Copyright © 2018 by Ariel Dorfman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, writing or recording, or through any other system for the storage or retrieval of information without the written permission of the publisher.
Seven Stories Press
140 Watts Street
New York, NY 10013
www.sevenstories.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dorfman, Ariel, author.
Title: Darwin's ghosts : a novel / Ariel Dorfman.
Description: Seven Stories Press first edition. | New York : Seven Stories Press, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018002021 | ISBN 9781609808242 (hardcover); ISBN
9781609808259 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Voyages and travels--Fiction. | Family secrets--Fiction. | Human zoos--Fiction.
Classification: LCC PR9309.9.D67 D37 2018 | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002021
For Angélica, always.
Darwin’s Ghosts was inspired by a series of true events that effectively happened in the nineteenth century. However improbable they may seem at first glance, these have all been rigorously documented. Readers will have to decide for themselves whether the same can be ventured about the narrator of this story and his fate.
“Any attempt to know the past is a voyage to the world of the dead.”
—Carlo Ginzberg
“The only hope is to be the daylight.”
—W. S. Merwin
ONE
It came a bit after dawn, the dark condition that was to plague me, so sudden that I was unable at first to give it a name. How to know right away that it had been incubating inside some ancient zone of myself and my ancestors for one hundred years, begin to guess that it had infected the vast, blind world for far longer? All the more unfathomable because its advent, as with many another subsequent terror in my life, was so entirely unforeseen.
I searched, almost from the start, for signs that might have announced its emergence, might have prepared me for the catastrophe. I can remember my adolescent hands leafing through our Foster family album, page after page, a ritual consolation that allowed me to stop and diagnose each previous, untainted appearance of mine, pinpointing with my index finger what used to be my sunshine face, lingering on it.
Until my fourteenth birthday, when it disappears. The image disappears, my face disappears, not the family album. That continues to fill up with father and younger brothers and for a while my mother, they continue to find habitation in that endless chronology of endless ordinary life, graduations and celebrations, engagements and games and vacations, most of my family growing, blossoming, blooming in the album without me. To think that as a child I thought that was boring, for one day to be like the next one, that I prayed, as I voraciously read stories of the sea and odysseys in exotic lands, that something adventurous might befall me. It did, it did—but not until that dawn of contagion when everything changed.
So innocent, I had been so innocent in the first photo my father snapped of me suckling at my mother’s breast, the derisive welcome the camera offered, though not instantly, not yet a Polaroid, then and there in 1967. Like all babies just arrived in this world I am barely recognizable in that photo and yet recognizable enough that I can identify that infant with myself, not that different from what my father had distinguished through the viewfinder and the camera bagged and froze in time while I was drawing pleasure and milk from my mother, Mom so radiant and jubilant at her first-born child, look at me, just look, luminous in all my suckling glory, ecstatic to be alive. The image of me that my father’s camera and every other camera would continue to display during the initial phase of my life, normal, so exceedingly, delightfully, yawningly normal. My involvement in that album concluded with the last snapshot taken the day before my fourteenth birthday, the photo that I pinned up, enlarged, above my desk, to perpetually remind me of what I had been, could no longer be. Next to the photo Cam Wood, the one love of my one life, had given me—another reminder of what I thought I had lost forever.
How effortless it all was while it lasted, the photographic trail left behind by that early buoyant life: performing each stage of existence for others, for myself, for posterity, for the lens of a cold machine. My first toy duck in my mouth, the first tooth peering forth like an interloper, my first step holding a hand, my first step without a helping hand, my second step, all the etceteras that my parents kept lapping up, oh isn’t he the cutest little monkey?, oh you little savage you. Yes, that’s how they used to describe me, not knowing that the joke would be on them, unaware as they dispatched photo upon photo to grandparents and uncles, showed to willing and unwilling neighbors, unaware as the tired attendant at the AAA office who nipped my first official picture for a passport (can it be that they really took me to Paris—Paris of all places—when I was six, so small next to the Arc de Triomphe with hands in pants, so curious and grimacing at the chimps in the zoo of the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne, indeed, indeed, they took me there), unaware and oblivious and heedless as the folks at the kindergarten when they demanded a large print of me to put on the board with all the drawings of flowers. So easy, compliant. Snap, click, ready, here you go, here he is.
Just as I was unaware. No intimation, let me insist, of the fate ahead, the horror my life would become when I reached puberty. When something happened, somebody happened. He happened, my visitor.
I remember the day as if it were yesterday. For all purposes it was yesterday, never ceased being one day ago, became in my mind the day I was expelled from modern life.
It started as such days did for millions of boys my age or thereabouts.
For that first light of September 11, 1981—my fourteenth birthday—I gave myself an early present, just as the sun was rising. I masturbated for the first time. I thought of Camilla Wood, how just the previous night—her dad was out to see some movie, American Werewolf in London, I think it was—we had gone as far as she wanted to go, the pang of kisses and the touch and tip of her breasts, and something more, but not enough, not enough, I thought of Cam’s unexplored depths the next morning when I did it by my solitary self as I listened to Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers” and the spasm of that verse, that foreboding verse, If looks could kill they probably will.
I have told myself that it was the sex that brought on that punishment, the fact that I could from that shuddering moment onward certifiably produce offspring, as my parents were able to conceive me, repeating the coupling of generations before us, so many men and women making and unmaking me in the distant and less distant past. It’s difficult to doubt that conjunction of sex and sickness, and yet, how many boys have inaugurally fondled their genitals for their first and abiding time—and girls, and girls like Cam—how many have joined in a panting bout of sex, how many kids had watched with hot amazement their sperm jetting thick and white into whatever sweet receptacle was available, while they melted all over, from the slope of their toes to the expanding universe of their brain, and thanked the stars and Peter Gabriel that they would soon repeat the experience? How many ended up afflicted like me? How many descended, as I did—wanly and proudly descended the staircase to breakfast, where my dad awaited with the latest model of his SX-70 camera to catch the exact second when I would gawk at what lay next to my plate: the keys to a small motorbike, my dream vehicle. And two tickets to the upcoming Rolling Stones private pre-tour concert at Sir Morgan’s Cove in Worcester. My father wanted to fix in eternity that Polaroid moment of familial bliss, of the kind that he himself had devised and presented to millions of TV viewers with
the stellar presence of James Garner. Click!
That was it. The click that divides my existence. Before the click and after the click. I remember the exact aftermath so well. One second after my father eagerly received into his hands the spool of instant celluloid and, shooing the rest of us away, watched something arise as always from the gray like a ghost, that’s all it took, while my mother kissed and hugged me with her overwhelming warmth and my siblings sang their stupid happy birthday anthem, good wishes meant for everybody else on this earth, but never again for me.
My father’s face. Gaping into the abscess of that Polaroid likeness of me as if it were the devil incarnate. It was, it was, I was certain that it was for many a year. But he did not believe his own eyes, he muttered No, no, no, and stashed the incriminating evidence in his pocket, squished it there as if it were a venomous worm rather than a photo—so alarmed and disgusted that I wondered if my recent erotic initiation had not been revealed in my reddened cheeks, if the author of my days had not somehow guessed by some efflorescence of features, some telltale pimple, some leering dribble from my lips, what had transpired in my room upstairs some brief minutes ago while Peter Gabriel crooned about kissing baboons in the jungle, but it was not that, I have often prayed that it would have been something so inconsequential. No, no, no. What he said, and then: I need another shot, this one came out sort of blurry. I’ll have to tell the guys at the lab that they haven’t fixed the glitches on this latest model. Wouldn’t want to have to recall the whole batch. As if the only trouble was technical and the only entity requiring protection, his precious Polaroid company.
So he herded us, the whole family, into one frame and again, click. The second momentous click of my existence. The second click, perhaps worse than the first one, because it governed all else that was to follow. Because this time he showed the photo, he was compelled to do so, showed it to my mother, and the revulsion on her exquisite face as she tried to keep it from me, but I was too quick, I snatched it from her hands and . . .
There I was.
Not me. In the middle of all those other commonplace, conventional faces, only mine—well, not mine—stood out.
My body. My place at the table. My mother on my left, my brother Hugh on my right, both of them beaming at the camera, while my other brother, Vic, crowded eagerly in.
Instead of what had been for fourteen years my face was another face, the face of a young stranger.
The eyes of that man, his wild overgrown mop of black hair, his snub nose and high cheekbones, his thick aboriginal lips with barely a white hint of teeth flickering between them, his sultry enigmatic defiant look—oh if looks could kill, if looks . . .
The eyes, the dark eyes.
My visitor.
Though I did not yet call him that, did not know that he would mutely reappear over and over again, each time any photo of me was snapped, any film, any portrait, solo or in a group, any replica, that he would not go away, would crop up incessantly, unrelentingly, twinned to me as if we had been born together of the same soundless matrix.
Peering out from my neck and shoulders, parked on me like a quiet, mad totem. The only thing familiar about him: that short dense mane of his that seemed a bad imitation of a Beatles hairdo—a slight contemporary touch and echo that made his face even weirder and more threatening, perhaps because his hair almost reached the eyebrows, shadowing them, making their orbits gleam all the more starkly.
“If this is another one of your pranks,” my father said. Not because he believed it but because he needed to say something, anything, and I was a mischief maker, the carefree sort, the good fun favorite of everyone and especially my impish mother and practical jokester Cam. My dad was playing for time, trying to squeeze this aberrant incident into some semblance of order, ready to blame anything but his saintly and sacred SX-70 Sun 600 Series model.
I was also playing for time. Taking my cue from my father, I asked my brothers if they were pulling a stunt, had conspired to flash a mask in front of me without anyone realizing it, I was also doing my best to rationalize what had just happened when I showed them the photo and accused them directly of . . .
“We didn’t do anything, Roy,” they cried out, “swear to God and hope to die, we’d never . . .”
“A mistake, a mistake, Fitzroy,” my mother added, but her eyes were as wild as the stranger’s in the Polaroid, not as full of night but as wild and with far more fear. “This latest model your dad brought home just yesterday, who knows what quirks it may have, try another one, Jerry.”
Click. Number three. A close-up. Only of my face, nothing more.
His face, nothing more.
I grabbed it, the photo, grabbed it before anyone could stop me, rushed to the door, came back for the keys to the motorcycle, eluded my father’s hands vainly attempting to block me and then the clutching claws of my siblings who by now were beginning to enjoy the spectacle, Me too, me too, each of them screeched, I also wanna see the monkey man, I also wanna see the Roy ape, and Mom shushing them horrified and I allotted them just one look and they were silent, if looks could kill, they knew that I was older and stronger and would eventually exact revenge. But not now, not yet, now I careened out to the driveway and was on my way, heading for Cam’s house. Who else could I show this to, who else could give me comfort, lift whatever evil spell had been cast, decree that this was only an accident, something that would slink away, that somebody else’s camera, yesterday’s or tomorrow’s model, would not repeat.
She’d be there. I knew she would be waiting for me so we could go to school together, that she’d awoken that morning thinking of me and my birthday, thinking of me as she made breakfast for her father, saw him off in his Mustang, left the front door open so that I wouldn’t even need to ring the bell, I always, always would be welcome.
Though not the photo I showed her.
“Who is it?” she asked.
I told her that I did not know, did not care.
She insisted: “Who is he? What does he want?”
To fuck me over, that’s what he wants. Words I didn’t bother to spit out.
Already feeling a chasm yawning between us, that primate’s face separating me from her, setting me apart. Because I could not even reveal that I suspected that this had leeched onto me due to that morning’s transgression, that I had betrayed her, had engaged in sex with myself instead of showing patience, bestowing on an empty room what I should have been depositing inside her, listening to Peter Gabriel instead of hearing her murmur and gasp into my ear, I could not tell her that truth or any other truth. Maybe this happened to every boy who—maybe this was the most arcane rite of initiation, the secret of sex and puberty that no one wanted to talk about, maybe she would hate me for having spent myself, maybe if I pretended nothing much had happened it would go away by itself, tomorrow I would wake up and a different photo would announce my return to normality. Maybe I had been wrong to flee to her, trust that she would have a solution. When all she had was the question: Who is it?
It was the right question but I was not ready for it, I could only think of myself, why me?, why me?, that was my blundering and dumb response to her query, dumb because I did not articulate those words to her, just let them shape and slap my mind, breaching an even darker chasm between us, she was interested in who that man was and I didn’t give a damn, all I wanted was for him to be gone and for her to take me in her arms and offer my stained body refuge, but he was already digging a pit around me, a wall forged from his eyes and hair and brown skin, he had made me and therefore her into strangers.
I looked at Cam as if I had never seen her before, as if I could already predict what lay ahead of us, the Rolling Stones tickets thrown into the garbage, the days and then weeks and months and years when we wouldn’t speak to each other, avoid each other’s company—as if I could come by and lavish a kiss from her lips, as if only the two of us were in the room or under the stars or on her bed, when there would always be three, yes, his poison
was beginning to seep into every cranny, starting with her.
“You,” I stuttered, “you,” and I could barely manage to breathe out what ensued, but she could picture it in my eyes, she wasn’t afraid and yet took a step back, such was the violence of my frustration, “You can’t tell anyone about this, no one, no one, not your dad, not one soul, or . . .” Or what? Would I despise her, abduct her, maim her, kill her, cage her like a wild animal?
Cam’s response was gentle, and for the click and snap and instant of a tick of time I managed to hold onto the illusion I was not turning into somebody else, into him, into the man whose face had ravaged mine, that it would all work out, that she still loved me as she had the night before and that I could still be whole, because she said:
“You can count on me,” that is what she promised, that is what years later I would discover was the truth, but that interlude of peace dissolved and I knew it was too late, I had let some monster out or in and she had asked who it was, who is it, what does he want? And so I backed off. Instead of falling into her arms and sobbing there and planning by her side what to do, I snatched the Polaroid print and turned and left her without any promise on my part, she could not count on me because there was no me anymore, just us, just the young barbarian and this contaminated fourteen-year-old condemned for reasons he did not understand, clinging to memories of the girl he had just broken with, as if remembering could bring salvation.
We liked to joke that it had been love at first splash. Or first stroke, which had a more erotic loop to it.
At the tryout for the swim team at our school, that’s when we recognized each other. We both loved swimming, we were both good at it, we were paired together by Coach Griselda, a former Olympic bronze medalist who wanted to mix boys and girls up, considered it stimulating for competition.
I barely spared a glance at the petite damsel by my side, this partner who had been foisted upon me—hey, I was ten years old and often vented about how stupid girls were, overcompensating for my fear of the other sex, their pert looks, their gossipy mouths, their giggling conspiracies, the mysterious attraction of slim legs as they ran or, in the case of the swimmer perched next to me at the pool’s edge, fleshing provocatively from the contours of a bathing suit. So I just nodded in a perfunctory manner, indicative of my obvious superiority, when the coach introduced us, this is Cam Wood, this is Roy Foster, hello, hello, hello and goodbye, I hoped, I’d leave her behind me in the water soon enough.
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