Firmin Read online

  I moved into a little place I had arranged in the ceiling above the shop, midway between the Balloon and the Balcony, where I could keep track of things, while I continued my education at night in the basement, devouring book after book, though no longer literally. Well, that’s not entirely true. Dwelling as I did each night in the mysterious interstices between reading and snacking, I had discovered a remarkable relation, a kind of preestablished harmony, between the taste and the literary quality of a book. To know if something was worth reading I had only to nibble a portion of the printed area. I learned to use the title page for this, leaving the text intact. “Good to eat is good to read” became my motto.

  Sometimes, to give my burning eyes a rest, I would go spelunking in the erstwhile ancestors’ old shafts and secret rooms, and there one night, while creeping along behind the baseboard, I ran up against a dam of fallen plaster, a barrier I had previously mistaken for a portion of a wall but now saw was in fact a blocked tunnel. The obstructing pieces were quite large and angular and were snugged tightly together, so it took me considerable time and effort to break my way through and discover, concealed behind them, a new hole. This was a handsome, almost circular opening, right through the baseboard into the main room of the store. Cunning, or perhaps just lucky, the industrious ancestors had driven it through just behind an old iron safe, at a spot practically invisible to any people in the shop. The Balcony and the Balloon, precious as they were, amounted only to lookouts, observatories suspended like aeries above the mingle and fray of the business, and had not given me actual entrance to the store and to its vast trove of fresh books, as did this new discovery. With what I thought was a fine sense of deliberate irony, I named it the Rathole. I could have named it the Gate of Heaven.

  After that I pretty much abandoned the basement for the superior books upstairs. Room after room of them. Some were bound in leather, their pages edged with gold, though I personally preferred paperbacks, especially the ones from New Directions, with their black-and-white covers, and the serious, austere ones from Scribner’s. If I were a person reading in a park I would always carry one of those. The basement had been good to me, but it was upstairs that I really felt myself blossoming. My intellect grew sharper than my teeth. Soon I could do a four-hundred-page novel in an hour, knock off Spinoza in a day. Sometimes I would gaze around me and tremble with joy. I could not understand why this had been granted me. Sometimes I imagined it was part of a secret plan. I thought, Could it be that I, despite my unlikely appearance, have a Destiny? And by that I meant the sort of thing people have in stories, where the events of a life, no matter how they churn and swirl, are swirled and churned in the end into a kind of pattern. Lives in stories have direction and meaning. Even stupid, meaningless lives, like Lenny’s in Of Mice and Men, acquire through their place in a story at least the dignity and meaning of being Stupid, Meaningless Lives, the consolation of being exemplars of something. In real life you do not get even that.

  I have never been very brave in a physical way, or in any other way either, and I have had a hard time facing up to the blank stupidity of an ordinary, unstoried life, so I very early on started comforting myself with the ridiculous idea that I really did have a Destiny. And I began to travel, in space and time, in my books, looking for it. I dropped in on Daniel Defoe in London for a guided tour of the plague. I heard the bell ringer calling, “Bring out your dead,” and I smelled the smoke from the burning corpses. It is in my nostrils still. People were dying like rats all over London—in fact the rats were dying too, like people. After a couple of hours of this I needed a change of scene, so I went to China and climbed a steep narrow path through bamboo and cypress, to sit for a while in the open doorway of a small mountain hut with old Tu Fu. Staring silently out at the white mist swirling up from the valley, listening to the wind blowing through the reed curtains and the faint reverberations of distant temple bells, we were each “alone with ten thousand things.” After that I shot back to England—hopping over oceans, continents, and centuries as easily as stepping off a curb—where I built a small fire by a cart road so that poor, doomed Tess, grubbing turnips in a bleak windswept field, could warm her chapped hands. I had read her life twice through to the end already—I knew her Destiny—and I turned my face away to hide the tears. Then I journeyed with Marlow aboard a ragged steamer up a river in Africa looking for a man named Kurtz. We found him all right. Better for us that we hadn’t! And I introduced people. I put Baudelaire on the raft with Huck and Jim. It did him a lot of good. And sometimes I made sad people happier. I let Keats marry Fanny before he died. I couldn’t save him, but you should have seen them on their wedding night, in a cheap pensione in Rome. To them it was a fairy palace. I let the books enter my dreams, and sometimes I dreamed myself back into the books. I held Natasha Rostova’s tiny waist, felt her hand resting on my shoulder, and we danced, seeming to float on the swells of the waltz, right across the gleaming parquet of the ballroom and out into a garden hung with paper lanterns, while the dashing lieutenants of the Imperial Guard furiously twisted their mustaches.

  You laugh. You are right to laugh. I was once—despite my unpleasant mien—a hopeless romantic, that most ridiculous of creatures. And a humanist too, equally hopeless. And yet despite—or is it because?—of these failings I was able to meet a lot of fabulous people and a lot of geniuses too in the course of my early education. I got on conversational terms with all the Big Ones. Dostoyevsky and Strindberg, for example. In them I was quick to recognize fellow sufferers, hysterics like me. And from them I learned a valuable lesson—that no matter how small you are, your madness can be as big as anyone’s.

  And you don’t have to believe stories to love them. I love all stories. I love the progression of beginning, middle, and end. I love the slow accumulation of meaning, the misty landscapes of the imagination, the mazy walks, the wooded slopes, the reflecting pools, the tragic twists and comic stumbles. The only literature I cannot abide is rat literature, including mouse literature. I despise good-natured old Ratty in The Wind in the Willows. I piss down the throats of Mickey Mouse and Stuart Little. Affable, shuffling, cute, they stick in my craw like fish bones.

  And now, at the end of it all, I cannot make myself believe anymore that many real people have Destinies, and I am sure that rats never do.

  Despite my intelligence, my tact, the delicacy and refinement of my feelings, my growing erudition, I remained a creature of great disabilities. Reading is one thing, speaking is another, and I don’t mean public speaking. I do not mean that I suffered from social phobia, though that was in fact the case. No, I mean actual vocal utterance—of that I was not capable. Loquacious to the point of chatter, I was condemned to silence. The fact is, I had no voice. All the beautiful sentences flying around in my head like butterflies were in fact flying in a cage they could never get out of. All the lovely words that I mulled and mouthed in the strangled silence of my thought were as useless as the thousands, perhaps millions, of words that I had torn from books and swallowed, the incohesive fragments of entire novels, plays, epic poems, intimate diaries, and scandalous confessions—all down the tube, mute, useless, and wasted. The problem is physiological: I don’t have the right kind of vocal chords. I spent hours declaiming Shakespeare’s lines. I was never able to get beyond a few incomprehensible variations on the basic squeak. Here is Hamlet, dagger in hand: squeak squeak squeak. (And there is Firmin crushed beneath a barrage of boos and seat cushions.) I do better with the lines where Macbeth talks of life being a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing: a few pathetic squeaks serve pretty well there. Oh, what a clown! I laugh, in order not to weep—which, of course, I also cannot do. Or laugh either, for that matter, except in my head, where it is more painful than tears.

  It was during the period of tunnel exploration—I was still very young, having scarcely graduated from the children’s classics and possessing only a shaky grasp of the world—that I saw myself in a mirror for the first time. The door under RESTR
OOM carried a handwritten sign that said PLEASE KEEP THIS DOOR CLOSED. And people did. After the noise of rushing water and before the sound of footsteps on the stairs, there had always intervened the forbidding click of a latch. I was in the corner behind the water heater the day the silence fell, louder than any click, between the flushing and the footfalls. I knew right away what had happened, and when the shop closed that evening I crept out into the flickering. The door under RESTROOM stood open, and a light was on in the small chamber beyond, brighter than anything I had ever imagined. At first I was dazzled by the light and bewildered by the porcelain figures within. These closely resembled the altars I had seen in A Child’s Picture Bible, and I assumed I was entering some sort of temple. The smooth white surfaces and the shiny silver fixtures seemed very solemn. (At that age I still had difficulty distinguishing between solemn and sanitary.) I first explored the rim of an oval basin half-filled with water, its interior streaked with brown stains, and then I nibbled a bit from a roll of soft white paper attached to the wall beside it—it tasted like Emily Post. From there I was able to jump to the high altar, which turned out to be another basin, but empty this time, with a round silver-rimmed hole at the bottom. Above it, slanting slightly downward, hung a large metal-framed mirror in which the room behind me tilted crazily. Though my intellect was still fairly undeveloped, I grasped immediately the principle of the thing. I stood on my hind legs on the basin’s outer rim, and by stretching my body up as high as I could I managed to see myself plain for the first time. I had of course seen the members of my family, and I suppose I really ought to have been able to infer my own appearance from theirs. Yet we differed in so many important ways, I had assumed—willfully assumed, I now realized—that we would differ in this respect also.

  In the end, seeing myself for the first time was not at all like seeing just any old rat. The experience was more personal, and more painful too. While it was easy enough to gaze at the unlovely shapes of Shunt or Peewee, it was horrible to have to look upon my own similar aspect. I realized, of course, that the intensity of this pain was in exact proportion to the enormity of my vanity, but that thought only made things worse. Not just ugly, but vain as well—which only added ridiculous to the pile. There I stood, tilted slightly, in irrefutable detail—short, thick-waisted, hairy, and chinless. Firmin: fur-man. Ridiculous. The chin, or the lack thereof, caused me special pain. It seemed to point—though in fact this nonentity was incapable of anything as bold as pointing—to a gross lack of moral fiber. And I thought the dark bulging eyes gave me a revoltingly froglike air. It was, in short, a shifty, dishonest face, untrustworthy, the face of a really low character. Firmin the vermin. But the details—no chin, pointy nose, yellow teeth, etc.—were not important in themselves when compared to the overall impression of ugliness. Even back then, when my ideas of beauty reached no further than Tenniel’s drawings of Alice, I knew that this was ugly. And the contrast, the heartbreakingly unbridgeable distance, became only greater when later on I became aware of truly beautiful creatures like Ginger, Fred, Rita, Gary, Ava, and all the Lovelies. It was not tolerable.

  From then on I went to great lengths to avoid my own reflection. It was easy to stay away from mirrors, but windows and hubcaps were a different story. Whenever I caught a glimpse of myself in one of those, I was instantly horrified, as if I had seen a monster. Of course I quickly recognized that the monster was just myself again, and I cannot describe the grief I then felt. So I developed a little mental trick: whenever this happened, instead of saying “that’s me” and bursting into tears, I would say “that’s him” and run away.

  During those early days, and especially after I had won access to the main floor, I burned the candle at both ends, and except for the times when hunger drove me out into the world to scrounge for food, I used up most of my night hours reading and traveling in the bookshop and spent the better part of every day glued to the Balloon or the Balcony, fearful of missing something of the goings-on below. Twice I was so tired at night that I fell asleep on a book, and each time woke with a start at the rattle of a key in the front door—Norman was opening the shop—only to dive through the Rathole in the nick of time. And once, nodding off at my post, I almost fell out of the Balloon.

  It was from the Balloon that, some weeks earlier, I had glimpsed Norman for the first time. I had not glimpsed all of Norman though, just the shiny dome of his head, and the tops of his shoulders and arms. He was not Norman yet either, he was still just the Owner of the Desk. It had taken me a long time to screw up the courage to peer down from the Balloon during store hours. But then early one morning I finally managed. Hearing no sound from below but the plaintive creaking of the chair and an occasional rattle of paper, I placed a cautious eye at the rim of the Confidential Crack, and I saw him there at the desk. Elbows on the chair arms, he was reading a newspaper. With my amazing eyesight I could read the paper as well, but at that moment I was more interested in reading what was written on Norman’s bald head. My life has been marked by a series of extraordinary coincidences—for a long time I took these as further signs that I was in possession of a Destiny—and it so happened that just before I looked down on Norman’s head for the first time I had been learning a thing or two about skull-reading.

  I had been working under RARE BOOKS AND FIRST EDITIONS for the previous week or so and had spent part of the previous night hunched over Franz Joseph Gall’s The Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General, and of the Brain in Particular, a groundbreaking work on phrenology. While I was skeptical at first that a person’s character could be read from the bumps and dimples on his skull, a systematic palpation of my own furry pate—by means of a forepaw—had disclosed large protuberances (amounting almost to deformations) right where you would expect them. The bulge on my forehead—a wartlike knob I habitually rub when puzzled—is indicative, according to Gall, of prodigious linguistic endowment, while the sad-sack ridges below my eye sockets are signs of an elevated “spiritual” temperament. I also discovered at the base of my skull telltale bulges for “adhesiveness” and “amativeness,” indicating the presence—and can I deny it?—of “a tendency to form strong attachments to others” and “a proclivity to lust and carnal appetite.” Finally, just to show that even a skull is capable of a little irony, I bear on my temples small but unmistakable ridges produced by the outward thrust of irrepressible Hope.

  Peering over the edge of the Balloon, I mapped the hills and dales of Norman’s bean. Posted there as plain as day were the signs of intelligence, spirituality, mental energy, firmness, and—this was the best of all—a regular hillock pointing to “philoprogenitiveness,” defined by Gall as a “particular feeling that leads one to watch over and provide for helpless offspring.” This discovery of the true nature of the Owner of the Desk filled me with happiness—for the first time in my life I did not feel alone in the world. It gave me a sense of security and—as Gall might have put it—a strong feeling of adhesiveness. I was instantly in love.

  Here I seem to hear sounds of impatience, a pointed shifting of a chair, a deliberate snort. The sight of my happiness, I suppose, goads you into pointing out the painfully obvious, and you wonder aloud if it had never occurred to me that I might not exactly belong to the category of “helpless offspring.” The short answer to that one is: never. Looking back I can see that the whole near-tragedy, which I shall get to shortly, was caused by the simple fact that Norman’s head was not entirely hairless. My investigation of his character, however diligent, was blunted by an ill-kempt growth of dark curls shrouding his temples. Had I been able to perch on a shoulder and explore those temples with my forepaws I have no doubt as to what I would have found: crescent-shaped ridges over the ears, indicating “destructiveness,” aided and abetted by a pair of wedge-shaped bulges, pointing to “secretiveness.” But all that was in the future. For now it is appropriate to place beneath the picture of Norman at his desk the caption THE FIRST HUMAN BEING F. EVER LOVED.

  I trave
led in my books but I no longer ate them, and food—the mundane, illiterate kind—was a constant problem. I was forced to leave the shop every night, ramp up my courage and creep out under the cellar door, to forage around the Square, cringing in shadows, creeping down drains, racing from dark spot to dark spot. Diary of a Nightcrawler. As the year wore on, the days growing colder, then warmer, I began to notice changes in the neighborhood, and I don’t mean the stunted flowerings of a few ragged clumps of grass and daffodils. Indeed, the changes I am referring to stood in ironic contrast to those meager burgeonings. On nearly every block businesses were vanishing, and at night the side streets, and even the Square itself, emptied out earlier. Apart from the knots of sailors in the doorways of bars, there was often no one around after eleven. There were more broken windows in the buildings, and these often went unmended or were replaced by plywood sheets. Trash piled up in alleys and even on the sidewalks in front of some stores. Cars were abandoned at the curb, to be slowly picked to pieces by scavengers, and the brick buildings themselves seemed to sag with age, as though, like old people or old rats, they had lost the will to hold themselves erect. Rats moved into the cars, building cozy burrows in the seats.

  Now and then I bumped into one of the old bunch out there. They too had changed a lot since setting out on their own. Hollow-cheeked and furtive, long bodies and hanging bellies, they were unpleasant-looking characters—to the point where I almost didn’t recognize them. They usually liked pretending they didn’t know me either. They were always frantic to get someplace or other—chasing rumors of easy grub or running from the Man—but occasionally one of them would stop to bat the breeze, give me the news and maybe a tip about where I could scarf up some supper. The tips were usually false, designed to send me off in the wrong direction. Deep down they had not changed much—in their eyes I was still a prize chump. It was through one of those chance encounters that I found out Peewee had been killed, run over by a taxi the night before. I stood with Shunt on the sidewalk while he pointed out a patch of fur in the middle of Cambridge Street, like a little rug. Though Peewee had never shown me the slightest consideration, it was unnerving to see him like that. In my mind, I posted next to his name the words RIDICULOUS and LIFE.