The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (37 page)

Soon I will ask you to imagine my long purple fingers manually spinning the hands of an analog clock representing the period of time in which I have lived my life, and as I do, momentary snippets of my experiences over the course of these two years will fade in and out and blend together as the hands of the clock spin faster and faster, until the eye can no longer distinctly see the hands themselves, but only a radial gray blur. Then the hands of the clock will gradually slow down, until I’ve frozen them in place again, two years after Lydia and I first moved to the ranch. But before I ask you to imagine this, I am going to relate an important incident in the development of my young consciousness, which occurred about a year or so into our habitation at the ranch. I am going to tell you about the death of Hilarious Larry.

This was a significant event in the process of my ontogenesis: it
was my first glimpse of death. I would come to know death more intimately later on, but this was my first real peek behind the curtain that beshrouds the stage of life. As I mentioned earlier, Hilarious Larry was an elder chimp, and just as it is no tragedy when an old man dies, neither is it a tragedy when an old chimp dies. I never got to know Larry well. He was always standoffish with me, distant, faintly suspicious, uncaring, unloving. Of us chimps who inhabited the ranch, Larry was both the least humanized and had suffered the most traumatic past. Larry wore clothes, yes, and yes, he ate his dinners and breakfasts with the rest of us in a civilized manner, at the table, with fork, spoon, and knife. But unlike me—and unlike, to a less obvious degree, my poor mute friend, Clever Hands—he had never asked to live this life, the life of a man. Samuel Johnson remarked that he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man, and the converse of this is that he who makes a man of himself gets rid of the pleasure of being a beast. Larry had been kidnapped as an infant and then rudely thrust against his will into his mock manhood, which in the process had robbed him not only of his freedom and his savage dignity, but of the pleasure of animality that is the birthright of the beast alone.

In many respects Larry reminded me of my own father, Rotpeter. Like my father, Larry had not been born in captivity, but as a natural citizen of the state of nature. Like my father, he would learn at a heartbreakingly precocious age that life in the state of nature may be nasty, brutish, and short: he too most likely saw his family slaughtered when he was an infant. But Larry’s subsequent imprisonment had been so much worse than my father’s. Rotpeter had gone to the zoo, Larry to the circus. His experiences there had filled up his heart with disgust, anger, and loathing for human beings, in whose civilization he had been forced to live for most of his life, and this darkly colored his worldview. Now Larry was very old and very ill. He wanted to die. Larry could have been a great patriarch of
the jungle, a powerful and revered alpha male, proudly commanding his tribe of apes in the darkness of the forest. That was his true destiny, which of course he was denied. Instead he was removed to America, to sing and dance in a clown costume, to clap his hands and juggle and ride a tricycle, to suffer a life of slavery and humiliation. Of course, he could never have gone back to the wilds. He was accustomed to humans, he had undergone the injustice of being socialized to them. And this was what he resented most of all. The way he looked at me was never hostile (though at times I felt a note of condescension in the dark silent music that issued from his eyes), rather it was a look of incomprehension—incomprehension at my desire to betray my species so openly, at my willingness to join the ranks of this animal, man, who had proven himself to be the enemy of all other things that are living. No, he never had much of that yearning to join the human race that confused and perverted the creature speaking to you now. Larry lived a life of torment and exile, and I could no more have understood his psychology than he could mine. I loved the artifacts of humanity—these things of such great sweetness and light, all these jewels and candies of human civilization: the paintings of Van Gogh, the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, the architecture of a church, the taste of wine, the singular beauty of an articulated word—these things were motivation enough for me to join humanity, these things were all it took to nudge my soul into a state of rapture. Hilarious Larry, even if he had understood these things—though I do not believe he ever could have—would have found nothing in his heart to love them with. He would have preferred to spend his life beating his chest, sleeping in the trees, and fucking in the mud beneath an open sky, to move through the world in the sensory immediacy of nature. What could Van Gogh or Beethoven have possibly given to such a soul? Nothing. I cannot help but admire the obstinate purity of such an attitude, and although I do not share it, my reflections
on it sometimes cause me to doubt the inner honesty of my own convictions on the fundamental goodness of art. And then, if I let them, my most pessimistic ruminations on this subject lure me to the thought that perhaps we must count all things of human artifice that outlast the very days of their creation as only so much pollution.

One evening, Lydia and I hiked the half mile or so between our peaceful little house and the big house that everyone else lived in, in order to join the others for dinner. Upon our arrival Mr. Lawrence informed us in solemn tones that Larry’s illness had taken a severe turn for the worse. A curtain of respectful quiet had fallen over the house. Mr. Lawrence sat with us as Lydia and I supped on a modest meal of bread and tomato soup. Then we went upstairs to the bedroom that Larry and Lily slept in.

There lay Hilarious Larry, in bed, surrounded by his friends, his adopted family. I had last seen Larry a week or so before, and I knew he had been ill for some time—but since last I saw him he looked to have aged thirty years. He had been so stalwart, so stocky and meaty and hale before, but now he was thin, frighteningly thin. He must have lost forty pounds. The spirit of the big fat dominant male had left him, and his life itself was soon to follow it out of his body. His body was an old house being rapidly vacated by the energies that had inhabited it. It’s a frighteningly awkward thing to stand around a deathbed. Does he want company as he breathes his last? What good is company?—give him the respect of space, let him die in the peace of his solitude. The blinds were drawn shut. It was dark except for a lamp in a far corner of the room. There was a sad foul odor, sewage, fetid water, rotten onions—which I supposed was the smell of a decomposing body, of death. Larry’s long and hairy hands lay weak and limp on the red sheet that was drawn up over his ghastly thin body. I could see the depressions in his chest between his ribs through the sheet. His false teeth were in a
foggy glass of water on the bedside table, and his toothless face was caved and sunken. His eyes were each open a sickly slit, but they may as well have been closed for all they were doing. He wasn’t looking at anything in particular. He glanced at us through the thick veil of his fever when Lydia and I entered the room as noiselessly as butterflies, and then he looked away. Regina Lawrence, her white-streaked red hair knotted in a long braid dangling behind her, sat with Clever Hands near the foot of the bed, holding one of his hands in hers, and Lily sat beside Larry’s head, rocking her body methodically in her chair, which squeaked under her shifting weight, and she fondled the beads of a rosary in her long purple hands. No one spoke. Lydia and I sat down on unoccupied chairs and joined this somber company in the darkness, the silence, and the smell. I wondered how consciously Larry understood that he was dying. He did not seem to fear death.

We sat around his bed a long time. Regina went out and returned some time later with a cup of heated chicken broth. Chicken broth was something Larry liked. He liked the comforting warmth and saltiness of it. As he was too frail to lift it himself, Regina held the cup to his sunken withered lips. Larry submitted to take a sip of the hot salty liquid as Regina gently tipped the lip of the cup to his toothless mouth. He took a long sip and then gently pushed it away. His chest trembled with the labor of moving air in and out of his lungs.

The bed itself. It was an old and simple oaken four-poster bed, covered with red sheets. In the simply decorated white room, this bed gave it a feeling of a monk’s room—a feeling helped along by the crucifix, an insistence of Lily’s, that hung on the wall above the center of the headboard.

Regina set the cup of chicken broth on the side table and returned to her chair at the foot of the bed. Larry was shivering, despite the stifling warmth of the room. I watched Lily set her rosary in a
clicking pile of beads on the bedside table, right beside the cup of broth and Larry’s teeth in the glass of water. Then she took off her dress. In front of everyone, without so much as a sidelong glance in our direction, she struggled out of her dress, lifting the dark blue and white polka-dotted garment up and over her head. She shirked it from her body and onto the floor. Then she climbed into the bed beside Larry. Larry’s feverish head turned toward her as she got into the bed. She scooted toward him beneath the red sheet, and Larry let his body crumble into hers, into her arms. And she held him. She took the dying old toothless chimp into her arms and pressed his head against her furry chest. She lay with him there in that bed beside him, embracing him, waiting with him for the life to leave his body, the pressure and warmth of her body easing his passage into death.

Clever looked at me, and our eyes met, and, I following his lead, we respectfully left the room. Regina and Lydia followed. Hilarious Larry died shortly thereafter. Peacefully, in his sleep, with Lily lying beside him. Actually, I have no idea whether or not his death was peaceful. All we know is that he died in his sleep. He had already passed away by the time the veterinarian arrived. We should not have sent for the vet, but for the priest.

For some reason the image of Larry’s deathbed hauntingly remains burned into my memory like a scorch that lingers in the vision from looking too long at the sun. And I mean the bed itself, the thing in which he had slept during his decade of retirement at the Lawrence Ranch. Think about the bed. It is a symbol of both birth and death. A bed is a lucky thing to be born in, and it is an even luckier thing in which to die. I suppose it is a blessing to have a death as quiet as Larry’s. It fit him. He was a creature of proud stoic resignation. I suppose that was why he was not afraid to die. Even if I manage to die in a bed, Gwen—which I suspect at this point I will—I do not expect my death to be like his. I am no Socrates,
nor even a Hilarious Larry. I know I will not die with such peaceful bravery and grace. I know that I am a coward, and I will probably die like a coward, in the same way we are all wrested from the womb in the first place: kicking and screaming. I am afraid of death. I fear it and I hate it. I hate death because I love life. It’s a morbid irony that an excess of love for life often leads one to a life dogged with fear and anger. Larry was not like that. He embraced death like a man reunited after a long separation with a childhood friend. Born in the jungle, raised in the circus, he died in a human house, in a bed. He turned his back on life and died himself a soft, domestic, taciturn death, not in his boots, but in his slippers. I cannot imagine myself doing that—at least not in the way he did it. Those who love life, who truly love it, love it to the point of jealousy, of rage, of sickness, of possessiveness and obsession—those who love life the most cannot help but be cowards. I suspect that I will die a violent and cowardly death, like a lover, even if I have to do it, like a lover, in bed.

There was a small funeral for Hilarious Larry several days later. His widow, Hilarious Lily, insisted on a Catholic service, even though Larry himself had never been a believer. It hardly matters: funerals are for the living. The service for him was held at the Sacred Heart of Mary Cathedral in Montrose. It was an old church, a rarity in the West. It was built in the nineteenth century with all the pomp and glory of old-fashioned religious architecture. It served a parish of mostly Mexican immigrants, and offered daily services in both English and Spanish. This was the church where Rita would take Lily on Sundays for confession and the service. Rita knew the priest—Father Malcolm—and Hilarious Lily’s face was familiar to him, always sitting beside Rita in the first or second pew from the pulpit, her hairy head lowered in sincere genuflection. Of course
he agreed to say the liturgy for her husband. Why shouldn’t an ape go to his God as well? If he truly believed Christ was King of Men, then does it not follow, if one is also able to accept that all men are apes, that Christ was also King of the Apes? Much like Tarzan? I don’t know what his logic was (not that there necessarily had to be any), but he performed Hilarious Larry’s funeral rites as seriously as he would have for a deceased human. As Saint Francis—who could make peace between men and animals—did not find it odd to preach to birds and baptize the wolf, Father Malcolm did not find it odd to say the liturgy for an ape.