Chloe Aridjis - Asunder

I was already in bed with the lights out when I heard the brass handle of the door to my room being pressed down and, seconds later, a push. Light entered from the corridor and Daniel’s silhouette came into view. He whispered my name. I didn’t answer. He said it again, a bit louder, wavering in the doorway. I couldn’t tell whether he could see my eyes were half open or whether he assumed I was asleep. We’d said goodnight only ten minutes before. My arm itched all of a sudden but I resisted lifting a hand to scratch it, remaining as still as I could. It was the way he’d said my name.

He didn’t persist. After a few more seconds at the threshold he withdrew, pulling the door closed ever so gently behind him. I considered calling him back. Of course I had thought many times of what it would be like. And I’d always been drawn to his mouth, the bee-stung lips, often chapped, and the small gap between his front teeth. After all, we were in another city, in other beds, under someone else’s roof, now would be the moment, more than any other, to try something new.

But no, to summon him would be too much of a risk, I reminded myself, and as I listened to his irregular steps retreating down the corridor I slipped further under the covers, processing what had just happened, namely, that my best friend had tried, for whatever reason, to step over the silent and invisible boundary we had drawn long ago, almost as soon as we’d met, the boundary that had held our friendship in such perfect place. Together we had composed our hymn to distance, that magical distance that held the best of life in place. The music of the night , Daniel once quoted, lies not in the stars but in the darkness between them . And yet that evening, perhaps driven by nothing more than an impulse or curiosity, he had attempted to redraw the line, which may have been glorious or disastrous depending on the results, but I didn’t want to risk it, no, and as I lay there trying to sleep in the doomed couple’s bed, positioned at the centre in order to not be fully on his side or hers, I began to worry about a new imbalance, the kind that might arise from a small shift, when a tiny peg is removed from one hole and inserted in another.

‘Coffee or tea?’ he asked when I entered the kitchen at half past ten. I’d lain in bed an extra hour, hoping that perhaps I would find him at his desk by the time I came out for breakfast.

‘Tea’s fine,’ I said, reaching for the pot. He reached for it at the same time. Our hands met. Mine quickly withdrew.

He poured me a mug and turned back to his toast.

‘How’d you sleep?’

‘Fine,’ I lied. ‘And you?’

‘Like a dead man.’

I felt his eyes on me as I opened the jar of honey, so delicious it tasted of forest, and spooned some on to my plate.

‘The bread’s still warm,’ he said, passing me the basket.

‘Thanks.’

‘I was thinking… ’

He paused. I bit into my toast, dreading the end of the sentence, and stared down at the ugly vinyl tablecloth.

‘… that we could go to the menagerie today, at the Jardin des Plantes. Have you ever been there?’

I shook my head.

‘It’s one of the oldest zoos in the world. I’d like to go. I have some poems in mind.’

‘Sure,’ I said, eager for some activity and distraction, and relieved that last night’s visitation had gone unmentioned.

A gravel path led us through a sweep of manicured gardens, past rows of thorny hedges and denuded trees, past the seated statue of Buffon, the great naturalist under whose direction the zoo had flourished. It led us past a large rotunda of vaulted green iron and glass reminiscent of a train station, past countless signs in assorted typefaces, their edges darkened by rust, and, finally, to the menagerie itself.

The first animals to arrive in 1793, our pamphlet said, were saved from the king’s private zoo at Versailles, pillaged during the Terror. Many, including a camel, had already been eaten or destroyed. In 1795 France acquired its first elephant and in 1827 its first giraffe (a present to Charles X from the pasha of Egypt), inspiring a craze that featured everything from songs, poems and vignettes to gingerbread giraffes and ‘ coiffure a la girafe ’, high chignons held aloft by a wire frame.

The first animals we stopped to admire seemed entirely removed from, in fact almost resistant to, this animated past: a giant tortoise in its domed brown carapace resting alongside a rock of equal size, the two locked in a contest of immobility, and a lone black yak dozing on the dirt ground of its enclosure, its eyes half closed and front legs tucked under, its shabby coat like a worn blanket, L-shaped horns pointed upwards as if waiting for signals from a mountaintop continents away. A pair of majestic eagle owls, or hiboux grand duc , seated on high branches like small, sad kings. Placid dromedaries with faded patches on their knees.

Daniel began to say something but I moved away, desiring silence while I looked, and motioned to him before stepping into the vivarium. Inside, three stock-still Nile crocodiles suspended in shallow water like strips of bark, a snake with an unblinking silver eye like a coin, a leaf-green chameleon on a branch basking in the ersatz glow of a sunlamp. A few paces behind, Daniel had followed me in, and once near he remarked on the effective camouflage of some of the reptiles, almost lost to the eye in their viridescent surroundings, too long a word for too simple a thought, and then fell silent. The stuffy air of the vivarium was only tolerable for a short while. After five minutes we emerged and took a path to our right that led us to the monkey section, where large skittish eyes hung over pairs of little black hands clasping the wire nettings.

The great aviary was filled with diurnal birds of prey, all kinds of landscapes of feathers inside, some moving and others very still. The only free birds we saw were a gang of pigeons loitering beneath, pecking at some fallen seed; even birds must understand that beauty has a price. Daniel began jotting something down in his notebook. Standing with his legs anchored apart, he looked up every now and then at the trapped brushstrokes beyond the bars, strokes thicker than the ones we were used to, and back down at his writing. If I didn’t know, I’d think he was sketching the birds rather than finding words for them.

As the afternoon started to thicken, his figure, especially when hunched over his notebook that way, took on a somewhat sinister aspect, much less attractive than any of the creatures around us, and I started to feel slightly annoyed too by the unevenness of his gait. In fact that day his limp, at such variance with his other movements, rattled me to such an extent I found myself silently, guiltily, willing him a headache. Anything to remove the limp: bring back the Hungarian and resummon, reconjure, resurrect the headache, I thought to myself as we walked more or less side by side, and at first I thought he’d read my mind when he quoted a poem about a caged panther forever pacing round one centre, its mighty will paralysed, its vision wearied by the bars.

As if in answer to this sudden burst of quotation, we arrived at the snow leopard. Judging from the enraptured crowds circling the enclosure this animal was the zoo’s main attraction. People held up their children, murmured and exclaimed, snapped dozens of pictures. The metallic light at that hour, a bluish silver, made the cat look even more powerful and mysterious, and before long I too succumbed to its spell, transfixed by the glacial green eyes flecked with sparks of boredom and irritation, pride and captivity impossible partners, and the fluid, elegant movements of the large spotted paws. It was the only creature that day that looked straight back at us, silently hissing — ears pinned back and jaws sprung open — and for a heart-stopping second I forgot there was a pane of glass between us.