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Prologue
So there we were on that ice floe, just the two of us, adrift in the polar night. Viskovitz turned and said, "I'd like you to get our conversation down in black and white."
"It's not possible," I answered. "I'm not a typist. I'm not a writer. I'm a penguin. As far as I'm concerned, 'getting it down in black and white' means making more penguins."
So instead there I was a month later, standing still with an egg under my belly, remembering . . .
I was the one who had brought up the subject.
How's Life Treating You, Viskovitz?
There's nothing more boring than life, nothing more depressing than light, nothing more bogus than reality. For me every waking was a dying--living was being dead.
Jana squeaked, "Wake up, Visko! It's May! They'll end up getting all the best acorns."
With great difficulty I stretched and grudgingly opened one eye. Because in spite of everything, you have to live.
"Just a minute," I croaked. "I have to thaw out."
It was the end of an eight-month hibernation. I was waking up in the gray hereafter, the underworld of dormice.
In the darkness of the den I made out topiform shadows tottering past piles of slumberers, heading out of this sepulcher--souls of those who had passed on, who were transmigrating into wakefulness. As was I.
I rolled onto one side, and all the bones of my mortal remains creaked. I began to recognize the familiar outlines of members of my tribe--nephews, nieces, grandnephews and grandnieces, grandparents and great-grandparents, parents and parents-in-law. Some of them were catching forty more winks, curled up under their long furry tails. They were groaning as they gave themselves over to that devastating pleasure.
As my metabolism got into gear I was tortured by pains in my joints, by dehydration, by the distress of every single cell. It was the agony of reawakening, of a torment that would last another four months until the next hibernation. At a time like this there's only hunger that gives you the strength to get to your feet--the knowledge that if you don't fatten up, you won't be able to get back to sleep.
"Up and at 'em!" I said to myself. "At your age you can reasonably expect another three hibernations. And it would be a shame, old dormouse, to miss out on them."
Like a zombie, I hoisted up my body--worn out, wooden, deprived of fats and spirit--and shoved it awkwardly in the direction of the light. My eyes watered in the glare.
"You're thin as a pin, Visko," Jana shouted at me. "Come on--let's go gather acorns." For years she'd been the mate to whom I'd been faithful, not out of any monogamous inclination--which we dormice frankly do not have--but out of laziness and a desire to be bored. She was the ugliest and most depressing female of the whole community, the silliest and most tedious. I'd chosen her for exactly that. Because only a life made up of boredom and frustration leads to fulfilling and magnificent dreams. And those are the moments that count. If the hereafter--that is, wakefulness--is hell, then life--that is, dreaming--will be paradise. Not the other way around.
I didn't feel like venturing out in the branches, so I spied a couple of acorns that had landed on the ground and, at a prudently slow pace, lowered myself along the trunk. I staggered up to one of the nuts, tore off the cap with my paws and sank my molars into the ripe cotyledon. I immediately felt better.
My den was the former nest of a woodpecker hollowed out of a sessiliflore oak. We'd been passing it down in our family for generations. It bore the most fruit of any tree in the woods; all it took to make it to the fall was to pick it clean. My children were already working at it, idly stretched out in the branches. With paternal satisfaction I appreciated their indolent lounging, their dull eyes, their stubborn resistance to life. Then I set off toward the lakeshore.
Because another thing you have to do while you're awake, besides putting on some fat and trying to bore yourself, is to store up oneiric material for the next hibernation. For this we dormice always make the rounds of the most enchanting places. We're looking for inspiration for our stories--characters, incidents. There is yet another way of enriching your imagination, and that is to listen to someone else's dreams, hoping to find in them some idea you can copy. That's what Zucotic, Petrovic and Lopez were doing as they sprawled in a patch of sun under an oak, sweeping up fallen acorns with their tails.
"Good to see you up, Viskovitz," Lopez said. "So tell us how it went."
I cut him off. "Talking wears me out."
There was nothing I could learn from them. Lopez's dreams were horror stories in which everyone ended up in the fangs of a weasel or an otter. In Petrovic's, on the other hand, there were dormice who killed everyone only to end up getting killed by Petrovic himself, one after another, bite by bite. Zucotic, poor guy, suffered from insomnia. If you heard a voice coming from the other world while you were sleeping, it was always him.
My own dreams weren't ones you could talk about in public. They were always about a certain female dormouse, and I can assure you it wasn't Jana. A she-dormouse who exists only in dreams--the masterpiece of my imagination. It had taken me years of ugliness and frustration to succeed in imagining that absolute perfection of murine features, that exact combination of sanctity and sin. I had made her as beautiful as sleep, as seductive as a yawn, as soft as a pillow.
And I named her Ljuba.
Thinking of her always gave me an abrupt and deep desire to sleep. I took three more steps and collapsed next to a tree trunk, out for the count . . .
I found her where I'd left her, in the tropical forest I'd dreamed for her, among hibiscus flowers in the shade of acacias, that fairyland habitat where there are no noises, only music; no odors, only perfume; no uphill, only downhill. There was nothing to poke you and nothing hard to bump into. Everything, even the tree trunks, was lined with furs, flower petals and feathers. There were no predators or rivals. There was no male besides me, and there was no other god but Viskovitz.
I greeted her with a zi-zi, our dormouse love-call. Then, coming down from a banana tree, I approached, gorgeous and indolent as a rodent god.
"I'm back, my love," I squeaked. "I'm here only for you."
"Right now I have things to do, Visko," she said, sighing. "I'm looking for an oak tree. It's not easy finding an acorn or a beechnut in the middle of these banana trees."
"You have only to ask," I told her, and with a single act of my imagination I made three acorns pop out of the ground, big as watermelons, without any cap and without any husk. Like all enlightened dormice, I knew how to dream while being conscious of dreaming. That made each of these instants immensely richer.
"But now, my treasure, come take care of me," I ordered. "I don't have a whole hibernation to play around with, just a little nap. Look at that bed of blossoms, it seems to me an ideal place . . ."
"No, Visko."
"No?"
It isn't pleasant to hear someone say no to you in your own dream. Not withstanding the progress I'd make in training my oneiric creativity, I hadn't yet succeeded in subjecting to my control a strong character such as I'd given Ljuba. She gave me no rest.
"I'm tired of being treated like a little doll and obeying your whims," she snorted, shaking her whiskers. "It's easy for you. For you this is only a dream, and you can do anything you want with it. For me it's the only life I have--I want you to let me live it . . ."
"You know it's not your only life--you know I'll bring you back to life in every dream I'll
have."
"Sure, they all say that. Meanwhile, you don't give me the time to eat or express a thought. You make me live in this ridiculous soporific world of yours, without dormice, without oak trees, in this eternal dusk. You don't let me have babies, you don't let me have a life of my own . . ."
"But I let you dream . . ."
"Oh, right--but what can I dream if all I know is this fairy-tale world of yours?"
"Let's not argue about it now, my treasure, I really have just a little time. Cheer up and come over here."
"No, Visko."
As usual, it ended up that to make her feel "alive," as she called it, I had to dream all the vulgarities of life for her: sunrise, oaks, beeches, and maybe even Zucotic. I was more tired than when I fell asleep. It took at least an hour for Ljuba to come close enough to me to let me feel the touch of her sweet-smelling fur. Then she slowly stretched out on the moss in a come-hither way and mewed two provocative zi-zi.
"No, Ljuba," I warned her. "You know that's not what I want."
The problem with Ljuba was that she never wanted to do with me those things that boy and girl dormice do in dreams--that is, sleep. To share the magic moment of nodding off, the wickedness of yawning, the passion of dozing, the final fusion of bodies in one devastating slumber, the fusion of souls in a single triumphant dream.
When she was with me, she wanted to gather nuts, make love, have children and all those banalities. But at the crucial moment, just when her eyelids were beginning to close, she always refused to let herself go. So it always ended with my having to do without that perfect pleasure, and this time, too, seemed it wasn't going to be any different.
But she started by saying, “Okay, Visko. I want to make you happy. Let’s do it. This time it suits me, too.”
I couldn't believe my ears.
Suddenly I felt a paw on my neck and I woke up. I was understandably furious. If I'd had the strength I would have been capable of murder. Anyone who wakes you up doesn't deserve anything else. A big sack of fur was weighing me down.
"Visko!" I heard it squeak.
It was a familiar voice. I lifted my muzzle and saw a female dormouse. I said to myself, "What the hell's going on?" Not only was she absolutely gorgeous, but she was more like Ljuba than Ljuba herself. She was the quintessence of Ljuba.
"There are you, Viskovitz, the one who's always dreaming me," she said, chuckling.
I looked around, perplexed. What was Ljuba doing in reality? "Ljuba? What are you doing here?"
"I told you I wanted to do what you asked me to, but I prefer to do it here, not in that silly dream."
If this was a joke, it was truly in poor taste. I'd heard people say that reality is a dream, but I'd never believed it: who could be so perverse as to make a dream out of stuff like that?
"I don't know who sent you, Ljuba, but they've certainly made a mistake. Look, this is no place for you. Do you smell that stench? It's acid rain, nitrates, sulfur. Every square inch of this neighborhood is polluted. Here you have to wear yourself out to live. It's full of noise, disease. There are martens, owls, weasels. There's man. I have an extremely jealous mate and fourteen children. It's a cursed reality, Ljuba, you'll never be happy here, you'll never find peace . . ."
"That's not necessarily so . . ."
"Believe me, sweetness."
"Not anymore, Visko."
"Not anymore?"
She curled her tiny lips in an enigmatic sweet smile and squeaked out: "All this exists only because I have chosen to imagine it, Visko. This isn't 'life,' it's my hibernation. The reason you were always dreaming me is that I willed it. I didn't ever tell you because I wanted it to come as a surprise. It amused me to toy with you."
"That's good, that's really good. And I suppose you dreamed Jana, Zucotic and all the others?"
"Certainly. I made them such losers because I wanted you all to myself, dear. You don't believe it? Watch this."
Before my eyes I saw three acorns pop out of the ground--big as watermelons, without caps, without husks.
"Until today, Visko, I was too shy. It's not easy to go up to someone and say, 'You're the dormouse of my dreams.' I wanted you to look for me, I wanted you to dream me. I wanted to test you. Now I know that you love me, my treasure, I'm not afraid. I want to make you happy. We don't have any more time to lose, Visko, all dreams come to an end. Come."
She made a bed of chamomile blossoms appear, and she lay down on it.
"The reality is that I am even lazier and sleepier than you, Visko, and there is nothing I wish for more than to sleep in your arms, than to hear you snore in my sleep." She opened her mouth in a yawn that was so brazenly open it seemed that her very soul would slip out . . .
Exulting, I melted away. I didn't fully understand who was dreaming whom, but under my fur, my heart dissolved in an ocean of blessedness. With one thankful blink of my eyelids, I blessed all that dreariness--that foul lake and that polluted forest, that suffocating air and that sterile earth. That whole desolate worn-out world: only a yawn away from bliss.
But Don't You Ever Think of Sex, Viskovitz?
Sex? I didn't even know I had one. Imagine when they told me I had two of them.
"We snails, Visko," my old ones explained to me, "are insufficient hermaphrodites--"
"How disgusting!" I shrieked. "Even our family?"
"Certainly, sonny. We are able to fulfill both the masculine function as well as the feminine one. There's nothing to be ashamed of." With his radula, he pointed to my two tools.
"And how come insufficient?"
"Because we can couple only with other snails, if there is a reciprocal inclination, but never with ourselves."
"Says who?"
"Our faith, Visko. The other nasty thing is a mortal sin. Even to think of it," Daddymommy warned.
"And it is also impure conduct to shut yourself up in the shell, talk to yourself and be too pleased with yourself," added Mommydaddy.
A shudder of terror rippled my mantle.
"It's high time you started looking around for a good match; the reproductive season lasts only a few weeks."
Perplexed, I stretched out my tentacles in various directions. "But the nearest snails are months away!"
"You're mistaken, sonny, there are some excellent young ones in the neighborhood."
But nearby I could see just Zucotic, Petrovic and Lopez, my old schoolmates.
"You must be joking. You don't think that I--"
"They come from good families, with a pretty good genetic inheritance and good evolutionary prospects. Beauty isn't everything, Visko."
"But have you looked at them?" I pointed my rhinophor toward Zucotic, a gaunt gastropod with a shell that was practically clypeiform, an invaginated eye, an atrophied ctenidium. He revolted even predators. Did they really want to have grandchildren like this?
"With time you'll change your mind. You'll see. We snails have a saying: 'Love thy neighbor, because he who is far away will remain so.'"
"I'd rather be dead." I said goodbye and retreated inside my shell. I carefully closed the operculum and sealed it with calcified salts, because one never knows.
"It's not done to lock yourself inside the shell, little Visko, people will think ill of it." The hell with people.
In the days that followed, for one reason or another, I was unable to think of anything but sex, or the sexes, that is.
It began as indefinable itches, little hormonal disturbances that made my gaze linger on the folds of some snails' mantles, trying to guess their shape under the shell, admiring the undulations of their feet. Nothing to be sick about, you understand, or to lose sleep over. Some of the snails in the garden were not bad, morphologically speaking, but snails who really suited my purpose, who had the class and the zoometric requisites to go with a Viskovitz, were nowhere to be found. I came to the conclusion, therefore, that they did not exist and that probably none had ever been born.
I was mistaken.
Her majesty the gastropodic beauty appeared suddenly among the heads of lettuce. He was rather distant, but I made out her breathtaking profile voluptuously spread out in the sun, the generous shapes barely contained by the trim shell.
Parbleu!
Bewitched, I stopped sleeping and eating. For my ocular antennae there suddenly was only she-he. I began to secrete mucus for no reason. But what could I do? My flame was at least two snail-years away! If I sprinted off then and there and started running like mad, even forgoing hibernation, I would still get there old and decrepit.
Unless . . . yes. I was thinking just that. What madness. What if she-he started running toward me? In that case, the point of contact would be among the squash blossoms, and we would unite as two middle-aged snails. The more I thought about it, the more I was seduced by the romantic grandeur of that gesture. I was consumed with yearning and anticipation. The sacrifice of youth for love's promise. And wasn't love always a great wager?
Was she-he looking? He-she was looking. Clearly, she-he had noticed me. It was very, very clear. You had to be bivalve not to get the signs of willingness that he-she was sending with his-her antennae.
"Viskoooo!" shouted Mommydaddy. "It's not good to talk to yourself. People will think ill of it."
"Let them think."
"Pull yourself together! Mr. Lopez is coming to visit."
Lopez was closing in frantically, drooling mucus and slipping in it, his face convulsed with lust, with dilated osfredia, a drooping mesenchyma, a flaccid radula, panting, and now only two days away from me. Moreover, a few more hours away, Petrovic and Zucotic were charging in my direction, set on a death race to have me, to pleasure themselves with my young body. I felt a chill in my hemolymph, and my palleale cavity stiffened. I extruded my esophagus in a spasm of horror.
I turned my eyes toward the lettuce and in an instant--one of those instants in which a life is determined--the choice was made.
"I'm coming!" I shouted.
And she-he also set him-herself in motion.
After six months of running I was a wreck.
Passionate impulses are not for mollusks, especially us snails. I had rashes on my squamae, and my mesenchyma was in pieces. With the end of the reproductive season, the hormonal levels had dropped, and the romantic agitations had dropped with them. Youth had vanished, and my mucus was drying up.
I could see my body changing faster than the view. If life is a race against time, well, one thing is certain, against us snails time is the odds-on favorite.
At the start of my journey, I had deluded myself that, worst-case scenario, I would have at least seen the world, virgin territories and foreign cultures inches-upon-inches away. But I was coming to see that the whole world was vegetables. I had deluded myself that I could make a clean break with the past, but every time I turned my antennae, relatives and acquaintances were there, wearing disapproving and furious expressions, their stares loaded with reproof. The snails of our childhood are forever in our field of vision, as are those of our old age. Casual meetings don't exist for us, nor does privacy. It is clear, then, why one needs a shell, despite the trouble of having to lug it around on one's back.
But I kept running toward him-her, sighing and dreaming with eyes wide open, at night, under the moon, with the scent of parsley and the wind's caress on my squamae. And she-he also was coming toward me. That was all that mattered.
Winter came, and after three months, spring and the buds of the first squash blossoms.
And then, the long-awaited moment.
I was dismayed, the world had crumbled under my foot. No wonder he-she was coming toward me, was responding to my calls. She-he was my reflected image. I circled the spigot and saw myself quietly weeping my last drops of mucus. Poor Viskovitz. I felt for me an infinite tenderness. Then I leaned on that chromed surface and began to howl with laughter.
What else could I do? I was laughing. No. We were laughing. But my image immediately became serious and began to look at me attentively. How beautiful I was! So pliably feminine and vigorously virile. I couldn't tear my eyes away from myself: I was still a superb animal, probably the most attractive one who had ever existed, extraordinarily sexy for a mollusk. A sensual radula on squamae out of a fairy tale, an elastic and compact physique, a shell that was camouflaged but elegant, and reproductive equipment . . . Parbleu! In an instant the meaning of this event was clear to me. I timidly bent my ocular antennae toward each other, and for the first time my right pupil stared into my left one. I felt the short circuit, the shudder in my soul, and was able to stammer only one banal sentence:
"I love you, Viskovitz."
"Me too, silly."
With my radula I delicately caressed my pneumostome, with the distal part of my foot I brushed the proximal. I felt the warm pressure of the rhinophor slipping under my shell, and a strong agitation froze the center of my being. "Oh, heavens! What am I doing?" I stammered. But I gave myself up to my embrace, I clung to my flesh. Inebriated with desire, I pressed myself to me, I throbbed at the clammy touch of my epidermis, I drank of the viscous liquid of mucus, greedily straining to possess those adorable limbs. I clutched them desperately.
When I was done, I realized that in the frenzy I had come out of my shell and was lying on my back, with my sexes waving in the breeze. And that everyone's eyes were aimed at me. In a half-foot radius alone there were three families of snails, and you can imagine their reactions.
"How gross. What a thing to have to see!" a neighbor complained.
"You will be damned forever, Viskovitz," snapped another. They yelled at their children to turn the other way, but they themselves took care not to turn their antennae.
"We will teach you a lesson," they threatened. As if a snail had ever beaten up another snail. I had taken enough abuse, so instead of retiring inside my shell, I stood up before them.
"Insufficient hermaphrodites yourseeeeeelves!" I screamed at those hypocrites.
The days that followed were the happiest of my life. The spring breeze had brought the homage of two big yellow petals, and I languidly stretched myself on them and bathed myself in their scent, happy to be a mollusk and in love. I had taken this new abode in place of my shell, too unsuited to the complex geometry of hermaphrodite eroticism. But my story had not stopped causing scandal:
"This is nothing but a typical example of the collapse of gastropodic society," said one. "The 'I' has replaced society, and the narcissistic personality triumphs. We are falling back on the personal and the private."
I confess that I was falling back on my privates rather willingly. It was one of the few advantages of not having a spine.
And there were those who sought to psychoanalyze me: "When you have secondary narcissism, frustrated love turns on itself and gives birth to delusions of grandeur, to the overestimation of the self. The 'I' believes itself to be God."
No, it had never occurred to me that I was God. If anything, He was the one who started those rumors.
"The advancement of old age shatters the dream of the blessed extension of childhood's omnipotence, and the self-protective mechanism of narcissism breaks down . . ."
I had to admit that I hated growing old. Old age made me become jealous. More than once I had caught myself fantasizing about a younger snail, and my heart had broken to pieces. Naturally I was that snail, my youthful image spread out on the lettuce, but that didn't make the pain any less. During such moments I locked myself in my shell and wept. I wasn't loving myself back. My eyes weren't looking at each other anymore.
But life went on, there was no getting around it--I was pregnant. I lived in terror that the stories about the dangers of self-fertilization were true, and that I would bear monsters. Types with a turreted shell or with a bifid foot who would make me feel guilty for the rest of my days.
I was mistaken.
As soon as I saw the tiny shell of my newborn son, Viskovitz, I recognized it. Her majesty the gastropodic beauty. He was the perfect copy of her parent, more like a divinity than a mollusk. So tiny it looked like a snail seen from a distance, that snail seen from a distance. How beautiful she was! I delicately caressed his pneumostome, with the distal part of my foot I caressed her proximal . . .
"I love you, Viskovitz," he answered.
As in fairy tales, love triumphed. But this time there would be no end. There would never be an end.
"How gross! The things we have to see!" a neighbor complained.
You're Losing Your Head, Viskovitz
I asked my mother, "What was Daddy like?"
"Crunchy, a bit salty, rich in fiber."
"Before you ate him, I mean."
"He was a little guy, insecure, anxious, neurotic--pretty much like all you baby boys."
I felt closer than ever to the parent I had never known, who'd been dissolved in Mom's stomach just as I was being conceived. From whom I had gotten not nurturing but nourishment. I thought, Thank you, Dad. I know what it means for a mantis to sacrifice himself for the family.
I stood still for a moment of recollection before his tomb, that is to say my mother, and said a Miserere.
After a bit, since thinking about death never failed to give me an erection, I figured that the time had come to catch up with Ljuba, the insect I loved. I'd met her about a month earlier at my sister's wedding, which was also my brother-in-law's funeral. And I'd remained a prisoner of her cruel beauty. Since then we'd kept on seeing each other. How had that been possible? God had blessed me with the most precious gift he could give a mantis: premature ejaculation. A necessary condition for any love story that isn't ephemeral. The first week I'd lost a pair of legs, my pincers. The second week the prothorax with the connectors for flying. The third week . . .
My friends Zukotic, Petrovic and Lopez started yelling from the higher branches where they'd settled: "Don't do it, Visko, for the love of heaven!" For them, females were the devil, misogyny their mission. They had been sexually deviant or dysfunctional since metamorphosis. They had taken priestly vows, and they spent the whole blessed day chewing petals and reciting psalms. They were very religious.
But there wasn't a prayer that could stop me, not once I heard the icy sigh of my mistress, the hollow rustling of her membranes, her funereal, mocking laugh. I moved frenetically in the direction of those sounds with the one leg I had left, using my erection as a crutch, making every effort to visualize the glory of her curvaceous shape, which I couldn't see since I no longer had ocelli, which I couldn't smell since I no longer had antennae, which I couldn't kiss since I no longer had palpi.
By now I'd lost my head.
Excerpted from You're an Animal, Viskovitz! by
Alessandro Boffa.
Copyright 2002 by Alessandro Boffa. Excerpted by
permission of Knopf,
a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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