Flamingo Boy

  “Rousel”, “grette”, “Capo”, “Val”, “Lot Lot” – these were just some of the words that he used, many of them quite often, words he clearly longed for me to understand. I could see he liked it when I repeated the words back to him. That was what made him happy. So that’s what I did. He liked me to be an echo. And I also learned early on with Lorenzo that he liked truth, that for him pretending between people, unless it was for fun, was not truthful, and that upset him.

  It took a while for me to begin to understand this strange, awkward man, who seemed to live so much of every day in a world of his own. He was like no one I had ever encountered before. He joined our world – the real world as we like to think of it – and left it as and when he felt like it. Everything he did was both spontaneous and meant. His words and his ways were his own. I was getting used to his language, his moaning, or groaning, or humming, to his sudden shrieks and shouts of exuberance, his bursts of laughter and clapping. I noticed that Ami, if he could, would follow Lorenzo everywhere he went, walking at his heels. Unlike me, he seemed to understand every word Lorenzo spoke, every gesture and grunt. Kezia too, I could see, understood him instinctively. I envied the closeness between the three of them, the complete understanding and trust. I felt an outsider sometimes, but they never treated me as such.

  Lorenzo had his own way of ending the day. He would be gone for an hour or so out on the farm, saying goodnight to the animals in his hospital, I presumed, or patrolling the marshes, looking for waifs and strays. When he came in, he rarely sat down at all, even to eat, but liked to stay in the room with us while we did. He would stand, watching the fire in silence, usually nibbling on a piece of sausage – he ate almost nothing else but sausage. When the moment came that he decided to go to bed, it always took me by surprise, even though I was expecting it. He would turn away from us, stop to crouch down for a while over Ami, touch him on his head, give him the last of his sausage, then, with a wave of his hand, walk very deliberately towards the stairs. As he went, he would lift his arms, make wide beating wings of them, and make his way upstairs, honking his farewell.

  Kezia and I would sit and talk by the fire, or sit together for a while in comfortable silence. I was by now much less tired than I had been.

  There was so much I wanted to ask her, about Lorenzo especially, but also about the photographs on the walls too, who everyone in them was, how the two of them had come to be living here together. I had asked her once about how she had learned to speak English, but still she had not told me. I was longing to find out. I was intrigued about everything, and I knew that time was short. Now I was up and about a bit more – though I was not yet allowed outside in that wind – I would soon have to think about leaving. I did not want to have to say goodbye before finding answers to all the whys and wherefores in my head.

  I had asked her more than once as well about the photographs on the walls, who everyone was, but Kezia simply said they were family, and would say nothing else. I felt that to ask again might be to intrude and upset her, and, after all she and Lorenzo had done for me, I did not want to do that.

  CHAPTER 6

  How it Was, How We Were

  As it turned out, I never had to ask her at all. One evening, as we were sitting there by the fire, just after Lorenzo had gone up to bed, Kezia started asking me questions. “Alors, Vincent. You must tell me something about yourself,” she said suddenly, quite unexpectedly. “In England, en Angleterre, where do you live? Have you any brothers or sisters at home? I know nothing about you. What have you been studying, Vincent? And what were you doing, by the way, wandering through the Camargue in the middle of the night? This I have always wanted to know.”

  I kept it short, told her only the essentials. I told her about home, about the boat picture on the wall in my bedroom, about how it had fallen off and nearly killed me, and the letter from my grandparents I had discovered on the back, about Vincent van Gogh and the Camargue, about my horrible exams, about how, once they were over, I had said goodbye to my mother, walked out of the door, rucksack on my back, free as a bird, and found my way down to the Camargue.

  Her eyes, I noticed, lit up when I told her that. “Bravo! I see you have the Roma spirit in you,” she said. “You are a wanderer, a traveller. I like that. And now that you have answered my questions, and I feel I know you a little better, maybe it is time for me to answer your question.”

  I did not know which question she meant. There were so many I wanted to ask by now. I must have looked rather blank.

  “Vincent, you do not remember? You asked me how I learned to speak English so well. Maybe you do not wish to know?”

  “No, no, please, I want to hear,” I told her.

  She sat back in her chair, hitched her shawl up around her shoulders, and looked across at me. “So much of everything that happens to us, Vincent, that makes our lives what they are, is just pure chance – le hasard, as we say in French. The families and times we are born into, the places we live. All chance. Think of it. Think of what happened to you. Because a picture falls off a wall, you find yourself wandering down a dark road to nowhere through the marshes of the Camargue, and you get sick, and Lorenzo happens to be out there with Ami on one of his evening patrols, looking for any abandoned fledgling flamingos, and they find you half dead on the road, and bring you here. So here you are, and here I am, with Ami, and Lorenzo. C’est le hasard, Vincent, just chance.

  “You know what they called Lorenzo when he was little, when I was little too, when I first knew him? Flamingo Boy. En fait, some people still do. You can understand why, I think. Lorenzo and me, we grew up here on this farm, together. We have known each other for almost all our lives. We were best friends from the day we met. And there was a very good reason for that. Lorenzo was different. I was different. It is not easy growing up different, not then, not now.”

  “I was wondering about that,” I said. “I mean about Lorenzo’s … well, about Lorenzo’s difference.”

  “Listen, Vincent.” She was reprimanding me now, with a frown and a wagging finger. “If you go on interrupting, I shall never even begin my story, let alone finish it, or I shall fall asleep telling it. You want to know everything, about Lorenzo, about us, about this farm. I understand that. You told me your story, which was quite short, but very interesting. So I shall tell you ours – that is only fair. But we are much older than you, both of us, and therefore it will take longer. I know from your passport you are just eighteen. Lorenzo and I, as I told you, we are the wrong side of fifty. So mine will be a longer story. Alors, Vincent, no more questions. Let me just tell you how it was, how we were, why I speak English, and why you find us together in this place.

  “It is a little cold tonight. It is uncomfortable weather. Too hot in the day, and cold at night. Put a log or two on the fire, Vincent, and then just lie back, be quiet and listen. No more interruptions, agreed? D’accord?”

  I did as I was told. Ami settled down to listen beside me, his eyes, and mine, never leaving Kezia, as she looked into the fire and began.

  “Renzo, Lorenzo Sully, was born upstairs, here in this farmhouse in the summer of 1932, on May the twenty-eighth. I remember this date rather well because I was born on the very same day, but not here. I was born thirty kilometres away, down by the sea. I am not sure exactly where, because being Roma people, travelling people – gypsies they call us in English, I think – my family was always on the move. So I was not to be part of Lorenzo’s story until a few years later. We were not to meet until we were nine years old. Until then, I was travelling here, there and everywhere, with Maman and Papa, in our caravan, setting up our carousel whenever and wherever they wanted us, on saints’ days and holidays, at fairs and festivals in villages and towns all over the Camargue. That was our life.

  Meanwhile, Lorenzo was growing up here on the farm with Nancy and Henri Sully, his maman and papa. They bred white horses, and black bulls, and kept some sheep too, for their wool and their meat and their cheese. They had spec
kled hens for their eggs. They gathered herbs from the countryside all around, and they fished in the lakes and streams and canals. And there were frogs there too. They had bees for honey. They grew some rice, potatoes and beans, and also corn to feed the black bulls through the winter. It is only a small farm, about fifty hectares, and they did all the work themselves.

  As you will hear, Nancy was later to become like an aunt to me – or more like a fairy godmother, I sometimes think. She told me often that, when Lorenzo was born, it was the greatest joy of their lives. He seemed a healthy child, always cheerful and loving. But then, when he was about two or three, they began to notice that he did not seem to want to get up and walk like other children, but sat there, watching the world go by. He was often bewildered and agitated, inconsolable sometimes, and for no reason they could understand. Neither was he learning to talk as other children did. Whenever they went into town, to Aigues-Mortes, which they did every week to set up their stall to sell their produce, other stallholders and customers would begin to comment on their beloved Lorenzo. They were not being deliberately unkind, but from time to time they did say that Lorenzo did not seem to be like other children.

  Becoming more and more anxious about him as the years passed, and upset by some talk in the town that was not so kindly meant, Nancy took him at last to the town doctor who examined him. He told her that Lorenzo was not developing as a normal child should, and informed her that there was an institution, in nearby Arles, for children like Lorenzo, where he could be cared for. When Nancy cried, the doctor simply said that these things happen, and that an institution was what would be best for the child. “Such strange and unnatural children,” the doctor told her – and she never forgot his words – “do not belong amongst normal people in normal society.”

  These words, Nancy always said, stopped her tears. Anger stopped her tears. She told the doctor: “This is my child, our child, and he belongs with us.” She never went to see that doctor again.

  At home, on the farm, Lorenzo grew up strong and happy, in his own way, at his own speed. He learned to walk – though he was never as coordinated as other children. His legs and arms always seemed too long for him to manage, and he found it hard to run, but grow he did. He grew and he grew.

  “He shot up as fast as a sunflower,” Nancy told me once, “and just as beautiful too!”

  Speech he also found difficult. But he loved to play with words, repeat them endlessly, rhythmically, whole sentences sometimes too, and he loved to sing, hum songs – words seemed to come easier to him when he sang them. Nancy and Henri soon realised he had a genius, a real genius, for imitating the sounds and movements of animals and birds, especially flamingos.

  He loved above all else to be outside with Nancy and Henri on the farm. He was strong, so always happy to fetch and carry. He liked to feel useful. He would bring fodder and water to the animals, and loved to stay close to them, crouching down to watch them as they fed. Everyone noticed that horses, bulls, sheep, hens were always calm around him. The wildest of black bulls, the fiercest of the white stallions needed only to hear him humming, to feel his touch on their neck, his breath in their nostrils, and they were as gentle as lambs.

  But it was the flamingos he loved to be with best of all. “Flam flam”, Nancy always said, were the first words he ever spoke. He would sit down for hours on end, in his favourite place – on an upturned rowing boat by the side of a lake – looking out over the island, just to be with them. His great treat as a little boy was to be rowed by his papa out to the island to be near the little flamingo chicks, watching them finding their legs, trying their wings. He would call to them and they would come to him. He knew instinctively how to tread softly, move slowly, be still amongst them, and become one of them. He loved them, and they trusted him.

  Whenever he came back in the boat, Nancy always told me, he would run about the farm like a flamingo, honking as they did, imitating their run through the shallows before take-off, the spread of their great wide wings, the stretching of their necks in flight and then their elegant landing, his timing as perfect as theirs. Nancy told me once that when Lorenzo was being a flamingo he was at his happiest, that he became who he really was, his natural self.

  And Lorenzo loved to ride. It was often the best way to get around the farm anyway, to move the bulls or see the brood mares, or to gather in the sheep, and, of course, to see the flamingos in the lakes all around. So whenever one of them went out on the horse – usually it was Henri – Lorenzo always had to go with him, whatever the weather, whatever the time of day. He loved to be up on that horse – Cheval, Lorenzo always called him – clinging on behind Henri, laughing and singing. Sometimes Nancy would be there too, all three of them riding together, with Lorenzo in the middle – rising and rocking to the rhythm of the ride.

  But they could never let him go riding on his own. He wanted to, longed to, but they dared not let him – he could not balance well enough. He had tried, often, but had always fallen off. It angered him and frustrated him, and when he was like that he would start to shout, to hit his head with his hands, and storm about the place, in a fit of rage, sometimes for hours on end before he calmed down.

  There was one horse, though, that he discovered he could ride. This is where I come into the story, and how I first met Lorenzo.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The Charbonneau Carousel

  “Lorenzo and I first saw one another on a spring morning forty years ago. It was market day in the town square in Aigues-Mortes, and holiday time for the children in town. Maman and Papa and I, we had spent all the day before setting up our beautiful carousel, the carousel that Papa had made with his own hands. He had carved all the animal rides himself, and Maman had painted them in bright colours, all the colours of the rainbow. Papa was very proud of it, so was she, and so was I, and so were all our Roma family.

  We always caused quite a stir wherever and whenever we arrived, our carousel in bits and pieces, piled up into carts behind us. Family and friends would all come along to help put it up. It is what we always did during the spring and summer months, Vincent. We travelled the countryside with our carousel. We would set up in a village maybe, or in a field on the edge of a town, anywhere they would let us. We were quite a tradition, I can tell you. Remember, Vincent, this was a very long time ago. There was no television, of course, no films either, or very rarely. Just the Charbonneau Carousel. We were the big attraction.

  But this was the first time we had ever brought the carousel to Aigues-Mortes. It was Papa’s idea. It was the biggest town around, he said. Business would be good there, with plenty of customers, lots of children, who might come again and again to have a ride on the carousel. We could stay for a while maybe. Maman liked the idea, as he knew she would. Roma families like us, travelling families, generally we like to keep moving on. But Maman always wanted to stay in a place longer than Papa. We Roma, Vincent, we have a saying. We like to follow the bend in the road, to be free to go where we want.”

  My heart leaped. I hadn’t told her my story of the old traveller and the policeman, and I so wanted her to know it now, that in a way it was following the bend in the road that had brought me here. But I did not dare interrupt her again. I would tell her later.

  “So that’s why we came to Aigues. We found a place for our caravan in a field down by the canal, just across the water from the town walls, where the horse had grass to graze, and water to drink. Honey, our horse was called. Unfortunately, I was the one who had to look after her, see she was fed and watered, pick out her hooves, groom her. Honey was not at all sweet. Badly named she was. Très méchant, ce cheval! She had a wicked temper. I never liked her and she never liked me. But for pulling the caravan she was the best horse we ever had.

  They let us set up our carousel in the square, under the shade of a great plane tree, close to the church and the cafés and the shops, right in the heart of the town. It was a perfect pitch for the Charbonneau Carousel. The town was busy, the people seem
ed friendly, and, as Papa had said, there were lots of children about, so the rides on the carousel were almost always full. On fine days, when the wind was not blowing, and the rain was not driving in, we did good business.

  We stayed there in Aigues-Mortes, of course, to earn money – everyone has to do that, Vincent, as I am sure you know. But there was another reason why Maman in particular was happy to stay put in one place much longer than usual, as I was soon to discover. Now that I was older – Maman broke the news to me soon after we arrived in Aigues – she told me we would be staying in the town long enough for me to be able to go to school for a while, to learn to read and write. And Aigues, she said, seemed the perfect place for me to start school. I never liked the idea at all. But Maman was very determined. So on weekdays I found myself, like it or not, going off to school, along with all the other children in town. But more of school later.

  After school, and at the weekends, I was still where I most wanted to be, working on the carousel in the town square with Maman and Papa. Papa turned the handle to make it go round. He was as strong as an ox, shoulders and arms as hard as wood. Maman took the money and played the barrel organ, and I helped the children up, and looked after them once the carousel was turning, making sure they did not fall off nor try to jump off while it was turning. But, best of all, I was the one who had to bring in the customers, tempt them in, and I had my own special way of doing it.

  I always chose Horse to ride, because he was the most popular. I would jump up on to his back, and, with the carousel turning, I would shout it out all over the square. “Roll up, roll up for the Charbonneau Carousel! Come along, come along! Have the ride of your life: on Lion, or Tiger, on Elephant, or Dragon, or Bull, or on Horse, this lovely white horse from the Camargue! Roll up, roll up!”