The Sacred Beasts (13 page)

“Really?”

“Your cosmic calm. You’re always so charismatically at ease. You
weren’t when I met you.”

“Oh, no, I was demonic.”

“So last night, I asked for your demons again.”

“Is this what we’ll be together?”

“Angelic and demonic.”

“Our roles again?”

“As in art, so in love.” She is serious, no longer playing.
“Haven’t you found it so?”

“Mmm. But . . . more often angelic.” She looks at me fondly,
tenderly. Yes, she is a lovely kitten today, and it is as natural as what
happened last night. “To breakfast, to eat,” I conclude. Silently, I decide: I
have come for the wildlife, so I cannot complain that it is too wild for me.

When we have moved our equipment into the jeep, I hardly know
where we will go. The world has opened its arms to me, as it always does when
my whole being is quickened to beauty and love, and immediately, I want to
work. The endlessly disturbing question of how to live is only a matter, after
all, of love and work. Paradise is no more and no less than these, and it is as
true for women as for men. Only in the pleasure of these primal acts and their
spiritual flashes of selflessness, do we revere the earth enough to protect it.
Truth is ultimately simpler than illusion; it pleases the classicist and
derails the romantic.

We can probably work best on the banks of one of Doñana’s lakes.
Which one? They are all beautiful and very different from one another. Some
plunge into the forests and carry their diverse life; others lie both within
and outside the preserve. Their waters are different colors, which will
interest Sylvie. Charco de Toro has forbiddingly black waters. Lake Tarje has
purple silt in the spring; leading away from it are trails of pale lilac. Santa
Olalla, where we have already camped, has green waters. When the wind gusts and
rips the surface, it turns into a bed of sheer green foam. I decide that we
will camp tonight beside Lake Tarje, where the tamarisks grow.

When we are settled beside the lake, I find, not surprisingly,
that my sensors and cameras from our previous campsite have excellent footage
of deer, both from the present and from spring. I immediately give it to
Sylvie, since she has never seen their life cycle.

Then we are absorbed in our work for many hours. From time to
time, one of us looks up at the other. When this happens, we always know we are
being observed and feel a glow of delight. It is much as though we are sharing
the same thoughts.

As footage of animals passes before my eyes, I see only Sylvie’s
beauty. It seems to hold different images in differing contexts. In daylight,
the exoticism of her face, coloring and simple tunics make me think of the
women of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Persia, even South Asia. In bright
sunlight, it is a profusion that gleams and scatters itself into the world like
light. At night, her beauty is a unified force of tremendous power. Would I
ever be able to resist her? At night, I must merge with her yet by day, she is
a perfect sculpture I can turn about in my vision and thoughts, always
different yet always exquisite. She often sketches while lying on her side, and
then I cannot take my eyes away from her.

I do not mention her beauty to her, as I sense
she has heard too much about it from men and has not wanted what inevitably
follows. I am not surprised by her ambivalence toward men. I have long
suspected that extremely beautiful women do not draw the best out of men, but
the worst.

In the late afternoon, when I am totally absorbed in my work, I
look up and find that she has disappeared. For a moment, I am alarmed. As I
look around, her arms embrace my back and I feel her lips on my neck: she has
been directly behind me all along. “I don’t think I have ever been so happy and
so exhausted at the same time,” she says, her head resting on my back.

“Me, too,” I say. “We have to sleep tonight. Even paradise has its
limits.” She nods her head as her arms embrace my waist, and I feel a peaceful
ecstasy. “I would love to see your drawings,” I say. She places her pad of
paper beside my leg, and I see immediately that she has chosen images from the
spring.

The first drawing shows a family of deer at dusk. They are seen
from the rear as they leave the tall grasses of the scrublands to graze. Here
is the regal solemnity and powerful girth of the stag with his huge antlers
piercing the sky in arcs like elegant cups. The doe is caught in a dancer-like
pose whose round-curving withers pick up the sinuous lines of the stag as the
two merge into the landscape. Awkwardly and charmingly, the faun follows on
thin, ungainly legs, his ears as large, upright and expressive as a
jackrabbit’s.

The light of late sunset strikes the long stalks of weeds and wild
grasses that oppose the family’s movement as they leave the scene, creating the
contrary force that perfects the drawing’s composition. The suggestion is
ephemeral beauty: enclosing this brief moment, nature destroys the original
scene like a Tibetan mandala of colored gravel that is continually created and
destroyed.

Sylvie’s second drawing is a rare view of the faun’s head as he
looks directly into the camera. The dusk places his face in umber shadow. From
this gentle darkness faintly rise the beginnings of new horns covered with
fuzz. The faun has immense soft ears that lean out of the shadow for a touch of
dusky light. The huge brown eyes beneath long lashes are full of tenderness.
The nose is large and soft, and the subtlety and delicacy of the whole drawing
is breath taking. Tall stalks of wild grass and scrub throw a plethora of green
lines over the scene, as though a celebration of youth was implicit. The
drawing is another ephemeral moment, a still point that is resonant and eternal
while its subject may no longer exist.

“It seems so effortless for you,” I say. “I am beginning to think
you are a genius.”

“There’s nothing like great love to make you one,” she sighs and
we laugh.

“No, I don’t think it works quite like that, though it’s a damned
good warm-up.”

After a late bath, then dinner and wine, I pitch a waterproof tent
with flooring for us. Huge thunderclouds darken the sunset, and the night or
the morning will surely bring rain. Then, silent, nude and innocent as
children, we fall asleep in one another’s arms and awaken perhaps ten hours
later to an afternoon sky that is pouring rain. We look out of the tent to
heaving greenery and the ripe odors of wet mud. The tent is dry and has
protected us well. Beyond the aperture of the tent is a world of continuous
movement from infinitely small, shining green surfaces that delight us, the sky
seemingly at war with the ground.

“I would never have known what a gorgeous place this is to be in a
storm,” Sylvie says.

“We can even bathe just outside. Want to?”

I follow Sylvie out the front of the tent and we laugh and wash
ourselves in the torrent. We can even brush our teeth in this downpour. Then we
kiss and hold one another, our hands sliding everywhere. There is surely no one
to see us today. Without bearings in the intense downpour, the rain seems to
wash away some strata of our minds: we are again animals in passionate union
with the world and one another. I am not surprised when she pulls me down to
the ground and we make love in streams of water, mud and grass. Her legs slide
over my shoulders and she instantly climaxes again and again. Our senses
register nothing but the blind urgings of our bodies and the world’s rough
deluge upon us. I have no sense of time passing until we begin to laugh. Then
we are nothing but bodies lunging together and laughing. The laughter is much
like orgasm, too, and then a single thought breaks into my consciousness. “Into
the tent, wildwoman,” I say. We stand up and take a now very necessary bath in
the rain and lunge into the tent, still laughing. Laughing and wrestling with
one another on the tent floor like Greek soldiers, she gives me one climax
after another until we are unconscious.

And we awaken into a universe of such silence and peace that I
scarcely know where I am. It is no longer raining, and slowly the sounds of
wind, birds and insects, and water lapping in the lake break into my
consciousness. I rise and walk out of the tent into a world of such sharp
sensations that I can remember how it feels to be a child. My body gives me
jagged pangs of hunger and equally intense pangs of love for the earth: they
are as natural and definitive as sexual passion. The rain has just ended, and
the world is burgeoning into a dark red sunset and sliver of moon. Sylvie joins
me and we hold one another in this darkly bleeding light that has the pure
clarity of childhood. “We’ve been reborn,” I say, “and we’ve gone crazy.” I
kiss her forehead.

“I love this craziness,” she says.

“
Krasna život!
to the beauty of it.”

“God yes,
krasna život!”

“What will it do for your art?’

“Good things, wonderful things. I’ll draw that rainstorm, then two
women naked, laughing and fighting on the floor of a tent—except I’ll take out
the tent. They’ll fight in the night sky. What will it do for your science?”

“Good things, too. Great warm-up. When I publish my research on
Doñana, I’ll have to list you as co-author for your outstanding contributions.
Too bad Jane Goodall didn’t have you along.”

We laugh so long and hard we nearly can’t stop. “Shush, we’re
going to start having orgasms from laughter again.” Then we are silent and look
only at one another. We are lovers and strangers, for she is the one who can
make the world turn, rush, become a delirium. She can annihilate my mind until
I am lost in a world of violent beauty. We no longer care what will happen to
us: There’s the bliss of it.

We say little and are full of tenderness for one another as we
prepare our dinner, then eat and drink wine over the fire, listening to the
sounds of the night, somehow much softer now. Finally, the time seems right for
me to tell Sylvie what she must know, what I hope will protect her. “Can we
possibly have made love enough so that I can think in your presence? I’m not
sure, but it’s worth a try,” I say. “This bed-time story is in fact a lecture I
have never delivered entitled ‘Who We Are, Where We Come From, and Where We Are
Going, Fast.’” Yes, her eyes are following mine with interest. “Don’t be
surprised if the voice of the old professor takes over. I’ve taught students
for so many years that I can’t express scientific ideas in a casual way
anymore.

“To begin with, being lesbian, gay or bisexual is genetic, a part
of normal human sexual variation. Since it is a complex behavior and
undoubtedly involves several genes, we prove this through twin studies. In men,
the prevalence of homosexuality has been compared between identical twins,
fraternal twins and siblings. If a trait is genetic, identical twins will show
it most frequently, fraternal twins somewhat less and siblings least. This is
true of homosexuality, and it demonstrates the genetic basis even if we do not
know the genes involved yet. The exact function is unknown, though it must be
consistent with what we know of evolution. The possibilities are these: we know
for a fact that bisexuality is the norm in the chimpanzee species closest to us
genetically, so we have the genetic endowment from that source. Homosexuality
or bisexuality can be (or have been) a means of reducing the destructiveness of
male aggression since that is its main function in chimps. There are
cross-cultural anthropological studies that show the presence of gay men
reducing male aggression in many types of human society. It can also be (or
have been) a population control device for prehuman groups that were small and
arboreal. There is some evidence for this in studies of sibling gender and
birth order in the families that have gay sons (i.e. the more sons, the greater
probability that the youngest will be gay), as well as a mother’s age at her
child’s inception in families that have lesbian daughters (i.e. the older the
mother, the greater the probability of a lesbian daughter).

“Less parsimoniously and more speculatively,
it could be that evolution favors a certain number of individuals who do not
reproduce and raise children because they spend their lives making unusual
contributions to human civilization. There is some evidence for this. The
original Kinsey data from the 1950s, for example, found that lesbianism was
strongly correlated to higher I.Q., though there was no correlation in either
direction for gay men. On the other hand, history is full of gay men who were
clearly geniuses—Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Handel,
Henry James, Alan Turing, etc. The list is endless, and some of the most
brilliant periods of human civilization, such as that of the ancient Greeks,
were primarily homosexual or bisexual. Gay people—male and female—are well
represented among the people who have most influenced our civilization. I am
most convinced by our genetic endowment from the chimps and the function of
homosexuality as a male aggression control mechanism. As a scientist, I must
conclude that the more speculative idea is fluff, but
very
interesting
fluff, to say the least, and the jury is out on its relevance.

“What we
do
know scientifically concerns human sexuality
and the characteristics of long-term human relationships. We know from very
recent research by experimental psychologists that when we evaluate long-term
gay relationships, male and female, we find that they compare favorably to
those of heterosexual married couples. In heterosexual marriage, the political
and economic dominance of men and the lower status of women are harmful to a
continuous loving relationship, according to these researchers, and gay and
lesbian couples, who are much more egalitarian, are well ahead on all indices
of mental health.”