The Sacred Beasts

by Bev Jafek

  “Those are good questions! Many valid arguments can be made that sexual arousal is more complex, and involves more contexts and bodily systems, than what the researchers measured. Brain scans would begin to refine the results. But, whatever your theory or whatever precedes the arousal, the end result must involve the genitals or it’s really some other kind of arousal. Too, any theory must actually explain the data: why were straight-labeled women less turned on by heterosexual visuals and more turned on by gay visuals than they said they were? Why did men respond in the opposite way? The results are very specific, you see, and they clearly show a disconnect for women unless they conceive of themselves as bisexual or lesbian.

  “Even the researchers were not able to explain the data, in my opinion. Their speculation was that evolution may have favored a constant diffuse sexuality in women since they are always vulnerable to heterosexual rape and might suffer greater injury if their bodies were not partially responsive. Intriguingly enough, behavior like this has been observed in bonobos. But for women, why would this threat result in bisexuality rather than heterosexuality? The reverse should be true. Again, the specific results are impossible to explain if most women are not falsifying or blocking their own self-awareness.”

  “What does bonobo sex look like?”

  “It’s missionary position for both straight and gay sex, unlike the other chimps whose sex is ventral-dorsal or dog-style. Bonobos have plenty of sex—many times a day, whenever a dispute might arise, like when food is being divided among group members. They have a very short orgasm—just a few seconds—and they may have sex in groups, even involving children. When two adults are mating, a child might get into the act by rubbing itself on the female’s thigh, for example.”

  “Not much like our sex, then . . . oh no, I just thought of something that explodes your theory! Children get involved! Do you see what that means? If bonobo sex is a biological basis for our sex, then it must also provide the same basis for pedophilia. Surely you don’t agree with that?”

  “No, I don’t. There is nothing like human pedophilia among bonobos. Sexual participation is voluntary for children; it is never traumatic or coerced by an adult. Human pedophilia is a coerced, traumatically learned behavior with no instinctual basis. The best and most recent scientific work on pedophilia shows that it is the result of traumatic, irreversible learning in childhood. All pedophiles were themselves sexually abused as children. Men become sexual predators as a result, raping children throughout most of their life span, and these children, if male, become predators. Women who were sexually abused as children show a more complex response: they are likely to marry a pedophile, and they rarely become sexual predators.

  “The scientists who studied pedophilia have also demonstrated that sexual abuse causes huge amounts of stress hormones to be released in the body, damaging the brain and resulting in some memory dysfunction, though fortunately overall intelligence is not affected. It is virtually identical to post traumatic stress syndrome, the recurrent hallucinations of soldiers who have seen constant violence in warfare. Sexual abuse from pedophiles is therefore among the most horrifying acts ever carried out by human beings, causing great physical and psychological damage, fully equal to the constant presence of death and the sight of people blown to pieces in warfare.

  “Male pedophiles who rape male children are therefore not gay. Gay and bisexual behavior is genetic whereas pedophilia is the result of traumatic learning. Though pedophiles are not fully responsible for their behavior, having suffered the same abuse they will later inflict, it is necessary that we incarcerate or otherwise restrain them. They cause great trauma and damage to the vulnerable and can even be responsible for virtual epidemics of pedophilia in certain countries or regions. Homosexuals and bisexuals as such can never be considered criminal; they are part of normal human sexual variation, and they cannot injure their partners any more than heterosexuals can. Science is clear and definitive on the difference between pedophilia and homosexuality, and science should always be the umpire on matters of sexuality, especially those involving the legal system. In the States, these issues are explosive, and political conservatives define both pedophilia and homosexuality as criminal, perverse, and deserving of punishment by the justice system.”

  “Another question for the professor: I have an odd feeling that your arguments imply we cannot solve crises like global warming without sexual liberation. Are you really saying that?”

  “I am saying that certain instinctual behaviors occur together in a cluster for both humans and bonobos. Sexual liberation has a way of defusing violence and resolving conflict, enhancing natural union or collective will in the process. But, we don’t follow all of our instincts, obviously; we have science and human rationality to help us make the sharp distinctions necessary to solve complex problems. Our greatest challenge is that we are not using science and reason to solve universal problems like global warming; they have been overwhelmed by religious dogma united with political conservatism.”

  “Last questions: are your arguments truly scientific? Has all of this been ‘proven’? For that matter, do you really place so much faith in science?”

  “The answer is no to all, oddly enough. Science is like the old adage about women’s work that is never done. It will always be updated, refined and revised. I’m just giving you the best of what we know to date. Too, science can be manipulated politically like any other part of our culture. Still, it’s the least biased and most insightful information we now have in approaching political problems. The sexuality research and the work on bonobo and chimp behavior are both rock-solid science. I am speculating as to the relationship it may have to political conservatism and liberalism, though primatologists speculate in this way freely and talk about parallel developments in the human and chimp worlds often. Too, I am over-generalizing in many of my ideas. Undoubtedly, there are parts of Africa and the Islamic countries, for example, that should be seen more favorably than I have depicted them. I have many theoretical details still to work out.”

  Sylvie smiles and kisses me. “If you have the proper recreation . . .” I can only reciprocate. How irresistibly lovely is our conflict resolution. It is pure poetic justice for the challenges of my work to be relieved just as the bonobos would do it. What need have we for divine justice?

  It is still early when we finish our breakfast and begin to work. Sylvie is taking the jeep again today, so I have no idea where she will be. I am spending the day comparing my data from all but one of my cameras, the latter still somewhere on the banks of Lake Dulce. As the afternoon wears on, I see proof after proof of what I came to learn: Doñana is dying. It is only spring, but many parts of the preserve are as parched as they will be in late summer, when the marshes and even the lakes dry up, and the most brutal struggle for survival occurs. Other areas have only held onto life through flooding caused by unusually tempestuous weather, the first stage of global warming. All of the animals we find here have been given a death sentence—unless humans can summon the political will to stop polluting and pillaging the earth.

  I feel terribly disturbed and almost despairing throughout the afternoon, when suddenly I come upon you, a dancing magician impeccable in black and white: the avocet. You are the creature whose combination of precision and elegance is greatest of all. Physicists believe that these qualities are intrinsic to the universe, and if so, you are Doñana’s cosmologist. Your color is simplest and most classical: dazzling white with a very sharp and angular black hat and cape of feathers. Your exceptionally long, slender black beak tips upward at its end like a Chinese roof. Your legs are so long and slender that you can only walk in a sinuously swaying pattern that is nature’s ballet. You are a living thing that is the most ideal embodiment of Oriental art. I might have begun to cry if I hadn’t found you, but you have given me hope perfectly allied with desire: If I can share the earth with one such as you, I will fight for your life with all the energy I have left. The afternoon passes, and I feel peace
with echoes of a quiet storm.

  Sylvie returns early, and we spend an hour bathing and then just lying together, touching. I sense we have both seen something terrible today; and so, like wind chimes in the air, we are again stirred by the same wordless phenomenon, as though sharing the same thoughts. Finally, I look at what she has drawn today. Clearly, she has been in parts of Doñana that are dying in summer’s torrid phase, though it is still spring, formerly the time of greatest growth and abundance. Throughout her drawings, I see stronger life ravening the weaker and death at its most frantic pace.

  One drawing shows several birds of prey that have gathered together on the ground. A black and a griffin vulture as well as a magpie are eating the same carrion, something that should never happen in the spring. The composition is dramatic and ominous, like a meeting of MacBeth’s three witches as rendered by nature. The black vulture is the eldest sister; largest, its wings are so upraised and rounded that they form a deadly black cape that can effortlessly surround its prey. About its neck is a violent ruffling of feathers that suggests the high collar of royalty. I have often seen its powerful head, similar to that of the Imperial Eagle, at the tops of totems designed by Northwest Indian tribes. This fierce head severely contrasts black and white color in a design of demonic beauty: thick black lines surround its huge red eyes like an Egyptian god, and a black stripe curves down its predatory beak. All else is electric white.

  Smaller and less dramatic, the griffin vulture is the younger sister. Its color is limited to shades of gray, and its small beady eyes sit in a head of no beauty at all. Its compressed wings also form a powerful cape that can close over its prey. Both vultures display the fierce ruffling of feathers that characterize almost all birds of prey: Never sleek or elegant like other birds, the very texture and force of deathly struggle seems to cover the entire surface of their bodies, as though they were baptized in fiery chaos.

  In sharp contrast, the magpie is much smaller, the size of a nestling. One would never guess that it, too, is a bird of prey. Its brilliantly black and white symmetrical color combination and sleek form do not show the chaotic ugliness of the vultures. Yet as the bird lands, you can see the characteristic compressing of wings and tail into a cape and, like a vulture, the whole body can fall vertically, covering its prey while the beak pierces flesh. This dramatic caped ensemble signifies the destruction of life’s beautiful unities into dead, blind elements. Carrion is the result, shapeless black pieces of flesh strewn haphazardly over the ground.

  In another composition, two poisonous vipers hang down from the branches of a cork oak tree. They do this to cool themselves in the torrid heat of late summer, another ominous sign in the spring. Their bodies display a simple color harmony of black symmetrical patterns on brown, scaly skin, similar to designs on American Indian beadwork. There is an eerie, primeval horror to this scene that disturbs me. The ground below the tree shows nothing but undulating layers of sand left by the wind and the approach of the snakes. The tree should be an aviary or a source of protection for mammals in the spring, and plant life should be abundant. Yet the parching heat of a summer interrupting the spring has so destroyed this environment that only death thrives here. Hence poisonous snakes hang indolently from the boughs, pregnant with death’s abundance. It is a fitting ideogram for the numbers I have seen today.

  We have been silent so long that words seem strange to me, yet I must try to explain the horrible thing that has silenced us. “Life is being destroyed in many parts of Doñana now,” I say. “The spring life cycle has been truncated by chaotic weather, and the summer drought has come early. You will literally be unable to draw anything but death in many parts of the preserve. We’re lucky to have seen as much wildlife as we have. I can get the last of my equipment tomorrow on Lake Dulce. A spring flood has left plenty of water there, so the wildlife will still be thriving. Why don’t we go on to Madrid and Barcelona after that?”

  Sylvie sighs and holds her head in her hands. “I’ve spent half the day feeling nauseous. Thanks for letting me know what’s going on here. Yes, let’s leave as soon as we can.”

  We eat our dinner in the most prolonged silence that has ever passed between us. We both sense that the world we have found here is dying. Under a clear, star-lit sky and a crescent moon, we make love in the death that surrounds us. It is another long, enveloping night when we can’t stop loving until exhaustion overtakes us. The close presence of death brutally clarifies the world and like all animals, we can only resist death with sexual love.

  The following day, our last in Doñana, we move on to Lake Dulce, since it still has water and the greatest variety of birds, rich fodder for both art and science. It is so early in the morning that we drive through the still, perfect darkness just preceding first light, then we set up our camp on the riverbank, which is enclosed in a dense morning mist and spanned by a multitude of invisible birds’ raucous cries. The sounds seem to be revolving through the sky in arcs as these unseen birds wheel around us. As we eat our breakfast, the black sky shrieks with their calls, and their size seems to grow and become monstrous as the volume of sound increases. We silently wait for the dawn as though in prayer. We could be primeval, mythic beings summoning the earth’s radiance and bounty to resist darkness full of demons. Then, in the dawning light, the mist rises and we see the demons transformed into processions of grave, stately birds at the far side of the lake: heron, spoonbill, grebe, purple gallinule. When the light is clear and bright, I sit by the riverbank, alternating between watching the birds and looking at film footage from the sensors and cameras I placed here a month ago. Sylvie wanders around the lake with her sketchbook.

  My film footage shows so many wonders of the earth and air that I am continually surprised. The first image sequence is a rare buzzard family nesting on the ground. These birds generally nest in cork oak trees, but this family is probably on the ground for its proximity to abundant prey. The mother’s warrior-like head wears the raiment of a winter morning: dull, lightless beige and brown color tones. Her hugely round, cavernous eyes rest in shadows cast by great brow ridges, and her fierce visage ends abruptly in a powerful, curved beak, short but lethal. At her breast is one of nature’s wonderful contradictions: two chicks that seem to be the softest, gentlest young in creation, covered with white down at once so full and delicate that their shapes can’t be discerned. From these impossibly soft palpitations of white fluff will emerge some of Doñana’s most rapacious carnivores and carrion-eaters, as though this predatory species were nurturing its last vestige of innocence.

  In the gleam of many animal eyes, morning becomes afternoon and then evening as I remain immersed in the endless story of bird lives that my equipment holds. From time to time, I wonder what Sylvie will find in our last feast of nature. Sometime close to sunset, I feel a distinct longing for her and she is suddenly beside me. “I missed you,” she says, kissing me. “Everything was calling to me, but I wanted to be back here with you.” I can only smile: we are sharing the same thoughts again. This happens so often between women.

  As I look at her sketchpad, I see that she has been able to create clear renderings of several very swift birds that are difficult to find. Two appear in one of her compositions, probably as a contrast. Here is the nightjar’s protective coloration as it fades into the browns of summer’s dying scrublands. You could mistake it for a stick, a bit of dead scrub, or bark on a tree. This is the reason it is one of the least known of birds, but Sylvie’s sharp eye has captured it. Beside it, in trumpeting color, is the multi-colored bee-eater. This bird is a harlequin of brilliant motley colors that entertain and invite the eye to play. Vivid green paints the breast, tail and crown of the head. Bright yellow daubs the throat and drops a stripe on the back. Warm reddish-brown splashes over the top of the head, neck and portions of the wing. The bird is a fabulous darting, whirling harmony of color, the work of an artist at play or a fashion designer. Yet you are seized and held by the bird’s dark orange eyes that glow like lon
g-burning coals.

  As we prepare our dinner and eat, it seems to me that this day has passed too quickly. We have been too happy chasing our beautiful beasts. Perhaps we have loved the world too much. Is a reckoning imminent? The earth does not return a romantic’s love. Sylvie sits silently and watches me with her intent dark eyes, and I feel a burning emotion or question radiating from her, though that may simply be the effect of her beauty that is always striking and never still.

  When we have finished eating and are drinking wine over our campfire, she suddenly says, “When we leave Spain, come with me to Paris. Live with me. Be my lover. I don’t want to leave you. Ever.” I am shocked, as though I had fallen into frigid water. A pure chaos: the wildest, most intense pleasure plays my heart like a musical instrument. How I would love to be young and live my life over again as her lover in Paris! But I am no immortal, no goddess. I always thought she would know I am much too old to offer her a long-term relationship. The tears are already falling from my eyes.

  “Sylvie, I don’t know how I can do that.”

  She looks at me in shock. “Why not?” Her eyes are suddenly as full of tears as mine. To my continuing astonishment, I see that they are angry tears and she is enraged with me. I reach out to hold her, but she pushes me away.

  “Sylvie, it’s only that I know you can’t really want this. Not with me, at my age. You want a lover who is young, with whom you can spend your life.” Now she is trembling.

  “I want . . . ?” I reach to touch her but she punches my shoulder. “Why did you say you loved me when you only wanted . . . what? a whore for the summer?” Her face betrays astonishment, and I can tell that she has never said that word aloud before.