The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  “Oh. I’m away the one after, for Easter.”

  They were drifting into a zone of indecipherable courtesies.

  “So we’ll talk when you’re back, then.”

  That had been nearly a month ago and they had yet to talk. Alex didn’t know if he was the one who ought to call, though with each day that passed it felt more and more unlikely that he would. Two fucking solitudes. He wished he had never got near that bastard André. Their argument kept playing over and over in his head, along with the acid responses he ought to have made. We didn’t need Mr. Trudeau to tell us who we were. Who was that, exactly? The priest-loving, wood-hewing anti-Semites that Quebeckers had been before the likes of Trudeau had come along to drag them into the twentieth century? But André’s swastika comment had had the ring of truth. Trudeau had been raised by the Jesuits, after all, he’d attended lectures by Lionel-Adolphe Groulx himself. Maybe his whole career after that had just been an elaborate denial of the messed-up Maria Chapdelaine notion of his roots that the priests had pounded into him. It would make sense: he had had to kill off Quebec to rise above it. Classic Oedipal stuff. Alex had seen the footage, how he had promised Quebeckers the world and then delivered up only his piddling Constitution, cutting Lévesque out of the deal at the final moment and sending him home like a beaten dog.

  So how did that hit you, exactly? I mean, here’s this role model, this man you’ve looked up to all your life, this champion of human rights, and you find out he was some kind of Jew-hater.

  Well, I wouldn’t want to go too far with this, Peter, it’s really just hearsay at this point. And if it comes to it, my own grandfather was a fascist. They were different times.

  It was all beside the point, of course. None of this was what really rankled; none of it was what had kept him, all these weeks, from picking up the phone. What really bothered him, what had left the bitterest taste, was how he had recoiled like the worst sort of homophobe when Félix had cut himself. That André had caught him doing it.

  Months from now, maybe, he would run into Félix on the street wasted to skin and bone and would have to face up to the fact that he’d learned nothing, that people were dying off all around him and his only reaction was, Better them. Or maybe he would find out that Félix was fine, that he wasn’t sick at all, that he’d merely been on a diet, that the whole drama he’d been playing out in his head had just been his own bigotry. All the more reason, then, that he should call him: it would be pointless to go on shouldering the guilt of having abandoned him if Félix was actually going to carry on in his cushy life to a ripe old age.

  Alex had come out to the bottom of Simpson. The gaping ruins of the Unitarian Church still sat there, monstrous and charred, virtually untouched since the fire that had consumed it a few weeks before. Another blight, now, along his path. Such a waste. It was that jerry-built woman that Alex had caught a glimpse of one day from the church doors playing the organ who had set it, out of some gripe. A transsexual, it turned out. Brilliant! Stunning! Alex had actually come here for a service once, not long after Amanda’s suicide, and had not felt entirely out of place: this was religion, he had surmised, for people who didn’t really believe in it but couldn’t quite bring themselves to do without.

  Whatever chance he might have had was lost now, reduced to this burnt-out shell. He had seen the smoke from his balcony and had been aghast, when he went out to it, to see that it was his own little Unitarian jewel going up in flames. It had been a fearsome sight, the great stained glass windows of the façade lit like a scene from the end times and flames reaching out above the last of the roof in building-high licks. A crowd had gathered behind a line of police tape, people stared at the fire with a kind of horrified fascination, amazed that this huge stone thing, this monument, was being consumed, and there was nothing to do but watch it burn.

  Nothing much remained of the church except the rectory and the spooky outlines of the rest, jagged stretches of wall, the stumpy remnants of the façade. Its demise had left the prospect along this part of Sherbrooke hopelessly impoverished, shattering the symmetry the church had formed with St. Andrew and St. Paul up the street and the Eskine and American United further on. No trinity for the Unitarians. The fire was part of an assault against Sherbrooke that had been going on for some time, year by year its glory fading, the few old mansions that remained changing over one by one into brand-name outlets, and even the tonier shops interspersed now with empty windows showing FOR LEASE signs and middlebrow galleries selling cheap watercolors or mass-market Inuit soapstone.

  The Golden Square Mile. All the good Calvinist Scots’ nose-to-the-grindstone pecuniousness and hard work that had made this place was coming to naught. They were the enemy now, those old city builders; somehow they had got lumped in with the English, though the Scots had hated the English as much as the French ever had. If it came to a question of blood the English shared more with the French than they did with the Scots, by way of the Normans. Trudeau had been right about that, at least: there was no building a nation on bloodlines, that was just nuts. Like Alex’s claim to the Samnites—all bunk, he’d discovered. He had actually looked them up, with an eye to somehow working them into his dissertation, and had found out the Romans had done to them what they’d always done to their troublesome vassals: they had scattered them to the winds, replacing them with Albanians, Macedonians, Turks, whatever slave race they could lay their hands on. It turned out Alex was a mongrel through and through. The purest line in him probably descended from none other than those same Normans, who had come through raping and pillaging and spreading their seed somewhere back in the eleventh century. To this day, he had cousins on his mother’s side who were as blue-eyed and blond as any Swede.

  He ought to call Félix. It would be a national disgrace not to make the effort. Years from now he’d be teaching in Nanaimo or Moncton or Red Deer, God forbid, and he’d be singing the same tune as every backwoods Anglo. Oh, I lived there a few years, but I couldn’t take the French thing after a while. He hadn’t been able to put the awkwardness from his mind that he’d felt between Félix and him at Félix’s door that night, the rawness of it. There had been something between them, at least, some connection. Maybe his Norman blood finding its place at last across the centuries.

  It was all in Darwin, the silliness of trying to separate bloodlines, of thinking of beings as discrete. It had come as a surprise to Alex—though the title of his book ought to have been a clue—how much of Darwin turned on this question, namely the niggling one of species. Everything had followed from a simple insight that all life was connected, that no difference was absolute. Alex had never seen this suggested in so many words, but he thought it was those barnacles of Darwin’s that had really clinched things for him, more than the finches, those eight years he had spent on the most intimate terms with them in his little study. What he had found was this: that barnacles, by nature hermaphrodites, often carried within them little penis-like consorts, tiny fledgling males that served as a sort of insurance if their own parts gave out. They were a missing link, how creatures moved by slow degrees from vulvic all-in-ones to barnacle boy and barnacle girl. All forms were fluid, each contained part of the last and the next. Maybe the Unitarian organist could have taken heart from that: not a freak, but a link.

  As blond as any Swede. He had been blond himself as a child, well into his teens. It came to him, out of the murk of high school history, that before the Normans had been Normans they’d been Norsemen: Vikings. Wearing their horns and drinking their mead and sending their longboats out across the seas. He could smell the Swedish air again, could see the pellucid sky. As blond as his son. It was the merest whim, perhaps, but still his blood went quick. It was a link.

  – 6 –

  He checked his watch as he neared the Liberal Arts Building: past five. “Stop by my office,” Jiri had said, as if he merely had some new Baudrillard to show him, as if this wasn’t Alex’s life on the line. The word was another misconduct charge had co
me up against him, spurious, from the looks of it, but still. This wasn’t the old days. The more Jiri’s life skidded off the rails, however, the more inscrutably dangerous and calm he became.

  Some hundred pages, Alex had given him, already formatted to MLA rules as if to make the proposal seem more a fait accompli. The whole framework was there, all his methodology, what he had struggled with for two years but then had miraculously taken shape over a matter of weeks. It had been like an out-of-body experience, as if he had become a mere conduit for some higher doctoral power. The real breakthrough, though, had come when he had finally braved an excursion into the natural sciences and stumbled upon the sociobiologists: here was a whole netherworld of unabashed trend-buckers, people who put the words science and art in the same sentence without fearing they would rend the very fabric of the cosmos. It was all total anathema to the literary purists, insofar as they even deigned to notice anything so reactionary—it was just biological determinism writ large, they said, the worst sort of regression, a heartbeat away from social Darwinism and eugenics—but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

  By now he had thumbed through his own copy of the pages so often he could quote the first paragraphs of it almost verbatim. He opened with the Derrida quote about the road in the forest, his sop to the theorists—talk about logo-fucking-centrism, the way Derrida went on, and yet there was something there, a real insight—and then went right to the heart of the matter:

  In the Galápagos Islands, the masked booby performs an elaborate mating ritual. The male approaches the female and after a series of gestures aimed at attracting her attention—one of which, skypointing, involves a graceful arabesque of spread wings and stretched neck, the beak pointing skyward as if in plaintive lament—he pushes before her an assortment of offerings. A stick, perhaps. A blade of dried grass. A stone. These items, there is no other way to see them, are metaphors: of food, of home, of fecundity. With them, the booby is telling his prospective mate a story. “Come with me,” he is saying, “and we will have children and live in abundance.” This strange collocation of all the essential elements of narrative at the most basic level of nature suggests that this oldest of stories, the happily-ever-after of fairy tales, may be older even than we have ever imagined.

  A road in the forest is also a form of writing. That seems the tenor of Derrida’s ruminations on the via rupta in Of Grammatology, tossed off in a parenthetical aside, in typical Derridean fashion, and yet going to the heart, really, of his radical revisioning of the idea of writing. We might even go further and say that the road is a narrative: it has a beginning, a middle, and an end; it tells another of the classic stories, the story of the journey, a journey we ourselves think to make in taking the road, though in fact we only re-create, as in a story, the journey already set out for us. Thus the road, too, is merely a metaphor, a trope, a trace of the journey already taken. Human roads, as it happens, often follow animal ones, like the ancient transhumance paths of Europe by which early shepherds, following the yearly migrations they saw in the wild, learned to move their domestic flocks between mountain and plain. Again, the narrative predates us. Like Derridean writing, it can be thought of not as belated, as an afterthought, but as originary, before speech, before language itself.

  If narrative predates us, as its traces everywhere in nature suggest, if it is not the product of our self-knowing but perhaps only a means to it, then we must perforce begin to sever the sacred link we have always made between narrative and that seat of all our self-knowing, human consciousness. A booby woos his mate with a story of abundance; a bee dances out a story of food. Whatever line we draw between instinct and awareness does not change that the story is there from the outset, long before there are poets to recite it or scribes to record it. So it is that what we still think of as our unique heritage, the thing that sets us apart, what the gods have given us, the magic moment of “Let there be light,” is perhaps only a passage on a much longer journey, one that is primal beyond reckoning and that goes back to the very beginnings of life itself.

  Alex still felt a thrill rolling the phrases off in his mind. Primal beyond reckoning. He liked that. He’d been especially pleased at working in the transhumance; that should have Jiri scrambling to his dictionary. The word had the arcane ring of something cutting edge but was actually right out of his own family history: la transumanza, the yearly moving of the sheep between alto and basso Molise. He owed this bit of lore, again, to his cousin, who had taken him to the very paths, remnants of which still stretched across the countryside for miles, part of a network that had crisscrossed the entire region. Wild animals—bison or deer or mastodons or whatever—had cut the first swaths of them back in the mists of time, and then Homo aeserniensis, Isernian Man, the local protohuman, had further beaten them down in the hunt. When the shepherds came they turned them into institutions, which they had remained until his own parents had left Italy thirty-odd years before. One of them passed behind his aunt Clotilda’s house, a good twenty yards across, just a stretch of grassy earth now, but with stone markers here and there along the edges that went back to Roman times. His aunt had told him about the flocks that had passed there when she was a young bride, for days on end, with bonfires every night and bagpipes playing and the constant bleating of sheep like the crying of souls at the end of the world.

  After his opening he had toned down the lyricism to lay out his overall scheme, which was a kind of Frygian anatomy by way of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Stories of Food. Stories of Home. Stories of Love. Stories of Death. Stories of Rebirth. Out of the sociobiologists he had gathered up all sorts of suitably rarefied cross-references to the natural sciences and the animal world; humans didn’t really come into things until the Great Depression, as Alex thought of it, that awful moment somewhere in prehistory when somebody wondered what was the point. The rest had been easy—he’d pulled in the Greeks, the Babylonians, he’d pulled in Jesus, Osiris, even Beowulf. For his primary texts, the next hurdle, he’d given the nod to the Odyssey and Ulysses, though the former he hadn’t read in ten years and the latter he had never quite finished. No matter; they would do. Joyce, in particular, was a real darling of the postmodernists, who loved all that sophomoric punning, though it was mostly Leopold Bloom whom Alex was interested in. What held the whole caboodle together, of course, was Mr. Darwin: narrative, like everything else, was a strategy. Get it right, and, like Scheherazade, you survived.

  Who was it that said about Darwin—what was it?—I think it was something like, “How stupid of me not to have thought of that.”

  (Self-deprecatingly) I think it was Thomas Huxley, actually, Peter. Not that I’d want to put myself at that level.

  It had not been easy with Jiri. It wasn’t the work, so much, though Alex had made the mistake of handing in another draft before he’d really hammered things out that Jiri had summarily ripped to shreds. The problem was Jiri, his life. Ever since Jiri had stayed with him, Alex had never really got free of him. It was like being the child of an alcoholic, shoring up his lout of a dad each time he came home drunk just so the man would be around the next day to give him a proper beating.

  After Alex had evicted him Jiri had gone straight back to living in his office. The dean had issued an ultimatum, which Jiri had ignored, until it seemed that after surviving every form of discipline the university had been able to mete out he would be done in by the Board of Health. Alex, out of self-interest as much as anything, terrified that he’d be shunted off to some new advisor who would make him start his thesis over from scratch, intervened. Against his better instincts, he landed Jiri a sublet in his building with a guy named Dan, a gay Quebecois temporarily decamping to Sherbrooke to look after his dying mother. Dan had been fighting his increases for years and was paying a ridiculously low rent. The arrangement was for Jiri to make his payments to him directly, to avoid having the landlords try to block an official sublet, but only a week after Jiri had moved in Alex got an angry phone call.

  “
His fucking check bounced. Didn’t you say he was a professor?”

  That was just the beginning of a long series of abuses. There was another bounced check; there were cigarette burns on Dan’s furniture; there were complaints about noise and about garbage not put down the chute. Far from taking the clandestine nature of his rental as a reason for caution, Jiri seemed to take it as a license for abandon. Meanwhile the phone calls from Dan were coming almost weekly.

  “They sent me a notice, for Christ’s sake. I don’t need this right now.”

  “I’ll talk to him. He’s going through a bit of a rough time.”

  “Him and me too.”

  Alex didn’t mention that Jiri’s rough time included a skinhead son up on charges of beating a gay man to within an inch of his life. This was not something that Jiri ever brought up either—dark rumors made the rounds of the department, about steel pipes and broken bones, about lawyers’ bills, but Jiri himself went about with a kind of manic good cheer as if he’d just won the lottery. Alex feared for Jiri’s sanity, waiting for the moment when he stepped in front of a bus or took a rifle to the top of the Hall Building and started picking people off on the street below.

  Jiri’s apartment—Dan’s apartment—had become a safe house for every questionable associate Jiri had, young female undergrads he’d lured there despite his probation, frowzy older women who seemed ready to spill from their clothes at any instant, a host of unsavory males straight out of central casting, thin, grizzled types in smelly overcoats, or overbearing ones who silenced every opposition and held court until the wee hours. One of these—John, he went by, though really Jana, potbellied and with a thinning mane of silver-white that he tended like an aging rock star—came by almost nightly, claiming the best chair and draining Jiri’s Scotch three fingers at a go. He was a blowhard, by any measure, full of pronouncements and easy cynicism, but Jiri sucked up to him as if he were Dubček himself.