Extrait:
1
The contemporary zoo, the "Zoo Eden," is the final irony: a false paradise in which the last representatives of soon to be extinct species are displayed to a public eager to be absolved for their extinction. The expensive exhibits conjure up a world that never did, never will, exist, in which predator and prey gaze stupidly at one another across invisible but effective barriers, while plant life flourishes, water supplies are stable, and all of nature is benign.
Ellen looked up from the magazine. There were more of these essays about zoos lately, and some were in unexpected places. This one was in a magazine Paul had brought her which was usually devoted to articles about the economy or politics. She glanced down to the end of the paragraph to see what the author was getting at. In nature, as in our own society, she read, we will not rest until we have eliminated all possibility of "the wild."
Was it true? Well, it might be true. Lucius stood up on the window-sill and arched his back, gazing on his mistress with cold feline eyes, the domesticated cat, bored by surveying, through the screen, his archenemy, Barker, the over-bred, aristocratic collie. No wildness in this scene.
But what exactly did this journalist mean by "the wild?" The sounds of her husband getting out of bed, crossing the landing outside her door on his way to the bathroom, triggered her fingers back through the pages to the beginning of the article, where "The Great Divorce" was printed in large letters and, beneath that, in smaller letters, the author's name. The title intrigued her, for she had used the word divorce in her own mind to describe the breakup between the human species and the rest of nature, which like all divorces was causing pain in many quarters, even to the couple's dimwitted friends who refused to take sides, like Lucius, who didn't care, or Barker, who followed his nose in the dull hope that everything would turn out all right.
She slipped the magazine back on the shelf. She could make coffee for Paul, tea for herself; they might have time for a quiet breakfast before the girls got up. But as she rose from her chair the phone rang; of course it was Beth. Gina was on her way from Primates with an infant Diana monkey; the mother had bitten off one of its fingers. "How bad is it?" Ellen asked.
"Gina said it's completely off. I haven't seen it yet. I can have a look and call you back."
Paul was singing now. In a moment he would be in the shower. "No," Ellen said, "I'd better come. I'm on my way."
She would get a cup of coffee and a brioche at Mylie's. In the kitchen she wrote a note on the phone pad: Hurt monkey, be back soon. Paul was hitting the high note of Tosca's aria to God: "Perche, perche, Signor."
Why do you pay me back like this?
Last night there had been another phone call. Paul answered, gave his diffident hello, his eyes on Ellen because he was midsentence with her on the subject of a trip to Saint Francisville he would take next week--he really had found an extraordinary old murder case--then he listened. His expression changed, there was the flicker of a smile, his eyes shifted from her expectant face to some middle ground of air between them, and he said, "No, I'm afraid you have the wrong number." He hung up but he'd lost the thread; Ellen had to bring him back to it. So he had started a new affair and she was bold enough to call him at home. This explained his high spirits of late, his enthusiasm for the old murder case, the necessity for research trips. To his credit he would keep the woman out of town as much as possible and probably get the work done as well, for the combination of guilt and energy an affair inspired was a tonic to him; his confidence soared, he was full of good humor and sympathy for all his fellows.
And she would have some time to herself, a few quiet evenings--if the girls didn't have a crisis to deal with--in which she would drink expensive wine, read and catch up on work, go to bed early, and sleep in the middle of the bed.
In the car she considered a title: "The Rewards of Adultery for the Maligned Spouse," and a list: more time to pursue own interests, ebullient, oversolicitous mate, catch up on children, never have to answer phone, no guilt. It was age and cynicism that turned up such thoughts, no doubt. There was a time when she would have exhausted herself trying to figure out who the woman was and how to put a stop to the affair, how to let Paul know that she knew, that he was hurting her, yet do all this without creating a confrontation. The tightropes of yesterday. Now that seemed so much unnecessary drama. If Paul was going to leave her, he would have done so long ago.
She turned the car into the long, tree-shrouded drive to the hospital, her thoughts converging on the world behind the gate ahead. It wasn't uncommon for a baby primate to suffer aggression from an adult; the attacker was usually an adult male, occasionally another female. Yet Beth had been clear on the phone; this infant had been wounded by his own mother. In a way, Ellen thought, the actual injury was the least of their worries. The mother was doubtless a problem individual, neurotic at best, who would continue to cause trouble. Primates adjusted to captivity more readily than most animals, carrying on, as well as they could, their own peculiar and complicated idea of community. But this community could never be what it was in the wild, because it was closed off, controlled. There was no place for the inevitable outcasts to run. Neither wild nor domestic, they existed in a netherworld of human scrutiny and intervention. Ellen was determined to intervene as little as possible. The baby would be returned to the mother, and with luck, if rejected, he would be adopted by another female.
Ellen parked her car and walked quickly to the hospital door. When she entered the treatment room Gina and Beth were standing before the x-ray screen; the monkey lounged in Gina's arms, a limp mass of fur, his impossibly long arms draped about her shoulders, his bleary eyes fixed on her face as she crooned to him, commiserating, "Your mom isn't very nice to you, is she, poor fellow. You haven't got much of a mom."
2
Paul found the first mention of Elisabeth Boyer Schlaeger, the "catwoman of Saint Francisville," on a microfiche of the New Orleans Item, dated April 30, 1846. As was often the case with his best discoveries, he was looking for something else, some record of a property transfer, and here, tucked away on a back page, was a notice of the public execution of a woman, surely a white woman, for the paper listed her full name as well as that of her husband, whom she was said to have murdered. Paul leaned over the strip of film, his mouth frankly agape. To his knowledge--and not many people knew more about such matters than he did--no white woman had ever been executed in the state of Louisiana. And what was to be made of this cryptic allusion to the murderess as the "catwoman," as if every reader was familiar with the case, as if the town had been following a scandalous trial, when, in fact, he had been over the court records of this period more than once and never seen a word about it?
He sat back in his cold library chair and thought hard. This was what he loved about his work, these moments when his brain seemed to blaze with activity and he remembered scenes he had summoned up from old records, letters, diaries, newspapers, a world he wrested back from the dead. Two thoughts came forward, the first a disheartening one, that the records from 1852 to 1860 were woefully inadequate. There were gaps, weeks at a time, lost in fires, to mice, a whole year destroyed in a flood near the river only fifty years ago. The second was that the name Schlaeger was familiar. He had a list of the owners of every plantation from Pointe-a-la-Hache to Natchez for well on a hundred years, and he felt certain that Schlaeger was one of them.
Paul made a note of the date and the two names, Elisabeth Boyer and Hermann Schlaeger, then flicked off the machine and sat rubbing his eyes, smiling to himself. "The catwoman," he said softly. Did she keep a lot of cats? She was French, but her husband, Hermann, was surely not. Not many Germans owned big houses in Saint Francisville. Perhaps he was an American, part of the invasion, and he'd married a Creole to gain access to the salons of his neighbors. But it hadn't worked. Creole society was inbred to the point of genetic exhaustion and determined to remain so. Mlle. Boyer was probably expected to marry one of her cousins. She'd refused, married a German, and found herself excommunicated from her family and from all the lighthearted entertainments, the gay soirees and riding trips along the levees, isolated on her husband's plantation, where the only French she heard was from her own slaves.
Paul gathered up his notebooks and pens, dropped the microfiche at the desk, and made his way out into the humid air that hung like a drapery between the air-conditioned library and his air-conditioned office. He hardly noticed the heat. It seemed to him he could see the list, the very page on which he had read the name Schlaeger. The records in Saint Francisville were in better condition than those in New Orleans; it wouldn't be difficult to find a notice of an arrest. Unless he was wrong and the Schlaegers were not wealthy landowners but poor whites of unknown origins, living on the outskirts of civilized society, not Creole nor free people of color nor slaves nor rich Americans, but something other and excluded by all, left to their own devices on land even a slave would disdain to farm. Then there might be little in the way of records, and the case would not repay his investigations. His readers had no interest in proletarian violence, the banal passions of the disenfranchised or the poor, though if a wealthy man murdered his slave or vice versa, they might be entert...
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