"C" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCarthy Tom)

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In the beginning,” says Simeon Carrefax, standing on a small raised podium in Schoolroom One, “-in the beginning, ladies and gentlemen, was the Word.”

His audience, a gaggle of the parents of prospective pupils at the Versoie Day School for the Deaf, sit squeezed into the schoolroom’s child-size chairs. Miss Hubbard stands behind them at the back of the room, her gaze darting nervously between Carrefax and a box full of small pieces of lead piping lying by her feet.

“The Word was with God,” Carrefax continues, “and the Word was God. Which is to say: speech is divine. Speech itself breathed the earth into being-and breathed life into it, that it in turn may breathe and speak. What, I ask you, are the rising and falling of its mountains and its valleys or the constant heaving of its seas but breath? What are the winds that rush and swirl around it, now one way, now another? What are the jets of steam that gush from geysers or the spray that issues from the blow-holes of whales? And which man who has stood beside the torrent of a waterfall or, pausing in a wood, has heard the whisper of the leaves, the chirp and clamour of the birds, can deny that he has heard earth speaking?”

His eyes sweep the room intently. As they fall on individual parents, the latter cast their own eyes to the floor, or fix them on a wall-mounted whiteboard behind Carrefax. Here, drawn in charcoal across cotton-backed ground glass, a diagram shows plates, hinges, corridors and levers locked together in an intricate formation that suggests an irrigation system or the mechanism of a crane.

“And we, ladies and gentlemen: do we not also move to the same gasping and exhaling rhythm? Is not our spirit, truly named, suspirio? Breathing, we live; speaking, we partake of the sublime. In our conversing each one with the other-listening, responding-we form our attachments: friendships, enmities and loves. It is through our participation in the realm of speech that we become moral, learn to respect the law, to understand another’s pain, and to expand and fortify our faculties through the great edifices of the arts and sciences: poetry, reason, argument, discourse. Speech is the method and the measure of our flowering into bloom. It is the currency and current of our congress in the world and all the crackling wonders of its institutions and exchanges.”

He pauses, and the parents grow aware of their own breathing, suddenly loud and ponderous in the quiet of the schoolroom. He draws his head and shoulders back and continues:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to call myself an oralist. I count among my intellectual forebears Deschamps, Heinicke, Gérando and the great Alexander Bell. The human body,” he says, turning half-round to tap his knuckles on the whiteboard’s glass, “is a mechanism. When its engine-room, the thorax, a bone-girt vault for heart and lungs whose very floor and walls are constantly in motion-when this chamber exerts pressure sufficient to force open the trap-door set into its ceiling and send air rushing outwards through the windpipe, sound ensues. It’s as simple as that. Children!” He turns to face a row of three boys and a girl who have been sitting quietly on the side of the podium, opens the palm of his right hand and raises it firmly. “Up!”

The children rise from their chairs. Like a conductor Carrefax holds his hands out and then shoves them forwards, quivering in the air in front of him-and all four children break into a chorus made up of a single word:

“Haaaaaaa.”

The sound is long, drawn out and without harmony or intonation. A few seconds into it several prospective parents shift in their small seats, adjusting their positions. The children’s eyes stare straight ahead, vacant, as though entranced, or taken over by a set of ghosts; their shoulders, drawn back as they launched into their utterance, slowly crumple and deflate as it fades out. Carrefax draws his hands back again, then once more shoves them quivering forwards and the children moan again:

“Haaaaaaa.”

The sound, the second time round, seems like a response, a weary, empty answer to a hollow question. Carrefax’s hands draw it out for as long as they can, all the while trembling from the effort. Eventually, though, the children’s voices start to shudder, then to break down into groans, which die away as the inarticulate spirits that have seized their bodies give up and relinquish them again.

“Children,” says Carrefax, turning his palms to face the podium’s boards, “down!”

The children sit back in their chairs. Carrefax points at them and announces:

“When these four children came to my school, each of them was held to be not only deaf but also mute. What? Yes, mute: doubly afflicted. And yet how erroneous the diagnosis! Are you, sir, considered mute due to your lack of proficiency in the Mandarin tongue? Or you, madam, because you never speak Estonian and, beyond that, remain entirely ignorant of the very existence of Quichua, the language of the remote Inca people of the Andean cordillera?”

He fixes two prospective parents with his gaze. They look slightly alarmed and shake their heads.

“Of course not! No human born with thorax, throat and mouth is incapable of speaking these or any other languages! Yet how would you come to speak a tongue that you had never been exposed to, tried on, tested? So is it for the deaf child with English. Speech is not a given: it must be wrung from him, wrenched out. The body’s motor must be set to work, its engine-parts aligned, fine-tuned to one another. Miss Hubbard.”

Blushing, Miss Hubbard crouches down beside her box and, picking up the short lengths of lead piping, starts distributing these around the room.

“Gentlemen and ladies,” Carrefax instructs the prospective parents, “press your lips firmly together and blow air between them.”

The prospective parents look at one another.

“Do it!” Carrefax commands. “Compress your lips, like so-hmmm-and blow air through them.”

He half-raises his hands in front of him again. Slowly, the prospective parents purse their lips, take deep breaths, then expel these through them like so many toddlers making farting sounds at table. As the sounds fill the room, the parents’ faces redden with the strain, or with embarrassment, or both.

“It is a far-from-pleasant sound, I think you’ll all agree,” announces Carrefax above the tuneless rasping. “A fly trapped in a glass sounds no less gracious. But now take the length of pipe you each have in your hand and, making once again your buzz, bring the tube firmly to your lips. Go on.”

The prospective parents obey. As each one presses the tube to their mouth, the flatulent rasps give over to clear, trumpet-like notes.

“Splendid!” booms Carrefax. “Now tighten your lips further.” The prospective parents do this and the notes rise in pitch. “Wonderful! Now you, sir, and you, madam, loosen yours two notches while the others hold them tight.” They comply; the high-pitched notes become offset by deeper ones. “Magnificent!” roars Carrefax. “We have a brass band here, no less! What symphonies we could compose! Miss Hubbard.”

Miss Hubbard moves around the classroom gathering the instruments back from their players.

“Were we to pay a visit to the finest opera singer,” Carrefax announces, “and, secreting ourselves among the curtains and décor of the opera house armed with a sword, rush out onto the stage right in the middle of her most enchanting aria to cut her head off in mid-song with one sharp, well-aimed blow-Splendid! Yes, what? Were we to do this, her headless neck, while air still rushed through it, would issue forth a sound just like your buzzing lips denuded of their pipes. Well, in the same way, deaf children… deaf children are like headless opera singers inasmuch as, inasmuch as…”

There’s a pause while he searches for his next words; then a clang as Miss Hubbard drops a length of lead pipe to the floor. Prospective parents turn to look at her. She curtsies to pick it up; Carrefax clears his throat and continues:

“Our job here is to restore to the deaf child the function of his pipes and all their stops: the larynx with its valves; the timbre-moulding pharynx; the pillar-supported palate which, depressed, hangs like a veil before the nares; and so on. Speech, like song, is but the mechanical result of certain adjustments of the vocal organs. If we explain to deaf children the correct adjustments of the organs they possess, they will speak. Timothy, Samuel and Felicity-” he points to three of his four protégés, opens his palm and resolutely raises it towards the ceiling-“up!”

The two boys and the girl rise once more. Carrefax conducts them with one hand this time, using it to sculpt precise shapes and positions in the air in front of him, repeating a sequence which is mirrored in the looping series of sounds that spill from the children in unison:

“Ah ee o ee, ah ee o ee, ah ee o ee…”

He lets the sequence run through several times, then brings it to a halt with a decapitating slice.

“Here, with the mere sinking and lifting of the palate, we already have the base for a range of words. Timothy.” He singles out a boy with freckles and, pinching his own ear between his fingers, draws from the boy the utterance:

“Ee-ah.”

“Splendid! Good lad!” he booms. Then, taking a piece of charcoal, he writes on the board the word area before pointing to the girl. “Felicity.”

Felicity pronounces the progression “aih-ree-ah.” Its second syllable is expelled with a heavy breath.

“Splendid again!” booms Carrefax. He turns back to the board, wipes out area and writes in its place eerie. “Samuel.”

The round, blond Samuel reads the word aloud. Again a heavy exhalation flushes out the “rie.” Carrefax nods at him contentedly, turns to his audience and tells them:

“Ear, area, eerie: the slightest command of our vocal apparatus opens up for us the wherewithal to indicate the body’s organs, to conceive of blocks of space, to name the southernmost of North America’s Great Lakes and to express the air of mystery that clouds our dreams. How much more of a blossoming of our verbal powers arises when we bring into play the tongue, which flicks against the palate’s ceiling like the brush of Michelangelo against the Sistine Chapel’s still-wet plaster, or the lips which frame the masterpieces crafted in our throats and mouths-and, in so doing, attract, as temples to the pilgrims of our eyes. How right is Romeo, upon his first meeting with Juliet, to shun her palmistry! Our lips communicate, not our hands. Watch this profoundly deaf child read mine-and listen as this supposedly mute child uses the full range of her own vocal apparatus to respond.” He turns to Felicity and, fixing her with an intense stare, says to her slowly: “Felicity, what part of England were you born in?”

There’s a pause, then Felicity replies: “Talesbury, Mr. Carrefax.” She pronounces the T and b of “Talesbury” with utter precision, but its vowels drag and stretch out, as though snagged on the consonants. The f and x of “Carrefax” hiss like a punctured football.

“Splendid! Now ask Timothy how many brothers he has.”

Felicity turns to the freckled boy and says, slowly and diligently:

“Timothy: how many brothers have you?”

Timothy eventually responds: “I have two brothers.” His voice is slightly deeper than hers; his final s resembles more a buzz than a hiss. His hands twitch slightly by his sides as he intones the words, then cling to the fabric of his shorts, as though tethering themselves down.

“Splendid! And now, Felicity and Timothy both: tell me, what poem have you been committing to heart of late?”

The children reply together but slightly off-kilter: “ ‘The Shepheardes Calender.’ ”

“Recite the first few stanzas for our friends here,” Carrefax instructs them. The children turn away from one another; Carrefax cues Felicity with a nod and she declaims:

Cuddie, for shame hold up thy heavy head,

And let us cast with what delight to chase,

And weary this long lingering Phoebus race.

Whilhom thou wont the shepherd’s lads to lead,

In rhymes, in riddles, and in bidding base…

She speaks slowly and deliberately; the words snag and stretch and drag and hiss again. Prospective parents lean forward in their undersize chairs, straining to catch the meaning of her phrases. These give the strange effect of coming from some other speaker lurking out of view-off to the podium’s side, or under it. A couple of prospective parents glance around the room, disoriented. When Felicity’s finished, Carrefax nods at Timothy and he begins:

Piers, I have pipéd erst so long with pain,

That all mine Oten reeds be rent and wore:

And my poor Muse hath spent her sparéd store,

Yet little good hath got, and much less gain.

Such pleasance makes the Grasshopper so poor,

And lie so laid, when Winter doth her strain…

His words, like Felicity’s, seem to issue not from him but rather to divert through him-as though his mouth, once it formed and held the correct shape for long enough, received a sound spirited in from another spot, some other area, eerie, ear.