Poison Arrow

Posted on January 30, 2006 in Violence Zoos

Zoos mix the peoples of the city, bringing the sealed-off almost to our very faces. I had not been to the main San Diego Zoo for more than a year because of construction. Yesterday, I took a wrong turn while leading Leah, Lynn, and Mindy and found myself lost in the new Monkey Trails section. It took an hour for me to find the way out (of course, we stopped to look at the various guenons, the colobus, and the punk-spiked black macabays as well as a couple of new additions to the pig collection). When we emerged, my companions sincerely thanked me for being a good guide.

It was late in the afternoon, when we took Leah to see the turtles in the galleries behind the old reptile house. Leah had just learned, to her horror, that Indians distilled the venom by roasting the frogs. This didn’t faze me. The husband was tall, maybe five ten or six foot. A baseball cap crowned his curly, red-peppered hair. Two boys cut in front of us so they could peep at a poison arrow frog. A tall, slender Asian woman leaned against him, bending like a madonna carved out of an ivory tusk. My eyes followed her figure upwards. Then I saw her face.

A large, square bruise lay just beneath the skin around her left eye. The full menace of it had faded to a pale grey. The dead blood clouded her pale complexion.

Our eyes met. She shot me a look. But what was it? Fear? Pain? Embarassment? A call for help? Did she beg me for rescue or did she feel shame because the bruise wasn’t what I thought it was?

I got out of the building, dragging Leah who had stopped to get a look at an Asian horned frog. Outside, I mentioned the woman and my confusion at the public display of her wound.

What is this fear of the suffering that afflicted me? Her mind, her husband’s mind were inaccessible to me. Had he taken her there to be shown, to humiliate her or was the humiliation in the appearance of sin? I could not reach out my hand and pull her close, move my mouth in that public place to ask her what happened. Either I would be made a fool or she might find herself under his fist again.

Among the herps I found a mystery as perplexing as the amphisbaena they displayed three windows up from the poison arrow frog.

How can we save one another in a world as large and as dead to cries as this?