Darwin's Ghosts

by Ariel Dorfman

  I reluctantly agreed. At this rate, most of humanity could qualify. I imagined the possibility of myriad abstruse linkages, past and present, between my life and that of an unknown savage seized from Patagonia. And yet, once Cam had departed for Paris, I welcomed the work she had plied me with as a subtle way to ward off the desolate hours alone with my visitor, just him and me again.

  I whispered to him that I was looking for someone who had done grievous harm to him, his murderer or maybe just someone who had seen the crime. Yes, I was speaking to him once more, now that Camilla had crossed the ocean that he also had crossed a hundred years ago. Guide me, I said, let me see through your eyes for even one instant, the eyes that must have seen somebody who tormented you. Or maybe I should concentrate on seeing you from the outside, from the gaze of someone who ripped you from your island or your steppe or your hut, a vision that, alien to your culture, would be closer to my perspective. Where should I start, who sold you for a few pennies, who looked the other way, who would you not forgive?

  I didn’t need to tell him, of course, that I had reservations as to whether the gaggle of primary suspects I came up with would yield any real evidence once I sent their names to senior members on both parental sides of the family to see if they rang a remote bell. He was peering over my shoulder, knew about my doubts, as I waded through hundreds of books and articles I had partially digested and returned to now with—yes, a vengeance I guess is the right word.

  First off, I filled page after page with every likely culprit and their foulest crimes or sayings. Though who was to say that it was someone mentioned in those books, selected by history? Who were those three military men in the photo, their backs turned to the camera and Julius Popper as they crouched, aiming at unseen victims? Croats, one source suggested—escaping recruitment by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, impoverished, looking for a promising horizon at the tip of South America. Bandits, said another scholar. Rabble, most reports agreed. With so many Westerners flooding Patagonia, slayers of whales, discoverers of islets and passageways, transporters of smallpox, denigrators of those nomads of land and sea, miners for gold and shearers of sheep, how to discern if my ghost did not hold a grudge against one of them?

  I wrote my reservations to Camilla, who replied: “Concentrate on the most famous,” her message came scrawling down my screen just after she had written it on the other side of the ocean, and this abolition of distance made me feel paradoxically removed from her, how was it possible that her words could travel so instantaneously but not her body? “There’s a reason we know their names: due to the great evil—or, like Gusinde, the considerable good—that they perpetrated. The man we’re looking for will eventually find his way onto our list.”

  Two weeks later, I was able to report that the task had been exhaustively accomplished. Without help from my visitor, though I had kept pleading for his participation.

  And now that the list was complete, I again spoke to him:

  Have I left anyone significant off? I asked, and was greeted, as always, by his silence.

  I stared at those hundreds of names. I couldn’t very well send them all off to relatives whom I hadn’t written to in ages. The accused had to be placed into a hierarchy of guilt, the list pared down to the most egregious criminals.

  Violence, I decided. I’d kick off with those who had done bodily harm to my visitor or one of his family or tribe. Six villains, I thought, to start out with, send three names first and then another three and if my extended family responded with bafflement then I’d trickle down the list. Though I found my own decision soon undermined when I examined the naturalists and explorers and found there the disturbing name of Georg Forster.

  The twenty-one-year-old son (my age!) of a German naturalist, Georg had accompanied his father on the 1772–1775 voyage of Captain Cook around the world. Besides dubbing the Patagonians filthy, indolent, stupid, uncouth, degenerate, attacking “the whole assemblage of their features that formed the most loathsome picture of misery and wretchedness to which human nature can possibly be reduced,” this Forster fellow sneered at them for being insensible to the superiority of European civilization.

  I felt like thrashing this pedantic disparager, overcome with a wave of hatred that moved me uncomfortably close, I thought, to my visitor. What if this smug Georg was one of my forebears? What if a great-great-great-grandson of his had migrated to America and lost the r, becoming a Foster? What better revenge than to impose the features this Georg Forster had called so abhorrent on one of his remote offspring? Did we not have Teutonic blood in our veins?

  When I wrote my concerns to Cam, she dismissed them immediately. “Too easy, too ideological, too remote,” she typed back. “Go with violence, your initial instinct, Fitz.”

  Glad to have instructions to turn my back on the abominable Georg Forster, I obediently complied.

  The pyramid of infamy started, of course, with the inevitable Maurice Maître of whom I had already made inquiries, receiving the assurance that no one of that name—or of Belgian origin—had been a member of our family line, but I could always try and dig deeper. Occupying second place was our bête noire, Julius Popper, who had dared to bring along a photographer to commemorate his murders. Not even MacInch, my next choice, the fiercest stalker of the Selk’nam, had done that. Unaccompanied by a camera, he hunted them down for having thieved and eaten sheep, which they considered small and tasty guanacos, prodigiously provided by Nature for the sustenance of her sons and daughters. MacInch also merited a third place on the list due to his justification of the carnage: a favor, he said, to exterminate these miserable creatures rather than prolong a long, cruel, and painful death as captives in the mission. Just as terrible, though less loquacious, was the estanciero José Menéndez. One of his strategies was to find beached whales or dead sheep and lace their insides with strychnine, poisoning dozens of famished families that devoured the beasts thinking they were being invited to a feast rather than to a grave. But I shoved him down the list, as there was not even a hint of Spanish or Latin American ancestry in my family. Rumors of some Dutchman, however, had been floated by a second cousin on my mother’s side, so I reached back many centuries to Admiral Olivier van Noort who, in 1599, disembarked with his crew on Punta Catalina in order to kill penguins and ended up shooting several dozen Selk’nam, and capturing a woman, who was returned to her island after being raped, while the six youngsters kidnapped with her ended up dead. More than enough reasons to seek retribution.

  I added to this dubious company a certain Reverend Stirling, partly because I had a vague recollection that at some point there had been some sort of Anglican clergyman in my granddad’s family during the last century but also because I took a particular dislike to him—he had taken four Patagonians to England (two of them died on the return trip).

  The sixth man on my list?

  None other than Captain Cook. Though he had admired the ability of the Patagonian natives to survive in such adverse circumstances, he entered my hall of perfidy due to casual observations made about Tierra del Fuego, averring the abundance of whales and seals ready for slaughter and commercialization. Those innocent words, when published after his circumnavigation, led throngs of hunters to descend upon the southernmost reach of the hemisphere, depleting the sea of most of its native fauna. While the lamps of Europe and the East Coast of the United States were afire with oil from blubber and the ladies of those lands wrapped themselves in the pelts of sea lions, while the stores filled with soap, paint, medicine, and fertilizers, the Onas began to starve and waste away. Faraway streets and homes were lit, leather polished, grease smeared on steam engines, all squeezed from dead whales. Guess what the cetacean bones, I asked Cam, were used for? Corsets and skirts and buggy whips, tennis rackets and hairbrushes. Modernity was the invisible culprit behind extinction.

  “Could you be overreaching, my dear?” Cam inquired from Paris—she who had urged me to put Darwin on the list. “I mean, maybe you’re casting the net—exc
use the metaphor—a bit too wide. There won’t be anyone alive in our countries who didn’t benefit from the wholesale killing of every Moby Dick, sea lion, or guanaco to be found. Everyone will end up guilty.”

  I responded that maybe the ultimate point of so much reading and finger-pointing might be to signal to my visitor that we recognized that it was not only a matter of one man kidnapping eleven, or one stalker killing a hundred, or one clergyman inadvertently opening the door to a raging epidemic, that something more systemic and horrible was afoot. Besides, who was to say that our ghost did not have a sense of humor and would find it appropriate to bring Captain Cook into the equation, even if not directly responsible for the impact of his words on the imagination of the fisheries of Nantucket or the designs of the British admiralty or the owners of French schooners. Was I directly responsible for a Belgian felon abducting a young man from his native tundra? Cook had unleashed this onslaught and his descendants would have to face the consequences, the Flecks and Davisons and Ducks and Carters and Scotts and so many more—oh, his DNA (he had eight children) was rampant everywhere.

  “All right, send Cook’s name out along with the others, though who knows what your relatives will think.”

  I had been meaning to write to the family for some time. My two grandmothers, my surviving grandfather, several aunts, the ubiquitous Uncle Carl and other assorted members of my tribe had not even been notified of my tiny wedding, and that event—now almost two months ago—seemed like a good enough excuse. Responses dribbled in: congratulations on my marriage, while informing me tartly that they were unsurprised that I hadn’t thought to invite them given my weirdness over the last decade. And not a word regarding my genealogical queries. What they wanted to know was when they would get to kiss the bride, what on earth was she doing in Europe so soon after our hermit-like honeymoon? Was she in Paris to have a good time, all by herself ?

  Yes, in fact, she was having a swell time. For almost a year now she had been shackled—like a Bengal tiger, I thought ruefully—to me and the visitor I harbored, inhibiting other aspects of her life and postponing the core of her own biochemical research. A prolonged vacation, a hiatus without atrocities and naked corpses and a recalcitrant face in a photo, would be good for her.

  And for me.

  It reminded me what life could be like if we confounded my apparition and sent him back to the other side of reality. In her emails and phone calls and even occasional faxes, she enthused about the cafés and the free streets of Paris. I did not envy her that stroll through Montmartre or the sandwich au jambon she munched in the gardens of the Rodin Museum, “so many places, Fitz, that I’m enjoying because I can now imagine how they’ll look when you’re at liberty to join me.” How to reproach anyone who said: “I feel like a navigator mapping out a territory so her beloved can safely sail here one day. You’re with me, my dear, every moment. I’m feeding my eyes and tongue and ears, I’m smelling the fresh aroma of baguettes in the morning for you and wolfing down rich, dense, stewy boeuf bourguignon in the evenings, for you, for you, so you can feast on my senses when I get back, drench yourself with my memories.”

  So I let her live with ferocious delight, enjoy the life she had sacrificed during the last year for me, for me.

  And yet, despite these altruistic sentiments, I must admit that I welcomed the news that she would soon be on her way to Bonn, was impatient until she had fixed the date—a few days, she said, before my twenty-second birthday, promising some astonishing revelation.

  She called me at noon, that September 11, 1989—six in the afternoon German time.

  “Are you ready for your birthday present?” she asked, all bubbly. That stir of excitement in her voice. She’s found him, she knows who the hell he is, she was right, she was right! “Are you?”

  “Yes,” I answered cautiously. “I’m ready if you are.”

  “Do you want me to tell you what I discovered first and then how I discovered it or would you rather—?”

  “Cam, my God, just tell me.”

  We had been wrong, she had been wrong, that damn André, the damn son of the damn owner of the damn bookshop, had been wrong regarding the hostages of 1889. Oh, they had existed, Maître had stolen them, only four had survived, all that was true.

  And here Camilla paused, I could almost hear her swallowing saliva, lubricating the inside of her lovely throat. “But your visitor is not among them.”

  “How do you know?”

  In Gusinde’s archive in Bonn she had found a photo of Maître and nine of his Onas. Maître stood to one side, dressed in typical European garb of the late 1880s, bearded like Popper had been, holding a stick or a whip or a pointer in his hand, a white terrier at his feet. To his right were arrayed his captives. “The Anthropos Institute people allowed me to photocopy it, I’ll send it by fax once we’re done talking, Fitz. But you’ll see that none of them looks at all like our visitor. Four women, four children ages one through twelve, and one hunched, older man at the extreme left. Dressed up in furs, staring out at the camera. Snapped in Paris, the caption says, by an unknown photographer. Gusinde notes, separately, that two of the Selk’nam died on the voyage to Europe. So it can’t be him, Fitz. Your visitor’s a Kaweshkar, called Alakaluf by Gusinde.”

  “How do you know? How can you be sure?”

  Disconcerted by the absence of my intruder’s face among the Indians exhibited by Maître, she had kept poking around in Gusinde’s papers and, with the assistance of a friendly archivist, had rifled through a number of magazine and newspaper cuttings, finally detecting a copy of Le Journal Illustré. “And he was there, Fitzroy. In an engraving by a C. Nielsen—”

  “Wait a minute. Not a photo? Why an engraving?”

  “They hadn’t created the technique yet to print photos in newspapers, so when they wanted to illustrate a story in a broadsheet or magazine they did it with drawings and woodcuts, what they called gravures. So this Nielsen fellow depicted the group. Eleven of them, just as for the 1889 exhibit, that must have been what set pompous André off on the wrong trail. These eleven only have three infants among them, and four women, their breasts sagging, and two older men and two younger ones, and one of the younger ones, it’s him, Fitz! He’s standing just above some of his fellows who are squatting next to a fire, in exactly the same pose as in the photo, holding a sort of spear or stick. Behind him to one side, in the very middle of the picture, an older man crouches in a canoe, while some other Kaweshkar are huddled inside a sort of primitive hut, except for yet another older man, erect next to it, and behind them you can manage to perceive, separated from the nomads by a fence and a moat, several barely distinguishable Parisians, with top hats and cravats. And some children onlookers as well. As if visiting a zoo, and that’s what they called the exhibitions, zoos humains, human zoos—this was a famous one, the archivist told me, in the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne. That’s why, in the drawing, there’s a bird strutting around the compound, as well as other animals, certainly happier than the natives, all of them miserable, half naked, their backs to the spectators but not to this Nielsen who captured them on paper and then had the image published in this Le Journal Illustré. We’ve found him, Fitz.”

  “But not in 1889?” I asked dully, unable yet to register such a brutal shift in the direction of our research. A whole year chasing down the wrong crime, the wrong criminal, the wrong date!

  “You’ll never believe the date that this magazine was published, my dear. Go ahead, try.”

  I thought for a moment. She wouldn’t be asking this if it were not something that made some sort of maddening rational sense, that would resonate especially with me.

  “September eleventh,” I said. “My birthday.”

  “What year, Fitzroy Foster? What year?”

  It had to be, it could not be any other, it was undoubtedly . . . “Eighteen eighty-one,” I said.

  “Eighteen eighty-one,” Camilla repeated and now her voice was almost singing over the
phone, the wire seemed to be burning with her fervor. “One hundred years exactly before he comes to you. I’m sure that the day it was published, that very day someone also must have snapped the photo of him.”

  I didn’t tell her that it couldn’t have been the exact day. The photo must have been taken several days before the Journal was printed in order to give time for a gravure to be made from it. But she was so exultant and I was so excited and there were more urgent questions to ask.

  “So what’s his name? And who took the picture in the carte postale?”

  I tried to imagine the scene. Someone speaking to my visitor, ordering him to stand, to grimace, to turn, to frown, to sit.

  “Who took the picture? That’s what we’re going to find out. The past does not die that easily.”

  Her first discovery, once she had returned to Paris from Bonn, was spectacular.

  Again, she could not contain herself, calling me over the phone.

  “We found him!” The first phrase, without even saying hello. “It took me a while but I tracked down another magazine, La Nature, from November 1881, something written by Paul Juillerat. It’s a journal specializing in the sciences and their application to the arts and industry. Juillerat was at the Jardin, he visited them, he has tons of specifics, I’ll translate the article for you and send along by email, but here’s what matters: we found the bastard!”

  “Juillerat?” I managed to stutter.

  “No, he’s just reporting his observations—well, yes, a bastard, like so many of them, but not the culprit, not who’s to blame. He’s—but listen, these Alakaluf or Kaweshkar, though Juillerat calls them Fuégiens, inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, people of fire, that’s what he—first there’s a long historical recounting of their discovery and customs and then this Juillerat guy recounts how his savages were captured. Eleven of them, four women, four men, three children, just as in Nielsen’s engraving. They were brought to Europe by a hunter of sea lions, Johann Wilhelm Wahlen, who enticed them on board his ship, gorging them with food and treating them with prudence, that’s the word Juillerat uses. When the boat docked in Le Havre, a man named Saint-Hilaire was waiting for them, and took them to the Bois de Boulogne. Juillerat finishes his report by stating that ‘Only the future will tell if those who find themselves right now at the Jardin d’Acclimatation will extract any profit from their stay among us. Our opinion is that they will be enchanted to find themselves back home and that the memory of whatever they have seen’—listen to this, Fitz, listen to this—‘will remain in their spirit like a dream’—like a dream, Fitzroy—‘that was perhaps not completely pleasant.’”