Galileo's Middle Finger (21 page)

I tried and tried to get someone at Viking to tell me why “Last Tribes” reached such a late stage—the copy I obtained from a library in Wisconsin was printed and bound, complete with a professionally designed cover and advance reviews—but was never actually published.
Viking wouldn’t give
. All I could learn came from the book itself. I realized, as I read its four hundred pages, that I was probably one of only a handful of people who had ever bothered to find and read this book. But I wasn’t reading it for information on rain forest gold mining. I was reading it as the AAA should have read it—to learn about Patrick Tierney, the man they chose to follow into a full investigation of Chagnon. And boy, did I learn.

Like Tierney’s first book (
Highest Altar
), “Last Tribes” tells a first-person story of the author’s explorations in South America, in this case following Tierney’s earnest attempts to gather dirt on the illegal gold-mining operations that are harming the rain forest and the native peoples, including the Yanomamö. In “Last Tribes,” Tierney—who, mind you, in
Darkness in El Dorado,
moralizes on every possible point about Neel and Chagnon’s supposedly unethical behaviors in the field—admits to having repeatedly lied about his own identity, even to indigenous people, ostensibly to further his activist journalism. He reveals that he faked identity documents to
pass himself off as a Chilean gold miner
and that, as part of his disguise, he
carried mercury into the rain forest
, even though he knew perfectly well the devastating effects of mercury on the habitat. “Last Tribes” also shows that Tierney
illegally purchased a shotgun
and carried it into the indigenous territories; wandered into remote villages
without first undergoing appropriate quarantine
; and trekked into Yanomamö lands
without first obtaining the required legal permission
from FUNAI (Fundação Nacional do Índio, the National Indian Foundation), the agency charged with this travel regulation. (FUNAI was the agency to which Tierney delivered his dossier in an attempt to stop Chagnon from doing further research with the Yanomamö.) Heck, in “Last Tribes,” Tierney even brags about having met up with
self-confessed murderers
—men he knew were wanted by the police—with apparently no thought of reporting their whereabouts to the police. Perhaps to prove how important he has managed to make himself in his muckraking, he also reports that he seemed to have
gotten another man killed
because the other guy was mistaken for the troublemaking Tierney.

Even more telling, “Last Tribes” reveals that, during this “work,” Tierney was
housed, fed, protected, and encouraged by local Roman Catholic priests
. When going into remote regions disguised as a gold miner, Tierney left his money and real identity papers with the priests. When he got arrested, it was Bishop Aldo Mangiano who sprung Tierney from jail. All this was pretty much confirmed for me in a later interview in Cleveland with Father Giovanni Saffirio, a Consolata missionary priest and anthropologist who had known both Chagnon and Tierney through their various interests in Venezuela. Chagnon had for a time been an advisor to Saffirio when Saffirio was earning his degree in anthropology. When I asked him to tell me about Tierney,
Father Saffirio responded
in his heavily Italian accented English that Patrick Tierney was “a good Catholic” and said that Bishop Mangiano “was pleased to help him.”

When I made the arrangement to travel to Cleveland to see Father Saffirio, I wasn’t sure that the trip would be worth it. But it was. As we talked in the rectory of Saint John Nepomucene, a church where he was staying for a time, Saffirio told me long and interesting stories about the missions in the area of the Yanomamö, about how they sometimes really hurt people as they intended to help them. The old priest clearly appreciated the complexity of human beings and yet he knew how to balance judgment with forgiveness. I got the sense from him that Tierney had started off doing activism and advocacy that might have really been helping.

“Bishop Aldo Mangiano found Tierney helpful because he was telling American and European people what was really happening in the forest,” Saffirio told me. He meant that Tierney was working to expose the horrific effects of mining—destruction of habitats, of indigenous homelands, and so of entire cultures. But Tierney had obviously used some problematic techniques; Saffirio told me that Tierney had “traveled through the area [where the Yanomamö live] with a fake ID card saying he owned a mining company in Chile where he was born. He cheated gold buyers saying he was eager to open a
garimpo
(a mine)
in Roraima
.” Whatever Saffirio thought of this particular charade, he clearly felt that
Darkness in El Dorado
amounted to a great injustice to Chagnon and Neel.

“Chagnon is a great scholar,” Saffirio said to me, adding, “He didn’t make up stuff. The data he gathered were done properly.” He went on:

Whatever his personality is, he did a great scholar[ly] job among the Yanomami. For one, it was Chagnon that made the Yanomami known worldwide with books, hundreds of articles and dozens of documentaries, inspiring many anthropologists and scientists to do research among them. When Tierney writes negatively about Chagnon, it hurts me because Chagnon helped the Yanomami in his own way. Sure, by doing research among the Yanomami he earned a lot of money and fame, he drinks beer, at times his temper can be short, but what that matters [
sic
] in the
big picture of a fine scholar
?

From Cleveland I drove to Pittsburgh to interview the anthropologist John Frechione. I was under the impression that Frechione had helped to provide a visiting scholar appointment for Tierney at the University of Pittsburgh, one that appeared to still be active, and I wanted to know about that and whatever else Frechione wanted to tell me. This university appointment was surely one of the accouterments that had allowed Tierney to look like a real scholar.
Frechione informed me
as we started talking that since
Darkness in El Dorado
, he and Tierney had been collaborating on a project aimed at showing the supposed remaining ethical problems with Neel’s behaviors during the 1968 epidemic. I listened tensely and said I’d be happy to look at the evidence they claimed to have, but mostly I was stunned that these people were still at it so many years after the AAA debacle. Was Pittsburgh some kind of anthropological zombieland, where the deadest of claims kept rising?

I knew that, after Tierney’s work had emerged in 2000 and was being shot full of holes, Frechione had given Tierney a hand by doing an important interview with a physician named Brandon Centerwall. Brandon was the son of the late physician Willard “Bill” Centerwall, another American who had been on the ill-fated 1968 expedition. When he’d returned, Bill had told his teenage son Brandon about the epidemic. Bill made the claim to Brandon that Neel had wanted to let the epidemic run unchecked in the village of Patanowa-teri to see what would happen to the vulnerable Yanomamö populace. By doing so, Neel would have been unethically testing quasi-eugenic theories of fitness. Bill claimed to his son that he had stood up to Neel, calling him to a higher moral standard, and that Neel had given in and treated the ill. This story—recorded in a
2001 interview with Brandon Centerwall
by Frechione to help Tierney defend his book—seemed proof positive that Tierney, Turner, and Sponsel were right: Neel had been a heartless eugenicist who had let infected Yanomamö die during the 1968 measles epidemic.

For a long while, the Centerwall story had been like a peppercorn stuck in my molar. All the documentary evidence suggested it couldn’t have happened the way Bill Centerwall had told his son, with Neel supposedly wanting to let the epidemic run unchecked. But both Frechione and
Turner had Brandon
on record
remembering his father’s vivid story of Neel’s cold-blooded plan and Bill Centerwall’s lifesaving intervention. So I did what I had to do: I asked the son to try to explain the discrepancy between his story and the rest of the historical record.

In my digging to find him, I discovered that Brandon himself had been at the center of a little controversy; a student of literature as well as a physician, Brandon Centerwall had apparently written a dangerously persuasive scholarly article
suggesting that Humbert Humbert
, the pedophile of Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita
, actually was a veiled self-portrait of the author. I hoped surviving a controversy might make Brandon more inclined to speak with me, not less. I felt strange having to question a man’s late father’s story, but it obviously mattered rather a lot. After confirming by e-mail that I had the right Brandon Centerwall,
I wrote to ask him to confirm
Frechione’s and Turner’s accounts of his retelling of his father’s story.

No answer.

I wrote again five days later
. Would he talk to me?

Two days later, Brandon answered, but cryptically, in a short message saying that he would send me a real reply later that day. He added, “I give you full permission to do as you wish with it, including quoting any or all of it,
or sharing it with others
.”

Still, his response to my questions came not that day but two days later.
His four-page letter
began: “To cut to the chase: (1) My recollections are accurate as to what my father told me about the expedition when I was fourteen years old, in 1968. (2) What he told me was entirely false with regard to those aspects of the story which are of concern to you. . . . The purpose of this response is to account for why my father would make up an elaborate story which simply wasn’t true.”

Brandon hastened to be sure I understood that his father “was a hard-working pediatrician who no doubt saved hundreds, thousands, of children’s lives while he was working in rural India for five years (I was there).” He added that his father had been “a tireless worker, an excellent clinician, and a devoted instructor as a professor of pediatrics. He was cheerful and upbeat in character, and there were few who didn’t get along with him.”

However, Brandon said, Bill had “a habit of padding his résumé” and of telling his son stories meant to make the father look just the way a son would want his father to look. Brandon explained his father’s psychology further: “[Bill] was hypersensitive to any kind of criticism whatsoever, but especially to criticism directed at perceived inadequacies in his performance,” just the kind of criticism Neel had likely doled out. “He would brood over any such criticism and wreak vengeance upon the critic, but only in his imagination.” This combination of behaviors—of generosity, of résumé padding, of imagining vengeance—covered up “the painful reality . . . that he was a coward.”

After putting together various puzzle pieces, Brandon had come to realize that the story of his father Bill standing up to Neel was one among many tall tales his father had told him “for reasons of ego.” Brandon recalled in his letter to me that his father had also told him that he knew some Cantonese because he had been in training for intelligence work on the Chinese front during the Second World War. Brandon had since figured out that his father actually knew Chinese because he had had a Chinese girlfriend. “I suppose that when later he was courting my mother, a devoutly conservative Christian, he needed to have a logical explanation as to why he knew Cantonese, an explanation that did not involve him living in sin with a Chinese girlfriend.” Brandon, ever the student of literature, suggested, “Perhaps the simplest, most direct way to an understanding of my father is to be found in James Thurber’s short story, ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,’ a favorite story of my father’s.”

Brandon was sure his father never meant his story of standing up to an amoral Neel to hurt anybody. Brandon suspected the impulse for the story came from Bill’s perceiving a slight from Neel—probably when Neel would have had to “put him in his place: that he was not Neel’s colleague, that Neel was his boss. . . . Regardless of how tactfully Neel may have phrased it (or not), my father’s inevitable emotional response would have been a sense of deep humiliation accompanied by anger and resentment.” Brandon continued:

After he returned home, he told me a lengthy, detailed fiction in which Neel had proved to be a villain and he himself was the hero of the occasion. . . . My father was a hero, and an unsung hero at that! At fourteen years of age, I was sufficiently callow to believe it all. I am certain that I am the only one to whom he ever told this fiction. Telling it once was sufficient to vent most of his continuing sense of mortification and anger. I suspect he felt confident that nothing would ever come of his telling me this outrageously false account, and he was very nearly right.

If Turner and Tierney had not moved to develop a story featuring Neel as a Nazi-like eugenicist, Bill Centerwall’s story would have rested quietly in the memory of his son. Brandon would never have formally supplied his father’s story to Neel’s critics. Brandon might never have realized that the story was but one instance of his father telling tales. But now Brandon had to conclude in his letter to me, “So the story was false in all pertinent aspects. It makes me heartsick to have to write such things about my father. I will stop now.”

Now, a few months later, sitting in Frechione’s Pittsburgh office, I had to tell Frechione—the man who had tried to help Tierney by recording on tape Brandon Centerwall’s memory—that Brandon had withdrawn the story. As I recall, I did not go into the detail of Brandon’s letter, but simply let Frechione know that Brandon had retracted his belief in his father’s story about the epidemic and that I really didn’t think there was anything left in this matter as a strike against Neel.

When I’d made my plans to go to Pittsburgh, I’d taken with me Patrick Tierney’s parents’ address, the address where he seemed to be living. Tierney had not been answering my requests for interviews. I hadn’t been sure when I’d entered Pittsburgh whether I should go to the Tierney house and knock on the door to see if maybe he hadn’t gotten my requests. Finally, in talking with Frechione, it became clear that Tierney knew I was trying to reach him and didn’t want to talk to me.