Some notes on Coco

Berbiguier’s pet squirrel “Coco” is a major plot element and a silent character on her (?) own. Eventually I will organize this, but for now, I’m consolidating my Coco-related notes into a single post.

It’s worth calling out the “actual” of Coco’s story, filtered through an unreliable narrator. Some time during the night in October 2017 Coco’s tail was injured, and M.B. talks in his memoir [cite chapter] about being urged to harm the squirrel. His death is described in v2ch16, but it is confusing. In September 1819 the squirrel, who does not live in a cage, doesn’t eat his food. He may perhaps be sick, unknown. Typically M.B. leaves his coat piled on his bed for Coco to sleep in, but this night, Coco is under M.B.’s bedsheet, and as M.B. climbs into bed, he feels like the goblins shove him, and he crushes Coco. How true is any of this? Small animals are resilient, they’re not fragile things made of glass. It’s hard to tell exactly what happened here. Coco is variously described as being sweet and gentle, and badly behaved, and his injuries vary (while M.B. mentions his tail being injured several times, Coco’s broken leg is mentioned off-handedly once in v2 [cite when found], and never again.) 

Take this from v2Ch49: “They had found a way to get into his fur to torment him, agitate him, to make him unbearable, by making him jump in various directions, go up and down along my clothes, to upset me to the point of making me lose my temper, to force me to hit this poor little animal, to the point of diminishing the friendship that we had for each other, and to expose me to being bitten by him, without there being any bad intention on his part, any more than on mine, when I beat him.”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pet-squirrel-craze

https://www.vin.com/apputil/project/defaultadv1.aspx?id=5454945

All that is to say, M.B.’s relationship to Coco is ambiguous, at best, and if he has a condition like paranoid schizophrenia, who can say what M.B.’s behavior to the creature was before he filters it through the lens of an unreliable narrator. Coco has been a terrible bastard, M.B. is keeping him in a hotel room, he’s running loose, we’ve established that he’s poorly trained, and that means likely to bite and gnaw. M.B.’s landlord is likely a very tolerant person, but what happens if M.B. is told that Coco is damaging the room, and he’ll have to get rid of him, and then what story will Berbiguier tell the reader?