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EMM N°2 de 16 “Agustín Tosco” Lengua extranjera - Inglés 4to año
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"Axolotl" by Julio Cortázar
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(Specially edited)
There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.
I got to them by chance one spring morning when Paris was spreading its peacock tail after a wintry Lent. I was heading down the Port-Royal Boulevard when I remembered the lions. I was a friend of the lions and panthers, but I had never gone into the dark, humid building where the aquarium was. I left my bike against the gratings and I went to look at the tulips. The lions were sad and ugly and my panther was asleep so I decided on the aquarium and I hit it off with the axolotls. I watched them for an hour, leaving me unable to think of anything else.
In the library at Sainte-Genevieve, I consulted a dictionary and learned that axolotls are the larval stage (provided with gills) of a species of salamander of the genus Ambystoma. That they were Mexican I knew already by looking at them and their little pink Aztec faces and the placard at the top of the tank. I read that specimens of them had been found in Africa capable of living on dry land during the periods of drought, and continuing their life under water when the rainy season came. I found their Spanish name, ajolote, and the mention that they were edible, and that people used their oil (no more) like cod-liver oil.
Next day I went back to the Jardin des Plantes. I began to go every morning, and some days in the afternoon. The aquarium guard smiled taking my ticket. I would lean up against the iron bar in front of the tanks to watch them. There's nothing strange in this, because after the first minutes I knew that we were connected, that something infinitely lost and distant kept us together. The axolotls huddled on the wretched narrow floor of moss and stone in the tank. There were nine specimens, and the majority pressed their heads against the glass, looking with their eyes of gold at whoever came near them. 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
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part of their 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. The mouth was masked by the triangular plane of the face; in front a delicate crevice barely slit the lifeless stone. On both sides of the head there grew three tiny sprigs, red as coral, a vegetal outgrowth, the gills, I suppose. And they were the only thing quick about it; every ten or fifteen seconds the sprigs pricked up stiffly and again subsided. Once in a while a foot moves, I saw the diminutive toes poise mildly on the moss. It's that we don't enjoy moving a lot, and the tank is so cramped we barely move in any direction and we're hitting one of the others with our tail or our head --difficulties arise, fights, tiredness. The time feels endless if we stay quietly.
It was their quietness that fascinated me the first time I saw the axolotls. Obscurely I seemed to understand their secret, to abolish space and time with an indifferent immobility. I knew better later; the gill contraction, the tentative reckoning of the delicate feet on the stones, the abrupt swimming (some of them swim with a simple undulation of the body) proved me that they were capable of escaping from the tank in which they spent whole hours. Above all else, their eyes obsessed me. The eyes of the axolotls spoke to me of the presence of a different life, of another way of seeing. Gluing my face to the glass (the guard would cough fussily once in a while), I tried to see better those diminutive golden points. It was useless to tap with one finger on the glass directly in front of their faces; they never gave the least reaction. The golden eyes continued burning with their soft, terrible light; they continued looking at me from an unfathomable depth which made me dizzy.
The absolute lack of similarity between axolotls and human beings proved to me that I was not propping myself up with easy analogies. Only the little hands . . . such hands, and we are not at all alike. I think it was the axolotls' heads, that triangular pink shape with the tiny eyes of gold that I looked game me calm. They were not animals.
It would seem easy, almost obvious, to fall into mythology. I began to see in the axolotls a metamorphosis which did not succeed in revoking a mysterious humanity. I imagined them aware, slaves of their bodies, condemned infinitely to the silence of the abyss, to a
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hopeless meditation. Their blind gaze, the diminutive gold disc without expression came to me like a message: "Save us, save us." I caught myself mumbling words of advice, conveying childish hopes. They continued to look at me, immobile; from time to time the rosy branches of the gills stiffened. In that instant I felt a muted pain; perhaps they were seeing me, attracting my strength to penetrate into the impenetrable thing of their lives. They were not human beings, but I had found in no animal such a profound relation with myself. The axolotls were like witnesses of something, and at times like horrible judges. I felt ignoble in front of them. They were larvas, but larva means disguise and also phantom. Behind those Aztec faces, without expression but of an implacable cruelty, what appearance was awaiting its hour?
"You eat them alive with your eyes, hey," the guard said, laughing; he likely thought I was a little freaky boy. What he didn't notice was that they were devouring me slowly with their eyes. At any distance from the aquarium, they were always in my mind; they affected me from a distance. It got to the point that I was going every day, and at night I thought of them immobile in the darkness, slowly putting a hand out which immediately encountered another. Perhaps their eyes could see in the dead of night, and for them the day continued indefinitely. The eyes of axolotls have no lids. I know now that there was nothing strange. Leaning over in front of the tank each morning, the recognition was greater. They suffered and every fiber and nerve of my body reached toward that deep pain, that rigid torment at the bottom of the tank. They were lying, waiting for something, an age of liberty. Not possible that such a terrible expression which was reaching the overthrow of that forced blankness on their stone faces should carry any message other than one of pain. I pressed my face against the glass of the aquarium; I saw from very close up the face of an axolotl immobile next to the glass. No transition and no surprise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I understood.
Only one thing was strange: to think and to realize that, for the first moment, like the horror of a man buried alive awaking to his fate. Outside, my face came close to the glass again; I saw my mouth, the lips compressed with the effort of understanding the axolotls. I was an axolotl and now I knew instantly that no understanding was possible. He was outside the aquarium. I was an axolotl and I was in my world. The horror began -- I learned in the same moment of believing myself prisoner in the body of an axolotl, metamorphosed into my human mind intact, buried alive in an axolotl, condemned to
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move lucidly among unconscious creatures when a foot just touched my face, when I moved just a little to one side and saw an axolotl next to me, and I understood that he also knew, no communication possible, but very clearly. Or I was also in him, or all of us were thinking humanlike, incapable of expression, limited to the golden splendor of our eyes looking at the face of the man pressed against the aquarium.
He returned many times, but he comes less often now. Weeks pass without his showing up. I saw him yesterday; he looked at me for a long time and left. It seemed to me that he was not much interested in us anymore; it was an old habit now. Since the only thing I do is thinking. It occurs to me that at the beginning we continued to communicate, that he felt more connected to mystery which caught him. But the bridges were broken between him and me, because what was his obsession is now an axolotl, and not his human life. I think that at the beginning I was capable of returning to him in a certain way, only in a certain way-- and of keeping awake his desire to know us better. I am an axolotl now, and if I think like a man it's only because every axolotl thinks like a man inside his rosy stone semblance. Only in those first days I could communicate, when I was still him. And in this lonely final to which he no longer comes, I console myself by thinking that he probably writes a story about us, that, believing he's making up a story, he's going to write all this about axolotls.
After Reading 1. Do you like axolotls? Where do they live? 2. Describe the main character and the other characters as well. 3. What is the Plot of the story? 4. Try to describe and suppose the setting of the story 5. What are the atmosphere, theme and style of the story? 6. Describe the point of view of the story. 7. What do you think about this story? 8. What can you tell me about the end? 9. Can you compare the main character to yourself? Explain 10. What do you know about Julio Cortázar?
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The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (Specially edited)
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Afterword: One morning of 4 August 1944, a car arrived at 263 Prinsengracht, the address of the Secret Annexe. German and Dutch police arrested the eight people who were hiding In the Annexe. Somebody must have told the authorities that they were hiding there. They also arrested two of their helpers, Mr Krugler, and Mr Kleiman: Miep and Bep were not arrested. The police took all the money and anything valuable that they could find in the Annexe. Miep later found Anne’s diary in the building and kept it safely after the war. The police took Kugler and Kleiman to a prison in Amsterdam. On 11 September 1944 they were sent to a concentration camp in Amersfoot, also in Holland. Because Kleiman was ill, he was allowed to go free on 18 September. He lived in Amsterdam until he died in 1959. Kugler later escaped, and he went to live in Canada, where he died in 1989. Bep’s real name was Elizabeth Voskuijl Wijk, and she died in Amsterdam in 1983. Miep Santrouschitz Gies is still living in Amsterdam, but her husband died in 1993. The eight people from the Annexe were first taken to prison in Amsterdam. Then they were sent to Auschwitz, the concentration camp in Poland. It seems that Mr Van Daan died by gas at Auschwitz and his wife was taken to several more concentration camps. She died in a concentration camp, though nobody knows exactly how. On 16 January 1945, Peter Van Daan had to go on the terrible prisoners’ walk from Auschwitz to Mauthausen in Austria, where he died on 5 May 1945. He died only three days before the Allies got to the camp. Albert Dussel died on 20 December 1944 in the Neuen Gamme concentration camp. Edith Frank, Anne’s mother, died in Auschwitz concentration camp on 6 January 1945, too tired and too hungry to live any longer. Margot and Anne Frank were taken from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Hanover, Germany. A terrible illness attacked the prisoners there. They both died in the winter of 1944-5. Anna must have died in late February or early March. All the bodied of the prisoners were thrown together. The British Army arrived at the camp on 12 April 1945.
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Otto Frank was the only one of the eight still alive. After Russian soldiers reached Auschwitz, he was finally taken back to Amsterdam. In 1953, he moved to Switzerland, married again, and lived there until his death in 1980. He spent the rest of his life trying to share the message of his daughter’s diary with the rest of the world.
After Reading 1. Did you enjoy the story? Who was your favourite character? 2. Describe the main character. 3. What is the Plot of the story? 4. Try to describe and suppose the setting of the story 5. What are the atmosphere, theme and style of the story? 6. Describe the point of view of the story. 7. What do you think about Otto Frank? 8. Can you compare the main character to yourself? Explain 9. Why did they have to hide? Where did they go? 10. What was happening to the world? 11. What do you think about the love story? 12. What are the Jews? 13. Which was the event that really caught your attention? 14. What can you tell me about the end? 15. What happened to the Frank Family? 16. Who was the only one to survive? What did he do?
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Sleep Now, My Darling by Michael Dean
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The Wave by Morton Rhue
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