Marina Perezagua - The Story of H

The zoo of a city at war, my love. Imagine what that’s like, a zoo in a city at war. Impossible to imagine without seeing it. Here you could truly feel people’s agony, much more than outside. You can’t really appreciate people’s death by seeing dead people. I had seen so many dead people already they all seemed the same to me. You can really feel people’s death in a derelict zoo; the hanging bellies of the hippopotamus dragging like newborns around a fake pond that’s nearly dry; the hoarse orangutan who has been sobbing so disconsolately it lost its voice and now merely opens its mouth wide in a silent scream that punctures your eardrums. Outside the zoo, the dead and the wounded are all the same. United in suffering, people lose their individuality. But in a zoo where animals have been abandoned in their confinement, each species manifests its pain in a different way, within the parameters of its way of being; the way of the bear, the way of the monkey, the way of the lion, the way of each animal in keeping with its nature, like all the facets composing a diamond that is the human heart. I’ve always known that the creatures inside Noah’s ark weren’t animals, but the entire spectrum of a person’s feelings. He tried to salvage joy and grief in all their variants. That was Noah’s work.

Oh, if only you could have seen Yoro’s eyes, my love… You would have fallen in love with her, even though she’s your granddaughter, and despite the love you felt for me. I felt a special attraction to her myself. How beautiful our granddaughter is, daughter of my biological daughter, and how good you were to find me, to make me feel like her mother without ever needing to let me in on the secret. You’d have told me eventually, I know that, but it doesn’t matter now. It never really mattered because I’ve moved along the same roads I’d have traveled had I known the truth, and perhaps not knowing made me a little more patient when I told myself: Take heart; don’t worry; looking for someone else’s daughter isn’t so important. But the second I laid eyes on her, I knew for sure that she’d sprung from my own genetic sequence. Some things you know without having to study them. So how important is blood, my love? Can it help us identify the mysteries of the human chromosome? I always thought it couldn’t, that blood isn’t important, and I still think this because even though I was born defective and wrongly sexed by relatives and doctors, at least I was born of myself. Yet when Yoro looked at me it was as if the little puppy of the little puppy I’d gestated for so many years suddenly recognized me, smelled me, and looked over my body with hunger, maybe looking for the nipple of the woman I wasn’t allowed to be when I was born, condemned to the flat chest of a sad man. But Yoro was there, turning me into a mother and a grandmother in one fell swoop. A snap! Everything faded into the background when I saw her. Like in a birthing chamber, only she, newly born, was all that existed. Her presence signified everything. Even you disappeared in those first few moments. The birth, my love, was painless. All the catchphrases mothers use are true: when Yoro was born, all that I had suffered stopped hurting me. It’s hard to explain, it’s not really that nothing hurt, more like all the suffering somehow transferred into a kind of movie that I could watch scene by scene, but no longer feel.

After so many years searching for Yoro, when I finally found her, it was like coming back to you again. Spilling water over your ashes at the foot of a tree to watch how the limbs rise up. All of you, erect. Yoro has your eyes, but with a twinkle of a star that has heated up over years of pressure. There was pressure there. The pressure of war. She was so young, and yet the look in her eyes was on the verge of splintering from rage, from heat. But she was good. She bent down to caress the wizened skin of a crocodile. But the animal didn’t move. If it had been a person, I would have thought he was dead, but for a crocodile inertness and sadness are one and the same thing, and sadness, everyone knows, is an evergreen tree.

We walked slowly, checking all the cages. Many of them were open. We saw a tiger approaching some fifty yards away. We knew it by its stripes. The stripes were nearly the only thing it had left. Stripes without a tiger. It couldn’t walk. It scraped forward with its front paws alone, dragging the back ones so slowly we weren’t the least bit alarmed when it got close. When it reached us, it raised a hungry tooth to the sky; that’s what its feline strength had been reduced to, a chameleon’s failed attempt to catch a fly.

Yoro is beautiful, my love, but what really stands out is her kindness. She caressed the iron bars as if they were wounded flesh. She entered the cages with respect, as if not wanting to awaken the dead. We saw a young elephant, still alive. It was lying on its side and it reached out to us with its empty trunk, which reminded me again of the image in my recurring nightmare, shed snakeskin—though now I knew what had happened to my penis, my testicles. All of it was in Yoro. An empty elephant trunk was no longer a symbol of my genitals looking for me all over Hiroshima; now it was just that, an empty elephant trunk. Yoro and I spent many hours together picking whatever grass was left, locating grain and water in other cages. For the elephant. It was so weak. Yoro placed the food in the lobes at the end of the trunk for it to smell, then set it in the elephant’s mouth with some water. It was as if she’d grown up taking care of sick elephants. Maybe it was just that. Right now I don’t know anything about her. How to ask? I haven’t told her who I am yet either. But I believe she knows, Jim, I believe she does. I wish you could see how she looks at me. She knows the same way that I’ve always known, like you never told me, through the silent communication that runs from body to body. It doesn’t matter, though. I will tell her the truth. I have to think about how to go about it. How to explain using words why we have spent a life, the only lives we had, looking for her mother, looking for her. Our only life, Jim. A life dedicated almost exclusively to searching for the treasure you didn’t live to find.

We spent seven days at the zoo. The first six we traveled on foot. The last, my love, the last, Yoro left on the back of an elephant. If only you could have seen it. The elephant was tame. It stepped around the bodies lying on the ground. I realized when I mounted that seen from above like that, desolation multiplies. That’s how I saw the city as a battleground. That’s why the kings and the gods deserve less forgiveness, because the higher up you are, the better you see the plain and the easier it is to prevent war.

Squalid horses roamed about with their ribs poking out, sniffing the human pasture. They nibbled it. Thousands of years of an herbivore’s diet replaced by a carnivorous one. The thing about war is that it makes anything possible. I watched the horses, my love, die without complaint. Their way of showing pain is silence, which isn’t the case with other animals. Will I die silent as a horse or will I let out a pig’s squeal that in a single blast quells all the silence I’ve suffered? We trekked through the city for almost an hour before the elephant finally recovered its ancestral memory, raised its trunk to the sky, and shook us off its back with a great trumpeting roar. From the ground we heard its footsteps running away, but it didn’t bother to sidestep the vacant-eyed faces of the ones responsible for his captivity. Two helmets cracked in a single footfall. I liked the sound of it. “Peace,” it said on one of them. But you can’t drain a solid, and the soldier brain, now a liquid thread, might just flow into one of the lagoons of true peace, the peace those soldiers ridiculed. About a year ago, a spoiled little girl in a suit made a feminist speech at the UN headquarters. The candid words of an actress aren’t going to change the world. The world is fixed by the tread of an elephant recovering its memory as it races away. You taught me you don’t ask for equality using words like please. Equality is not even under discussion. That was then. It’s different now. The only way to defend black people and women is the tread of an elephant. The world no longer understands words.