The Steampunk Trilogy (8 page)

Responding to the jovial salutations employing his nickname—“
Bonjour
,
Agass!” “Agass, come look!” “Agass, zee
homard
,
catch heem!”—the head of this scientific factory made the rounds among his workers.

As he was inspecting Pourtales’s coprolite in an attempt to discern botanical remnants, Edward Desor emerged from an inner room.

Desor was Agassiz’s second-in-command. He had been employed by the naturalist for ten years, since 1837. Of German extraction, originally a law student with facility in languages, he had been tutored in the rudiments of science by Agassiz, although his knowledge never passed that of a half-hearted amateur. His main utility lay in his ability to get things done. He had overseen the day-to-day operations at Neufchâtel, and could bring off the most complicated expedition without a hitch.

Thin and dapper, still under thirty, Desor was inordinately proud of a straggling mustache to which not one hair had been added, as far as Agassiz could determine, since he had come to work for the Swiss. His eyes continually shone with a light that reminded Agassiz of the gaze of a stoat (
Mustela ermined
). After a decade of constant association, Agassiz still felt uncertain at times of the inner mental workings of his assistant.

Agassiz was generally ambivalent about Desor. On the one hand, he was efficient and industrious. He did not need to be continually supervised. On the other hand, he was somewhat reckless and imprudent. For instance, there was that lecture Desor had arranged in England, just before they sailed for America. “Bedlam College,” Desor had named the venue, and it had turned out to be an insane asylum, where Agassiz was forced to deliver a talk to the staff amidst the cacophony of caged lunatics. . . .

Still, Agassiz felt that Desor’s virtues, on the whole, outweighed his defects, and, averse to tampering with a fruitful relationship, defended him against all detractors, chief of whom had been Agassiz’s wife, Cecile.

Cecile. It had been mainly thoughts of his wife that had plunged him into depression earlier today. Agassiz still felt guilty at having left her and their three children back in Switzerland. But what could he do? He had progressed as far as he could go in his native land, and the Prussian grant—secured by his mentor, Alexander von Humboldt—to travel to America had come at just the right time in his career. He had had no alternative but to take it. Surely Cecile could see the logic in that. Agassiz consoled himself with the observation that she had not cried overmuch. . . .

How devoted to him she had been when they first met! He had accompanied his school-chum, Alexander Braun, to the latter’s German home for holidays, and met his sister, Cecile, a perfect specimen of Aryan femininity. Infatuated, she had sketched a portrait of him then which he still possessed. (Had he ever looked that young . . .?) Years later, they had married and gone on to live happily.

But when Desor came to reside with them, things had begun to fall apart. Cecile had found the ex-law-student vain, crude and irresponsible. He had made off-color jokes which embarrassed her. Agassiz had continued to stick up for Desor, almost irrationally (did the man have some sort of spell on him? he sometimes wondered), and the distance between the naturalist and his wife had thereafter grown wider and wider.

Irritably, Agassiz now put all domestic reverie aside and turned to confront Desor.

“Yes, Edward, what is it?”

Desor preened his incipient mustache. “I just want to remind you, Louis, that my cousin, Maurice, will soon arrive. You recall that we discussed hiring him.”

Agassiz exploded. “How could you think of authorizing your cousin’s passage when we still have other, more competent people yet to bring over? As far as I remember, we had left his hiring unsettled. What prompted you to take such a step?”

Desor failed to exhibit a suitable chagrin at his employer’s ire. “I knew he would be of supreme use to the establishment, and took the liberty of securing his services before someone else did so.”

“Refresh my memory as to his qualifications, if you please.”

Desor now managed to appear a trifle apprehensive. “He is young, energetic, and eager to serve—”

“But what of his scientific experience?”

“He is an expert in bovine anatomy.”

“Meaning?”

Desor visibly squirmed. “He once worked in an abattoir for a week.”

Agassiz threw up his hands. “Impossible! But I suppose we cannot turn the ship around, now that it’s sailed. Still, if I receive reports of Maurice’s disappearance at sea, I shall not languish overlong. Well, we shall deal with Maurice when he arrives. Is there anything else, Edward?”

“No,” sullenly replied the assistant.

“Very well, then, you are dismissed.”

Desor left in a sulk.

After some further consultations with his staff, Agassiz ventured into the house’s kitchen. There, he found Jane.

Jane Pryke was the household’s cook and maid, a buxom English lass of eighteen, with a charmingly freckled complexion. Her flaxen hair she conventionally wore in a long braid. In her initial interview for the job she had replied to Agassiz’s query about the correct pronunciation of her surname with the verse, “Rhyme it with ‘shrike’ if you like, but not with ‘trick,’ ’less you want a kick.” Agassiz had laughed and immediately hired her.

Now he approached the nubile factotum quietly from behind, as she stood at the woodstove stirring a pot of fish chowder compiled from specimens found unfit for mounting. Grabbing her around the waist beneath her apron and causing her to emit a shriek, Agassiz began to nuzzle her neck.

“In my chambers, after supper,” he whispered.

Jane giggled, and lost her spoon in the soup.

For the rest of the afternoon, Agassiz found himself mentally reciting a kind of contrition: Cecile, please forgive me.

But the guilt did not suffice to spoil completely that evening’s intercourse.

After the physical interlude, Agassiz fell asleep.

He awoke in darkness to the sensation of someone stroking his face.

“Jane. . . .” he murmured, then stopped.

Jane’s hands were somewhat work-roughened, but they certainly did not feel like this—

Agassiz rolled away from the stroking and fumbled for an Allin-patented phosphorous match on his bedstand. He struck it, then looked to his bedside.

The hideous face of an ape glowered back at him.

Then the ape smiled, and said, “
Bonjour, Monsieur Agassiz
.”

2

SINUS PUDORIS

O
NCE AGASSIZ HAD
had a nightmare. In the nightmare, he was an animal, a deer of some sort. Though whether
Cervinæ
or
Rangiferinæ
was unclear. (Imagine, the great Agassiz, splendid representative of
Homo sapiens
,
an animal . . .!) In that dream he had been trapped, one hoof pinned in a crevasse. And bearing down on him was a glacier, one of the great ice sheets that had scoured the Northern hemisphere, whose geological traces he, Agassiz, had brilliantly construed, thereby earning himself the title “Discoverer of the Ice Age.” (And damn Charpentier, Schimper and Forbes as egregious liars, for all their claims to a share in the discovery!) As he struggled to extricate his hoof, the speed of the ice began to increase. Soon it was moving fast as a steam locomotive, tons and tons of blue-white, air-bubbled ice descending on him, eager to grind him to a red smear on the gravel, take up his bones and deposit them in some future moraine. . . .

He had awoken in a cold sweat, found Cecile sleeping peacefully beside him, and gratefully hugged her to him.

The sensation Agassiz now experienced, as he confronted the repulsive visage of the grimacing French-speaking ape, was in all respects identical to what he had experienced as a trapped animal about to be crushed. He was immobilized by fear; beads of perspiration burst through his pores like the foul exudation of some toad (
Bufo marinus
,
say), on his brow and across his bare hairy chest. All he could conceive was that he was about to be torn to shreds.

The match, burning down, reached Agassiz’s fingertips. The pain jerked him out of his immobility. As the room was plunged once more into darkness, he rolled out of bed and began to crawl on hands and knees across the floor, heading toward the door.

Suddenly, the room was illumined again, this time by an Argand oil lamp thrust through the open window that gave onto the seaward side of the house.

“Hallo!” called the bearer of the lamp. “Ist dis not der house of Doctor Agassiz?”

In the fuller light of the lamp, Agassiz laid his eyes once more on the ape who, after stroking his cheek, had so shockingly addressed him. After a moment of redoubled amazement, he realized the true nature of the visitor.

Not an ape, but a Negro!

And not a Westernized slave, but a wild African!

The Negro, slight of stature, was attired thusly: a mantle of sheepskin over its shoulders—fastened in front with bone buttons through leather loops—and a multilayered raffia skirt threaded with colorful glass beads. Its arms and legs were festooned with rings of iron and copper, as well as shell-strung leather thongs. The flesh left bare was covered with what appeared to be an admixture of rancid animal fat and soot.

As Agassiz, frozen on all fours, stared in horror at the leering monkey-face of the African intruder, a bulky, pantaloon-clad, booted leg thrust itself through the window after the lamp-bearing arm. A second hand clamped itself onto the window-frame. Then there ensued a period of intense grunting, followed by an exclamation:

“Gott be damned, mine fat zelf ist ztuck! Dottie, come und help!”

The wild blackamoor turned then and moved toward the window. Agassiz was astounded to see that the creature’s skirt in back was rucked up over enormous fatty buttocks so huge and disproportionate as to render the very term “obscene” an instance of litotes.

“One moment, Jacob,” said the Negro, and the timbre of its speech, in conjunction with the name by which it had been addressed, roused in Agassiz the realization that the savage Ethiop was female!

At the window, the Negro grabbed the wrists of her companion and tugged. The booted foot already inside found purchase on the floorboards, and soon the rest of the man followed.

Big as some bear (perhaps
Ursus horribilis
)
from the notebooks of Lewis and Clark, plainly of European extraction, the man wore a dirty white blousy shirt and a conical cap made out of what Agassiz recognized as an animal’s stomach. His jocund, sun-cured face was decorated with mustache and chin-whiskers rather in the manner of the British story-teller, Dickens.

Setting down his lamp, the man hastened over to Agassiz and, gripping him under the armpits, hoisted him weightlessly to his feet, all the while issuing a stream of atrociously fractured English.

“Doctor Agassiz, mine greatest apologies for making der disturbance of your dreams in zuch a vild fashion, like rascals in der night, ja, to be zhure, but vee have only chust arrived—mine boat, der
Zie Koe
,
she is anchored right outside your vindow—und dere ist not a moment’s time to vaste if vee are to find der ztolen fetiche!”

Agassiz stared at the madman in stupefaction. He swivelled his gaze briefly, just long enough to ascertain that the Negro woman—that abominable anthropological specimen whose touch had profaned his face—was hanging back near the window at a suitable, if not entirely comfortable distance. Then, finding his tongue, he spoke.

“Who—who are you? And what do you want?”

The uninvited visitor slapped his forehead and exclaimed, “Vot a dumb zhit! Mine apologies, in zpades! To be zhure, I forget minezelf totally. Your name ist zo famous, und I know of your zircumstances so vell, dot I imagine you zhould know me alzo. Vell, permit me. Mine name ist Jacob Cezar. And dis vun vit me ist Dottie Baartman.”

The man leaned confidently toward Agassiz and said, “Of course, her real name ist Ngldatu, but I get to call her Dottie.”

The Negro, responding to her click-punctuated name, smiled once more toward Agassiz, her gruesome flat nose wrinkling horribly.

Agassiz shivered uncontrollably, and not from any effects of the warm June air. He snatched some bedclothes up and wrapped them around his waist. Then he faced Jacob Cezar once more.

He was feeling somewhat more charitable toward the intruder, who had exhibited at least enough breeding both to apologize and to praise Agassiz’s fame. “Your name, sir, fails to prompt my recognition. And I am still in the dark as to how I may help you. . . .”

“Let us zit down, und I vill explain all. Perhaps dot decanter of zherry I zee dere vould help lubricate mine zpeech—”

Obliging his guest’s request, all the while keeping one eye on Dottie Baartman where she squatted on her haunches by the wall, her raffia skirt falling between her legs and revealing more of her hideous black haunches, Agassiz tried to compose himself to listen to the man’s tale.

He was not prepared, however, for his reaction to Cezar’s opening words.

“I am der zun of Hendrik Cezar, und Dottie ist der daughter of—”

Suddenly, recognition dawned. “The Hottentot Venus!” exclaimed Agassiz.

Jacob Cezar smiled. “Ach, I zee Europe ztill remembers her.”

And to be sure, Europe, in the person of Louis Agassiz, still did, though the woman in question had died when Agassiz was only eight years old, in 1815.

In the year 1810, a man named Hendrick Cezar arrived in London and set up a sideshow in Piccadilly. His exhibit consisted simply of a large cage on a platform elevated a few feet above the eager spectators.

Inside was a black woman.

Billed as the “Hottentot Venus,” she had been, before her stage career, simply the South African servant girl Saartjie Baartman.

Representing like all her fellow Bushmen a curious hybrid of bestial and human qualities, she was soon drawing spectators by the hundreds, all eager to witness this degraded representative from the lower rungs of humanity.

The guffawing men and tittering women in the audience were particularly struck by her steatopygous traits, those immense gluteal lipoid deposits which Agassiz had noticed in her daughter. This feature was exhibited sans clothing to the audience, who were free to poke and prod it, though, in a gesture of modesty, Saartjie kept her pudendum covered with a loincloth.

(But there were a few members of the audience who claimed in vague terms that the real shock of the attraction lay beneath that ventral covering . . .)

After a highly successful tour of the British provinces, Cezar and his charge departed for France, where they met with similar acclaim from layman and scientist alike.

But Cezar’s captive—who, interrogated once by representatives of a Benevolent Society, affirmed in fine Dutch that she was cooperating willingly for a share of half the profits—contracted an inflammatory ailment and died in Paris on December 28, 1815.

Setting down his glass of sherry, Jacob Cezar proceeded to divulge to Agassiz that portion of the Hottentot Venus’s fate that was generally unknown to the public.

“Upon der death of Zaartjie, mine fodder, zaddened und intent only on returning to Capetown, handed over der body of his countryvoman to der French zientific establishment at dere request, in order to zettle a long-time question of natural history. Namely, der existence of der
femince zinus pudoris
,
or curtain of zhame.”

Agassiz blanched. The very notion of the curtain of shame—for decades, he had assumed, merely a racy bit of naturalistic folklore bandied about when scientists foregathered—was absolutely disgusting to him. Yet, he counseled himself, as a man of reason he should face with equanimity all such quirks of the Creator.

It had long been rumored by explorers and other unsavory types that females of the Khoi-san peoples of South Africa possessed a genital appendage not shared by their more highly developed female cousins in the civilized portions of the globe. Called the “curtain of shame,” it was said to be a flap of skin attached either to the upper genitals or the lower abdomen, which hung down like a fleshy apron to hide the sexual organ.

Steeling himself for Cezar’s discussion of this physiological aberration, Agassiz was however once more shocked by the twist the man’s story took.

“Der man who performed der dissection of Dottie’s mudder vas Baron Cuvier.”

Georges. God, how he still missed that influential man! Dead for fifteen years, Baron Cuvier still occupied a hallowed niche in Agassiz’s affections.

With tremendous nostalgia, Agassiz recalled how, as an ambitious twenty-two-year-old, he had dedicated his first book,
Brazilian Fishes
,
to the eminent Cuvier, whom he had never till then met. This inspired gambit had led to close contact between the two, and eventual apprenticeship and collaboration with the elder naturalist, firmly establishing Agassiz on the road to fame and fortune. Upon Cuvier’s untimely death from cholera, Agassiz had been fortunate enough to find in the Prussian genius Alexander von Humboldt a substitute mentor whose patronage continued to the present.

“I never knew,” said Agassiz, “that Georges had anything to do with the Venus of the Hottentots, much less that he dissected her corpse. Why did he never mention it to me?

“Ach, dere’s good reason vie he never zpoke to you about it. First of all, it vas old news, had happened almost fifteen years ago by der time you met. Und zecond, it represented a great disappointment to him. But let me continue vit der story as a few udder people know it, before revealing its zecret zide.

“Your Baron vent like a bloodhound ztraight for Zaartjie’s private parts. Dere, he found dot der
dablier
,
as der French called der curtain, vas nothing more nor less den der familiar
labia minora
extended by an extra dree or four inches beyond der European norm.”

A grunt of disgust escaped involuntarily from Agassiz’s lips as he contemplated a whole race whose women were marked by such a disgusting deformity. He flicked his eyes to the Hottentot female not ten feet away from him, and found himself swept by an almost unmasterable compulsion to flee. Only by a superhuman effort of will did he force himself to remain seated.

“Der Baron next pickled Zaartjie’s organ, wrote a paper on it, und continued vit udder researches.”

Agassiz was aghast. “You maintain that he preserved her
tablier
in formaldehyde?”

Cezar nodded. “Ja. Und he did more den dot. He made a fetiche out of it.”

“What!?”

“You heard vot I said. Your hero, Baron Georges Cuvier, vas a black magician.”

“This is preposterous—”

“No, it’s der plain facts. I have proof dot Cuvier vas a Martinist! Correspondence in his own hand!”

Agassiz had heard rumors of the Martinists during his time in Paris. During the late eighteenth-century, one Martines de Pasqually, resident of Bordeaux, had established a Masonic offshoot organization called The Order of the Elect Cohens. Their rituals and goals, while never precisely revealed, were said to be a cross between those of Rosicrucianism and those of the infamous Abbé Guibourg, Satanist in the court of Louis XIV.

“Cuvier,” continued Cezar, “vanted to convert Zaartjie’s
dablier into
a dalisman of immense power, much like a Hand of Glory. But he vas unzuccessful. Or zo he thought. He placed der zpecimen in der
Musée de l’Homme
und forgot about it.

“Vot Cuvier did not realize vas dot he vas only vun ztep zhort of achieving his goal. He lacked only vun vital ingredient, a hermetic herb found in mine country.

“Ven mine fodder returned to Capetown, he zpoke to no vun about vot had happened to Zaartjie’s remains. Und dot included me, his zun, und Zaartjie’s daughter, Dottie, who remained connected to our family.

“Chust zix months ago, mine fodder vas on his deathbed. Den, after all dis dime, he decides to ease his conscience und zpill der beans. I immediately passed dis news on to Dottie. Unfortunately, anudder person alzo got hold of it.

“Dat vun is D’guzeri, zorceror of Dottie’s dribe.

“D’guzeri instantly decided dot he vould recover Zaartjie’s
dablier
,
complete der activation of it, and use it for his own purposes.

“I vas not vorried at der dime. How ist a Bushman going to get to Paris und zteal zomething from a museum? But den, a month ago, I hear from a friend, a Dutch merchant named Nicholas van Rijn, who dravels all around der globe, dot Zaartjie’s remains have been ztolen. His zources alzo tell him dot der culprit has fled to America. I realized den dot dis D’guzeri must be ztopped. Zo I get in mine boat, der
Zie Koe
,
und zail quick as I can for your zhores.”