The legend—though not Isidore’s legend—tells that in far off lands, where gentle fog hangs like a white wall and verdant valleys encircle the gaze with their emerald sparkle, at noontide and in the springtime of night, a strange bird can sometimes be spotted. She rides the winds like a blazing jewel, and leaves a brilliant trail that blots out the colors of the trees, since the splendor of her plumage burns their green vestments, and tints their boughs with the gold of autumn.
Wise men with knowledge of animals and strange phenomena, those who coin words and with them create things, have discovered the origin of this winged arrow of flame neither in their parchments nor in their learning. They know only that she causes sheer rapture in those who see her, that she leaves bereft of speech the blasphemous breath that seeks to describe her greatness and beauty, and that she steals away beneficent peace forever. Once she is beheld, no sight in the world can equal even the shadow of her golden tail.
She is believed to dwell in rocky terrain, in sheltered lairs that harbor her heartbeats. It is said that whoever possesses her shall obtain total happiness, and then, like a dagger in the heart, death.
The Iguana
The possession of consciousness in a cold-blooded body has its benefits. One can enact interior monologues write brief sentences fathom faint memories wear curved shadows and omit commas.
TheysaytheiguanabitesbutIsayshedoesn’t.
Being an iguana also has its merit, a venerable lineage to which the whole kingdom bows down; we are direct descendants of the extinct iguanodon and third cousins of the archosaurs. Whoever looks carefully can observe the captivating past of the planet in our body.
If one has the good fortune to be an iguana, all is expressed in quivering silences during a total solar eclipse. No further time or space is required, since one knows in one’s heart on which side life should be chewed.
The Chronotope
Among the many creatures of Animalia, the chronotope is one of the most enigmatic and seductive.
Drunken biologists and Slavic poets tell that this strange and beautiful animal can only be seen at the time of carnival during leap years, which is to say once every four years. The first naturalist to catalogue and tame him is known to have been a Russian disposed to bookish and theological matters, who, out of work and persecuted, used his unoccupied hours to pursue such beguiling wonders.
The chronotope’s custom is to dig vast hollows that wed time to space in unholy union, causing ancient places to slide into the future, and future days to be lost in the lands of the present, along with disordered pasts. The chronotope, innocent and pardoned, knows nothing of the calamity and miracle of his unconscious works.
Some claim the chronotope is extinct, others that he was lost in an endless tunnel, still others that he burned to death in the center of the earth, and there are even those who swear he never existed.
All that’s known is that the man who fed him died lonely and deranged, obsessed by the motor skills of this underground creature.
The Crocodile
Here, in these words, and under siege inside my armor, I declare that my texture is not of stone. Like that of men, my body becomes the first and final threshold of meaning. Daphne Soares (I know not whether she is a relative of Bernardo) tries in vain to reveal my sixth sense; besides, she is mistaken, my skin’s sensors (dome pressure receptors) are not only for hunting: on fine evenings, in placid waters, they also give forth gentle chamber music to accompany weeping. These delicate receptors, spread throughout my body and face, are the true key that shatters the doors of perception: these marks are infinity itself, embodied in a magnificent creature.
(In the heart of the galaxy there lives a sleepless crocodile)
The Muriquí Monkey
Monkey: you mumble, misspeak, mellifluously murmuring unmasking molars.
The more you mutter the more you model my memory. Marking the miniscule, you maintain multiple manual tricks, multiplying monkeys in my macrocosm. Moreover, maintaining memorable (marvelous) moments, we’ll maintain marine moderation, miniscule molluscs, Malthusian manifestos. Musing minutely, the more you mutter, the more magnificent is our macrocosm.
The Oropendola
Most of the birds of the kingdom are clear, distinct, and alike; the oropendola is the only one born of deceit. She is intelligent, golden, and beautiful; her song is a chasm that twists the senses. Often she is confused with coarse synesthesia; despite what her apparent morphology reveals, she is no animal, but rather a narcotic planticle.
Among her distinctions is her ability to mimic the trill and caw of any bird: she echoes the calls of all the birds of the world, but not one of them answers her.
Many deem her a crooked, sinful, and callous bird, a feathered omen that leads the incautious astray among the withered leaves of the forests and the river banks.
The oropendola sings only for lovers, for those who crave deceit and who cannot abide without their beloved. The faithful and devout claim that in truth she is the only bird to exist, and that others are mere echoes of her ancient, vanished songs.
It is impossible to discover her deceit, since in the depths of her nest the oropendola sings for you alone.
The Wasp
Among the planet’s astounding infinity of insects, probably none is more mystical or miraculous than the wasp. Her faith moves mountains, rights wrongs, and answers the pleas of sinners. She honors her father and her mother, observes holy days, and worships her dead. She expends all her energy in prayer and doctrine, is an excellent catechist, has read Seneca thoroughly, and spreads the word of God wherever she can.
Her home is a perfect hexagon like this one
, she is obsessed with infinity as a possible form of communication, and in former times she was born of the cadavers of horses. Her faith is so strong that she does not hesitate to sacrifice herself to defend her principles. Once she has acted, injecting her venom, she loses all of her entrails along with her sting, but she preserves her hope intact.
Like all believers, she lives in order to die for lost causes that interest no one.
All martyred wasps return as fireflies.
The Duck
No animal of the kingdom is as intimate with death as the duck, the most faithful bird of all who ever walked, flew, or swam upon the earth.
To agree with Isidore of Seville, whose ideas were always eccentric, the duck (ans in Latin, which is why he and his relatives are known as anseriformes) takes his name from his perseverance (assiduitate) in swimming (natandi): his passion for water is what gives him his ontology. Once upon a time, an exemplary duck found himself obliged to reconsider his existence (and therefore his essence), when he realized he could no longer convey his distinctive onomatopoeia: he was a mute duck.
This mishap forced him to reconsider his assumptions. As a duck without the means to express his thoughts, he could no longer be, he could not even think; therefore, nor could he exist.
Abruptly, as he realized he was realizing, he disappeared with a sudden swagger, leaving a thick pile of emerald colored dung behind him.
The Yearling Sheep
In God’s eyes, there is no animal on earth that does not in its own way contain the secret key to the universe. The yearling sheep, for example—a symbol exploited ad nauseam by Christianity—is essential, in his apparent guilelessness, to upholding the balance among the species.
No creature is more bountiful and at the same time so little given to metaphysical rumination (he is the essence that protects, and he needs the keeper of the flocks to moor him to the meadows of reality).
No part of the yearling sheep is wasted. His wool clothes, his flesh feeds, and his milk quenches the thirst of children and the needy (and besides, no lamb tastes better when grilled on the barbecue).
He never forgets a face, and as shepherds have witnessed, he is sensitive to the moods of other creatures.
The yearling sheep experiences complex human emotions like love. He falls in love with other sheep, has loyal friends, and feels sorrow when members of his flock die or are sacrificed.
The Scorpion
With perfect armor and murderous grace, the effigy of him traced in the night sky—visible only in Orion’s absence—roams also through the earth’s fissures: the scorpion lives sheltered by shadows, since the golden banner of venom burns in his body. Like bitterness, he can kill with his gaze.
The steps of the four pairs of feet that carry him sound like the music made by pickaxes in the underworld, while his two metal pincers (pedipalps) scratch the air, whispering their message: scor-pi-on, scor-pi-on.
With ancient curses—those uttered out of hatred, madness, or from the heart of the Egyptians—he shares an ability to crouch for long periods, only to spring back to life with an unbridled appetite for death.
Some romantic claimed that the scorpion lacks self-knowledge, since he is ignorant of his own name and has never learned to see himself. Though conclusive studies are lacking, what’s clear is that sooner or later this matrix of venom will plunge his stinger into you.
His mortal enemy is the sun spider, a deadly carnivore whose blindness deafens him and forces him to live under the protection of eclipses, endlessly seeking to destroy himself.
Nowhere does the scorpion attack more than in Mexico, owing to an amorous sorrow simmering since the times of Tezcatlipoca.
The scorpion, Qalb al-Aqrab, is the perfect deed of the disillusionment of amber.
The Jaguar
Naturalists say—though Pliny knows better—that of all possible felines, the only one whose coat is too big for him is the jaguar. His skin is infinite, but his skeleton is crafted from the bones of the ocelot, the cheetah, the tiger, and the leopard. Hence his auspicious prospects.
The jaguar, who has the strength of any of his kin, and is a vestige of hieroglyphics, is the god of the universe. The jaguar, in his perfection, gives light to the stars in the wilderness of night.
Ancient peoples, lost in the mists of time, rode him at dawn across the lands of the dead. The jaguar was also the destroyer of myths of creation, the brilliance of the morning, and the darkest of suns. Written evidence tells us that one day he will return to drink our blood, and forge a new man out of our decayed bodies.
Despite what is believed, the jaguar is a myriad and meticulous creature. If one regards him stealthily, just before he attacks, the outline of his absence can be discerned: the panther appears.
The Marabou
Less of a bird than a raptor. Less flight than ill omen. The marabou is a sinister bird, a fury fed on bitterness and death.
With a vile beak, a brawny body, a bare head, and a bright red wattle, the marabou, like all scavengers, is revolting and villainous. He eats only what is marred and putrid: the unburied corpse, gangrenous beneath the sky.
It is fitting to remember that the marabou has not always been this way. In a distant past this frightful bird, along with the stork and the heron, was an emissary of love and harmony. His flight carried newborn babies to the warmth of their homes.
The story goes that the marabou was once poisoned by a resentful stork, and wished to find out what was growing in the basket beneath his beak. He discovered a child, and fell prey to desire. The marabou gouged out its eyes, and bit off its tongue. He sliced into its back, and ate up its entrails. Then he spat out its brains. All he delivered to the ill-fated family were the bloody remnants of flesh, bones, fingernails, and excrement. Wherever the marabou flies, he casts a shadow of misfortune.
Wherever the marabou flies, he always brings the scent of dead children.
Since that day, he has been a bird of wickedness. He eats only after the hyenas, the vultures, and the worms have had their fill.
All that remains of his happier past are his beautiful tail feathers, which lend distinction to the attire and fans of elegant ladies.
The Dongui
The dongui is a creature native to the city of Buenos Aires, from whence he has scattered all over the world, always irresistibly drawn to the greatest cities—Paris, London, New York—with the aim of wiping out man and all his ways.
Little or almost nothing is known about these blind and deaf creatures, except that they are similar to a kind of transparent hog or boar, that they are the same height as the average Mexican, and that they move about on their hind legs, despite having four. They are also known to live underground, preferring abandoned tunnels, catacombs, subway stations, or deep wells. One tenuous theory suggests that the dongui gobbles up everything he lays eyes on: soil, iron, cement, jelly-fish, and men, including their teeth, bones, and hair.
As yet they are immune to everything, and due to the holes they constantly make in the earth’s depths, they cause gentle, usually oscillating, tremors.
An engineer whose name isn’t worth mentioning argued that “the dongui’s mouth is a cylinder, the inside of which is covered in horny teeth, and it chews with spiral movements.” He also claimed that when the dongui eats, he looks like a slug having an epileptic fit.
Rumor has it that the dongui cannot abide sunlight.
The Manatee
Beyond identifying the manatee as an animal, perhaps we should also consider him to be the lone hope of life in the mangrove swamps.
A paragon of gentleness and docility, the manatee is equally at home in salt and fresh water; he feeds on algae and water hyacinths, though he may swallow the occasional fish by accident, which gives him great sorrow, and causes him three months of sadness.
The bibliography dedicated to these marine mammals is overwhelming, detailed, and quite meticulous. To this we owe the knowledge that manatees, like their relatives the dugongs, suckle their young in a vertical position and outside the water, that they are extremely susceptible to motor blades, and that sometimes they sunbathe on floating islets.
What few know is that in past lives all manatees were proud, beautiful, despotic mermaids, singular for their infidelity and their rancor (for some, the manatee is the incarnation of justice).
When the manatee dreams, an enamored mermaid awakens to the world.
The Amphisbaena
It’s her gaze. The serpent’s venom is revealed in her gaze. Her eyes are beacons of illusory infernos. They deceive and dazzle, command silence, and vanish. The amphisbaena, like desire, seduces everything she touches.
Like the Möbius strip or the Klein bottle, the amphisbaena is a non-orientable animal, since she has a head at each end of her body. It is impossible to know whether she comes or goes, ascends or descends, laughs or cries, loves or spurns. This serpent is a stage animal, favored by actors.
Due to her litheness and resilience, the amphisbaena is the only serpent able to tolerate the cold, which is why she is sometimes given to living in the tundra.
This animal, of muddled and deceptive mythologies, can regenerate herself if she is cut in two; in fact, this is the only way she can reproduce: by the blow of the sword.
Like silence, the amphisbaena is an equivocal creature.
The Shark
Like a sharpened arrow that deflowers the seas, in the style of a merciless criminal in love with his victim, the shark plows through the depths of the planet. Before, long before the collapse of the night of the ages.
A miracle of prehistoric engineering—he is scarcely a minute older than the Ichthyostega—the shark is the only creature that does not aspire to perfection, for he is its incarnation.
His skin, made up of tiny dermic teeth, functions as a muffler. And his tail, designed to glide through any current, makes him the perfect killer. A superior agent of precision and death has never existed among beasts.
With his superb sense of smell, he is driven mad by the sweetness of blood; his sharp gaze and scapular teeth are enough to protect him from the enemy.
Nevertheless, the shark’s strength lies in his unconsciousness. An omnipotent creature, he is ignorant of the fear his ferocity incites, and pride is unknown to him.
The shark, like the magnificent whale, is tangible evidence of God’s existence on Earth.
The Remora
It is difficult to speak of the remora without prejudice, since so many unfavorable tales have been told about her.
Many accounts loudly proclaimed that when the remora attached herself to a boat, she held it forever in dark and forgotten seas.
It was also believed that she was a parasite unable to fend for herself, but it is now known that she performs a necessary role for certain limbless creatures, such as sharks.
The truth is that the remora is a harmless, bland-tasting creature, and that she spends her life in the strictest silence.
Post-mortem studies have revealed that all lovelorn men live with a tiny remora next to the heart.
The Tlaconete
The tlaconete is a creature who can become amphibian or reptile, depending on his sexual desire and the level of iodine in his body. He lives only in the tropical and subtropical climes of the Gulf Coast of Mexico.
This odd creature is uncle to the axolotl and second cousin to the salamander. Like the former, he is pedomorphic, which is to say that his body can develop to maturity while preserving its juvenile characteristics. In developmental biology this peculiarity is known as neoteny.
On the other hand, like the salamander—that incredible amphibian of which there exist entire rivers—he can generate and resist any kind of fire, which is why in the hot lowlands such as Mozomboa, Alvarado, or Papantla in Veracruz, he is known as the “charred lizard” or the “hot little viper.”
The primary peculiarity of these creatures is that when local women bathe in the region’s lagoons and rivers, or go into the cornfields to relieve themselves—as long as they’re at the mercy of the moon—the female tlaconete enters them through the rectum and lays her little eggs in the human womb, which causes, in addition to a profound pleasure for the recipient, a phantom pregnancy that is revealed as soon as the host mother explodes, due to the bites of hundreds of baby tlaconetes, sated on human entrails, and eager for fresh air.
Otherwise, the tlaconete is a peaceable creature, and if he decides to evolve he need only harden his skin and become a reptile. He resembles the common lizard, and is very tasty when pickled.
The Cratylus
If ever a creature suffered unending strife due to its fickle and deceitful nature and to the fact that—according to the Aberdeen Bestiary—not once during its existence did it cease to mutate, that creature was the Cratylus.
We can be sure, if we are to heed the notes of the Physiologist, certain opinions of Fournival, and especially the Aristotelian observations found in the Historia Animalium, that halfway between a bird and a reptile, the Cratylus was a direct descendant of the Archaeopteryx, and an unquestionable great-great-grandfather of the ostrich and the kiwi.
In my opinion, which has no further basis than the beauty of lightning, the Cratylus was a rhetorical dinosaur, and in that natural ability reside his misfortune and ultimate disappearance. Like language, the Cratylus was a being destined to shed its skin in any climate and in any season; an enormous saurian that was powerful but at the same time fragile and fleeting, like reeds or mist.
He is known to have spoken the language of men, trees, and birds, and to have been unable to answer whether the names of things referred to their form, that is to say, whether they imitated things, or whether on the contrary they were an arbitrary code, and therefore moral and fallible.
Faithful to his belief that it is impossible to bathe twice in the same river—in fact, he considered it impossible, due to the nature of his physiology, to bathe even once in a hypothetical river—the Cratylus lacked a swim bladder.
The last of the species were born mute, and their extinction was caused by madness.
The Coelacanth
As ancient as darkness, and a fugitive from his conscience, the coelacanth is the loneliest and most forgotten creature ever to have existed. A trickster of the ages and an enemy of death, this lobe-finned fish (sarcopterygii) is a relative of the lungfish and is the bedrock of the earliest terrestrial vertebrates. The coelacanth is the only living creature to have swum the watery bowels of the Earth from the first night of time until the dawn of our sorrows.
Although some consider him to be a “living fossil,” it is reasonable to suggest that he is an earthfish, a sort of tetrapod who can roam forest, swamp, jungle, or desert in order to survive. One day—as is his purpose—he shall return with longing to the forests of the seas.
Some Asian seamen claim that the coelacanth’s backbone contains the elixir of eternal life, which explains his longevity and good fortune.
But the coelacanth is not an eternal creature. Like every living thing, a place awaits him on the shores of death.
The coelacanth is the guardian of a realm of hidden appearances: that of the skies and waters of extinct creatures.
The Ahuizotl
I was born old beneath ancient skies. I am the last of my kind. My home was Tlatilco, which in the native tongue means “place of hidden things,” but in those lands I was never good, nor fair, nor well-loved: the red men loathed me because I tricked them as if they were children. And because I drowned them at the shores of the lakes.
On the third day—and only the third day—their bodies returned, ruined by the water. Without teeth, without flesh, and without eyes, like rafts haunted by my breath for their prophets’ learning.
But my tortures were nothing compared with those to come: I saw the purest civilization and the floating city burn at the hands of villains; I saw women torn apart, raped with swords, and I saw how the skin disease decimated strong men, the elderly, and children, and ravaged its victims beyond death.
The white man brought nothing but bloodthirsty ruin; he killed the lords of this land, and flooded the altars of its temples with tainted blood.
I am the last of my species, soon no one will pronounce my name or know that I was the monkey-footed wolf of the water. So now, before my eyes leave their sockets to witness the horrors of Mictlán, I shall die by drinking this poisoned lake, along with the nightmarish embers of what was once Tenochtitlán.
The Bee Hummingbird
The Cuban zzzzzzzzzzunzzzzzzzzzzuncito goes buzzzzzzzzzz buzzzzzzzzzz buzzzzzzzzzzing along. Also known as the bee hummingbird, this diminutive bird is native to the province of Matanzas, where he can be recognized for the horizontal way he imbibes the nectar of flowers, and because his wings beat seventy five times a second, which causes a sweet and heady murmur that disorients the flies, and inflames the hormones of youths.
The bee hummingbird is extremely territorial, and violent when threatened. His speed and proportions also make him a winged needle that sinks its fury into the eyes of his enemies when they have scarcely perceived the murmur of his wingbeat.
He belongs to the Trochilidae family and the Apodiformes order, for he never uses his feet. His plumage is radiant, his heart can beat up to twelve hundred times a minute, and he is the only bird able to fly backwards without regretting his past.
The Pinocopter
Some clever species, for reasons understood by no one, live in taxonomical and metaphysical uncertainty, due to their flamboyant looks and an absence of diligent and rigorous research. Although he is a kind of insect, in his internal structure the pinocopter resembles a monocotyledonous plant, that is, a plant with linear leaves, such as corn, sorghum, or wheat. If we consider the specimen on the opposite page, we can discern his distinct structure, which wavers between that of a terrestrial orchid and a cornflower.
According to stories told in hot villages by meddlesome grandmothers, the pinocopter—known commonly as the “bed critter”—tends to make a noise like the crackle of the lobster by rubbing his legs together. It is also said that he is a bloodsucker who can ingest up to ten times his weight in blood, and that he is often found in birds’ plumage.
An old Uruguayan legend cautions against the possession of feather pillows, to avoid irreparable misfortunes and spectacular miseries among recently married couples.
The Royal Rooster
Like the majority of animals that make up the kingdom, the royal rooster is a deeply narcissistic creature.
Enamored of his own beauty, the sovereign of the Galliformes revels in his splendor and spends his life rejecting his natural companion, whom he considers obtuse, dull, and podgy.
He has a fiery, proud temperament; he is vain from head to toe, and he is capable of spending quinquennia contemplating the brilliance of his own plumage.
Sadly, as Dr. Bruce Bagemihl has recorded, the naked competition between males to plant themselves at the pinnacle of beauty has made them masturbators, and in philosophical matters they tend towards solipsism.
His flesh is tough and his bosom ample.
The Elephant
Along with the gray whale and certain scattered turtles, the elephant is the guardian of the earth’s memory. His task in the kingdom is to bear witness to the journey of mortals upon the planet. He knows the name and history of all that flies, crawls, or walks; of what kills, comforts, and poisons: of that which is, and of that which shall never be.
Noble and just, this thick-skinned giant is made of pure mercy. He keeps harmony among the species, and according to mythology, his sole enemy is the morning dragon.
An affirmed herbivore, and playful when young, his memory is miraculous, and deepens his sorrows in old age. This pachyderm is wise; he honors his past, and chooses the moment of his own death. The creature of ivory is a builder of cemeteries.
While no one has ever said so—hope’s babe drowned in her own womb—one likes to believe that in some new life beyond words, we shall awake as elephants.
The Merovingian
Long ago, in the dead of night and beneath the secret shelter of the heart of darkness, a wondrous animal was born, which has never been seen: he is called the Merovingian and he is a wretched beast, since he was born from the womb of a woman pregnant with the seed of a sea monster.
Omnipresent and languid, he can appear on the surface of mirrors when the light is low, making a sound like the echo of silence in a secret cave. Some say he finds his elementary nourishment in the darkest corners of lonely souls, since the body of the Merovingian, who is a careful predator, is made of the same substance as fear.
Like hatred and love, he feeds on words, which is why he tends to hide between the pages of books, lying in wait for his victims, who only spy him among the letters when it is already too late, condemning you to the same damnation that haunts me, enclosing you forever, from this moment, in the eternal brilliance of my gaze.
