Ancient of Days (37 page)

CAROLINE:
Excuse me, Dr. Blair. Isn’t
Homo zarakalensis
a term you coined two years ago for a hominid skull that one of your Kikembu assistants found in the Lake Kiboko digs?

BLAIR:
Yes, it is. It means “Zarakali Man.”

CAROLINE:
But there’s controversy over that designation. Your skull appears similar to those of the habiline specimens unearthed by the Leakeys at Koobi Fora in Kenya. Richard Leakey, in fact, claims they’re identical.

BLAIR:
That may be. We paleoanthropologists are aggressively territorial. What I’ve always stressed, however, is that my discovery is somewhat older—perhaps by as much as a half million years—than the Leakey “habilines.” In other words, this distinctive hominid probably
originated
in what is today Zarakal and only later
migrated into
what is today Kenya. For that reason, if for no other, it ought to be called Zarakali Man.

CAROLINE:
But
habilis
is altogether neutral in regard to the hominid’s place of origin. It suggests the creature’s tool-making ability. Is it fair to discard that bit of preexisting descriptive nomenclature for a term that has only your own egotistical chauvinism to recommend it?

BLAIR
(
chuckling benignantly
): Well, that’s what I’m trying to ask Adam. You see, it’s his place to decide. Just as American blacks decided they wished to be called blacks, Adam ought to be the sole authority in
this
matter. It directly affects only him. I’m not going to throw a tantrum if he opts to go with
habilis
. He’s the one who’ll have to answer to Handyman, Handyman, Handyman.

CAROLINE:
Dr. Blair, it seems to me—

BLAIR:
For someone who was going to let Adam and me converse, young lady, you’re becoming a fair threat to monopolize our talk.

CAROLINE
(
forthrightly
): Forgive me.

BLAIR:
Now, then, Adam. Which do you prefer?
Homo habilis
—Handyman, you know. Or
Homo zarakalensis
? Your word, I have a strong hunch, will be the paleoanthropological community’s command.

ADAM:
Is not
Homo sapiens sapiens
within my humble purview? I’m not a handy person, and never in my life have I set foot in Zarakal.

BLAIR:
Homo sapiens sapiens
?

ADAM:
Mais oui
. With Miss RuthClaire’s tender help, I fathered a human child. And thanks to the surgeons at Emory, I speak even as you do, sir. Also, I have many perplexing spiritual longings and a freshly emergent concept of God. Considered in these lights, am I not a twentieth-century human being whose archaic bone structure is irrelevant to his dignity and worth?

BLAIR:
But
many
species are interfertile, Adam. And your ability to speak is an acquired characteristic. A
surgically
acquired characteristic. To assign yourself to a species classification on that account is to fall prey to insidious Lamarckian error. Please, Adam,
think
.

CAROLINE:
He’s thought, sir. He wants to be called
Homo sapiens sapiens
. You said you wouldn’t quibble with him.

ADAM:
In truth, I’d prefer to be called Adam. Adam Montaraz.

CAROLINE:
That’s fine with me. How about you, Dr. Blair?

BLAIR:
I find it perfectly acceptable. But let’s get on with this. We’ve many important things to talk about.

(
At this point, the participants took a short break. Caroline checked her recorder. Then the conversation resumed
.)

BLAIR:
I’m afraid I’ve been doing all the talking, Adam. What I’d like to know, of course, is how you were raised, what you remember of your childhood and youth, and whether any of your people, be they called habilines or
Homo sapiens
, still exist on this island. Would you mind addressing those questions?

ADAM:
Very happy to. The first two are more difficult to answer than the last one, however. I can only do my best.

BLAIR:
No one asks more of you, Adam. Begin with the easiest of the three and then proceed as you like.

ADAM:
Miss RuthClaire told me once of the Yahi Indian called Ishi, about whom Theodora Kroeber wrote eloquently. Ishi was the last of his tribe in the state of California. Like Ishi, I am the last of my tribe—my species, you would say—on the island of Montaraz. In the entire great world, too, I fear.

(
I glanced at RuthClaire. Her letter, of course, directly contradicted Adam’s testimony. Ostensibly, after all, I had come to Montaraz to see, evaluate, and perhaps represent the work of an unspecified number of habiline artists. Was Adam lying to Blair, or had RuthClaire lied to us to give us a compelling reason to come? Wearing a sheepish grin, she shrugged and looked away.
)

BLAIR:
What happened to your people?

ADAM:
Exterminated. Persecuted, hunted, killed. Those who escaped the Duvalier pogrom—a very few—were scattered on the winds of politics and commerce. Off the coast of Cuba, five years ago, two of my people died at the hands of a man greatly more animalish than we. One who died was my brother. These deaths ended all our desperate struggles to prevail in a world such as this. I was then the last one of us all.

BLAIR:
Weren’t there any women on Montaraz to keep things going? Isn’t it possible that some far-scattered fellow habilines may still be alive?

ADAM:
No sightings, no reports. Such a hope seems foolish.

BLAIR
(
sighing audibly
): Ah, well. Yet another proof of contemporary humanity’s unparalleled ability to muck up or destroy what clearly ought to be preserved. It makes me ashamed.

ADAM:
Don’t reproach yourself too harshly, sir. Should I die before
H. sapiens sapiens
obliterates itself along with this oh-so-lovely planet, why, your kind will have outlasted mine. Only by a little, and only after a reign much briefer than the furtive persistence of us habilines—but you must take your victories, Dr. Blair, where you find them, even if they are upsettingly Pyrrhic. Not so?

CAROLINE:
You seem to be identifying yourself as a habiline now, Adam. Do you mean to?

ADAM:
I am identifying with my people, whom others have called habilines. Also, of course, I’m a good
H. sapiens sapiens
myself. Perhaps my people were too, even lacking speech. In my mind, Miss Caroline, they will always seem human—nobly human.

BLAIR:
I take scant comfort from surviving by a mere breath an ancestral human species that preexisted us by at least two million years.

ADAM:
Then you are noble, too, sir.

BLAIR:
Thank you. I appreciate your vote of confidence.

CAROLINE:
Adam, Dr. Blair’s other questions concerned your childhood and youth, your memories of habiline society and culture here on Montaraz. Those strike me as topics of crucial value to any study of your vanished people. Would you tell us what you can about those topics?

ADAM:
You and Dr. Blair must never forget that that portion of my life corresponds to the portion of ongoing human experience you call “prehistory.” I have a prehistoric life and an ego-documented life. I’m speaking now out of the latter context. Recovering the prehistoric elements of my life from the vantage of my crystallized ego is very hard. Distortions arise. Who I am now contaminates what then I was. Contaminates and discolors.

BLAIR:
You’re wholly unable to reconstruct your early life?

ADAM:
Of course not. It goes around in my head like a dream. It’s a hard dream to tell, though, because then I had no language with which to chain and tame it. I had
heard
language spoken, but I had none of my own, and if you had seen me in those days, you would have thought me a feral thing surviving by instinct rather than wit. I had an invisible umbilical cord to my family, and another to the island’s soil and vegetation, and another to the snakes and capybaras, and yet another to the sea and air. Everything around us was magical, and I was a kind of joyfully suffering magician. Falling down might hurt. Getting kicked might hurt. Going hungry might hurt. But the
living
of life, the living of even these many cruelties and hurts, was ever and always magical, Dr. Blair.

BLAIR:
But was the population of habilines from which you sprang a patrilineal or a matrilineal society? Was sexual dimorphism a factor in assigning domestic tasks and leadership roles? Did you have any noteworthy rites of passage to mark your movement from one stage of life to another? Did you hunt, scavenge, or forage for your food? That’s what my colleagues will ask me, Adam. Can’t you remember, can’t you tell me anything about such basic matters?

ADAM:
In the absence of the people themselves, Dr. Blair, such knowledge seems—forgive me—irrelevant, keenly and profoundly irrelevant.

BLAIR:
Hardly, Adam. Knowledge of the world is knowledge of ourselves. What you can tell us of habiline mores, customs, and survival strategies will enable us better to comprehend who and what we are.

ADAM:
To know the habiline life in any sense truly meaningful, sir, you would have to live it. You would have to stop scrutinizing it from afar and plunge into it with uncritical abandon. That’s possible no longer. Gone, gone.

BLAIR:
If nothing else, can you tell me
where
you lived?

ADAM:
Dominican slaves were freed by Boyer in the 1820s, but it was not until 1874, when Peter Martin Rutherford ceded Montaraz to Haiti, that we habilines obtained our liberty from his cacao and coffee plantations. We left en masse and made a secret republic for ourselves on one of the island’s little-populated fingers. That is all I can say. For a long time, no one bothered us. Then the twentieth century happened, and everything changed. Gradually, oh so piecemeal, for the worse. I’m speaking now, you see, from the vantage of my crystallized ego.

BLAIR:
Can you take me to the site or sites of that “republic”?

ADAM:
No. It is impossible. They’re gone, and I’ve forgotten.

BLAIR:
But, Adam, the island isn’t that large. Suppose the Haitian government were to authorize travel and archeological research in various areas. Don’t you think you’d assist? Wouldn’t you cooperate with me and others in uncovering your people’s past?

ADAM:
No, Dr. Blair. Let the dead rest in the memories of their loving kin.

BLAIR:
But isn’t it true that you had your son’s ashes disinterred and brought here to Montaraz by your friends the Loyds?

ADAM:
It is.

BLAIR:
Then I don’t understand the distinction between that and excavating the living sites of your extinct habiline relations.

ADAM
(
coldly
): Apparently not.

BLAIR:
Sorry. I meant no offense.

(
The participants took another break
.)

CAROLINE:
All right. I’ve flipped the tape. Dr. Blair, please begin again.

BLAIR:
This has been a somewhat frustrating exchange for both of us, Adam. Let me apologize for that again. You see, I never expected to sit down with a surviving representative of any of the hominid species whose bones I’ve been digging up and cataloguing these last fifty years. It’s not a conversation I ever imagined taking place.

ADAM:
Of course not.

BLAIR:
You don’t knap flint, do you? You don’t chase hyenas off the remains of a lion’s kill. You don’t recall walking upright through the ash storm of an erupting East African volcano. You can’t say anything about the other hominid species—
Australopithecus robustus, Australopithecus africanus
—with whom your people shared the savannahs. You can’t illuminate your people’s millennia-long trials and tribulations in the hills of present-day Zarakal.

ADAM:
Regretfully, I can’t. I am a product of Montaraz. So were my parents. So were
their
parents. On this island, we go back nearly seven generations.

BLAIR:
Doesn’t the allure of Africa niggle at you, Adam? I’ve seen some of your paintings. Baobabs, volcanoes, grass fires, hunting parties. It’s hard for me to believe that the continent of your origin doesn’t arouse your curiosity. Wouldn’t you like to visit? Wouldn’t you perhaps like to emigrate?

ADAM:
I would like to see a giraffe.

BLAIR:
A giraffe?

ADAM:
Yes. It would be fine to see a giraffe performing its dreamy, slow-motion gallop across the great African steppe. Otherwise, sir, I have no ambitions to fulfill on that score. I am home again. Montaraz is home, and it puts me in touch with earlier homes.

BLAIR
(
after a lengthy pause
): A little while ago, Adam, you mentioned that you have—let me see—“many troubling spiritual longings” and “a freshly emergent concept of God.” Would you care to expound a little on those matters?