The glass looks on to an enclosure surrounded by high masonry walls, which give it the appearance of a prison yard but actually it is the “garden” of the gorilla’s house-cage; from its soil rises a short, leafless tree and an iron ladder like those in a gymnasium. Farther back in the yard there is the female, a great black gorilla carrying a baby in her arms: the whiteness of the coat cannot be inherited, “Copito de Nieve” remains the only albino of all gorillas.
White and motionless, the great ape suggests to Mr Palomar’s mind an immemorial antiquity, like mountains or like the pyramids. In reality the animal is still young and only the contrast between the pink face and the short snow coat that frames it and, especially, the wrinkles all around the eyes give him the look of an old man. For the rest, the appearance of “Copito de Nieve” shows fewer resemblances to humans than that of other primates: in place of a nose, the nostrils dig a double chasm; the hands, hairy and – it would seem – not very highly articulated, at the end of the very long and stiff arms, are actually still paws, and the gorilla uses them as such when he walks, pressing them to the ground like a quadruped.
Now these arm-paws are pressing a rubber tire against his chest. In the enormous void of his hours, “Copito de Nieve” never abandons the tire. What can this object be for him? A toy? A fetish? A talisman? Palomar feels he understands the gorilla perfectly, his need for something to hold tight while everything eludes him, a thing with which to allay the anguish of isolation, of difference, of the sentence to being always considered a living phenomenon, not only by the visitors to the zoo but also by his own females and his children.
The female also has an old tire, but for her it is an object of normal use, with which she has a practical relationship, without problems: she sits in it as if it were an easychair, sun-bathing and de-lousing her infant. For “Copito de Nieve”, on the contrary, the contact with the tire seems to be something affective, possessive, and somehow symbolic. From it he can have a glimpse of what for man is the search for an escape from the dismay of living: investing oneself in things, recognizing oneself in signs, transforming the world into a collection of symbols; a first daybreak of culture in the long biological night. To do this the gorilla possesses only an old tire, an artefact of human production, alien to him, lacking any symbolic potentiality, naked of meanings, abstract. Looking at it, you would not say that much could be derived from it. And yet what, more than an empty circle, can contain all the symbols you might want to attribute to it? Perhaps identifying himself with it, the gorilla is about to reach, in the depths of silence, the springs from which language burst forth, to establish a flow of relationships between his thoughts and the unyielding, deaf evidence of the facts that determine his life . . .
Leaving the zoo, Mr Palomar cannot dispel the image of the albino gorilla from his mind. He tries to talk about him with people he meets, but he cannot make anyone listen to him. At night, both during the hours of insomnia and during his brief dreams, the great ape continues to appear to him. “Just as the gorilla has his tire, which serves as tangible support for a raving, wordless speech,” he thinks, “so I have this image of a great white ape. We all turn in our hands an old, empty tire through which we would like to reach the final meaning, at which words do not arrive.”
The order of scaly creatures
Mr Palomar would like to know why iguanas attract him. In Paris he goes now and then to visit the reptile house of the Jardin des Plantes; he is never disappointed. What is extraordinary, indeed unique, about the appearance of the iguana in itself is quite clear to him; but he feels there is something more and he cannot say what it is.
The
Iguana iguana
is covered with a green skin that seems woven from very tiny speckled scales. There is too much of this skin: on the neck, on the legs, it forms folds, bags, flounces, like a dress that should adhere to the body and instead sags on all sides. Along the spinal column there is a jagged crest that extends to the tail; the tail is also green up to a point, after which the farther it stretches the paler it becomes, and it is divided into rings of alternating colors: light brown and dark brown. On the scaly green snout, the eye opens and closes, and this is an “evolved” eye, endowed with gaze, attention, sadness, suggesting that another being is concealed inside that dragon semblance: an animal more similar to those we are at home with, a living presence less distant from us than it seems . . .
Then there are other spiky crests under the chin; on the neck there are two round white plates like a hearing-aid; a number of accessories and sundries, trimmings and defensive garnishings, a sample-case of forms available in the animal kingdom and perhaps also in other kingdoms: too much stuff for one animal to bear. What’s the use of it? Does it serve to disguise someone watching us from in there?
The forelegs, with five fingers, would suggest talons rather than hands if they were not attached to actual arms, muscular and well-shaped; but the rear legs are different, long and flabby, with fingers like vegetable propagations. The animal as a whole, however, even from the depths of his resigned, motionless torpor, conveys an image of strength.
At the glass case of the
Iguana iguana
Mr Palomar has stopped, after having contemplated the case with ten little iguanas clinging one to the other, constantly shifting position with agile movements of elbows and knees, all stretching in a lengthwise direction: the skin a brilliant green, with a copper-colored dot in the place of gills, a crested white beard, pale eyes wide around the black pupil. Then the Squirrel of the Savannah, which hides in sand its identical color; the Tegu or Tupinambis, yellowish-black, almost an alligator; the giant African Cordilo, with thick, pointed scales like fur or leaves, the color of the desert, so concentrated in its determination to exclude itself from the world that it coils in a circle, curling its tail against its head. The gray-green upper shell and the white underneath of a turtle immersed in the water of a transparent tank seem soft, fleshy; the pointed head emerges as if from a high collar.
Life in the snake house appears a squandering of forms without style and without plan, where all is possible, and animals and plants and rocks exchange scales, quills, concretions. But among the infinite possible combinations only some – perhaps actually the most incredible – become fixed, resist the flux that undoes them and mixes and reshapes; and immediately each of these forms becomes the center of a world, separated forever from the others, as here in the row of glass case-cages of the zoo; and in this finite number of ways of being, each identified in a monstrosity of its own, and necessity, and beauty of its own, lies order, the sole order recognizable in the world. The iguana room of the Jardin des Plantes, with its illuminated cases, where dozing reptiles are hidden among branches and rocks and sand of the forest or the desert of their origin, reflects the order of the world, whether it be the reflection on earth of the sky of ideas or the external manifestation of the secret of the nature of creation, of the norm concealed in the depths of that which exists.
Is it this atmosphere, more than the reptiles in themselves, that obscurely attracts Mr Palomar? A damp, soft warmth soaks the air like a sponge; a sharp stink, heavy, rotten, forces him to hold his breath; shadow and light lie stagnant in a motionless mixture of days and nights: are these the sensations of a man who peers out beyond the human? Beyond the glass of every cage there is the world as it was before man, or after, to show that the world of man is not eternal and is not unique. Is it to realize this with his own eyes that Mr Palomar reviews these stalls where pythons sleep, boas, bamboo rattlesnakes, the tree-adder of the Bermudas?
But of the worlds from which man is excluded each case is only a tiny sample, torn from a natural continuum that might also never have existed, a few cubic meters of atmosphere that elaborate devices maintain at a certain degree of temperature and humidity. Thus every sample of this antediluvian bestiary is kept alive artificially, as if it were a hypothesis of the mind, a product of the imagination, a construction of language, a paradoxical line of reasoning meant to demonstrate that the only true world is our own . . .
As if the smell of the reptiles were only now becoming unbearable, Mr Palomar suddenly feels a desire to go out into the open air. He has to cross the great hall of the crocodiles, where there is a line of tanks separated by barriers. In the dry part beside each tank lie the crocodiles, alone or in couples, a spent color, squat, rough, horrible, heavily stretched out, flattened against the ground the full length of their long, cruel snouts, their cold bellies, their broad tails. They all seem asleep, even those whose eyes are open, or perhaps all are sleepless in a dazed desolation, even with their eyes closed. From time to time one of them stirs slowly, barely raises himself on his short legs, crawls to the edge of the tank, lets himself drop with a flat thud, raising a wave. He floats, immersed in the water, as motionless as before. Is theirs a boundless patience, or a desperation without end? What are they waiting for, or what have they given up waiting for? In what time are they immersed? In that of the species, removed from the course of the hours that race from the birth to the death of the individual? Or in the time of geological eras that shifts continents and solidifies the crust of emerged lands? Or in the slow cooling of the rays of the sun? The thought of a time outside our experience is intolerable. Palomar hurries to leave the snake house, which can be visited only now and then and in haste.
THE SILENCES OF PALOMAR
PALOMAR’S JOURNEYS
The sand garden
A little courtyard covered with a white sand, thick-grained, almost gravel, raked in straight, parallel furrows or in concentric circles, around five irregular groups of stones or low boulders. This is one of the most famous monuments of Japanese civilization, the garden of rocks and sand of the Ryoanji of Kyoto, the image typical of that contemplation of the absolute to be achieved with the simplest means and without recourse to concepts capable of verbal expression, according to the teaching of the Zen monks, the most spiritual of Buddhist sects.
The rectangular enclosure of colorless sand is flanked on three sides by walls surmounted by tiles, beyond which is the green of trees. On the fourth side there is a wooden platform, of steps, where the public can file by or linger and sit down. “If our inner gaze remains absorbed in the viewing of this garden,” explains the pamphlet offered visitors, in Japanese and in English, signed by the abbot of the temple, “we will feel divested of the relativity of our individual ego, whereas the sense of the absolute
I
will fill us with serene wonder purifying our clouded minds.”
Mr Palomar is prepared to accept this advice on faith, and he sits on the steps, observes the rocks one by one, follows the undulations of the white sand, allows the indefinable harmony that links the elements of the picture gradually to pervade him.
Or rather, he tries to imagine all these things as they would be felt by someone who could concentrate on looking at the Zen garden in solitude and silence. Because – we had forgotten to say – Mr Palomar is crammed on the platform in the midst of hundreds of visitors, who jostle him on every side; camera-lenses and movie-cameras force their way past the elbows, knees, ears of the crowd, to frame the rocks and the sand from every angle, illuminated by natural light or by flashbulbs. Swarms of feet in wool socks step over him (shoes, as always in Japan, are left at the entrance); numerous offspring are thrust to the front row by pedagogical parents; clumps of uniformed students shove one another, eager only to conclude as quickly as possible this school outing to the famous monument; earnest visitors nodding their heads rhythmically check and make sure that everything written in the guidebook corresponds to reality and that everything seen in reality is also mentioned in the guide.
“We can view the garden as a group of mountainous islands in a great ocean, or as mountain tops rising above a sea of clouds. We can see it as a picture framed by the ancient mud walls, or we can forget the frame as we sense the truth of this sea stretching out boundlessly.”
These “instructions for use” are contained in the leaflet, and to Mr Palomar they seem perfectly plausible and immediately applicable, without effort, provided one is really sure of having a personality to shed, of looking at the world from inside an ego that can be dissolved, to become only a gaze. But it is precisely this outset that demands an effort of supplementary imagination, very difficult to muster when one’s ego is glued into a solid crowd looking through its thousand eyes and walking on its thousand feet along the established itinerary of the tourist visit.
Must the conclusion be that the Zen mental techniques for achieving extreme humility, detachment from all possessivenéss and pride require as their necessary background aristocratic privilege, and assume an individualism with so much space and so much time around it, the horizons of a solitude free of anguish?
But this conclusion, which leads to the familiar lament over a paradise lost in the spread of mass civilization, sounds too facile for Mr Palomar. He prefers to take a more difficult path, to try to grasp what the Zen garden can give him, looking at it in the only situation in which it can be looked at today, craning his neck among other necks.
What does he see? He sees the human race in the era of great numbers, which extends in a crowd, leveled but still made up of distinct individualities like the sea of grains of sand that submerges the surface of the world . . . He sees that the world, nevertheless, continues to turn the boulder-back of its nature indifferent to the fate of mankind, its hard substance that cannot be reduced to human assimilation . . . He sees the forms in which the assembled human sand tends to arrange itself along lines of movement, patterns that combine regularity and fluidity like the rectilinear or circular tracks of a rake . . . And between mankind-sand and world-boulder there is a sense of possible harmony, as if between two non-homogeneous harmonies: that of the non-human in a balance of forces that seems not to correspond to any pattern, and that of human structures, which aspires to the rationality of a geometrical or musical composition, never definitive . . .