Palafox

6

So your life unfolds without other concerns but the search for a little food and a shade, without other activities than the seasonal harvest of berries and mushrooms, the hunt for butterflies, the fishing of crayfish, without worse predator to fear than a female post-coitum. And then they arrive with their dogs, their weapons, their traps. They hunt you. They capture you. Put yourself in the place of Palafox. They rip you by the roots from your sylvan existence. Palafox paws the ground, you’d paw too in this narrow box. He snorts, relax. Calm down. Maureen appeases him, her fingers play along his nape, creep up between his ears and, lower, her hand rests flat on the nearly perfect white star near his nose. Be a good little Palafox, behave now. He doesn’t reject a fist full of grass. His teeth are yellow and uneven, his tongue is rough. Blinders keep him from seeing the professors Cambrelin and Baruglio to his right, Zeiger and Pierpont to his left. This new consultation was obviously necessary. We cannot pretend to be unaware of the savage acts he has committed, or so it would seem, while he has been on the run. Before starting to train him again, Algernon wants to know if he is or isn’t salvageable, whether he can or can’t be broken. In addition to the misdemeanors about which we know, or think we know, innumerable tragedies past are bubbling up to the surface again, those that preceded Palafox’s first appearance amongst us and for which the true culprit was never identified: whenever the field mouse was implicated in a case, the wolf came out pure and white, and vice versa, the wolf being implicated, white became the mouse. In brief, Palafox is suspected of having slit the throats of many thousands of our fellow creatures. And of having horned many thousands of others. Suffocated still more. Strangled others. Crushed others still. Poisoned countless. Through the centuries. For motives that remain uncertain. Of having mutilated, well yes, millions and millions more, ripping a finger or two from the hand extended only to pet him or bully him, never to give. If that were all it had been, but tearing the arm with it, and with the arm the shoulder, with the shoulder the breast, with the breast the infant, rending a foot here and there, tearing away leaden limbs of swimmers weak at the knees — those, pitiful in the water, diminished on the banks, unfortunate wherever they fall, sinking into despair in a balloon or along a line. To this list of crimes please add the decimated herds, the pillaged granaries, the emptied ponds, the poultry yards, the sheep barns, the sacked pigsties and vines, the devastated orchards, because pig doesn’t make for good dessert (hors d’œuvres variés, asst. cold meats, plate upon plate, nutritious, filling, but nothing sugary to bring it all to a close, no chocolate, no sweetness). Let us then list, in the hosts of houses where Palafox, doubtless, by turns, served as pet, or companion animal, the soiled carpets, the confettied curtains, splattered ceilings, debased baseboards, compromised couches, marked mirrors, furniture befouled, sweaters unraveled, knickknacks paddywacked, spools tangled, books unbound, cooling pies pinched from sills, plants phylloxerized, stolen diamonds, nights ruined, sons stripped bare, trashcans upended, endlessly….

It would be endless were we to list his hideous crimes in full, the multiple pillagings, every trespass of paws that brought death or destruction, whatever the intention behind them, of which Palafox is suspected, to provided an exhaustive list that would leave out none of the relevant details, for every incident, each circumstance, the date and the place of the event, the level of intimacy that linked him to the victim, when their association began, how often they were in each other’s company, if the nature of their company were normal, ordinary even, the magical moment when in the heat of the moment death arose and what happened to the ashes, and to hear one after the other the plaintiffs still alive enumerate their suffering and their gripes! Incidentally, his ferocity was also and on many occasions for our own good, right away Baruglio wishes to make the point were Palafox was ever found to have been guilty of this and all things. It’s all a question of point of view, of course, as it often is, a matter of the angle from which one observes the event: only the explorer who was well placed to watch the animal swallow a cloud can speak with authority on hippo mucous membranes. His back-packing companion will remain mute on the subject, or very evasive, but saw, on the other hand, with his own eyes a rocky island disappear beneath the mist and advises us to hurry because there isn’t anything good about having night creep up suddenly in these regions far from camp. And in effect it was high time, for in a few minutes the jungle has filled with shadows. This example chosen among a thousand possible others for its exceptional setting, Zambezi, its roseate twilight, its white birds, will it be properly understood? Our eyes are rolling like marbles on the surface of things, this is the banal idea that Baruglio is arguing for: beware of appearances. Let us give Palafox his due. He defeated many malefactors and destroyed many caterpillars, worms, beetles, the banes of our flowerbeds, his guano fattening the fruit of our vegetable gardens, and therefore in turn our vegetables, our children, our ogres, his tunnels favoring aeration and the fertilization of our soil, fighting against the oversilting of our rivers, more effectively than our engineers of the Departments of Water and Forestry, without him the muskrat and the starling would swarm our countrysides.

But we aren’t here to plead in his defense. His guilt remains to be proven. The accusations rest on nothing: no fingerprints, contradictory testimony, the private conviction of Madame Fontechevade constitutes the only serious element we could level against him. The unresolvable question of his age alone would have us stay his execution. He seems young, recall his mischievousness. His fur is silky, his groin humid, his mouth full of teeth, his eyes glitter, his tail functions, sweeps. It would be in bad faith to try him for murder, even for walking out on a check, someone not yet in the world at the time of the facts already mentioned. We will not begin to blame larvae for every shadowy crime, all the unsolved murders. Imagine for a moment the number of maternity wards the police could then assault in search of supposed assassins, caught like rats in a trap, plucked up at birth, with no other choice but to give themselves up, and be shot on the spot? Needless to say such an alibi would be impossible to contradict, and would clear Palafox. Alas! It will be difficult to establish. Even if his mother of whom we know nothing were suddenly to step forward, we would have to buy her testimony. Yet we know what lies and sacrifices a mother can make if it should mean saving her endangered child. She would perhaps go so far as to confess to having committed the crimes herself. Besides, she seems thoroughly compromised in this affair. It is not impossible that we are mistaken in believing he is so young. Since his arrest, everything is calm. No sign of new aggression or attack around us. Henceforth walking in the woods does one good, on foot or horseback. Peace begged on bended knee before wine and wiseman alike, peace that had been refused us, here she reigns, reestablished, in this church where wafts the scent of a cellar. Coincidence, adds Baruglio, simple coincidence.

The study of reptiles (the researching of the aviary origins of the blindworm in particular) have led Professor Baruglio to take a closer interest in paleontology-a small demonstration of his general competence in this field: to reconstruct hour by hour the schedule of a tyrannosaurus, all he has to do is take a look at its fossilized footprint, preserved by some miracle, since that muddy morning of the secondary era when the monster, rudely awakened, did not himself know what he would do with his day. But in the absence of even the barest hint of a trail, the most meagre trace, Baruglio’s enquiry is stuck, is at the mercy of the winds. Palafox left no prehistoric traces, or he erased them, or bad weather did, glacial erosion perhaps accountable, or why not Aeolian, or fluvial, or we could inadvertently attribute them to some animal already on file, present at the same times at the same places or somewhat earlier or long after, or long before or a little after. It would have been too terrific to find his fossilized shell in the rock like those of numerous other cephalopods. (In the interest of those who have seen an ammonite, take rapid note that they would be wrong to bother seeing a second. Save for variations of weight and diameter, nothing differentiates one from the next. Their discovery dates back to an ancient era and once the initial surprise was past, man’s interest in the whole kit and caboodle diminished exponentially, daily were dug up more examples, leading us to little more than a lot of clutter. It’s with the invention of paper, then the loose sheet that one saw a movement in their favor take shape, initially almost imperceptible, it was born in literary milieus before settling though the lower strata of society. The ammonite became indispensable to man the day he understood its raison d’être and made corresponding use of it. He had lost interest in it before, as he would have if clothespins had existed in nature, in the rough, until the invention of fabric, at which point the clothespin would have been a runaway success, thus the ammonite remains today, despite the competition of Plexiglas cubes and varnished pebbles, the paperweights most prized by people of taste-a position of trust already ostensibly coveted by young mollusks that barely find use as rubber bands, but time is on their side, time passes.)

As you have already noted, a great many of the rock paintings (blood and ash, brown ochre) dated to the middle-Magdalenian era, represent a humped quadruped, with back-curving horns, of which the curved neckline of wooly fur recalls that belonging to Palafox. Let us not rush to conclude the image is in fact of him. Drawn in the shadowy discomfort of a rocky wall, these approximate figures, clumsy, frequently unfinished, suggest a great many other animals, such as the bison. Above all, what do we know of the artistic conceptions of the troglodytic painters? Why, for example, wouldn’t they have left their imaginations run free and invent this ruminant from scratch? Let us not expect an answer from Baruglio. These men and their rituals have become foreign to us. The generation gap — widened and flooded in zoos to keep monkeys or Lemuroid from sneaking into the company of visitors — this famous trench seems deeper still, and more unbridgeable, which keeps us from the carcasses and other fine remains of our direct ancestors. All one need do is show their gently prognathous skulls to a contemporary to judge, and listen as their laughter overflows.

Now immobilized, head held low, masticating hay, Palafox seems indifferent to everything said around him. He makes no move to exculpate himself. In fact, he conducts himself as if he were convinced of the inutility of the least effort, as if the executioner had already hoisted his cleaver, lowered it, and was now walking away at dawn in search of other thrilling adventures, other unbalanced encounters, other temporary liaisons. It is true, once again, that everything points to him, his ferocity, his omnivorousness, his claws sharper than canines, his canines like sabers, his coat clotted with blood. Scientifically, declaims Pierpont in staccato syllables (he polishes each and joins one carefully to the next), we must prove sci-en-tif-i-cal-ly the innocence or the guilt of Palafox and therefore, in the first place, go back and consider the entirety of his life, search backward for the moment of his birth. We can do this. The lengths of his tusks, the wear and tear on his hooves, his song, the position of his ears at rest, the suppleness of his spine, the size and number of his tines and antlers, we have enough information to succeed. But would it not be faster to have recourse to the techniques commonly utilized to date relics? Zeiger envisions for example the partial dissolution or perhaps irradiation of Palafox. Thanks to this last method, the historian knows instantly where, in which Greek or Inca dresser, to arrange the exhumed plate with a fistful of gold pieces — an archeological discovery then, but also a fine symbol of an earth at once nurturing and nurtured, let it be noted. There are many other methods of dating more or less along the lines of those already mentioned. Push a fisherman into the water and count the circles that expand around the place he fell, you will learn the age of the river.

Or the age of the fisherman, opinions differ on this point, but at root this changes nothing for us, proclaims Baruglio who suggests that we could count, rather than Palafox’s antlers, the concentric circles of the green and red scales of his carapace. Because the antlers mislead — you admit along with me that the stag wears no hat, and yet look at where we all threw ours when we came in. And Baruglio points out, hung on the wall, the varnished antlers of a ten-point buck. Antlers mislead, here’s why, they break in battle, stop growing and multiplying after ten years and never produce more than stolen fruit. You just can’t trust them. Nor the ridges on the shells, Pierpont objects. While quite clear during the early years, very deep and numerous, they become erased through time. After half a century, any carapace will appear perfectly smooth, flawless, as polished as our skulls, Messieurs, which may as well be compared to billiard balls, to staircase finials and pommels, in the best of cases to the knees of actresses. (From that time on we better understood why Madame Fontechevade had finally thrown her tortoise Tatiana out a window. While her own face wrinkled, Tatiana’s shell grew smoother with time, and as a result of inverted evolutionary trajectories there reached a point where they criss-crossed and each exhibited an identical state of dilapidation, from which a chain-reaction of comical mistaken identity arose, and what was bound to happen did, and one day Tatiana was taken for a younger sister of our old, vexed, terribly vexed, friend.)

According to the spot where Sadarnac had caught him, in the very center of the Sargasso sea, it is likely that Palafox followed the migratory route, gulping down unrelentingly, and without deviating from his route, the offspring of sardines and anchovies and herrings which really hit the spot, here as elsewhere, when tasty little dishes won’t do. This established, continues Cambrelin, the problem remains undiminished as we have no idea in which direction Palafox swam. Did he return to spawning-grounds, a vigorous adult at the peak of his prowess, or, just out of the egg, did he take to the open sea for the first time? In fact, we would be no more enlightened about his age if we were to illuminate this mystery. The eel, for example, undulates with the river until it reaches the delta, making its way down the warm currents to reproduce in the sea, while the salmon, counter-exemplary, abandons the sea, making its way up the icy stream and lays its twenty five thousand eggs beneath the stones of a calm river bordered by willow and alder or aspen. It is in this manner that the returning salmon journeys accompanied by the young eel and the young salmon accompanied by the mature eel. Was Palafox born in saltwater, in which case the vigorous adult at the peak of his powers when Sadarnac caught him, on his way to spawn in fresh water? Or was Palafox born in fresh water, fresh out of the egg when Sadarnac caught him, heading out for the first time to the open sea? Really, this is the only point that demands clarification.

Cambrelin is a stern fellow, sloppy in appearance. His passion for ichthyology comes from his maternal grandfather, an eczematous double-pedal amputee, taciturn, who used to revel in the presence of water and liked to make bubbles in his bath beneath the interrogatory and already myopic eye of the keyhole. Cambrelin wears silver-framed glasses, patched with red plastic tape. When he speaks he barely moves his lips. His voice is dry, rather disagreeable to hear. What he might say or think is of no interest to anyone. By the end of his intervention, along the lines of those indices enumerated above, length of horns, state of coat, wear of hackles, etc… the three other naturalists counted seventy-four, seventy-four years, the likely age of Palafox. For now, it is important to locate the animal in relation to ourselves, in our pyramid of ages.

The oldest of Ziegler’s recollections concerns a little boy who was very keen on ornithology who went by the name Swift Eagle and wanted to become sachem. According to him, all we have to do is multiply this number, seventy-four, by seven. Palafox would therefore have merited the respect that we owe and the care that we offer our elders of five hundred eighteen years of age. Pierpont contests this calculation. Pierpont also draws on bonafide experience. In his tender youth, each day he invented an ingenious grasshopper and, blindfolded, spent most of his free time taking apart and reconstituting various beetles. According to him, the right answer was to divide the existing number, seventy-four, by twelve. Then Palafox could be our son, or our grandson, even our great grandson, meaning it would be up to him eventually to take care of our long-term care. (Once, of course, beds become free. Because of the war, all the hospitals are full to bursting. Sets and staging are conventional, metal beds in a row, white walls, grey blankets, stark fluorescent lighting; the casting however allows for pleasant surprises, the nurses, the wounded, the powerless doctors then the providential priests, all are remarkable. We expect an extended run. The enemy is mounting an underhanded resistance. Guards are stabbed to death. Bridges explode underfoot.) As for Baruglio, he remains quiet as to the birth of his vocation, nonetheless we know that he laughs at snake bites — at worst a rattlesnake with a head cold will inject him with its virus. Like experienced boxers who smile when you break their noses, he has developed total immunity. His idea seems straightforward and smart: multiply our number, seventy-four, by seven, five hundred eighteen, and then divide that by twelve. Palafox, like most forty-somethings, still has many good years ahead of him.

By the same token, his innocence is blinding. Palafox did not exist in 64, when the emperor Nero first fed Christians to the lions. Other persecutions followed, under Domitian (81–96), under Trajan (98-117), under Decius (249–251), under Valerian (257–258), under Diocletian (309–311), before the Edict of Tolerance of Milan put these massacres to an end, in 313. But at that time, still no Palafox: neither the imago we know, nor the silken chrysalis swaddled in silk, nor the first worm, nor the blackberry shrub where he first nibbled the tender young leaves, one by one, avoiding those awful fruits and the hooked hand of the vampire that gathered, to make jams, these clots of black blood. The counts of indictment are laid to rest, one upon the next. Dismissed. Dismissed. How could he have spread the plague to London in 1347? Dismissed. Nothing to keep him from his training sessions. The routine needs to be ready this summer at La Gloriette. Algernon is counting on the attendance of professors Pierpont, Zeiger and Baruglio. They will come, they promise. But not my wife, alas! Cambrelin makes clear, she is unwell, she no longer goes anywhere, do please excuse her.