Human Traces

  On the other side of the stable wall, the pig grunted and moaned in its sty; Jacques turned from the door, his eyes wet, aware of something absent from his understanding of the world as he hurried back towards his father’s house.

  I want my brother back, he thought, as he scraped up the remains of the rabbit gravy from his plate. Tante Mathilde was sitting by the door again, intent on her sewing, while Grand-mère, the mother of Jacques’s own mother, who had died of childbed fever in the week of his birth, cleared the plates from the table and took them out with heavy steps to the parlour. Beyond it, she had a small room of her own with a bed and a chair and a washstand, which Rebière allowed her in return for her unpaid services as housekeeper.

  She was a person of few words in an almost silent household. Since Jacques had no memory of his mother, he could not revive her in the eyes or manner of Grand-mère; there was not so much as a drawing or daguerreotype of the first Madame Rebière, Isabelle, who had been twenty-seven years old when she died. Jacques loyally pictured her as slight, dark-haired, elegant in a white summer dress and with eyes full of laughter, though there was no reason to think she was any of these things; when he did ask Grand-mère about her she replied only that she was ‘a good girl’. Jacques had somehow, from glances or words exchanged between Grand-mère and his father, gained what people called an ‘impression’ that she had also been moody or in some way difficult, but it was less of an impression, Jacques thought, than an uncertain glimpse.

  He liked to make such distinctions, not because he was verbally precise, but because he was interested in the way things worked. An ‘impression’, on wax or metal, was draughtsmanship from which accurate images, unlimited in number, could be taken. His mother was something much vaguer, beyond even the abstract grasp of memory, yet still present, still an entity in his mind, a glimpse of a life withheld.

  He stood up and took his plate and the empty pewter mug out to the scullery to wash. The candles in their iron sconces threw shadows up the wainscoting and onto the discoloured ceiling, which showed in stripes between the grey-painted beams. Rebière’s parlour was furnished with unmatching pieces taken in part-payment from tenants who could not find their rent. There was a high-backed armchair, in which Tante Mathilde sat to catch the light from the candlesticks above the fire; a glass-fronted corner cupboard with some dusty crystal glasses, unused, reserved for a future occasion of unspecified grandeur. On the back wall, near the foot of the steep, unbanistered stairs, was a gilded mirror, whose glass was cracked, showing greenish-silver runs and shards incapable of reflecting the light of the dim candles back into the room. A framed painting in oil of an eighteenth-century nobleman of unknown family – certainly not a Rebière – gazed from the centre of the other wall on to his adopted home.

  Jacques had made a chair for the table in his room, using wood he found in the stables and tools he borrowed from the joiner in Sainte Agnès. The way things worked and fitted together was a joy to him, his passion in the quiet world. The joints of his chair were glued and fixed firm; the surface of the wood lapped up the oil and polishes he worked into it; the result was no work of art, but there was a pleasing concavity to the seat and it did not squeak or rock beneath his weight.

  With eagerness, he settled himself back into it, relit the candle and prepared to continue his experiment. He did not mind working at the jobs his father set him in the woods and fields because in the course of his day he had the opportunity to observe a good deal in the natural world that intrigued him. He collected birds’ eggs; he knew the names of every tree and plant; he was content to spend hours alone contemplating different kinds of moss. He had been – Tante Mathilde reminded him – an inexhaustibly curious child, and although he could no longer remember the questions that had irritated her, he recognised a feeling that continued from that time: his amazement that anyone could be so lacking in curiosity as his stepmother.

  He told her that the tides flowed and ebbed at the calling of the moon – a piece of information that seemed to him so exotic when he first heard it that he felt compelled to share it with everyone he knew; he described how plants used the energy of light to build new compounds and to grow; he assured her that even in deepest space all objects were in motion, following fixed laws of oddly simple mathematics.

  ‘And who’s going to pay for your new boots?’ said Tante Mathilde.

  There was a space of two or three years in which he was able to share his enthusiasm with his elder brother before other matters occupied Olivier’s mind. Old Rebière seldom spoke to his sons. He had never been a talkative man, but after his first wife died he became almost mute with them. Five years later, he married Mathilde, a woman of almost his own age, a person of no wealth and little charm, whose own family had long resigned themselves to seeing her die single in the village where she had been born.

  In Sainte Agnès, it was assumed that Rebière had hidden reasons for marrying again, and that Mathilde was expected to inherit money or would at least be set to work hard at home or in the business. Yet in the event, Rebière invited Grand-mère, his first mother-in-law, to keep house and refused to let Mathilde anywhere close to his own affairs; all he asked was that she make sure Olivier and Jacques went to the village school on time, properly dressed, and found no trouble on their way home. At night, in their shared room, the boys sometimes wondered out loud why he had married again.

  ‘Perhaps he was lonely,’ said Olivier.

  ‘He doesn’t seem lonely,’ said Jacques. ‘If he wanted company you’d think he’d talk to her.’

  Olivier laughed. ‘“This is not the time to talk,”’ he said in imitation of his father.

  ‘“Perhaps next month would be more appropriate. After All Saints.”’

  ‘“After quarter day. When the rents are in.”’

  ‘“Perhaps when we’re both safely dead. It would be improper to rush it.”’

  ‘But perhaps he really was lonely,’ said Jacques. ‘Why else would he have done it?’

  Olivier peered across the darkness at him. ‘Perhaps that’s it. Lonely.’

  There was silence in the room, and Jacques could feel a question rising up in him that he fought with all his strength to batten down.

  ‘Olivier?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you remember our mother?’

  ‘Yes . . . Not very well.’

  ‘Do you remember what she looked like?’

  ‘She was . . . pretty.’

  ‘Was she really pretty or do you think it was just that you loved her? Was she . . . Dark or fair? Short or tall?’ Jacques could barely speak for the jealousy he felt of Olivier; he had to drag out the word ‘loved’. He hesitated even to use the phrase ‘our mother’ because he had never known her; she was only Olivier’s mother, really. He launched the words, then lay shuddering at his audacity.

  ‘She was gentle. There was a feeling . . . of kindness.’

  ‘But I want to know about her in particular. Her voice. What did she smell of? Anything?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t . . . I just remember a feeling, a sense of someone. I’m sorry, Jacques. I never thought I’d have to remember – to store it up. I was only four. I feel I should have been warned.’

  ‘But at least you knew her. At least she touched your head. She kissed you goodnight. She held you.’

  ‘I’m sure she prayed for you, too. I’m sure she held you before she died.’

  Perhaps she did, thought Jacques, holding up the twin electrodes; or perhaps she was too feverish to know.

  Hold me before you die. Just once before you die. That was all he would have asked of her if he had been conscious at the time. Now, as Olivier travelled further into his own world, he took with him Jacques’s last chance of ever making contact with his mother’s memory.

  Jacques removed the pins from the splayed feet of the frog and touched the electrodes to the part of the thigh where he could see the femoral nerve, as thick as a piece of fishing line.

  ‘
Good God!’ he said out loud, as the creature leapt off the table and landed on the floor beside him. It was as though the frog was alive. Jacques bent down to pick it up again. His face was illuminated, even in the gloom of his bedroom, by the light of discovery.

  ‘This is more like it,’ said the Curé, as they left the sanded path between the pine trees and went down on to the stony beach. ‘Do you like the curlews? You see? There.’

  ‘Have you always been interested in animals?’ said Jacques.

  ‘For me,’ said the Curé, Abbé Henri, ‘the natural world is part of the love of God. But I was a naturalist even before I was a priest.’

  A gust from the sea made him reach up to clamp his wide-brimmed hat down on to his head, as a smile broke over his smooth and eager face. ‘It would be a sort of blasphemy to be indifferent to such a miracle of design.’

  ‘You don’t know my Tante Mathilde.’

  ‘Of course I do. She was at mass this morning.’

  Jacques bent down to the shore and picked up a stone. ‘But you don’t know what she’s like. She has no interest in anything beyond her sewing. I don’t even think she’s interested in money, or the other things you warned us about.’

  ‘What does she do all day, your Tante Mathilde?’

  ‘I don’t know. I go out to work so I don’t see her. She used to get us ready for school and cook dinner in the evening. But now Grand-mère does the cooking.’

  ‘But she must at least enjoy books?’

  Jacques laughed. ‘Tante Mathilde? She can’t read!’

  The Curé looked shocked, as though he had never heard of such a thing, though Jacques knew that most of his congregation was illiterate. Perhaps the Curé still needed time to grow used to the countryside.

  ‘And how did you manage with the electrical bottle I lent you?’

  ‘It was marvellous! I made my frog jump up and down as though he was alive. He jumped once right over . . .’ Jacques became suddenly aware that he was sounding like a child and not the man of science he aspired to be; he felt himself blush a little beneath the wind. ‘I must let you have it back.’

  ‘Ah yes, the nervous system. I used to think the knee joint one of the finest anatomical creations, but now I think this system of minute signals, far too small for us to see, may be the masterpiece.’

  The velvet ribbons of the Curé’s hat were whipping across his face as they walked on towards the headland. ‘And what did you learn from your jumping frog?’

  Jacques was unsure. ‘That an electric current joins the nerves to the muscles . . . That this current can be reproduced by static electricity stored in a b-bottle.’ He was inclined to stammer when he was nervous.

  The Curé smiled. ‘It is almost a hundred years since frogs were first made to twitch. An Italian gentleman had laid out a specimen for dissection and noticed that sparks from an electrostatic machine nearby were making the dead creature dance. Such effects could also be produced during thunderstorms, so he naturally assumed it was the result of electricity in the atmosphere. But then, later on, he discovered that some movements would also occur if he joined the nerve and the muscle with a piece of metal. And what do you think he concluded from that?’

  Jacques was anxious not to disappoint. ‘I suppose . . . you must conclude that the metal was conducting a force that existed in the animal.’

  ‘Exactly!’ said the Curé. ‘Animal electricity.’

  Jacques allowed himself a smile at having reached the right conclusion.

  ‘But he was wrong,’ said the Curé. ‘Signor Galvani – that was the name of our frog man – had a friend called Volta. Signor Volta used to make electricity pass through his tongue. He was sure that it was the charge in his own flesh that was the source of the current that flowed between two coins above and below his tongue. Then he had a clever idea. In place of his tongue he tried a piece of cardboard soaked in seawater – and the current still flowed. No flesh, no tongue, no frog! What do you think of that, Jacques?’

  ‘The source of the current must be . . . elsewhere,’ said Jacques, non-committally.

  Abbé Henri stopped and took his arm. ‘Well. Galvani had one more trick up his sleeve. He made a frog’s muscle contract by touching it with the nerve of another frog. So he showed that animal tissue does contain electrical forces.’

  ‘Does that include human tissue?’ said Jacques.

  ‘I imagine so, my dear Jacques. It would be sad to think that we lacked such dynamic forces as God has granted to the animal world.’

  ‘So . . . Galvani was right. If nerve cells do carry electrical charges, then—’

  ‘Not in the way that Galvani suggested,’ said the Curé. ‘Volta was right that there was no such thing as animal electricity.’

  ‘No. Galvani was right.’

  ‘Really, Jacques, you must try to calm yourself. If you are too passionate and too hasty, you will never become a true scientist.’

  ‘I am sorry, Father.’

  They had reached the end of the beach, where rocks ran down from the headland into the sea; above them was a single larch tree, stripped and beating in the wind.

  ‘Do you ever think how long these rocks have been here?’ said Jacques sullenly.

  ‘These ones?’ said the Curé. ‘I am not familiar enough yet with your terrain. Weren’t they placed here by a curse or a witch or some angry king when his lover plunged beneath the waves?’

  ‘We are not all ignorant and superstitious here, Father. Not all Bretons are like that.’

  ‘Forgive me.’ He looked at the boy with wary indulgence.

  ‘I want to understand, Father.’

  ‘I know. Let us walk back along the beach. It’ll be getting dark soon. If you like, you can come and have supper at my house, after vespers. Will your parents allow that?’

  ‘My father locks the door at nine. I must be back by then.’

  Abbé Henri’s housekeeper left some extra food out at his request for the young visitor: some pieces of ham given by a parishioner for whose late father the Curé had said a special mass; soup she made by crushing potatoes and leeks into liquid spooned from the Curé’s meagre stockpot and some ewe’s milk cheese from the market.

  Back from vespers, Abbé Henri loosened the top button of his soutane, unbuttoned his boots and put on a pair of slippers that his housekeeper had left by the fire. He prodded at the embers and threw on a couple more logs; then he straightened the knives and forks on the table and sat down to wait for his guest.

  Jacques Rebière was not the kind of young man he had expected to find in this remote country parish, where most of his congregants, though pleasingly devout, confined their speculations to the likelihood of rain or the size of the fishermen’s catch. He was aware, only a few weeks after arriving from Angers, of being scrutinised one day in church as he preached. He allowed his own gaze to wander down the pews until it met two large brown eyes, unblinking beneath black brows, set in a thin, chalky face. The boy immediately looked down, embarrassed to have attracted the Curé’s attention by his stare, but Abbé Henri was amused and sought him out after the service.

  He quickly established from the stammering boy that he had finished early with his education in order to work for his father – a peasant, it seemed, with bourgeois longings, who had had neither the wit nor the good fortune to realise them. Old Rebière had apparently failed to see that encouraging his son at his studies might have provided a swifter route to respectability and wealth than pressing him into work.

  The Curé’s own education had been interrupted at a later stage, just before he was able to complete his medical studies. He had been driving in a coach late at night, on his way back from a dinner given for a departing professor in Orléans, when he received the call of God. He was looking through the window at the darkened countryside, thinking idly of when he might next see his father in order to ask him for more funds, when a fellow-passenger, sitting next to him, began to speak. She was a coarse woman in plump middle age with a greas
y bonnet who told a story of how she had been abandoned by her husband, taken up by another man, for whom she had borne a child, then deserted once more. It was not an unusual or particularly interesting story, and young Jules Henri found himself wondering what he might tell of the woman’s health by daylight; he imagined a high colour to go with her obesity and her whining voice and presumed she would shortly ask him for money, which he was not in a position to supply. He edged away a little, able to follow her story with half an ear. The following week he would hear the last of his lectures on physiology, and shortly after that would begin to search for a place as a hospital resident. Life was a challenge, a hill he felt vigorous enough to climb.

  He looked back to the woman in her dark corner of the coach and felt a profound and disabling emotion pour through him. He had lost his sense of her as a second person, a source of minor irritation, and experienced a sudden and irresistible feeling of identity with her. It was more than sympathy, something far less polite; it seemed as though his blood was in her veins and that her despair was the charge that animated his perception of the world. Her position was hopeless; he was obliged to bear her pain; both of them were connected in some universal, though unseen, pattern of humanity. His obligation was not to diagnose her but to love her; while his greater duty was to the larger reality, that place outside time where their connection had been made, the common ground of existence into which he had been granted a privileged glimpse.