Palafox

2

No need to cite all their books, those by professors Zeiger, Cambrelin, Pierpont, Baruglio, as if any of them required an introduction. It took them a great deal of study and effort to get them where they are, they had read a great deal, traveled, waited forever in blinds, tricked hunger with thirst, thirst with cold, cold with fear, fear with boredom and boredom, finally, with hunger. Henceforth bald, their precious knowledge under glass, they have little left to learn.

Let’s take Pierpont, the entomologist. After months of daily contact, he succeeded in quieting first the suspicion then, second stage, winning the trust of a colony of damselflies more commonly called dragonflies and more vulgarly still damselflies, they allowed him to play with them, go on their excursions, in exchange at first for a few sweets, then without anything in return, in friendship, in brotherhood, an adopted damselfly integrated into the group arousing neither fear nor curiosity, only the desire of the females in spring. The fear that gripped him at the beginning of the experience — he confessed it without false shame as soon as he recovered the use of words, after several weeks of reeducation, before a gathering that was taken aback to see the scrawny attendee try to scale his carafe — soon made room for a feeling of security, shocking when one knew the native nastiness and the strength of these animals. He could turn his back on them without fright. In the end, he slept without his weapon. Baruglio had followed the opposite initiative, no less rich in discoveries. Rather than going to live among the reptiles (he had no desire to drag his family with him), the celebrated herpetologist raised one in his home, like a son, having scrupulously recreated its Madagascar habitat in a cupboard. Could one imagine better conditions for the study of an animal? Its every gesture and deed, its daily routine, nothing escapes the observer who dwells on the grounds in these places, rises at dawn to exchange bittersweet words with his mate, drinks some coffee, reads the papers, answers the mail, lunches at noon, half-past, drinks a cognac, shuts himself in his laboratory until evening — where he is not to be disturbed under any circumstances — dines at the stroke of seven, half-past, steps out onto the balcony, contemplates street and sky, dispassionately flips through professional journals, swallows a sleeping pill, kisses his companion on the forehead, and falls asleep on his belly — yes, it is odd, almost systematically on the forehead and on his belly. The information made the rounds of the building, people came down from upstairs to watch Baruglio handle his reptile. All the same, certain neighbors complained, necessitating the immediate elimination of the creature. She seemed so sweet, inoffensive even, but how could one say what a wild animal would do in captivity? One way or another reptiles eventually escape into the sewers, it’s common knowledge. A petition circulated. Baruglio put an end to the experiment, and got rid of his blue radiata tortoise.

These two eminent zoologists responded to Algernon’s call. But let’s not forget professor Zeigler, polyglottal ornithologist able to imitate beyond reproach the calls or wheezes of some sixty birds, who could, thanks to his gift of the gab, marry an ostrich, however much he hesitated to do so. Finally Cambrelin, the ichthyologist, was sent by Sadarnac. This one claims whenever he gets a chance to have harpooned Palafox in the middle of the wide Sargasso Sea, after having missed him once in the Floridian Straits. A lie. Specialists not without other interests, Pierpont, Zeigler, Baruglio, and Cambrelin do not know all there is to know about wild animals, batrachians, rodents, mollusks, ruminants, primates, or seafood. Algernon entrusted them with Palafox. The four men made a circle around the glass cage where the exposed animal finally remained calm. Zeiger examined his eyes, his nostrils, his crest, Cambrelin his right side, Baruglio his rump, Pierpont his left hand, turn please, Pierpont his eyes, his groin, his goatee, Zeigler his right arm, Cambrelin his stinger, Baruglio his left wing, turn please, Baruglio his eyes, his beak, his antennae, Pierpont his right fin, Zeigler his flat, trowel-like tail, Cambrelin his left side, please turn, Cambrelin examines his eyes, his wattles, his horns, Baruglio his right gill, Pierpont his rectrices, Zeigler his left arm, they look at each other, yes, they would do well to dissect Palafox. They decide against it. Certain organisms do not tolerate well being cut into pieces, their hearts beat anxiously when handed around, and the effects of such shock to the nervous system tend to have unpredictable results, one example alone, there is nothing harder in all the world than to get a quartered thoroughbred to gallop. We content ourselves, then, with a few dermatological samples, some muscle, a bit of blood, bone and cartilage, which shouldn’t prevent the well-trained Palafox from carrying its jockey on to victory.

The arrangement satisfied everyone, after which everything went to hell. Pierpont and Zeigler begin to quarrel, brothers however, and with shared experiences — ah! these drinking orgies — who had stuck together when fireless winters encroached upon womanless springs, when you would’ve swallowed your own brain if you could to fill your belly, before either had tasted glory or had tossed to the public (beaten, standing, unleashed) the wolf at the door and the ears of a mad cow. Their friendship came to an end the day when the unforgivable ornithologist forgot the entomologist’s precious collection of coleopteran beetles in the aviary, in particular the weevil, the Capricorn beetle, the carob, and the june bug, thus the sapphire faded, the ruby, the topaz and emerald, all these gems fading, their value evaporating, soon to be gravel. The dispute is about Palafox’s nervous system. Pierpont refuses to use sulfuric acid, even in the interests of pacific experimental ends. Zeiger, on the contrary, swears by the benefits of the process, very popular with frogs, which allows for immediate observations, reproducible at will, thanks to which schoolchildren learn to develop their reflexes and respond intelligently to stimuli. Let’s admit that nothing could be funnier. A few drops of acid induce a string of irresistible visual gags, we might even believe we’ve been transported back to the golden age of silent film: the frog tears itself free of the cork board upon which it was resting, lazily, pinned, decorative, jumping like it possessed magic beans or the winning number or the solution to all the world’s problems, upending the contents of the laboratory, leaping into the middle of the retorts, devoting itself without believing in them to chemical experiments, alchemical, obtaining white precipitates, black precipitates, buttressing itself against the tip of the Bunsen burner, it melts lead, cinnabar, at whim, sipping bubbly alcohols, drawing liquid out of gold and from eau regale, inhaling the mix, obtaining this time a thick red smoke, a laugh-inducing tear gas, leaving no one indifferent — its number is up when it implodes, happily we have plenty of others, a whole crate.

Whereas Palafox is a rare specimen in our experience, Pierpont counters, perhaps the last, perhaps the first. Let’s not make another move, let’s watch it gather pollen, distill caterpillars, and weave its web and soon we will know everything about it. You see, with this sort of trunk linked to his digestive tube, how he pumps the nectar from flowers. On his rear paws, there, there, come closer, that there, we see miniscule balls of propolys, resin gathered on buds, which will allow him to caulk the cracks in his habitat, reinforce the attachment of these strips of wax, and to stickily ensnare the aphids he eats from time to time. Look at the progress we are making. These first observations are interesting actually, admitted Cambrelin, but, that said, let’s be reasonable. Think of all the errors made in the past in the classification of living things. We had first thought the whale a fish, for example, in those days when men were trusting and naïve. Today, we presume they belong to the same group as our own, dear Maureen, that of mammals, but a researcher more in the know, and better equipped as well, let it be said, perhaps will tomorrow discover that in reality it is a passerine, however heavy, a pretty sparrow. So let’s not go crazy here.

There are nearly two thousand species of snake, Baruglio announced abruptly. If Palafox seems at first not to resemble in any way an asp, that does not necessarily mean that despite everything it isn’t one, as we have seen many a screech owl that resembles an owl (raised eyebrow of our ornithologist duly noted). It was night, Baruglio insisted. That excuses nothing, hissed the ornithologist who will never forgive his brother for having forgotten an anaconda in his aviary, noting the bird of paradise, the lyrebird, the hornbill, the toucan, all these high-end parakeets bred in limited numbers by nature to distract the explorer, compensated for his efforts as a tsetse fly kisses his cheek. Having taken the floor (let him keep it) Zeiger wonders where Palafox nested before he had a cage at his disposal. The egg had only been a stage. In light of recent events and of the manner in which the animal, without having even been invited to sit down, had appropriated the sofa (even a repo man would have avoided eating it on the spot), he must have benefited parasitically from existing structures. In all likelihood, he would dislodge an enfeebled goldcrest and take residence in his nest. The brood collapses overboard, the birds, still weighed down with their eggish reflexes, slow to adapt to the soil — their cardboard skulls strike the corner of a violet, and the only witness to their death is a succulent slug. Palafox settles down, makes himself at home, his head beneath strangely endivelike wings, with no other means of escape from his sad destiny than to dream, he falls asleep. As for the slug, slugs are not famous for their spirit of initiative, Palafox the next day found it there, prepared in its own juice, served warm upon a mint leaf. This hypothesis, for want of being seductive, seemed the most likely. However, upon reflection, Zeiger put it aside, as a man accustomed to marching straight ahead no matter the reeds or rushes, and so it was precisely there in a swamp that he believed he could locate the true habitat of our palmiped. Palafox, therefore, widened and deepened a hole dug by a musk otter, built up the opening with mud, yes, with mud, where would he have procured the bones of a nun?

All the more so as he would have needed quite a few of them. I share your opinion on this point, Ziegler. But back to Palafox’s doings, you were conjuring up the sofa, let’s recall the breakfront, the vase, the liquors, and the books belonging to Algernon. How can you assert that this ferocity is a permanent characteristic of its nature, as characteristic as its goiter, for example, or its exasperating buzzing? Would you feel comfortable judging a being on the basis of only a few isolated facts? When you are angry, Zeiger, it happens, the biographer of Attila waits to see what will happen before writing to his editor that he has a great idea for his next book. Palafox dazzled by the gleam of the chandeliers will doubtless have given himself over to panic. And Pierpont goes on to mention how the trembling flame of a candle drives to similar acts of desperation the geometer moth: this little candlelit dinner beginning in high spirits ends in tragedy… (and if the child conceived beneath the table, during dessert, by a man and a woman, both tipsy, knew how many blue butterflies had paid with their lives to make his birth possible, would we see him ten years later test the twelve blades of his new knife on the lilac caterpillar? — but this is an aside).

Zeiger and Baruglio nod their heads. They are in agreement as far as this goes — free, Palafox lived a nocturnal existence. He lived in a hollow trunk. All day he remained there, immobile, unbudgeable, eyes stitched shut, impenetrable. At dusk, he exited his dugout canoe and went to work, punctual night watchman, guardian of nature’s order, he detected the vole ferreting about, like a fire starting among the crops. Taken one by one, the vole is the gentlest, the most delicate of beings, it arouses deep emotion and the desire within us to contaminate it with some mortal illness of which we will use every care we can muster to cure him. Two voles look almost identical. Three, lassitude sets in. Four eat like ten. Ten in a field closes a mill. One more and the country runs the risk of ruin, begging assistance from a neighboring state which in return for its help demands the return of a mountainous province, wooded, skiable, conquered by armed forces, then consents to the transportation of the supplies, supplies being powdered milk and radish-greens. Were it not for Palafox’s vigilance, his tireless rounds, his heavy but silent flight, since feathers and darkness ignore each other, brush against each other, want to avoid a scene, without his nyctaloptic angel’s eye, his watchmaker’s claws and beak hard at their task, without Palafox we would shiver with hunger, submitting to the humiliating generosity of the enemy that Chancelade at this very moment is tearing to pieces, if all goes as planned.

We have been living under high Palafoxian security most likely for a long time. The Museum has twenty thousand volic crania bequeathed to it by the artist, a collector who made his children pay dearly for their indifference. And yet the oldest of these skulls go back to the belle époque that precedes the first ice age. Thus, concludes Baruglio, by deduction, do we derive information on the probable age of Palafox. Baruglio concludes perhaps a bit too quickly, because nothing allows us to affirm that he had not survived by eating roots and wild fruits until the appearance of the vole. Nor would there have been life here, insists Zeiger, if each species had not been formed until its ideal prey had been fat and numerous enough to nourish it, if the mongoose had awaited the serpent, the serpent the toad, the toad the fly, if the fly had awaited us, etc., but man did not wait for the grocer to open his shop before spreading, he took the initiative. Similarly, not unreasonably, Palafox. Unless his appearance came after that of the vole. It might, what’s more — Zeiger exaggerates, to make sure the point is made — be that not one of the twenty thousand skulls in our possession was cleaned and spit out by Palafox. The vole doesn’t fare well in low temperatures. It constitutes the everyday fare of weasels, foxes, and wild cats. If it falls in water, it goes straight to the bottom. Plague, fire, famines never spare it. Finally, three or four years on, it is only a shadow of itself, it has no taste for living, you wouldn’t even recognize it, it dies from its pretty death. From there, conversation reaches an impasse, only a single step away-a step we will not take. We’re just hitting our heads against the wall, observed Pierpont. For the moment, let’s leave the question of dating aside. We’ll return to it, rest assured. Another point that remains to be clarified: Palafox and sex, which is to say which sex is Palafox? Does he have an organ, if yes where, if not what?

If not, then it’s definitive: I’ve suspected it from the start — Palafox is a starfish. Cambrelin leads the charge. Essentially, starfish, like Palafox, present an axial symmetry reticulated in five and that carmine color which would so delight us, Maureen, if you were to change the water in the tank from time to time. We usually call them starfish, however imprecise and hard to grasp a term it may be. Another common feature, starfish are also weak-willed. Their bodies, tugged at by contradictory urges, tear in two parts, one with three branches, the other with two. Later, the missing half and the amputated arms grow back to form two distinct individuals, indifferent to each other, already torn apart by inner conflict, hesitating between North and South, East and West, North and East, South and West, East and South, West and North. The great advantage in asexual reproduction, surely you will agree with me, resides in its simplicity. It circumvents a series of strategies, humiliating rejections and unpleasant surprises, and one is certainly at the very least spared the six hundred and forty days of gestation that paralyze elephants. Somewhere in the Sargasso Sea, there must be a colony of Palafoxes that all spawned from the one original, who still lives and twitches within each Palafox including yours, Maureen, yours whose water you should change and whose limbs you should try to count. Professor Cambrelin has the distinction of supporting his assertions, if not with disabling proofs, then with tedious erudition. Of course the first starfish did not create itself, despite its five arms, which blows Chamberlain’s theory out of the water.

Which doesn’t even begin to mention, adds Baruglio, that cobras are afraid of water. One finds them in the desert. Therefore, how did Palafox reach us? To me, that’s the first enigma for us to resolve. Age and gender are matters under the auspices of anecdote and gossip, we’ll save those for when we’ve gotten to the heart of the matter, once we learn the grounds for his presence and by what means of transportation he arrived among us. Palafox would not have been the first to have traveled in a suitcase. Indeed I have unwittingly brought back from my excursions several of those hooded snakes, as their morphology allows them to slip on a jacket or a pair of trousers just like you or me, a disguise in which they go unnoticed, or to coil up inside a mitt or a slipper, or in a cap. The shock is considerable when the masks at last are lowered or just plain dropped (hood not included). But usually, they manage to get out when the suitcase is open on the bed without being recognized or bothered. So this is how I see it: Palafox crawled to a harbor, spotted a hotel, snuck past a porter’s stare, slipped into a room, perhaps even into the arms of a chamber-maid, hid between the covers, or perhaps in the wake of a prostitute’s steps, or a frail child’s, night fallen, taking advantage of a traveler’s distraction to slip into the luggage. It’s the only way he could have crossed the Ocean. If he took the plane, same deal, we only need to transpose the action from the Hotel Magellan to the Hotel Lindbergh.

You seem to forget he has wings. Palafox couldn’t have made it by swimming, Zeiger willingly admits, but he would not be the first albatross or the first heron to have made it across Europe without a motor.