The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (13 page)

It was in this mood they had settled into their quarters – a guest room in an annexe to the brethren’s Hospital del Santo Spirito, a humble chamber in the quarters closest to St Peter’s Church, furnished like a monastery cell, its only window looking out on to a backyard in everlasting shadow.

In the daytime Schuster had disappeared to attend meetings. After spending hours with clerical officials in the Vatican offices, he would return late at night, depressed and restless. Hercule could awake to find him lying sleepless on his bunk, staring at a damp spot on the ceiling. Not until dawn did sleep take him by surprise amid his guilty feelings at not being able to gather his thoughts into a prayer.

Of the plans Abbot Kippenberg had made over their heads, Hercule still knew nothing. But Schuster, with antennae honed by a long and dangerous life, seemed to intuit them. Hercule, on the contrary, was still swept up by the
joie de vivre
that had finally liberated him, and by the belief that, if he was patient enough, he would sooner or later find his Henriette.

That afternoon it was with a child’s curiosity about existence and a feeling of invulnerability that he went to the Piazza Navona, where the Holy St Agnes had once prayed for her persecutors. It was there the phantom voice, for a reason he still didn’t understand, had started speaking to him.

Driven by an overwhelming curiosity, Hercule had followed on through alleys of the Ponte Parlone quarter. Dusk was falling. Far away over the Alban hills a storm was brewing as they passed through passages so narrow and so densely crowded that their inhabitants had ceased to interest themselves in each other’s secrets. Zigzagging through the trade quarters, they passed butchers’ shops and tanneries, taverns where drunks were playing cards, prostitutes on the lookout for the night’s first customers. Agile as a cat, the boy he was following had slipped through the throngs, climbing over sleeping drunks, slinking in between carriage wheels and mules and pushing on ahead in so matter-offact a manner that the city could well have been a part of his own clothing. Twice Hercule lost sight of him, but at the very moment he’d given up hope of again seeing his guide, he found him waiting at the next street corner.

At the Piazza Farnese their path was barred by a funeral procession. Hercule was just about to catch up with his diminutive cicerone when the latter suddenly raised his hand in a gesture that told him not to come close and in his mind whispered very clearly to him:
Keep your distance, it isn’t good for creatures like us to draw too much attention to ourselves!

He obeyed, but without understanding why this rule should make them play cat-and-mouse like this.

They went on along the wall until they got to the Jewish ghetto, whose gates were guarded by soldiers, its inhabitants being forbidden to leave the area after sundown. Turning left at the via Giulia, they followed the Tiber’s bank with its shellfish stalls, its lotteries, its invalids and ragamuffins holding out their begging bowls to passers-by, and so carried on eastwards until they got to the Forum.

Here, among the ruins of ancient Rome, cows were grazing, shepherds lay sleeping on the plinths of Corinthian columns, and an unnatural fog hung over everything, as if in a painting by some befuddled artist. Darkness fell abruptly. Once more, by the remains of an antique villa below the Palatine Hill, the other boy stopped to wait for him. They were alone now, no-one else was in sight, and he beckoned to Hercule to follow. Thrown aside on the floor of what had once been a mosaic-inlaid patio of a consular palace lay the cover from a well. His guide disappeared into the darkness and Hercule heard him say:
Creatures like us are better off underground. Don’t be afraid . . . follow me . . . but keep close, or you’ll be lost
.

Later he was to realise that it was down into Rome’s catacombs they’d climbed, though at the time he had supposed them to be a widely ramified, multi-layered cellar. He was astonished by the maze, corridors going off to right and left, the smell of thousand-year-old mildew and woodlice fleeing at the sound of footfall. The boy had lit a lantern, and Hercule followed without asking any questions.

At one point in these subterranean halls, where the dead exhaled hoarse whispers in Latin and the ghosts of Roman soldiers roamed in hope of finding a way out, they came to a crypt filled with human bones. Cowled skeletons stretched out bony hands to them, clung to yellowing scythes fitted together of vertebrae; held out worm-eaten hourglasses fashioned from infants’ collarbones. All this reminded Hercule of his own mortality; he would never find his way out again if he lost sight of his guide. Chandeliers made of human jawbones hung from the ceiling, enormous ornaments likewise made of vertebrae covered the walls, reassembled skeletons of children rested peacefully under the vaults of prehistoric thigh bones.

Delving ever deeper into this labyrinth they took a left turn, then a right, until after wandering for half an hour along humid tunnels filled with mysterious shadows cast by non-existent creatures, and where times and epochs criss-crossed in utmost confusion, Hercule found himself standing in a hall illuminated by oil lamps. When his eyes had adjusted to this sudden gleam, Hercule saw that he was standing in the midst of a troupe of extraordinary-looking people.

We’re all monsters
, his enigmatic cicerone whispered inside him. And with a theatrical gesture, as if on stage in front of a many-headed audience, removed his mask.

It wasn’t a boy who faced them after all. It was a full-grown man, albeit of exceedingly short stature. And Hercule understood immediately why he wore a mask. Right in the middle of this little man’s forehead was one single eye, as on the mythological cyclops.

The man who had led the way down through Rome’s meandering catacombs really was a cyclops. His name was Barnaby Wilson. The single eye in the centre of his forehead was a result of some congenital human deformity, not a result of being descended from the monsters who ate humans for breakfast in Homer’s verses. A native of the Welsh village of Llanerchymedd, Wilson, since losing his family at the age of seven in the great Cardiff fire, had been blown like a leaf in the winds of fortune, hither and thither throughout Europe. Just now he was the leader of one of Italy’s more obscure variety shows, a travelling troupe of more than thirty people who kept starvation at bay by exhibiting their hideous abnormalities for money.

In his later years Hercule would write about Wilson in connection with the unification of Italy; a period when Wilson acted as counsellor to Garibaldi himself, a position that suited him perfectly, since he, possessing as he did an inexplicable foreknowledge of the enemy’s secret plans, was able to disclose them even before they’d had time to be dispatched by courier. But all that was much later on, and at the time when Hercule first made his aquaintance Wilson was fully occupied with his travelling show.

What Hercule witnessed that evening in Rome moved him deeply, inasmuch as he for some reason had always lived in the belief that he was unique, alone not only with his gift, but also in his appearance. Judging by people’s reactions to him, he’d had no reason to believe otherwise than that such misfortune really was his alone. Never before had he met another real-life monster, but all this changed in the lamplight as one by one he was introduced to Barnaby Wilson’s protégés.

They surpassed anything Hercule could ever have imagined. There was a hermaphrodite, inspiringly named Gandalalfo Bonaparte and said to be Emperor Napoleon’s bastard child, and a girl with yellow curls named Miranda Bellaflor, in whose mouth four tongues vied for space. There were the twins Louis and Louise who had been joined at the waist since birth, who always spoke simultaneously and were often at furious odds with each other. And then, of course, there was Barnaby Wilson himself, the cyclops who, like Hercule, was endowed with the gift of mind-reading.

There were quite a few in the group who possessed unusual and unexplained talents and who, with the passage of time, had added greatly to the troupe’s reputation as it travelled throughout Italy from one market place to the next. Leon Montebianco, for example, was said to see as far back in history as ten thousand years and thus was able to search for the lost city of Troy. His testimony had proved to be so exact that on the one occasion when the German geographer-to-be Schliemann witnessed, as a child, a performance, he’d taken him at his word, and half a century later, after only a single thrust of his spade into an insignificant hill by the Hellespont, had discovered the site as predicted by Montebianco. There was Signora Ramona who every month since her fifteenth birthday had taught herself to speak a new language fluently, and was therefore able to write love letters in 116 known languages. There was the woman who could turn any type of base material into gold, and the Turkish poet whose single leg was covered in a scorching hot snakeskin, so hot you could light your cigar on it! Another member of this company was the Provençal dwarf Lucretius III, self-taught master of the art of handling a magic lantern, who by using a complex system of mirrors could display the most lifelike phantasmagoria of famous historical figures. But all these people’s gifts, Barnaby Wilson explained with great authority, were no more than nature’s compensation for their physical defects.

Years later, looking back on that night and at its subsequent tragic epilogue in Genoa, Hercule would understand that for the first time in his life he had come home. These were his fellow beings, brothers and sisters whose misfortunes were only relative and inspired in each other a melancholy sense of affinity. They too had been sacrificed on nature’s callous altar and existed for no weightier reason than as a warning to an age that believed the seed could be accursed for seven generations should some forefather have signed a contract with the powers of darkness.

As the hours went by, Barnaby Wilson told him about his wards, about their experiences of life on the outskirts of human existence; about their humiliations, sufferings and persecutions, about lunatic asylums; but also of the happiness they had found in one another, and of the fantastic laurels they had won by placing their gifts at the disposal of his travelling company.

Inspired by their story, Hercule gave a complete account of his own life. In the telepathic manner commanded by both of them from earliest childhood, he told Wilson of his childhood, his years in the asylum, his stay in the Jesuit monastery and everything that had happened there; about the peasants who’d taken him for a miracle worker and the monks who had suddenly been beset by doubt; in short, all the events that, in accordance with life’s implacable consequences and its refusal to state any alternatives, had brought him to Rome. And, not least, he told of Henriette Vogel, the girl-child he hadn’t seen since their eleventh year of life, but who had not been out of his thoughts for a single moment, who gave his life true meaning, who was the alphabet of his dreams and the meridian of his longing.

Moved by his tale, Barnaby Wilson invited him to join their troupe. That very morning they would be setting off with their appalling deformities and magical talents in fifteen canvas-covered wagons to bring joy to Calabrian villages, all for an entrance fee of two centesimi a head. This, the circus director guessed, would increase Hercule’s chances of finding the girl by several hundred per cent.

Hercule thought long and hard over this generous offer from a man he’d met for the first time only a few hours before and who seemed motivated by nothing but compassion for his brothers and sisters in misfortune. But in the end, feeling himself indebted to Schuster, he declined.

That same morning, with a deep sense of melancholy, he left the remarkable group of people. As they emerged from beneath the earth at the Forum the light of dawn could already be discerned behind the Colosseum. Holding up a finger no bigger than a child’s, Barnaby Wilson pointed him in the direction of Borgo Santo Spirito on the other side of the river. The cockerels of the Eternal City had united in a song that Hercule interpreted as signifying a final separation. But he was mistaken.

IN THE SAME
twilight hour as the phantom voice had begun talking to Hercule on the Piazza Navona, Julian Schuster had found himself in the Vatican in a papal stateroom in a magnificent building between the Belvedere palace and the Ethiopian College. He was listening with growing anxiety to what Cardinal Aurelio Rivero had to say about his protégé.

“This, Schuster, is undoubtedly a sensitive matter, and it must be solved in a manner satisfactory to all concerned. The general of your Order of brethren is following our investigations with great interest, and trusts us to bring the whole matter to a satisfactory conclusion. I suggest we as soon as possible carry out an examination of the boy in accordance with the rules laid down by Martín del Río.”

Cardinal Rivero, responsible for the brethren’s special commission in the fight against heresies, topped up Schuster’s wine glass, to remind him of the differences between the monastic way of life and that of their representatives in the Vatican.

“We are, even so, living in the nineteenth century,” Schuster made so bold as to say. “Not even in America did we cling to the
Recherche de Magique
!”

“New times, admittedly. But personally I draw quite other conclusions from this so-called ‘development’. With all due respect to reason, was it not the men of the Enlightenment who had us banned? Let me be honest: we must consolidate the power restored to us by the politicians, as a result of the Restoration.”

Schuster picked up an olive from the tray the Cardinal pushed over to him, but then, feeling he’d just overcome a temptation, replaced it.

“Your Eminence, what do you mean when you say the problem must be solved?”

“Hasn’t Abbot Kippenberg told you of our plans?”

“My task was to bring the boy to Rome for you to take a look at him. There was never any mention of
plans
.”

Rivero gave him a look that laid claim to a knowledge of details beyond an outsider’s horizon.