by Alan Weisman
He stops and looks at the floor. Then he raises his eyes.
“I was going to say that if we lived our celibacy faithfully, we could offer it as an eloquent message to the world that such action is possible,” he says softly. “But the eloquence of this message has been badly compromised.”
iii. Belle donne e bambini
It would seem that the spectacle of a Church exposed for abetting widespread serial child rape might finally mute its dicta that sex is only for “responsible procreation,” not pleasure or entertainment. But the Vatican is the oldest of political echo chambers, St. Peter’s resonant dome enlarging its proclamations in the ears of the proclaimers—even as right outside Vatican walls, few hear or care. Studies show that 98 percent of the Catholic women in the United States have used contraception; in Catholic Italy, the figure may be lower—but only due to a lingering cultural preference, particularly in conservative northern Italy, for coitus interruptus, also a forbidden sin to the Vatican. The fact that Italy nevertheless has one of the lowest fertility rates anywhere is partly explained by the success of parliamentarian Emma Bonino to legalize abortion in 1978, a campaign instigated after her own clandestine abortion. Church attempts to muzzle her were ignored; her long government career includes serving as vice president of the Italian Senate and as foreign minister.
In the 1990s, Italian women had the world’s lowest birthrate, 1.12 children apiece, only to be passed in 2001 by Catholic Spain. With one of the world’s highest percentages of women with doctorates—more Italian women have PhDs than men—Italy is poster-worthy proof that education lowers birthrates. Yet the details are complicated.
Sabrina Provenzani sits on the floor with her old college friend, Licia Capparella, whose three-year-old twins, Michelangelo and Adrian, are investigating her luxurious thick hair, comparing it to their mother’s long brown curls. It is January 2011; Sabrina, a producer for the public broadcasting network Radio Televisione Italiana, has the day off because the CEO has once more suspended her program under pressure from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The prime minister—whose days finally seem numbered—is lately mired in one of his more lurid scandals, involving a seventeen-year-old Moroccan immigrant dancer. Because Sabrina’s program covered the affair, Berlusconi is again threatening them.
What infuriated Sabrina most were the wiretaps that surfaced: hearing parents and siblings of several girls saying yes, go with him, he’s a generous man, it will set our future. These days in Italy, it’s easy to find girls who’ll leap to earn €7,000 in one night, rather than €7003 a month. Women may be Italy’s most educated sector, but they’re also the worst compensated. For more years than she cares to remember, Sabrina has been working twelve hours a day producing a TV show with 1.6 million viewers, but getting paid the same as a Fiat factory worker. The network deftly sidesteps a law prohibiting too many consecutive monthly contracts by paying her weekly as a consultant, not as a staffer eligible for benefits.
She and her husband, Emilio, a software designer, have now reached their late thirties, a time they’d always hoped to have enough economic stability to start a family. But as Licia is reminding her, working women who dare to have children risk everything.
For years, Licia worked for one of Italy’s oldest nature NGOs. She wrote about animals, ran their website, and loved her job. She worked from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., often came in on weekends, and was loved in return by her superiors—until she got pregnant.
“Silly me. I came running into work, all excited to tell my boss.”
Despite the frigid reception, she kept working. Even when she’d faint in the subway, she kept going to the office, working through the summer when nobody else wanted to. “After six months, when I got too fat with the twins and took maternity leave, I kept calling in to see if I could help by working from bed, even though that’s illegal. That’s when they told me they weren’t renewing my contract.”
Actually, they’d never given her a legal contract. For three years she’d had a string of temporary six-month contracts, even though the law required full contractual health benefits and five months’ maternity leave following the second renewal.
“Yeah, right,” says Sabrina.
Licia nods. At the NGO, they gave her a choice. After she had her babies, she could return, but she would lose her seniority and have to start all over. She is now working as a park guide two days a week, without a contract. “Nobody checks, and I need the work so badly, I accept it.”
What she didn’t accept was her treatment by the environmental nonprofit. She sued for €65,000, the additional amount she would have made if she’d had the correct contract in the first place. Wonder of wonders, they offered to settle for €35,000. The judge, a woman, commented tartly that if they were willing to pay that much, they were in effect admitting their guilt and by rights should pay the full sum. But in the end, to avoid further battle, Licia agreed to that amount plus her legal costs.
With two babies, the money was a godsend, but reinstatement in her former position was now out of the question.
“Still, we’re lucky. We have two bedrooms. We know people with children sleeping on the sofa. Or they’ve stopped eating meat. All these qualified people, barely making it to the end of the month. One of my friends has a doctorate in biology, but all she can find is work in a call center, for €1,000 a month. We’re like medieval serfs. We’re Italy’s new poor.”
In France, she says, they make it easier for parents, with state funding for day care and kindergarten. “In all of Rome, there are maybe three or four day-care centers. You’re really thinking of having kids?” she asks Sabrina.
“We’re talking about it.”
“Good luck. No one helps.” There is the “Berlusconi bonus”—a €1,000-per-baby government incentive to raise the birth rate. “It won’t even buy diapers. And now they’re cutting kindergarten to half-days, because the government needs to cut the education budget. Meanwhile, government funding gets siphoned to private Catholic schools so Berlusconi can get support from the Church.”
Licia’s father was one of fourteen children. She is one of four. Had she not been blessed with these adorable twins, her child would have been one of one. “I’m happy that we have these two. But it’s twice as hard for us.”
A generation ago, men and women married in their twenties. Women had babies earlier, and had more of them. Even so, family size had been dropping ever since the Industrial Revolution turned farming villages into manufacturing towns and women became part of the labor force. Today, being so well educated, they’re still hired as long as they’re single and childless, even as Italian men now live with their parents into their thirties, trying to save enough to get married. By the time they and their underpaid working girlfriends do so, there’s usually only time and money enough for one.
“Today,” says Licia, “a thirty-year-old is still a girl. I’m forty, and I’m just settling in to being a mother.”
Her friends are all leaving—for Germany, Australia, even Spain. There aren’t jobs there, either, but supposedly they do more to help women. Sabrina and Emilio have toyed with going somewhere, too. What a century: Italians aren’t having babies because it’s too expensive, or they flee Italy to have them somewhere else. Meanwhile, Italian schools are overfull, because immigrant children are taking the place of missing natives.
“If we have kids, what future will there be for them?” Sabrina asks. She and Emilio are having dinner in the home of their friends Claudia Giafaglione and Vincenzo Pipitone.
Claudia, who’s Sicilian, is serving grouper with couscous and a salted brioche stuffed with smoked salmon, ricotta, and chives. She has dark hair, round dark eyes, and a heart-shaped face, reminding Sabrina of a beautiful pet cat. She also has a degree in pharmacology and biology, and another in nutrition. Vincenzo, her tall, slim, handsome husband, is an army surgeon. They are more secure financially than most Italians their age—Claudia has just turned thirty-five—yet like Sabrina and Emilio
, they are terrified by the idea of having children.
Emilio, whose latest app design is a guide to olive oil, translates his own fears into hard cash: “I earn about three thousand euros4 a month. We use contraception because we’re afraid we can’t afford kids. Yet suppose in ten years we have a bigger house, and can afford a better school. Ten years later, my pension will be about five hundred euros. So in twenty years I’ll be poor. If we wait ten years to have a baby, how will we afford to raise it?”
“I agree with Emilio,” Claudia says.
“This is stupid,” says Vincenzo. “When I go on military mission to Afghanistan, I see people as poor as animals. No electricity, no security. Yet they have families. Italy may be crazy, but at least we have peace here. We must be happier than they are. Yet we think so much about what we don’t have. The national sport in Italy is complaining.”
For a few minutes, they take turns at that sport, excoriating their beautiful, frustrating country that has so many ancient wonders—and ancient infrastructure to match. When Vincenzo was a medical student, he was assigned to a hospital forty-five kilometers from where he lived: without public transport, his commute was three hours.
“My brother never sees his daughters,” says Emilio. “They’re asleep when he leaves for work and asleep when he returns. He’s working so hard to send them out of Italy to study, meaning he’ll see them even less. But it’s the only way they can escape this economy that he’s sure won’t ever offer them decent jobs.”
“That’s so paranoid!” moans Sabrina. But it’s exactly what they fear for themselves, if they ever have the child they’re still too scared to have.
“We figure that by the time the kid is fourteen, he’ll already be out of the house, in England or China. Or India,” says Emilio glumly.
“It would be a strain for her to live here,” says Sabrina. “Nothing moves. We’re stuck in a past that we didn’t build. I just watched an edition of my show from ten years ago. We had the same guests on, talking about the same problems.”
But Claudia isn’t even thinking about Italy. She has far bigger worries.
“How can we even think of bringing children into this world anyway?” she asks.
Two days earlier, she went to the annual Rome Science Festival. This year’s theme was “The End of the World: A User’s Guide.” The opening session was a National Geographic Channel film titled Sovrappopolamento—“Overpopulation.” Its premise imagined 14 billion people—the United Nation’s high projection for 2084, should family-planning programs founder—trying to fit on the Earth. It showed Mexico City literally crumbling under its own weight, then pulled back to describe a planet that in 1930 had a comfortable population of 2 billion. Ever since, it’s been adding the equivalent of ten more New York Cities annually. The film then showed Asia rapidly doubling, interspersed with animations of entire cities suddenly collapsing. Apartment buildings two hundred stories tall went up, then came down—as did forests, flattened for more farmland. Bridges fell under the relentless tonnage of trucks hauling food. Grimy clouds from four new Chinese coal-fired plants each week fouled the air from London to Los Angeles. Shit gushed from overflowing Manhattan sewers, followed by rats bearing meningitis. Countries desperate to feed people slathered the land with chemicals.
Finally, after thirty-five years of bending under the burden of 14 billion-plus, famine wiped out 80 percent of humanity. Population stabilized at 4 billion. At the film’s end, ecosystems began to revive. Fish refilled the oceans. Greenery burst forth. People grew enough food, and birds sang anew.
When the lights came on, Claudia saw that several middle schools had brought classes to the science festival. She shuddered to imagine what these fourteen-year-old schoolkids would be thinking to see in an alleged documentary the world where they’d barely begun to live hell-bent for cataclysm within their own lifetimes.
“I’ll bet they find a solution before it gets that bad,” said a girl in a navy blue sweater and jeans as her class filed out. “Someone will invent something.”
“They’d alert us before something like that happens,” said the girl behind her, dressed identically except for her knee-high suede boots.
“I’m not having any kids,” said another in a purple scarf.
“If we all have to farm, you’ll need them,” a boy in a blue stocking cap interjected.
The girls exchanged alarmed glances at the prospect of having to farm.
“We are just too many!” says Claudia as she serves warm chocolate cake with a molten center. “We will be like a bacteria colony, living off our own wastes! How do we bring a child into this world of trouble, when we are destined to die?”
Vincenzo reaches for the wine, changes his mind, and produces a bottle of grappa from a cupboard.
It emerges that Claudia, appalled at Earth’s deteriorating ecosystem, is writing a spy romance set in the most polluted place in the world. She went to the science festival for ideas about settings: she’s considering the saline wasteland left by the now-vanished Aral Sea, the island of floating plastic spreading over the Pacific, or methane geysers in the melting Arctic.
“Maybe when you’re done writing about something so dark, you’ll be willing to think about a baby—” Vincenzo says, but stops when he sees her stricken look.
He lifts his glass of grappa. “Our future children,” he says, “who could live to see the end of the world.” He shakes his head, then downs it. Sabrina and Emilio stare at each other across the table.
For a long moment, all is silent. “Coffee?” Claudia finally says. Relieved, everyone laughs.
“I think Claudia and I are thinking too much,” says Vincenzo, standing behind her with his arms around her waist as their guests leave. She looks up at him with her round cat’s eyes.
Under the yellow streetlamps of the Lungotevere della Vittoria alongside the Tiber, Emilio and Sabrina walk to their car, holding hands. Later that year, the answer to whether or not to bring a child into a frightening century will be instantly clear to them, upon learning that Sabrina is pregnant—the answer being, Of course you do. A child is not just a child, but the future incarnate. Despair vanishes when there is truly something to hope for: a world for your child. You’ll do anything to assure there’ll be one. It may have colossal problems, but your baby is part of the solution, as will you be: there’s no more compelling reason to save the Earth than parents wanting to protect their offspring, one of whom may invent the miracle that changes all the odds.
Two months before she is to give birth, Sabrina leaves her job, packs up their apartment, and boards a British Airlines flight to London. Emilio has been there for nearly a year; she conceived when he came to see her on holiday. He is designing mobile apps for a thriving clothing company, and has already been promoted.
Sabrina is the newest immigrant to the UK. When their daughter, Anita, is born, should they remain four more years, she will be a British subject.
CHAPTER 7
Gorillas in Our Midst
i. The DNA
Dr. Gladys Kalema, barely out of veterinary school, looked at the tranquilizer dart she’d just filled with anesthetic, then looked again at the mountain gorillas. She counted three females, two juveniles, three infants, two black-backed adult males, and naturally, a silverback—the patriarch. This one, Gladys saw, approached five hundred pounds, about as big as they come. He had a conical forehead head atop a pumpkin-sized jaw, arms that bent entire treetops toward a wide mouth flashing with oversized canines, and long, thick black body hair, except for the saddle-shaped, silver-gray patch on his well-muscled back. His close-set, round black eyes ignored the nervous park rangers and fixed on Gladys, as if he knew what she was planning.
Two hours earlier, Gladys, the rangers, and a visiting Kenyan vet had hacked their way into southwest Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, following three trackers who’d been there since dawn. After lurching uphill, they’d finally found this band in a stand of corkwoods, the juveniles in the trees,
swinging among the newest leaves, the adults lolling on the ground, pulling branches toward their mouths and within reach of the babies.
Less than half the size of Chicago, the Bwindi forest crowns a biologically fabulous escarpment containing more endemic species than anywhere else in Africa. The estimated four hundred Bwindi mountain gorillas account for nearly half those remaining in the world—the rest are scattered through Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, mostly in the Virunga volcanoes thirty miles south, where those countries and Uganda meet.
Sometimes called the Switzerland of Africa for its 8,500-foot inclines, Bwindi owes its great biodiversity both to elevation changes and to being one of the oldest forests on Earth, dating back at least twenty-five thousand years, before the last Ice Age. It wasn’t until the latter part of the twentieth century that biologists knew that the apes raiding surrounding settlers’ fields were, in fact, rare mountain gorillas.
The gorillas might have claimed the opposite: they were the ones who’d been raided. Once, this cool forest and the Virungas’ skirts formed an unbroken rainforest canopy along the Albertine Rift, a western branch of Africa’s Rift Valley that forms the Uganda-Rwanda-Congo border. The sole human presence was forest-dwelling Batwa pygmies, who hunted bush pigs and duiker and gathered wild honey, coexisting peacefully with their primate cousins.
But over the past few centuries, Bantu farmers, who cut and burned forests for fields, kept coming. The jungle that filled the Rift was chopped into three discrete fragments, their gorilla populations isolated from each other. Later, when British colonials introduced tea as a cash crop, the fragments kept shrinking as dark green tea rows advanced. Gladys Kalema first saw Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in the early 1990s, when confirmation of mountain gorilla presence led Uganda’s government to elevate it to national park status. By then, Bwindi resembled a shaggy green toupee plopped atop fields of tea, cassava, banana, millet, maize, sorghum, and pink potato flowers that smacked hard against the forest’s edge.