Ascent of Man

by Daniel Lockwood

(for Jacques Ducros)

The mid-summer sun has already gone to sleep but you still haven’t arrived. That suits me fine. This isn’t the capital, after all. The good people of this country town are all in bed, leaving me alone to wait in silence for you to arrive, for us to finally meet face to face. You’ll have to come, eventually.  

The darkness and silence bring out the ghosts once again, but this time I’m ready, even welcoming.

{:>-<:}

“Who did this?  Who?  I’ll kill him!”

I could barely recognize my own voice or the fury boiling inside of me. I’d never felt anger like this, not even when father beat me. But seeing her there sobbing and holding her face in a bloody heap raised my bile. How could anyone have been so cruel, so vicious? There were no words for this.

A week on, Cecilia could still barely speak. Things might have been different if I’d had the money to bring her to a real doctor, but who could be sure? We were barely able to afford bread as it was. And when I confronted him about the sagging jaw, the barber Gauthier simply shrugged and told me that some things could not be mended. He still stuck me with the bill as though everything had been, though.

And two weeks later, things became even worse when I lost my block-carving apprenticeship. Master Levesque was struggling and had no choice but to let some of us go.

“Besides, you’re illiterate. The other boys can follow the letters, but you? You’re always making mistakes!”

It was Cici’s turn to be furious. 

“You’re better off not working for that swine! You could go to Lacombe or Ballard, or even set out on your own.”

She offered to teach me how to read once again but there was little point. All the masters were cutting workers and I had to find a new job fast before there was nothing at all. And besides, the idea reminded me too much of mother – watching the two of them sitting together, pouring over letters. Since mother died, I’d always managed to somehow keep our heads above water, but now I felt we were drowning. I guess this was how mother felt after my father died, and after Cecile’s deserted her.

By the time I found work as a drinks vendor, we had been surviving on crusts for a week. I barely had the strength to carry the dispenser on my back, but the cold weather was setting in and the people needed warming. It was a tremendous stroke of luck to begin my own business after so much ill fortune had befallen us. Slowly, money came, and then food, and my strength returned, allowing me to walk farther into the city. I could reach the merchants now, and even once in a while a cup of tea for a gentleman exploring the slums for some entertainment.

And then I became obsessed with finding him.

His friends had called him Jacques, but every third man in this city was a Jacques-something. And she hadn’t even seen his face. He’d been wearing a mask, the kind those rich bastards wear when attending their balls. But she remembered his ring, a huge golden signet engraved with an ‘M’. How could she forget the ring that had cut her? But she still blamed herself. She shouldn’t have laughed at him. It was her fault.

“Forget him,” she pleaded. “There’s nothing we can do anyway. Leave it in the past.”

But I couldn’t forget, and certainly wouldn’t forgive. Cici couldn’t to go back to her previous work, not the way she was now. She took on some washing but wasn’t able to do much. I had thought it was just melancholia, but she’d been through worse and had never succumbed before. No, it was something else, something in her blood. She grew pale and thin, and then the fevers came. Even leeches did little to help.

I had to find a reason for her to recover.

This Jacques was nothing like anyone I knew. Young, moneyed, and with a group of his peers - I decided he may have been a student. And so I began to search closer to the university. Not too close – they’d chase me out in a second – but in the squares and cafés nearby. And one cold day, while pouring a drink for a carpenter’s boy, my ears caught the sound that I’d been searching for and suddenly nothing else in the world mattered.

“Well it is truly a shame, Jacques, but one could also see it at the same time as a blessing.”

The boy jumped back from the splash as the hot cup clattered to the ground. I shoved his coin back into his hand and hurried off after the two men. I followed at a distance, my heart pounding, as they sauntered down the street, but they wouldn’t have noticed a person like me anyway, all puffed up like pigeons as they were.

After several blocks, they stopped in front of a wealthy townhouse. One got into a waiting carriage and the other waved him on his way, golden ring glinting in the sunlight as if to taunt me.

“Goodbye, old boy! I promise I’ll write!”

Now I had his name, his face, and his voice, this Jacques. And he was going to pay for what he had done.

I returned the next day and wasted it waiting for nothing. In this area, hardly anyone gave me so much as a look, except to sneer at me, and I sold no more than a handful of drinks. But the following day my sacrifice was rewarded with another sighting. This time, a carriage arrived and a couple of men carried a trunk and several parcels onto it. And then my Jacques came out from the townhouse and got in. The driver cracked his whip and the horses trotted off.

For another week, I returned to that spot, a plan forming in my head, but I never saw him again. When I finally asked a chimney sweep, he told me the man had left the city for the provinces, though to where he couldn’t say.

It was a knife to the stomach, but there was a knife to the heart yet to come.

That same December, Cici took to her bed and never rose from it. She left me on a cold morning seven days later, an angel returning to heaven. Her blood had turned, they said. And I’d let the man who killed her slip away from me.

{:>-<:}

That was you, those twenty years ago, though I doubt you even remember what you did. Who would remember something as small as beating a poor girl in an alleyway? You didn’t know you killed her, did you?  But you also wouldn’t care. You were wealthy and powerful and she was nothing, nothing to you but a cheap way to entertain yourself. But to me she was everything.

And maybe I’m to blame.

I knew what was going on. I knew she was spending time near the Palais-Royale, and I knew the few ways a pretty poor girl could find coin in a place like that. I never warned her about the likes of you. But then I never truly realized how truly separated your kind is from ours, how to you we are nothing but cobblestones to walk on.

But things change, and you also never knew about me or expected me to find you.

{:>-<:}

With Cici gone, my life lost all colour. I had no feeling, no hope, and truly became just a cobble to be treaded on. Eventually, circumstance forced me to move on. The prices of bread and rent climbed every year, and a new gang that called itself a guild wanted part of my meager earnings for their coffers. The city was a dark, damp maze where the real rats had it better than most of us human ones. Eventually, I accepted that there was nothing for me there but misery, so I packed up and moved out to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, near Montreuil where I was born.

The streets were filled with the same poor, but we were nearer the farms and prices were lower so we could at least eat. And the guilds had no hold there. I was able to find work as a block carver again after showing what I’d learned in my apprenticeship. And I didn’t need to read. I worked for M. Réveillon, a man who had built himself up to be the wallpaper manufacture royale and who knew the queen personally. I cut blocks of pictures and designs for printing, and there were never any words to botch up.

I slowly became human again. The burden of my crippling grief left me, little by little, and I began to discover a new purpose in my work and my comrades, even finding some merriment in music and drink at the local tavern. I was even able to experience some of the beauty of life once more. Not joy, perhaps, but something. I could never bring myself to think of a family, though - not when I had failed my own so completely.

M. Réveillon was an ostentatious man. Having made himself rich, he wanted only to make a name for himself. So, he threw parties and constructed gardens and did all the things the unbelievably rich do. And then he began work on something new, something secret that was meant to be his biggest achievement ever. Jean-Philippe, the papermaster, knew what it was but refused to tell, no matter how we plied him with wine. But we all knew it was something special because we were printing some of the finest, most expensive paper we’d ever made.

Then one day, returning from the outbuildings past the great house, I heard a sound that struck me like a hammer. It was a voice, that voice, from ten years before. It was Jacques.

The world turned red as all my blood came to my face and my ears. The only thing that existed in the world was that voice and that man. I listened near the window as intently as a hound on a scent.

“It is ready, then?”

“Étienne, it is more than ready. It is glorious. It will be as if the king himself is smiling down on us from the heavens! Our names will be carved in stone to be read for eternity.”

“In that case, I ask your leave to prepare a trial. It would not do for it to go untested and then fail on the day.”

“Indeed not. I leave you to your work, monsieur. But do take care. It must remain in pristine condition so it will sparkle on the day of our triumph.”

Étienne? I didn’t care what he called himself. It was the same voice and the same man, and I had the same purpose, the one I had nearly forgotten. He wouldn’t slip away from me again.

There was noise at the front of the great house. I spied M. Réveillon depart in his carriage, and I knew that the servants all took time to breathe once the master was out of the house. It was the perfect moment. I returned to the same window which was still open and I carefully climbed inside. The room was empty, but a maid would soon come to retrieve the wine glasses standing there. I hurried to leave when I spied a pair of large, solid silver candlestick holders and realized I wanted a weapon. I took one and started out, tiptoeing down the hallways.

Then I heard a sound far away like the closing of a door. He had exited! I made for that direction, confused by the warren of hallways, and eventually found my way out to the rear courtyard. I heard a sound like light rain or burning leaves and followed it. There! I caught his heels disappearing behind the stables.

I knew I had the upper hand. I would surprise him and it would be done before he even knew I was upon him. And it would be quick, though that was far more than he deserved. I flew around the corner with my club held high, and everything turned on its head.

He was standing before a titan of gargantuan size. It was a blue globe, covered in golden faces and beasts of every sort, the bottom smoldering and smoking like a beast from hell. Had he summoned a demon? Whatever it was, he climbed up into it and released a rope, and it began to rise.

I fell to my knees, watching in shock and dismay as God or the devil carried him off. What sorcery had taken him away from me once more? My tears began to flow as a cry of “Thief!” and a thud turned the world from red to black.

{:>-<:}

You see, I almost had you but I wasn’t prepared. I was a fool. Perhaps if I’d been able to read then I would have already recognized your name from the bulletins. And I wouldn’t have been mesmerized by that floating orb, your montgolfier. I would have known that it was a creation of man instead of the devil. I was a fool then, but I’m not a fool now. I’ve learned so much about what I am, about what you are, about the world.

At last, there’s the signal! The lantern over that rise, three quick flashes as we agreed. You’ll arrive soon and finally you will know who I am, this man who has thought of nothing but you for so many years.

{:>-<:}

It was prison for me, as a poor thief and bastard son of nobody. The Châtelet, but not the good rooms.  The ground floor cells that stank of piss and blood from the nearby slaughterhouses. Summer’s heat was unbearable and winter proved unsurvivable for many. I finally learned my letters in that dungeon, Ancient Benoit teaching me through scratches in the dirt before he died. And somehow I survived, whether by God’s mercy or His torture, though the last winter was so severe, my fingers began to turn black. The surgeon had to take one, my left, my chisel hand.

Then everything changed once more. Cannons began firing for more than just marking the hour. Mobs sang in the streets. Gunshots rang out incessantly. And then one day we were freed. The door was opened and a throng of peasants carrying pitchforks and torches told us we were their brothers.

And I believed them. These were the poor bastards I had lived with and starved with my whole life. With my hand gone, I couldn’t cut blocks anymore, and anyway, I heard they’d burned Réveillon’s factory to the ground. Instead, I returned to my life as a drinks vendor, though business was interrupted almost daily by mobs and marches and massacres. The poor had risen up and the wealthy, mean, brutal masters were learning new lessons.

Then they took the king’s head, and his wife’s, and the ministers’, and soon anyone’s that wasn’t wearing a red liberty cap.  It continued on until it seemed like there was no one left to guillotine. And that’s when I finally understood my purpose for living through it all, for surviving starvation and torture and misery all these years. I had a duty, even a destiny to fulfill. I knew of a man who would survive all of this if his crimes went uncovered.

I felt that Cici was reaching down to me from heaven when I found him again through reading of his famous triumph, the first manned flight in history. I knew where he lived, where he worked. And I knew it was me who had to deliver his punishment.

{:>-<:}

An ache where my hand used to be tells me that a storm is coming. The horses come into view and the driver pulls them to a halt in front of the hotel. Your manservant leaps down and hurries inside, but the driver comes to me to receive a handful of coins before slipping away into the shadows. A good man. Loyal.

Now it’s just you and me on the dark, silent road back to your home. Your carrots are cooked.

I’d always wanted you to see my face, to know who was your undoing, but that changed with the revolution. I know now that I mean nothing. I’m just a soldier for the cause. Instead, I slip on the thin mask I carved with my one good hand. I want you to feel the same terror my sister felt when she was attacked by a stranger. I am vengeance. I am the Revolution made flesh.

I open up the door to find you fast asleep. You’re dressed in silks and your belly is fat. Time has been good to you. I draw my chisel, the one I still sharpen every night, and press it to your left cheek. You don’t stir. But when I begin slicing into your face, cutting effortlessly through flesh and sinew, I understand why. You’ve managed to escape me once more, you son of a dog. This time not with a carriage or a balloon, but with an even cleverer trick.

You’re already dead.

But your man isn’t, and his blade is in me even as the realization comes. I tumble to the ground, blood pouring from my body and the rain begins to fall in fat, hot drops. The wet stone pavement turns blue against my white flesh and the swirl of red blood and I see the tricolor and wonder if they’ll sing songs about me. And Cici is there holding my hand and smiling as the world turns to black once more.

THE END