Darwin's Ghosts

by Ariel Dorfman

  “Maybe it’s a brother,” Camilla said. I think she wanted to fill the void we both felt, the void left behind by that exposed corpse in Patagonia.

  “Or the father,” I said. “I’ll report back once I’ve read a bit more. Though who knows how much my elementary Spanish and an Italian dictionary will reveal.”

  As I laboriously went through Father Borgatello’s book, trying to catch something pertinent, I found no hint of the dead man’s identity. I went back to the photo itself and its lone caption: “This photo of some hunters of Indians in Tierra del Fuego makes us understand better than anything else the unbearable conditions in which the Fueguinos live and how great are the benefits offered by the Salesian Missions.”

  Cam and I had already learned enough about the predicament of the Selk’nam to understand why the missionaries were publishing the brutal photo of Popper and his victim. By 1887, the year after the execution of that naked native, a thousand indigenous women and children had been herded into the sanctuaries established by these Catholic priests, trying to save what was left of the Selk’nam population decimated by scum from the gold rush of 1880 and then by massacres perpetrated by the owners of extended sheep farms who began paying a British pound for each ear of an Indian brought in. Though the hacenderos, noticing Indians trading their furs and baskets without an ear, demanded henceforth that bounty hunters prove with head or testicles, breast and heart, that there was no cheating. The rescue by the Holy Cross of the remaining Selk’nam proved to be a remedy worse than the sickness: by corralling the survivors into squalid and unsanitary reservations, the priests unwittingly opened the lungs of their new congregation to tuberculosis and their bodies to typhoid and smallpox. The Indians could hide from the bullets and the snarling dogs and punitive expeditions and even endure the destruction of the guanacos that were their livelihood and sustenance, but could not hide from the microbes or viruses carried by the foreigners, infestations exacerbated by their close proximity to others carrying the germs. An author wrote that the worse disease for the Selk’nam was sadness, the loss of their culture, their way of life, the open pastures, the extermination of the animals.

  My visitor had not uttered one word, had never spoken to me. Maybe he didn’t need to. Maybe this was what he was urging me to discover on my own: his story, the story of those he had loved, who had given him birth, who had not outlived him by many years.

  There had been 4,500 Selk’nam in 1880. By 1924 there were one hundred left, ten in 1950, and Lola Kiepja, the last of her race of purely indigenous blood, had died in 1962, five years before my birth, Cam’s birth.

  Gone. Extinct. Disappeared from the face—yes, the face, the face—of the earth.

  THREE

  “I think the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.”

  —Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

  I had been wrestling for months with a growing sympathy for this recalcitrant visitor, trying to deny the sort of compassion that had led to my mother’s death. But who could shut his eyes to that long heritage of suffering, especially someone like me, who knew what it was like to be abruptly uprooted from normal life? I fought to keep my detestation of him vibrant, I needed to stay angry, a wrath now mitigated by the realization that I might well have acted in a similar way if I had been subjected to the sort of abuse that his people had tolerated for almost five hundred years. More reason not to choose—I wouldn’t have, I was sure of that—someone innocent like me to retaliate against. Innocent, unless, unless . . . Cam forced me to diligently note down the names of the long line of abductors, merrily declaring that “someday we’ll figure out if any of them are your ancestors. And then, then, then, that day,” she added flamboyantly—it was impossible to dampen her spirits, she laughed whenever I regressed to my former despondent self—“we’ll vanquish your visitor. I’ll find the connection, you’ll see. Before I come back from Europe.”

  Europe! Each day and night that relentlessly brought her August departure closer gripped my chest with despair. No matter what pangs of compassion might have been stirred by the plight of my Selk’nam visitor and his tribe, I did not look forward to spending so many lonely months in his ominous presence, no longer protected by my love’s smiles and those interludes of sex where he seemed to discreetly withdraw. And oh how I dreaded the return of those tiresome weekly photo sessions, his face overpowering mine without her buffoonery to sweeten the ordeal.

  Cam herself found an inimitable way to lighten my mood.

  “You know what this is?” she asked, one Friday evening in June.

  How could I possibly guess what she held pertly in both hands hidden behind her back. I tried to snatch at it, but only managed—a pleasant enough mistake—to touch her splendidly round and perfect ass. She spun around and slapped me on the cheek with an envelope.

  Inside was a letter from the Cambridge County Clerk asking me to appear before him this coming Monday in order to apply for a marriage license. Attached was a certificate from my doctor attesting to the fact that I did not possess a photo ID due to a medical condition, with a waiver from the governor’s office specifying that it accepted a birth certificate as sufficient proof. Furthermore, my father was named a Justice of the Peace for one day, July 14, 1989, so he could officiate at the wedding.

  I was stupefied as much as I was delighted. That she had been planning this with Dad for weeks, that she had not even bothered to ask me if I was willing to marry her, that she had taken my yes I will yes as a given. How was I supposed to react? Tell her how deliriously happy this made me? Ask her what hoops she had been forced to jump through in order to obtain the waiver?

  Instead: “Why July fourteenth?”

  “Two hundred years since the French Revolution—when a new era was born. Not a bad date to celebrate the rebirth of our love together, our storming of our own Bastille, so to speak, liberating whatever prisoners we have inside. And one hundred years since those Selk’nam were put on display in Paris, millions of visitors—yes, visitors, Fitz—ogling them. You’ll see why that matters when I give you your wedding gift.”

  For the next weeks, she dedicated many hours to preparing that offering, mostly when I was asleep.

  I would wake and see her bent over a huge green volume that easily reached a thousand pages. She forbade me from even glancing at the title, only going so far as to inform me that it had taken her several months and many pleading letters and phone calls to wrest this treatise in German from the library at Duke University, even though it had been consulted only once since being acquired for its special collections in 1931. But there it was in her nimble hands, night after night, testimony to her powers of persuasion and infinite stubbornness. All this gave to the approaching wedding celebration a bizarre quality: nothing substantial would change between us, after all, when the State of Massachusetts, through whatever words my dad might conjure from thin air, pronounced us man and wife. Perhaps that night the encounter of our two bodies, the only honeymoon someone with my condition could contemplate, would reach a more feverish, prolonged, arcane excitement and longing, making up for the many months of absence that loomed ahead. But her gift—what it was I could not predict, that would be a real surprise.

  And so, the night of July 14, 1989, after bidding farewell to the guests—Dad and my two brothers—when we closed the door to our room, the only place in the world where I felt safe, and faced each other and whispered the words, to have and to hold, that our hands made real, to have her hold me, to hold me in the having, once I had kissed the bride and she had stroked my hair as if to certify that I was not dreaming, she presented me with the gift.

  The book she had been poring over was Martin Gusinde’s monumental Die Feuerland-Indianer, Band I, Die Selk’nam—the first volume of four dealing with the Indians of Tierra del Fuego. Gusinde, a Catholic priest from the Order of the Divine Verb, had traveled there four times between 1918 and 1924, growing so close to his anthropological s
ubjects that he had been allowed to participate, the first Westerner ever, in the male ceremonies of initiation. According to the transcriptions into English that Camilla had spent many nights working on, this missionary had described countless recent kidnappings of natives by Europeans: a failed attempt to hijack a family of Alakaluf Indians in 1878; a man, woman and child of the Tehuelche ethnic group seized in 1879; another group, a larger one, of Alakaluf forcibly removed to Europe in 1881. Gusinde also mentioned the Araucanians exhibited in 1883 and photographed by Bonaparte. But the crown jewel of Gusinde’s revelations—and Camilla’s wedding gift—referred to the eleven indigenous inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego who had, in December 1888, been captured in the Bahía de San Felipe by the Belgian whaler Maurice Maître and taken to Europe, “chained as if they were Bengal tigers,” Gusinde’s exact words lifted, apparently from none other than the infamous Julius Popper. Gusinde not only revealed what we already knew from several pithy sources, that these captives had been shown at the Paris commemoration of the French Revolution, but that the nine who survived the crossing of the Atlantic were billed as cannibals and fed raw horse meat in a cage for the glee of spectators.

  In order for Maître to squeeze more money out of his hostages, he next transported them to London to be paraded at the Royal Westminster Aquarium—an exhibition that was suspended after a few days, despite the Indians being “the talk of the town,” due to protests by missionaries dedicated to evangelizing South American Indians. Under investigation by Scotland Yard, Maître escaped with eight of his victims to his native Brussels—eight, because one of the Ona women had been left behind, mortally ill and without a stitch of clothing, in St. George’s Infirmary, where she died on January 21, 1890. Maître managed to display them a couple of times before the Belgian authorities arrested him and sent the aboriginals back to the Chilean port of Punta Arenas. Only half of them arrived, as four died on the journey home.

  I read Gusinde’s three pages on this abduction a second time and only then, trembling, asked Cam what this meant for us: Which of these eleven was my visitor? Was there a photo of any of them in this German priest’s book?

  Camilla passed me a slim annex to this major work, an album of pictures that Gusinde himself had snapped during his four voyages to Tierra del Fuego. Worth examining, she said, in case I was interested in their ceremonies and habitat. But no photo remotely like the one she herself had found in the bookstore, no face that recalled the face that haunted mine. We still did not know anything about which of the captives was our man, nor if he was among those returned to Patagonia.

  There was, fortunately, one promising reference that the librarian for Latin American studies at Harvard had discovered: Gusinde had another annex of pictures that she had been unable to retrieve through Interlibrary Loan—who knows where or how it had been lost. The missionary had, however, bequeathed a trove of photos to the Order of the Divine Verb, now stored at the Congregation’s Anthropos Institute in Sankt Augustin, a few miles from Bonn. Once installed in Paris, Cam would travel there as soon as a suitable scientific excuse could be found, perhaps a visit to the Institute for Life and Brain, a biomedical center in the German capital. Her intuition was that one of those photos in Sankt Augustin would be crucial to our next steps. We had made real progress, she said, almost crowing with satisfaction. She was leaving for Europe with more clues than could have been expected when our quest had begun, ten months ago.

  It was not the only thing she was leaving with.

  I also had been hard at work on gifts, though only after she had informed me of our upcoming marriage did I realize that they would be perfect for our wedding.

  I had placed, inside some gaudy wrapping paper, a contract. Though secret negotiations had been going on for a while, it was only a week ago that I had signed an agreement with Adobe, a company out in Silicon Valley, to sell them the rights to my patented Imageplus digital image editing program. Adobe had developed, through two brothers by the name of Knoll, a rival method called Photoshop and would be putting this raster graphic editor into production next year, presumably in February 1990. My work would help them to eventually combine in one document pixel images with images that were vector based, a major visual breakthrough. This meant that the newly married couple now had one million dollars in the bank and soon, if the program was as popular as Adobe and I expected, many millions more at our disposal. And, perhaps more significantly: though the program was not yet able to manipulate my photo from age fourteen and make it grow older through Photoshopping to resemble my current face, the technology was just around the corner. Soon I could eliminate my intruder’s face from images, receiving a passport. This might well be the last trip she would ever take alone!

  The second gift was two personal computers. I booted them up, punched some letters and signs in mine, pressed yet another button, and there, suddenly on the screen of Cam’s machine, was a message from me to her: you mean the world to me.

  “We’re connected through the Internet,” I said. “The World, a company here in Brookline, will soon be selling this sort of access to ordinary citizens, no security clearance needed. Dad got us to be part of their experimental outreach program. Just promise you’ll also use the phone, so I can hear your voice. Try it, try it!”

  She sat at her computer and, using two fingers like a little bird, typed back a sexy message and I replied with something even more salacious and we squealed like pigs rolling in the mud, life seemed like a sport—so young, both of us, to have the world on a string, the world at our feet. Playing, playing, playing games as if we had all the time in the world, as if we could make up for the seven years my visitor had stolen from us. As if my mother had not been murdered for trying to find out the identity of that young man.

  “Perfect,” Camilla said. “No pretext for not sending me daily reports, maybe hourly.”

  “Every minute!”

  “Every second!”

  “About what? The reports?”

  While Camilla uncovered the identity of my visitor and his captors, she wanted me to make a list of every foreigner, from Magellan on, who was in some way complicit, directly or indirectly, whether as a predator or as an observer, in the extermination of those inhabitants, be they Selk’nam, Tehuelche, Hash, Alakaluf, or Yamana.

  I protested this onerous task. We knew who had kidnapped those eleven men, women, and children, including my intruder: it was Maurice Maître, the whaler from Brussels. I didn’t know of any Belgians in the family on either side, but it was worth sniffing around—as to others . . .

  Though Maître’s violence against the Selk’nam was paramount, Cam said, he might not be the precise person we were looking for. No laziness, no excuses, she emphasized: an extensive list, so that when she came upon suspects in her European inquiries we would already have advanced, discarded some, found others more probable. Every prominent European who had come into contact with the ancestors of my visitor.

  “What, even Darwin?”

  “Stunted, miserable creatures, ignoble, infected, abject, wretched savages, wild animals. Who wrote those words? Devils, troubled spirits from another world. Who accused them of howling from the shores a language that scarcely deserves to be called articulate, eh, who denigrated their hoarse, guttural and clicking sounds? Who spread the lie that they were cannibals eager to eat their own grandmothers?” Camilla had obviously been preparing for any vindication of the author of On the Origin of Species. In spite of his prejudice against the Patagonian Indians, I still felt queasy about placing this scientific hero of ours in the company of genocidal maniacs. But Cam was adamant: “Fitz: when a detective is trying to solve a crime, unearth the reasons behind an act of revenge, nobody is innocent. If he had the means, the motivation, the opportunity, Darwin qualifies, no matter how much we love his work.”

  “All right, all right. Note, though, that I’m not descended from him or my parents would have bragged about it nonstop.”

  “Who knows what Darwin was up to during his
travels on the Beagle, what Chilean wench he bedded, what young American damsel visiting Valparaíso or Bahia Blanca seduced him, how his chromosomes may yet pulsate in some faraway American kid celebrating his fourteenth birthday—the fittest did not survive by abstaining from intercourse, Fitz. And while you’re at it, investigate Robert Fitzroy, the captain of the Beagle. After all, he’s far worse than Darwin. On a previous expedition to Tierra del Fuego, he carted four hostages off to England, even changed their names. If it had been your relatives, wouldn’t that be a motive to invade some kid whose name was none other than Fitzroy? And why did your parents give you that name, exactly? Was it in that man’s honor?”

  “My Mom liked the name ever since she came across it in some novel about the life of Henry the Eighth. His illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, duke of Somerset or something or other, would have inherited the throne if he hadn’t died of consumption. Mom always mused about how sickness had deprived this young man of a chance to show his worth—but that her son would be different. Maybe that’s why she went bananas when I got sick myself. But my visitor can’t be so irrational as to wreck somebody’s life because their name coincides with the name of the captain of the Beagle. He knows me too intimately.”

  “You don’t really have the foggiest idea of what is motivating your visitor, do you?” Camilla said firmly. “Robert Fitzroy stays on the list.”