“I am the beneficiary of that prosperity,” Frano Vudarovic said, puffing on a pipe that jutted out from a prominent brown beard. “My university education, both here and abroad, derives from that business and the generations that kept it going. Moreover, I was emboldened to become a historian by my great-grandfather’s activities during the three years before he set up shop, which family legend vaguely rumored to have been infernal. When I tried to find out what had been so hellish about that time, all I received back were evasive answers—and soon resolved to arm myself with instruments to force the past to reveal its secrets. Later, I learned from my mentor at Sussex, the great John Lyell, that history seldom responds to our queries. History, he would say, is like a cemetery with unmarked graves, quiet and unyielding but if we look hard enough we will always find atrocities and victims, and they are far more interesting than the perpetrators. Was Anton one of the latter? I’d like to think he had no direct involvement in the killing fields of Patagonia, no blood on his hands. It would be sad if he had escaped from using the emperor’s Mausers against his fellow Europeans only to turn them on defenseless Patagonian Indians who were massacred by the thousands. Once back in Punta Arenas, knowing where to look, I noted that there was no reference to Anton’s participation in that violence in newspaper articles or letters. Though he most certainly sold the guns that did the killing. I saw the ledgers: between November 1893 and December 1895 he provided the Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego with twenty-seven rifles and eight revolvers, all of them .44 caliber, and twelve thousand five hundred bullets for the rifles, nine hundred fifty for the revolvers. And the knives, biscuits, fishing nets, clothes and boots, everything that was used in the mass slaughter on the sheep farms and on the nomad islands. An accomplice. And so, my dear friends, like you, I have something to atone for, a past that drives me.”
The sorrow we saw in his eyes had been there for a good part of his sixty-odd years.
“And yet, I ask myself, who is not the product of some crime committed in the past? I ask if there was ever a dynasty built without a murder, the pain of someone else, the erasing of that guilt? If so, then what matters is not what your ancestors did—which cannot be undone—but how you react to that, what you freely do, as Sartre once noted, with the life that was given to you. And here I am, the great-grandson of Anton Vudarovic, dedicated to keeping alive the heritage of the people he, at the very least, collaborated in exterminating.” And now that sorrow of his turned into a sort of bizarre elation. “So there’s the question for you, the real question that Henri might ask if he were alive, because he belongs to a gentle and not a vindictive race: what will you do with this knowledge you have acquired, this experience, this journey?”
Before I could open my mouth, Cam intervened: “First he has to be free enough to walk down a street, make a life for himself.”
Frano Vudarovic nodded, begged our pardon. “Yes, that’s what matters now, you’re right, that’s why you’ve come.”
“And they’re ready, the Kaweshkar elders are ready to help?”
“They’ll do what they can,” Frano said. “The Kaweshkar Council—an entity that’s only a few years old—has given its approval for a ceremony near Puerto Edén, where the few surviving members of the ethnic group now live. We’ll leave for that island on Sunday the eleventh—give you tomorrow to rest after your long voyage. We should arrive well in time for your October twelfth deadline. The photos are already there.”
“And they understand the significance of the photos, the date, our request?”
Frano sighed. “You know, Fitzroy, your life has revolved for many years around the past, your head turned backward. But the remaining Kaweshkar are concerned with the present. Like most people on this earth they want health, education, access to goods and transportation, and, particularly, security. Given the choice of lobbying, some decades ago, for a teacher who could teach the children elements of the Kaweshkar tongue or a police station in Puerto Edén, they went for the station. Memory is a strange creature, my friends. The massacres, the abductions, the epidemics in the missions, the bounty hunters, the onslaught of the whalers, the extermination of the sea lions, what happened a hundred years ago, that is the stuff of legend and deep trauma, but the fears of the Kaweshkar today are of more recent vintage. What the older people remember is how they were, for decades, the prey of bandits, the worst sort of scum, hiding out in the impenetrable labyrinth of coves and inlets. These strangers—many from the island of Chiloe, farther north—would force the natives to fish and hunt for them, ply the women with alcohol and trinkets, rape them. Theft became common and even murder—the kind of violence unheard of among them at the time of Henri’s kidnapping. So defending themselves from lawlessness was a priority—like you, they have understood that first you survive the most imminent danger, get rid of the shackles, so as to be free to pursue other goals and needs.”
“Needs? What sort of needs do they have now?” Cam asked. “Perhaps we might assist.”
“Jobs. They’re lobbying for a communal fishing area, an exclusionary zone that would forbid the big companies from depleting the marine reserves, a strategy designed to eliminate middlemen so artisanal craft can be sold directly in Punta Arenas and Puerto Natales. Not much you can do to bolster that project. But there’s the prospect of an ethnical kindergarten which might revive the indigenous tradition among the younger generation, as well as a new grammar and oral history they are working on with me—I was so bold as to pledge, on your behalf, a donation.”
“It was the right thing to do,” I said, though I also expressed a certain discomfort at the thought that we were, well, buying our way into the hearts of the surviving Kaweshkar.
“Oh, they’re authentically interested in helping you,” Frano said. “Anyone who cares about them and the mistreatment they’ve suffered, anyone who values their identity, at times more than they themselves do, is welcome. But they have come to comprehend, through tales told by their grandparents and their own experience, that tomorrow you, the visitors, will be gone and that they’ll be left with the legacy of centuries of exploitation. They have no illusions as to a permanent relationship with you. They don’t expect someone like you—or me—to save them. They may even see you as part of the problem, rather than a solution.”
“What do you mean?”
“If, once the ceremony is over, a youngster from Puerto Edén were to ask for a lift to Punta Arenas, how would you respond?”
“That we’d be delighted, how else should we respond?”
“All over the earth,” Frano Vudarovic said, “villages like Puerto Edén are becoming depopulated, the young are migrating to nearby towns and from there to cities and from those cities to other countries, the largest migration in history, culminating a process that started massively with the Industrial Revolution. The Kaweshkar Council keeps demanding more connections to the world, more traffic than one ferry a week. But the road that brings modernity is the same road the young use to leave. And you are, inevitably, with your curiosity and your need for a ceremony from them, with your devices and latest gadgets and clothes, a beacon and a magnet and even, once you agree to transport one of their people to Punta Arenas, a facilitator of the process that is erasing the universe that your Henri inhabited, erasing him from memory. The young are leaving now, not because they are being kidnapped, as in the past, but because they’re seduced by what people like you and I can offer. Wouldn’t you be seduced? Don’t you want to be free of your visitor so you can enjoy your own century rather than be imprisoned in his? Wouldn’t Henri want something similar if he were alive today? But we should talk more about this in Puerto Edén. You’ll see for yourselves on October twelfth where that inaugural visit by Cristóbal Colón has landed us.”
I did not have to wait that long. That very night I got a taste—a bitter one—of the dilemma he was describing.
His glum diagnosis of the illness besieging the indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego did nothing to dampen
our enthusiasm for the mission we had launched. Back at the hotel, Cam took me in her arms and snuggled me under the covers and we were able to voice our cries and sweet talk so unavoidably subdued during those many days in the tossing sea. The expression through throat and mouth and lips and teeth had opposite effects on Cam and me. It exhausted her and she fell asleep almost immediately, whereas I felt awake and alert and marvelously alive.
A while passed, with her soft black hair breathing on my shoulders—and when I realized I would not be able to nod off, I rose from the bed.
There was a chill in the air, despite the radiator going full blast, and rather than blunder back into pajamas, I got dressed—perhaps I could go down to the bar and enjoy a nightcap, perhaps the captain was there and he could inform me more about Sunday’s itinerary.
I looked out the window at the wide expanse of the city and the waters that Magellan had crossed and Henri had explored and Captain Cook and all those whalers had watched, as I did now, shimmering under a ghostlike moon.
And then a figure caught my eye, moving slowly, shuffling along uncertainly, through the plaza below.
A young man.
Somehow familiar, something that I—and then his face, as he stumbled and paused under a streetlight, for no more than two seconds, before he submerged himself in the shadows.
It was Henri.
Or somebody extraordinarily like him.
I thought of waking my love, having her validate my sighting, but she was deep in another dimension and the young man had staggered off into the dark and I had only this one chance to follow and find him.
If all those days at sea had not emboldened me, if the freedom of the waves had not still been carrying me forward, if I had not been inspired by glaciers from the times of Genesis and enchanted by birds flying with forever as a horizon, if the reckless wind had not taught and taunted me, I would never have dared to risk such an adventure. But that momentum from the immediate past, the independence with which I had proven myself, been able to organize this trip without anyone’s help, flung away any misgivings—I was like a hunter who would not ask his mate’s consent to go out in search of a quarry.
I crept out into the night.
It felt good to be on my own, unshadowed, grown-up.
What could possibly go wrong? Who could possibly photograph or identify me?
I had seen, from my window, where the man had been heading and that is where my steps carried me, peering into doorways and around corners, somehow inhabited by the conviction that I would track him down, wherever he was, whoever he was, I had spent more years with him than with anyone else on this planet, I knew him inside and out, I knew where he would go.
And stepped inside Sotito’s Bar.
There he was.
Not really Henri, of course—some distant relative, some of my visitor’s blood had to be coursing through his veins. A slightly less flat nose, the hair trimmed differently, but the eyes, the eyes and the cheeks and the mouth. The mouth! I had never seen it moving, opening and closing, any sounds coming from that throat, that tongue. How often had I imagined this scene, the moment when his photo would materialize into reality, when at last he’d speak? But not like this, a man sitting by himself in a bar in Punta Arenas, so much like Henri and yet not him, not him.
For a moment, I hesitated. Behind me, I heard the door to the bar reopen and a vicious wind blow in and then a voice, probably a tourist, because he said, “Sorry, buddy, you’re blocking the way.”
I took a step to the side, felt the man, burly and gruff, accompanied by a blond-bleached woman reeking of perfume, brush by me, install themselves at the bar, not far from where I—
Where I should be.
I walked to the young man’s table, stood by it. Seeing him up close, the resemblance was less evident—he was older than Henri had ever been, for starters, and the skin was lighter, perhaps tinged with some white blood, but that only made his presence more disquieting.
“Con permiso,” I said, in my rudimentary Spanish.
“Want to join me?” he said, in English, though heavily accented and somewhat slurred with an excess of liquor. “Sit.”
And when I did so, he signaled the waitress, lifting two wavering fingers. “You sit, you pay,” he said.
I nodded.
He reached into his pocket, fished out a flyer, and passed it to me. It was a bit rumpled but handsomely printed.
NOMADVENTURES it stated, in red letters at the top—red, the color that indicated one is welcome in the Kaweshkar community, or maybe that was a mere coincidence. I liked the way it played with words, “nomad” and “adventure” and also indicating this would not be mad, this adventure. Reassurance. Underneath that introductory banner, a photo of Henri’s double, smiling broadly, settled between two foreigners—a tall Scandinavian male, hair as yellow as cheese, and, on the other side, a pretty brunette, her eyes alight with pleasure. Then came several words: EXCURSIONS. TOURS. PENGUIN ISLAND. KAYAKING TO GLACIAR PARK. HORSEBACK RIDING. HUNTING. FISHING. And In Smaller Print: NATIVE CEREMONIES UPON REQUEST. AUTHENTIC. EXOTIC. And At The Very Bottom, A Name: JEMMY EDÉN WALAKIAL, GUIDE, ENGLISH-SPANISH. With a phone and fax number.
“Jemmy Edén Walakial,” I said. “Your name?”
“Así me llamo,” he said, in Spanish, yes, that was his name.
“Como Puerto Edén?” I asked, showing him that he did not need to continue in English.
He ignored the invitation. “Born Puerto Edén.”
“We’re going there soon,” I said.
“No penguins?”
“No,” I said.
“Nothing in Puerto Edén. I show you the penguins. Mating, Hatching. Isla Magdalena. I show you lots of things.”
The waitress, a tired-looking, drowsy woman, brought the drinks. Two whiskeys. He downed his in one gulp, indicated that I should drink mine. I shook my head. He reached across the sharp angle of the table, grabbed the tumbler, finished it off. He waved to the waitress: two more.
“Your name?” he asked.
“Fitzroy,” I said.
He snorted. “Like big sailor boy. You also big sailor boy?”
“No,” I said.
“No penguins? What you want Puerto Edén? Nothing there. Snow gliding? You like snow gliding? We got snow gliding.”
“No,” I said.
“You want shipwrecks, flamencos, guanacos? We got guanacos. We got foxes, black swan, many ducks. You want to hunt?”
I shook my head.
“What you want?”
“Kaweshkar,” I said.
“Kaweshkar,” he repeated unsteadily, but his eyes narrowed. “We got dance. Ceremony. Real shaman. Initiation dance. I teach you. But it cost you. Or maybe you like pretty girl, pretty Indian girl. Real thing. Young. But gonna cost you. Not cheap, Indian girl.”
“I don’t want an Indian girl,” I said.
“Indian boy, then.”
“No,” I said.
“What the fuck you want then?”
I wanted to reach out to him and touch his arm, feel its weight, make sure it was real. But that gesture would have been too easily misinterpreted.
Instead, on an impulse: “How do you say ‘forgiveness’ in Kaweshkar?” I asked.
“‘Forgiveness’?”
“Perdonar,” I said.
He looked at me, for the first time he truly looked at me, through me, into me, as if realizing that I was no ordinary tourist.
“Don’t know,” he muttered.
“Skin,” I said. “How do you say ‘skin’ in Kaweshkar?”
“Káwes. Also mean ‘body.’”
“And ‘face’? How do you say ‘face’?”
“Why you care?”
The waitress was back with the two drinks. He drank one, waited, drank the other one.
“Face,” I said. I took out a twenty-dollar bill. “How do you say ‘face’?”
“How you know I not lie?”
“Face,” I said.
Jemm
y frowned and pursed his lips. I never found out if he didn’t like the question or was simply holding out for more cash, because we were interrupted by an unexpected voice.
“I heard what you said,” and it was a loud American twang, Midwestern and male and intrusive, “about the penguins and such. We’ve got our tour arranged already, buddy, but we were wondering how much you charge for a day, your other services, I mean, if we wanted one of those, you know, ceremonies, dances, stuff like that.”
It was the burly tourist who had walked over from the bar where he had installed himself with that bleached-blonde woman.
“We’re busy,” I said, eager to turn my eyes back on Jemmy Edén, almost worried that if I lost sight of him he would disappear.
“Wiggins,” he said. “Jasper Wiggins, that’s my moniker. And over there, that’s my lady friend Matilda. Matilda Nordstrom.”
She flapped a glass of wine at me. Her face was pasty and had too much rouge, giving her a slightly clownish aspect. I didn’t like her, didn’t like her pert snub nose and her false eyelashes and her toothy grin, I didn’t like anything about her, but especially I didn’t like the fact that she was there, at that bar at the end of the world, staining and polluting my encounter with this Henri lookalike, this chance to have a conversation with one of the victims of my forefathers.
Wiggins must have seen the derision and disgust in my eyes and a dangerous glint embittered his.
“Not very friendly, are you, buddy?” He retreated a step or two, scraped against a chair. “I’ll be back later then, when you’ve calmed down, we’ll be around—me and Nordstrom there, we’ll be around for a while.”
I turned back to Jemmy, who had not reacted to this exchange between foreigners.
He took the twenty-dollar bill and pocketed it.
“Jeksórtqal,” he said. “‘Face.’ Add ak’iéfkar, ‘white face.’ Yours. Mine like fire. You want to know how we say ‘fire’ in Kaweshkar?”
I put down another twenty-dollar bill.
“Afčar. And ‘night.’ Night I give you for free. Ak’éme. ‘Night.’ My face. Fire and night. My face painted. Red, you are welcome. Black, not welcome. You want to see my face painted, my body painted. Like old times. You pay. How much?”
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