Webele chuckled. “Why yes. They are awful paintings. We have a
poor tradition of visual arts here. Ethiopians have always distrusted
artisans—they believe they are in league with Buda, the patron
demon of artists. The evil eye.”
They climbed back down the stairs into the basement of the
museum and entered a smaller room which was nearly empty except
for a glass case containing fragments of an incomplete skeleton,
arranged in a way that suggested the former whole.
“Isn’t she wonderful.” Webele said.
“Sure. I guess,” Roy replied.
“No. That’s her name. We call her Dinkenesh. ‘Isn’t she
wonderful.’ You call her Lucy. The bones of our oldest ancestor.”
“This is Lucy?” Roy said incredulously. “They keep her here?”
“Yes. Why? Where else would she be?”
Roy looked around. There were no cameras and no guards. The
most important skeleton in the world was languishing in an insecure
plexiglass case. She was practically begging to be stolen.
“She’s hardly safe here,” Roy said.
“Sure she is,” said Webele yanking on the lock, “See?”
Roy gazed at the jawline fragment and tried to envision her
beauty. She waswonderful, in a pathetic, morbid sort of way. He
began to imagine different faces on her: the faces of all the women he
had loved, whose femurs and pelvises he had caressed, whose
histories he had tried to decipher by touch. But now he could only see
Ellie, and so these became her bones. Suddenly, he could not breathe
in the small room.
When anthropologist Donald Johanson discovered Lucy in 1974 she
was hailed as man’s oldest ancestor. Her skeleton and the spot they
found it suggested three important things: first, our ancestors had
been walking around on two feet far earlier than it was commonly
thought, second, they probably hailed from Ethiopia or nearby, and
third, they likely lived in a verdant paradise, in “lush lake regions,
swarming with game, laced with winding rivers and thick strands of
tropical forest.” Previously, paleontologists contended that man
evolved on a desiccated, hostile savannah. Lucy’s bones and the soil
they found them in suggested, to the contrary, that the land of our
origins had been quite idyllic.
Sitting in his tent, pondering what to name the new woman in his
life, Johanson heard the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” come
ABYSSINIA
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