Black Mountain

by Venero Armanno

  ‘Don’t tell me the heat’s finally got to you, Cesare,’ the first said. ‘I suppose it gets everyone sooner or later.’

  The second moved his trolley closer to the grate and pulled on the heavy gloves everyone other than me had to use for accessing the fire. If he opened that metal door now, the burning, liquefying body would be revealed. I knew just how long flesh and bone needed before they would become ash, even with such immense temperature. Even then troublesome bits such as skulls, femurs, hips and spines needed to be smashed up with an iron poker if you really needed rid of them.

  I was beyond worrying, I decided. Maybe that poor abomination should have been brought to light after all.

  As he opened the grate the boy said, ‘We heard you’ve resigned?’

  He started to throw bandages in. They caught alight, and there was nothing in the flames, nothing at all, to impede their destruction. The individual had completely disappeared. I took off my blue hospital coverings and threw them in as well.

  ‘Yes,’ I told them. ‘My last job’s done.’

  Don Domenico came to the door in the gloom of the evening as he heard me arrive. I’d caught the mainline train, then a regional connection, then the local ferrovia, then hitched a ride with a farmer in his cart down into the valleys. The last kilometres I’d walked with my bags on my back. My master greeted me with warmth and without surprise, though he did seem unusually downcast. He helped me in and there was a vegetable stew in a pot over the fire, and then he told me straight out what I’d accomplished.

  ‘Kristof discovered what you did and went home and gave himself a terminal injection of morphine. His wife found him in his study the next morning. The man was being eaten alive with bowel and kidney cancer and he knew what he had ahead of him. Even though that creature was imperfect Kristof was still holding out hope.’

  I collapsed into a chair as if the blood had run out of me. I suddenly understood, it made a sort of sense: the creature was being kept alive for some purpose, some research. Something that would help Doctor Vliegan, and I’d taken that away.

  ‘The truth is that there wasn’t a shred of hope in either direction,’ Domenico went on, trying to push his own sadness aside.

  Then there was such kindness in his voice that it made me want to break.

  ‘Tell me something. The creature wanted release?’

  It was hard to meet his eyes. I gave a small nod.

  ‘It was human, Cesare, which means freedom of choice, and you helped it the way Kristof never would.’

  ‘Him,’ I said. ‘I helped him.’

  ‘Yes,’ Domenico replied.

  The creature dead by my hand, and the doctor dead by his own hand – because of me. I thought I would never be able to meet anyone’s eyes again, including my own, and went outside and sat in the cold, my face and my heart growing numb as one.

  My master left me alone for as long as I wanted to be alone. The evening was darker and the wind bit and howled. I stared out at nothing, and time was nothing too. So was I, of course, a piece of worthless flotsam blown back to Don Domenico’s house after committing a horror that had led to something equally appalling.

  Kristof Vliegan, with his round spectacles and concerned face, how many times had he helped me?

  The frozen night made it impossible to stay outdoors any longer. Full of shame, I had to return inside. I had no idea what the time might be. Domenico was waiting. In the lamplight he’d been reading and now he put his book down and went to the fire.

  ‘But what was the creature?’ I asked him. ‘Did Doctor Vliegan expect to use – I don’t know – parts of it, to try and cure himself?’

  I could see the effort this was going to take. Domenico moved closer and we sat at the kitchen table.

  ‘This may be a little difficult for you to understand, but that creature – let’s call him “a man” – that man was supposed to have grown into Kristof’s image a long time ago. Something went wrong right at the start, however, and Kristof didn’t have the heart to destroy it. He held out hope, but it was so obviously in vain.’

  I shook my head. This made no sense.

  Domenico said, ‘Let it sink into you.’

  Let it sink into you. As if this was something I ought to already understand?

  ‘All those years,’ I said, ‘Doctor Vliegan kept this man in his home?’

  ‘Yes, from the moment of his inception he cared for him. Until it became too sick. It – excuse me – he was likely to have died very soon. Though of course a creature like that couldn’t have any way of knowing what was happening.’

  ‘He knew,’ I spoke. ‘He knew what was happening. He knew a great deal.’

  I saw the way that sad individual’s long plain head had twisted and turned in anguish and despair, heard again the mewling cry from his throat.

  Domenico simply nodded, remaining downcast.

  ‘But are you saying —’ I started, but found it hard to construct the right question. Domenico had been more than correct – what we were speaking of wasn’t only difficult to understand, it hurt too. In my belly and in my heart. And it was sinking into me.

  ‘Are you really saying he was meant to become Doctor Vliegan, exactly him?’

  ‘Well, no one’s ever certain of the precise outcome,’ Don Domenico replied. ‘The procedures have never been perfect. It seems the good scientists of old were never able to predict whether the creatures would become true doubles of the people they were seeded from, or if they’d become something else entirely. In Kristof’s case, if things had worked out properly, then yes. The creature would have been him. But without his memories and experiences and so on. There’s no transmigration, nothing at all esoteric like that.’

  ‘Transmigration?’

  ‘Of souls or of memories. Not the psyche. The heart, if you like. The creatures are simply human beings reproduced from the person in question.’

  ‘Their children.’

  ‘Almost their perfect children, because the creatures’ make-up comes from only one person. The individual being seeded. It’s an extraordinary achievement of science, even if it’s never turned out quite right.’

  This was the door I’d been standing in front of all my life and finally it was being pushed open.

  ‘You are referring to us, aren’t you, Domenico? You and me.’

  ‘And people like us, yes.’

  I swallowed hard and looked at my hands. They were a young man’s hands. Not a thing’s. Not a sad creature’s, nor some milky individual’s.

  ‘There are more?’

  ‘Yes, there are.’

  I was shivering now, and not from the cold. Domenico looked at me with kindness, a satan’s face of kindness.

  ‘So that’s all we are then? Remnants of other people?’

  ‘We’re hardly remnants. If anything we’re more like the product of humankind’s dreams. Of course, you could say that’s what normal children are too.’

  He was watching me to see how I received this news. In fact, a little of the shock was passing, some of the pain too. The shivering subsided. I reached for the bottle of wine on the table and poured myself a glass and one for Domenico. Now my hands were steadier. I drank. He didn’t. It was as if I’d known these things all my life but had never possessed courage enough to face them.

  ‘It’s not so bad for us,’ Domenico spoke more gently. ‘Despite their intentions to the contrary we’ve managed to become ourselves, haven’t we?’

  Yes, of course: Be who you are.

  And those lines from The Venetian that Domenico loved so much: Man is a free agent; but he is not free if he does not believe it . . .

  Don Domenico wanted me to believe it.

  He stood up and took the saucepan from the stove, then ladled stew into the bowl that was always mine. Despite
everything, despite what I’d done and what I now knew about myself, and him, it was good to be here. It was good to be home.

  I was famished and tired, and couldn’t think of a single reason why I’d want to leave this place again.

  In the wintry morning I went outside with Domenico and helped him with all the simple tasks that I wanted to take over once more. The pigs were fat and the goats were annoying. Domenico saw my smile.

  ‘You’re really so happy to be back?’

  I made room for the largest pig to take its food from the trough, then we stepped back and watched.

  ‘Tell me something, Domenico, why did you send me away?’

  We sat down out of the freezing wind and watched the animals in their simple activities. Domenico idly scattered grain, and the chickens came and pecked near our feet.

  ‘I never intended to keep secrets from you, but I did want you to experience life and your own potential before putting you face-to-face with the truth.’

  ‘Maybe you thought Doctor Vliegan would tell me what we are?’

  ‘Possibly. He should have, really, because he understood the science involved. I wanted you to work with Kristof and maybe even join one of the teams, but he was a man who had problems with trust. Learned over too many years of keeping secrets. And your grades – unfortunately they didn’t quite reach the right levels.’

  He gently bounced his shoulder against mine when he saw me start to hang my head with shame.

  ‘But there was something that was equally important to Kristof. He worried over philosophical questions. He wondered whether it was right to let you know at all, or if it mightn’t be more right to simply let you live like normal people.’

  ‘I’m not normal.’

  ‘You have to be. You have to make every effort to be.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Here . . . in this place here we can live in silence and solitude. That suits me and I know why it’s so. My affliction is that I can’t bear the presence of others. Simple human demands. Even if it’s in friendship. People’s ideas and their dreams and their needs confuse me, and that makes me lose my equilibrium. But you still have the chance to go forward, you can still learn how to be a man in this world. One country house in one small island of the Mediterranean can’t be enough for you.’

  ‘You tell me to be myself then you expect me to be something I’m not,’ I replied. ‘I didn’t ask to be made this way, but if it’s how I am then let me be. I never want to live anywhere but here with you. Is that so wrong?’

  ‘When you were a slave you dreamed of other countries, didn’t you? Freedom and wild imaginings . . .’

  ‘That’s because I had to escape.’

  ‘Don’t you think the need to escape is what drives all people?’

  The friendly ease of the morning was beginning to slip away. The further this conversation went, the more my temples started to ache. I didn’t want to speak but I knew I had to.

  ‘The world —’ I started, but could barely bring myself to say what I felt. It was such a coward’s thing to utter. ‘Domenico, the world is full of horror.’

  ‘And always will be.’ He shrugged, but not unkindly. ‘You can change, Cesare. You’re young and you can become anything. Our antecedents don’t necessarily curtail our futures.’

  We watched the animals in their unhurried and unworried grace. I thought this was a pivotal moment. My heart cried out for Domenico not to send me away, not this time or ever again.

  He said, ‘While you were among your fellow students, other young people, did you feel any sense of connection, a feeling that you wanted to become close to them?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘What about females? Did you sleep with many?’

  I shook my head again.

  ‘Not one?’

  ‘Not one.’

  ‘Do you have urges?’

  ‘No. Or not often. I look. Sometimes I think I want to act, or I know I ought to, but I can’t. I don’t know why that is.’

  He accepted this without surprise, but didn’t seem happy about it.

  ‘Why are you asking?’

  ‘It strikes me there can be more to your life than solitude. Look at our books, the stories they contain. Most have to do with people together, the things they share and the things they can’t. The things they want and the things they need. There’s love and pain in equal measure, and people, they seem to be at their finest when they seek these things out. When they let one another into each other’s lives.’

  ‘Maybe you and I have that already.’

  He shook his head. ‘I like you being here, Cesare, but if you go, when you go, I’ll like that too. I’m talking about something infinitely deeper. Aren’t you curious about the love between a man and a woman?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I’m hoping you’ll find it, Cesare.’

  ‘Maybe I can’t. Maybe I just don’t have the means.’

  He nodded, thinking it through. ‘There are a number of characteristics that define us, and from there we do or we don’t individuate. A number of things we inherited from the originals and some other things were encouraged by design. A major characteristic appears to be what you’re referring to, the lack of sexual urge. More important is the lack of emotional interaction as well. It was considered important to take these away. The need to procreate was never going to be sympathetic to the tasks we’d be set.’

  ‘The tasks?’

  ‘You’re aware the Amati family were leaders in munitions development and manufacture, but historically they were also researchers into other means of winning wars. Going back many generations. At a certain point the family’s work became government sponsored, and very obviously by more nations than simply our own.’

  ‘Then it’s been replicated in other countries.’

  ‘That’s a reasonable conclusion. Italy’s not exactly an industrial powerhouse.’

  ‘So that was the intention? To make a type of soldier?’

  He nodded slightly, and he was watching me now, his gaze attempting to penetrate my heart.

  ‘How did you feel when you killed Kristof’s creature?’

  ‘It seemed —’ I struggled for the word. It was the most vile word I’d ever spoken. ‘It seemed easy.’

  Don Domenico kept his eyes on me, and the picture of him on that ridge striding toward Salvatore and Gino with his long rifle drawn, and the two perfect shots, finally made sense.

  ‘Who am I?’ I asked this man, the only person capable of telling me.

  He thought it over before replying.

  ‘In the wider world, that’s a question the young always have to find their own answer to, but of course we’re different. Before I try to tell you, remember that beyond anything else, you are yourself. No research into science and no intrusion of the hand of man changes that. They never succeeded in making us servants.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘You and I share a sort of parentage. I’m led to believe there were many, many surrogates for the seeds. Women who carried and delivered us. Women who’ve long since been paid and forgotten. My seed was the essence of a boy named Domenico Amati. The sad creature that went wrong, that was taken from Kristof Vliegan in an attempt to give his life some kind of a renewal once the cancer overtook him. And you – well, I believe you were from one of the minds most involved in all of this.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The patriarch, Giovanni Amati. He didn’t start the family’s interest in creating new men, that predated him by generations, but he certainly took up the reins.’

  ‘Giovanni Amati,’ I repeated. ‘The father.’

  ‘And me, of the son.’

  We gazed at one another, Domenico with a wry smile. The world was upside down and the two of us with it.


  ‘What about females?’ I asked, clearing my throat, trying to make sense of this news, wondering if it would change the relationship between us. ‘What about women?’

  Don Domenico spread his palms. He honestly didn’t know.

  ‘All I’m clear about is who we were seeded from, and despite all the hopes that went into us, the project failed. New people such as ourselves have too much potential for illness and disease.’

  ‘All of us?’

  ‘That’s unclear. But enough to ruin all the plans. One example is the way Kristof’s illness was multiplied in his creature. There has been a predisposition towards cancers, though there have been other unexpected problems too. Of the mind. Discovering all this, I believe the project was abandoned and funding was reallocated into the production of more traditional armaments.’

  ‘Was I one of the last?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘And you were involved?’

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I was nowhere near the Amati family. In my fifth year I was sent to live with Rosa and her husband and her sons, obviously an experiment to see how a new child would fare within a normal family. I fared badly. Much later, when I became friends with Kristof, he told me that the difference between me and the majority of other new children was that, physically at least, I grew into the mirror image of my seed. I looked like the original Domenico, and that’s rarely the case. But of course I didn’t know any of this until after the Amati factory was destroyed and I was withdrawn from the battlefields. Before then I’d never heard of the Amatis, much less been to their mansion and property.’

  ‘That’s why you seemed so strange there? And wanted to get rid of it?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘What about the destruction of the family’s plant in the north, was it really an accident?’

  ‘Everything points to an eradication. I was sent to take the place of the only son, the original Domenico, who’d had the good grace to die quietly and without fanfare in an asylum. Hence several of the more obvious issues I’ve had to deal with,’ he said, gently rubbing an index finger along his right temple.