Valicourt paused in her speech. She sank her fingers into her hair, improvising a kind of massage. With her head still hanging down, she added: ‘Nowadays the theory of hominisation is learned the way you learn times tables.’
And she talked about how the schools of thought currently in vogue mechanically repeated a series of concepts like a relentless drone with the aim of imposing their theories, their ideology, rather than expressing any kind of objectivity.
‘This conviction has been eating away at me for years,’ said Valicourt. When she lifted her head, her hair was a complete mess. She raised her voice slightly, her movements taut. ‘I needed to share my theories, to get them spread around. I was no nutcase, you’ll see! And so I sat down to write.’
She shook the disordered mane of hair towards one of the books she had in a corner of the desk: La légende maudite du vingtième siècle (‘The Damned Legend of the Twentieth Century’). This was the book in which she had denounced the way individual researchers as well as universities deferred to Darwinism so narrow-mindedly that they were incapable of reconsidering a theory of evolution that didn’t explain something so fundamental to humanity as the creation of consciousness.
‘You’re only asking them to allow you to follow another line of investigation,’ said Jordi. ‘Why do they create so many problems?’
‘There are basically two problems, in reality. One: questioning Darwin. Two: Cat Valicourt.’
Jordi was rather captivated by the image of his colleague entrenched behind her desk, upright and serious, proudly acknowledging the problem she herself was. Of course, his friend had broken the mould of the scientists’ guild, already well known for its oddities.
In 1990, Valicourt had been accepted, surprisingly, as a member of the French scientific research institution C.N.R.S., whose management communicated a wish to proceed with investigations into the process of craniofacial contraction. Her studies on the foetuses and embryos of primates had secured her an award from the Fyssen Foundation. The experts from the C.N.R.S. accepted that the research should continue, but in the hands of a specialist in matters of evolution.
They wanted to get rid of me. Valicourt suddenly saw it: The Neo-Darwinists who run French scientific institutions won’t stand for a follower of the Piveteau school — that is, of the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, that is, a Catholic woman, to hold the reins in this research, which is daring at the very least. A Catholic woman! The C.N.R.S. is risking their prestige. Their image.
Valicourt had seen they way the strings were being pulled. The affiliation of members of the (C.N.R.S.’s) committees to the Marxist unions was a historical fact, verified and widely known. Between the scientists and the Marxists, God was a taboo logic in the laboratories of the C.N.R.S. If on top of God you were to add the yeti, the jokes would go wild. And at the head of the disbelievers was no less a figure than Yves Coppens, the professor of palaeontology and prehistory who had taken part in the discovery of the most famous fossil in history, the Australopithecus afarensis, also known as Lucy.
Coppens monopolised the French efforts in the study of the evolution of mankind. Ever since 1982, he had begun to take control of human palaeontology in France, occupying key positions in leading scientific academies and colleges, securing for himself the co-directorship of the laboratory of the Museum of Mankind.
Valicourt was not going to allow Coppens to meddle in her project and end up — once again — taking the glory for himself. Nor was she going to give up being secretary of the Teilhard de Chardin Foundation. She believed in God. And she was a scientist. After all, Teilhard de Chardin’s original ideas had also suffered from religious attacks and the contempt of his scientist colleagues. Valicourt was following in the footsteps of her idol. She would come to be accused of being an anti-Darwinian, a creationist, and she would have to put up with slander from means of communication very well disposed to mock a professional with an uncommon profile. One might say she suffered a stoning in reverse: if Darwin had been caricatured alongside simians for propounding his theory, the illustration of Valicourt would represent her with a crucifix in her grip.
‘I’m preparing a new expedition to Chitral. Would you come?’ Jordi asked her a few afternoons later.
To Valicourt, going would mean disregarding the recommendations of her superiors. She expected no help from the C.N.R.S., but opposing Coppens was a serious matter.
She accepted.
Ever since Valicourt had declined to add researchers close to Coppens to the committee supporting her project and had continued to speak in public about the existence of prehistoric populations in the mountainous regions of Central Asia, she had begun to receive warnings from the C.N.R.S. directorate. Coppens made a number of statements that discredited Jordi. Then it was as though the dissident pair had evaporated. They ceased to exist. Nobody echoed Valicourt’s ideas, nor of course those of Jordi, the already public collaborator of the blessed fantasist.
‘As though the Neo-Darwinists automatically tagged their critics with the label religion,’ she said to Jordi. ‘When, in fact, faith is exactly the opposite of wanting to put an idea to the proof. God has nothing to do with everything that is accessible to my reason. Because it’s reason that speaks to me.’
A few threats were spoken: ‘We’re going to destroy the little immigrant.’
‘They said that — “the little immigrant”,’ a friend from the museum told him.
Jordi was stunned by those words for a few moments. Not even his defences, which he believed so resistant and unbreakable, could bear such an assault. ‘The little immigrant.’ It’s one of those labels that goes with you for the rest of your life.
‘Who was it who said that?’ he asked finally.
‘I don’t know, there were several of them, there were a lot of people in the group who came in from outside, academics just passing through. Maybe it was one of them.’
The magazines in the field rejected all his proposals for articles relating to the wild men. An astonished Jordi watched the mass response of a community that was apparently his own, but which had decided to shut its doors against him. He lived in a state between anguish and fury, impotent and unable to understand how personal interests could come into play against a piece of genuine research. It was astonishing the way people could just skirt around them. Make them disappear.
Jordi and Valicourt tried to keep each other’s spirits up; they found excuses to justify this dismissal, this contempt. They were not going to be worn down: We’re tough, we believe in this. There they were, seeking strength, oxygen, stimuli, when Jordi received a letter. It came from a group of English larynx experts. How strange, he’d had no dealings with that branch of science. He opened the envelope. The English scientists said that Jordi’s approach to the development of that cranial bone had really surprised them, and the Language Origins Society was inviting him to give a lecture in Cambridge.
XIII
‘MUM?’ said Jordi. ‘Hi. I’m just calling because a friend of mine from the Natural History Museum is going on holiday, and he’s letting me have his house for the summer in exchange for looking after his cats. If you want to come spend a few days in Paris …’
A few weeks later, Dolores was in the capital, opening her suitcase along with those of her daughter Esperanza and her granddaughters Marie and Isabelle. Esperanza and the girls were on their first visit to Paris, so they stretched the days out with as much walking as possible, excited and grateful for the possibility Jordi had offered them.
He would have liked to have had more time for them — the Magraners were only planning to spend one week, after all — but his work was absorbing him to such an extent that for the third night in a row he found himself having to leave the museum’s reptile and amphibian lab at a run.
‘I’m sorry, there’s just no way I can get back any earlier,’ he said as he came into the apartment. It smelled of fried garlic. Wh
atever had his mother come up with now? Dolores had also made gazpacho. Great. Jordi was sweating.
‘You know nobody here starts without you,’ said Esperanza. ‘How’s the zoology Masters?’
Jordi planted a noisy kiss on his sister’s cheek.
‘It’s not that, it’s just that in the evenings I’ve got my training at the museum. The Masters is earlier. But you don’t really want to talk about boring things like that, do you? Come on, let’s have dinner at last, I’m starving … Some host I’ve been! In Pakistan they’d hang me for less.’
Over dinner they chatted about the beauty and softness of patti, the cotton they use to make clothes in Chitral. Esperanza asked if he was still smoking the oak-coloured pipe he had brought from the valleys.
‘Of course, that’s the only thing I smoke,’ Jordi lied again, and as proof he went to fetch the pipe, lit the bowl, and drew on it. Through the smoke he considered the gaze of his women, his true women — that was how he thought of them. His fascination with those three female generations of Magraners, seeing them satisfied, once again moved him. It always made him happy. Perhaps the women’s enthusiasm was one of the main reasons for his having made it here. Not that he’d ever stopped to think much about this, but he certainly did want to measure up to his family’s expectations. He spent too much time far away not to offer them the best he could when they were together. He wanted to provide them with the dream just the way they dreamed it, in which case, if they expected a man of the mountains to smoke a pipe, so be it.
‘How’s the Cambridge thing going?’ asked Esperanza.
‘Cat and I are working like crazy. I’ve decided I’m going to read directly from the paper.’
‘Oh, no! With that gift of the gab like you have, and spontaneous the way you are …’
‘It’s just that these formal things … and on top of that the fact it’s in English … though I do know it all by heart,’ he said. Then he got to his feet in the middle of the dining room and, assuming a grotesque voice, improvised a parody of his speech that entertained his delighted audience.
‘OK, OK,’ said Esperanza, laughing, ‘but remember, you’re not to go in your camo gear. They dress up nicely at these universities.’
In September, wrapped up considerably more warmly and severely than they had been for that theatrical summer evening, dressed in a suit and tie, and accompanied by Cat Valicourt, Jordi unfolded his papers in front of an auditorium full of laryngologists, and spoke, in English, about a different jaw design in the faces of Neanderthals. He talked about a bone, the sphenoid, whose growth had made it possible to increase the size of the oral cavity, altering the working of the phonic apparatus in primitive man. The capacity to articulate complex sounds had favoured a rapid development of the brain, leading to superior thinking, and thence to consciousness.
The sounds emitted by this apparatus would be similar to those recorded in the wolf-children of the eighteenth century: high-pitched voices made up of guttural sounds and shouts. Just like the ones Jordi had insisted he’d heard on certain nights in Pakistan.
The Daily Telegraph wrote up his lecture, and in the months that followed he received countless shows of support for his next expedition. Several of these came from well-known researchers, among them the formidable naturalist Théodore Monod. At last, thought Jordi. It was time to take the plunge.
E-mails and letters of endorsement vouching for Jordi circulated in the corridors of companies and universities, but he quickly came to realise that none of that was going to make a significant difference to his situation: I’m still under severe economic pressures, and I’m still dealing with knockbacks from magazines. In any case, the backing of this select group ought to count for something. Having just a few would bring more, and these would lead to key support, like he’d got from that Winckler, who worked for Interpol reconstructing faces of dead bodies and who might prove extremely useful to a seeker of relict humans. Yes, of course they’d show up, even more so when they learned of the scale of the ambitious third expedition he was planning. The snowball was already on the edge of the slope, and it was just a matter of giving it a little push to get it rolling and start it growing. He devised a spectacular plan.
The initial project was set to comprise thirteen members, among them Kassil Ivanov and Raïtcho Gautchev, two of the best trackers of large mammals in Europe. Dist-Inject, the company where Andrés Magraner still worked, committed to supplying the hypodermic material they would use to anaesthetise the barmanus. Completing the equipment list was a range of photographic cameras, some professional sound-recording gear, a technical camera to record night-time movement, surveillance systems, tracker dogs (of the Laika Siberian breed), five motorcycles, nine Alaskan Malamute sleigh-dogs, and a 4x4. The plan was to stay three years. The budget: five-and-a-half million francs.
He bought five Malamutes. Since the whole pack did not fit in the Paris house, he asked permission to leave them in the garden of the Natural History Museum until they set off on their expedition. When his request was denied, he called Esperanza. He was sure his sister could do with a little distraction after the divorce. And, well, the house she’d just rented in that village north of Lyon had a terrace and garden that were pretty well ideal. And so he asked her to keep the dogs.
‘Don’t overdo it when you’re feeding them. Give them a little — I want them to start getting used to what they’re going to find in Chitral.’
Esperanza tried to follow instructions. She had some problems with Wolf, who spent the whole day barking and snapping, but she discovered Fjord. He was different from the other dogs she had met. He was perhaps the most robust and powerful of the group, although he did not make a show of his superiority unless forced to. Even Wolf had decided to stop provoking him after seeing his jaws close-up.
What was more, Esperanza sensed that the dog could hear her talk, that he even tried to please her. His distinctiveness was not hard to see. Fjord would eat at a different pace to the others; sometimes he would accompany her in the garden in silence.
‘You’re so like a person, lad — all we need now is for you to talk.’
One night, before closing up the door of the house, she saw Fjord stretched out calmly in the garden while the other dogs barked.
‘Fjord!’ called Esperanza.
The dog raised its neck and pricked up its ears. The others paused for three seconds of silence before getting on with their brawl.
‘Come! Let’s go!’ she commanded, opening the door a little wider.
The Malamute made his way slowly between his fellows and came into the house. The others spent the night howling outside. That was how it went the rest of the days, until the neighbours started leaving notes in the letterbox protesting against the night-time serenades. Then she went to the vet.
‘Mix these pills with their food, and they’ll soon sleep, you’ll see.’
Esperanza administered the prescription. The problem ended.
On Sunday, when Jordi came for his usual visit, Esperanza hesitated over whether to tell him about the dogs. After greeting the animals, her brother came into the kitchen to make himself something mouth-watering to eat.
‘So let’s see — saucepans!’ he shouted, amused, opening the cupboard with the pots.
Esperanza watched him with concern; he was probably going to mind her having taken such drastic measures. I’ll tell him, I won’t tell him … But she couldn’t keep it to herself.
‘You should know: I’ve been drugging your dogs.’
Jordi continued looking for pans, more or less impassive. His sister was taking care of his pack, after all. And he recognised that some of those creatures weren’t easy to tame.
‘There was no other way?’ he asked, crouched down while he chose a pot.
‘No.’
He objected a bit, more as a way of releasing his initial anger than because he really wanted to ar
gue, and then they agreed to transfer the dogs to a kennel in Drôme. Soon afterwards, Jordi himself settled at his sister’s house. It would be a good way for him not to lose contact with the dogs and to look for sponsors in Lyon, as he’d have to keep collecting money. As Esperanza and her daughters lived on the first floor, Jordi enjoyed a spacious area all to himself on the ground floor and the garage. He would often go out into the forest or make frequent escapes to Lyon or Paris. On Sundays he still cooked his Pakistani dishes, and he would have the whole family sitting on the floor and eating with their fingers.
‘For you to get the tastes of the place, you have to eat the way they do there,’ Jordi said on yet another Sunday, a phrase that was a kind of ritual. He formed a small piece of bread into a tiny bowl that he dipped into the middle of the stew, then pushed it with his thumb to scoop out a good-sized piece of meat that he gulped down in one mouthful.
‘Do you really need that many dogs for the expedition?’ asked Esperanza, working with both hands to stop her little ball of filled bread from coming apart.
‘They’re very useful for the mountains, and if I want to spend a fair bit of time travelling in the valleys …’
‘I don’t know. Just keep an eye on Wolf, he’s the craziest one …’
Jordi had given his answer quickly; his first impulse was to reassert his decisions, but he had spent days contemplating the possibility of cutting back on the scale of the expedition. The story of the mad dog could come in handy as a way of camouflaging his real motives. A few weeks later, he acknowledged the instability of the Malamute.
‘If Wolf’s really as crazy as all that, he’s out. What do we do with him?’
‘We can leave him in a kennel. And the twins, are you going to take them? They’re lumbering oafs, those two … they won’t be any use to you at all.’
His sister was right again. They, too, would remain in France.
‘Gorki and Fjord will be company enough,’ he said to Esperanza a few days later. ‘Better to have two good dogs than a whole useless pack.’
In the Land of Giants Page 7