Heart of Darkness

It is the shrunken head swinging from his watch-chain which arrests one when speaking with Professor Jason Quaeritor, Harvard's leading authority on the Jivarro Indians of the Orinoco Valley. Professor Quaeritor is well known as Harvard's Malinowski and Margaret Mead, combined into one, as it were. He patted the the miniscule head and took a deep breath on a blow gun he has rigged up as a pipe.

"Well, my interest in the Jivarros began as a small boy. I was brought up on the Orinoco, you know. God's country, you know--God's country. My father was a trader, and my mother, Jane, well she was of creole stock. So I am almost a native myself." He took another whiff of blow-gun smoke, tweaked his head's nose and continued.

Listening to Professor Quaeritor, one almost imagines himself in Jivarro territory. Books on sex habits of the Mayas are alternated with relics of pre-Columban civilizations. Bamboo furniture decorates his office in Widener 5000. Quaeritor got a Harvard Scholarship, the regional jungle grant, and came to Harvard in 1912. Since then he has spent his life commuting between Cambridge and his beloved jungle.

The other faculty members praise Quaeritor's research techniques and admire his ability to fit in with the natives so well. One of his former students comments, "Quaeritor swings their kind of axe. It is almost uncanny. I went on an exhibition with him once to study embalming habits in a matriarchal inner-directed sub culture. But while I regard the Jivarro only as an embryonic society, he sees them as a peer group. Uncanny."

I asked Professor Quaeritor what attracted him to the study of such a fierce group. He pulled a petrified tarantula from his back pocket--"My lucky charm," he explained. "Well, chiefly it's their marital system. You see," he chuckled, "the brother in the Jivarro tribe has with his sister the jus primae noctis, as it were. Enforced incest, a droll habit, you know."

I queried Quaeritor as to the value in studying such primitive peoples. "Well, it's valuable to escape the social orientation of the dominant European transplant of this country. Socio-economically speaking, the norm motivations of the Jivarro reveal a ritualized libido only slightly modified by environmental quasi-determinants, you know." Quaeritor cracked a coconut and drained it of its juice.

He began to talk about the courses he taught. "My seminar in the evolution of cannibal weapons, I sort of look at as a lab course. This semester we're concentrating on the properties of curare. I also give the lectures for the first term in Soc Sci 9; I present the Jivarros as a curtain raiser to Western culture--keeps the students from becoming culture bound."

Professor Quaeritor confesses to having a wife and family, of sorts. "My wife's name is also Jane--a coincidence, you know. We both indulge in an extracurricular liking for Chilean Dixieland; I always go to Mahogany Hall when they feature the Valparaiso Stompers."

As the oscilllations of the suspended head came to a halt, I realized that the interview was over. I thanked Professor Quaeritor, and upon leaving he rubbed his spider, "Don't call me Quaeritor, the natives don't."

"What then?" I asked. "Oh Kurtz will be fine, Mister Kurtz."