The Glutton

by A.K. Blakemore

For fuck’s sake. Maybe dead. There is no maybe about dead.

I am Tarare, he says. The Great Tarare. The Glutton of Lyon. The Hercules of the Gullet. The Bottomless Man. The Beast. So I have been called, he says.

The memoirs of a cannibal, she thinks. But who would wish to read such a thing?

He actually bit her. The killer catches his breath. Only a nibble, he says. How many men can say they have bitten a nun?—and he begins to laugh again.

If history is a stone lion, Tarare is the ivy that fills its mouth.

You talk a lot to fool people, says Tarare. When they’re listening they aren’t thinking, and then you can do what you like.

He considers what it means, to be alive but thought dead by everyone who matters. He realises that in quite a crucial sense, he no longer exists. Nollet had said a Pater, so it is possible that even God is now labouring under the misapprehension that he, Tarare, is dead.

How many words, thinks Lozeau, does a boy like Tarare even possess to describe how he feels? Hungry, angry, happy, sad. Itchy.

It is the first morning of July, Year of Grace seventeen eighty-eight, and Tarare’s body contains five news-sheets, a hat, three thimbles, twenty pigs’ trotters, two candles, and a blind puppy.

Perhaps a precondition of true beauty is surprise, he thinks: real beauty must seem as though it has fallen abruptly from the sky, or else come from deep inside the earth—some place where it had shone secretly and unseen, until you came along and saw it.

should I live for centuries, the sweet period of my youth would not be reborn, nor effaced from my memory—

Everyone looks like something, Tarare thinks. Nobody looks like nothing. God loves to plagiarise himself.

Now I know how Galileo felt, he says. Snorts. Demons.

But what priest would taste like that? Meat so tender it was like mouthfuls of love.

Then why? asks the doctor. Why would you do this? (He cannot bring himself to say it. He knows if he says it, says it clearly—why did you eat a child?—that he will laugh.)