Free Palafox by Eric Chevillard Page A

convinced of the inutility of the least effort, as if the executioner had already hoisted his cleaver, lowered it, and was now walking away at dawn in search of other thrilling adventures, other unbalanced encounters, other temporary liaisons. It is true, once again, that everything points to him, his ferocity, his omnivorousness, his claws sharper than canines, his canines like sabers, his coat clotted with blood. Scientifically, declaims Pierpont in staccato syllables (he polishes each and joins one carefully to the next), we must prove sci-en-tif-i-cal-ly the innocence or the guilt of Palafox and therefore, in the first place, go back and consider the entirety of his life, search backward for the moment of his birth. We can do this. The lengths of his tusks, the wear and tear on his hooves, his song, the position of his ears at rest, the suppleness of his spine, the size and number of his tines and antlers, we have enough information to succeed. But would it not be faster to have recourse to the techniques commonly utilized to date relics? Zeiger envisions for example the partial dissolution or perhaps irradiation of Palafox. Thanks to this last method, the historian knows instantly where, in which Greek or Inca dresser, to arrange the exhumed plate with a fistful of gold pieces - an archeological discovery then, but also a fine symbol of an earth at once nurturing and nurtured, let it be noted. There are many other methods of dating more or less along the lines of those already mentioned. Push a fisherman into the water and count the circles that expand around the place he fell, you will learn the age of the river.
    Or the age of the fisherman, opinions differ on this point, but at root this changes nothing for us, proclaims Baruglio who suggests that we could count, rather than Palafox’s antlers, the concentric circles of the green and red scales of his carapace. Because the antlers mislead - you admit along with me that the stag wears no hat, and yet look at where we all threw ours when we came in. And Baruglio points out, hung on the wall, the varnished antlers of a ten-point buck. Antlers mislead, here’s why, they break in battle, stop growing and multiplying after ten years and never produce more than stolen fruit. You just can’t trust them. Nor the ridges on the shells, Pierpont objects. While quite clear during the early years, very deep and numerous, they become erased through time. After half a century, any carapace will appear perfectly smooth, flawless, as polished as our skulls, Messieurs, which may as well be compared to billiard balls, to staircase finials and pommels, in the best of cases to the knees of actresses. (From that time on we better understood why Madame Fontechevade had finally thrown her tortoise Tatiana out a window. While her own face wrinkled, Tatiana’s shell grew smoother with time, and as a result of inverted evolutionary trajectories there reached a point where they criss-crossed and each exhibited an identical state of dilapidation, from which a chain-reaction of comical mistaken identity arose, and what was bound to happen did, and one day Tatiana was taken for a younger sister of our old, vexed, terribly vexed, friend.)

    According to the spot where Sadarnac had caught him, in the very center of the Sargasso sea, it is likely that Palafox followed the migratory route, gulping down unrelentingly, and without deviating from his route, the offspring of sardines and anchovies and herrings which really hit the spot, here as elsewhere, when tasty little dishes won’t do. This established, continues Cambrelin, the problem remains undiminished as we have no idea in which direction Palafox swam. Did he return to spawning-grounds, a vigorous adult at the peak of his prowess, or, just out of the egg, did he take to the open sea for the first time? In fact, we would be no more enlightened about his age if we were to illuminate this mystery. The eel, for example, undulates with the river