You're an Animal, Viskovitz

by Alessandro Boffa

  But it wasn’t all a bed of roses. One day I came back to the comb and found Lara curled up in front of the throne, weeping.

  “The larvae, Visko. Every day I have to come up with five thousand names. You could at least help me.”

  “Let’s call them all Viskovitz. Nothing wrong with that name. That way we’ll have more time for us, my little star.”

  “Holy hives!” she exploded. “Is it possible that you’re such an imbecile that you can’t think past your own setules? And cover them up, damn it. And don’t go around the hive with your wings spread out like that. The workers are female, after all. They’re not getting any work done, the gatherers aren’t gathering, the honey makers aren’t making honey . . .”

  “Well, it’s hardly fair that the appreciation of beauty should remain the privilege of a small elite.”

  “Enough! Out of my sight!”

  I decided that the time had come to move on. I’d never intended to be monogamous, after all. By nature I was meant to pollinate, to fly from flower to flower. I had always thought that cultivating and propagating beauty was my particular duty. It was in that spirit that I had always kept myself tanned and spritzed with cologne, making the effort to be—how shall I put it?—the artist, the work of art and its popularizer.

  Promoting my image was easier than I’d thought. The courtesans arranged meetings with the queens and, day after day, my genes were being translated into new versions, put out in millions of exemplars. It was my apotheosis.

  But the queens weren’t used to sharing, and even the female workers began to ask for their turn. Diplomatic incidents and social tensions erupted. Even some wars, both between hives and between castes. My life became a hell.

  So I decided to put an end to it. To make myself ugly. I slunk away to the underground passages where the solitary terricole bees lived, and I set about finding the nest of a certain Ljuba, a character who was known for her skill in reconstructive plastic surgery in wax. I was welcomed into an elegant waiting room lined in silk and waterproofed in the style of colletids, with resins and oily secretions. But when she came into the light . . . ah, I saw in her the very same misfortune that had befallen me: she was gorgeous. She had the same “chromatic vivacity” in her setules, the same “delicate tracing” in her mouth parts, the same “curvilinear rhythm” in her filled-out body segments. In a word, she had what no other female in the ruches possessed: a personality. And notwithstanding that she had funds of honey and stores of wax, she was decidedly feminine and fully sexed.

  “Good heavens!” she stammered as soon as she saw me. “They told me about you, but I really didn’t believe . . .” She was overcome by the intensity of the moment. “That anyone could impart to a creation so much luminosity, such original effects of delineation . . .”

  “Well, frankly, me neither. I didn’t believe that . . .” I was overwhelmed as a little larva.

  Damn, I said to myself, for the first time I’m meeting a bee who truly understands me, who can make sense of my beauty, and she’s the very one I have to ask to disfigure me. I tried to explain the purpose of my visit.

  “Aaaah,” she moaned. “Don’t talk heresy. I couldn’t ever . . . When I operate on an insect, it’s to make them look like you. And here you are, in your perfection, and you’re asking me to . . .”

  In the cells of her composite eyes there were thousands of images of me, and in mine, thousands of images of her. Each image of her reflected thousands of images of me which mirrored thousands of images of her in unison of visual ecstasy which reached far beyond fulfillment.

  “Let’s run away together, Visko. The world will be our honeycomb, life will be our nectar—”

  “No, Ljuba. It would always be the same story. I know how cruel it is, but we must choose—beauty or life.”

  “Not now,” she whispered. “For one night, let us celebrate their union.”

  “But Ljuba . . . we can’t put into the world other creatures destined for unhappiness. With parents like us, their features . . .”

  “You’ll see. A little bit of wax can do wonders.”

  The next day she showed me. We pledged eternal love to each other, whatever masks life might make us wear. Then she showed how attached she was to me by making me so ugly that no other insect would dream of approaching me. With her prostheses of wax she transformed my cephalic parts into truly dismal scrawls and my whole face into an “insipid, opaque, rhetorically ornamented hotchpotch.” In this way it was possible at last to fly around the meadows without being molested. I rediscovered the simple pleasures of life: love, work, family.

  Ljuba oviposited in the spring, and I helped her forage for the incubating cells, watch over the brood, keep away predators and parasites. Life was peaceful, but I was still tormented by the thought of the wax. It was clear that we would have to put some on the little ones, too, or else folks would drag them off by their heels. The wax would work for a while, but what would happen when the summer heat melted our masks? It was already April . . .

  One evening, as I returned to our underground passage, a grub announced, “They’re born. They look like you.”

  “Like me?” I said, pointing to my waxy extensions. Certainly not this me, I said to myself. Like Ljuba, if anyone. I went down to the cells and looked them over. The grub was all too right. It couldn’t be the wax, because they were still completing their pupal stage. They looked like this me. Like the implants I’d put on—they were glabrous, opaque, deformed.

  “Ljuba!” I shrieked. “What the hell is going on? Who is the father of these monsters?”

  “You are, Visko, I swear,” she replied. Tears streaked her face, melting her waxy features, revealing her horrendous aphanipterous palps, even uglier than those of our young. I felt faint.

  “Forgive me, Visko. I didn’t have the courage to tell you . . . Come on, please, don’t be like that. What really matters is being able to create beauty. Haven’t we sworn to love each other, whatever disguises we have to wear? And which of us has more to complain about? You who only have to imagine my ugliness, or I who have to look at yours all day? I’ll take care of everything, you’ll see, even the kids will be okay. They only need a little . . . stylistic unity.”

  Before my very eyes she began to smear them with wax. In less than a half hour she managed to give them grace and dignity, to transform them into two rosy-cheeked baby dolls, appealing little fluff balls, children any parent would want to have, or at least see. I thought I was dreaming.

  “Now, we mustn’t make them cry or they’ll melt,” she warned. “You stay away from them with that waxy face of yours.”

  What could I do? They were a boy and a girl, and we named them Junior and Sherba.

  I tried to convince myself that nothing had changed. After all, she was the bee who, more than any other, had known how to make me happy. And that was the only reality that mattered. But what would happen when the wax melted? I didn’t dare imagine. If the kids were that ugly, even having a father like me, what must she look like? . . . It was already May.

  One day, coming back to the comb, I idly stopped to watch a nuptial flight. There were six queens going off first, and I felt a pinch of nostalgia. I had found a spot facing the sun and, to finish up my errand, was extracting a little pollen from the flowers when I sensed that something wasn’t going right.

  Every sound had ceased and all eyes (composite or not) were on me.

  Damn! The sun, I thought. It’s melting my wax.

  I got my wings whirring and took off like a rocket, but the queens, the six queens, were already on top of me. They began to pull at me, grabbing at my membranes, my setules, my antennae.

  “I surrender!” I shrieked. “Don’t pull me to pieces!”

  They stopped with a start, astonished.

  “Wax! He’s covered with wax!” They wiped me clean with their spatulae and stared at me in a fury.

  “What a lump! And he looked so interesting . . . but he’s just another mannequin like all th
e others!”

  Like all the others? It was only when I looked at the other drones that I understood. Not a setule out of place, not a single vulgar detail. They were all sons of mine. It was natural that they were identical to me. I was the father of the whole new generation, of the whole fucking nation. Even the female workers had my features. At this point, commonplace.

  “Get rid of this imposter!” I was driven away with jeers and blows.

  Ljuba was looking at me from a flower, snickering.

  The sun was melting her wax, revealing all the monstrosity of her body and face. It came to me with a shudder that critical opinion would be unanimous in appreciating her “chromatic liveliness, the solidity of the architectonic solutions, the refinement of the modeling . . .”

  YOU LOOK LIKE YOU COULD USE A DRINK, VISKOVITZ

  “Papa, I want to stop drinking.”

  “Don’t say such a silly thing, Visko. You’re a sponge.”

  “What does that mean? That I have to spend my whole life stuck to this rock, filtering and pumping water like a vegetable?”

  “You are a vegetable, Visko, or at any rate a zoophyte. How you go on . . .”

  I despaired. All my attempts to create a life of swimming and pursuing my ideals were failing. Oh, if I only had muscles to push me to the calcareous sponge I loved and to merge with her into a single sycon! Oh, if I only had eyes to see her, a mouth to tell her I loved her!

  All that I knew of my beloved were nitrogenous traces that the current carried to me. To those particles in suspension I had given a shape, pores and a name: Ljuba.

  The one way to crown our love story was to reach her with some spermatozoa, but the current kept on running the wrong way—toward my mama, my sisters, my grand-mothers, creating all kinds of family embarrassment and genealogical complications. The situation was rendered still more equivocal due to the periodic sex changes that we hermaphroditic sponges have to undergo. It wasn’t easy for me to accept the fact that my father was the wife of his mother, that his daughter (my sister) was his grandfather and his grandmother was also his brother (my uncle). These relations were becoming even more morbid because of the way our bodies were piled together—it was difficult to figure out where you ended and where your immediate family began. And it wasn’t easy to develop a healthy personality when the canals of your flagellate chambers were held in common with an invaginated mother, incestuous sisters and a bisexual father. When the only anatomical features on which you could construct an identity were the gastral cavity and the aperture of your osculum.

  The tragedy of being a vegetable was that you couldn’t commit suicide. The advantage of being a sponge was that you could drown your sorrows.

  I prayed for something to happen. An earthquake, an ecological upheaval, that a cuttlefish would come to my rescue—something. And at last something did change. The current. It reversed direction and finally put me in a position to fertilize the sponge I loved! I immediately turned my attention to wrapping my sperm in gemmules and beginning to fire them downrange.

  But I didn’t find any.

  “Papa,” I shrieked, “I’m sterile!”

  “You’re not sterile, Visko. You’re a female. Like me.”

  I felt faint. How could I be so unlucky? Female. And meanwhile, Ljuba had become male, and her ejaculations couldn’t reach me because I was upstream!

  To add insult to injury, my mother’s sperm began to rain down on me. And my sisters’, and my grandmothers’ . . .

  “Damnation,” I cursed. “Damnation!”

  Even my daughter had gotten me pregnant.

  I was my own mother-in-law. Damn it, my own mother-in-law!!!

  But maybe it’s all for the best, I sighed. Who knows? The way things were turning out, I might begin to hate the mother-in-law who was in me. Who can say that this unhappiness wouldn’t finally make me happy?

  THESE ARE THINGS THAT DRIVE YOU WILD, VISKOVITZ

  What was left—I roared to myself—of our natural paradise, the Ngorongoro crater, the greatest in the world, the cradle of creation? Around me I saw only a movieland corrupted by nature show business. All that mattered was showing your fur and being talked about. And when did you get to be a success? Since the day I had appeared on-screen in a major role in a serial about great felines, I had become one of the park’s stars, chased by cameramen, zoologists and zoophiles. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I couldn’t stand the entourage of chic beasts and snobbish ruminants, I couldn’t stand hearing hyenas bark about dissolves and jump cuts. I needed a vacation.

  A Thompson gazelle came up to me. A pretty, photogenic type, delicate, with withers measuring no more than sixty centimeters. Many starlets I knew would have been envious of her shiny coat, but she moved in a natural way; she didn’t seem to be one of the usual soulless Lolitas. She asked me if I was Viskovitz the lion. Useless to deny it.

  “I beg you, tear me to pieces.”

  “That can be arranged,” I sighed. “But first you’re going to have to audition.”

  “You didn’t understand me. I’m being serious. Do you see this? It’s a radio collar. Do you see these scars? They’re from tranquilizer darts. And do you see these tags inside my ears? I have no peace, damn it!” She wasn’t acting, she was really unhappy.

  “I understand, dear. But I’m not the one you need to turn to.”

  “I’m very tender. I’ve always grazed on buds.”

  “I don’t doubt it. But what you saw were documentaries, you don’t seriously think—”

  “What are those scavengers here for? Aren’t they waiting for my leftovers?”

  “Oh no.” I smiled. “The hyena is Zucotic, he thinks he’s my movie agent. The jackal and the lycaon, Petrovic and Lopez, are two extras. They always look like that.”

  “But surely there has to be a true wild beast somewhere,” she mooed impatiently.

  “Not in Ngorongoro. Here it’s fashionable for carnivores to be vegetarian. Imagine what it would mean to tear apart live meat. Unless somebody ruins their close-up, of course. In that case, even an antelope would use its teeth. But I’ve heard that outside the crater, in the Serengeti, things are different, like in the old days. I suggest you try it there.” I shook my mane in the direction of the Mandusi. “But watch out: you could like life in those parts.”

  With a sigh, she turned her snout. “Down there?”

  “Yes. Beyond the lake there’s a trail that climbs up to the crest. Ask once you get to the Seneto . . . In fact, you know what? I’ll come with you for part of it, it’ll be good for me.”

  We went through a small wood of fever trees and proceeded along the northern bank of the Makati to avoid the camping grounds, the landing strips and the lodges. In the meantime, I gave her advice that might come in handy in her new environment, if she ever came to cherish her life. I was telling her old stories about the Masai, poachers and white hunters, about the savanna that once was, when a lion’s mane was still a king’s crown and our roar was law. As I was doing that, my heart was beating fast and I thought I was seeing the crater of my childhood when, from the lake, there rose flights of flamingos, teals, ibises and curlews, marabou, spoonbills and jacanas. And in the Mandusi, hippopotamuses dozed under the eyes of the herons and nycticoraces, Jackson’s widows and fantails.

  The gazelle explained she wasn’t leaving any loved ones behind in those pastures. No one who was worth saying goodbye to. That she no longer had the herd instinct, since the chief gazelle had decided to abolish reproduction and put the species close enough to extinction to raise their value in the eyes of wildlife management. I was trying to comfort her, but I found myself complaining about the breakdown of the male feline’s authority and the arrogance of lionesses who were growing more and more muscular, know-it-all, ambitious in a community— ours—that was becoming ever more similar to those of the hyenas, who had been living in matriarchal societies for some time now, and the results of that were there for everyone to see.

  Laughing and joking,
we reached the escarpment, and there I decided to follow her to the top to see what was on the other side: the Kilimanjaro, the Great Plains, Lake Victoria. A change of scenery, I explained to her, would do me a lot of good. We decided to stop near the crest. We ventured along a path that elephants and buffaloes had opened in the bushes and found shelter in a grove of nuxiae, gum trees and twisted junipers in the company of only a Cercopithecus and a few yellow baboons. There we stretched our legs and rested our heads on cassipurea moss. She was crying soundlessly, with quick sobs. I kept a paw on her shoulder and meanwhile wondered what it would feel like to sink my fangs in that slim neck and tear off pieces of that young, bleeding flesh. Probably a heaviness in the stomach, nausea and feelings of guilt, I said to myself. But maybe also a terrible pleasure . . .

  “You smell good,” she bleated all of a sudden.

  “Pardon me?” My wandering paw had freed the odors from under my armpit: could she be mocking me?

  “You have a nice lion smell, it’s a masculine smell.”

  “M-m-masculine?”

  “Yes. You lions are the most beautiful males in the savanna, so regal, so muscular . . . so much better than those effeminate herbivores. Have you ever asked yourself why all the ruminants have horns?”

  “No, I—”

  “You know, among us bovids there’s almost no sexual dimorphism, and it always gave me the creeps, going with those guys.” She turned toward me and languidly, wantonly, lowered her eyebrow ridge while the wind rippled her mane.

  What could I do? Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was loneliness . . .

  “Oh, Visko! It was marvelous!” she said afterward.

  “Yes, it was good,” I lied. It wasn’t good. It was fantastic. There was more of the female in that little goat than there was in all the divas of my following put together, a pantheon of big cats who thought that pleasures of the flesh meant beefsteak. And I also liked that name of hers, Ljuba . . .