The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  “There’s turtles over there,” he said back at camp. “Tortoises.”

  “Too bad you can’t make a nice soup. It’d be a change from that fucking grouper.”

  Twilight was coming on. Alex made a fire and threw one of the fish in, then dug some rice out of their sack and made a stand for the pot with a circle of stones. The wood burned with a smell like incense, vaguely calming and soporific. Alex lit his last cigarette—after the landing he had had to dry out the few he’d carried with him. His cigarettes were his lifelines here, those and his coffee, though already he was well into the second carton of his cigarettes, and his jar of coffee, thanks to Desmond, who treated it as his own, was down to a few paltry fingers.

  Alex had been sure their little blanketing of cloud would rain on them at any moment, but a few scattered stars appeared above them as the dark set in, then a crescent moon.

  Desmond started in on the fish.

  “Amazing place, isn’t it? Think of those tortoises out there—hundreds of thousands of years, and nothing’s changed. We humans think we’re so special, with our big brains, but we’ve got nothing on them. A flash fire is what we are. One day, poof, we’ll be gone, and they’ll still be here.”

  And good riddance, Alex thought, if Desmond was anyone to go by.

  Desmond was off on another jaunt through his long list of grievances and peeves.

  “What’s consciousness, for fuck’s sake, what does that mean? Don’t tell me my cat isn’t fucking conscious when he waves his bloody arse at me. Darwin said it all a hundred years ago. But most of these idiots—and I’m talking scientists here, not bleeding evangelists—still go on about how unique we are, as if God just came down from his cloud one day and sprinkled us with fairy dust. When was that, I’d like to know, was it Homo habilis or Homo fucking erectus? Bloody nonsense!”

  So he owned a cat. Alex wasn’t sure he wanted to think about this, any more than he wanted to think Desmond had a mother somewhere or maybe even some sniveling brat-child, whom he dispensed bullying parenting to and told to mind his manners.

  Where was that cat now? Alex wondered.

  “And then the fucking Labour Party, still holding their breath for The Revolution. They could do with a course in natural history. People are still bloody apes on the plains—you can shove Marx down their throats till they choke on it, but you won’t change their DNA.”

  Desmond was right, of course; this place was amazing. There were the goats out there in the distance, and the tortoises in their mud, and the stars coming out, one by one. That it was Desmond who had brought him here conferred a measure of redemption on him. The truth was Alex was getting tired of holding himself hard against Desmond—it was too much work, all this spite, it was too much commitment. Then who knew if Desmond’s view of things wasn’t actually the right one, or if what he was up to was any more suspect or strange than the Park Service carving a blood trail through a nature reserve.

  Desmond had crawled into his sleeping bag.

  “Time for a bit of shut-eye. I hope you brought some of that coffee along.”

  Alex already knew that he wouldn’t be sneaking off at dawn to Villamil. If nothing else, he wanted to see how all of this ended, if Santos got his fish, if Desmond got his mollugo. It was always these nightmarish trips, the ones he cursed the whole time he was on them, that he remembered most viscerally—in this, too, though it pained him to admit it, maybe Desmond was right, that Alex was lucky to be along, instead of off on some pointless drinkfest with the Americans or killing the hours at the Black Mangrove under the thumb of Mara.

  Alex sat by the fire to finish the last of The Beagle. He’d come to the biographical note at the end: it seemed Darwin had become somewhat of a recluse after his voyage, shutting himself up in his house at the edge of his little village and keeping an eye out for unwanted visitors. He’d had that ailment of his, never properly diagnosed, that had made him retch and convulse and that had required, on doctor’s orders, daily dousings in cold water. Somehow, it all seemed to go back to the Galápagos—it was as if some bit of volcano dust had got lodged in his being then, some metaphysical worm that kept eating away at it.

  Alex settled down to sleep, feeling suddenly worn out from the day’s climb. The crater held a circle of stars above them as if they were closed up in a snow globe, a private cosmos. He thought of Darwin sleeping out on the Pampas during his Beagle trip, a middle-class white kid traveling the world, the first of the backpackers. It was only afterward, really, that he had made any sense of what he had seen. Alex wondered what, in the fullness of time, he himself would make sense of, what small, crucial detail might be lodging itself in his brain that would shake his life to its foundations.

  He awoke the next morning cold but dry. The sun was peering above the rim of their crater, the private cupola of cloud that had hung over them the previous afternoon completely dispersed and the blue stretching away as far as they could see. Alex would have felt cheered if not for the thought that they’d be going back to the boat.

  Desmond was already making his rounds.

  “Get a fire going, boy! Busy day ahead of us!”

  Desmond wanted to descend by way of the far side of the volcano. The way out of the crater proved less harrowing there than the way in had, but very quickly the ground grew treacherous, the slopes brittled over with prickly lava fields. They had to make their way by whatever path they could pick out, shifting up and down the slope, clinging to rock and scrub, shimmying along rivers of scree. By mid-morning the water had gone, and soon Alex felt as if he’d eaten a fistful of dust. He regretted the sun now, even more insistent than it had been the previous day, the black rock sucking it in until the whole landscape around them seemed to burn.

  Desmond was looking particularly demented, acned and sunburned and caked with dust and still clutching that case of his as if it were the Grail. Plants had come and gone from that case, according to some scheme Alex hadn’t quite been able to figure, except that it seemed to involve making a mockery of a certain professor’s field research. But somehow the case itself had taken on a kind of life. Every morning Desmond performed his rites upon it, lifting back its portals to sprinkle it with his holy water and bare its mysteries to the God of the Sun.

  Past noon a cloud front, massive and dark, began to move in from the west. The wind had died again, with that ominous sense of the stillness before an onslaught. From the slopes they could see out to the bay Santos usually frequented, still smooth as silk but with no sign anywhere of his boat.

  “The bastard’s probably halfway to the Philippines by now,” Desmond said.

  Below them the coastline seemed an endless labyrinth of tiny green-encrusted inlets and lagoons. Alex couldn’t have said for the life of him which of them they’d landed at the previous day. From the shifty looks Desmond kept casting out in that direction it was clear he was no wiser.

  “Well we didn’t come up this fucking route, did we?” he said. “At least I don’t see any of the breadcrumbs you left to show the way.”

  They had to continue to the south in the hope that the ground would grow more familiar. They lost a lot of time in this, and in Desmond’s cursing, and meanwhile the afternoon slipped by and the clouds kept pushing in. They’d end up stuck out here in some hurricane, Alex thought.

  Each time Desmond turned his eyes coastward he looked more rattled.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Bloody bastard probably dropped us here on purpose.”

  They were back into palo santo. Looking for any distinguishing marks in it was like looking for a particular grape in a vineyard. Then finally they came across a patch of weeds that looked as if a truffle pig had been rooting through it: Desmond’s handiwork.

  “Christly hallelujah. Thank God I leave my mark.”

  They were able to trace their way back, reaching the coast just as the clouds were rolling into the bay. They found where they’d picked their way through the mangrove and came out to their little landing to discover San
tos already waiting for them in the boat. He slid the panga over to them.

  “Vámonos,” he said, as if he’d dropped them there moments before for a pee.

  “Buenos fucking días to you, too,” Desmond said.

  It had grown as dark as dusk over the bay, the sky slowly closing above them like a vault. Santos eased out of the inlet and veered north toward their cove following the jagged line of the coast. Then he rounded a spit and a boat appeared out of nowhere heading in their direction, done up in the telltale military green of the Park Service.

  “Shit,” Desmond said. “Bloody fucking bastards.”

  The boat was still a couple of miles out but was headed right for them. For an instant Santos didn’t react, but then as if on some impulse he pulled hard on the tiller. The boat rocked and swerved and Desmond toppled back.

  “What the fuck are you doing? They’re going to think we’re bloody pirates!”

  In a twinkling Santos had ducked the boat back behind the spit. It was hard to say if the patrol had seen them. Santos cut sharply into a little mangrove-shrouded backwater, reversing the engine to keep them from ramming headlong into the bush. The water frothed and churned behind them until finally the boat glided to a stop against the trees.

  Santos killed the engine.

  “Bloody idiot!” Desmond screeched, dashing around to stow his things. “They weren’t going to waste their time on us with this fucking monsoon on the way!”

  Alex could hear the whine of the speedboat as it grew nearer, then the sudden drop in pitch as it slowed.

  Desmond was casting around frantically for a place to stow his case. He flung open the hatch and practically crawled down into the hold in an effort to cram it in amidst Santos’s fish.

  “No, allí no!” Santos bellowed.

  But it was too late: the patrol boat had appeared at the mouth of the inlet. Desmond clambered out of the hold and kneed the lid into place.

  “We’re just bloody tourists, you understand? Not a word about my plants!”

  The boat came toward them with the caution of a reconnaissance patrol in a guerilla zone. Once again a boyish recruit was at the helm, but a small, much older man was standing in the bow, done up in starched khaki like a drill sergeant.

  He had a hand on the butt of his pistol.

  “Identifíquense!”

  An exchange ensued across the rails that involved barking demands from the ranger, who seemed ready to shoot them all on the spot if they crossed him, and Santos’s laconic replies.

  “La tormenta,” Santos said tersely, the storm, in the way of explaining their flight.

  Alex was surprised at the sheaf of documents Santos was able to hand over, battered little booklets and cards, huge folded sheets coming apart at the creases and covered in signatures and seals and colored stamps. The ranger looked each of them up and down with a painstaking thoroughness, then again.

  He grimaced.

  “Su itinerario.”

  Alex could see Santos had taken the measure of the man. This wasn’t some child he could put off the way he’d done at Tower. There was a particular tension between the two that Alex couldn’t quite place but that might have had something to do with Santos’s being a mainlander.

  “No tengo,” Santos said finally.

  The ranger let the admission hang.

  “Es obligatorio.”

  “Sí. Lo sé.”

  The ranger bundled the documents back into a tidy stack. Maybe that was the end of it, maybe he was just one of those self-important types who would bristle at everything but let them pass.

  He slipped the documents into his shirt pocket and drew his revolver.

  “Revise la barca,” he said to his underling. Inspect the boat.

  The deputy clambered over the rail and went about peering in tackle boxes and poking at bags without the least notion, it was clear, of what he was looking for. One of Desmond’s lumpy duffel bags was poking out from beneath his bunk through the cabin doorway.

  “Jesus bloody Christ,” Desmond muttered, then nudged the lid of the hatch with his shin where it sat a little askew.

  The ranger caught the movement.

  “La bodega! Apúrese!”

  Desmond blanched. The deputy lifted the lid and leaned down into the hold, the stench of grouper wafting up.

  “Es bacalao, capitán,” he said sheepishly.

  “Busque!”

  The deputy made a half-hearted show of rooting around in the fish. But then something caught his eye.

  “Es una caja, señor.”

  “Traela, imbécil!”

  The deputy brought up the case. Things happened quickly then.

  “It’s mine, you idiot, leave it!” Desmond snapped, grabbing the case, and the ranger cocked his gun and trained it with both hands at Desmond’s head.

  “Drop it!” he said in perfect English. “Drop it or I will shoot!”

  Desmond threw up his hands, dropping the case as if it had bit him.

  “It’s full of plants, for fuck’s sake! It’s bloody plants! Get that thing off me!”

  “Stand back!” the ranger shouted. “Stand back!”

  “It’s just my fucking plants!”

  The deputy was fumbling for his revolver. In a moment they would all have a bullet in them.

  “Stand back! Everyone stand back!”

  The deputy’s gun was pointing waveringly toward Alex’s midriff. Alex didn’t dare budge. All he could see was that barrel staring at him, not two feet away.

  “Ábrela!” the ranger shouted.

  The deputy squatted to the deck and pulled the case over to him with his free hand, his gun roaming erratically. It took him an instant to figure out how to prize open the lid and Alex actually felt a squirm of suspense, as if some dreadful secret was about to be revealed. But there, after all, sat Desmond’s plants, in sad disarray now from their fall, dirt and broken tendrils everywhere and all the careful labels Desmond had affixed to them hopelessly tangled.

  The deputy stared down blankly.

  “Son plantas, capitán,” he said finally.

  “Sí, imbécil, no soy ciego.”

  Alex suspected that if the ranger hadn’t still had his revolver trained on Desmond, Desmond wouldn’t have been able to restrain himself from leaping on the case again.

  “You can see for yourself, for the love of Christ, it’s just plants, now take that thing off me!”

  The deputy was sorting through the plants with the barrel of his gun. He fiddled with the little dividers.

  “Nada, capitán,” he said. “Solo plantas.”

  The ranger finally uncocked his revolver.

  “Traigalas aquí.”

  They came back to earth. Slowly the color returned to Desmond.

  “You’d think it was the bloody atom bomb!” he said under his breath.

  The deputy brought the case over to the rail and the ranger gave it a cursory look. The whole drama, it seemed, had put him out. His business had been with Santos, not this gringo, but Santos was pretty well forgotten, standing arms crossed by the cabin door with what seemed almost an amused look. Alex sensed that he and the warden might even have shared a joke at this point if they hadn’t been so inimical, some mocking jibe about the gringo and his plants.

  “Mollugo flavescens,” Desmond said. “If that means anything to you.”

  The ranger made an effort to restrain his contempt.

  “You are a researcher?”

  “Imperial College, University of London.”

  Now that he wasn’t under the threat of imminent death, Desmond had returned to his old self.

  “So you have a permit, then. For these plants.”

  “Yes, I have a permit,” Desmond said, not wavering an instant. “Back at the research station. I’ll be very happy to show it to you when I return there.”

  A spasm of irritation crossed the ranger’s face. It was clear he would have preferred simply to be done with the matter.

  “You must
carry it,” he said. “It’s required.”

  “Well, I didn’t know I’d have to wear it on my bloody sleeve.”

  The ranger motioned to his deputy to close up the case.

  “Traigalo.”

  The deputy made to climb back over the rail with the case, but Desmond looked ready to spring on him again.

  “You can’t take those! That’s weeks of work in there!”

  “You must follow us to Villamil,” the ranger said dryly. “There we will see. In any event there is the storm.”

  Santos, having apparently got the gist of this, stirred uneasily, but Desmond pre-empted him before he could make any protest.

  “Those specimens are extremely fragile, you’re not carting them off to some storage shed! If anything happens to them you can be sure your superiors will hear about it! They’ll probably be very anxious to learn how you and your assistant nearly gunned down two researchers from the University of London!”

  The ranger scowled. He might simply have pulled his revolver again to finish the job if the storm hadn’t chosen that moment to unleash its first fat drops.

  He looked skyward.

  “Qué pendejo,” he spat out, which Alex would have guessed meant something along the lines of “fucking asshole.” He gave an angry nod toward his deputy. “Déjelo.”

  “Capitán?”

  “Déjelo!”

  The deputy, still at the rail, set down the case. Desmond snatched it up practically before it had touched the deck.

  “Vamos!” the ranger barked. “Rápido!”

  Santos’s papers were still bulging from his shirt pocket.