A REPORT FOR AN ACADEMY
GENTLEMEN, eminent members of the academy!
You have done me the honour of asking me to present a report on my simian past.
Unfortunately, however, I won’t be able to carry out that request in the sense in which it was intended. Nearly five years now separate me from my simian state, a short time when measured by the calendar, but practically endless if you galloped through it like I did, sometimes accompanied by admirable people, by advice, acclaim and orchestral music, but fundamentally alone, because anyone accompanying me, to pursue my metaphor, stayed safely offstage in the orchestra’s pit. That effort would have been impossible if I’d stubbornly tried to cling on to my origins, to memories of my youth. In fact, my highest law was to relinquish any wilfulness I found within myself; I, a free ape, bent my neck to that yoke. As a result, whatever memories I had became ever more closed off from me. Although at first I could still—had the humans wished it—have gone back through the high, wide arch that the sky forms over the earth, the way back became lower and narrower the more I drove my development forward; I started to feel more comfortable and more embedded in the human world; the storm chasing me from out of my past began to settle; today it’s no more than a breeze to cool my heels; the distant gap through which it comes and through which I once came has shrunk so small that even if I had the strength and the willpower to get back to it, I would have to scrape the hide off my body just to squeeze through. To put it frankly, even though I do like to use figures of speech for these things, to put it frankly: your own simian heritage, gentlemen, insofar as you have something like that in your past, is no more remote from you than mine is from me. Yet everyone who walks this earth feels that little tickle at his heel, from a little chimpanzee to the great Achilles.
But I can perhaps answer your invitation in a more limited sense, and will do so with great pleasure. The first thing I learnt was: shake hands; shaking hands leads to openness; and now that I’m at the high point of my career, I’d like to add some candid speech to that first frank handshake. I won’t be able to tell the academy anything substantively new and I will fall far short of what was asked of me, which I wouldn’t be able to provide with the best will in the world—nevertheless, let me sketch the course of how someone born an ape was able to enter the human world and thrive in it. But even the little that follows I wouldn’t be willing to explain if I weren’t completely sure of myself and my position, and if I hadn’t unshakeably established myself on every great variety stage in the civilized world.
I come from the Gold Coast. For an account of how I was captured I have to rely on the reports of others. A hunting expedition mounted by the Hagenbeck Company—with whose leader I’ve since shared many a fine bottle of claret—was waiting in a riverbank hide when I and the rest of my troop arrived for an evening drink. Shots were fired; I was the only one hit, and I was hit twice.
Once in the cheek; that one just glanced me, but it left me with a big hairless red scar that earned me the disgusting and wholly unsuitable name Red Peter, which really might have been dreamt up by an ape and which implied that the only difference between me and a recently deceased, moderately well-known performing ape called Peter was the red mark on my cheek. That’s just by the by.
The second shot struck me below the hip. It was more serious, that’s why I still limp a little to this day. I recently read in a piece by one of the ten thousand windbags who air their opinions of me in the newspapers that my simian nature has not yet been entirely suppressed; the proof being that, when I have visitors, I still like to pull down my trousers to show them where that shot hit me. That hack deserves to have every finger on his writing hand shot off one at a time. I, I can pull down my trousers in front of whomever I please; you’d find nothing but a well-groomed pelt and a scar left by—let me use this specific word for this specific situation, because I don’t want to be misunderstood—the scar left by a criminal assault. All this is in the open; there’s nothing to hide; any high-minded person would drop the constraints of politeness when it’s a matter of demonstrating the truth. If, on the other hand, that scribbler were to pull down his trousers when he had visitors, it would appear in a very different light, and I take it as a sign of vestigial good sense that he doesn’t do it. But I’d like him to spare me his delicacy of feeling!
After those shots I came round—and this is where my own memories gradually take over—in a cage below decks on the Hagenbeck steamer. It wasn’t the classic cage with four barred sides; rather, it was three-sided and fixed to a crate, with the crate making a wall. It was too low to stand up in and too narrow to sit down. So I crouched with bent, shaking knees and, probably because at first I wanted to stay in the dark and not see anyone, I faced the crate while the thin bars behind me cut into my flesh. It’s considered good practice to keep wild animals in this kind of accommodation during their first moments in captivity, and after my experiences I can’t now deny that from the human perspective that is correct.
Back then I couldn’t think like that. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have a way out; at least there was no way out directly ahead of me; directly ahead of me was the crate, with each board nailed firmly to the next. There was in fact one small gap between them, something I greeted with rapturous howls of unreason when I first discovered it, but which was not nearly big enough to fit even just my tail through and which all my simian strength was unable to widen.
I was told later that I made unusually little noise, leading the hunters to conclude that either I would soon give up the ghost or, if I managed to survive the difficult first phase, I would take very well to training. I survived the first phase. Muted sobbing, painful searches for fleas, weary licking of coconuts, knocking my skull against the crate, sticking out my tongue when someone came—these were the first occupations of my new life. But all of them came with the same feeling: no way out. Of course I now only have human words to sketch an ape’s emotions, but even if I can no longer precisely describe the old simian truths, the gist is correct, there’s no doubt about that.
Until that moment I had always had so many ways out, and now I had none. I’d been run to ground. I would have been no less free if I’d been nailed to the floor. Why was that? Scratch the flesh between your toes until it starts to bleed, and you still won’t understand. Push yourself backwards against the bars until they almost cut you in two, and you won’t understand. I had no way out, but I had to make myself one, because I couldn’t live without it. To be pressed up against that crate for the foreseeable—it would have been the end of me. For Hagenbeck, however, the place for apes was next to that crate—so I ceased to be an ape. A lucid, beautiful deduction, one that I must have somehow gestated in my stomach, because apes think with their bellies.