Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  Outside the restaurant, I gave her a hug. Her belly quivered. I was intrigued.

  The next day I drove down from Laurel Canyon, where I lived, and soon arrived outside a Spanish-style apartment building in Beverly Hills, south of Charleyville. The door to the building was open so I entered and soon located her apartment on the ground floor facing the street. The door to this was also open, but I rang the bell anyway.

  ‘Come on,’ I heard her call out, ‘I’m in the phone.’

  Her English was excellent, but often peppered with prepositional mistakes like these. ‘So, if you don’t like it, throw it by the window,’ she would say, or ‘Matthew, you’re driving me off the wall.’ She was very well read and loved books and language and sometimes her mistakes seemed to improve conventional words and phrases. When something moved her, she’d say, ‘I have a knot in my throat.’ ‘Bob’s my ankle’ and ‘I’m out of the hoop’ were common mistakes. When someone offended her, she stared at him ‘in appallment.’ Later, when I knew her better and suggested we do something she wasn’t too sure about, she said, ‘It sounds interesting as a fantasy, but in reality, I’m a little squirmish about that.’

  Then there were the Brazilian expressions. In a men’s clothes shop, she saw an old queen watching me. ‘Look at him,’ she whispered, ‘his teeth are getting bigger by the minute.’ Perhaps my favourite of her expressions is ‘Each monkey on his branch.’ If I wanted to go out drinking with Diogo when he was older, she might say, ‘Let him go with his friends, Matthew. Each monkey on his branch.’

  Three weeks after I came to visit, she and I drove north up the California coast to stay in a little hotel named Deetjun’s in Big Sur Inn. In spite of her whiteness, Denise had, like many Brazilian women, the high, round buttocks of an African.

  Two weeks later, she called me from Brazil where she had returned to shoot a film and told me she was pregnant.

  I was thirty-six and I’d been drinking a lot. I had recently written an entire script drunk, starting each day with a shot of Mexican brandy flushed into the gullet with beer. It was a money gig and I was trying to stir up some enthusiasm. Tears of self-pity and minor car accidents were stirred up too, and I was thinking I might not make forty let alone have a child, so I said, ‘Let me think about that.’

  AIDS was just taking hold, in Brazil as virulently as in America. Denise pointed out that we both knew people who had received death sentences as a consequence of sex and here were we, rewarded by life. And then she said, ‘A child born out of love cannot go wrong,’ and I was so touched by the simple faith of the statement that I said, ‘Okay, let’s have it.’

  This faith is the source of everything I love in her and everything about which we argue. Denise calls herself a Catholic, and yet believes in a woman’s right to choose, contraception, and homosexual rights. Our daughter’s Brazilian godmother is a lesbian. As well as being a Catholic, Denise believes—as casually and naturally as you or I believe in the weather forecast—in Candomble, the most African of all the Macumba sects. Brought over by slaves, Candomble has syncretistically combined with Catholicism to such an extent that the lucky African ribbons Denise wears around her wrists come from a church in Bahia where they’ve been blessed by a Catholic priest. Among many deities in the Candomble religion are Iemanja, the goddess—or saint—of the sea, to whom we throw offerings of flowers on New Year’s Eve; Oxala, the father of all saints; and Oxum, the goddess of fresh water, who is Denise’s saint. Everyone has at least two saints, determined by the high priests, or Pai de Santos, by throwing shells on the sand.

  In Brazil, no one is thought primitive, insane, or eccentric for believing in all this. One night I had dinner with the Head of Protocol for the President of Brazil. She spoke perfect English and French and had a degree in political science from a European university. The next night, walking on the beach, I saw her dancing around a fire, while a white robed priestess from Bahia sang incantations to the sound of twenty drums. Intellectuals, CEOs, politicians, doctors, any one of these will visit a Pai de Santo and make animal sacrifices to bring on good luck or ward off evil and then go to a Catholic church to light a candle. A friend of mine, who is one of the most powerful men in Brazilian TV, was told if he folded his money a certain way, it would ensure his continued prosperity. He folds it that way. Denise believes if she lights candles in front of photographs of my dead mama and her dead papa, it will stimulate them to work on our behalf and bring us good fortune. Superstitious faith is the sine qua non of Brazilian life at all levels.

  Denise’s faith is so powerful, not just in God(s), but in herself, that she is often incapable of a balanced view. She is a partisan, a warrior. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and when she is wholly right, which is nine times out of ten, she has no doubt that the other person is wholly wrong. She will then fight with a ferocity which I, in this respect very much an Englishman, find at once impressive and terrifying. I look at her in ‘appallment,’ which makes her even angrier.

  Both she and I were neglected, in our own ways—I because of my mother’s alcoholism, she because of her mother’s literal abandonment—and both of us have a compensatory devotion to our daughter which verges on the obsessive. Since Anna Bella was two years old, Denise has read to her every single night, usually for an hour, sometimes more. We take her with us wherever we can because she gives us so much pleasure, and lavish everything we can on her because she at least deserves it. We live in the best building in the best neighbourhood nearest to the best school, so that Anna can walk there every morning, accompanied, of course, by both her doting parents. She must go to all the right parties in clothes she can be proud of. She must have piano lessons and tennis lessons and go to camp each year. She must not feel deprived in any way.

  We live in a world of enormous wealth. Her friends are the sons and daughters of investment bankers and stockbrokers. As I often say to Denise, ‘We’re providing her with everything she needs to end up despising us.’ I earn what in almost any other section of society would be considered a fortune, and feel like a wretched pauper.

  Denise is an optimist. As much as she has faith in God and in herself, so she has faith in me. She is convinced that I will always do better each year, always be in demand, always pull down the necessary cash to finance our life. And herein lies a problem. I am a pessimist like my mother. Tomorrow I’ll fall and break my wrist, or the studios will realise I’m no good, and then what? I have no other skills.

  This is what cranks me up in bed at three in the morning, gasping with anxiety. In fact, Denise has been right so far, and I wrong. What a waste of energy, all this fear! But how long can it hold? What about tomorrow?

  My pathetic contribution is this: because I love my daughter with an absurd and passionate commitment, I work ceaselessly and endure a life I would not choose for myself. The great relief of having a child is that it gives you the certain knowledge that you have the courage to die. I would die for Anna Bella in a second. Perhaps I am dying for her already, but slowly, wringing my heart into submission so she can live on the Upper East Side and go to Harvard.

  If, as my dictionary states, being a liberal means being ‘favourable to progress and reform in political or religious affairs; favourable to concepts of maximum individual freedom … free from prejudice or bigotry; open-minded, tolerant,’ then I am certainly a liberal. But in the case of abortion, I wonder if it’s as simple as liberals would have it or if it only seems simple because those who argue against it do so with such illogical fanaticism, linking themselves not to pure reverence for life, an easy and honourable position to defend, but to a drearily literal interpretation of the entire Bible, which is, as everyone knows, full of vile instructions which no one in their right mind would obey. Out of intellectual good taste, one instinctively recoils and takes whatever position is as far from theirs as possible; but in truth, an element of what they say has virtue: abortion is more than just a minor surgical procedure. Contraception is different—one only has to whack off
into a handkerchief and look at the stuff to know one isn’t killing anyone—but when the sperm meets the egg a human life does begin, and deciding if it should continue or not is profoundly complicated and gets more so with every hour.

  If I think about my mysterious daughter, this creature who I saw drawn from Denise’s stomach looking rubbery and artificial and yet wholly miraculous, this baby who had a sense of humour even before she could focus her eyes, this child who dropped fearlessly off high walls into my arms, this willed, opinionated, exceptional girl, this beautiful young woman, this human I love beyond all things on earth; when I think of her and then think about abortion, which might have seemed the wiser choice given all the circumstances of her conception, a vacuum forms in my chest and something infinitely cold rushes in.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Menace of Darwinism

  I sleep well in my large, uneven bed, high in the corner of the hotel in Star City, and wake up refreshed, ready to plunge further down below the Bible Belt. The bus that will take me to Chattanooga, only fifty miles from my destination, does not leave until late morning, so I get up slowly and take my time showering and getting dressed. I enjoy the silence of the room and the sight of small-town America beyond the windows. Where I live in Manhattan, on the East River, there is a constant vibration, even at night, out of which other unpleasant noises struggle to emerge. Here, at the height of rush hour, individual sounds clang out like church bells on Sunday.

  After breakfast in the lobby, the hotel van-driver takes me to the Roanoke bus station. There’s a Bible on the floor between the seats so I ask him which brand of Christianity he favours. He tells me he attends a Pentecostal church where they speak in tongues and fall over backwards.

  As if offering incontrovertible proof of the existence of God he says, ‘I’ve seen people fall over benches and ev’thing, ain’t never seen one git hurt. It’s amazin’ I ain’t never done it myself but my mama would git to hollerin’ and shoutin’.’

  It requires so little proof on the one hand and so much on the other. People will inform you that Jesus was born of an angel-impregnated virgin and walked on water ‘because it’s in the Bible,’ but think nothing of telling you with a sniff of contempt that evolution is ‘just a theory, ain’t no proof.’ The inherent unfairness of this double standard is one of the things which attracts me to the Scopes Trial. The other is the characters who were involved. William Jennings Bryan, three-times Democratic Presidential Candidate, one-time Secretary of State, and at the end of his career, an evangelical fundamentalist, is one of them.

  Bryan began puffing around the South in the early Twenties trying to get laws on the books to prevent the teaching of evolution in the state schools. His initial intent had been to prevent the teaching of evolution as fact as opposed to theory and to balance it with the teaching of creationism. Soon, however, the crusade became more virulent and sought to banish the teaching of evolution completely. From my point of view, Bryan is the antagonist in the story of the Scopes Trial, but he is a tragic antagonist and an interesting one. He was not, at least in most areas of his life, the kind of bigoted conservative you’d expect to find behind a campaign such as this.

  Born in 1860, in Salem, Illinois, he was the son of Silas Bryan, a judge and gentleman farmer. Silas was a deacon of the Baptist church, opened court with prayer, and prayed three times a day. William worked on the farm when not in school and grew up strong and healthy. At the age of fourteen, he attended a revival held by the Cumberland Presbyterians and converted. He remained a Presbyterian until he died, although he was at ease in any church.

  When William graduated from Union Law School in Chicago, he married Mary Baird and returned to Jacksonville, where he practised law, without much success. He wanted to run for elected office as a Democrat, but Jacksonville was solidly Republican, so in 1887, he moved his family, now consisting of one child and two parents-in-law (Mary’s parents would live with them for the rest of their lives) to Lincoln, Nebraska. Here he got involved in the Democratic Party. Throughout school and college he had honed his speaking skills in various debating societies and now put them to use campaigning for various candidates.

  In his biography of Bryan, A Righteous Cause, Robert W. Cherny writes that Bryan came home one night, after a speaking engagement, woke Mary up and told her, ‘I have had a strange experience. Last night I found that I had power over the audience. I could move them as I chose. I have more than usual power as a speaker.’

  At that time, the farmers were suffering because of the way in which grain was bought and distributed. The grain buyers held one monopoly and the railroads held the other. This issue of the exploitation of the ‘producer,’ the working man, by the bankers, distributors, merchants, and lawyers was central to Bryan’s campaign when he ran for Congress in 1890. One of the other big issues of the time was Prohibition. In the First Congressional District, where Bryan was running, the electorate hated the idea. Bryan, a teetotaller all his life, who not only disapproved of alcohol socially but also considered it a sin, took a deep breath, spoke against Prohibition, and won.

  He entered Congress at the age of thirty in 1890. Mary, who, like Bryan, was at first considered ‘a hayseed,’ or country bumpkin, would help him write his speeches and then watch him from the gallery, giving him directions with a nod or a shake of her head. He became famous as an orator while fighting to overturn unfair Republican taxes on the dirt farmers of his adopted state. Without seeming to raise his voice, he could make himself heard to even the largest crowds. His speeches were beautifully written and delivered with passion. Before long he was known as ‘The Boy Orator of the Platte,’ then as ‘The Great Commoner.’

  His best speech—in my opinion, not his—was given at the Democratic National Convention in 1896 when he advocated changing a gold-based currency to a silver-based one, believing it would benefit the working man. I don’t understand the economic principles behind the speech and probably it was hogwash, but if so, hogwash was rarely more dazzling. Known as his ‘Cross of Gold’ speech, the most noted line of it is, ‘You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.’ His talent—to mix the language of progressive politics with that of old-time religion— was a great talent and in the early days he used it well. Listen to his defence of the working man in the ‘Cross of Gold’ as he talks to the gold delegates:

  ‘When you come before us and tell us that we are about to disturb your business interests, we reply that you have disturbed our business interests by your course.

  ‘We say to you that you have made the definition of a business man too limited in its application. The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer … the merchant at the crossroads store is as much a business man as the merchants of New York; the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day—who begins in the spring and toils all summer—and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth, is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain; the miners who go down a thousand feet into the earth, or climb two thousand feet upon the cliffs, and bring forth from their hiding places the precious metals to be poured into the channels of trade are as much business men as the few financial magnates who, in a back room, corner the money of the world.’

  At the age of thirty-six he was nominated Democratic Presidential Candidate. He got 47 per cent of the vote and won in more states than his opponent. Voter fraud, however, stole six states from him and he lost this election and then two more.

  In his thirty years in politics, he fought for minority rights, women’s suffrage, workmen’s compensation, the minimum wage, the eight-hour workday, and the expansion of education. The first presidential candidate to promote himself using movies with sound (in his 1908 campaign), he was incredibly popular and drew vast crowds wherever he went. He could be funny too. Once, when he was about to
give a speech in a rural area, he realised he was standing on the back of a manure spreader and remarked, ‘This is the first time I have ever spoken from a Republican platform.’

  But only those who have mainlined the powerful narcotic of applause can know its transcendently addictive and corrupting effect. To keep it flowing into the ego’s main vein, a great actor becomes a ham and an orator of conviction becomes a pompous windbag. Nor can one calculate the effects on an already religious man of the seemingly unjust defeats which Bryan suffered when he ran for President. And as battered wives and hostages will often feel gratitude to their persecutors for at least not killing them, so believers will suffer the most outrageous and undeserved bashings from God (including, in Bryan’s case, diabetes) and in some weird paradoxical way find in them increased evidence of His goodness.

  So, if you read Bryan’s speeches you see that as time goes by the political conviction and humane passion start to be subsumed by tedious religious dogma. He becomes a rampant Prohibitionist. The preacher overwhelms the reformer. Now what you get are the leaden, inane pronouncements of the typical Christian. In his 1904 speech, ‘The Prince of Peace,’ he tells us ‘The mind is greater than the body and the soul is greater than the mind,’ and ‘A belief in immortality not only consoles the individual, but it exerts a powerful influence on bringing peace between individuals.’ (How come I never heard of an atheist kamikaze pilot and how easy a sell would Jihad be without the promise of eternal life?) You get questions such as: ‘Can God Perform a Miracle?’ or ‘Is the Bible True?’ (yes to both, according to Bryan) and suddenly, and sickeningly, you’ve sunk to the level of the religious tract.