suddenly felt as if his life was finished, over, consumed, and for the first time he knew what fear felt like.

He began to suffer long bouts of insomnia. He would wake up in the depths of night, shift Alice’s arm from where it weighed heavily on his chest, get up, and dress in the shirt and trousers he had been wearing the day of his arrival. He had others now, more than enough to change every day of the week if he felt the urge. Sometimes when he opened the cupboard where they were hanging, he would stand for a moment, disconcerted before such pointless abundance, after which he invariably reached out for the more familiar old rags. Then he would leave as cautiously as he had slipped out of his cell a year before, and walk alone on the deserted site given over now to the dark.

The first time she had seen him don his clothes slowly, mechanically, to leave in the middle of the night, Alice had gotten up and called softly:

“Baptiste, you’re a somnambulist.”

“What?” He had never heard that word.

“You’re walking in your sleep, come back to bed.” And standing next to him she had tried to lead him. He’d freed himself with an absentminded movement. It was exactly what he had experienced for weeks now and hadn’t been able to name: the impression that he was walking in a dream, or under water, day and night but particularly in the daytime.

“H-how do I stop?”

“Stop what?”

“Sleepwalking. How can I stop?”

“There’s just one way. To wake up.”

That was useless: wasn’t he already awake? A moment later she asked, to be quite sure:

“Are you asleep?”

“I don’t know,” he replied in all honesty, and went out.

From then on Alice, whom the slightest movement would waken, got up when he’d gone out the door and watched him move away, her forehead against the cold window.

Seeing them all side by side: the mountain of quivering rolls of fat that was Jemma, whose every movement reverberated at length in her white, turquoise-veined flesh, the way a pebble dropped into water gently traces circles that subside as they move away from the centre; the body shared by Qiu and Quan, their two heads, each on its own shoulders, two oranges on a table; the short silhouettes of the midget couple, child-sized but with adult heads, with hair in their ears and hairy genitals in their underwear, who waved their little limbs the way some fish out of water comically twitch their fins; the graceful, perfect figure of Ilsa – until she turned around to show
her sow bear’s face, which seemed at first to be a joke in bad taste on such a delicate neck; the muscular mass of Ulrich the strongman, whose biceps and triceps bulged under his skin like foreign bodies slipped in between flesh and bone; at the sight of them, hideous and fascinating, Baptiste felt as if he were advancing in a waking nightmare. His life since Mount Pelée seemed to him to be unfolding in a kind of half-sleep where objects, though endowed with their familiar outlines, put up no resistance and allowed themselves to be passed through when he held out a hand to catch them. He took from this insubstantiality the sense that he himself was unreal. Maybe he was still stretched out on the ground in the Saint-Pierre dungeon and all this was just a dream.

M
ONTHS LATER
B
APTISTE, ALONE IN A CELL
again, would recall the afternoon when he’d seen her for the first time, suspended between two horses galloping around the track, raising clouds of golden dust that floated a few inches above the black and glossy backs. She had left the first and had not yet grabbed the mane of the second, so when he thought of her he would always have this image: she was flying.

Hair as shiny as the croup of the horses who obeyed the slightest click of her tongue; red lips; wasp-waisted in her sequined costume that reflected the light from the electric bulbs, she was alone with the stallions under the big top. She had headed for Baptiste without hesitating, as if they already knew each other. Above her lips sparkled tiny beads of sweat he longed to lick with the despair of the thirsty man who sticks his tongue out when he feels on his forehead the first drops of rain.

“Are you the Apocalypse?” she asked, examining him
from head to toe with no animosity but no warmth either, rather with a kind of detached curiosity.

Sorry not to be more spectacular, he could only utter painfully:

“Y-y-yes.”

“What was it like?”

“I-I don’t know. Hot. And then … I passed out.”

Briskly, she unlaced her fine leather boots and pulled them off like the peel of a fruit, revealing white feet with seashell nails. Continuing on her way barefoot, she let the boots fall in the sand where Baptiste bent over humbly to pick them up, quickening his pace as she was walked away without looking over her shoulder, sure he was following her. He’d had the impression that he was waking from a dream.

With the tips of her white fingers she traced a path down his back where the tangle of scars formed something like a crown of thorns. She had removed his shirt without a word, they had loved one another standing, leaning against one of the posts that held up the tent where the manatee was lapping the lukewarm water in its basin. Then she had gently turned Baptiste over and written on his burnt skin a message that seemed to be engraved in his flesh more deeply than the wound left there by the blazing mountain, like an invocation.

“Does it hurt?”

“No,” he lied. But it was only a half-lie, for to feel her fingers on his shoulders, her breath on his neck, he would have suffered a thousand other pains.

Stella lived with Rochester and he shouldn’t expect that the events of the afternoon would ever happen again, she explained coldly as she straightened her costume with its shiny sequins. But of course it did happen again: when night had fallen and only the animals were awake, pacing their cages in circles; during the parade when only workers and extras remained on the circus site; in the train car where Stella travelled alone when James Bailey had sent Rochester to recruit some unknown prodigy or new monstrosity.