The Origin of Species (35 page)

“I say all these things not to punish you, but only so you understand why I acted as I did.” This was where she softened him up for the letdown, he figured, where she told him how extraneous he was, how he couldn’t expect to go waltzing into her life like a callow bohemian again. “Now, however, I think I was wrong to keep the truth from you. I was thinking only of myself, and not of you and your son.”

His throat went tight at the phrase
you and your son
. It was as if she was offering the boy to him, handing him back.

“I am sorry also for my first letter to you, which perhaps frightened you to think you must do as I wanted. But it is not for me to decide what sort of father you are to your son. It was a very funny thing, not to know that one day he must grow curious of you. I feel I have been sleeping here all these years in my little village, and now he has woken me. You mustn’t feel guilty as you will because it was not so unpleasant, to be asleep, to be here safe in my home with our son.”

He felt as if he’d been threading his way through an impossible maze of narrow passages and had emerged, unaccountably, into light. Where had this forgiveness come from, what turn had he made to reach it? It seemed to loom before him even more ominous than accusation: there was no wall in front of him now, only empty space.

“We hope you will come, your son and I, we hope you will stay with us for a time. Not as before, perhaps, not the same, but still as our family.”

She’d ended not with the sort of blessing she always used to include, the divine invocation, but simply “With love.” God had hardly been mentioned, only the “test” she’d referred to, but then she might have failed it,
might have cursed the Great Examiner and sent him packing. There would be no obstacle between them then. No excuse.

There was a postscript that made reference to a picture. “He did it himself, of course, but I thought I must send it, it was such a surprising thing. Perhaps you still have the other.” It was that sheet still stuck to the envelope. He pulled it free to reveal a child’s drawing of some sort of vehicle, a tractor perhaps, big spiky wheels at the back and smaller ones, a bit lopsided, at the front. Across the top, in Ingrid’s hand, was the title “From Our Visit to the Farm.”

For an instant he couldn’t make sense of it. There was Lars’s picture, yes, packed away now in some box in his parents’ basement, but this seemed merely some parody of it, some practical joke. Then his eye went to the bottom corner, and the tears welled up in him. “From Per,” it said, in a child’s simple lettering, “for Father.”

It was past one. He felt exhausted, drained, as if he’d lived a lifetime in the space of a day. But for the first time in months the fog over him seemed to have lifted. María, Liz, all the rest, felt suddenly manageable: he would put his lands in order.

He thought of calling Sweden. They would just be rising now. He could say he would catch the first flight. He could say a millstone had been lifted from him. But it felt too soon: he wanted to relish this last bit of his old life, before he turned into someone new.

He fell asleep almost at once, dead tired now, but awoke some time later to a sound of ringing. The phone: it was Ingrid. A panic went through him. He clambered up from his bed, groping toward wakefulness, and his first lucid thought was,
He’s dead
.

The horror of phones in the night: car crashes, drownings, sudden death. He had to stumble around in the dark, disoriented after his weeks on the couch.

“Hello?”

There was a sound at the other end that he couldn’t make sense of, heavy breathing, maybe, or someone underwater.

“Who is it?”

Someone was crying.

“It’s me. It’s Katherine.”

His heart sank. He realized at once who he’d hoped it was, who
could have called him in tears at two in the morning without having stepped from the realm of the expected.

“What is it? What’s happened?”

It was an eerie sort of crying, breathless and reedy.

“My God, Alex. My God.”

At every instant, some theory went, every timeline divided into an infinite number of other possible ones, each one infinitesimally different from the next. Which one would he end up in?

“Katherine, where are you? Tell me where you are.”

But he knew.

“It’s Amanda,” she said. “I’m at Amanda’s.”

He had imagined this moment a dozen times, but in imagining it had somehow believed he had headed it off.

“Just stay there. I’ll come. Just stay.”

He had to scrounge for quarters, dimes, whatever, to gather up cab fare. Somehow he got to the street and managed to flag one down.

He gave the address.

“Cold night,” the cabby said, in unaccented English.

Everything felt very small suddenly, a pinprick, as if the universe was shrinking back to the sucking black hole it had been at the start, the nothing in nothing.

“You wanna take Sherbrooke?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Out of the black beyond the windows another whirl of snowflakes descended and speckled the windshield of the cab with drops of wet.

“Winter, eh? I couldn’t believe it. Next week all the Frenchies’ll be heading to Florida.”

Alex hunkered down into his seat and tried to will his mind into blankness, feeling the cold coming off the window as the bits of snow wheeled out of the dark and back into it.

—
January
1980 —

Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.

CHARLES DARWIN
The Voyage of the Beagle

B
y the time Alex boarded the weekly flight out of Quito for the Galápagos—a place he’d never had any intention of going to, that he couldn’t afford, that he wouldn’t even have been able to place on a map before he’d met Anders on the Inca Trail—it seemed that everything that could possibly have gone wrong since he’d left Ingrid had. It started on the connecting flight through London, where the woman sitting next to him, a high-strung American somewhere near the detonation point of her biological clock, talked him into sharing a hotel room with her that set him back some fifty dollars out of the paltry few hundred he had left. In Rio he spent New Year’s Eve in a hostel in the Catete district listening to the reveling outside with a strange dread, the whooping and the shouts and the endless salvoes receding into the distance that might have been fireworks or submachine-gun fire, for all he knew, the rat-a-tat of swaths of street children being mown down in honor of the coming year. In the morning he walked out through neighborhoods that looked as if a marauding army had passed through them until he got to the beach at Ipanema, where he stared out at the apartment blocks and hotels that circled around to Dois Irmãos and thought,
What am I doing here?

Their plane was a noisy sixteen-seater that rode the air pockets out of Quito rising and dipping like a leaf, so that Alex envisioned ending up in one of those tabloid stories where people were wrecked in the remotest mountains and ended up resorting to cannibalism. At Guayaquil, on the coast, they stopped to pick up a handful of locals, flying in low over a muddy delta that was spilling every manner of flotsam into the Pacific, car parts and bits of building and whole palm trees with clumps of earth
still clinging to them as if they were little islands putting out to colonize the seas. After that there was nothing but the roar of the engines, which at least drowned out the Americans at the back of the plane, and then miles and miles of empty ocean that stretched to the very curve of the earth.

At some point Alex slumped into sleep like a dead man, his body worn out from a week of illness on the Inca Trail. In his dreams he tried to work out quadratic equations that looped through a dozen variables he had to pound one by one into place, only to have them revert at once to chaos. He woke just as they were making their final descent, though what he saw beneath them was not the Edenic world of white sands and blue lagoons that Anders’s descriptions had led him to expect but an island that looked like a lesion on the skin of the sea, a patch of rock and scabrous earth completely barren except for the occasional cactus.

Taxiing into the terminal, they passed an area of sunburnt streets laid out amidst the waste in a tidy purposeless grid, empty squares of concrete coming off them as if a pleasant suburb had once stood here that had been vaporized by some nuclear blitz.

“It’s the old GI base,” he heard one of the Americans say, the know-it-all, a real collegiate type. “I guess the locals picked it apart after we pulled out.”

We
. As if he’d been here in the flesh, fighting at Iwo Jima or whatever.

The only sign Alex saw of the wildlife the place was supposed to be famous for was a lone bird that looked like the commonest sort of sparrow, standing vulturish and bored on a post near the entrance to the terminal building. Inside, they had to pay what they were told was a park fee, something Anders had failed to mention. A
WANTED
poster depicting a mustached man who looked like the archetypal
bandito
hung on the wall behind the ticket counter with the warning
PELIGROSO PARA LA SOCIEDAD
.

They were ferried across a channel to a second, much larger island. An old army bus sat waiting for them at the dock. The land rose up with a monotonous regularity to a single peak that disappeared into cloud, the sole mark of human incursion the road that cut up the slope as straight as a seam. The landscape was freakish, barren near the shore but slowly giving way to gray half-soil studded with gray scrub, the vegetation spaced out so evenly it looked sinister, crisscrossing the slopes with the same eerie symmetry as the abandoned streetscape they had passed near the airport. As the bus rose higher, the scrub turned to bush and the bush
to spindly forest, row on row of desolate telephone-pole trees that stood completely naked except for their bits of crown.

At the crest of the slope, in the space of a dozen yards, they passed from brilliant sun into impenetrable fog. For half a mile or so it went on, until they came out at the other end of it into what seemed a different country. The landscape was within the realm of the familiar now, messy and dense and multispecied and soon enough dotted with signs of civilization, roadside shanties and smoking fires and little half-plots of field carved out of the bush. It was as if they had passed to the normal world by way of its underside, its infernal blueprint.

Alex felt exhaustion clotting his brain again by the time they reached Puerto Ayora. He had to walk the length of the town to get to the hotel Anders had recommended, the Black Mangrove, past the string of gloomy restaurants and shops that lined the harborside like a false front. Ahead of him, the Americans had all turned in at the Angermeyer, a two-story place with a gallery up top like a frontier saloon’s and a rubbly courtyard where people had pitched tents and stretched out sleeping bags as if the place was a free-for-all. This was clearly the favored establishment for travelers of his ilk, though the thought of having to face the whole Byzantine world of backpacker culture right then made him shudder.

The Black Mangrove, set back in foliage amidst a snarl of unprepossessing outbuildings, had the air of something out of a Graham Greene novel. The lobby was deserted except for a great lizard who sat sunning himself on the patio, which gave onto a scraggly backwater of overgrown cove. Alex rang a bell, and by and by a young black woman with hips like bludgeons and a look of ancient affront shuffled out from a back room.

“You have reservation?”

“I didn’t think I’d need one.”

She leafed through the register with an air of impatience.

“Come.”

Though the place looked empty, she skipped all the oceanfront rooms to give him one with just the barest sliver of a view onto the harbor. Now that he was settled, Alex had nothing to distract him from the folly of his having come here. Fucking Anders. Alex still wasn’t sure if he had been some kind of saint or just a head case. He had saved Alex’s life, it was true, but the more Alex thought of him the more his memory of him seemed to skew.

He stretched out on his bed and fell asleep at once. Night had fallen by the time he awoke, but instead of grabbing something to eat, he went out to the bathroom to take a leak and fell right back into bed. This time he didn’t wake until morning. When he opened his eyes he felt the fear go through him that he was still on the trail, in the rain and the cold. He had been so horribly ill. His body felt like an engine that had been run without oil or coolant: too late to do any servicing, the damage was done.

He had breakfast on the patio. His lizard was there again, a demonish, black-skinned creature, along with his black warden, who took his order and then brought out items that seemed to bear little relationship to it. Afterward he set off into town. What one did here in the Galápagos was charter a boat: that was how you got to the interesting game, or whatever it was that was out there. He had picked this up not from Anders but by eavesdropping on the know-it-all from the plane. It would have made sense to have cozied up to the Americans so that he might have joined them and split his costs, but the prospect of spending days and days on the high seas with them like some sort of Canadian pet was too depressing for words.

He stopped in at a cruise office he had passed the day before, a tiny hole-in-the-wall, frigid with air conditioning. The agent, a young man immaculately dressed in pleated trousers and a pressed shirt, looked him up and down.

“You are alone?” he said, frowning.

“Well, right now I am, yes.”

He spread a map of the islands in front of Alex. It was the first time Alex had really looked at one. He was surprised at the distances involved, hundreds of miles.

“You see? Many islands. Many days. You pay the food, the boat, the guide, is very expensive.”

“How expensive?”

“Five hundred. Six hundred. Eight hundred. Like that.”