PETS

PETS
C 2001 JoJo

I love all animals, but the ones that have brought me the most joy, have been dogs, birds (Antonico, my green Amazon parrot) and monkeys! Yes, monkeys.

When I was very young, we acquired a male and a female marmoset. These are tiny monkeys, about 5 inches high, with huge big eyes and a very long tail. My parents named them Napoleon and Josephine. A small hammock was slung for them in the corner of the dining room, and they’d sleep there every night, arms and tails wrapped around each other so tightly, they looked like one big mass of confusing monkey!

Every morning, when we came down to breakfast, we’d deliberately rattle a cup and make a noise, then watch the hammock. It would start swinging wildly as the monkeys disentangled themselves, then two eager little faces would pop up over the edge of the hammock, which never failed to make us laugh.

Down they’d come and one would sit on my shoulder and the other on Doreen’s. The routine never changed. I’d break off a piece of banana and direct it towards my mouth as if I was going to eat it, but a wee furry hand would reach out and grab it. One of Napoleon’s favourite snacks was bread and butter dipped in sweetened coffee! I now wonder if he didn’t get off on the cafeeine high off the coffee, but we didn’t know about such things in those days, and since he loved it so much, he always got it! Both he and Josephine also got a healthy diet of fruits and nuts, but breakfast time, was spoiling time!

We had a poor cat in those days. I say “poor cat” because those two made her life miserable. They actually worked as a team. We had a long hanging lamp in the middle of the sitting room, and Napoleon would shinny up the wire onto this lamp and hang there, swinging back and forth gently. Josephine meanwhile, would start teasing the poor cat (I don’t even remember her name – I always thought of her as the “poor cat”) by darting back and forth in front of her, chattering noisily. These antics never failed to get a rise out of the poor cat, who would get down onto her haunches, head in between her two front paws, and start stalking Josephine. Josephine keep this up, gradually drawing the poor cat until she was right under the hanging lamp, at which point Napoleon would let go of the lamp, and land squarely on her back, which would scare the living daylights out of her. She’d let out a yowl and leap right up in the air, by which time Napoleon was long gone, having climbed up out of her reach again.

That poor cat slept with one eye open, because the pesky monkeys would wait until she was soundly asleep on her favourite sunny spot on the windowsill, then they’d sneak up, nip her tail then dash off laughing their heads off. Poor cat.

Marmosets are very sensitive monkeys and when Napoleon died, Josephine promptly pined to death too. We were heartbroken, but life without Napoleon just wasn’t worth living as far as Josephine was concerned.

My second experience with marmosets was at the age of 4, when I entered kindergarten at the “Colegio Agnes Erskin” in Recife (coincidentally, when she was young, my mother studied in this school and later became a teacher there and was actually married to my father in the school’s chapel). The grounds of the school had many fruit trees, and they abounded with marmosets. All of us shared our boxed lunches with them, and they knew it. As soon as the bell rang for the lunch time recess, they’d start chattering at the top of their voices and would scamper across the trees, causing the branches to sway.

Many years later, when Dad had transferred to Christ Church, Rio de Janeiro, for a short while, we acquired a little chimp, kind of by default. His owner was moving into an apartment building where pets weren’t allowed. This chimp’s name was Petey and at some point in his checkered career, he’d come a cropper and had lost a couple of digits, but that didn’t deter him in the least bit.

Now Petey had one unfortunate habit – he absolutely loved ladies’ panties (knickers) – just ladies’ panties, nothing else. Every night he’d raid our neighbours’ clotheslines, and yank all the delicate panties off the clothes lines and bring them back to us, with a very smug look on his face, expecting us to praise him for his efforts on our behalf!

In no time flat, the word whipped around the neighbourhood that there was a asexual defiant hanging around with a fetish for ladies’ panties, but we knew that “deviant” was good old Petey.

This put us in a delicate situation. We could hardly take a basket full of panties, door to door asking each woman “Excuse me, are any of these yours?”

So in the end, we sadly concluded that Petey had to go to the zoo, where he’d be in the company of lots of other chimps, and would forget about ladies’ panties – the little dickens. So that’s where Petey went.

I’d go to the zoo once in a while, just to see how he was getting on, and he was easy to recognize because of his missing digits. He was doing just fine – last time I went, he was making out with a female chimp and he didn’t even notice me!

Monkeys are a lot of fun to have, but they’re a lot of work and are always up to devilment and mischief. You can’t take your eyes off them for a single moment!

Many years later, I was sailing on the Blue Star ship, the “Amazon,” to go to college in England. One of our ports of call was Bahia, and when we sailed away, somehow or other, a little marmoset got left on board. The ship’s doctor decided to adopt it and kept it closed up in his cabin. I took the doctor aside and warned him that unless he let the marmoset out to romp and play, it would pine to death. I never did find out if he listened to my advice and whether that marmoset made it safely to England.

But like I said, they’re very sensitive little creatures, but a lot of fun (and hard work) to have around. I would compare it to having a very agile, highly intelligent and full of the old nick 18 month old baby!