Mariano Zaro

Reading the Diaries of Patricia Highsmith

On July 26, 1967, Patricia Highsmith writes

“My oldest snail died today.”

She says that the snail was born

“around late September 1964”

and “traveled from England to America and back,

went to Paris five or six times, to Majorca and Tunisia.”

Snails appear often in Highsmith’s writings.

I read once her short story The Snail Watcher.

I had forgotten it.

The snail in her diaries

brought back the story to me.

Memory is magnetic. Memories attract one another.

When I was a child, my father told me about snails.

They are hermaphrodites,

but they still need each other, he said.

I had to look up hermaphrodite in the dictionary—

a heavy volume, almost too big for my hands.

Why do snails have antennae? I asked my father.

They are not antennae, they are tentacles, he said.

Their eyes are on the tip of each tentacle, you know.

The more you remember, the more you see.

Snails can hibernate for long periods of time.

They produce a white membrane, like silk

or tissue paper. It’s called epiphragm.

They seal themselves.

With memory we travel in the spiral of time,

until we realize that the world we remember

does not exist anymore.

My father placed an empty snail shell

in the palm of my hand. It was almost

transparent, so light you could blow it away

like a dry blade of grass.

Anatomy and Color Pencils

In the school library

I copy illustrations of science books

with tissue paper.

You are not allowed to take these books home,

but you can copy the illustrations

if you are careful.

I copy illustrations of insects most of all.

First, I trace the perimeter.

Insects have segmented bodies,

jointed legs, and external skeletons.

Then, I trace the head, thorax and abdomen.

Even the antennae and the coiled proboscis.

Butterflies have thin antennae with club-shaped tips.

Moths have comb-like antennae, feathery.

It’s difficult to draw the inner organs:

brain, heart, Malpighian tubules.

The average life span of a butterfly is usually one month. 

Some small butterflies only live one week.

I transfer the illustrations to my notebooks,

bring them home, into my room—

each body labeled, organized, immutable.

Monarch butterflies have a life span of about nine months.  

So many times, in secret, I try to label my own body,

to be my own insect, my own entomologist.