Beatrice and Virgil

by Yann Martel

Henry was struck by the irony of the timing. Just as coffee and cake were delivered to them, Virgil and Beatrice mourn their absence. And earlier Beatrice had said how the sun had gone, leaving them without faith, and here they were basking in the sun. It also struck him how naked and alive Virgil and Beatrice were, so much more revealing of themselves than their author.

  "They have conversations like that at first," the taxidermist said. "A mixture of passing the time and figuring out what they should do next."

  "I like the jokes being whispered. That's good."

  "They also speak on their own at times. Soliloquies. Beatrice can still manage restful sleep, even whole nights, and with dreams too. Virgil, however, is a poor sleeper. He always has the same dream: a noise--a boring--that slowly gets louder until he wakes up with a gasp, his eyes popping open like burst balloons, as he puts it. He jokes that he's always dreaming about termites. It's the anxiety."

  "Why is Virgil so anxious?"

  "Because he's a howler monkey in a world that doesn't want howler monkeys."

  Henry nodded.

  The taxidermist continued. "When Beatrice is sleeping, Virgil sometimes talks to himself. In the middle of their first night next to the tree, he wakes up and talks about a book called Jacques the Fatalist and His Master."

  "Yes, by Denis Diderot," Henry said. A French classic from the eighteenth century. He'd read it long ago.

  "I didn't understand it at all," the taxidermist said.

  Henry tried to remember the novel. Jacques and his master travel around on their horses, talking about this, that and the other. They tell stories, but are constantly interrupted by events. Jacques is presumably a fatalist and his master is not, though Henry couldn't vouch for it from memory, only assumed so from the title. He couldn't recall having especially "understood" the novel. He remembered only the Gallic lightness and the modern, comic feel of it, a bit like Beckett on horseback.

  "Why do you make reference in your play to a novel you didn't understand?" Henry asked.

  The taxidermist replied, "I'm not bothered by that fact. I use it because there's an element in it I found useful. Jacques and his master have a discussion on the various injuries a body can suffer and the pain that goes with each. Jacques strongly argues that a knee injury is the champion of hideous, unbearable pains. Virgil can't remember if the example Jacques gives is of falling from a horse and hitting one's knee against a sharp rock or of receiving a musket shot in it. Whatever the case, it convinced Virgil when he read the book. But now, during his soliloquy, he mulls over the measuring and comparing of physical pains. He grants that the kind of knee pain described by Jacques would be blinding, but it would also be a jolt, short and powerful at the moment of impact, but then greatly reduced. How does that compare with the grinding, hindering pain of a bad back? A knee is small, locally linked and comparatively easy not to use. 'To put one's feet up and relax'--the pleasure of not using one's knees is even celebrated in a cliche. But the back is a real railway hub, connected to everything, demands constantly made upon it. And what about the pain of thirst and hunger? Or that entirely different kind of pain, the one that injures no particular organ yet kills the spirit that links them? At this point, Virgil starts to weep but he stops himself so that he doesn't wake Beatrice. This is one soliloquy he has during the play."

  "I see."

  "He has another one that morning, while Beatrice is still sleeping. Virgil remembers how their miseries started. Started in his mind, that is, the moment when he realized what was happening to them. He acts it out. He's reading his morning paper at his favourite cafe and his eyes are drawn to one of the headlines. The headline announces a government edict concerning new categories of citizens--or rather, as the article makes clear, a category of citizens and a new category of non -citizens. Virgil reads with increasing astonishment as he realizes that he--he himself personally, in all his specific details, this monkey sitting in a cafe reading a paper, such an ordinary thing--is the exact and intended target."

  Henry took mental note: a government edict excluding Virgil. He didn't want to interrupt the taxidermist, who was becoming quite animated. A customer or two glanced over casually. But it was the waiter returning to their table that had an effect on the taxidermist. He brought his hands into his lap and looked down.

  "Do you need any help?" the waiter asked Henry. He corrected himself: "Can I get you anything else?"

  "No, I'm fine, thank you. Would you like a refill?"

  The taxidermist said nothing, only shook his head slightly. He seemed to be pretending he wasn't there.

  "I'll just have the bill, please."

  "Yes, of course."

  Henry had the sense the waiter was about to talk to the taxidermist, but changed his mind and walked away instead.

  The taxidermist was bent on finishing his description of Virgil's cafe scene. He continued rapidly.

  "It's the expulsion from Eden! The Fall! In an instant, the newspaper is transmogrified into a giant finger floating in the air, pointing at him. Virgil is filled with apprehension that other patrons at the cafe, many of them reading the same newspaper, will notice him. Why, over there and over there, didn't they just glance at him? That's how the events entered his life, he laments, as they had entered the lives of so many others, a vast and varied group that included him and Beatrice and others and others and others: with a single moment of realization. In that moment the world shattered like a pane of glass, so that everything looked exactly as it had earlier, and yet was different, now clear and newly sharp with menace. After that--"

  The waiter reappeared with the bill. Remarkably quick of him, Henry thought. Was he wanting to get rid of us? He paid and they stood up. With the taxidermist being mid-story there was nothing to do but walk towards his store. Though so close, it felt like a different world. Hardly anyone was walking by and it was much quieter than the more commercial end of the street. Henry was disappointed to see black fabric hanging down each of the bay windows. The effect upon turning the corner, which he was looking forward to, was utterly different. In fact, with no okapi peeking out, there wasn't much of an effect at all. Just a fading jungle mural on a brick wall. The taxidermist noticed him looking at the black fabric.

  "I don't want people lingering about when the shop is closed. You never know with people," he said, as he fished for keys in the pocket of his coat. He looked around as he said that, scanning the few people who were passing by--a middle-aged couple, a slouching teenager, a lone man.

  "You don't like people, do you?" Henry said, which he meant lightly.

  The taxidermist looked at the passersby for another moment, then turned his gaze onto Henry--and it was a pinpoint of concentration wholly focussed on him, animal-like in its intensity, exactly that, animal-like. As the taxidermist bore into him with his steady eyes, a single thought occurred to Henry: I am people .

  Henry made an attempt at an apology. "What I meant is you're comfortable with animals. You know them. Whereas people, people are strange and unreliable. That's what I meant."

  The taxidermist turned and unlocked the door of his store without saying a word. They entered. There in the gloom, hidden and quiet, anxiously awaiting his return, were all his animals. He flicked a few switches and the light seemed to bring them to life. The taxidermist was visibly relieved to be back in his store. He headed for the back room. Henry lingered as Erasmus settled on the floor next to the front counter. The dog seemed out of sorts, Henry noted in passing.

  When Henry entered the workshop, the taxidermist was already at his desk. Henry took his usual place on the stool. The taxidermist was not to be put off finishing what he was saying. He said it more freely now.

  "After the incident reading the paper in the cafe, Virgil bemoans how his feelings have shrivelled. He corrects himself: he says that one feeling has expanded--fear--while all the others have shrivelled. Intellectual thrill, aesthetic rejoicing, quiet appreciation, fond recollection, witty banter--these have all been crowded out by fea
r, leaving him dull-eyed and indifferent most of the time. Were it not for Beatrice being in his life, Virgil says, he would feel nothing at all. Everything, even fear, nearly, would be shrugged off. He would be a wandering corpse, a bundle of mindless functions, like a house without its inhabitants. He says that, and then he remembers the landscape of the previous evening, how moved he was by it. Considering his circumstances, this astounds him, that he was moved by a wind and a few fields. Like taking a moment in a museum on fire to appreciate a fine landscape painting."

  Henry wondered if the taxidermist didn't live in his store, not above it or nearby, but actually in it. He looked at Virgil and Beatrice, nearly said hello to them. He was starting to know them well.

  The taxidermist went on, uninterruptible.

  "He's so elated at this unexpected burst of feeling that for nothing, for joy, he gets up and cartwheels himself onto his hands. He examines the landscape upside down. He leans to one side and holds himself up in the air on a single arm, which is easy for him. After a moment, he returns onto all fours and he does the same balancing act with his legs, first standing on both and then getting onto just one. That's a harder trick for a howler monkey. They're not normally bipedal. His two arms shake, his raised leg trembles, his tail jerks about in the air. And that's when Beatrice wakes up and asks him the key question of the play."

  He searched on his desk. Henry couldn't see why the taxidermist's pages had to be so scattered. He was forever shuffling through them. Why didn't he have them in order? It was a play, after all, a sequence of scenes that should follow some narrative logic.

  "Here, I found it," the taxidermist said. And he read--aloud, of course:

  "That's the key question in the play, how they are going to talk about what happened to them. They come back to the question again and again."

  "And to answer the question I asked you at the cafe," Henry broke in, "about what happens in the play, in effect what happens is they talk about talk."

  "I think of it as talking about memory."

  If Henry hadn't seen it earlier, he was starting to see now where the problem lay with the taxidermist's play, why he needed help. There seemed to be essentially no action and no plot in it. Just two characters by a tree talking. It had worked with Beckett and Diderot. Mind you, those two were crafty and they packed a lot of action into the apparent inaction. But inaction wasn't working for the author of A 20th-Century Shirt .

  Henry wanted the taxidermist to explain his play, but he didn't want to be the first to invoke the Holocaust. He thought the taxidermist would be more forthcoming if he brought it up himself.

  "Let me ask you a simple question: what's your play about?"

  As soon as the question had left Henry's lips, the irony of it leapt to his mind. It was the same question the historian had asked him during that terrible lunch in London nearly three years ago, the question that had gutted and silenced him. And here he was asking it himself. But the taxidermist had no problem dealing with it. He practically shouted his answer.

  "It's about them!" His hand violently swept the room.

  "Them?"

  "The animals! They're two-thirds dead. Do you not understand that?"

  "But--"

  "In quantity and in variety, put together, two thirds of all animals have been exterminated, wiped out forever. My play is about this"--he searched for words--"this irreparable abomination. Virgil and Beatrice call it--wait!"

  The vehemence and conviction of his tone took Henry aback. The taxidermist dove into his papers again. For once he found what he wanted quickly:

  "You see, the question comes back again and again. Virgil and Beatrice set up a list, a very important list. Here, look."

  The taxidermist abruptly got up from behind his desk. Henry stood up with him. The taxidermist came round to Beatrice. Placing one hand on Virgil's rump and the other under his bent leg, he lifted Virgil off Beatrice's back. He placed him on the desk.

  "Look," he said again.

  He was pointing at Beatrice's back. Henry looked. All he could see was thick donkey hair, a little matted here and there. The taxidermist went to get his light. When he shone it on her back, Henry could see a vague pattern in the way the hair was matted.

  "It's the list," the taxidermist said. "Because they live in a country called the Shirt, they call it their sewing kit. Virgil starts writing on Beatrice's back with a wet fingertip a list of all the ways they come up with of how to talk about the Horrors."

  Henry looked closely at Beatrice's coat. There was no way that spit and hair could spell anything on a donkey's back, he thought, certainly nothing that would survive the course of an ordinary day, but it was no doubt another of the taxidermist's symbols.

  "The first item in the sewing kit is a howl. Beatrice gets the idea from hearing Virgil the previous night. The second item is a black cat."

  "A black cat? How is a black cat a way of talking about the Terrors?"

  "The Horrors. Like this."

  The taxidermist carefully resettled Virgil on top of Beatrice and went back to his papers. Henry mused that it would be so much easier if he could get the play into his own hands and read it. He realized that he was close to thinking "and write it."

  The taxidermist found a page and read from it:

  "It's symbolic again," the taxidermist said.

  "Yes, I understand that. But all this talking. In a play, as in any story, there must be--"

  "There's silence too. At one point Virgil says that words are just 'refined grunts.' 'We overvalue words,' he says. After that, they try to talk about the Horrors by other means, through gestures and sounds and facial expressions. But it exhausts them. The scene is right here in front of my eyes."

  He launched forth:

  "You see, it's not just words. There's also noise and silence. And there are gestures too. Like this one. Virgil and Beatrice put this one in their sewing kit."

  The taxidermist made a gesture with his right hand in front of his chest.

  "I've done a drawing for the actor," he added.

  He held the page in the air above the desk. It was a drawing in four sections.

  A HORRORS HAND GESTURE

  Henry noticed the hairiness of the arms. For this irreparable abomination unto animals, the taxidermist would have the actors dress for the part. The hand was brought in front of the chest, two fingers were pointed down and then the hand dropped down. Why two fingers, he wondered?

  "Words, silence, noise, characters, symbols--these are all important elements in a story," Henry started. But you also need a plot, you need action , he would have added, but the taxidermist interrupted him.

  "The list grows long. The play is constructed around it. I will read it to you, the full sewing kit list. Virgil reads it out one last time near the end of the play. This list is my greatest literary achievement."

  Henry might have laughed at the statement, but the taxidermist just wasn't a man you laughed at or with. The air around him, the expression on his face, sucked the life out of laughter.

  The list, exceptionally among the elements of his play, was not found amidst the papers on top of his desk, but was extracted from a drawer. The taxidermist read:

  A howl, a black cat, words and occasional silence, a hand gesture, shirts with one arm missing, a prayer, a set speech at the start of every parliamentary session, a song, a food dish, a float in a parade, commemorative porcelain shoes for the people, tennis lessons, plain truth common nouns, onelongword, lists, empty good cheer expressed in extremis, witness words, rituals and pilgrimages, private and public acts of justice and homage, a facial expression, a second hand gesture, a verbal expression, [ sic ] dramas, 68 Nowolipki Street, games for Gustav, a tattoo, an object designated for a year, aukitz.

  It was mumbo jumbo. Heard but not read, and heard only once, the words vanishing into silence before he could seize their meaning, Henry retained hardly anything and understood even less. He didn't know how to react, so he said nothing. But the taxidermist wa
sn't saying anything either.

  "I didn't get the last one," Henry said, at length.

  "Aukitz, a-u-k-i-t-z."

  "It sounds like German, but I don't recognize the word."

  "No, it's not. It's a kind of onelongword."

  "It doesn't seem that long to me, only six letters."

  "No, that's not it."

  The taxidermist turned the page and pointed with his finger at a word in the middle of it: onelongword.

  "What does it mean?"

  "It's one of Beatrice's ideas."

  He searched and found:

  "A scene follows where they think they've been found, but they're wrong. They're still safe. They come back to onelongword."

  "Say that one again," Henry said.

  The taxidermist nodded, acknowledging that Beatrice and Henry had the same opinion of Virgil's onelongword.

  "Aukitz is a variation on a onelongword. Beatrice proposes that the word be printed in every book, magazine and newspaper, in a spot conspicuous or discreet, depending on the wishes of the author or publisher, to indicate that the language within is knowing of the Horrors."

  "And all the other items in the list, this sewing kit for the Shirt, have the same purpose, to make things knowing?"

  "Yes, exactly."

  "Can I see the list, please?"

  The taxidermist hesitated, but then passed it to Henry.

  "Thank you," Henry said, managing to check any outward sign of surprise. He could barely believe it. He was certain the taxidermist would snatch the page back before he had time to read it. Finally he would stop the flow of the taxidermist's words and have them before his eyes, fixed and immobile, like one of his mounted animals. The words were lightly indented into the page, creating a Braille-like embossment on the reverse side, the result of being mechanically typed.

  The list was laid out in a column:

  A Horrors' Sewing Kit

  a howl,

  a black cat,

  words and occasional silence,

  a hand gesture,

  shirts with one arm missing,

  a prayer,

  a set speech at the start of every parliamentary session,