The Origin of Species (70 page)

“Damn cops,” his father said, with a grunt that would have been a laugh if he had been with someone else.

Alex saw it then, the cruiser at the head of the file. It turned off at one of the concession roads, and one by one the other cars sped away.

The incident had put his father in a good mood.

“That’s how people are,” he said. “They’re good until nobody’s looking.”

He could hardly remember another time when his father had done that, when he had shared anything like a worldview with him outside the context of a bitter argument. Afterward that line of cars had become a sort of koan for him of the strange ambivalence that surrounded anything associated with his father. What had he meant, exactly? Had this been just another of his knee-jerk attacks against the welfare state or some protective truth he was passing on like a talisman? If a truth, didn’t it fly against every supper-table argument Alex had made that the human animal was perfectible, that it deserved things like unemployment insurance and special rental units that were set aside for welfare moms? The real battle, of course, was the one within: his own private suspicion, amounting sometimes to a dastardly hope, that his father was right, that humans were rotten to the core, that the only thing keeping the farmers on those concession roads from slitting their neighbors’ throats and stealing their combines, keeping the mucky-mucks in town from raping the farmers’ wives and then stringing them up till their legs twitched, was the fear of being punished for it.

Of course, it was possible that his father had only been making a joke.

Note to oneself: Molly Bloom’s orgasm as the Big Bang. He had never actually got that far in the book, but he’d heard of the scene so often he felt like he’d fucked her himself.

He was drifting. It had been some time since he had actually been attending to what he was reading: they were with Little Gavroche, haunting the wineshops and eating dandelions in the street, though when Alex pictured him he saw Per. It was that Norman blood. There would still be time, he thought, they could still fly their kites on the coast as he had years before with Lars and Eva. It kept coming back to him, that day, the smell of the air, the not-quite-describable
thingness
of things, the gray cliffs, not gray, the not-green grass, the unbearable un-blue of the sea. What was the point of these longings, these hearkenings back? They seemed to want to be the very thing they recalled, and show that they couldn’t be, and be the thing in between. To make you long, and long for longing. To say there was a chance, and a chance, and a chance, yet all was lost.

Such a
funny
thing, Ingrid had said. The whole of it, she’d meant, every beat of a wing, every breath.

Out in the sound you could make out the island of Ven. Tycho Brahe had sat there, jotting his numbers down, but though they had stared at him, speaking their truth, they had not shaken his faith. Earth at the center; sun to the side. Little circles and circles within circles to explain the anomalies. That had been the Ptolemaic World, all this figuring and working out just to buttress people’s pigheaded assumptions, as if knowledge was always merely the handmaiden to belief. Who knew what circles they were drawing now, to explain away what they had misunderstood. It was all darkness and ignorance, Alex figured, more profound than the human mind could fathom. If God was the thing that passed understanding then there was still God enough in the world, for surely every truth, every fact, every faith, that was now held sacrosanct would one day prove the merest superstition.

Note: The end point of evolution, if there was one, would be the perfect creature: contradictory impulses resolved, no thoughts, no needs, no rage; able to see through rocks; to survive without eating; to change things by force of will. To live forever. It would be exactly what it had displaced. It would be God.

Ninety-six point seven: going up. Menswear. Lingerie. Home furnishings.

It was not much more than a year, he thought, since he’d met her. Walking then, on her cane; chatting about Chernobyl.
Isn’t it awful?

In
The Gazette
that day there had been an article, small and buried in the back pages but there, about the worldwide ban on
CFC
s. From the most unlikely places came hope. María had backed the right horse. Now that she was home, he expected to hear any day that she’d ended the war.

This was what would happen: he would go off to Sweden like Wallace to the Rio Negro, it would be cold, he and Ingrid would argue, Per would dislike him in some covert, lingering way. He would teach English as a second language, part-time, for peanuts; he would work for the university marking exams. He would never finish his dissertation. Or he would finish it and it would be ignored, or scooped, or, worse, turn out to have been unconsciously plagiarized and have to be shredded. Meanwhile he would be stuck with his no-name degree from his
no-name university. He would give up and come home. He would teach English as a second language, part-time, for peanuts.

This was the likely scenario. And yet, and yet. There it was in his breast, he could feel it battering away at his ribcage like a trapped bird, hope.

He had stopped reading. It was miracle enough, maybe, the thingness of things, their funniness. That there were clouds, that there was air, that stones formed from the sand and then turned to sand again, on and on. What were these things, where had they come from, what could they mean? How could they fill the mind and yet be so small? There might be gods beyond them, and gods of gods, and, beyond these, things unimaginable, that the human mind could not name or give shape to and yet it could think they were there, it could marvel at the immensity of its own ignorance. Somehow through the chance of events, the slow building of things with No Plan, the mind had become fitted for such thoughts, for such moments of wonderment.

A shred of memory came to him, or perhaps something he’d dreamed, beckoning there at his mind’s mid-horizon. He was in a northern country, walking or cycling, it wasn’t clear which, and it was raining or had rained or the sun was out, and he was traveling, he was on a journey. He had been here before. For a moment the place took on such a vividness he thought he could hold it whole, could possess it: there were farms, clapboard houses, the outskirts of a town, a view across woods to a lake. The smells of things, the clarity of them, even while they slipped from him and refused to take on their meaning. It was like living a thing and losing it in the same instant. Where were those houses, that lake? He had been here. It was like a place in the mind he returned to to find its meaning, only to find that the meaning of it was simply that it was there.

He took Esther’s hand again, and knew he was about to go. If he were to tell the story of this moment, all the important things would be missing—the slightly clammy feel of Esther’s skin, the pilled thinness of her sheets, the scuffed floor. The feeling like sadness in him, not sadness, and then that part of him that was already elsewhere, that had finished with this.

Alex heard footsteps in the hall. Likely one of the other nurses on her way to send him packing. The footsteps had the hollowness to them of
nighttime desertion. Things would end, and they would end, and they would end, they seemed to say, and still go on.

“Good-bye, Esther. Good-bye.”

She hadn’t turned.

Outside, he knew, the city still lay stretched, just an instant’s remove from the wildness it had been once, and would return to; the planet was still hurtling through space at untenable speeds. He kissed Esther’s hand, then slipped quietly through the door and into his life.

For their help with my research and with this manuscript I am deeply grateful to the following: Marvin Luxenberg; Rafy Winterfeld; Benjamin Cornejo; Nubia Diaz de Cornejo; Francisco Rico Martínez; Rivka Augenfeld; Colin MacAdam; John Montesano; Oscar Rangel Manjarrés; Ana Escobar; José Escobar; Myron McShane; the Centre for Refugee Studies, York University; Marshall Beck; Lisa Kowalchuk; Tanya Basok; André Jacob; Eusebio García; Roxana Valencia; Alfonso Valles; Salvador Torres; Iliana Hernández; Nancy Giacomini; Nicola Martino; Don Melady; Alex Schultz; Lorena Leija; Stephen Henighan; Daniel Poliquin; Paul-Antoine Taillefer; and Paul Quarrington. I owe a special debt to my wife, Erika de Vasconcelos; to my agent, Anne McDermid; and to my editor, Martha Kanya-Forstner.

In the course of my research I consulted many sources, foremost among them the works of Darwin himself. Apart from those, I will mention only
Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist
, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore;
The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology
, by Robert Wright; and
The Boy on the Back of the Turtle: Seeking God, Quince Marmalade, and the Fabled Albatross On Darwin’s Islands
, by Paul Quarrington. And, of course, Wikipedia.

For their material support I am grateful to the University of Windsor Department of English; Assumption University, Windsor; the Canada Council Writer-in-Residence Program; Mitch Kowalski and the Toronto Writers’ Centre; John Carroll University, Cleveland; Steven Hayward and Katherine Carlstrom; Jimmy, Eddie, and Frances; and Barbara and Dr. John Schubert and the Schubert Foundation.

NINO RICCI’S
first novel,
The Book of Saints
, won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the SmithBooks/
Books in Canada
First Novel Award, and the F. G. Bressani Prize. A longtime national best seller, it was followed by the highly acclaimed
In a Glass House
and
Where She Has Gone
, which was short-listed for the Giller Prize, and the national best seller
Testament
, which won the Trillium Book Award in 2002. He lives in Toronto.

Copyright © 2008 Nino Ricci
First published by Anchor Canada in Canada in 2008

Other Press edition 2010
Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

Epigraph from
Illuminations
, translated by
Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968).
Epigraph translated by Samuel Butler.
Epigraph translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976).              

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site:
www.otherpress.com
.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Ricci, Nino.
The origin of species / Nino Ricci.
p. cm.
“First published by Anchor Canada in Canada in 2008.”
eISBN: 978-1-59051-371-2
1. Graduate students–Fiction. 2. Self-realization–Fiction. 3. Montréal (Québec)–History–20th century–Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.3.R512O75 2010
813′.54–dc22

2009041070

P
UBLISHER’S
N
OTE:
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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