Beatrice and Virgil (10 page)

   There is no excuse for bad work. To ruin an animal    with shoddy taxidermy is to forfeit the only true canvas we have on which to represent it, and it condemns us to amnesia, ignorance and incomprehension.

   There was a time when every good family brightened up its living room with a mounted animal or a case of birds, some representative from the forest that remained in the home while the forest retreated. That business has all dried up, not only the collecting but the preserving. Now the living room is likely to be dull and the forest silent.

   Is there a level of barbarism involved in taxidermy? I see none. Or only if one lives a life entirely sheltered from death in which one never looks into the back room of a butcher shop, or the operating room of a hospital, or the working room of a funeral parlour. Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body. It is from there that both babies and cancers are born. To ignore death, then, is to ignore life. I no more mind the smell of an animal's carcass than I do the smell of a field; both are natural and each has its attaching particularity.

   And let me repeat: taxidermists do not create a demand. We merely preserve a result. I have never hunted in my life and have no interest in the pursuit. I would never harm an animal. They are my friends. When I work on an animal, I work in the knowledge that nothing I do can alter its life, which is past. What I am actually doing is extracting and refining memory from death. In that, I am no different from a historian, who parses through the material evidence of the past in an attempt to reconstruct it and then    understand it. Every animal I have mounted has been an interpretation of the past. I am a historian, dealing with an animal's past; the zookeeper is a politician, dealing with an animal's present; and everyone else is a citizen who must decide on that animal's future. So you see, we are dealing here with matters so much weightier than what to do with a dusty stuffed duck inherited from an uncle.

   I should mention a development of the last few years, what has been called art taxidermy. Art taxidermists seek not to imitate nature but to create new, impossible species. They--that is, the artist directing the taxidermist--attach one part of an animal to another part of another, so the head of a sheep to the body of a dog, or the head of a rabbit to the body of a chicken, or the head of a bull to the body of an ostrich, and so on. The combinations are endless, often ghoulish, at times disturbing. I don't know what they mean to do. They are no longer exploring animal nature, that is clear. I think they are rather exploring human nature, often at its most tortured. I cannot say it is to my taste, it certainly goes against my training, but what of that? It continues a dialogue with animals, however odd, and must serve the purpose of some people.

   Insects are the eternal enemy of taxidermy and have to be exterminated at every stage. Our other enemies are dust and excessive sunlight. But the worst enemy of taxidermy, and also of animals, is indifference. The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals.

   I became a taxidermist because of the writer Gustave Flaubert. It was his story "The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator" that inspired me. My first animals were a mouse and then a pigeon, the same animals that Julian first kills. I wanted to see if something could be saved once the irreparable had been done. That is why I became a taxidermist: to bear witness.

  The taxidermist looked up at Henry from his papers. He said, "Then I have a list and brief descriptions of famous displays in various museums, from single animals to full dioramas."

  "Let's leave that for later," Henry said. "I'm thirsty. Could I have some water, please?"

  "There are glasses on the edge of the sink."

  Henry walked over. He rinsed a glass, filled it, and drank. The skeleton of a rabbit was soaking in a blue chemical solution in a plastic tub at the bottom of the sink. He drank several glassfuls of water. It was very dry in the store and his throat was parched. He was hungry too, for that matter.

  Henry thought about what the taxidermist had just read to him. To read on one's own and to be read to are two very different experiences. Not being in control of the words submitted to his attention, unable to establish his own pace but rather dangling along like a prisoner in a chain gang, he found that his level of attention and retention had varied. It had been interesting enough, this discourse on taxidermy,   but not highly personal. He still knew nothing about the taxidermist himself.

  He remembered the advice of a friend who taught creative writing. "A story begins with three good words," she'd said. "That's where you start when reading a student's submission: find three good words." That wouldn't be hard. At school long ago, the taxidermist had clearly been taught and had learned well the essential elements of prose. And it helped in keeping the listener's attention, at least his, Henry thought, that the subject matter was the odd rather than the mundane, taxidermy rather than fiscal planning.

  The glass slipped through Henry's fingers. It shattered on the floor. "I'm sorry. It slipped from my hand."

  "Don't worry," responded the taxidermist, unconcerned.

  Henry looked around for a broom and a dustpan.

  "Leave it, leave it."

  Henry's guess was that, being a craftsman, the taxidermist was practical, and small accidents and their clean-ups did not trouble him. Henry walked back to the desk, shards of glass cracking under his shoes. He sat back down on the stool.

  "That's good, what you've written," he said to the taxidermist. Now, Henry wondered privately, was the man seeking nothing more than the reassurance of praise, or did he want proper criticism? "Perhaps a little repetitive and disjointed at times, but clear and informative."

  The taxidermist said nothing, just looked at Henry, deadpan.

  "I noticed how as you went along you started using the personal pronoun 'I' more often. That's good in a first-person narrative. You want to stay rooted in the experience of the individual and not lose yourself in generalities."

  Still nothing.

  "With that kind of a smooth flow to your writing, your play must be coming along nicely."

  "It's not."

  "Why's that?"

  "I'm stuck. It doesn't work."

  The taxidermist admitted to his creative block without any showy frustration.

  "Have you finished a first draft?"

  "Many times."

  "How long have you been working on your play?"

  "All my life."

  The man rose from his desk and walked to the sink.
  Crackle, crackle
  , went the glass under his feet. From a shelf under a counter, he produced a brush and a dustpan. He swept the floor clean. Then he picked up some rubber gloves and put them on. He bent over the sink. The silence did not weigh on him. Henry observed him and after a moment saw him in a different light. He was an old man. An old man stooped over a sink, working. Did he have a wife, children? His fingers were bare of rings, but that could be because of the nature of his work. A widower? Henry looked at the man's face in profile. What was beyond that blankness? Loneliness? Worry? Frustrated ambition?

  The taxidermist straightened himself. The rabbit skeleton was in his giant hands. It was in one piece, each bone still connected to the next. It was very white and looked small and fragile. He turned it over, inspecting it cautiously. He might have been handling a tiny baby.

  A one-story man, a di Lampedusa struggling with his
  Leopard
  , thought Henry. Creative block is no laughing matter, or only to those sodden spirits who've never even tried to make their personal mark. It's not just a particular endeavour, a job, that is negated, it's your whole being. It's the dying of a small god within you, a part you thought might have immortality. When you're creatively blocked, you're left with--Henry looked around the workshop--you're left with dead skins.

  The taxidermist turned the tap on and rinsed the skeleton in a gentle stream of water. He shook the rabbit again and then placed it on the counter next to the sink.

  "Why a monkey and a donkey? You told me how you got these two here." Henry reached out and touched the donkey. He was surprised at how springy and woolly its coat was. "But why these particular animals for your story?"

  "Because monkeys are thought to be clever and nimble, and donkeys are thought to be stubborn and hardworking. Those are the characteristics that animals need to survive. It makes them flexible and resourceful, able to adapt to changing conditions."

  "I see. Tell me more about your play. What happens after the scene with the pear?"

  "I'll read it to you."

  He removed his gloves, wiped his hands on the apron around his waist, and returned to his desk. He fished through papers.

  "Here it is," he said. The taxidermist read aloud again, stage directions and everything:

  "That's the end of the opening scene," he said. "Beatrice hasn't ever eaten a pear in her life, or even seen one, and Virgil tries to describe one for her."

  "Yes, I remember."

  He continued:

  He stopped. That even, expressionless style he had of reading was really quite effective, Henry decided. He brought his hands up and quietly made the motion of clapping.

  "That's excellent," he said. "I like that analogy between the sun and faith."

  The taxidermist nodded slightly.

  "And when Virgil says that talk is better than silence, and there's a long silence that follows, broken by Beatrice saying, 'It is,' I can see that working well onstage."

  Again, no definite reaction. I should get used to it, Henry told himself. It was likely shyness.

  "This sudden darkness--with Beatrice bursting into tears--that's also a nice contrast in tone with the lighter first scene. By the way, where is the play set? I didn't get that."

  "It was on the first page."

  "Yes, I know, they're in some park or forest."

  "No, before that."

  "There wasn't anything before that."

  "I thought I had copied it," said the taxidermist.

  He gave Henry three pages. The first page contained the following information:

 
A 20th-Century Shirt
  A Play in Two Acts

  The second page:

Virgil, a red howler monkey

Beatrice, a donkey

A boy and his two friends

  And the third page:

A country road. A tree.

Late afternoon.

     The province of Lower Back,

in a country called the Shirt,

a country like any other,

neighbour to, bigger than,

smaller than, Hat, Gloves,

Jacket, Coat, Trousers,

Socks, Boots and so on.

  "The story is set on a shirt?" Henry asked, puzzled.

  "Yes, on the back of it."

  "Well, either Beatrice and Virgil are smaller than bread crumbs or it's a very big shirt."

  "It's a very big shirt."

  "On which two animals are moving about? And there's a tree and a country road?"

  "And more. It's symbolic."

  Henry wished he had said that first. "Yes, clearly it's symbolic. But symbolic of
  what?
  The reader must recognize what the symbol stands for."

  "The United States of America, the United Clothes of Europe, the Union of African Shoes, the Association of Asian Hats--names are arbitrary. We parcel out the Earth,   give names to landscapes, draw maps, and then we make ourselves at home."

  "Is this a play for children? Have I read it wrong?"

  "No, not at all. Is your story for children?"

  The taxidermist was looking at Henry directly, but he always did. Henry couldn't detect any irony in his voice.

  "No, it's not for children. I wrote my novels for adults," he replied.

  "The same with my play."

  "It's for adults despite the characters and the setting."

  "It's for adults
  because
  of the characters and the setting."

  "Point taken. But again, why a shirt? What's the symbolism there?"