Quasimodo peered gloomily into the
greasy mirror, pondering his future, or, more accurately, the little that was
left of it.
“You are, my friend, becoming an
ancient. You are almost as old as the Cathedral itself. Who is it that will
ring the great bell when I am gone for, surely, the time is coming when that
moment will spring upon us like the young gazelle leaping through the verdant
grass of the veldt.”
Well, all right, he didn’t mention
gazelles or anything like that. Allow me a little poetic licence here and there
for otherwise this will become an increasingly gloomy story. It should also be
said that the beloved hunchback would have spoken in an almost unintelligible
French accent had he been speaking English but, since he was speaking French,
he had almost no accent at all other than the normal slurring speech of the
Marseille folk. On a slightly different tack, there are almost no original
Marseille folk left in France now as they have all gone to England and Germany
to play football for huge salaries in the Premier League and the BundesLiga.
The great back heaved as he sighed
deeply. He reached for a scrap of paper and found a stub of charcoal amongst
the ashes of last night’s supper fire. Carefully, and with some difficulty, he
scratched the letters out on the paper:
“Attendé: C’est un opportunité magnifique pour un fil pauvre...”
OK, OK... I’ll do it en Anglais:
“Attention:” happy now? “Here is a
wonderful opportunity for a poor boy to get a poor job for poor pay with poor
conditions and absolutely no prospects of promotion or job satisfaction. Walk-in
interviews conducted on an ad hoc
[it’s Latin, OK? Not French!] basis daily. Apply within.”
Quasimodo climbed down the stairs, down
the stairs, down the stairs, down the stairs, down the stairs, down the stairs
from the bell tower - it’s a long climb. Get the picture? Tacked the note to
the back door of the cathedral with a small piece of chewed bread and climbed
back up the stairs, up the stairs, up the stairs, up the stairs, up the stairs,
up the stairs to the bell tower.
Scarcely had he settled in and picked
up his favourite piece of ‘L’Équipe’
that he had discovered blowing in the wind some years previously and felt,
immediately, sorry for it, when there was a distant knocking on the back door
of the cathedral. Naturally, being riddled with tinnitus after years of ringing
the great bell, Quasimodo never heard it so it was some considerable time that
a cathedral lackey arrived, puffing and blowing, at Quasimodo’s garret adjacent
to the bell tower.
“You will have to get shorter stairs,
Quasimodo.” the lackey gasped.
“But, then, they would not reach this
place where I need to be.” replied Quasimodo with some veracity, after all.
“Perhaps you could, like other,
civilised, places - England, for example, fit a rope to the bell and ring it
from lower down?” enquired the exasperated lackey.
“And will a rope polish the beloved
bell of our forefathers? Will a rope clean the disrespectful pigeon doos from
it? I think not. Besides, the climb keeps me fit so that I can carry out my
duties with the proper care and diligence. Unlike you who cannot bend over to
pull on your socks without wheezing.”
“I do not wear socks. Socks are an
affected, foreign, indulgence.”
“You do not wear socks because you are
fat and lazy so cannot pull them on. How is it you get so fat on the miserly
pay that we receive from the cathedral? Are you robbing the poor box?”
“I am poor so I am not robbing it - I
am merely pre-empting the distribution process. Anyway, there is a skinny boy
to see you. I suspect that you are not the pure, sweet and innocent person that
you pretend to be.”
Quasimodo sneered back at the lackey, “Did
you leave the lad downstairs? Why did you not bring him with you? Were you
frightened to be seen alone with a young boy? Do you have a reputation for such
things - like the Cardinal? Hmm? Send the poor fellow up. Once he finds the
first stair it is likely that he will be able to find the second. Only you are
that dim in the head. I think it was Father O’LeClerque that told me he had
given you a painting of an oil lamp because you were frightened of the dark and
thus you carried it everywhere at night.”
The ancient floorboards creaked in
despair at the force of Quasimodo’s mirth. He watched the portly rear of the
lackey disappear down the stairs and waited patiently for the young chap to
appear.
Twenty three and a half minutes later
the boy’s head poked above the top flight of stairs.
“Step up, young Fellow. Fear not, I
shall not eat you in spite of being mightily hungry.”
“I have come here in response to the
notice that has been removed from the back door of the cathedral.”
“Removed? Who removed it, I wonder?” Quasimodo
asked.
“It was attached with bread. I removed
it to eat the bread and then had no means of re-attaching it. My apologies - perhaps,
if you have a pin...?
“It is a small matter to which I shall
attend should the need arise.” Quasimodo considered, for a moment, that if he
had a pin he should have used it to attach the note to the door in the first
place.
He surveyed the almost skeletal frame
of the lad and wondered if there was enough meat on the bones to do the task
required.
‘Oh, well,’ he considered, ‘perhaps he
is stronger than he looks’.
Aloud, he said, “Come with me to the
bell and I will show you how the job is done.”
He headed out into the bell tower with
the small boy padding softly behind him. He thought, inconsequentially, that
this is what it must feel like to have a dog.
“This, my Boy, is the Great Bell.” he
pointed at the massive bronze structure hanging under the huge pintle. In his
mind he had a vision of the lad barking in response, “It is our honoured task
to ring it at the appropriate times. I shall now demonstrate the way that this
is done. This is the method that has been handed down through a generation of
ringer.”
With that comment Quasimodo grasped the
edge of the huge bell and swung it away from himself. He watched it carefully
as it reached its zenith and then swung back towards him. Precisely at its
nadir he smacked it very firmly with his forehead both stopping the bell in its
tracks and producing a deep, resonant, boom.
He stepped back and surveyed the bell
appreciatively and glanced at the boy who was standing, mouth and eyeballs
agape with horror, motionless at the shock and noise of it.
“But...” he said.
“Ah!” replied Quasimodo, nodding, “There’s
always a butt.”
“But, I can’t...” the lad was becoming
tremulous.
Quasimodo realised that the only way to
master a horse is to get on it - the thought was apropos of nothing in
particular but it seemed to fit the current circumstance. “Try it yourself,” he
said, patting the bell affectionately but with, he supposed, due reverence.
The boy swallowed hard and stepped over
to the bell, put a finger on it and pressed hard. It moved, maybe, two and a
half centimetres which, in real numbers, is about an inch. As it moved gently
back he touched it with his eyebrows. There was no sound.
Quasimodo was disappointed. He waited
for the bell to become still again.
“Step aside, Lad. I shall show you once
more how this is achieved. Faint heart ne’er won fairground prizes, you know,
and none but the brave deserve the fair.” he was fairly sure he’d got that
right and, smiling with the anticipated pleasure of the thing, he swung the
bell again. Once more he stopped the bell dead with his brow producing that
rich, mellow thunder known to every citizen of Paris.
“Now you try again.” he nodded at the
boy as if this would enable the required, successful, action.
The boy was still horrified. He pushed
the bell so that it moved just short of seven and three quarter centimetres [a
few inches] and tapped it gingerly with his head. Quasimodo imagined he heard a
faint ‘ping’.
“I am so sorry, my young friend. I
think that you are not the person who is suited for this job. Perhaps you would
be better off approaching another person with a task more suited to your
physique and personal abilities. Have you tried the American burger place down
the road?”
The lad was desperate. Saying nothing
he attacked the bell with all his might. He watched in amazement as it swung
away from him in a graceful arc until it was almost parallel with the floor
[NB: This is not the same thing as ‘horizontal’]. Observing it carefully, as
Quasimodo had done, he waited until the precise moment that it reached its
lowest point on the downward swing and, with wonderful determination and
application of will, struck it with all the power at his disposal.
Quasimodo watched helplessly in horror
as, not only did the bell not cease its motion but the momentum of its travel
was transferred to the young fellow who described an equally graceful arc in
the other direction. And sailed out of the window.
Gathering both his wits about him,
Quasimodo shuffled over to the window and looked down.
“Oh, no. Oh, dear, oh, dear.” he
muttered, turned and headed for the stairs.
Down the stairs, down the stairs, down
the stairs, down the stairs, down the stairs, down the stairs, Quasimodo went
until, at last, he reached the side door of the cathedral.
Outside a crowd had gathered. There
were mumblings of ‘he just appeared out of nowhere’, ‘sacred blue’ and ‘name of
a dog’.
A gendarme had arrived and was
surveying the splat that had been the boy. He looked up and saw Quasimodo
pushing his way to the front, panting and sweating.
“Quasimodo, my friend. What brings you
down to the ground. Almost as unusual an event as this boy falling from the
sky, is it not?”
“I saw the crowd forming below my
window and wondered what it was that had occurred to cause such a gathering.”
“As I said; it seems that this boy has
fallen from the sky onto his head. Do you know him, Quasimodo?”
Quasimodo bent over and examined the
corpse in some detail. Eventually he straightened, stroked his chin and said, “I
cannot say that I know this lad but the face... the face... it rings a bell.”
