The deformation was indeed grotesque. Both brothers had a fully developed head and upper body, but merged under the shoulder blades and were conjoined at the spine from the sacrum to the coccyx. While Antonio had a fully formed body—exceptionally formed, some women claimed—Carl’s chest was narrow and bulged steeply. His head sat neckless on the torso; the lower jaw was fused with the sternum, which lent his posture a servile and simultaneously rebellious quality and his voice a strained, asthmatic timbre. His small pelvis stuck out at a right angle over Antonio’s backside and formed a baggy hollow of skin that was closed by the rudimentary little legs and oversized feet, which were reminiscent of the flippers of seals, when he bent them in an embryo-like fashion. Behind it the surgeons had created an artificial passage where Carl’s only half-formed digestive tract now ran into that of Antonio. Only in that way could the twin survive. On the other hand, despite state-of-the-art medical technology, the “backpack” could not simply be removed from Antonio, because the nerve pathways of both bodies intersected in the lower area—which resulted in strange physical as well as psychic reactions.
On top of that, they needed each other in yet another way. What would the melancholy, clumsy, somewhat retarded Antonio have done without his “backpack” full of intelligence, wit, spirit, and imagination? What would Carl be without Antonio, who sustained him with his healthy appetite and his robust body, which he battened on and lived off like an exotic epiphyte?
There were women who were sexually attracted to the monstrous physique, but it required some skillfulness—and Carl’s help getting the shared body to the necessary blood alcohol level—to bring Antonio out of his apathy, stimulate him, and arouse his dull libido. While Antonio ultimately toiled away silently and unflaggingly, so the stories went, Carl on his back screamed like an excited chimpanzee; he threw his head back and forth so violently that the saliva sprayed from his lips, and writhed as if he wanted to break free from his twin. And when Antonio, grunting, finally climaxed, Carl’s lower body had turned into a swollen mass that looked like the butt of a baboon, and a shape the length of a finger, purple and thin, jutted from his loins.
CarlAntonio lived above all off being a monster; some dottori at the Policlinico on Piazza Sassari lived off it as well—and probably better. On the side, the two brothers ran errands for the botanical institute of the university.
CarlAntonio. Back then they were still alive. They had just turned twenty, if I remember correctly. But shortly thereafter, it happened. The Hobbits ambushed them, those racists in their gray loden jackets and lederhosen and pointy felt hats on which they stuck feathers of dead birds, those self-proclaimed guardians of the genetic inheritance and preservers of the purity of the Aryan race.
Carl was still alive when they were found—for he had his own heart and his own lungs. They had used a knife. Hobbits always use knives, hunting knives or butcher knives, which they grandiosely call “swords.” They had slit open Antonio’s belly and had not forgotten to mutilate him; they had blinded him and hacked his face to pieces, as they always do, because they cannot tolerate a subhuman—a nonhuman—having a human face.
Carl made a detailed statement, but the police wouldn’t do anything, we were all sure about that. You could tell by the officers’ faces; they were no different from the Hobbits, sympathizers from the bottom of their hearts—their uniforms couldn’t fool us. Carl had not seen much, had only felt the terrible pain. His voice was weak and toneless. It was as if his brother’s mind had escaped into him at the moment of horror, seeking refuge in his head, with all its dullness and lethargy. And gradually, death too came creeping over and nested in his breast and grew into a suffocating, dark weight. But it took hours before it crushed him. The end came with a desperate rearing up, as if he still wanted to break free of his brother’s cooling body after all, and with rattling breath, he flailed around.
Just when we all believed that the worst was over, he asked for a mirror so that he could see his twin’s face one more time. The ward doctor fulfilled his request. He had two mirrors brought over and positioned in such a way that his wish was granted. Carl wept when he saw the maimed face of his brother. Fifteen minutes later he too was dead.
* * *
I UNFOLDED MY battered flexomon, smoothed it out and pressed it to the wall, then inserted the TV modem into my ICom until it clicked into place. Luigi’s input tongue darted out, I put the papal chip on it, and Luigi swallowed it like a frog swallowing a fly. The golden keys on a blue background appeared on the flexomon.
“You are Domenica Ligrina,” said a pleasant male voice. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Bertolino Falcotti from the Istituto Pontificale della Rinascita della Creazione di Dio, San Francesco. Please wait a moment.”
The signal on the monitor switched into IA-mode.
“Would you like visual contact?”
“Yes, please,” I replied. “One moment.”
I pinned the camera to the middle of the flexomon. A red dot appeared on the upper edge of the monitor, immediately followed by another. The papal emblem disappeared, and I was looking into a study, saw a desk with piles of books and periodicals, between them a thick, burning candle.
“I’m glad that you are still interested in working together, Signorina Ligrina.”
The man sitting behind the desk nodded amiably to me. He was dressed casually, wore a black button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled up above the elbows. In his early forties, by my estimation, though the slightly graying hair on the sides made him appear older. His glasses flashed. Dimples formed in his cheeks when he smiled. That lent him a certain charm. He could have been an assistant at the university. In any case, he did not look like the clergymen I’d dealt with previously. Behind him, on the whitewashed wall, I spotted an icon, its gold shining out of the gloom.
“First, if you permit me, I would like to ask you a few personal questions.” He was quiet and well spoken. “Beforehand, I must alert you to the fact that this conversation is being recorded. Do you agree nonetheless to answer questions about yourself?”
I shrugged. “To whom will the recording be made accessible, Signore Falcotti?”
“Only the committee that decides on your application.”
“And who are they?”
“Unfortunately, I cannot answer that question.”
“You are not permitted to answer it.”
He raised his hands in a conciliatory fashion. “For me there’s no difference.”
“All right, I agree.”
He nodded and brushed back his short-cropped hair with his fingertips; fleetingly he touched a slight unevenness at his left temple. An implant? He had a thin, well-proportioned, almost boyishly handsome face. The glasses gave him an aloof quality, and perhaps he wore them for that very reason.
“I don’t need to tell you that, at the end of our conversation, both interactive data carriers are ROM. That gives them the character of a document that is not accessible to unauthorized individuals without your express approval.”
“With the exception of the committee.”
“You have already agreed to that.”
“That’s correct.”
“But enough with the formalities.” He opened a file. A window popped up on my flexomon, and the image of my father appeared. The picture must have been taken years before his death. A dark blue shirt, a white single-breasted jacket. His eyes flashed boldly from under the brim of his panama hat.
“Authorized material from the registration authorities,” explained Falcotti. I suddenly realized that I was smiling at the photo on the monitor, and I immediately pulled myself together.
“Your father’s name is Giacomo?”
“No—his name was Jacopo! He is no longer alive.”
Falcotti looked up and scrutinized me. Had there been too much intensity in my voice? Or grief? Why should I have concealed it? Even if it was more than ten years earlier. I had loved him from the time I was a small child. And later I could not be angry with h
im when I heard that he had had frequent affairs. He was often on the go and as a textile sales representative constantly came into contact with beautiful women—models, owners of boutiques. On the contrary, I had been proud of him. He was … a man of the world. Good-looking, always elegantly dressed. He had to be. And he always made jokes that Mother either didn’t get or didn’t want to get, because she was much too sober and humorless to appreciate our silliness. I was always delighted when he winked at me conspiratorially from under the brim of his panama hat, and I would double up with laughter. I enjoyed when he took me out, to the holos, to eat ice cream or visit a museum. Then I felt like one of his “hussies,” as Mother called them with a venomous look and a shrill voice, although I had no idea what she meant by that. Women liked him, and he liked them. I could not grasp why Mama wept so often.
“He died in an accident?”
“He died in the attack on the Naples–Rome express near Mondragone in September 2039, which took so many lives.”
“I remember. It was terrible.”
All the travelers from the Mezzogiorno who resided south of the Gaeta-Termoli line and had no special permission to travel north had been refused tickets and reservations in Naples and had been forcibly prevented from getting to the platforms where the trains to Rome departed. The city was seething with unrest, and the Stazione Centrale resembled a besieged fortress. Special police units cracked down hard on the demonstrators and hermetically sealed off the train station. The Neapolitans were outraged at being equated with the Moros. Under strict security measures, the Naples–Rome express finally rolled out of the station. Half an hour later, shortly after Falciano-Mondragone, an explosive charge was detonated in the first car of the fully occupied high-speed train as it entered a tunnel. It was never possible to determine how many people died in the inferno, for despite all the security there had been many passengers on board who had no reservation. The official statements put the number of dead at 412, but according to estimates, more than 500 people must have lost their lives in the attack. No corpses were found, only a compressed mass of steel, aluminum, charred plastic, and protein that had agglomerated into a hard plug in the tunnel tube. It took weeks of work to gouge it out. That same year the terror bombings began against authorities and politicians in Rome, but the regime remained firm. It stuck to a plan envisaging a sort of tiered system of dams against immigration from the south to the north to stem the tide of people from the Mezzogiorno. Meanwhile the rivers of refugees had long flowed past it along the coasts.
“What was your father’s occupation?”
“He was a sales representative for textiles. In the end, mainly for holotextiles produced by a Korean company, which were really in fashion in those days.”
Falcotti smiled to himself. So he was familiar with those garish, lewd, glitter miniskirts with the sewed-in chips, which came out in the early thirties and were an absolute hit: shameless HoloClips, which could be activated with a skilled twitch of the hip, which conjured away the material for seconds and were programmed with all manner of intimate scenes, from the harmless groping of a soft-core porno about fellatio to hard-core penetration—and that in bright metallic and vivid colors.
Mother made sure that Father never took them out of his sample cases at home, because she loathed that “disgusting stuff” from the depths of her soul. “We live off it,” Father had replied, shrugging. “It’s not simple today, believe me.”
“Your mother is still alive?” asked Falcotti.
An image of my mother appeared. A pretty woman, who had probably been really sexy in her youth before grief and disappointment had consumed her charm. A pale face that had become a bit doughy with time. The pallor was accentuated by her curly black hair, which she wore pinned up in the back in an old-fashioned way and from which one or two corkscrew curls always hung down on the side. Oh yes, her slightly receding chin, the constantly mournful pursed lips, the sad, always somewhat reproachful look, the tiny bite of bitterness in the left corner of her mouth, which had deepened with the years … Would I look like that one day, I wondered involuntarily. The resemblance was unmistakable, but I had my father’s eyes—and his chin too!
Falcotti observed me. I wrinkled my forehead and sighed. “Yes. She moved to Genoa a few years ago, to live with her mother when my grandfather died.”
Grandfather! How distant were the times when I got to spend my vacation with him? He had been such a lovable man, who had kept his sense of humor despite everything. Back then he seemed ancient to me, although he was not yet sixty, and he walked laboriously on crutches. A few thugs from the Mafia had mauled him when he still had his café on Piazza Caricamento near the Palazzo San Giorgio on the harbor. He had refused to pay them protection money, because he already had a contract with the Moros. The Mafiosi were going all out at the time—the south was increasingly slipping away from them, and so they were attempting to gain the upper hand in the north by force. A hopeless undertaking, at least in Genoa, for the city had been firmly under the control of the Africans for more than sixty years.
The Moros were generous: They compensated him for the injuries and paid for the operations. I did not grasp at the time what getting shot in the knees meant. My grandfather never uttered a word about the pain inflicted on him by this barbaric injury and he would not have tolerated any pity, but he enjoyed my affection. I loved him—most of all his big fleshy ears, which I touched with a mixture of shyness and admiration when he let me. And I loved going grocery shopping with him. I sat on his lap and we whirred in the wheelchair down the road and across the big parking lot to the supermarket.
With that memory, my nose filled with the scent of freshly brewed coffee that emanated from his clothes because he sat behind the counter all day operating the espresso machine, removing the steaming metal filter, knocking it out on the edge of an old coffee-soaked wooden drawer, and filling it carefully with freshly ground coffee.
With the compensation from the Moros he had been able to buy a small terrace café overlooking the city, along with the house attached to it. It was on a quiet street, which had lost its significance due to the construction of the highway. My mother moved there after Father’s death, because it had become too dangerous in Frascati for a single mother with an adolescent daughter. Actually, that gave her a pretext to help her mother with the household chores and Grandfather in the café, for they could no longer manage on their own.
The summers became more overpowering with each year. Day after day you saw the hopeless deployment of fire-extinguishing planes, of fire brigades and volunteers. Burning forests on Sardinia, Corsica, and Corfu. Seas of flames on the Peloponnese and the Balkans, ash-clouded sky and people fleeing. Helicopters with food and drinking water in areas surrounded by fires.
The hills above Genoa were magnificent. Most mornings, a breeze wafted up from the sea and alleviated the heat, while it took your breath away in the city below. In the late afternoon, the wind from the hills stirred, filling the evening with the fragrance of herbs and cool pine needles. We all had our hands full. Most of the time, the terrace was already full of guests at ten in the morning—excursionists from the cities on the coast—and after sunset all those craving a breath of air and a cool drink. Business was good.
When the last guests had left and the weather permitted it, I pushed Grandfather out onto the terrace in his wheelchair and he showed me the stars.
“You have to come visit us sometime over Christmas vacation, Domenica, then we could look into the galaxy. The Sagittarius Arm is visible then, brimming with stars. Now, in summer, only a few neighbors can be seen, which belong to the Orion Arm like us: Vega, Deneb, Antares, Altair, Arcturus, and Spica, and the brightest over there in the Perseus Arm. Beyond that begins the great void,” he told me enthusiastically.
He knew all the strange-sounding names of the stars, which the Arabs had given them: Sirah, Algorab, Algenib, Shedir, Albireo, Achernar, Alamak, Sadalmelik, Merak, Alcyone, Dubhe, Zubeneschamali, Zubenelgenubi,
Zubenelakrab, Ras Alhague, Aldebaran, Alderamin, Hadar, Enif, Furud, Sulafat, Sadalsuud—names as smooth and sparkling as polished gemstones.
“Those people lived under a close sky,” Grandfather explained. “They needed only to look up when they camped at night in the desert.”
And I pictured a caravan camp on a moonless night. The snorting of the camels somewhere in the darkness, the last tea, heavily sweetened and with a few sprigs of fresh mint in the glass, had long since been finished, the embers of the fire had been consumed, the sand was cool, the sky had spread out its treasures.
Yes, I owed the sky to Grandfather. He had made it accessible to me, and my interest in it had never died. On starry nights I could sit outside for hours and go on journeys with my eyes, tens of thousands of light-years away through the depths of the universe, which remain closed to most, because no one handed them the key to this treasure chest.
Vacation in Genoa. All that was now fifteen years in the past. Grandfather was long dead. What might it look like there today?
“Are you in contact with her?” asked Falcotti.
“Sorry?”
The Cusanus Game Page 4