The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred by Carl-Johan Vallgren Page B
Authors: Carl-Johan Vallgren
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Schall’s girls being the only people he ever met, he knew nothing of the outside world. In the daytime he never transgressed the boundary between the two worlds and it was an unwritten rule that no-one took him with them on outings or errands into town. For girls who took money for their dishonour this had nothing to do with a lack of courage; on the contrary, they well understood the necessity of protecting him from a world that rarely accepts deviates. So his dismay was all the greater the day he encountered it for the first time.
This incident occurred at Easter in the seventh year of his life. One Maundy Thursday, to be exact. It was mild for the time of the year, but windy, and he was in the garden with Henriette where the girls were busy pruning fruit trees, when a sudden gust of wind caught her printed calico cap and tossed it high above the privet hedge into the neighbouring yard, enclosed by four walls, which belonged to an old stablemaster. Taken aback, the girl stood looking after it and Hercule Barfuss did not hesitate for one moment to take his first historic steps out of love’s sheltered realm; he scraped off his left shoe with his right foot, opened the gate with his toes and, without so much as a thought, without any further consideration, without hearing any alarm bells, but filled with a sense of excitement for which he had no name, Hercule ran with one bare foot out on to the potholed road, weathered by the winter storms.
He didn’t stop until he got to the stablemaster’s house, by the wall of which lay the cap, alongside a budding daffodil. Picking up the cap with his foot and putting it between his teeth – as he usually did with things he wanted to move – and glorying in being at Henriette’s service, he did not notice until that moment that he was being watched.
In front of him stood a boy, horrorstricken at seeing, for the first time in his life, a figure out of a fairy tale, of the kind that edifies children by scaring them out of their wits. Hercule himself, sensing the boy’s terror, became equally frightened and dropped the cap. But when he tried to calm him by smiling, the boy started to scream, which brought more people to the spot.
Surrounded by an outraged crowd of men, women, children and old folk, he heard the buzzing of their thoughts –
an abortion . . . what is Satan doing here on our road on Maundy Thursday?
– filled with such fear and hatred that for a split second he was afraid he might drown in it.
No-one would remember who cast the first stone, and for Hercule it was all a muddle – the uproar, the strangers – so nothing of all this left him any memory of the faces.
Afterwards, when Henriette Vogel comforted him up in the servants’ room, she told him – in the remarkable way in which they had learned to communicate – that the hairs on his back had stood on end. He himself had no memory of how he’d managed to get back into the house with her cap in his mouth. Where he lay, curled up close to her, he was still too upset to be reconciled with an evil world, so he barely noticed the pain in his head where the stones had struck him. Only when she held the cap up for him to see did he smile, comforted by the thought that his suffering had been for love.
This event was significant. No sacrifice was too great for Hercule to make for this girl, the inexplicable object of his affection, whom he loved without a second thought, limitlessly, and without asking for anything in return. In summertime he picked flowers for her in the garden and tied them up in silken bouquets. In the autumn of her years Madam Schall, who saw him on one occasion tottering along in the flower bed, carefully breaking off the flowers’ stem between two toes and gathering a bunch of them in his mouth, would commission an artist to depict this ontological love she had devoutly preserved in her ever more confused memory. Hercule carved wooden figures for Henriette, also, of course, with
This incident occurred at Easter in the seventh year of his life. One Maundy Thursday, to be exact. It was mild for the time of the year, but windy, and he was in the garden with Henriette where the girls were busy pruning fruit trees, when a sudden gust of wind caught her printed calico cap and tossed it high above the privet hedge into the neighbouring yard, enclosed by four walls, which belonged to an old stablemaster. Taken aback, the girl stood looking after it and Hercule Barfuss did not hesitate for one moment to take his first historic steps out of love’s sheltered realm; he scraped off his left shoe with his right foot, opened the gate with his toes and, without so much as a thought, without any further consideration, without hearing any alarm bells, but filled with a sense of excitement for which he had no name, Hercule ran with one bare foot out on to the potholed road, weathered by the winter storms.
He didn’t stop until he got to the stablemaster’s house, by the wall of which lay the cap, alongside a budding daffodil. Picking up the cap with his foot and putting it between his teeth – as he usually did with things he wanted to move – and glorying in being at Henriette’s service, he did not notice until that moment that he was being watched.
In front of him stood a boy, horrorstricken at seeing, for the first time in his life, a figure out of a fairy tale, of the kind that edifies children by scaring them out of their wits. Hercule himself, sensing the boy’s terror, became equally frightened and dropped the cap. But when he tried to calm him by smiling, the boy started to scream, which brought more people to the spot.
Surrounded by an outraged crowd of men, women, children and old folk, he heard the buzzing of their thoughts –
an abortion . . . what is Satan doing here on our road on Maundy Thursday?
– filled with such fear and hatred that for a split second he was afraid he might drown in it.
No-one would remember who cast the first stone, and for Hercule it was all a muddle – the uproar, the strangers – so nothing of all this left him any memory of the faces.
Afterwards, when Henriette Vogel comforted him up in the servants’ room, she told him – in the remarkable way in which they had learned to communicate – that the hairs on his back had stood on end. He himself had no memory of how he’d managed to get back into the house with her cap in his mouth. Where he lay, curled up close to her, he was still too upset to be reconciled with an evil world, so he barely noticed the pain in his head where the stones had struck him. Only when she held the cap up for him to see did he smile, comforted by the thought that his suffering had been for love.
This event was significant. No sacrifice was too great for Hercule to make for this girl, the inexplicable object of his affection, whom he loved without a second thought, limitlessly, and without asking for anything in return. In summertime he picked flowers for her in the garden and tied them up in silken bouquets. In the autumn of her years Madam Schall, who saw him on one occasion tottering along in the flower bed, carefully breaking off the flowers’ stem between two toes and gathering a bunch of them in his mouth, would commission an artist to depict this ontological love she had devoutly preserved in her ever more confused memory. Hercule carved wooden figures for Henriette, also, of course, with
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