by Chris Eaton
After the shoots, and away from the pressure of competing with the host, he would be sociable again, and even fun, and they would hit the local establishments and he would apologize for his behaviour and buy a round or two to make up for it. He was funny and charming; well-travelled; and he told good stories, often related to the area in which they were shooting, like the story of Johann Beringer, which he told often, for whatever reason.
***
Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer had also taken many trips. At the time of his death he was perhaps one of the most travelled men on the planet. Born in 1667 in the town of Würzburg, Bavaria, Beringer showed a natural early interest in geography. His father, also Johann Beringer, was an apprentice cartographer under the Dutch master Sorric van de Haat with the VOC (or, Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), who had recently managed to establish a base camp at the Cape of Good Hope in order to facilitate their expanding spice trade, and while Beringer the Younger was much, much too young to come on any of those voyages, his father promised to take him to Egypt as a cabin boy when he was thirteen, and brought him maps from the various places he’d explored, including: Morocco; Madagascar; the African kingdoms of Kongo, Mutapa, Baguirmi and Lunda; an entire atlas of the continent that he received on his twelfth birthday; and several maps that the elder Beringer had merely invented for his son’s amusement, such as a map of the routes to Atlantis, and his map of Heaven (Accurata Coelum Tabula; 1674), with directions from its candied Pearly Gates through several layers of ecstasy and bliss, including a peppermint stick forest and molasses swamp.
Because of this playfulness, as well as Beringer’s penchant for both artistic ornamentation (maps that resembled crouching tigers, or mermaid tails, or that were meant to be more of riddles than any sort of accurate topological renderings) and horrible mistakes of judgment (his larger Mappe of Afrika famously connected The Nile and the Congo at the same source), Beringer’s lifework became something of a celebrated oddity, particularly within the literary crowd. He probably would have sunk completely into obscurity were it not for Jules Verne and The Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Prussia’s Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, had made a deal with Louis Napoleon III to stay out of the “familial” conflict, and once Bavaria was safely under Prussian influence, Bismarck made a gift of Beringer’s puzzle maps to the riddle-raptured Frenchman. Louis Nap was so taken with them that he often displayed them at functions, inviting his guests to try their hand at Tabula Incontinens, which sometimes appeared to contain fifty-seven countries and other times sixty-one, or the Isla Nubilar, which upside-down looked like a beautiful young woman. Verne, who had become a fairly major celebrity as a result of his serialized work and could often be found holding court at Versailles, became particularly obsessed. Working from copies he scribbled when no one was looking, Verne first incorporated a Beringer map into Ton Chariot Sphere, his 1870 novel that experimented with second-person point of view about a fantastic orbital time machine that travels back to the earliest seconds of the universe, which was part of his Extraordinary Voyages series. When he published L’Île Mystérieuse five years later, Verne was similarly unapologetic about its resemblance to Beringer’s Madagascar as a prowling octopus. He even shared some of his reproductions with Robert Louis Stevenson, who saw Beringer’s Kukuanaland on a visit to Verne’s summer home in Nice and began work immediately on what would become Treasure Island (1883).
In his final years, after an attempt on his life, Verne became less interested in fiction, seeking out as many Beringer originals as possible. He’d already snatched up Napoleon’s collection after the emperor’s deportation, and so his next step was to approach the VOC, where he spent months poring through the company’s archives. Miraculously to him, Verne uncovered several dozen pieces that had gone straight to the vaults, so lacking in accuracy that they were apparently nearly destroyed, and convinced the current librarian to let him add them to the show he was planning to curate for the 1900 World Expo in Paris. The show was a bomb, failing to attract any more people than the unfinished Métro, but Verne remained undaunted, and spent the last five years of his life financing tours of the maps around Europe, even bequeathing a considerable amount of his fortune to their preservation and continued showings after his death. This is how, in Berlin in 1918, the young Austrian Raoul Hausmann attended the opening of the Beringer display at Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm gallery (he was renting the apartment directly above it). Hausmann was so enthralled he began producing poetic maps of his own, built entirely of manipulated typography, in the studio of his friend Erich Heckel. Along with Heckel and his mistress Hannah Höch, Hausmann launched the failed Kartist movement before joining the Berlin Dadaists, presenting one of his maps at the inaugural Berlin Club Dada. It was criticized roughly by the visiting Huelsenbeck – and even Höch – as too pretty, and eventually these morphed into his “phonemes,” or poster poems, including enscatohri (1920), which Kurt Schwitters claimed was a direct influence on his seminal Ursonate (1922–32). Jorge Luis Borges, having spent all of his teenage years in Europe, tried several times to arrange a showing of Beringer’s maps in Buenos Aires, but was unable because of the country’s various fascist governments, towards which the largely Jewish Dadaists had always been opposed. Nevertheless, Borges wrote a piece called “Beringer’s Library,” included in The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), which amounted to an exhaustive list of his most outlandish pieces, real and imagined, most of which are actually the titles of poems by Borges’s childhood friend, Sancho Rieta. In the 70s, after his country’s civil war, the prized Nigerian author Thrinropo Sachete used Beringer’s faulty African Congo/Nile map as the basis for his parable of corruption and AIDS in Western Africa, in which the entire region becomes separated from the rest of the continent, drifts into the Atlantic, and the rest of the continent rejoices. And most recently there is Artonio Phere’s Chatvard (2007), where Italy’s controversial enfant terrible uses maps of Beringer’s home country in a novel about a futuristic totalitarian state where political correctness and fear of allergies is taken to its next logical step, building on the banning of smoking, peanuts and perfumes to include soap and even pets, until the simple act of bathing or owning a cat is punishable by death, and “a group of morons,” as he puts it, “sets off to find a place where all morons and their crutches can live in peace.”
Even before all of this, the younger Beringer viewed his father like a god, and wanted nothing more than to grow up like him, mated to the high seas. On the nights when he happened to be home in Würzburg, which were often six months apart, Beringer Senior would quiz his son on the nations of Africa, including the names of various gulfs, capes and inlets, the largest sources of coal and salt, where to avoid mermaids, and the best places to catch dragons. But on the eve of his thirteenth birthday, news arrived of a storm off the coast of Senegambia. The representative from the VOC said his father’s ship had struck a reef and everyone was lost. But young Beringer knew from his maps that the more probable cause was that they’d sailed too close to the valley of the giant squid.
***
Without her husband’s financial support (the VOC initially provided her with a meagre pension, but after the first several years, the packages stopped arriving and she had no way with which to reach them for clarification or appeal), Beringer’s mother did her best to raise the boy on her own, cleaning homes for some of the professors at the town’s university. When he was old enough, Beringer attended the school, on a scholarship provided by one of those professors who had taken note of the particular skills possessed by both son and mother, and before long Beringer had a new mentor and a new father. It was also at the university that he met Rio Schaaten, an American of all things, if it was suitable to call anyone an American yet, whose father had made a fortune as a coffee and cotton merchant in the prosperous, Atlantic Triangle between Europe, Africa and the New World. After eighteen years of doing all of his business with her at his side, Emil Schaaten had brought his daughter to Würzburg to nurture h
er artistic side under Richter Söph, one of the masters of the Wessobrunner School of stucco work that would dominate European ornamentation for the next hundred years or so. And Rio, who had spent so much of her youth travelling the world, wherever her father happened to be posted at the time, had never had a chance to make real friends in Philadelphia, or Amsterdam, or Frankfurt, so the attention of a naïve Bavarian with a view of the world so rural and unsophisticated enabled her to quickly develop – towards Beringer, of all people – feelings akin to affection.
Needless to say, Beringer was instantly smitten. Rio had already seen so much of the world, Beringer felt like a child in her presence: ascending the pyramids, dining with cannibals, even dancing with France’s latest President. Even if she hadn’t also been spectacularly beautiful, the subject of paintings by everyone from Murillo, when she was just a young child, to a portrait at seventeen by Rathniesco that had been condemned by the Church as bordering on pornographic, she still would have embodied all that he wanted in the world. Even her name was exotic, christened after a river in the Americas, though it was uncertain which one because either she or her father preferred to keep it a mystery. Beringer preferred to think of it as the Rio de la Plata, which was the deepest; or sometimes he fancied it as the Rio Atrato, because it was the most fiercely determined; either way, it was wonderful to think about.
Naturally, part of the appeal for Beringer was also her father’s occupation and financial status. On the first of two occasions that Schaaten returned to Würzburg to visit his daughter in that four-year period, Beringer cornered the trader with questions about trade winds, nautical customs and kraken. Schaaten, who was hoping to hitch his daughter to a Bavarian prince but was beginning to think Beringer was the best opportunity he was likely to get, and having consumed too much alcohol, let it slip that Beringer should accompany him on a future expedition. On the second trip, Schaaten was barely off the train before Beringer was asking for Rio’s hand in marriage, already dreaming of the three of them on the high seas.
The wedding, Rio insisted, should be in Würzburg. She’d finally made some friends, she claimed, and it was more important to her than anything else that they all be in attendance. No matter, Beringer thought. He’d been hoping to marry in some place more exotic, surrounded by naked children and topless tribeswomen, but he could wait until the honeymoon. And certainly Schaaten would provide them with a handsome gift with which to see the world. Rio’s best friend was Amalia Pachelbel, daughter of the German composer, and she whisked Rio off to her home in Nuremberg to get ready, pampering her with every spa treatment imaginable and leaving Beringer to complete the final preparations on his own.
The day of the wedding was perfect. The sun broke spectacularly over Mt. Eibelstadt. Rio was rested and beautiful in a long, green gown, her hair up in a chaste, white headdress. Nothing could ruin things for Beringer at this point, so close to the ocean now – at least in his mind – that he could taste the salt on the air. The service was held in the university’s chapel, with the reception near their home in the country. Emil Schaaten brought cherries from Spain and oranges from Southeast Asia, but they also received many other gifts, including a lovely gilt mirror from the university depicting scenes from the Passion of Christ, a chandelier, a tiny statue of Saint Margaret for fertility (from Beringer’s mother), a small dog, and a pair of nondescript clogs from Amalia, in which she proposed Rio might try her hand at gardening. Amalia’s father composed a song for the occasion. Amalia, fittingly, caught the bouquet.
What happened next would never be clear to Beringer. One moment everything was perfect, and then his world was being pulled out from beneath him again, Amalia consoling Rio as her father stormed from the tent, claiming to have disowned her. Beringer ran after him. But Schaaten was tight-lipped, saying he should ask his wife. Then he laughed. Rio would likewise disclose nothing, and when Beringer pleaded for her to patch things up (Did she understand how little he made?!), she said, What need do we have for money? Don’t we have a home? Don’t we have love? And what could he say to that? As Schaaten’s carriage lurched out of town towards Amsterdam, Beringer was forced to acknowledge that he was stuck in Würzburg forever.
Had he not discovered the fossils near Mt. Eibelstadt, it’s likely that his life would have remained entirely meaningless.
***
A short time later, Amalia moved into the shed behind their home. The composer’s daughter had come to Würzburg to study watercolours, but had then discovered the genre paintings of the Dutch masters and, swept away by the Baroque fascination with the mundane, she began experimenting with media that were progressively more “of the people,” eventually settling on knitting. She was not particularly adept, and proceeded at an astonishingly slow pace, working on the same pair of socks for what seemed to Beringer as an eternity and a day. But her book of patterns was the first of its kind, and while far from a commercial success – knitting had yet to catch on with the upper class, and the farmers’ wives were far from needing patterns – it did begin to gain her the recognition she was seeking. Besides, her new philosophy also meant a complete rejection of all financial luxuries, living like a peasant by squatting on Beringer’s land and joining them for meals. Whenever Beringer brought it up, she scoffed about his ego.
As Beringer’s need to travel increased, things between him and his wife grew steadily worse. If she got a job, he said, they might be able to scrape enough together to take a proper honeymoon. But shortly after Amalia’s arrival, Rio decided she was going to be a poet. Travel? Travelling was for the dull and crass. Travelling was like daydreaming for people without imagination. All Rio needed was right here, to be close to the land and the beasts of the land, and the German peasantry who knew more about what it was like to be alive, and to know who they were, than just about anyone. She liked to sit in the shade beneath a blossoming fig tree and watch them toil in the dirt, the sweat from their brows feeding the seeds of truth beneath them. The fact that none of them would be able to read her work made it even more real for her.
She also didn’t take to his suggestion she might tidy up the house now and then, accusing him of belittling her new job, and he was forced to use more of his meagre stipend to hire a maid. This meant Beringer had to give up his office in town and both of them had to work from home (three if you counted Amalia), which seemed to put an even greater strain on their relationship.
It also meant that he was home the day the young child showed up on his doorstep with the “formed stone.”
The idea of fossils had fascinated Beringer for some time, and he’d bored Rio and Amalia almost nightly with his talk of the mastodon bone they’d uncovered in Argyll, Scotland, fetched from the muck of a sheep farm by a Shetland Collie; or in Jemeppe-sur-Meuse, near Liege in Belgium, where a man operating one of the first steam engines fell down a well to find himself in the belly of a monster, like Jonah or Pinocchio, encased in a magnificent ribcage. The world is changing, he said through a mouthful of potatoes. We are changing. And Rio just yawned, while Amalia may have looked up from her socks. The truth doesn’t change, one of them said.
But what was the truth? The most common belief was that the bones represented tribes of giant men, Goliaths, like the one slain by David. The local priests displayed them to their congregations as battle trophies, the scars of a world brought low by evil and mended by the steady hand of God. And the townsfolk ate it up. But children still slept uneasily, their untainted imaginations allowing room for things like monsters. And Beringer slept like a baby, dreaming of his father’s dragons.
Needless to say, Beringer had never dreamed of finding any fossils here. He demanded to know where the boy had found it, ordered the child to take him there immediately. And by the end of the afternoon, the two of them had uncovered three more prime specimens: one with an image of the sun and two others with what appeared to be winged worms. The next Monday, he went back to the beach and discovered another five stones. On Tuesday, another three. And by Fri
day he was actually becoming quite good at it. He couldn’t believe his luck. Sometimes they weren’t even partially submerged in dirt, these things, these formed stones. They were just lying there, on a rock, on the bleached branch of a dying tree, or on top of another formed stone, not even trying. It was astounding no one had ever discovered them before. He spent weeks at it, months, more than a year. There was rarely a day when he didn’t return home, exhausted at the end of a hard day’s work, with at least a half-dozen more in hand, to find Rio and Amalia doing nothing as usual, and the result was Lithographiae Wirceburgensis (1726), the most comprehensive text on fossils to that date, with paleontological theories – although the word paleontology did not yet exist – that would lead to the extinction theories and comparative anatomy work of Georges Cuvier, but also, unlike most fossil work of the period, eschewed debates about religion in favour of mythology. Here was the proof, he said, of dragons, not to mention centaurs, and gryphons, and mermaids, and even an eye of the beholder. And Beringer’s populist approach meant that it became the best-selling book on such things until Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species over a hundred years later. It was his masterpiece. He was an instant celebrity, selling enough copies to buy another home, keep the maid on full time and allow Rio and Amalia to live in increasing states of leisure. He was also invited to speak as far afield as Oxford. But he refused. There were still so many stones to study, so much truth to uncover. And he immediately began working on the sequel, so good at locating them now that he barely had to look, transforming the entire world, or at least the way people saw it, from the little town of Würzburg.
Don’t you worry about God?, Amalia said to him one evening as he was making them dinner. Aren’t you concerned that God will punish you for ratting him out? And when he replied with logic, she just laughed and glanced knowingly at Rio.
