The Monkey Grammarian (5 page)

Stains: thickets: blurs. Blots. Held prisoner by the lines, the liane of the letters. Suffocated by the loops, the nooses of the vowels. Nipped by the pincers, pecked by the sharp beaks of the consonants. A thicket of signs: the negation of signs. Senseless gesticulation; a grotesque rite. Plethora becomes hecatomb: signs devour signs. The thicket is reduced to a desert, the babble to silence. Decayed alphabets, burned writings, verbal debris. Ashes. Inchoate languages, larvae, fetuses, abortions. A thicket: a murderous pullulation: a wasteland. Repetitions, you wander about lost amid repetitions, you are merely a repetition among other repetitions. An artist of repetitions, a past master of disfigurations, a maestro of demolitions. The trees repeat other trees, the sands other sands, the jungle of letters is repetition, the stretch of dunes is repetition, the plethora is emptiness, emptiness is a plethora, I repeat repetitions, lost in the thicket of signs, wandering about in the trackless sand, stains on the wall beneath this sun of Galta, stains on this afternoon in Cambridge, a thicket and a stretch of dunes, stains on my forehead that assembles and disassembles vague landscapes. You are (I am) is a repetition among other repetitions. You are is I am; I am is you are: you are is I. Demolitions: I stretch out full length atop my triturations, I inhabit my demolitions.

Hanum
n, a stone sculpture at the edge of the path to Galta. The devout write out a prayer or trace a sign on a piece of paper and paste it on the stone, which they then cover with red paint (photograph by Eusebio Rojas).

An indecipherable thicket of lines, strokes, spirals, maps: the discourse of fire on the wall. A motionless surface traversed by a flickering brightness: the shimmer of transparent water on the still bottom of the spring illuminated by invisible reflectors. A motionless surface on which the fire projects silent, fleeting, heaving shadows: beneath the ripples of the crystal-clear water dark phantoms swiftly slither. One, two, three, four black rays emerge from a black sun, grow longer, advance, occupy the whole of space, which oscillates and undulates, they fuse, form once again the dark sun of which they were born, emerge once again from this sun—like the fingers of a hand that opens, closes, and opens once again to transform itself into a fig leaf, a trefoil, a profusion of black wings, before vanishing altogether. A cascade of water silently plunges over the smooth walls of a dam. A charred moon rises out of a gaping abyss. A boat with billowing sails sends forth roots overhead, capsizes, becomes an inverted tree. Garments that fly in the air above a landscape of hills made of lampblack. Drifting continents, oceans in eruption. Surging waters, wave upon wave. The wind scatters the weightless rocks. A telamón shatters to bits. Birds again, fishes again. The shadows lock in embrace and cover the entire wall. They draw apart. Bubbles in the center of the liquid surface, concentric circles, submerged bells tolling in the depths. Splendor removes her garments with one hand, without letting go of her partner’s rod with the other. As she strips naked, the fire on the hearth clothes her in copper-colored reflections. She has dropped her garments to one side and is swimming through the shadows. The light of the fire coils about Splendor’s ankles, mounts between her thighs, illuminates her pubis and belly. The sun-colored water wets her fleecy mound and penetrates the lips of her vulva. The tempered tongue of the flames on the moist pudenda; the tongue enters and blindly gropes its way along the palpitating walls. The many-fingered water opens the valves and rubs the stubborn erectile button hidden amid dripping folds. The reflections, the flames, the waves lock in embrace and draw apart. Quivering shadows above the space that pants like an animal, shadows of a double butterfly that opens, closes, opens its wings. Knots. The surging waves rise and fall on Splendor’s reclining body. The shadow of an animal drinking in shadows between the parted legs of the young woman. Water : shadow; light: silence. Light: water; shadow: silence. Silence: water; light: shadow.

Stains. Thickets. Surrounded, held prisoner amid the lines, the nooses, the loops of the liane. The eye lost in the profusion of paths that cross in all directions amid trees and foliage. Thickets: threads that knot together, tangled skeins of enigmas. Greenish-black coppices, brambles the color of fire or honey, quivering masses: the vegetation takes on an unreal, almost incorporeal appearance, as though it were a mere configuration of shadows and lights on a wall. But it is impenetrable. Sitting astride the towering wall, he contemplates the dense grove, scratches his bald rump, and says to himself: delight to the eye, defeat of reason. The sun burns the tips of the giant Burmese bamboos, so amazingly tall and slender: their shoots reach to a height of 130 feet and they measure scarcely ten inches in diameter. He moves his head, extremely slowly, from left to right, thus taking in the entire panorama before him, from the giant bamboos to the undergrowth of poisonous trees. As his eyes survey the dense mass, there are inscribed on his mind, with the same swiftness and accuracy as when letters of the alphabet typed on a machine by skilled hands are imprinted on a sheet of paper, the name and characteristics of each tree and each plant: the betel palm of the Philippines, whose fruit, the betel nut, perfumes the breath and turns saliva red; the doum palm and the nibung, the one a native of the Sudan and the other of Java, both of them supple trees that bend and sway gracefully; the kitul palm, from which the alcoholic beverage known as “toddy” is extracted; the talipot palm: its trunk is a hundred feet tall and four feet wide, and on reaching the age of forty it develops a creamy inflorescence that measures some twenty feet across, whereupon it dies; the guaco, celebrated for its curative powers under the name lignum vitae; the gutta-percha tree, slender and modest; the wild banana,
Musa Paradisiaca
, and the traveler’s tree, a vegetable fountain: it stores in the veins of its huge leaves quarts and quarts of potable water that thirsty travelers who have lost their way drink eagerly; the upa-tree: its bark contains ipoh, a poison that causes swelling and fever, sets the blood on fire, and kills; the Queensland shrub, covered with flowers resembling sea anemones, plants that produce dizziness and delirium; the tribes and confederations of hibiscuses and mallows; the rubber tree, confidant of the Olmecs, dripping with sap in the steamy shadows of the forest; the flame-colored mahogany; the okari nut tree, delight of the Papuan; the Ceylon jack, the fleshy brother of the breadfruit tree, whose fruits weigh more than fifty pounds; a tree well known in Sierra Leone: the poisonous sanny; the ram-butan of Malaya: its leaves, soft to the touch, hide fruits bristling with spines; the sausage tree; the daluk: its milky sap causes blindness; the bunya-bunya araucaria (better known, he thought with a smile, as the monkey-puzzle tree) and the South American araucaria, a bottle-green cone two hundred feet high; the magnolia of Hindustan, the champak mentioned by V
lmïki on describing the visit of Hanum
n to the grove of Ashoka, on the grounds of the palace of R
v-ana, in Lanka; the sandalwood tree and the false sandalwood tree; the datura plant, the source of the drug of ascetics; the gum tree, in perpetual tumescence and de-tumescence; the kimuska, that the English call “flame of the forest,” a passionate mass of foliage ranging from bright orange to fiery red, rather refreshing in the dryness of the endless summers; the ceiba and the ceibo, drowsy, indifferent witnesses of the spectacle of Palenque and Angkor; the mamey: its fruit a live coal inside a rugby ball; the pepper plant and its first cousin the terebinth; the Brazilian ironwood tree and the giant orchid of Malaya; the nam-nam and the almond trees of Java, that are not almond trees but huge carved rocks; certain sinister Latin American trees—which I shall not name in order to punish them—with fruits resembling human heads that give off a fetid odor: the vegetable world repeats the horror of the shocking history of that continent; the hora, that produces fruits so light that the breezes transport them; the inflexible breakaxe tree; the industrious bignonia of Brazil: it builds suspension bridges between one tree and another, thanks to the hooks with which it climbs and the tendrils with which it anchors itself; the snake wood, another acrobat climber, also skilled in the use of hooks, with markings like a snake skin; the oxypetal coiled up amid blue roots; the balsam fig with its strangling aerial roots; the double coconut palm, thus called because it is bisexual (and also known as the sea coconut since its bilobate or trilobate fruits, enveloped in a huge husk and mindful of huge genital organs, are found floating in the Indian Ocean) : the male inflorescence is shaped like a phallus, measures three feet in length, and smells like a rat, whereas the female inflorescence is round, and when artificially pol-lenized, takes ten years to produce fruit; the goda ka-duro of Oceania: its flat gray seeds contain the alkaloid of strychnine; the inkbush, the rain tree; the ombu: a lovely shadow; the baobab; rosewood and the Pernam-buco ironwood; ebony; the bo tree, the sacred fig beneath whose shade the Buddha vanquished Mara, a plant that strangles; the aromatic karunbu neti of the Moluccas, and the amomum that produces the spice known as grains of paradise; the bulu and the twining dada kehel…. The Great Monkey closes his eyes, scratches himself again and muses: before the sun has become completely hidden—it is now fleeing amid the tall bamboo trees like an animal pursued by shadows—I shall succeed in reducing this grove of trees to a catalogue. A page of tangled plant calligraphy. A thicket of signs: how to read it, how to clear a path through this denseness? Hanum
n smiles with pleasure at the analogy that has just occurred to him: calligraphy and vegetation, a grove of trees and writing, reading and a path. Following a path: reading a stretch of ground, deciphering a fragment of world. Reading considered as a path toward…. The path as a reading: an interpretation of the natural world? He closes his eyes once more and sees himself, in another age, writing (on a piece of paper or on a rock, with a pen or with a chisel?) the act in the
Mahan
taka
describing his visit to the grove of the palace of R
vana. He compares its rhetoric to a page of indecipherable calligraphy and thinks: the difference between human writing and divine consists in the fact that the number of signs of the former is limited, whereas that of the latter is infinite; hence the universe is a meaningless text, one which even the gods find illegible. The critique of the universe (and that of the gods) is called grammar…. Disturbed by this strange thought, Hanum