The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (4 page)

“I’ll
have
to tell people about this,” says the woman with the video camera.

“Mommy?” says a little girl, “is the monkey raping the frog?”

“This is the monkey,” says the woman to her camera, “oh, wait, oh, see the frog, see the frog—”

“Just look at him goin’ at it!” says a man.

From somewhere up above us comes the laughter of a child, a bright pretty squeal of the stuff.

“Look at him
enjoying
this, this is so horrible!”

“Oh my God, it’s still alive,” someone says.

“Yeah, what’s crazy is the frog is still alive,” says the man, typically quick to interject the more emotionally detached factual analysis on an atrocity.

“Oh, and it’s still alive!” says the woman. “Oh, you poor thing—run away, little froggie, run away!”

Of course the frog didn’t make it. After my father shot his wad down the frog’s throat, he peeled it off and tossed it over his shoulder like a slob does a dirty sock, and slumped himself down for a postcoital nap on the spot.

The frog wasn’t dead, just maimed, violated, wounded beyond the help of modern medicine. I so vividly remember seeing that poor stupid animal staggering around, reeling, the victim of a brutal sexual assault, dragging its belly through the dirt on its weak legs, near death, pale sticky underbelly heaving in, out, sputtering, my father’s jizzom dribbling from its mouth. And I was overcome with sympathy for this creature. I am no savage, Gwen. My own heart bleeds when I see pain in another. The only humane thing left to do for this frog was to put it out of its misery: and so I scooped up the ravished frog and, swinging it by the legs, mercifully bashed out what little brains it had in its frog head by whacking it against a nearby log. This coup de grâce was uncharitably misinterpreted by the humans as a mere continuation and the natural culmination of the sickening orgy of sadoerotic torture that the
Pan troglodytes
were for whatever reason enacting upon this defenseless frog. At this point I think a woman at the ledge shielded her young daughter’s eyes with a hand of parental censorship.

My father, needless to say, with his cigarette-smoking and
frog-raping antics, was a local favorite among the primates at the Lincoln Park Zoo. His ill-gotten celebrity at the zoo outshone all the other residents of the Primate House, and oh God did he bask in that iniquitous limelight, the stupid narcissistic thug. They loved him at the zoo. Adored him. As I mentioned earlier, there were a few lowland gorillas living in the habitat across the hall from us, including a magisterial old silverback male whom I don’t believe I ever saw engaged in any activity other than dejectedly draping his massiveness over the structures in his habitat in various attitudes of languor so bored, so hopeless that they could have only arisen from a feeling of humiliation so complete as to reduce his life of confinement and public display to a flat stretch of days full of nothing but a dull yen for the only remaining passage of escape still availed him in the bittersweet promise of death. The miracle of my fate is that I was offered my release from just such a miserable life by the salvation of language. Quite literally, I talked my way out. But you could see, you could just
see
that fat old silverback’s regal eyes glistening with hatred for my father, hatred for all of Rotpeter’s zany performances, all his crowd-pleasing, repulsive clowning around, the way that self-debasing popinjay would prance up and down along the length of the chimp habitat right in front of the glass, banging on the window, hooting, clapping, stomping, clacking his teeth, making silly faces, doing the hear-no-see-no-speak-no-evil routine, peeling back his wet pink pinguid pithecine lips from his gums to reveal two rows of slimy yellow teeth, and slapping his palms on his chest and generally behaving for all the world like some sort of caricature of a chimpanzee, a loathsome self-parody, thus prompting the humans to point and giggle and ooglie-mooglie at him like the slavering idiot clods they were and
oh
, did they love him, the humans, how they would point at him behaving like a moron and then remark among themselves how
human
, how eerily strikingly
human
he looked (as if that was a compliment!). Look, look,
look
! Oh, honey, look at what he’s doing now! How almost
human
! And all the while that lazy indignant silverback gorilla across the hall (who never attracted a crowd because he never
did
anything) seethed with the desire to come over here and kick the shit out of him for all that repulsive singing and dancing—and wishing, of course, that he was not prevented from doing so by not one but two walls of three-inch-thick glass. But my father, but Rotpeter, oh, he was a primate’s primate all right, big hit with the humans: little ones, big ones, pretty ones, ugly ones, elderly and otherwise physically defective ones squeaking by in wheelchairs, handsome young couples holding hands, canoodling, pushing strollers containing
yet more
of their squiggling burbling spit-faced progeny to inherit and infest the earth and to one day, and it won’t be long, survive to celebrate the deaths of the last wild animals.

My feelings about the human race are complex. I love them and I hate them. More on this later. I’m telling you all this, I think, to underline the sense of relief, the feeling of having been specially selected for salvation that I felt when Lydia came to rescue me from having to spend the rest of my life in the company of these animals.

It is probably not a coincidence that I was the lowest-ranking male in the habitat. If I had been higher up on the dominance hierarchy I might not have wanted to leave as badly. But because I was the lowest rung on the ladder, I had nowhere to go but up. Or
out
, away. I fled. I fled into the arms of the human race, into the arms of a woman.

There must have been an aura of angelic luminescence encircling Lydia’s blond head, placed on those shoulders way up there on the very top of that long and beautiful human body. I saw her standing there in the doorway to the inside of our habitat—the
door painted to disappear into the wraparound mural of the jungle scene, the door the zookeepers used to enter the habitat at feeding time. The door opened, and there stood Lydia, accompanied by one of the brownshirts. My father furtively stepped on the cigarette he’d been smoking.

“Rotpeter!” the brownshirt barked.

Rotpeter shrugged his shoulders, like,
What?

“What have you got under your foot?”

Nothing,
he shrugged.

“Don’t give me that, I can smell it all over you—it stinks like a bar in here.”

“You let him smoke?” said Lydia, horrified.

“God no! He learned to smoke from watching people, and now some idiots still throw him cigarettes even though we put up a sign.”

“How does he light them?”

The brownshirt sighed in pained, embarrassed resignation. “He’s got a lighter hidden around here somewhere.”

Lydia gave the brownshirt a look that an intervening social worker might give a neglectful parent when she sees the home is cluttered with unhygienic detritus.

“Oh, you poor baby,” said Lydia to me, realizing at once the shameful extent of the ugliness, the neglect and emotional abuse I had suffered in this hellhole, this prison, this degrading and dehumanizing panopticon in which I had grown up.

And she bent down to me and again held out her arms, like a saint, and she called to me:

“Come here, Bruno. Come to me.”

I raced into her arms, planting kisses of gratitude on every exposed patch of that glabrous, supple, sweetly aromatic human flesh I could reach. She’d come back! Come back for me! She must love me, too!

My mother grunted at her and suspiciously licked a glob of filth off of her thumb. My mother always knew I had a thing for human girls, and strongly,
strongly
disapproved of it. Of course, it was difficult for even me to tell
precisely
what my mother was thinking because she was so disastrously inarticulate. Like most chimps, hers was a vocabulary consisting entirely of signs—grunts, gestures, noises, postures, faces, and so on—signifiers with amoebic and inconstant sets of signifieds depending entirely upon the ephemeral context of the immediately present moment. She had in her communicative arsenal not one thing that could truly be called a word, which I think of as a sort of compact ball of signification—the use of which can change depending on the situation, but the meaning of which is firmer and less psychologically elastic than a nonlinguistic sign. Yes, conversations between chimps certainly do occur, thoughts of a certain sort are indeed communicated between them, but it would be absolutely impossible to translate them into human language, because these nonlingual conversations occur outside the sphere of activity that is capturable by the tools of the text; these communications happen entirely within the Theatre of Cruelty, within the realm that is ineffable, a dreamlike mode of communication halfway between thought and gesture, based not in words but in mentality and physicality, in the raw language of the nonsymbolic sign.

I
suppose the time to divulge the nature of my earliest sexual stirrings is now, Gwen. I had not yet come into full sexual maturity at this time. As I said, I think I was about six years old. Chimps—especially those in captivity—reach puberty at a younger age than humans. I was an unusual case. I always have been.

The other chimps in the zoo were perfectly content to mate among their own species—it seemed only natural; I don’t think any of them really even gave it any serious thought. But even my earliest sexual proclivities lay elsewhere. My father couldn’t have cared less, but I believe my mother found this—in her view—
perversion
of mine deeply disturbing.

There was only one female chimp close to my age living in the habitat: little Céleste. I will describe Céleste for you carefully, because she played an important part both in the development of my early consciousness and in landing me in my current situation. I gather that it was hotly anticipated and hotly hoped among the zoo management that either I or else my elder brother, Cookie, would one day couple with Céleste and impregnate her, thereby furnishing the Lincoln Park Zoo with additional chimps. Céleste was acquired from the Indianapolis Zoo when she was two years
old and given to our poor aunt, who was as barren as Sarah, to raise as her own. (Keeping us apart for the first two years was a bulwark against the Westermarck effect, so that one day we might find each other sexually appetizing, as we had not been desensitized in early childhood to one another’s pheromones.) So Céleste was introduced to me when she was two years old, and I was three and a half.

Céleste never particularly bonded with Cookie, who was about eight years old at the time and much bigger than us, and was habitually boorish, brutal, and crude with her (Cookie took after our father in all the worst ways); but Céleste and I developed an adamantine emotional bond, a connection, primitive and deep, that needed no words to express it and needed none to understand. We often cuddled together in a warm tangle of slender hairy limbs, and, our two hearts, each the size of an avocado pit, beating softly in unison within a physical proximity of mere centimeters and our lazy young brains dopey with the natural tranquilizers of childhood love, we would fall asleep, in a nest of rushes, in a hot band of Chicago sunlight streaming through the window. Together, Céleste and I sweetly aped the bonding activities that we saw the grown-ups performing: with her fingers she would delicately pick the bugs and crumbs and weeds out of the fur on my back, and then she would turn around and let me do likewise unto her. We explored every inch of our habitat, Céleste and I, together we overturned everything in it that could be overturned, our young minds’ cups brimming over with environmental stimuli, the mysteries of existence rushing headlong into our eager consciousnesses.

I will relate one brief incident from my early childhood with Céleste, one of the few definite memories from this time in my prelinguistic life that I still carry with me, secreted away somewhere deep in the squiggly crevices of my tender electric brainflesh. I was playing with Céleste. We were playing with a hat. I don’t know
how it got into our habitat in the first place—it must have come in the same way as the frog, these curiosities, these artifacts from the outside world that accidentally wandered in to become such important semantemes in the early development of my consciousness. Most likely the wind had blown this hat off of the head of a zoogoer, across the moat, and into our habitat—this being the one American city to claim the apropos moniker of “the Windy.” But this hat—I now realize, as I reconstruct the memory knowing what I now know—was a woman’s hat, a woman’s sun hat. It was beige, wide-brimmed, shallow-crowned and flat, made of straw—tightly woven slats of thin shiny straw. It was festive, festooned with a wide band of diaphanous silk on which was printed a design of blue and red and purple flowers, which wrapped around the crown of the hat and was secured in place with a bow. Perhaps at the time Céleste and I imagined—as I now imagine—that this hat had previously lived on top of the head of a beautiful woman. There were even—as I recall—a few long threads of human hair caught in the interstices of the hat’s weave, possibly red hair, almost invisible except upon close viewing, sleek and strong, as long as my forearm and well-nigh impossible to break with the hands. This hat was a magical object to us, a portent from the gods lying on the ground: beautiful, weird, otherworldly, bright.