A case of curiosities (4 page)

"As I explained, it was a remarkable sample. And I do not use jam jars. My bottles are made to specification in the Lorraine."

The Abbe tried to console Madame Page, who at this point was highly agitated by the sight of her unconscious son. "You chose the wrong proverb," he said. "God tempered nothing at all, except perhaps the steel that sheared your little lamb."

The mother was reduced to more gnomic incantation: "On the fool's beard the barber learns to shave."

"No, Madame," the Abbe said. "We have been worse than fools. If I held sway with the authorities . . ."

"... but you do not," the surgeon interjected. "It is / who hold sway. And with that, I think, the subject can be closed."

The Abbe shouted, "Enough of your grim-reapery! Leave!" He moved menacingly toward the surgeon and held up a poker that suggested a surprising capacity for violence.

And so the surgeon left—with Claude's finger, it should be noted.

THE vengeful WIDOW entered again as the surgeon hurried from the cottage. She blew through the herbs hanging from the rafters, sprinkling the occupants below with the petals and leaves of the older and less potent plants. She whipped up the cards on the floor, extinguished an unglobed candle, and ruffled open the pages of Claude's copybook. The last assault caught the Abbe's eye. He adjusted his spectacles and took the copybook gingerly in his hands. Opening it, he observed the first page was blank. "The frontispiece of the perfectionist," he said.

The images that followed confirmed the Abbe's expectations. Claude was indeed an exacting draftsman. His reputation had spread to Grand-le-Luc, a village on the other side of the valley. He was known as the Pencil Boy, in the way other children of the region were distinguished by cowlicks, or their unusual predilections, the Boy Bee-eater being perhaps the most noteworthy. Claude had a great deal of time to pursue his talents. Except during the seasonal mushroom explosions, when Madame Page insisted on help, Claude was free to do as he pleased. And when he was not obliged to skirmish with his sisters, what pleased him most was drawing. Hence the nickname.

What did Pencil Boy draw? What was it the Abbe now observed? It was a private register of fascinations, frustrations, and flights of uncontrolled fancy. Claude drew the cemetery yew, and on its branches hung a few dozen water rats affixed by their tails. He drew a soap house overtaken by a colony of spiders spinning webs worthy of the finest watch work. Wild as these designs were, both the tree and the soap house faithfully represented Claude's curious vision. So did the windmills that spun through the high-domed skies, the paddle wheels that slapped the Tournay river dry, and the sparks that rose from the scalp of Christine Rochat, the local pyromaniac. The Abbe found little or no depiction of the conventional. There was one image of Matthew Rochat, the farmer who also served as the local barber. He was sketched behind the Red Dog, performing the surgical procedure on the aforementioned ridgeling. A phrase ran across the bottom of the page: "Shave for a Sou, Bleed for Two. Hogs and Rams Gelded." Next to it, Claude had drawn a picture of a chicken freshly decapitated and hanging from a drying line.

The Abbe leafed back and forth through the disturbing images of the copybook. He came upon a picture of a wedge of cheese, a variant of Gruyere. In the bubbles, Claude had placed the heads of some of the more powerful residents: Sister Constance, a Discalced Carmelite who greatly distressed the Abbe; Gaston, the proprietor of the Red Dog; and, near the rind, a rotund, bespectacled fellow the Abbe rightly took to be himself. Claude drew a few self-portraits and even a series of Mole Kings, studies of his deformed hand.

While a curiosity to be sure, the mole was not the most serious of physical aberrations visited upon the village of Tournay. Claude's little book documented with tremendous acuity the dreadful results of intermarriage and unacknowledged couplings of a more temporary nature. Once, a company of performers passed through the village, a rare event given the rugged terrain and the scant and miserly population. By the time the players decamped and left the valley, it was hard to establish who had been more surprised, the visited or the visitors. What had the performers made of the Tournay family with toenails like oyster shells, or of Hairless Ruth the lacemaker? When the Abbe observed Claude's drawing of Ruth without her bonnet and scrubbed clean of the burnt cork that normally traced across her fuzzless eyebrows, he thought of an acorn deprived of its cap.

The reason for the limited and intense commingling of families can be reduced to a single word: inheritance. Along with the land and livestock, lace and lock tools, the racks of pewter common and fine, came bequests unrecorded in the heavy elephant folio registers kept by the parish notary. There were harelips, bulbous noses, large ears, high foreheads, and, yes, sometimes even the odd mole. The genealogical trees of the valley often grafted branches back to trunks.

The Abbe came upon portraits of Claude's family. Evangeline found kinder but less frequent representation than Fidelite, whose delineations made the Abbe laugh aloud. And there was Claude's mother, depicted hunching over a large cluster of mushrooms. The Abbe's favorite image was of the three children and Madame Page standing beside the chimney, a hookah and telescope on the mantel and the Dragon rug under their feet.

The Pencil Boy awoke, again indulging in a sleepy, full-fisted rub of his eyes. He became agitated when he observed the Abbe inspecting his copybook. The Abbe silenced the objections with a question: "Where is your father? Why haven't you drawn him?"

"I do not remember what my father looks like." There was an edge to Claude's reply. Indeed, what was missing from his copybook was missing from his life. As if by conspiracy, Michel Page was never mentioned. The only hint of paternal legacy was hidden in the family portrait. "This is all there is," Claude said. He pointed to the telescope, the hookah, and the Dragon rug. These souvenirs told the story of Michel Page, a second-generation watchmaker.

As with an increasing number of the farmers trapped in winter by the windswept snows, Claude's grandfather had cut a window in the wall of the farm, set up a bench and chuck, and crafted timepieces in a land ruled by the sun and stars. He acquired the valley's secrets and transferred them to his son, Claude's father. Michel Page augmented these secrets during a polygonal tour of France. On his way home from apprenticeship, he met a sturdy Lyonnaise girl, a minister's daughter, whom he liked and promptly married. Juliette was uninterested in the devotions of the Church. She chose to dedicate herself instead to plants and children, which suited Michel Page perfectly. Returning from an almost somber wedding celebration overseen by Juliette's father, the young couple shared a coach with an enigmatic vizier. (Is there any other kind?) Michel Page struck a deal to construct a complicated watch reckoned to the Muslim lunar calendar. Other orders followed, and not long after, he made a six-month trip to Constantinople. He did well satisfying the Turkish love of astronomical watches. Pearls and blue-green enameling practically guaranteed profitable sale in Constantinople, and if not there, in Baghdad. His business expanded. He negotiated lucrative arrangements with Persian caravans that stopped in Smyrna and Aleppo. Silk for watch works. More deals were made. Michel Page befriended the people he needed to befriend, the French consul in Constantinople in particular, and was granted a concession normally unavailable to a man of his humble origins. He returned from the East with a pouch of silver piasters. He also brought back a hookah, a telescope, a carpet of fantastical design—called the Dragon rug by his children though it depicted no recognizable dragons—and stories of distant lands.

Claude loved the stories best. Michel Page mixed Eastern myths and local tales shamelessly. Travel had taught him to burp like a Chinaman, pass gas like a Prussian, and tap his head like a woodpecker pecking at the trunk of a hollow oak. He could even play little tunes on his teeth, until he lost a left incisor, a C-sharp, in a wineshop brawl outside the port of Toulon.

The stories stopped when Claude turned seven. Page pere kissed the forehead of Page fits and left for Geneva. From there, it was on to Besancon and beyond, a trip that would take him to the farthest reaches of the Turkish Empire. He never returned. Two years later, the Abbe brought news of his death. In his vast web of correspondence, he had learned of a devastating plague in Aleppo that had turned every fourth resident into food for worms. According to a trusted spice merchant, an unnamed watchmaker had been snatched up by the horrid malady. The Abbe wrote again, and in less than four months a letter arrived detailing the tragic end of Claude's father. "The tally stick of Michel Page," the merchant wrote in a postscript, "has been marked." No effects were returned except a watch of little value hiding gears of ingenious design. This was an important, if unrecognized, heirloom for the young boy.

Michel Page hadn't been a fool. Before leaving to conduct business with the Muhammedans, he had purchased an annuity for his wife. The receipt, a printed document with manuscript additions, was kept in an iron box near the chimney. He had paid 8,450 livres for an annual income of 650, which made the widow one of the richest residents in the community. Yet even with this wealth, she retreated to the forests, a kind but lonely woman, who, as Claude's drawings made clear, was happiest digging for roots by the light of a waxing moon. She spent substantial sums on the education of her children—they learned to read at an early age—and little on herself.

The Abbe shut the copybook. The feverish and unruly images appealed to his own scattered preoccupations. Many of the drawings reached beyond the borders of the page, as if the paper were not large enough to accommodate Claude's desires, as if his field of focus were at once too narrow and too wide. The Abbe worried that the talent displayed in the copybook had been, in a single stroke of the knife, severed. (Staemphli, with more exactitude, would have said the act necessitated three crosscuts of a surgical saw.)

The Abbe turned to Madame Page. "Before the operation, your boy had a skill that would have made his father proud. It must be retrieved. I wish to see him next session day."

Claude lost a finger that night but acquired something much more valuable: a patron and a mentor. Amputation had brought about attachment.

The patient did very little during the days that followed. Barricaded in the attic, he directed his attentions to his hand, a scabrous island surrounded by a pink-and-scarlet sea. He spent hours playing with the flap of flesh that was supposed to heal.

He refused to speak and controlled his immediate environment by flinging turnips and dried-up field mice at anyone who attempted to enter his lair. It was soon clear, however, that the hand was festering, and that the healing promised by the surgeon was not taking place.

Madame Page forced her way up the ladder and tended her son's wound despite his protestations. She made him take a wormwood drink, but the bitter taste, worse even than the opium, only provoked more hailstorms of rodentia. She switched to lemon-balm infusions, and still the fever rose. She applied a cabbage leaf bought at great expense from a hothouse near Geneva, hoping that as the leaf withered, the hand would grow strong.

It did not. As a last, desperate act, she employed a risky febrifuge known to produce quick and dramatic results. The fever finally broke, and after a fortnight of suffering, Claude's hand was clearly on the mend. The gauze was soon replaced by dossils, basil-laced clumps of lint. As the wound healed, however, the corruption appeared to move inward; that is, Claude's mood began to fester. He was so mournful that his mother likened him to the pasteboard pietas dispensed by Sister Constance. He refused to draw in the copybook during his convalescence. What imaginative power he retained was employed in thoughts of revenge against his elder sister, against the surgeon, against the world. In fitful dreams, he banished the surgeon to the Pompelmoose Atoll. He contemplated the use of bell-topped stalks of wolfsbane, the plant made famous by the poisoner of Passerale. He finally responded to Fidelity's taunts with the surreptitious application of a powerful laxative, which kept his sister bent-kneed in the bitterly cold outhouse for two days.

A month after the operation, the Abbe returned unexpectedly. He brought three winter pears from his orchards and a snake stone from the quarry that ran between the mansion house and the Page cottage. He gave a piece of fruit to each of the three children and made a special gift of the fossil to Claude. When he learned that Claude had not drawn since the fateful night, he administered a remedy far more efficacious than all those previously applied: praise. Taking hold of the copybook, the Abbe moved his spectacles to and from the sketches. "Excellent. Truly gifted. Your sister's nose hair is treated with great subtlety, though I must say you've been kind. Does your mother really hunch over so much? Perhaps she does. 1 hadn't noticed until you drew her. Am I so silly in appearance? Maybe 1 am."

Claude said nothing. He just rubbed his bandaged hand.

"Does it itch? If it does, I suggest you try using a nutmeg grater. Come down here and I'll show you. Then you can draw for me." Claude refused. "Stop all this self-pity and draw," the Abbe said. A piece of demi-royal materialized, and Claude was once again at the side of the rotund seigneur, seduced by his kind voice and tender touch. And, of course, by the sugar. He still refused to pick up a pencil.

"There is a myth, Claude, that hands are destiny. This is nonsense. Take Old Antoine, he's the finest watch-finisher in the valley. Have you seen his miserable extremities? Yet he can patch together the most delicate timepiece. Or take the Genevan miniaturist whose palsy forces him to paint by holding a brush in his rotted teeth, a technique developed after experimenting with the brush in his nose. Or Rumphius the mala-cologist. He completed the plates of his Thesaurus Cocblearum unaided. Not bad for a crippled blind man. And then there's Diirer; his Praying Hands almost make me a believer. You know, he suffered terrible warts."