Elephant walks home

(Originally published on a now defunct blog, 2011 June 13.)

   

    

Don't blame the Italians, my grandfather used to say.  Your uncle is in the Mafia.  You don't want to wake up with a dead rat in your bed.  This was before the Godfather movies gave us the mystique of dead horse heads.

He was speaking about Toni.  (I’ve changed his name to protect my innocence.)  Toni was a fit man, defined by a six-pack and a muscular chest, long before gay men made them popular.  He was tall, dark and handsome.  It was easy to imagine how he had swept my aunt off her feet.  And, he was just what the family needed, as my own pearlescent skin-tone should suggest.  At the age of five, I was already certain that we’d descended from a line of Transylvanian vampires.  I was losing my baby teeth and waiting for my fangs to descend.  If my grandfather had to make up stories about Mafia muscle to explain the ripple in the family gene pool, so be it.

The line about the rat came from a story Toni told after a Christmas dinner when his ethnicity became a topic of conversation.  Toni had known a "rat", whom he called a wise-guy, who "squealed" on a mob boss in Cincinnati.  They buried him, Toni explained, in a "real-live” coffin. ... "real-live" was a 1960s way of adding emphasis, but I think it may also have been Toni's little nudge toward a joke.  His southern Italian humour could sail across the ears of his southern German in-laws like a whisper in the wind.  Before they closed the lid, they'd filled the coffin, so he said, with lots’a live rats. . . . He paused to stretch back in his chair and extend his arm around my aunt’s shoulder.  . . . They buried the coffin only an hour or so later, after the screams from inside stopped.  The looks of horror he received were met as though they’d been the silent question: "How could you say such a thing. This is a Christmas dinner."  What?, he exclaimed in reply, You don't wake up no dead.  Toni was a drop-dead serious kinda fellah; you could never tell when he was making something up.

I remember, once, when we stopped at a Pizzeria for a take-out that my aunt and mother had ordered, Toni thought that I was going to stay in the car while he went in to retrieve the order.  So when I followed him out of the car, and, he slammed the door on my finger, he showed no compassion or remorse but instead said something like, Looks like we already got our pizza!  That thing's flat and is covered with sauce.  To emphasize the contention, Toni jumped back into the car as if he were preparing to leave.  Instead, he pulled a first-aid kit from the glove compartment and handed it to his wife.  Here, he dead-panned.  I’ll go inside.  It looks like they didn’t put any pepperoni on that thing.  My mother and aunt where left standing there like two Andrews Sisters missing a third.

Anyway, when asked where his smart-fellahs got so many rats — I mean, really, how many rat farms can there be — he said, da pet store!  I must have looked puzzled by the thought of cute-and-cuddly furry white, pink-nosed pet-store rats.  Don't matter, he spoke, reading my mind, how cute they are.  They turn vampire with hunger in there.

The moral of the story was clear: "Watch what you say about the Italians.  I would hate to see you end up as some rat's last supper."  But, it’s here that this story begins, with a rat’s last supper.

I have a rat, well, had a rat.  Not a pet rat, nor an ersatz rat à la Banksy.  A wild rat.

This isn't something that I would normally admit.  Not that I normally have rats as houseguests.  In fact, I haven't had many houseguests of any species since moving to the United Kingdom.  To me, rats, outside of a temple or two in India, suggest unseemliness, a general lack of cleanliness.  A local grocery store, for example, appears to invite the rats I've seen scampering over cereal box-tops.  It can't seem to keep the place clean, . . . though that may be because the rats keep spilling cereals and pasta into the aisles.  Of course, I won't say that I'm not capable of being delighted by their play.  Isn't a rat nesting in a loaf of bread something like a child hollowing-out an igloo from a mound of snow?

Ignoring for the moment that it’s dead, allow me to repeat: I have a rat; and, though neither a pet nor invited, it is a special rat.  But, I'll come to that after telling you something about it.

First, I should say that I hate rats.  Genetically, I'm compelled to find them disgusting.  Did I mention that I'm descended from a line of Germans?  Stereotypically, we — my family, that is — compulsively turn off lights in unused rooms and refuse to acknowledge that we might be the font of any filth, let alone of the sort that might attract rats.  Rats, when they appear, are not a natural hoard, but a punishment for something we must have done.

Rats remind me of Quasimodo, Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame.  Creepy, with their mincing walk and fervent devotion to games of hide-and-seek with the dog.  Yet, compared to rats I've seen in North America, rats with ardent eyes and knurled teeth, unkempt coal black fur and possibly the mange, more Morlock than Quasimodo, this rat has inquisitive eyes and groomed brown fur.  In a word, it seems respectable, a character of the sort you'd expect to see in a children's book.  Though it has that hunchback's posture, there is — or, was — something likeable about this rat.  Ask the dog.  The two of them were up all night, playing games, running up and down the stairs, turning on the motion-detection lights.  It seemed to bemuse the dog rather than challenge him to ownership of the water bowl.   In the short time since it climbed in — I thought — through an opened sky-light window, it seemed to have grown to think of itself as part of the family.  That, however, isn't what makes it special.

In fact, there is nothing special, per se, about rats in Britain.  According to the Times, which ran an article on their recently purported population explosion, they are, as we Americans say, “a dime a dozen” — “ubiquitous”, as they say here — “legion”, as they say amongst comic book heroes and heroines.  Legion!

No, what is special about my rat is something entirely beyond its nature, as a rat, that is.  You see, this rat is a messenger, a kind of homing-pigeon for divinity.  It is a horseman for the elephant god, Ganesh, of the Hindu Pantheon.  At least, that is what the women of my neighbourhood news-stand tell me.  I won't patronise their faith.  Indeed, I'm inclined to believe them, . . . not for their reasoning, nor because the day that the rat appeared marked the start of Ganesh Chaturthi.  That's the festival of Ganesh, the patron of wisdom, prosperity, good fortune, and creativity.  The iconography of Ganesh often depicts him as riding on the back of a rat.

Since Ganesh Chaturthi, in the Fall of last year, my rat has put in appearances on every Hindu holy day since.  And, only on the Hindu holidays.  While the neighbours' rats are reported to appear indiscriminately, I'd say that my rat is pretty special.  I was a bit disappointed with him when Holi rolled around though.  Holi is the holy day that marks the beginning of Spring.  Westerners usually think of it as a kind of Indian spectacular water-balloon-fight.  It's the day when children of all ages pelt one another with vibrant powered dyes traditionally made from the flowers of the palash tree, which once — when forests were still as ubiquitous as the rat remains today — was called the "Flame of the Forest".  My rat appeared to have little to celebrate.

When he appears alone, the women explain, the rat prepares the way for the Lord of Creation [Ganesh] to enter your life”.  My consulting business has gone done the tubes with the rise of European austerity.  I could use a rebirth or, at least, a little good fortune.  And, frankly, since the chain supermarket opened around the corner from them, the Indian women could do with a little prosperity-engendering fortune as well.  I'll send him over when he's done at my place, I tell them.  They laugh.  I suspect that, while they're delighted to hear of this sign from Ganesh, they're also rather glad to know that his rat has been billeted nearby rather than in their store.  The health inspector would shut them down.

There’s some Bible-banger in Birmingham, Alabama, just about now posting email to me that reads, Man, you are seriously screwed.  By that, I'm certain he means that I will not be going to heaven.  For starters, he is typing, everyone knows that elephants are afraid of rats.  That’s actually a myth — that elephants and rats are like oil and water.  Anyway, religious precepts are seemingly made to defy perceived wisdom.  Who in America hasn’t seen oil float on the surface of water, whether it’s a motor-oil stain in a rain-soaked parking-lot, or, on TV, scenes from an oil-spill at sea?  It may be the improbability of a belief in elephant gods riding on the backs of rodent chargers that suggests the power of creativity.  Sometimes, even a rat alone prompts a re-assessment of the world.  I, for example, searched and filled all potential points of entry into my house.  I would have done the same if it were water rather than a rat.  And, that could be the reason that it’s now dead.

The rat was special, too, because it filled me with a sense of acceptance rather than of violation.   It had invaded my home, I told myself, testing my limits.  And, what was a rat doing in a new-build anyway? I asked, expecting that if I couldn’t feel outrage toward the rat, I could feel disgust with my builder and surveyor.  Still, I felt nothing.  Instead, I calmly herded the rat into my study and closed the door on it.

Blood sport should have followed in true it's-him-or-me spirit.  It didn't.  And, though I still have a rat, albeit a dead rat, I have to say that I'm relieved.  Relieved, not simply because I would have never satisfactorily explained its death at my hands to the women at the news-stand.  No, I was relieved that some flinty spark of humanity allowed it to live despite the eat-or-be-eaten instinct.  I may be a chicken, but I am not going to kill a rat! I told myself defiantly.  Over night, I left the door closed, a window inside the room opened, and laid out a feast of peanut-butter and Appenzeller cheese on the sill to make a route of escape obvious.

In Florida, I once woke to the screams of the woman who lived in the garage-apartment above me.  Her screams were accompanied by the thundering sound of line-dancing.  She and her boyfriend were fresh from the backwoods; and, they frequently came home, from late nights out, in drunken reverie.  I presumed that this was the evening’s last dance.  And, eventually so, the footfalls slowed.  Then, the wooden screen-door of her apartment complained of its opening, as it had on occasions before when she lingered on the porch after sex to smoke a cigarette.  And, eventually too, the voice of the woman's boyfriend replaced her screams with the reassuring words, Now, let's go to sleep.

In the morning, she knocked at my door.  Can I wake the dead? she chirped.  I hope not, I replied, still groggy from the evening before and motioning toward the grave-stone of “Baby Girl Elder” that I kept in the window of my ground-floor flat as a deterrent against thieves.  Is that what you were trying to do last night? I asked.  You heard us then! she confessed.  Jerry was so cute, she continued.  The tone of her voice implied the familiarity of girl-talk.  Now, you probably already know where this story is going; but at the time, I could only image that I was about to hear the details of how she'd "slain" Jerry the night before.  A tale of wild sex and the intimate lives of cow-folk was the last thing I needed on a Sunday morning.

It was just then, a cartoon played in my head.  Tom and Jerry.  The mention of her boyfriend's name always had that effect.  It was a name that he shared with a cartoon mouse.  The vision couldn't have been more incongruous with reality.  Her boyfriend looked as though he'd been plucked from a Lynyrd Skynyrd album cover.  Son of Johnny Van Zant!  Jerry was so cute last night, she repeated herself.  You should have seen him.  All he was wearing was a pair of cowboy boots.  She paused intentionally to gauge my reaction.  Now, I don't know what she saw in the man, but seeing him in nothing more than cowboy boots probably wouldn't have convinced me that Jerry was the mouse that roared, let alone as cute as his name-sake.  All he was wearing was a pair of cowboy boots, when he killed that rat and threw it outside, she said, pointing into the yard where a lump of fur lay lifeless.

In the morning, I tore apart the room in which I had trapped the rat, to confirm that it had made its escape.  I opened the door to my study cautiously and let myself in, closing the door behind me.  I recall being fearful of a pre-emptive attack by a hungry rat — Thank you, uncle Toni.  Crossing the threshold was like stepping into the frames of Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit.  Every action seemed to be taken in stop-gap motion.  The rat was no-where to be seen.  But, a rat can be a wily creature.  It can lay flat amongst sheets of paper.  It may have been as afraid of my wrath as I'd been of its meeting its rabid hunger.  To be certain, this was no Plan 9 from Outer Space experience.  It held no take-me-to-your-leader moment.  It was 7 a.m.  The street was still.  And, I was hopeful.

Perhaps the rat that rests, mouldering, now behind the wall of my larder is yet another.  I have noticed that, in the Do-It-Yourself stores, there has explosion of rat e-RAT-ick-a-tion stuff.  To paraphrase Paul Simon, there must be at least fifty ways to kill a rat!  A woman I met there plies me with folk-wisdom and, reassuringly, with the assessment that where there’s one, there are ten.  I don’t brother to tell her that I see the rat only during Hindu holidays or that, as the women at the newsstand tell me, we must be very blessed indeed.

I left the store with hole fillers, bricks, concrete, and the like.  Ganesh was going to have to billet his rat somewhere else.  Little did I know that I'd gone home to seal him inside a wall.  So, . . . now that it's dead, there's a big blue elephant that's going to have to walk home alone.  Heaven awaits.