by Yann Martel
Hell? What hell? Henry wondered. But at least now he understood the connection to The Divine Comedy . Dante is guided through inferno and purgatory by Virgil and then through paradise by Beatrice. And what would be more natural for a taxidermist with literary aspirations than to fashion his characters out of what he worked with every day? So of course he would use talking animals.
Henry noticed three pieces of paper taped to the wall next to the two animals. On each was text surrounded by a border:
"Are these part of your play?" Henry asked.
"Yes. They're posters. I have a scene where they would be projected onto the back wall as Beatrice is talking."
Henry read the posters again. "The monkey isn't popular, is he?" he asked.
"No, not at all," replied the taxidermist. "Let me show you the scene."
He started going through some papers on his desk. Without hesitation he had taken Henry's answer to be yes. Henry didn't mind. Beyond indulging the man out of politeness, he was intrigued.
"Here it is."
Henry extended his hand to take the papers. The taxidermist left Henry's hand hanging in the air and cleared his throat instead. Henry realized he was intending to read the scene aloud to him. After looking at the text for a moment, the taxidermist started:
Food again, thought Henry. First a pear, now a banana. The man is obsessed with food.
The taxidermist broke off his reading. "That's when the projector would be turned on and the posters would appear side by side in big letters on the back wall."
He returned to his play. He read in a steady, unaffected voice, laying out the words in an easy way. To each character he gave a different tone, so Beatrice the donkey spoke softly while Virgil the monkey expressed himself with greater animation. Henry found himself listening to them without being aware of listening to the taxidermist.
The taxidermist stopped again and looked up at Henry. He seemed to hesitate. "Well, how would you describe Virgil? What does he look like to you?" He got up abruptly and went to one of the workbenches. He brought over a powerful lamp. "Here, I have a light," he said, with resolve. He set it on the desk and directed its beam at the monkey. Then he waited.
It took Henry a moment to realize that the man was serious. He really did want him to describe the stuffed monkey. It dawned on Henry with amazement: this is the help he wants . It's not a matter of encouragement, or confession, or connections. The help he wants is with words. Had the taxidermist made the request to Henry ahead of time in his letter, he would have refused, as he had refused writing commissions of all kinds for years. But here, in this setting, next to the very characters, in the fire of the moment, something in Henry woke up and yearned to rise to the challenge.
"What does he look like to me?" Henry said. The taxidermist nodded. Henry leaned close to the animal, to Virgil, since he had a name. He felt like a doctor about to examine a patient. He noticed that Virgil was not sitting on the donkey, on Beatrice, the way the peacock in the other room was set on the hippopotamus, as a convenience in the absence of a table. He had rather been mounted so that he sat naturally on Beatrice. His rump, two legs and an outstretched arm were laid out in a way that fitted the shape of her back perfectly, and his long tail, curled at its end, flowed so that it rested snugly against her back and side, looking very much like a casually set anchor in case she made a sudden movement. His other arm was resting on a bent knee, hand open, palm up, in a relaxed pose. Virgil had his mouth open and Beatrice her head partly turned and one ear swivelled round. He was saying something and she was listening....
Henry thought for a moment. Then he started. "Off the top of my head, without any preparation or much thought, I'd say Virgil has the pleasing dimensions of a smaller dog, neither too bulky nor too slight. I'd say he has a handsome head, with a short snout, luminous reddish-brown eyes, small black ears, and a clear black face--actually, it's not just black--a clear bluish-black face fringed with a full, elegant beard."
"Very good," said the taxidermist. "Much better than what I have. Please continue." He had picked up a pen and was writing down what Henry had said.
"I'd say," continued Henry, "that Virgil's body is robust and well built, served by long, attractive limbs, flexible and strong--they look flexible and strong--with a powerful hand or prehensile foot at the end of each. His narrow hands have long digits, as do the feet."
"Oh, yes," the taxidermist interrupted. "Virgil plays the piano. He's a very good player. He can play on his own a Brahms 'Hungarian Dance' for piano four hands. As a final flourish, he curls up his tail and taps the last note with it, bringing down the house. And look at the patterns on his hands and feet."
Henry looked. He went on. "I'd say the palms of his hands and feet are black and covered"--he paused and examined them from different angles to get the play of light--"are black and filigreed with loops and whorls that look like the finest silverwork."
"That's absolutely right," said the taxidermist.
"I'd say his long tail, longer than the rest of him, the pride and joy of him, is as dextrous as a hand, with a grip like a constrictor's coil."
"But it also has fine motor control. He plays chess with it. Virgil--"
Henry raised a hand to stop the taxidermist. "A tail with a grip like a constrictor's coil, yet with a deftness of touch that allows him to move a pawn on a chessboard with it."
What other details would Beatrice notice? Henry wondered. He peered into Virgil's mouth.
"And he has good teeth--why does no one ever mention that? Or the detail I notice every day without fail: his lovely dark nails, shiny and slightly bulbous, so that the tip of his every finger and toe glistens like a large dewdrop." Henry was pleased to be speaking in Beatrice's voice.
"Excellent, excellent," muttered the taxidermist. He was writing as fast as he could.
"And I have yet to describe his most eye-catching attribute, that which earns him half his species name: his fur." Henry lightly ran his hand over Virgil's back. "It's soft, thick and lustrous, the back brick-red in colour, while the head and the limbs have more of a chestnut hue. In sunlight, when Virgil is in motion, climbing trees and jumping from one branch to another while I stand, four-footed and rooted to the ground, there is something of molten copper to his movements, a direct, unspoiled ease to even the simplest gesture, dazzling to watch."
"That's Virgil to a letter," exclaimed the taxidermist.
"Good." A conventional descriptive job, matching a concrete reality with its most obvious verbal counterparts, yet Henry too was pleased. It had been such a long time since he had made this kind of effort.
"And his howl?"
The taxidermist returned to the cassette player, rewound the tape and played it a second time. Erasmus immediately started up again in the next room. Henry and the taxidermist ignored him.
"The sound quality isn't very good," Henry said.
"No, it isn't. It was recorded more than forty years ago in the jungles of the upper Amazon."
The howl had that quality, of something coming from far away long ago. It had survived--it was there, coming through all the crackling--but Henry was as much aware of the span of time and gulf of distance over which it had improbably bounded as he was of the howl itself.
"I don't know. It's hard to put into words," he said.
The taxidermist played the howl a third time. Erasmus was properly howling himself in the next room.
Henry shook his head. "Nothing's coming to me at the moment," he said. "Sounds are hard to describe. And my dog is distracting me."
The taxidermist stared at him blankly. Was he disappointed? Piqued?
"I'll have to wait for the muse to whisper to me," Henry said. He felt a weight of weariness descending on him. "I have an idea. I'll think about the howl. In the meantime, in exchange, write something for me about taxidermy. Don't overthink it. Just dash some thoughts onto the page. That's always a good writing exercise."
The taxidermist nodded, but Henry wasn't sure if it was
in agreement.
"And why don't you give me your play? I'll read it and tell you what I think."
The taxidermist's reply was short: "I don't want to." Henry heard the definite tone. The full stop in his refusal had resounded like the pad of a judge's gavel being struck. There would be no appeal, or even any explanation, about why he didn't want Henry to read his play.
"But take the cassette player with you. That way you can listen to the howl again while you're working on it."
Henry had not bargained on that.
"I noticed you were looking at the monkey skull mounted on the golden rod," the taxidermist continued.
"Yes, I was. It's striking."
"It's the skull of a howler monkey."
"It is?" Henry felt a quiver of horror.
"Yes."
"But not Virgil's?"
"No. Virgil's skull is inside Virgil's head."
Thirty minutes later Henry walked out of the store, an impatient Erasmus pulling at his leash. It was good to be out in the brisk air again. Henry was late for rehearsal but he entered the small grocery store anyway. He asked if he could have a dish of water for Erasmus. The man behind the counter kindly obliged.
"That's quite the store around the corner," Henry said to him.
"Yeah. It's been there since the dinosaurs went home."
"What's he like, the man who runs it?"
"Crazy old man. Gets into fights with the whole neighbourhood. Comes in here to do two things and only two things: to buy pears and bananas and to make photocopies."
"I guess he likes pears and bananas and he doesn't have a photocopier."
"I guess so. I'm amazed his business survives. Is there really a market for stuffed aardvarks?"
Henry didn't mention the expensive monkey's skull that was in the bag he had gingerly placed on the floor. Skull and glass dome had been packed so that they would arrive safe and sound at their destination. There was also the wolf, the still one, not the leaping one, that had interested Henry, but he had managed to check his impulse.
The man looked at what he had placed on the counter.
"Now there's a vintage piece of technology. Haven't seen a cassette player like that since I was a kid," he said.
"Old and reliable," Henry replied, picking up his precious cargo and heading for the door. "Thank you for the water."
In the taxi home, Erasmus collapsed on the floor and fell asleep right away. Henry thought about the taxidermist. He was not conventionally attractive, fell on the unhandsome side of ordinary, with an inexpressive face that did not project what it was thinking or feeling. Yet those dark staring eyes! His presence had a suffocating quality, but at the same time he radiated a certain magnetism. Or did that appeal come from all the glass-eyed animals surrounding him? Strange that someone so involved with animals should react so little--in fact, not at all--to a live one right in front of him. The taxidermist hadn't even glanced at Erasmus.
Henry thought of him again as a man with a mask. But he'd given the taxidermist a task, to write something about his trade. That should start to make him less of a sphinx. Henry reflected on his day. He had started it meaning only to drop off a card, and now he was loaded down with goods from Okapi Taxidermy and committed to returning.
As soon as he got home, he told Sarah.
"I met the most amazing man," he told her. "This old taxidermist. A shop like you wouldn't believe. All of creation stuffed into one large room. His name's Henry, as it happens. An odd fish. I couldn't place him at all. He's written a play and he wants my help."
"What kind of help?" she asked.
"Help writing it, I think."
"What's it about?"
"I'm not sure. There are two characters, a monkey and a donkey. They're quite focussed on food."
"Is it for children?"
"I don't think so. In fact, it reminded me of..." but Henry let his voice trail off. He didn't want to mention what the play reminded him of. "The monkey isn't popular," he said instead.
Sarah nodded her head. "So you've been roped into becoming a collaborator without even knowing what the story's about?"
"I guess so."
"Well, you seem excited. That's nice to see," said Sarah.
She was right. Henry's mind was racing.
The next day Henry went to the main public library to do research on howler monkeys. He discovered odds and ends about the species, that they live in matrilineal groups, for example, and that they keep no fixed territory but over time roam the forest, searching for food and avoiding threats. That evening, after locking Erasmus in the farthest room, he set the cassette player next to the computer and listened to the howl again. He tried to describe it from Beatrice's perspective. If he remembered correctly, she was talking to an imaginary person while she was waiting for Virgil to come back from foraging for food:
A howl, a roar, a howling roar, a deafening roar--these barely hint at the reality. To compare it to other animals' cries becomes a kind of zoological one-upmanship that addresses only the aspect of volume. A howler monkey's roar exceeds in volume the cry of a peafowl, of a jaguar, of a lion, of a gorilla, of an elephant--at which point the inflating of hulk stops, at least on land. In the ocean, the blue whale, which can weigh well over one hundred and fifty tons, the largest animal ever to grace this planet, can put out a cry at a volume of one hundred and eighty decibels, which is louder than a jet engine, but this cry is at a very low frequency, hardly audible to a donkey, which is probably why we call the whale's cry a song . But we must, in all fairness, grant the blue whale top spot. So there, if they were lined up side by side, between the massive bull elephant and the colossal blue whale, involving a serious dropping of the eyes, stands Virgil and his kind, without a doubt the most noise per kilo of any life-form on earth.
One could endlessly dither about the carrying power of a howler's howl. Two miles, three miles, heard over hills, heard against contrary winds--various observers have given their estimates. But the nature of Virgil's howl, its aural quality, goes missing in all these measures. I have, on occasion, heard sounds that reminded me of it. Once Virgil and I were walking by a hog farm while a herd was being roughly moved out of an enclosure. Panic set in among the animals and they started up, and that sound, of an entire herd of swine barking and squealing in distress, collectively, brought to my mind something of Virgil's howl.
Another time we encountered a heavily loaded wagon whose axles had not been greased in a long while. Every so often the undercarriage let out a pent-up, bone-crunching squeak, dry and thunderous, which, had it been magnified a hundredfold, would also have conveyed some of the life and power of Virgil's cry.
And I read once a description in Apuleius, my favourite classical writer, of an earthquake that made "a hollow, bellowing noise" and this image, of the earth itself in crisis, moaning and groaning, also clothes well enough in words Virgil's holler.
But ultimately there is only the thing itself, in its raw purity. Hearing is believing.
Henry returned to see the taxidermist within a few days. He was nervous about holding on to his obsolete cassette player and the precious tape, but he was also eager to share with him what he had written.
Henry brought Erasmus again, but this time he tied him outside. The taxidermist seemed neither pleased nor displeased to see him. Henry was confused. He had phoned the taxidermist to tell him he would be coming. They had agreed on a time. Henry wondered if he had made a mistake and if he was late or early. But it just seemed to be the taxidermist's manner, the way he was. He was wearing an apron and was moving a wild boar into the workshop when Henry entered the store.
"Need help?" Henry asked.
The taxidermist shook his head without saying a word. Henry stood and waited, marvelling at the animals. He was happy to be back. This was a room full of adjectives, like a Victorian novel.
"Come in," said the taxidermist from the back room. Henry turned in to it. The taxidermist was already sitting at his desk. Henry sat on the sto
ol again, like an obedient junior clerk. He handed the taxidermist the part he had written for Beatrice. While the other man read, which he did slowly, Henry looked around. The taxidermist had finished the deer he was working on when Henry had first visited. But the other mannequin, the round one, was no further advanced. As for Virgil and Beatrice, they were still in conversation.
"I don't like the jet engine," the taxidermist started, without any preliminaries. "And I'm not sure about the hog farm. But I like the idea of a whole herd of animals. And the dry axle, very good. I can see it. Who's Apuleius? I've never heard of him."
Was it the forgetfulness of old age or personal incapacity that made the man able to say please but not thank you?
"As I say in the text, he's a writer," replied Henry. "His most famous book is The Golden Ass , which is why I thought I'd make him Beatrice's favourite classical writer."
He nodded. Henry wasn't sure whether he was assenting to what he, Henry, had just said, or was agreeing with his own private thoughts.
"And you, what do you have? Did you manage to write something on taxidermy?"
The taxidermist nodded and picked up some papers from off his desk. He looked at them for several seconds. Then he just started reading aloud to Henry:
The animal is lost from us, has been taken out of us. I don't just mean in our city lives. I also mean in nature. You go out there, and they're gone, the ordinary and the unusual, they're two-thirds gone. True, in some places you still see them in abundance, but these are sanctuaries and reserves, parks and zoos, special places. The ordinary mixing with animals is gone.
People object to hunting. That is not my problem. Taxidermy does not create a demand; it preserves a result. Were it not for our efforts, animals that have disappeared from the plains of their natural habitat would also disappear from the plains of our imagination. Take the quagga, a subspecies of the common zebra, now extinct. Without the preserved specimens now on display here and there, it would only be a word.
