‘A Short Treatise on Tortoises’ by Cathy Sweeney
There are many different types of tortoises but the one I am thinking of is the size of a crate and heavy as a small reindeer. It has tender black eyes and a hard shell. You may not realise it when you pet the tortoise’s shell, or even pat it, but it contains nerve endings and is sensitive to touch. Something about the tortoise’s shell will make you want to touch it, even though it is scaly and rough against your skin. Maybe it is the fact that the tortoise cannot move away quickly, although it must be said that they are excellent at winning races. Or maybe it is because we like touching ancient things, like old trees or the stones of ruins. Or maybe it is the fact that tortoises stay still for a long time, and things that stay still give us a feeling of timelessness.
Even when it is very hot, the tortoise cannot take its shell off. It is stuck inside there for its whole life which, for a tortoise, can be over a hundred years. All it can do is poke its head out of its shell and crawl along on its dusty leather feet. If you ever see a tortoise with no shell you are dreaming or on drugs. I saw one once. Its skin was like that of a chicken and you could see every bone and knuckle of its body. It reminded me of a boy I knew when I was young. I remember him standing naked by a river, and behind him, the sky blue with large clouds.
Unlike people, tortoises cannot swim. They just hold their breath in water for a very long time. Also, in winter, when they hibernate, they stop breathing completely. People, on the other hand, can be quite like tortoises. A few years ago, I met the boy I knew when I was young and we went to a hotel to have sex. He was no longer thin-skinned and bony. Around his torso a hard, protective shell had developed due to the fusing of his spine, ribcage and pelvis. It was as though his organs, especially his heart, could not bear human contact. The shell was not sensitive to touch. I regularly have sex with both men and women, and I have observed that, as people get older, a tense encrusted casing encircling the body is common.
Tortoises love the sound of mechanical noises – shutters and flashbulbs, ringtones and buzzers – but their favourite by far is the click-clack of typewriters. I discovered this when I spent a summer living beside a tortoise sanctuary in Spain. I wrote a novel sitting under a Eucalyptus tree in the garden just to please one particular tortoise that I came to know, an old tortoise that I named Joe because I have always liked the name Joe. The novel was moderately successful. It was about a man who discovered a planet with oxygen on it and decided to live there on his own but went crazy due to lack of sex.
Tortoises have both male and female parts, which is different to people, mostly. In the seventeenth century a scientist conducted experiments on tortoises and found that if you extract the brain of a tortoise, it will live for a few months, and if you cut off its head, it will live for days. It is easy to imagine a tortoise with no head. You would just think the tortoise was shy, although you might miss its tender black eyes. They remind me of the eyes of the boy I knew when I was young. Maybe I should have married him while his skin was still thin. We wait and wait, but very rarely does anything better come along, and anyway, it is always pleasant to have something living beside you.
From issue #6: spring/summer 2018
About the Author
Cathy Sweeney is a writer living in Dublin. Her short fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, Egress, Winter Papers, The Tangerine and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her debut short story collection Modern Times is published by The Stinging Fly and Weidenfeld & Nicolson. She is at work on a novel.
