Rich Text Document (draft of December 2008)
Nimrod
I SPENT all that August playing with a splendid little puppy, which turned up on our kitchen floor one day, listless and puling, still smelling of milk and infancy, with an unformed, round and tremulous head, paws astraddle like a mole’s at his sides, and the most delicate, ever so soft coat.
From the first inspection, that fragment of life captured all the rapture, all the enthusiasm of my schoolboy soul.
From what heaven had this favourite of the gods so unexpectedly fallen, dearer to my heart than the most beautiful of toys? Imagine too that old and entirely uninteresting scullery maids might occasionally stumble upon such magnificent ideas, and bring from the suburbs — at an utterly early, transcendental hour of the morning — such a wonderful puppy to our kitchen!
But oh — alas! — I was still absent, not yet delivered from the dark womb of sleep, when that happiness had materialised. It was waiting for me, lying listlessly on the cool kitchen floor, unappreciated by Adela and the household. Why hadn’t they woken me earlier? A saucer of milk on the floor testified to Adela’s maternal impulses, and testified also — alas! — to moments gone by and lost to me forever, to pleasures of adoptive maternity that I had taken no part in.
But before me lay everything to come. What a host of experiences, experiments and discoveries were now promised! Life’s secret, its most essential mystery, laid bare to my insatiable curiosity — reduced do this simpler, handier and trifling form. How unutterably fascinating it was to have such a particle of life for my very own, such a molecule of the perpetual mystery in such a novel and amusing shape, awakening by its strangeness endless curiosity and discrete respect, an unexpected transposition of the same thread of life that was in me into a form different from my own — an animal.
Animals! Objects of insatiable curiosity, exemplifications of the riddle of life, created as if to show man to himself, unfolding his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each brought to some paradoxically furthest limit, some characterful ebullience. My heart opened, no longer burdened by the ties of exotic concerns that disrupt interpersonal relationships, full of sympathy for strange emanations of eternal life, full of loving, collaborative curiosity that is the disguised voice of self-knowledge.
The puppy was velvety and warm, his tiny heart pulsating. He had two soft ear laps, bluish clouded eyes, and a pink snout — which one might put one’s finger to without any risk — and delicate, harmless paws, with a touching little papilla at the back of his forepaws. With these paws he crawled to his milk bowl, greedy and impatient, lapping it with his pink tongue, dolefully raising his little muzzle once he was sated, and backing away listlessly from the milky bath, with a drop of milk on his beard.
His walk was an ungainly sideways waddle, a lurch in an undecided direction, along a slightly tipsy and wavering line. The main characteristic of his mood was some unspecified and fundamental sorrow, orphanhood and helplessness, an inability to fill with anything the empty life between the marvels of his meals. This was evident in the unsystematicality and inconsequentiality of his movements, his irrational attacks of nostalgia, his doleful whimper and his inability to settle in any one place. Even deep in sleep — during which he had to placate his need for dependence and nestling, using his own body for this purpose, rolled up into a tremulous ball — the feeling of isolation and homelessness still haunted him. Ah, life — young and frail life, sent forth from the dependable darkness, from the snug warmth of the maternal womb into a great and unfamiliar, illuminated world; how it flinches and draws back, how it hesitates — filled with aversion and discouragement! — to accept the venture proposed to it.
But little Nimrod (he was given that proud and martial name) slowly began to savour life. His exclusive mastery by an image of maternal unity gave way to the charm of multiplicity.
The world began to lay traps for him: the unfamiliar and bewitching taste of different foods, a quadrangle of morning sunshine on the floor, where it was so pleasant to settle down, the movements of his own limbs, his own paws, and his tail, mischievously provoking him to play games with himself, and the embraces of human hands, under which a certain playfulness slowly ripened, his body bursting with gaiety, engendering a need for entirely new, vehement and daring movements — all of this bribed, persuaded and encouraged him into acceptance, to resign himself to life’s experiment.
And another thing. Nimrod had begun to understand that everything that happened to him, despite the appearances of novelty, had in fact already been, many times, infinitely many times. His body experienced situations, impressions and objects. But nothing surprised him very much. In the face of each new situation he would dive into his memory, into the deep memory of his body; he searched gropingly, fervidly, and found inside himself an appropriate reaction already prepared, the wisdom of generations assembled in his plasma, in his nerves. He found certain actions, decisions he had not even been aware of, which had ripened inside him and were waiting to spring out.
The scenery of his young life, the kitchen with its pungent buckets, floor-cloths with their complicated and intriguing fragrance, the clacking of Adela’s slippers and her noisy coming and going — no longer terrified him. He considered it his domain; he had made himself at home there; he began to develop in regard to it an unclear feeling of affiliation, as of a homeland.
Unless, that is, he was unexpectedly beset by a cataclysm in the form of the scrubbing of the floor — an abolition of the laws of nature, the swish of warm lye scouring all the furniture, and the ominous scraping of Adela’s brush.
But the danger soon passed; the brush, quiet and motionless, lay placated in a corner, and the drying floor had the pleasant scent of damp wood. Nimrod, restored once more to his normal rights and free upon his own terrain, felt a lively willingness to seize with his teeth an old rug on the floor and pull it with all his might to the left and the right. The pacification of the elements filled him with unutterable joy.
All at once he stood rooted to the spot: before him, some three puppy steps away, a black monstrosity was approaching, a monster skimming rapidly along on its sticks of many tangled legs. Deeply shocked, Nimrod directed his gaze along the oblique course of the shiny insect, nervously following that flat, headless and blind trunk carried along by the eerie mobility of its spider-like legs.
Something rose up inside him, ripened and bulged at that sight, something he himself did not yet understand, something akin to anger or terror, but pleasant somehow, and accompanied by a jolt of energy, single-mindedness, aggressiveness.
Suddenly, he dropped to his forepaws and produced a voice hitherto unknown to him, alien and quite dissimilar to his usual whimpering.
He produced it once and once again, and once more, in a thin descant, which wavered, losing its bearings.
But, in that new language generated in a sudden impulse, he apostrophised the insect in vain. There is no place in the categories of cockroach thought for such a tirade, and the insect continued its oblique trek toward a corner of the room, enacting movements sanctified by an immemorial cockroach ritual.
Besides, feelings of detestation had as yet no permanence or force in the puppy’s soul. His newly awakened joy of life transformed his every emotion into gaiety. Nimrod went on barking, but the meaning of that barking was imperceptibly altered — it became a parody of itself, his way of expressing the unutterable nimbleness of this magnificent venture of life, full of piquancy, unexpected thrills, and implications.
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