Héctor’s gaze was fixed somewhere among the half-painted walls. I’d lost any desire to talk, so we silently continued to hang panels and hide cables while we awaited Iago’s return. I was beginning to realize that knowing so many details about his past wasn’t the orgy of knowledge that a historian would kill for. They were real memories, and painful, and their consequences had lasted across millennia. I was starting to understand that a long life, the dream of immortality that every human fantasizes about, only serves to prolong conflicts, disagreements, and suffering.
No matter how much Jairo might deny it, they were all marked.
As marked as I was.
59
IAGO
Mars Day, the eighteenth day of the month of Duir
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
When I left BACus so that I could hear Rebekka’s voice better on my phone, the wind patted my back in the same way that a treacherous friend would. I moved as far away as I could from the noise coming from the café. I knew what was coming. I glanced one last time at the overcast sky before hearing the bad news.
“Daddy is dead, Isaac,” said a subdued voice that had once been shrill.
“I’m really sorry, Rebekka,” I replied, and it was the truth.
Deaths don’t usually affect me more than separations or farewells, because in my case it ends up being the same thing: I don’t see that person again. Worse still, even if that person is still living, I don’t hear anything more of him or her, which is sometimes more painful, because there’s a real possibility that we’ll meet again, which my circumstances have nipped in the bud.
“I can be there in four hours if you want,” I offered.
“No, I’d rather you didn’t. Daddy died two days ago and we cremated him yesterday. I didn’t let you know because I didn’t want you to see me in such a bad state.”
“You don’t have to provide any explanations. I’m very grateful that you called,” I said, sitting down next to the lavender bush. The gallego wind was gusting disagreeably, blowing my hair into my mouth, and forcing me to shout a conversation that ought to have been spoken in whispers.
“The doctor was about to give him another session of chemotherapy, but then he said that the cancer had spread throughout his entire body. They sent him home to die, as he’d requested.”
I listened in silence to all the details she wanted to tell me, asking myself if, deep down, Rebekka wasn’t thinking exactly the same as me: that her father would still be alive now if he hadn’t met me.
It was hard to know.
“Daddy left something for you, so I need an address where I can send it.”
“That’s not necessary. Whatever it is, I’d prefer you to have it,” I replied uncomfortably.
“Well, I don’t want it in my house, so if you don’t want the contents of his laboratory, I’ll donate them to the foundation, no matter how much my father insisted the day before he died that I mustn’t,” she spat out angrily.
“Okay, calm down. Send them to me.” I made plans on the fly, anything to prevent the foundation from finding out about Flemming’s discoveries and his illegal acts. “Look, I’ll give you an address in Spain, where I’ve been working for the company this past month. Send it with my initials, I. C.”
Then I gave her my address in Paseo de Pereda and the address of a transport company that specialized in moving those sorts of goods. I thought about the samples he was keeping in the fridge, feeling like a scavenger, because I had already begun to sketch out experiments as I was speaking to the fatherless daughter of my friend.
“Is your mother with you?” I wanted to know.
“Yes, she arrived with her husband and her son. They want to move into this house. She hasn’t wasted any time in starting to change everything around.”
“Rebekka, are you sure you don’t want me to come? I can keep you company the first few days and help you with whatever you might need.”
“That would be really nice,” she said, her voice cheerful for the first time. Then she cleared her throat and became serious again. “But I’m really, really tired. These days I just want to climb into bed and forget about everything. I’ll be in touch, okay?”
Once Rebekka had hung up, I took my time thinking through all the implications, and then I made my way to the Interpretive Center, where I found Dana on her own, hanging up the murals about the sewing implements. She was pensive—more so than usual—but when I reached her, she didn’t ply me with questions, nor did she query me with her eyes.
“Let’s go to the rock ledge,” I said, taking her by the hand. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
She looked at me with no sign of curiosity, somewhat absentmindedly, as if her curiosity quota for the day had already been reached.
“Is something wrong, Dana?” I asked her once we’d climbed down and I was sitting beside her.
The last time we’d been there, Jairo was stretched out on the ground, but I repressed the thought, because our spot was too sacred for my brother to spoil it with that memory.
“I’ve just found out I’ve been hired by forgers.”
So that was it.
“And who the devil told . . . ? Oh, now I understand! Héctor.”
She nodded.
My father and his sense of integrity.
“Angry?”
“Less so than I would have expected. The confession came with a very interesting proposal I’ve been left mulling over. He told me, ‘You’d have fresh material within reach of a few blows with a pickax.’ ”
“And you find it tempting?”
She sighed, resting her back against my chest. “You take the prize, you and your family.”
It’s not so serious, then, I thought with relief.
“And now it’s your turn. Something’s happened, hasn’t it?” she said.
“Yes, indeed. There’s something no one in the family except Héctor knows about, but I have to share it with you so you know what you’re mixed up in. And anyway, I think I’ll have to dedicate a fair few hours at home to it in the near future, so I want to tell you all about it.”
“Something to do with the research into your longevity?”
“Yes. It has to do with telomeres and the conversation you overheard a few months ago, before I went to San Francisco. I received firsthand information over there that gave me a clue as to where to start researching, but I falsified the report before I gave it to the family so Kyra didn’t think it was relevant and dropped that line of investigation, which is what I was hoping for.”
“Remind me never to have you as an enemy,” she whispered, looking up at the storm clouds that were already heading for us.
“The thing is that it seemed relevant to me, but I had no way of checking it out behind Kyra’s back, so I called on one of my contacts at Genética in Copenhagen, Flemming Petersen.” It hurt to speak of him for the first time as a dead person rather than a living friend. “Flemming was obsessed with finding the cure for progeria. His daughter, Rebekka, is fifteen and has already surpassed the life expectancy for that illness.”
“Progeria?” She raised her split eyebrow with interest. “I was looking at the effects of that illness when I was checking all of you out. Do you think it has something to do with you?”
“My theory was that the cause of progeria is shortened telomeres, and Flemming confirmed it with Rebekka’s cells. But then he injected his own body with cultured cells with active telomerase in the hope of controlling their behavior. He took a risk and it killed him. The cells he injected into himself were cancerous, and they spread to various organs in his body within a few weeks. The call this morning was from his daughter. Flemming died on Monday.”
“Your tone of voice suggests he was more a friend than a contact,” she said, slipping her arm around my shoulder, alert to my demeanor.
�
�He was. Today isn’t a good day.”
I loathed all these stereotypical conversations that took place after a death. But once again I couldn’t see a way of avoiding the clichés. I forced myself to continue. “The situation is that Flemming has left me the contents of his laboratory, or rather, his experiments and his cell cultures, which amounts to the same thing. They’re going to send them to Paseo de Pereda, and I’m going to install the equipment on the top floor. I don’t want Kyra to know anything about it, but I’m going to do my own studies.”
“I thought you didn’t want to find out the reason for your longevity. I thought you were opposed to creating longevo offspring in a lab.”
“I still am.”
“Then I don’t understand.”
“In the first place, I want to finish what Flemming started, in order to find out if telomeres really do have something to do with us. If that’s not the case, I’ll destroy the evidence and write a posthumous article under Flemming’s name so that his discovery with respect to progeria isn’t lost.”
“And if it does have to do with your condition?”
“I’ll still destroy the evidence and spend the rest of eternity keeping Lyra and Nagorno away from anything remotely like telomeres.”
“As you intended to do with the Fountain of Eternal Youth.”
“That was the plan.” Why deny it?
“Did you find it?” she asked.
“Of course not.”
If only they could see you now, I thought. Less than a month ago you wouldn’t have even asked me that out loud; you would simply have been offended.
Dana continued to ask me about telomeres. She wanted to understand every aspect of my theory, and I brought her up to speed. It had started to rain a short while earlier, and we had to shelter under the roof of the cave so we wouldn’t get soaked. It took time for the storm to abate, so we remained seated side by side in silence, even when midday arrived and with it, our hunger pangs. It was dangerous to climb up the wet rocks, so Dana ended up reading me Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, which she’d hidden in the hole in the cave wall in place of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. She tried to provide me with some consolation through her voice, and although the book neither improved my humor nor changed my day, I did realize as I listened to her that Dana was beginning to understand us, with a wisdom far beyond her years.
I was a foreigner in their midst, but no one realized it. I lived among them as a spy and no one, not even I, suspected it. They all took me for a relative; no one knew I’d been swapped at birth. I was just like the rest of them without anything in common—a brother to all without belonging to the family.
I’d come from wondrous lands, from landscapes better than life, but only to myself did I ever mention these lands, and of the landscapes—seen in dreams—I never said a word. My feet stepped like theirs over the floorboards and the flagstones, but my heart was far away, even if it beat close by, false master of an estranged and exiled body.
No one knew me under my mask of equality, nor knew that I had a mask, because no one knew that there are masked people in the world. No one imagined that at my side there was always another, who was in fact I. They always supposed I was identical to myself.
60
ADRIANA
Thursday, June 28, 2012
It happened in the afternoon. I’d had a meal alone at home and decided to dedicate a few more hours to my research into my mother’s affairs, an item that was permanently on the to-do list in my head.
There was one thing I had ignored since I’d first seen it—an ugly piece of paper torn from my mother’s diary on which she had written her final words to me. I lifted the mattress and liberated it from the pages of my adolescent diary. It had been there since the day Marcos gave it to me, and since then I hadn’t looked at it again. I took it out of its plastic pocket and, with a sigh, examined it.
What was it about that piece of paper that didn’t quite fit?
In the first place, the date it was written on in the diary, “December 20. Day 354 of the year 1997.” My mother died on December 8, day 342 of that year. Why did she tear out and write on a page from several weeks later, and not on the one that she would have had open that day? Maybe all the intervening pages already had appointments written on them, and she pulled out the first blank page she found. That could be it.
And then the other thing that didn’t fit was that final comma in the message “I’m sorry, hija,”. My mother was really fussy about punctuation. If this was the full extent of her message to her daughter, she would have ended it with a period. A period to mark the end of her life: “I’m sorry, hija.” Period. I’m going, it’s over, and that’s it. If she intended to write more and collapsed just at that point, her handwriting showed no sign of it. It was as strong and controlled in the final comma as it was in the initial I.
December 20, 1997
I’m sorry,
hija,
Day 354
And then I spotted it. The final comma looked remarkably like a 1 in front of the 354—“1354.”
What if she was sending me, her daughter, a message via that unnatural comma?
Nonsense.
Or maybe not.
Suddenly all the pieces fell into place. I threw myself under the bed and pounced on the safe. I turned the wheels: 1-3-5-4. Click. The safe opened.
Holding my breath, I looked inside. There was a black notebook exactly like all the others my mother used for her consultations. I flipped through the pages over and over again without managing to read a single one of the sentences she’d written so long ago. I had to shut the notebook and force myself to breathe.
Then I opened it at the first page.
Patient 1354.
First visit: June 18, 1997.
Reason for consultation: post-traumatic stress.
I glanced over the remaining pages, my disappointment etched on my face. Another patient. Another blessed patient. Who cared, fifteen years later? But that made me focus on the most obvious question: Why had my mother gone to the trouble of hiding this notebook in a safe? What was so special about this case?
I looked over the notebook more carefully and realized that, unlike most of the cases, this one was almost fully written up. Three hundred pages for a case that only lasted a few months. Three hundred pages in her distinctive handwriting, tight and minute. A nightmare to read.
I hunted for the date of the last consultation and froze: December 5, 1997. Just three days before she died. Moreover, my mother’s final annotation made reference to a consultation that would take place on December 8, the day she died.
I was just starting to read it from the beginning again when Iago arrived. He guessed what had happened right away from the look on my face.
“You’ve managed to open it.”
“Yes, but it’s only a consultation notebook like all the others.”
I was too frustrated to go into the details of how I’d tumbled to the winning combination. Would he be amused by my mad process of association?
He looked at me as if he was thinking, And what did you expect, Dana? But fortunately he didn’t say it and instead pretended a degree of enthusiasm.
“Come on, start reading,” he said, sitting down beside me on the bed.
He’d switched on the light because, not for the first time, the hours had gone by and night had fallen without my noticing it.
“What about dinner? Aren’t you hungry?” I asked him.
“I can wait a bit longer today,” he replied, running his fingers through my hair.
I began to read it again, out loud, while Iago listened, absorbed.
Male patient, comes for a consultation after a family tragedy he refuses to specify. The tragedy, according to him, has had the immediate consequence of his separating from his wife.
Onset of anamnesis in the pat
ient; searching for antecedents.
Previous therapies: negative.
Initial conclusions: I’ll begin by focusing the therapy on his feelings about, and reactions to, the “family tragedy.”
61
IAGO
Jupiter Day, the nineteenth day of the month of Duir
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Dana finally fell asleep after spending a considerable amount of time reading from her mother’s thick, recently recovered notebook. I had listened to her, lying next to her on the bed, pretending to share her delight but feeling an ever-mounting concern. Hidden within the detailed description of one more clinical case, I thought I detected a story I already knew.
I let Dana read out loud, waiting for her to collapse in a heap from tiredness and her emotions. And eventually it happened. Her cheek fell on top of the last page she’d been reading, scrunching it. I pretended I was overcome by sleep, too, and I waited until I heard the deep breathing I knew so well and which I had made my objective of the evening. I lifted her head and freed the notebook. I went to the study and sat on the floor and continued to read where Dana had left off.
Family background: born in Madrid, from a well-to-do family, in the habit of traveling. Santander is one of the destinations he’s been visiting frequently because of work. It’s obvious that he’s a man of the world; he has the manners and style of a cultured person.
Response to the question of whether he’ll remain in Santander for some time: “As long as necessary, Doctor,” refusing to be more explicit, which makes it difficult to map out a medium- to long-term treatment strategy, so I will work on the immediate, without taking account of other pathological possibilities in the patient’s personality.
The Immortal Collection (A Saga of the Ancient Family Book 1) Page 43
