The midwife argued with the doctor who hauled him out with forceps anyway, and with a thunderclap he washed up on shore and the line was cut. The lights were so bright. He was abandoned, shipwrecked, a castaway who couldn’t stop talking, but for five days the best he could do was a half-dead fly in a swaying web in the white place while other babies who would not listen rolled around and howled.
When the nurse scooped him up and carried him down corridors, he met pirates and tried English, Dutch, French, African dialects, Indian dialects, American tribal dialects, Spanish. The nurse whispered she was a nun from Convent of Las Consebinas and warned him of the unhealthy air of Porto Bello.
Back at his mother’s breast he took a nipple in the afternoon, half listening to familiar rumbles from a man who had lost his rights to this dry harbour that tasted of home: “Amorous barbarous collusion, destitute epiphany.” He’d never seen such rain. The window was streaming. His mother’s breasts were streaming. All was black and white and blue.
The man smiled at him but blankly, and continued to rumble.
All manner of things and animals and people were gathered, waiting, and now would listen just to him. Except the foliage was in the way, as was concern for his mother, as was his own size and ability, as were walls and windows. He needed, among other things, to explain that he was no bird or copycat or urchin. Nobody should have doubts at this age. He turned from the nipple to question the man, but was shipwrecked again on the same hostile sterile promontory. He interrogated a castle owner about his scorched-earth policy. “Up the Chagre River west of Colon into the jungle with a force of twelve hundred.”
There were noise-like words and word-like sounds; he played with both but did not have the meaning knack, though he was beginning to grasp and manipulate the flashes when exhaustion hit him like a fleshy wall.
It went on like this, rescue and shipwreck, the nun carting him along riverbeds to his mother, back to the white place (floaty web in the window), to his mother, to the white place and web, to his rumbling father. He shaped his voice till it was full of plaint, a confession if that would do, an apology if that would do the trick, a summation of the events of his life so far, a comparative study of pre- and post-womb societies, attempts that he knew were going nowhere and which he should not expect ever to end. Nothing had prepared him. Each rescue took him past rows of faces and to each he pled his case: should a human soul be so treated? Was this capture and release? Was this the price to pay for an audience? Were they his wide continuous diverse family and he the sole performer? He tried the blue wheel, combustion, shuttle-cock, the reformation, re-priming the pump, binary fission, and was working on knitting when the egg cracked, the wind freshened and blew the roof off, and he was bouncing in his mother’s arms away from hospital smells and into new inter-locutions and challenging protocols.
He opened his mouth and spoke to a crow, a street, eight houses and a freighter. He spoke to heat and cold and his father’s prickly stinky friends, icicles and sunbeams and uncle’s fingers. What did he tell? It was a long unbroken description of all he’d seen before the time of wreckage and rescue, and it was nuanced and detailed, a portrait of God in a cosmic gallery, the flares and iridescent explosions from wars that must be recounted, for this was important, this was the prehistory of his species. The birth of fingernails, the right to choose, the mouthful of scavenged antelope, the loggia with a view, a baseball hat on a battlefield, the think-am man, the industrial revolution, the musical always of his mother’s voice singing on and on except at night, dreams that would open all the doors and windows, and angels lining up for the rickety roller-coaster that was being assembled and would soon take up all the space in the backyard and . . .
Creatures nodded and made trilling noises, but made no sign that they understood what he was telling them.
He kept extolling the epic. They kept interrupting. He grew desperate. It began to fade. Its vivid urgency diminished. And then at last he began to understand the level of their expectations of themselves and of him. At first disheartened with the paltry traffic they taught him to use in glory’s place, and then horrified, he talked ferociously, passionately, to everyone.
Then when he was two a woman with a large face and loose throat praised his foot.
“What a little foot,” she said. “Such a pretty foot.”
He was dumbstruck. He stopped talking in amazement.
She took his foot in her rough hand and held it to her cheek. The heat of her hand, the penetration of her stare. And he stopped and felt the simple separate pieces that he’d been noticing lately (but needed to ignore because he couldn’t connect them) fit together.
The new terrible confusions began with socks, which foot to which sock? which sock to which shoe? and proceeded through buttons and the discovery of size and order — his pants button would fit into his mother’s shirt’s torn buttonhole but that was wrong — and vehicles, which side? how turn? why was outside inside in transit? He was a vital tiny speck in the thrust of things who had been awarded a voice big enough to infiltrate every nook and mall and empyrean his senses butted up against, and the urge to describe such forays, and he was reduced to geography. He tried to please his mother but it was useless. She found him perfectly flawed. And as far as his dad was concerned he was a show-off.
Then came the period of cuts and stomach-aches and here is the potty (the summit of his tribe’s cultural accomplishments), do a Good One.
He spoke to everyone, adapting the plain system he’d inherited, and said nothing of interest, as far as he was concerned, until he was twenty-six and met his cousin Emma in the university cafeteria amid a blinding riot of silver slashing light, crash of crockery, chirping voices. He didn’t hear a word she said and none of her communication reached him, except for the way she leaned. The way she leaned, listening to him, shaped something similar, a kind of twirl, in him.
Charles decided that from then on he’d speak as if he belonged to a race of speakers who would only speak to those who knew how to listen. And Emma was the queen of listeners. The twirl turned into a squirm. Be careful, he said to himself. Conserve.