* * *
—
The Stehr (Hermann). This is the name of a large maggot that has been discovered in the Gehauptmann’s coffin. His conspicuous size led to the assumption that he had only accidentally entered this peculiar environment. It has therefore been attempted to place the Stehr, very carefully, in other living conditions, which was achieved, albeit rarely. But the Stehr has remained a maggot.
* * *
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The Storm (Theodor). One cannot say of him that it is long dead, for this creature has never existed other than in a stuffed form. Truly, it never possessed something called “internal organs.” To stuff the Storm, the taxidermist filled the smooth gray-yellow skin with sea grass, heather, gull feathers, and the like, which gave the Storm a stale smell, for which the Storm is still valued today in the houses of brave German Nordic vicars. That particular smell is the essence of the Storm. One calls this odor “mood.” The fragrance was extracted, fixed with zero percent alcohol and brought into the market in bottles of all formats. The most famous of these colognes was once Jorn Uhl, and this was for some time the most popular mouthwash of the German mind, and the Germans used it to wash their deepest, toothless hollows.
* * *
—
The Swinburne (Algernon Charles). This large enchanted English bird sang once before the rising of a sun that never rose—an oversight. He once sang in front of the crucifix against the crucifix—a misunderstanding. The miracle of this bird is that it is, nevertheless, full of extraordinary melodies, and has, in human terms, a style that no human being ever possessed at the time or later on. This style is so inimitable that the Swinburne himself could not imitate it when he tried to, after growing old.
* * *
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Tennyson (Alfred). Sometimes an elderly mime plays Enoch Arden with a musical accompaniment—no other works remain of this provincial Virgil. He was poeta laureatus; no one laughed at this appellation, for it suited him; he thought exactly what his queen thought, and he only put his thoughts into words in the best style. He was always terribly serious about what an Englishman, as the Chesterton says, has to do to assume a horrible appearance. He had a lot to say, but he had far more words than necessary; therefore, if he talked for a long time, he no longer knew what he was talking about.
* * *
—
The Tolstoy (Leo). Originally the Tolstoy was a steppe horse, but already selectively bred. He was first ridden by Grusinian, Circassian, and Cossacks chiefs. Later, he belonged to the regular heavy cavalry of Literature. In the north and south of Time and Space, he participated in all the great campaigns, including those which lasted several volumes. Stringy, lean, but fiery, always ready to cartwheel and quaff champagne from buckets as a fierce steppe horse should, but always hovering at the manger and even a little spoiled, the Tolstoy followed his logical destiny of becoming the company trumpet-major’s steed. In battle he had carried winners on his back; in his old age he whinnied in a kind and subdued tone while his dung balls were revered as golden apples. This animal’s most striking feature is his superior mind. All his life, he refused to understand that the sparks came from his hooves hitting the ground; that his upturned nose and small head were gruff, devoid of beauty, and even unpleasant, particularly when he rolled his big naive eyes until they protruded, giving him a gloomy stare; and that his long tail, left untrimmed, belonged to a Gobi desert of the spirit; he also refused to acknowledge that he was only a glum reminder of the vast wealth of Asiatic desert horses. With the tip of this tail, he whipped his loins in a Christian manner, believing he was lambasting the world and transforming it in the process, which showcased the limitations of his horsey narrow-mindedness. But the sparks which had once sprung from his hooves remain unforgotten.
* * *
—
The Unruh (Fritz Von?) [the balance]. The Unruh is a dainty frog that usually lives in ponds and feeds on small water skeeters. It is, however, equipped with an inflatable pharyngeal cavity, with which it may sing, but which it also needs to fill with air, albeit only occasionally. To this end, the frog must seek out dry land, even though this species of Anuran lacks the ability to survive out of water. The Unruh, drawing in clean air, expands its pharynx to the size of a child’s head, attracting the passers-by’s attention. Thereafter, our frog redoubles its efforts to draw air, causing its throat to enlarge to the size of a watermelon. Luckily, the Unruh loses its balance, because of the out-of-proportion air bubble, and rolls back into the water, where its throat immediately empties. When in its element, the Unruh is a delicate little frog.
* * *
—
The Vollmöller (Karl). The Vollmöller is a sea serpent, of which only part is visible on the surface of the water. How long the Vollmöller is, no one knows, but the assertion that it is longer than eighty centimeters is to be rejected as exaggerated.
* * *
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The Walser (Robert). This is a pulchritudinous, graceful, and whimsical animal from the family of the squirrels. On the highest trees one cannot spot it (nor does our animal make any attempt to get up there). Yet the Walser’s naive and mischievous grace gives the average-sized trees a joyous liveliness.
* * *
—
Wassermann (Jakob) [Aquarius], also called Mogen Jaakob, is a small—but not too small—star in the constellation of Pisces, and can be seen particularly well from the high-positioned Beer-Hofmann observatory. It is equidistant from Vienna and Dostoyevsky, respectively, to the north and south of these two poles, and was made famous by a mysterious music of the spheres, which, as if emanated from Yahweh himself, gave the Germans—the new chosen people—in other words the absolute Germans, their final ahasverish name: Madness. This mysterious name was also found in a meteorite of incommensurable size, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a mixture of graphite, ink, paper, moss, ambition, and binding strings.
* * *
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The Werfel (Franz), as round as a ball, lacks the ability to curl up like an hedgehog, whereas he can expand. From the hedgehog, it has the pikes, only these are very delicate and soft and sometimes they curve inwardly, which hurts the animal. This contradiction between the appearance and the essence of the Werfel makes this round, soft, and somewhat lazy animal a very popular mundane porcupine at today’s cultural gatherings. One can hardly find a social circle where he is not on display. Therefore, the person who is unfamiliar with the nature of the Werfel’s spikes marvels at seeing this sharp-pointed grenade showcased on the palm of one hand, while the other strokes the sting-sharp creature like a cat, and, in fact, doing so seems to induce very pleasant sensations. That being said, the Werfel is loved for the sake of a different ability with which God has endowed him: he can sing like Caruso and likes doing so, happily and often, especially when he hears noise around him. If, for instance, a war rumbles, the Werfel sings. If the songs were printed, it would be easy to fill a 308-page-long octavo volume with them. On account of his tenor voice, which distinguishes itself in arias and trills, the Werfel is greatly envied by other animals, who seek to imitate him.
* * *
—
The Wevonscholz. This is a useful bird, given its propensity to consume the bits of tapeworm that come out of the Friedrich Hebbel (and also the Paulernst), which all other animals find indigestible. Instead, the Wevonscholz gobbles down every little piece with much satisfaction. Sometimes this bird sings quite beautifully. And it might sing even better if it fed on any other food.
* * *
—
Whitman (Walt). Thus is the Great Pan named, who never died, because he alone among the gods was immortal, although often times he disappeared into the deepest cave of the earth. On the old man’s wrinkled hand, a butterfly rests, and the insect knows exactly what the Whitman is: a branch from the world tree, from which was hewed out the cros
s planted on a mound of shards.
* * *
—
The Wilde (Oscar) was a famous and much-talked-about cutout silhouette from the end of the last century. The silhouette was reminiscent of the costume of a man in tights, in which the wild Wilde, a beauty of a predator—in other words, the negation of negation—loved to show up, with Lord Brummel’s grace, to be admired by the ancestors of our snobs. The Emperor Nero in a similar manner liked to dress as a comedian, to be more than an emperor, to be everything, to be Proteus himself. Faithfully, Wilde partook in the false universalism of an epoch, of a system full of hypocrisy: one can seem what one is, or one can play the role of what one would have wanted to be. It is only through terrible excesses that laws which still exist are capable of suffusing the social classes barriers with reverential fear, inasmuch as the same laws can instill the foreboding of fateful events into men terrified by their fate. To such legal excesses, the Wilde also fell victim—a vain sacrifice, for the same caste he had tried both to imitate and transform, condemned the Wilde by donning the judge’s robe, shedding the silhouette in tights.
* * *
—
Zola (Emile) owned a sprawling factory for the production of social schematics. His situation machines would punch people out smoothly and cleanly through continuous-flow manufacturing. Other machines, which laminated the truth on the causality chain, would collect processed people and assemble them into theater companies that were taught to act on experimental stages, as naturally as Nature itself. A small moon made of silver paper added the required amount of sentimentality.
* * *
—
The Steffzweig (Stefan Zweig) must be mentioned in this bestiary, since it is still regarded as a living being by a few. Still, the Steffzweig is an artifact, made to celebrate the occasion of a Viennese poet’s congress, with feathers, skin, hair, etc., from each and every kind of European beasts. It is, so to speak, a volapük* animal. At present, only in remote lands, and in certain Geneva circles, does anyone believe in the Steffzweig’s existence. Some claim to have seen the Steffzweig in a Leipzig home, on 7 Short Street, under a small glass bell. In the last few years we have heard of an Arnzweig as a real animal. Ascertaining the Arnzweig’s existence has proved to be impossible so far, since it occurs solely in Zion. Nor is it possible to determine this country’s geographical position. Breaking news report that the Arnzweig is a good, honest animal created by God.
* Volapük is a constructed language, created in 1879–1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Roman Catholic priest in Baden, Germany. Schleyer felt that God had told him in a dream to create an international language. The vocable “volapuk” is composed of “vola,” from the English “world,” and “pük,” from the English “speech.”
Horacio Silvestre Quiroga Forteza (1878–1937), or Horacio Quiroga, was a playwright and poet born in Salto, Uruguay. He began writing in prose and verse but soon realized that his calling was leading him toward the short story form. Many of his stories were set in the jungle and inhabited the viewpoints of both humans and animals in their struggle to survive. Quiroga was also adept at portraying mental illness and hallucinations. He loved to travel and often went to the jungle in order to get more material for his stories. Stories of the Jungle (1918) and The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories (1925) are his two major collections, but his novel Anaconda (1921) is generally considered his greatest work. “The Alligator War” first appeared in Quiroga’s collection Stories of the Jungle.
The Alligator War
Horacio Quiroga
Translated by Arthur Livingston
IT WAS A VERY BIG RIVER in a region of South America that had never been visited by white men; and in it lived many, many alligators—perhaps a hundred, perhaps a thousand. For dinner they ate fish, which they caught in the stream, and for supper they ate deer and other animals that came down to the water side to drink. On hot afternoons in summer they stretched out and sunned themselves on the bank. But they liked nights when the moon was shining best of all. Then they swam out into the river and sported and played, lashing the water to foam with their tails, while the spray ran off their beautiful skins in all the colors of the rainbow.
These alligators had lived quite happy lives for a long, long time. But at last one afternoon, when they were all sleeping on the sand, snoring and snoring, one alligator woke up and cocked his ears—the way alligators cock their ears. He listened and listened, and, to be sure, faintly, and from a great distance, came a sound: Chug! Chug! Chug!
“Hey!” the alligator called to the alligator sleeping next to him. “Hey! Wake up! Danger!”
“Danger of what?” asked the other, opening his eyes sleepily, and getting up.
“I don’t know!” replied the first alligator.
The other alligator listened: Chug! Chug! Chug!
In great alarm the two alligators went calling up and down the river bank: “Danger! Danger!” And all their sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts woke up and began running this way and that with their tails curled up in the air. But the excitement did not serve to calm their fears. Chug! Chug! Chug! The noise was growing louder every moment; and at last, away off down the stream, they could see something moving along the surface of the river, leaving a trail of gray smoke behind it and beating the water on either side to foam: Chush! Chush! Chush!
The alligators looked at each other in the greatest astonishment: “What on earth is that?”
But there was one old alligator, the wisest and most experienced of them all. He was so old that only two sound teeth were left in his jaws—one in the upper jaw and one in the lower jaw. Once, also, when he was a boy, fond of adventure, he had made a trip down the river all the way to the sea.
“I know what it is,” said he. “It’s a whale. Whales are big fish, they shoot water up through their noses, and it falls down on them behind.”
At this news, the little alligators began to scream at the top of their lungs, “It’s a whale! It’s a whale! It’s a whale!” and they made for the water intending to duck out of sight.
But the big alligator cuffed with his tail a little alligator that was screaming nearby with his mouth open wide. “Dry up!” said he. “There’s nothing to be afraid of! I know all about whales! Whales are the afraidest people there are!” And the little alligators stopped their noise.
But they grew frightened again a moment afterward. The gray smoke suddenly turned to an inky black, and the Chush! Chush! Chush! was now so loud that all the alligators took to the water, with only their eyes and the tips of their noses showing at the surface.
Cho-ash-h-h! Cho-ash-h-h! Cho-ash-h-h! The strange monster came rapidly up the stream. The alligators saw it go crashing past them, belching great clouds of smoke from the middle of its back, and splashing into the water heavily with the big revolving things it had on either side.
It was a steamer, the first steamer that had ever made its way up the Parana. Chush! Chush! Chush! It seemed to be getting further away again. Chug! Chug! Chug! It had disappeared from view.
One by one, the alligators climbed up out of the water onto the bank again. They were all quite cross with the old alligator who had told them wrongly that it was a whale.
“It was not a whale!” they shouted in his ear—for he was rather hard of hearing. “Well, what was it that just went by?”
The old alligator then explained that it was a steamboat full of fire; and that the alligators would all die if the boat continued to go up and down the river.
The other alligators only laughed, however. Why would the alligators die if the boat kept going up and down the river? It had passed by without so much as speaking to them! That old alligator didn’t really know so much as he pretended to! And since they were very hungry they all went fishing in the stream. But alas! There was not a fish to be found! The steamboat had fright
ened every single one of them away.
“Well, what did I tell you?” said the old alligator. “You see: we haven’t anything left to eat! All the fish have been frightened away! However—let’s just wait till tomorrow. Perhaps the boat won’t come back again. In that case, the fish will get over their fright and come back so that we can eat them.” But the next day, the steamboat came crashing by again on its way back down the river, spouting black smoke as it had done before, and setting the whole river boiling with its paddle wheels.
“Well!” exclaimed the alligators. “What do you think of that? The boat came yesterday. The boat came today. The boat will come tomorrow. The fish will stay away; and nothing will come down here at night to drink. We are done for!”
But an idea occurred to one of the brighter alligators: “Let’s dam the river!” he proposed. “The steamboat won’t be able to climb a dam!”
“That’s the talk! That’s the talk! A dam! A dam! Let’s build a dam!” And the alligators all made for the shore as fast as they could.
The Big Book of Classic Fantasy Page 111