They Shall Begin Again

by Giacomo Papi

  Adriano wanted to escort them all the way out, one by one. The first one to leave was Amiatello. His eyes were teary. His son was with him, a man of sixty in a pink shirt and pointy loafers who cut his way furiously through the thick crowd. People chattered, not caring if the living dead man could hear them.

  “He looks normal enough.”

  “He looks a bit sad.”

  “They’re never happy.”

  Adriano shook Amatiello and his son’s hands and watched as they climbed into the car that was waiting for them. He shut the passenger door and walked back into the hospital. They looked at him to see if his contact with the reborn had left some sort of visible trace. He passed through the tangle of bodies, and noticed how the crowd wasn’t made up of complete individuals, but of limbs, shoulders, abdomens and calves. He remembered how he had picked up a branch from a linden tree a few days earlier. He had gotten out of the car, bent down, picked it up and tossed it to the side, but he had felt like he was gripping a sort of petrified eel, twisted and dark, something dense and hard, absolute and alone. He looked through the branches, splayed out against the sky like dark fingers. The bustling of incoming visitors kept on behind him.

  Michelangelo Lopez was next. He had no bags. Standing next to him were Traccanella, the man from the hospital receiving desk, and Rosaria, who had managed to convince Don Lucio and her husband, after a furious fight, that she needed to live her life without them, on her own. She was sad to say goodbye to her children, but she wanted her new life to be like this. She would take care of Michelangelo. She felt he needed protection. The physician, the woman and the boy walked to the gate.

  Teenage girls stared screaming as soon as they caught sight of the boy. Rosaria walked ahead while Adriano stood by Michelangelo’s side. As soon as they got a little bit closer, pairs of hands jutted out of the crowd. They wanted to touch him, photograph him, have him sign diaries, but he didn’t understand the world as it had become. He looked around, fearful and in a daze, at the faces of those around him. He was in the spotlight. He was famous. A taxi was waiting for them. The moment to say goodbye had come. They embraced. Adriano watched them be driven away.

  Silence fell. Serafino Currò walked out. People took pictures with their cellphones, cameras were rolling, no one wanted to miss seeing the first reborn man. He walked slowly, carrying a suitcase that his son had packed for him on the night he had returned, now almost two months ago. The crowd made way for him, without bothering him. A little girl of about six held her mother’s hand, pointed at him, and stared. His movements suggested a weightless stability. It was time for him to leave. Three nurses cried. Adriano watched from afar. They had already said their goodbyes earlier.

  Serafino had knocked and entered. They didn’t say anything to each other and for almost an entire minute they were silent. Then the old man scratched his cheek and unkempt beard and leaned across the desk.

  “I believe you did well, Dottore.”

  “In doing what, Professore?”

  “In refusing to do it.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  He looked at him seriously.

  “We didn’t choose to live, Dottore. We didn’t fill out a questionnaire, we didn’t sign contracts, and we didn’t ask to come back to life. We are just alive. We exist, just like you, like everyone. We’re identical. We’re men. You did well in not doing what they asked you to do to that boy.”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “Getting rid of a dead man might seem different from killing a living one. Men rely on all of language’s nuances to protect themselves, to not feel guilty.”

  “Professore, how did you find out?”

  “It doesn’t matter. But if you had done it, if you had killed that boy, and you well could have, anyone in your place could have, it would have been easy to justify. But it would have destroyed the essential bond.”

  “What bond?”

  “Have you never heard of the legend of three dead men and the three living men?”

  “No, I don’t think I have.”

  “It was a popular story in thirteenth century Europe. The return of the dead is an ancient fear. Hollywood didn’t invent zombies. It’s a trope. Three young hunters find three skeletons covered in rags and devoured by maggots. It’s an image that has been used in at least five poems and a handful of paintings. At first the dead are lying down, static, passive, but then, beginning in the fifteenth century, they become animate and rise up in order to haunt the living and to pierce them with their arrows. The next time you happen to be in a church, remember this and you might see it.”

  “I’ll remember it. But why are you telling me all of this?”

  “Because the message is always the same. The dead carry this message to the living. There are thousands of variations of it. You can see it as an epitaph on many tombs, both in Latin and in vernacular. “Sum quod iris; quod es ipse fui, Itel con tu es itel fui et tel seras comme ge sui.” Am I boring you?”

  “If you don’t translate it for me I won’t understand.”

  “I was what you are. You will be what I am.” Look around you, Dottore. Thanks to the bond between the living and the dead, and thanks to our awareness that existence is a part of the human experience, however staggered in time it may be, we are human beings. The world was built by men who are now dead; it belongs to them more than it belongs to those of us who are living. The words with which we think and describe our feelings to others, the landscapes and the cities, the roads, our homes, these are all fruit of the labor of those who are not with us any more. Reality is the fruit of the labor of dust. We live on top of a pile of stones put together by the deeds of people who are now gone. The land that we walk on is scattered with bones.”

  “Thanks for the lecture, Professore.”

  “Your wife understands these things. She knows them.”

  “Maria is not my wife.”

  “What difference does that make? She knows them anyway.”

  “When did you talk to her?”

  “When she came to visit me, the time you weren’t here. She didn’t tell you?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Then you must excuse me. I’ve made a gaffe.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not jealous. What will you do now?”

  “I think the only thing for me to do now is to go back to my son. I imagine he won’t be pleased, but perhaps with time he will get used to having me around again.”

  “I called him this morning. I felt it necessary to warn him you were coming back.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He sounded frightened, but it could have been the suddenness. You will find harmony together.”

  The old man sighed and stood up on his skinny legs. His flexibility was outstanding. He took a piece of folded graph paper out of his pocket on which he had jotted down his address.

  “I would be grateful to you if you gave this to your wife. In any event, it might come in handy.”

  “I most certainly will, Professore. Thank you.”

  “Good luck, Dottore Karaianni. Don’t work too hard. Time never comes back, believe me, even if we end up living forever. By the way, have you found out the sex of the baby yet?”

  A few days later he found out. The gynecologist rubbed a cold, clear gel on Maria’s stomach and placed something that looked like a bar-code reader on it. The speakers let out a frizzing sound, like something slithering and scratching in its own liquid, and inside that sound he could hear a more rhythmic one, the echo of a furious heartbeat, accentuated and primordial: the beat of a newborn, the beat of a reborn. Adriano had heard it many times in the last few months. He had listened to it, recorded it, and studied it to the point of dreaming it. Then, a little being appeared on the screen, it had legs and hands, a mouth, but then the images floated and disappeared. The gynecologist pressed the instrument to her stomach once more and the fetus reappeared, showing its gender, bouncing in its waters.

  “It
’s a girl.”

  She pointed to a spot on the monitor.

  “Yes, yes look, it’s a girl.”

  Maria burst out in laughter.

  “Looks more like a frog to me, look at those flexible bones.”

  Adriano couldn’t take his eyes off it. The being was floating. What did it feel? It found itself in the place where nothing has begun, and everything had yet to become. It was nothing now, just imagine it growing into a little girl. How do things originate? The beginning is not a matchstick being struck in the darkness, or a stain of light, crashing into the colors of the iris, or a small white spot containing everything already.

  The baby girl slept inside her own slumber; the feelings she would come to experience were agitated and faint, like in a dream. Adriano felt like that in cemeteries. The overwhelming feeling of immensity—of voices heard, of faces observed, of words said and unsaid by those who no longer are living. It was slumber, but it resembled the buried emotions of the dead.

  They left the office in a daze. They decided to go shopping to take their mind off of the experience. A couple was bickering in the parking lot. A man was pushing an overflowing shopping cart, a little boy clung to the front, and a smaller girl sat inside. Another child, crying, sat in a stroller that was being pushed by his mother.

  Maria touched Adriano’s arm.

  “Promise me that we’ll never end up like that. I don’t want to become a family, me and you.”

  “I will do everything I can, but technically speaking, two people who live together and have a child constitute a family.”

  “What should we do, then?”

  “Let’s pretend like nothing ever happened. Maybe people won’t notice.”

  The supermarket was bustling with people crowding over goods and items. Maria and Adriano bought just what they needed, paid and fled. There was traffic outside. The streets were swarming with people and vehicles. The trees had lost their flowers and, even though it was only May, the sidewalks were scattered with fallen leaves. Many people believed that the rebirths would pick up where they left off, and this time they would happen more rapidly.

  Stories and ridiculous legends sprouted. The most recent one was that a naked old man appeared in front of the Swiss guards in Saint Peter’s Square, claiming to be Pope Sixtus V. People at sea were terrified. Fishermen reported seeing floating carcasses of men, women, and small children. No one could identify them or tell if they were shipwrecked or reborn. A fishing boat had saved a young boy who clung to a tuna net. He couldn’t remember anything. He just remembered that freezing, dark water, seeing the moon and beginning to swim. The sea spat up drowned men who floated to the water’s surface.

  They stopped at a red light. The car radio spoke of an increase in suicides. A thirty-year-old woman in Germany had overdosed on heroine because she didn’t want to grow old. She froze her body in the prime of her beauty, instead of waiting for it to decay, so that she could be reborn young and attractive as she was at the moment of her death. This was the final frontier of plastic surgery.

  Eighteen

  Umberto Currò had his own reasons for killing himself. He jumped out of the window one morning in late June while his father was out shopping for groceries. When Serafino got back to the house, he noticed people crowding around the front door. He approached them. On the floor he saw a white linen sheet, too small for the body it was covering. He saw a bare foot. He shut his eyes. When he opened them again the body was still there. No one dared get any closer. They watched as he crouched down and pulled the sheet back, placed his thin fingers on his son’s eyelids and closed them.

  The funeral took place three days later. There were ten people from the neighborhood and they were mostly elderly. The only people who came from the hospital were Adriano and Maria. No one else.

  Umberto lay in his coffin with his hands clasped tightly, fingers interlaced. He would never unclench them again. His face was human, but he looked like some thing. A rock. He was calm. He was white. He was old. He wasn’t frightening. He went back to being lifeless. His body was its own casket.

  Inside the church, Serafino sat by himself in the first row. The rebirths made the sins committed by suicides especially venial, and the Catholic religion, albeit unofficially, readmitted them. The coffin was minuscule, a shoe box. Even the priest was small and decrepit. He started to recite a passage from the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans.

  “‘Know you not that all we, who are baptized in Christ Jesus, are baptized in his death? For we are buried together with him by baptism into death; that as Christ is risen from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in newness of life.’”

  The accouterments of Christianity were being shattered to smithereens, but the scriptures continued to be a solid resource.

  By the time the procession made its way to the cemetery, the sun had come out. There were four vehicles, including the hearse. A ditch had been dug and it was almost entirely filled with caskets. It looked like a trench. Nine people lined up at the mouth of the ditch, and sprinkled dirt over the tenth coffin, which belonged to Umberto Currò. It was lowered down by a yellow crane. The priest recited the final prayer.

  “‘Remember our brothers and sisters who have gone to rest in the hope of rising again; Bring them and all the departed into the light of your presence.’”

  The priest then uttered a few words. He maintained that the word for “love” derived from the Greek, and that it shared the same root with the word for “death,” but with the alpha privative.

  “A-mors means without death, but love has the power to overcome death, to let us live in the everlasting light of God.”

  Serafino turned to Maria and Adriano and scoffed.

  “This is absolute nonsense. I read about it on the internet.”

  Dirt and pebbles bounced off the bier. The wood made an ordinary sound. Serafino wore a coat although the sun was out. He started to walk away, and the yellow tractor crane covered everything with dirt.

  Adriano and Maria drove him home. Looking at him through the rearview mirror, he seemed even older. When they got there he asked them to come upstairs. He didn’t want to be alone. The apartment was even messier than Adriano remembered it. The air was stuffy. No one had opened the windows in months. Boxes of canned food and water bottles lay on every shelf. Maria couldn’t understand. Serafino explained that his son, ever since Serafino had died, had been obsessively afraid of famine and shortage, and kept an immense food supply in the cellar.

  “He’d always been sensible, even as a child.”

  The old man went to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. He gulped it down, revealing a sharp Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down with every swallow. Maria thought of a bird without plumage. She got closer to him. Serafino opened a cupboard and pointed to a coffee pot. They shared an intimacy that was natural and obvious. The night before, Adriano had asked her why she hadn’t told him about her visit with Serafino in the hospital. Maria just answered: “I liked sharing a secret with him.”

  The old man filled the coffee pot with water and instinctively tapped his fingers over the filter, and then very meticulously filled the filter with teaspoons of rich, brown coffee, muttering to himself under his breath. That was his way of thinking things through.

  “There comes a time in life when children become strangers. We think that they are the ones to pull away. At a certain point you realize that the memory of your son or daughter does not correspond in any way with the adult that is standing in front of you. It hurts because in that moment you feel that everything is vanishing. To give life is also to give death. Letting someone be born is also letting someone die. It means making him mortal. A-mors, what foolishness. Even love dies. It’s the weakest of them all. It wins battles but loses wars. Ultimately, love is what should die.”

  Nineteen

  A girl crouched down in the back of the elevator, naked. Dirty with grime and sweat, she had her knees under her chin and her hands ov
er her ears, as if the noise of the machinery were terrifying. Her blonde hair was pasty with dust and mud. She looked like a wild beast, trembling. Medioli was petrified.

  “And where does this one come from?”

  Cautiously, Adriano took a step towards her. The girl made a motion to flee but froze. He placed his hand on her forearm, lightly. She was very close to him now. Frighteningly beautiful.

  “Are you ok?”

  She did not answer. She might be deaf-mute.

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  The young girl jerked away. She moved to get up. She was tiny but she was perfect. He saw her breasts, her stomach, her sex. She started to scratch her right thigh violently, as if she were being bitten by a swarm of fleas. She dug her nails so deep into her skin she was almost bleeding. He noticed her hands were unattractive and manly. He took a step back, outside the elevator. The girl followed him. Maybe she was starting to trust him. In order not to scare her again, Adriano tried speaking to her. He looked at Medioli, whose mouth was still ajar. Another wave must be coming. Where did this beautiful girl come from?

  “We need to find out her name.”

  At the sound of that word, the girl squeezed Adriano’s index finger.

  “Nomen?”

  Adriano tried making eye contact with Medioli.

  “Yes, your name … Nomen …”

  She opened her beautiful lips and revealed her pink gums. She let out a husky voice from her throat.

  “Mihi nomen Rufina est.”

  Adriano racked his brain, trying to remember high school days. Four more words came to the surface.

  “Quid nomen tibi est?”

  The girl burst out in laughter, someone understood her and answered.

  “Mihi nomen Rufina est.”

  Her name was Rufina.