axolotl

you know when you learn a new word & then it seems to haunt you everywhere you go?

my word is axolotl.

it all started at work, when a friend began to explain his previous pets, and we only got to a-talking about that because i mentioned lampreys, which still make me shiver when i think about them. they are jawless fish with teeth. click & be scarred for life.

but axolotls are a different story. they are cute & meek and secretly smiling their goofy smile at you. & they don't suck your blood.

this little fellow has been following me around everywhere. he came up in a conversation. i saw a sign for salamanders somewhere. i was reading the news and lone & behold, there he was. i was catching up on some reading, only to find that julio cortazar had written a short story called 'axolotl'. i was mesmerized:

I saw a rosy little body, translucent (I thought of those Chinese figurines of milky glass), looking like a small lizard about six inches long, ending in a fish's tail of extraordinary delicacy, the most sensitive part of our body. Along the back ran a transparent fin which joined with the tail, but what obsessed me was the feet, of the slenderest nicety, ending in tiny fingers with minutely human nails. And then I discovered its eyes, its face. Inexpressive features, with no other trait save the eyes, two orifices, like brooches, wholly of transparent gold, lacking any life but looking, letting themselves be penetrated by my look, which seemed to travel past the golden level and lose itself in a diaphanous interior mystery.

there is something so uncanny & so flaneur-esque about this story and yet perfectly natural that it ends the way it does. you can see him building up to it -- the little eyes, the fingernails... & then i find i am overwhelmed by the greatest ironic sadness, when the man no longer returns.

Weeks pass without his showing up. I saw him yesterday, he looked at me for a long time and left briskly. It seemed to me that he was not so much interested in us any more, that he was coming out of habit.

the metatext of the story is so simple and yet never ceases to captivate.

scratch that. i am trying to say something remotely intelligent & literary about it, but i can't. perhaps my brain is out of practice; perhaps i like it too much to analyse the fuck out of it. or perhaps it's just their little, inquisitive, beady eyes...



to read the original short story, click here.