There was only one domain in which a certain capacity for abstract thought seemed to develop in her mind, and that was the visual one. It had already been the sight of herself in the mirror that had given her the first shock, the first fatal wrench: the one that severs us from the rest of things and makes of every human being a solitary monad. Later she had recognized various fruits in a still life. Since then she had taken pleasure in searching for them all over the place: in front of anything round—a ball, a skein of wool, even a curtain ring or an egg—and also before a shadow, a stain on the wall. She would say, “An apple!” or else, “A cherry!” (according to the size) and point at the stain or the object with obvious satisfaction.
Nanny gave proof of untiring patience and showed her all kinds of pictures, although she failed most of the time. Sylva recognized only a few objects, the most usual ones or those of the simplest shape, such as a chair, a saucepan. She never recognized a living being.
And when she did recognize the picture of an animal for the first time, her reaction was so surprising that we were hesitant at first to guess its true origin. It was only a word, a phrase of Sylva’s, which I shall relate presently, that put us on the right track and made us realize that what had so far prevented her from identifying a man or a beast in a picture was their immobility. For a fox, a living creature is not an object but movement accompanied by smell. With the result that when she did recognize a dog’s likeness that lacked both one and the other, it was due, quite paradoxically, to its very immobility; and that is why this recognition produced a shock of such violence in her that she almost had a nervous breakdown. For the dog looked like Baron, and Baron meanwhile had died.
He had died in a stupid way: by strangling himself with his chain. I suppose that during the night he must have caught a rat between his paws and, turning around in circles to prevent it from escaping, had suddenly found himself choking and by dint of struggling had strangled himself in the end. He had probably not even been able to bark, for nobody had heard him. And the other dog must have been asleep. It was Sylva, come to greet her friend as she did every morning, who had found him stiff against the wall, with lolling tongue, and dead for several hours.
She had not called out, but Fanny saw her from her window trying over and over again to put the dog upright on his legs. Fanny gave us the warning and we arrived at a run. I uncoiled the chain and sounded the dog’s chest to see if there was anything still to be done. But the dog unfortunately was rigid and spread a sickly smell which was not yet the smell of putrefaction but a mixture of cold, stale fur and flesh.
Nanny wanted to pull Sylva away, but she resisted obdurately—no visible sign of emotion or grief, but simply a kind of vegetable stubbornness, an obstinate inertia. She wanted to stay there, it seemed, and that was all. I went to fetch a farm hand, and together we carried Baron away in a piece of canvas to bury him. And as was to be feared, Sylva followed us in silence, close on our heels.
Were we going to dig the grave in front of her? In the ensuing indecision I did what one usually does: put it off till a later moment. We left Baron at the foot of a tree. I was hoping that Sylva, so easily distracted, might eventually forget about him. But for more than an hour she kept up her pathetic efforts to put him on his legs again. In the end I made up my mind. I went back with the farm boy and dug the hole. We put Baron in the bottom of it. Sylva looked on without saying anything.
Her eyes were slit and fixed.
I wondered what she would do when we threw in the earth. She did not protest. She remained there, motionless, during the whole operation and when it was over, she let herself be taken away, this time unresistingly. She lunched as usual and with a healthy appetite.
But in the afternoon, giving the watchful Nanny the slip, she disappeared; and we found her where we went without the least hesitation: at the dog’s grave. She had already removed almost all the earth. She did nothing to prevent my putting it back, while Nanny clasped her to her breast and kissed her. She watched me finish with a kind of motionless and absorbed attention.
Once again she let herself be taken away quietly, and at home she played as usual, bolted down her dinner and, no sooner put to bed, went to sleep. In the morning, she went to fetch the dog where she normally found it, tied up in the yard. We had followed her. At first she seemed surprised at finding the chain abandoned, sadly sprawling on the ground. We then saw her move toward the spinney behind the outhouses, where we had buried her friend. Nanny wanted to run there, but I held her back. It seemed to me that we ought to let Sylva go to the very end of her discoveries.
When we joined her a little later, she had indeed unearthed the dog but had not touched it. After a day underground, it looked rather atrocious; attacked by ants, moles and carrion beetles, it already resembled an old, worn, moth-eaten goatskin, stained moreover with bloody excretions. The smell was beginning to be almost unbearable. Sylva looked at the carrion with impressive immobility. I walked up to her, put my arm around her, said gently:
“You see, he is dead.”
Since I had let her go so far, I thought I must also teach her the word. I did not clearly think at that moment that the experience of death is essential to the formation of the human mind; let us say that I had a more or less conscious inkling of it. Sylva did not take her eyes off her unfortunate playmate. She began to tremble, very faintly but incessantly. It was rather like a long, interminable shiver. I hugged her closely against me. At last she asked, with a sort of difficulty, as if she found it hard to make use of speech:
“No more… play…?”
I said with as much gentleness as I could command, “No, my little Sylva. Poor Baron no more play.”
Sylva shuddered even more intensely. And then she wrenched her eyes from the pitiful body and rested them on me. It was not a questioning look. It was more like a keen, curiously sharp scrutiny. Like a deep meditation on the meaning of the human face. I let her look at me, without saying anything, not daring either quite to smile or to show too grave, too sad a face. I returned her gaze with tenderness, but she wasn’t looking at my eyes. It was my nose, my lips, my chin. And in the end she asked, but her voice was flat and toneless:
“Bonny too, no more play?”
I burst into subdued laughter, soft rather than loud, a laugh just meant to banish this quaint fear.
“Why no, Bonny will still play. Bonny isn’t dead! He is very well. He will play with Sylva every day!”
Most unexpectedly, this answer seemed to make her cross. She jerked out of my arms as if to stand aloof. She repeated, more imperatively:
“Bonny too, no more play?”
I believed at first, however astonishing it may seem, that she meant to order me to mourn for her friend. Yes, for a moment I thought that the idea of playing when Baron was dead seemed to her revolting. It was obviously a stupid thought, when applied to a little soul still so close to an animal. But on the spur of the moment I answered:
“Not at once, of course. You are right.”
With even greater surprise I saw her stamping her foot with a movement of childish impatience—the exasperated movement of a child whom the grownups refuse to understand. And her whole face twisted with irritation but at the same time was marked with such anguish, such torment, perhaps such terror, that when for the third time she almost shouted, and her voice broke: “Bonny too, no more play?” I understood at last, understood with poignant certainty that what she wanted to know was whether some day, some day like Baron, some day “Bonny too” would play no more, nevermore.