I Am an Executioner

by Rajesh Parameswaran

  And yet I find it hard to deny her, everything she says pulls so hard at my soul. Determined to remember her loss, she does have a dignity and a power all her own. Perhaps it is only this that gives attraction to what she says.

  Is an elephant capable of murder? Not a bull crazed by musth, but a normal cow, bound by all that is natural to the protection of her sisters? It shouldn’t be possible. After all, what are our lives about? Grass, water, and sleep; and when these things are unavailable, the fretting over their absence. A constant seeking for safety and food, for time to enjoy the company of our sisters and our children. What could be more straightforward?

  Yet how we complicate the seeking of our so-simple desires! I think it is because we are born into families, bound already at birth into a knot of disappointed affections, blood-strong desires. Our families breed in us our elephant and inelephant qualities both.

  Look, there plays little Shanti, such a sweet calf. But a daughter already to Amuta, a cow so parsimonious in her affections, inspiring but also demanding, a leader battle-ready and hard. A beast capable of doing anything to protect her herd.

  Look how affectionately and uncritically Shanti follows her mother. That affection is sure one day to be disappointed. Shanti’s not the brightest calf but an earnest one, trying always to please. Other calves her age are embarrassed to be seen with their mothers, but not her. Look at them clinging close in the river, look at Shanti throwing mud at her mother’s rump, the parts she cannot reach. The softening in her eyes when her mother touches her, that pure gaze of gratitude and joy. The motherly touch is a supersweet pleasure, an impossible bliss. All the sweeter when it comes from an elephant as usually hard as Amuta. For all the favor she has bestowed me, Amuta has never touched me in that way. The kindness she has bestowed on me, in fact, is only one tiny part of the kindness my own mother would have shown. Amuta has conferred me with status, but it is nothing like the status I would have enjoyed if my own mother were queen. Why, I would have been the apparent heir, and not this clumsy infant Shanti, poor thing. I’ve played with her often, taught her to fell small trees. It’s a joy to watch her grow, but she’s no born ruler. She’s a submissive calf, nothing like the little me. Yet she enjoys Amuta’s truest love and is the favorite one day to lead our herd. It is a logic that makes no sense.

  But what if it’s true that Shanti’s the daughter of a murderer, and I the daughter of a courageous queen? Then her qualities would be accountable, and mine as well. To rule would be my natural lot, and I have lived a life of unwarranted shame.

  Only by bitter happenstance are we the children of our mothers, so how can I resent Shanti for it, that simple-minded, blameless calf? Yet our identities come from our mother’s lives, either with them or against them we must be. We are implicated in our parents’ choices regardless of our own choosing. Shanti’s privilege is unearned. My sorrow is unearned. If we are to distance ourselves from our parents’ evil and its effects, mustn’t we also discount their good? Let Shanti renounce her mother and her right to the throne; let her fight me for it when she comes of age! Or, let her mother account to me for all she’s done. Let her make amends by declaring me heir.

  Deep down I know it’s true: My mother’s death was not her own doing. But to know this truth is far too painful. Everyone whom I have loved turns ugly in my eyes. Every clear elephant memory becomes questionable. Every close-held shame reveals its falsehood, yet makes me guilty for having held it. I see a world now where the young have no innocence, the old possess no necessary wisdom, our leaders merit no respect, belief in the herd is lost.

  Such knowledge is a lonely-making thing. My own mother, Ania, how I miss you! I remember everything about you, every time you cradled my infant body in your trunk’s embrace, and fed me food chewed in your own mouth. The memory of your scent makes me weak with longing. My own sweet mother, I’ll never be forgiven for every time I’ve cursed your loving soul. I’ll have to find a new way somehow, all on my own. Back

  23 How well do you remember your first time? I sat in an empty, late-night parking lot with a young woman I believed to be my friend, drinking shots of some purple-orange liquid she offered me. When we were both slump-eyed and slurring, she began to kiss me. And then, closing her eyes, and with a deep breath and a bitten lip, she popped open the buttons of my fly. Then she screamed. With her eyes still closed, with all her might she screamed. Then she fell asleep facedown on the pavement.

  24 Finding the massive and familiar carcass of my grandmother dangling by a cord from the lighting fixture in our own garage, was, I think, one of the events that precipitated my entry into manhood, and into the world, eventually, of elephants. Nana Marina was a severe caretaker to me, after my parents’ untimely departure, and life was a bit of a living heck, broken by those brief respites when Uncle Gustaf came home from his overseas travel and temporarily took over the caretaking.

  Nana Marina hated animals, and I had always suspected her of poisoning the stray cat that I fed secretly on the back porch, and which I discovered one morning frozen in a pool of its own piss, its tongue stuck out in a perpetual postmortem raspberry. With Nana’s passing, I felt free to leave home, travel to the city, and pursue my own passions.

  Yes, I had always had a way with animals. Cats could understand me. Dogs respected me. But it was in the city that I discovered I could speak with elephants. Back

  25 On January 4, 1903, for the crime of trampling a succession of trainers, Topsy the Elephant was executed in spectacular fashion on the Coney Island boardwalk, wired to thousands of volts of alternating current—a spectacle devised by none other than Thomas Alva Edison. On September 13, 1916, for flinging a man against a building and then taking a stroll over his head, Mary the Elephant was hanged by the neck from a hundredton crane, before an enraptured crowd. (Hribal, footnote 10 supra.)

  The roster of elephant executions is long; but few historians have been able to explain the murky death, on October 10, 1954, of the peace-loving elephant Clarabel, discovered in her corral in the Senaloca, Florida, winter quarters of Carlos Hermosilla’s Authentic American Circus, strangled by a loose length of chain that had been crudely looped around her neck and hoisted over the ramparts. Her body was found—forelegs lifted into the air, asphyxiated—by the only night watchman on duty at the time, who was lame in one arm, but with twenty arms would still not have had the strength to hoist Clarabel’s four tons of flesh. It must be noted that Clarabel had recently witnessed the tragic death of her own newborn calf and was moreover despondent from months of beatings by the circus’s new trainer, a man known even to his friends as Angry Jim. Historians, biologists, veterinary psychologists, much less circus workers have been loath to draw the obvious conclusion regarding Clarabel’s demise. Not even Hribal mentions it.

  Elephants are one of those rare species (along with humans and dolphins) known to recognize their reflections in mirrors as reflections. Self-consciously reflective (you might say), they see themselves as discrete individuals. Is it too far of a stretch to consider that they are also capable of obliterating themselves as discrete individuals? Of growing weary of the burdens of self-conscious existence and the heavy hopelessness of life in captivity? Of acting on that despair?

  Consider the great elephant Jumbo, P. T. Barnum’s star attraction. Despite the inconsistencies in the competing accounts of her death (see, again, Hribal), one thing is clear: after years of exhausting and mind-numbing work, Jumbo stepped forthrightly into the face of a speeding freight train.

  Elephants (like the great bull of Shanti’s tale) have long been subject to murder. It is a queer sort of vindication for me to point out that they are equally capable of suicide. Back

  26 KONI: You loved this man, yet you say his death is inconsequential? That we should blithely continue to graze in these foreign hills, not fearing the predator who killed him? But you aren’t the only one who loved this bull. He was father to many of our children. He is father to the child whom I now carry. His blood runs i
n ours, and whatever killed him will be hungry for more. We must mourn him properly, and then we must leave this place.

  Wrath rises in Amuta’s eyes. But then Amuta’s face calms; she seems cool, calculating.

  27 AMUTA: Koni, in your young life you’ve seen many elephants die. But this bull’s death, like your mother’s, is nothing to be frightened of. We’re better off without this bull, just like we’re better off without old Ania.

  Rage rises up in Koni now; bitter tears sting her eyes. But she holds her tongue.

  28 Or seemed to!

  29 Oh life, oh fate, oh Shanti! Would that you had died then, and not endured the hells to come!

  30 Have you ever left home and moved to the city? How I longed for my Dolphin Cove, that ugly home I so often hated. What would I have done, alone in the city, if I had not discovered the zoo, that inexhaustible comfort and solace? So many afternoons I stood outside the elephant enclosure in that vast, decrepit menagerie in that distant borough, eating someone else’s discarded caramel corn, gazing into the elephant enclosure and watching, with keen eye, the flicks of tail and flops of ear, which, to the casual watcher, were simply random tics; listening to the hiccups, harrumphs, trumpets, and brays which I knew to be clear and intentional messages from the elephants to each other and (more pertinently) to me—the first buds of a blossoming Englaphant. For twenty years of invisibility, we slowly developed our inchoate language of mutual despair. It was my solace, my refuge, my real life beneath my “real” life. It was the zoo that saved me, in my deepest despair, from rendering my own self null and void, a fate which I often felt I couldn’t avoid.

  My unusual family history led me, recently, to do extensive research into the history of auto-oblivion. My findings with regard to elephants are alluded to in footnote 25 supra. But that history is nothing as to the rich chronicle of human suicides. I don’t have space here to go into great detail, but allow me to summarize my findings:

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF OBLIVION

  Human suicide was invented in 1492 by Romeo Montague, with these words: “Here, here will I remain with worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here will I set up my everlasting rest, and shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last! Arms, take your last embrace! and, lips, O you the doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss a dateless bargain to engrossing death!”

  Romeo’s beautiful demise inspired countless generations of the world-weary and disaffected to slip their mortal coil, but none quite so beautifully. Not that they didn’t try: After Romeo started it, across Italy there spread a cult of sorts, the Association of Beautiful Suicides, who tried to outdo each other in doing themselves in, with tales of pathos and of woe each more gorgeous than the last, as they slipped onto their bare bodkins, or dangled tragically by their gosling necks from the banisters of Florentine balconies. They killed themselves in the highly questionable hope that suicide could be more than an act of despair, or a coward’s escape from an inhospitable world; that it could be a creative act, a gesture of life transcendent. The problem, however, was of genius and originality: After Romeo had done it best and first, everyone else came off as a pallid imitation. It was a secondary, creative death on top of the intended actual one.

  As time went on, young men and women tried to surmount this problem by moving beyond mere verbal flourishes, to astonish and inspire with the means of death itself: thus, the five young men who swallowed lit fireworks—dazzling.

  During his travels to the East, Marco Polo brought with him news of suicide, and it caught on like Venetian measles. In India, the mystics, ascetics and seers took up the challenge of the young Italian lovers, reaching sometimes new levels of the sublime. One woman skewered her tongue and tits with long needles, and spent sixteen months bleeding. A man covered himself with honey and sat silently on a bed of fire ants. It took sixteen hours, and he swelled up like a pumpkin squash. Another kneeled down before (yes) the temple elephant.

  It became an annual event, a Maha Mela, the Festival of Beautiful Suicide. Men and women ate diamonds and shat blood; hired surgeons to thread their hearts with razor wire, one end of which they’d tie to the top of the temple gopuram before diving: “heart flossing”; they bought vicious dogs and pasted their bodies with chicken gizzards; they tied themselves to kites and lofted themselves over shark-filled oceans.

  These suicide artists were ultimately stumped by the prime paradox of beautiful death: that is, its very creation was its destruction (or was its destruction its creation?). The subject of the act was the object of its obliteration. There was no way to improve a bad performance, and there were no second chances. In the end, what was so beautiful about death, anyway?

  So the more far-thinking of them began to consider things more broadly. Could self-elimination be accomplished while still, at least technically, living?

  The answer: sort of. The sage Babhuvallavar was the first to try it. He sat perfectly still for forty-four years—almost like dying, but more boring, frankly.

  Taking the concept further, an offshoot of the Beautiful Suicides prescribed a yet more elaborate route to self-abnegation. “Imitation is suicide,” said someone famous once, or was it me? Accordingly, the followers of this school set out, in a sense, to perfect and make intentional what the derivative Italians had stumbled upon unimaginatively. Recruited in their youth or early adulthood, they would each pattern their lives on another person’s, studying the other’s habits, adopting his behaviors, his clothes, his accent and manner of dress; then the imitator would go so far as to murder this other person, to clear the ground for the performance to begin (a difficult moment, as you can imagine—to eliminate the object of one’s utmost attention and care). The suicider then became, as far as possible, the other person—taking his job, sleeping in his bed, answering to his name—so that the suicider himself was nowhere, any longer, to be found. This form of “suicide” in its purest form consumed decades of incredible effort, and still butted up most profoundly against a central irony: when it was successful, it became invisible. Other people wouldn’t even know it was happening.

  But it was seldom successful. In attempting this particular form of invisibility, the suicider achieved not exactly oblivion, but another kind of existence; by trying so minutely to inscribe his life upon another’s, the practitioner of living suicide found that he inevitably and repeatedly deviated, and each deviation, however minor, signified the particular and unique life of the actor. The very thing which he had sought to render invisible became highlighted, offset, more pronounced. The act of self-annihilation became a (rather weird) act of self-creation. In other words, no one was fooled.

  Incidentally, please do not mistake any of this for a defense of suicide. The preceding sentence, while sincere, is also a paraphrase of my dear Charles Kinbote, in whose footnotes my own footsteps suicidally follow. For while imitation might aim toward suicide, it often begins as love. Back

  31 When the menageries of the Silver Brothers Circus enter the city, the first thing you sense is the rumble—not the familiar rumble of motoring vehicles, but a vibration of a slower, more deliberate frequency—through the soles of your shoes, into your tarsals and up through your heel, tickling your humeruses, until it is somewhere inside you. Through the darkness of Lincoln’s Tunnel, at the farthest end, there is a distant disk of light, a view, as it were, into another land. Suddenly, that light is blotted out, and one has only the sense that a large and inevitable blackness is approaching.

  And then, when you have been lulled into a certain stupefied awe by this blackness and vibration, as if you had been tucked inside the world’s own body, from out of the darkness burst forth the bright and dark visages of all the world’s fauna. The tigers, ostriches, giraffes, and rhinoceri; the black bears and Koala bears and polar bears and grizzlies; the prong-horns and prairie dogs and parakeets and hawks on string; the snakes, turtles, crocodiles, and lizards; the orangutans and gorillas, the gibbons and monkeys (the tiniest of which wer
e tethered to little chains, decorated with purple fedoras, and made to twirl and jump); and finally, bringing up the rear, what all deep-souled watchers were waiting for: the elephants on parade. Back

  32 “I don’t remember,” Shanti says, but surely what she means is that she remembers, instead, other things from that chaotic time. Whatever she doesn’t remember, she didn’t see in the first place. Cf. footnote 19 supra.

  33 They came toward me, tail in trunk, tail in trunk, linked in that humiliating way circus elephants are always linked, each one moreover individually hobbled by a heavy chain leading from rear left to front right ankle. And I saw something distinct in the eyes of each one. Not just the watery sadness one finds in the eyes of all elephants in captivity, but something more specific, more familiar. And when she approached, I knew immediately that we, too, were linked; that somehow, across space and across time, my trunk was curled round her tail; that somewhere else, wherever I really came from, we had been kin. Once I saw her, I could not part myself from her, each year that the circus was in our city. How could I allow her to live in captivity? Her large ears flapped open, as if to say, Speak to me! Her truthful eyes spoke more directly, begging for a way out, yes, but more than that, for freedom.

  34 Whose face is not seen, whose name is not mentioned? Which elephant was smart enough and had every motivation to lead Shanti and Amuta into this trap, to collaborate, as it were, with whomever dug this hole? Which elephant? Shanti doesn’t tell us, but we know.

  35 AMUTA: (Aside) I must loosen momentarily the ties of loyalty that keep these idiots from leaving.

  (To the herd) Fools! Imbeciles! Think of yourselves, and flee! Don’t just stand there! Morons! Iala—you suckled me as a child, but I am not a child anymore, so don’t stand there cowering! Weak old woman, a burden to this herd. No man wants you so you wish to bring the herd to the grave along with you? You would allow them to die as you let your own children once starve?