Darwin's Ghosts

by Ariel Dorfman

  I reminded him that we had a bargain: no deal until he opened his life to scrutiny.

  “Fair’s fair. I can’t get a job because I was caught smuggling refugees into our resplendent land of the free. From El Salvador, to escape the civil war—a few years ago, you know, when . . . It was for money, I’ll admit that any day, though the truth is I’m proud of saving those families caught in the middle of a massacre they wanted no part of and didn’t understand. They caught me, my former buddies in the Coast Guard—caught me, but the charges couldn’t stick. Some idiot had deported all the Salvadorans so the evidence was gone, they couldn’t be cross-examined by my attorney who’s as sharp as a cutlass. So I got off the hook on a technicality—far from heroic, but I’m not complaining. My license was reinstated, they couldn’t deny me that, but the bureaucrats made sure nobody’d ever touch me again, not with a ten-foot anchor. So, enough said?”

  What would Cam have done? She’d have pressed him for more. I needed to play the tough guy.

  “What are you holding back?” I asked.

  “Okay, okay. I smoke and I drink and I whore around—yeah, even at my age, but you don’t want one of those goody-goody squeaky clean seafarers who swears that they’re as pure as the Virgin Mary, blessed be her soul. So that’s me: slightly over seventy, and no job. There you have it. I’ve told you as much as I’m willing to tell, just like you told me only a wee bit of the truth, but enough so that each of us knows who we’re dealing with. You need a boat that can survive the roughest squalls and the most treacherous rocks on this planet? I can have the perfect craft in a few weeks’ time, along with two mates I’d trust my mother’s life with, if she were alive—one’s a hand deck, the other’s a cook, ready to help in case of an emergency. Just give me the word. And a deposit.”

  He had me and he knew it. But there was still one more condition he and his crew needed to agree to before we could sign a contract: no cameras on board, not one picture taken, not one.

  London Wolfe shrugged. He’d seen stranger requests. He’d never been partial to photos anyway—they always lied.

  I had never met anyone like him. An understatement. My tiny world of Cam and Dad and my two brothers was about to expand explosively with this stranger who seemed to have emerged from one of the adventure tales I had read as a child. Who knew such people really existed? And would Cam find him as attractive as I did? We shook hands and its roughness felt like yet one more auspicious sign that change was coming. It had been sailors like him who had handled the ropes and rigging and currents that had taken Henri from his home and now would carry his photos with us to the southernmost tip of our hemisphere. Would Wolfe be able to deliver on his promises?

  Two weeks later he returned and I had the response in my own rather more delicate hands. A series of pictures of a magnificent cruising sloop. One sail, two diesel engines, three cabins—one for me and my wife, a smaller one for him, the last one with berths for the two crew members, toilet a bit compressed, but what the hell . . . A Delanta Dehler model, forty feet. Slick, sturdy, nobly built—another auspicious sign—in 1981, slipping into the sea at about the time Henri was slipping into the waters of my mind. And with a name—The Southern Cross—that made my heart leap. Snug inside if it was raining, ample decks if the day was bright with blue and the cloudless nights full of stars.

  I tried to contain my excitement, sound business-like.

  “And how long would it take to reach Punta Arenas?”

  “Thirty-three days, eighteen hours, and two minutes—at ten knots a day, but taking into account weather delays, stopping for repairs and fuel, water and supplies, calculate a month and a half to get there by early October, as per plan.”

  I computed all this rapidly in my head. “But that means we’d have to leave by this Saturday at the latest. Four days from now.”

  He nodded his head, yes, that’s what it meant, adding: “We’ll tell the authorities that before we head for Europe we’ll sail the Caribbean first and then my contact at the IMO will cover for us when we keep going south. Just the right window of time to escape Hurricane Andrew as it diminishes and before Bonnie, that vixen of a storm, blows us to kingdom come.”

  “Good plan,” I said, as if I understood what he was talking about. “Saturday’s fine.”

  The captain passed me a sheaf of papers to be read and signed, along with a budget detailing overall costs. This little adventure was going to cost us close to $300,000—if we did not run into any unforeseen trouble.

  The enormity of that sum, so nakedly exposed, startled me out of my grandiose reveries. Was it worth it, to spend so lavishly, based on a capricious intuition on my part, a plan not so much as whispered to the woman I loved and who would be asked to join me on the high seas four days from now? All this money, time, and energy expended, and there was no guarantee—quite the contrary, really, given the record of the last eleven years—that taking the photos to Tierra del Fuego and burying them in some island which might not even be Henri’s birthplace would appease my visitor. Wasting such a fortune might be deemed by Henri as proof that I had learned nothing, was just a spoiled brat who deserved to be persecuted by those eyes till the day of his death and beyond. He had been abducted for money and photographed for money and raped for money and touted through Europe for money and probed for money and now my money was supposed to save me, buy my freedom. How would the men and women and children of the world, enslaved, starving, dying for lack of water, dying from curable diseases, judge me? How would Cam? And Henri? Wouldn’t he have preferred that I use the funds to help the few indigenous people left in Patagonia?

  I must have gone pale, shown signs of dizziness, because Captain Wolfe had to steady me with his strong arms.

  “Having second thoughts, eh, lad? Can’t say I blame you. It’s one thing to get all excited about going to sea, another to face the storm when there’s nothing to save you but your own two hands and whatever mates are by your side and just damn luck. Lord knows, the South is calling to me, but if you don’t feel up to it, just pay me for my two weeks of prep and I’ll go and spend it at a nasty dive I haunt in Boston and then it’ll be goodbye—as long as you also compensate my buddies Jim and Wellington. No harm done, except to my dreams and yours—and mine have been frustrated enough times for me to be vaccinated by now. Yours, well, I won’t pry, but I can recognize suffering when I glimpse it on a man’s face. Whether this voyage will placate whatever demons are plaguing you, that I can’t say and you’ll surely never know. Unless you sign on the dotted line.”

  I signed, of course I signed. Feverishly, until every consent had been agreed to, the lease of the ship, the bond in case anything happened to it, the insurance, the three contracts with Wolfe and his mates, the escrow fund to cover future costs, an array of fees we’d encounter on our way, I signed each document with a flourish and then a hefty check, and handed the whole lot to him.

  “Now,” I said, and my hand was trembling but not as much as my heart, “there’s only one thing left for me to do.”

  “Oh. What’s that?”

  “I need to tell my wife we’re departing in four days’ time.”

  “She doesn’t know?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “You’re a brave man, Fitzroy Foster, I’ll say that much for you. Though I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when the missus hears what you’ve got her into without her say-so.”

  And now I really panicked.

  That independence of mine that gave me such pride, it broke the unspoken pact and consonance we had automatically established since those first strokes in the water of a pool more than half a lifetime ago. Now to be tested in waters that we would navigate under the guidance of an old man whose main merit was his expunged criminal record. I was putting Cam’s lovely, lithe body, not to mention my more cumbersome and awkward one, at the mercy of rough waves and someone I really knew nothing about. I could already hear her: You what? Three hundred thousand dollars? Pretend you’re going to Hamburg a
nd end up in Patagonia? Back out, Fitz. There’s got to be a clause that allows it. Or do you really believe I’ll just hop on an unknown boat with a drunken, whoring smuggler? With all those photos of yours and Henri? Giving Downey the chance to grab you?

  “Can you wait here a sec?” I said to the skipper—and rushed upstairs to the attic. The photos were there, nestled in a box. The imagery and itinerary of my life. Those eyes of his that had bewitched me and that now wanted to convince me to take them thousands of miles away. A final act of perdition, that was Henri’s deepest desire, to destroy me as he had done with my mother and tried to do with Camilla. Burn them, my father had urged, burn the damn things and be rid of the specter forever.

  I closed my eyes, beset by turmoil and confusion.

  My hand reached into the box and extracted a photo.

  Filled with apprehension, I forced my eyelids to open and he was there like a corpse or a newborn child, as unspeaking and demanding as the first time we had met, almost eleven years ago. And I knew that I could not burn him anymore than set fire to myself and my loved one and our home.

  I would follow my plan through to the end.

  Only one way to cast aside all doubts, make it impossible for Cam to persuade me to withdraw from this mad scheme: to do something even more foolish and bold than the voyage on The Southern Cross itself. I scribbled a short letter and then placed it in the box, alongside the thousand and one images of Henri monstrously twinned with my body. Next I wrapped it with brown paper, taped the edges and seams and addressed it to Frano Vudarovic at the University in Punta Arenas, Chile. And asked Captain London for a favor. “Can you send off this box by express mail? Taking care that nobody’s following you and that you pay with cash, as credit cards can be traced. Can you do that for me?”

  He accepted with alacrity.

  Cam would be, I thought, a harder nut to crack.

  Downey, of all people, unwittingly smoothed the way. He had, that very afternoon, tracked Cam down at the library.

  I had never seen her so agitated.

  “He knows Barry’s detectives have not come up with any other victims like his daughter, he knows Barry came to visit, he calculated that now we might be more receptive to his offer to join forces. He wants to use you, Fitz, I knew it, I knew it, didn’t I tell you what his plans were? He’s got some horrible experiments in store, tap your blood, sample your skin, scrape your retina, graft your hair, extract marrow from your spine, he’ll—”

  “Wait, wait, wait. He said he intended to do all that to me?”

  “He didn’t need to. I know what he’s up to. He spoke about his daughter, how she could have helped him stop the invasion if she hadn’t lost hope, but there were others out there, close by, very close by, he said, who could thwart the enemy before they get their hands on the process—sometimes he seemed to be speaking about the Russians or the Chinese, other times he hurled insults at savage creatures who were infiltrating cameras and photos and synapses.”

  “Did he tell you anything else about his research?”

  “He said that he had just recently detected the first tentative signs of a pandemic, a game changer that made his work more urgent, something he calls the next stage.”

  “The next stage?”

  “He spoke about finding some combination in the blood, the bones, the optical membrane, an aberrant gene. That if we could prove it was recurrent, if we had enough cases for a scientific comparison—just as I had told you, right, how important it was that you not be a unique specimen, right?—if we discovered this mutation, we could stop the plague from becoming widespread, advance to the next stage, our faces, our faces, he said over and over, and not just the photos. He grew more excited as he talked, as if he’d forgotten who he was speaking to—we can do it, we can do it, he kept repeating.”

  “Do what?”

  “Isolate the strain of that virus so as to find an antidote before somebody introduces it into our food or water supply. Worse than the Black Death, he said, our whole way of life could collapse into chaos, the social fabric that holds together our civilization. And then you know what he said? He said he couldn’t wait to meet you, because he’d heard you were so brilliant at computing and that you’d find the solution. And then he took a step back and looked at me, leered at me, as if stripping me naked, Fitz, I’m not embroidering this, and said, No, not find. Your husband won’t find the solution. Fitzroy Foster is the solution.”

  “And that makes you sure he wants to get his hands on me.”

  “But he won’t. I won’t let him. As long as you stay put, don’t venture forth from this house, we’ll be fine, we’ll be protected.”

  I took a deep breath. We had exchanged roles. Here was my love demanding that I never leave the nest and here was I, about to tell her that four days from now we would be on a small vessel on our way to Patagonia. A deep breath as a prelude to revealing everything I had been up to while she was busy chasing down duplicate victims. She listened quietly, anxiety and alarm draining from her face as if my words were a transfusion of energy and courage and serenity—could this really be me formulating these plans?—there was none of the fury or dismay I had expected.

  She took it all in her stride.

  “Good for you,” she said. “It’s wacky, of course, and risky as hell, and will probably end in shambles, but it sure makes sense. More than what I’ve been doing, can’t dispute that. Good for you,” she repeated, “and also for me. I love it that you’ve fixed this up, that you did it without my help.” And then: “But not through the Panama Canal, right? Down the Atlantic Coast.”

  “Like Henri,” I said. “The same seas he was forced to cross . . .”

  “But in reverse, undoing his route, yes.”

  She was back, she had returned to me, the two of us were again thinking the same thoughts!

  “Only one more question before I start packing—winter clothes, as it rains all the time—what did you write to this Professor Vudarovic in your letter?”

  “That we’d arrive there by boat a few days before October twelfth. That we felt that the photos were safer with him and the elders of the Kaweshkar in case anything happened to us—so that if we did not show up, they could go ahead with the ceremony. To please be careful because we were under surveillance and he might be as well. And I apologized for burdening him with all of this, but he had said he would welcome me if I told him the truth, so I was only appealing to Xolás and the tradition he had invoked.”

  Four days later, on a gray imperfect misty dawn, we set sail from New Bedford for the islands Magellan had first sighted and claimed for a European king, the islands that Henri’s ancestors had inhabited for thousands of years.

  Without knowing who was awaiting us there.

  NINE

  “All we can do is return. We have no more tasks. Our days are over. Think of us, do not erase us from your memory, do not forget us.”

  —The Maya Book of Counsel

  We arrived in Punta Arenas with barely three days to spare, on October 9, 1992, a Friday morning.

  The voyage had been both more and less eventful than anybody could have forecast.

  It had been no trouble to sneak on board The Southern Cross in the middle of the night, nor did the port authorities or the immigration and customs people give us a hard time, hardly casting a cursory glance at our passports and certainly not questioning our navigational plans, probably judging us to be a couple of spoiled American yuppies out to spend Daddy’s money.

  And just as Captain Wolfe had promised, our change in course, he announced triumphantly, was duly noted without questions from the maritime organizations. It was our business that we headed south once we passed Martinique, instead of veering north-northeast. Not a sign, either, of any watercraft following in our wake and we doubted we were important enough to warrant satellite spying.

  The weather, for the most part, cooperated to make the journey glorious and without major perils, though with enough rain and choppy seas t
o give us a thrill. And even a scare, when we hit a squall that seemed to threaten to sink our ship, and damaged the foresail. So there was some time lost when we had to undergo repairs in Montevideo, and also one tense moment when we were accosted by an Argentine patrol refusing us entry to Bahía Blanca, but our captain and crew did not seem fazed by this obstacle—they simply headed to the nearby Falklands to restock before the long haul down toward Antarctica.

  “Just as we planned,” London Wolfe used to exclaim at dinner when he would show us the nautical miles advanced as we sat down to spicy dinners, prepared with flair by Wellington’s Jamaican hands, whose specialty was the fresh fish caught by Jim, a tall and cheerful Australian who ended up teaching me the joys of struggling against a forty pounder so that I might become the main provider of that fare. Like Hemingway in these very seas, Jim said. And I answered in my mind, like Henri, like Henri!

  If the itinerary was what the captain had minutely planned, the exhilaration of the voyage itself was a surprise.

  Until I stood at the bow of the boat that first morning, holding hands with Cam, the canvas in the sails flapping from the mast at our back and filling my expanding lungs and heart; until the spray dashed onto that skin of mine that had been drying and withering in the seclusion of my room; until the eyes that had blinked away at computer screens and mathematical algorithms and binary codes greeted the tinges and hues and shades of waves rippling on the stern and the cathedral of the sky so clear and lofty; until the ears that for eleven years had only registered nature through recalcitrant birds chirping above dreary urban streets began to decipher the sound of wind and seagull and the cries of our first dolphins urging us on toward our destiny; until we tasted the salt and the unfathomable depths, until then and so much more, I had not really measured the inhuman deprivation suffered by my senses. That Cam herself had never boarded a boat in her life, that this was also an adventure for her, everything startling and unexpected and enchanting, what a gift to again be sharing, like when we had first met, the rhythm of reality.