Darwin's Ghosts

by Ariel Dorfman

  I stood up from the ground, shivering, wrapped myself in both blankets like a newborn child, recoiling from the sin I had been about to commit—against myself, against life, against my love.

  Warmed by her voice from afar.

  And yet, it was not merely her memory that made me cease that sexual ceremony before it had culminated. I also did it to spite my visitor. He had foraged into my secret core, become my twin, my equal, my obdurate companion, the only one who knew my real thoughts. The place of trust that I had always conjectured Cam would occupy: to be my confidante, my mind reader, my pillow, the swimming maiden I’d conceal nothing from. Well, there was one thing, this one private thing that belonged only to me, that I would keep from him.

  I headed home.

  He could hover above me like rotten breath all he wanted, he could wait till the ebbing of time for me to masturbate for his voyeuristic eyes. I would not perform in his peep show. I would not give him that satisfaction, not now, not ever, not repeat in his presence that instant when I filled the cup of my fancy with Camilla Wood and our dream of swimming through life together, side by side, stroke by stroke, forever, the true forever. I would not let him share what was reserved for her, that intimacy.

  I would not betray her.

  It was madness, a delusion. What chance did I have of spending a night, much less a lifetime, with that splendid woman, when she was free to pursue her cravings and I was restricted to festering inside that stranger’s stare?

  Madness, a delusion, but it saved me, allowed me to live for something other than to be a depository of pictures retched on my countenance. By that river of death, I had been struck by the revelation that she could be a visitor as well, at least in my mind, in my forlorn heart. You can stop me from being with her, but not from dreaming about her, you cannot stop her from visiting me.

  All the more reason for me to not immediately, that night or in the months and years that followed, try to resolve the questions Cam had posed when shown the photo, who is it, who is he, what does he want? No, I would not honor that fiend by searching for his identity.

  That was a task my mother had taken on with such verve and determination that she had eventually found what she believed to be an answer. How was she to know, how was I, that it would lead to even worse injury, a deepening of our tragedy?

  Her search had begun tentatively, reaching out to family members. She needed to explain anyway my sudden absence from the flock of pictures periodically sent their way. “These headaches,” she wrote, favoring letters over the perilous give and take of a phone conversation, “have made Fitzroy extraordinarily shy of cameras. Each time a photo is snapped, he feels his head is about to explode. So we’d appreciate, if you come for Thanksgiving or Christmas, that you abstain from mentioning this traumatic condition to him, let alone take photos. He requires peace and quiet and affection.” And in a nonchalant postscript, a scrawled afterthought: “Just wondering if you know of any such adverse reactions in our family. Any gossip would be most welcome.”

  The responses were unanimously sympathetic, swearing discretion, but unable to shed light on any family member who had ever shunned cameras. Mom’s mother added, a touch acerbically, that she could not imagine anyone in her past or her husband’s who behaved like “one of those savages from Africa, afraid that a camera will steal his soul.” My father’s mother was less sharp in her reply, but equally unhelpful: “I feel so sorry for poor Roy. This impenetrable desire to escape being photographed goes against everything I’ve heard in family lore, photography being, according to legend, central to our prosperity many generations back. I wish I had paid more attention to my grandparents, those snatches of conversation I barely registered when I visited them in France before they died.”

  With our tribal past closed, the only piece of evidence left to my mom was the likeness of the invader himself.

  The man was some sort of barbarian, an uncivilized brute who must have been immortalized in a photograph long ago, and was therefore presumably dead. Natural then that she should begin her investigation at the Harvard library, going through stacks of books on native peoples from everywhere on the planet—and months later, had to admit that she had come up short. There was nobody who looked exactly like this specter—though his features vaguely brought to mind those of some Indians of the Americas.

  She decided that it made sense to confer with some anthropologist who specialized in the field, preferably someone far from the Boston area, so as to keep him at bay if he grew overly inquisitive. For that she would have to send out the face, making sure to cut out my neck and shoulders, so no one could link the image to me. This instantly led to another round of altercations between my parents. My father reminded his dear wife that their agreement did not include showing the photocopy to foxy academics who might well extricate its secret. Dad only relented after wresting from my obstinate mother a promise to be extra tactful.

  Mom enlisted the services of her brother Carl Bailey, a physicist at UC Berkeley. Lately she had been thinking, she wrote, about studying anthropology, maybe obtaining a Master’s degree. He probably recalled her childhood dream of being a vet—a calling made impossible by her husband’s allergy to fur and the hot breath of carnivorous creatures. You were the one who counseled me, Carl, remember?—that if I couldn’t heal animals, then why not study primitive people one step up the evolutionary scale. And having spent oodles of time with my father and his Polaroid colleagues she wondered if photography and aboriginal tribes might not make for an intriguing area of research. Did he know of anyone who might offer some orientation?

  Uncle Carl—the only member of the family to sport an academic career—replied with the address of Dr. Sheridan Beck, who had helped create an Indigenous Study Center at Berkeley in the seventies but had now retired to Denver, where he taught an emeritus course on Amerindians at the University of Colorado.

  In the letter Mom fired off to Colorado, along with asking for guidance regarding future studies, she included the photocopy of the cutout face, inquiring if he might have some notion of its origin or tribal identity, as she found it mysterious and compelling.

  Months passed. Just when Mom had lost all expectation of a reply, a letter arrived. Dr. Beck would be glad to help a relative of Professor Bailey’s, and listed several institutions of higher learning where she might pursue her studies. Regarding the bizarre photocopy he had, despite lapses in recollection due to his age, some preliminary answers to her query. At first glance, there was a remote resemblance to a tribesman from the Ket ethnic group whose features he had snapped during a trip to Siberia twenty years ago. More likely candidates, however, were members of the Kuikoro and Kalapalo in Brazil, tribes recently relocated inside the Xingu reservation in order to save them from extinction. Here was the conundrum. No camera had been present at the first fleeting encounter with the Kuikoro in 1884, and only in 1945 did his good friends, the Villas-Bôas brothers, establish the first Western contact with the Kalapalo. Given the graininess of the image, however, it had to be earlier than that—shot in the 1870s, in some European country or the States, certainly not in the Amazon. Where, then, had Mrs. Foster come across such a specimen, indeed mysterious and compelling, more so because the body of the subject was missing? In what year had it been taken? If there was an expedition into the Amazon in the middle of the nineteenth century, carrying sophisticated photographic equipment, he would appreciate learning about what might turn out to be a ground-breaking discovery. Would she mind keeping in touch?

  “Ha!” Dad cried out when he read Dr. Beck’s letter. “You see, you see. I told you not to send it out. He’ll show up at our doorstep any day now, announcing that he’s figured out how that face is connected to the family.”

  Mom calmed him down, brandished her thank-you note to Dr. Beck, stipulating that she couldn’t remember—she was also having her senior moments, she joked—who had sent along that photo. Once she’d tracked that person down, she’d respond more fully to his query.
When the anthropologist excitedly answered, begging her to make an effort, and Mom simply ignored his pleas, several frantic letters from him followed.

  And then, abruptly, no more communications from Colorado. Uncle Carl mentioned the reason, passingly, in a phone call: Dr. Beck had died of a heart attack. “Maybe that guy in the photo, your Mr. Monkeyman, killed him,” my brother Hugh suggested, echoed by truculent Vic. If that savage could infiltrate my photos, why couldn’t he engage in more dire actions? They began dancing around as if possessed by simians.

  Mom, secretly relieved that our worries regarding Dr. Beck were over, contained her fury at such unbecoming behavior. Poor man. She had been rude to him whereas he had been so generous, providing real clues to the identity of our intruder. Clues she would diligently pursue for the next years.

  Margaretta Foster had interrupted her studies at Boston College in order to support her husband while he finished Harvard Business School. I was now the pretext for a return to her frustrated vocation. Strange twists and turns of life: the monster had ruined my life but was offering a new lease on hers. She plunged into the history and geography, the religious and cultural customs, of the Amazonian Indians, quickly dispatching the vulnerable Ket people of Siberia—a red herring, she decreed, a waste of time.

  During the first year of what she called, without realizing the irony, her voyage of discovery, she supplied once a week—precisely after the photographic session that I had to endure and that invariably ended with the same face plastered on top of my body—a report about her findings. What started, however, as a detached comment, neutral in voice and tone, gradually began to be colored by passion, spilling over into dinner conversations, flavored ever more frequently with allusions in Portuguese, a language she had started to learn with furious devotion.

  It was not merely, I realized, that she had resolved that this was the path to save me. She was also saving herself, erasing an inexplicable guilt that lurked inside. When each passing day brought me no remedy, she increasingly felt—oh, Mom always took everything too much to heart—that she must be responsible for my disorder, had done something wrong and was being punished. To engage in that research was a relief, the certainty that she could get to the root of what had transpired.

  “There must be an image somewhere,” she would tell us, upon returning from her library expeditions. The Amazon had been explored by many travelers in the nineteenth century and she seemed bent on exploring them, each and every one, with equal determination. She would not give up, no matter how impenetrable the thicket of bibliographic references became. When the obvious choices, the drawings of Henry Bates and the photos of Louis Agassiz (“He must be the one who took the photo, he came from the Boston Area, he took his wife Elizabeth Cary with him, you see how women also opened up those rivers?”), yielded no match with my visitor’s visage, she spent weeks looking for a hint that perhaps the collection of Alfred Russel Wallace—the naturalist who had surmised before Darwin the evolutionary origin of species—had not really been lost when his ship back to England caught fire. When that trail and so many others led nowhere, she leapt to the twentieth century, to Percy Fawcett and his search for El Dorado, and then on to the expeditions of Euclides da Cunha and the Villas-Bôas brothers and so many others, the search seemed endless and, invariably, she came up empty.

  “Maybe I should not be concentrating on the explorers,” she said, “but on the dead.”

  This mystifying phrase was slowly clarified over the next two years, as she plummeted into the predatory exploitation of those unfortunate Amazonian creatures, how they had been robbed of their land and habitat by successive generations of conquistadors and then cultivators of drogas do sertão, did we know that the Indians were obliged to dig up cloves, cinnamon, vanilla, cacao, sarsaparilla, all sorts of seeds, for export, all for export, Brazil nuts and copaiba oil, forced to cut down trees on land where their ancestors had hunted, laboring because their women and children were held hostage in filthy encampments, enslaved by rubber barons and iron ore companies and diamond magnates and petty thieves and missionaries. Missionaries! Mom almost frothed at the mouth when she spat out the word. They were the worst—destroying the aboriginal culture under the guise of saving souls. Victimized by epidemics, smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, influenza, sexually transmitted diseases. The horrors went on and on and on. Descimentos and resgates and guerras justas became words as habitual to us as corn flakes and french fries. Turtle butter, she would exclaim at dinner, passing the ordinary cow’s butter to smear on our corn on the cob or mix into her al dente linguini. Her eyes blazed: they were obliged to make butter out of the turtles, their amphibian friends.

  But I really became conscious of how extreme was her transformation when she ceased to refer to my visitor as a fiend, a ghoul, a savage, a barbarian, a demon. He became that poor boy.

  Her stories of oppression, rather than assuage my attitude toward him, made me more resentful: he had stolen my face and now was stealing my mother. I was sorry that his tribe had been exterminated, but why was that my business? Had I invaded his Amazon territory as he had invaded mine? Why hadn’t he chosen some descendant of conquistadors or better still a contemporary logger who seemed to be the villain, why not someone ravaging the rain forest? Why me? It always came back to that question.

  To which I had added another one, more specific to my own family.

  Why not one of my brothers? Both of them?

  I waited anxiously for Hugh and Vic to reach puberty. Wait is not the right word. I urged them to masturbate, fed them Playboy magazines and pornographic pictures and dirty jokes and innuendoes and positions, anything that might entice a visitor to come for them as he had come for me, the same visitor or one of his brothers if he had them, anyone would do. Mitigate my loneliness, join the club, in fact make it into a club, an entity with more than one member. But they hit thirteen and then fourteen and indulged in pleasures that I had given up on and yet showed no signs of infiltration, nothing more irregular than pimples, nothing more drastic than high-pitched vocal chords, a knowing smirk.

  So that was that: this curse only descended upon the firstborn of this family. I was to carry the burden by myself.

  Not only by myself. Mom also, she was also condemned.

  Unlike my visitor’s sudden initial incursion, this time we should have been prepared for the impending calamity. The signs were all there, made themselves manifest one night just after she had served each of us a habitually generous portion of dessert.

  “Vanilla and cinnamon,” she spewed the words as if they were insults. “The four of you like them, eh, vanilla and cinnamon, eh, like I did, like I did?”

  We looked down at the bread pudding, delicious as ever.

  “Made from Wonder Bread,” she said. “Wonder, wonder, no wonder,” she said. “No wonder,” she said, “no wonder those people fled to the forests and the headwaters of the hinterland. No wonder,” she breathed each word out as she pointed to the bread pudding, “that they wanted revenge. No wonder they sent an emissary to our comfortable world, living off their rubber and oxygen, munching their nuts, gobbling up their meat, sprinkling their dessert with vanilla and cinnamon. No wonder, no wonder.”

  Several minutes of silence followed this tirade, until my father spoke for the four men of his tribe: “You’re taking his side. After all that he’s done to us.”

  As if he hadn’t made the accusation, as if I wasn’t beholding her with amazement, she let us know what really puzzled her. These marauders had been Dutch and Spanish, Brazilian and Portuguese, but not of remote French or German ancestry as she and her husband were, so why should that young man have chosen their eldest son to exact vengeance, why Roy, why our family? And only then: “Yes, I’m taking his side. Not against you. Against the world that made him do this. I’m taking his side because it’s the only way to convince him to stop haunting our boy. Or do you happen to have a better idea?”

  “In fact, I do,” Dad answered. “We both do.
”

  It was a plan that we’d been hatching covertly for the last year. Dad had left Polaroid after Dr. Land’s retirement, ending up at Negroponte’s MIT lab, helping to explore how personal computers might revolutionize the media. One night, he’d brought home a Commodore 64 and hooked it up to a startup screen.

  “This device or some future model will someday cure you,” he said, stroking the computer as if it were the Venus de Milo. “It won’t be long, the lab folks say, before we’re able to manipulate images digitally, not requiring negatives or even light to process and reproduce a face. Just a series of binary codes inside a machine. Once that happens, the bastard’s fucked. Whatever he is, whoever he is, he belongs to the past. Born into a world of photography, like we were. But humanity is about to leave him behind. Computer imaging will stop him from smuggling his ugly mug into your pictures. His primitive tactics and knowledge, wiped out for good, made obsolete.”

  “So what, Dad? This invention and that invention and this camera and that one and the latest newfangled device and a damn paradigm shift. I’ll believe it when I see it. When your solution is as real as he is. So let’s talk again when somebody truly manages to capture images through this digital shift, this digital shit.”