They Shall Begin Again

by Giacomo Papi

  Ari Gastel: Then in April the second wave came.

  Adriano Karaianni: There were 25 of them, more or less, right? Therefore by mid June there will be 625?

  Ari Gastel: Yes, but how much is 625 times 625?

  Adriano Karaianni: A lot. Almost 400 thousand.

  Ari Gastel: Exactly. In fact, they estimate that over 300 thousand have come back to life since it all started.

  Adriano Karaianni: I’m sorry, and how much is 300 thousand to the second power?

  Ari Gastel: That would make more or less the end of the world, my friend. 90 billion. More or less. But don’t worry. This won’t happen tomorrow. And you can comfort yourself with the thought that we’ll run out of dead people sooner or later.

  Maria opened the windows. It was nine in the morning. It had rained during the night, but not a lot, and Adriano was already out. She was agitated. The sky was charged with electricity because the storm hadn’t broken yet. Breakfast was waiting on the table. She took a sip of tea from the red mug. It made her think of her mother. She picked up the telephone.

  “Mom, hello. Yes, It’s Maria, how are you? Yes, Adriano, he’s all right, he’s going to the conference tomorrow … What do you mean, which one? The one that everyone is talking about … The conference … He needs to go, Mom, it’s for work … Never mind … Yes, yes, we’re well, we’re staying at the hospital these days … No, nothing’s happened. We’re living at the hospital now. It’s complicated, I don’t have time to tell you the whole story … Yes, you’re right, it will be safer for the baby … I want to see you, Mom. Why don’t you fly over? In six hours you’d be here … OK. I figured as much. But don’t start up again now. Dad, yes I know, of course, but you’re not old … Don’t say that … I’m sorry, Mom, but I just can’t. Fuck, I’m here, pregnant, alone, and you’re the one who’s crying! Does that seem right? Alright, OK, bye then, Mom. Be well.”

  She hung up the phone and angrily at the report that Adriano had left on the table. Almost all of the papers fell to the floor. She took hold of one that was still on the table and began tearing it to pieces, muttering words under her breath.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  She didn’t realize that someone had walked in and was observing her.

  “Am I interrupting you?”

  She turned around. Serafino stood at the threshold, leaning forward, his arms open.

  “Good morning, Maria. I brought you a present.”

  She was unable to answer. He came in, and handed her a bouquet of yellow daisies held together with some string. Maria blushed. He had picked them for her. She didn’t even thank him, she just emptied out Adriano’s jar of pens and placed the flowers in it. Pencils and markers rolled around on the floor.

  “What’s the matter, Maria?”

  She scoffed, dejected, and slumped into the chair.

  “Nothing, Serafino. Everyone is dead, and I’m alone.”

  The old man watched her with both affection and irony.

  “You know, when I was eighteen I fell in love with a girl. There was never anything between us. But it was love just the same. I think of her a lot and wish I could see her again.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I’m not quite sure. I think you need to think about it.”

  He shot her a sly glance, kissed her on the cheek and hopped around the room, like a dancer.

  “Do you want me to teach you how to tap dance?”

  “I would love to learn, Serafino, but I’d bounce all around the room with this fucking belly.”

  The waiter took the credit card and trudged off towards the cash register. Throughout their dinner Ettore Aloni and Massimo Interminelli didn’t look at the waiter once. They were too absorbed with their conversation and they spoke softly as not to be heard by other customers.

  “Can you believe it, Ettore?”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “If we don’t make a decision right away, it will all be over in a few months.”

  “Yes, but what can we do?”

  “There are only two possibilities. You know that as well as I do.”

  “What are they?”

  “It’s quite simple: them or us. We need to get rid of them one by one as soon as they reappear. Otherwise they will end up exterminating us.”

  “That seems a bit extreme.”

  “Extreme my ass, Ettore! Are you aware that there are organized groups of reborn individuals? They say that to put a stop to the demographic explosion the only solution is mass suicide or the sterilization of the living. They want to prevent us from reproducing. They’re sterile anyway. If we don’t do something before the new wave of the reborn, it will be too late.”

  “What?”

  “Every country has its own army, I believe, with no reborn in it, thank God.”

  “So, you’re proposing a mass extermination.”

  “Extermination? Fuck that, Ettore! These are all people who have already lived. They were born, lived their lives and then died! It seems fine to me.”

  “And what if they are born again one more time?”

  “Then we will eliminate them again.”

  “So your official proposal is mandatory manslaughter. That’s too much for me, I’m out.”

  “I will take note of that, Ettore. But I assure you that I will remain steadfast in my position throughout the conference.”

  “Are you leaving tomorrow?”

  “Yes, and on top of everything I have to take Karaianni with me. What does he have to do with anything? I’m here busting my ass for everyone, behind the scenes obviously, and now I have to babysit this so-called doctor.”

  “That wasn’t my decision.”

  “He didn’t even have the balls to do what we asked him to do to the boy, and now I have to be with him all the time. This is absurd.”

  Ettore Aloni scratched away at his last freckle with the nail of his thumb and shrugged. Interminelli stank.

  Carlo Medioli stared at her from the bed. Rufina ate another fig. It must have been her tenth. She had found a fig tree that afternoon in the garden of the hospital, and she picked them. Her mouth was dirty and she took off her clothes. It was evening but it was still unbearably hot. The air conditioning had been broken for over a week now. Medioli untied his robe, revealing a sweaty belly. He opened his mouth. The girl got closer and caressed his lips with a fig.

  “Nunc ede, Carle. Mange ora. Ficus Ruminalis est.”

  It was sweet. It melted in his mouth, between his teeth and his tongue.

  “Come closer, Rufina.”

  “Fack yum.”

  She sat at the foot of the bed with the bowl balancing on her naked thighs.

  “C’mon, don’t be mean. Be a good girl.”

  “Pro diva Rumina, Carle. Do this.”

  Medioli ate another one.

  “Nescis quod cupio.”

  “Huh? You’re crazy, little girl.”

  “Tu nesci quello che volio.”

  “You, on the other hand, you know what I want, right?”

  He tried getting hold of her hand, but she drew it back.

  “Tibi non fello ora.”

  “Please, I beg you, Rufina.”

  “No. Cupio fertilitatis prodigium, gravidata esse.”

  “Ew, disgusting! What the fuck are you doing! Put that stuff down.”

  She squashed a fig on his stomach and tried to spread it around, but Medioli grabbed her wrist.

  “And who the hell is this diva Rumina?”

  “Diva Rumina fertilitatem donat. Fici ruminales propitii sunt.”

  Carlo understood and burst out in laughter.

  “Are you telling me that you’re gorging on figs and you’re squashing them on me so that you can become pregnant? What bullshit! I have never heard such a load of crap.”

  He dragged her towards him with force. Rufina lay down without putting up a fight.

  “Verbos tuos non intellego. Vidi Maria. Gravida est.”

  She
opened her legs and Medioli climbed on top of her.

  “That’s it, good girl. Yes, yes, I will knock you up too, now. How about that?”

  Rufina let him do his thing, whispering a sort of litany to herself.

  “Culpa mea expiare non potest. Furui fame. Lactantem meum uterum recipit quem paulo ante effuderat.”

  She stared at the ceiling, knowing the man wouldn’t understand.

  Medioli finished quickly and collapsed on top of her with all his weight. Rufina caressed his bald head with her manly hands.

  Maria and Adriano were naked. The room was stuffy. He closed his eyes. She sighed.

  “This heat is hellish. Did you have to park the dragon outside our window again?”

  “There was no other spot, Maria.”

  “Please tell him to stop breathing into our room.”

  He was going to leave at dawn and she wanted to ask him to stay. In the middle of the desk, his open doctor’s bag looked like a gaping mouth. Maria got up. The light from the lamppost carved out her dark profile. That afternoon, speaking to Serafino, she realized that she was actually terrified.

  Adriano knew that the conference wasn’t going to solve anything, but he had to go. He could come back any time he wanted. And they made him believe that refusing to cooperate would only make things worse. They would no longer be protected and, as it was, the hospital was the safest place for them. He looked at her secretly, as she moved about the room, clumsy and beautiful, round as she was, heavy and defenseless.

  “It will be alright, Maria.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “It will only be four days.”

  “But lots of people have died already, Adriano. If there’s another wave, I’ll find a reborn in my bed.”

  “If they actually come back in waves, the next one will be in a month.”

  “You swore to me that you wouldn’t leave me.”

  “I know. But we need to hold on tight to this room. It’s better if I go.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you want me to stay?”

  “That’s a bullshit question. Fuck you, Adriano.”

  Twenty-five

  You could make out the hint of a cityscape on the horizon, past the dark lagoon, a light graphite sketch on a gray paper sky. Adriano Karaianni looked out the car window, the glass was being pounded by millions of raindrops, like millions of sperm racing each other. A wet fog hung in the air, turning the morning from black to white. For the entire duration of the ride to the conference, Massimo Interminelli talked on his cell phone headset, his left hand on the wheel, his right at the stick shift, never once stopping. Adriano studied him for five hours straight. He looked even thinner in profile.

  It stopped raining. The wipers on the windshield screeched like insects. They were stopped for several minutes in traffic, waiting to cross the bridge that would carry them into the city, itself a miraculous construction emerging from a messy archipelago of muddy islands. Other vehicles lined up in front of them—a tangled mix of taxis, small buses, and trucks. Beyond, there was a wall of army jeeps and rows of soldiers in wet military garb. It was the same scene in all ports in the area, on every pier, commercial or private, with every boat, ship or motorboat that wanted to head out to sea. It was that same slow, feverish gridlock of wartime. Airports, train stations and ports were cordoned off, patrolled day and night by armed service men. Access was only by car or bus, and with proof of ID. The worldwide conference on rebirth was about to take place. The living would write the future in absence of the dead. People had been talking for weeks about how organized groups of reborn men and women were planning demonstrations and infiltrations.

  After a long debate, the most isolated and decaying city on the planet was chosen as the location for the conference; a city that was either sinking into sludge or disappearing into the fog, a city that attracted millions of tourists annually on account of its fragile agony. The summit that would see the participation of all world powers on a barely surviving stage, a fossilized souvenir, a city that reminded people of the biting sting of reality.

  They were stuck in traffic. Cursing, Massimo Interminelli opened the door and got out of the car to see what was going on. Adriano did the same. An abnormal, industrial city, lay sprawled in the direction of the mainland, its smokestacks looking like deformed posts growing out of the water and up into the sky; warehouses, asphalt docks, rusty container ships were surrounded by superhuman cranes that gesticulated oddly in the mist. Adriano observed the black earth on the side of the road, the silhouettes of the factories in the distance, and below the guardrail, a sliver of dark beach gripped a frozen sea. He wondered when and where land turned into mud and then into water. He looked up again. The blurred city was still there, beyond the bridge, not yet engulfed by the lagoon. The roofs traced a thin, elegant contour line that reminded him of historical buildings with their decaying souls, interrupted here and there by towers and steeples chiseled by man and worn down by time. Obsession and patience mingled. This was unlike any other place in the world, a place where the human need to observe beauty contrasted so sharply with the yearning to exploit it, to the point of violence.

  Their hotel was on the mainland, on the outskirts of the industrial zone; a pyramid of cement in the center of a garden that was too small for it. Traffic started moving again. They got into the car. They would park in the lot beyond the bridge, on the shores of the bigger island, and then continue by foot or water taxi to one of the many buildings that would host the conference.

  Interminelli spoke to him about dead people.

  “Did you know that for centuries all over Europe during the Spring, ceremonies would take place to drive Death out from villages? It often consisted of a parade of kids throwing a rag doll into the water, which they would then burn in the fields and hit with sticks while the villagers cheered them on. In some areas of the North, prostitutes and bastards would come out of the whorehouses and orphanages to drown Death in the river; it was the only day that they felt accepted by the townspeople. Today we have to deal with this scum. Did you see how much they eat? And how greedy they are? And the most amusing part is that they don’t even need to!”

  They drove up the ramps of the pyramid until they reached the reserved parking area at the uppermost level, on the terrace. When they walked out into the open air, Adriano realized how tiring it had actually been to sit next to this man, with his stench of unhappiness. They said goodbye at the water taxi stand, and made plans to meet up at dinnertime.

  The water taxi slipped through the canals. Almost no one was on the banks. The large number of invited participants did not compensate for the numbers of people who were evacuated from the city. The buildings ran along one after the other, theatrical set designs whose two-dimensional nature was contradicted by open windows, leaving people to wonder about suspicious, shadowy rooms. Adriano felt it inside his eyes, on his skin, inside his nostrils: the breath of deserted eras, the tread of men and women, the smells and voices that the present was not able to silence.

  The first conference was entitled How Many Were We? The lecturer was professor Chengrong Liang, a demographer from the University of Shenzhen, in China. By the time Adriano arrived, the lecture had already started. He made his way through the rows and managed to find a spot in the middle. As he usually did, he counted the rows and number of spots in each row. There were two hundred people, including those who were standing. He turned to look at the hall. They were in a deconsecrated church that had been hosting art exhibits and concerts for years. The average age of the audience was about sixty. Chengrong Liang spoke into the microphone from a small stage. Adriano noticed that he wore a drab white button down shirt with short sleeves and no tie. He was fat, around sixty years old. The interpreter was seated several meters off, behind a long plastic desk. It took a second for Adriano to make out that she was a woman. She translated every word.

  “Consequently, before attempting to answer the question which gives the title
to this lecture, I find it useful to begin by watching a short video. The following is supporting material which we will screen by way of introduction.”

  The professor went to sit next to his interpreter and the lights in the hall grew dim. A computer desktop with Chinese characters appeared onto the white screen of the projector. Someone moved the cursor to the icon at the top right and the film started. The first shot was of a hospital room.

  It showed a naked boy. He had a dark complexion and a pinched face, like that of an adult. Judging from his musculature he looked about twelve, but he looked shorter than a boy of twelve. It was hard to look at him. Almost painful. Behind him you could see a bed and a small window. You could hear the sound of something falling to the ground. The boy grew frightened and jumped on the bed and tried to climb up the wall to reach the window. He wasn’t normal. He looked like a bird without wings. The professor spoke again, followed by the interpreter.

  “This young boy, renamed Wa Zí, which in our language means ‘Ancient Child,’ was found two months ago at the fish market in Shenzhen, hiding in a crate of mollusks. He most certainly had climbed inside to feed himself. We established that he is about seven years old. He looks older. After several in-depth examinations, we can say that Wa Zí comes from the distant past. He is our ancient ancestor who lived during the late Pleistocene era, circa three thousand years ago.”

  On the screen appeared an x-ray of a skull, and next to it, the face of the boy. The professor began to speak again.

  “As you can well see, the head of Wa Zí exhibits an elongated shape; the ocular cavities are wide and rectangular, while the frontal arch is pronounced at the height of his eyebrows and slopes downward at the top part of his head. His jaws show characteristic signs of prognathism and his teeth appear relatively under-developed. The wide gap between his teeth and the dietary preferences of Wa Zí (he refuses to eat meat and hard foods) confirm the theory held by famous paleontologists that our ancestors migrated from Africa to the Asian coasts to find food. At the time their diet consisted of mollusks; this would explain the circumstances in which the boy was discovered.”