And then, almost immediately, Henri.
He’d come visiting and never left, and my life became even more acquiescent. Aware, oh so aware, that I was chained to circumstances I had not selected—but now not even harboring the misapprehension that I could change course, now married to my sickness, now submissive to a fault, caught, like Henri himself, in a world not of my making, made into a stranger, a pariah, a victim.
Cam had not transformed that fundamental dynamic, that I had always complied with what fate had dished out to me. She had been the active partner: her phone call years ago and her carte postale the next day, and then directing the quest and the research and even the date of our marriage. And when she had suffered her accident and I was handed the chance to be in command, show initiative and help her heal, I had simply retreated, let things take their course, a spectator of my own pain as if there was nothing I could do to alleviate it.
Well, now I was confronting a real choice.
I could dwell and sulk in this outrage done to me or I could climb out of that anger and chart a new map for my life. I could take control of the only thing that truly belonged to me—not Cam, nobody owns anybody else, I had just been taught that ruthless, necessary lesson—the one thing for which we should be judged: how to react when you have been damaged, when you feel betrayed by the one person who was the foundation and scaffolding and architecture of your very being, how to live with that and not succumb to despair and mistrust.
Did this mean that I’d forget that my Cam had let me twist and turn and had even, by her own reluctant admission, somehow enjoyed my plight? No, that festered inside me and would perhaps never be entirely assuaged. But that was what growing up meant. That we are imperfect beings, that we do stupid, incomprehensible things to one another, that we justify doing such things because we are too afraid to see our true image in the mirror. The contradictory truth I had to face: that we cannot live trusting anyone and that we also cannot live unless we renew that trust every day, because life without love is not worth living.
Cam was right. It was up to me.
She must have seen something shifting inside me, the seed, the hint, the dimmest lightning of an idea. If I could forgive her, might Henri not forgive me?
Now she took my hand and was not mistaken, because I accepted the temple of her offering, the refuge of her lips that followed and everything else, everything else that I had dreamt of for seven lean years and then for the months of her absence in Europe and finally during these last two years of loss and distance, how I had always wanted to greet the dawn that was renewing itself as we were, as we were.
And the first thing she asked in the morning, before we went down for breakfast—we had agreed not to let my dad or my brothers know that she had been playing a game all this time, preferred to greet them with the news that the miracle we had been awaiting had finally blessed us—her first question under that cold snowy January sky was:
“What year is this, Fitz?”
“Nineteen ninety-two,” I said, fighting the concern that perhaps she had elapsed back—this time for real—into amnesia land.
“Nineteen ninety-two,” she repeated the number with delight, rolled it on her tongue as if it were my mouth in her mouth. “You don’t think it’s significant that we’re ready to restart our adventure precisely five hundred years since Columbus set sail for the world which Henri’s ancestors had walked and inhabited and also sailed in canoes for thousands of years? Can there be a better date to figure out—together, Fitzroy Foster—what your voyager expects from us?”
I pondered this question as we descended the stairs hand in hand and as Cam received my dad’s jubilation and the rapture of my brothers, and continued to ponder it through a sumptuous brunch as my wife filled the rest of the family in regarding the Hagenbeck ancestry, congratulating Dad for his lineage no longer being solely responsible for the haunting. And Dad had answered by proposing a photo session, the first in over two years, perhaps this cannibal would leave us alone now that the family had acknowledged our ancestral participation in his fate, perhaps he was feeling benevolent, it was the New Year, after all, 1992.
So there it was, again, that date, and its possible relevance looming large when I sat down for my portrait, as if I were Victor Hugo in person and Dad were his distant forefather Pierre Petit. I did not protest this futile exercise or bother to tell him that I knew what was going to happen. No consternation when those features of Henri emerged, crowning my body with his unforgettable eyes, confirming that our knowledge of his exact itinerary, mistreatment, and death did not mean that the journey was over for us. Or for him. You know that, Fitz, his face seemed to be whispering, don’t tell me you really believed it would be that easy. I’ve missed you the last two years, man. Isn’t it great to be together again?
I smiled at his cascade of words inside me, insanely winked at my visitor in complicity.
My father caught me in the act—as he had so often when I was a child, and just like back then, now he was not pleased either.
“What? Getting chummy with the ghost? Recovering your wife hasn’t made you all sentimental and gooey and forgiving, has it? All of a sudden this demon’s benign?”
The rancor in Dad’s voice, contrasting with the serene, impassioned conversation I had held with my darling that dawn, bared something he had not wished to express when Cam had materialized in all her glory: I had my wife back and he had lost his, the monster had spared one and taken the other. But more crucially: we could not count on my father to second us in any effort at reconciliation with the savage who had ruined our family and left him bereft.
I could see Cam on the verge of trying to reason with him. She didn’t realize the endless abyss of his hatred, something dark and dank flaring in his breath, the overflowing rage of his fingers as he ripped the Polaroid print into pieces and cast them onto the burning logs of the fireplace. Even when he laughed—it was more of a cackle than a laugh, more of a sob than a cackle—Cam seemed oblivious, intent on saying something, wanting to include him in the next stage of our search. He had lost so much, he didn’t deserve to be left behind.
And yet, Cam finally said nothing. Just looked at me.
She needed me to enter the fray, respond to my own doubts by responding to my father’s. She needed me to publicly commit to the path we were about to go down.
“You could be right, Dad,” I said. “It’s certainly a possibility that he’s a demon. But there are other ways, more benevolent ways, of looking at him.”
Dad was not in a mood to ask me what I meant.
“The bastard murdered your mother! He tried to kill your wife! And you’re on his side now? How can you—oh God, you, of all people—what do you need? For him to start exterminating the whole human race, everything we love?”
Since infancy, I had learned to recognize danger signals, when his anger was on the edge of turning to rage and from rage into fury. Mom had helped me to navigate the endless sea of his mood swings, recede before the wave exploded, make sure that he never got physical. Mom had been an expert at this, the only one in the family who knew how to defy Dad without trying his patience.
But Mom, of course, wasn’t here. The whole point of his outburst was that she could not help us anymore. All I could do was guess what she would have said, how she’d have calmed him. That he was a man who believed in science and that the law of statistics and probability indicated that two events—such as a boat capsizing in the Amazon and a piece of mortar falling from a wall in Berlin—were not necessarily part of the same pattern, even if both victims were related to the same human being, and had been on similar missions of discovery. That the interpretation of those events, the decision to interlock them, depended on the perspective and outlook from which we started out. If someone, like my father now or me as I had been for all these years, understood Henri to be out for revenge, then that is what we would predictably discern in whatever befell us, regardless of whether he even had the power to enact th
ose assaults and misfortunes. If, on the other hand, we thought that his intervention in my life was not malignant—a stance that Cam had increasingly adopted, a position that I was on the brink of adhering to—then everything changed. Rather than Mom being killed by my visitor’s desire to liquidate the great-granddaughter of Carl Hagenbeck’s estranged granddaughter, Henri had been striving to protect her. And we could construe Berlin in the same way: it had been his intercession there that had averted a similar tragedy killing my wife. Or maybe all of us were mistaken and these accidents were no more than that, accidents—and Henri had nothing to do with either of them, and we were being distracted from what really mattered by presuming that a youngster who had been so helpless in life was a master of the universe in death.
That’s what I should have explained, composedly, to my father.
And yet, given that we could not agree on the fundamentals, was it not useless to enter into any substantive discussion, why even go through the motions of a deliberation, why not avoid altercations altogether? That is what Mom would have concluded, that is what she whispered in my ear. Don’t make matters worse. Keep the family together. Be as happy as you can because you never know when some tragedy will strike you, at a birthday breakfast or on the Amazon river or at a celebration in a city no longer divided by a wall. Indulge him, Roy. And find your own road to peace with the woman you love.
The consolation of hearing her voice inside me, my mother’s ability to persist somewhere, anywhere, could not prevail over the grief that it was not her mouth saying it, her lips blowing the words to me, one hand in mine and the other holding onto my father.
That’s when, in order not to start crying, not to open the new year, Mom’s favorite day of the year, with tears, that’s when I took a step forward and hugged my father. He tried to break loose but I wouldn’t let him, Cam joined our embrace and then my two brothers became entangled in that messy jumble of arms and torsos, all of us simply exulting in our communal breath, rejoicing in the possibility of loving each other enough to leave it at that and go our separate ways.
But which way was ours?
That was something that Cam and I now set out to discover.
Discovery was the key word, of course. Five hundred years since the discovery of America, though there were already many who were derisively calling it something else and declaring there was nothing to celebrate—especially the descendants of those who had existed for millennia on the continent incorporated into the Western world so abruptly, so violently, so unexpectedly on October 12, 1492.
Something had opened up in the history of humanity that day, when the world changed forever, when Henri’s fate in the South and our fate in the North had been determined. Columbus had started it all, returning with six Arawak Indians to be flaunted in the court and streets of Spain, he was the first to call them cannibals, the first to decide that their earth and trees did not belong to them, the first to describe with alien eyes what he saw.
If Cam hadn’t been hit by the debris from the Berlin Wall, if she hadn’t feigned the amnesia, if we hadn’t lost over two years, that date wouldn’t have entered into our discussion of what to do with the knowledge brought back from Europe, but as it was . . .
“It’s got to be a signal,” Cam said cheerfully—her optimism really was astonishing, how I had missed it, how I beseeched it to lift me up, now more than ever, now that the pangs of betrayal kept simmering somewhere in my soul. “Look at it this way: we’ve been given a chance. That whatever we have to do to atone will coincide with the commemoration, for good and for bad, of the half millennium since the first Indians met the first Europeans . . .”
Her words triggered in me an idea: What if we journeyed to Zurich and—
And I enjoyed her eyes opening wide with wonder, was I seriously proposing to travel?
I walked over to yet another drawer of my desk, also locked, and extracted something, concealing it behind my back, daring her to guess. An elephant? Wrong! A flying carpet? Wrong! An invisibility cloak? Wrong!
She came to kiss me and then snatched what I had in my hands and squealed like a monkey.
“A passport! How . . . ?”
“Well, I couldn’t tell you about this, could I, given that you supposedly didn’t even know a visitor was invading my—”
“Fitz, let’s not go there.”
Right! So I explained that, after abandoning my experiments in Photoshopping for most of the last two years, I had recently returned to them, concerned that if my love were to have another crisis or needed urgent care some place faraway, I needed an ID. The techniques of image manipulation had, using the very patent that made us rich, taken great strides forward. Many nights, while Cam slept—or was she just feigning that as well?—I had, starting from that old picture of myself at fourteen, constructed a model of how I looked now, like a plastic surgeon operating on his own face in front of a mirror. I did not confess to Cam that there was a certain perverse pleasure in this exercise of slowly aging the digital image—fuck you, Henri, look at me recover my identity in spite of you, look at me force the picture to conform to what Cam and my family see. But more important than the gratification at excluding my enemy was the certainty that this was my ticket to freedom.
“My doctored photo,” I said to Cam. “It fooled the bureaucrats, they promptly approved the passport.”
Great, but public places, Cam cautioned, were still perilous. If anything, she said, her exploration of human zoos had made her even more fearful, oversensitive to what might happen if powerful people ever learned about the image that was haunting me. Just as Virchow had measured the skulls and Von Bischoff had prodded the genitals, so there had to be many scientists who would love to get their hands on someone like me to experiment on, unravel a phenomenon that had no rational explanation. “I know them, Fitzroy,” she said fervently. “They’ll be out to extract some commercial value from your tragedy, Henri’s tragedy. We’ll only travel if absolutely necessary, if the rewards outweigh the risks.”
Zurich, I argued, returning to my initial idea, seemed to fit the bill. If we could find the body of Henri and the others who died there, if we could retrieve them and carry them home, reverse the journey they had taken over 110 years ago, if we could then give them burial on the island from which they had been abducted, if we could find some relative who—“A lot of ifs,” Cam objected. “I doubt that anyone knows where those bodies were buried—though I’ll admit that this was why I was going to Zurich after Berlin, to complete the investigation. But let’s say the bodies can be located, what right do we have to ask for an exhumation, let alone cart them away? It would be kidnapping them all over again, even if we had the best intentions—just like Hagenbeck who, after all, claimed he was educating the public, providing a service to science. And you’d end up in the spotlight. No, Fitzroy Foster—good try, but there’s got to be something more feasible.”
Over the next weeks we searched for another project. Go to Europe, confront the Hagenbeck relatives in Hamburg and whatever Pierre Petit descendants we might be able to find in Paris, enlisting them in some sort of private or even public act of penance. But if it had taken me eleven years to begin to decipher that my visitor might not be an enemy but perhaps a collaborator with benign intentions, how difficult, then, would it be to convince those distant members of my family to assume responsibility for something they had not personally done?
Then Cam timidly came up with the idea of working with Survival International, following my mother’s example. But it made me uncomfortable. Undoubtedly, the best way of redressing a wrong done in the past was, as Mom had put it, to make sure it was not repeated in the future—and yet, that solution was too abstruse and self-satisfying, too removed from Henri’s individual suffering and story. Save an Indian now to compensate for one massacred a century ago. No, whatever we came up with had to address his life, his motives, his extinction. We would have many decades ahead of us to make the world a better place. There was only one Octo
ber 12, 1992, and we had to do something that explicitly focused on that special date and dealt with my special visitor.
Cam responded to this demurral on my part by designing a gigantic cage, which she proposed to build in front of some major institution that had profited from the exploitation of Henri—like the Hagenbeck zoo or the Jardin d’Acclimatation or the Berlin Museum or even some bank where the profits from these human zoos had been deposited—and she, Camilla Foster Wood, intended to dress up like a native Patagon and there, half naked, gnaw on bones and utter guttural sounds and—It was so easy to shoot down her initiative that I felt a surge of pity as I said: “How about me? I’m the one who’s haunted and you’re exposing yourself? If this—this happening—were to work, well, I’d have to be in the cage with you, be photographed by any passerby and be carted off to jail as a public nuisance. And besides, Cam, we can never be Henri, we can’t really replicate his ordeal. Because, my dear, we can escape from that cage whenever we want. Now, if you really wish to turn into him, go with me to Patagonia and live with what remains of his tribe, spend the rest of our life trying to become a Kaweshkar Indian. I think that’s nuts, but at least it isn’t a performance, at least it would be the real thing. Only problem is that I don’t believe it’s what he wants.”
All our incoherent plans led us back, always back, to the same question. What does he want?
Darwin's Ghosts Page 17