Jon Bilbao - Still the Same Man

The professor interrupted him with a victorious guffaw.

“You see? He himself admits it. He hit your monkey.”

“It was an accident. It wasn’t my fault.”

“But you admit it!”

“I hit a monkey. We don’t know if it was this man’s monkey.”

“How many lost chimpanzees could there possible have been that day in the area?” asked the professor.

The stranger looked back and forth between the professor and Joanes. He pulled the chain tauter still, and Gagarin took a step backward. Having sensed the tension in the air, the monkey let out a screech and started to flex his legs over and over again and bare his teeth.

“It was your monkey. What did you call it before? Lolita? He killed Lolita. There’s no doubt it was her. She was wearing a bracelet on her wrist. A plastic, beaded one. Did Lolita wear a bracelet like that?”

The others anxiously awaited the answer.

“Yes,” said the man. “A pink and blue bracelet. She liked it a lot.”

Then he said, almost talking to himself now, “I gave it to her.”

“That’s the one!” exclaimed the professor.

“Hang on a minute,” said Joanes. “Let me explain. The monkey threw herself out onto the road. It all happened so quickly. I didn’t have time to—”

“Quiet!” bellowed the man, and they all fell silent.

Then, pointing at the professor with the machete, he asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

The professor straightened up in a gesture of hurt pride.

“Because it seemed you ought to know. Ever since he killed your monkey, he’s been going around telling everybody, boasting about it, bragging. As if it were something to be—”

Without even letting the professor finish his sentence, the man pointed at Joanes with the machete and said something that nobody understood — a single word, or something like a word, a series of clicks from his tongue. He let go of the chain, and Gagarin launched himself at Joanes.

Joanes barely had time to throw his arms up to protect his face. The chimpanzee pounded him with his arms and legs, all at once. Within a second, man and beast had transformed into a mass of limbs that collapsed onto the floor with a groan and the whistle of air being squeezed out of a pair of lungs. Gagarin climbed on top of Joanes’s stomach. Punches like hammer blows rained down on Joanes’s face.

The professor’s wife began to shriek. She begged them to break it up. She begged everyone. Her husband had to hold her to stop her from falling off the bed. She looked like she was about to get up and drag herself into some corner or another for refuge. While he struggled to restrain her, the professor, equally horrified by the monkey’s outburst, watched the struggle between his former student and the beast.

The monkey plunged his fist into Joanes’s nose, and they all heard a crack like a branch snapping in two. Joanes retaliated, swinging a huge punch. More out of luck than anything else, the blow struck the monkey right in the stomach. The animal doubled up in pain, but the respite barely lasted a second. The chimpanzee then began jumping up and down on Joanes’s testicles.

The stranger was also watching the fight, his eyes bulging, astounded by the animal’s wrath. He hadn’t expected him to react like this. The hand holding the chain was trembling. It was as if the chimpanzee was letting out years of accumulated anger.

“Stop it!” cried the professor. “Make it stop! Can’t you see it’s going to kill him?”

The man, who seemed paralyzed, didn’t respond.

“Stop it!” repeated the professor. “That’s enough! Are you mad?”

Between kicks and punches, Joanes managed to get the monkey off him. The animal took a starting run and jumped right back on him. This time he didn’t hit him but rather sank his fangs into Joanes’s left hand and shook his head as if trying to wrench it off.

“Please, please!” begged the woman. “Make it stop! We’ll give you whatever you want! But get it off him!”

“Control this damn beast!” added the professor.

“Stop, Gagarin!”

But the monkey was out of his mind and didn’t obey the order.

“Stop, Gagarin!” repeated the man, his voice quaking.

The chimpanzee didn’t pay him any attention, so the man was forced to tuck the machete into the rope he used as a belt and pull the chain with both hands to separate him from Joanes.

Gagarin resisted but finally began to back off, still clutching Joanes’s hand with his teeth. Joanes screamed. His hand and the monkey’s mouth were attached by something resembling strings of chewing gum. Afterward, the monkey separated himself fully from Joanes, two fingers remaining clenched between his jaws.

“Come here, come here!” said the man, clearly shocked, as he pulled to gather up the chain.

Backing away, the chimpanzee dropped one of the fingers, the pinky. The man reproached him, threatening him with his fist, and the monkey glanced at him and sat down at his feet, gnawing the other finger, the ring finger, as if it were a candy bar. He was soon as calm as he’d been when he entered the cabin, as if all his rage, having claimed its due, had simply disappeared. Or as if the whole thing had been nothing more than a brief show, just to let them know what he was capable of. Now he showed an almost vainglorious indifference toward them, even his master.

On the floor, Joanes was holding his hand to his chest. Both his hand and his nose, which was broken and bent at a strange angle, were bleeding profusely. His eyes were rolling back into his head as if he were going to faint.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” the woman repeated.

The man continued to scold the monkey. With his back bent, supplicant, he approached Joanes to ask his forgiveness and explain that he didn’t mean for this to happen, that he’d only wanted to scare him a little, just a little, that he was so sorry, that he didn’t know why Gagarin had reacted that way. He was so shocked, he looked on the verge of tears. Then he begged the woman’s forgiveness and said that Gagarin wasn’t like that, that he didn’t hurt people.

He didn’t get the chance to finish what he was saying. The professor, who in the meantime had picked up the cane, went up to him and thwacked him on the head.

“Shut up, old man!”

The man fell to his knees. Without knowing what had happened, he made to protect his head with his hand. He looked at the chimpanzee, but Gagarin was in his own world, impassive. The professor hit him again and the man collapsed, motionless.

Both Joanes and the professor’s wife watched the scene, paralyzed.

“What did you do that for?” she asked her husband. “He was apologizing.”

“I don’t trust him.”

Still holding on to Joanes’s finger, the chimpanzee contemplated his now unconscious master. Without letting go of the cane, the professor turned toward the animal, who simply scratched his armpit, moved as far away as the chain would permit, and went on chewing the finger.

The professor crouched down next to the man to take the machete off him. Next he opened his backpack and, with a look of disgust on his face, rummaged through its contents until he found a shirt. He tore it in two and used one of the strips to tie the man’s hands behind his back. With the other he gagged him, but not before tying a double knot in it, so that it would stay snug between the man’s teeth.

“This way he won’t be able to give the monkey any more of those orders,” he explained.

He acted confidently and efficiently, as if cuffing and gagging were among his normal daily activities. Afterward he went over to the bed and let himself flop onto it. His wife edged back to give him some space.

“Are you OK?” she asked.