Yzur

I bought the monkey at the auction of a circus that had gone bankrupt.

The first time it occurred to me to attempt the experiment these lines recount was one afternoon, when I read, I do not know where, that the natives of Java put down the lack of articulate speech in monkeys to abstention, not inability. "They do not speak," they said, "so that they will not be made to work."

Such an idea, not at all profound at first, ended by obsessing me until it became this anthropological postulate:

Monkeys were men who, for one reason or another, stopped speaking. This produced the atrophy of their vocal organs and of the brain centres of language; it weakened, almost to the point of suppressing it, the connection between the two, fixing the language of the species in the inarticulate cry, and primitive man sank to being an animal.

Clearly, if this could be proved, all the anomalies that make the monkey so singular a being would at once be explained; but there could be only one possible proof: to bring the monkey back to speech.

Meanwhile I had travelled the world with mine, binding him to me more and more through mishaps and adventures. In Europe he drew attention, and had I wanted to, I could have given him the fame of a Consul; but my seriousness as a man of business did not sit well with such clowning.

Worked on by my fixed idea of the language of monkeys, I exhausted the whole literature on the problem, without any appreciable result. I knew only, with complete certainty, that there is no scientific reason why the monkey should not speak. This had taken five years of thought.

Yzur (a name whose origin I could never discover, for his former owner did not know it either), Yzur was certainly a remarkable animal. His circus education, though almost entirely limited to mimicry, had developed his faculties a great deal; and this was what most tempted me to try my apparently absurd theory on him.

Besides, it is known that the chimpanzee (and Yzur was one) is the best endowed with brain among the apes, and one of the most docile, which improved my chances. Every time I saw him come forward on two feet, with his hands behind his back to keep his balance, looking like a drunken sailor, my conviction of his arrested humanity grew stronger.

Leopoldo Lugones, 1906. An excerpt, translated for Zeitzung from the Spanish text at Ciudad Seva. Public domain.