Rand brought out his briefcase all the same and with a smile and look of determination (indicative of the same attitude that allowed him to scale numerous mountains) he clicked it open and began handing me papers—some in Italian—which I was supposed to read and sign.
I spent a minute looking over each of the papers, understanding nothing, then signed and handed them back. When I was done Rand shuffled the papers together, then with a neat tap on the table, got them into a perfect stack. This stack, the last of my love with Silvano, was then put into an envelope to be sent back to Italy, which is where the love had flourished in the first place.
“Whatever happened to Cosimo?” I asked, a little sad to be losing my last ties to Italy.
“Cosimo?”
“Silvano’s dog, that little Italian greyhound. Remember?”
“The dog?”
“Remember Silvano’s neck?”
“Oh. That dog.” Rand raised his eyebrows and nodded a couple of times. “Laura Falconi wanted to take it. She had some affection for the animal. She said it was as if Silvano lived on, a part of the dog. But in the end they had to put it down.”
“Really?”
“The dog, Cosimo, had gone a bit nutty. It attacked her.”
“Cosimo?”
“In fact, it attacked several people.”
This was humorous, because Cosimo couldn’t have weighed more than seven pounds. I imagined Cosimo flying at people’s necks, their round-eyed surprise, their desperate flailing. “I guess once he tasted the forbidden flesh, there was no stopping him.”
I meant that as a joke, but Rand didn’t laugh. He nodded in a sincere way and I was forced to look around the corners of the room.
“The odd thing is that he only went after women. One of the police officers. Laura Falconi. Ann.” Rand raised his eyebrows and nodded. “Cosimo hated women.”
“Really. So they put him down.” I lit a cigarette. Poor Cosimo. The world was a dangerous place. “He would never have eaten Silvano if he wasn’t really hungry. I wouldn’t be surprised if they just put him down because he made them uncomfortable, the cannibalism and all.”
Rand gave it some thought. “Not that the dog really was a cannibal, because Silvano wasn’t his species. Besides, there’s no law against cannibalism in New York.”
“How strange.”
“In fact, the only state with a law against cannibalism is Idaho, and that was only passed in 1990.”
“Really.”
“The last person to be tried for cannibalism was Alfred Packer.”
“Alfred Packer. Wasn’t he a guide or something?”
“Yes. Something. He was originally convicted of five counts of murder, but this was eventually reduced to one count of manslaughter. He died a free man.”
“Is that what they teach you in law school?”
“In part. Cannibalism horrifies people. In law school, we are taught to apply reason—the law—to a variety of unsavory things. The Speluncean Explorers, for example, is an invention of law school, where you look at the moral implications of cannibalism and survival.”
“In what way?”
“If, hypothetically, explorers are lost in a cave and there only hope for survival is cannibalism… How does the law view that?”
“But it’s all hypothetical, of course.”
“Not necessarily. In maritime law, you have the Custom of the Sea. You’re in a boat adrift in the Pacific. You draw lots. The loser gets to be dinner. That sort of thing.”
“And that’s legal?”
“Yes. Yes it is.”
“Really.” The needs of appetite justified everything.
“There’s a famous case. Regina versus Dudley and Stephens. Captain Dudley was a cannibal. They ate the cabin boy, Richard Parker. Poe even wrote a story about it.”
25
Rand Randley’s assertion that Poe was inspired by the events of the Mignonette is not quite true. I read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as a child, a book that I devoured along with all the other writings of Poe. Edgar Allan Poe’s horror appealed to me, and as I’ve grown older, I’ve reached a deeper appreciation of his torments. Poe does write of four men in a boat set adrift in the Pacific as the result of a cruel storm. The men draw lots and the loser is the cabin boy, Richard Parker. But the Poe novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, was written in 1838, whereas the sinking of the Mignonette (the yacht on which Captain Dudley and the unlucky Richard Parker were crew) did not happen until 1884. The fictional account precedes the reality by forty-six years—a shocking coincidence—the stuff of a Poe story itself. But, as with most things, the reality was more shocking than its fictional counterpart. Reality never has to contend, as art does, with beauty.
My mother told me the story of Thomas Dudley. He had been trying to make it to Sydney, Australia, from Falmouth on the southwest tip of England. His goal had been 120 miles a day, 120 days for the journey. A yacht was small for the distance—the feat the first of its kind. Dudley had difficulty assembling a crew and the yacht had to be refitted for racing since it had once been a fishing vessel. The Mignonette was twenty years old. Her timbers were suspect, although a shipwright had decided that—with a few repairs—they were adequate for the journey. An Australian, Jack Want, had paid for the Mignonette and her transportation. A lawyer, a politician, and now a yachtsman, Want had already angered the gentlemen yachters with his disregard for the more traditional aspects of the sport. Maybe they had conspired to have him purchase an inferior craft. Dudley was a working man who admired the audacity of Want and hoped that the Mignonette would win Want many prizes when it was outfitted once more in Sydney. Outfitted for speedily hugging the coastline and winning trophies, not for carving a path across the Pacific.
Ned Brooks and Edwin Stephens were not his first choices for the crew. Others had quit because of the state of the boat, but Brooks and Stephens had committed because Dudley was a fair man. Their rations were not to be the typical salt horse floating in brine, dubious food rejected by the Royal Navy, occasional meat that concealed hoofs and often an equine eyeball. No. Dudley had suffered among the lower ranks before acquiring his captain’s certificate and was determined to feed his men better. Pork until it ran out, and after that tinned beef. The only privation on his boat was the absence of spirits which, in his opinion, made men wild and undermined discipline. Spirits reduced men to animals in thrall to appetite.
Richard Parker had not needed the added lure of good provisioning. He was only seventeen, although he claimed to be a year older, and found adventure enough to sign him on. He would be the cabin boy. A cabin boy on a boat so small with a crew of only four seemed a luxury or an encumbrance, depending on how you felt. But to maintain discipline Dudley believed that a hierarchy was necessary. A cabin boy gave a tautness to the pecking order. And Dudley believed in order, an order that was based on character, knowledge, and hard work, an order that once he was in Australia would serve him well. Then he would send for Phillippa and the children. Phillippa would be freed from the classroom, where the wealthy children learned their letters and numbers. Dudley had taught himself how to read. This process was such a torture that he had no admiration for it. Maybe he would teach Richard Parker to read, save him the indignity of illiteracy, save him the pain of figuring out the letters on his own. The boy reminded him of himself, growing up on the seas, filled with hunger for the unknown.