Summoning my professionalism to protect against wayward thoughts, I pointed to a chair next to mine.
“Okay, Adriana, here’s the situation. As you know, the Prehistory Museum of Cantabria has been closed to the public for several years. We managed to arrange the temporary loan of quite a few of their pieces, but now the museum has changed directors, and the new one is keen to speed up their reopening process. They got in touch with Héctor yesterday, and they’ve given us a period of ten months to return the pieces. I need you to start hustling your contacts as of today in order to bring whatever you can to the MAC. We’ll have to reorganize the Prehistory Hall and fill the calendar with temporary exhibitions from other museums or archaeological sites. We’re going to lose eighty percent of our exhibits by November.”
She gulped. “Eighty percent?”
“Yes.”
“Within ten months?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“That’ll leave a huge hole”
I nodded in agreement. More like a case of plunder.
The paradox—a painful one—was that many of the pieces to be returned were ours. Really ours. The bone needles from the hideout in Monte Castillo; one of my actual molars . . . Our original plan had been to keep the pieces at the MAC until we closed it in a few years’ time and then to replace them with forgeries before disappearing, in order to reappear with new identities. The previous day’s unforeseen news had exploded that attractive possibility. We ran the risk of legal problems if a museum such as the Prehistory realized we had given them back forgeries. There was no alternative but to hand over the original artifacts. I suppressed a sigh. What does a man have to do to hold on to what is his?
“Iago, I can arrange for exhibitions, but ten months is very little time. Memoranda of agreement take more than eighteen months just to organize the permits to take the pieces out of their original country, never mind preparing the display. I can’t knock on any doors with that time frame or put that kind of pressure on my contacts.”
Adriana was right, and I knew it all too well.
“Well, then, we’ve got a problem if we don’t want to close the space for a few months. Let’s go to the Prehistory Hall,” I suggested. “I think better if I’m surrounded by artifacts.”
We went down the four flights of stairs, the wooden staircase creaking under our feet, as all old wooden floors should. The Prehistory Hall was one of the MAC’s biggest spaces. Héctor and I were especially fond of this era. As Rilke used to say: “Man is the inherited memories of his infancy.” It made no difference how many millennia we might have been walking the earth: Héctor would always be a Cro-Magnon from Paleolithic times, and I a hunter who refused to abandon his way of life and join the Neolithic Revolution.
The security guard had already unlocked the gallery, although the first visitors of the day hadn’t arrived yet. I allowed Adriana to go in first and followed her. She walked up to the same display cabinet where I’d met her the day before. I smiled. It contained one of my favorite pieces.
“ ‘The Mea Culpa of a Skeptic,’ ” I said, standing next to her.
“Is it the original?”
“Yes, my family has had it since 1902, with good reason. My grandfather’s father passed on to him the story behind the events that had occurred in his lifetime and, in turn, my grandfather told us.”
“Go on,” she encouraged me, raising an eyebrow in a manner that would have made Marilyn Monroe envious.
“When Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola discovered the bison paintings in Altamira in 1879, all the prehistorians of the day accused him of being a fraud,” I said. “They didn’t believe that prehistoric man was capable of creating art.” Holding back a sneer, I added, “As if people were mentally deficient fourteen thousand years ago!
“Decades later, when similar paintings were discovered in other caves in France, Émile Cartailhac, the world authority on the era, wrote the article you’re looking at, begging Marcelino’s forgiveness for not having believed him. But it arrived too late; Sautuola had died fourteen years earlier.”
“Do you think the same thing would happen nowadays?”
“It’s still happening. That’s why I like to have the document on display. It’s an illustrative lesson, don’t you think?”
“In what? That you don’t need evidence in order to believe?”
“No. That you shouldn’t deny a reality just because you don’t have the evidence for it yet.”
“I tend more toward the evidence camp, Iago.”
“If something is true, the evidence will appear,” I insisted.
She politely agreed, though she wasn’t convinced, and began to wander the length and breadth of the hall.
“Listen, Iago, I’ve been mulling over the enormous loss the collection faces.”
“And . . . ?”
“Since we’re going to be left with only a few artifacts—”
“Very few artifacts,” I corrected.
“Very few artifacts,” she repeated with a knowing smile—a sexy smile, I might even have said. “We could focus on transforming the space into an Interpretive Prehistory Center. When visitors arrive at prehistory exhibits, they always find the same things: skulls, spearheads, and bifaces. The Stone Age in its purest form. They leave with their heads full of the same clichés they had when they came in. As you’ve just finished saying, today’s popular view of prehistoric man is still that of a monkey-like being who lived permanently in caves and wore ragged skins. Let’s take him out of the caves.”
Well, well, this is starting to sound interesting. What passion!
“I’m listening,” I said encouragingly. “Go on.”
She began to prowl the hall in search of something, until she found it. “Here, take a look at this: ‘Bone needles. 26,000 BP. Upper Paleolithic. Gift of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, Kiev.’ ”
“So?”
“If you leave these needles in the display cabinet with a plaque written by and for archaeologists, people won’t understand their significance. What if we take the needles and create a whole display around them? If there were needles, there must have been thread made from tendons. We already know that, but the visitor might not. So we help them understand that clothing twenty-six thousand years ago was much more elaborate than the average person believes. Here in Europe, at the height of the Würm Ice Age, they must have been dressed in the same way as the Eskimos today: jacket, pants, boots—”
“Inuit,” I corrected her.
“Pardon?”
“Inuit, Adriana, not Eskimos. That name was officially abolished in the seventies because they considered it derogatory. Go on.”
Perhaps I was a bit harsh, but she looked at me undaunted, taking my correction in her stride. I liked her attitude.
“Fine, Inuit. I was saying that none of the original clothing remains, but we can suggest it in dioramas, using the items we still own, and linking them to Inuit examples. We can recreate scenes of people sewing.”
“I have to admit that this sounds appealing. What else?”
“Let’s do the same with the few pieces we’ll still have. Let’s show daily life in prehistoric times: eating, hunting, fishing, harvest time. We can include material from various tribes today to make people aware that there are still regions on our planet where people live as they did in prehistoric times. The Yanomani of the Brazilian Amazon region are still fully Paleolithic; I wrote an article about it. We could include the Hadza of East Africa, the Tasaday in the Philippines, the Australian aboriginals, and the Bushmen of South Africa. Or rather, the ethnic San,” she corrected herself, “if you want to split hairs.”
“Let me give it some thought. Your suggestion would require a complete transformation of the gallery,” I said to her, wandering around the display cabinets, “although there’s no reason we would have to close it. We could use th
e Conference Hall, which is wasted space at the moment, to start setting up the Interpretive Center with the pieces we do own. Then the day we have to return the other eighty percent, we inaugurate the new gallery and close this one. There’s a lot of possibility there.”
How could I not be excited by her challenge? To recreate our way of life, recover our occupations, our clothes, our day-to-day activities, pretending to use our imagination while we reached back through our memory to those times and experiences the archaeological sites would never uncover. But immediately I saw the danger too: up to what point could I pretend to imagine? I couldn’t risk attracting too much attention from the archaeological community. That was my eternal frustration and dilemma: pretending not to know what I had lived. That was why I had resigned so many times as a professor of history. How could I not become angry with the official versions of the past? How could I not want to help colleagues who spent their entire lives trying to solve a puzzle by providing them with the clues that would decipher the enigma? But if I did, they’d hate me. The truth would make them feel insignificant, and they would envy me having been there. Because no matter what period it might be in human history, I had always been there.
The sound of a throat clearing brought me back to the present. It seemed I had spent some time lost in my digressions, and patience didn’t appear to be one of Adriana’s virtues.
“My apologies. I was thinking over your suggestion. The work required to have it ready in ten months would be intense. It would require all my attention. Héctor would have to coordinate everything else for those months.” My brain leaped ahead to months working side by side with Adriana to create displays unlike any we’d ever had. “I will need you to keep pursuing collaborative agreements in the meantime. Use your connections to attract exhibits from other museums and digs. For now, here’s all the information about our funding so that you can start delving into the MAC.”
I handed over a memory stick I had prepared with the data for her department. She stared at the little MAC logo as if she was fascinated by it. I glanced at my watch, then again at her captivated—and captivating—expression.
“It’s midday. Would you like to join me at BACus for a few pinchos?”
The staff usually ate at eleven, so I figured the bar would be almost empty at this hour. Everyone was eager to meet the new employee and work out her relationship with us. Some time away from their scrutiny might make things a bit easier for her.
“Sure. I’ll just stop by Salva’s office for a minute to congratulate him on yesterday’s opening. I’ll see you there in about ten minutes, okay?”
“Wonderful,” I replied with a satisfied smile as I gave way to a couple of students plugged in to their audioguides.
I sensed that she would be easy to work with.
I was mistaken.
Yet again in life, I was wrong. Not even the passage of millennia makes you infallible.
8
IAGO
Mars Day, the eleventh day of the month of Luis
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
There were barely two unoccupied tables in BACus; all the others were taken by tourists and visitors to the museum. We headed to the bar together, where I ordered my usual, and Adriana asked for a latte. After we chose some pinchos, I nodded in the direction of the table at the back of the room, on the other side of the wooden railing. We’d be comfortable there, well away from the stares of inquisitive busybodies.
BACus had the air of the cafés of the late nineteenth century. The floor looked like a chessboard, the square tables had white marble tops and black wrought-iron feet, and the mirrors had period frames. The fire in 1941, which destroyed the historical center of Santander, left the city without a single café from that era, so we assumed that a little nostalgia might fill our coffers, and we hadn’t been mistaken.
“So, what’s brought you back to your old neighborhood?” I asked, sounding her out.
“Call it homesickness,” she replied as she looked around her in a distracted manner.
Just then the waiter brought over a tray with our hot pinchos.
“Do you live with your parents?” I offered her a mushroom vol-au-vent. “Try this. The mushrooms are local, from the Valle de Pas.”
“Thank you,” she said, taking a bite. “You’re right; it’s delicious. Is this a redcurrant sauce?” Unselfconsciously, she touched her finger to the vibrant sauce and brought it to her mouth, savoring the tartness.
I realized I was staring at her at about the same time she realized I was still waiting for the answer to my question.
“Oh, yes, my parents. I’ve practically lived on my own since my mother died when I was seventeen. Not long after that, my father and I moved to Madrid. But my father is a traveling salesman, and he’s always on the road. So it’s just me, although I’m living in the apartment where I grew up. Will you please pass me a croquette?”
“Of course. They’re not the ones from the Este Market, but—”
“Oh! The Este Market . . . It’s been a long time since I went in there. Thank you for the reminder! It’s the first thing I’ll do when I finish work today. And what about you? Have you been here right from the start?”
Quite literally, I thought, smiling to myself. And you’re an expert at changing the topic.
“Yes, since we set up the museum four years ago.”
“Amazing. So you’ve been technical coordinator since you were thirty. That’s some record.”
“Thirty-one,” I specified. “And why does that surprise you so much?”
“I’m just astonished that you’re so young,” she explained, shifting nervously in her seat. “All the coordinators I’ve known so far spent time in various departments of museums, which usually meant at least a few decades gaining experience, so they were all in their fifties. And you must be . . . thirty-five.”
“And seven months,” I interjected.
This is starting to be surrealistic, I thought. And I admit I’m not a patient man.
“So you think I can have a general idea of all the areas, but I can’t be an expert in . . . your prehistory period, let’s say?” I challenged her.
“I really didn’t mean to offend you, Iago, or doubt you. It was more of a compliment. But,” she said carefully, “your youthfulness is so . . . striking.”
Well, this will be amusing.
“I’m not offended, but it would be better if we cleared up this misunderstanding right from the start. If we’re going to be working together, I need you to have as much confidence in me and my expertise as you have in your own. After all, you are quite young, too.”
“So what do you propose? That we put it to the test? That isn’t what I was suggesting, seriously,” she said, more and more nervous.
You testing me? My dear girl, I had already spent millennia wearing out the ground you’re standing on when the notion of a test was first mooted.
“I have a better idea,” I suggested. “Let’s play for the last salmon pincho. Ladies first. Come on, pick your topic.”
“As you please, but just for the record, it’s not that I have any doubts about you.”
“Come on, start.” I gave an enigmatic smile; I’d always enjoyed pretending to be offended.
“Let me see . . .” she said, looking around her for inspiration.
The waiter came over to our table again, carrying a tray.
“Your espresso, sir.”
“Thanks, José.”
“Got it,” she said after she’d briefly scrutinized my coffee. Her eyes sparkled. Was that a hint of mischief? She seemed to have started to enjoy our game. “How long have we been drinking milk?”
“As adults? About seven thousand five hundred years. The mutation that enables us to digest dairy products throughout adulthood originated in the Balkans.”
“Wow!” she exclaimed, a look of surp
rise on her face. That raised eyebrow really was going to cause me grief, I could tell already. “That study was published in PLOS Biology.”
“August 2009. Are you going to limit yourself to questions about journal reviews?” I persisted.
“Okay, let’s change the topic,” she suggested, becoming more excited. “When did the last Neanderthal become extinct?”
“The remains of the most recent specimen suggest it was about twenty-eight thousand years ago, in the Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar.”
And if you were more open, Héctor would be able to give you more details than you could ever dream about.
“Fine,” she said. “Did they hunt with harpoons?”
“Definitely not.”
“Body painting?”
“Well, that would depend on the clan in question, Adriana. Each one had its own aesthetics. Cultural anthropology and the concept of ‘ethnicity’ come to mind. Although in general terms, Neanderthals mainly used black and ochre.”
“That’s a supposition,” she countered, shaking her head. “I assume you say that because they’ve found kilos of iron oxide in some of the caves. But that’s not sufficient to allow you to infer that they painted their bodies. We’ll never have any evidence of their external appearance.”
Ask Héctor. He’ll tell you.
“Of course,” I conceded. “Keep going.”
“Do you think they interbred with us? That at some stage human-Neanderthal hybrids were born?”
“Yes, we were living together in Europe and the Near East for many millennia. Tell me, when have we Homo sapiens ever missed an opportunity to spread our seed? The proximity would have proven irresistible.”
“True, but even if physical contact had occurred, it remains to be seen whether or not we were different species. Intercourse and interbreeding are not the same. If Neanderthals were a different species, a hybrid would not be viable.”
The Immortal Collection (A Saga of the Ancient Family Book 1) Page 6
