Peter Carey - Parrot and Olivier in America

My mother would now punish me for pinching her. She would be cold, so much the better. Now I would discover what had made this smell. I would go through her bureau drawers when she was praying. I would take the key to the library. I examined the papers in my father's desk drawers. I climbed on chairs. I sought out the dark, the forbidden, the corners of the chateau where the atmosphere was somehow most dangerous and soiled, well beyond the proprieties of the library, beyond the dry safe wine cellar, through a dark low square portal, into that low limitless dirty dark space where the spiderwebs caught fire in the candlelight. I found nothing-or nothing but dread which mixed with the dust on my hands and made me feel quite ill.

However, there is no doubt that Silices si levas scorpiones tandem invenies-if you lift enough rocks, you will finally discover a nest of scorpions, or some pale translucent thing that has been bred to live in a cesspit or the fires of a forge. And I do not mean the letters a certain monsieur had written to my mother which I wish I had never seen. It was, rather, beside the forge that I discovered the truth in some humdrum little parcels. They had waited for me in the smoky gloom and I could have opened them any day I wished. Even a four-year-old Olivier might have reached them; the shelf was so low that our blacksmith used it to lean his tools against. One naturally assumed these parcels to be the legacy of a long-dead gardener-dried seeds, say, or sage or thyme carefully wrapped for a season some Jacques or Claude had never lived to see. By the time I pushed my snotty nose against them, which was a very long time after the night I pinched my mother, they still exuded a distinct but confusing smell. Was it a good smell? Was it a bad smell? Clearly I did not know. Not even Montaigne, being mostly concerned with the smell of women and food, is prepared to touch on this. He ignores the lower orders of mold and fungus, death and blood, all of which might have served him better than his ridiculous assertion that the sweat of great men-he mentions Alexander the Great-exhaled a sweet odor.

The old blacksmith had died the previous winter. Gustave was the new blacksmith, and Jacques his apprentice. They had recently restored our damaged gates with fierce spikes along their top and were presently rehanging them. While Gustave barked at Jacques, I quietly laid the first of these musky parcels outside on the flagstones. They certainly did not look like death or horror. The yellow wrap of newspaper, being very old, broke apart like the galettes we ate at Epiphany although, in this case, they contained not the delicious almond cream called frangipane, but-what was I looking at?-no more than the desiccated body of a bird, a pigeon from whose dried remains there issued a line of small black ants, and it was the ants who caused me such upset. That is, they swarmed along my arms and down my neck, and bit me. I was soon running up and down the courtyard crying and it was not until Gustave removed my tunic that I was saved.

So loud were my screams that my father rushed from the court in his judicial gown and wig. A robust bride and big-nosed groom came after him and peered at what I'd found. Gustave and Jacques now produced dozens of these parcels and laid them, according to my father's instructions, in a neat line along the side of the building. When they were all formed up, my father gave orders that they should be destroyed, which I naturally assumed was because they were filled with horrid ants.

Odile, drawn by my screams, came out to see. So did Bebe. This was a considerable crowd to be in such a place. But then my mother drove through the open gates in The Tormentor-which is what we called her swaying carriage-and in a moment she had descended and was in the thick of it, against my father's wishes.

"No, Henriette-Lucie, you must not." Those were his words, exactly.

My mother snatched the crumbling paper from my father's hand. "My pigeons!" she cried.

I did not understand, not for a second, but I had found the very explanation of my life.

My mother held her handkerchief across her mouth. It seemed she might be vomiting. She was blind to me, half dead with noble shame. She would not be attended to by servants, only by the aristocratic Bebe who now escorted her to the chateau. No one noticed me, and I remained behind while my father ordered his bride and groom back into the court. I stayed to watch the cremation of the pigeons, but even so I did not understand that each parcel contained a victim of the Revolution.

Inhabiting the wainscoting, as it were, I easily rescued a single fragile sheet of paper and, careful of it as if it were a lovely moth, carried it away into the woods to read.

THE HORRIBLE AUSTRIAN stared at me as I fled toward the oratory whose door I hammered at until the latch jumped free. I threw myself before the altar, blood pouring from my nose. Would God not protect me from that hideous thing I carried crushed inside my hand?

Then my Bebe kneeled beside me. He took my hand as if to comfort me, then forced it open. Firmly he held my wrist, gently he brushed the fragments from my palm.

"What is this my child?"

It was a drawing from the old newspaper that had wrapped a pigeon.

It showed a machine, an awful blade, a set of tracks, a rope, a human head severed from its body. It was the king's head. I knew his noble face. A hand held the head separate from the butchered neck of whence the blood did spurt and flow. An ornate typography declared: QUE LE ROI SOIT DAMNE.

Bebe offered his rumpled handkerchief. It was not the complete and total inadequacy of this that frightened me but that he, my own Bebe, should look at his Olivier with eyes so dull and tired.

"This happened?" I demanded.

He held out his big hands in resignation. This was terrifying but worse than that, far worse-he shrugged.

"It is horrid." I cried as bats cry, flying through the dreadful dark.

Below me was a great abyss, no floors, no walls, and my mind was awash with the monstrous terrors of decapitation. The king's head was a perfect living head that might smile and speak, and its eyes were perfect eyes, and the hair was dressed as a king's hair should be dressed, and everything about him was so fine and good except for this vile machine, these flying drops of blood, this filthy squirt and gush.

"Is this why my mother cries? Does she know this?" I meant was this what she saw when she lay with the damp sheet across her eyes?

"Yes, my darling, alas."

"Then who made this dreadful thing, Bebe? Who would imagine such a horrid sight?"

"It is thought to be kinder," said Bebe.

"It was Napoleon who did this? This is why we hate him?"

"No, this is the father of Napoleon."

I did not understand what he could mean-a father.

"Bebe, who killed so many pigeons?"

"The peasants put the birds on trial for stealing seeds. They found them guilty and then they wrung their necks."

"But we don't have pigeons, Bebe. The loft is empty. We have never had pigeons."

"Your grandfather kept pigeons. The peasants felt oppressed by them it seems, to have them eat the planted seeds."

Can you imagine such a flood of horror washing over so young a child? But so it was, at six years of age, I had my first lesson in the Terror which had been the flavor of my mother's milk. My parents had been thrown into Porte Libre prison where every day one of their fellow nobles was called "to the office" and was never seen again. In these months my father's hair turned white, my beautiful mother was broken in that year of 1793, when the sansculottes came up the road from Paris.

My family had been at table, Bebe told me, as he "got the boy outside," out past the forge, beneath the linden trees. They had been at dinner, my mother and father and grandfather, when the gardener had come hurrying inside and stood before them with a pair of secateurs in his gloved hands.