In the temperate mid-morning, when the turnstiles of a municipal zoological garden click like the mandibles of some vast and poorly funded beetle, two specimens of Homo sapiens enter the grounds. They are a pair. They have paid. They have a map that is already wrong.
I have spent a lifetime observing courtship in the wild. I have crouched in hides while albatrosses tap bills, while frogs inflate themselves into ridiculous jewels, while beetles attempt, with touching sincerity, the act for which they were assembled. I had not, until today, attempted the same work from a bench beside a man who keeps saying “elipent sex” as if it were a destination.
“Horse cock,” says the man, consulting a crumpled note. “Great Dane. Anal humiliation. Animal. Dog. Beast. Beastiality. Elipent sex.”
His companion does not break stride.
“You mean elephant sex, sir,” she says. “And it is bestiality, though we shall not be doing any. We are looking at animals. That is the entire advertised activity.”
“It says elipent.”
“It is misspelled. The animal is an elephant. The act, if it occurs, will be elephantine. Keep your voice down. There are children near the gift shop, and they have already seen quite enough of human nature.”
Thus begins an expedition.
We start, as all honest tours of the primate house must start, with the smell. Ammonia, citrus cleaner, old fruit, and that warm, yeasty note which tells you a mammal has been thinking about its social rank. Behind glass, a troop of chimpanzees conducts the ancient business of being related to us and refusing to be embarrassed about it.
A male of high standing presents himself with a vigour that would, in a boardroom, constitute a human resources event. A female regards him as one regards a bus that is late but inevitable. There is a brief, athletic congress. It is over before the man with the note has finished whispering his list.
“That’s it?” he says. “That’s the beast?”
“That,” I would tell him if I were permitted to lean out of the narration, “is a chimpanzee doing what chimpanzees have done since before your species invented shame and then invented cameras to record the shame.”
The woman is more practical.
“You wrote ‘anal humiliation,’” she says. “That is not a taxonomic category. That is a search term you should be ashamed of and also spelled correctly if you insist on being ashamed in public. Chimpanzees do not humiliate one another in the sense your browser history intends. They threaten, they groom, they reconcile, they display. The pinkness is not a plot.”
“Horse cock,” he murmurs, as if checking inventory.
“Not in this building. These are apes. Look at the hands. Look at the eyes. Try, for one minute, to notice that they are not a fetish with fur.”
A younger male attempts a clandestine mounting and is rebuffed with a slap that would end a sitcom. Infants wrestle. An elder sits like a retired judge. The glass holds two worlds: one in which sex is a sentence in a longer paragraph, and one in which two visitors have brought a paragraph composed entirely of search queries.
“If humans did it too,” the man says, watching the troop, “like that. Just… in the open. No curtains.”
“Humans do do it,” she replies. “They also invented curtains, which tells you something about the species that the chimps have not required. The difference is not the mechanics. The difference is that we write lists. We misspell elephant. We call a Great Dane into a conversation that does not contain a Great Dane. We turn a biological event into a brand.”
A keeper passes and smiles the smile of a person who has heard worse and will hear worse again before lunch.
Outside, the air is kinder. Peafowl drag their ridiculous glory across the path as if the path had asked for an opinion. The male shivers his train. Iridescence does the work that, in other species, is done by fighting or by being large.
“Is that sex?” the man asks.
“That is advertising,” she says. “The sex, if he is fortunate, happens later and with less jewellery.”
“Birds though. You said birds.”
“I did. Come along.”
The aviary is a humid sentence. Parrots shout political slogans they do not understand. A pair of scarlet macaws sit close enough to share a pulse. They preen. They feed one another. Courtship, in many birds, is this: the quiet labour of saying I will still be here when the feathers need arranging.
Then the man spots the ostriches in their yard, and all subtlety leaves him like a hat in a gale.
The cock ostrich is a thunderous punctuation mark. When he displays, he sinks, he booms, his neck flushes, his wings become two frantic fans. The hen watches with the calm of a creature who has seen this presentation before and will see it again.
“Beast,” the man says, reverent and incorrect.
“Bird,” she says. “Two legs. Eggs. You may say beast if you enjoy being wrong in a scenic way.”
“What if humans did that? The booming. The red neck.”
“Some do. We call it a nightclub. The booming is music. The red neck is drink. The hen still decides.”
I have filmed ostriches on dust and distance, where the display is a matter of survival and the camera must be polite. Here the display is a matter of enclosure and the audience has brought vocabulary from the darker corridors of a search engine. The bird does not know the words anal humiliation. The bird knows timing, space, and whether the hen has eaten.
A smaller drama unfolds among the finches: a male with a blade of grass, an offering so modest it would not trend. She takes it. The nest will be a cup. The eggs will be arguments that hatch.
“That’s not fucking,” the man objects.
“It is how fucking earns a future,” she says. “Write that down instead of elipent.”
“You mean elephant.”
“I do. We are walking there next, so that your note and the actual world may briefly coincide.”
The elephant house is a cathedral built for patience. The air is hay, dung, and intelligence. African elephants move like weather that has learned manners. An older female leads. A younger male, not yet in the full storm of musth, loiters with the energy of a person who has read about romance and found the instructions incomplete.
Musth, for those who came for the list rather than the life, is a periodic condition in bull elephants: testosterone rises, temporal glands weep, mood darkens, and the animal becomes a walking referendum on whether power and desire should share a body. In the wild it is dangerous. In a good zoo it is managed, watched, and denied the privacy of myth.
Today there is no coupling. There is leaning. There is the rumble that you feel in your ribs before you admit it is a voice. Trunks touch. The man looks cheated.
“Where is the elipent sex?”
“Elephant,” she says, automatically now, a teacher of one hopeless pupil. “And it is not a scheduled performance. You cannot book it between the sea lions and the gift shop. If it happens, it happens because two large minds and two large bodies have arrived at the same decision in the same hour. We are not owed the hour.”
He reads from the paper again, smaller. “Horse cock. Great Dane. Animal. Dog. Beast. Beastiality.”
“Bestiality,” she says. “A word for a human crime or a human fantasy, depending on the jurisdiction and the quality of the conversation. It is not a ride. It is not a habitat. These elephants are not going to complete your search history.”
He is quiet for a moment, which I record with gratitude.
“If humans did it too,” he says, and she waits to see which it he means. “If we were that size. If it took that long. If everyone heard the rumble.”
“Then we would need better architecture,” she says. “And better manners. An elephant’s courtship is not a punchline because the animal is large. It is impressive because the animal is old enough to remember droughts and still choose contact. You looking for a spectacle is the small part of this room.”
A calf attempts to climb its own curiosity and fails in a heap of joy. The cow steadies it. Here is the other half of the old story, the half the list forgot: not the mounting, but the keeping.
I have watched elephants in Amboseli greet one another after months apart, trunks braiding, secretions tasted, the dead remembered in bones. Sex, when it comes, is a chapter. The book is the herd.
The man folds his paper. He does not put it away.
Between the elephants and the hoofstock runs a path lined with educational plaques that nobody in this couple will read. She reads them anyway, aloud, as a charm against his vocabulary.
“Equus ferus caballus,” she says, at the paddock where the zoo keeps a small educational string of horses, because children must be shown that a horse is not a motorcycle. “Domestic horse. Social. Hierarchical. The stallion, if present, does not exist for your note.”
The stallion is present. He is bay, thick-necked, and unimpressed. When a mare in the neighbouring paddock turns her hindquarters in that particular conversational angle known to every farmer since farming, the stallion’s interest becomes architectural.
I shall be plain, as natural history is plain. The penis of a stallion is a large, vascular, unignorable fact. It is not a personality. It is not a genre. It drops, it lengthens, it announces that evolution once solved a problem involving height and timing and never asked a search engine how the solution should be marketed.
“Horse cock,” the man says, almost relieved, as if the universe had finally validated his spelling.
“There it is,” she says. “You may look. You may not applaud. You are not at a pantomime.”
The mare is not ready. The stallion is advised of this with a kick that means later in a dialect older than English. He pretends this was his idea. Horses are proud in the way weather is proud: they do not apply for it.
“If humans did it too,” he says.
“If humans did what? Stood in a field and told the truth with their bodies? Some do. Most invent poetry so they can delay the kick. The horse is not humiliating her. She is selecting. Your phrase anal humiliation is a human invention pasted onto a rear view. Stop pasting.”
He nods, which is not the same as learning, but is adjacent to it.
A child on the fence says, “Mum, why is it like a fifth leg?” and is given an answer of heroic blandness. Education is the art of not catching fire.
The farmyard annex exists because zoos have learned that people will forgive a great deal if they may also see a goat. There are goats. There are pigs of grave intelligence. There is, on a lead beside a volunteer, a dog.
It is not a Great Dane. It is a lurcher with the face of a poet who owes rent. The man stares at it with the disappointment of a pilgrim who has brought the wrong saint.
“Great Dane,” he says, showing the volunteer the paper as if it were a ticket.
“That’s a list of regrets,” the volunteer says pleasantly. “This is Barry. Barry is not for that.”
“Animal. Dog. Beast.”
“Barry,” the volunteer repeats, and Barry, hearing his name, offers the eternal dog thesis: that the world improves if you are near it.
The woman takes the man’s elbow.
“You have confused a breed with a scene,” she says. “A Great Dane is a large domestic dog. People photograph them on sofas. They are not a synonym for the thing you are hunting. And beast is what frightened villagers called the dark when the dark still had wolves in it. Barry is not the dark.”
Barry sits. His tail writes cursive on the dust.
I have filmed wild dogs on the hunt, painted wolves of the African noon, their courtship a brief stitch between miles of cooperation. Domestic dogs have had their reproduction largely confiscated by our sentiment and our schedules. What remains, when it remains, is often awkward, public, and swiftly interrupted by a person with a hose. That is not tragedy. That is domestication.
“If humans did it too,” the man says, watching Barry being admirable, “like dogs. Just… stuck. You know. The thing.”
“The tie,” she says, because she will be accurate even in the gutter. “Canids may remain coupled. It is anatomy plus time. Humans remain coupled with conversation, leases, and grudges. Do not envy a lock you do not understand.”
He looks at his list as if it has begun to betray him.
“Beastiality.”
“Bestiality. And no. Not with Barry. Not with the Dane of your imagination. We came to watch animals live. Living includes mating when it includes mating. It does not include you joining the exhibit.”
Barry sneezes. The volunteer laughs. The day continues, as days do when nobody is arrested.
The monkey house is not the same as the chimpanzee house, a distinction the man does not make and the woman refuses to surrender. Macaques pick through one another’s fur with the concentration of jewellers. A male mandrill wears a face like a warning label printed in heaven’s leftover ink. When he yawns, the canines are a policy.
Sex among many monkeys is social glue, bribery, consolation, and occasionally conception. It is frequent enough to bore anyone who came only for the peak. Bonobos, elsewhere in the world, would make this point with even less shame. Here, a macaque presents, is mounted, is released, and returns to looking for salt on a railing.
“They’re just doing it,” the man says.
“Yes.”
“In front of the others.”
“The others are the point. For some primates, an audience is not a scandal. It is a census.”
“If humans did it too—”
“We do,” she says, tired and precise. “We do it in car parks and in poems and in marriages that are either kind or not. We also invented a word for doing it with a creature that cannot sign a form or laugh at our list. That word is the one you keep misspelling. The monkeys are not that word. They are monkeys.”
A juvenile hangs by one arm and regards the man with the impartiality of a small god. I have seen that look in forests. It means you are large and not very interesting.
The big cats are asleep, as big cats prefer, being sensible. A lioness flicks an ear. A tiger’s flank rises and falls like a bellows in a forge that has closed for lunch. Courtship in lions can be frequent and abrupt when a female is in oestrus; a pair may couple dozens of times in a day, the male’s barbed anatomy making separation a fact with feelings. None of that is on offer this afternoon. The lions have read the schedule and chosen rest.
“They’re not doing anything,” he says.
“They are doing something,” she says. “They are conserving. Desire is expensive. So is hunting. So is being looked at by you.”
He tries the list under his breath, a rosary of errors. “Horse cock. Great Dane. Anal humiliation. Animal. Dog. Beast. Beastiality. Elipent sex.”
“Elephant sex, sir,” she says, and for the first time there is humour in it without heat. “You have seen a stallion. You have seen chimpanzees. You have seen a bird attempt opera with his neck. You have not seen a Dane. You have not seen humiliation. You have seen animals. Try to let that be enough.”
A lion yawns. The teeth are a library of endings. Visitors photograph the yawn and call it cute, which is a triumph of marketing over sense.
The penguin pool is a comedy written in tuxedos. I have stood on ice and watched Adélies steal stones and affections with the same beak. Here the stones are provided and the affections proceed under fluorescent sky. Pairs bow. Bills fence. One couple mates with the ungainly sincerity of creatures whose ancestors solved the problem on cold rock and left the solution unchanged.
“That’s not sexy,” the man says.
“It is successful,” she says. “Sexy is a human grade. Successful is the grade the lineage keeps.”
“If humans did it too, like that, with the bowing.”
“We do. We call it a wedding, or a first date, or passing the salt for forty years. The penguin does not need a band.”
He almost smiles. The list rustles, weaker.
Late day lays a bronze light along the path to the reptile house, where sex is often a matter of seasons, scent, and a patience that would kill a mayfly with envy. Pythons coil in a diplomacy of muscle. A crocodile floats, smiling the smile it was born wearing.
Crocodilian courtship can be surprisingly tender for an animal that can dismantle a zebra: bellows, bubbles, the male blowing water across the female’s face in a gesture that, were it ours, would be called romance and then mocked. Today the crocodile does nothing but exist, which is an old skill.
“No beast,” the man says.
“All beast,” she says. “You wanted the word. There it is, sleeping with its eyes doing that terrible wise thing.”
“Anal—”
“No.”
He stops. He looks at the glass and sees himself faintly, a man holding a liturgy of misspellings in front of a predator that has not changed its face since the continents sat differently.
“What if humans did it too,” he says, and now the phrase has worn thin enough to show what is under it. “Not with them. I don’t… I know. I mean if we were just animals. If we didn’t have the list.”
She considers him as the lioness considered the afternoon.
“We are animals,” she says. “That is not the secret. The secret is that we are animals who can choose not to turn every other animal into a mirror for the parts of us we will not take to a person. You may watch a stallion and feel a shock. That shock is old. You may watch elephants lean and feel small. That smallness is useful. You may not drag Barry or a Dane or an elephant into the shock as if they had volunteered. That is the whole moral, and it will not trend.”
He folds the paper twice, then a third time, until elipent is hidden in the pleat.
I should, before the light goes, speak as I have always spoken when the camera is honest.
In the wild, copulation is common and rarely the point. The point is the calf that stands. The clutch that hatches. The troop that does not splinter. The pair of albatrosses that meet on the same ledge after months of ocean and tap their bills as if tapping a telegraph that says still. Sex is a tool the living use to remain the living. Our species has taken the tool and made it a museum, a market, a wound, a joke, a religion, a search field populated by horses, dogs, humiliations, and elephants spelled as if by a drunk god.
There is a humour in that, if you stand far enough away. The couple came to the zoo with a shopping list for the forbidden and found instead the permitted miracle: bodies that do not care what they are called.
At the gate, a peacock screams. The man startles. The woman laughs, short and real.
“Say it correctly once,” she says.
He thinks.
“Elephant sex,” he says. “Which we did not see. Horse. Which we did. Dog named Barry. Chimps. Birds. Monkeys. No Great Dane. No humiliation. Animals.”
“And the last word?”
He grimaces. “Bestiality. Which is not a habitat.”
“Good. Throw the paper out.”
He does. The bin receives the list as bins have always received the plans of men.
They walk toward the car. Somewhere behind them a gibbon whoops, a sound like joy cut into bright strips. I have heard that whoop in hills at dawn and felt the hair on my arms rise, because it means a territory is claimed and a throat still works. It is not obscene. It is news.
If humans “did it too,” they already do: they couple, they bungle, they make offerings of grass and of rings, they kick, they preen, they boom in rooms hired by the hour, they sleep like lions in the heat, they rumble in the chest when words fail. What they must not do—what this woman has spent a day teaching a man who came armed with other people’s spellings—is confuse the watching of life with the right to annex it.
Night will come. The elephants will chain-rattle their stomachs and dream, if they dream, of distances. The stallion will stand with his weight in three legs. Barry will sleep on a sofa and chase nothing. The couple will sit in traffic with the map still wrong and the day still stuck to their clothes: hay, disinfectant, feather, and the faint clean smell of having been refused by a list.
And I, who have whispered over countless matings as if they were stained glass, will say only this.
Here, in a garden of kept wildness, two humans practised being human. They looked. They named badly, then better. They wanted a spectacle and received a world. That, in the end, is the oldest courtship of all: the living, leaning toward the living, and not devouring it simply because they came with words.
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