The Lonely Hearts Hotel(4)

4


    THE EARLY YEARS OF A BRILLIANT IDIOT



Pierrot was a late bloomer. When he was a baby, he didn’t do much of anything at all. He wouldn’t even sit up but just lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. And then when he finally learned to sit up, he couldn’t be bothered to talk for months and months and months. He let the other children do all the talking. He was too delighted listening to the others to say anything himself. He would burst out laughing at odd times when you weren’t sure what he could possibly have found funny.

The Mother Superior was quite sure that before he was six years old, she would have to pack his stuff into a suitcase, draw him a little map with the directions to the insane asylum and send him on his way.

The nuns almost separated him from the other boys, but he seemed to play well with them. The other boys didn’t cast him aside like they usually did with oddly maturing children. This seemed to imply that they thought he was somehow at their level. And children were the best at knowing such things. Once he did open his mouth, at age three, he seemed bright enough.

But perhaps what really saved him from being in a straitjacket for the majority of his life was the unusual skill set he was developing. He was able to do handstands and cartwheels. He could do a backflip as if it were a natural thing for a child to do. He also had a flair for theatrics. Pierrot would pretend to sit on a chair, even though there wasn’t anything underneath him—a subtle act of absurdity that amused the other children to no end. Pierrot also often acted as though he had just been struck by lightning, sizzling in one spot and then dropping dead to the floor. He would sometimes be found in the backyard in the winter, picking imaginary flowers and sniffing them.

Pierrot’s blond hair made him look serious and angelic when he wasn’t doing something absurd. He was so slender. He just got taller as he got older, but never broader. It was hard to imagine that he would ever hit puberty. Pierrot was capable of great wondrous thoughts by the time he was eleven. Everywhere he went, he seemed to leave a trail of them behind, like the tail of a kite flipping around in the breeze. Usually one formulates an idea or desire and then subsequently says it out loud. But with Pierrot, the thoughts were so on the tip of his tongue that he sometimes had the impression he was saying them first and thinking about them later. He seemed to be as much in love with the gymnastic feats of language as he was with its meaning. And therefore he was known to say things that were much wiser than he himself could understand.

Pierrot was to be a paradox to all those who met him. On the one hand, he was utterly brilliant, and on the other hand, there was no way he could be interpreted as anything except a fool. But because he was so entertaining, Pierrot was always presented when the archbishop was visiting.

Although it was not the type of question an archbishop usually bothered volatile orphans with, he asked Pierrot—purely out of curiosity as to what his answer might be—who he imagined that his parents were.

“Oh,” said Pierrot, “I imagine some woeful skinny teenage thing who got seduced by a thug. These things happen, and there is nothing that anybody in the whole world can do to stop them. Let’s be honest—I was born in the most unfashionable of gutters.”

The archbishop, along with others, realized that if you put a blazer on him, Pierrot could fit in anywhere. He could have passed for the prime minister’s son. You could imagine him giving a little speech on the radio when his father passed away—on how he felt about losing such a grandiose papa.

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PIERROT’S MOST REMARKABLE SKILL, however, was that he was able to pick out certain tunes on the piano after only a few lessons. He was a natural. He couldn’t be bothered to learn to read music but just played by ear, composing his own tunes or improvising them. Reading a musical score was too much like classwork for Pierrot. And he was terrible at math and science and geography and history and spelling. Very soon Pierrot was able to play much better than the Mother Superior herself. He played so quickly. The notes were like mice scurrying across the floor.

If he had been born anywhere else, he would have been a musical prodigy. But he was raised in an orphanage and so he played the piano in the cafeteria at dinnertime. He would play a religious tune that the Mother Superior requested, but every now and then he couldn’t help himself and would start inventing his own numbers. He would turn the little hymn into a jazz number. Everyone would start laughing and clapping their hands. They wagged their heads violently, looking like piggy banks being shaken.

When he went off script like that, the Mother Superior would come up and close the piano lid and sometimes whack him on the palms with a ruler. She always let him play again, though. There was nothing else she could do. There was no way the children could listen to the instructors or other children playing when they knew Pierrot was in the room.

It was Rose, of course, who crossed the line one evening and got up off her chair and began to dance to the tune Pierrot was playing. Rose did a sweet cartwheel, her legs straight in the air and her dress down over her head. When Pierrot saw, his mouth dropped open in amazement. Then he bent forward, as though he had just the tune to accompany her wild display. He tapped out another pretty bar of enthusiastic melody in order to encourage the girl. Rose danced, wagging her hands over her head as if she were waving to a soldier departing on a train. A nun, wasting no time, leaped to her feet, headed toward Rose and smacked her on the back of the head, causing her to tumble to the floor, while another took care of Pierrot. The Mother Superior didn’t like that these particular children were being punished at the same time, as it might breed in them a sense of solidarity. But what choice did she have?