The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [11]
My feelings about the human race are complex. I love them and I hate them. More on this later. I’m telling you all this, I think, to underline the sense of relief, the feeling of having been specially selected for salvation that I felt when Lydia came to rescue me from having to spend the rest of my life in the company of these animals.
It is probably not a coincidence that I was the lowest-ranking male in the habitat. If I had been higher up on the dominance hierarchy I might not have wanted to leave as badly. But because I was the lowest rung on the ladder, I had nowhere to go but up. Or out, away. I fled. I fled into the arms of the human race, into the arms of a woman.
There must have been an aura of angelic luminescence encircling Lydia’s blond head, placed on those shoulders way up there on the very top of that long and beautiful human body. I saw her standing there in the doorway to the inside of our habitat—the door painted to disappear into the wraparound mural of the jungle scene, the door the zookeepers used to enter the habitat at feeding time. The door opened, and there stood Lydia, accompanied by one of the brownshirts. My father furtively stepped on the cigarette he’d been smoking.
“Rotpeter!” the brownshirt barked.
Rotpeter shrugged his shoulders, like, What?
“What have you got under your foot?”
Nothing, he shrugged.
“Don’t give me that, I can smell it all over you—it stinks like a bar in here.”
“You let him smoke?” said Lydia, horrified.
“God no! He learned to smoke from watching people, and now some idiots still throw him cigarettes even though we put up a sign.”
“How does he light them?”
The brownshirt sighed in pained, embarrassed resignation. “He’s got a lighter hidden around here somewhere.”
Lydia gave the brownshirt a look that an intervening social worker might give a neglectful parent when she sees the home is cluttered with unhygienic detritus.
“Oh, you poor baby,” said Lydia to me, realizing at once the shameful extent of the ugliness, the neglect and emotional abuse I had suffered in this hellhole, this prison, this degrading and dehumanizing panopticon in which I had grown up.
And she bent down to me and again held out her arms, like a saint, and she called to me:
“Come here, Bruno. Come to me.”
I raced into her arms, planting kisses of gratitude on every exposed patch of that glabrous, supple, sweetly aromatic human flesh I could reach. She’d come back! Come back for me! She must love me, too!
My mother grunted at her and suspiciously licked a glob of filth off of her thumb. My mother always knew I had a thing for human girls, and strongly, strongly disapproved of it. Of course, it was difficult for even me to tell precisely what my mother was thinking because she was so disastrously inarticulate. Like most chimps, hers was a vocabulary consisting entirely of signs—grunts, gestures, noises, postures, faces, and so on—signifiers with amoebic and inconstant sets of signifieds depending entirely upon the ephemeral context of the immediately present moment. She had in her communicative arsenal not one thing that could truly be called a word, which I think of as a sort of compact ball of signification—the use of which can change depending on the situation, but the meaning of which is firmer and less psychologically elastic than a nonlinguistic sign. Yes, conversations between chimps certainly do occur, thoughts of a certain sort are indeed communicated between them, but it would be absolutely impossible to translate them into human language, because these nonlingual conversations occur outside