Tõnis Tootsen

Pâté of the Apes: One Primate’s Thoughts and Memories

Tõnis Tootsen

Translated into English by Adam Cullen

Thinking back, my first memory isn’t of my mother or father, but of humans. That is if I haven’t sketched the recollection into my mind later; I’ve just heard about it so many times from other mouths. On birthdays and Tailster holidays and Manifestation Eve and so forth. Even after growing into a full-fledged ape, I was constantly reminded of how close I’d been regardless.

                How close to what, exactly, was a point of contention. That’s why the story was a family favorite, splitting my relatives into two camps. “Hey, how’d that one thing go again?” someone would ask (usually my uncle while painting Tailster bananas), looking as casual as possible as if they’d completely forgotten about “that one thing” already but still held the exact same opinion each and every time.

                This is how the story went. Not far from my monkeyhood home was a taxi garage where my grandpa worked and was, on that day, celebrating his 35th birthday. A car that no one had ever seen before suddenly pulled up. Mom claimed it was red. Dad swore it was blue. My uncle insisted that my dad said it was red at first, too. My aunt argued the opposite: that my mom said it was blue. In any case, the driver and passenger were humans, a man and a woman, who were ecstatic when they saw me. The woman immediately scooped me up into her arms, cooing: “Oh, a baby ape!” That’s what I remember—bare arms. Were they already titillating back then? Her skin was as velvety smooth as the dress she was wearing. And wasn’t she just as warm as sun-heated sand . . . And how sweetly she smelled! I can still see my own teensy fingers playing with the big, round stones hanging around her neck. The next thing I remember is being torn away from that warm embrace. I cling to one of the stones, but the next thing I know, the rest are hitting the ground and the woman is screaming. That’s all.

                My first memory. Paradise lost, as Dad would say. His own father, Grandpa Puma, would, on the other hand, call it the gates of hell. It was my other grandpa’s birthday which we were celebrating that day, of course. In any case, those humans wanted to buy me as a playmate for their child. As the years passed, my dad inflated the amount they offered—even I can remember that. Maybe he started to feel embarrassed? It wasn’t about the money, naturally, but the question itself. With those humans, I would have been surrounded by everything my dad preached about day after day. I would’ve been far closer to it than he himself—someone who came into contact with humans exponentially more than any ordinary primate who was allowed to touch a person with their own hands maybe once a year around Manifestation Day. Dad believed that although an ape can only become human after death (“a good ape,” he made a point of specifying whenever I got into mischief), proximity to humans would increase the likelihood by leaps and bounds. According to his faith, an ape could be utterly dishonorable in life but if they perished in the arms of a human, then they were destined to be reborn human. He was also convinced that such a fate would certainly await me if I were a good ape to those people. Yet, Grandpa Puma quickly lost his patience and wrenched me away from that woman. Whatever might have happened next was left to my extended family to speculate. Perhaps the humans were just joking? Opinions ranged from one end of the spectrum to the other but before the debate became too heated, someone would always remark: “Only humans can know what would’ve become of him. It’s not for a single ape to say.” And more or less everybody would agree. I suppose they each took exactly what they wanted to take from the story anyway.

                My grandfather—the one with the birthday, on my maternal side—had no right ear. He lost it fighting the red apes. Only a tiny strip of flesh was left. When I fingered it as a little monkey and asked, Grampa-Grampa, why’s your ear so little?, he said it was so he wouldn’t hear stupid questions. I mostly remember him sitting on the bench at the taxi garage. He’d lounge there in the sun, his tail curled up, chain smoking and dropping the butts into a big metal bucket at his side until it was filled to the brim. Then, he’d dump it out somewhere and start all over again. He never spoke a word about the Big War, so even when I was just a little monkey, I realized there was no point bringing up the topic—though it was the most exciting subject of all!

                “Are you afraid of death?” I nevertheless dared to ask one time.

                “Stupid question,” he replied.

                So, he just sat and smoked outside the garage and was silent. Or sipped coffee. And was silent. He was silent about everything. When I was older, he’d occasionally ask how I was doing. “Good,” I replied. “That’s good,” he’d say.

                Every now and then, Undo or Redo, Grandpa’s younger colleagues, would roll onto the lot. When both showed up at once, they’d immediately wall him in, plop down on either side, jam a pack of smokes into his hand, and steer the conversation towards the Big War. Although Undo and Redo were both born after it ended, they rarely talked about anything other than what maneuvers the brown apes executed or what kinds of hammers the red apes used: how big the biggest were, how tiny the tiniest were, how the length of the handle and the weight of the head affected the precision and strength of a strike, et cetera. Hammers were parade weapons, of course, and carried into battle only by chosen apes who were also instantly killed. Thus, it was a great honor to bear one. Undo still had his grandfather’s long-handled copper hammer. “Thirty kilos of pure justice,” he’d say, stroking its head. “Who knows how many craniums it’s beaten to a pulp.” Even though he was likely well aware there was a high probability of zero. But an ape could always dream. In any case, they patted Grandpa on the back and pet him and praised him and had endless questions lined up. Questions so exciting that they wouldn’t be put off by his silence, but started answering themselves. Undo and Redo knew just enough to fill each other’s gaps, albeit while screeching and exchanging occasional nips. Grandpa would merely listen in silence, thank them for the smokes, and then disappear into the cafeteria for a coffee.

                My own patience held out longer. When they stayed on the bench after he’d left, I’d continue listening to their conversation to no end. After Grandpa passed away, his spot between Undo and Redo was occupied by a giant jar of fermented orange juice that they took turns sipping—only after the end of the workday, of course. “You just remember that, little monkey!” Undo would customarily command to finish a particularly intense argument, juice smeared across his chin and his chest fur matted and sticky.  “It’s history!” Undo and Redo, burly chimpanzees who were born during the red apes’ occupation, spoke of the occupiers much more mildly after Grandpa, who’d fought for the brown apes, was no more.

                Red apes were responsible for the intriguing idea that primates had no use for humans; that humans were simply exploiting them. So, the red apes simply massacred a sizeable share of the population (and the apes who were loyal to them). Those who managed to escape became blue apes over time. The blue-ape leaders feared the red apes’ idea could spread like wildfire. And when the brown-ape movement arose on the peripheries of both, then blues shoveled bananas and weapons galore into the cause, intending for it to be a bulwark, or what’s more, a bulldozer that could push the reds into the dustbin of history. However, the bulldozer started living a life of its own and plowing all apes into the dustbin of history, broad- and narrow-nosed alike, leaving only chimpanzees and people. Undo and Redo found this method extremely agreeable, as both just happened to be chimpanzees as well. The blue apes, on the other hand, believed such indiscriminate killing was utterly cynical: that the killing of any ape, be they broad- or narrow nosed, was justified only if it was a red ape. One was permitted to kill those whose heads were filled with thoughts of the wrong shape, not apes whose head itself was the wrong shape. Such was a fundamental principle of blue-ape culture: no matter how wrong the shape of one’s head, they must still have the freedom to fill it with thoughts of the right shape.

                Now that I, older than Undo and Redo were at the time, think about it, I realize their worldview was a combination of two ideologies that were trying to wipe each other off the map. The golden days of their youth transpired under the rule of the red apes, when walls were plastered with posters displaying a gorilla smiling kindly, his arms heaped with a bevy of baby primates: chimpanzees, orangutangs, rhesuses, bonobos, macaques, and so forth. The colorful assortment was meant to build a human-free future in cheerful solidarity. “Now that was a time when an ape’s life really meant something!” Undo railed. “Ape cared for ape. He really did! But now, we stab each other in the back whenever we need to grovel to humans.” Consequently, they were also fans of red principles; especially Undo, whose grandfather fought in the red-ape army. But the truth of the matter was that as soon as the picture was taken, that gorilla shook off all the babies as if they were fleas and quivered his silver back. How on earth could such diversity be curbed?

                The brown apes offered a fine alternative: leave only one color; their own. They realized, of course, that it meant brown would no longer be brown, so they devised a plan to build a big brown museum with just enough space for the rest of the colors. There, they would all stay nice and still, arranged in the correct order like a stairway to heaven, the last rung of which—the threshold to paradise—would have been brown, the king of all colors. Brown-ape principles were therefore also dear to Undo and Redo; especially the latter, as his grandfather fought in the brown apes’ legion. The red apes triumphed regardless, though it quickly became clear that they also saw the world in monochrome and intended to construct a rather similar color ladder, the uppermost rung of which—the closest to heaven—would be red.

                Life only became truly multicolored when the red regime submitted to the blue regime, around the time I was born. All of a sudden, all colors were declared equal—that is, so long as each was blended with a little blue. But what does a little mean? Experimenting with the boundary, there came to be a whole lot of red, brown, green, and purple apes who would have gladly seen their own color dominate instead of blue and wanted that to be mixed into all the rest of the colors.

                It’s hard to tell with colors. Undo and Redo, who began wistfully reminiscing about the former red-ape regime, were known to grunt, “Oh, they’re just an old red,” about one blue ape or another. It also wasn’t unheard of for them to grumble that the blues were actually the new reds; that there was no real difference between them. And after slurping a healthy mouthful of orange juice and nodding thoughtfully in affirmation, they launched into a fresh discussion about how dissimilar blues and reds were all the same. When I pointed this out, they explained didactically that not all reds were alike: you could be red in a good sense or red in a bad sense. Provokingly, I asked if that meant not all magentas were alike—the purplish-pinkish blend which stood for absolutely everything that Undo and Redo despised. Could you also be magenta in a good sense? I asked. Redo didn’t even take a moment to consider. Of course you can! You can be magenta in a good sense when you’re a dead magenta. To which Undo added that it was his last chance to say something like that, because before you know it, blues will be banning that kind of talk because in reality they’re all magentas already. Then, they fell silent for a few minutes before asking suspiciously if I hadn’t, by chance, ever voted for magentas. Or even worse . . .

                “Boy, if you turn out to be magenta, too, then we’ll strangle you to death with your own tail,” Undo growled.

                “Luckily, I’m a chimpanzee,” I stammered, trying to turn the whole thing into a joke.

                “Well, I’m sure we’ll find the tail to strangle you to death with.”

                “Ah, he ain’t! He ain’t! The boy’s no magenta!” Redo protested, coming to my defense.

                That was more or less the color theory that Undo and Redo, masters of living, propagated to their foolish apprentice. The outcome being that I no longer dared to even open another jar of paint, my hands and brush quivering as I stood frozen before the snow-white canvas. I suppose the majority of apes and humans view the world from a dignified colorless perspective such as that—to yourself, you always taste like pristine water; a refreshing sip of sensibility.