That communion with each other and delight in the ocean billows was enhanced by the growing health of our young and robust muscles, too long confined to stuffy, overheated or air-conditioned rooms. Despite the tossing and rolling and heaving of the ship—and it would get worse, Wolfe gleefully admonished, worse than the storm we had survived, worse, he insisted, the closer we got to Cape Horn—despite so much turbulence neither of us was attacked by the sort of seasickness that had floored poor Charles Darwin when he had embarked on the Beagle in 1831. So bad that the young naturalist could only combat it stretched out horizontally on a table for days, his nausea worsened by the screams of sailors being whipped with the cat o’ nine tails, a punishment that my namesake, Captain Robert Fitzroy, imposed upon his crew to ensure discipline.
I knew about this barbaric practice—and Darwin’s disgust at it—because my father had given us several books as a present before we left. Cam insisted that we confide the real itinerary to him, though we had been careful not to divulge fully what we intended to do in Tierra del Fuego. Instead, I explained that among the Kaweshkar a dead person’s possessions couldn’t be inherited by the living, even his canoe left to rot by the seashore, clothes, ornaments, amulets, his very hut, consumed by flames. “Brilliant,” he said, assuming we had taken his advice to heart and were determined to finally burn the photos. “The only thing he left behind were his images—so you get rid of them in the place where he was born and poof, he’s gone as well!” He’d been so pleased with the idea that he’d bought us some reading material. “The sea,” he exclaimed, ever the advertising man, “doesn’t exist only as nature. It’s also something created by the mind, the pens and imaginations of men who explored it and then sold it to readers who craved going to sea, investing in oceanic trade. You won’t only be navigating water. History, you’ll be navigating history.”
The diaries of Columbus, the journal kept by Pigafetta as he rounded the earth with Magellan, Darwin’s logbook of his own years on the Beagle, an anthology of sea tales, and, to top it all off, Moby-Dick.
“Thousands of pages of ballast,” Captain Wolfe snorted, when he saw our little library. “Didn’t I warn you to pack light?” But despite protesting that it was a shame to be reading about an ocean when it was there to be experienced, he ended up enjoying the historical references we came up with.
“Do you know why this is called Puerto Plata?” I asked him as we docked at that port of the Dominican Republic in order to refuel and stock up—and celebrate my twenty-fifth birthday!
“Because they charge you lots of plata,” he answered, rubbing his fingers together significantly, “moola, doubloons, pesos, for everything.”
And opened the narrow straits of his eyes wide when I enlightened him. The natives in another part of that island had told Columbus—eager to get him to sail elsewhere—that there was a bay nearby where the land was made entirely of silver. And, in effect, it had seemed to the approaching Spanish fleet as if the shore was ablaze with precious metals—one more illusion foiling Columbus, produced by the sun reflected on untold leaves as they fluttered and swayed in the breeze, but the name, silver, plata, had survived the ages.
“A mockery now, that name,” Wellington remarked, as he peeled some potatoes for a luncheon chowder with which we would continue celebrating, after the walnut-crusted waffles he’d cooked that morning, this special September 11—and pointed his knife bitterly toward the hordes of beggar boys diving next to a nearby wharf for coins flicked by passengers on a gigantic ocean liner. “Go ashore, follow those kids to their hovels or the streets where they’re exploited by pimps, and you’ll see the face of human misery. Some of them are probably even called Cristóbal, in honor of Columbus. Columbus, my black ass!”
My priority was not the face of human misery but keeping the face that Henri had bequeathed me from thousands of tourist cameras roving the town in search of a souvenir. Cam did descend, mainly to call my dad and enthuse about the Caribbean, where we’d tarry a bit soaking in the sun while we waited for Hurricane Bonnie to race by. And not to worry if he didn’t hear from us till we reached Cadiz at the end of September. Taking care to speak extra loud to throw Downey’s aides off the trail in case they were eavesdropping. We didn’t want our pursuer guessing we were on our way to Brazil and would soon cross the equator.
The equator! That moment when we passed into the southern part of our planet on our Southern Cross boat. So ecstatic that we did not resent the dunking the crew gave us, chucking both neophytes overboard. We astonished them by swimming together, stroke by stroke, like two superb swordfish, round and round the unwavering ship. Just one more form and shape and manifestation of togetherness—to be renewed on dark moonless nights in our berth, keeping as quiet as clams as we let our lower bodies express what the day had drifted into us and left behind, muffling our own whimpers and endearments and especially the heartbeats that could have wakened a regiment. Trying to still the sound of our lovemaking not only out of a desire for privacy, but also because it seemed prudent not to flaunt my privileges to the other males on board. Until Wolfe took me aside one twilight evening. “Not to worry,” he said. “Enjoy! You’re young and we will be relieved in the next port just as we were in the last one. If you were not married, I’d show you the most affectionate whores this side of paradise. To each his own.”
And thus did the days pass so placid and pleasantly, the nights with such warmth and passion, that I almost forgot the purpose of our mission.
As soon, however, as we hit Brazil and entered the bay of Sao Salvador and saw the docks overflowing with dark-skinned bodies, stevedores and fruit merchants and prostitutes, Henri reminded us of his existence. As did Darwin in the journals Cam and I were reading. He had recorded the words of despair uttered by an African slave in that very port of Bahía, If I could but see my father and two sisters once again, I should be happy. I can never forget them, anticipating like an obscene echo what Henri must have felt fifty years later.
That was how South America greeted us, with black faces in Bahía and black memories of lost souls, millions of them, who had never returned home, in whose name, perhaps, Henri was rebelling, motivating me yet again to navigate toward a funeral that he and they had never been afforded in their place of birth.
And Henri came to me again a few days later in Rio, though for different reasons. In this city, I said to Cam somberly, my mother had landed on her way to the Amazon. I felt like jumping ship and walking the streets she had walked a week before her death. She had written, in a last letter sent from this very place, how the vitality and beauty of Rio animated her, its botanical garden, the Cristo Redentor, the Pão de Açucar, the wide beaches of Ipanema bursting with surfers and youngsters playing soccer, oh my darling Roy, I took photos of them, soon you’ll be as free as they are. The city of the River of January, Rio de Janeiro, tells me that I will not, cannot, fail.
And here we were, fulfilling her promise, bringing Henri inside me to the South, ever to the South, Montevideo and the Falklands, until finally cooler winds and larger and more permanent waves and far-off cliffs announced that we were at last nearing Patagonia, nearing Henri. The same seas he had crossed and gales that had said goodbye to him. With this difference: no fires from hill to hill that had alerted Darwin to the existence of the savages he could hardly conceive of as human, no fires now from one clan to the other communicating the arrival of percherai, strangers, no fires because there were no longer any hands to light them, any lips to pronounce astonishment at the intrusion of foreign ships, no eyes to examine the invaders with curiosity. And this other difference: Henri’s ocean had not been choking with plastic, he had not passed carcasses of fish and birds poisoned by the slick from oil rigs, and the sun in his days had not been dangerous to the human skin, his ozone was not depleted, there was no rust crusting the waves. How would he have grieved to see the ocean which had given his people sustenance for millennia turned into a garbage dump, the sewer of the world. Perhaps he would ha
ve considered that crime more unforgivable than his kidnapping—that violence, after all, had affected eleven Kaweshkar but at least back then the sea had remained intact, the great mother had not yet been assaulted. “Maybe that is what he has come to warn us about,” Cam whispered, divining, as always, my thoughts. “Maybe that is what he wants us to understand. That we shall all become percherai, strangers on this planet, unless we stop this madness.”
I could only hope he had such benevolent intentions in mind. At any rate, it was not to sadden him that we had come so far. Better to let him drink in, through us, the scenery that would have still been recognizable to him, made, as we were, of the same clay. The cone of snow on jagged distant mountains, the blue glaciers rearing out of the water like white leviathans, dark ragged clouds rolling down between gulfs in the fjords, strong outlines marked on a lurid sky. And the cries of gulls and far away, when a lull in the wind allowed, the howling of some animal. He would have welcomed the way sea and coast merged under a rain so icy that each drop seemed to pierce the skin—we were not protected, as he and his people had been, by the thick oil from the seals, we used deodorant and soap and indoor plumbing, we had forgotten what it meant to be at the mercy of the elements, we had forgotten that we were once mineral.
For us, in love with the color green above all, biking from a young age by the lush rivers of New England, the bareness of Patagonia was both repellent and attractive, those naked islands rising from the sea with trees and bushes scant, scant and blasted and stunted and gnarled. How had Henri ever survived? We were in October and the Southern Hemisphere days were growing longer and the seas rougher, testing our endurance with waves that washed over the vessel as if it were a toy boat, and then, a sudden calm and the springtime sun would peep through the overlaying of cloud upon cloud, once in a while the wind would die down and the rain would cease for a few minutes, how could anyone survive in a lone canoe during winter nights seventeen hours long, when the temperatures dropped and smothered the tundra and froze the fingers that had learned to carve utensils from the great marine mammals, how could these tribes have survived the extraordinary hostility of nature only to be destroyed by their fellow humans, hunted down, exterminated, and, in the case of some, carried off, never to return? The wrong question, the wrong way of looking at this land of fire with no fire, this land of the Patagons without any Patagons left, this land, this land—the wrong question because he had loved it here, this was his home, this was what he had yearned for on those warm Parisian nights and then in Berlin during the autumn and finally in that aseptic bed in a Zurich hospital as the snow fell outside, as his life ebbed he had dreamt of these channels, these archipelagos, these breakers he knew as we knew the television channels and the avenues and neon of our cities. And perhaps, if we were lucky or deserving enough, some representative of his people would greet us not as strangers but as friends come to learn, come to listen under the rain that had been his constant companion.
That is what Cam and I thought, promised ourselves, hoped for, as The Southern Cross approached Punta Arenas. It had started to snow—more mellow than the icicles that had fallen upon our ship just the night before and driven us shivering to our cabin. The soft white flakes brought with them a descending hush that seemed a benediction after the relentless sleet hounding us since our ship first ventured into the Straits of Magellan.
Chilean policemen and customs officials were waiting at the wharf. They were less perfunctory and far more inquisitive than their American counterparts; London Wolfe had no buddies in this country. What were we here for? How long did we intend to stay? Our place of residence? Anything to declare?
Cam and I, with the assistance of captain and crew, had rehearsed our answers. We’d come to see the baby penguins hatch, streaks of yellow already adorning their necks, and when we’d had our fill of that marvel, maybe explore some islands. Staying no more than a few days, at the hotel Cabo de Hornos on the Plaza Muñoz Gamero. As to declarations, I had to bite my tongue not to tell them, declare to the winds of Patagonia the joy my wife and I felt at alighting with someone hidden inside me who’d been stolen from these very shores over a century ago thanks to the lack of oversight of the Chilean state, but I kept quiet, smuggled Henri across the border, as I chortled to Cam later, once we had collapsed on the ample bed at the Cabo de Hornos.
That bed, the hot shower, the champagne promptly delivered by room service, the radiators steaming warmth, the phone, the radio, the television, the gym on the top floor and the bar at the bottom—and outside, streets with cars and lamplights, asphalt and discotheques. A city! The southernmost of the world, with all the charm of a frontier town—it reminded me of settlements I had seen in Westerns—but stocked with everything modernity, not to mention tourists, demanded.
After more than forty days at sea—like Noah!—to step into a late-twentieth-century town, steady and dependable and civilized, was a shock. I had grown accustomed to sharing Henri’s view of the world—if not from a canoe, at least from the perspective of a skiff that, in spite of our provisions and gadgets, was still at the mercy of massive waves and sudden spasms and perils of the weather. So that, as I let the devices and luxuries sink in, I was still able to access, though with increasing remoteness, Henri’s wide-eyed amazement when he had seen Hamburg and then a train and then Paris, the dizziness he must have felt at finding himself in a universe so removed from his previous experience. It lasted only a short while, this sharing in Henri’s bewilderment—yes, that was the word, because for him the industrially produced world was a wilderness and his tumultuous ocean was normality—whereas we belonged on this hotel bed, we were being returned to our privileges and comfort zone and could not truly understand how divorced he must have felt from his new world.
And even so, something of his disorientation and perplexity remained with us. Just scant hours ago, we had been exposed to a hostile environment, real danger no more than a compass point away, a turn of bad luck. Aware of how easy it would be for our fleeting civilization to melt away, for my body to become like Henri’s and Cam’s like Lise’s, Adam and Eve at the start of time, naked under the last savage ribs of the Andes. The only thing really separating me from my visitor, I realized, was that he did not require cameras and computers and combustion engines and satellite readings to get through the day. If ever a catastrophe swept away all the inventions mankind had placed between itself and the encroaching jaws of nature, we would all have to become Henri or perish. Virchow, Hagenbeck, Pierre Petit, Darwin himself, would not last a week if stranded on these bleak beaches, all their belief in progress and commerce and improvement and industry, mere smoke and mirrors, ephemeral as a dream. In that respect, Henri was far superior to them—and certainly to me. One had only to consider him, not as a piece of anatomy to be prodded in a lab or a spectacle to be gaped at, but as a wondrous human perfectly adapted to his circumstances, admirably adapted, highly intelligent and gloriously free.
If we had merged transiently with him during our voyage and our common, underlying humanity had been revealed and prized, yet now that these pillows fluffed our hair while we viewed the Straits through double-paned windows manufactured in some factory far to the North, another lesson, a lesson about the distance that separated us, was being learned. In effect, I had no desire to live forever chained to a boat and buffeted by chance. I was a man of my time and clime and this room was paid for by my skills at coding and Photoshopping, and Cam was wedded to her microscope as much as to me, loved splicing and enzymes as much as she loved the body of her Fitzroy. It was a delusion that we could ever truly go back to what he was and how he had endured. I should be grateful that my prosperity had given me occasion to draw near to Henri under that rain, but I had to acknowledge how inseparably far we were from his precipices. He was unreachable and not ever returning.
All of this we explained that very evening to Frano Vudarovic as we dined with him on the delicacies of the zone prepared by Elba, his lovely, freckle-faced wife: the king
crab centolla, then cordero magallánico with local potatoes and greens, topped off by a choice between British bread pudding with homegrown berries or an apple strudel. They must have known that, in spite of whatever wonders the cook on board our ship had been able to rustle up, we’d be famished for this kind of hearty home fare—and for the conversation with someone willing to discuss my dilemma without subterfuges.
Vudarovic understood what had guided me to him more intensely than I could have hoped for. Now that we were face-to-face he could admit that his cordial reaction to my desire to atone obeyed deep, personal reasons.
A kidnapping, he said, had brought me and Cam to Tierra del Fuego. Well, a kidnapping—of a different kind—had done the same for him. In 1881, the same year that Henri and his fellows were abducted and taken to Europe, Frano’s great-grandfather, Anton Vudarovic, had fled that very Europe in the opposite direction. Perhaps their boats had even crossed somewhere in the Atlantic. Like many Croatian males, he was escaping the forcible impressment into the Austro-Hungarian Army. Most of those migrants wound up in the nitrate fields of Chile’s Atacama desert. But Anton was also anxious to evade the fate of his family, dedicated since Roman times, so legend had it, to mining salt from the extensive shallows of their native island Pag—Vudarovic meant “son of a miner” in Croatian. So Frano’s great-grandfather jumped ship in Punta Arenas and let his brother and other compatriots continue north up the Pacific to seek fortune in drier climes. Anton worked for a while at one of the recently launched sheep haciendas, but once gold was discovered, he drifted into his forefathers’ profession: with his mining experience, he soon amassed enough capital to marry and establish a shop catering to his former gold digging comrades, as well as to whalers and the general public.
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