As the days passed, it became progressively evident that Sylva was ceasing to act on impulse by virtue of her automatisms, and beginning to act by choice in accordance with her preferences. And by the same stroke I realized for the first time that choice and automatism are mutually contradictory by definition. Any possibility of choice obviously excludes automatism (and farewell to instinct!) just as automatism necessarily excludes any possibility of choice (and farewell to reason!). A relentless dilemma! Was it conceivable that I had for so long been ignorant of such a self-evident truth? That’s the threshold, I told myself, the frontier that separates instinct from intelligence. Previously, like many animal-loving people, I had denied the existence of a definite borderline. What scatterbrains we are! The borderline is cut with a knife.
And so I discovered that, from the day of the hare onward, Sylva could never again obey all her impulses like a blind mechanism. Henceforth, I thought to myself, she would have to make up her mind herself. And in so doing she would lose one by one the automaton’s powers and precision, just as the human race has lost them. She would become hesitant, clumsy, she would take a hundred wrong turnings for one right one. With an almost anguished giddiness I realized in a flash of insight that this was a fatal, inevitable necessity; that it was part of the very essence of the human being. That to hope that one might acquire understanding and at the same time preserve one’s instinct was an absurd wish. That every conquest made by reason or by the will involves as a corollary the surrender of an innate but unconscious knowledge. And this relinquishment, I told myself, is the price we pay for our freedom.
As was indeed inevitable, Sylva’s indecision assumed greater proportions every day. Everything aroused in her an intense and absorbed attention. In many circumstances she behaved as she had when faced with the hare: a first instinctive movement, promptly checked as if to examine if that was really what she wanted to do. Of course she no longer knew what she really wanted, and more and more often she would mope in a kind of dreamy apathy. While this latter state aroused some anxiety in me, Nanny was delighted. At last, she said, she was on her home ground again, that of educating backward children. The sudden interest Sylva nowadays showed for all creatures and things around her, she also seemed to show, though still silently as a rule, for Nanny’s explanations. She would not say a word but some time later we would discover that she had grasped the gist. Nanny taught her to count on her fingers. Sylva watched her stretching them out one after the other, but she did not repeat the figures. Yet, while in the first days when we told her at lunch, “Go and fetch three apples,” she would bring us two or five at random, she eventually brought back the right number one day and never made a mistake again, whatever figure we mentioned.
I have said before that for a long time we were stumped by her inability to understand pictures, at least insofar as they represented animate beings, until she thought she recognized that of a motionless dog—the dead Baron. This revelation, as I have said, shook her violently (screams, gasps and sobs interspersed with the dog’s name) but simultaneously it seemed to have opened a door in this brain full of locks and bolts, onto a field with vast prospects; for on the next day all pictures had become intelligible for her and produced cries of pleasure.
Nanny gave her paper and pencil, showed her how to make use of them. To begin with, of course, her pupil only managed to scrawl at random, like a very small child. But the mere fact that she scribbled was already a remarkable novelty, and whenever some flourish happened to form a circle, she would exclaim, “An apple!” and laugh.
Indeed she now laughed more and more, thus confirming my own modest theories: it was death, I was certain of it, that had led her to laughter. It is because the human species is the only one which knows that death is our common lot that it is also the only one to know laughter as a saving grace. An atavistic fear lies within us from our childhood, more or less unconscious and lurking in our depths, and when something delivers us from it for a fleeting second, it produces suddenly such a relief, lifts such a weight, that our body shakes with “brutal convulsions.” In laughter, in comedy, we seek a second’s respite, a short moment of organic oblivion from our condition. During the moment when laughter shakes us, we are immortal.
Sylva always laughed after being afraid. She also laughed—not always—after some unforeseen effect of her acts. To have drawn an apple unintentionally was one of those effects. In order to experience this pleasure, she began to draw them on purpose. Then she learned from Nanny that one could put into a circle two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and she started to draw funny figures endlessly with childish fervor. But she would draw them lying down.
“Why lying down?” Nanny asked her eventually, intrigued. “Bonny, no more play,” said my vixen, and she laughed and jumped at me jocosely, kissing and biting me to manifest her joy at my being alive.
I did not start writing this story to describe Mrs. Bumley’s methods of re-education. They were excellent and proved quick and effective. Sylva was soon able to recognize not only pictures but sounds. I mean printed vowels, then consonants, then groups of letters. When she understood that a cry, a word, could be represented, a new door opened onto a new domain, and through it abstract ideas rushed in. Notions such as time and space began to mean something to her. So the “but not for a long, long time” which a short while ago had been unable to soften the terrifying revelation that Baron’s death meant mine and hers as well—for in her mind which was still impervious to duration, still like a fox’s living in a perpetual present, this death in fact made us at once alive and dead—this “very long time” became comprehensible to her, the sinister prospect ceased to be imminent and even withdrew so far that she hardly ever referred to it. All that it left on her mind in process of formation was an indelible mark, a half-unconscious imprint, rarely expressed but which became the inner driving force of the mind’s progress just like the secret presence of the engines, silent and invisible, in the heart of a ship.
Chapter 30
IS there any need to go on? My aim, in starting this notebook, was to write the story of a metamorphosis. It is done. Reliable authors assure us that the human species is a schism: a piece of nature in revolt, vainly struggling from the time of its origin to lift the mask behind which is hidden all raison d’être. Had not my little vixen now taken the decisive step beyond which there is no return, had she not passed over entirely to the schismatics? What remained of her earlier state? Hardly a memory. She was henceforth human, to the very depths of her soul. Certainly it was up to us now to educate her, to “raise” her in every sense of the word—but from now on this would be above and beyond the transformation. The metamorphosis was accomplished.
So what could I relate other than the type of progress which a child could make in the hands of efficient educators? Dr. Sullivan had warned me at the time: “She will start putting questions, you’ll have your work cut out!” She had not started immediately—it had required a more formidable motive power than her self-recognition in a mirror. But now, good Lord! Everyone has known the kind of children who daze you with questions about everything and nothing. They are angels of self-restraint compared with what Sylva was during that time. With the aggravating difference that she had an adult brain and that one could not fob her off with the vague replies which seem to satisfy children. Yet her questions were of a thorny type and most embarrassing: “Why does one live? Why die?” Poor Baron’s death was still dimly reverberating on the direction her mind was taking, since her mind itself had in a way been “hatched out” by this shock. What Sylva wanted to know was nothing less than the beginning and end of things.