Mitz. Sigrid Nunez
when they moved in and that they had never got round to throwing out. Virginia brought the cage upstairs and set it on a small table next to Leonard’s chair. She got out Mabel’s sewing basket and took from it several large scraps of silk. She spread these scraps on the bottom of the cage.
By now Leonard had coaxed Mitz out from under the chair and was trying to feed her, as he had tried unsuccessfully to do several times earlier that day. To his relief, she finally accepted some biscuit and orange rind. When she had eaten her fill, he placed her in the cage, and, after a fastidious inspection of the premises and rearrangement of silk scraps, she curled into a tight ball and went to sleep.
This was how it would be. During the day Mitz and Leonard were inseparable. She stayed either tucked in his waistcoat or perched on his shoulder, her long tail hanging like a braid down his back or wound about his neck. But every evening at sundown she went to her cage, where she stayed until the next morning. The door of the cage was always kept open, and it was easy for Mitz to get to it, jumping from floor to chair to table. In this way she could get away from Pinka whenever she wished. But within days Mitz had grown quite used to Pinka and would never find it necessary to nip her again.
As for Pinka, she knew Mitz’s smell now, and she knew Mitz’s tiny teeth, and what more was there to know? Pinka understood, just as Leonard had said she would, that Mitz was not a squirrel or a rabbit to be chased. But neither was she someone to run and tumble with, like the dogs Pinka met every day in the square. Indeed, Mitz, hardly bigger than one of Pinka’s feathered paws, was too small to play with. This being the case, Pinka quickly lost interest.
“But do you think Pinka likes Mitz?” Virginia asked Leonard.
“Yes, I do.”
“And how can you tell?”
“Well, watch: whenever Pinka hasn’t seen Mitz for a while and then sees her again, she wags her tail.”
And Virginia watched, and it was so.
Now that Mitz was in his care, Leonard discovered that she was in worse health than he had thought. She still hobbled when she moved quickly. Her joints were swollen. Her eyes and her fur were lusterless. She had dandruff. She had eczema. (Pinka, too, had once had eczema, and Leonard recognized the scaly pink patches.) And only now did he discover an ugly sore under Mitz’s chin, probably caused by the same chain that had rubbed away the fur of her neck. Leonard washed the sore with soap and hot water three times a day. The eczema he treated by dabbing it with cotton soaked in olive oil. Lack of vitamin D was the cause of the rickets, and Leonard knew the cure. He took Mitz out every day, letting her take the sun on his shoulder, and every day he fed her a spoonful of cod-liver oil and some butter.
The Woolfs were now ensconced in Rodmell, but from time to time one or both of them would have to return to London for some engagement. On the first of these trips, Leonard went to the London Zoo. Like many people, Leonard had mixed feelings about zoos. On the one hand he did not like to see any animal forced to spend its life behind bars. On the other he was fascinated by animals and animal behavior and could not get enough of observing them. Leonard had traveled much in his life, and in many cities he had visited he had been to the zoo. And he believed that you could tell a lot about a city’s people from its zoo. In the London Zoo he saw a “microcosm of London” itself: clean, proper, orderly, where “even the lions, as a rule, behave as if they had been born in South Kensington.”
That day he went straight to the monkey pavilion and sought out the keeper, a man cast in the same mold as the square keeper: a dry, down-to-earth chap who loved to talk.
“Drafts!” said the zookeeper, wagging a forefinger. “That’s what you have to watch out for.” Damp, chilly weather (London weather!) could be the death of a monkey. Very small monkeys (and marmosets were among the smallest monkeys in the world) were not very hardy, and all monkeys were sensitive to drafts. Marmosets caught cold easily and were vulnerable to pneumonia and consumption. Their nerves were not strong. They had been known to drop dead out of trees at the sight of a leopard’s eyes shining in the dark.
According to the zookeeper, Mitz came from somewhere along the coast of Brazil. Natives caught marmosets in the jungle and sold them for a song to sailors, who in turn hoped to sell them for a great deal more back home. Many of the monkeys got rickets from being kept in the dark for months, first in the holds of ships and later in warehouses. The zookeeper guessed that probably half of them died en route, some of them literally frightened to death. “And half the ones that survive have the pneumonia and don’t live very long.” He recommended a diet of fruits and vegetables, both raw and cooked, hard-boiled eggs, and liver. He cautioned Leonard to go easy on the milk. Too much could cause diarrhea. “Too much banana ain’t good, neither.”
But in fact Leonard had discovered a strange thing about Mitz: though she loved all other fruits, she would not eat banana. Given a piece she would either ignore it or, stranger still, take it into her mouth and spit it out forcefully.
The zookeeper said he had never heard of a monkey that did not like banana. “She’ll eat insects when she catches ’em,” he said. “Oh, you won’t be seeing many spiders in your flat no more. And don’t be alarmed should you discover her one day chewing on a mouse.” The zookeeper said he had seen marmosets pluck sparrows right out of the air and devour them.
“Good luck with her—and mind you don’t get too attached, and don’t take it too hard if you lose her. Here, we’ve never been able to keep one alive for more than four years. They don’t belong in England, you know. This ain’t no climate for ’em. Summer’s one thing, but come winter . . .” And he shook his head.
The first thing Leonard did when he got back to Rodmell was to move Mitz’s cage away from the window. Then he boiled an egg and fed it to her along with some apple slices for lunch. As always, he was fascinated to watch Mitz eat. The rapid working of her mouth and jaws was almost like that of a mechanical thing. Like Virginia, Leonard found Mitz’s gluttony somewhat unsettling. Not even the one who fed her was to be trusted. She would snatch the food and move quickly away, glancing back at him over her shoulder, as if she were afraid he would snatch the food back. This brought back to him a heartbreaking memory from Ceylon. He had once given bread to a beggar urchin who had run into an alley and gobbled it down with just such fearful glances over his shoulder.
“What I want to know,” said Virginia, “is whether the males really do help the females give birth.” It was true—Leonard had remembered to ask the zookeeper. As the mother gave birth—almost always to twins and sometimes to triplets—the father would take them from her and wash them. Then, while the young were growing up, it was the father who carried them about, on his shoulders or his back, handing them over to the mother only at feeding time.
“Now, that is advanced,” said Virginia. “Do other monkeys do that?” It seemed they did not. And here was another interesting thing about Mitz: unlike other monkeys, who had fingernails and toenails, like people, Mitz had claws, like Pinka, on all except her great toes. On her great toes, oddly enough, Mitz had nails. Mitz was also unlike other New World monkeys in that she did not have a prehensile tail. Long as it was, it was useless for hanging.
Mitz could climb trees, though, as she nimbly demonstrated in the garden of Monk’s House.
The Woolfs had been happy to learn that Mitz was not afraid of cars. Driving to Rodmell she rode all the way on Leonard’s shoulder—she seemed to enjoy it particularly when the top of their Lanchester convertible was cranked back. But at Monk’s House she had the bad habit of escaping into the garden and climbing trees all the way to the highest branch, and then they had quite a time getting her down again. When calling and tongue-clicking did not work, Leonard resorted to temptation. He put a bit of honey or tapioca pudding (her favorite foods) into the lid of a tin and put the lid in the bottom of a butterfly net. He leaned a ladder against the tree and climbed it, holding the food out to Mitz. Down she came, to be caught in the net.
As many times as Leonard played this trick on Mitz, she never