14
Cinnamons Strange Sign Language
* The Musical Offering Cinnamon stopped talking once and for all just before his sixth birthday, Nutmeg said to me. It was the year he should have entered elementary school. All of a sudden, that February, he stopped talking. And as strange as it may seem, it was night before we noticed that he hadnt said a word all day. True, he was never much of a talker, but still. When it finally occurred to me what was happening, I did everything I could to make him speak. I talked to him, I shook him; nothing worked. He was like a stone. I didnt know whether he had suddenly lost the power to speak or he had decided on his own that he would stop speaking.
And I still dont know. But hes never said another word-never made another sound. Hell never scream if hes in pain, and you can tickle him but hell never laugh out loud.
Nutmeg took her son to several different ear, nose, and throat specialists, but none of them could locate the cause. All they could determine was that it was not physical. Cinnamon could hear perfectly well, but he wouldnt speak. All the doctors concluded that it must be psy- chological in origin. Nutmeg took him to a psychiatrist friend of hers, but he also was unable to determine a cause for Cinnamons continued silence. He administered an IQ. test, but there was no problem there. In fact, he turned out to have an unusually high IQ. The doctor could find no evidence of emotional problems, either. Has he experienced some kind of unusual shock? the psychiatrist asked Nutmeg. Try to think. Could he have witnessed something abnormal or been subjected to violence at home? But Nutmeg could think of nothing. One day her son had been normal in every way: he had eaten his meals in the normal way, had normal conversations with her, gone to bed when he was supposed to, had no trouble falling asleep. And the next morning he had sunk into a world of deep silence. There had been no problems in the home. The child was being brought up under the ever watchful gaze of Nutmeg and her mother, neither of whom had ever raised a hand to him. The doctor concluded that the only thing they could do was observe him and hope that something would turn up. Unless they knew the cause, there was no way to treat him. Nutmeg should bring Cinnamon to see the doctor once a week, in the course of which they might figure out what had happened. It was possible that he would just start speaking again, like someone waking from a dream. All they could do was wait. True, the child was not speaking, but there was nothing else wrong with him....
And so they waited, but Cinnamon never again rose to the surface of his deep ocean of silence.
Its electric motor producing a low hum, the front gate began to swing inward at nine oclock in the morning, and Cinnamons Mercedes-Benz 500SEL pulled into the driveway. The car phones antenna protruded from the back window like a newly sprouted tentacle. I watched through a crack in the blinds. The car looked like some kind of huge migratory fish, afraid of nothing. The brand-new black tires traced a silent arc over the concrete surface and came to a stop in the designated spot. They traced exactly the same arc every morning and stopped in exactly the same place with probably no more than two inches variation.
I was drinking the coffee that I had brewed for myself a few minutes earlier. The rain had stopped, but gray clouds covered the sky, and the ground was still black and cold and wet. The birds raised sharp cries as they flitted back and forth in search of worms on the ground. The drivers door opened after a short pause, and Cinnamon stepped out, wearing sunglasses. After a quick scan of the area, he took the glasses off and slipped them into his breast pocket. Then he closed the car door. The precise sound of the big Mercedess door latch was different from the sounds other car doors made. For me, this sound marked the beginning of another day at the Residence.
I had been thinking all morning about Ushikawas visit the night before, wondering whether I should tell Cinnamon that Ushikawa had been sent by Noboru Wataya to get me to pull out of the activities conducted at this house. In the end, though, I decided not to tell him- for the time being, at least. This was something that had to be settled between Noboru Wataya and me. I didnt want to have any third parties involved.
Cinnamon was stylishly dressed, as always, in a suit. All his suits were of the finest quality, tailored to fit him perfectly. They tended to be rather conservative in cut, but on him they looked youthful, as if magically transformed into the latest fashion.
He wore a new tie, of course, one to match that days suit. His shirt and shoes were different as well. His mother, Nutmeg, had probably picked everything out for him, in her usual way. His outfit was as spotless, top to bottom, as the Mercedes he drove. Each time he showed up in the morning, I found myself admiring him-or, I might even say, moved by him. What kind of being could possibly lie hidden beneath that perfect exterior?
Cinnamon took two paper shopping bags full of food and other necessities out of the trunk and held them in his arms as he entered the Residence. Embraced by him, even these ordinary paper bags from the supermarket looked elegant and artistic. Maybe he had some special way of holding them. Or possibly it was something more basic than that. His whole face lit up when he saw me. It was a marvelous smile, as if he had just come out into a bright opening after a long walk in a deep woods. Good morning, I said to him. Good morning, he did not say to me, though his lips moved. He proceeded to take the groceries out of the bags and arrange them in the refrigerator like a bright child committing newly acquired knowledge to memory. The other supplies he arranged in the cupboards. Then he had a cup of coffee with me. We sat across from each other at the kitchen table, just as Kumiko and I had done every morning long before.
Cinnamon never spent a day in school, finally, said Nutmeg. Ordinary schools wouldnt accept a child who didnt speak, and I felt it would be wrong to send him to a school with nothing but handicapped children. The reason for his being unable to speak-whatever it was- I knew was different from other childrens reasons. And besides, he never showed any sign of wanting to go to school. He seemed to like it best to stay home alone, reading or listening to classical music or playing in the yard with the dog we had then. He would go out for walks too, sometimes, but not with much enthusiasm, because he didnt like to see children his own age.
Nutmeg studied sign language and used that to talk with Cinnamon. When sign language was not enough, they would converse in writing. One day, though, she realized that she and her son were able to convey their feelings to each other perfectly well without resorting to such indirect methods. She knew exactly what he was thinking or requesting with only the slightest gesture or change of expression. From that point on, she ceased to be overly concerned about Cinnamons inability to speak. It certainly wasnt obstructing any mental exchange between mother and son. The absence of spoken language did, of course, give her an occasional sense of physical inconvenience, but it never went beyond the level of inconvenience, and in a sense it was this very inconvenience that purified the quality of the communication between the two.
During lulls between jobs, Nutmeg would teach Cinnamon how to read and write and do arithmetic. But in fact, there was not that much that she had to teach him. He liked books, and he would use them to teach himself what he needed to know. She was less a teacher for him than the one who chose the books he needed. He liked music and wanted to play the piano, but after learning the basic finger movements in a few months with a professional piano teacher, he used only manuals and recorded tapes to bring himself to a high level of technical accomplishment for one so young. He loved to play Bach and Mozart, and aside from Poulenc and Bartok, he showed little inclination to play anything beyond the Romantics. During his first six years of study, his interests were concentrated on music and reading, but from the time he reached middle school age, he turned to the acquisition of languages, beginning with English and then French. In both cases, he taught himself enough to read simple books after six months of study. He had no intention of learning to converse in either language, of course; he wanted only to be able to read books. Another activity he loved was tinkering with complicated machinery. He bought a complete collection of professional tools, with which he was able to build radios and tube amplifiers, and he enjoyed taking clocks apart and fixing them.
Everyone around him-which is to say, his mother, his father, and his grandmother (Nutmegs mother)-became accustomed to the fact that he never spoke, and ceased to think of it as unnatural or abnormal. After a few years, Nutmeg stopped taking her son to the psychiatrist. The weekly consultations were doing nothing for his symptoms, and as the doctors had noted in the beginning, aside from his not speaking, there was nothing wrong with him. Indeed, he was a virtually perfect child. Nutmeg could not recall ever having had to force him to do anything or to scold him for doing anything he shouldnt have done. He would decide for himself what he had to do and then he would do it, flawlessly, in his own way. He was so different from other children- ordinary children- that even comparing him with them was all but meaningless. He was twelve when his grandmother died (an event that caused him to go on crying, soundlessly, for several days), after which he took it upon himself to do the cooking, laundry, and cleaning while his mother was at work. Nutmeg wanted to hire a housekeeper when her mother died, but Cinnamon would not hear of it. He refused to have a stranger come in and disrupt the order of the household. It was Cinnamon, then, who ran the house, and he did so with a high degree of precision and discipline.
Cinnamon spoke to me with his hands. He had inherited his mothers slender, well-shaped fingers. They were long, but not too long. He held them up near his face and moved them without hesitation, and like some kind of sensible, living creatures they communicated his messages to me.
As Nutmeg had said, I had no trouble understanding the words that his fingers conveyed. I was unacquainted with sign language, but it was easy for me to follow his complex, fluid movements. It may have been Cinnamons skill that brought his meaning out so naturally, just as a play performed in a foreign language can be moving. Or then again, perhaps it only seemed to me that I was watching his fingers move but was not actually doing so. The moving fingers were perhaps no more than a decorative facade, and I was half-consciously watching some other aspect of the building behind it. I would try to catch sight of the boundary between the facade and the background whenever we chatted across the breakfast table, but I could never quite manage to see it, as if any line that might have marked the border between the two kept moving and changing its shape.
After our short conversations-or communications-Cinnamon would take his suit jacket off, put it on a hanger, tuck his necktie inside the front of his shirt, and then do the cleaning or cooking. As he worked, he would listen to music on a compact stereo. One week he would listen to nothing but Rossinis sacred music, and another week Vivaldis concertos for wind instruments, repeating them so often that I ended up memorizing the melodies.
Cinnamon worked with marvelous dexterity and no wasted motion. I used to offer to lend him a hand at first, but he would only smile and shake his head. Watching how he went about his chores, I became convinced that things would progress far more smoothly if I left everything to him. It became my habit after that to avoid getting in his way. I would read a book on the fitting room sofa while he was doing his morning chores.
The Residence was not a big house, and it was minimally furnished. No one actually lived there, so it never got particularly dirty or untidy. Still, every day Cinnamon would vacuum every inch of the place, dust the furniture and shelves, clean the windowpanes, wax the table, wipe the light fixtures, and put everything in the house back where it belonged. He would arrange the dishes in the china cabinet and line up the pots according to size, align the edges of the linens and towels, point all coffee cup handles in the same direction, reposition the bar of soap on the bathroom sink, and change the towels even if they showed no sign of having been used. Then he would gather the trash into a single bag, cinch it closed, and take it out. He would adjust the time on the clocks according to his watch (which, I would have been willing to bet, was no more than three seconds off). If, in the course of his cleaning, he found anything the slightest bit out of place, he would put it back where it belonged with precise and elegant movements. I might test him by shifting a clock a half inch to the left on its shelf, and the next morning he would be sure to move it a half inch back to the right.
In none of this behavior did Cinnamon give the impression of obsessiveness. He seemed to be doing only what was natural and right. Perhaps in Cinnamons mind there was a vivid imprint of the way this world-or at least this one little world here- was supposed to be, and for him to keep it that way was as natural as breathing. Perhaps he saw himself as lending just the slightest hand when things were driven by an intense inner desire to return to their original forms.
Cinnamon prepared food, stored it in the refrigerator, and indicated to me what I ought to have for lunch. I thanked him. He then stood before the mirror, straightened his tie, inspected his shirt, and slipped into his suit coat. Finally, with a smile, he moved his lips to say goodbye, took one last look around, and went out through the front door. Sitting behind the wheel of the Mercedes-Benz, he slipped a classical tape into the deck, pressed the remote- control button to open the front gate, and drove out, tracing back over the same arc he had made when he arrived. Once the car had passed through, the gate closed. I watched through a crack in the blind, holding a cup of coffee, as before. The birds were no longer as noisy as they had been when Cinnamon arrived. I could see where the low clouds had been torn in spots and carried off by the wind, but above them was yet another, thicker layer of cloud.
I sat at the kitchen table, setting my cup down and surveying the room upon which Cinnamons hands had imposed such a beautiful sense of order. It looked like a large, three- dimensional still life, disturbed only by the quiet ticking of the clock. The clocks hands showed ten-twenty. Looking at the chair that Cinnamon had occupied earlier, I asked myself once again whether I had done the right thing by not telling them about Ushikawas visit the night before. Might it not impair whatever sense of trust there might be between Cinnamon and me or Nutmeg and me?
I preferred, though, to watch for a while to see how things would develop. What was it about my activities here that disturbed Noboru Wataya so? Which of his tails was I stepping on? And what kind of countermeasures would he adopt? If I could find the answers to these questions, I might be able to draw a little closer to his secret. And as a result, I might be able to draw closer to where Kumiko was.
As the hands of the clock were verging on eleven (the clock that Cinnamon had slid a half inch to the right, back to its proper place), I went out to the yard to climb down into the well.
I told Cinnamon the story of the submarine and the zoo when he was little-about what I had seen from the deck of the transport ship in August of 1945 and how the Japanese soldiers shot the animals in my fathers zoo all the while an American submarine was training its cannon on us and preparing to sink our ship. I had kept that story to myself for a very long time and never told it to anyone. I had wandered in silence through the gloomy labyrinth that spread out between illusion and truth. When Cinnamon was born, though, it occurred to me that he was the only one I could tell my story to. And so, even before he could understand words, I began telling it to him over and over again, in a near whisper, telling him everything I could remember, and as I spoke, the scenes would come alive to me, in vivid colors, as if I had pried off a lid and let them out.
As he began to understand language, Cinnamon asked me to tell him the story again and again. I must have told it to him a hundred, two hundred, five hundred times, but not just repeating the same thing every time. Whenever I told it to him, Cinnamon would ask me to tell him some other little story contained in the main story. He wanted to know about a different branch of the same tree. I would follow the branch he asked for and tell him that part of the story. And so the story grew and grew.
In this way, the two of us went on to create our own interlocking system of myths. Do you see what I mean? We would get carried away telling each other the story every day. We would talk for hours about the names of the animals in the zoo, about the sheen of their fur or the color of their eyes, about the different smells that hung in the air, about the names and faces of the individual soldiers, about their birth and childhood, about their rifles and the weight of their ammunition, about the fears they felt and their thirst, about the shapes of the clouds floating in the sky....
I could see all the colors and shapes with perfect clarity as I told the story to Cinnamon, and I was able to put what I saw into words-the exact words I needed-and convey them all to him. There was no end to any of this. There were always more details that could be filled in, and the story kept growing deeper and deeper and bigger and bigger.
Nutmeg smiled as she spoke of those days long ago. I had never seen such a natural smile on her face before.
But then one day it ended, she said. Cinnamon stopped sharing stories with me that February morning when he stopped talking.
Nutmeg paused to light a cigarette.
I know now what happened. His words were lost in the labyrinth, swallowed up by the world of the stories. Something that came out of those stones snatched his tongue away. And a few years later, the same thing killed my husband.
The wind grew stronger than it had been in the morning, sending one heavy gray cloud after another on a straight line east. The clouds looked like silent travelers headed for the edge of the earth. In the bare branches of the trees in the yard, the wind would give a short, wordless moan now and then. I stood by the well, looking up at the sky. Kumiko was proba- bly somewhere looking at them too. The thought crossed my mind for no reason. It was just a feeling I had.
I climbed down the ladder to the bottom of the well and pulled the rope to close the lid. After taking two or three deep breaths, I gripped the bat and gently lowered myself to a sitting position in the darkness. The total darkness. Yes, that was the most important thing. This unsullied darkness held the key. It was kind of like a TV cooking program. Everybody got that now? The secret to this recipe is total darkness. Make sure you use the thickest kind you can buy. And the strongest bat you can put your hands on, I added, smiling for a moment in the darkness.
I could feel a certain warmth in the mark on my cheek. It told me that I was drawing a little closer to the core of things. I closed my eyes. Still echoing in my ears were the strains of the music that Cinnamon had been listening to repeatedly as he worked that morning. It was Bachs Musical Offering, still there in my head like the lingering murmur of a crowd in a high-ceilinged auditorium. Eventually, though, silence descended and began to burrow its way into the folds of my brain, one after another, like an insect laying eggs. I opened my eyes, then closed them again. The darknesses inside and out began to blend, and I began to move outside of my self, the container that held me.
As always.