WHAT HAPPENED to your hands? The question gathers at the back of the barn and sweeps forward in a bitter gust of curiosity. Murmuring, and clucking, and craning their necks, the audience asks what the idiot does not have the strength of mind to say. I am not tonights attraction! the girl protests, though looking down at her hands, she sees that her two great mitts have at last completed their return.
What happened? surges up once more from the audience. She is suddenly glad that the half-wit is there to keep her from falling. Not wanting to look again at her hands, she turns boldly to the audience: It's nothing! she cries.
And peering out at them, she discerns their faces: jealous Sophie, who now wears her hair piled atop her head; the bald-pated chemist, who used to slip her sweets behind his counter; the bashful mayor, his youngest daughter perched neatly on his lap; and Mother, Father, her brothers and sisters, among them the foolhardy Mimi, whom Mother is barely restraining from running forward to the stage. Mysteriously, these faces she remembers as so particular are now almost indistinguishable to her, every one of them stricken, every one of them wearing an identical look: of guilt, and most especially of pity.
She cannot bear to be the object of this look.
But they have made me special! she insists. They have taken me to places I would never otherwise have been.
And displaying her mangled hands for all to see, she repeats a phrase borrowed from M. Pujol: An abnormality, to be sure, but I consider it, as should you, a gift!
The audience remains unconvinced.