Authors: Carl-Johan Vallgren
People love theatre and spectacles
, the voice inside him sighed,
and that’s generally how we make our livings. Has it never occurred to you to make yours as a seer? Believe you me, you’ll strike them dumb, they’ll shower you with gifts and eulogies. There’s nothing more flatters a man than having his innermost self presented in a favourable light, especially if he’s sad and full of self-hatred. Use your talents, your phantom gift, join our association, dance with us in our Festival of Fools. Before you can say knife some mentally retarded prince will be rewarding you with your weight in gold, all because you’ve got him to swallow some brilliant prophecy based on petty secrets he imagines he has managed to keep, but which you’ve seen right through all the time!
The mob began jeering at the stage where Colombina, having been so ingeniously stabbed from behind, was bathing in her virgin blood, and the final line was being delivered by a tearful Harlequin holding up the murderer’s dagger.
You poor thing,
the phantom voice went on
, you seem quite lost. So many people, so many thoughts and feelings, all so confusing! But beware, young man, all too often the likes of us end up in trouble. And considering what your face looks like, why don’t you wear a mask like Harlequin and Il Dottore up there? It’d spare you all the shame and cries of horror and facilitate an incognito . . .
Hercule Barfuss was intent on trying to locate whomever it was, somewhere amid this sea of people, playing hide-and-seek with him. And by and by, albeit very faintly, he managed to trace the outline of his observer, perhaps only because he was being allowed to do so. Never before had he encountered so cleverly closed a mind.
He searched at waist level, between men’s legs, amid the belts on women’s skirts, instinct telling him that the man who was addressing him stood at the same lowly altitude as himself, was perhaps squatting down, or leaning over, the better to survey him.
Not bad,
he heard the phantom voice say
. You’re getting closer, bird or fish or something in between! Anyway, what are you doing here all by yourself? Where’s that guardian of yours, that Jesuit brother?
At the Vatican
, he replied, on the same wavelength the other was speaking on, as he shut out the stench of rotten fish, of horse droppings and rubbish barrels, the sweet sickly smell from spice vendors and florists’ shops, ignoring a shove from a drunk in the crowd, who a moment later, staring down horrified at this grotesque apparition, crossed himself. He shut off all four of his other senses so as to focus wholly on his search for the source of this petulant voice inside his head.
At the Vatican? Do you have the least inkling of what plans are being concocted over your head? Doesn’t it occur to you that the abbot had some special design in sending you all this way? If I were you I’d watch my step. And what about the girl you’re searching for, have you found any traces of her? There there, don’t forget I’m as familiar with your thoughts as I am with the contents of my own trouser pocket, you simply haven’t learned to shield them. I’ve been following you for two weeks now and you’ve noticed nothing
.
Following me, why?
he asked, surprised.
People like you interest me. For professional reasons. You might be useful to me, but everyone has to go through a trial period . . . I’ve checked up on you, put you to certain tests, to see what you’re made of. The problem here appears to be the girl, you simply don’t seem able to get her out of your mind
.
What do you know about Henriette?
he asked nervously.
No more than your unending obsessions have revealed. Anyway, how was your journey? From what I understand, you’ve come as a pilgrim from afar
.
How was my journey? he thought. Each day had been like Creation’s first. Not a moment had passed since he’d left the monastery without his experiencing something for the very first time. Unfamiliar smells, the landscape, changing as he and Schuster had travelled south, the plains, rivers, the stupendous Alps; people they had met or looked at through the carriage windows, the colours and tastes, the pines and olive groves that as twilight fell over the fields looked like sleeping animals. The world’s sheer size and wealth had filled him with amazement. But on another score the voice was right: a thousand times on his journey he’d taken soundings amid all these people. Somewhere out there, in this continent called Europe, he kept thinking,
she
must be. Somewhere in this complex weave of time and events that links people together she must have left her imprint, dropped a stitch. Such was the hope he had nurtured ever since they had left Silesia. If only he could come across a memory of her in the mind of someone who had seen her, whether recently or long ago made no odds. Encounter someone who’d glanced at her if only for a brief instant yet retained the image of this girl for whom he never gave up searching, and whom he loved with a force able to defy the laws of nature.
In the gloom of taverns he had fumbled in the innermost psyches of chance encounters, floated adrift in their memories, been shipwrecked in an archipelago of sorrows, gone astray in a nautical chart of dreams. In draughty attic rooms shared with travelling salesmen and pilgrims, in the transient atmosphere of post houses, in godforsaken villages, at the gates of clamorous cities, by waysides, changing horses at the post stations, in the unassuaged longings of men in whom painful memories suddenly flared up like torches, in the pasts of beggars that struck him like sad melodies as they stretched out their hands to passers-by, engrossed in a happier past that had been sunnier, warmer, better. Day and night he had gone on searching in his mad hope that the age of miracles was not yet over. But nowhere had he found any trace of her.
Get a hold of yourself
, the voice interrupted his ruminations.
Stop thinking about that girl and look behind you!
He gave a start. Up on the stage the actors were taking a final bow after their last act.
Slowly the crowd dispersed, clearing his view. Now, in the light of the Roman sun, Hercule saw him very clearly. His instinct that had told him to look for his observer at eye level had been correct. The person in question was standing only a few yards away, beckoning eagerly to him to follow. Not bent double, as he’d guessed at first, or squatting down to get a good look at a real-life monster. It was a boy, dressed in a tatty black coat, his face hidden behind a Venetian-style carnival mask.
It was in the October following the storming of its gates that the head of the monastery had decided to send Hercule to Jesuit headquarters at the Borgo Santo Spirito in Rome, there to be examined by the Inquisition’s special committee on demonology, which had only recently, after some years lying fallow, retrieved its authority.
According to the version Abbot Kippenberg had given Schuster, what they wanted to ascertain was the source of the boy’s gifts. Did these derive from a brighter or a darker source? Were they subject to some rational explanation in line with those modern Enlightenment ideas that, to the horror of some and the secret delight of others, were gradually gaining ground even in the venerable Society of Jesus.
Naturally the object of this interest had not himself been consulted, and in any case Hercule was so absorbed in his newfound freedom that nothing else interested him.
That night when the monastery had been stormed by the Silesian peasantry he – for the first time – had come to appreciate the full extent of his gift. He had stirred up people’s minds to such a degree they’d taken him for a miracle worker; and only pure luck and Julian Schuster’s intervention, pacifying the agitated mob with threats and promises, had prevented them from tearing him to pieces. This had placed him doubly in the elderly priest’s debt.
Their journey to Rome had taken over a month; firstly through the German countries by mail coach, then on foot and by sleigh over the Alps, and finally astride the mules provided by the Jesuit houses along the pilgrim route into Italy.
Hercule was a beginner in the
refugium
of existence. His whole life had been spent behind locked doors, so he knew little of the outside world. Nor had he grown a centimetre taller since his eighth birthday. But he’d matured, until he seemed to be four times his real age. From his chin sprouted a goatee beard and on his cheeks grew lynx-like side whiskers. At the same time his cranium had lost the little tuft of hair it had once had. But the thick fur on his neck and back was still there, as were the cleft, snakelike tongue and the monstrous cavity in the middle of his face that could scare the living daylights even out of a rabble of soldiers, and which would pursue them in their nightmares to the end of their days. Unchanged too were his dwarf legs, his arms that resembled parboiled roots from some rare medicinal plant. With these attributes, and from the rustling suit of pleated linen the brethren had sewn for him before he’d left on his journey, it was hardly surprising if he’d been an object for all eyes, drawn everyone’s attention.
One Sunday afternoon after Mass at Innsbruck he had played a piano with his bare feet in an inn, and so stirred up the music-loving landlord’s feelings that he’d wept like a child. Chins dropped when people saw him scratch a louse bite with the tip of his shoe or, seated on the floor, fasten the top button of his ruffled shirt with one foot while holding up a mirror and critically looking at himself with the other. On one occasion even the horses had turned pale in wonder as he, standing on one leg, had helped the coachman change the canisters, and while silently whispering to them in animal language, had groomed their tails with the other foot.
Probably the journey would have been easier had he – precisely as the voice on the Piazza Navona would later reproach him for not doing – worn a mask. It happened that children burst into tears at the mere sight of him, and on more than one occasion Julian Schuster had had to muster up all his authority for them to be allowed to spend the night at some hostel whose very pigsty the landlord declared to be full, though actually terrified of bringing down God’s wrath for putting up what they were sure was a child of Satan, one thereto “rigged out in carnival costume”.
Accusations of this kind weren’t new to Hercule. But not until the autumn of his years, when wisdom had taught him to brace himself against all manner of insults, would their poison cease to hurt him. Meanwhile, he stored it up, until he could no longer stand being consumed by it.
In one Tyrolean village they had visited the market and almost been lynched while waiting for the coachman to repair two broken wheels. It was early morning and a pregnant woman at one of the flower stalls had let out a shriek at the sight of our hero and fallen senseless to the ground in a shower of pine needles from a funeral wreath. Folk had come running from all directions and soon Schuster and Barfuss were surrounded by menacing villagers accusing them of putting the Evil Eye on an unborn child. One market salesman claimed the fruit in his baskets had turned rotten at the very moment the stagecoach had drawn up on the highway, and another that he’d had dreams auguring a divine visitation on the region. Once again it had been Schuster who’d saved them by displaying the elegant missive he’d received, impressively sealed and stamped with seven authoritative stamps after leaving Cardinal Rivero at the Jesuit Congregation, declaring this boy to be a famous miracle worker under papal protection. Only then, and most dubiously, had the crowd withdrawn.
Apart from these mishaps the journey had gone better than expected, without their being confronted by any of the ever more brutal highwaymen typical of that time and who were seldom known to spare their victims, even less so if they turned out to be ecclesiastics. They’d crossed the Alps in a snowstorm of Olympian force no less fierce than the one that had ravaged Königsberg the night Hercule had been born. A rumour would reach them that it had cost twenty-four pilgrims their lives when their horses had panicked at the wind’s terrible howling and taken nine sledges with them over a precipice. When they arrived in the Po plain it was summer again and at each roadside altar Julian Schuster had fallen to his knees and kissed the little statues of the Blessed Virgin.
The only really black cloud had been the Jesuit’s waning spirits. He had seemed happy enough during the journey’s first weeks. He’d been positively affected by a badly needed waft of the adventurous years of his youth as he had struck up aquaintance with other travellers, played cards with the coachmen and drunk cider in the taverns, where he was surprised to hear the same old travellers’ yarns he’d heard in his youth. In a word, he had enjoyed this escape from monastic routines and from feeling stifled by incense, from the refectory’s sepulchral silence, from Abbot Kippenberg’s air of misunderstood sainthood, and, not least, by the doomsday atmosphere that had prevailed in the monastery since Hercule’s arrival.
But gradually, as they neared their destination, his spirits had failed him and his joviality given way to worry.
Ever since the night when he had received conclusive proof of his protégé’s gift, Schuster had begun to see the boy through a new and sharper lens. Instinct told him the boy’s powers were not demonic, but something else, something inexplicable. Allowing for his still being confused, he’d taken care not to frighten him.
Rightly. Marked by his experiences, it was taking Hercule time to overcome his feelings of mistrust. Not until the fourth week of the journey did he begin speaking to his friend with the aid of his strange gift. At first not often, but gradually, as Schuster won his confidence more. And though he was never to confide in him to the extent he deserved, he became more and more candid.
Hercule knew what he owed Schuster. And it pained him to see his saviour fretting, plagued by misgivings that in short measure had come to command his entire life, the only life he knew, and question every choice he’d ever made, to become the person he now was. A terrible fate for a man who’d spent a lifetime in the services of the brethren. The fact was, Schuster had started to doubt the existence of a God who rarely heeded prayer, so seldom in fact that when it did happen, it seemed more like a stroke of luck. Schuster had come to doubt the value of a monastic life and suspected Fate of really having had another life in store for him, of which it had already written out the score, though by some stroke of ill luck, and because he had heeded the call of his heart, he had condemned himself to suffering, and been fooled into choosing another path. Tormented by a celibacy he was too old to revoke, he was haunted by the voices of children and grandchildren he’d never had, by the happy laughter of a family in whose bosom he would never grow old, unquestioned patriarch of the family estate between Jerez and Seville, whose monastic substitute seemed ever more hollow and poverty-stricken. As they’d approached the Holy City he was also filled with another, more diffuse, cause for concern, whose motives, since they were unknown to him, escaped not only our hero but also Schuster himself. The priest’s apprehensions had hourly grown stronger as they had drawn nearer to the city. So obviously beset was he by these worries that on the evening they arrived in Rome at the assembly’s seat of honour at the Borgo Santo Spirito, Hercule had half expected Schuster to break down and weep.