Love, Let Me Not Hunger

by Paul Gallico

  One night the caretakers were awakened by a cracking, splintering sound. When they seized their electric torches and ran out of the wagons to investigate, they found that Judy had somehow managed to loosen some thin, rotting roof boards overhead beneath the tiling and was trying to eat them. It was a struggle for Toby to get the pieces away from her, for the splinters would surely have pierced her stomach and killed her. They were compelled to unchain her from beneath the roof, coax her to the other side of the enclosure where there was none, and stake her down there where all they could do for her was to fill a tub of water and give it to her. There was a plentiful supply of the latter, for there was an old bucket well in one corner of the finca.

  Further they had to endure the agony of watching the animals thinning, developing sores and mange, and slowly disintegrating from fine-looking, well-kept beasts to scrawny, moth-eaten, miserable specimens. Now that there was no fresh straw on which to bed them, they were forced to lie on the hard floors of their cages, which did further damage to their skins and coats.

  All of them tried to overcome their growing despair by doing the best they might for the animals. During the day they went to the nearby farms, even to the outskirts of the town, to try to beg or scrounge what food they could; they tried to keep the beasts as clean as possible and tend their sores, but they had no ointments or medicaments. Then would come nightfall and the awful, heartbreaking sounds from the cages.

  Of all the animals that Rose loved, it was the once glorious tiger that was closest to her heart, but the sufferings that gave her the most pain were those of the elephant, the beast that hated her and would have killed her if she could have done so. This was surely because of her great bulk, the towering and overwhelming nature of her presence, and the actual amount of physical space she occupied. For her huge size only served to emphasise her need for food. And then there was also her keen intelligence, as well as her visible emotions as expressed through her small, sad brown eyes. Within those eyes she could express anger, cunning, satisfaction, fear, and sorrow, and she could weep, weep for the unhappy fate of Judy. The monkeys, too, could shed tears but somehow there was something far more heart-rending in those of an elephant, a beast so powerful and awe-inspiring, like that of a strong man breaking down and sobbing. And for one so huge Judy could make the most pathetic little sounds, and the gurgling joy with which she would fasten upon a piece of stale bread or some apple peelings was even more touching than her moans and complaints. They could see her shrink inside the folds of her own skin. She smote their eyes and disturbed their consciences, and none more than Rose, who of all of them had most recently known and suffered pangs of hunger. There was no escaping Judy’s plight.

  The kangaroo sorrowed in a corner of her cage. She was used to eating large quantities. She ate bran, wheat kernel, bread, toast, cake, grass, cabbage leaves, carrots, apples, anything that was offered her. For the last days she had subsisted on no more than some handfuls of weeds and grass they had been able to gather from the nearby fields. At night the dogs of Janos howled themselves to sleep and the dwarf knelt at their sides, the tears streaming down his ugly face.

  C H A P T E R

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  The beasts communicated their sufferings—through their eyes, those mirrors of green, gold, brown, or hazel, which from their starving bodies reflected all they could not speak.

  It was only natural that under these circumstances all of the humans, even those who were circus-bred and thus had rationalised the animals with whom they lived in close contact, should turn to anthropomorphism and begin to see and think of the miserable beasts in human terms.

  Fred Deeter’s only concern was the horses; his first, Marlene, the exquisite and intelligent palomino he had trained so well that at times he almost believed himself in communication with her, but in the end all horses, including the stolid, heavy rosin-backs of the Walters family. For he was a horseman from way back and they were his life and his love.

  It was their very stupidity and uncomplaining acceptance of their fate to hunger when they were not fed that made the ex-cowboy feel the most guilty. All through his long career he had counted upon horses—his life several times had been saved by one—he had lived through, by and from them—but he also well knew the extent to which they depended upon him. If they were his slaves, he had also spent a lifetime as their servant, watching over them in sickness and in health and at all times doing his best for them. Always he had been more kind and honest with horses than with humans.

  There they stood in the shade in quiet rows, their heads hanging, their eyes dull, their coats roughening, and he felt their silent reproach. Only Marlene seemed to be attempting to talk to him by nuzzling, searching his pockets whenever he came near, and sometimes pawing with her foreleg in the handshake he had taught her as though she were saying: “See, I am shaking hands with you. Please feed me! Why, oh friend, are you doing this to me?”

  And this exacerbated and fomented a grinding rage within Deeter, and he would see himself with his fingers at Marvel’s throat if ever he came back, shaking the little man like the rat he was; and sometimes in the night he would dream and see himself glaring at him over the sharp sight at the end of a long pistol barrel. He was reaching the end of his tether where he knew something must be done before the one day’s waiting into another would destroy them all.

  And so, too, was Janos, the Hungarian dwarf, the misfit who had never inspired any human affection and had therefore had to substitute the love of dogs.

  The abiding emptiness in the stomach of Janos, Janos the greater part of whose life was concerned with pampering that organ, slowly distilled into cold and vengeful anger. It had always been a compensation to him for his lot, for as long as he ate well—and better than others—and to his fancy, he was reasonably content and could live at peace with the grotesque trick that nature had played upon him. Now, denied his food, a dangerous sourness filled the mind of the dwarf.

  The pangs of hunger gnawing at his middle awakened all the savagery and brutality of which his race was capable and made him more deeply aware of the plight of his animals.

  The core of truculence hardening within him was stimulated further by his great feeling of guilt as his dogs pined and thinned, but their faith in him remained unwavering, and their hungry, reproachful eyes watched hopefully his every movement. Starving, the great Danes should have reverted to their atavisms and turned killers, but Janos knew very well they would not because with love and kindness he had rooted out instincts which could have saved them. He had taught them to trust in humans and their reward for learning this lesson might well be death. Dark plots began to hatch in the mind of Janos.

  Toby’s outburst came one night when lying next to Rose. He had finished with her and had not yet got up and left. And as always, he was steeped in melancholy, the feeling of emptiness and disappointment and the sense of sin, and these suddenly seemed coupled with the horror of the situation and the anguish of the animals out there. He heard an occasional moan or sigh from the big cats, the stamping of horses’ hooves, mumblings and mutterings from Judy, and the gentle jangling of her chains as she shifted her feet.

  He had a sudden picture of himself in the ring with her, as filled with pride, arrogance, and confidence in his own strength and superiority, he made her sit, lie down, roll over, dance and stand upon her head.

  In the darkness, forgetting where he was and who lay next to him, Toby suddenly struck his forehead three times with his fist and cried out, “Christ, I just can’t stand the sight of that bloody elephant shrinking!”

  He was startled and shocked when a gentle hand was placed upon his breast and from the neighbouring pillow he heard the faint, throaty whisper, “Oh, Toby—I’m sorry. I do understand.”

  He sat up as though stung and said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, let me be! How would you know what it feels like to see all of them starving like this? You’ve never lived with them like I have.” He got up and went back to the other compartmen
t where he climbed into his bunk, buried his face in his arms, and tried to be a man and not cry.

  Rose lay there thinking that though she might not have lived with them for long, she had loved them, and it dawned upon her that perhaps up to that very moment in his life Toby had never really truly loved anything or anyone. She knew that he did not love her—had always known it, and suffered it as long as she was able to be with him. What moved her now was a kind of sorrow that he could not experience the warm and all-encompassing love that she did. And this made her feel for him all the more. Yet somehow, somewhere there was love in him: he had cursed her because he was suffering for his elephant.

  And thus, left alone there in the darkness, her thoughts turned to the tragedy of the lithe cat animals, now no longer beautiful, imprisoned behind bars, and who if they were not fed would soon die without pride.

  It was this loss of their dignity, the shame and humiliation of their fate, and the cruel and senseless destruction of beings so lovely and touching which hurt her. She did not even know there was such a word as dignity. It was only an impression within her, an inner conviction that beauty perhaps was not allowed to be, that wherever it appeared upon the scene it must be robbed and destroyed, as though human beings could not bear this gift that had been bestowed upon them and in the end strove only to return to the dirt from which they had come.

  She thought of the great tiger as she had known him in his full strength and glory and the poor, moth-eaten wreck to which he had been reduced, and she wondered whether her companions would have the grace to fold down the shutters on the cages and let the beasts at least die out of the sight of human eyes.

  Rose was filled with anger and rebellion because of what was happening to those helpless animals who had accepted her as a friend and for the first time given a meaning to her young life, and her thoughts turned to what could yet be done to help or save them.

  As for Mr. Albert, he heard voices. They were not aloud or hallucinatory, but well inside his ear within himself. They were the cries of his only friends one and all, from the lowest, the armadillos curled up and shrivelling to death within their own coffins, through the big-eyed ruminants, to the near-human monkeys.

  They all broadcast to him endlessly, repetitively, reiterately: “We don’t know what to do. We don’t know what to DO! We don’t know where to go or what to DO! There’s nobody comes and gives us anything, and we don’t know what will happen to us. Where shall we go? There’s no place to go! Our stomachs are empty. Nobody comes. Nobody cares. You used to come. You used to care. Now your hands are empty. There’s nothing to put in our feeding pans. We’re frightened! We’re frightened! We’re frightened! We have been from one end of our cages to the other a thousand times and there’s no place else to go and nothing else to do. We’re hungry. Tell us what to do and we will do it. Oh man, man, man! Why is this happening? Why does no one care any longer? Why is there no longer any food? What shall we do? Oh tell us, what shall we do?”

  They were all so close to Mr. Albert that he did not know and could not distinguish that the voices, in fact, were not the many but only one and that his own, as he was remembering his own panics and feelings of despair and deep inner cries for help when suddenly he had known old age to be upon him and it had become so inescapably clear that for him there was no place to go, nothing to do about it, and nobody to care.

  It was one morning when the conviction had grown upon all of them that something must be done to stave off disaster that the cries seemed loudest in Mr. Albert’s ears, as he stood in the yellow of the early sunlight before their cages as helpless as they in his ridiculous dusty black tail coat and bowler hat, looking owlishly and miserably over the rims of his spectacles, his head turning from side to side as the protests came tumbling in upon him.

  The sharp-faced coyote was still pacing hysterically back and forth in the narrow confines of his cage, but the little dwarf deer had lain down upon its side and its melting eyes were stricken. The kangaroo sat in a corner braced upon her thick tail, but her lips were withdrawn from her yellowish teeth. The feathers of the eagle, the cassowary, and the hornbill were ruffled and dirty, for they no longer bothered to clean themselves. The tapir and the wart-hog stood frozen, with their snouts pressed against the corner of the bars of their cages, to be ready at any instant should someone give them anything, and the monkeys sat in little clusters with their arms about one another and mourned. The boa-constrictor hung limp from the branch of its artificial tree.

  He looked thus, helplessly, at all the birds and beasts who, seeing him, joined their own muted cries to the inner ones that were tormenting him, glancing from the unhappy bear pleading and begging with sweeps of his paw, to the sad, collapsed figure of Old Congo, the orangutan whose once stout paunch was now wrinkled and sagged as though all the air had been let out of it. Unable to stand more, it was to the latter’s cage he went, opened it, and, reaching in, plucked the beast forth as though it had been a child and held it in his arms closely. The orang put its hairy hands and wrists about Mr. Albert’s neck, rested his head upon his chest, and wept.

  And now Mr. Albert was filled with another kind of guilt as well—had been for some time—and it had to do with a secret he had kept from the others and which now he could hold no longer. He restored the orang to his cage and went shuffling across the enclosure to where they were by their caravans—Deeter, Toby, Rose, and the dwarf.

  They looked up as they heard him, and when he had come close he stopped and stood peering at them over the tops of his spectacles, embarrassed, sheepish, fumbling for words, and which finally came in a kind of a half-choked mumbling: “Listen,” he said, “I got something to say to you—something to tell you—something I done I oughtn’t of.”

  They stared at him enquiringly and waited. His story struggled within him but he could not get it out. At last he sighed heavily and, reaching inside the tail pocket of the cutaway coat, produced a frayed black leather purse. This he opened, revealing folded therein some green notes of one pound and these he fished out and smoothed in his nervous fingers. Then suddenly, like a child who has been caught with something not his own, he held them out to them. There were six.

  Deeter said, “Why, you son-of-a-bitch! You dirty old bastard! You’ve been holding out on us! You got any more?”

  Mr. Albert looked more foolish and apologetic than ever. “Oh no,” he said. “I wasn’t meaning to hold out. I was sure Mr. Marvel would be coming back.” He glanced at the notes in his hand for a moment and then from one to the other in the hopes that they would understand. “You see, it’s all I’ve got. I was keeping it in case—well, you know how it is when you’re getting along a bit in years—if Mr. Marvel gave me the push. Anyway, there it is and you can have it now.”

  “Gimme,” said Deeter, and snatched the money from Mr. Albert. He rustled the notes through his fingers and looked upon them gloatingly. “By God,” he said, “this’ll do the trick. I ought to kick your ass, old man, for not having ponyed up sooner.”

  “Now we feed my doks,” Janos shouted.

  “Maybe some meat for the cats, I thought, and some hay,” said Mr. Albert.

  But Deeter was all absorbed and swollen with his big idea. “To hell with that!” he said. “So they fill their bellies for a couple of hours—how far is six quid going to go? I got something better to do with it. I’d have done it long ago if I’d had it.”

  Toby said, “What’s that?”

  “Telephone to that bastard Marvel and tell him that if he don’t want a lot of dead animals on his hands to cable us some money pronto.”

  The daring, the novelty, and the simplicity of this idea struck them all silent, for they were none of them telephone users or telephone-minded. This means of communication rarely entered their lives. It was not an instrument for nomads. It simply had never dawned upon them that there, marooned on a desert island as it were, in the heart of the great land ocean of La Mancha, voice projection was possible with that far off Britain
so many, many long and tedious days of travel away.

  “Well, what do you say?” Deeter urged. He tapped his little pocket diary. “I got his number there at Chippenham.”

  Mr. Albert threw a despairing glance at the green notes, now clutched in Deeter’s hard brown fist. He said, “But I gave it so we could buy them some food. It’s all I had and I meant it for them.”

  Rose, who was looking at Mr. Albert, felt her eyes fill with tears of affection and understanding for the old man. How often in her life she had rejected the temptation to use the worn ten-shilling note she kept hidden away separately upon her person to be spent only in the direst emergency, and how strongly she had learned to resist it. For as long as that note was there she was not destitute.

  Toby said, “You’ll get it back from Mr. Marvel when he comes, old man. I’ll see to that.”

  Janos wagged his grotesque head and said, “Yo, yo! When he comes; when he comes. And if he don’t coming?”

  “It ain’t that,” said Mr. Albert. “Only if we—” And he looked once more agonisedly at the money in the cowboy’s hand.

  “Listen,” Deeter said, “what do you want to do, sit here on your asses until they’re all dead? Maybe Marvel don’t know. Maybe something’s happened to him.”