The Sacred Beasts (3 page)

They slowly gaze at one another, poised to break their pregnant
silence. I decide to crack the nut for them: “You’ve come about that revolting
heap of metal on my lawn.”

“We did wonder
why
you wanted it.” Nadia carefully begins
what will no doubt be a subtle, probing examination.

“What
is
it to you?” asks Mariska, ever the one to uncover
the root of the matter.

“A pile of grunge, obviously. I’m going to create a metal
sculpture with it, hence the blowtorch and wires, hence the whisky to top off a
new life. I will call it ‘Mediocrity’ or something more interesting and
creative. But that’s the gist.”

“You’re taking up a new career,” said Nadia, now letting the
significance settle.

“That’s it, basically. I don’t know how many of these creatures I
will give birth to, but the others, if there are any, will not cause such a din
in the street. This is Homeric grunge, epic scale.”

“It
was
quite noisy,” said Nadia.

“No, it was an infernal din,” I said.

“I see now,” said Mariska, smiling slowly. “And mediocrity: that
is the enemy?”

“Absolutely! In zoology, it is known as the law of the
preservation of the identity of the species. It means that evolution does not
favor extremes in physical form or behavior, except in the event of
catastrophes, which introduce powerful chance factors. The Greeks knew it well
as the Golden Mean. It sounds like a sensible warning against intemperance, but
it is something darker and more dangerous. You see, it also applies to traits
we value: intelligence, empathy, foresight. It means that most of us will
always value mediocrity over creativity, class over democracy, repetition over
innovation, immediacy over the visionary potential of the future. It will
always be more likely that we persecute our geniuses rather than celebrate
them, and those who are recognized must be misunderstood and tolerate
inordinate pain. Yet whatever progress we make, paradoxically, is due to them.
Katia was one of these. I loved her even though I knew she might kill herself.

“But it is worse and goes further than one woman’s death. We will
never quite be able to learn from our mistakes. We will pollute the planet
rather than saving it because we cannot bother to see beyond our trivial greed
and addictions. The polar ice and that of the highest mountains is melting, and
many of the animals I have studied all my life will have nowhere to go. A third
of the Arctic ice is gone. Elsewhere the weather runs amok: floods rage through
Europe and drought in Africa. Hurricanes have become uncontrollable in the
American Gulf States. In Japan, baby whales are found suffocating in pieces of
floating ice. In time, Ushuaia will be under water. Again, the Greeks knew it
well: Plato’s Philosopher King still does not wish to rule. The George W.
Bushes will always be re-elected, and I must watch the world I love be
destroyed by a species I belong to yet do not fully recognize as myself. I am
alien, as she was, as you are.”

Something of their quiet poise causes a powerful emotion to race
through me. “Katia lost her battle with it. I will,” my eyes were again filling
with tears,” not lose mine.” I was now silent, shocked at my words. It was not
what I intended to say at all. But the quiet, poised waiting of these two
whitish-blonde jaguars brought the unexpected. I instantly recognized it as
truth. How uncanny: are these two really witches, creators of charms that make
one blurt out unknown truths? Stranger things have happened at the end of the
world. I looked at them with suspicion, hostility and doubt, which merely
caused their smiles to deepen.

Mariska’s face was now settled and pleased. She had taken a
sounding and come back satisfied. “Let’s eat and drink to this distinguished
project, however noisy and colossal. I’ll get the plates and the casserole.”
And the evening—the third without Bear and first with a wrecked marvel on the
lawn and a feast celebrated by witches—had begun.

After some hours of eating and drinking, I was again alone,
staring out the window at my moonlit monster. The door was now closed, the air
brisk, the wind higher and more turbulent. The mountains wore a soft turquoise
cape beneath the moonlight. I had drunk far too much again, but my eyes were
open to the world and not turned inward upon myself.

Then a truly astonishing thing occurred. An ouraka, a fierce,
brown Patagonian bird, alighted upon the wreck. I could clearly see its large
crest and long tail. A sighting of this bird is very rare; it is almost never
to be found so close to human habitation. It drew its wings together and seemed
to regard the skeleton as a resting-place.

An ouraka is one of the ugliest creatures on earth or in the air,
its war-like crest and tail (which remind me of medieval armor and swords)
matched only by its pugnacious temperament. It seems to hate humanity and has
been known to attack humans, who are orders of magnitude bigger, heavier and
more dangerous.

Its presence gave me the keenest pleasure. What a comrade for the
moonlight! So you bless me, vengeful creature. I reciprocate. I wish I could
see your face. It is immensely difficult to look an animal full in the face.
The dangers of territorial and fixed aggressive behaviors preclude it. But in
those rare moments when I have been privileged to do so, I have felt a joy like
the most expansive, ecstatic love. To see the face of an animal, to know it
sees you and gives you its full regard, seems akin to a state of grace, as though
a butterfly had chosen your open palm, of all places, upon which to alight.

Along the eastern seaboard of Patagonia, I have occasionally been
face-to-face with one of our indigenous elephant seals. Preternaturally
silver-black and shining with the colors of water and sky, they have quick,
round eyes; heavily curved brow ridges; powerful noses and fabulous whiskers.
They remind me of overweight German bankers or American stockbrokers. Like
giants of finance, they are strangely inflexible outside their watery medium:
On land, their bodies can only form a curving line not quite a dollar sign. But
then they roar in one of the loudest, most magnificent cries in nature, and you
are confronted with three tons of a being standing twenty feet tall, whiskered mouth
to the sky. I have always thought of them as creatures of violent, unending joy
beyond our comprehension. And, if I were ever to imagine a myth of primordial
creation from chaos, its first being might be one of these immense, roaring,
shining madonnas with their gleaming, coal-black babies, to which they are very
tender.

When I was a girl camping out in southern Patagonia, I was once
awakened from sleep in early morning light by what I thought to be the face of
God. God had huge clear liquid eyes with hooded lids and long lashes and could
apparently see both in front and to the side. And, God had a long, slender face
of the softest gray fur; gracefully rising nostrils; high, delicate,
all-knowing ears and a smile having the nobility and sweetness of a Buddha.
Surrounding such an impossibly tender face was a body of thick, chaotic
cinnamon fur and four slenderly elegant, long legs.

As I began unconsciously to rise in awe from my sleeping bag, God
uttered a sound that was something between a horse neighing and a child
sneezing and then ran off in an antic prance, its chocolate tail bounding
behind it. By then, I was sufficiently awake to realize I had been looking at
the face of a guanaco, a llama-like Patagonian member of the camel family, and
I was lucky it was merely curious and had not spat at me, since it can release
the entire contents of its stomach to derail a predator. The wonder of the
vision followed me for days like light breaking through clouds, and I still
think of it often.

With that memory, I was very close to sleep. My hypnogogic thought
was of my mother and my early life with her in a strange, faintly flickering
lantern of images. I saw her towering above me on an ocean liner to Patagonia,
her skirt ballooning in the wind, when I was a very young child. We were
survivors of the Holocaust in Germany. Jews, we were of those pale, skeletal
things covered with dirt who came shivering into the light when it shone, at
last, in the bottom of Hell at Buchenwald as we left it, barely able to walk. We
had only been in the concentration camp for a month, but that was enough for my
father to be beaten to death by a guard and my mother and me to be starving. I
remember nothing of it but a milk-white sky and a fence of barbed wire. I was
so young as to find the fence alluring and mysterious and believed a monster
dwelt outside it that was causing our suffering. How amazing to be so unformed
as not to know that the monster was inside.

I saw my parents’ subtly contoured, keenly alive faces that often
dissolved like a glowing, amber liquid into shadows, faces of Renaissance
painting. My father had been a mathematics professor and a musical composer. My
mother was a pianist and music teacher. Upon liberation, my mother was in such
a state of traumatic confusion that we first went to London, then France, then
New York, then she could not decide if she felt safer in North or South
America, and we ended up in Ushuaia. Her confusion and fear never truly ended,
and she was short-lived. As a result, I speak German, French, English and
Spanish and could go to America for my undergraduate and doctoral study, where
I met Katia. I became a citizen when I began teaching and tried to forget the
despair that always shrouded my mother, who was dead by then. Yet now, I thought
only of her, the past washing freely around and over my wanderer of a mind, a
dark tide I floated upon as dreaming began.

Then I was swimming in cold black waters off Cape Horn, making no
progress, only moving, fighting, moving in a paradox of frigid fever. I awoke
with the rough, turgid dream dripping off me and unable to go to the cemetery.
The film reel of Bear’s death began to play, and I could barely move around the
kitchen and bathroom. I was very hungry, as though I had undergone long, tiring
labor. Eating from the casserole dish, I sat looking out my window at the
colossus of the lawn and again, an astonishing thing occurred. The ouraka was
gone, but a Patagonian black-crowned night heron alighted suddenly upon the
wreck.

This bird haunts the coastlines at night, and its appearance by
day this close to humans is again rare. It has a body of angular sharpness yet
great elegance and a piercingly long beak. With a stern gullet and wings
fluffed forward over the thinnest of legs, it seems to be wearing a judge’s
robe. It looks as though it observes the world keenly with repugnance,
delegating it the tepid smile of irony, its amazingly long beak able to lance
the object of its vision with great precision. When Bear first saw one, she
said two words: “Jane Austen.” My eyes were suddenly filled with tears and my
heart with pleasure at the thought of Jane Austen and her progeny, alive and
well in Patagonia and now multiplying, flying! I stared at the bird until it
flew off and realized my memories of Bear and my work might perhaps save me.

The film reel did not repeat, and I could work hard for the
afternoon outside, cutting and soldering the wreck to render it into a horror,
and I didn’t need whisky to do it. I worked efficiently, purposefully, angrily.
I wanted to both create and destroy, and my material, with effort, began to
submit to my desire.

It was early evening before I felt the suddenness of exhaustion
and radiating spikes of pain in my limbs. I looked at the colossus: the wire
homunculus was beginning to form on top. I had even created what would become
its face to the sky and its mouth-to-be wide open in a triumphant cry. The
bottom, composed mainly of its chassis and the car’s frame, would take much
more work, perhaps weeks, since I wanted it to suggest a large creature of
intrinsic weight and dignity, contrasting with the homunculus. Still, it was
more than a beginning and I continued to stare in fascination at this living
process that had completely occupied my mind and body for so many hours. Yes, I
had been somewhere else, a dimension I had never known before, where anything
at all could come into being for the pure wonder of it: speaking in tongues of
images; meaning one thing and many; harmonic; reflective; radiant. No wonder
Katia had given her life to it: that life was returned, nurturance in an elixir
of wonder. Suddenly I was very close to her, sensing her presence distinctly,
an emotion I never expected to feel again.

I went inside and spent the evening hours lost in thought and
memory of my life with Katia. There it was in tableau bounded by the new
dimension we shared: her startling responses to my work—a mixture of whimsy,
acid and insight—the bird that would now always be Jane Austen to me. I
remembered telling her about a study I had done on the fighting behavior of
rheas, one of Patagonia’s flightless birds. The males lock necks and whirl one
another around in circles. The one who becomes too dizzy to continue is the
loser. I smiled in remembering her observation that this was very much like
American presidential elections.

I stretched out full length on the sofa, my arm and a pillow
beneath my head. There were our trips around Patagonia, the week we spent
watching the Magellanic penguins on the coastline of Cabo Virgenes. It is a
huge colony of what are often called jackass penguins for their loud braying.
Some two hundred thousand males waited, braying, for their females, who were
swimming 1,500 miles from Brazil. Their meeting is a truly fantastic
altercation, four hundred thousand heads and fins wildly butting one another in
joy, the sound a screeching roar that fills the sky. They look as though
possessed by seizures. After this comes the laying of eggs and then an equally
wild and violent defending of territory little more than the size of a
penguin’s bottom.