These precious things

Saturday. Renan takes me to a shed at the back of the farm, but prohibitively far from it. Inside it felt like the island of Dr. Moreau. Aquaria with all kinds of animals. Terraria with frogs, bulky toads, snakes of various kinds. It is incredible to see how much wildlife can be enclosed here in this humanized place. We create a civilization far from wildlife, destroy their natural habitats so we can later jail them in these sad terraria, aquaria and cages (the same animals we tried to avoid by urbanizing everything).

It's ten in the morning; Renan brought me here to see the animals' feeding. The shed reeked of stuffy air from the inside that choked me and made me want to sneeze. There was a huge skylight on the roof that was fake: it was more like transparent tiles allowing more natural light to flow into the shed. The place had the temperature of a banana silo. It was dense and inexplicable just as a rainforest. The natural light filtering down from the tiles didn't confer the environment a daylight atmosphere. Instead it lent the place a real sinister mood.

"Sinister, eh?" he asked me smiling.

"Funny how that exact word just crossed my mind."

Renan picked up a small cage that abounded with small white rats inside, distressed by both the shaking of the cage and chiefly by the guess the human young had no mirthful plans for them. He then drew a camera out of his pocket — the same Andrés forbid to function at the Mithraeum when the kid planned to have his brother catch him on video slaying that bull — and adjusted it for video capture. He asked me to hold the cage for him, drew one of the rats by the tail and approached the first terrarium.

"A copperhead rat snake my father imported from Burma for me. Beautiful, eh?" and he turned on the camera, focused carefully and introduced the rat in the terrarium. It soon died in the horrific way rats usually die when fall prey to snakes. Renan took two delightful minutes filming the snake's lunch. He kept filming and grinned at me, proud of his pet.

"She's a real glutton, want to see?", and he introduced a second rat that didn't take long to disappear head first into the snake's throat. The most distressing was to watch its little legs still shaking with life as it got swallowed. Not to mention the disgusting sight of the rat's tail still moving, sticking out of the snake's mouth, like a nervous tongue. All of this recorded passionately and in macro detail by the eager camera of Renan.

I only gave in when he warned me he was to feed a Burmese python a live piglet. The last I saw in the distance was the boy passing, holding the poor piglet by the rear legs.

A permanent season | I did it just the same

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