Palafox (3 page)
Authors: Eric Chevillard
There are nearly two thousand species of snake, Baruglio announced abruptly. If Palafox seems at first not to resemble in any way an asp, that does not necessarily mean that despite everything it isn’t one, as we have seen many a screech owl that resembles an owl (raised eyebrow of our ornithologist duly noted). It was night, Baruglio insisted. That excuses nothing, hissed the ornithologist who will never forgive his brother for having forgotten an anaconda in his aviary, noting the bird of paradise, the lyrebird, the hornbill, the toucan, all these high-end parakeets bred in limited numbers by nature to distract the explorer, compensated for his efforts as a tsetse fly kisses his cheek. Having taken the floor (let him keep it) Zeiger wonders where Palafox nested before he had a cage at his disposal. The egg had only been a stage. In light of recent events and of the manner in which the animal, without having even been invited to sit down, had appropriated the sofa (even a repo man would have avoided eating it on the spot), he must have benefited parasitically from existing structures. In all likelihood, he would dislodge an enfeebled goldcrest and take residence in his nest. The brood collapses overboard, the birds, still weighed down with their eggish reflexes, slow to adapt to the soil - their cardboard skulls strike the corner of a violet, and the only witness to their death is a succulent slug. Palafox settles down, makes himself at home, his head beneath strangely endivelike wings, with no other means of escape from his sad destiny than to dream, he falls asleep. As for the slug, slugs are not famous for their spirit of initiative, Palafox the next day found it there, prepared in its own juice, served warm upon a mint leaf. This hypothesis, for want of being seductive, seemed the most likely. However, upon reflection, Zeiger put it aside, as a man accustomed to marching straight ahead no matter the reeds or rushes, and so it was precisely there in a swamp that he believed he could locate the true habitat of our palmiped. Palafox, therefore, widened and deepened a hole dug by a musk otter, built up the opening with mud, yes, with mud, where would he have procured the bones of a nun?
All the more so as he would have needed quite a few of them. I share your opinion on this point, Ziegler. But back to Palafox’s doings, you were conjuring up the sofa, let’s recall the breakfront, the vase, the liquors, and the books belonging to Algernon. How can you assert that this ferocity is a permanent characteristic of its nature, as characteristic as its goiter, for example, or its exasperating buzzing? Would you feel comfortable judging a being on the basis of only a few isolated facts? When you are angry, Zeiger, it happens, the biographer of Attila waits to see what will happen before writing to his editor that he has a great idea for his next book. Palafox dazzled by the gleam of the chandeliers will doubtless have given himself over to panic. And Pierpont goes on to mention how the trembling flame of a candle drives to similar acts of desperation the geometer moth: this little candlelit dinner beginning in high spirits ends in tragedy ... (and if the child conceived beneath the table, during dessert, by a man and a woman, both tipsy, knew how many blue butterflies had paid with their lives to make his birth possible, would we see him ten years later test the twelve blades of his new knife on the lilac caterpillar? - but this is an aside).
Zeiger and Baruglio nod their heads. They are in agreement as far as this goes - free, Palafox lived a nocturnal existence. He lived in a hollow trunk. All day he remained there, immobile, unbudgeable, eyes stitched shut, impenetrable. At dusk, he exited his dugout canoe and went to work, punctual night watchman, guardian of nature’s order, he detected the vole ferreting about, like a fire starting among the crops. Taken one by one, the vole is the gentlest, the most delicate of beings, it arouses deep emotion and the desire within us to contaminate it with some mortal illness of which we will use every care we can muster to cure him. Two voles look almost identical. Three, lassitude sets in. Four eat like ten. Ten in a field closes a mill. One more and the country runs the risk of ruin, begging assistance from a neighboring state which in return for its help demands the return of a mountainous province, wooded, skiable, conquered by armed forces, then consents to the transportation of the supplies, supplies being powdered milk and radish-greens. Were it not for Palafox’s vigilance, his tireless rounds, his heavy but silent flight, since feathers and darkness ignore each other, brush against each other, want to avoid a scene, without his nyctaloptic angel’s eye, his watchmaker’s claws and beak hard at their task, without Palafox we would shiver with hunger, submitting to the humiliating generosity of the enemy that Chancelade at this very moment is tearing to pieces, if all goes as planned.
We have been living under high Palafoxian security most likely for a long time. The Museum has twenty thousand volic crania bequeathed to it by the artist, a collector who made his children pay dearly for their indifference. And yet the oldest of these skulls go back to the belle époque that precedes the first ice age. Thus, concludes Baruglio, by deduction, do we derive information on the probable age of Palafox. Baruglio concludes perhaps a bit too quickly, because nothing allows us to affirm that he had not survived by eating roots and wild fruits until the appearance of the vole. Nor would there have been life here, insists Zeiger, if each species had not been formed until its ideal prey had been fat and numerous enough to nourish it, if the mongoose had awaited the serpent, the serpent the toad, the toad the fly, if the fly had awaited us, etc., but man did not wait for the grocer to open his shop before spreading, he took the initiative. Similarly, not unreasonably, Palafox. Unless his appearance came after that of the vole. It might, what’s more - Zeiger exaggerates, to make sure the point is made - be that not one of the twenty thousand skulls in our possession was cleaned and spit out by Palafox. The vole doesn’t fare well in low temperatures. It constitutes the everyday fare of weasels, foxes, and wild cats. If it falls in water, it goes straight to the bottom. Plague, fire, famines never spare it. Finally, three or four years on, it is only a shadow of itself, it has no taste for living, you wouldn’t even recognize it, it dies from its pretty death. From there, conversation reaches an impasse, only a single step away-a step we will not take. We’re just hitting our heads against the wall, observed Pierpont. For the moment, let’s leave the question of dating aside. We’ll return to it, rest assured. Another point that remains to be clarified: Palafox and sex, which is to say which sex is Palafox? Does he have an organ, if yes where, if not what?
If not, then it’s definitive: I’ve suspected it from the start - Palafox is a starfish. Cambrelin leads the charge. Essentially, starfish, like Palafox, present an axial symmetry reticulated in five and that carmine color which would so delight us, Maureen, if you were to change the water in the tank from time to time. We usually call them starfish, however imprecise and hard to grasp a term it may be. Another common feature, starfish are also weak-willed. Their bodies, tugged at by contradictory urges, tear in two parts, one with three branches, the other with two. Later, the missing half and the amputated arms grow back to form two distinct individuals, indifferent to each other, already torn apart by inner conflict, hesitating between North and South, East and West, North and East, South and West, East and South, West and North. The great advantage in asexual reproduction, surely you will agree with me, resides in its simplicity. It circumvents a series of strategies, humiliating rejections and unpleasant surprises, and one is certainly at the very least spared the six hundred and forty days of gestation that paralyze elephants. Somewhere in the Sargasso Sea, there must be a colony of Palafoxes that all spawned from the one original, who still lives and twitches within each Palafox including yours, Maureen, yours whose water you should change and whose limbs you should try to count. Professor Cambrelin has the distinction of supporting his assertions, if not with disabling proofs, then with tedious erudition. Of course the first starfish did not create itself, despite its five arms, which blows Chamberlain’s theory out of the water.
Which doesn’t even begin to mention, adds Baruglio, that cobras are afraid of water. One finds them in the desert. Therefore, how did Palafox reach us? To me, that’s the first enigma for us to resolve. Age and gender are matters under the auspices of anecdote and gossip, we’ll save those for when we’ve gotten to the heart of the matter, once we learn the grounds for his presence and by what means of transportation he arrived among us. Palafox would not have been the first to have traveled in a suitcase. Indeed I have unwittingly brought back from my excursions several of those hooded snakes, as their morphology allows them to slip on a jacket or a pair of trousers just like you or me, a disguise in which they go unnoticed, or to coil up inside a mitt or a slipper, or in a cap. The shock is considerable when the masks at last are lowered or just plain dropped (hood not included). But usually, they manage to get out when the suitcase is open on the bed without being recognized or bothered. So this is how I see it: Palafox crawled to a harbor, spotted a hotel, snuck past a porter’s stare, slipped into a room, perhaps even into the arms of a chamber-maid, hid between the covers, or perhaps in the wake of a prostitute’s steps, or a frail child’s, night fallen, taking advantage of a traveler’s distraction to slip into the luggage. It’s the only way he could have crossed the Ocean. If he took the plane, same deal, we only need to transpose the action from the Hotel Magellan to the Hotel Lindbergh.
You seem to forget he has wings. Palafox couldn’t have made it by swimming, Zeiger willingly admits, but he would not be the first albatross or the first heron to have made it across Europe without a motor.
3.
We have therefore learned, Algernon recapitulates, that Palafox built a nest from twigs and moss in the shape of a cupola, with a side entrance. That he lives on tortoise eggs, rotting carcasses, and pollen. That he hibernates in a crevice, here opinions vary, or at the bottom of a hole, rolled in a ball or hanging from his feet. We have therefore learned very little - little that isn’t unreliable. We will swear to nothing, will not put our heads on the block for any of it. When you think about it, it seems even doubtful that Palafox thought of building a nest in a tree. When you weigh between nine and ten tons, you tend not to linger long in the foliage, on principle, doubtless one would like to remain a little longer, to enliven the leaves with chirping since the view is fine, unobstructed, the air purer, the sky radiant, but you never do more than pass through, the earth reasserts its dominance through violence, an iniquitous law voted into being by hummingbirds serving them and them alone. If a pear, which was destined to fall from the start, conceived and shaped in this manner, still bruises itself when rolling on the grass, imagine a mammoth, a true mammoth. Palafox would have been wrong to have perched so high, his maternal instinct would have warned him off. Whereas, without worry, he could climb in his hut in La Gloriette park, solidly fastened to the three limbs of the walnut tree that seemed tailor-made to his specifications and needs. In truth, Algernon had designed it for his son, Archie. He often placed the palms of his hands on his wife’s swollen belly: Archie training as a boxer in his mother’s belly developed his left hook and his footwork, the heir to the Buffoons would be a fighter, a chief, a leader of men, a true terror on earth. He would set up his own H.Q. in the plank hut, walls pierced with arrow slits, thatch roof, built by his father.
Archie was born and named Maureen a few days after the burial of her mother which at first had monopolized everyone’s attention. Algernon did not survive the poor dear. What good henceforth to drag oneself through life, he preferred to put an end to it and have the Fontechevades take care of the child. But imagining suicide is one thing, the ornamental lake was dry, the blade dull, the gas jet empty, the high beam worm-eaten, the window painted shut, the car being serviced, railway workers on strike, the revolver jammed,
merde,
and of course, at this late hour, the pharmacy closed, Algernon unto the breach once again with Maureen in his arms. Invited that summer to La Gloriette for the presentation of Palafox, the Fontechevades had responded yes, they would be at the party. Madame is a saint, a vice-squad volunteer, sufficiently robust and mustached to be put into service in the event of a redeployment of forces, treasurer of a cell fighting against prostitution that has sworn to imprison pimps everywhere and recently made the arrest of an orchid-sel ler who was exposing his flowers in his storefront window, as if in Amsterdam, an early victory. Fontechevade married her only a week after his having embraced military life, for however many conquests certain men may have, they always end up with the same type of woman. General Fontechevade loves his work, prospects are good, there’s time left over to read, which one can use to shoot rabbits, and he travels abroad a great deal, meets tons of people, or tonlets at first, one has to start somewhere, then more later, that’s what we do, pack people in, if not us who will? So it is not rare that the general’s wife should find herself alone in the house with Olympia.
merde,
and of course, at this late hour, the pharmacy closed, Algernon unto the breach once again with Maureen in his arms. Invited that summer to La Gloriette for the presentation of Palafox, the Fontechevades had responded yes, they would be at the party. Madame is a saint, a vice-squad volunteer, sufficiently robust and mustached to be put into service in the event of a redeployment of forces, treasurer of a cell fighting against prostitution that has sworn to imprison pimps everywhere and recently made the arrest of an orchid-sel ler who was exposing his flowers in his storefront window, as if in Amsterdam, an early victory. Fontechevade married her only a week after his having embraced military life, for however many conquests certain men may have, they always end up with the same type of woman. General Fontechevade loves his work, prospects are good, there’s time left over to read, which one can use to shoot rabbits, and he travels abroad a great deal, meets tons of people, or tonlets at first, one has to start somewhere, then more later, that’s what we do, pack people in, if not us who will? So it is not rare that the general’s wife should find herself alone in the house with Olympia.
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