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Bella answered. “No, I am sorry, Mr. Norman, Miss Diantha is not here. She tell me she be back tomorrow. Elsie is fine. We are watching Walter Disney.”

If I still had my revolver, I might have been tempted to drive several hours to their tryst, find them, and kill him. Which fantasy only depressed me further. To the point of uncorking my Cork Dry Gin and setting up to mix a near-lethal potion. I was going about this with grim resolution when Alphus came into the kitchen with a sheaf of papers, put them on the table, and signed “Memoirs. A first sketch.”

Misery has its own momentum, and right then I didn’t want to interrupt my own. I wanted the solipsism of gin, enough to take me down to the small death of sleep and the smaller resurrection of waking. But in the active mode of mixing the drink, I happened to glance at the first few lines. Mechanically, I poured gin over ice. I sat down. A touch of vermouth. I sipped and read.

I remember first of all birdsound and the warmth of my mother’s furry breast. She was high in the hierarchy of our troop, and the members paid court to her through me, their faces big and friendly as they loomed over us, their hands reaching out to touch me under my mother’s wary eye.

I remember her love and care and how she sheltered me from the pelting rains and the flashing light and thunderous noise of storms that came in from where the sun rose. I must have been about a year old, big for my age but still vulnerable, when, seemingly out of nowhere, a muscular leopard came with deadly speed up the trunk of the tree we were sitting in. In one quick motion my mother grabbed me and swung out of danger onto an overhead branch. One of my older cousins didn’t act quickly enough. There was an awful scream and brief struggle before he lay limp, his head in the cruel grip of the cat’s fangs.

The rest of us shrieked and hooted from a safe distance, throwing anything to hand, including you know what, to little effect at the leopard, which calmly dismembered and ate our fellow chimp with feline efficiency.

I experienced several such adventures. I once came close to being bitten by a black mamba that we disturbed on our way through a cape fig tree toward clusters of ripe fruit. Several times marauding males from a neighboring troop of chimps came by looking to steal my mother and more than likely murder me.

But nothing compared to our dread of human hunting parties. Oh, but they were smart and brutal. They would come from one direction making noise so that we fled right into where their comrades lay in ambush. We thought of the gun as having magic powers. It’s true they make a terrific noise. But from far away. The noise would sound and someone close by would grunt, lose his grip and fall, the body bouncing off limbs before it thudded to the ground. We would all try to hide in the foliage and stay as still as though we were already dead.

That’s how it happened. My mother was holding me, high in a tree where she had been feeding. A group of hunters came up stealthily and stood in a small clearing just at the base of the trunk. The sound of the gun and the thud of the slug hitting the back of my mother’s head came at the same time. I clung to her and, I believe, she clung to me, shielding me even in death as we fell and fell until we landed near the hunters, three black men in khaki shorts and shirts. I screamed at them, baring my small fangs. I heard them laugh and then darkness closed in as they dropped a burlap bag over me and hoisted me up, still screaming and struggling.

I paused at this point, the gin hardly touched in the melting ice. My eyes had misted over, and I wanted to go in and give him a hug. I read on as Alphus described at some length a sad litany of abuse, by turns caged and chained as he was bought and sold, ending up in a German circus at the age of ten. This began what he called the best years of his life until taking up residence at Sign House. I’ll let him tell it in his words.

Our trainer, a dour, self-tortured Scot named