Rich Text Document (draft of July 2010)
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 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 completely 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 my kitchen!
But oh— alas!—I was still absent, not yet delivered from the dark womb of sleep, when that happiness had materialised. He 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 for ever, to pleasures of adoptive maternity in which I had taken no part.
But all the future lay before me. What a host of experiences, experiments and discoveries were now promised! The secret of life, 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 very strangeness endless curiosity and discrete respect—an unexpected transposition of the very 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 eloborate concerns which disrupt interpersonal relationships—full of sympathy for strange emanations of eternal life, full of loving, collaborative curiosity, which was the disguised voice of self-knowledge.
The puppy was velvety and warm, his tiny heart pulsating. He had two soft ear laps, clouded grey-blue eyes, and a pink snout to which one might put one’s finger without any risk, and delicate, harmless paws, with a touching little papilla at the back of his forepaws. These paws carried him, gluttonous and impatient, to his milk bowl, which he lapped 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, and an inability to fill with anything the empty life between the marvels of his meals. This was evident in his unsystematic and inconsequential movements, his irrational attacks of nostalgia, his doleful whimper and his inability to settle in any one place. Even fast asleep, when he had to placate with his own body, rolled up into a tremulous ball, his need for dependence and nestling, 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 subjection to an image of maternal unity had begun to give 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 tail, mischievously provoking him into playing games with himself, and the embraces of human hands, under which a certain playfulness slowly ripened, his body effusive with gaiety, engendering a need for entirely new, vehement and daring movements—all of this bribed, persuaded and encouraged him into acceptance, into resigning 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 happened 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 fervidly, gropingly, 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 that even he had not been aware of, which had ripened in him, and were only waiting to spring out.
The scenery of his young life, the kitchen with its pungent buckets, the floor-cloths with their complicated and intriguing smell, the clacking of Adela’s slippers and her noisy coming and going, no longer terrified him. He considered it his domain, and he made himself at home there. He began to develop toward it an unclear feeling of affiliation, like a homeland.
Unless, that is, he was unexpectedly beset by a cataclysm in the shape 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 a pleasant scent of damp wood. Restored once more to his normal rights, and free upon his own terrain, Nimrod felt a lively eagerness to seize with his teeth an old rug on the floor, and pull it with all of his might to the left and the right. The pacification of the elements filled him with unutterable joy.
Suddenly he froze, rooted to the spot. Some three puppy steps in front of him, a black monstrosity was approaching, a monster skimming rapidly along on sticks of many tangled legs. Deeply shocked, Nimrod watched closely the oblique course of the shiny insect, nervously following that flat and headless blind trunk carried along by the eerie mobility of its spiderlike legs.
Something rose up inside him at that sight, ripening and swelling, something that he himself did not yet understand—something akin to anger or terror, but pleasant somehow, and accompanied by a jolt of energy, single-mindedness and aggression.
Suddenly he dropped to his forepaws, and produced a voice hitherto unknown to him—alien, and quite dissimilar to his accustomed whimpering. He produced it once, and once again, and then 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 had become a parody of itself, attempting to express the unutterable excellence of this magnificent venture of life, full of piquancy, unexpected thrills and frissons.
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