Sylva

As was indeed inevitable, Sylva’s indecision assumed greater proportions every day. Everything aroused in her an intense and absorbed attention. In many circumstances she behaved as she had when faced with the hare: a first instinctive movement, promptly checked as if to examine if that was really what she wanted to do. Of course she no longer knew what she really wanted, and more and more often she would mope in a kind of dreamy apathy. While this latter state aroused some anxiety in me, Nanny was delighted. At last, she said, she was on her home ground again, that of educating backward children. The sudden interest Sylva nowadays showed for all creatures and things around her, she also seemed to show, though still silently as a rule, for Nanny’s explanations. She would not say a word but some time later we would discover that she had grasped the gist. Nanny taught her to count on her fingers. Sylva watched her stretching them out one after the other, but she did not repeat the figures. Yet, while in the first days when we told her at lunch, “Go and fetch three apples,” she would bring us two or five at random, she eventually brought back the right number one day and never made a mistake again, whatever figure we mentioned.

I have said before that for a long time we were stumped by her inability to understand pictures, at least insofar as they represented animate beings, until she thought she recognized that of a motionless dog-the dead Baron. This revelation, as I have said, shook her violently (screams, gasps and sobs interspersed with the dog’s name) but simultaneously it seemed to have opened a door in this brain full of locks and bolts, onto a field with vast prospects; for on the next day all pictures had become intelligible for her and produced cries of pleasure.

Nanny gave her paper and pencil, showed her how to make use of them. To begin with, of course, her pupil only managed to scrawl at random, like a very small child. But the mere fact that she scribbled was already a remarkable novelty, and whenever some flourish happened to form a circle, she would exclaim, “An apple!” and laugh.

Indeed she now laughed more and more, thus confirming my own modest theories: it was death, I was certain of it, that had led her to laughter. It is because the human species is the only one which knows that death is our common lot that it is also the only one to know laughter as a saving grace. An atavistic fear lies within us from our childhood, more or less unconscious and lurking in our depths, and when something delivers us from it for a fleeting second, it produces suddenly such a relief, lifts such a weight, that our body shakes with “brutal convulsions.” In laughter, in comedy, we seek a second’s respite, a short moment of organic oblivion from our condition. During the moment when laughter shakes us, we are immortal.

Sylva always laughed after being afraid. She also laughed-not always-after some unforeseen effect of her acts. To have drawn an apple unintentionally was one of those effects. In order to experience this pleasure, she began to draw them on purpose. Then she learned from Nanny that one could put into a circle two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and she started to draw funny figures endlessly with childish fervor. But she would draw them lying down.

“Why lying down?” Nanny asked her eventually, intrigued. “Bonny, no more play,” said my vixen, and she laughed and jumped at me jocosely, kissing and biting me to manifest her joy at my being alive.

I did not start writing this story to describe Mrs. Bumley’s methods of re-education. They were excellent and proved quick and effective. Sylva was soon able to recognize not only pictures but sounds. I mean printed vowels, then consonants, then groups of letters. When she understood that a cry, a word, could be represented, a new door opened onto a new domain, and through it abstract ideas rushed in. Notions such as time and space began to mean something to her. So the “but not for a long, long time” which a short while ago had been unable to soften the terrifying revelation that Baron’s death meant mine and hers as well-for in her mind which was still impervious to duration, still like a fox’s living in a perpetual present, this death in fact made us at once alive and dead-this “very long time” became comprehensible to her, the sinister prospect ceased to be imminent and even withdrew so far that she hardly ever referred to it. All that it left on her mind in process of formation was an indelible mark, a half-unconscious imprint, rarely expressed but which became the inner driving force of the mind’s progress just like the secret presence of the engines, silent and invisible, in the heart of a ship.

Chapter 30