The Sacred Beasts (15 page)

“OK, actually the question I really want answered is this: how can
we possibly be living in the world we know, where women are still subjugated,
where gay people lack civil liberties, where the texts of all major religious
faiths encourage us to believe that women and gay people are morally inferior?
You say we are closer to the bonobos, but how can that explain the world as it
is?”

“I have no doubt that all of our political, social and cultural
institutions, to varying degrees, oppress women and gay people while promoting
patriarchy and heterosexuality. Those research results on sexuality show that
something very powerful and inclusive has happened, not just to a minority but
to all women and men. Not only has political conservatism tried to legislate
against a woman’s right to control the functioning of her own body; it seems to
have succeeded in wiping out most women’s ability to discern their own sexual
feelings. If a woman’s sexuality is not what patriarchal values want it to be;
then presto, the offending part of it is gone. I wanted you to be aware of this
scientific research because all public discussion of these issues seems to
float horribly in a diseased, bacterial sludge of fear, hysteria and anger in
our time. It is virtually unmentionable in public today, and even the
primatologists who describe bonobo research are prone to nervous giggling when
they speak to lay audiences. I favor shining a sharp, bright light on the
god-awful mess. In fact, I am writing a book on it.”

“I can tell from your voice that you think the situation is
hopeless and it infuriates you.”

“Actually, I know that, my perceptive and beautiful companion, but
I am surely compelled to attempt it, as would any bonobo matriarch.”

“I’m glad you finally said all of this. Now you can give yourself up
to the sole pursuit of loving me and be otherwise incapable of thought.”

“Said like the queen of the bonobos. I will let you resolve all of
our disputes. Have you noticed what great work we’ve been doing together for
months now?”

“It’s curious about that, yes. Love with you makes me want to
imagine and create.”

“You didn’t expect that in paradise?”

“No, the Eden version contradicts it. Adam and Eve wanted to be
free of work.”

“Here’s a new myth, just for you: think of the real Eden as
arboreal. It will give you some new insights whenever you look at a tree,
whenever you feel at peace in a forest or even a park. We were once up in the
trees among our ancestors, creatures somewhat like the bonobos, where fruit was
plentiful and most predators down below. Gentle matriarchs decreed that sex was
free and violence, nil. Under such circumstances, the population exploded. We
had to conquer a new environment on the forest floor. That was ‘the Fall,’ the
real one. Our violence increased as did our size; our empathy cooled. Males
were largest and fought most of the battles, seizing power and becoming
patriarchs in the process. We have known Paradise and the Fall, so why not
Heaven and Hell? We have mastered nature sufficiently to protect and enhance
life on our planet and need only master ourselves. We must lose that old ape
behavior or understand it well enough to control its destructiveness. The
umpire must be science, not sheer mass ignorance quoting scripture all the way
to our doom. The future will be a Heaven of renewable energy in a clean and
peaceful environment or a Hell of environmental catastrophe that destroys
civilization.”

“You’re thinking about what you will say in your book again. Stay
obsessed with my beauty.”

“No problem there.”

“Would you like to make love in a tree tonight?”

“How can I refuse the bonobo queen? Since we
have made love on the grass in the middle of a thunderstorm, in a cold lake at
dawn, and all night in the close company of rutting deer, I see no reason why
not. However, perhaps I should draw the line at the certainty of falling out of
a tree onto my head. No woman has ever compelled me to make love under such
uncomfortable circumstances, so take that as a measure of your beauty, power
and grace. Why don’t you shock me by wanting to make love in a tent?”

“It had better be a big strong tent!” She looks at me ferociously
and laughs.

In fact, we find the tent to be a most congenial and comfortable
partner to a love more tender than any we have yet shared. We are still holding
one another when we fall asleep.

I wake up with my lips still touching her ear. Her eyes are bright
and restless from the moment they open: perfect for art. We smile and kiss,
knowing that we are completely renewed for our work today. What will that be? I
only know that it is my favorite daily mystery in Doñana.

The lake is cool and full of sparkling light, and I decide to
spend the day here, sifting through my footage and data until I am in communion
with my beasts, and again they tell me what I know and then all the living
truth I still must learn. I am so immersed in my work that it has become the
shape of my life. I smile at the shadow I cast, sensing that my work and its
truth are real and my mind, the phantom hovering over. Egolessness is one of
the many pleasures of the explorer and lover of nature.

Sylvie wants to drive the jeep all the way to the sand dunes and
might even reach the shoreline. What will she see? Snakes making patterns like
perpetually disappearing gusts of wind as they twine themselves over the sand,
or wind making snake-like patterns that continually arch and then vanish into
the sand? Nothing of this. She will conceive something utterly original,
startling, perhaps shocking. She is unpredictability incarnate and for that and
more, I love her. She can even annihilate the scientist in me, though
fortunately it is never permanent.

It is late sunset when she returns, very silent and serious. Her
work has obviously been arduous; I have never seen her look so exhausted.
Immediately and without words, she lies down on her sleeping bag and hands me
her sketchbook; I see that she spent her day doing many preparatory drawings
followed by just a few that are final. It is a pattern she shows when she is
wrestling with a creative problem that arouses strong emotions. Instantly, I
see that she stopped in the region called the
corral
, where vegetation
slowly fades away into sand dunes that can no longer support plant life. As I
page through her unfinished work, I sense that she is attempting to envision
identity within boundaries and perhaps the ultimate forms of life residing in
nature’s edges and extremes.

The first completed drawing shows a tree that is nearly destroyed
by sand and wind and yet, in its complex form, still clutches fiercely to life.
Sand has replaced the soil and the dying tree rests on its side with all of its
roots exposed to the wind. The roots, drawn in sharp and intricate profusion,
twine themselves all over the tree in search of water and nutrients until they
even reach up to the sky. The drawing seems to be the ultimate or archetypal
form of the tree’s life cycle as it perishes with all the extraordinary force,
paradoxically, of an intensely living thing. Its largest root curls
convulsively upon itself and then reaches in a perfectly straight line up to
the sky as though comprehending, in its form, that it must leave the life of
the soil and hurl itself into the cosmic. As such, its shape is so
unrecognizable that it could be an alien life form on another planet, yet it is
a tree living as truly in nature as any other.

The drawing arouses pity and awe in me. The tree has a death-like
gravity, like a spiritual quest that has cost all the energy of life, yet it
reveals and embodies the violent and beautiful world we have found here
together. I think of Katia again. In the great extremes of her life, did she
articulate this explosive vision of life or did she stop short of it?

The answer lies in the second completed drawing. Going further
into the dunes, Sylvie found the last dying tree before the land becomes purely
sand. Its boughs and roots, helplessly seeking nurturance, have actually
reached a point in which they fold over themselves into four knots, nearly
forming a square, and then continue to grow so that a pattern forms above of
intertwined figures dancing in apparent ecstasy. This powerful life force,
resisting death, has left the concrete world entirely and entered the symbolic
realm as passionate art. As a symbol, it suggests some of the most powerful
human images of the spirit: a Hindu Shiva dancing in a circle of flames; the
mudra of Buddha’s thumb and forefinger forming a circle; an American Indian
Dreamcatcher. Life and death turn full circle and become eternity. The figures
above that seem to burst out of the image are dancing in a passion that is
immortal, perhaps angelic, yet at the very center of this world. Yes, Katia
stopped well short of this.

I smile at Sylvie in amazement and can well understand her
exhaustion. Her eyes search mine with intensity. She seeks my judgement, perhaps
not yet understanding what she has achieved. “It’s as though you have
discovered a spirituality in nature, even one that seems to touch upon
religion,” I say. “You astonish me. This work is superlative. I don’t know if I
am nearly done here, but you are. We will move on to Madrid and Barcelona
soon.” Still exhausted, she raises her arms to me and then I sense what she
needs. I lie down with her and cover her with my body.

“I want to sleep just like this,” she says, and her arms and legs
embrace my body. Is she taking the form of her art? It is so unexpected and
lovely to me that we do fall asleep in either the bliss of exhaustion or the
exhaustion of bliss. When I wake up in the night, I sleepily take off my
clothes. She has already done so. I remember only a shape, a push, a laugh and
then, “lie on me again.” When I awaken in the dawn, my body still covers hers.
I hear only a word, “now,” then a whisper, “make love to me now.” Her entire
body is embracing mine, and some unknown time later, her back is arching and
she is climaxing again and again. I no longer know how it happens. It is like a
continuation of sleep, perfectly instinctual. Our minds are asleep and our
bodies, intensely awake and alive, rising and falling, over and under and into
each other, a rhythm of our own.

Then we awaken together. “I think I could spend the rest of my
life like this,” I say.

“I could, too. Do you think we will actually be able to leave this
park? Maybe we will just stay here, making love.”

“We would join the company of the great eccentric Doñana women if
we did that.” Our laughter completely wakes us up. Then we are half sitting up,
resting on our elbows.

“I just thought of something even funnier. We are actually
tourists of Spain. Has that fact even entered your mind?”

“No, good-god, no. No flamenco, no bullfighting, no Velasquez, El
Greco, Picasso.”

“We are in another reality.”

“No, that makes it sound strange. We are . . . our story is . . .
about the women, the animals, the land, in Spain. That story has never been told,
so it seems like another world. But, it is not. It is a story that has not been
told, one worth telling.” We are now fully awake, pensive.

“What would Katia say to that? You never talk of her now.” She
smiles mischievously at me.

“And, you know very well why I don’t talk about her. After she
died, I knew what she would say all the time. Now, I must think even to
remember. She would say . . . well, she was a provocatrice. She would throw
down the gauntlet in anything she said. So then, of our story . . . about the
women, the animals, and the land . . . she would say that we are rewriting
The
Sun Also Rises
.”

“Really? So, she would think of it as a challenge, that it should
be rewritten by women?”

“It is a challenge.”

“But should that novel be rewritten?”

“Actually, Katia loved Hemingway’s writing. She read everything
but
Death in the
Afternoon
and
The Green Hills of Africa
for the obvious reason—she also loved animals. I seem to recall that she much
preferred the short stories, thought the women in the novels were infantile and
unreal except for
The Sun Also Rises
. She said that the primary female
character was based on a woman Hemingway knew, and he wrote the book just after
a frustrating encounter between them in Pamplona. Now I can almost hear Katia
in my head; she still is one of my oldest, strangest and wisest voices. She
would say that the important thing to understand, the challenge, is that all of
those ‘unhurried sensations’ making up his work, that directness and simplicity
of feeling that passes easily to so many readers, depends on the repression of
other stories, on implicitly declaring them irrelevant. So yes, his novel must
be rewritten by our story . . . of the women, the animals, and the land.”

We are silent for a long time, holding hands. Finally Sylvie says,
“I’m sorry that I seemed to make light of what you told me night before last.
That research on sexuality is appalling. It is not exactly a luxury to know
when you are having sexual feelings, and I am truly appalled that men have a
clear sense of it and so many women apparently do not. It’s infuriating. I can
see why you want to write about it and I can understand why you told me. What’s
going on there: are women lying, or do they really not know what they’re
feeling?”

“That’s impossible to say without more research. A few women are
probably lying, but it’s hard to see what could be threatening about admitting
the truth anonymously. Their names would never appear in the research, so why
fear telling the researcher?”