“Not too soon, Fitz? Maybe we should . . . ?”
But didn’t finish her phrase. We would have to find out eventually. Why not right away?
Again, that click and the shuttering of the lens and the endless few seconds it took for the print to develop and emerge.
And again, he was there.
Just as in every image since I was fourteen. Just as in the carte postale that Cam had brought back from the rue de l’Odéon.
Only more uncanny.
Because up till now my clothed body below his face in the photo had always been separately mine, my body and my shirt and my pants kept me in contact with myself, assured me that I still belonged to my century, that there remained a zone of my space and life untouched by his influence. This time, in this recent photo and fresh incarnation that Cam had just snapped, my bare and exposed physique echoed his, copied its pose, reproduced the configuration of the intruder’s own uncovered body. His face was, as usual, superimposed on a neck and torso that were mine but in that new image my nakedness minutely recalled and imitated his, allowing him to merge into me with wilder intensity than ever before. It was him in the photo and not him. It was me and not me. The discovery of his ethnicity, the revelation of the rest of his frame hidden until then, rather than distancing this Patagonian from my life, seemed to have drawn him obscenely closer, made monsters of us both.
Even in that dim light, Cam could read my frustration.
What would I have done if she had not been there, had not snuggled me in her arms and grasped the shoulders that were not his but made from my flesh and muscles and bone and skin, with those hands that loved me and that he would never feel, my chest that she held tight against the flowering of her breasts, and that he would never touch or caress, lick or suck or kiss, turn into honey, my body that had been swimming toward her all our lives?
He might have me, but I had her.
I had her saying to me: “It’s better this way, Fitz. The slow way. The hard, patient way. It means we have years ahead of us to solve this together, to ease him out of our lives, the five thousand steps that Dr. Land once mentioned to you, remember? Taking our time can only bring us closer to one another.”
She had recommended patience but there was one area in which I refused to comply.
“Where are you staying?” I asked.
“At the YWCA on Temple Street until I can find some place nearer to MIT.”
“No, you’re not. You’re moving in here with me. With us, with my family. Tomorrow.”
She did not protest. Perhaps she felt comfortable because Mom had blessed and welcomed her, making her a daughter of the tribe before any of the men knew about that relationship.
And so it was that Camilla Wood entered my life like a whirlwind, reorganizing everything, offering a foundation from which to gaze, unafraid, upon a world that I had turned into a phalanx of hostile stares. Entered my life understates the earthquake of her presence: entered our house, entered my room and bed and mind and heart.
She agreed with my father—whom she instantly put at ease with her cheerfulness and, of course, their mutual veneration of science and progress—that it was perilous for me to be caught by any of the many cameras that roved the world. She cared not a whit for Polaroid’s reputation or the photographic industry’s future if news of this illness got out. She knew enough about guinea pigs and fruit flies and chimps, enough about laboratories and experiments on animals and amoebas and errant cells to be wary of doctors and engineers and bureaucrats getting their hands on me and even worse if they were betokened to corporations and governments for funding. The fact that my visitor determined a need for furtiveness and clandestinity, did not mean, however, that I should be his slave, genuflect to him, defer and postpone all the delights of the outside world. She would act, she said, as my scout before we ventured out and after that as my buffer, ready to confiscate any indiscreet camera.
She favored, as I did, the most outlandish hours and had always loved the wilderness that I had so missed, insisted on taking long walks through the Massachusetts forests that had not seen the footprint of men or women since the Indians had been driven from this land centuries ago. It was during those weekend outings that I poured my heart into hers, told her everything that had happened to me since fleeing her presence: everything, the masturbation while Peter Gabriel’s song played, the terror I had felt at losing her, my years of penitence, the rage and helplessness that had culminated in the near suicide by the Charles River and her miraculous intervention, my memory of our first swim to keep me sane in the time that followed, my mad conversations with the invader, the guilt that had corroded me upon my mother’s death. Cam took it all in her stride—you can be a mystery to the world, secrete yourself away from everyone else, but not from me. Even making fun of my need to hide away. A burlap bag? No way. How unfashionable, Fitz. She wrapped me up as a mummy for my first Halloween in seven years—“who cares if it’s only this once”—and back home we gave ourselves indigestion feeding each other the candy and caramels and chewy treats overflowing from our plastic pumpkins.
She also arranged for me to reconnect to my estranged brothers, enchanting them with her cooking skills, housekeeping abilities, and penetrating good looks. They wanted a female in the house, had suffered during the recent harrowing bachelorhood all four of us had endured. Made all the smoother when Cam placed on the mantelpiece a memento of her and Mom in obvious camaraderie that she had enticed some kind passerby outside the library to snap. They were both fondling a stray dog, one more thing that joined her to my mother, the love of animals.
Even the weekly photographic sessions were transmogrified beyond recognition. Cam popped herself into every shot, planting a wet smack on my lips or embracing me with an octopus squeeze or simply making funny faces at the camera, hey, this is Cam, you silly camera, I’m the real Cam camera here, wiggling her fingers at the lens or the intruder or both—registering an ever more extravagant pose, turning what had been a solemn and excruciating ceremony into a festive occasion, full of jokes that I almost looked forward to.
Almost, because I could not shake the apprehension that such unseemly conduct might be construed by my unwelcome caller as an affront, provoking him to shift his attention from me to my lover, that he or some other Ona ghoul—a female one?—that accompanied him in his netherworld might haunt this woman who was mocking them. What if Cam, like Mom, was unable to protect herself from the curse? When I timidly broached the subject with her, she laughed, waving away any possible threat. “Let him, her, them, just try,” she said, sticking out the tongue that had licked me all over. And that was that, if she was enjoying herself so much and lifting my spirits with her clownish antics, why should I be concerned? Later I would kick myself, brood on the debacle that, again, I had failed to forestall.
As if I had much time to worry. Cam had started me on a crash course on the events in our country and the world that I had paid no heed to for all these years—what, you don’t know what Iran-Contra is? What? You don’t know about the savings and loans mess? What? You don’t know what perestroika is, what glasnost? What? You don’t know that Grenada was invaded—or that the Falklands War even happened? You don’t know that the man likely to be our next president was the head of the CIA? To work, you lazy bum. And back to my schooling as well, that had fallen by the wayside due to a combination of Mom’s inattention during hours consumed by the Amazon jungle and my obsessive experiments with pixels and digital images. Why study history or geography if I’d never travel anywhere? Why learn languages?
“Spanish,” Cam resolved. It would come in handy, she announced, for our research into the events in Tierra del Fuego.
A quest that we embarked upon the very Monday night that followed my twenty-first birthday, as soon as she had unpacked her few belongings.
There were three major directions for our probe, according to the systematic Ms. Wood: Patagonia and its indigenous population; records of natives from that area forcibly removed to Europe
in 1889; and anything relating to this so-called Prince Roland Bonaparte and his photographic collection. Though there was an adventurous, impulsive streak in my Cam, she also had her feet firmly on the ground. I would be constantly amazed in the years ahead at her ability to confront complex situations and swiftly choose the best alternative in a split second, and invariably the one that entailed less danger. No matter how much she wished me to leave my cocoon, she decided it was imprudent for me to accompany her to the Harvard Library. She’d check out books and materials for me to safely peruse at home—increasingly in Spanish to hone my skills—while she, fluent in French and German, reserved for herself the more laborious examination of archives.
“I suspect there will be no straight line to a clear resolution,” she said. “Everything worthwhile, in life and science and health, and even in love, Fitz, advances through zigzags, coiling around itself in and out, hiding from us until it’s ready to reveal its mysteries, doubling back and forth, groping in the dark before the light comes. Like strands of DNA itself. Like the five thousand steps of Dr. Land. I’d be satisfied if we can turn up enough clues, both about the Onas and your genealogy, anything that will allow me further inquiries once I return to Paris next fall.”
A trip I dreaded, though I did not protest, determined not to stand in the way of her vocation. Better to concentrate on what joined us during the year that was left until her departure, tracking down all those clues.
We started with the most notorious and public, and therefore the easiest, of our leads, Prince Roland Bonaparte. Easiest and also a red herring, no matter how fascinating the man’s life had been, as we learned from the copious material sent by André from his father’s Paris bookshop in late October, not that I was particularly gladdened by any favors from this potential rival.
Thwarted by a decree by the French government forbidding a military career to heirs of the Bonaparte dynasty, the young Roland had dedicated himself to anthropological studies, an increasingly popular field of inquiry in the wake of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, the year after the prince’s birth. His mentor had been Paul Broca, founder of the French Society of Anthropology and an expert on aphasia and speaking disorders. Besides exploring the brain and measuring craniums, Dr. Broca had decided that photography was the perfect means for regularizing, classifying, and profiling all manner of subjects—from criminals to savages and, eventually, ordinary citizens in need of passports and identity papers, and it was to photography that the prince had devoted his every hour. Not strange, then, that the owner’s son had ascribed the prints he’d sold Cam to Roland Bonaparte. A misattribution, according to my love’s exhaustive inquiries. The prince had not personally photographed the 1889 photos of the kidnapped Onas. Taken by somebody else, Bonaparte had purchased them for his legendary collection, already filled with other “specimens,” as he called them, which he had captured with his lenses: the Kaliña/Galibi of Suriname, the Omaha Indians of the American prairies, Queensland aboriginals, Kalmyks from Siberia, Senegalese, Somalis, Eskimos and natives from what was then Ceylon. Chile was not absent from this mix: from the center of that long country had come Araucanians, also known as Mapuches. No Onas though. Not one inhabitant from Tierra del Fuego.
Anyway, it wasn’t possible that the prince’s DNA was in any way twisting and turning inside me. His offspring was reduced to one surprising and scandalous woman—Princess Marie Bonaparte, famed psychoanalyst, investigator of female sexual dysfunction and patient first and then benefactor of Freud, having provided the funds that helped extract him from the clutches of the Viennese Nazis. Her two children—Prince George (heir to the throne of Denmark and Greece) and Princess Eugénie (heir to nothing but the title), were certainly not involved with either of my families. As I looked at the photo of Marie Bonaparte, with her dreamy eyes, reclining seductively, all decked out in white and lace, so different from my unclothed visitor, I wondered if she had been taken by her father, at age seven, to see the exhibition of the Onas. Was that image still floating somewhere in that indecipherable mind of hers that had made the venerable Sigmund ask a question that I had avidly first encountered in some porno book that was circulating at school and that I later saw on several T-shirts, all of this before my fourteenth birthday: “What does a woman want?”
A question that only mattered now that Cam had reentered my existence, and which she had no trouble in answering with a sexual frankness that would have awoken jealous suspicions if she had not sworn that she had been as faithful to me over these seven years as I to her. More faithful, as she had no incident with her genitals and Peter Gabriel albums to report nor any last minute dalliance before contemplating suicide by an icy river. Nor did she hold back what she wanted of me, for me: that I should get well, so we could carry out the adolescent plans—marrying, settling down, pursuing careers in biology and math respectively, having children, swimming toward old age together—that my visitor had interrupted.
Just as his own life had been interrupted, though it took us almost a year to establish the circumstances of the abduction—Cam, after all, was working full time at her lab job and could only snag a few hours a week to pursue our research. As for me, I was close to useless: housebound, reading what she happened to hunt and gather on her outings, eager for the evenings when my love would come home and I could discuss my findings with her and slowly piece together the ordeal of the eleven inhabitants of Patagonia. They had indeed, as we discovered, been kidnapped in 1889 to be exhibited in Paris at the Chilean pavilion—Onas, according to most versions, though Cam soon started to call them Selk’nam, the name they seemed to have used for themselves.
This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that such kidnappings took place in those islands that had been baptized Tierra del Fuego, the Land of Fire, by Magellan in 1520 when he crossed the stormy straits that still bear his name. Besides calling the first natives he encountered Patagones—very tall and gentle and clothed in strange furs—Magellan also ordered two of these natives to be violently taken on board, so they could be exhibited at the Portuguese court—an enterprise that was frustrated by their deaths. Did they die of European sicknesses? Did they resist and then were murdered? Did they commit suicide, jumping into the sea, trying to swim back home? Our readings shed no light on these questions—just that the gentle giants lived on raw flesh, ate rats without skinning them, and liked to gnaw on a sweet root they called Capac. And that before dying they embraced Jesus Christ as their savior—one was baptized John and the other Paul. True or false, these reports? Could we lend any credence to the stories their captors told?
This much, however, was clear. In the centuries that ensued, no nation that traveled to this land of fire—and all Europeans did so, all were bent on the spices of the Indies and the riches of the Orient and control of the route through Cape Horn, they all competed to discover the continent rumored to be at the southern end of the earth, terra australis incognita—was immune from the temptation of taking men, women, and children from their original habitat. The Dutch, the French, the Spanish, the Germans, the British, the Portuguese, they all raided those shores and brought home samples of these savages. Except the Americans: they had been content with slaughtering almost to extinction the seals and whales that provided the fundamental food and clothing, shelter and weapons, for the survival of the five tribes that had lived under that inhospitable sky and turbulent sea and freezing climate for over six thousand years.
It depressed me to read these accounts day after day imprisoned in my room.
And more so when the enterprising Miss Wood brought home a book by a Father Borgatello and an album of photos published in Torino in 1907 by the Salesian Congregation that contained, she said breathlessly, a photo I needed to see.
“Him? Is it him? Have you found out who he is?”
“I don’t think so, but . . . Here, take a look. It’s a Selk’nam.”
Sprawled across the bottom of the photo, framed carefully by someone un
acknowledged, was the corpse of an Indian, naked among brown and scraggly tufts of grass on the tundra of some wasteland in Patagonia. Genitals exposed to the wind back then and later to eyes, just like mine now, of anyone who came upon the picture. In one hand the dead man clutched a long broken bow, white because it may have been carved from the bone of a whale. In the other, three equally white arrows.
I looked closer at the Selk’nam’s face. It was smudged over, hard to identify, except for the snub nose and mop of hair on his head, which appallingly recalled those of my visitor. Above the murdered native stood a handsome bearded man in military gear, casually clasping a rifle, somewhat like hunters tower over the prey they have just shot, though his indifferent foot was not touching the corpse, his body mostly turned away from the lens of the camera, glancing to where three other armed men crouched, their backs to the photographer, intent on shooting at some objective, probably other Indians, on the wide and flat horizon, resisting with arrows perhaps or perhaps just waiting to be killed or simply fleeing.
“That’s Julius Popper,” Camilla jabbed a finger at the bearded man just above the dead Selk’nam. “Remember him?”
I did. We had come across his name before in other readings, but never contemplated his face yet, a Rumanian who headed an expedition sent to explore the region by the Argentine government in 1886, but also interested in staking a claim to the pastures where sheep could graze, be fattened, and then exported to Europe.
“Eighteen eighty-six,” I mused, almost to myself. “So it can’t be him, can’t be our visitor?”
“Not unless we’re mistaken about the 1889 abduction—and there are so many sources insisting that such an event did happen.”
I looked at the corpse, just familiar enough to force me to ask questions I’d rather have avoided. How often had I wanted my visitor dead, would have gladly strangled him? And here was someone just like him—who knows, perhaps even my visitor himself if the 1889 date was wrong—supine, helpless, muted by death, no longer defiant, submitted to the iron laws of bullets and the jaws of technology, shot first by a rifle and then by a camera—both artifacts invented and manufactured thousands of miles away, transported to Tierra del Fuego to do their inexorable duty. What happened immediately before that picture was snapped, before that moment was arrested forever? What happened afterward, when the lens ceased to witness and transmit the incident and the boots moved on to other tundra, other murders, an evening meal, the hearty smoke of a pipe next to a fire inside a tent? How to get that dead man in the photo, on the tundra, to respond? Did my visitor know the answer?
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