Mr Palomar

  Leaving the zoo, Mr Palomar cannot dispel the image of the albino gorilla from his mind. He tries to talk about him with people he meets, but he cannot make anyone listen to him. At night, both during the hours of insomnia and during his brief dreams, the great ape continues to appear to him. “Just as the gorilla has his tire, which serves as tangible support for a raving, wordless speech,” he thinks, “so I have this image of a great white ape. We all turn in our hands an old, empty tire through which we would like to reach the final meaning, at which words do not arrive.”

  The order of scaly creatures

  Mr Palomar would like to know why iguanas attract him. In Paris he goes now and then to visit the reptile house of the Jardin des Plantes; he is never disappointed. What is extraordinary, indeed unique, about the appearance of the iguana in itself is quite clear to him; but he feels there is something more and he cannot say what it is.

  The Iguana iguana is covered with a green skin that seems woven from very tiny speckled scales. There is too much of this skin: on the neck, on the legs, it forms folds, bags, flounces, like a dress that should adhere to the body and instead sags on all sides. Along the spinal column there is a jagged crest that extends to the tail; the tail is also green up to a point, after which the farther it stretches the paler it becomes, and it is divided into rings of alternating colors: light brown and dark brown. On the scaly green snout, the eye opens and closes, and this is an “evolved” eye, endowed with gaze, attention, sadness, suggesting that another being is concealed inside that dragon semblance: an animal more similar to those we are at home with, a living presence less distant from us than it seems . . .

  Then there are other spiky crests under the chin; on the neck there are two round white plates like a hearing-aid; a number of accessories and sundries, trimmings and defensive garnishings, a sample-case of forms available in the animal kingdom and perhaps also in other kingdoms: too much stuff for one animal to bear. What’s the use of it? Does it serve to disguise someone watching us from in there?

  The forelegs, with five fingers, would suggest talons rather than hands if they were not attached to actual arms, muscular and well-shaped; but the rear legs are different, long and flabby, with fingers like vegetable propagations. The animal as a whole, however, even from the depths of his resigned, motionless torpor, conveys an image of strength.

  At the glass case of the Iguana iguana Mr Palomar has stopped, after having contemplated the case with ten little iguanas clinging one to the other, constantly shifting position with agile movements of elbows and knees, all stretching in a lengthwise direction: the skin a brilliant green, with a copper-colored dot in the place of gills, a crested white beard, pale eyes wide around the black pupil. Then the Squirrel of the Savannah, which hides in sand its identical color; the Tegu or Tupinambis, yellowish-black, almost an alligator; the giant African Cordilo, with thick, pointed scales like fur or leaves, the color of the desert, so concentrated in its determination to exclude itself from the world that it coils in a circle, curling its tail against its head. The gray-green upper shell and the white underneath of a turtle immersed in the water of a transparent tank seem soft, fleshy; the pointed head emerges as if from a high collar.

  Life in the snake house appears a squandering of forms without style and without plan, where all is possible, and animals and plants and rocks exchange scales, quills, concretions. But among the infinite possible combinations only some – perhaps actually the most incredible – become fixed, resist the flux that undoes them and mixes and reshapes; and immediately each of these forms becomes the center of a world, separated forever from the others, as here in the row of glass case-cages of the zoo; and in this finite number of ways of being, each identified in a monstrosity of its own, and necessity, and beauty of its own, lies order, the sole order recognizable in the world. The iguana room of the Jardin des Plantes, with its illuminated cases, where dozing reptiles are hidden among branches and rocks and sand of the forest or the desert of their origin, reflects the order of the world, whether it be the reflection on earth of the sky of ideas or the external manifestation of the secret of the nature of creation, of the norm concealed in the depths of that which exists.

  Is it this atmosphere, more than the reptiles in themselves, that obscurely attracts Mr Palomar? A damp, soft warmth soaks the air like a sponge; a sharp stink, heavy, rotten, forces him to hold his breath; shadow and light lie stagnant in a motionless mixture of days and nights: are these the sensations of a man who peers out beyond the human? Beyond the glass of every cage there is the world as it was before man, or after, to show that the world of man is not eternal and is not unique. Is it to realize this with his own eyes that Mr Palomar reviews these stalls where pythons sleep, boas, bamboo rattlesnakes, the tree-adder of the Bermudas?

  But of the worlds from which man is excluded each case is only a tiny sample, torn from a natural continuum that might also never have existed, a few cubic meters of atmosphere that elaborate devices maintain at a certain degree of temperature and humidity. Thus every sample of this antediluvian bestiary is kept alive artificially, as if it were a hypothesis of the mind, a product of the imagination, a construction of language, a paradoxical line of reasoning meant to demonstrate that the only true world is our own . . .

  As if the smell of the reptiles were only now becoming unbearable, Mr Palomar suddenly feels a desire to go out into the open air. He has to cross the great hall of the crocodiles, where there is a line of tanks separated by barriers. In the dry part beside each tank lie the crocodiles, alone or in couples, a spent color, squat, rough, horrible, heavily stretched out, flattened against the ground the full length of their long, cruel snouts, their cold bellies, their broad tails. They all seem asleep, even those whose eyes are open, or perhaps all are sleepless in a dazed desolation, even with their eyes closed. From time to time one of them stirs slowly, barely raises himself on his short legs, crawls to the edge of the tank, lets himself drop with a flat thud, raising a wave. He floats, immersed in the water, as motionless as before. Is theirs a boundless patience, or a desperation without end? What are they waiting for, or what have they given up waiting for? In what time are they immersed? In that of the species, removed from the course of the hours that race from the birth to the death of the individual? Or in the time of geological eras that shifts continents and solidifies the crust of emerged lands? Or in the slow cooling of the rays of the sun? The thought of a time outside our experience is intolerable. Palomar hurries to leave the snake house, which can be visited only now and then and in haste.

  THE SILENCES OF PALOMAR

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  PALOMAR’S JOURNEYS

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  The sand garden

  A little courtyard covered with a white sand, thick-grained, almost gravel, raked in straight, parallel furrows or in concentric circles, around five irregular groups of stones or low boulders. This is one of the most famous monuments of Japanese civilization, the garden of rocks and sand of the Ryoanji of Kyoto, the image typical of that contemplation of the absolute to be achieved with the simplest means and without recourse to concepts capable of verbal expression, according to the teaching of the Zen monks, the most spiritual of Buddhist sects.

  The rectangular enclosure of colorless sand is flanked on three sides by walls surmounted by tiles, beyond which is the green of trees. On the fourth side there is a wooden platform, of steps, where the public can file by or linger and sit down. “If our inner gaze remains absorbed in the viewing of this garden,” explains the pamphlet offered visitors, in Japanese and in English, signed by the abbot of the temple, “we will feel divested of the relativity of our individual ego, whereas the sense of the absolute I will fill us with serene wonder purifying our clouded minds.”

  Mr Palomar is prepared to accept this advice on faith, and he sits on the steps, observes the rocks one by one, follows the undulations of the white sand, allows the indefinable harmony that links the elements of the picture gradually to pervade h
im.

  Or rather, he tries to imagine all these things as they would be felt by someone who could concentrate on looking at the Zen garden in solitude and silence. Because – we had forgotten to say – Mr Palomar is crammed on the platform in the midst of hundreds of visitors, who jostle him on every side; camera-lenses and movie-cameras force their way past the elbows, knees, ears of the crowd, to frame the rocks and the sand from every angle, illuminated by natural light or by flashbulbs. Swarms of feet in wool socks step over him (shoes, as always in Japan, are left at the entrance); numerous offspring are thrust to the front row by pedagogical parents; clumps of uniformed students shove one another, eager only to conclude as quickly as possible this school outing to the famous monument; earnest visitors nodding their heads rhythmically check and make sure that everything written in the guidebook corresponds to reality and that everything seen in reality is also mentioned in the guide.

  “We can view the garden as a group of mountainous islands in a great ocean, or as mountain tops rising above a sea of clouds. We can see it as a picture framed by the ancient mud walls, or we can forget the frame as we sense the truth of this sea stretching out boundlessly.”

  These “instructions for use” are contained in the leaflet, and to Mr Palomar they seem perfectly plausible and immediately applicable, without effort, provided one is really sure of having a personality to shed, of looking at the world from inside an ego that can be dissolved, to become only a gaze. But it is precisely this outset that demands an effort of supplementary imagination, very difficult to muster when one’s ego is glued into a solid crowd looking through its thousand eyes and walking on its thousand feet along the established itinerary of the tourist visit.

  Must the conclusion be that the Zen mental techniques for achieving extreme humility, detachment from all possessivenéss and pride require as their necessary background aristocratic privilege, and assume an individualism with so much space and so much time around it, the horizons of a solitude free of anguish?

  But this conclusion, which leads to the familiar lament over a paradise lost in the spread of mass civilization, sounds too facile for Mr Palomar. He prefers to take a more difficult path, to try to grasp what the Zen garden can give him, looking at it in the only situation in which it can be looked at today, craning his neck among other necks.

  What does he see? He sees the human race in the era of great numbers, which extends in a crowd, leveled but still made up of distinct individualities like the sea of grains of sand that submerges the surface of the world . . . He sees that the world, nevertheless, continues to turn the boulder-back of its nature indifferent to the fate of mankind, its hard substance that cannot be reduced to human assimilation . . . He sees the forms in which the assembled human sand tends to arrange itself along lines of movement, patterns that combine regularity and fluidity like the rectilinear or circular tracks of a rake . . . And between mankind-sand and world-boulder there is a sense of possible harmony, as if between two non-homogeneous harmonies: that of the non-human in a balance of forces that seems not to correspond to any pattern, and that of human structures, which aspires to the rationality of a geometrical or musical composition, never definitive . . .

  Serpents and skulls

  In Mexico, Mr Palomar is visiting the ruins of Tula, ancient capital of the Toltecs. A Mexican friend accompanies him, an impassioned and eloquent expert on pre-Columbian civilizations, who tells him beautiful legends about Quetzalcoatl. Before becoming a god, Quetzalcoatl was a king, with his palace here in Tula; a line of lopped-off columns remains, around an impluvium, a bit like a palace of ancient Rome.

  The temple of the Morning Star is a step-pyramid. At the top stand four cylindrical caryatids, known as “Atlases”, who represent the god Quetzalcoatl as the Morning Star (through a butterfly they bear on their back, symbol of the star), and four carved columns, which represent the Plumed Serpent, the same god in animal form.

  All this has to be taken on faith; for that matter, it would be hard to demonstrate the opposite. In Mexican archeology every statue, every object, every detail of a bas-relief stands for something that stands for something else that stands, in. turn, for yet another something. An animal stands for a god who stands for a star that stands for an element or a human quality and so on. We are in the world of pictographic writing; the ancient Mexicans, to write, drew pictures, and even when they were drawing it was as if they were writing: every picture seems a rebus to be deciphered. Even the most abstract, geometric friezes on the wall of a temple can be interpreted as arrows if you see a motive of broken lines, or you can read a numerical sequence, depending on the way the key-pattern is repeated. Here in Tula the reliefs depict stylized animal forms: jaguars, coyotes. Mr Palomar’s Mexican friend pauses at each stone, transforms it into a cosmic tale, an allegory, a moral reflection.

  A group of schoolchildren moves among the ruins: stocky boys with the features of the Indios, descendants perhaps of the builders of these temples, wearing a plain white uniform, like Boy Scouts, with blue neckerchiefs. The boys are led by a teacher not much taller than they are and only a little more adult, with the same round, dark, impassive face. They climb the top steps of the pyramid, stop beneath the columns, the teacher tells what civilization they belong to, what century, what stone they are carved from, then concludes, “We don’t know what they mean,” and the group follows him down the steps. At each statue, each figure carved in a relief or on a column, the teacher supplies some facts and then invariably adds, “We don’t know what it means.”

  Here is a chac-mool, a very popular kind of statue: a human figure, half-reclining, holds a tray; on this tray – the experts are unanimous in saying – the bleeding hearts of the victims of human sacrifice were presented. These statues in and of themselves could also be seen as good-natured, rough puppets; but every time Mr Palomar sees one he cannot help shuddering.

  The line of schoolboys passes. And the teacher is saying, “Esto es un chac-mool. No se sabe lo quiere decir,” and he moves on.

  Though Mr Palomar continues to follow the explanation of his friend acting as guide, he always ends up crossing the path of the schoolboys and overhearing the teacher’s words. He is fascinated by his friend’s wealth of mythological references: the play of interpretation, allegorical readings, have always seemed to him a supreme exercise of the mind. But he feels attracted also by the opposite attitude of the schoolteacher: what had at first seemed only a brisk lack of interest is being revealed to him as a scholarly and pedagogical position, a methodological choice by this serious and conscientious young man, a rule from which he will not swerve. A stone, a figure, a sign, a word that reach us isolated from its context is only that stone, figure, sign or word: we can try to define them, to describe them as they are, and no more than that; whether, beside the face they show us, they also have a hidden face, it is not for us to know. The refusal to comprehend more than what the stones show us is perhaps the only way to evince respect for their secret; trying to guess is a presumption, a betrayal of that true, lost meaning.

  Behind the pyramid there is a passage or communication trench between two walls, one of packed earth, the other of carved stone: the Wall of the Serpents. It is perhaps the most beautiful piece in Tula: in the relief-frieze there is a sequence of serpents, each holding a human skull in its open jaws, as if it were about to devour it.

  The boys go by. The teacher says, “This is the wall of the serpents. Each serpent has a skull in its mouth. We don’t know what they mean.”

  Mr Palomar’s friend cannot contain himself: “Yes, we do! It’s the continuity of life and death; the serpents are life, the skulls are death. Life is life because it bears death with it, and death is death because there is no life without death . . .”

  The boys listen, mouths agape, black eyes dazed. Mr Palomar thinks that every translation requires another translation and so on. He asks himself, “What did death, life, continuity, passage mean for the ancient Toltecs? And what can they mean t
oday for these boys? And for me?” And yet he knows he could never suppress in himself the need to translate, to move from one language to another, from concrete figures to abstract words, to weave and re-weave a network of analogies. Not to interpret is impossible, as refraining from thinking is impossible. Once the school group has disappeared around a corner, the stubborn voice of the little teacher resumes: “No es verdad, it is not true, what that señor said. We don’t know what they mean.”

  The odd slipper

  While traveling in an eastern country, Mr Palomar bought a pair of slippers in a bazaar. Returning home, he tries to put them on: he realizes that one slipper is wider than the other and will not stay on his foot. He recalls the old vendor crouched on his heels in a niche of the bazaar in front of a pile of slippers of every size, at random; he sees the man as he rummages in the pile to find a slipper suited to the customer’s foot, has him try it on, then starts rummaging again to hand him the presumed mate, which Mr Palomar accepts without trying it on.