Diego Marani - God's Dog

28 May

Guntur’s laboratory is in an old building on the Nieuwe Diep Basin. The windows look straight on to the canal embankment, but to the right of it there is a strip of land occupied by an old disused greenhouse, separated from the entrance by a brick wall; and that was where we left our bicycles, chained to some railings. As we went in, a violent storm was brewing over the Jimeer; the dark sky was flecked with strips of grey and orange, and there was a rumble of distant thunder out at sea. In the restaurant, Guntur had started to tell me more about his experiments. At one point he had looked at the wall clock as though he were waiting for some particular moment in time. Now he had switched on the computer and opened the safe where he kept his data banks. He linked up the hard disk and started the programmes. His large room on the ground floor is crammed with various kinds of apparatus and oddities of the kind he likes to surround himself with, including an old barber’s chair.

‘When I started studying mirror neurons I immediately felt that I was standing at a door that would give me access to a new scientific dimension. Mirror neurons alert us to the existence of an empathy that is all pervasive: they are found in men and monkeys, but we are also discovering them in other animals. So why should they not also exist, in other forms, in plants? Perhaps mirror neurons are fragments of a unity which once suffused all creation. In part, we humans function in the same way as all other beings, and the more contact there is between us, the more we interact. In a word, we think together! And perhaps every being is capable of some form of thought. So your Teilhard de Chardin was right when he talked of a noosphere. The whole subject has begun to interest me deeply: mirror neurons might be a step towards the scientific proof of the existence of God; of intelligent design, do you see? The world on its way back to a journey towards the divine!’

As he talked, Guntur had his eyes not on me, but on the computer screen where his data was coming up. Now he gestured to me to come closer, as he brought several photographs of a monkey up on to the screen.

‘This is Django, a young adult chimpanzee we brought back from the forests of Kibele. I started by doing transcranial magnetic stimulation tests, and nuclear scanned encephalographs, in order to locate the mirror neurons. So far, so unremarkable: we already know that chimpanzees have mirror neurons in the inferior parietal lobe and frontal cortex. But Django had another apparently sensitive area — I could see vaguely on the scan but had difficulty bringing it into focus. From the reactions to the neuronal stimuli, I began to suspect that it was a sort of Broca’s area proper to the chimpanzee. In the human brain, Broca’s area is the one concerned with speech. Do you see what this means? That chimpanzees too are capable of speech, or at least they’ve got the brains for it! I carried on stimulating the area in question, and getting Django to do exercises which I hoped would make it more responsive. Until, one day, the incredible happened: I was adjusting the apparatus when I suddenly realised that Django’s usual grunts were now interspersed with clearer sounds; intermittent ones, but definitely phonetic. I taped the lot, and played it back a thousand times. It was then that I made my great discovery: Django speaks Swahili!’

Wide-eyed with emotion as he told his tale, Guntur seemed to be keeping the air down in his lungs, as though afraid of running out of breath. Usually so mild, his face, now drained of colour, was twisted into a grimace, his eyebrows suddenly more prominent so that he resembled a mask in an ethnographical museum. He carried on:

‘He speaks ready-made phrases, mangled and incomplete, but it’s definitely Swahili! He must have learned them from the scientists who reared him in Nairobi. Django was born on a nature reserve and has always been in touch with human beings. I wrote to a neurolinguist from the University of Leyden whose name I was given by an imam. Professor Aren De Smet will be coming to see Django next week, but for now the whole business is completely hush-hush. I haven’t mentioned it to anyone, apart, obviously to this same neurolinguist from Leyden, who is completely trustworthy and an observant Muslim. Do you realise what atheists would do with this discovery? If Django can speak, then he must have a soul. Does that mean that every living being has a soul? And, if so, what is the difference between life and matter? We have to find out more, and get there first.’

As he was speaking, Guntur took a bunch of keys out of the safe.

‘Come on, let’s go and see Django. Then you can make up your own mind.’ I followed him through a gate, then down a wrought-iron staircase leading into the basement, from which the greenhouse was entered through a passageway beneath the boundary wall.

‘You’d better stay on this side of the terrarium, you’ll be able to hear him well enough from there. He doesn’t know you, and he might take fright,’ said Guntur as we went into the greenhouse. It had begun to rain, the drops were drumming on the glass and blurring the outlines of the tugboats riding at anchor on the quays of the Nieuwe Diep. The art nouveau building was divided into two by a grille, leaving the chimpanzee ample space to move around on the side nearer the water, from which it was separated by panes of thick glass. The interior of the enclosure was fitted out with ropes and raised walkways, and there was a sandpit in the middle of the concrete floor. The space was crossed by a channel containing a stream of running water, flowing out into a drain. I took up my post behind the terrarium and watched Guntur as he walked forwards towards the cage among the flowering plants. The chimpanzee was sitting on the ground, his back against the grille; he turned his head as he heard Guntur’s voice.

‘Habari ya jioni, Django! Habari yako?’ I heard Guntur repeat. The chimpanzee seemed intrigued by the showers of rain against the glass; he was looking around him as though puzzled, surprised that he could hear the rain beating but could not see it fall. After some coaxing from Guntur he finally bounded up to the first walkway, which was some two metres above the ground, where he stayed, huddled, fixing Guntur with an alert but distant look. He seemed somehow sad, perhaps even worried. He grunted, yawned, dug around in his fur with his nails until he found something which seemed to be annoying him, removed it and put it in his mouth. He sat still for a few moments, looking listless, then suddenly turned his head to look at Guntur. Now his eyes really did seem to be saying: ‘What do you want from me?’

‘Habari yako?’ Guntur repeated patiently until Django, goaded by his insistence, suddenly gnashed his teeth in something approaching a laugh, uttered a laboured ‘Habari yako’ in return, then leapt down from the walkway and ran off towards the glass wall overlooking the water, where he stayed, looking out to sea, his head bowed. The clouds, which had been moving off eastwards shortly before sunset, now parted, allowing a ray of sun to light up the iron arches of the greenhouse for a moment and cast Django’s squat shadow on to the embankment. A shiver ran through me as I caught a brief glimpse of something human in that animal figure. I followed Guntur along the passageway in silence; back in the laboratory, we stood watching the lights come on along the quays.

‘If Django’s speech is nothing more than unwitting imitation on the part of a particularly intelligent animal, then we can send him back out into his pen for children to gawp at. If on the other hand he has a mind of his own, we must learn more about him; we must go to the forests of Kibale and seek out traces of the birth of man!’ said Guntur, a slight quiver in his voice.