YZUR (4)
By:
September 23, 2025
Inspired no doubt by Richard Lynch Garner’s widely publicized 1900 study Apes and Monkeys: Their Life and Language, Lugones’ proto-sf story about the secret of chimpanzee intelligence (and the cruelty of science) was first published in the author’s 1906 collection Las Fuerzas Extrañas (Strange Forces). Translation by Carlos Costa and Georges Dodds for ERBzine.com. HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize an excerpt for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5.
And three years passed, without him being able to achieve the pronounciation of any words. He tended to associate things with the letters whose sound predominated in the associated noun. This was all.
In the circus he had learned to bark like his task-mates the dogs; and when he saw me giving up hope in trying to make him speak, he barked strongly, as though to show me everything he knew. He pronounced the vowels and consonants separately, but he could not string them together. Beyond that, we would string together a sequence of p’s and m’s.
As slow as it was, there has been a great change in his character. His facial features had lost their mobility, his gaze arose from great depths and he adopted meditative poses. He had acquired, for example, the custom of contemplating the stars. His sensitivity had also grown; he could easily be brought to tears. The lessons continued with unwavering determination, although with no greater success. It had become a painful obsession, and little by little I became inclined to use force. My character had been soured by failure, until it had assume a heedless animosity towards Yzur. He was becoming more and more of an introvert; in his stubborn silence, he began to convince me that I would never remove budge him from his stance, when it suddenly dawned on me that he did not to speak because he did not want to. One night the cook, horrified, came to tell me that he had surprised the monkey “speaking genuine words”. Yzur was, according to the cook’s story, curled up next to a fig tree in the orchard; but the cook’s fright was so great that he could not recall the most essential element, namely, the words. He seems to remember only two: cama (bed) and pipa (pipe). His stupidity almost led me to kicked him.
Needless to say, I spent the night in a highly excited state; and undertook that which I had not done in three years — a mistake that brought all to nought — out of nervous tension arising from a lack of sleep, as much as from an excessive curiosity.
Instead of allowing the monkey to manifest his capacity for language on his own terms, the next day I called him to bear and tried to force him and draw obedience from him under threat of punishment.
I got nothing but p’s and m’s out of him, the which I was already fed up of. Then there was his hypocritical expression and — God forgive me — a certain hint of irony in the faces he was pulling.
This angered me, and thoughtlessly I struck him with a whip. The only thing I could get out of him was tears and an even more absolute silence, unbroken even by moans.
On the third day he fell into a kind of dark dementia complicated by meningitis-like symptoms. Leeches, cold infusions, purgatives, cutaneous counterirritants, alcohol rubs, bromide — all the therapeutic tools at my disposal were applied to him. I fought with desperate determination, stimulated by remorse and fear. This was because I believed the beast to be a victim of my cruelty; and because he might take his secret to the grave.
After long time he improved, however, he remained so weak that he could not move himself in the bed. His brush with death had ennobled and humanized him. His eyes full of gratitude, were always fixed on me and followed me around the room like two revolving balls, even if I was behind him. His hand searched for mine in the intimacy of his convalescence. In my own great solitude, he was quickly acquiring the importance of a person.
The demon of experimentation, which is naught else but a form of the spirit of perversity, drove me to renew, nevertheless, my experiments. In fact the monkey had spoken. That could not go unnoticed.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.