The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(41)
Despite all this, it could not be said that Wells left for London in high spirits. He did so more with a feeling of deep unhappiness at not receiving his parents” support in this huge adventure. He was convinced his mother hoped he would fail in his studies, confirming her belief that the Wells boys were only fit to be bakers, that no genius could possibly be produced from a substance as dubious as her husband’s seed. For his part, his father was the living proof that failure could be enjoyed just as much as prosperity.
During the summer they had spent together, Wells had looked on with dismay as his father, whom age had deprived of his sole refuge, cricket, clung to the one thing that had given his life meaning. He wandered around the cricket pitches like a restless ghost carrying a bag stuffed with batting gloves, pads, and cricket balls, while his china shop foundered like a captainless ship, holed in the middle of the ocean. Things being as they were, Wells did not mind too much having to stay in a rooming house where the guests appeared to be competing for who could produce the most original noises.
He was so accustomed to life revealing its most unpleasant side to him, that when his aunt Mary Wells proposed he lodge at her house on the Euston Road, his natural response was to be suspicious, for the house was to all appearances normal, warm, cozy, suffused with a peaceful, harmonious atmosphere, and bore no resemblance to the squalid dwellings he had lived in up until then.
He was so grateful to his aunt for providing him with this long-awaited reprieve in the interminable battle that was his life that he considered it almost his duty to ask for the hand of her daughter Isabel, that gentle, kind young girl who wafted silently around the house. But Wells soon realized the rashness of his decision.
After the wedding, which was settled with the prompt matter-of-factness of a tedious formality, not only did he confirm that his cousin had nothing in common with him, but he also discovered that Isabel had been brought up to be a perfect wife. That is to say, to satisfy her husband’s every need except, of course, in the marriage bed, where she behaved with a coldness ideal for a procreating machine but entirely unsuited to pleasure. In spite of all this, his wife’s sexual frigidity proved a minor problem easily resolved by visiting other beds. Wells soon discovered there was an abundance of delightful ones to which his hypnotic grandiloquence gained him entry, and so he finally dedicated himself to enjoying life now that it seemed to be going his way. Immersed in the modest pursuit of pleasure that his guinea a week scholarship allowed, Wells not only gave himself over to the joys of the flesh, to making forays into hitherto unexplored subjects such as literature and art, and to enjoying every second of his hard-earned stay at South Kensington, but he also decided the time had come to reveal his innermost dreams to the world by publishing a short story in The Science Schools Journal.
He called it The Chronic Argonauts, and its main character was a mad scientist, Dr. Nebogipfel, who had invented a machine which he used to travel back in time to commit a murder. Time travel was not an original concept; Dickens had already written about it in A Christmas Carol and Edgar Allan Poe in A Tale of the Ragged Mountains, only in both of those stories the journeys always took place during a dream or state of trance. By contrast, Wells’s scientist traveled of his own free will and by means of a mechanical device. In brief, his idea was brimming with originality. However, this first tentative trial at being a writer did not change his life, which to his disappointment carried on exactly as before. All the same, this first story brought him the most remarkable reader he had ever had, and probably would ever have. A few days after its publication, Wells received a card from an admirer who had read his story and asked if he would take tea with him. The name on the card sent a shiver down his spine: Joseph Merrick, better known as the Elephant Man.
12
Wells began hearing about Merrick the moment he set foot in the biology classrooms at South Kensington. For those studying the workings of the human body, Merrick was something akin to Nature’s most amazing achievement, its finest-cut diamond, living proof of the scope of its inventiveness. The so-called Elephant Man suffered from a disease that had horribly deformed his body, turning him into a shapeless, almost monstrous creature. This strange affliction, which had the medical profession scratching its heads, had caused the limbs, bones, and organs on his right side to grow uncontrollably, leaving his left side practically unaffected. An enormous swelling on the right side of his skull, for example, distorted the shape of his head, squashing his face into a mass of folds and bony protuberances, and even dislodging his ear. Because of this, Merrick was unable to express anything more than the frozen ferocity of a totem. Owing to this lopsidedness, his spinal column curved to the right, where his organs were markedly heavier, lending all his movements a grotesque air. As if this were not enough, the disease had also turned his skin into a coarse, leathery crust, like dried cardboard, covered in hollows and swellings and wartlike growths. To begin with, Wells could scarcely believe such a creature existed, but the photographs secretly circulating in the classroom soon revealed the truth of the rumors. The photographs had been stolen or purchased from staff at the London Hospital, where Merrick now resided, having spent half his life being displayed in sideshows at third-rate fairs and traveling circuses. As they passed from hand to hand, the blurred, shadowy images in which Merrick was scarcely more than a blotch caused a similar thrill to the photographs of scantily clad women they became mixed up with, although for different reasons.