Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“What did you do?”

“I went to the Amazon to study the Onuma. That was as far away as I could get from bullshit and still remain in academia.”

“Who are the Onuma?”

“They live in the rain forest, and they’re often described as the last of the hunter-gatherers, although, technically speaking, that’s not exactly right, since they garden. They’re one of the last cultures to come in contact with modern civilization.”

“But now they’ve come in contact with you.”

“And they’ll never be the same!”

“Isn’t that a problem?”

“You mean like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, but with bigger particles?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“Well, actually, Absalom has thought about that quite a lot.”

“Absalom?”

“Absalom Garibaldi. I work under him. He started studying the Onuma in 1964. He walks a fine line between a hands-off policy and humanitarian intervention. Just think about sickness. Their view is that disease is caused by the curses of their enemies and the only way to combat the curses is to blow ebene up their nostrils, which is one hell of a hallucinogenic drug, and go into a trance where you can undo the curse, and that view is not anything that we’re going to try and talk them out of. But if Absalom sees a child dying of a bacterial infection, he’s going to slip the kid some antibiotic to go along with the ebene and the witch doctor’s charms. Obviously, our being there leaves a footprint, but that isn’t really an argument against our studying them, especially since it can shed so much light on our evolutionary past.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. I was just being facile.”

“It’s nice that you can admit that. I assume you haven’t been an academic for long.”

“No. I’m a first-year grad student.”

“What made you decide to go to Frankfurter?”

“Jonas Elijah Klapper.”

“Yeah, like me. I just went where Absalom was.”

“To the Amazon.”

“Yes, but I meant my institutional affiliation.”

“Which is here?”

“Harvard? No. I’m at Berkeley. When I first started working with Absalom he was at Tulane, but I just switched when he did.”

“Yeah, some of Professor Klapper’s grad students did the same when he came from Columbia to Frankfurter.”

“Were you a Frankfurter undergrad?”

“No, Columbia.”

“So basically neither of us knows where the hell we’re going right now.”

They had walked determinedly across Harvard Yard, each following the other, and now exited onto a street, which they crossed.

“That looks like the right place,” the girl announced, pointing to a redbrick building not noticeably different from any of the others around it. “Excuse me, is that the Faculty Club?” the girl asked a woman passing by.

“Yes, it is.”

“I always find my way,” she said, turning back to Cass, “even when I have no idea where I’m going. It’s inexplicable.”

“It must come in handy in the rain forest. What country do the Onuma live in?”

“The borderlands between Brazil and Venezuela. I’m mostly in Venezuela. I lived in a village called Meesa-teri. Teri just means ‘village.’”

“Do you speak… what’s the language they speak?”

“They speak Onuma. That’s what we call it. They don’t have a name for themselves. ‘Onuma’ is a name from the Kentubas, another tribe, and it means ‘dirty feet.’ Is this the reception for Klapper?” she asked a woman inside the Faculty Club who was sitting behind a table.

“Yes, it is.” She smiled in a transparently perfunctory way. “Your name, please?”

The girl turned to Cass with a flourish, gesturing for him to go first.

“Um, yes, I’m Cass Seltzer.”

“I have it, Cass,” the woman said, her traveling finger stopping at a name on her list. She handed him a name tag. “And your name, miss?”

“I’m with him,” the girl said.

“I still need your name.” The perfunctory smile was growing rigid round the corners. The woman had an upper lip so stiff it looked as if it could make puncture wounds.

“Roslyn Margolis.”

“I don’t seem to have you on the list, Ms. Margolis.”

“Are you sure? Didn’t you inform them I was coming, Cass?”

“I don’t know.”

Roslyn Margolis smiled at the gatekeeper.

“Absentminded professors!”

“Oh, are you a professor, Professor Cass, I mean, Professor Seltzer? Excuse me. I hadn’t realized. You look so young.”

“He is young! He’s a prodigy! That’s why he’s so absentminded! Cass, how could you have forgotten to let the club know I was coming with you?”

“Oh well, not to worry. This can be remedied lickety-split,” said the gatekeeper, producing a magic marker and the fixings for a name tag. “You know,” she said to Roslyn in a confidential tone, “we have quite a few professors who forget to mention their significant others.”

“Oh, thanks. I appreciate it. We could have used your help the last time this happened. I was almost kept out of seeing him inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,” said Roslyn Margolis, pinning on her name tag.

“Oh my! The Academy! And so young! Well, wonderful to have met you both!”

Cass stared at Roslyn Margolis. He had begun to doubt everything she had said up until this moment, not excluding that her name was Roslyn Margolis.

“Anyway,” the girl continued, as they headed into the reception area, “so far as my speaking Onuma, I do speak some. There are lots of dialects. Sometimes people from one village can’t understand the people from another village. They can be pretty isolated from each other. There are still lots of villages that haven’t had any contact with outsiders.”

“Are they noble savages?”

“Noble savages?”

“You know, uncorrupted by society’s venality.”

“Frolicking like bunnies in Rousseau’s Never-Never Land? Funny you should ask. When I first applied to be Absalom’s student-he was wary of me, since I was coming from studying the kind of anthropology he doesn’t have much use for, but, then, I didn’t either, so it worked out great-but when I first met him, I asked him what they were really like, the Onuma, and he said, ‘They’re assholes.’”

She laughed. She had a wonderfully lusty laugh. Cass couldn’t hear it without grinning himself.

“And are they?”

“Assholes? It’s against the anthropologist religion to say anything judgmental, so if it strikes you as judgmental then don’t repeat it, or Absalom or I will have to kill you, which we’re capable of, but, yeah, basically they’re assholes. They’re not noble-savage pretty. The Onuma are about as good a counterexample as you’re going to find for a universal moral instinct. They don’t seem to have any compunctions about lying or stealing, the men can beat their wives whenever they feel the need to, they’re constantly raiding each other’s women, which is how their wars start, it’s always about kidnapping women, and then the raided go raiding to get them back, preferably taking a few extra women with them as long as they’re going to the trouble, and they have an unquenchable thirst for revenge.”

“It sounds like a dangerous place to be a woman.”

“It’s a dangerous place to be a human.”

“And what do they make of you?”

Roslyn Margolis, if that was indeed her name, was a tall, slender girl, only a few inches shorter than Cass, but she looked, despite her slenderness, as if she would never have to ask a man to remove any twist-off top for her. Her face looked strong, too. There was something bold and arresting. Once you really looked at her, it was hard to look away. She had a high-bridged nose and clear blue eyes, and her upper lip looked sweetened by all the laughter it had laughed, it looked generous to share that laughter with others, and it looked, despite all its fun, noble. Her whole bearing had something noble about it. But, even with the height and obvious physical strength and the suggestion of nobility, she was feminine.