by Giacomo Papi
Next to the x-ray of the cranium another skull came into view.
“Many of you have certainly heard of the Shandingdong Man, whose remains were found in a cave in the North of China in 1933. As you can see, the similarities it shares with exhibit B, the so-called ‘Ancient Man,’ are striking. It has been proven that this ancestor of ours lived circa eighteen thousand years ago, in the late Paleolithic era.”
The scene changed. The boy was seated on a stretcher. He was naked and sedated. A few doctors stood beside the bed, handing him food and toys. Wa Zí stared at them with an empty gaze, millennia away, then his mouth opened and he let out guttural and high-pitched sounds like those of monkeys and wolves. A minimal language, disconnected but structured in its own way: the cry of an animal but the language of man.
The lights came back on. The lecturer smiled contentedly. He cleared his throat.
“Fifty thousand years ago, something happened inside the brain of Homo Sapiens, who first appeared on this earth five hundred thousand years ago. Fish bones were found in caves, a sign that they began eating harder foods. Several more ancient rituals, such as the burial of the dead became charged with religious rites. Fifty thousand years ago, the first signs of artistic expression appeared, abstract thoughts came into play and a language was born. In other words, the evolution of man.”
Chengrong addressed his audience triumphantly, without suspecting that what he was describing could actually sound frightening to his audience. Next to Adriano, a foreign-looking, pale and beautiful girl was taking notes in a red notebook. She was surrounded by elderly people. The professor mentioned that true demographic growth came with the rise of agriculture, between fifty and eight thousand years ago, because before that time, the population of mankind had never exceeded several tens of thousands.”
“What Wa Zí tells us is that regeneration might include every human being who has lived on this earth from the beginning of time. How many might they be? And so we go back to the title of this lecture. The estimates given today vary between seventy billion and nine hundred million, as hypothesized by Nathan Keyfitz in 1977, and one hundred and ten billion as proposed by E.S. Deevet in 1950, but let us not forget the one hundred and six billion put forth in 1995 by the fundamental How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth? Our calculations bring us to just under one hundred billion.”
The same figure mentioned by Ari Gastel.
Twenty-six
The restaurant was crowded. Interminelli had warned him it would be. While he waited, Adriano called Maria. It was the tenth time he tried to get through, but he still couldn’t get service. He had spoken to her upon his arrival, just before crossing the bridge, and she had assured him that everything was going well, but then the call was dropped. To distract himself he eavesdropped. The air conditioning was at the maximum and the noise it made was terrible. A drunk American geneticist slurred his words while entertaining his table.
“Our DNA is eternal. Eternal. It doesn’t disappear when we die, or dissipate in the different places we have been, or on the surface of objects we’ve touched, it wanders in the air. In the air. And so this … this mess … is just a spontaneous process of self-cloning. None other, ladies and gentlemen, than our damn Lavoisier. Nothing is created and nothing is destroyed.”
Adriano saw in the smallest movements and actions of his own body—like the way he curled his lip or how he stepped out of the a bathtub—the traces of the now departed who had loved him and from whom he stemmed. It was a fragile trail of a shattered but solid stability that belonged to his father and mother, and it existed within his own life. It was a strange feeling, a combination of familiar company and foreignness. From the innermost part of his body surfaced the dust that had managed to escape the cleaning of time in order to tell him something, and it wanted to stay on the surface. He had thought about it a lot, how when someone dies, their children begin to take on that person’s characteristics, since the genes of the departed are ignited in the living.
He focused on a different table. A disheveled anthropologist was speaking to a colleague enthusiastically.
“In many past cultures the dead are friends of thieves. In Ukraine, in order to make sure that everyone in the house they were going to rob was asleep, the robbers would play flutes made out of human shinbones; in India they would scatter ashes from a funeral pyre, in Peru dust from ground up bones, in Java fresh earth from a tomb. Am I boring you?”
“Not at all. Can you pass the salt, please?”
“And it’s not like in Europe we are any less macabre, on the contrary. Did you know that in the Middle Ages thieves would obtain the hand of a hanged man, preserve it in a way so that they could use it as a candle, and light a flame on each finger in the hopes of keeping everyone in the house asleep. If the flame on one of the fingers extinguished it meant that someone had woken up.”
The woman lowered her voice.
“They made candles out of the hands of unborn babies, too. In the 1600s in Europe there were instances of pregnant women killed solely for the tiny hands of the babies in their uterus. For every little finger, a little candle.”
Adriano gulped down some wine and looked towards the entrance. Interminelli was making his way between the tables, followed by a heavy, bearded man, who somehow resembled a great big tree in the middle of the countryside.
“Pardon my tardiness, Karaianni, but there’s a hell of a traffic jam out there. Let me introduce you to John Ametrano, a colleague of mine from the American secret service. Have you heard the latest news?”
“No, I haven’t. I can’t even make a phone call.”
“John here was telling me that rebirths are springing up all over. Nothing dramatic yet. We’re still talking small numbers, but there’s certainly commotion. Oh, here’s the waiter. I hope you are both hungry. I’m dying.”
They ordered. Interminelli was so excited that instead of reading the menu he asked to have whatever the American was having.
“It could be that we are at the beginning of a new wave. Isn’t that right, John?”
“It could be.”
“Therefore we must get ready. There will be an overload on the infrastructure. A blackout. No phone service. Airports closed. We did well to come by car, trust me.”
“Have cases been registered here too?”
“It doesn’t seem like it, for now. But we need to get moving.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been saying it for some time now, and if you had listened to me, we wouldn’t find ourselves in our current situation.”
The American butted in.
“We’ve had some encouraging meetings today, Massimo, let’s not despair.”
“Yes, John, you’re right, they were encouraging. Everyone’s starting to believe us, even the cowards.”
“Of course they are, Massimo. Because the reborn aren’t just standing around, doing nothing …”
“But do you know, Karaianni, that some of these fucking cadavers say that the only solution to the problem is to prevent human beings from being born? Can you believe it? Not to prevent the dead from being reborn but to actually prevent the living from reproducing.”
“No, I’m not sure I understand.”
“You don’t? Your wife is pregnant, right? The reborn cannot have kids—you know that because you discovered it. We, the living, on the other hand, can. Ergo: for them the only solution is to prevent babies from being born, stop procreation.”
“How?”
“Yesterday, in Moscow, a team of reborn men attempted an assault on an obstetrics ward. There were four of them, we killed them all, but they still tried.”
Adriano reacted.
“Who is ‘we’?”
“The living: us.”
“I need to go home right away.”
“Don’t worry, Karaianni. Don’t get worked up. Your wife is at the hospital with Medioli, the safest place on this planet. And anyway by now she’s probably as big as a whale, it’s pro
bably safer that she doesn’t go out in the streets. It’s not worth moving her. What I’m trying to tell you is that the playing field has changed: eliminate the reborn or they will eliminate the living. Which side are you on?”
“So you’re saying that we need to choose whether we are assassins or will be assassinated, basically.”
Ametrano burst out in laughter.
“Be real, Dottore. This is war: either we kill the dead or they kill us, beginning with our fertile women.”
They walked back to the car. They walked down streets, through alleys, up and down bridges sprawling over canals of black water that looked like swollen veins of stale blood, and across piazzas. The majority of the guests had already gone back to their hotels or rooms or boarding houses on the mainland. Adriano and Interminelli’s footsteps echoed on the cobblestones, worn down by millions of footsteps over the course of thousands of years. They were quiet. Adriano recalled the sticky, unpleasant sound of Ametrano’s laugh. It throbbed in his brain like a goldfish trapped in a bowl too small.
He tried calling Maria again. She answered on his second try. He told her not to worry. She was safe where she was. Everything was normal at the hospital. She seemed calm, affectionate even. Back at the hotel, he took a long, hot shower. He sat down inside the shower and let all the water molecules of the universe fall on top of him, letting some of what he had seen that day—Wa Zí, the ancient child, the conversations at the restaurant, Ametrano’s rheumy eyes—wash off his body and slip far away.
The bed in his room looked awful. The windows were wide open, but no noise came from outside. He was exhausted but nothing had happened yet. It was like trying to sleep on Christmas Eve. Maria was sleeping and the baby was sleeping inside Maria, and perhaps inside the baby Maria was sleeping, or maybe he was sleeping … He woke up suddenly, frozen, his eyes popping out of his head with a sudden revelation: the American official that reminded him of a tree, John Ametrano, was a dead man. He was a reborn. He had figured it out from his gaze, from his permanence, from that extra animalistic essence that emanated from his every gesture and word. And a reborn in that city and in those days, should not have been there for any reason whatsoever.
Twenty-seven
A packed herd of men and women assaulted the soldiers that were lined up to protect the bridge. Adriano sat silently by Interminelli as the latter changed radio stations in search of news. Adriano thought about the strange revelation that had come to him the night before. When he woke up that morning, his hypothesis that John Ametrano might be a reborn man was less convincing. Maybe it was just a dream. He tried bringing it up at breakfast, but Interminelli burst out laughing and shot down the idea immediately. He was overly excited by what he was going to do that day; it was clear that he had no intention of leaving the city early. Back in his room after breakfast, Adriano called Maria and calmed down. She sounded happy. People came and went on foot, in the road, on the sidewalk, next to their car, trying to overcome the blockade. It was a very hot and muggy day. Seagulls screeched in the white sky. The air weighed on the water like a block of dense marble. The smell of salt and something rotting penetrated his nostrils, got into his clothes and his pores, and spread a sticky and slimy film over everything.
They finally made it to the city. Trains, ships, and airplanes were all out of service. The train station was surrounded by soldiers. He walked around, asking himself what he was doing there. He went to two conferences but his mind was elsewhere. He was easily distracted. The words of the speakers were meaningless to him. He was hypnotized watching the audience: old people with darting eyes, women and men who where involved and at the same time strangely distant. In the afternoon he listened to a geneticist who restated the same hypothesis that the drunkard had babbled about at the restaurant. The idea of spontaneous regeneration, a self-cloning process beginning with organic dust left behind after the death of an individual. It seemed the only explanation fit to solve the mystery of resurrection.
Two distinct sides were taking shape. The majority sustained that the only solution was to put a stop to the demographic explosion by confining the reborn to special camps or to resort to mass extermination. But there were also a few ancient scientists in that city who sustained that to cap the demographic explosion women of fertile age needed to be sterilized or the living should undertake a mass suicide. Inevitably they would return anyway. It was about time that the number of humans was limited, they said.
Everyone talked about it, everywhere. Not just at the conference, where it echoed in the conference halls, before the lectures began and right after they were over. The subject aroused the public’s curiosity, it found space in people’s conversations, it lingered over the city like a cloud. A decision needed to be made, this much was clear, but it was a decision that would be made in absence of, or rather, the forced exclusion of, the dead. Interminelli was unstoppable. He had foreseen everything and nothing could hold him back. The idea that he had supported from the beginning was now slowly gaining general acceptance. He had been obsessed with the idea ever since he convinced the government to ask Adriano to kill Michelangelo Lopez, and when he had obtained authorization to shoot the homeless man. Every night he had dreamed that the dead man would come back for him, but it hadn’t happened yet. Circumstance proved that the cycle of resurrection could be interrupted.
They lunched at an outdoor cafe. As they were about to pay the bill, they noticed a pale, fat, old woman watching them. She looked like a larva and stood naked, dripping and barefoot, several meters away from them, bending forward slightly as if she were about to jump, her eyes fixed on their table. Adriano noticed her first, and shifted his weight in his chair. Interminelli stayed quiet. The woman hopped into action, like a kangaroo. She stole a handful of sugar packets and ran off, her head thrown back, her jaw open, her fingers dipping into the stolen sugar.
“You see, Dottore, they are coming back. Do you understand, now, that there is no other solution?”
Adriano thought of John Ametrano, Michelangelo, Rosaria, Calogero, and Serafino, as well as the silhouettes of many confused people he had seen in the last few hours: a sweaty old man with a goatee and bow tie, a scantily dressed woman, a sickly-looking girl. Over the course of the day, the dead were no longer single appearances, but a tangible presence in the city. The dead were now wandering around the only place that was solely populated by the living.
In between one lecture and another Adriano found himself near the national museum. It was an old building, caked with smog. No one was around, the following lecture would only begin in an hour, so he went in. The halls were deserted, and for the first time he felt afraid.
He was afraid of the faces that stared at him from the walls, portraits of men who lived centuries ago, men and women whose only trace was a hint of life and color fixed on canvas. He was afraid of the malicious shapes that crowded an enormous painting: horses’ hind ends, dust, unsheathed swords, human spines twisting until they spasm, and all around them were mountains, sky and forests, history’s spectators. And in an upper corner there was even an outline of a city torn to pieces by a gloomy shadow, hanging over a rocky spur. He was suddenly afraid for Maria and their child. He imagined them surrounded by those painted shadows, the same ones that were now spying on his footsteps from the walls. In those deserted rooms, in the company of the quiet effigies of the dead, the notion of a comeback acquired substance and became real. Art revealed the horror of emptiness that surrounds everything and the violent desperation with which man, since the beginning of time, tries to tear it from his soul.
He recognized the city in the painting. It was the city where he now found himself. There was a crowd of people in the foreground, a mass of men and women, some on the street, some under porticos. To the right was water, a long canal crowded with many boats, almost brushing against each other. One was being captained by an African man, and he saw the head of a small dog in another boat. At the bottom of the painting was a bridge, almost entirely sealed off o
n both sides by a wooden palisade: on it was a procession of people with covered heads dressed in white, red and light blue tunics. They marched forward and held long poles. Beyond the bridge, in a slanted perspective with respect to the overall frontal arrangement, were roofs of homes with chimneys that looked like smokestacks twisted by an earthquake, enveloped by a pink and yellow sky with gray and light blue clouds. They were floating premonitions of the clouds that would be expelled from the chemical factories on the mainland five hundred years later.
“It’s breathtaking, isn’t it?”
Five meters behind him, the massive figure of a man stood in the frame of the door, backlit by neon. It took Adriano a few seconds to recognize him. It was John Ametrano.
“Yes, it looks contemporary.”
“I often came to admire it when I was alive. It dates back to 1496, or thereabouts. Did you see the little white dog on the ship? That’s the detail that strikes me the most. To think that even that dog was alive.”
“Who says that sooner or later he won’t be born again, too?”
“No one knows. Maybe T-rex will be born again, maybe ferns and mangroves, Dottore Karainanni, not just dogs. At that point, your friend Interminelli might even call up the rats from the plague, no?”
“Interminelli isn’t my friend.”
“But his proposal is gaining consensus: let’s kill every one of them. He’s bursting with happiness. It’s better than his stench, at least.”
“He says you agree with him.”
“He says so and you’re right. We’ll see about that tomorrow evening. Are you coming as well?”
“I don’t know, he hasn’t mentioned anything to me.”
“Oh, do come, it’ll be worth your while. I will invite you. But don’t leave his side, even if you aren’t too fond of him. I will bring some of my friends. I must go now, farewell.”
He vanished just as he had appeared, turning around and crossing through the doorway. For a second, observing his black contour, it occurred to Adriano that this man was clenching his buttocks. He looked back at the painting, but his attention was captured by another canvas. It, too, was filled with people. They were amassed around a canal where figures wrapped in white clothes were swimming, searching for the sunken ring of the Virgin.