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Show Ursula is sure hybrids are sterile, like mules. I say ligers and tigons, those spotted and striped hybrid cats, aren't healthy, and they're confused about whether to hunt alone or in packs, but they can breed. We're arguing in a restaurant in Trieste: Ursula's Italian is better and I'm sure couscous is semolina, just bigger, although I don't know what constitutes a species, whether Australopithecus is the same as Cro Magnon. Each of us thinking, boy, I'm glad I'm not married to her. Is our quarrel scientific- she wants things fixed, I like them open? Or about names and groups-the threshold of language? Faith exists in a world where every day someone's painting quail heads black or cloning a baby. Why argue if there's no money or land at stake, is it just talk? The city's Austro-Hungarian and Italian, Alpine and Mediterranean, with a beach that separates men and women by an eight foot wall built into the sea. Ursula photographed me among the half-naked bodies, ridiculous in my sunhat and shorts. Yet I'm invisible to the women, like a pigeon I don't count, and neither do they, to me. Eighty years ago, James Joyce and Italo Svevo- Irishman and Italian-Austrian Jew-did they debate Darwin? Did they stiffen their necks, gesticulate knives, someone always speaking a foreign tongue? Ursula's from Bern, and my German's shot with English, or should I say American. The German for hybrid and sterile is close to English-it's fertile that won't come to me. Mule is esel, jackass. That beach suggests a different century, not lesbian monkeys and the error of the gametic binary, but categories crisp as breadsticks. Maybe lions and tigers shouldn't be bred. Ursula and I are crow and jay, squawking at each other from across the table. Taxonomy, from taxis, order, not from tax, tangere, touch. |
