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

one another and are increasingly difficult to fit into any pattern of inner harmony.

The albino gorilla
     
    In the Barcelona zoo there exists the only example known in the world of the great albino ape, a gorilla from equatorial Africa. Mr Palomar picks his way through the crowd that presses into the animal’s building. Beyond a sheet of plate glass, “Copito de Nieve” (“Snowflake”, as they call him), is a mountain of flesh and white hide. Seated against a wall, he is taking the sun. The facial mask is a human pink, carved by wrinkles; the chest also reveals a pink and glabrous skin, like that of a human of the white race. With its enormous features, a sad giant’s, that face turns every now and then towards the crowd of visitors beyond the glass, less than a meter from him, a slow gaze charged with desolation and patience and boredom, a gaze that expresses all the resignation at being the way he is, sole exemplar in the world of a form not chosen, not loved, all the effort of bearing his own singlarity, and the suffering at occupying space and time with his presence so cumbersome and evident.
    The glass looks on to an enclosure surrounded by high masonry walls, which give it the appearance of a prison yard but actually it is the “garden” of the gorilla’s house-cage; from its soil rises a short, leafless tree and an iron ladder like those in a gymnasium. Farther back in the yard there is the female, a great black gorilla carrying a baby in her arms: the whiteness of the coat cannot be inherited, “Copito de Nieve” remains the only albino of all gorillas.
    White and motionless, the great ape suggests to Mr Palomar’s mind an immemorial antiquity, like mountains or like the pyramids. In reality the animal is still young and only the contrast between the pink face and the short snow coat that frames it and, especially, the wrinkles all around the eyes give him the look of an old man. For the rest, the appearance of “Copito de Nieve” shows fewer resemblances to humans than that of other primates: in place of a nose, the nostrils dig a double chasm; the hands, hairy and – it would seem – not very highly articulated, at the end of the very long and stiff arms, are actually still paws, and the gorilla uses them as such when he walks, pressing them to the ground like a quadruped.
    Now these arm-paws are pressing a rubber tire against his chest. In the enormous void of his hours, “Copito de Nieve” never abandons the tire. What can this object be for him? A toy? A fetish? A talisman? Palomar feels he understands the gorilla perfectly, his need for something to hold tight while everything eludes him, a thing with which to allay the anguish of isolation, of difference, of the sentence to being always considered a living phenomenon, not only by the visitors to the zoo but also by his own females and his children.
    The female also has an old tire, but for her it is an object of normal use, with which she has a practical relationship, without problems: she sits in it as if it were an easychair, sun-bathing and de-lousing her infant. For “Copito de Nieve”, on the contrary, the contact with the tire seems to be something affective, possessive, and somehow symbolic. From it he can have a glimpse of what for man is the search for an escape from the dismay of living: investing oneself in things, recognizing oneself in signs, transforming the world into a collection of symbols; a first daybreak of culture in the long biological night. To do this the gorilla possesses only an old tire, an artefact of human production, alien to him, lacking any symbolic potentiality, naked of meanings, abstract. Looking at it, you would not say that much could be derived from it. And yet what, more than an empty circle, can contain all the symbols you might want to attribute to it? Perhaps identifying himself with it, the gorilla is about to reach, in the depths of silence, the springs from which language burst forth, to