by Joe Gores
She is an American about my age, barely into her twenties, breathtakingly beautiful in a fragile way, gleaming black hair in a smooth waterfall halfway down her back, a heart-shaped face, huge dark eyes with long lashes and unknown hurts lingering in the corners of her glances. Willowy and warm, with an appealing inner dignity.
“Naked,” I say, “because her face is more demure.”
She claps her hands. “What a wonderful answer! When she is naked, a woman to survive must be more demure, not less!”
I tell her I am hitchhiking across Europe, she tells me she is a touring art history major with a month each in some of the great gallery cities: Madrid, Rome, Paris. It is the first high adventure of her young life. Despite her tiny budget, she already has one American, in Madrid studying the guitar, sleeping on her couch. If I need a floor to throw a sleeping bag on…
I assure her I am here just a few days, and have a room.
If she cannot give me accommodations, at least she can begin my art education. And she does. With, oddly-because I am a sunny chap in those days-the museum’s darker, more brooding works. El Greco’s San Sebastian with the murderers’ arrows buried deep in the naked saint’s flesh; Bosch’s grotesque Lust; Pieter Breughel’s macabre and frenzied Triumph of Death… What does she see in me, even then, that I do not see in myself?
And, of course, she shows me Goya’s “black paintings.” I cannot tear myself away from Saturn Devouring His Children: an aged, naked, demented figure with mad and terrified eyes, a flying mane of white hair, cramped, twisted limbs, screaming even as he bites the head off his own nude daughter.
“Saturn is the symbol of time,” she tells me. “He devours his children-us-because he is our fate, our melancholy.”
I find this, from this untouched and lonely girl, almost unbearably poignant. In Buen Retiro Park a short distance from the museum we share a half-bottle of red I supply, a carefully wrapped ham sandwich she brings from her handbag. The park has tall plane trees lining footpaths where nurses push rich people’s babies in prams, and old men who probably fought in la guerra civil rake up the leaves to put into wheeled receptacles. Around this little oasis the traffic grumbles and honks.
This becomes our pattern: we meet each morning in front of that day’s painting to be analyzed, lunch each day in Buen Retiro on wine and that inevitable ham sandwich. Her presence makes of Madrid a pure and wondrous adventure. I am half in love without ever having touched her or even knowing where she lives.
On the Friday I become aware of a man standing very close behind me. I turn quickly; in Spain are many Gypsy pickpockets.
“She is not coming,” he says.
I know him instantly, though she has never described him: the student of the guitar who sleeps on her sofa. He is as tall as I but bulkier, with brown and curly hair, a fleshy chin, a strong, almost hooked nose. His face is round. Without the chilly blue eyes he would be the Pillsbury Doughboy.
So sure of him am I that I ask, “Flamenco or classical?”
He looks surprised for a moment, then sneers, “Oh. Pillow talk. Classical. I am the next Andres Segovia.”
“I doubt that. Why is she not coming?”
“I told her you’d found someone else to fuck. I knew she was dicking someone so I followed her, saw you two together.” His fleshy face darkens. His heavy brows draw down. His skin flushes. “Dicking you and she won’t even give me stink-finger.”
What says Cyrano?
Oh, my friend, I seemed to see
Over some flower a great snail crawling!
“Every night she makes the next day’s fucking ham sandwich. I got up early this morning and opened up her sandwich and jerked off into it and wrapped it up again.” He gives a sneering laugh. “Now that’s what I call mayonnaise! She’s probably eating it right now. Eating me right now. Maybe I should have waited until after you’d had lunch with her to tell you about it so-”
I knock him down. Had I been Raptor at that time, I would have slain him where he stood. A woman is running for the guard, her shoes echoing on the marble floor. I stand over him.
“If you return to her apartment, even to pick up your guitar, I will kill you. Do you believe me?” I know in that moment that I am speaking true matters, and I can see the belief in his face also.
I walk away, out of the Prado and out of Madrid and out of her life forever. I wait long enough to see him leave the museum and entrain for Barcelona. Perhaps there he will buy a new guitar. Now my path to her is clear, you say; but to what end? In truth, I cannot bring myself to see her without telling her how he has violated her; but to be told it will destroy something within her it is essential I preserve.
In a world where such horrors occur, as Raptor I find in myself a violence to equal them. Need more to be convinced? I have more- la verite toujours la verite, remember? It can be found in Colin Wilson’s A Criminal History of Mankind, the chapter titled “The Psychology of Human Violence”:
They found them [the habitual violent criminal] amazingly skillful at self-justification — suppressing any material that might lose them sympathy — but the real problem lay in the criminal character. They lied as automatically as breathing… Most criminals have developed a psychological “shut-off mechanism” to push inconvenient thoughts out of consciousness… This meant that responsibility, too, could be shut off…
It seems to eerily echo my own dark nature, but surely, I tell myself, this is not me! These men are true psychopaths. But then I have a terrifying thought: is it possible that I also have no capacity to understand what truth is? Is this why I constantly seek the origins of things-especially in myself? If I know it from the beginning, must it not be true? So I always compulsively demand, Why did this happen? To whom did it happen? What are the consequences?
But in the last analysis, does it matter? You see, he has jerked off into her sandwich and she has eaten it. Telling her about it will not change it, only destroy her. And now I know that Raptor, not yet named or acknowledged, lurks within me.
Thus, when the current need arises, I become him. Ah, what relief! As Raptor, I can let the discarded shards of myself pierce the barrier. And afterwards… Well, afterwards, I need only activate my shut-off mechanism to be pleased at the cleverness with which I have slaughtered, is it not so? Rather than suffer any afterthoughts, bad dreams, sleepless nights?
Aha, say you, but Raptor has such insomnias, regrets, nightmares. What if you have rent the temple veil from top to bottom, have left the fabric of your life tattered around you? What then, murderer?
But that is nonsense. I am my profession. To prove it, I go now to kill again. After that will be time to stop.
If I can.
CHAPTER FORTY
“If I can,” said Will, “I want to stay with the great apes. The first one known, thirty-pound Aegyptopithecus (28 m.y. ago), once was believed to be ancestral to all living monkeys and apes. But we now know the hominoid line began about the same time he did, rather than descended from him: some twenty-two pithecoid species, scattered over Africa, Europe, and Asia, now are known. Yet only the line of Dryopithecus (12 m.y. ago) survived-by devising a whole new way of getting around.
“Brachiation.
“Brachiation means swinging beneath the branches by the arms, rather than running around on top of them on all fours. Evolutionists call brachiation ‘utterly adaptive’-which means that if you were an ape, you learned to brachiate or you died. In a world of shrinking forests, brachiation gave us new function and anatomy to go with our innate primate playfulness.
“Function: developing amazing gymnastic skills to swing through the trees, to hang by an arm while reaching out to the tips of branches for ripe fruit. This required judgment — how far away is that next limb-and concentration. Lose your concentration, misjudge, you miss your grip and fall. And die.
“Anatomy: the torso is straightened, the arms and upper body are strengthened, the hands and wrists become fluid, the pelvis begins its adaptation for eventual
upright walking. The ape could retain his bulk while expanding his brain and remaining in the trees where, for the time being, all the fun was.
“This is most important: there is the same joy in an ape’s swift flight through the forest as there is in a bird’s soaring flight over it; and it was this sense of fun, of adventure, that helped certain hominoids walk out into that unknown veldt.
“Between those Miocene pithecoids we have been talking about and the modern apes we want to talk about, the fossils showing homin oids becoming homin ids are, as William Howells says, ‘no more than mutterings in the dark-a piece of jaw here, a piece of arm bone there.’ We hear not even mutterings about the ancestors of gorillas and chimps, except a single bone from the Samburu Hills in Kenya some 6 to 9 m.y. ago.
“The gibbons and siamangs are the most joyful, perhaps the brainiest of the surviving great apes. But by one of those double whammies of which Nature is so fond, they ‘chose’ a life of wondrous dexterity and delight in the tops of the trees-thereby removing themselves from this discussion.
“The orangutan’s direct affinity to us is tenuous: he packed his bags for Borneo about the time Proconsul (22 m.y. ago) appeared in Africa. But he is a hominoid, and when we talk about our direct ancestors we find some of his ways suggestive.
“The basic orang social unit is blood-related females who stay together in a single area. Once a young male is driven away from the band, he rapes any female he runs across. It is true rape, by the way-she is not ready to receive him.
“When he is full grown, he seeks females who are receptive, mates with them, and then leaves. He is solitary and his relationship with all other males is antagonistic: meeting, they invariably fight until somebody backs down or is seriously hurt.
“Gorillas, in their mountain habitats in Central Africa, are different: they travel in fairly stable social groups of females and infants led by a dominant ‘silverback’ male. Most imam ture males, as they mature, are driven off as the young male orang is. The young gorilla loner also will grab any females he can find, but his intent is very different. He keeps them to form his own harem-thus establishing a new basic social group.
“Big daddy silverback defends his harem against such seducers with violent displays in over 75 percent of the encounters, with actual physical battle 50 percent of the time. He must, because a low-ranking female often will run off with one of these traveling salesmen: in his new harem she will have the status she lacked in the old.
“Chimps and gorillas have a shared morphology that suggests species closeness; the complexities connected with knuckle-walking are even more compelling. Nobody but chimps and gorillas do it, and both species do it exactly the same. So… a shared common ancestor well after the human line had split off?
“Not so, says DNA-structuring and amino-acid analysis: almost identical human/chimp DNA suggests their split was only about 5.5 m.y. ago, while our single ape fossil from the Samburu Hills suggests the gorilla split off 6 to 9 m.y. ago.
“The basis of chimpanzee society is a male kin-group with one or more alpha males; it is the females who are the strangers. If the band splits up, there is no bond among the females; they disperse until they find new male bands. And they mate with as many of the males in their community as they can so the males, never knowing if they are the father of any given infant, will usually be solicitous of all.
“Chimps live mainly on fruit, so they have to travel in small bands of four to eight because the availability of ripe fruit dictates how often they get together. Separation can be for several weeks, and upon remeeting they have elaborate reunion reactions-hugs, kisses, back-slapping… sound familiar?
“Nobody can see anything much in a rain forest, so basic communication is by the so-called pant-hoots PBS specials have made so familiar to most of us. Every voice is unique-chimps can recognize each other over long distances of for est. These calls are usually territorial or to announce a major food source.
“Males travel with other males, aggressive to protect against aggression. They view their environment as hostile and patrol the peripheries of their territory in stealth and in numbers, always ready for war.
“So here we are at long last, at the edge of the trees with the chimps and the direct hominid forerunner of Lucy whom many anthropologists picture as a timid plant-eater forced from the trees by bad weather and bad neighbors. Sure, the Pliocene was dry after the wet Miocene, and the forests were shrinking; but anthropologist Owen Lovejoy targets bipedalism as an absolutely enormous anatomical change, one not for the faint-hearted.
“So was it the weak, or the strong, who crept down out of trees into the unknown-and survived? Common sense gives us the answer. For those who don’t believe in common sense, the chimpanzee is here as a prime source about our earlier selves, because he is so close to us, and because he obviously has changed less than we since we shared the edge of the savannah.
“Only a third of a century ago, Robert Ardrey could write with a straight face: ‘Every modern primate, whether gorilla or macaque, chimpanzee or vervet monkeys or gibbon or baboon, is inoffensive, non-aggressive, and strays no further from the vegetarian way than an occasional taste for insects.’
“Ardrey was wrong about the chimps. The chimp, so close genetically to man, is a hunting ape, the only hunting ape apart from ourselves. He does it for fun, not necessity; for pleasure, not for profit. He does not need the protein supplement to his diet to survive. So, why hunt?”
Will drank water, and Dante realized with a start that he had been so caught up in the story that he had again forgotten his central function of looking out for danger. Of being constantly alert like a chimp patrolling the perimeter of his territory. This lecture hall, right now, was Dante’s territory. He had better be ready to defend it against Raptor.
“Bloodlust? Dudley Young believes, and I agree, that the chimp’s hunting is at once something much simpler and much more profound. He hunts for the hell of it. Because it is fun, because it wards off boredom. That chimps get bored and hatch convoluted political and domestic plots within the troop is well known. That they are clever is undisputed: given an electronic board in place of their unevolved vocal apparatus, some chimps use large vocabularies, even create simple sentences.
“Is his hunting behavior shocking? Probably, when we consider that he is the brainiest and most affectionate, and the closest to us of all the primates. Certainly his behavior on hunting forays is decidedly at odds with the way he lives the rest of his life-which in my fieldwork I have found to be subtle, complex, even touched with a sort of refinement.
“Yet hunting troops seem to hunt twice a month, usually successfully. ‘Success’ is relative: the killing is inelegant at best. They kill infants often snatched literally from the mothers’ arms. About half the kills are monkeys, the rest infant baboons, baby bushbuck, squealing bushpiglets.
“They bite their victims on the head or neck, they flail them to death on rocks, they stomp them to death, they dismember them, they disembowel them. Eaten first is blood, then brains, if the skull can be cracked open so they can be swabbed out with finger or leaf. Next, viscera, flesh-all is fought over, and there are politics involved. Though male chimps are tremendously more aggressive than females, the females are surprisingly keen and vicious hunters, vociferous in their demands for their fair share of the spoils.
“Indeed, these hunts cause a veritable contagion of aggression-biting, screaming, crapping, mounting, groveling, embracing… Young likens it to the Dionysian frenzy. As if the chimps know they are doing something forbidden, almost shameful. Schizophrenic, Dr. Jekyll one minute, Mr. Hyde the next. Their brains, biologists tell us, are neither large enough nor complex enough to hold such concepts; yet anyone who has ever loved a dog knows that dogs understand all about shame and forbidden acts-with a brain a lot smaller than a chimp’s.
“While there is violence in the other primates’ lives, it is genetically ordained and ritually contained; in the chimp during his hunting foray
s it is not. Why is the chimp so different? Why is his violent behavior so out of control?
“Because he has no genetic or ritual guides to curb his hunting behavior, and, like us, is not physically designed for it. No claws, canines not a whole lot better than ours, and, most importantly, he is not au fond a predator like lions, leopards, wild dogs or hyenas. So he carries no genetic imprint of how to do it.
“Predators hunt for a living. There is certainly enjoyment in a good stalk; there is no anger at a failed one. Disappointment, perhaps, but not rage. It is their profession, after all. Chimps gather fruit for a living. It is an orderly and ordered activity without loss of control, though there might be a scuffle or two over some choice fig or banana.
“But when the chimp hunts, it all changes, because he is not ‘tooled up’ for predation. Though he uses behavior adapted from his range of daily domestic aggression-charging displays, shrieking, baring the fangs, occasionally biting or striking-he goes outside the limits of his genetic triggers. In the hunt he does not stop, he goes on, he maims, he kills.
“For the unarmed, fear and rage accompany the act of killing. The nonpredator cannot be moved to violence without these emotions. The chimp is not afraid of the baby monkey, this tiny mite cannot harm him; but fear there is. Of what?
“I believe it is fear of the act of killing itself The chimp knows he is out of control-but that is precisely why he seeks the state. To experience the unknown, to know the nasty pleasures of the forbidden. Do we see Adam and Eve foreshadowed here, eating of the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge?”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Armand “Red” Grant swung the cream-colored Lexus off Marina del Rey’s Via Dolce into Tahiti Way where Tosca was docked in Marina B. Tosca was a seventy-eight foot all-weather motor yacht custom-built for Mr. Prince by Hattaras for a million-two; RADAR, SONAR, a thousand-mile cruising range, slept a dozen people in luxury.