and subsequently devoured. He was forced to watch while they dismembered his parents with machetes, drilled spits through their corpses, cooked them over a fire and ate them. The two adult chimps they killed and ate because they were hungry, but they refrained from killing the baby right away because there was little meat on him (he was more valuable alive). Instead they tied him to a stick by his wrists and ankles, which they carried around with them for several days until they crossed the border to the Central African Republic and arrived at a populated area, where they sold my father to a German trader who illegally trafficked in exotic animals. The German was a man in a big yellow hat, who starved and beat him, and put him in a cage, which was transported from one place to another until he wound up on an airplane that landed finally in Germany, where he spent five years in the Berlin Zoo before a mysterious chain of exchanges and communiqués put him back on a plane, which this time landed at O’Hare, where he was loaded into the back of a van and conveyed to the Lincoln Park Zoo, where he was introduced to a jejune and somewhat mentally obtuse female chimp whom he was expected to shtup immediately, and whom out of boredom he eventually did. Thus my brother Cookie was conceived, followed three years later by me. The Germans had named him Rotpeter, meaning “Red Peter,” after the streaks of distinctly ruddy coloration in his fur. My father never quite lost that touch of aboriginal uncouthness. He’d known freedom only to have it cruelly revoked—whereas I, Bruno, was born in captivity, became free because I learned language, committed a transgression, and now, as you see, am in captivity once again. My father, though, had—however briefly—experienced life the way it was meant to be lived. He knew what he had lost, and this knowledge fueled him with an indignant rage that as a child—even in my terror of him—I admired. Not so my mother. She had never known Zion. She was born in the ghetto, a zoo-child of zoo-parents. And she suffered my father’s boorish machismo and womanizing with the same matter-of-factly passive acceptance with which she accepted her own confinement from birth. Rotpeter screwed my mother often but would also slip it in her sister whenever he felt like it. See, we shared our habitat with my maternal aunt, Gloria, and another adult male chimp, Rex—pitiful Rex!—who coupled with Gloria whenever Rotpeter was feeling too fucked out or overfed to swat him away, but Rex would never have dared try anything with my mother. Because Rotpeter was Alpha Male (not a hugely impressive achievement when there are only two adult males in the habitat) and because he had been born in the boondocks of Zaire and didn’t put up with anybody’s shit (at least not that of anybody he could physically overpower), he simply felt biologically entitled to every wet hole in the cage: my mother, her sister, and I could swear the disgusting fart already had a lecherous eye trained on little Céleste, who good Christ was still a child then, even younger than I, scarcely weaned from the teat.
Perverse, isn’t it? That I should sit keeping my poor dull downtrodden mother company, letting her comb the bits of filth out of my back fur while not twenty paces away my father is fucking my aunt? You’d think I grew up in Appalachia. This is the sort of background I came from. Oh, and I should tell you about the frog.
There was this frog—wait. Not now. Not just yet.
I think a general description of my early childhood is in order. The summers weren’t so bad, because they let us romp around on the grass outside. The whole family would spend most of the day lolling around in the trees and hammocks on this sort of grassy artificial island they’d built for us. We had enough space to move about as we liked, but there was a concrete ditch with a moat in it surrounding the island, and beyond that, a wall that was too high and steeply sloped for us to climb. The humans would crowd around the ledge of this wall and look at us. If it got too hot we could retreat