Firmin Read online

  Mama would be gone for what seemed like forever, and we would horse around there in the dark, even though we were supposed to be very quiet on account of not being legal tenants. We were in fact squatters, though seeing that the whole kit and caboodle, the bookshop, the strip joints, even the garbage cans, were on a straight path to oblivion, with us just hanging on for the ride, maybe stowaways would be more accurate. But we didn’t know that yet, I mean about the ride to oblivion. At that age you think everything is forever.

  After what seemed hours and hours, when we were practically desperate with hunger, we would hear her coming back. We were supposed to be very quiet, and there would come Mama crashing and stumbling down the stairs.

  I may as well call a spade a spade and say right off that Mama was some kind of tosspot. That—and her enormous girth—accounted for her problems with the stairs. In those days you could lap up booze off the sidewalks in our neighborhood, and Flo was not one to lay obstacles in the path of temptation. She was that kind of girl; it was that kind of neighborhood. So she was always pretty well tanked when she finally tumbled back home, which probably explains how she could nod off in the midst of all that shoving and squealing. Out like a light and snoring, that was Mama. A lot of people have boozehounds for parents, nothing special in that, but looking back I can see that in my case it was a great piece of luck and probably saved my life. Alcoholism’s Silver Lining: A Child’s Story. By the time she tottered back from one of those trips up top she usually had soaked up so much sauce her milk would set your head spinning. Not mine, of course. I was predictably off on the sidelines somewhere eating my heart out while the rest of them slurped and gurgled the great-tasting stuff she had brought home, stuff that would have caught fire had there been a spark. In the end, however, alcoholic beverage had the same effect on my brothers and sisters as it had on Mama, and one by one they nodded off, the nipples slipping from their little pink-gummed mouths. By this time, of course, most of the alcohol had worked its way out of Flo’s system and the milk was starting to run pure. So all I had to do was clamber over the rows of sleepy little tipplers and go from tit to tit emptying the last delicious drops from each. It was never enough. But it made the difference, keeping me alive, though just barely.

  I don’t have to lean out over the precipice of my birth to find Mama anymore. Now I could lie on my back in the confetti, adorable pink feet curling in the air above me, and look up at her great bulk. And I did this often. Yet the picture of Mama I have kept from that moment, aside from the sheer mass of her, is scarcely more than a featureless blur. I scrunch up my eyes, I drag out my telescope, I focus, I focus—and I hardly see anything. When I think of Mama at this point nothing enters my mind but words. I screw my concentration up to the point where I am almost fainting, and still nothing is there but a blurred shape and the words not enough tits—that, and a thick sawdust-and-beer fragrance like a saloon floor.

  I have not been able to get around much in the so-called real world, but I have done a lot of traveling in my head, riding my thoughts this way and that. Once on one of these trips I met a man in a bar who told me a story about when he was a small boy in Berlin, Germany, right at the end of the war. That would be the Second World War. The whole city had just been bombed to smithereens, so it looked a lot like Scollay Square is going to look a little later in this story, and it was winter and cold and there was nothing to eat. His house, what was left of it, was very dark and cold, so this little boy spent most of his time sitting on the sidewalk in the shelter of a sunlit wall where it was a little warmer. He sat there for hours every day and dreamed about food. The street in front of his house had a big hole in it where a bomb had fallen. People had partially filled it in, but it was still a hole, and one day a truck loaded with coal came rolling down the street. The driver didn’t see the crater in time and the truck hit it, kerbang. There was a tremendous jolt and a lot of coal fell off the truck. But the truck did not stop. It went on around the turn, and for a moment there was just this empty sunlit street littered with coal. One small piece had rolled over right next to the little boy’s foot. And then all of a sudden, as if on cue, doors flew open up and down the street, and men and women, mostly women, came rushing out. The little boy looked on in amazement as they started snatching up the pieces of coal, gathering them in their aprons and baskets and even fighting over them. He put his foot on top of the little piece that lay on the ground beside him, and later, when the people had all gone back inside, he slipped it into his pocket. From the behavior of the women he could tell it was something very valuable, though he had no idea what it was. Then he went around the corner and took it out of his pocket and tried to eat it.

  And in Africa during famines the starving children eat dirt. If you are hungry enough, you will eat anything. Just the act of chewing and swallowing something, even if it does not nourish the body, nourishes your dreams. And dreams of food are just like other dreams—you can live on them till you die.

  In the basement of the bookshop where we lived there was not any coal and there was not any real dirt. There was plenty of dust, but you can’t eat dust. It sticks to the roof of your mouth and is impossible to swallow. Paper, on the other hand, I discovered early on, has a wonderful consistency and in some cases an agreeable taste. You can masticate a hunk of it for hours if you want, like gum. Shoved off to the side by my muscular siblings, biding my time while trying to fill the gnawing hollow in my gut with vast imaginary repasts, I started chewing on the confetti at my feet.

  Despite the fact that I was barely out of my infancy, I think it fair to call this moment the beginning of the end for me. Like many things that start as small, illicit pleasures, paper chewing soon became a habit, with its own imperative, and then an addiction, a mortal hunger whose satisfaction was so delightful that I would often hesitate to pounce on the first free tit. I would instead stand there chewing until the wad in my mouth had softened to a delectable paste that I could mash against the roof of my mouth or mold into interesting shapes with my tongue and safely swallow. Unfortunately, the chewed paper left a sticky coating on my mouth and tongue that lasted for hours and caused me to smack my lips in a truly unpleasant manner.

  I started slowly, with a nibble here and there, but in next to no time I was on a roll, and in just a few days I had managed to tuck away so much of the communal bed that patches of bare concrete were showing through. This caused no end of bad feelings between me and the others and even earned me a few sharp drubbings, but I did not let that stop me. I can be very determined when I put my mind to it.

  In the end, to stop the bickering, Mama had to go out and drag back a few more pages of the Great Book. We were getting pretty big now, so we all joined in the shredding party. Squeaking with delight, we ripped and tore with a vengeance. There is nothing like destruction for creating a warm sense of camaraderie, and for a few minutes there in the rough-and-tumble of it all we actually felt like a big happy family. When people ask me to recount something from my childhood, I always trot that one out, just to show that we were normal.

  Needless to say, the arrival of all this fresh paper that no one had ever shat or pissed on did nothing to tame my appetite, and I must have put away whole chapters by the time I was old enough to toddle on wobbly fours out of our dark corner and into the flickering bigness. I am convinced that these masticated pages furnished the nutritional foundation for—and perhaps even directly caused—what I with modesty shall call my unusual mental development. Imagine: the history of the world in four parts, fragments of philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, astronomy, astrology, hundreds of rivers, popular songs, the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Book of the Dead, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, hundreds of insects, street signs, advertisements, Kant, Hegel, Swedenborg, comic strips, nursery rhymes, London and Thessalonica, Sodom and Gomorrah, the history of literature, the history of Ireland, accusations of unspeakable crimes, confessions, denials, thousands of puns, dozens of languages, recipes
, dirty jokes, illnesses, childbirths, executions—all this and more I took into my body. Took it in, I admit, before I was ready. I have a vivid, even visceral, recollection of my young self curled up in a dark corner on a bed of shredded paper (my future meals), clutching a grotesquely distended abdomen and groaning with pain. Oh, such pain!—the long crescendoing cramps burrowing and twisting as they gnawed their way through my shuddering bowels. I still find it amazing that this repeated agony did not put me off paper chewing forever. But of course it did not. I had only to wait for the pain to pass before beginning anew, and sometimes I could not wait even that long.

  Do I hear snickering? I suppose you see this as merely a rather vulgar case of addiction or perhaps as the pitiable symptoms of a classic obsessive-compulsive disorder, and no doubt you are correct. Yet the concept of addiction is not rich enough, deep enough, to describe this hunger. I would rather call it love. Inchoate perhaps, perverted even, unrequited surely, but love all same. Here was the crude glutinous beginning of the passion that has dominated my life, some would say ruined it, and I would not necessarily disagree. Had I been more astute I might have been able to see the dreadful abdominal pain that followed the exercise of this passion in its infantile form as a warning, an augury of the interminable sufferings that seem always to accompany love.

  Eaten daily—or in my case almost constantly, if one includes the subsequent smacking at the sticky after-coating—even the most delectable dish eventually cloys. I am ashamed to say it, but as time went on the Great Book slid ineluctably down the scale of charms toward insipidity, grew increasingly tasteless, boring, scarcely more than cardboard really. I needed a change of diet. And besides, I had grown weary of drubbings.

  So one day I decided to give my family a break and carry my chewings out into the stacks. It was Sunday morning the first time I ventured out. The shop above was closed, and there was almost no traffic in the Square to add its distant harmony to the blended snores of my stupefied family. Slipping down the passageway that led from our homey corner and out into the flickering big room, nose to the floor, the first thing I came across, sprawled open on the cement, was the Great Book itself, or what was left of it. I recognized it instantly by its smell. Inhaled in this concentrated, multifoliate form, hundreds of pages packed densely together, it made me a little queasy. The Impact of Genius. I looked up at the remaining books in the low shelf from which Mama had dragged this one and found that I could make out the titles quite easily. Obviously even at that early age I was already suffering from the catastrophic gift of lexical hypertrophy, which has since done so much to mar the smooth course of what might otherwise have been a perfectly ordinary life. Above this group of shelves was a handwritten paper sign bearing the word FICTION and a crude blue arrow pointing straight downward. As I explored the room further in the days and weeks that followed I came across other signs saying HISTORY, RELIGION, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE, BARGAINS, and RESTROOM.

  I regard this period as the decisive beginning of my education, even though the craving that was driving me out from my cozy corner and into the big world was not yet a hunger for knowledge. I began with the closest shelves, the ones under FICTION, licking, nibbling, savoring, and finally eating, sometimes around the edges, but usually, whenever I could pry the covers open, straight through the middle like a drill. My favorites were the Modern Library editions, and I always chose one of those when I could, perhaps because of their logo—a runner with a torch. At times I have thought of myself as a Runner with a Torch. And oh, what books I discovered during those first intoxicating days! Even today the mere recitation of the titles brings tears to my eyes. Recite them, then, say them slowly aloud and let them break your heart. Oliver Twist. Huckleberry Finn. The Great Gatsby. Dead Souls. Middlemarch. Alice in Wonderland. Fathers and Sons. The Grapes of Wrath. The Way of All Flesh. An American Tragedy. Peter Pan. The Red and the Black. Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  My devourings at first were crude, orgiastic, unfocused, piggy—a mouthful of Faulkner was a mouthful of Flaubert as far as I was concerned—though I soon began to notice subtle differences. I noticed first that each book had a different flavor—sweet, bitter, sour, bittersweet, rancid, salty, tart. I also noticed that each flavor—and, as time passed and my senses grew more acute, the flavor of each page, each sentence, and finally each word—brought with it an array of images, representations in the mind of things I knew nothing about from my very limited experiences in the so-called real world: skyscrapers, harbors, horses, cannibals, a flowering tree, an unmade bed, a drowned woman, a flying boy, a severed head, field hands looking up at the sound of an idiot howling, a train whistle, a river, a raft, sun slanting through a forest of birches, a hand caressing a naked thigh, a jungle hut, a dying monk.

  At first I just ate, happily gnawing and chewing, guided by the dictates of taste. But soon I began to read here and there around the edges of my meals. And as time passed I read more and chewed less until finally I was spending almost all my waking hours reading and chewed only on the margins. And oh, how I then regretted those dreadful holes! In some cases, where there were no other copies, I have had to wait years to fill the gaps. I am not proud of this.

  Now, buffeted and stunned by life, I look back at my childhood in the hope of finding there some confirmation of my worth, some sign that I was destined at least for a time to be something other than a dilettante and a buffoon, that I was defeated by inexorable circumstance and not by a flaw within. Let them say, “Hard luck, Firmin,” and not, “We could have told you so.” I scrunch up my eyes and point my telescope, but, alas, it picks out no divine afflatus, magnifies not even a few sparks of genius, discovers nothing but an eating disorder. Instead of telescopes, the doctors will haul out their stethoscopes, their electroencephalograms, their polygraphs, all in support of the crushing diagnosis: a routine case of biblio-bulimia. And the worst of it is, they will be right. And in the face of this essential rightness, the demeaning obviousness of their crushing judgment—crushing is a word I like using—I want to cry out at myself like old Ezra Pound locked in his rat’s cage in Pisa, “Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.” Pound was a Big One.

  But enough of this. The small creature I was back then had as yet no inkling of such agonies. Back then, perched on the lowest rung of the ladder of life, I was still the Sabbath child, bonny and blithe, and those were happy days in the bookshop. Or, I should say, happy nights and Sundays, since I did not dare venture out into that flickering vastness during the hours when people were in the store. From our dim basement covert we could hear the murmur of voices and the creak of footsteps on the ceiling. Hear them and tremble. Sometimes the footsteps would leave the ceiling and come down the wooden stairs into the basement. Usually this descent was followed by a period of silence, but sometimes it would be followed by gruntings and growlings, even inexplicable explosions, and these frightened us terribly. After that would come the noise of rushing water, and then footsteps on the stairs again. The footsteps going up were never as loud as the ones coming down.

  One night while I was poking around under BARGAINS, I noticed a crude hole in the masonry where a large black pipe came out of the wall. It snaked across the floor and slithered into the opposite wall under RESTROOM. There were no shelves against that wall, just a door, and that was always closed. I poked my nose into the hole and sniffed. It smelled of rats. The pipe entered the wall and then turned and ran straight up. Though it was a very big pipe, it did not entirely fill the hole that had been made for it, and the masonry all around it was rough and jagged. I had a lot of curiosity in those days, and the smell was reassuring, though it was not exactly like the rat smells I was used to. It was sadder than those.

  Bracing my back against the pipe, I placed my feet against the side of the hole and hauled myself up using the jagged bits of masonry as toeholds. It was a fairly easy climb. At the top, at a level corresponding to the baseboards on the first floor, the tunnel branched. One path went on up along the pipe, while others s
naked left and right along the base of the wall between the plaster laths and the exterior masonry. That night I went left. The next night I went right. And in a week I had a map of the whole system in my head. The building was veined with tunnels, a regular honeycomb, a twisting, back-looping warren. If I were not in such a hurry—there is almost no more time—I could at this point launch into an interminable description of the whole tunnel system, which obviously had been constructed by the cooperative labor of thousands of rats long before my time, generations of them grinding their incisors to stubs just so I, Firmin, could one day travel undetected to every point in the building. I could break your ears talking about shafts, chutes, stopes, and drifts, about the difference between a raise and a winze, and if anybody was still awake I could put him to sleep with glory holes, scrapers, dippers, manladders, and footwalls. If you enjoy that sort of description, you should get a book on mining.

  At first I expected to bump into other rats at every turn, the builders of this cavernous city, but I never did. I eventually came to think of them as “erstwhile.” I never found any food either. And maybe that is why there were no more rats. Before the shop became a bookstore, perhaps it had been a grocery store or a bakery. Now there was nothing to eat but paper. Yet my patient exploration, night after night, of what seemed like miles of tunnel finally brought rewards that were to me superior to any food. You have to keep in mind that these intramural shafts were totally dark. I have excellent night vision, but there I had to feel my way by smell and touch. It was slow, tedious work, and it was several days before I stumbled upon a chute that took me directly up into the ceiling over the main room of the shop. The building, like most buildings in that part of town, was very old, without insulation in the ceiling, and the space between each pair of joists formed a long open chamber, incredibly hot and dusty. My dogged forbears had gnawed neat circular holes in the joists, and by means of these holes I was able to clamber from chamber to chamber. I was working my way in the direction of the street, exploring each chamber thoroughly with feet and nose before moving on to the next, when I came upon something so unexpected it set me back on my heels. After more than a week of nights spent groping in inky blackness, here suddenly were rays of light streaming up through the floor from the shop below. At some point long ago someone—not a rat—had cut a large round hole in the shop ceiling for a light fixture, which had then been installed slightly off center, leaving a narrow crescent-shaped opening along its rim. Peering cautiously through this crack I looked down into the room below.