The Evolution of Jane

by Cathleen Schine

  "Very Robinson Crusoe," Martha said, tossing the rags on the bed. As she turned to leave, I could see her through the dim cabin, in the doorway, against the dark, clear sky.

  "Did we cross the equator yet?" Gloria called after her in a groggy voice.

  When the wake-up bell rang, I crawled out of bed and blinked in the morning light. In the dining room, the other passengers clapped and cheered at my recovery. I wore my last intact pair of nylon quick-drying many-pocketed shorts.

  "Late last night, passengers aboard a familiar seagoing bark were startled by loud, violently scraping noises," said Jeremy Toll. "The hullabaloo lasted mere seconds and remains, as of the following morning, shrouded in mystery."

  "No, no," Mr. Tommaso reassured me. "Martha said it was just something that got caught in the fan."

  "Poor little endangered species," Mrs. Tommaso said. "Probably."

  12

  WE SPENT the last full day of the trip on Santa Cruz, an island whose volcanic slopes display a range of vegetation that exactly follows the most emblematic of diagrams you see in books about the Galapagos—bands of like-minded plants, from the saltbush of the littoral zone all the way up to the club moss of the misty pampa zone. Santa Cruz, in its diversity, has a town, too, a picturesque gathering of white one-story structures and half-built boats perched in their scaffolding, called Puerto Ayorta. Depending on when in the last fifteen years our guidebooks had been published, they informed us that the population of Santa Cruz was anywhere from four thousand to twenty thousand.

  "They've paved the roads," Jack said. "It looks so different."

  "You never came here before," Dot said.

  "I've seen pictures."

  "Poser," said Dot.

  "Poseur," Jeremy said gently.

  As we walked through the town to the Darwin Research Center, Jack made no other comments, no observations about flora or fauna or geological formations. He did not march up front beside Martha as he usually did. He no longer exhibited his knowledge for Martha's approval or correction. He did not smile or make jokes or offer me a drink from his water bottle. He walked in uncharacteristic silence, looking mild and distracted. He seemed, in fact—and it was almost inconceivable, so that it took me a while to come up with the right word—lost. Having accomplished his mission, he seemed less like the teacher's pet than the teacher's pet on summer vacation, purposeless, aimless, nothing to do for months and months. He also seemed, like a child with nothing to do for months and months, relieved.

  Still a little weak, I brought up the rear of the procession.

  "Are you okay?" Jack said.

  "Everyone is so kind." I realized I sounded like Scarlett O'Hara. No, not Scarlett. Like what's-her-name, Ashley's wife, the simpering one.

  "Are you okay?" Jack said to his mother.

  "I'm bereft," his mother answered. "If you don't mind."

  Poor Jack. His work was done. His father was scattered.

  "A very goal-oriented young man," Gloria whispered, nodding at him. "Poor dear."

  I felt sorry for Jack, too, now rudderless, as if he'd lost his faith.

  "Look," I said, poking him the way Martha used to poke me. "A sesuvium."

  Jack turned, fingered a leaf.

  "It's a saltbush," he corrected me, without much enthusiasm. He tore off a leaf. "Taste it."

  "Salty," I said.

  He seemed cheered, just a little.

  "Jane, are you okay today?" Martha asked me. "I was worried about you last night. You were sort of babbling incoherently."

  Babbling incoherently. I had pondered the nature of friendship, had dissected and scrutinized it, had theorized and deduced its origins, had witnessed its extinction and excavated its fossilized remains, and the sum of this adventure in natural history was incoherent babbling.

  "Oh, yeah," I said. "The sun, you know? Fine, I'm fine now."

  The research center was a touching, deeply human place. I, of course, saw it as a metaphor for all of human endeavor. Martha, of course, objected strenuously to such an interpretation. But what else can you say about a place in which people devote their lives to breeding endangered tortoises other people have spent centuries endangering? Some of the tortoises were babies, the size of the pet turtles we used to have in school. They crawled around their shady nurseries, labeled by island and species. Then we went into the bigger corrals of the bigger tortoises. They stared at us. They stretched out their necks. They plodded toward us. They were huge. They were as grand as pianos.

  A tortoise, its eyelids drooping over ancient, cloudy eyes, began chewing on one of Mrs. Tommaso's bright green trouser legs.

  She said, "Shoo!"

  There was a slide show in the visitors' center about the threat of feral dogs to baby iguanas and the threat of feral goats and donkeys to the vegetation the tortoises needed to survive. Mrs. Tommaso was visibly distressed by this presentation.

  "The poor..." She stopped, unable to decide which species to worry about first—the iguanas? the dogs? and those sweet-looking donkeys!—stunned by cognitive dissonance as by an electric shock. "The poor..."

  "Things," Gloria suggested.

  We followed a boardwalk past more corrals until we found Lonesome George. He was the last of his kind, perhaps the only real individual in the world. There were no other Pinta tortoises left. The research center occasionally tried to stimulate him manually, as Martha delicately put it, in order to preserve some of his sperm. Just in case another Pinta turned up somewhere.

  The idea that we would all return home the next day suddenly struck me, and struck me as very sad. I would be lonesome, like Lonesome George.

  "Well, not exactly," Gloria said.

  "The tortoises can live over a hundred years," Martha was saying. "What if a sailor in, say, 1881 took a tortoise home from Pinta to his wife? It might have lived as a pet all these years. It might yet be discovered and brought home to old George. Or to his sperm. His old sperm. Or so one hopes. They've tried mating George with other species. They could then mate him with his daughter, and then his granddaughter, and the strain would be almost pure again."

  "A trifle Appalachian," Jeremy said.

  "The last time I was here," Martha said, "we saw two tortoises mating. The shells provide a challenge. Luckily, the male has a forked penis."

  Martha described the left penis, the right penis, and Lonesome George's unhappy attempts to use his own ambidextrous member, all to Dot's wide-eyed, snorting delight, then moved on to the different shapes of the shells of different species, by which they could be told apart and which allowed them to eat at different levels, some grazing like sheep, some reaching up into the trees like giraffes.

  When Darwin came to the Galapagos, he rode on the backs of tortoises. They live to be so old that it was even possible, or almost possible, which was good enough for me as I stood there surrounded by their enormous shells, that Darwin had ridden on the back of one of these very creatures. Darwin timed them as they lumbered to and from a watering hole. He was told by the governor of the Galapagos that one could identify which island a tortoise came from by the shape of its shell, but Darwin didn't realize the significance of that information until much later. I think the Beagle crew took a young tortoise with them on their journey and that it died, but I'm not sure. Maybe that was Melville. Martha told us that whalers used to load up on tortoises and store them upside down in the hold. Six months later, they could haul one out, still alive, and slaughter it for fresh meat and turtle soup.

  "It's okay," Jeannie reassured Mrs. Tommaso, who again looked alarmed. "Sailors must be practical and keep up their strength!"

  Martha led us through the research center and told us more stories. She had a story for everything. Turtle penises seemed as dramatic to her as volcanoes. Even the family feud had a story. Perhaps the feud was not as stirring as Lonesome George's sex life, but still Martha, the raconteur, had been able to unfold a tale of lovers, of broken engagements. Because she liked so much to narrate, to report and e
xplain and instruct, it puzzled me once again that she had never offered her version of the end of our friendship. I had offered mine: incoherent babbling.

  Perhaps friendship has no end, meaning no intent, no goal, and so no narrative structure. I wondered again what evolutionary value friendship could possibly hold. There are theories about cooperation, I know, but friendship is hardly that. I suppose it could be some remnant of parental love or sibling love or family love in general. That makes sense. Just a vestige, though, like the male nipple.

  We walked on the recently paved road into the town, past the bright tourist boutiques. There were quite a few boats anchored in the harbor, and the town was busy and lively. I bought a T-shirt with iguanas on it.

  Martha smiled at it, a little condescendingly, I thought.

  "Well, I can always wear it to the gym."

  Gloria bought a boobies T-shirt, which said "Boobies" across the chest.

  "And I don't go to a gym," she said.

  "So many new shops," Martha said. "When I'm away for a few weeks, another always springs up."

  Martha, what are you doing here? I thought. I have been with you for seven days on this trip, cheek by jowl, and I still have no idea.

  "This shop wasn't here two weeks ago," Martha said, walking into a boutique. We all followed her and began fingering the merchandise, beautiful dresses and jackets and bags made from some kind of tightly woven, brightly patterned Ecuadorian material.

  "This is awfully chic for Puerto Ayorta," Martha said.

  The stuff was surprisingly elegant, not at all like the usual tourist-bound native crafts. Gloria eyed it suspiciously.

  "Where is this from?" she asked the man behind the counter.

  "Wife," he said. He called in Spanish into a back room, and Wife stuck her head out. She looked at me. She looked at Martha. A cigarette hung from her mouth. A Winston.

  "Son of a bitch!" she said.

  "No, no, they're lovely," Gloria said. "I just wondered—"

  "Son of a bitch!" Graziela said, holding out her arms, enfolding Martha and me in a hug.

  The sound of Graziela's voice, the sound of Martha's laugh, and the smell of tobacco came together, a heady atmosphere of comfortable memory and confused, unlikely disorder. What was Graziela doing in the Galapagos? What are you doing here, Martha had asked me at the beginning of the trip, and I had answered, My mother sent me.

  "Did my mother send you?" I asked Graziela.

  Graziela offered me, then Martha, a cigarette.

  Graziela gestured to the man behind the counter. "Husband," she said. Then she expanded the gesture to take in the whole store, of which she was obviously equally fond. "Shop."

  "Boutique," said Husband.

  "Castro, kiss my ass!" Graziela said.

  Her English, while still colorful, was not any better than it had been ten years ago. Martha spoke to her in Spanish, though, and ascertained that Graziela had been living in Guayaquil with her husband, an Ecuadorian she'd met in the States. They had just expanded their business to Santa Cruz, opening the third of their line of dress shops in that country.

  Graziela picked out dresses for us. "No union label!" she said.

  Her husband gave everyone discounts.

  "Hamburger!" Graziela cried, and led all of us off to a restaurant.

  Is this why I'm here? I thought. Did I come here to find you, to find the past in this antediluvian place, to smoke cigarettes with my antediluvian friends? Was Gloria wrong, after all, and had I succeeded in digging up the old bones of friendship, in slapping the skin and feathers back on like Darwin's ostrich rescued from the stewpot?

  Graziela and Martha chatted in Spanish. Graziela made sure to turn to me and, in English, swear like a sailor as she petted my cheeks and threw up her hands in astonished delight at the vagaries of fortune that had brought us together again. Martha translated the most important parts. But we were not little girls in Barlow distracting the housekeeper from her duties. We were not best friends bumming cigarettes off Aunt Anna and her companion. Aunt Anna was dead, Graziela was a married entrepreneur, and Martha and I were distant cousins.

  We took our farewell of Graziela, who gave me her card, which had a tiny green turtle in the upper-right-hand corner, and Martha guided us to a dusty blue bus. I waved to Graziela. She blew a kiss and called out, "Dirty goddamn bastards!" with a big sentimental smile and tears rolling down her cheeks.

  The bus rattled up a gravel road through a fertile humid zone, much of which was still farmed and privately owned, to a fern forest at the top of the lopsided central mountain. Martha guided us along a narrow path, identifying the vines and branches that brushed our faces. I remembered walking through our meadow of tall wildflowers in Barlow. I remembered the day I met Martha.

  We came out into an opening and faced two cavernous holes, calderas, enormous bowl-shaped valleys overgrown with plants, every single one of which, it seemed, Martha insisted we look at through our binoculars. The calderas were called Los Gemelos, the Twins.

  We were all wearing rain jackets to protect us from the famous mists that were supposed to blanket the higher elevations during that season, but the sky was clear and it was hot. The names of the plants did not interest me anymore, now that our trip was almost done. I tried to look carefully, though, if only for Jack's sake, to encourage him, keep his chin up, revive the teacher's pet in him.

  "I'm actually a little tired of examining little leaves," he said. "And yet I don't want to go home, I don't ever want to leave. Funny, the end of a trip, isn't it?"

  Martha guided us to a field where we saw two huge tortoises grazing. A little farther on, a corpulent sow and a line of piglets ran past. The light was fading. The field looked like the English countryside, open and lush, a tall tree here and there swaying above the stone walls. It was a familiar scene, from hundreds of books and movies, from Masterpiece Theatre. Why was it here?

  We were all standing, marveling at the appearance of barnyard animals. We said how cute they were. We jostled one another trying to get pictures. Martha leaned against a tree and looked on in disgust.

  "You have come three thousand miles to a new hemisphere to take pictures of pigs?" she said.

  We continued to watch the mother pig and her enormous piglets, comfortably scratching themselves against a tall, introduced tree. It was a homey scene, if your home happened to be Sussex. The tortoises, two of them, rare and lumbering through the grass, looked out of place, fragile. The parable of the tortoise and the pig.

  "My father had a pig's valve in his heart," Jack said.

  His mother began to dab her eyes. Mrs. Tommaso stared at him in anti-vivisectionist angst.

  "Nothing is where it should be," Dot said.

  "You have fine instincts," Jeremy said, patting her head proudly.

  "Look, extinction is the counterpart of evolution," Martha said. "Let's go. It's getting late." She tried to round us up. "Come on. They're just pigs."

  But we stood transfixed in a meadow that looked as if it had posed for an illustration of Dr. Dolittle's Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. When one stands in an evening field and the sky fades in a glorious wash of scarlet, and the barnyard animals are grunting, and lush green grass rolls in every direction, gently, to the horizon, and the faint scent of damp earth rises as the sun sets, even the presence of two Galapagos tortoises cannot obstruct a rush of almost hackneyed emotion, of delicious melancholy, of homesickness, of the impossibility of complete happiness and, at the same time, the unending need for it.

  "This is a Caspar David Friedrich moment," Jeremy said, his voice hushed, awed.

  "I want to go home," Dot said.

  I thought of Barlow. I could almost smell my mother's lilacs.

  "Come on, off we go," Martha said. She poked me.

  How did you get here, Martha? I thought. How did you end up at home in the Galapagos like these pigs?

  Unable to move us, Martha took a deep breath, then assumed her instructive role. "Those pigs and those tortoises
are actually related. One way you can see it is when you examine the mammalian inner-ear bones. They are derived from reptilian jaw elements."

  Probably you came here on a whim, just like me, I thought. Although surely you came on your own whim, not your mother's. Fate, which is to say, whim, brought us together. And Fate, which is to say, whim, would separate us again.

  "For the last hundred, hundred and fifty years, a lot of zoology has been the study of phylogeny, that is, tracing an organism's form back to a common ancestor, and so reconstructing that common ancestor. It's a limited way of looking at evolution, but it has yielded some interesting descriptions."

  If a century of zoologists could devote their lives and their monographs to such a pursuit, surely I was within my rights attempting to trace friendship, this oddest of all organisms, back to its roots.

  "When two organisms have attributes that derive from an equivalent characteristic of a common ancestor," Martha was saying, "they are said to be homologous."

  Why weren't Martha and I homologous?

  "Would you say you and I are homologous?" I asked Martha.

  "Why? Because we both have Barlow in our name?" She laughed. "You're so literal-minded and fanciful at the same time."

  I was, wasn't I? A black hole, sucking up the world around me to metaphorize it out of all recognizability. Darwin was right— the habit of comparison leads to generalization. He was right—we travelers stay such a short time, able to make mere sketches of what we've seen. And then we fill up the wide gaps of knowledge with inaccurate and superficial hypotheses.

  Wasn't that what Martha did as well? No. Martha told stories, but she described what she saw. Detailed observation—just what Darwin valued. The world opened up before her, inspired by her vision and her touch. She used what she found, like my father opening all those misfiled drawers. Whereas all I seemed to do was put things in the drawers. I was the one who misfiled in the first place.

  I wondered how much of my life I had misfiled over the years. Had I misfiled my ex-husband, Michael? Obviously. Although whether I had misfiled him under "Husband" or had misfiled him under "Ex-husband" was anybody's guess. Probably both. I had certainly misfiled Martha. And our friendship.