The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (36 page)
Authors: Carl-Johan Vallgren
They parted company that same afternoon, Wilson on his way to Sicily where he was to attend a meeting with Italian nationalists to whom he was to teach the new socialistic ideas by which they could build a better state, based on justice and basic human worth. As they said farewell, they knew it was for good.
In September that same year Hercule Barfuss took the stagecoach to Paris. He’d decided to look in on the Institute for the Deaf in Rue des Moulins, the school Wilson had told him about.
At that time this Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets was the world centre for methodical sign language. Hercule arrived at the end of the month with a written recommendation from Barnaby Wilson, and was immediately taken on as a student.
It was during his stay in Paris that his lifelong conviction about the superiority of the visual teaching technique as compared to the oral was founded. In no time at all he learned French sign language, though signing with his feet complicated the grammar. All his life he would be an embittered opponent of the German School, where the emphasis was on teaching the deaf to lip-read and use their speech organs. One event in particular made a deep impression on him. Twenty years later he wrote of it:
During one of my first lessons I witnessed the following: a teacher, trained by the grammarian Sicard, was to prove the excellence of the visual method for a representative of the French Academy of Sciences. Standing at the teacher’s desk, he dictated a text – I think it was a poem by Victor Hugo – using methodical signs for the students, who were seated in the classroom in such a way that they couldn’t see each other’s papers. There were five of them: four lads and an exceptionally beautiful girl. As the teacher dictated to them in sign language they wrote down what they “saw” him say, and this in no fewer than five languages, one for each student. The girl wrote in Latin. The boys in French, German, Italian and English. The representative for the Academy was stunned by the result. Of course he knew that sign language uses neither letters nor words, but concepts, which – on condition you know them – can be written down in whatever language you are familiar with. But what really amazed him – and me too – was the level of language education among the school’s students, far above the average at a French
lycée
It was also during his time in Paris that he began to understand that grammar is universal and can be adapted to the eye as well as to any other sense:
The teachers, as well as the students among themselves, used depictive signs (“fire” and “horse” were the first two I picked up), signs reproducing movement, indicative and arbitrary signs. Plural was indicated by a repetition of the basic sign, the definite form was signed by a slight indication after the sign, the verbs were inflected to all the various tenses in French by the addition of different signs to the present – all of this grammatical usage I was of course already familiar with through reading, but now it took on new meaning and greatly widened my horizons. It even occurred to me that dialects could arise within sign language, and that the idiom used by non-hearers was the universal language man had dreamed of since the beginning of time.
It was in Paris, too, with the school chaplain and headmaster, he said his first prayer in sign language, the Lord’s Prayer.
He remained at the Institute half a year. He maintained contact by corresponding with some of the teachers. The school’s destiny continued to be close to Hercule’s heart until the end of his days.
He left in March 1838, having by then laid the foundations for a perfect understanding of sign language. Love was the fundament his life rested upon; love for the dead girl who no longer belonged to any place in particular.
A new continent awaited him, and a new existence. In Martha’s Vineyard.
A postscript for Miss Vogel and other initiates
LOVE, IN EARLY
Egyptian poetry, is symbolised by a peculiar three-part hieroglyph. It consists of a hoe, a mouth and a male figure holding his hand to his mouth. The first Egyptologists wondered if Pharaonic love was a kind of labour demanding tools and a gardener’s patience. Or perhaps love didn’t exist before there was a way of expressing it? Some asked themselves jokingly if love’s dwelling was in the chest? And, for fear it might fly away with a careless word, the man was holding his hand to his mouth.
Perhaps, Miss Vogel, there was something to that point of view, since the Egyptians also happened to be the first to equate love with the heart: “My brother seduces my heart with his voice”, a poet has a woman exclaim. So love’s abode was in the heart, and the voice was the tool to unlock it. On terracotta vases and papyrus scrolls people lose their hearts, or feel them break from unrequited love, and the pain is unbearable.
In his twilight years, when Hercule Barfuss concluded the long educational journey that had brought him all the way to the drawing rooms of the learned in America, he was to write a letter to one of his grandsons who was at that time involved in taking a licentiate examination in classical languages at Harvard:
Hieroglyphics are, as you know, the foremost of all written languages, being capable, in one and the same symbol, of reproducing an image and expressing abstractions. Hieroglyphics are the true alphabet of the deaf.
In one of his work journals Barfuss makes the observation that sickness as a metaphor for love first appears in the “Song of Songs”. “Refresh me with raisin cakes, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love,” cries the speaker, King David. But the theme persists like a scarlet thread throughout the history of love poetry. Together with Plato’s thoughts, it forms the basis for our experience of passion.
In Plato’s
Symposium
the following story is told about love’s origins. In prehistoric times there was neither man nor woman, instead there were various blends of the two. They had two faces, four arms, four legs, four feet, and so on; they were attached back to back and therefore able to go both backwards and forwards. Some consisted of two male parts, others of two female parts, and a third group, the largest, was half-male, half-female. These four-legged primaeval beings, Plato says, were so power-mad that they constituted a threat to the gods. So Zeus decided to divide them into two, thereby diminishing their power. Thus man and woman were created.
But once their original form had been divided, they were driven by a longing to be reunited. Thus Plato, and later on Barfuss, describes love as the desire to merge and grow together.
“Each and every one of us is only half of what used to be a human being,” he was to write. “The pleasure of romantic love is not in itself enough to account for the strength of lovers’ feelings. Love is the search for the lost half, and the striving to merge with it. For ever.”
For our ancestor, Miss Vogel, this was a truth whose incontestability could measure itself against the greater laws of nature. During his last year in Europe he’d heard Henriette Vogel speak to him, and this had been his life’s pivotal moment. The conviction that love continues beyond death had changed him. His hatred and lust for revenge had disappeared overnight, as had his unfathomable sorrow.
On several occasions my father, John Barefoot, retold the story for me in sign language, using the gesture for love in which both palms of the hands are pressed lightly against the heart, and the sign for eternity, the right forefinger drawing circles horizontally from left to right. He explained that Barefoot was convinced he would meet her again in an existence beyond our earth-bound one. Nothing could shake him in this belief, and until his dying day, he lived with the conviction that love, no less than matter, is indestructible. “Just as matter can be converted into energy,” he observed, “and energy into matter, so love persists, indestructibly, throughout eternity.”
His experience in Vienna he ascribed wholly to love as a force powerful enough to overcome death. But his certainty that he would meet his beloved again didn’t make life on earth any the less meaningful. On the contrary, he lived his remaining years to the full, as if each and every one might be his last.
The revelation had also influenced his decision to leave Europe. In March 1838 he left Calais on a steamship bound for Liverpool, and on his arrival there booked his passage through a Belgian agent to New York. The price was thirteen pounds and included third-class board and lodging on the schooner
St Mary
. Like so many other travellers to the Americas, he spent the night in a hotel on Duke Street, while waiting to sail.
On the evening of April 24, a final divine service was held on the quayside, and the day after, at dawn, the ship lifted her anchor. From where he was standing on the foredeck he saw the English port spread itself out, the last glimpse millions of people were to have of the Old World, before it was enveloped in a mist as the ship headed out across the Irish Sea.
This was the same year the paddlewheel-driven Atlantic steamship, the
Great Western
, accomplished the crossing in a record-breaking fifteen days, before Samuel Cunard founded the first passenger line for regular crossings between England and the United States, before the era of mass emigration some decades later, when Iman, Dominion, National and the White-Star shipping companies all competed for the crossings of millions of Europeans leaving everything they possessed behind them in order to make a new life for themselves in “the land of opportunity”.
But Barfuss doesn’t seem to have noticed the lack of comfort or dreariness of a crossing that took six weeks, the dead calm on the fortieth degree of latitude, the seasickness or the unpalatable food. Instead, in his diary entries made during the crossing, he writes enthusiastically about life on board. He is captivated by the sea, admires the ship’s technical equipment, its deadeyes, blocks, square topsails and their tackle, he makes sketches of masts and spars, and tries to familiarise himself with procedures involving log lines and charts and other navigational instruments.
The schooner was a reconstructed brig, launched in Hull in the 1810s on behalf of a slave-trading company. It had four masts. The passenger count was 240. They came from all corners of Europe and comprised no fewer than seventeen different nationalities.
In the ship’s logbook the captain wrote about an epidemic of jaundice and a few cases of scurvy among the Irish. Most of the passengers were plagued by seasickness, as well as scabies and lice. The ship’s rats behaved shamelessly and stole food from the hands of careless children.
The men, among them Barfuss, slept in hammocks on the ‘tween deck. Astern was a department for women and families. The areas were screened off with hanging drapes.
Barfuss seems to have made a friend in the
St Mary
’s carpenter. He writes about “my new-found friend Richards who has taken me under his protection and shown me around the ship”. A sailmaker, by the name of Waddington, too, seems to have taken pity on him. Perhaps they thought he was a handicapped child? Nothing is said about how people reacted to his appearance, his deafness or his eating and writing with his feet, nothing about the thoughts he picked up from his fellow travellers. Maybe they simply were all too caught up in the excitement to adhere to old patterns of behaviour?
His longing for the new country grew with each sea mile they put behind them. He writes about the “new life” which is about to start, and his faith “in a better future”.
The
St Mary
must have sailed before favourable east winds. In his logbook, the captain records a maximum speed of seventeen knots. Barfuss spends a lot of time on the poop, looking out at the horizon surrounding him on all sides. Of the sea he heard nothing, nor did he hear the flapping of sails and ventilators, or the wind and the sea birds that began appearing as they approached the east coast of America. But his other senses, he felt, were wide open.
On May 27 the ship put in to New York harbour. The journey had been normal by the standards of the day. From the original figure of 240 passengers, 238 were alive. One child and three old people had died during the crossing, but a Scandinavian woman had given birth to twins. Nothing of this is mentioned in Barfuss’ notes. Nor, it’s true, is there any mention in the ship’s logbook of deformity or deafness and dumbness. Just the births and deaths. And a sailor who had been washed overboard in a storm just south of Iceland.
When Hercule Barfuss arrived in New York the stream of immigrants had not yet reached the level that some two decades later would cause the still-young American state to set up an immigration authority. Several decades more would come and go before the buildings on Castle Garden and Ellis Island were built in order to facilitate the administration of the enormous hordes of people arriving daily in the new land. When the schooner SS
St Mary
cast anchor in Upper New York Bay at dawn on May 27 there were no persons in authority waiting for her passengers. The travellers were transported in small steamboats to the harbour, or, more precisely, to the small area on the southern tip of Manhattan nowadays called Battery Park.
It was a very hot morning, a heatwave having swept in from the west. The health inspectors and passport-control officials were as yet but a dream nurtured by suspicious bureaucrats. There were no waiting rooms or delousing halls, no chalk lines drawn on the trunks or labels pinned to the nervous immigrants’ clothes by uniformed officials. A few lodging houses flanked the quayside. Some “runners” from various hotels and routes met the passengers on the gangway, holding out tickets to the riverboats and contracts for mining concessions in the great lakes up north.
In the ship’s passenger list, preserved at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Hercule Barfuss is listed as passenger #67. His name is written in capitals. There is no mention of nationality. What is noted is that he lacks an emigration passport from a European authority and that he is deaf and dumb.
