BENGALURU: It happened mid-afternoon, right after lunch. Anne had returned from her meeting carrying a fragrant roast chicken, They had both eaten the little bird with the appetite of a couple who still made love often. Gustav had sunk the tip of his fingers through the ribs of the chicken, scraping the chest of all shreds of meat, stuffing his mouth, sucking the grease off his fingers. While chewing, Gustav had bitten the side of his tongue and tasted his blood mixed with the white meat.
Now, as he was holding Hector’s tiny torso, after putting a clean diaper on him and massaging the baby with some talcum powder, he felt a shiver of horror traverse him. Hector and the chicken were the same thing. Sentient beings with feelings, with the same experience of life.
Gustav realized that the chicken he had just eaten in such a famished rush had been a small chick, conceived by parents and, even more importantly, that that animal, having a rib cage that so resembled that of his son, was actually a being in no way different from a human. That chicken had lived. He had felt. He had rejoiced in the simple basic and common fact of being alive, taking pleasure from nourishment, from the warmth of a mother or perhaps even a father, from the joy of waking up, opening his eyes, and experiencing life through all senses.
That’s when Gustav felt that all beings - chickens, pigs, cows, goats, sheep - all beings that we humans kill, skin, drain of blood, chop, quarter and prepare in a neat package for a counter, all of them had the experience of life. The same as us. He felt like a cannibal.
The day after, when Gustav and Anne took Hector out to get some fresh Parisian air in his stroller and stopped at the corner brasserie for lunch, Gustav found himself in front of a tourist menu with images of meat and fish glazed over by a special lighting effect, which Anne explained involved a cube of panels refracting light so as to make a dead fish look like one of the blond ladies in the professor’s vintage porno magazines. It wasn’t exactly nausea Gustav felt from what, until the day before, had been his favourite dish, the yummy steak frites; it was something deeper. It was a specific feeling, the feeling that his own flesh could be there, on that plate, garnished with crunchy, oily potato strips. He ordered a niçoise salad without tuna.
Two weeks later, Gustav and Anne found themselves with Hector in the Moroccan coastal town of Essaouira. They had gotten on an inexpensive flight from Paris to Marrakesh and rented a car at the airport. It was time to take a break from Paris, and Anne would also photograph the annual Berber music festival, which gathered musicians from all over the world. Gustav recognized the thick walls of the city where Orson Welles had shot Othello. He was aware of how much his own experience of architecture, cities and geography had been influenced by his exposure to literature and cinema. He felt he was culturally programmed and could not experience anything without a reference to an illustrated volume he read as a child, or a memorable movie he saw as a teenager, or a profound novel he read in his twenties.
(Excerpted from A History Of Objects by Carlo Pizzati, with permission from HarperCollins)
