Free Mr Palomar (Vintage Classics) by Italo Calvino Page A

of the terrestrial continents and of the loins of the animal body.
    It must be said that the man-beef symbiosis has, over the centuries, achieved an equilibrium (allowing the two species to continue multiplying) though it is asymmetric (it is true that man takes care of feeding cattle, but he is not required to give them himself to feed on), and has guaranteed the flourishing of what is called human civilization, which at least in part should be called human-bovine (coinciding in part with the human-ovine and in smaller part with the human-porcine, depending on the alternatives of a complicated geography of religious prohibitions). Mr Palomar shares in this symbiosis with a clear conscience and full agreement: though he recognizes in the strung-up carcase of the beef the person of a disemboweled brother, and in the slash of the loin chop the wound that mutilates his own flesh, he knows that he is a carnivore, conditioned by his alimentary background to perceive in a butcher’s shop the premiss of gustatory happiness, to imagine, observing these reddish slices, the stripes that the flame will leave on the grilled steaks and the pleasure of the tooth in severing the browned fiber.
    One sentiment does not exclude another: Mr Palomar’s mood as he stands in line in the butcher’s shop is at once of restrained joy and of fear, desire and respect, egotistic concern and universal compassion, the mood that perhaps others express in prayer.

PALOMAR AT THE ZOO
     
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    The giraffe race
     
    Visiting the Vincennes zoo, Mr Palomar stops at the giraffes’ yard. Every now and then the adult giraffes start running, followed by the baby giraffes; they charge almost to the fence, wheel around, repeat the dash two or three times, then stop. Mr Palomar never tires of watching the giraffes’ race, fascinated by their unharmonious movements. He cannot decide whether they are galloping or trotting, because the stride of their hind legs has nothing in common with that of their forelegs. The forelegs arch loosely to the breast, then unfold to the ground, as if unsure which of numerous articulations they should employ at that given moment. The hind legs, much shorter and stiff, follow in leaps and bounds, somewhat obliquely, as if they were of wood, or crutches stumbling along, but also as if playing, aware of being comical. Meanwhile the outstretched neck sways up and down, like the arm of a crane, with no possible relationship between the movement of the legs and the movement of the neck. The withers also give a jolt, but this is simply the movement of the neck that jerks the rest of the spinal column.
    The giraffe seems a mechanism constructed by putting together pieces from heterogeneous machines, though it functions perfectly all the same. Mr Palomar, as he continues observing the racing giraffes, becomes aware of a complicated harmony that commands that unharmonious trampling, an inner proportion that links the most glaring anatomical disproportions, a natural grace that emerges from those ungraceful movements. The unifying element comes from the spots on the hide, arranged in irregular but homogeneous patterns: they agree, like a precise graphic equivalent, with the animal’s segmented movements. The hide should not be considered spotted, but rather a black coat whose uniformity is broken by pale veins that open in a lozenge design: an unevenness of pigmentation that preannounces the unevenness of the movements.
    At this point Mr Palomar’s little girl, who has long since tired of watching the giraffes, pulls him towards the penguins’ cave. Mr Palomar, in whom penguins inspire anguish, follows her reluctantly and asks himself why he is so interested in giraffes. Perhaps because the world around him moves in an unharmonious way, and he hopes always to find some pattern in it, a constant. Perhaps because he himself feels that his own advance is impelled by uncoordinated movements of the mind, which seem to have nothing to do with