Forcing us to realize that we needed to draw even closer to him, at least try to understand where he had come from, what sort of life he would have led if Hagenbeck had not created human zoos, if Columbus had not stepped on an island he did not yet know was part of a new world.
Let Henri guide us. Give him whatever agency we could in this quest. Make him part of it.
And that was the reason why, toward mid-February 1992, Cam returned to the Harvard Library to find an answer to our problem in books and materials and maps.
And came back with a different sort of problem.
Mrs. Hudson, the librarian, after congratulating Cam on her recovery, had suggested they go to the cafeteria, where she confided, in a conspiratorial whisper, that an official from a government agency had come by a few months ago, in early November of last year, to inquire about the books and documents Miss Wood, later Mrs. Foster, had requested in 1988–89. When Mrs. Hudson had refused, citing client confidentiality, the administration had intervened and ordered her to cooperate, for reasons, they said, of national security. She had complied with the bibliography, not allowing the man, however, to take the books from the library’s premises. This agent, Danny Makaruska, he said his name was, returned the next day accompanied by an older man who had spent hours perusing those volumes and taking notes and often photos. A strange fellow, a bit creepy, Mrs. Hudson commented, and sad, as if perpetually on the verge of tears.
Cam had asked if the man was tall, gaunt, bald, with redrimmed eyes? Yes, that was right! A melancholy man, very silent, hunched over his labors, very concentrated. The agent had referred to him, quite deferentially, as Doctor.
“Dr. Downey,” I said.
“It’s got to be him. Ernest Downey. How did you guess?”
I told her about his visit to our home on November 9 of last year, a date coinciding with this stranger’s incursion into the vaults of the Harvard Library.
“Why do you think he’s stalking me, him and this—this Makaruska agent?”
Later that evening, we held an emergency family meeting. Even if Dad disapproved of any initiative of ours that might presume Henri was a friendly force, he was even more infuriated by the idea that someone was shadowing us.
“How dare the bastard go snooping around!” Dad exploded. “I’ve a good mind to seek him out and—no wonder he gave me the jitters. National security? I very much doubt it!”
We agreed, however, that it would be better not to alert Dr. Downey that we were onto his spying.
“Maybe he thought there was some sort of clue in those books as to where my scientific research was going,” Cam ventured. “That’s what he seemed obsessed with when we met briefly in Paris.”
It was something that also obsessed me. Ever since she had awoken from her false amnesia attack I had started to press her to resume her work, retrieve all that lost time. More so now that it seemed that this Downey fellow was out to steal her ideas.
“So what? If he finds the gene that allows visual memory to be transmitted from one generation to the next, good for him, great for science, terrific for us. But listen, even if he—or I—were to find the link inside someone’s DNA, that still won’t solve the enigma of your visitor. It will just depict how he did it, how nature did it, how memories transfer. These years you keep calling lost have, in fact, helped me to realize a fallacy in science: we keep thinking that if we uncover the how of something we’ll have solved its mystery, get it to speak. But Henri will still be silent, we’ll still not understand what he wants and why. I’ve brought back more books and material from the library, on the Kaweshkar, their language, their history, their customs, their spiritual ceremonies. We’ll never get inside Henri, see the world as he did, that would be so arrogant, to presume that we can abolish time and history, undo our own identity and desire, turn into natives, in fact impossible to embody him entirely, possess him all over again, but we can essay a respectful approximation, that’s where we have to put our energies. Chromosomes will always be there, ready for exploration.”
All through the next month and a half, as we plunged into everything published about the Kaweshkar—so much written about a tribe that did not itself have writing, that believed in words that were hurled into the wind and kept alive by the waves and the rocks and the birds—I kept bringing up how strongly I felt that she should at least set up an appointment at MIT and see if some sort of job might be open, and she kept on postponing such an interview. Until one day, I cornered her: “I think you’re afraid that your research is no longer valid, no matter how much you say that you don’t care, and I’d be the first to grant that such a fear is legitimate, Cam, but look at it from my perspective: every day that passes makes me feel guiltier for having blocked your career. So, please, even if it’s just to allay my own remorse, please, please, speak to your friends at the lab.”
My anguish convinced her—and she came back in mid-April from MIT, with an expression that hesitated between joy and concern. The good news was that she was welcome to start right away, collaborating with the genome project. The bad news was—who did I think was in charge of this unit, parachuting in from Stanford?
“Downey,” I said.
“Downey,” she confirmed. As soon as he'd been informed that she was requesting a job interview, he’d mentioned how eager his team would be to fit her in, in view of her pioneering work at the Institut Pasteur. He would, in fact, be visiting soon, and had expressed an interest in getting reacquainted, hoping to take Mrs. Foster and her husband out to dinner when he was next in the Boston area.
Cam had not lost her cool for one instant, playing along, accepting the relayed invitation, but not just yet, as she would only be returning to work later in the year—she lied to them as she had lied to me, feigning that she was not completely well, under doctor’s orders to go easy on strenuous mental and social activities.
“I wanted to consult you first, Fitz,” Cam said. “Should I set up a meeting to sound him out?”
“No way,” I responded. “I don’t like the idea of you even getting near that weirdo.”
“So how can we find out what he’s really up to?”
Neither of us would budge—adventurous Cam against cautious Fitzroy. Fortunately, Vic was home from Chicago Law School for Easter holidays and he solved the impasse. A classmate, Laura—and he blushed at her name, so we realized he was studying more than jurisdiction with the girl—was the daughter of Barry Cunningham, a former police captain who had set up a private eye agency. Why not turn the tables on this mysterious Downey and scrutinize his past and intentions?
By early May Cunningham, a beefy, affable man with brows so bushy they almost overshadowed the mischievous sparkle in his eyes, sat in our living room with a preliminary report.
There had been nothing furtive about Downey’s research until a few years ago, when he had suddenly moved from epidemiology and public health studies—he had been instrumental, along with the Institut Pasteur, in discovering the cause of AIDS—into the diverse area of visual memory and its genealogical transmission. That recent research was classified as top secret by the Pentagon and Pharma2001, the gigantic German-American company, the entities subsidizing Downey’s work. So Cunningham had told the detective assigned to the case to back off, though feelers had gone out to a contact in the FBI for further information.
Laura’s father was able to provide, nevertheless, compelling details about Downey’s personal life.
At about the time Downey had switched his field of interest, a corresponding sea change had occurred in his character. From a cheerful, amiable, back-slapping colleague, considerate with others to a fault, he had transmogrified into a misanthrope, fanatical about his work, haughty and difficult to deal with. And then, suddenly, a few months after this remarkable transformation, tragedy had struck the scientist’s family in Palo Alto. He had come home one evening and found both his wife Anna and his eighteen-year-old daughter Evelyn dead, hanging from two belts. That double suicide pact had deepen
ed the shift in Downey’s personality, made him even more introspective and lugubrious. And he had thrown himself into his work with fury, the only consolation left to a man whom everybody agreed was beyond brilliant, a perennial candidate for a Nobel Prize in Medicine.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Cam said. “That’s it, that’s got to be it!”
Before we could even guess what she meant, she asked Barry Cunningham to please dig up details about Downey’s lineage, as well as his wife’s, back at least five generations. And would say nothing more on the matter till, two weeks later, Dad received a packet from the detective agency—at his office, as Barry had intimated that our house might be under surveillance.
“I knew it,” Cam exclaimed when we had finished reading. “No wonder she killed herself.”
“Who?”
“Downey’s daughter. No wonder her mother . . .”
I read through the report again, passed it to Dad.
Ernest Downey descended directly from a famous photographer, William Ernest Downey. Born in 1829, a favorite of Queen Victoria’s, he’d immortalized Prince Albert, the whole royal family, and innumerable viscounts and earls and notables of that age. Awarded a Royal Warrant in 1879, most of his fortune, like Pierre Petit’s, had come from postcards. Our Dr. Downey’s grandfather had been the grandson of this original Downey.
“Fitz, Jerry! See? The sixth generation! Evelyn! And look at her mother Anna’s side!”
Anna Farini prided herself on tracing her ancestry back to William Leopold Hunt, known far and wide as the Great Farini, a Canadian who had been one of the world’s great showmen and acrobats in the late nineteenth century. He had walked a tightrope across Niagara Falls on stilts with a fat woman on his back while juggling swords and soon became famous for daring circus performances with Lulu, a boy who, for years, had been disguised as a girl. Farini had eventually reinvented himself as a major entrepreneur in London, displaying freaks and bringing friendly Zulus from Africa to the Royal Aquarium. Besides adopting Lulu as his son, Farini had two boys of his own, one of whom was the great-great-grandfather of Anna, Downey’s wife. The Great Farini fathered no daughters but had given his name to a girl from Laos.
“Don’t you see, don’t you?” Cam was beside herself with excitement. “A notorious showman and circus entrepreneur on one side of the family and an eminent photographer on the other, their blood coming together after all those generations, just like you. So it’s got to be—yes, yes, yes, that’s what it’s got to be. Lulu or the girl from Laos or . . . Wait, wait, wait.”
And before Dad or I could question her further, she was out the door. Dad grinned at me. “Married life,” he said. “I think she’s terrific.”
I spent the rest of the day perusing the report again. Evelyn Downey’s genealogy resembled mine to a depressing degree. Had Petit crossed paths with this first Downey, did Hagenbeck have dealings with the flamboyant Farini?
Dad and I were preparing dinner, had laid the table, when Cam breezed back in, pushed aside plates and cutlery and plopped a large book down, opening it to a page marked with a feather.
An image stared out at us.
“Krao,” she said. “Gentlemen, please meet Krao Farini as photographed by William Ernest Downey in 1882.”
The sight struck dread into my heart. The child—perhaps seven or eight—was almost entirely covered with a dense coating of soft black hair about a quarter of an inch long, through which a brown-olive skin gleamed faintly here and there. Her cheeks were full and pouched, made more gruesome by a low and short nose with excessive nostrils. Though hunched forward in an apelike pose, her eyes were large and beautiful, sad and immensely human.
Cam turned to another page.
Krao had two arms and one leg wrapped around a distinguished bearded gentleman—the Great Farini, my wife announced triumphantly. This time the girl was clothed in pajamas, forlorn as she clung to her adoptive father. He responded by holding her tenderly, carefully, like a doll.
Next page.
Krao by herself again, fully clothed, showing off teeth which seemed more like those of an animal than of a female child, sharp and separated, a grimace meant to ingratiate but mostly repulsive. With those eyes, those eyes.
Cam explained that Norwegian explorer Carl Bock had heard on one of his Asian trips that there were tribes of these savages deep in the Laotian jungle, akin to apes, the possible missing link of Darwinian fame. In 1881, Farini paid for a new expedition by Bock to bring back a specimen: none other than Krao, called thus due to the plaintive cry emitted by her tribesmen when she was forcibly separated from them. This little orphan (her father, abducted along with her, had died on the trip to Europe and the mother had been forbidden to travel by the king of Siam—the same one made notorious by the musical The King and I) had caused an unparalleled sensation in London and later in the States and—“get this,” Cam enthused, “was examined by good old Virchow and Von Bischoff.” Despite the latter testifying that the girl was not a missing link, simply born with a sickness known as hypertrichosis, she continued to be billed as “Living Proof of Darwin’s Theory of the Descent of Man,” drawing hundreds of thousands of spectators till the end of her days at the age of fifty-four.
“A very intelligent girl,” Cam went on, “who spoke, in adulthood, many languages, and was described by fellow performers as one of the sweetest people alive. What is strange is that all accounts describe her as content with her lot—whether this is true or not, we have no way of knowing. But that she might be happy is strange.”
“Strange? Why?”
“Because she haunted Evelyn Downey. That’s why Evelyn killed herself. Didn’t you almost commit suicide?”
“Yes.”
Dad gasped. He must have suspected that I’d contemplated taking my life, but, like so many of my secrets, we had skirted talking about this one.
“And wouldn’t you have done so if, instead of Henri, the photo were that of a disgusting child that seemed an animal, would your sanity have withstood an invasion by someone like Krao, if you felt that ape-child crawling inside you, demanding sympathy?”
“I’d rather die.”
“And the mother, Anna,” Dad asked, “what about her?”
“The difference with your family and Downey’s is that they knew right away about the ancestry, the past was not a blur for them as it was for you Fosters. Imagine Anna when she realizes that the freak the Great Farini kidnapped was colonizing her daughter, seething inside her own child.”
“And another difference,” I said. “Downey. As a doctor, he—”
“Must have decided to experiment, run tests on her, find out how these incursions transpired. And when he lost his loved ones he persisted, tried to turn his tragedy into a major scientific achievement.”
“He went mad,” my father said. “That I understand.”
“He went mad,” Cam said. “And he’s dangerous. Don’t you see, guys? If we’ve been able to track him down, well, what doesn’t he know about us, given his means? We hunt down Henri and his victimizers, he hunts us down. He knows, Fitz, he’s discovered who you are. Once someone like me has established the genealogy, anyone following my itinerary will deduce why I’m doing this, find out I have a husband who drops out of sight, out of camera range, at puberty. Downey knows what that means, his daughter must have had some sort of sexual experience as an adolescent that triggered this, made her feel she was to blame. But that’s not all, my dears.”
We waited expectantly.
“If you are not a solitary phenomenon, if Evelyn repeats your visitation, there must be others. You’re not alone, Fitzroy Foster. Who knows how many men and women are also haunted by ghosts from the past, just waiting for us to find them.”
SEVEN
“. . . why all the living so strive to hush all the dead . . .”
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Over the course of the next months, Camilla became unrecognizable. She threw herself into an endless quest for those she cal
led Henri’s brothers and sisters, searched voraciously for the men who, like my ancestors, might have victimized those natives.
Realizing she was serious, I remonstrated with her. Wouldn’t we have heard if there were that many cases like mine, surely somebody would have gotten a whiff of their existence?
Not necessarily, she answered. Some might have foolishly revealed themselves to the authorities and were now quarantined in some hole or laboratory, rotting away, being dissected by Downey’s avid hands. Others might have followed the path of Evelyn and killed themselves. But it made sense that some, like me, must have squirreled themselves away.
I decided not to contest her newfound mission. Maybe this was just a pretext to get out of the house where she had been confined—albeit by her own foolish choice!—for two years. Maybe it would be good for her to compensate now with a mad dash of activity. Who could blame a vibrant woman like my wife for wanting to spread her wings again?
She’d leave early in the morning and come back late at night, full of dates and exhibition notices, names of entrepreneurs and explorers and photographers, copies of postcards and drawings, charts and newspaper clippings. Most of the victims were anonymous, forgotten by history except for a solitary snapshot, while those responsible for their captivity had led well-known lives. Kidnappers like Willy Moller and his Egyptian caravans and the French entrepreneur Jean Tauver and his Kula tribe from Equatorial Guinea shown in Madrid, and Xavier Pene, the owner of a plantation in Dahomey, who transported sixty-seven Africans against their will to Chicago in 1893. And of course, the omnipresent Jacobsen and another partner of Hagenbeck, Joseph Menges. The victims were harder to identify, as always in history, Cam said, even though they far outnumbered the criminals. Javanese dancers and headhunters from Borneo and wild women from Somalia and wild men from Togo and Samoa, wild anything and anybody from the Philippines and Indonesia and Abyssinia and the Sudan, the Bella Coola tribe and Zulu performers from the Transvaal, Bedouins at Brighton Towers, a New Zealand Maori chieftain frowning from his portrait, captives from Formosa and Okinawa, Lilliputians from the Caucasus—a perpetual planetary tour of horrors. Blind Ashanti boys and girls. Miserable Andaman Islanders from the South Pacific. A Negro cretin from Fouta-Djallon. Only a few sported names. Saartje Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, whose immense posterior was more famous than her face, paraded in cabaret acts and circuses, promoted in caricatures and postcards and lewd jokes, her skeleton preserved after death, her likeness copied in wax at the London Wax Museum. Also embalmed in London, Julia Pastrana, a goateed indigenous woman from Sinaloa, whose beard Darwin had admired. The Congolese Gemba, Kitoukwa, and Sambo who, after dying at the Brussels International Exposition in the summer of 1897, were buried among suicides and adulterers when the townspeople of Tervuren stoned the funeral procession that would have lowered them into consecrated ground. Maphoon, a thick-haired African woman who was photographed in Manchester in 1855 breastfeeding an angelic child. No names for the Danaki tribesmen that Carl Milano caught with his camera in Turin in 1884. Just one more of what seemed an endless list of photographers. Jules Grand and Julien Damoy and Julien Lecerf and countless other Jules and Juliens. And Jesse Tarbox Beals, Ferdinand Deslisle, Matthew Brady, Nicholas Henneman, Carl Gunther, Charles Dudley Arnold, and Harlow Higginbotham, even some women like the Gerhard sisters, official photographers of the St. Louis Exhibition of 1904.
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