Mister Memory Page 3

There is a considerable silence, into which Marcel appears to be pouring pain.

  ‘He was standing behind her. They were both standing. She was leaning over the back of the armchair. They were making a lot of noise. Then they saw me, and they stopped. Bishop stepped back, his trousers round his ankles. He had a stupid look on his face. He looked down at himself. Ondine laughed at me. Bishop shouted. I took up the gun and I shot her. Bishop shouted at me again, and then I ran. I ran into the street and then I stopped.’

  He falls silent, and still he stares at the wall ahead of him.

  ‘Why did you stop?’ asks Morel. ‘Why did you not run?’

  For the first time, Marcel turns and looks at Morel. He almost makes eye contact, though not quite. The look on his face suggests his answer plainly enough: where would I have run to? And why? She was dead. What does it help to run?

  Dr Morel considers the man in front of him. From his notes he believes him to be around thirty-two years of age, but there’s something about Marcel that feels younger. Of course, he’s only met him since the moment in which he lost his wife, and became a murderer. That would be enough to change anyone’s demeanour. Now Marcel is staring at the wall, or not even at it, but through it, and has become unresponsive again. He has resumed his gentle rocking, hugging his knees to his chest.

  The doctor is unsure whether to break off for the day, or to continue. In the end, Morel allows that he has done something positive, for a major breakthrough has been achieved – he has got the subject to speak.

  But Marcel does not speak the next day, or the next, and Morel grows frustrated with his lack of progress. He wonders whether the man is worth the trouble, for the doctor is fully aware that his years are passing, and he requires a great success before his days are up. A success with which to make his name as great as Charcot’s, from whose shadow he still cannot seem to emerge. And if this recalcitrant will not provide it, he will move on to the next.

  When Morel returns the following morning, however, he brings another thought with him: perhaps the way to break through is to try to connect with a time when Marcel was not hysterical.

  ‘Monsieur,’ says the doctor, ‘I have heard that you were a performer of some kind. You worked in the cabarets. Would you tell me about that?’

  Marcel is silent. He stares at the wall, he stares at the wall. His heart barely beats, his lungs barely breathe. There is such a stillness about him that were you not to know better you would say he was dead. As if he were dead though alive; airless, though breathing; bloodless, though his heart still beats faintly.

  ‘What did you do?’ Morel asks. ‘Were you a singer perhaps? An actor? What was it?’

  Without looking up, sitting on his bed, staring at nothing, Marcel answers, ‘I remembered things.’

  Morel is not sure he can have heard correctly.

  ‘You . . . ?’

  ‘I remembered things. That’s why they call me Mémoire. Marcel Mémoire.’

  ‘You mean, you helped in the offices in some way?’

  Dr Morel has never been to the cabarets. These things are all quite alien to him. He has no idea what passes for entertainment in the Boulevard de Clichy and the surrounding streets. The cabarets of Heaven and Hell. The Cabaret of Nothingness. The Cabaret of Insults. The Theatre of Grand-Guignol.

  ‘I remembered things. I remembered everything. I still remember everything.’

  After that remark, it takes Morel a very long time to get Marcel to speak again, and when he does, the doctor remains confused.

  ‘It’s my act,’ Marcel says, ‘to remember things. I remember things, and people find that amazing, and they pay good money to see it.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Anything. Numbers, for example. Mostly numbers. On a chalkboard. Someone writes the numbers on the board, and I am given a minute to look at them, and then they turn the board so that only the audience can see it. I stand behind it. Then I call out the numbers, and everyone claps.’

  ‘It’s some sort of trick, then?’ asks Morel.

  Marcel looks at him, as if he is confused. ‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s no trick.’

  ‘Then how do you do it?’

  ‘I just . . . remember,’ Marcel says. ‘I remember everything.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ snaps the doctor, ‘no one remembers everything.’

  But Marcel doesn’t answer, as if there is no need to bother arguing the point. That irritates Morel.

  The following day, he returns, somewhat pugnaciously, with a chalkboard and chalk. He sits himself on the far end of the bed from Marcel, and props the board on his knee. He says not a word. He begins to scribble on the board, and a minute later, he turns it round to show Marcel.

  Marcel does not seem to have seen it. He does not seem interested, but Morel is patient, and waits, and waits, until finally Marcel turns to look at what Morel has written.

  On the chalkboard, in ten rows of ten, are one hundred numbers.

  Morel stares at Marcel as he in turn stares at the board. There is a tightness in Morel’s chest, and a quickening. He wants to speak, to ask, to demand: how long should I hold the board for? How long do you need? Must I say anything? When will you start? But Morel says nothing because he does not know which of these to say and can see no reason to be arbitrary. Dr Morel abhors whimsy.

  Then, Marcel closes his eyes, and starts speaking.

  ‘Nine, four, three, three, six, two, nine . . .’

  Morel spins the board round to face himself.

  ‘. . . eight, six, eight, one, three, one, seven . . .’

  The quickening intensifies, both of Morel’s heartbeat and the speed with which Marcel rattles out the numbers on the board, in order, left to right, and then down, line by line, so that in far less time than it took Morel to write them, Marcel has repeated them all back to him.

  ‘. . . nine, nine, two, five, six.’

  Morel has gone cold. He turns and checks for reflections in the cell, some way that Marcel might have been able to see the numbers, but there is none. Patients do not have mirrors, the one small window is high and in the wrong place to have been of use. And he has already noted that Marcel’s eyes were shut as he recited. Morel practically breaks the board as he thumps his sleeve across it to wipe the numbers out, heedless of the white smear he makes on the black sleeve of his frock coat.

  ‘Again!’ he says, and starts to scribble. A minute later, he shows the board to Marcel, who, in even less time than it took before, closes his eyes and then begins to report.

  ‘Seven, three, four, one, four, nine, zero, four, five . . .’

  Again Morel turns the board back and cowers over it to be absolutely sure that only he can see it. Marcel pays the doctor no attention whatsoever as he checks each digit on the board, the numbers spilling from his patient’s mouth.

  ‘. . . six, two, five, three, eight, one.’

  The magic is over just as fast as last time, but before Morel can start to erase them and try once more, Marcel is speaking again.

  ‘One, eight, three, five, two, six . . .’

  It takes Morel a moment or two of bafflement to realise what Marcel is doing. Marcel is saying the numbers backwards. Speechless, his eyebrows walking a little further up his forehead, Morel verifies the reverse sequence. Once again, perfect, not a single mistake, not even a hesitation.

  Before Marcel can speak again, Morel tries something else.

  ‘Diagonal: top left, bottom right.’

  ‘Seven, four, nine, eight, seven, three, four, five, two, one.’

  ‘Top right, bottom left,’ snaps Morel, and again Marcel relays the numbers faultlessly.

  The game continues. Morel scribbles, shows, listens, erases. He expands the quantity of numbers until he cannot fit any more on the board. He tries it with letters instead of numbers, he uses a mixture of both. It does not matter, Marcel cannot be beaten. Finally Morel slumps back, exhausted. He is amazed, both by what he has seen, and also by the showpeople of Montmartre
, the people of the cabaret. Dr Morel cannot conceive that they in turn cannot have understood the quite simply extraordinary nature of what Marcel is able to do.

  But that is showpeople; they don’t care how a thing occurs, as long as it does, and as long as it earns them some money.

  OF LOVE

  Oh, Marcel. What must we think of him? It’s easy to form the wrong impression of him; this strange wanderer. He is not only of the mind, but of the body too, and the soul, and there were women in his life, before he married Ondine. It was impossible in Paris not to encounter females of the most alluring kind on a daily basis.

  There were the three young seamstresses in the studio across the cour from him, their shoulders and faces right at the window so as to be near the light, so close as to be almost able to lip-read their conversation. It was impossible not to catch their eye when raising a blind, or investigating a noise from below. There were the blanchisseuses down in the passage, always singing, their skirts often rucked up as they scrubbed, exposing their sleek calves. There were the ladies of the picture card factory, twenty of them, hammering away all day with little hammers and steel dies to beat images into cards. There was the bookbinder’s daughter, there was the girl who sold Marcel his milk and coffee every morning, there were the shapely models who sat, frequently disrobed, for Fraser, the Scottish artist in the studio next door. And all this within the cour itself. Beyond lay Paris, and Marcel found the sophistication of Parisian women to be far beyond the females he had known in Étoges, as if they were a new species.

  If it sounds as if Marcel viewed women as distant objects, that may be because there is some truth in it. And yet he was not cold or callous. He was no chauvinist. He had a heart in him, and he admired and respected the many women, young or old, pretty or not, who came his way. And they came his way rather often, because, though he was extraordinarily unaware of the fact, he was a very handsome young man. So there had been romances, though none had lasted any time at all, days usually, weeks at most. Something always went wrong, something that left Marcel puzzled, and each time his confusion grew. It may be that he was not aware of what was happening, or what was expected of him. To paint that picture, it is only necessary to relate the first sexual encounter he had, even though Marcel didn’t realise that that was what it was. That alone should make the point, but in case of doubt, consider the day, long ago in Étoges, when Ginette the doctor’s daughter suddenly burst into his house one still, summer afternoon.

  It was harvest time; the whole village was in the rows, every able man and woman bending themselves to the most important moment of the year. Marcel was not working; he had been particularly distracted of late and was spending more and more time indoors.

  Ginette came in through the kitchen door, which stood open.

  ‘Marcel? It’s me! Ginette!’ she called, and Marcel came down from his room to find the young woman in a state of distress.

  ‘I’ve been stung!’ she declared, and Marcel immediately sought to help. He sat her down at the kitchen table, and never once wondered why she hadn’t gone to find her father instead. He was a doctor, after all.

  Ginette seemed to hesitate. Marcel noticed that her hands were shaking, and wondered if she was suffering an allergic reaction, as some people were known to.

  ‘It’s in a . . .’ She faltered. Then seemed to collect herself. ‘My leg. I was stung on my leg. Will you look at it for me?’

  Marcel nodded. Poor Ginette.

  ‘Show me,’ he said.

  Ginette wore the long white cotton dress that she always wore as befitting a doctor’s daughter, tied in at the waist with a wide black belt, and with a close-fitting bodice. The skirts were looser, though, and as Marcel knelt before her, he could already see her ankles above her smart black boots.

  ‘Oh, Marcel,’ Ginette said, ‘it’s high up. It hurts. I’m worried the sting is still in.’

  Marcel nodded. ‘I’ll see,’ he said. ‘I know how to take them out. You must use your fingernails.’

  Ginette faltered again, losing her nerve. How she’d steeled herself in her room to go through with this. They had walked out on many occasions, as many as she could engineer with Celeste’s help. She had spoken to Marcel of many things often of love, and of dreams and futures, but nothing she’d done or said had ever moved Marcel to do anything, to want anything or take anything, not even a single kiss.

  It was a hot afternoon, the hottest of a summer that had been building steadily. The sort of still heat that made Ginette want to heave her clothes off, stand in front of Marcel and make him finally notice her, and she’d thought of a way to do it. Only now, in the moment, her nerve began to fail.

  ‘Let me see,’ Marcel said, comforting her, and with that Ginette showed him. She’d had to force herself to leave the house. Before that, as she’d removed her drawers, her fingers had trembled at what she was planning. Now, at Marcel’s gentle reassurance, she slowly pulled up the long white skirts.

  ‘It’s high,’ she tried to say, but the words caught in her throat. Marcel noticed that, as he noticed the shaking of her hands and the rapid rising and falling of her chest, and understood that the poor girl was very frightened.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Let me see.’

  She let him see.

  She pulled the skirt higher still, her legs apart, so that it slid over her knees, and up her thighs, until finally, she pointed a shaking finger at the spot where she’d pinched herself a dozen times till it stood up sore and pink, no more than a sigh from the place where her inner thigh met dark hair.

  There was a silence. Ginette could not bring herself to remember to breathe. Marcel peered at the spot.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ he said.

  Ginette nodded rapidly.

  ‘I can’t see the sting. It must have come out.’

  He reached a fingertip towards the pink mark. Of course he saw the other pinkness, right there, a finger’s length away. She was only young, really barely a woman; there was a little hair above her lips, which Marcel noted, fascinated, but which he then ignored.

  He touched the spot.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ he said, and it was all Ginette could do to stop herself fainting. She began to breathe, hard and rapidly.

  ‘I think I should get your father,’ he said, concerned that she was having an attack of some kind. ‘Let me—’

  ‘No!’ Ginette blurted out. ‘No. I’m fine.’

  ‘But you seem—’

  ‘I’m fine. Really, I’m fine,’ she said, and hurriedly pulled her skirts down, standing and leaving in almost a single motion.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she added. ‘Thank you, Marcel.’

  She left, cursing herself, not really cursing Marcel so much, for it was her own clumsy idea, not his. She really must be utterly unattractive for him not to have leapt all over her in the instant that she showed him her—

  Oh God! What had she done? She burned with shame and only then realised she should have asked him to keep what had happened to himself, a thought that would keep her awake for the next several nights.

  She need not have worried. Marcel mentioned to Celeste that evening that Ginette had been stung by a bee, but he didn’t say where because it didn’t seem important. Poor girl, he thought. What on earth was a bee doing up there, anyway?

  It would be years before Marcel made the connection, understood what had really been happening. Some of the older men at LeChat’s print shop seemed to take a passing interest in him, and after an especially ribald conversation in a bar one day after work, had correctly deduced that Marcel was not yet familiar with the physical act of love. This didn’t concern Marcel half as much as it seemed to concern the other men. That time would come and did it matter at what point in his life it started? He was still Marcel.

  He tried to explain this to the men, but such rambling and somewhat incomprehensible philosophy made three of them frown and two of them laugh. So they concluded to settle the matter and having poured a half-bottle
of wine into Marcel, and taken a few bocks themselves, they dragged him across the river to a maison close, their favourite, number 2 in the Petit Place Mars. The madame was well used to such initiatory ventures, and since she was a kindly individual, she selected a girl called Rosa, because she knew she would be easy on the boy.

  Upstairs, Marcel found himself reliving his past.

  ‘I’ve got something that aches,’ Rosa said, sitting on the edge of the bed. Despite being kind, subtlety was not her long suit. ‘Won’t you take a look at it?’

  He knelt before her, as she pulled up her skirts. She was naked underneath. Marcel took a good look. She had more hair than Ginette, and more flesh, but otherwise things were pretty much the same. Marcel remembered that hot August afternoon, and he remembered Ginette. He thought about her, and the time they’d spent together. They’d walked around the pond, and up to the church. Sometimes they would walk as far as Montmort-Lucy and admire the chateau and its parkland. There were peacocks on the lawn of the chateau, great strutting birds with miasmic rages of colours to show when they wished to. The chateau was only a small one, Marcel later found out, but being much larger than theirs in Étoges, it remained the grandest thing he knew until he came to Paris. He remembered the first time he’d seen the Panthéon, the Hôtel des Invalides, Notre Dame, and then he knew what real splendour was. He wondered if Ginette would ever come to Paris. She’d always been so kind to him; other people became impatient with him, though he was not always sure why. But not Ginette. Ginette always had time and a kind word. She was interesting too, and pretty, Marcel remembered. Much prettier than this Rosa. This girl who the men—

  He was suddenly aware that the woman was still in front of him, waiting.

  He looked up at her. He remembered Ginette again, and the day she had been stung by a bee, and finally he understood. He was so surprised he said it out loud, his voice dreaming, his gaze far away, far back in time.

  ‘She wasn’t stung by a bee.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Rosa, though she kept her legs happily apart.

  Marcel took another look, and remembered when he’d touched Ginette’s phantom sting. How she’d breathed heavily. And given a little moan.