by Giacomo Papi
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They Shall Begin Again
Giacomo Papi
Translated from Italian by Clarissa Ghelli and Oonagh Stransky
Einaudi
Contents
Preface
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
About the Author
“All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again.”
—Sir Thomas Browne, The Garden of Cyrus, 1658
The first ones swam back on the night of the second day. They came in swarms during the most desolate of hours, dipping into the waters of the sleepy ports and nameless piers, setting out from the anonymous shores of sludge and weeds forgotten on dry land, swimming slowly in the middle of the lagoon, illuminated and darkened intermittently by the moon and clouds, emerging from the sea like crabs or frogs, climbing up on poles, on docked boats, on stairs cut into stone, and they invaded the islands.
For many hours no one saw them.
Some of them had been reborn in the city. Suddenly there they were: under a portico, in a courtyard, in the foyer of a building, crouched down naked in a corner, or else running down the street, directed who knows where.
Electricity and phone lines went down more and more frequently.
Masses of people determined to get somewhere at any cost, eager to escape, poured into stations and airports around the world, but trains, airplanes and ferries were leaving ever more rarely.
It was happening everywhere. The third wave was enormous. Space was running out. Soon there wouldn’t be enough food and water.
One
On the evening that Death made its return, the trees that lined the road that Adriano Karaianni took every day to get to work suddenly blossomed with flowers. He hadn’t noticed them earlier that morning because the branches had still been bare, and it was also strange because spring usually arrives at night when everyone is sleeping. Winter was coming to an end. Green sprung forth, cars drove past and the brisk air that burst indoors from outside suddenly seemed brand new. He shivered. He had always been afraid of beginnings.
The day before, during the first ultrasound, he had felt that same disquiet. Maria was fifteen weeks pregnant but the baby’s heart was already beating furiously. On the monitor he saw what looked like a sleeping tadpole. Then the gynecologist turned up the volume and the crackling noise that came from the speakers was so deafening it made him wonder how a heart not even a millimeter in size could be so alive.
At the end of the day, traffic was always a tangle of metal creatures and lights. Just before removing his doctor’s coat, Maria called and reminded him to pick up milk on his way home. Though it was already late, the supermarket might still be open. As he was driving, he looked at himself in the rearview mirror. He was going grey. He turned thirty-eight a month ago. He was a giant at two meters tall and he weighed a ton. That’s how his child would see him. He switched on the car radio. Someone behind him honked. He drove on. He saw the neon sign at the end of the street, to his left, beyond the roundabout. The lights in the supermarket were on. He found a free parking spot right in front and was glad not to have to park underground. He hurried through the arches, past the shopping carts and in through the entrance. A man in a suit and tie, two guards, and a cashier in uniform were all standing by a register. They turned to look at him.
“Are you still open? I only need one thing, I’ll be quick.”
“Stay right there so we can block him from leaving.”
“Block whom?”
“There’s a naked old man running wild around the store. He’s jumping around like a madman.”
“What do you mean? Naked? I’m a doctor, maybe he’s sick.”
A violent crashing sound came from the back of the store. Something heavy had fallen over. The man in the suit and tie pointed with his left hand towards the meats and cheese counter. Adriano noticed that a segment of the man’s ring finger was missing.
“There he is! I saw him! He’s back there.”
One of the guards sprinted forward. The others followed. Adriano heard muffled, hurried footsteps.
That was when Adriano first laid eyes on the man. He stood there without moving, just five meters away, naked. His body was the old and consumed body of a thin, aged man, pale like a birch tree in winter. He wore the frightened expression of someone who had been catapulted into another universe. The two men looked at each other. He stared right back at Adriano, perplexed and curious but at the same time eager to flee. The guard came running up to them from the end of the aisle, the keys on his keychain clanking against his thigh. He stopped.
Adriano started to say something. The old man’s muscles grew tense. He hunched down, bent his legs and leaped forward and to the left like a monkey, pivoting on his right foot, and hoisting himself over the wall separating him from the second aisle. His hands grabbed the top shelf and other leg kicked around searching for support to climb over.
“He’s getting away!”
The guard grabbed onto the old man’s legs with all his weight. Adriano yelled.
“What are you doing? You’re hurting him!”
The second guard did the same thing as the first guard and tried to pull the old man down.
“I’ve got him! Help me!”
“Let go of the shelf! Let go!”
The old man let out a sharp, feeble cry, like a large wounded insect. The manager and cashier came running. Adriano tried to talk sense into them, but no one wanted to hear it. The prisoner let go of the shelf and fell into the open arms of the first guard. His body looked like a frail carcass of an ox. The game was over. The manhunt had ended with the capture of a ridiculous prey. The cashier found a stool and dragged it up, motioning for the old man to take a seat.
“Sit down. Calm down. Behave.”
The old man obeyed. He lowered his head and then looked up at them and started to laugh quietly to himself, showing off an inflamed, toothless set of gums. He crossed his legs to hide his sex. His right temple looked swollen. He must have gotten hit during the struggle. Adriano approached him.
“Do you feel alright?”
“I’m fine, yes. But I feel warm.”
“I’m a doctor. May I have a look?”
It was just a bruise, but it was big, and given the man’s age and location of the lesion, he thought it best to have him checked out. The old man let Adriano examine him. He was almost completely bald, except for a few strands of hair that were incredibly long. His fingernails and toenails looked like they hadn’t been clipped in years.
“Do you know what your name is?”
“Serafino Currò.”
“And where do you live, Mr. Currò?”
&n
bsp; “Not far from here, across the street, number 33.”
“Hold still for just a little longer. I’m almost done. I want to look at your pupils and measure your pulse.”
The cashier stared at the old man out of both compassion and anger. The doctor looked in the man’s eyes: his irises were an indefinable opaque blue and he was having a hard time focusing. His pupils moved in horizontal micro-movements and his visual axes were not aligned. His heart rate was 180, highly abnormal for a man of his age. Adriano proceeded to examine the man’s skull but stopped, it was so hot it almost burned: his skin was swollen and the bones at the top of his head looked as if they hadn’t yet calcified.
The cashier interrupted the examination. “Why did you get undressed?”
“I felt hot, Signora.”
“Normal people don’t wander around naked.”
“I guess I felt hotter than normal people. Or maybe I’m not normal.”
The woman blushed. Adriano signaled to the manager that he wanted to talk to him in private. They walked off a bit.
“We have to call an ambulance.”
“But he seems fine. It’s probably just a case of arteriosclerosis. With this sudden change of weather, old people tend to go a bit mad with the heat. If you only knew what my mother-in-law does …”
“No, I don’t think that’s it, there’s something strange going on here. Something I’ve never seen before. He can’t focus his pupils and his heart rate is off the charts. He’s showing all the symptoms of cardiac arrest, he should be feeling ill, and yet he’s calm. His cranium is even stranger: two areas of it are soft, like a newborn baby’s that hasn’t calcified yet. It’s very strange: either he’s dead or he’s just been born.”
“I get it—we’re going to be here all night.”
“Call an ambulance, please, or I will.”
The manager shrugged. He pulled out his cell phone, plugged in his earpiece, and dialed the hospital’s emergency number. Adriano went back to join the others. The guards looked impatient, they wanted to go home. The woman, on the other hand, was fascinated and proudly handed the old man a bundle of clothes.
“He left these over by the frozen section. Get dressed, now, Mr. Serafino, and try and act like a normal person.”
The old man obeyed slowly.
“So, Dottore, am I going to die?”
“No, but I’d like you to get checked out right away. The ambulance is on its way and we’ll take you to the hospital where I work. It won’t take long. I’ll come with you.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d do me a favor first, if it’s no problem for you, and then you can join me at the hospital, if you really want to.”
“Of course, tell me.”
“I’d like my son to be notified. You can find him at number 33, ring the buzzer with the name ‘Currò,’ it’s stairwell A, sixth floor. It’s not far, only about 300 meters away.”
“You can call him yourself if you’d like.”
“He doesn’t own a telephone. He’s a little strange that way.”
When the ambulance arrived after about twenty minutes, the old man looked completely different. It was hard to imagine him pushing down shelves and climbing over aisles, completely naked. He refused to sit in a wheelchair and walked to the ambulance, leaning on one of the nurses, and dragging his feet. He looked like a normal, elderly man who had been struck with the first signs of an ending life. Adriano watched him climb into the ambulance like a docile, aged animal and then called Maria to tell her he was going to be home later than expected. A man had fallen ill at the supermarket and he had to take him to the hospital, he said. He told her to go to bed and that he would be home as soon as he could. There was something very strange going on, but he didn’t want to mention anything now.
Two
Adriano was on his way to the old man’s house when he realized he had forgotten to buy milk. Maria’s body was beginning to fill out. A revolution was taking place inside of her. The initial split of a tiny egg was followed by its breaking up into an infinite number of cells in an organized explosion. It’s incredible how all things, even the most extraordinary, seem normal when they happen. He once read that if humans continued to grow in volume at the rate that they grow from the moment of fertilization up to the first six months of pregnancy, at seventy years of age we’d be as large as planets. He imagined himself as round as Jupiter, bouncing around the hospital garden, and he laughed to himself. Two girls walked by. They, too, were laughing.
He took a deep breath and could taste the smells of the river flowing nearby. The cool air that filled his lungs did not belong to winter. He felt the seasons changing and the universe awakening. There’s a day that comes once a year, sometime at the beginning of spring, when women step out of their houses transformed into flowers or butterflies. Details, apparitions. An imminent rebirth. A patch of pink skin seen at a café, a beauty mark on a neck, women’s legs measuring the sidewalks like compasses.
He looked up. The moon hung in the sky between the houses like a white mirror. The same moon as always. The same moon as the one that belonged to the dinosaurs, the same moon that floated through the sky on the night the first heartbeat sounded, on the night when Man first fell in love. The moon accompanied the birth and death of men on Earth since the beginning of time; the moon was there when he had come into this world and when Maria was born, it was there when they first met and it would be there to witness the birth of their child. Oval, not full, a three-quarter face whose dark spots made a mask. There were deserts and mountains on the moon. As a child he often studied the map of the moon in the Atlas: the Sea of Crisis, of Nectar, of the Edge, of Cold, of Moisture, and of Clouds; the Lake of Dreams, the Ocean of Storms, the Bay of Dew and the Bay of Rainbows. The Island of Winds, the Straight Wall, the Peninsula of Insanities, the Marsh of Sleep. He asked himself who had come up with such marvelous names. He looked up again. It was still low, resting on a bed of clouds, and then piercing through them, violently, spinning its way between the clouds and the earth. He reached up to pull it closer, but the wind blew the clouds eastwards, and the moon slipped back into the sky. The first evening they met, Maria had turned to him with a look of wonder.
“Don’t you think it gets tired of spinning?”
“It only spins at nighttime. Maybe it has its fun during the day.”
“It must get bored, being there all the time.”
Maria seldom spoke, she was a woman of few words, and had a strong sense of what was right and wrong. She laughed and cried easily, though: she could burst into tears at the sight of an uprooted orange tree in the courtyard or find a pianist’s page-turner at a classical music concert irresistibly comical. Habits never made things lose their edge. She was so marvelously and luminously distant that she seemed forever present to him.
He came to a bend in the road. Number 33 was across the street. A large, decaying post-war building erected hastily during a time when neither making babies nor constructing buildings required much thought. The white glare of the streetlights did not hide the crumbling yellow walls. He studied the old fashioned buzzer, the kind that has multiple nameplates. There was a little of everything: last names from the South, Arabic and Spanish names, mysterious initials, acronyms, architects’ studios. “Currò Umberto” was in the middle of the bottom row. Adriano pressed the buzzer with his index finger and waited ten seconds. He tried again, but nothing happened. He pushed the door. It was open.
In the inner courtyard, blossoming hydrangeas grew near a makeshift chapel that housed a Virgin Mary. Weeds broke through the cracks of cement. No one was there. No lights were on. Staircase A was the first staircase on the left. A block of wood held the dark steel door with frosted glass open. Darkness inside. He could make out the red call button of the elevator. There was the smell of disinfectant and silence. He stepped in the elevator and pushed number 6, absentmindedly brushing his hand against the Braille.
On the sixth floor there were three apartments. The ground
was worn marble. The light bulb was out. He needed light to see the names on the doors so he opened the elevator again, but he couldn’t see any names. He rang the bells at random. After a second or two, he heard the slow ruffling of footsteps and locks being opened. A skinny elderly man of about ninety opened the door. The light from inside the apartment shone on him, and Adriano couldn’t see his face.
“Good evening, I apologize for bothering you at this time of night. My name is Adriano Karainni and I’m a doctor.”
The man looked at him with an astonished expression, as if he had just woken up or just finished crying. He didn’t utter a word and didn’t move.
“Does Mr. Serafino Currò live here?”
The old man stared at him without saying a word.
“Mr. Serafino has asked me to tell his son that he is being taken to the emergency room for a checkup.”
He heard the old man’s voice. He was whispering. He hadn’t noticed that the man’s lips were moving.
“Did something happen to him?” the old man asked, hastily and in a high pitched voice, almost as if he were wishing something had indeed happened to him.
“No, not exactly, don’t worry. Nothing serious. He just lost his calm at the supermarket across the way. I happened to be passing by and noticed a bruise on his right temple and, based on a quick assessment of his vital conditions, I thought it best to take him in for further examination. I repeat, it’s nothing serious but you know, it’s best to be cautious with a man of his age. Do you understand me?”
“Is he coming back tonight?”
“We’re not sure. Are you his brother?”
“No.”
The man stepped aside to let him in. The long corridor opened onto several dark rooms, all identical in size. The floor was made up of light-colored marble specked with blue and brown, with a thin border. The bookshelf in the hallway held all kinds of food: boxes of pasta, cans of beans, tins of tuna fish, jars of jam. A tower of stacked water jugs reached the ceiling. It smelled stuffy. Adriano had to slow down so as not to step on the other man’s heels. He heard the old man sigh deep, asthmatic breaths. Maybe he was anxious. The old man turned around to face him at the doorway at the end of the hall.