Take it from me—a larva with declining secretions is the most despised of all creatures. They began to say to me, “You’re rotten, Viskovitz.” “You’re disgusting.” Or “You’re a zero.” These are words that are very hurtful.
So one day I said, “It’s time to get moving, Zuco. It’s time to do something.”
“Do something?”
It’s not an easy concept to grasp for a larva without legs, wings or sex.
“Precisely,” I said. “We have to plan our future, take our fate in our own tarsi.”
“Tarsi?”
“Figure of speech! We’ll make do with our mammiform prominences—our bulgy parts. We’ll use our orifices if we have to. The important thing is that we get to the royal larva nursery. If we eat that nectar we’ll become queens, brother, and we’ll rule the world. The gruel they feed us here isn’t even food enough to make us asexual worker ants. We’ll stay larvae the rest of our lives, Zuco. Have I made myself clear?”
“I wouldn’t mind staying a larva, Visko. However things go, I’ll always be an ant. So it’s better to keep on being a formless plasm. I believe it’s just for that reason that fate put me here and gave me this name.”
How could I reason with that acephalous creature? Contracting every fiber and gripping every bump with my buccal apparatus, I dragged myself to the way out of the chamber. Then, sticking myself onto the walls with my fluids, I began to climb, to gain the first millimeters of my progress up the social scale. After a week of those furious gymnastics I was exhausted and famished, but I reached the chambers of the upper story. I collapsed on the floor, panting and moribund.
My dehydrated body didn’t have any secretions to barter for food, but some larvae agreed to release a little something to me in exchange for the story of my adventure. Restored, I abruptly fell into a deep sleep, but what I’d eaten wasn’t royal jelly, and when I woke up I found myself with legs but no crown. I had a horny exoskeleton, and my scythe-like mandibles were weapons. I was a soldier.
At the first assembly, when I had a chance to observe myself alongside the fellows in my unit, I was rather disappointed. Malnutrition had harmed me in a conspicuous way. Entire somites of my body were atrophied and deformed. The overall effect was that I was an underdeveloped little guy. I was a gnome. Ranked by height, I was once again the next to last, if you count the regimental mascot, an aphid.
But the more serious harm was the atrophy of the scent glands, the most important organs for an ant. An ant without an odor is an ant without identity, without an anthill. He is the most insignificant of creatures, a useless meaningless being even by ant standards. He is a zero.
I soon realized that no one was speaking to me or sharing food with me. They only noticed me when they bumped into me, and sometimes not even then. Not infrequently they came to bury me, thinking I was a corpse.
“Damn it, Visko,” they would say to me then, “if you’re such a wreck while we’re at peace, what’ll you be when there’s a war!”
But when a war broke out with the neighboring anthill, it was soon apparent that the enemy didn’t notice me, either. For them I wasn’t even an insect. I didn’t exist. Ah, if only I’d been tall enough to reach them with my mandibles. I got a nickname: “the unknown soldier.” Aphids and springtails laughed at me. Even the embryos.
One evening, I ate some soporific fungi, and, hidden behind a clump of dust, I tried in vain to rest. I breathed noisily to convince myself of my existence. Then I prayed in silence. I wasn’t asking for love, because I knew I was an insect without sex or hormones. I wasn’t aspiring to intellectual fulfillment—I was a soldier. And I wasn’t seeking communion with the fat god who sprayed insecticide. And certainly not worldly pleasures. No. I was asking for power.
The power to master the world and to enslave my neighbor, to humiliate and destroy every creature bigger than a micron, to transform every desire into a decree, every whim into a verdict. That thought was the only thing that kept me going.
I devised a plan. Being small increased my ability to concentrate and synthesize. In me there was literally no room for sentiments or scruples. I was a lowlife, predisposed by nature for every sort of villainy. My lack of odor made me, for all practical purposes, invisible. I could go into any anthill whatsoever without being stopped, and I could acquire the odor of any ant by rubbing myself on his abdomen. Dead ants could readily be used for this purpose. My handicaps would become my weapons.
It all happened very quickly. I shuffled between the rival anthill and ours and became a spy, revealing the military secrets of each side to the other. My disclosures determined the outcome of the battles and caused me to rise rapidly in the hierarchy of each army and in the esteem of the respective queens. So one day I found myself the commander in chief of both forces. I decided to let the victor be the anthill in which I was known by the name of Viskovitz. The queen of the betrayed anthill was killed and its people enslaved. With the aid of certain of its slaves, I put together a conspiracy to kill my queen. Then I had the other conspirators arrested and killed. I declared martial law and assumed all civil power.
The next day I proclaimed myself emperor.
At that point I was the most powerful insect in the known world. My every word was law, my every deed history. On that throne I could complete the conquest of the planet, or create a new civilization—abolishing castes, trophic castration, the extermination of males—thereby changing the course of history and the entire evolution of the species.
But it is a given that an ant lives only a few months. And it was also a given that the fat god had gone on vacation and left a loaf of dry bread on the table. I decided that the energies of my people would be better employed building a colossal monument to me. It would be an imperishable testimony to my Myrmidonian greatness, the work that would make me gigantic and immortal. I myself directed the construction at the same time as I posed, my hind legs slightly bent and my gaze fixed on the horizon. Every other activity was suspended and all individuals summoned to take part in the work. Those incapable were sacrificed, and their bodies used as cement in the construction. The jaws of the soldiers sculpted the shape in the bread, the worker ants carried away the soft white parts and the dead bodies. I posed patiently, fanned and perfumed by slaves.
The miracle was almost finished. My deep-felt satisfaction began to appear in the expression of the statue that portrayed me. It was all true: those long, jointed antennae, that immense mesothorax—they were mine. This masterpiece was my second metamorphosis; I felt my soul transfer itself into that perfect and indestructible body. It was the apex of my triumph.
Only one thing was missing: Zucotic.
I found him in the same malodorous underground chamber in which I’d left him. Eating almost nothing, he’d managed to postpone metamorphosis. He remained a larva. He was a senile wrinkled baby, an opaque clot of acidic lymph and resignation. You had to see him to believe it.
“Infancy is over, Zuco. It’s time to grow your little feet and walk.” “I’d rather stay here, Visko. I’m at peace with myself. The bit of food I take is offered freely. I’m not a burden on the community.”
“This isn’t advice, Zuco. It’s an order. I’d like to see the face you’ll make when you have one. Is it possible you don’t realize how ridiculous you are? They give you charity because you’re a clown, because they can laugh at you and feel superior.”
“And yet there must be something of value if the emperor has deigned to come see me. It would astonish you to learn that people come here not to mock me but to ask my advice—”
“That’s enough,” I snapped. “Guards, feed this creature. And feed it with royal jelly, I want it to become a queen.”
They forced the nectar down his gullet, but the metamorphosis didn’t take place. His wilted membranes couldn’t take the strain and his body burst like a boil, oozing its yellowish contents onto the ground.
“Did you know him, Your Majesty?” the chief of staff asked.
“General, he was my best friend.”
“I’m very sorry, Your Highness.”
“I, on the other hand, am not,” I replied, irritated. “What difference does one friend make when I can have millions of slaves?”
The inauguration was two days later. Throughout the empire the calendars were reset to zero. My people gathered in front of the Colossus on their knees. The priests chanted the “Ode to the Emperor,” and I, Viskovitz, I the great, marched up to the podium and turned to the crowd.
“Citizens of the empire,” I thundered. “This extraordinary work of engineering genius is a monument to greatness itself. I mean exactly that—to greatness. Because greatness, ladies and gentlemen, isn’t something measured in millimeters. Greatness is measured in centuries! Anything that has value outlasts time. And in the judgment of time, ladies and gentlemen, great is the ant and small are the dinosaurs . . . Today more than ever, my children, I am sure of one thing: when all the animal species that now exist are extinct, we will still be here— building anthills. And, admiring this statue, we will cry out, ‘Who would have said it? The greatest of all was Viskovitz!’ ”
“Hurrah! Long live the emperor!”
It was then that I heard the crack. It might have been the ovation or the tramping feet of the people. The two hind legs of the monument had given way and the Colossus had settled on its abdomen.
“Shall we suspend the ceremony, Your Immensity?” my vizier asked.
“No. Let it go on,” I ordered. The damage was irreparable. Who would manage to relift that boulder? There was only one thing to do.
I bent over, reached back with my mandible and cut cleanly. I, too, sank onto my abdomen. It was extraordinary —I felt no pain. And once again the resemblance was perfect.
“Greatness, my people—” I shouted, drowning the cries.
Crack.
Another three legs had snapped. Now there was only one propping up the construction.
I did what I had to do.
“Greatness,” I shrieked, balancing on my last leg, “is not—”
Thump.
The crowd began to flee in every direction. The collapsing sculpture had broken into three truncated sections. The head and the thorax had shattered, but the large oval shape of the abdomen had stayed intact and was rolling toward me. It wasn’t the idea of dying that bothered me so much as the shape of that abdomen. It looked like a larva. It was a statue of Zucotic that was killing me, not a statue of me. It wasn’t the portrait of an emperor that I was leaving to history. It was the portrait of a nothing.
WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, VISKOVITZ?
“Who am I?” I asked myself. Not finding an answer, I asked my father.
“Depends on the context,” he explained. “We chameleons are like the pause between two words.”
“And . . . our personality?”
“Why settle for one personality, kid, when you can have them all? Where does it get you to be yourself when, just by pretending to be someone else, you can seduce really fantastic lizards, get good marks at school, make your rivals run away? Follow my example: today I’m your pop; tomorrow, who knows?”
It was always the same story. All you had to do was remix the colors a little, inflate the pulmonary branches and you could look like whomever you wanted . . . Of course that meant you couldn’t trust anyone, not even relatives. It wasn’t an accident that in our family we all had names that ended with a question mark. I was called Viskovitz?
“I don’t know what to believe in anymore, Dad. I’m confused.”
“Good for you, son. If you’re confused, you’ve got it made as a chameleon. It’s better that the secret of our existence doesn’t get out, Visko? Most of all to certain serpents. Now get moving—it’s time to go to school.”
“School? What the hell am I going to do there? The only subject is ‘Our Native Tongue.’ And the first lesson is how to hold it.”
“Fine. That way you’ll learn to express yourself without getting in my face.”
“Dad, let me tell you that when it comes to oral expression, a good kiss is better than all those hours at school.”
“I don’t want to hear you talking about kisses, Visko? They’re dangerous, they’ll tie you up. It’s better not to get mixed up with girls.”
“Oh, fine—and if you’ve fallen in love?”
“Well, then you’re in trouble, son. It’s the worst thing that could happen to a chameleon.”
“Did it ever happen to you?”
He thought a bit, raising a flexible eye toward his crest. “Yes. Even I fell in love once. But I have to say, I never understood with whom. And then I never succeeded in telling her apart from the background. And then I got terribly jealous. If someone brushed a branch, I thought he was feeling up her prehensile tail. If he licked dew from a leaf, I thought he was sucking her ear. If he sighed over the view . . . well, I saw the worst implications. Luckily, love is a thermal phenomenon, Visko?, and we cold-blooded animals only have to worry about it between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.”
I had had enough of the cynicism of that old lizard— and who knows if he really was my father. I said my good-byes and lowered myself by way of a hanging root. At the shrub level I melted into the selaginella and the zinziberace. I kept on past the water-lily pond until I reached the tree of the chameleon I loved. I stealthily climbed the trunk of a cauliflore palmetto, carefully managing my mimicry so I wouldn’t give myself away—and then I was blessed with a vision of her. She was indeed visible. She was gazing at herself in the water gathered in a hollow leaf of an epiphyte and, humming, was peeling off her skin in a slow striptease, while her body, rather than mimicking, was inventing fantastic colors. Hidden behind a saprophytic orchid, I landed a furtive kiss dead center. I wondered if I was the only one doing this. Then I spread my tongue on a branch, hoping she’d lie down on it.
She called out, “Who’s there?” Perhaps I’d made a noise.
“Visko?” I admitted, leaving out the “vitz,” because if you pronounce letters like “T,” “L,” “D,” “N” or “Z” with a dry throat, there’s always the chance your sticky tongue will stay stuck to the roof of your mouth.
“And what do you want?” she hissed. With one independent eye she continued to look at her reflection, while with the other she looked me in the eye that was looking her in the eye that was looking at me. I told her the truth. I told her I’d been enchanted by her cutaneous chromatophores, and I wondered how she managed to be so creative with her scales. She smiled at me.
“It’s not hard,” she answered. “To be original you have to go back to the origins, lizard. The secret of being oneself is knowing how to give up on it. Empty yourself, and let yourself fill back up. If you know how to do that, voilà, your colors will start to speak to each other, and instead of a question mark at the end of that ridiculous name, you’ll be able to put an exclamation point. I am Ljuba!” She pronounced that difficult name without hesitation, snapping her tongue like a whip. Then, unexpectedly, she said, “Want to go for a stroll?”
I froze. “A stroll?”
“Yes, it’s the mating season and you’ll do as well as any other . . . Come here.” I couldn’t believe my luck. A slime like me with that arboreal fairy! I went closer and discovered that my colors imitated hers: vermilion, turquoise, poppy red; marbled, speckled, pebbled! “Caramba!” I said to myself. “This must be bliss.” She was completely different from my pale schoolmates. For her I would climb mountains, I would face vipers and civets. And if she were to get mixed up with the background, so what—seeing her scales everywhere, I would love every leaf, every sunset, every flower. And to each one I would give that unpronounceable name “Llljuba!”
I dove into that rainbow. I caressed her dermal lobes and I clung to her crest. I let myself be carried away by her undulations and I sank into oblivion, drowning in her viscid exudations, adoring every millimeter of those scales. WHUMP. We fell off the branch and plummeted onto the thorns of a whistling acacia.
Ah well. The next day I discovered that my stupid ex-girlfriend Lara had the same wounds, and so did my sickly and repressed deskmate Jana. They were the same chameleon!
It was then that I lost my last certainties.
And it is there that I finally found myself. But I didn’t recognize me.
YOU’VE FOUND PEACE AT LAST, VISKOVITZ
In my heart was only nothingness and beatitude.
My mind, having destroyed the armor of the ego, being free of desire, memories and karmic impulses, was focused in the greatest meditative absorption, close to a cessation of all activities, to a sublimated state of consciousness.
Transcendence, illumination, reawakening.
At that point my diamond body would have overflowed with shining prana from head to tail and I, Viskovitz, would have finally dissolved into light, the divine Atman, the Eternal Orgasm . . . But just then an unpleasant smell started swirling in my turbinate bones. A smell I thought I had buried in the past. I tried to keep my concentration, bark my mantra and visualize a mandala, but the delicate balance of the samadhi had been shattered. I painfully opened an eye. In front of me was Skittles, our spiritual master, absorbed in the peace of meditation, and all around were the monastery’s other dogs, some perfectly still in their asana, others more interested in the offerings deposited on the pagoda’s minor altars than in self-discovery. A German shepherd with brown fur was climbing the temple steps. I intercepted him just in time, as he was lifting his leg against the altar.
“You’re in a sacred place, Zucotic!” I growled. He was a police dog, and I knew full well that his training did not include any type of spiritual education. I, too, had worn that collar.
“Long time no see, you old wolf,” he barked, and joyously sniffed my butt. He talked about the old times, when we had worked together in Narcotics. Then he told me that he had come to ask my advice, to discuss something that was bothering his conscience.
You're an Animal, Viskovitz Page 7