by James Morrow
Gitika spun on his heel and, sliding the machete back into his belt, sauntered up to Malcolm. “Surely you know I would not have tortured him,” he said in English, unleashing a smile in which all thirty-two of his teeth participated fully. “Not the way the executioner spent four hours dismembering the failed assassin of Louis Quinze, or so Léourier tells us. We primitive Huancabambas could never behave in so civilized a fashion.”
Now Comandante Cuarón joined the conversation. “My opinion of civilization is no higher than yours, Gitika. That said, we are obliged to hand this monster over to the authorities in Iquitos.”
“If we spare Zumaeta, Don Rómolo will have him out of gaol in a day,” Gitika replied. “We must put him on trial now. I shall ask our good friend Capitán Torresblanco to act as judge, jury, and executioner.”
“As judge, I urge the jury to recall that Zumaeta has committed a thousand heinous crimes,” said Torresblanco, stepping away from the ribeirinho artillery squad, the parrot still riding on his shoulder. “As jury, I have reached with myself a unanimous verdict of guilty. As executioner, I shall now do my duty.”
“Puta madre!” squawked Miguel.
With an impressive economy of motion Torresblanco unholstered his pistol, strode up to Zumaeta, and with four closely spaced shots transferred a large quantity of his brain matter from his skull to the ground, where it lay in the dust like a spurt of sentient lava. Clearly no stranger to gunfire, the parrot remained perched on Torresblanco’s shoulder, even as dozens of startled jungle birds—red macaws, topaz parakeets, golden tanagers, and flaming cocks-of-the-rock—took wing, so that for a fleeting instant the sky over the Marañón valley acquired a flying rainbow.
* * *
Never before had the Reverend Granville Heathway faced so vexing a dilemma. During the night a considerable spider—fat, brown, and oblate, like a walnut with legs—had built her web amidst his painting supplies, binding his palette knife to his best brush, so that he could remove neither implement without destroying the delicate construction. The idea for his next painting had already taken root in his imagination: The Nativity of Gregor Mendel, featuring the shades of Aristotle and Isaac Newton attending the monk’s birth, laying gifts before his cradle. But he did not dare pick up his brush, lest he deprive the spider of her livelihood.
Within the hour the situation was resolved (though not to the spider’s advantage) when Guinevere fluttered into the cell and, perceiving in the arachnid a ready meal, devoured her on the spot. Tears collecting in his eyes, Granville muttered a prayer for his departed cellmate, then unfastened the capsule from the pigeon’s leg and rummaged through his nightstand drawer in search of his quizzing-glass.
Dearest Father,
At long last I have news of the Diluvian League. Earlier this week the Paragon dropped anchor in Trebizond, from which port Mr. Dalrymple dispatched a semaphore message to the Grand Vizier. Captain Silahdar has hired two guides, expert climbers who will escort the expedition across the Coru River, then over the Doğu Karadeniz Range as far as Oltu, a mere 150 miles northwest of Mount Ararat.
I continue to pass my afternoons in the hookah-den. Most of my conversations with the habitués are too tedious to bear repeating (how sad that so sane a person as yourself gets locked away whilst deluded egoists remain at large), but yesterday Yusuf ibn Ziayüddin commended to my attention Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and I lost no time striking up a conversation with this brilliant Jesuit priest.
To reach the hookah-den, Père Teilhard informed me, he was obliged to journey all the way from the Lyon of 1937, which means he covered an even greater distance than did Gregor Mendel. True, Teilhard came here via railway and hired coach, whereas the monk traveled on foot, though I suspect the Jesuit could have walked if necessary, for at fifty-six he seems as vigorous as a man half his age. Like Mendel, Teilhard is pledged not only to chastity and obedience but also to poverty, and yet he had enough coins in his pocket—“some detritus from our Rockefeller Foundation grant”—to purchase a bag of Cannabis sativa.
“Yusuf Effendi believes that, as a schoolman of scientific bent, I would appreciate your story,” I told him. “My personal faith is Anglican rather than Roman—my father oversaw a village parish ere becoming ill—but I intend to be a sympathetic listener.”
Père Teilhard filtered a puff of hashish through his thin lips. He cuts a figure at once romantic and cerebral, like a privateer captain commissioned not to plunder enemy ships but to sink inferior ideas. “On the surface my life is enviable, Bertram, un grand cirque of loving friends and gratifying scientific investigations. And yet, when I return to my proper time-stream, I shall again find myself at odds with my precious bane, the Society of Jesus.”
“What science do you pursue?”
“Paleontology.”
“You’re a disciple of Mr. Paley? Natural Theology is my father’s favorite book!”
“A paleontologist studies fossils,” Père Teilhard noted, then placed a canvas sack on the table, drawing out five skulls, each markedly different from its fellows. He arrayed the death’s-heads in a semicircle about the hookah. A passing stranger might have taken us for heathens celebrating a barbarous rite. “Behold the stations of the human ascent, from ape to man-ape to our own sapient kind. They’re plaster casts, of course—the original fossils reside in laboratories and museums. These bones testify to the phenomenon of biological evolution, Bertram, a process whose mechanism will be revealed a decade from now, when the English scientist Charles Darwin publishes his theory of natural selection.”
“Which is the skull of Adam?” I inquired.
“In my time-stream only the most hidebound persons regard the narrative of Adam, Eve, and the serpent as an actual historical event.”
I scowled and said, “Now see here, Père Teilhard. On my view it’s churlish to call a water-pipe companion hidebound.”
The priest glowered. “Were I desirous of reproach, I could have stayed in Lyon. My provincial is forever scolding me as you have done.”
Glowering back, I said, “If you will ignore my discourteous remark, then I shall ignore yours.”
Père Teilhard closed his eyes, savoring his Cannabis reverie. He blinked and gave my hand an affirming squeeze. “Absolument.”
“For purposes of this conversation, there was never an Adam,” I said. “Hereafter our motto shall be ‘Let him amongst you who can refute the fossil evidence cast the first bone.’”
My new friend laughed and said, “For the past thirteen years the Holy Office has forbidden me to publish a single word on human evolution, all because of my unfinished paper questioning the doctrine of original sin, which a Vatican minion stole from my drawer.”
I sucked on my pipe. Today’s featured blend was especially stimulating, making me desirous of further communion with Père Teilhard’s supple mind. “Do you accord the Genesis flood the same skepticism you bring to the Garden of Eden?”
The priest puffed and said, “Oui.”
I was tempted not only to tell him about the Diluvian League but to inquire whether, in light of his ex post facto knowledge of nineteenth-century history, the ark hunt had succeeded, but Yusuf ibn Ziayüddin forbids his patrons to seek such information. Instead I asked Père Teilhard how he reconciled his Catholic faith with his insistence that the world’s first man was not an unruly Adam but an unlettered ape.
The priest offered a seraphic smile. “There is no contradiction in ascribing to our species both a divine origin and a simian descent, for the universe is itself an all-encompassing and ever-changing organism. It is le Tout, the All. In fulfilling our need to come closer to God, paleontology often serves better than prayer.” He grasped the smallest skull. Had he claimed that it belonged to an infant chimpanzee, I would not have disagreed. “The Taung baby of South Africa was found and named in 1924 by the anatomist Raymond Dart, who recognized that she was neither human nor ape but something in between. My colleagues believe Australopithecus africanus flourished about
three million years ago. Three million. Shortly after Dr. Dart published his startling conclusions, the paleontologist Robert Broom burst into his laboratory and knelt before the Taung baby, ‘in adoration of our ancestor,’ as he put it.”
“An idolatrous response, by my lights.”
“The Holy Office would agree with you. But in Broom’s place I would have done the same.” Père Teilhard pointed to the second fossil, which to my untutored eye suggested the skull of an orang-utang. “Pithecanthropus erectus, the famous Java Man unearthed in 1891. Another missing link, at least a half-million years old, perhaps a million, manifestly much closer to our own species than to Australopithecus. These fossils all have voices, Bertram. Their oratorios resound in my soul. I hear cantatas of an evolving cosmos.”
“If a skull ever sang to me, I should begin to doubt my sanity.”
“I spent most of the decade following the Great War—”
“Great War?”
“We must not speak of it. I spent that decade as an exile, banished by Rome to the Jesuit school in Tientsin. But I had the last laugh, for I soon joined my fellow paleontologists in looking for fossil primates in the Choukoutien caves. Late in the winter of 1929 we came across this fellow”—Teilhard seized a skull evocative of Java Man—“Sinanthropus pekinensis, Peking Man, who roamed Asia perhaps thirty thousand years ago. I believe Sinanthropus and Pithecanthropus are different races of the same species, but that controversy won’t be settled soon.”
“I wish you could meet another Romish acquaintance of mine, Gregor Mendel, but he’s presently indisposed, residing in the Moravia of 1868. When he and I shared the pipe, he told me of his struggle to solve the riddle of heredity. Does your own era know of him?”
Père Teilhard’s smile rivaled that of his Sinanthropus skull. “No biologist would dispute that our modern understanding of genetics rests on Mendel’s work. Two months ago, after lecturing in Philadelphia at a symposium on early man, I was awarded Villanova University’s Gregor Mendel Medal.” The priest’s smile collapsed. “Of course, Mendel himself never received a Mendel Medal—or any such recognition. He died in obscurity, his great paper ignored until the turn of the century.”
“Your news saddens but does not surprise me. An aura of loss clung to the man.”
“Mendel’s breakthrough was so dramatic it prompted many scientists to declare that mutation is the essential engine of evolution,” said Père Teilhard. “Anti-Darwinists argued that profound alterations in germ cells could lead to correspondingly radical changes in a species’s genotype, though now we know that sweeping benevolent mutations are rare. Modern evolutionary theory is headed towards a synthesis of natural selection and Mendelian genetics, with the result that Darwin once again occupies the center of the biological universe.”
“When the monk and I last talked, he told me he’d given up on impressing his colleagues, but he did hope to hybridize a superior strain of hashish.”
“As far as I know, he never achieved that laudable goal.” Père Teilhard took a puff, then indicated the next fossil in line, not unlike the skull of a gorilla. “The sacred wheel turns, until at last a true man appears. In 1856 the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf yields a skull fragment from Homo neanderthalensis, who lived in Europe three hundred thousand years ago.” He pointed to the last skull and stared into its eye sockets. “The epic continues, bringing forth a mighty hunter, named for a Cro-Magnon or ‘great big’ cave in the Dordogne, where the first such skeletons were found. Some fifteen thousand years ago the Cro-Magnons painted astonishing images of bison, mammoths, and bears on the walls of their caves.” The priest pitched his voice to a poetic timbre. “Of course, the phenomenon of Man does not terminate in our own species. Le Tout remains in flux, and our descendants’ descendants’ descendants will know a quality of consciousness we cannot begin to imagine. Since first placing my hand on the brow of Peking Man I have understood that Homo sapiens is being pulled forward as if by a preternatural magnet, bound for a nexus outside time and space, an ineluctable Omega Point where now and forever God brazes the nodes of infinity to the axis of eternity!”
Spellbound, I said, “What an enthralling idea.”
“You think so? You aren’t simply appeasing my ego?”
“Never, Father. Flattery is a sin.”
“My dear Anglican, your praise is balm to my aching soul. This past year has been a tribulation. The newspaper accounts of my Philadelphia lectures were très stupides, a travesty from which thousands got the impression I believe humans emerged from modern monkeys. Monkeys! Sapristi! When I traveled to Boston College, I learned that I would not receive a Doctor Honoris Causa after all, thanks to the machinations of the city’s Darwin-hating archbishop. And then, once back in France, I was reprimanded by my provincial for allegedly calling too much attention to myself.” The priest inhaled a dose of Cannabis. “But now you have healed me, Bertram. Tomorrow I begin my return trip to Lyon, there to write my magnum opus. If I can explicate my philosophy with sufficient lucidity, the superior general will realize I’m more orthodox than he imagines.”
“A splendid plan, Père Teilhard—so splendid that it calls for more Cannabis. This time you must allow me, not the Rockefeller Foundation, to fund our euphoria.”
The following morning my friend packed up his skulls and left for France. After his magnum opus is published, he will again visit Constantinople and present me with a copy. I wish him luck. I have never before met anyone like this cosmically inclined curé. We don’t have mystics in the Church of England, do we, Father? More’s the pity.
Your admiring son,
Bertram
Antique skulls, future Omega Points, the eternal majesty of le Tout: this latest pigeon missive, thought Granville, was the most enthralling yet. No less compelling were Father Teilhard’s references to “the English scientist Charles Darwin,” almost certainly the same Darwin with whom Granville had once corresponded via carrier pigeon. Apparently the universe was as rife with coincidence as with ancient bones.
After placing his son’s fourth letter in the nightstand, Granville enjoyed an unexpected visitation from his Muse. “This latest vision of yours, this Nativity of Gregor Mendel, is sublime, and in time you will paint it,” the golden-haired Mireille informed him. “For your present project, however, you must illustrate Teilhardian philosophy.”
As his patron goddess hovered near the dovecote, Granville stared (and stared and stared) at the blank canvas, until at last the solution flashed through his brain. He freed his brush from the spiderweb, loaded the bristles with white pigment, and touched the tip to the canvas. And so it was that his third painting came into being, The Eye of God: a white dot on a white background—invisible to ordinary human perception but available to Granville, for whom the Omega Point had become as real as the wart on his thumb.
* * *
It was all most ironic. Having spent the morning dispatching snakes in a manner guaranteed to cause their slaughter, Chloe now renewed her preoccupation with the salvation of other reptiles: the Galápagos tortoises and iguanas. All during the airship journey from the fallen fortress to the Dominican mission, she wondered precisely what moves on her part might checkmate the Reverend Mr. Hallowborn. When no strategy came to mind, she set about helping Philippe Léourier and André Hervouet deflate the silk envelope and mend the bullet holes. But her heart remained with the jeopardized animals, whose dire situation she continued to ponder long after the balloon was healed and the moon had risen.
Her somber musings occurred in an incongruously joyful atmosphere, the carnaval de la victoria that the local aborigines, the ribeirinho militia, and the rescued rubber tappers were staging that night within the mission walls. At the core of the celebration a bonfire crackled and roared, throwing quivering shadows on the statue of Santo Domingo, Padre Valverde’s fighters swaying in joyous circles around the flames whilst inhaling draughts of epená and eating prodigal quantities of fish and caiman, the bellow of the burning logs counterpoi
nting the thunder of Bawuni drums, the squeal of Yamuna panpipes, and the wailing of Ucharu flutes. Chloe guessed that perhaps two-thirds of the fighters had joined the carnaval, the others having absented themselves either voluntarily (being in mourning for fallen friends and relations) or pursuant to a command: guard these prisoners, secure that coffin, dig this grave, go to the hospital and do as Dr. Ruanova tells you. Sadly but predictably, Padre Valverde was amongst those missing from the festivity, his malaria having grown so acute that on the physician’s orders he’d retired to a private sickroom.
It occurred to Chloe that the carnaval might be a trifle premature, as the final fate of the Huancabambas was not yet decided. The present plan called for Princess Akawo and Princess Ibanua to guide the liberated seringueiros through the mountains and thence home to the Rio Jequetepeque valley near Puerto Etén, an arduous but feasible exodus (assuming the fugitives encountered no federal troops authorized to shoot Indians on sight). At the same time Comandante Cuarón would march the Marañón valley tribes and the ribeirinho militia into the plantation settlements, freeing the workers and imprisoning the district governors, after which Prince Gitika would lead the remaining Huancabambas home to the sea. Presumably this campaign would be little more than a mop-up operation, accomplished with minimal fighting and light casualties, but Chloe could not but recall Antony’s most sardonic line in Siren of the Nile, “If you want to make the gods laugh, tell them your plan for winning a war.”
Sitting in a circle of epená aficionados, whilst amber sparks shot from the bonfire, and the faces of her English and French friends shone like the golden calf of the Israelite apostasy, she alternated her gaze between the frenzied dancers and the quiescent airship. The Jean-Baptiste Lamarck lay moored beside the church, the newly inflated envelope looming above the wicker carriage like a gigantic bola being cured on an immense spit. Contemplating the Man in the Moon emblem, she suddenly realized that her best hope for getting her fellowship to the sea consisted not in joining the princesses on their trek through the Andes passes (a journey certain to entail hunger, cold, exhaustion, and maddening delays) but rather in chartering the Lamarck.
