Joanes let out a laugh.
“I need it,” the professor insisted. “Something serious has happened to my son. I’ve got a terrible feeling about it.”
“A feeling? repeated Joanes. “A feeling? That’s not like you. You, who are so pragmatic,” he said, tapping his temple with his index finger. “Pragmatism, that’s what you always drilled into us in class, remember? Of course you remember. ‘Pragmatism,’” said Joanes, putting on the professor’s voice. “Just like Alan Turing and his pragmatic mathematics. A good book. Very interesting. If a little biased in its contents, don’t you think? But nonetheless very revealing, there’s no doubt about it. Revealing in many ways. Not just of poor Turing. You know what I’m talking about.”
The professor listened with a stony face. When he answered, he did so as if Joanes’s words had gone in one ear and out the other, or as if he hadn’t heard them at all.
“How do you think that man out there would react if he knew that you killed the monkey he’s looking for?”
“Don’t involve him in this. This is between us.”
“Between me and you?” said the professor, raising his voice. “Of course it isn’t! They are other people implicated here. For starters, the people sitting right there in the next room.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” repeated Joanes.
“Give me the telephone. That black man out there could be dangerous. Didn’t you see his machete?”
“Forget it.”
The professor left the room, and Joanes stepped out after him.
“Ah, my friend!” said the professor, approaching the man. “Are you awake?”
The first one to react was the chimpanzee, who got straight to his feet and stood with his arms hanging by his sides and his legs bowed, like a gunslinger from the Wild West ready for a duel. The man opened his eyes and as a ref lex snatched the machete.
“Don’t touch me,” he said.
The professor stopped dead in his tracks.
“Calm down, I wouldn’t dream of touching you. I just want to tell you something that might be of interest.”
With his free hand, the man grabbed the chain that connected him to the monkey and pulled it taut to keep Gagarin under control. Without letting go, he sat up, leaning his back against the wall.
“What do you want to tell me?”
“You see that man?” asked the professor, pointing to his former student. “You see him?”
The man nodded. From her bed, the woman asked, “What’s going on? What’s going on?”
“That man,” the professor went on, “was out driving the day before yesterday along the costal highway, the one that skirts Tulum. That’s where you lost your animal, the female. Is that correct? Good, well that man was right around Tulum when a monkey, a chimpanzee, jumped out onto the road. And he hit it with his car. He didn’t kill it in the act, but he left it badly hurt. And do you know what he did next? Or, to put it correctly, what he didn’t do? He didn’t ask anyone for help. No one! He stayed there watching as the poor animal breathed its last breath. And then he got in his car and carried on driving as if nothing had happened.”
As the professor spoke, the man got to his feet, still holding on to the monkey and the machete.
“Now, that’s not exactly what happened,” said Joanes, his voice tense. “I didn’t stay there watching while—”
The professor interrupted him with a victorious guffaw.
“You see? He himself admits it. He hit your monkey.”
“It was an accident. It wasn’t my fault.”
“But you admit it!”
“I hit a monkey. We don’t know if it was this man’s monkey.”
“How many lost chimpanzees could there possible have been that day in the area?” asked the professor.
The stranger looked back and forth between the professor and Joanes. He pulled the chain tauter still, and Gagarin took a step backward. Having sensed the tension in the air, the monkey let out a screech and started to flex his legs over and over again and bare his teeth.
“It was your monkey. What did you call it before? Lolita? He killed Lolita. There’s no doubt it was her. She was wearing a bracelet on her wrist. A plastic, beaded one. Did Lolita wear a bracelet like that?”
The others anxiously awaited the answer.
“Yes,” said the man. “A pink and blue bracelet. She liked it a lot.”
Then he said, almost talking to himself now, “I gave it to her.”
“That’s the one!” exclaimed the professor.
“Hang on a minute,” said Joanes. “Let me explain. The monkey threw herself out onto the road. It all happened so quickly. I didn’t have time to—”
“Quiet!” bellowed the man, and they all fell silent.
Then, pointing at the professor with the machete, he asked, “Why are you telling me this?”
The professor straightened up in a gesture of hurt pride.
“Because it seemed you ought to know. Ever since he killed your monkey, he’s been going around telling everybody, boasting about it, bragging. As if it were something to be—”
Without even letting the professor finish his sentence, the man pointed at Joanes with the machete and said something that nobody understood — a single word, or something like a word, a series of clicks from his tongue. He let go of the chain, and Gagarin launched himself at Joanes.
Joanes barely had time to throw his arms up to protect his face. The chimpanzee pounded him with his arms and legs, all at once. Within a second, man and beast had transformed into a mass of limbs that collapsed onto the floor with a groan and the whistle of air being squeezed out of a pair of lungs. Gagarin climbed on top of Joanes’s stomach. Punches like hammer blows rained down on Joanes’s face.
The professor’s wife began to shriek. She begged them to break it up. She begged everyone. Her husband had to hold her to stop her from falling off the bed. She looked like she was about to get up and drag herself into some corner or another for refuge. While he struggled to restrain her, the professor, equally horrified by the monkey’s outburst, watched the struggle between his former student and the beast.
The monkey plunged his fist into Joanes’s nose, and they all heard a crack like a branch snapping in two. Joanes retaliated, swinging a huge punch. More out of luck than anything else, the blow struck the monkey right in the stomach. The animal doubled up in pain, but the respite barely lasted a second. The chimpanzee then began jumping up and down on Joanes’s testicles.
The stranger was also watching the fight, his eyes bulging, astounded by the animal’s wrath. He hadn’t expected him to react like this. The hand holding the chain was trembling. It was as if the chimpanzee was letting out years of accumulated anger.
“Stop it!” cried the professor. “Make it stop! Can’t you see it’s going to kill him?”
The man, who seemed paralyzed, didn’t respond.
“Stop it!” repeated the professor. “That’s enough! Are you mad?”
Between kicks and punches, Joanes managed to get the monkey off him. The animal took a starting run and jumped right back on him. This time he didn’t hit him but rather sank his fangs into Joanes’s left hand and shook his head as if trying to wrench it off.
“Please, please!” begged the woman. “Make it stop! We’ll give you whatever you want! But get it off him!”
“Control this damn beast!” added the professor.
“Stop, Gagarin!”
But the monkey was out of his mind and didn’t obey the order.
“Stop, Gagarin!” repeated the man, his voice quaking.
The chimpanzee didn’t pay him any attention, so the man was forced to tuck the machete into the rope he used as a belt and pull the chain with both hands to separate him from Joanes.