The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  Irish stonemason and architect James Purcell had built the House, its plain exterior faced with the limestone of his native Cork. It was said to have been modelled after the great sixteenth-century Italian architect Palladio’s neoclassical masterpiece, Villa Foscari, more commonly known as La Malcontenta. Built in 1555 on the banks of the placid canal Brenta, just outside Venice, and described by a twentieth-century travel writer as “a dreaming pile of stone and frescoed plaster,” it was, nevertheless, said to be haunted by a sleepless discontented spirit: the ghost of Francesca Magdalina, the great-granddaughter of the Doge Foscari. She had been imprisoned in the villa for dishonouring the family and perhaps had even died there. The famous fresco of La Malcontenta, “a lady with a most forbidding expression on her face,” was discovered under fading layers of whitewash on a wall panel in the interior of the house.

  Last fall, at a lecture in the Assembly Room, temporarily furnished with metal chairs hard as granite, Miles had rather flintily taken on the expatriate Newfoundland geologist Dr. Eldon Piercey, who was giving the annual public lecture of the august Newfoundland Geological Survey. It had included, in what felt like geological time, a discussion of tectonic plates and continental drift, a comprehensive historical survey of all the stone quarries on the Island, and then a catalogue of the various types of stone in all the major stone buildings in St. John’s, unfortunately with a bit of freewheeling politico-historical commentary mixed in. The wrong kind of mortar, you might say, not to mention, in Miles’s view, at least, somewhat lacking in accuracy and a little too arrogant and patronizing in the aggregate. He informed our expatiating expatriate that there was no Cork limestone left on the House. It had taken the government thirty years to do it, but all of it had been replaced with “Canadian stone from your home province of Ontario.”

  This too would disintegrate in time, I thought, and I imagined another fresco being uncovered a hundred years hence, under the layers of alien Canadian stone—a gentleman with a most forbidding expression on his face. Miles was even more finely attuned to the House’s spiritual dimensions, to the sad iniquitous history of the place.

  The speaker on Monday evening, a geneticist named Dr. Eugene Legge, had stepped down from the lofty heights of science to enlighten us laymen about what he called “the Genome Project”; but engaging and humble though he was, not patronizing in the least, he was obviously young and inexperienced. He would have been more at home in an intimate and congenial uni-disciplinary colloquium than in the larger and rougher public forums, where loose cannons, axe-grinders, shit disturbers, autodidacts, and self-styled debaters and disputers of anything and everything lay in ambush, along with other academics and genuinely knowledgeable laymen, wary defenders of other turfs, academic and otherwise, including le turf de Terre-Neuve.

  From the very beginning of the talk, Miles began to mutter and sigh desolately, to bristle and stir uneasily in his seat. I half expected him not to wait until the end of the talk, but to jump up and interrupt right in the middle of it, or perhaps leave the room altogether. He held his asthma inhaler—his “puffer,” as he called it—on standby in his right hand, and seemed to be taking more than the usual number of inhalations as the talk wore on. Toward the end, in an attempt to help his lay audience visualize the mysterious internal world of the DNA molecule, Dr. Legge presented us with a rather fascinating analogy, fascinating for me, at least. He compared the cell, or its nucleus, to a library or archive—we were inside an archive ourselves, he reminded us—containing all of life’s instructions: Primary Source writ large, or small. The chromosomes, containing DNA, are the bookshelves, he said; the DNA molecules are the books; the genes are chapters in the books; and the chemical compounds that make up our DNA are the words, the letters, on the page. There are only four, he said—A, C, G, T—representing the base (base!) organic compounds that make up our entire flesh and blood; but this mini-alphabet, repeated millions of times in different sequences of paired letters, contains the unique genetic makeup of every individual human being ever born.

  We were shown a slide of a free-standing, twenty-three-foot-high model of the DNA molecule, the double helix, made up of five hundred encyclopedias symbolically depicting the vast amount of archival information contained within. Scientists were already inside the archive, he said, working away. They had broken the genetic code, had learned the language, were busily mapping our genes, and would ultimately decode all three billion pairs of letters in the so-called language of inheritance, life’s blueprint, the human story. It would not take very long, he predicted.

  Miles’s legs began to shake, piston-like, and his entire body seemed to emit a high-voltage emotional current, a hum of adversarial intent. I could tell, however, that he was not having a seizure, a stroke, or a heart attack in response to Dr. Legge’s rather innocent analogy, not even an asthma attack, but rather what we archivists had begun to call, in mock reference to Heritage Canada’s soupy Heritage Moments on television, and even before the main features on the silver screen, a major archival moment.

  When the talk was over, beneath a gentle shower of polite applause, I sensed an inauspicious stirring beside me, and Miles, with athletic alacrity and a thundery look—Drop down dew from heaven above, and let the clouds rain down righteousness—was on his feet with his hand in the air, but was not recognized by the chair. (I didn’t recognize the chair myself, though he looked familiar; he had forgotten to introduce himself before introducing Dr. Legge.) A man, still seated, but with a loud, metallic voice—and a British accent, of all things—had beaten him to it. He was fascinated by the Genome Project, he said, and wanted to know if they had found the colour-blindness gene. Dr. Legge said no, that “mapping,” as he called it, had really just begun. Finding genetic flaws was a difficult task, and even after they did find a flawed gene, they would still be a long way from finding a cure for the disease that it caused.

  Though he was still on his feet, Miles was ignored by the chair for question number two in favour of a starry-eyed young student in genome heaven.

  “That goddamn Murray,” I heard him say under his breath, and then I recognized Mr. Murdoch Murray of the Newfoundland Historical Society.

  She had just made a “career choice,” the student announced to Dr. Legge, who looked even younger than she did. He assured her that the field offered enormous opportunities and that she wouldn’t be disappointed in her decision.

  Miles had remained standing during this sweet fatherly exchange to make sure that he would be recognized by the chair next time. He was—and in more ways than one. I remembered that Mr. Murray had chaired the geology lecture last fall.

  Miles was surprisingly restrained and magnanimous, however. “Brendan Harnett here,” he began. “Mr. Murray…I have a few questions for Dr. Legge, Dr. Eu-gene Legge.”

  This elicited a few murmurs of laughter from the audience, and a benign smile from the doctor himself, whose name undoubtedly had been the object of levity on other occasions. Miles was not looking in his direction, however, but, smiling himself, looking directly at the chair.

  Chairman Murray had good reason for ignoring Miles. He knew, as I knew, that Miles wasn’t actually going to ask any questions. He was going to lecture Dr. Eu-gene with some answers—riding his historical (and sometimes hysterical) hobby horse on his usual exasperating roundabout route, down the highways and byways of what his spiritual mentor, Judge Daniel Woodley Prowse, in his “magisterial” A History of Newfoundland, published exactly one hundred years ago, he had informed me on the way here, had called the “strange, eventful history” of “this ill-used and down-trodden Colony.”

  It was a history that was a classic example, Miles felt, of what Edward Gibbon had said about history in general. In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “the Great Gibbon,” as Miles always referred to him—I always picture a great ape intently focused on picking nits from the Great Head of History—had famously remarked that histo
ry is “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

  Yes, that about summed it all up for Miles, though he continued to do the daily Newfoundland register, to voice his indignation in the upper register, to take his place at the public grindstone: cataloguing the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of this ill-used and down-trodden place; identifying the ill-users and the down-treaders; blowing the whistle; naming names. Prowse, of course, had been a great user of the public grindstone himself, but it might be said that all present-day users of “the public grinder” sank into insignificance compared with Miles.

  Though he would be the first to point out that Prowse’s book was called A History of Newfoundland and described by Prowse himself as “a very incomplete history,” it was certainly the version that Miles subscribed to. He had even created a Prowse Society to keep it alive, though “cell” rather than the more saccharine-sounding “society” might better describe it. Nothing made him madder than to see Prowse’s History disparagingly described by academic historians, professional historians, archivist-historians, British historians—“neutralizers, appeasers, apologists, revisionists, collaborators all,” he said—as “unfortunately the best history of Newfoundland,” or, “still read and unfortunately still quoted by people who should know better.”

  “Unfortunately, unfortunately, unfortunately…” he shrilled one evening last winter at a meeting of the Prowse Society in the quiet but smoke-filled Travers Tavern, before being overcome by a combination of smoke and outrage and forced to go outside to administer his asthma medication. When he came back, he didn’t retrace his steps, or even pick up where he left off, but jumped to the overwhelming question:

  “What did Benjamin Lester, one of the richest West Country fish merchants, have on the wall over his fireplace in his mansion in Poole? Not a portrait of the King, I can tell you that. Not a painting of one of his glorious ancestors, either. No, a sculpture of the noble cod—not one, but two, salt fish carved in marble, like religious icons, built right into the hearth, the home’s altar, for daily worship. Don’t say Lester didn’t know what his drawn butter was smathered on.

  “As Prowse said, ‘The great English historians ignore altogether the part Newfoundland played in the making of England.’ And he was writing in 1895! Have any of you read Churchill’s History—his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, published in the 1950s? Three volumes, voluminous, but hardly a mention of us at all.”

  “Dr. Legge,” Miles continued, but still addressing the chair, “is no doubt a bit too young to have heard of the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace in London, the Great Exhibition of the Works and Industry of All Nations. We were a nation, too, then, of course, and our new House of Assembly had just opened the year before. Now this so-called Great Exhibition, which had over six million visitors, and some famous ones, like Dostoevsky, was the first of what were soon to be called ‘world fairs.’ The Americans, of course, grabbed hold of the idea right away and there was another one in New York a couple of years later, in 1853, where the Newfoundland exhibits won three gold medals. We didn’t win anything in 1851 because they just didn’t understand what we sent, though it’s crystal clear to me, if you’ll pardon the pun.

  “It was almost as bad as when we sent that load of salt fish to the Great Exhibition of the Poverty of All Nations, the Great Depression of the Dirty Thirties. Poor depressed Newfoundland sent untold quintals of salt fish to Canada, to the Prairies. My sister, Sister Nano, a woman of the veil, was helping farm families in Saskatchewan at the time. She wrote home to tell us they were using it for roof shingles, canvas, shoe leather, snowshoes, goalie pads. They had no idea how to cook it, and we didn’t send the recipe.

  “But to get back to the Great Exhibition of 1851. The list of objects displayed filled a three-volume, fifteen-hundred-page catalogue, and under “Newfoundland” we find listed a single solitary bottle of cod liver oil. That’s right: one bottle of cod liver oil.

  “This bottle, by the way, was brought back home and ended up in the new museum when it opened in 1911. But in 1934, when we officially lost the country, when Nofty lost the pork, when we were colonized once again, when our so-called Letters Patent—our “letters of inheritance,” in Dr. Legge’s vocabulary—were rejigged, reformulated, re-engineered, when that benevolent dictatorship, that odious oligarchy, known as the Commission of Government took over—even one of the original commissars, the more enlightened Mr. Thomas Lodge, called it a dictatorship—one of the first things they did was to close down the museum.”

  “Mr. Harnett, could we have your question, please,” said Mr. Murray.

  “You can always tell, Mr. Murray, when the dictators have arrived, or when they’re on the way. First, they tell us we’re up to our arse in debt, that there’s not a cent left in the public treasury—except, of course, to shore up the police force and pay the bondholders, the poor malnourished bondholders. There’s always enough money for them. Then they shut down the museums and the archives. They always want to control the archives.

  “They dispersed the exhibits in the museum to the four winds, including such dignified places as the Old Laundry at the Sanatorium on Topsail Road—an early form of ethnic cleansing, perhaps—which was where the bottle of cod liver oil ended up. It’s now behind the bar at the Travers Tavern.

  “Now I can understand the British not appreciating our exhibit, but there was no excuse for the people back home. Just the other day I was looking through a newspaper in the library, an 1852 issue of the Newfoundlander. There was an editorial describing the exhibit as ‘blind and perverse stupidity.’ But just recently, another writer—a Canadian, even—called it ‘a stroke of genius.’ What other country, he said, had so cleverly ‘distilled itself into the contents of a single bottle’? I have to agree with him. As it turns out, he was onto something a bit more far-reaching than he thought—but I’ll get to that in a moment.

  “Now we didn’t have an archives, sad to say, when the country went under, but we had an elected government, an elected legislature, and that, as you all know, or those of you who were born BC—Before Confederation, Before the Convention, Before the Commission of Political Enlightenment—was also shut down. We lost the right to vote for fifteen years. But they voted—our own government, that is—they voted, they voted to give up the vote, the apologists, the collaborators, like to point out. And in return for what? Bread, debt relief, a bailout, being looked after—thirty pieces of silver. ‘Do you want to vote or do you want to eat?’ then Prime Minister Alderdice asked us. Now what kind of a shameful, stupid question is that? What kind of leader, what kind of human being, would ask a question like that?”

  There was audible mumbling and grumbling now, even a low-pitched hissing sound. “Shame,” someone said, though I wasn’t sure if this was anti-Alderdice or anti-Harnett.

  “Mr. Harnett, do you have a question?” said Chairman Murray. “May I remind you that our subject is science, not history.”

  “Yes, b’y, I’m coming to it. It’s all connected—just different types of engineering.

  “We were heavily in debt, o’ course; but do you know why? Because of the war. Fighting for the Empire in the First World War, fighting for the right to vote, for Chrissake, making the world safe for democracy. Making the world safe for the bondholders is more like it. Not to mention all the young lives lost. We spent that money for England. The whole thing should have been written off, or we should have defaulted. England herself defaulted, never paid back her war debt to the States. We should have had the guts to default as well, used the bit of money we had for food. Jesus, we don’t have the sense to feed ourselves.”

  “Shame,” someone said again, clearly an anti-Harnett sentiment this time.

  “Mr. Harnett, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to sit down,” said Mr. Murray.

  “Which brings me to my point, Mr. Murray. I was thinking as Dr. Legg
e was speaking: what would we send to a world exhibition today? The answer of course is another bottle, another single solitary bottle. But not cod liver oil…and not crude oil…certainly not seal oil…but blood…a bottle of blood. All this talk of biochemical maps, geographical locations of genes, letters of inheritance, and so on…I was asking myself why it all sounds so familiar. Maps have a long history in this part of the world. Now when you think of maps you usually think of land, so you might be surprised to hear that the first maps of this place were not maps of land at all, but of water, or land under the water—the Grand Banks, the great cod banks of Newfoundland. We all know the final outcome of that, of course. Now you’re talking about mapping the human body, colonizing the human body. Not maps of water, but maps of blood.”

  “Sit down!” someone shouted.

  Miles was looking directly and intently at Dr. Legge now. “You and your associates,” he went on—I felt spittle—“are, as you put it, already inside the library, inside the archive, and you obviously think that you own the place, that you can have a free hand with the books, the manuscripts, the documents, and that once you’ve plotted, mapped, and decoded, there’s nothing wrong with changing, altering, rearranging the information, the codes, the letters of inheritance—and not of a single country or a single race, but ultimately the whole human race.”

  There was a long pause. We were all wondering, I suppose, if Miles had actually finished. Dr. Legge began a tentative response.