The Wall Between Them
His name was Jerome, and he had been a clerk before his imprisonment, convicted on testimony he maintained until his last conscious day was manufactured entirely by a rival merchant with sufficient money to purchase whatever witnesses a court required. He had spent his first three years at the Château d'If in a state he later described to Faria, once the two men had established contact, as something closer to suspended animation than true living: a mind gone deliberately dull to spare itself the full weight of an indefinite sentence, marking time rather than inhabiting it.
What broke this suspended state was a sound he initially mistook for rats, or for some structural settling of the ancient fortress's stones, and gradually came to recognize, over several increasingly attentive nights, as the unmistakable rhythm of deliberate, patient digging, a sound too regular, too purposeful, to be anything but a fellow prisoner's escape attempt, conducted with a discipline Jerome's own dulled mind had long since abandoned any capacity to imagine attempting himself.
He did not, at first, respond to the sound in any way beyond simple curiosity. A mind roused from years of protective numbness does not immediately leap to hope, having learned, through the particular hard education imprisonment provides, that hope unearned by real prospect is simply another form of suffering, arriving early and voluntarily rather than waiting to be inflicted from outside. But the digging continued, night after night, with a consistency that eventually overcame Jerome's careful resistance to feeling anything at all about it, and he found himself, against every discipline he had built across three years of deliberate emotional flatness, listening for the sound each evening with something he had not experienced in longer than he could accurately measure: anticipation.
When the wall finally gave way, not completely, but enough to permit a whispered conversation between two men who had each spent years believing themselves entirely alone, Jerome discovered on the other side a former priest of evident and considerable learning, whose own explanation of his imprisonment involved political intrigue in Italy that Jerome only partially followed and did not particularly need to follow in order to recognize, within the first exchange, that he had encountered a mind of really extraordinary capacity, trapped in circumstances as unjust and as apparently permanent as his own.
What Faria offered him, in the months and years that followed, was not merely companionship, valuable as that alone would have been after three years of enforced solitude, but something Jerome had not realized, until it was offered to him, that he had been starving for with an intensity that made the previous three years' deliberate numbness seem, in retrospect, like a form of slow death he had simply not recognized as death while it was happening: education. Faria taught him languages, history, the rudiments of several sciences, delivered through a small gap in a stone wall with a patience and rigor that would have been remarkable in any classroom, and that struck Jerome, receiving it in circumstances so far removed from any ordinary classroom's comfort, as something closer to a miracle than to mere instruction.
He found, across those years of lessons whispered through stone, that his own mind, which he had assumed permanently dulled by imprisonment, was in fact entirely intact, merely dormant, and that Faria's patient teaching was reawakening in him a capacity for true intellectual engagement he had not experienced since his own brief and interrupted education as a young man, decades earlier, before circumstance had redirected him toward a clerk's more modest and more limited working life. He began, for the first time since his conviction, to imagine an actual future beyond his cell walls. Not escape, precisely, since neither man had yet devised any plan for that considerably more difficult undertaking, but simply the possibility of a mind continuing to grow and change, regardless of the physical circumstances confining the body that carried it.
It was this reawakened capacity for hope, more than any specific plan Faria eventually developed for their mutual escape, that Jerome would later understand, in his own final months, as the single most valuable gift his unlikely friendship with the Abbé had given him, a gift that made his own eventual death, when it came, considerably harder to bear than the numb, protected years that had preceded it, precisely because Faria had taught him, too well and too late, exactly how much a fully awakened mind actually had left to lose.