The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [126]
This was a significant event in the process of my ontogenesis: it was my first glimpse of death. I would come to know death more intimately later on, but this was my first real peek behind the curtain that beshrouds the stage of life. As I mentioned earlier, Hilarious Larry was an elder chimp, and just as it is no tragedy when an old man dies, neither is it a tragedy when an old chimp dies. I never got to know Larry well. He was always standoffish with me, distant, faintly suspicious, uncaring, unloving. Of us chimps who inhabited the ranch, Larry was both the least humanized and had suffered the most traumatic past. Larry wore clothes, yes, and yes, he ate his dinners and breakfasts with the rest of us in a civilized manner, at the table, with fork, spoon, and knife. But unlike me—and unlike, to a less obvious degree, my poor mute friend, Clever Hands—he had never asked to live this life, the life of a man. Samuel Johnson remarked that he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man, and the converse of this is that he who makes a man of himself gets rid of the pleasure of being a beast. Larry had been kidnapped as an infant and then rudely thrust against his will into his mock manhood, which in the process had robbed him not only of his freedom and his savage dignity, but of the pleasure of animality that is the birthright of the beast alone.
In many respects Larry reminded me of my own father, Rotpeter. Like my father, Larry had not been born in captivity, but as a natural citizen of the state of nature. Like my father, he would learn at a heartbreakingly precocious age that life in the state of nature may be nasty, brutish, and short: he too most likely saw his family slaughtered when he was an infant. But Larry’s subsequent imprisonment had been so much worse than my father’s. Rotpeter had gone to the zoo, Larry to the circus. His experiences there had filled up his heart with disgust, anger, and loathing for human beings, in whose civilization he had been forced to live for most of his life, and this darkly colored his worldview. Now Larry was very old and very ill. He wanted to die. Larry could have been a great patriarch of the jungle, a powerful and revered alpha male, proudly commanding his tribe of apes in the darkness of the forest. That was his true destiny, which of course he was denied. Instead he was removed to America, to sing and dance in a clown costume, to clap his hands and juggle and ride a tricycle, to suffer a life of slavery and humiliation. Of course, he could never have gone back to the wilds. He was accustomed to humans, he had undergone the injustice of being socialized to them. And this was what he resented most of all. The way he looked at me was never hostile (though at times I felt a note of condescension in the dark silent music that issued from his eyes), rather it was a look of incomprehension—incomprehension at my desire to betray my species so openly, at my willingness to join the ranks of this animal, man, who had proven himself to be the enemy of all other things that are living. No, he never had much of that yearning to join the human race that confused and perverted the creature speaking to you now. Larry lived a life of torment and exile, and I could no more have understood his psychology than he could mine. I loved the artifacts of humanity—these things of such great sweetness and light, all these jewels and candies of human civilization: the paintings of Van Gogh, the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, the architecture of a church, the taste of wine, the singular beauty of an articulated word—these things were motivation