“Are you sure, are you sure, Cam?”
“Silly,” she said, as she nibbled at my earlobe and her hands descended down my back to my buttocks and made sure I was firmly inside her, “you are so silly, we’ll be fine.” Letting our bodies speak after all those months of silence, with each shift of my hips I let my visitor know that there were things he could not take from me, walls he could not erect.
And suddenly, time had been abolished—Cam’s welcoming skin remembered what her mind could not recover, I was not the one with extra years of memories brimming with explorations of her pleasure and mine, our gentle rage against death, and she was not the one who was feeling this for the first time, giving herself to me against all the odds of a universe that had wagered that we would never find each other, she and I were equals in our voyage of discovery, I was every man who had ever lived and she every woman, both of us wishing that this interlude would last forever, that it would never cease.
But it had to end, she had to open her eyes and remember that she did not remember, and I had to open my eyes and remember that she did not remember, we both had to admit that there were no shortcuts to the future—as if that mattered, as if our lovemaking had to have a purpose other than the renewal of our vows and the forgetting that there were boundaries to the human heart.
She fell asleep before I did, I stayed awake watching her, blessed by the wonder of her breath and cascading ebony hair, the sprawl of her legs wet with my semen.
She slept a lot in those days—Dr. Dalrymple said nothing could be better for her dazed brain cells and twisted synapses than to rest. Each time she wakes, he had said, try to find out—not an interrogation, Mr. Foster, no pressure—what she’s been dreaming. Her subconscious, after all, may not be affected—that’s why hypnosis often works as therapy in cases that are not as serious as hers, why spontaneous recovery can be prompted through past mementos or photos. So what is stored inside or next to her hippocampus might float up in bits and pieces during REM sleep. Just be sure she doesn’t feel under any strain.
I was the one who felt the strain. There was so little I could do to cure her, I took the suggestions of Dr. Dalrymple as if they were instructions, trying to always be there when she awoke, spending long vigilant nights by her side, waiting for a miracle.
She never remembered one sliver of a dream.
But watching her there prone and defenseless, I could not help but think of how alone she had been during those hours after the Berlin Wall had crushed her. Specifically, when she was about to reveal the ultimate secret. In a corner of our room, in the bottom drawer of my desk, was the German material that Dad had recuperated from her hotel. As well as the evidence amassed by Cam during her last months in Paris, sent back by the Institut Pasteur along with their best wishes, accompanied by a handwritten note from Dr. Ernest Downey declaring that her accident was a loss for science and indicating he might drop in to wish the patient well if he found himself in the Boston area.
But the real treasure of the trove was a thick blue folder that must have been the exercise in commemoration that she was rewriting each night in order to be shared upon her return—there it was, the contents of her search. But, like her mind, under lock and key. So that not the slightest insinuation of curiosity might trouble my decision to cast my visitor from our world. Like any addict, I needed to go cold turkey, not allow a sip of that Kaweshkar to pass my lips, intoxicate my throat, burn my intestines. Not to be even consulted, her report, I said to myself—she had promised to read it to me with full and moist lips, reiterated this so often that it felt like a betrayal to eavesdrop on her past, open her archives, peruse those words without her jokes and comments and shining eyes. Proof of her love for her Fitzroy, what had brought her to Berlin to meet her violent fate, his power over my love.
His power: he had chosen to hurt her. And her choice: to forget him. The one benefit that crawled out of this ghastly affair was that she could start fresh, be rebuilt in all her purity, take the path she might have picked if I hadn’t shown up on that birthday of mine waving the photo. He was providentially gone from her mind, along with the loss of other, more delectable memories, and all in all that was for the better. Never again would I center my life around the existence of those black eyes of Henri’s, never again tangle our identity inextricably with his. Maybe he—or destiny or God or history or the fucking fragment of the Berlin Wall—had done us a favor by purging her of any recollection of his floating, sad face, opening the door to my doing the same.
And yet, I could not, as weeks and months stretched into two years of solitary insomnia, waiting for even a glint of those mislaid eight years to glimmer back through the murk of her dreams, I could not stop from obsessing, the same question spinning inside: How had he done it, intervened in the fate of the women I loved? Or was it just my sick imagination that made him guilty of engineering the death of my mother? And Cam’s accident? But Mom had been way off track, whereas Cam had managed to pin down Henri’s name, photo, circumstances of kidnapping, itinerary, companions. So one had been attacked because she was far from her objective and the other because she was so close?
The randomness of it was maddening. The more you compared Mom and Cam the less their respective searches had in common. A stone falling on someone’s head on a cold November night in the North of the planet, a woman falling into the muddy current of the Amazon in the torrid South, what had one to do with the other? What if they were indeed chance events, as arbitrary as his choice of poor Fitzroy Foster for his experiment, a situation that had no meaning or direction, like evolution itself, simply a chain of accidents that seemed like a pattern to someone like me, born into a species that survived by searching for a higher order, that became mighty and lorded it over nature and reigned over the globe by linking incidents, hammering cause and effect together, connecting spheres that were distant and dissimilar? Why suppose that he had a plan, a goal, a rational motive for any of this? Had Camilla guessed it before the Berlin Wall had—?
Why, why, why the Berlin Wall?
Could my visitor, a practitioner of primitive communism, with no interest in individual possessions, have been displeased that the Wall had come down, that this modern version of communism had failed—and censured Camilla for rushing off to dance on the ruins of the dreams of Karl Marx? But that dictatorial state communism, stifling and bureaucratic, had nothing to do with the free, egalitarian lifestyle of the indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego, there was no real connection between the two. Why should he care what happened in the world? Did he understand the complexities of the twentieth century, he who had lived, for all purposes, in prehistory?
Or was I belittling him by inferring such indifference, prejudging him in death as his kidnappers, those spectators, those scientists, had done in life? Maybe Henri understood more than I presumed. Maybe the dead received daily bulletins as to how their descendants were despoiling the planet bequeathed to them—and if so, would he not hate capitalism? It had been merchants, after all, who had destroyed him and his people. Entrepreneurs who exhibited exotic savages in human zoos, entrepreneurs who photographed their outlandish features for penny postcards.
Cam would know the answer, of course, she would have been able to separate what was real from what was false, Cam would have, probably already had before her accident, put all this chaos in order, offered a more coherent and grounded explanation.
The one person I couldn’t involve in my doleful conjectures.
As the months dripped into one year and then the next one, as she progressed toward whom she had once been at a snail’s pace, as the Cam Wood who had greeted me on my fourteenth birthday mingled with the Cam Foster who had last spoken to me to assure me that we had paid our dues, the two Camillas overlapping and contradicting each other and collaborating, as my wife started to assert her independence and ventured out of the house on her own, spent an hour away and then two and then afternoons, I found myself buffeted by hope and despair in equal measure.
As November 9, 1991, that lethal anniversary, approached, I began to absurdly expect some significant change. The doctors had always mentioned two years as a possible limit for curing her—an arbitrary statistic, I knew, an average, a median, and yet that number recurred in the literature consulted. And hadn’t dates, their replication, been important, hadn’t September 11 recycled itself, hadn’t Cam chosen July 14 for our wedding, wasn’t I in thrall to patterns, configurations, echoes? Why shouldn’t this November 9th bring to a close one cycle and open up another one?
It came and went without the slightest alteration. Well, almost. At around noon, the doorbell rang—and a while later, my Dad came up to say that there was a doctor who had said he knew Cam, had worked with her in Paris, name of Ernest Downey, a professor from Stanford. If we didn’t mind, he’d like to pay his respects, and if the patient was not well enough—and in fact, Cam was fast asleep right then—perhaps Mr. Fitzroy Foster might be so good as to offer him some minutes of his precious time? I told my father to dispatch this Downey fellow, recalled that Cam had known him only in passing and that he seemed to give her the chills, “creepy” was the term she had used. What I least wanted was for someone from her past research to come in contact with her.
A few minutes ticked by. I heard the front door open and shut downstairs and from behind a curtain watched the pathway upon which Dr. Downey was walking away, shoulders hunched, eyes glued to the ground, slouching off. And then, suddenly, he turned and stared back at the house, straight toward the second floor from where I was spying on him. Henri had made me an expert in faces and I did not like what I saw, did not like that this man seemed to know what I was up to, my whereabouts, almost as if those eyes like scissors could cut through the curtains and reveal my presence. But he couldn’t see me—and his scrutiny of our home and my possible existence lasted no more than a few instants, and then the man was gone.
Except for that hiccup of an incident—quickly consigned to oblivion and certainly not communicated to Cam—I lived that day like every other day since her return and eternal convalescence: inside our premises like captive animals, shut away from the world as if out there a blight stalked the land instead of an infinite array of temptations and potentialities that she seemed to be developing a taste for.
Only in that sense did that date carry any significance.
Though it did allow me, forced me really, to look back over the span of her illness and interrogate its contours. Had it advanced or deteriorated? What had my strategy accomplished? And how long could we continue like this, creating an artificial paradise far from the world’s woes, as if she were Siddhartha and I could keep death and disease and terror away forever?
My illness had glued us together, Cam and me, my visitor had ended up making us a couple. Her project in life had been me, curing me, freeing me, imagining a future we could share. And now the roles were reversed and she was my sole project, her healing what I lived for. But she had seen my salvation in setting me off into the unknown world I had feared and been intimidated by, she had sought every means of pushing me out of the cave I had made for myself. Whereas I had done the opposite. I had convinced her, abusing her trust in me, that the outside environment was toxic, a threat to her well-being. I wanted her so much for myself that I had kept her from any possible external influence. And up till recently she had played along. Instead of imitating her altruism, I had reduced the potential richness of her experience to the poverty of my own.
The more I thought about my dilemma and how I had failed her, how my exclusion of the visitor—months and months without his features gobbling up mine—had ended up barring her from any project we could really plan together, the more I admitted how selfish and deficient had been my solution. And the more I felt the answer had to lie inside her, in who she had been, who she truly still was deep inside. She might not be able to illuminate what to do now or next, but she had left me her voice, she had prepared a story for me. Her voice was there, close by, lurking inside the perverse attraction of that thick blue folder from Berlin.
If she woke to her former self, would she not demand why I had not read her long report to me, using her research to help her, to free myself so I could free her?
And then, abruptly, it was the last day of the year and 1992 loomed ahead.
As if she recognized that there was nothing to celebrate, no kiss at midnight, no vows of renewal that made any sense, she fell asleep early.
Maybe it was the fireworks going off in the neighborhood, the early hugs from my father and brothers before they went off to their respective parties, or maybe it was the symbolism of the date, even if I did not realize till later how significant that year was. Am I overinterpreting? Better to suggest that I was simply fatigued, tired of keeping up the pretense that things would fix themselves without some pivot on my part. She was maturing, catching up, becoming ever more autonomous. It was wonderful to see the old Cam emerging again into the light, wonderful and scary to see her challenging me, taking the lead, slogging out of the house without giving details about where she was going or for how long, but that also meant that soon, soonest, soonest, she would begin to press me, cease to tolerate my phony explanations, accelerating my shame, my regret.
Watching her sleep as the new year dawned, ushering in for everybody but us hope for change and renewal, I felt possessed by a sudden urgency to retrieve the voice that had been denied to me since that last phone call over two years earlier. I walked over to my desk, slipped the key in the lock of the bottom drawer—and there was the folder containing the words she intended to read in my presence, that I would now read silently in hers. Was there a better way to spend the night?
The fate of Henri, his fate and yours, Fitzroy Foster, and therefore mine—was determined, as most of our fates are, from afar. From really far, in his case—from the extreme North of the planet and years before he was born.
It was in 1848—a year of revolution across the globe, somewhat like 1789, 1968, and our current 1989—that Claus Hagenbeck, a fishmonger, first exhibited in Hamburg some seals from the Arctic regions. It didn’t seem that groundbreaking to show marine animals in large tubs in the backyard of a fish shop, but it turned out to be highly profitable. The seals were next exhibited and then sold in Berlin, launching what was to become a family dealership in beasts that today, 150 years later, is very much alive in the Hagenbeck Zoo in Hamburg.
This success was due, in great measure, to the fishmonger’s son, Carl, who had started feeding the seals when he was four years old and whose ambitions went far beyond those of his father. By the age of twenty-two—your age, Fitz—he was running the firm and specializing in African animals: elephants, lions, giraffes, hyenas, raccoons, snakes, and, eventually, apes, showing his catch in a mini-zoo in the two acres at the back of his new house in the Neue Ferdmarket. He was also feeding the demands of circuses, monarchs, and private collectors.
The firm’s supply chain was threatened in the early 1870s when the Mahdi, an Islamic prophet-warrior, took over the Sudan, forcing Carl Hagenbeck to look to the cold North for a solution. He recalled that, as a ten-year-old boy, he’d been “notably impressed,” as he states in a letter to the American circus impresario P. T. Barnum, by the sight of Zulu Kaffirs paraded in a cage in the Saint Pauli neighborhood of Hamburg. So why not import, along with reindeer from Norway and Sweden, the original trainers of the animals and display animals and humans interacting as if still in one of their villages? If he had been so astonished as a child, might not customers pay for the experience?
Using a Norwegian animal catcher, Arnold Jacobsen, as an agent, Hagenbeck imported a group of Laplanders. These “little men and women” were a sensation—going on tour to Berlin, Leipzig, and other venues. Scavengers who had served the family business in the past were informed that henceforth they should be on the lookout for any exotic folk, not monstrous enough, it was stipulated, to disgust our audiences but not so beautiful that they ceased to be bizarre.
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sp; There would follow, Fitz, in the years to come, Eskimos, Sinhalese, Kalmyks, Somalis, Ethiopians, Bedouins—and, in conjunction with American impresarios, Plains Indians. The most noteworthy venture, for our purposes, were three Nubians from the Upper Nile, enticed to Germany in 1876—the first of many collaborations with our old acquaintance Saint-Hilaire, the manager of the Jardin d’Acclimatation—and photographed on their visit to Paris by none other than Pierre Petit.
The need for supplementary savages became insatiable. Not only for clients, but also for academics. The directors of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory were particularly anxious to inspect the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, so influential in the formulation of Darwin’s theories. Led by . . . my former hero, Rudolf Virchow. Desperate to be the first scholar to find the missing link between ape and man and disprove Darwin’s theory, he forms an alliance with Hagenbeck to bring back these “Feuerlanders,” providing funds and political backing, the sort of international legitimacy needed in order to kidnap citizens of a sovereign country.
This led to Jacobsen’s being dispatched to Cape Horn in 1878. He was on the point of embarking with a group of Kaweshkar, when the governor of Punta Arenas blocked the hijacking. I note with pleasure, Fitz, that I share that governor’s surname, Wood—Carlos Wood Arellano. I doubt he is one of my ancestors (so many Woods!), but maybe the coincidence has given Henri a reason to be fond of me, brownie points, in case he ever desired to inflict his dark nefarious arts on yours untruly. Though aren’t all we white folks the same to him, just like we think blacks—or Asians or Indians—are indistinguishable from one another?
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