FROM MARINE LEGEND TO REAL MONSTER
The giant squid has been known as a creature of fantasy since ancient times. Homer, in the Odyssey (900 A.D.), tells of a confrontation Ulysses has with a ferocious creature named Scylla “with twelve deformed legs, that would frighten even a god.” Pliny the Elder (Natural History) tells of a “polyp” of uncommon size that was caught off the Spanish Atlantic coast. It is mentioned as a real animal for the first time in 1555, with the name of “Kraken”: the archbishop of Sweden, Olaus Magnus (History of the Northern Peoples) mentions that in Norwegian waters, among the coastal caves there lived “serpents of seventy meters long and ten meters thick, possessing a long mane, eyes like flames, and covered with sharp scales of a blackish hue. They often chase the ships and rise up like columns to sweep the sailors from the deck and devour them.” Renaissance zoologist Ulises Aldrovaldi spoke of “enormous octopi with ferocious instincts.” In 1734 the Norwegian missionary Hans Egede reported a sighting of a marine monster off the coast of Greenland. According to his description “the beast’s body was as thick as a ship, and three or four times as large, and the monster rose up out of the water with an agile leap and then sunk down again.” In 1856, the first credible witness of the existence of the Architeuthis was presented when the Danish zoologist Japetus Steenstrup officially exhibited the beak of one of these giants. Until that year, science was reluctant to accept the existence of these invertebrates, branding any reported sightings as legends and stories.
ENCOUNTERS WITH AN ELUSIVE GIANT
On November 17, 1861, the crew of the French warship Alecton had an encounter with a giant squid off the coasts of Tenerife (Canary Islands). In spite of the sailors’ efforts to hoist it on board, the specimen broke into two pieces, and the harpooners could only preserve the enormous tail, which measured some eight meters long.
Between 1871 and 1876, twenty Architeuthis specimens washed up on the beach at Thimble Tickle, in Newfoundland, which allowed the naturalist Addison Verril to study them. The largest of these measured a little less than ten meters from the end of the tail to the mouth. Its arms had a span of almost twenty meters long and had the thickness of a man’s body. The tentacles were equipped with powerful suckers with teeth, the circumference of its body was two meters, and its weight was calculated at several tons.
In 1943 there was an encounter between a giant squid and a fisherman, on the open sea around the Maldives (Indian Ocean). The fisherman (Mr. J.B. Starkey) indicated that he was fishing in the middle of the night when a giant squid passed next to his boat. The first thing he saw was a greenish, luminous halo, which lit him up in the darkness. In the center of the halo, he could make out an unblinking eye the size of a dinner plate. He could see its tentacles, which measured over sixty centimeters thick. Minutes later, the gigantic squid shot off and disappeared in the darkness.
AN EXTREME ENVIRONMENT
“In this area, fishermen have captured specimens fourteen meters long, so it seems to us more than promising that we might find a giant squid and film it in its natural state,” explains Sergio Mansur, biologist, adventurer, and director of the project. Mansur has a sound knowledge of the area and its possibilities. The technical difficulties, however, are numerous. “It’s problematic to try to capture images in an area without light and with a pressure of eighty atmospheres. But if a squid appears, the cameras are ready to capture it,” he says confidently. These freezing marine depths are the last terrestrial frontier. “These animals live in an environment that is very hostile to life as we know it, and its adaptations to that environment are also extreme. It has three hearts, vision that is a hundred times stronger than that of humans, and a very developed brain. To manipulate its flotation in an environment with very high pressure, its body is permeated with ammonia. Eating a few slices of this squid would be like taking a long drink of drain cleaner.”
Architeuthis Dux captured in the Ross Sea, close to Antarctica. It was found at four hundred meters deep, eating hake, which can be up to two meters long.
ENDANGERED?
(caption) Beached adolescent giant squids along the Cantabrian coast
Medium frequency waves, used to search for oil beneath the continental shelf, could be affecting the giant squids, and could even be causing their deaths. Beachings have been reported along the Cantabrian coast, coinciding with the operations of ships exploring the Bay of Biscay using the technology of medium frequency shock waves. Necropsies of these animals found damage to their circulatory, nervous, and auditory systems.
Chapter 21
Danielito was in an operating room, but at the same time he wasn’t—his presence wasn’t entirely physical in nature. There were two operating tables: a live baby was on one and a dead baby on the other. There were no other people, but from one moment to the next, doctors were going to come in to do an organ transplant from the live child to the dead one. Outside, in the doorway of the operating room, a woman was waiting, the mother of the dead child. A while earlier, someone had said that he, Danielito, was a floor from which they had just ripped up the carpet. He felt two things: a sense of unease, and a need to urinate. A bell sounded, probably announcing the arrival of the doctors, but no one came in. The bell rang again, and Danielito realized his clothes were wet. At the third bell the operating room disappeared and Danielito opened his eyes. The phone rang one more time and fell silent, but he was already awake. He blinked, looking at the ceiling, and he realized that, as he had pretty much already known while he was still dreaming, he had wet the bed. In his underwear, he stripped the sheets from the mattress and threw them on the pile of dirty clothes, and then he took the mattress outside to dry. He had no idea what time it was, but he guessed it was close to noon. He took off his underpants and went to shower. The phone rang again. Danielito stumbled over to it; it was his mother calling to ask him to come over—it was urgent.
“What time is it?”
“Almost twelve. Come quick, the dogs bit me.” He got dressed and pulled the van out, and in less than ten minutes he was at his mother’s. She let him in, her right hand and forearm wrapped in an elastic bandage that was spotted with blood and held with two safety pins. She had been feeding the dogs when she got dizzy and collapsed to the ground.
“And I put my hand down next to Torito’s food. He saw it and thought I was going to take the food away, and he grabbed my hand. He dragged me a few meters before I grabbed a brick from the ground next to the wall, and I hit him in the head until he let go.”
Danielito told her to get in the car, he would take her to the hospital.
“No, no, I don’t need to go, I already washed it, I put Merthiolate on it and bandaged it.”
“But you’re going to need stitches, look how much you bled.”
“I’ll take care of it myself. Some of it is Torito’s blood, it’s not all mine.”
On the kitchen table was the box holding the .14-caliber pistol his mother kept for safety reasons.
“I can’t bring myself to kill them—I raised them. But I can’t stand it anymore.”
Danielito went out into the yard. The two dogs came over fearfully, their heads down and their tails wagging between their legs. Danielito patted their sides. Torito’s head was covered with blood, and there were two more or less large puddles of blood on the cement floor, connected by lines of drops marking the path the animal had taken when he moved from one place to another. Danielito knelt down to inspect the damage. He tried to touch Torito’s head, but the dog turned away, growling and showing his teeth.
“You busted his eye.”
The animal’s left eye was sunken inward, opaque with blood and coagulate. His head had several cuts and a little strip of flesh was hanging off next to his ear. His mother had used the sharp edge of the brick.
“And what would you have me do? He was going to kill me if I didn’t do anything. I had to do something to get him to let me go.”
“I’m telling you, I’m not going to kill them.”
“Daniel, please, I can’t keep them anymore. And I can’t kill them, I raised them up from puppies.”
A shiver ran down Danielito’s spine when he heard his name.
“I’ll take them, then. But I’m not going to kill them. You have any Rohipnol left?”
His mother went inside and came back with a blister pack of pills and the piller. Danielito put a pill in each of their throats and waited for them to take effect. With some effort (they were heavy, and since they were relaxed it was hard to keep their bodies in one position), he carried them in his arms to the back seat of his car. The dogs whined unhappily, but they practically couldn’t move, so they didn’t present any danger.
“For when it wears off.”
“Don’t worry, I have some at home.”
“Take them.” She put the pills in his hand. “These two know I’m not here anymore.”
* * *
He drove to a veterinarian in Makallé. He took Torito out of the car so he could be treated. They cleaned his eye and sewed up the strip of flesh. They advised Danielito to keep drugging him for a few days, so he wouldn’t scratch himself and open the stitches.
Chapter 22
Duarte was fascinated by animal behavior, and he was having fun patting the female dog’s snout and avoiding the slow bites she launched at him in response. An hour earlier Danielito had given them another pill, so the dogs were pretty dopey, splayed out on the floor. Torito had a bandage around his head to hold the patch in place over the eye he had lost.
“Watch out, they’re just slow to react,” said Danielito. “But they’re sons of bitches. That one, if she gets you, might tear your hand off, she’s worse than the male.”
“What’s she going to tear off, poor fucker,” Duarte said, and he hit her hard on the snout. The dog narrowed her eyes, let out a low, slow growl, and opened her enormous mouth, showing her teeth in a chilling grimace. “Ha ha, but you’re right, once she gets better she’ll chew me up, bones and all. How much does she weigh?”
“What do I know. A lot, I carried them in my arms.”
“And your mother managed animals like that?”
“They have choke collars.”
“Still, with choke collars you and I can manage them, but your old lady… wow. And the way she went at this poor dog,” he said, pointing to Torito, “a little more and she’d have killed him. How much before she split open his skull? Not much, seems to me…”
“She hit him with a brick. With the sharp part.”
“She was crafty. And your mom was scared of them? That’s rich. They should be scared of her.”
“They are scared of her. But he thought she was going to take his food away so he attacked, they have strong instincts. He bit her really hard on her arm—it’s not like my mom came out on top. She was all bandaged up, the bandages were covered in blood.”
“Yeah, well, but this is what I want to say. Any other woman your mom’s size wouldn’t last fifty seconds against that dog. And your old lady fucks him up with a brick and just about kills him. She’s a champion. Also, these dogs don’t feel pain.”
“This one felt something, otherwise he wouldn’t have let her go.”
“You’re right. And what did she say about why she couldn’t bring herself to kill them?”
“That she couldn’t do it because she’d raised them.”
“Ha ha, divine.”
Chapter 23
In spite of the decision he’d made, it took Cetarti a while to start cleaning out the rooms and the garage. The first few days he wandered around among the piles of trash, thinking about an efficient way to free himself from the mountains of stuff. He thought he would have to sort through it first, and that he would have to do it systematically, so the place wouldn’t become even more chaotic. It occurred to him to classify everything into three groups: first the stuff that was garbage pure and simple, which would be bagged and taken out daily. Then the things that could be sold by the kilo (paper, of which there was a lot, and other things), which would be collected on the porch, under the roof. The third category was hypothetical: objects that could be sold to second-hand stores. If anything qualified, he planned to put it in the space left by the things he would clean out of the first room. Once the methodology was decided on, he got down to work: he bought ten packages of standard-size trash bags, a broom and plastic dustpan, a bucket and mop, and bleach and disinfectant for the floor. He started in the living room. That first day he moved close to a hundred and fifty kilos of paper to the porch, and he took nine trash bags out to the street. For the final category he could only separate out a five-volume Sopena Encyclopedia, 1957 edition, amply illustrated. He also rescued two Styrofoam sheets, in impeccable condition, twenty by thirty centimeters and two centimeters thick. In the afternoon he went out to walk (more than three hours) along the river. That night he didn’t eat dinner, and he stayed up watching TV until two in the morning. Then he slept soundly. He dreamed that he and his brother were by the ocean at sunset. There were hundreds of beached adolescent giant squids on the sand (pink bodies, eight or nine meters long, stretched out on the sand like irregular balloons with a little air let out). The suffering cephalopods blinked their eyes weakly and shifted their tentacles. Impeded from any other action, they picked up little piles of sand and let it slide between their suckers, or they fumbled over rocks, the shells of other mollusks that were dead already, or plastic bottles. Cetarti and his brother were walking among them. Cetarti could somehow clearly perceive the animals’ state of mind: an instinctive sadness and a feeling of confusion at the strange tactile perceptions (the salty air, the skin quickly losing water), the confusion caused by the powerful light and the sudden weight of their bodies. At one point his brother stopped and looked at Cetarti with the same serious expression he’d worn in the photo of them as children. He knelt down next to one of the bodies, pointed to a part of the head, and said something. Cetarti didn’t understand. He wanted to ask his brother to repeat himself, but he realized that he couldn’t—his lips were glued together. Or he just didn’t have a mouth: he didn’t know, because he couldn’t see his face.
Chapter 24
Duarte drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Night had fallen, and he was talking with Danielito in the darkness of the van’s front seat.
“They tortured it with electricity to teach it to dance. They put it on a sheet of electrified metal, and now the elephant moves its feet all the time. It can’t stop.”
“Sure,” said Danielito after thinking about it a moment. “But then, it’s not really dancing. It’s just moving its feet is all.”
“And what do you think, they’d have a choreographer for it? I guess at most they played music that more or less went with the movement of its feet.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s it. What does the elephant care about music.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Duarte scratched between his eyebrows
“If it was my job to teach that elephant to dance, I’d play music with a good rhythm, like: tum, tum, tum. And I’d stand her on the metal and with every ‘tum’ I’d shock it, so it’d learn that every time the ‘tum’ sounded it had to lift its feet.”
“But if the electricity is in all four feet, she’s going to try to lift them all at once. She’s going to jump, not dance.”
“I’d have to shock two feet. One in front and one in back, like in a diagonal.”
“Ah, that might work.”
Duarte turned on the ambulance’s radio. For a while they sat silently, listening and not talking. Then Duarte looked at his watch and told Danielito that it might be time for him to get out. Danielito obeyed and stood to one side of the cattle gate, among some tall plants. They waited some twenty minutes in their places. A scooter approached, the sound growing louder and louder. The bike reached the cattle gate and stopped, and a woman in a helmet got off. As soon as the woman got off the bike, Duarte turned on the van’s headlights. Surprised, the woman froze and looked toward the sou
rce of the light with squinting eyes. Then Danielito came out from the plants, put a plastic bag over her head, threw her to the ground, and tied her hands with a zip tie. With Duarte’s help, he lifted the woman and the bike into the van. Danielito stayed in the back and Duarte closed the back doors. Then he got behind the wheel and pulled away. In the back part of the van, with no light at all, Danielito took the woman’s helmet off, found her mouth with his hand, stuck a Rohipnol into it, and gagged her with packing tape, pressing it tight. So that she wouldn’t see anything later, he put some packing tape over her eyes as well.
Chapter 25
Danielito got up at nine thirty, again with clothes and mattress wet. He carried everything out to the yard, gave the dogs food and water, and took a shower. Then he fixed two mugs of tea with milk and a few pieces of toast. He spread plum jam on three of the pieces, put them on a plate along with the cup of tea, and went down to the basement. The woman was in the bed, with one hand cuffed to a bar in the wall; she was still a little slow from the pill, but much better, more awake. He put the plate on an unpainted table next to the head of the bed.
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