You're an Animal, Viskovitz (Vintage International)

by Alessandro Boffa

There’s nothing more boring than life, nothing more depressing than light, nothing more bogus than reality. For me every waking was a dying—living was being dead.

Because in spite of everything, you have to live.

Because only a life made up of boredom

and frustration leads to fulfilling and magnificent dreams.

besides putting on some fat and trying to bore yourself, is to store up oneiric material for the next hibernation.

“The reality is that I am even lazier and sleepier than you, Visko, and there is nothing I wish for more than to sleep in your arms, than to hear you snore in my sleep.”

We snails have a saying: ‘Love thy neighbor, because he who is far away will remain so.’”

I confess that I was falling back on my privates rather willingly.

before his tomb, that is to say my mother,

After a bit, since thinking about death never failed to give me an erection,

One of the first things I would teach my children: the virtue of doubt.

“Cuckoo, Viskovitz.”

I don't think i follow the ending, was ljuba a cuckoo dating a cuckoo

When you’re all tired out and the pear is ready, you have to defend it as you would your life, or they’ll carry it off by force. Even your best friends, the ones you grew up with. The material is more powerful than we are, Visko. It eats up your soul.”

It wasn’t with riches that I wished to storm the castle of her heart.

It isn’t for nothing that the ideogram jia (a pig under a roof) means “family.”

How beautiful she was! She was as seductive as an intuition, as disconcerting as an antiphrasis, as shy as truth. Stupid as a poem.

“What can we do to get beyond these cut-rate answers, to escape this humdrum, this mediocrity? Tell me, master, what must we do?” “Do,” the sage answered.

Studies conducted by humans have demonstrated that her image on a cardboard cutout is enough to get a male to fertilize the eggs. Even if the eggs aren’t really there. Not only that—we continue to incubate the nonexistent eggs and oxygenate them with our tails. This doesn’t mean we’re stupid, mind you. It means that nature prefers to err on the side of plenty rather than on the side of scarcity.

Then I understood that our whole love story had been a misunderstanding. At last I had an explanation for those many looks charged with hate, and others with bursts of love. And for that strange story of the grandfather who escaped from a sardine tin.

From that day, from that moment when I understood she was a cardboard cutout, our relationship became more serene, communication less burdensome and the sex fantastic.

You get to go on living on account of the speed of your killer reflexes. You wouldn’t be so fast if you could think about what you’re doing. All it takes is a nothing—a vibration in the critical zone around you—and zak! Your blind reflexes just lash out. It’s the madness of this ecosystem that creates an uncontrollable and stupid machine like you, Viskovitz.”

“Okay, Lara. Let’s do it. Lara?” I thought she’d fallen asleep. Only later did I realize she had my stinger planted in her skull. Our relationship hadn’t stood the test of time.

Figuring it was the proper thing to do, I carried her body to her family. In my desert vocabulary I tried to find some words of condolence and apology, but all I managed to do was massacre her parents and rape her sister. I really wasn’t made for social life.

But day after day, month after month, life went on peacefully. The babies went on growing up healthy, slaughtering their schoolmates. Ljuba and I went on adoring each other, massacring the next-door neighbors. Everything went on in perfect harmony, and there was no way to escape this intolerable, sinister happiness.

The power to master the world and to enslave my neighbor, to humiliate and destroy every creature bigger than a micron, to transform every desire into a decree, every whim into a verdict. That thought was the only thing that kept me going.

But it is a given that an ant lives only a few months.

The collapsing sculpture had broken into three truncated sections. The head and the thorax had shattered, but the large oval shape of the abdomen had stayed intact and was rolling toward me. It wasn’t the idea of dying that bothered me so much as the shape of that abdomen. It looked like a larva. It was a statue of Zucotic that was killing me, not a statue of me. It wasn’t the portrait of an emperor that I was leaving to history. It was the portrait of a nothing.

“Why settle for one personality, kid, when you can have them all? Where does it get you to be yourself when, just by pretending to be someone else, you can seduce really fantastic lizards, get good marks at school, make your rivals run away? Follow my example: today I’m your pop; tomorrow, who knows?”

Of course that meant you couldn’t trust anyone, not even relatives. It wasn’t an accident that in our family we all had names that ended with a question mark. I was called Viskovitz?

He thought a bit, raising a flexible eye toward his crest. “Yes. Even I fell in love once. But I have to say, I never understood with whom. And then I never succeeded in telling her apart from the background. And then I got terribly jealous. If someone brushed a branch, I thought he was feeling up her prehensile tail. If he licked dew from a leaf, I thought he was sucking her ear. If he sighed over the view . . . well, I saw the worst implications. Luckily, love is a thermal phenomenon, Visko?, and we cold-blooded animals only have to worry about it between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.”

Ah well. The next day I discovered that my stupid ex-girlfriend Lara had the same wounds, and so did my sickly and repressed deskmate Jana. They were the same chameleon! It was then that I lost my last certainties. And it is there that I finally found myself. But I didn’t recognize me.

“I understand your state of mind, Zuco, but you’re wasting your time talking about this with me. I stopped believing in your values years ago. Then I stopped believing in values in general, and finally I even stopped believing in believing. After which I began to dissolve into the universe . . . you can’t ask the air you breathe for advice, Zuco.”

It really was, cynologically speaking, a body that was superb in its proportions and the arrangement of its parts, exemplary in its conformation and profile.

It seemed to me that there was only one way to find peace. One day, I said to myself, I’ll be able to rise above those crude material attachments, but for the time being, go with the flow . . . wasn’t that the Way of Tao after all?

It’s amazing how a few hormones always manage to deceive us. In this universe in which everything is unstable and ephemeral, nothing is more evanescent than love between dogs. No illusion is briefer. It is for this reason, I think, that we need other idols, other masters.”

And what would you say are my defects?”

My mother was a big fish, she nourished me splendidly. Naturally it took me a while to get her down, since I was so small, still in gestation. I started on the inside and made my way out through the blood-rich organs, so I can’t say I really got to know her. I do remember she had a good heart.”

“Oh yes, you know what those creatures are like. They say they’re symbiotic, but they’re really parasitic. They fasten on to your stomach with those toothy fins and they don’t ever let you go. But the worst thing is their hypocrisy. They criticize your every mouthful, they fill you with a sense of guilt. They tell you the personal history of every tuna and herring, so that when you eat them you lose your enthusiasm and the remoras get more leftovers. Son, I’ve seen remoras fatter than sharks.”

The critical reception was unanimous in appreciating “the chromatic liveliness, the solidity of the architectonic solutions, the refinement of the modeling.”

“That could be,” others replied. “But ours is a matriarchal society, and even if he’s no genius and not exactly a lightning bolt with his wings, with a cute little ass like that, he’ll go far.”

“Let’s run away together, Visko. The world will be our honeycomb, life will be our nectar

“Forgive me, Visko. I didn’t have the courage to tell you . . . Come on, please, don’t be like that. What really matters is being able to create beauty. Haven’t we sworn to love each other, whatever disguises we have to wear? And which of us has more to complain about? You who only have to imagine my ugliness, or I who have to look at yours all day?

The one way to crown our love story was to reach her with some spermatozoa, but the current kept on running the wrong way—toward my mama, my sisters, my grand-mothers, creating all kinds of family embarrassment and genealogical complications.

The situation was rendered still more equivocal due to the periodic sex changes that we hermaphroditic sponges have to undergo. It wasn’t easy for me to accept the fact that my father was the wife of his mother, that his daughter (my sister) was his grandfather and his grandmother was also his brother (my uncle).

I felt faint. How could I be so unlucky? Female. And meanwhile, Ljuba had become male, and her ejaculations couldn’t reach me because I was upstream!

Who can say that this unhappiness wouldn’t finally make me happy?

I, Viskovitz, was a microbe. I was told, “It’s not size that counts, Viskovitz. The important thing is to be yourself.”

“Animal?” At that stage I was open to any suggestion— what was degeneration for one could be evolution for another. “I wouldn’t know where to begin,” we confessed.

“Hmmm . . . Now you have to learn to kill and devour others. As big as you’ve become, that shouldn’t be hard for you.” “Others who are alive?” “Only until you’ve killed them, Visko. There’s nothing wrong with it—it’s called heterotrophic life.”

I cautiously moved alongside her and stuck to her gluey mass. Then I extroverted “I,” stiffened him and sank him into her body so that he would find his lost partner. In the splish-splash I ended up losing “I” as well. He slid out of his membrane and dove, plasma and periplasma, into her “U.”