You're an Animal, Viskovitz

by Alessandro Boffa

It began as indefinable itches, little hormonal disturbances that made my gaze linger on the folds of some snails’ mantles, trying to guess the shape under the shell, admiring the undulations of the foot. Nothing to be sick about, you understand, or to lose sleep over. Some of the snails in the garden were not bad, morphologically speaking, but snails who really suited my purpose, who had the class and the zoometric requisites to go with a Viskovitz, were nowhere to be found. I came to the conclusion, therefore, that they did not exist and that probably none had ever been born.

  I was mistaken.

  Her majesty the gastropodic beauty appeared suddenly among the heads of lettuce. He was rather distant, but I made out her breathtaking profile voluptuously spread out in the sun, the generous shapes barely contained by the trim shell.

  Parbleu!

  Bewitched, I stopped sleeping and eating. For my ocular antennae there suddenly was only she-he. I began to secrete mucus for no reason. But what could I do? My flame was at least two snail-years away! If I sprinted off then and there and started running like mad, even forgoing hibernation, I would still get there old and decrepit.

  Unless . . . yes. I was thinking just that. What madness. What if she-he started running toward me? In that case, the point of contact would be among the squash blossoms, and we would unite as two middle-aged snails. The more I thought about it, the more I was seduced by the romantic grandeur of that gesture. I was consumed with yearning and anticipation. The sacrifice of youth for love’s promise. And wasn’t love always a great wager?

  Was she-he looking? He-she was looking. Clearly, she-he had noticed me. It was very, very clear. You had to be bivalve not to get the signs of willingness that he-she was sending with his-her antennae.

  “Viskoooo!” shouted Mommydaddy. “It’s not good to talk to yourself. People will think ill of it.”

  “Let them think.”

  “Pull yourself together! Mr. Lopez is coming to visit.”

  Lopez was closing in frantically, drooling mucus and slipping in it, his face convulsed with lust, with dilated osfredia, a drooping mesenchyma, a flaccid radula, panting, and now only two days away from me. Moreover, a few more hours away, Petrovic and Zucotic were charging in my direction, set on a death race to have me, to pleasure themselves with my young body. I felt a chill in my hemolymph, and my palleale cavity stiffened. I extruded my esophagus in a spasm of horror.

  I turned my eyes toward the lettuce and in an instant— one of those instants in which a life is determined—the choice was made.

  “I’m coming!” I shouted.

  And she-he also set him-herself in motion.

  After six months of running I was a wreck.

  Passionate impulses are not for mollusks, especially us snails. I had rashes on my squamae, and my mesenchyma was in pieces. With the end of the reproductive season, the hormonal levels had dropped, and the romantic agitations had dropped with them. Youth had vanished, and my mucus was drying up.

  I could see my body changing faster than the view. If life is a race against time, well, one thing is certain, against us snails time is the odds-on favorite.

  At the start of my journey, I had deluded myself that, worst-case scenario, I would have at least seen the world, virgin territories and foreign cultures inches-upon-inches away. But I was coming to see that the whole world was vegetables. I had deluded myself that I could make a clean break with the past, but every time I turned my antennae, relatives and acquaintances were there, wearing disapproving and furious expressions, their stares loaded with reproof. The snails of our childhood are forever in our field of vision, as are those of our old age. Casual meetings don’t exist for us, nor does privacy. It is clear, then, why one needs a shell, despite the trouble of having to lug it around on one’s back.

  But I kept running toward him-her, sighing and dreaming with eyes wide open, at night, under the moon, with the scent of parsley and the wind’s caress on my squamae. And she-he also was coming toward me. That was all that mattered.

  Winter came, and after three months, spring and the buds of the first squash blossoms.

  And then, the long-awaited moment.

  I was dismayed, the world had crumbled under my foot. No wonder he-she was coming toward me, was responding to my calls. She-he was my reflected image. I circled the spigot and saw myself quietly weeping my last drops of mucus. Poor Viskovitz. I felt for me an infinite tenderness. Then I leaned on that chromed surface and began to howl with laughter.

  What else could I do? I was laughing. No. We were laughing. But my image immediately became serious and began to look at me attentively. How beautiful I was! So pliably feminine and vigorously virile. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from myself: I was still a superb animal, probably the most attractive one who had ever existed, extraordinarily sexy for a mollusk. A sensual radula on squamae out of a fairy tale, an elastic and compact physique, a shell that was camouflaged but elegant, and reproductive equipment . . . Parbleu! In an instant the meaning of this event was clear to me. I timidly bent my ocular antennae toward each other, and for the first time my right pupil stared into my left one. I felt the short circuit, the shudder in my soul, and was able to stammer only one banal sentence:

  “I love you, Viskovitz.”

  “Me too, silly.”

  With my radula I delicately caressed my pneumostome, with the distal part of my foot I brushed the proximal. I felt the warm pressure of the rhinophor slipping under my shell, and a strong agitation froze the center of my being. “Oh, heavens! What am I doing?” I stammered. But I gave myself up to my embrace, I clung to my flesh. Inebriated with desire, I pressed myself to me, I throbbed at the clammy touch of my epidermis, I drank of the viscous liquid of mucus, greedily straining to possess those adorable limbs. I clutched them desperately.

  When I was done, I realized that in the frenzy I had come out of my shell and was lying on my back, with my sexes waving in the breeze. And that everyone’s eyes were aimed at me. In a half-foot radius alone there were three families of snails, and you can imagine their reactions.

  “How gross. What a thing to have to see!” a neighbor complained.

  “You will be damned forever, Viskovitz,” snapped another. They yelled at their children to turn the other way, but they themselves took care not to turn their antennae.

  “We will teach you a lesson,” they threatened. As if a snail had ever beaten up another snail. I had taken enough abuse, so instead of retiring inside my shell, I stood up before them.

  “Insufficient hermaphrodites yourseeeeelves!” I screamed at those hypocrites.

  The days that followed were the happiest of my life. The spring breeze had brought the homage of two big yellow petals, and I languidly stretched myself on them and bathed myself in their scent, happy to be a mollusk and in love. I had taken this new abode in place of my shell, too unsuited to the complex geometry of hermaphrodite eroticism. But my story had not stopped causing scandal.

  “This is nothing but a typical example of the collapse of gastropodic society,” said one. “The ‘I’ has replaced society, and the narcissistic personality triumphs. We are falling back on the personal and the private.”

  I confess that I was falling back on my privates rather willingly. It was one of the few advantages of not having a spine.

  And there were those who sought to psychoanalyze me: “When you have secondary narcissism, frustrated love turns on itself and gives birth to delusions of grandeur, to the overestimation of the self. The ‘I’ believes itself to be God.”

  No, it had never occurred to me that I was God. If anything, He was the one who started those rumors.

  “The advancement of old age shatters the dream of the blessed extension of childhood’s omnipotence, and the self-protective mechanism of narcissism breaks down . . .”

  I had to admit that I hated growing old. Old age made me become jealous. More than once I had caught myself fantasizing about a younger snail, and my heart had broken to pieces. Naturally I was that snai
l, my youthful image spread out on the lettuce, but that didn’t make the pain any less. During such moments I locked myself in my shell and wept. I wasn’t loving myself back. My eyes weren’t looking at each other anymore.

  But life went on, there was no getting around it—I was pregnant. I lived in terror that the stories about the dangers of self-fertilization were true, and that I would bear monsters. Types with a turreted shell or with a bifid foot who would make me feel guilty for the rest of my days.

  I was mistaken.

  As soon as I saw the tiny shell of my newborn son, Viskovitz, I recognized it. Her majesty the gastropodic beauty. He was the perfect copy of her parent, more like a divinity than a mollusk. So tiny it looked like a snail seen from a distance, that snail seen from a distance. How beautiful she was! I delicately caressed his pneumostome, with the distal part of my foot I caressed her proximal . . .

  “I love you, Viskovitz,” he answered.

  As in fairy tales, love triumphed. But this time there would be no end. There would never be an end.

  “How gross! The things we have to see!” a neighbor complained.

  YOU’RE LOSING YOUR HEAD, VISKOVITZ

  I asked my mother, “What was Daddy like?”

  “Crunchy, a bit salty, rich in fiber.”

  “Before you ate him, I mean.”

  “He was a little guy, insecure, anxious, neurotic— pretty much like all you baby boys.”

  I felt closer than ever to the parent I had never known, who’d been dissolved in Mom’s stomach just as I was being conceived. From whom I had gotten not nurturing but nourishment. I thought, Thank you, Dad. I know what it means for a mantis to sacrifice himself for the family.

  I stood still for a moment of recollection before his tomb, that is to say my mother, and said a Miserere.

  After a bit, since thinking about death never failed to give me an erection, I figured that the time had come to catch up with Ljuba, the insect I loved. I’d met her about a month earlier at my sister’s wedding, which was also my brother-in-law’s funeral. And I’d remained a prisoner of her cruel beauty. Since then we’d kept on seeing each other. How had that been possible? God had blessed me with the most precious gift he could give a mantis: premature ejaculation. A necessary condition for any love story that isn’t ephemeral. The first week I’d lost a pair of legs, my pincers. The second week the prothorax with the connectors for flying. The third week . . .

  My friends Zucotic, Petrovic and Lopez started yelling from the higher branches where they’d settled: “Don’t do it, Visko, for the love of heaven!” For them, females were the devil, misogyny their mission. They had been sexually deviant or dysfunctional since metamorphosis. They had taken priestly vows, and they spent the whole blessed day chewing petals and reciting psalms. They were very religious.

  But there wasn’t a prayer that could stop me, not once I heard the icy sigh of my mistress, the hollow rustling of her membranes, her funereal, mocking laugh. I moved frenetically in the direction of those sounds with the one leg I had left, using my erection as a crutch, making every effort to visualize the glory of her curvaceous shape, which I couldn’t see since I no longer had ocelli, which I couldn’t smell since I no longer had antennae, which I couldn’t kiss since I no longer had palpi.

  By now I’d lost my head.

  YOU’RE GETTING A LITTLE CUCKOO, VISKOVITZ

  After a lot of migrating I found a neat little place in a beech grove in Upper Bavaria. An uncrowded, luxuriant territory with a nice view of the lake, but above all just two wing beats away from a grain field. That’s the stuff— grain. I don’t know about you, but I’m by preference granivorous. I can get along as a fructivore or insectivore, and I can eat snails and things like that. The truth is that we talented finches end up doing well in whatever ecosystem you put us in. I’ve toured lots of habitats, and you can take my word for it—there isn’t a better place to nest than right here. It was time to get around to starting a family, time for my offspring to be born, wide-awake guys like their father, eager to put into practice the teachings of old Viskovitz. So, while it was still winter, before it was hormones telling me what to do, before anyone else got around to it, I set about building a nest. I had plenty of time to plan it, find the best materials, get it in tip-top shape. I happen to know that the nest is the first thing a she-finch looks at. When I’d finished it up, all the nubile females in the area—not all that many, to tell the truth— began to gather round.

  I wasn’t so much looking for showy plumage in the mother of my chicks as a healthy robust physique (while still feminine), a well-developed ovipositor, a vigilant sense of responsibility and an unshakable morality.

  For this I chose Ljuba.

  “Oh, Visko, it’s a dream,” she chirped when she’d barely put a claw on the veranda. She couldn’t believe her eyes.

  On the right, just past the entrance, there was the egg nook lined with down, with vents to regulate the air flow and temperature. On the left there was the breakfast nook with storage space for shelled grain and other supplies. The upper story was a sumptuous alcove with a view of the lake, waterproofed and lined with feathers, grasses, wool and flowers. The weight-bearing members of the structure rested solidly on a frame of beech twigs, after the fashion of weaver sparrows. It was held together with clay and saliva, the way swallows build, and it was finished off with dried dung. I had camouflaged the outer walls with sweet-smelling ivy, just enough to hide them from the eyes of predators but not so much that my neighbors wouldn’t burst with envy. And in due course I would build another nest, the way some moorhens do—down by the lake with a sun deck.

  “Oh, Visko, is it all yours?”

  “Ours, my little chickadee.”

  “I’m so excited.”

  She was in the middle of her first ovulation. I made allowances for that. “That’s love,” I explained. “After a while it passes.” I asked her to come upstairs.

  “Oh, Visko . . .”

  After a few days we were expecting our first chicks.

  Waiting for the blessed event, I passed the time on the terrace admiring my territory. I thought it odd that there was so little competition around here—only three sparrows looking a bit befuddled. In time I’d be able to extend my territory all the way to the wheat fields. You really had to envy my future heirs. With a father like me, their life would be one long triumphal march.

  I began to hop from branch to branch for no particular reason—because I felt like it, because they were my branches.

  Suddenly I heard a suspicious noise, and I spied a feathered creature moving cautiously into my territory, getting close to my possessions.

  I sang out, “Hold it right there, finch!”

  “Sorry, Visko. It’s me, Petrovic . . . I’m wounded.”

  My neighbor Petrovic was dragging himself along the ground, his feathers dripping with blood as if someone had hit him with birdshot. Who had cut him down like that?

  “The cuckoo, Viskovitz. He did a number on me.”

  I admit that I didn’t know much about the subject of cuckoos. I thought they only came out of clocks and went “cuckoo.” Petrovic painted a far more disturbing picture. They were animals five times bigger than us . . . and they had a nasty habit.

  “Reproductive parasitism?! What are you trying to say?”

  “Those bastards have no morals, Visko. They don’t build nests, they get it on when they feel like it—on branches, without any courtship or wedding. Then they leave their eggs in someone else’s nest . . . chuck out one of yours and put in theirs. And then sometimes the little bastards kick your children out of the nest. It’s a massacre. It happened to Lopez.”

  “Holy tempest!”

  “And if you’re so dense that you don’t catch on, it ends up with you feeding him for months, thinking he’s your child. That’s what happened to Zucotic. He’s been taking care of him for a year. He goes around with a cuckoo four times his size, saying, ‘Look how big my boy is!’ No one has the
nerve to tell him the truth.”

  “Blessed birdseed!”

  “This year I caught the cuckoo in the act—he was changing the eggs in my nest and I read him the riot act.”

  But apparently it had been the cuckoo who had the last word.

  My thoughts flew immediately to Ljuba. She might be laying at any moment. I had to get to my nest in a hurry and stand guard. I said goodbye and took off.

  “Never take your eyes off the clutch,” Petrovic yelled after me. “It only takes an instant!”

  I found Ljuba in the living room, sprawled on a cushion of flowers. She confirmed everything that Petrovic had said. “Everyone knows about cuckoos, they’re a fact of life. But we don’t have to worry, Visko. This nest is a bunker. And you’re not as dumb as your neighbors.”

  “Right, right. But better safe than sorry.”

  I waited for three days without closing my eyes until the eggs were laid. God granted us three of them, white and perfectly oval. I measured them, and then with my beak I inscribed a “V” on each of them. Ljuba kept me from using dyes—what if they got through to the yolk?

  We had to stay alert. We set up tours of duty for standing watch and for brooding. We had enough food so we wouldn’t have to leave the nest. I kept watch behind the door; if someone stuck his beak in, I’d let him have it between the eyes. I couldn’t stop thinking about that story about cuckoos, about how for centuries we passeriforms had been duped. I felt wounded in my dignity as a finch. The truth is that many of us passeres, including finches, have a bad habit of behaving in a stereotypical way. If we see a straw doll with a hat, we think it’s a farmer. If we see a chick with its mouth open, it has to be fed. So of course folks take advantage of us. One of the first things I would teach my children: the virtue of doubt.

  In the dead of night I put my ear against the shell and listened to the little darlings breathe.

  When it was time for Ljuba to stand guard, I allowed myself a short nap. When I woke up I found her sprawled on a pile of down—snoring!