by Mark Mills
No, it was an absurd notion. He was drawing wild conclusions based on a couple of exchanges with an unkempt Italian communist he'd met in a bar.
He reached for his cigarettes and lit one. As he did so, he caught sight of Maurizio strolling down the path toward him.
Adam got to his feet as nonchalantly as he could. "Hi."
"Hello."
Maurizio looked up at the statue of Flora, then down, past the grotto to the Temple of Echo nestling among the trees at the bottom of the pasture.
"I haven't been here for a long time."
"You don't like it?"
Maurizio appeared intrigued by the question. "I haven't thought about it. But no, I don't think I do. I find it a bit. . . sombro."
"Somber."
"Yes."
"Death is, I suppose."
"I suppose," parroted Maurizio. "We came here a lot when we were children. This was our world." He glanced down at the trough sunk into the ground at the foot of the amphitheater. "The water was cold, even in the summer. Very cold." He looked up, smiling. "One minute and eighteen seconds—Emilio's record, for holding his breath. I was never close. Not even a minute."
The idea of Emilio prostrate in the narrow trough gave rise to another image, dark and unsettling: of Emilio stretched out in his coffin beneath the flagstone floor of the chapel. Adam shook off the fleeting thought.
"And your sister?" he asked, unable to recall the name of Antonella's mother.
"Caterina? Oh, she held the watch."
"What is she like?"
Maurizio gave a thin smile. "Difficult. You will meet her at the party."
"She's coming?"
"It is the only time she comes—for the party." He paused. "You will still be here, I hope."
"Yes. I mean, if that's okay."
"Of course it is. You must be there . . . after everything you've done for my mother."
It was a weighted compliment, and for a moment it seemed Maurizio was about to steer the conversation this way. He didn't, though; he asked if Adam would accompany him on a quick tour of the garden.
They had just passed through the glade of Hyacinth when Maurizio said, "Can I ask you to do something for me? A favor."
"Of course."
"It's about my mother. You have had a very good effect on her."
"I doubt that."
"It's true. She says so herself. Anyway, it shows. We can all see it." He paused. "But something worries me, something Maria has told me. She takes pills for the pain. Not Maria, my mother, I mean . . . although I'm sure there are times when Maria could use them too."
Adam smiled politely at the joke.
"Recently she has taken a lot. The doctor was here yesterday. Twice. He came back with more pills. Maria found them. She thinks they are even stronger than before."
His gaze lingered meaningfully on Adam.
"I'm not sure I understand."
"My mother is a proud woman. She has always pushed herself. Maybe she is pushing herself too much. Maybe even to impress you."
"Me?"
"It's possible. Her new companion . . ."
His tone was tinged with mockery, and it rankled.
"What's the favor?" Adam asked, just shy of unfriendly.
"That you keep an eye on her. That you don't encourage her . . . to push herself too much."
"Of course."
"She is still weak."
"I understand."
They were able to put this moment of mild antagonism behind them for the remainder of the circuit. Adam even laughed when Maurizio described how his sister had once dressed the statue of Venus in one of their mother's old party gowns.
Returning to the foot of the amphitheater, Adam recovered his copy of The Divine Comedy from the bench.
"A masterpiece," observed Maurizio.
"Absolutely."
"Where have you got to?"
"The ninth circle of Hell."
Maurizio searched his memory. "The ninth circle . . . ?"
"Caina. Those who've committed crimes against their own flesh and blood. Dante named it after Cain, who killed his brother, Abel."
Later that night, lying in the big old bed, staring into the darkness, he tried to make sense of his reply to Maurizio's innocent inquiry.
The words had issued from his mouth, and in that respect they had been his. But even now he felt no ownership of them, no responsibility for them. He had not intended to speak them. They had tumbled from his lips unbidden. This might have been less troubling if there had been more truth to them.
He had, in fact, progressed well beyond the ninth circle of Hell—with its icy lake and its host of sinners frozen up to their necks—and on into Purgatory.
The most worrying thing, though, was the change his words had wrought in Maurizio. The mention of Cain and Abel had, for the briefest of moments, cast his features in stone and turned his eyes cold and crystal-hard.
HE WOKE LATE AFTER A FITFUL NIGHT'S SLEEP. THE NEW day brought a new clarity with it. He had allowed his mind to run away with him; he had imagined things that weren't there—or, at the very least, misinterpreted those that were. This realization gave him comfort, and he forced himself to think only of things that wouldn't jeopardize that.
His resolve faltered somewhat when he headed downstairs to the study. He couldn't be sure, but he had the distinct impression that someone had been through his papers on the desk. There was something not quite right about the topography of the various piles. Some sat too close together, others were too neatly ordered. The first thing he did was delve through them and pull out all of his scribblings relating to Emilio's death. These he burned in the grate.
He made his way to the cavernous, brick-vaulted kitchen in the south wing, Maria's spotless domain. She was nowhere to be found, although the air was thick with the caustic odor of bleach liberally and recently applied. It was Sunday; maybe she was at church.
The room gave little away about its tenant aside from a whisper of brisk and efficient orderliness. The surfaces were clear, the fresh fruit and vegetables neatly piled in their terra-cotta bowls, the copper pans back on the long shelf, arranged from left to right in ascending order of size. There was certainly no visible record of the small feast Maria had prepared for him and Signora Docci the evening before.
The dinner had been a subdued affair at first. Visibly depleted by her foray into Florence, Signora Docci had nevertheless reported the trip in some detail, describing a visit she had paid to an old friend—"Her husband is a homosexual, but after all these years she still cannot see it." She went on to list the numerous purchases she had made, everything from a fennel-flavored salami to an antique ebony walking stick, which she had handed to him across the candlelight of their table on the back terrace.
It had a whalebone pommel in the form of a human skull. Adam stared at the pale, carved death's-head.
"It's appropriate," said Signora Docci. "I shall be clutching it until the end. I don't mind being reminded of that fact."
Fearful that he was being drawn out of his conversational depth, Adam headed for shore. He asked her about the skulls in the study, the ones high up in the cabinet behind the desk—orangutan skulls, if he had understood Maria correctly.
"My father was a naturalist, a botanist. This was before he became an archaeologist. He was many other things too. He was a . . . disoriented man, I can see that now. At the time it was, well, exciting."
They were indeed orangutan skulls, keepsakes from a trip the family had made to the Dutch East Indies in the last century.
Signora Docci said she couldn't remember if her mother had put up a fight when her father first proposed that the whole family travel with him. In fact, there was much she couldn't recall about that period in her life, being only six years old in 1884, the year they steamed out of Livorno.
"Your Mr. Darwin was to blame, with his theories of evolution and natural selection. My father was a scientist, but he was also a religious man, a strict Catholic; it wa
s not easy for him to accept the new ideas. He fought them for twenty years with words, then he went in search of the evidence his arguments lacked. That's why he dragged us halfway around the world."
Her memories of the East might have been patchy, but they were somehow no less vivid for it. She could recall the grandeur of her parents' stateroom on the boat over. She remembered the latitude starting to tell on familiar constellations, the Great Bear's tail dipping below the horizon as they slipped southward on the Suez Canal. This phenomenon was pointed out to her by a Scotsman many years her senior with whom she developed a close relationship (but only, she now realized, because her nanny had been so eager to spend time in the company of Walter F. Peploe—the F stands for foolish, Nanny had said).
Walter F. Peploe claimed to be an expert on all matters pertaining to the weather, and he certainly had the equipment to prove it. The captain allowed him to lash a louvered cabinet fitted with thermometers and other paraphernalia to a spar in the after-part of the ship. His pride and joy, though, was what he called his "Richard" barograph—a free-swinging contraption that he'd rigged in his cabin, and which gave accurate atmospheric readings irrespective of the ship's roll. He was adamant that all vessels should be fitted with such a device if they were to avoid the perils of a sudden tempest. His stated aim in life was to persuade the Dutch authorities in Java to adopt the barograph on all government vessels plying the treacherous waters of the East Indies, and thereby make his fortune.
He was a little disappointed when their own ship's passage of the Indian Ocean unfolded without incident, even if the clement weather was borne out by the readings on his barograph. Denied the opportunity of forewarning the captain of some impending climatic disaster, he devoted his time to investigating the idiosyncrasies of the ocean currents. This involved dropping numerous messages over the side of the ship, and to this end he regularly dispatched the young Signora Docci to loot empty beer bottles from the ship's pantry—considerably more bottles, it seemed to her, than the actual number of messages he spent so much of his time dictating to Nanny back in his cabin.
Maybe some of those bottles were cast up on foreign shores, their notes returned, as requested, to his home address in Glasgow. If they were, he never got to know of it. Within six months of their arrival in Java, a Dutch postal packet went down with all hands in a typhoon off the island of Celebes. Walter F. Peploe was among those listed missing, presumed dead. "The silly fool," Nanny had said. "I can just see him at the end with his stupid barograph, oh so pleased with himself, shouting 'See, I told you so!'"
News of the meteorologist's untimely end only reached the Doccis just before they boarded the boat home, after a trying year in the tropics. Most of their time had been spent on Borneo, with a brief interlude in northern Sumatra, because that island was also home to orangutans—the great apes that had lured her father halfway around the world.
Again, her memories were patchy yet precise. She could recall the Dutch gentlemen, kind and courtly, dressing for dinner in heavy black tailcoats despite the enervating heat and humidity. They were forever smoking cigars and drinking gin and bitters. She also remembered the black teeth of the natives (considered a mark of beauty), the milky white water of the coral reefs and the smoke of the volcanoes rising in misty clouds against the clear blue sky. Then there was the virgin forest that clad almost everything and called no one master. This was where they spent the greater part of their time, beneath the dense green canopy, where only the odd stray sunbeam penetrated to the mulchy forest floor. There were no views in the forest, no horizons, just the trees closing in behind you as you traveled through it. And then there was the eternal imminence of death.
She had a strong recollection of the natives on Sumatra huddling in the treetops whenever the tigers came, which was often. There were no tigers on Borneo, but the banteng—the wild buffalo—was just as feared. It attacked for no apparent reason, and with lightning speed. One time a rhinoceros broke from a bamboo thicket, sundering their rank of bearers, leaving a path as broad as a cart track behind it in the matted undergrowth. And of course there were the snakes, the stuff of childhood nightmares. The king cobra had been known to pursue men for many miles, although if you had the presence of mind to shed one of your garments, it would halt to attack that, buying you precious moments to escape.
She described how they had emerged one morning from their hut to find a giant python coiled in a wooden cage, unable to escape, having swallowed whole the former occupant of the cage, a goat they kept for its milk.
Her most vivid memories, though, and the most disturbing, were of her father, of his physical and then his mental deterioration. When he wasn't hunting orangutans, he was preparing their skins and skeletons. He would emerge from his makeshift charnel house exhausted, reeking of putrefaction, his hands cut and red, raw from the arsenical soap he'd applied to the bones to deter insects. The feet of the trestle table he worked on were placed in bowls of water—a barrier to the ever-present ants—but somehow they always found a way onto his specimens. When he began to take this as a personal affront, her mother started to worry. When he threatened to shoot one of the bearers for sneaking sips of the arrack in which he preserved his pelts, it was time to talk of calling a halt to the venture.
He resisted the suggestion, insisting that the skins and skeletons were a lucrative source of income—which they were, zoological museums paid handsomely for both—and rejecting the counterargument that he had traveled to the tropics in the name not of Mammon but of Science.
With hindsight, Signora Docci went on, it was clear that the expedition was doomed from the first. It was the final stab of a desperate man intent on debunking Darwin. To her father's credit, his position had shifted since The Origin of Species was first published, moving from one of knee-jerk ridicule to a more tempered assessment of the scientific facts. The third phase of his own private evolution had taken the form of a preemptive strike: there was nothing wrong with Darwin's theories of natural selection because the most esteemed Christian thinkers, including Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, had already sanctioned a kind of "derivative creation"—the argument being that when God declared "Let the waters produce" and "Let the earth produce," he was conferring forces on the elements that enabled them, in accordance with his laws of nature, to produce various species of organic beings. Her father's efforts to harmonize the new science with Catholic orthodoxy soon foundered, though, as he struggled to bend the words of the venerable theologians to his own ends.
Instead, he reached for another theory—his last, and the one that had carried him and his family to the East Indies. This conceded to Darwin the development of new species by natural selection, man included, while allowing for a divine, overarching plan. Put simply, her father argued that after innumerable generations of influence, natural selection had run its course, spent its load. All life on earth had now entered an era of "conservative heredity" in which the power of adaptation in organisms had slowed to the point of being almost nonexistent. This theory permitted a return to the old idea of the absolute fixity of living species, with man at the top of the pyramid, as intended by God.
Where better to search for proof of this than among the anthropoids, the order of great apes whose existence now haunted man like some ancestral ghost? It was a matter of reliable record that two types of orangutan inhabited Borneo, living side by side, even nesting in the same trees. The mayas tjaping (as it was called by the locals) was a larger animal, with a square head flanked by fatty cheek pads. The mayas kassa was slighter, its face narrower, more delicately featured.
From the presence of orangutans on the neighboring island of Sumatra—the only other place on the planet where they were to be found—one could safely conclude that all orangutans shared a common heritage reaching back to a distant epoch when a land connection existed between the two islands. The big question— and one that her father believed answered itself—was this: given the separation of the Bornean and Sumatran oranguta
ns hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years previously, why had the two populations not evolved independently of each other according to the Darwinian model? By all accounts, they were the same, right down to the subtle differences of physiognomy between the two types of orangutan, both of which were also present on Sumatra.
This wasn't to say Darwin was wrong—there was too much evidence in favor of his evolutionary theory—simply that he was no longer right. The power of heredity had evidently increased since the primordial era to the point that living organisms were now fixed and immutable.
The logic was sound, even to her mother's skeptical ears, or she wouldn't have consented to accompany her husband to one of the least hospitable corners of the planet.
There was only one problem.
After a few months on Borneo, her father had identified only one type of orangutan—the mayas tjaping, big and square-headed. Some had fatty cheek-expansions, while others didn't, but this distinction seemed to be no more than a feature of age in the male of the species. It was looking increasingly likely that the sound logic was based on unsound evidence. There was only one way to tell.
It was on their trip to Sumatra that her father almost lost his mind, and on a couple of occasions his life (Dutch authority in the northern province of Aceh extending no further than the range of their guns from a handful of forts). During his time there, he shot, skinned and prepared the skeletons of more than fifteen orangutans. They, too, were all of one type—a different type, smaller than the mayas tjaping, with narrower faces and hair of a paler hue than their Bornean cousins. For that was what they clearly were: cousins, and several times removed.
