Word Document (draft of June 2008)
Nimrod
I SPENT the whole of August that year 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 end p.48 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!
Oh — alas! — I was still absent, not yet delivered from the dark bosom of sleep, when that happiness materialised; it was already waiting for me, lying listlessly on the cool kitchen floor, unappreciated by Adela and the household. Why had they not 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 the pleasures of adoptive maternity in which I had not taken part.
But all the future lay before me. What a host of experiences, experiments and discoveries now opened up! The secret of Life, its most essential mystery, was laid bare to my insatiable curiosity — reduced do that simpler, handier and trifling form. It was unutterably fascinating 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 endless curiosity and discrete respect by its strangeness, an unexpected end p.49 transposition of the same thread of life that was in me into a form different from my own — an animal.
Animals! The object of insatiable curiosity, exemplifications of the riddle of life, as if created to show man to man 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 which disrupt interpersonal relationships, full of sympathy for strange emanations of perpetual life, full of the loving, collaborative curiosity which is a 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 to which one might, without any risk, put one’s finger — and delicate, harmless paws, with a touching little papilla at the back of his forepaws. With these paws he would crawl to his milk bowl, greedy and impatient, lapping it with his pink tongue, to raise his little muzzle dolefully once he was sated and listlessly back away from the milky bath, with a drop of milk on his beard.
His walk was an ungainly sideways waddle, lurching 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 bosom end p.50 p.51: ILLUSTRATION into a great and unfamiliar, illuminated world; how it flinches and draws back, how it hesitates — full of 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 was happening 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 he found inside himself an appropriate reaction already prepared, the wisdom of generations, assembled in his plasma, in his nerves. He found certain actions, end p.52 decisions that even he was not 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, the 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 made himself at home there; he began to develop an unclear feeling of affiliation with it, 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 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 which was 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.
end p.53
But he apostrophised the insect to no avail in that new language, generated in a sudden impulse. There was no place in the categories of cockroach thought for that 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 had 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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