Platero and I is usually thought of as a children’s book. In the book trade it is certainly marketed as such. Yet in this set of vignettes held together by the figure of the donkey Platero there is much that an impressionable child will find hard to bear, and in addition much that is beyond the range of interest of children. I therefore find it better to conceive of Platero and I as impressions of the life of a town, Juan Ramón Jiménez’s home town of Moguer in Andalusia, recollected by an adult who has not lost touch with the immediacy of childhood experience. These impressions are recorded with the delicacy and restraint that is proper when side by side with the adult reader is an audience of children.
Besides the ever-present gaze of the child, there is a second and more obvious gaze in the book: the gaze of Platero himself. Donkeys are, to human beings, not particularly beautiful creatures – not as beautiful as (to speak only of herbivores) gazelles or even horses – but they do have the advantage of possessing beautiful eyes: large, dark, liquid – soulful, we sometimes call them – and long-lashed. (We find the smaller, redder eyes of pigs less beautiful. Is this the reason why we do not find it easy to love or befriend these intelligent, friendly, humorous beasts? As for insects, their organs of sight are so alien to us that it is not easy to find a place in our affections for them.)
There is a terrible scene in Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment in which a drunken peasant beats an exhausted mare to death. First he beats her with an iron bar, then he beats her over the eyes with a club, as if above all he wants to extinguish the image of himself in her eyes. In Platero and I we read of an old blind mare who is chased away by her owners but insists on returning, angering them so much that with sticks and stones they kill her. Platero and his owner (this is the term our language provides for us – it is certainly not the word Jiménez uses) come upon the mare lying dead by the roadside; her sightless eyes seem at last to see.
When you die, Platero’s master promises his little donkey, I will not abandon you by the roadside but bury you by the foot of the great pine that you love.
It is the mutual gaze, between the eyes of this man – a man whom the gypsy children mock as crazy, and who tells the story of Platero and I rather than of I and Platero – and the eyes of ‘his’ donkey that establishes the deep bond between them, in much the same way that a bond is established between mother and infant at the moment when their gazes first lock. Again and again the mutual bond between man and beast is reinforced. ‘From time to time Platero stops eating to look at me. I from time to time stop reading to look at Platero’.1
Platero comes into existence as an individual – as a character, in fact – with a life and a world of experience of his own at the moment when the man whom I call his owner, the crazy man, sees that Platero sees him, and in the act of seeing acknowledges him as an equal. At this moment ‘Platero’ ceases to be just a label and becomes the donkey’s identity, his true name, all that he possesses in the world.
Jiménez does not humanize Platero. To humanize him would be to betray his asinine essence. By its asinine nature, Platero’s experience is closed off and impenetrable to human beings. Nevertheless, this barrier is now and again breached when for an instant the poet’s vision, like a ray of light, penetrates and illuminates Platero’s world; or, to make the same claim in a different form, when the senses that we human beings possess in common with the beasts, infused with our heart’s love, permit us, through the agency of Jiménez the poet, to intuit that experience. ‘Platero, his dark eyes scarlet from the sunset, walks off gently to the pool of crimson and rose and violet waters; he dips his mouth gently into the mirrors which seem to turn liquid at his touch; and through his great throat flows the heavy stream of shadowy, bloodlike water’. (p. 37)
‘I treat Platero as if he were a child … I kiss him, tease him, infuriate him; he understands very well that I love him and he bears me no spite. He is so like me that I have come to believe that he dreams my very dreams’. (p. 58) Here we tremble on the edge of the moment so urgently longed for in the fantasy lives of children, when the great divide between species crumbles away and we and the creatures who have so long been exiled from us come together in a greater unity. (How long exiled? In the Judaeo-Christian myth, the exile dates from our expulsion from Paradise, and the end of exile is yearned for as the day when the lion shall lie down with the lamb.)
At this moment we see the crazy man, the poet, behaving toward Platero as joyfully and affectionately as small children behave toward puppies and kittens; and Platero responds as young animals do to small children, with equal joy and affection, as if they know, as well as the child knows (and the sober, prosaic adult does not), that we are finally all brothers and sisters in this world; also that no matter how humble we are we must have someone to love or we will dry up and perish.
In the end Platero dies. He dies because he has swallowed poison, but also because the lifespan of a donkey is not as long as that of a man. Unless we choose to befriend elephants or turtles, we will mourn the deaths of our animal friends more often than they will mourn ours: this is one of the hard lessons that Platero and I does not shirk. But in another sense Platero does not die: always this ‘silly little donkey’ will be coming back to us, braying, surrounded by laughing children, wreathed in yellow flowers. (p. 45)
From: Stranger Shores, J.M. Coetzee
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