Mister Memory Read online

  Marcel thought about the doctor’s idea. He thought about it for a long week, during which, had anyone been present to see him, they would have found him sitting on an old chair in the kitchen, staring into space, or standing at his parents’ bedroom window, gazing out across the vineyards. No one could have known what was going through his mind. Nevertheless, at the end of the week, he somehow decided to act. The house was sold with all the furniture, debts were cleared, a trunk was packed, train timetables consulted. And sooner than he could have imagined, it was time to go.

  Marcel arrived in Paris, as the expression has it, like a flower. Naïve and trusting, open and guileless, the city might have destroyed him. He arrived in the spring of ’89, too late to help construct anything, and yet there was still plenty of work to be had. He found an apartment in the Latin Quarter, the cheapest he could find, on the sixth floor in the little passage known as the Cour du Commerce, and he started his life over again.

  He worked!

  He worked as a kitchen hand, a porter, a ticket collector, a doorman. He cleaned tables in cafés, dug ditches, swept the streets, and in all these jobs, the same result: the sack. No matter how simple the task he was given, it seemed he could not focus. He would be found staring into space as if deep in thought. He would stare at a chair, or a poster on the wall, and once it had happened often enough in each occupation, he was told to leave.

  Still his memory remained undetected, but not for much longer, because his fortunes were to improve. Somehow, he got a junior position in a newspaper office. His job was another simple one, involving the adjustment of two small screws mounted into the frame on the top of the printing cylinder, to control the blackness of the type. Too little pressure and the type would be illegible, too much and it would be blotched. He seemed able to do this delicate but extremely boring task with great skill, and for once his employer, the perpetually bewildered Monsieur LeChat, seemed happy enough with him.

  On 12 February 1894, however, history intervened in the life of Marcel Després, and set him on the road to becoming Marcel Mémoire.

  There was an explosion at the Café Terminus, Gare Saint-Lazare. It was the work of an anarchist named Émile Henry, but though it was not the first such event, all of Paris was in uproar over this one; it was the most despicable to date. The perpetrator was French! And educated and formerly respectable to boot. Monsieur LeChat made to dispatch his reporters but, the attack occurring in the evening, they were not to hand. He sent errand boys to find them, and learned that his best two were already in their cups in one of the seedier cafés along the Boulevard Saint-Germain. LeChat, in his usual frantic manner, was dismayed that this major event would go unreported by his paper. It was around half past ten when an urchin knocked on Marcel’s door up on the sixth floor in the Cour du Commerce; in his desperation, the newspaperman had sent after every able-bodied man he had, even that rather quiet and odd man who watched the ink for him.

  Marcel excelled himself.

  On returning to the print offices he produced voluminous, detailed and wide-ranging accounts of his interviews with seven different witnesses to the affair. He was focused and fast.

  ‘Excellent! Good!’ cried LeChat as Marcel gave his story. ‘Fascinating detail. Excellent!’

  Then, LeChat himself hastily prepared a report from this verbal account of Marcel’s, ordering the presses to be set for immediate printing. They would have the story on every street corner and on every café countertop by dawn, and it was only when LeChat had dispatched the typesetters to do their work that he stopped short, his whirlwind stilling for once. The colour drained from his face, as if frozen by the discovery of a terrible act, and he turned a glare of suppressed fury upon innocent Marcel.

  ‘What game are you pulling on me, boy?’ he said.

  Marcel shook his head blankly.

  LeChat waved a hand at him. ‘You think it’s funny? Making that stuff up?’

  ‘Sir?’ said Marcel.

  ‘No notes, boy. You took no notes.’

  It was true. In his haste to take down the story, LeChat had scribbled and scribbled, barely looking up, not realising until now that Marcel had not been reading from a notebook, but merely recounted from memory what he had learned.

  ‘I didn’t need notes, sir,’ Marcel explained, but that was enough to propel the incendiary nature of Monsieur LeChat into hyperactivity.

  ‘Didn’t need notes!’ he roared. ‘You gave me the names not only of the café owner but all the staff! You gave me the names of all the policemen present, all of them! You gave me the names of the inspectors from the Sûreté. You gave me not just the names, but the addresses too, of all the victims. And you expect me to believe you did that without notes?’

  Marcel did expect him to believe that.

  He stood there silently. He was wondering what the problem was, but he was not stupid, and it was starting to dawn on him.

  ‘I don’t need notes, sir,’ he said, and he said it with such innocence and honesty that it took the wind right from LeChat.

  ‘Don’t need notes?’ he said. ‘Don’t need . . . You remembered all that? Everything you just told me?’

  Marcel nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

  LeChat’s temper rose one final time before dying for good. ‘You’re not having me on, are you, boy? I’ll wring your neck!’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Marcel’s open face, his utter honesty, won through. LeChat peered closely at his young apprentice.

  ‘Well, I . . . That’s . . . That’s remarkable. How do you do it, boy? Some trick?’

  ‘No,’ said Marcel. ‘No trick. I just remember.’

  So the paper ran the story of the Gare Saint-Lazare bombing, and in the days that followed was revered by the other papers for its achievement that night.

  No trick. He just remembered.

  It seemed that a life as a journalist beckoned for Marcel, but that was not to be the case either. For while his phenomenal memory meant he could dispense with a notebook, he utterly lacked the skills required to be a reporter; above all, he could not write. He did not know how to structure a story, did not understand what needed to be said and what was irrelevant. He got bogged down in details and lost in cul-de-sacs of false logic. And while his memory never let him down, nor did the sturdy pencils and trusty notebooks of his colleagues, and they knew how to write.

  Despite all this, he held down the job for two years, until finally LeChat decided he had to let his underperforming reporter go.

  Unhappy with this failure, unwilling to return to his life on the inking screws, all might have been lost. He took a job in a factory producing machine parts, working as an ‘efficiency expert’ because it required someone with a good memory to oversee the production line and try to work out how things could be improved. He lasted no longer there than he had as a reporter.

  He drifted for a while, mostly out of work, living off the balance of the sale of his mother’s house, until one day the idea was put to him that he ought to try his luck up in Pigalle in the cabarets. In the studio apartment across the passage from his own was a pair of newly arrived art students: a Frenchman from Marseille and a Scot. It was they who told Marcel about the cabarets, for they industriously spent much of their free time up there.

  ‘There are all sorts of acts,’ said Fraser the Scot, in his rapidly improving French. ‘It’s not just the singers, the dancers. Musicians. There are other acts too: magicians, illusionists. There was a memory act we saw once, but it wasn’t good. Now you, you could do it well . . .’

  Marcel thought about it for another long week, at the end of which he devised a flat little routine that involved perfectly recounting strings of numbers written by a third party at random on a chalkboard. The next day he took his act to Pigalle, where he secured an audition, and a job, in a squalid venue called the Cabaret of Insults. He was next to the bottom of the bill, above a fat old chanteuse whose only job was to make the rest of the acts seem half decent.

  Desp
ite that, having worked five evenings that first week, he came home on Sunday night with more money than he’d ever earned in any seven days of his life.

  It was Fraser who thought up the name.

  Marcel Mémoire. Mister Memory.

  ANOTHER FAÇADE

  The front of the asylum of Salpêtrière could easily mislead the visitor to the city of light. What is this grand building? A palace, surely. No? Not a palace. Then it’s a court of law. Or a lesser known possession of the university, the Sorbonne. Or the grandest library in the world. No, no and no. What the visitor to the city gazes upon is in fact the imposing, regal, elegant face of a hospital. Once a rough ex-gunpowder factory housing the insane of Paris, the old building was demolished and this magnificent structure erected in its place, though on bad days Dr Morel, to whom Marcel’s case has been assigned, swears he can still sense a sniff of the saltpetre from which the site took its name. Perhaps that’s just his fancy.

  Dr Lucien Morel, the Assistant Chief Alienist of the hospital, met Marcel the morning after his transferral from the commissariat of the 6th. At first he paid little interest to this newcomer, there being more than enough work in the asylum for the elderly doctor, but as the days went by, he began to take a keener look at the patient.

  These days, Morel walks a little more slowly on his rounds than he used to. His gait is a strange one, walking with his feet turned out, and never lifting his shoes more than an inch or two above the ground, giving the impression of clearing invisible snow before him as he goes. This action gives his hips a funny little shuffling thrust with every step.

  Today his work is interesting him greatly, and he moves a little faster, a little more like he used to.

  If the front of the hospital is a grand building, the equal of many better known sites in the capital, what lies behind is a little different. The site occupies almost a square kilometre, and is very much a small town in its own right, composed of many buildings, small avenues, even a chapel. There are the administrative offices, the infirmaries, the dispensary, the blanchisseries or laundry rooms, the morgue, the lecture theatres and so on, but Dr Morel is headed to see Marcel in his little cell. This cell is like a tiny terraced house, save that it consists of only one room. The terraces stand in rows of twenty-four Petites Loges, with a pavement running along in front of all of them, protected slightly from the elements by a colonnade. The columns are painted an elegant light grey, as are the front doors of the cells. Outside each cell, in the colonnade, a small semicircular wooden bench is set into the wall and supported on twin spirals of iron, again painted in the calm grey that is the hospital’s uniform.

  Though he would never admit it, the reason Dr Morel hurries through his other calls this morning is that he has begun to suspect there is more to Marcel than had first shown itself. Initially, Morel had him marked down as a hysterical catatonic. From the moment Marcel stopped running, it appeared that his mind and body had shut down. Witnesses described how Marcel, who was well known to his neighbours, burst from the street door, took no more than another six steps, and then just stopped.

  One of the pretty blanchisseuses who lived and worked in the cour said it was as if he froze, like a statue. The awful horror of what he’d done must have suddenly struck him, she said, and he’d fallen to his knees.

  ‘Was he crying?’ her friends asked her the next morning, as they got busy over their linens. ‘Was he struck with remorse?’

  The girl shook her head firmly. ‘That, I don’t know. I suppose he must have been. He just knelt there. We all stood around and watched him. He was shaking, ever so slightly. No one went near him.’

  She was enjoying this attention, having been fortunate enough to be just returning home as Marcel sprang into the passage. Never had anyone taken so much interest in her in one stretch, despite her looks. She grew to meet her audience.

  ‘Yes,’ she decided. ‘It was the remorse that did it. Stopped him in his tracks. He knelt there while old Monsieur Bonvoisin fetched the gardiens. And then they came, and even then he didn’t move. He didn’t try to fight, or get away, or anything. He’d done what he’d done and it was remorse that got him. Fancy!’

  Dr Morel had been told that since that moment, Marcel had neither moved without being urged to, nor spoken a word. He stared into space, nodding in a distracted way as they confirmed his name and address in the commissariat. Even a spell in the ‘kitchen’, the room at the back where arrested parties were ‘cooked’ for information, was not enough to bring Marcel to speak. After he had been cooked, he took to rocking backward and forward, on his heels if standing, on his haunches if sitting. It didn’t seem as if he had even noticed the blows thrown at him, mostly into his stomach to avoid undue questioning from the examining magistrate, and there he sat until he was moved to the asylum.

  Still he did not speak.

  Hysteria was the speciality of the hospital. Once, the Salpêtrière had been no more than a dumping ground for the mad, as well as a prison for prostitutes. But the purpose of the asylum had grown and changed over the years. Until very recently, it had admitted only female patients and the great Charcot had established not only his own reputation, but also that of the hospital, with his work on the hysterical woman. The last few years had seen the admission of a few men too, and though Charcot was now gone, hysteria was still very much the order of the day.

  On their first meeting, Dr Morel walked around Marcel and looked. He had him stripped and measured and weighed. He made notes. He shook his head and he came away. Hysterics, as Morel well knew, could manifest their illness in many different ways; they might scream and rail, of course, but those were obvious and boring symptoms that did not interest him greatly. Much more fascinating were cases of divided personalities, of altered states of consciousness and physicality. Why, some of Charcot’s greatest subjects had displayed such wonderful symptoms! The young women whose skin would rise in pronounced lines after a stroke with a blunt needle – Charcot had even been able to spell out one particular girl’s name and have the letters rise red and bumpy on her back. That girl was also a great one for attitudes passionelles, during which her body and face would contort into strange positions, which she could not be got out of, even by the strongest of the warders.

  Catatonia was not unheard of, but it was rare enough. And though hysteria is known to the public as a female affliction, Charcot had proved beyond doubt that there were enough hysterical male patients in the city’s hospitals for it to be more than a curiosity.

  It seemed that Marcel had entered a catatonic state and that he was, potentially, stuck there. Morel sought to rush in before the disease had a chance to secure itself in Marcel’s body. The obvious thing was ice baths, so these were tried, without result. Marcel barely seemed aware that he had been lowered into the icy water, and despite frequent immersions of increasing duration, he rose from the water with his eyes still staring, his body not even shivering.

  Morel shook his head, and wondered what to try next to shock Marcel’s body into breaking its grip upon his mind. That was the theory of what he was attempting, but everything he tried had the same negative outcome. If only he were a woman, Morel thought, I would try the ovarian clamps. They usually brought rapid if not permanent results, and he had discussed the concept of a male equivalent with Dr Charcot in the year before he left. It would be a simple enough matter, easier than with the female version, for the equivalent structures in the male lay handily placed, of course, outside the body. For some reason that was never spoken aloud they had not developed the apparatus.

  Things continued thus, until finally, one day, Morel asks Marcel a simple question that no one has asked him yet.

  ‘What did you do?’

  No one has asked that question because everyone knows what he’s done. Ondine’s lover, Bishop, the American, another of the performers in the cabaret, was there after all; was lucky that Marcel didn’t plug him too. Crowds of onlookers had gawped as Ondine’s bloody body had been taken away.
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  But Morel asked the right question. His mind is burdened, he said to himself, and he needs to unburden it. Let us see what happens if we give him that chance.

  ‘Monsieur, what did you do?’

  And after all the days of silence, Marcel speaks. His rocking ceases temporarily.

  ‘I killed her,’ he says.

  ‘And?’ Morel prompts, uncaringly. ‘Tell me all of it.’

  Marcel stares at the wall of his cell, as if it is a cinematograph screen upon which he’s reviewing the whole business. Morel notes this, mentally, unaware how close this is to the truth.

  Then, Marcel speaks some more.

  ‘I left work. I took my bicycle and I came home. I left the bicycle in the passage, and came up. The concierge grumbled that I was late. She always grumbles when she has to let anyone in late. I came up to the studio. I heard them before I even opened the door. I heard them.’

  He pauses. Morel shuffles a little on his feet.

  ‘Go on,’ he says, his voice chipped and flat.

  Marcel blinks at the wall.

  ‘I opened the door, I saw them. They were . . .’

  He stops again.

  ‘Who are we speaking of?’ asks Morel. He’s growing impatient, but he has no idea how much his patience will be tested yet.

  ‘Ondine. My wife. And the American.’

  ‘I see. And you were saying . . . ? They were . . . what?’

  ‘They were having . . .’ Marcel whispers. His voice is low, and that is the only clue to his state of mind. He is otherwise apparently emotionless, and he speaks as if these things are not of very great interest.

  ‘What, Monsieur?’

  Marcel does not seem to feel that the doctor is provoking him. He keeps watching the wall ahead of him.

  ‘Sex.’

  ‘Describe the act, if you please.’