He was about to reach her.
A stream separated her from a soot-colored soil turning blue in large dull wet patches and cracked like a compost heap too long exposed to the Sun. She felt around to see how deep it was, sinking to her knees, and to get herself out more quickly she gathered what strength she had left and stepped over onto the other side. What seemed a fairly dense soil was nothing but horrible muck. She nonetheless continued to advance; Hemo piggy-backed on her shoulders as she slipped along. The two banks of rotting matter on either side of the furrow slowly closed up and leveled over. The silt lost more of its consistency, becoming so soft that little wavelets skirted over it; she continued to push forward, now up to her waist, drawing herself up forcefully amidst a spattering of mud which threatened to both drown and poison her. Jan, after a single step, was forced to throw himself quickly out of the horrible quick-sand; he watched her, trembling, his teeth chattering even though he was streaming with sweat from every pore beneath the crust of mud which covered him.
Now the poor wretch could no longer walk, no longer slip over the surface, but rather swam in a lake of muck, mouthfuls of which stifled the cries of terror coming from her mouth. Her head had disappeared more than once, when she believed she saw a solid rock a couple of strokes away; an agonizing moment and she was able to touch it. It was the corpse of an elephant, no doubt a victim of the last flood. While the Siberian ice preserved such corpses intact for thousands of years, the tropical sun, powerful incubator of rot which hastens the recycling of matter, had already made of this a disgusting piece of carrion whose flanks rippled under the thrust of worms. D’ginna climbed, but the hideous raft tore away under her grip; sinking little by little, and knowing herself to be doomed, she no longer fought, no longer attempted to escape, but turned instead towards the kneeling Jan and lifted Hemo out towards him as far as she could reach. Having quickly taken off his clothing, Jan tied together two great bundles of reeds which he tore up by the handful and which in turn tore up his flesh. He used the bundles as a pair of life-buoys to support himself from sinking into the quick-sand. D’ginna was almost totally submerged except for the top of her head and the arm supporting her dearest responsibility above the level of the marsh. In her final act of motherhood, she threw him the child with the miraculous accuracy of a mother on the brink of death.
Back on solid ground, safe along with Hemo, Jan’s overexcitement got the better of him and he passed out. When he came to, he saw himself naked, filthy, and it took a few moments and much rubbing of his eyes in order to remember. Hemo, sitting calmly beside him, was stroking and looking through his hair. The Sun was going down. Upon the marsh nothing moved but clouds of mosquitoes. Likewise, nothing could be heard but a deadened clamor of fright like the voices of those buried alive emanating from the long, dry, hollow bamboos transformed into mysterious organ pipes by the dusk breeze.
CHAPTER VII
The rainy season was back: 30 to 35 weeks of rain, two thirds of which came as hurricanes and torrential downpours. The cabin, warm, well sealed, took on the reek of a slaughterhouse and tannery with meats smoking in the rooftop, two pelts destined for carbatines rolled up, fur side out, in one corner, as well as water buffalo and antelope killed the day before. Jan cut out clothes and shoes from other pelts which he would then assemble during the long evenings of this season.
Hemo slipped down from the hammock in which he was swinging, dragged a pelt over towards the fire and settled there, sucking on sugar cane stalks and tossing them on the coals once dried of sap. They were at first blackened, suppressing the flames and giving forth thick smoke, then they would catch and crackle in a shower of sparks. He stretched out fully and fell asleep.
Interrupting his tailoring, Jan stared at him so fixedly that one would have thought him to also be asleep, were it not for two big tears rolling down from his staring eyes. He remained many hours examining him thus, for months he had been wondering if the creature before him was or was not his son, was a human being or a little ape; but this was the first time he cried, his thoughts never having taken such a cruel turn.
Doubt had not assailed him all at once.
His native friends’ assurance that they saw in Hemo a young d’ginna which he was attempting to tame, rather than eat, had nothing to do with it, for to this he saw the counterpoint in an instance recounted by one of the greatest naturalists of modern times, where he had drawn a picture of a newborn monkey, only to have a woman who had recently given birth claim she saw the features of her little boy in the portrait. In the moonlight he recognized Hemo as his son, all his old fears evaporated, and he was exultant and joyful, psychically intoxicated with the certainty of his paternity. Nothing remained of his past. Quivering with pride he now lived only in the present, but his brain, after D’ginna’s death, so long overexcited that it was a miracle that it had not been overcome by apoplectic shock, naturally cooled down. Alone with Hemo, always cuddling and kissing him, he could not help but see the physiognomy, the behavior, the whole being, rather than continuing its upward progress, beginning to stagnate, even to regress towards increasingly maternal traits, growing worse and worse as time went on. Little by little, during these rainy days of reclusive, forced indoor confinement, his uncertainties grew. He consulted his books and observed Hemo in the hope that some idea, some remark, a clue, a mannerism previously unseen and suddenly discovered would force him to either admit him into his family or reject him as purely animal in Nature.
In two columns labeled “Hemo-Man” and “Hemo-Ape,” facing each other in a copybook, every piece of evidence supporting one or the other thesis was tabulated; the two columns remained basically equivalent in length.
Hemo was two years old, smaller in terms of height and more burly than most European children of his age; but such traits vary so greatly on an individual basis that one cannot conclude much from them. If his brow bulged outward, and his eyebrows were prominent, the belly had a protruding navel which one might think about to burst open like an abscess, the Pahouins were the same, their noses were even more flattened. How often, in his proudest moments, wiping D’ginna’s son’s nose, had he believed himself to be wiping the characteristically elongated nose of the sons of the Maas’ of Rotterdam, one of those noses like his own, at which Saskia used to laugh so heartily, out there beyond the desert, the oceans, at the Brinckleymann café‚ in Haarlem! Hemo hardly has a chin, but neither do a great number of Christians, his rounded ears with the outer edge of the conch rolled inward, like those of men, were closer to these by their lack of mobility, than those of so many monkeys met in the tropical forests, including amongst others, the galago lemur which, when he spied out their narrow snout among the foliage, Jan always took to be an aerial hare, a sort of strangely perched sentry.
The heavier hair grew quickly. Matching everywhere the pattern seen in man, the hairs were upturned on the forearm—a trait Jan knew to be of particular importance. This trait had led to the belief that the common ancestor was in the habit of sheltering himself from the rain by crossing his hands over his head. The orientation of the hairs towards the elbow in front would offer a preferential path for the water to run off, and so become hereditary. The hairs were black, heavy on the nape of the neck, few at the joints. So, not counting those men in every country in whom a probable atavism confers a hirsuteness such as Hemo’s—for example, the famous Krao from upper Laos, whom the first scientists in London hesitated to categorize as a woman or a she-ape—are there not entire races renowned for the extreme development of their pillosity, for example the Ainu of the Kuril Islands and Amur River delta, who, according to Lapérouse, Broughton and all the navigators who followed in their wake, seem to literally be covered with a bristly fleece?
The wrinkled face, the hands and feet having remained hairless were suntanned. Jan observed, after many others, the strange commonality of skin color between men and apes inhabiting the same climes. As black with D’ginna as it is with Africa’s black natives, so it is a ye
llowish-red in Oceania among the Malay as with the orangutan.10 Similarly the gorilla and black man have an elongated skull, the orang and the Malay a short skull.11 Feeling Hemo’s then his, Jan discovered that they were similarly constructed, and within the two extremes.
The noblest organs of this face, the eyes, separated by a thin nasal septum, directed forwards, bright or dimmed when some surprise wrinkled the brow, were imminently human.
The extremities of the limbs were so to the same degree, except that on the hands the first two fingers, the index and the middle finger were less distinctly separated, and on the feet the thumb was opposable and the sole of the foot not curved into a pretty arch. But this similarity of the limbs still meant nothing to Jan in terms of anatomy, for he knew that most apes presented those traits; that the expression quadrumane had been expunged from present day science; that rather than comparing the ape’s foot to that of European man, compressed within shoes and for thousands of generations only employed for walking, one should compare it to that of other races, and one would see them as flat as the other, and both with an opposable and prehensile big toe, which other races demonstrate by handling tools equally well with feet or hands. He knew that while other anthropomorphs resembled man, the orang, especially by its brain, and the chimpanzee by the bone structure of its head as well as its teeth, the gorilla underwent its evolution primarily in terms of the structure of its limbs. Jan remembered having first chosen the orang in his Haarlem laboratory for his future experiments, based on its advanced intellectual faculties and its habitat in the Dutch colonies; however, since there was nothing which evolved more slowly than the skeleton, and this Oceanian great ape had an extra bone in the wrist, he had rejected it as a more distant cousin than its Gabonian counterpart. And as he reflected on the large effect brought on by a small cause, he stated: “One less small bone in the orangutan’s carpal region and it wouldn’t have been D’ginna I married.”
Hemo took his first steps like a child, the feet pointed inwards and only touching the ground along their outer edge.
If he wanted something he could not reach, he pointed to it with his finger, whined like a child wishing to suckle, struck the ground with the palm of his hand to draw attention. If one refused him this request, he sulked, face scowling, mouth thrust forward in a sullen pout, arms linked over his head by interlaced fingers. Then, when truly angered, he screamed, lips retracted, throwing his arms about left and right, and rolled on the ground. If one annoyed him, he turned his back, making the hand gesture common to all men wishing to chase away the importunate; if one tickled him, he smiled, eyes sparkling, eyelids creased, the commissure of the lips drawn back in a satisfied purr. If something or other amazed him, his eyebrows were drawn up, his entire physiognomy took on the expression of bewilderment taken on by an actor who played the dimwitted servant. Presented with an unpleasant smell, he sniffed, shook his head, blocked his nose. Jan left birds loose inside the cabin to entertain him, and he would feign sleep, blink his eyes while they approached unsuspecting, then pluck and torture them with the wicked pleasure of a young boy when he caught them. He never cried, but as the lower monkeys and many other animals cry, even tears cannot be admitted as a privilege reserved to man.
Thus he resembled a child of his age, no more nor less than them. He did not present, or at least Jan did not see in him any specific trait, which drawing him closer to man or differentiating him from any other pure-bred gorilla, would supply an irrecusable proof of his immortal bastardness.
Jan had discovered in the books in which he sought the principal distinctive trait of humanity, that a baboon dissected by Galen had served as the basis of his anatomy. Since then, as they progressed in their studies, scholars had recognized that between men and the great apes the leap was less abrupt than that between these larger apes and the class of apes immediately beneath them. This held true for the intellect, the emotional baggage, the inclinations, for the soul, in a word in all ways as with the body. This was, of course, as long as one compared the chimpanzee or the orang to the nearby Pahouin or Dayak and not to Rembrandt or Newton, following the mistakened belief of those who cited as specific to man his religiosity, his capacity for self-awareness, for linking cause and effect, while no doubt ignoring that the Hottentot had no more interest than the mandrill in those who comment upon Plato and Hegel, and that in this regard more than three-quarters of the world, including Europe, is populated with Hottentots. Between the intelligence of the many savages with whom he had lived and that of D’ginna, his even more intimate friend, Jan would only admit to small differences in quantity, not quality. If he allowed that savages had a soul, albeit one still in Limbo, as proud son of the janitor of the Great Church of Rotterdam, he would affirm with equal energy the existence of D’ginna’s soul, and with great pleasure, given certain memories. While he was a theoretician rather carried away with the concept of progressive evolution, seeing a golden age in the future and not in the past, he compared the universal assent of races, which he had heard invoked in the past, to the belief of all indigenous people that the apes with which they had daily intercourse, had the same origins as they, belonged to their own tribe in primitive times, and had been chased out for their laziness and depravity; a belief, the young Jan added, just warming up, identical to that of the Catholic writer who, thurifer to both pope and executioner, places science and civilization in the garden described in Genesis, and considers, during his evenings in St. Petersburg, the savages to be degenerate branches, broken away from the social tree.
At least, if he did not have what he was looking for, Jan knew what he must look for. The most characteristic capacity of man being not only that of language—the majority of animals, perhaps all, having one they understood and by which they communicated quite well—but that of articulated speech. If Hemo displayed it, then the experiment was concluded. Again, here the range of abilities was very wide: from Spinoza’s most sensitive hiatus to the Australian aborigine whose language only included a couple of hundred words; from the aborigine to monkeys’ rising clamor during their games or their disagreements. There was no need for Hemo to discourse like Demosthenes or like an honest businessman advertising his damaged wares. No! Let him articulate, like the most humble of savages sound to which he attached a specific meaning, let him acquire speech, the principal prerequisite for conscious thought, let him speak then and the proof will be irrefutable.
Jan reproached himself the silence he had kept almost constantly since D’ginna’s death. Never hearing a voice, how would Hemo develop his own? Those deaf at birth were they not also dumb? Little boys, be they French or Italian remained mute when with a mute, and would at best resort to the sort of indistinct prattling which would draw from a mother a kiss upon the lips like unto flowers noisy with the sound of tame bees.
He then chatted incessantly, did not ask for or hand over an object without carefully enunciating its name, pretending he was not paying attention when presented with any gesture, until it was accompanied by some babble or other. The child, impatient to reach towards a fruit, towards his fruit and drink, got angry, made a great fuss, and his squalls thrilled Jan, to whom they seemed more complex than his earlier cries.
Besides that, he sang: ancient Dutch ballads by Cats the storyteller, Fockenbroch the macaronic, or the peasant Cornelius Poots, tales of country fairs, battles with the English and Flemish, waking no memories in Jan other than those of the nice old lady who would mutter them by his bedside. A more modern one by Tollens, about some sailors’ victory over the polar ice, he could not begin without remembering his father, good old Philip Maas, serenading the first verses to a parrot for an entire year with a fit of coughing after every verse, so that the bird, coughing in the same manner, sounded like a polyglot with a cold, adding to refrains pertaining to Holland the sneezes of Poniatowski. Presenting concepts quite at odds with what he expressed, Jan’s features and words, along with his appearance and his sense of social hierarchy were in such poor concordance
that even a student more attentive than Hemo would have been confused. Happily, he usually would hum children’s rhymes which reminded him of Saskia’s beaming face as a child. An involuntary smile became so commonplace to him that by force of smiling he soon was blessed with only clean thoughts and happy songs.
Fearing that a virtually uninterrupted reclusiveness would be detrimental to Hemo, who, so it seemed to him, was losing some of his vivacity, he took him for a noontime walk when the rain allowed, not too far from the cabin, so that they could come back in quickly in case of a storm. The magnificent forest, perpetually green, sheltered them well, but Jan feared the ambush of fevers more pernicious than ever hiding beneath the strong aromas of reawakened sap. Between the stones, recently flooded cavities teemed with fish. In these fresh waters, blessed with the warmth of an incubator, the fry, drawn away by the river, hatched in mere minutes. The temperature in these climes was always moderate and free of sudden fluctuations. Jan fished, and got Hemo used to what he caught, where at first he refused to touch the flopping creatures. He wished to rid him gradually of the fear of reptiles which he had inherited from his mother, such a fear that amongst the entire race the sight of a snake paralyzed them and they allowed themselves to be bitten when they could easily have moved aside. Hemo, certainly more educatable than certain urban street urchins whose rickety frames and idiocy, caused, alas, by lingering hunger and alcohol, took pleasure in this game. Boiling over with impatience, leaping on the pike, he would grab everything, adults and fry, and enjoy squeezing them to see their gills gape open. They fished with igongo, a lovely leguminous plant whose leaves, when torn up in the tiny pond, poisoned the fish, or rather, put them to sleep, for they remained fine to eat once one took them belly up from the surface where they lay stunned and yawning. Jan had to stop Hemo from going into the deeper recesses in order to catch the smaller fry. His cries of happiness during these moments of freedom differed so much from his raucous, angry cries or mutterings when in a bout of sulking, that Jan, the dreamer, wondered whether sounds so simple yet so diverse might not be a step along the path to those interjections and onomatopoeia which must constitute the basis of any truly primitive language. Had it not been shown that the vowel a tied to a given sound, such as ba, pa, da, ta, and thus constituting the easiest sound for the child to vocalize, signified, almost everywhere in the world father, mother?
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