Across the Endless River (26 page)

Before they left Venice in early December, Paul took him to see an altarpiece by Titian in an austere brick church called Frari. Baptiste left Paul peering at the image of the Assumption over the main altar, and wandered through the empty church, inspecting the side chapels. Before one of these, near the back of the nave, he stopped in wonder at the sculpture that hung above the altar. At the center of a complicated array of columns and forms floated a life-size crucifix in glowing white marble. The body of Christ was carved with such realism and detail that Baptiste was shaken.

The muscles of the arms, torso, and legs were perfectly formed, the veins and tendons pushing out against the taut skin, the fingers lightly closed over the nails that pierced the hands. The head of Christ hung to one side in the silent surrender of death, though everything about the finely shaped body spoke of youth, power, and life. Baptiste knew what he found so disturbing. The image before him was like that of Jumping Fox and his other friends as they hung overhead after the spirits had left them. Whoever had fashioned this body had observed a young man in the agony of death. The picture of the marble Christ remained in his mind for many days after they left Venice.

During these months, Baptiste was continually impressed by the places he saw and the people he met, but he discovered something about himself that was as true here as it had been in St. Louis: though this was a world whose currents he could navigate, it was not his world. He sometimes felt as if none of the places he had ever visited, either in Europe or North America, would claim him. He lived in between these two worlds in a place that encompassed both yet remained separate. He thought of himself as an in-between person. In St. Louis, there were others like him who moved easily between the white man's civilization in the towns along the Missouri and the network of Indian villages that extended up the river and its many tributaries. Though he met no one quite like himself in Europe, he considered that Theresa had moved to Russia as a young girl and Maura claimed to be both Irish and French without being entirely either. He began to understand how others shared this same capacity to live in two worlds at once.

T
WENTY-FIVE

N
EW
Y
EAR'S
D
AY
1825
S
TOCKHOLM

Dear Captain Clark,

I write to you from Sweden, where for the last couple of weeks we have been visiting friends of Duke Paul. Before we came here we spent time in Saint Petersburg, which is as far north and east as I have been in Europe. The winter in Russia and Sweden is like January in the Mandan villages: blizzards that leave a foot or two of snow in a day, winds so strong you can hardly stand, and air that feels cold enough to bite, if you dared to open your mouth. The furs here are of excellent quality, though the size of the pelts is smaller than what we are used to. I think they take the animals before they are fullgrown.

Winter also brings short days this far north. The sun appears only for a few hours, and very low on the horizon. The Swedes drink liquor like no people I have ever seen. I had to slow down after two days of wildness over the Christmas holidays, but our hosts kept at it for the better part of a week, one long party with a kind of brandy that would peel the paint off a parlor. We are the guests of the king, a Frenchman, Bernadotte, who fought under Napoleon and was one of his best generals. I hear about Napoleon everywhere we go; people in Russia talk about him as if he had left yesterday.

In Saint Petersburg we rode in big sleighs pulled by three horses onto a wide lake that was frozen solid, with pinewoods along the shore as far as the eye could see. It was the first time since I have been in Europe that I saw something like the prairie. Not the same trees or terrain, you understand, but a sense of openness that seemed like it went on forever, and a night sky that let me believe I was far up the Kansas or the south fork of the Platte, until I lowered my eyes and it became Russia again. I don't mind telling you that at that moment, and for much of the next day, I thought a lot about home, and was sorry to go back to the city.

In what they call the countryside, it is hard to find any place you or I would call wild. I expect you know this already, but it has come as a discovery to me on my travels. Another difference is that being a “gentleman” here is everything, and you are judged by your family, your friends, the way you dress, the way you talk. There is some of that in St. Louis, I know, but in America how much money you have cuts through everything, while here it is not the most important thing. It has also made me see how free I was when I headed up the river. There it is only your wits and your experience that count, and I miss that.

You may be interested to know that Mr. Chouteau's business associate, Mr. Astor of New York, is known to many of the people Duke Paul and I have visited. He lives now at a big country house in Switzerland overlooking Lake Geneva, and he entertains European aristocrats. They call him “the richest man in America,” so perhaps money is more important here than they let on.

Tomorrow we sail down the Baltic Sea to Hamburg. We should be in Paris again within a month.

My thoughts are often with you and those I know in St. Louis. Please be assured I am determined to learn all I can on this great adventure.

Yours affectionately,
Pomp

T
WENTY-SIX

D
UKE
P
AUL, FROM HIS PRIVATE JOURNAL
J
ANUARY 1825
W
IED
-N
EUWIED

I have spent the last three days in the company of Prince Maximilian and his brother, Prince Charles, two pre-eminent collectors I first met in Berlin. Maximilian is a student of Professor Blumenbach at Göttingen and was most insistent on my visiting in order to talk over my findings from North America. He himself spent two years in Brazil, from
1815
to
1817
, and he contemplates a similar exploration of the American frontier in the years ahead. After covering the general outline of my trip, then the particular places on my itinerary, I was subjected to the most rigorous questioning about every aspect of my travels: flora, fauna, geography, climate, tribal customs, etc. I answered as completely as I could until, after more than two hours of interrogation, it was apparent to me that the prince intended to cover every step of my way in the same methodical fashion. I cut him off, finally, pleading exhaustion and assuring him that he would have the opportunity to examine my findings in detail when my account is published.

There was something altogether disquieting about his insistence on specifics, and I drew back defensively to protect what I regard as my own hard-won findings, at least until they are in book form, when the world will see my name associated with the work. Are we all but vainglorious schoolboys, obsessed with our own renown? “Esteemed colleague” surely disguises more motives than the pure ideal of a free and full sharing of one's discoveries, though Maximilian and I use this formulation to address each other without a second thought. We are, after all, complicated social beings full of contradictions.

If Prince Maximilian knew of my own financial difficulties in preparing for a study of the works I have collected, he would be well and truly surprised. His immensely rich family supports him and Prince Charles unquestioningly in their pursuit of natural science, whereas I do not have even the means to unpack my tribal objects in suitable surroundings, much less to catalog my collection and write about my discoveries. I must find funds for my projects, and the only hope seems the one urged upon me by my family: a suitable wife.

Maximilian showed me many of the specimens he collected in Brazil, all masterfully displayed in special cabinets that occupy a wing of the building given over to his work. He cannot be faulted as a close observer of animals in the wild—his descriptions are full of surprising details of behavior, which can only have come from painstaking hours of waiting and watching. But one has the feeling that he is entirely consumed by the accretion of detail for its own sake, and takes no time to stand back and assess what he has seen. Moreover, his command of the principles of Linnaean classification is regrettably superficial, and in my cursory visit I found no fewer than three specimens (a small alligator and two members of the rat family) about which I strongly question his attribution of the specimen's genus. I kept this to myself, however, not wishing to question his competence while enjoying his hospitality. When I told him that I had collected an alligator at the mouth of the Mississippi, he asked curtly, “How long does yours measure?” and I discerned a jealous air. That, I fear, is what we are sometimes reduced to in the race to find undiscovered and exceptional members of the animal kingdom.

The prince is anxious to renew his travels in the Americas, and seems keen on visiting the Missouri. For him there is a mystical aspect to confronting the elements under extreme conditions. “Where in Europe can you find independence, danger, unmediated beauty, and an experience of nature unalloyed by metaphor?” he asked me. “In the New World, a lightning strike is still a lightning strike!” Fair enough, but perhaps a bit high-minded.

Maximilian voiced one great disappointment with respect to the material he has published on his exploration of Brazil. He told me he wished he had taken an artist along on the expedition, and he assured me that he would never again make that mistake. I told him that I made my own sketches, and he scoffed. Even von Humboldt had proved unequal to the task, he said. Publication of one's findings increasingly requires drawings with the verisimilitude that only a practiced artist could provide. He told me that Baron Langsdorff is even now exploring the interior of Brazil with two French artists the Russians agreed to pay for when they funded his expedition. Have we truly reached the point where a careful description of a specimen must be accompanied by a faithful image of the subject?

Fortunately, Baptiste and I leave early tomorrow morning for Paris, a timely departure in light of an exchange that has left the atmosphere tense, if not entirely poisoned. It happens that Prince Maximilian purchased a slave when he was in Brazil, a young male member of the Botocudo tribe, whom he brought here to Wied. Baptiste came across the Botocudo native today in the prince's laboratory, where he works as a menial factotum, cleaning display cases, preparing dissection equipment, making sure the lamps have oil, and the like. The prince and I walked in on their conversation, and Maximilian commented that they both seemed to be benefiting from the effects of civilization, as they were conversing in German. Baptiste took this badly, turning on him with a savage look in his eye. “You forget, sir, that we have our New World civilizations, as well. I have as much in common with this gentleman as I do with you.”

Maximilian was shocked and offended at this outburst, and things rapidly went from bad to worse. Baptiste demanded to know how he could possibly have bought a human being, and the prince replied that it was only to give him his freedom. “Is this freedom?” Baptiste asked him, to which the prince responded, with perhaps too much self-satisfaction, that his lot was certainly better here compared to what it was in Brazil. “Yes, he has everything but his own people,” Baptiste retorted, and so it went, with neither giving ground. “This man is perfectly free, you young fool!” the prince shouted, and left the room.

I am proud of Baptiste—and not a little astonished at how deeply he feels about this matter. I now recall that soon after we met in America, Baptiste was uncomfortable when I discussed with him the fact of black slavery in St. Louis, along the river, and again in New Orleans. His own guardian, General Clark, was a slave owner, and no doubt Baptiste regularly saw Clark's slaves and spent time with them. He told me when we first arrived in France that the slaves' grumbling came to mind when he heard the sullen undercurrent against the king among the poor in the streets of Paris. To be sure, a wall separates master and slave in St. Louis: whites are free; Negroes are slaves. But for those of mixed blood, like Baptiste, the riddle must always come back: “I am not a slave, but neither am I entirely free. What am I?”

T
WENTY-SEVEN

F
EBRUARY 1825
P
ARIS

B
aptiste eased the mare along the roadway at the center of the Pont Neuf as the sky darkened in the west. Shops and stands lined both sides of the bridge. Halfway across, he had an unbroken view down the river, and saw that a storm was coming in fast. Feathery arcs of rain descended from the deep gray clouds on the near horizon and gusts of wind snaked across the river, rippling its narrow surface and shaking the branches of the leafless trees along its banks.
You can
never see enough sky here to know what the weather is,
he thought as he rode off the bridge.

Baptiste followed the street up the gradual rise of what the locals called the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, the “mountain” named for the patron saint of Paris.
We wouldn't even call this a hill at home,
he thought. Paul frequently admonished him that such comparisons were inappropriate. This was a good piece of advice, and Baptiste had gradually overcome his tendency to voice his feeling that the landscape seemed puny.

Sometimes, though, his spirit rebelled. The rain began to fall in torrents, and he leaned into the wind. “Mountain!” he muttered as the mare made her way up the incline of glistening cobblestones.