Darwin's Ghosts by Ariel Dorfman

Author:Ariel Dorfman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: polaroid picture, 19th century human zoos, freak show, paranormal photography, ghost photography, latin american novelist, freak shows, novels about slavery, novels about racism, novel about time travel, time travel, 19th century, human zoos, post-colonial novel, postcolonial novel, postcolonial, postcolonial fiction, relations of power, ghost story, kidnapping fiction, colonial kidnapping, indigenous fiction, chilean author, colonialism, chilean fiction, latin american fiction, post-colonial fiction, paranormal fiction
ISBN: 9781609808259
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2018-05-03T18:00:00+00:00

SIX

“There’s one thing that’s truly terrifying in this world and that’s that everyone has his reasons.”

—Jean Renoir, The Rules of the Game

Of course it was her. Of course she had been there all the time. And of course the answer had been staring me in the face all these months, to use her past voice to cure that amnesia, and only the relief flooding me drowned out the reproach that it could have been sooner, the day she had been brought back on a stretcher from Berlin, if only I had not been so consumed by hatred.

She saw in my face what I was thinking and shook her head.

“No,” she said. “You don’t understand. It was never about me. It was a test for you.”

What did she mean? What test? And why tell me I didn’t understand, instead of celebrating, whooping in wonderful 1992, rushing to my dad’s room, rousing Vic and Hugh so we could break open a bottle of champagne? She was back and that was enough, that—

Cam carefully set aside the blue folder and the manuscript and took my hand in hers. “There’s something you need to know.” And then started patiently, in excruciating and twisted detail, to tell me about the accident and what had followed.

Nothing new, at first, in her tale. She had indeed suffered from the diagnosed retrograde amnesia due to that chunk dislodged from the Wall, awakening in the Charité Hospital thinking she was fourteen years old. And when my father had walked in, she took his excuses at face value, certain her own dad awaited her at home. Dazed and confused, she had welcomed, she said, some drugs that put her to sleep.

Upon opening her eyes a few hours later—and here Cam paused for the longest while before plunging on—when she awoke, well, she had remembered everything, her whole life, including those last hours in the hospital.

She had healed herself.

I interrupted her, startled, a dreadful bird gnawing at my stomach, bleeding me with questions.

“But—but—why didn’t you—if you—if you—these two years, we’ve—you lost your memory again, right, right away, right? When you came back here you—I mean, you didn’t recollect a thing, you still—I mean—”

“No, Fitzroy. I had total recall, even that I’d been afflicted momentarily with amnesia. A bit of a headache, my neck hurt like hell, woozy and disoriented, but entirely myself, twenty-two years old, married to the wonderful Mr. Foster junior, the bride who had just concluded the mission we had planned, all the pieces of the puzzle in place—or almost all of them, I had yet to pass through Zurich—the same person I am now, my identity, memories, love intact.”

I stared at her in disbelief. Disbelief was better than anger, than the humiliation starting to poison me in its toxic glow—impossible that she had been fooling me, us, the doctors. Even to contemplate that she could have perpetrated such a cruel hoax caused me a distress and grief that bordered on insanity. To deliberately allow me to believe she was ill, knowing how my mother’s death had disarmed me, no, it couldn’t be.

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