Butterfly Larvae

Larval Lust

Spring of 1929 would have been memorable even without the terrible event that took place during it. I was forty-six years old at the time (yes, it has taken me all of forty years to write this down), erect and slim, fresh-faced and eagle-nosed. Handsome, if I dare say so myself, well preserved, and, most importantly, recently divorced and freshly laid off my clerical job. Like I said, it would have been memorable even without what happened.

It was a mild spring that year, the air soft yet warm, the fields fragrant; even today, when I think of the word spring, Monnikendam in April of 1929 comes to mind. Since my military days I have held a special interest in insects, especially bugs, and even more precisely butterfly larvae. There is something therapeutic in their transformative power that got me through those bleak war years. For a short while I even kept a little notebook dedicated to them, which I kept in my breast pocket and because 1929 had been such a transformative year for me, in the metamorphosical sense, I thought I would morph my passion into a project, jobless as I was, and hunt for my preferred species the Euphydryas aurinia (a rather interesting butterfly larvae prevalent in North Holland) and write about them. Just a few short days later I rented a room in Monnikendam, overlooking the Gouwzee. 

Monnikendam is a wonderful little place and despite what happened I still think back to the town fondly, though I shall never go back. In Monnikendam one does not have to leave the city in order to enjoy the country. Here the houses mirror themselves in all the watery channels, the Monnikendammergat and the Gouwzee and so forth, and look out over the wide plains. You hardly notice where nature begins and where the town — one melted into the other without contradiction. 

The day that so painfully sticks out in my memory was particularly beautiful. At the cafés and restaurants people sat in the open, dressed in summery clothes, in that typical Dutch fashion in which, when the sun shines, however cold, they pull out their lightest dresses and airiest shirts. I was seated at some distance from the music, writing about butterfly larvae, and I wrote with interest and attention. Nevertheless, I was aware of the chirping birds, the people’s voices, and the songs played, wafting between me and the cafés. I heard the melodies without being disturbed by them, for our ears are quite capable of adapting themselves. A continuous din, or the sound of wind through leaves, or the smooth scratch of a pen adjusts itself completely to our consciousness, only an unexpected halt or abrupt change can startle us into listening.

And so it was that my pen suddenly stopped mid-sentence. Something had caused the musicians to stop playing “Kijk eens in de poppetjes van mijn ogen” by Annie de Reuver and Karel van der Velden, which was strange because the concert usually lasted until ten, especially throughout the weekend. One by one they walked off the podium towards the town’s billboard, where a group of younger men and women were already standing. And because, at that point, I was sufficiently distracted I made my way over as well. 

Before I continue, let me state the obvious. Things might have been done differently when I was young, but Freudian psychoanalysis, the emancipation of women, and our culture in general has brought about so complete a change within one generation that really, I should not have been chastised for what I did. I was, in a way, a victim. Me, a newly single man, brought up in Calvinist Protestant Zeeland, a mere tourist in the free-world of North Holland, where everything seemed permissible. The only sin I committed was my naïveté. It was more straightforward in the Middle Ages where at least the repercussions for our carnal desires were honest, filled as they were by an upright conviction that sensuality was the sting of the Devil and that bodily lust was unchaste and sinful. How hypocritical society was in those years, and still is today! It limits its morality, not by forbidding a man from sex, but by reprimanding him if he does not go about it as inconspicuously as possible. If he is not able to do away with his sexuality he is required to, at the very least, hide it from the world. 

On the billboard, around which a group of people had formed, sat a familiar array of papers. I say familiar because not only was the handwriting mine, but they were also the yellow pages on which I wrote. They must have been ripped right from my notebooks. 

Thank God, I thought, for my pseudonym, that funny name I had crafted for myself when I started on my writing escapade. Anonymity in every aspect of my life was a necessity to me. Even as a boy I would cringe at those artists of an earlier generation who, by means of velvet coats and unruly locks (Johan Thorn Prikker, Jan Toorop and so forth) and showily trimmed beards or clothing in extreme style, sought easy recognition on the street. Only I, I thought with relief, knew the origins of those pages. 

Or so I thought. No more than ten minutes had transpired since the music stopped and everyone found their way to the billboard, when suddenly my house-servant, a remarkable woman, still wearing her starchy white shield that concealed her attractive figure, shouted “it’s him, he is the author of those verses!”

As I said earlier, one does not hear noise as long as it’s constant. That is why the silence that followed sounded so unbearable, and why I can still hear it today. 

“Disgusting,” one woman said, finally. 

“Absolutely vile.”

I should presumably add, to avoid further confusion, that my writings on larvae weren’t so much scientific studies, but metaphorical ones, symbolic, an allegory of our time, a theme, an analogy to describe how I felt as a man, newly divorced from his wife. The urges that came up since — a certain emergence from my cocoon, the cocoon in which I was trapped for many long years of unhappy marriage. Like Neruda used nature, I used my butterfly larvae which are far more poetic than any breast shaped mountains.

“But oh, one day, his time will come,

To shed his skin, to beat that drum.” A man read from my yellow pages, quoting a verse from Larval Lust. Someone else followed suit: 

“In the garden’s secret bed,

Where petals blush and roses spread,

A caterpillar, thick and long,

Wriggled with a need so strong.”

I couldn’t bear to hear another word. I fled. I practically flew back to my room, swift as a butterfly, shed my clothes, put on a new set so as not to be caught, and left on the earliest train, never to be seen again.

That’s my story. I could bore you with the particulars, about how I never wrote again, how I found another clerical job, how I even married again, but why should I, what’s the use of anything anymore without my Euphydryas aurinia?

Papilionum Noctornum - British Public Library