Guadalupe Nettel - Natural Histories - Stories

One Saturday morning soon after that Dad got in the car and left the house very early, without letting us know. When I saw the dismayed look on my mother’s face, I had to stay with her and instead of going out with my friends like I always did I helped her make lunch. When he came back he had with him a terrarium in which we could make out the shape of a viper. He hastily greeted us as he walked by the kitchen door with his new purchase. There were too many changes in too short a time and we didn’t know how to deal with them. We tried to interrogate him during dinner. Why did you buy it? What are you thinking of doing with it? Is it poisonous? Dad didn’t give us a single good reason, only what felt like evasive answers about the snake being a healing symbol in the Chinese tradition.

That same evening my mother and I looked through the trash for all the information we could find about his pet. We discovered that he had bought it in a store a few blocks from the Les Gobelins metro station in Paris, its address written on the plastic bags. When Dad set up his snake in the pagoda I was afraid he was going to move up there to live with it. He’d spend hours sitting in front of its terrarium doing nothing but looking at it, so absorbed in his thoughts that he sometimes forgot to close the door. What was happening to him? Why, after having shared everything with Mom, was he excluding her from his search for his origins? Had he gotten tired of living in that Dutch womb? It was truly a mystery. Rather than hurt me, his incipient madness intrigued me. I started watching him through my binoculars every evening, looking from the kitchen into his den’s only window. I wanted to know what he spent so much time on in that place he had built for no apparent reason and without respect for the house’s original design. At first I held on to the hope that from his isolation a great creativity would emerge and flow into a marvelous play. But not once in all the times that I spied on him did I see him write a single line. Reading, that he did do, and when he wasn’t doing that he was sitting in a chair watching the snake. He was a sorry sight.

Two Saturdays after that Dad again went out without telling us where. My mother searched his clothing for the pagoda key and found it. We took advantage of his absence to enter the place he’d never invited us. I remember Mom judging everything with disapproval and disgust, as if it were an assassin’s lair rather than her husband’s sanctuary. I can’t say which was more noticeable in her expression, the disgust she felt or the sadness. I on the other hand gazed in curiosity at the objects Dad had accumulated in so little time: some blue metal balls, an etching of a yin-yang, Chinese coins, fabrics with dragon prints, a small carpet that looked antique. On his desk, the Tao Te Ching and The Chinese Oracle of Changes . It was all there, available and exposed, as if on display. I wondered if with all those symbols and esoteric texts he wasn’t trying to summon his ancestors. The snake was, for me anyway, the most interesting thing there. It must have been about a meter long. Its brown skin had round, dark marks laid out in perfect symmetry. Mom and I stopped in front of the glass. It seemed to be in a deep sleep, coiled up in a corner of the terrarium. Though we tried, we couldn’t find either its head or its face. I said to her, brightly so has to reassure her, that an animal so tame couldn’t be dangerous. But she didn’t agree with me at all and wanted to leave right away. After locking the door we put the key back and went downstairs. Mom poured herself a tall glass of whiskey on the kitchen table and summed up in a single phrase what she was thinking:

“The devil has entered our home.”

She went on for a few minutes about vipers and their characteristics, as she understood them. Temptation, selfishness, evil. those things were my father, according to her. He carried all that inside him ever since he returned from China.

“Look at how skinny he is! I wonder if he started smoking opium. It would be terrible but at least we’d know what was going on with him,” she concluded, leaving me stunned.

Monday, instead of going to school I decided to pass by the pet store where my dad had gotten his. The man and woman in charge were Asian, probably married, and middle-aged. I tried to speak with them without, of course, revealing my reasons for coming, but they could not have been harder to read. I pretended to be intent on buying one of their animals, and only then did they look at me with vague interest. After prowling past the aquariums against the walls, the fish tanks with turtles and chameleons, I asked them if they sold snakes. The man studied me in silence. I don’t know why, but I got the impression that he was trying to guess my height and weight.

“We have them. Of course we have them,” the woman replied. “It is our specialty.”

They took me to a dark shed in the back room with artificial indigo lighting. I looked at the terrariums for a few minutes. In each there was a pair of the same species. The snakes were very different from one another. They varied mostly in size and color. Some had smooth skin that looked slippery. Others, however, had swollen scales that, as much for the texture as for the symmetry of the patterns, brought to mind a woven basket. The kind of plants and the intensity of the lighting changed with each habitat. I paused to watch an anaconda slowly eating a blue bird. It didn’t discard anything, not even the bones.

“It is just an appetizer,” said the man. “It could devour you when hungry.”

I tried to stay calm and kept on walking. As I wandered the shed, I found a snake just like my father’s and, just like his, it was sleeping.

“What species is this?” I asked the woman.

She slipped a piece of paper out from under the terrarium.

“Its scientific name is Daboia russelii ,” she replied. “It is found mostly in India, but in China it is known as a scissors snake.”

“I like it,” I lied. “It looks very tame.”

She shook her head.

“They are very poisonous. As for their temperament, there are all kinds. Some of them are serene, others not so much. Depends on each animal. This specimen is not usually this calm. It’s going through a bad time.”

I wondered if this was a selling tactic. A boy looking for that kind of a pet had to want something more than an inert viper.

“She’s in heat and last week her mate was taken away. They were very close. I urged the man who bought the male to take both of them. I even offered him a good deal, but he refused.”

I looked at the paper she’d read from and saw the price: 1,500 euros. I thought of how much my father had spent since he’d come back from China. Just building his pagoda must have been several thousand. I looked a second longer at the snake and thought of how sad it must be without its mate.

I left the place with a heavy feeling in my stomach. My father’s nostalgia for his country of origin had driven him to buy a piece of its fauna. Instead of going to class I went straight home. Dad had a meeting with a director friend of his from a foreign theater and I was sure that Mom would be happy to hear what I’d discovered. I was right to come home; as soon as I opened the door I found her drowning in tears and completely out of her wits. She didn’t ask me about school and got straight to the point:

“Your father has a lover. An Asian woman he met on his trip. I told you that animal was a sign of misfortune. I don’t know what to do, thank goodness you’re here.”

I decided not to tell her that I’d been to the pet shop. Instead I suggested we go to her favorite pastry shop on the other side of the city. An absurd idea that she readily agreed to. She was in such a state of shock that I think she would have gone along with anything I suggested. Once in the café, in front of a chocolate Sachertorte that she looked at as if it were a stone, she told me what she knew and how she’d learned it.