Guide to Animal Behaviour

by Douglas Glover

  Dear Baby Jesus, Take care of my brother Ramon who is in the prison and we have not heard from him.

  Outside the church, I threw my holy mud (now dried to sand) away, though some continued to cling to the lines in my palm and beneath my fingernails.

  I wondered about Ramon, where he was and what terrible crime he had committed, or not committed. I wondered if Ramon were the man with his head off and his own cock in his mouth, like the snake biting its tail or like the Worm of Ouroboros, the worm of the world.

  Or if he had become ashes on the wind.

  Somehow I did not see him as one of those who managed to survive by staying out in the prison yard, under the search lights night after night, while the buildings rang with shrieks and moans and cries of ecstasy.

  Or, I asked myself, had he climbed through a gap in the wire fence, hidden from the search lights by night and the billowing smoke which ascended from the pyres of bodies and mattresses?

  In the sunlight at Chimayo, with the passionate worshippers gathering to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus (a man about my age who died in Palestine two thousand years ago; also, I conjecture, about Ramon’s age; also a prisoner — we must all seek release in our own way, or we must all seek transformation, that is what I say, we must transform ourselves whatever the cost), with the lines of passionate pilgrims hiking up the roads to Chimayo bearing their palms and crosses, passing the little white crosses and bundles of plastic flowers (shrines to motor vehicle accidents), with all this, shall we say, excessive religiosity going on around me and my companion, the Angel of Death (Dona Sebastiana, she of the death cart, with bow and arrow, in the museum at Taos — I will explain this later), frowning at me for throwing the mud away, as if my lack of faith somehow cast doubt on her own belief (we must all be pilgrims together say the sheep and the shepherds), with all this going on, I am thinking quite passionately myself about Ramon slipping like a wraith along the mesa, hiding beneath pinyon trees as the sun comes up, drinking his own urine in the heat, searching for a cave to lie up in, perhaps with a lion or a rattlesnake.

  Brother of the rattlesnake.

  I imagine — this is what I would have done, and have I not made it clear already that I see Ramon, no doubt a petty drug dealer awaiting trial, as a doppelganger, my other (better) self, the one who manages to break out, to evade, escape, translate? — I imagine that he has taken care to throw his captors off his trail.

  Perhaps he found a body (I am nearly positive it was Ramon who arranged the man-biting-his-own-penis image; he is that sort, a desperate rogue with a biting sense of humour), somewhat the analogue of his own (we cannot escape, or make art, without this curious doubling), and used the acetylene torch to destroy its facial features and fingerpads. (This is gruesome, some of the worst killers in that prison are momentarily sobered and frightened by Ramon’s single-minded indifference; they back away in awe, then splash giggling down the corridors.)

  The teeth he smashed out with a ballpeen hammer, then ground into a fine dust and scattered over the sewage water running at his feet. (Once you decide to escape, to change yourself, you must be ruthless, you cannot be afraid — and besides, the man was dead, or at least unconscious, before Ramon began.)

  I don’t blame him at all. Circumstances had driven him mad, the prison, the hideous tribal retaliations, the images of torture and the walls that kept him in there, and the thought of his sister weeping, wringing her handkerchief in the kitchen beneath a picture of the Sacred Heart. (The note’s hand had been female, a pious young woman’s writing — already I am a little in love with her and plan, as Ramon and I flee together over the Blood of Christ Mountains, disguised, yes, as priests, to become better acquainted when we meet her to exchange news and acquire money and food.)

  The woman I am with disapproves of my lack of faith and my sexual preference (like Ramon, I am a homosexual, one of those in the prison they like to rape with their fists, then kill). She thinks she can save me, would like to get me into bed.

  She thinks I am the kind of man she could settle with for a while — this, I hasten to add, is an impression resulting from the fact that I listen to her uncritically, which is something many women miss in a man. And I like her, find her interesting. This is terribly flattering (considering the life she’s led) and it’s almost enough to make her fall in love with me. So, when I throw away the holy mud, it is as if I am throwing away her (mud) heart.

  Everything is symbolic, you see. And I signify my petty rebellion by reversal, loving the mirror’s reflection, not the other.

  It was her idea to come to Chimayo — and, believe me, I am grateful. This Ramon connection is more than I could have hoped for.

  Absently I scan the nearby mountains, imagining that I might spy him there, a naked man (he had to get rid of the prison clothes first thing; the prime rule of transformation is you must go naked, you must leave everything behind).

  Without his clothes and with his identity left behind with that poor, mutilated corpse (after everything, he consigned it to the pyre), he is a new man up there on the mountainside.

  He looked down at us with an other-worldly curiosity. Who are these strange creatures, these boxes that move and don’t, their antennae waving in the sunsets?

  It is my theory that the prison is the representative image of the modern world. You’ll recall that Shakespeare let his characters strut their moment upon the stage. But nowadays we are inside a prison, the walls of a labyrinth, and there is no outside, or outside is madness and Ramon. I exult and wave to the hills. I lift up mine eyes unto the hills.

  But the hills don’t answer.

  New Life Forms

  My friend’s name is Esmé Altschuler. I call her the Angel of Death because that is the work she does. She hires herself out to sit with the dying. When they see my friend coming through the door, these people know it is the end. Some welcome it. She will call me during her lunch break. In the background, sometimes drowning out her words, I will hear the moans and grunts of the dying. What’s that? I ask, trembling. That’s just Bruce, she says, and goes on telling me the gossip.

  Bruce is a retired movie executive dying of prostate cancer.

  Esmé’s calling me from the deathbed; Bruce hears everything she says.

  Esmé’s from Chicago. Her first lover was a boy named Leopoldo, the son of an Argentinian diplomat. They made love in the ruins of a condemned tenement, in the dust and broken bricks. Her father was an alcoholic, and she recalls the day he left for good, when she was eight and had just climbed to the crotch of an oak tree in their yard. She watched her father walk out to his car with a suitcase in each hand.

  Esmé married a man who does biological research, inventing new life forms. I met him once, in a bar called Richard’s Horseman’s Haven out by the race track, where we had a long, drunken conversation about the possibility of some of these life forms escaping. He said it was entirely probable that some had already done so. Generally, they would be too weak to survive in the real world, he said. They could not sustain themselves against everyday diseases or the attacks of higher animals or heat or cold.

  Esmé and the biologist came west to New Mexico together and then divorced.

  She married a Vietnam veteran and joined the Divine Light Mission. They lived in an A-frame near Taos. Twice they gave away everything they owned on the whim of their guru. After the second time, Esmé drifted south to Santa Fe, looking for another kind of light.

  She studies at the Santa Fe School of Natural Medicine, things like massage technique and herbal remedies. She lives with two other students in a bungalow in the Spanish barrio behind the deaf school. She smells of saffron. Hanging over the shower curtain rod in their bathroom are the rubber tubes and bladders of three enema kits.

  The Angel of Death.

  Esmé and her friends eat peyote and take turns lying naked in the bathtub.

  They g
ive themselves enemas and see gods. She wants to sleep with me.

  I smell saffron and hear Bruce’s grunts (his screams inhabit my dreams).

  I think of the image of Dona Sebastiana, mounted on a cart, a bow and arrow in her hands, in the Taos Museum and the strange, wooden Cristo behind the reredos in the church at Las Trampas, the Cristo with His ribs carved outside His chest, that look of mortified agony on His face, His body riding upon the nails.

  Spanish Boys

  When we drive down from Chimayo, it is night. East of the road, the Sangre de Cristos are tumescent and silver, sharp against the clear, moonlit sky. Westward, clouds creep over the Jemez and lightning bolts shatter against the slopes like glass rods.

  I think of my friend Larry, a stained-glass artist from San Francisco. Larry can’t find work in Santa Fe except as a labourer. He spends his days scraping bark from redwood logs to make the natural-looking beams contractors use in the modern adobe subdivisions out on the mesa.

  Nights Larry wears black velvet gloves to hide his hands.

  Nights he and I go to La Fonda to listen to a Panamanian salsa band and dance with the Spanish stenographers. (Two of the musicians are ex-priests and gay — they tell of a huge monastery in the mountains where bent priests from all over the country go to be purified or hidden; the drunk priests, mad priests, promiscuous, gay and pederastic priests, the sinful men of God — I don’t know if this is true.)

  From time to time Larry disappears, and I know he is downstairs in the basement men’s room, having sex in the cubicles.

  When I go down there to pee, there is always a Spanish boy at the next urinal asking me for taxi fare home, or a man sitting in a cubicle with his trousers down and the door open.

  These Spanish boys have a difficult time. They are expected to be macho womanizers and, at home, in the towns and villages around Santa Fe, they act the role. But nights they sneak into the city for sex with white men, to bars like the Senate, the Gold Bar or La Fonda (La Fonda is the safest because a lot of women go there).

  Outside, other Spanish boys in low-riding cars squeal their tires and toss beer bottles at the queers in the streets.

  The boys are quick, passionate lovers; the sense of sin, of being lost to the world, of going down into the depths, of giving up, is a kind of transformation for them.

  Spanish boys know something about miracles and evil.

  Brothers of Light

  This is in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as I have said.

  Forty miles away at Los Alamos, men like Esmé’s husband, with degrees from Harvard and M.I.T., are building bombs and fusion reactors and components for machines that will travel in outer space. At a museum there, they have exact replicas of Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The tour guides at the museum are wives of research physicists — even the wives have Ph.D.s.

  Once in a Los Alamos bar, I met a retired army sergeant who had witnessed thirty-three atomic bomb tests, crouching as close as a mile from Ground Zero. (Note the numerological correspondence — Jesus was thirty-three when he died; it is Easter; I am thirty-three.) His greatest regret was missing the first detonation at Trinity in White Sands because of the flu.

  Dotting the mesa roundabout are the ruins of ancient Indian villages called pueblos. Sometimes, at places like Puye and Tsankawi, you stand atop the cliffs amid the ruins like a man on the prow of a ship, surveying the vast pinyon country where these people once grew their crops of maize and beans.

  Contemporary pueblos have Catholic churches and little adobe-walled cemeteries crowded with white wooden crosses. But the Indians (they survive by adopting the disguise of the other) also preserve the kivas of their own religion. As the calendar rolls around, they hold their seasonal rites and dances: the corn dance, the cloud dance, the buffalo dance.

  I have seen these — at San Ildefonso, Tesuque, Santo Domingo — it is like seeing the cave paintings at Lascaux, it is like seeing the animal masters calling their prey.

  They dream of the day when the buffalo will return.

  In the mountains between Santa Fe and Taos, I have driven through picturesque run-down Spanish villages with names like Cordova, Truchas, Ojo Sarcas, Chamisal and Las Trampas. Each village has a morada, an unprepossessing chapel (adobe, with no windows, strangely prison-like) where Los Hermanos Penitentes, Los Hermanos de Luz, the Brothers of Light, hold their cruel medieval rites, whipping one another (at Easter especially), and at night marching through the streets carrying wooden crosses.

  In days gone by, it is said, they would crucify a man, taking him down from the cross before he died, in commemoration of the passion of Christ.

  A human Cristo, image of Christ.

  I am fascinated by these believers. I think particularly of the men chosen to act the part of Jesus, the ones who are crucified.

  Once Larry (an indefatigable and promiscuous lover) met a Spanish boy who invited him to a Penitente Easter service. He sat with his friend, amid the congregation, listening to the strange hymns and litany, the eerie pitero pipes. In the next room, hidden from the worshippers, the brothers were whipping themselves with yucca cactus spines. Larry could hear the sound of the whips falling. At the instant of tenieblas, when the candles were snuffed and a shout rose and the sound of whirling bull-roarers (metracas) filled the air, Larry observed an old woman fall to the floor in a fit or a swoon.

  The rest of the congregation ignored her. Larry had no idea what he should do. For all he knew, she could have been choking to death or having a heart attack. He knelt and felt her pulse, then grasping her wrists, dragged her into the darkness outside and gave her the kiss of life. Just as shouting and roaring subsided and the brothers relit the candles inside the morada, the woman began to spit up and moan.

  Faces (chalky white, he says, with eyes like coal or chips of obsidian) appeared in the doorway. “A devil!” they shouted. “A devil!” Larry’s friend tried to lead him away by the hand, but he stood there a moment, confused and unnerved, while Los Hermanos railed at him, shoving him with their fists and whip handles. When they began to collect stones to throw, Larry fled, racing through the streets after his lover, with shouts of “Devil! Devil!” following him and stones clattering on the pavement.

  Larry says Los Hermanos thought she was dead. They thought only the devil or some powerful sorcerer could bring that woman back to life.

  I think of Larry bringing the dead woman to life and being stoned for making miracles and the man who becomes Christ on the cross. I think of Ramon in the hills fleeing his walled Jerusalem. I think of the Indians dressed in animal skins and the transformations of the atom. (Hiking in the Bandelier Forest, Esmé and I picked up shards of pottery a thousand years old and, at the same moment, heard muffled explosions from nearby canyon test sites.)

  I think of Ramon, who is me, stumbling into a Penitente village, finding himself petted, healed and fed. Perhaps they bring a young, beautiful girl for him to lie with. Then in the night, the Brothers come for him with their nails. The man who has escaped the hell of the prison (Jerusalem) finds himself spread out upon the boards. Screaming, he feels the spikes spread the bones of his hands, the flesh tear. He did not kill the man, he shouts. He is innocent.

  The Brothers shake their heads sagely; their expressions are passionate and beatific. They pound the nails and whip themselves in a frenzy. The bull-roarers whirl. The yucca thorns dig into Ramon’s scalp and forehead.

  Screaming, he goes out of himself. His soul goes up to the stars.

  His atoms recombine in new ways.

  Huge amounts of energy are released.

  A mushroom cloud rises above the spot (Trinity).

  Hymns rise to the heavens.

  The world is transformed.

  It becomes worse.

  Somewhere his sister wakes from a cruel sleep, feeling the wounds in her hands and feet and side. She wa
kes screaming. She prays to the Baby Jesus. She thinks a miracle has occurred.

  Carreta del Muerto

  I sleep with Esmé, the Angel of You Know What.

  It’s not so bad.

  Perhaps the holy mud from the Sanctuario has worked its rude magic. I remember a verse from a Penitente hymn.

  Esta vida es un ungano,

  Y nos tiene con desvelo,

  Y los eres invertidos

  Para sustentar el duelo.

  In bed we talk about the impossibility of freedom in the industrial age. I hazard the opinion that my sexual ambiguity, my love for Larry, my moods, caprices, depressions, neuroses and suicidal tendencies are signs of moral worth in an age ruled by technocracy.

  The bed smells of saffron, death and vaginal secretions. The sheets rustle as we move. In the bathroom, I smell the stale rubberiness of enema bags.

  Esmé (a.k.a. Death, Dona Sebastiana, Hecate, the Virgin Mary, Clytemnestra, Cassandra, Jocasta, Isis, the Wicked Witch of the West and my mother) crouches above me in a kind of triumph, touching herself with fingers she moistens on her tongue. I close my eyes and let my hands explore the alien contours of her breasts, the corrugations of her rib cage, the mysterious angles of her belly. I touch the hand touching herself, wondering where her mind is (her eyes are closed), what her pleasure is like.

  I think all love is this solitary riding, and we never touch each other.

  I think (of course) of Ramon’s sister, with her black velvet gloves, the stigmata and her starved, waxen body (I conjure her from old lovers and books), a hot ventricle for the reception of my (arrow) cock. She is so thin; she is all eyes and hands and feet. Her turgid nipples, black like eyes in the moonlight, scrape against my chest and draw blood. Her body smells of rubber. (The invisible woman is the real woman.)

  The death cart in the museum at Taos is a low wooden wagon with solid wheels like the old ox-carts. Dona Sebastiana is a small, rubbery figure, clothed in a black dress, with staring, coal-black eyes and a chalky face. In her hands, she holds a drawn bow and arrow. It is said that sometimes, as the cart is dragged through the streets, the jostling of the wooden wheels causes the bow to release; the arrow flies and whoever it touches dies.