She paused to catch her breath.
I said: “So who is he? Does Juillerat say anything about who my visitor is, which of those we saw in the engraving, his name?”
“Nothing about any of them individually, Fitz.”
“So what’s the big discovery? Why so excited? You said we got him, we found the bastard. Found who?”
“The photographer, Fitz. The man who took the photograph. That’s what’s most valuable, besides the names of Wahlen and Saint-Hilaire, you need to add them to the suspects until I—but, listen, there’s an engraving that accompanies this article. Against a background of trees—a thicket, full of leaves, to give the impression of something natural—we see five of the eleven. A woman with an elongated breast that falls from her chest, holding a baby, not sure what sex, the child is leaning over, playing with a strand of straw like a typical child of two, maybe three years of age. Squatting next to her is a youngish man, holding a bow and arrow, looking out at us with a dazed expression, and above him, to the left is another woman—seems like one, at any rate, as she has a protruding belly and one of her arms is pressed against a breast, half hiding it. And next to her is your visitor. This time, Fitz, there can be no doubt—I mean, the engraving from Le Journal Illustré was a bit blurry and with a distant perspective, but in this new, larger one from La Nature we see him just as he is in the carte postale, just as he appears in your photos over and over, now we know that rather than protecting his genitals he was carrying a long stick that slants across his lower torso. And the caption below this illustration says—wait for this, listen to this, it’s what we’ve been searching for during this last year, it’s the jackpot, Fitzroy Foster—the caption states ‘The inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego in the Paris Jardin d’Acclimatation. According to’ —d’après is the French word—‘a photograph by’—note down the name, my love, push it to the very top of your list—‘Pierre Petit.’”
“Pierre Petit?” I let the words roll around in my mouth as if they were small pebbles. “Does it say anything more about him? Why he took the original photo that the engraving was made from?”
“Not a word. But it should be smooth sailing from now on. Easy to find that out here in Paris. Also about this Saint-Hilaire who took the eleven natives from the ship. He must be the man running this human zoo at the Jardin or some sort of entrepreneur.”
“What about my visitor? And the rest of them? What happened next, after Paris—if they survived Paris, that is, if they—sorry to be so incoherent, Cam, it’s just more than I can absorb in one sitting.”
“Well, get ready for many more sittings, because now’s when things begin to get interesting.”
And the disclosures began to roll in like waves, only restrained by Camilla’s grueling professional schedule. First of all, by e-mail, clarifications about the two malefactors we had targeted. “There’s no sign of this Wahlen fellow so far, but Albert Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, he has a record longer than Al Capone’s. He came from a long line of naturalists, father Isidore and grandfather Etienne, but he was more interested in animals as spectacle than as an object of study, taking charge of the exhibitions at the Jardin. His major innovation came in 1877, when he added fourteen Nubians to a menagerie of exotic beasts, camels, elephants, giraffes, ostriches, dwarf rhinos. Attendance skyrocketed, le tout Paris flocking to the Jardin. Next came six Eskimos, then Laplanders, and Argentine gauchos, Bushmen, Zulus, American Indians—and, in 1881, the eleven Alakaluf.”
“So I should write the extended family to see if the name Saint-Hilaire rings a bell?”
“By all means, Fitz,” came Camilla’s rejoinder, “though I have someone else I’ve come across, but would rather not divulge his identity quite yet, I don’t want to rush to conclusions as I did with Prince Bonaparte—there are two names in fact that I’m keeping in reserve but in case my new leads send me on a wild goose chase, you just stick for now to Saint-Hilaire. Our real objective, however, should be Pierre Petit. He’s the one, after all, that we’re absolutely certain was on the other side of the lens when your visitor’s face was captured. A real jerk. Along with snapping innumerable pictures of exotic humans at the Jardin, he was engaged in a series of more staid and respectable portraits. School groups, for instance, when the students graduated. Members of the Faculty of Medicine. Tons of clergymen, cardinals, abbots, bishops. He was the official photographer of the French episcopal conference and of France’s religious orders. So prominent, our friend Petit, that the government commissioned him to register week by week the progress of Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty before the French sent it over to America, he even visited New York several times to take photos of its erection. I wonder what he thought of give me your huddled masses? But masses weren’t his specialty. He captured a series of notable French artists and intellectuals, Berlioz, Gounod, Gustave Doré, and someone who was even more famous.”
“Maybe my grandparents have heard about this Petit guy.”
“Hold on,” I could almost hear her tapping the words over there in Paris, knowing I would receive them lovingly in my lonely room in Massachusetts, “before you stir the pot, let me check something out. It’ll take me a while before I have a free day to go to the Place Vosges, just be patient.”
Place Vosges. I looked it up and found nothing that indicated why she wished to visit it—a symmetrical old square in a corner of Le Marais district, near where the Bastille had been stormed. More and more I felt that she was on a journey of her own, speeding so fast that she couldn’t find the time to fill me in on each detail. Or was it that she enjoyed holding back certain morsels of information, waiting until she could present an irrevocable and dramatic picture, in typical Cam style, impress me with each new pinnacle of accomplishment?
A week later, I got a succinct message: “Fax machine. Carte postale coming in. Kisses and bisses, Cam.”
I waited for the fax, heard it whir, saw the page emerge, half-recognized the features on the postcard she had sent, couldn’t recall where I’d seen that face, a tuft of gray hair above an ample forehead, two pencils of eyebrows and small dark eyes peering out from above a middling nose. A mouth encompassed by an elegant beard, but not exceedingly so, as if its owner wanted to advertise some gist of disobedience without, however, belying the overall calm, made all the more serene by the hand that had been lifted to the right side of the cheeks, bestowing a further dose of pensiveness. The more I squinted at him, the more I knew this was not his first appearance in my life, but who, where, when? And then, finally, the whole photo was in my hands, the man’s gray frock coat sitting loosely on large shoulders, an arm resting on the contours of a chair. And underneath, at the very bottom, three words: Pierre Petit, Phot.
Was it Petit himself, a self-portrait? No, somebody else, I was sure of it.
I rushed up the stairs to my computer. As I was mounting them, before I even read Cam’s message, it hit me. I knew who he was, the man that Pierre Petit had immortalized in that carte postale.
Victor Hugo.
“Victor Hugo,” Camilla echoed my thoughts and supplemented them in her next e-mail. “Petit photographed him in Brussels in 1862. One of the most famous pictures of the author of Les Miserables. A few months ago I asked your dad at dinner—remember, darling?—about your brothers Hugh and Vic, why those names, and he answered Victor Hugo. So enthused that he had learned French to read him in the original and that his French grandmother, when she had come over for his graduation from high school, had brought along a picture of none other than the great writer, an original, which was up in the attic. So, my dear, up, up you go, with your dad and brothers. Check it out. See if it matches the carte postale I faxed. Till soon, your loving, lascivious Cam.”
All four male members of the family dutifully trooped upstairs and gathered around the picture of Victor Hugo, the very image Cam had found at the Place Vosges, the very photo snapped by Pierre Petit more than a century ago, the gift my great-grandmother had offered to my father when I had not yet been bor
n, there it was, framed with gilt edges, clearer and sharper than the hazy carte postale sent via fax by Camilla.
“Can we take it out?” I asked Dad—as if asking for his permission would make it less of a profanation—and he nodded, carefully dislodged the portrait from its protective glass and frame.
We turned it over.
And read the words awaiting us on the other side.
À ma Thérèse Jacquet, de la part de son arrière-grand-père, Pierre Petit, un portrait de Victor Marie Hugo, son auteur favori.
“Arrière-grand-père?” I asked, though I knew the answer, Camilla had known it without even climbing to the attic.
Great-grandfather. Pierre Petit was my great-grandmother’s great-grandfather.
The man who had seen through a lens the face that would travel from his French eyes into some hidden recess of his French memory to be transmitted across all those generations until it germinated inside me, one hundred years from when he had snapped that shot, the savage had been captured in light and shadow and those eyes, those eyes, so different from Victor Hugo’s, that nakedness waiting for years to make its appearance.
My father was devastated.
I had kept him apprised, from time to time, about our investigation and he knew that we were searching for some ancestor who had been in touch, ominously so, with the young Patagonian he still called a monster.
Now he felt absurdly responsible for what his forebear had done, one click of the shutter of Pierre Petit’s machine had repercussions a century later, was still causing irreparable damage to us and our tribe. Why me, why me, why you? The questions we had been asking for over eight years now had an answer, or the hint of an answer. Pierre Petit had spawned both the photo and a family and my father and my brothers and I had the genes of that family tumbling inside us, and yet, and yet . . .
“Why not me?” Dad asked. “Why . . . ?” without needing to complete the thought. Why, indeed? What was so special about Gerald Foster’s son Fitzroy that he was selected as a victim rather than his father, who sported the same lineage?
Camilla had a response that tried to assuage my dad’s feelings of guilt, spread the blame. “Tell your father that I’m certain that Petit all by himself is not enough to have provoked this apparition, that there has to be something unique to you, a contribution, let’s call it that, from your mom’s side of the stock.”
“And not my brothers?”
“The firstborn always pay for the sins of the past, Fitzroy. But we’ll soon take that burden from your shoulders.”
She had some potential clues, she said, to the identity and fate of my visitor, and, parallel to that hunt, the possibility of finding what I might have inherited from my mother’s German lineage. It had been a German whaler who had hijacked the eleven Kaweshkar and there was one trace in a newspaper clipping about this Wahlen man, linking him to a certain Captain Schwers or Schweers, acting on orders from someone in Hamburg. She’d soon, soonest, report significant progress on all these fronts.
“You know more than you’re telling me.”
“Of course I do. Since I arrived in Paris, I’ve been writing notes daily, correcting, adding comments and little meditations, processing each discovery and idea, rewriting the story over and over again so it all makes sense, who did this, why, when, where, how—the typical questions a detective asks, Fitz. But the picture’s not complete yet. It’ll be ready by the time I’m back—maybe Christmas, definitely before New Year’s Eve.”
“I miss you, love.”
“I miss you too, Fitz. But each time I write something in my report, it’s as if you were here in the room with me. Thinking of how I’ll read it to you slowly, savor it by your side, see your face as you hear it from my lips, moist and full, the whole story, from the moment they are kidnapped in July 1881 until five of them are sent back to Chile in March or maybe April 1882.”
“What? Where did you get that information from? Five of them survived?”
“I didn’t say five survived. I said five were sent back.”
“Who were they? Is my—?”
“Patience, love. We have to be in the same room together.”
“Just tell me this. Did he make it? Did he ever return home?”
“All in good time, Fitz. I can only guess how hard this must be for you, waiting, waiting. But this is what he wants. For me to tell you why he’s come, why he chose you. That’s what I think he wants and we should respect that.”
Did I care, did I really care what he wanted? But I wasn’t in the mood to quarrel with her, not over the phone, not ever, in fact—when had she ever lost an argument anyway, my stubborn, glorious Cam?
So all I said was: “Send me anything, something, love—not your report, rewrite that till it’s perfect, I understand that, but keep me up to date.”
“So you can understand a bit of what’s going on, yes.”
“So I can be near to you, that’s what matters. And I’ll be sure to send your way anything I discover, okay?”
Before a packet from her arrived two weeks later, chock-full of photos and some clippings from French journals, translated into English—expedited from Paris by Roberts Express service, only two days for these international deliveries to cross the ocean, how the world was growing smaller by the day!—I had received from my father’s mom, Grand-mère Amélie, the confirmation that her own grandmother Thérèse had always claimed the family was related to an eminent photographer. Indeed Amélie had nebulously recounted how she and her mother, Georgine, had visited a dying relative whose atelier was overflowing with photographs and he had signed one for her, the photo of Victor Hugo. As daughters gave birth to daughters, that dead forebear’s surname had been diluted and swallowed up by time, but now that I mentioned it to her, yes, the name was Pierre Petit.
“You, child,” my grand-mère announced, not understanding full well the implications of her words, “are the sixth generation. Aren’t you proud to be descended from such a wonderful man?”
FOUR
“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they can never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have.”
—Susan Sontag
The sixth generation!
What ghosts then would haunt our son or daughter if ever we dared to breed, what would the seventh generation be like? Would the other members of the group that had been kidnapped from Tierra del Fuego and stuffed into my ancestor Pierre’s camera find a way into the dreams of my offspring? None of these thoughts shared with Cam as I examined the many reproductions of their photos she had sent me, culled from a smattering of Parisian archives. My visitor was present in a series of collective representations that must have been snapped one after the other, all of them against a background of trees.
Paris in September, an ideal time, Cam commented, for a family outing to the zoo on the train line expressly built to carry innumerable clients back and forth. Animals and beasts mixed together: one of the photos flaunted an ostrich crossing the expanse where the clutch of natives sits. In the next shot, probably a minute later, two of the men have stood upright while my visitor remains crouching, more mistrustful and startled than ever, and he is still in the same position the next time Pierre Petit’s camera bags the group that has begun to disperse and separate, a white light from overexposure slicing the scene nearly in half. The light overwhelms them in the ensuing shot, and still he does not move, he continues to stare straight at the man who was my great-great-great-great-grandfather, if looks could kill, if looks could kill. Until in the next take, he is no longer visible, my visitor, engorged by a smudge of infested light. And then, new combinations: there with an older man and woman and a tiny naked babe, and in the following sequences he’s standing by a different woman and after that accompanied by an older, fierce man—oh, my visitor was popular, one of Petit’s favorites. And of course, of course, the shot that was to be transferred to a carte postale and sold for a few sous over a hundred years ago only to end up in
a bookshop in the rue de l’Odéon. But it was the others that my faraway wife kept demanding that I look at—who were they, what relation did one have to the other? Was that older couple the mother and father of my visitor? Was that baby his brother? His nephew? The other baby, his niece, his sister? Was that other young man a brother? I interrogated their faces as I had done for all this time with my visitor’s and, as with him, their answer was silence.
But on this occasion I had some help, the beginning of a response from the material Camilla had sent over, mainly a long article published by the Anthropology Society of Paris, which tried to understand where these natives fit in the Darwinian scheme of evolution, wondering about their intelligence, how close they might be to the mongoloid race, how far from Asian ancestors. A presentation by Dr. Léonce Manouvrier on November 17, 1881—“by then,” Cam wrote, “they were already in Germany, ten of them, because one of the children had died. The daughter of the woman called Petite Mère, little mother, a name not given to her by Pierre Petit, but by their keepers. They baptized the fiercest looking one Antonio, described by Manouvrier as having a wild appearance. The gentle, older man is called the Captain, his wife for some reason keeps her own name, Piskouna. The other women are Lise and Catherine, and then there are the two younger ones, Henri and Pedro. Manouvrier’s descriptions don’t allow us to fathom which one might be our visitor. But nevertheless, that scientist spent many hours with them on five different occasions, so you should spend time with him, with the pictures, Fitzroy Foster, no better way to get close to those natives and lift the curse, if indeed it is a curse and not, perhaps, a blessing.”
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