“Is that something?” he asked.
“Is that something!” I cried. “Why, good God, I’m no medical man, but I can see that the least of those wounds you’ve got down there ought to be enough to kill any man. How do you manage to be alive, Cuckoo? How is it possible?”
“You think you’ve seen something? Listen, you’ve seen nothing till you see my back. But never mind about that now.”
“Tell me,” I said, “how the devil did you come by all that? They’re old scars. You couldn’t have got them in this war—”
He slid down the knot of his tie, unbuttoned his collar, pulled his shirt aside, and said, dispassionately: “No. Look—this is all I got this time.” He pointed nonchalantly to his throat. I counted five bullet scars in a cluster, spaced like fingertips of a half-opened hand, at the base of the throat. “Light machine-gun,” he said.
“But this is impossible!” I said, while he readjusted his tie. “That little packet there must have cut one or two big arteries and smashed your spine to smithereens.”
“Sure it did,” said Corporal Cuckoo.
“And how old did you say you were?” I asked.
Corporal Cuckoo replied: “Round about four hundred and thirty-eight.”
“Thirty-eight?”
“I said, four hundred and thirty-eight.”
The man is mad, I thought. “Born 1907?” I asked.
“1507,” said Corporal Cuckoo, fingering the dent in his skull. Then he went on, half-dreamily. How am I to describe his manner? It was repulsively compounded of thick stupidity, low cunning, anxiety, suspicion, and sordid calculation—it made me remember a certain peasant who tried to sell me an American wristwatch near Saint Jacques in 1944. But Corporal Cuckoo talked American, at first leering at me in the dim light, and feeling his shirt as if to assure himself that all his scars were safely buttoned away. He said, slowly: “Look . . . I’ll give you the outline. It’s no use you trying to sell the outline, see? You’re a newspaper man. Though you might know what the whole story would be worth, there’s no use you trying to sell what I’m giving you now, because you haven’t got a hope in hell. But I’ve got to get back to work, see? I want some dough.”
I said: “For roses, chickens, bees, and turpentine?”
He hesitated, and then said: “Well, yes,” and rubbed his head again.
“Does it bother you?” I asked.
“Not if I don’t touch that stuff you gave me,” he replied, dreamily resentful.
“Where did you get that scar?” I asked.
“Battle of Turin,” he said.
“I don’t remember any Battle of Turin, Corporal Cuckoo. When was that?”
“Why, the Battle of Turin. I got this in the Pass of Suze.”
“You were wounded in the Pass of Suze at the Battle of Turin, is that right? When was that?” I asked.
“1536 or 1537. King François sent us up against the Marquess de Guast. The enemy was holding the pass, but we broke through. That was my first smell of gunpowder.”
“You were there of course, Corporal Cuckoo.”
“Sure I was there. But I wasn’t a corporal then, and my name was not Cuckoo. They called me Le Cocu. My real name was Lecoq. I came from Yvetot. I used to work for a man that made linen—Nicholas, the . . .”
Two or three minutes passed, while the Corporal told me what he thought of Nicholas. Then, having come down curse by curse out of a red cloud of passion, he continued:
“. . . To cut it short Denise ran off, and all the kids in the town were singing:
Lecoq, lecoq, lecoq,
Lecoq, lecoq, lecoq . . .
I got the hell out of it and joined the army. . . . I’m not giving you anything you can make anything of, see? This is the layout, see? . . . Okay. I was about thirty, then, and in pretty good shape. Well, so when King François sent us to Turin—Monsieur de Montegan was Colonel-General of Infantry—my commander, Captain Le Rat, led us up a hill to a position, and we sure had a hot five minutes! It was anybody’s battle until the rest cut through, and then we advanced, and I got this.”
The corporal touched his head. I asked: “How?”
“From a halberdier. You know what a halberd is, don’t you? It’s a sort of heavy axe on the end of a ten-foot pole. You can split a man down to the waist with a halberd, if you know how to handle it. See? If it had landed straight . . . well, I guess I wouldn’t be here right now. But I saw it coming, see, and I ducked, and just as I ducked my foot slipped in some blood, and I fell sideways. But all the same that halberdier got me. Right here, just where the scar is. See? Then everything went sort of black-and-white, and black, and I passed out. But I wasn’t dead, see? I woke up, and there was the army doctor, with a cheap steel breastplate on—no helmet—soaked with blood up to the elbows. Our blood, you can bet your life—you know what medical officers are?”
I said soothingly: “Oh yes. I know, I know. And this, you say, was in 1537?”
“In 1536 or 7. I don’t remember exactly. As I was saying, I woke up, and I saw the doctor, and he was talking to some other doctor that I couldn’t see, and all around men were shouting their heads off—asking their friends to cut their throats and put them out of their misery . . . asking for priests . . . I thought I was in hell. My head was split wide open, and I could feel a sort of draft playing through my brains, and everything was going bump-bump, bumpety-bump, bump-bump-bump. But although I couldn’t move or speak I could see and hear what was going on. The doctor looked at me and said . . .”
Corporal Cuckoo paused. “He said?” I asked, gently.
“Well,” said Corporal Cuckoo, with scorn. “You don’t even know the meaning of what you were reading in your little book—Pipeur ou hasardeur de dez, and all that—even when it’s put down in cold print. I’ll put it so that you’ll understand. The doctor said something like this: ‘Come here and look, sir, come and see! This fellow’s brains were bursting out of his head. If I had applied theriac, he would be buried and forgotten by now. Instead, having no theriac, for want of something better, I applied my digestive. And see what has happened. His eyes have opened! Observe, also, that the bones are creeping together, and over this beating brain a sort of skin is forming. My treatment must be right, because God is healing him!’ Then the one I couldn’t see said something like: ‘Don’t be a fool, Ambroise. You’re wasting your time and your medicine on a corpse.’ Well, the doctor looked down at me, and touched my eyes with the ends of his fingers . . . like this . . . and I blinked. But the one I couldn’t see said: ‘Must you waste time and medicine on the dead?’