God's Dog

by Diego Marani

  28 April

  This morning we woke up to thick mist, which is unusual at this time of year. I could tell it was misty because of the bicycle bells: when it’s misty, they sound as though they’re ringing underwater. The mist didn’t rise until midday, but even then the sun didn’t come out. And I had various irritating problems: that business with the money raised its head again. I had to go to the bank to explain. Rome sends me too much at a time, and I can’t invest it all immediately; money laundering takes time. I can’t start buying diamonds! I’ve tried to explain things to the Papal Nuncio, and he always promises that he’ll talk it over with the Secretary of State. Meanwhile, I’m in danger of being accused of money laundering by the Dutch Customs Service. If they think I’m going to start going all over Europe with suitcases full of banknotes, they’ll have to think again! They’ll have to take on a mafioso to do that for them. I don’t understand their strategy here either. If we must engage in money laundering, let’s do it properly. With a good investment plan we’d run fewer risks and do better business. For example, how about them setting me up with a nice slush fund! It works like that here too. Why not pay some newspaper to write what we want, instead of insisting that we sell our own, which no one reads? Or why not invest in marine insurance, or armaments or container ships? That would mean sure-fire profit and less snooping. I keep on sending reports to Rome with details from firms which are up for sale, but I might as well not bother.

  2 May

  Today Guntur took me to his madrassa again. Some of the old men still mutter when they see the crucifix in my lapel, but they all hear me out, and when I read the psalms, some of them recite them with me. It is clear that we are all praying to the same God. Guntur pointed out that the Koran almost always speaks of believers, very rarely of Muslims, and in his view this is proof that Mohammed’s first followers made no distinction between themselves and the Christians or Jews. They felt that they were all part of the one single faith; the real difference was with the others, the pagans and above all the atheists. The Slotervaart Muslims are well-organised. They have their own schools, which are better than those run by the state, their own social security system, their own doctors. They send their children to Arab universities, but then have them come back here. Holland is their country, and Muslims are in the majority in the cities; only the provinces are Protestant, though there are still a few Catholics in the south. The people in Rome would like me to spend time among them, to go to Maastricht to distribute catechisms in the schools; they fail to understand the game that is being played around these parts.

  8 May

  Sometimes I am puzzled by Guntur’s attitude to science, and I think that even in his own world he is regarded as an oddity. For Muslims the only aim of science is to explain, to transmit, never to query or investigate. Guntur on the other hand has no qualms about discovering things which might put God’s truth in doubt, indeed he maintains that one should never hesitate to follow the path along which doubt leads us. Yesterday evening in the Coffee Shop we had a disagreement. My view was that scientific discoveries are our own miracles: they are inexplicable, they can lead only to further wonderment. However far man may push himself, even in tinkering with life itself, the result will never be his own creation; at most, it will be mere rejigging. But Guntur disagreed.

  ‘If God leads me to make discoveries which put my faith in doubt, it is because He wants to point me down another road to come to Him. Religion is like science. Without free and open debate, it withers and dies, leaving the road open to atheism. It is rational proof that thwarts attempts at undermining faith. The greatest discovery that science constantly presents us with is our own ignorance, and that is why the believer should have no fear of it. Today neither Christianity nor Islam can provide answers to mankind’s problems. Christ and Mohammed are but remote memories: it is so long since God sent us a sign. We are like a vessel wandering through space which has lost all contact with its base. If for thousands of years man has been getting no nearer to God, it must be because we have taken a wrong path. Science may help us find the right one.’

  12 May

  I sense that Guntur wants to tell me something, but he can’t quite bring himself to do so. Perhaps he does not trust me, and this upsets me. Today he told me what he is working on at the university, namely, mirror neurons. Apparently he knew Neil Corrigan; he has read all his books. He cannot know that I was responsible for the suicide of his colleague at Imperial College. But Guntur is a scientist of another kind.

  14 May

  Guntur has gone to Zeeland for a few days, for a conference. He left only yesterday, but we have been e-mailing each other constantly: in the form of letters, which is what we like to do. I tell him about what I have been reading, about my various battle plans; he sends me little drawings of conference life, a sort of real time chronicle of his day, meetings with old windbags and a visit to the dike on the Scheldt. I feel as if I am there with him. I didn’t know about the old wool trade between Holland and Scotland which he mentions. I should really travel a bit more: I have been in Holland for years, but I have never been to Zeeland, nor to Friesland.

  18 May

  Today Guntur and I took the ferry to Enkhuizen and went for a trip on the Markermeer. It was a gloriously sunny day, the kind you don’t often get in this part of the world. Along the coast we saw fields of tulips and old windmills, just like in a Dutch landscape! On the boat there were fishing-rods for hire, and you could buy live bait. So we started to fish, without catching anything, of course. Even the little boys beside us were reeling in one herring after another, whereas all we did was lose our bait. But Guntur seemed to enjoy it enormously, laughing amidst the spray, and smiling that disarming smile of his which makes everything seem like a small miracle. At times, when I’m alone, I too try to be amazed by little things, I try to wonder at the clouds, driven by the wind, at a flower closing its petals as evening approaches, at the fire burning in the fireplace. But I never succeed; all I do is get bored. Clearly, I am not the meditative type!

  On the beach at Enkhuizen we ate poffertjes in a bar that was raised on piles. Everything in it smelled of fried food, even the gardenias on the windowsills. For some reason, it was full of English, the kind who wear trainers and baseball caps; they walked as though they were drunk, dazed by too much sun. The dunes were covered with such rich, green vegetation that the effect was almost Mediterranean. At a certain point a group of horsemen came galloping across the beach. Guntur rushed up to them to have a closer look. He said he remembered horses from his early childhood, galloping along beaches just like this. Then his mood darkened.

  ‘Have you ever been back to Banda Aceh?’ I asked him.

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘Would you like to?’

  ‘No. I’m afraid.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘Of meeting someone who knows me. Of knowing. Perhaps they are still there…’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Father and mother.’

  I would have liked to ask him to tell me more, to find out something about his childhood. But then my own fear of remembering flooded back into my mind. It’s like a safety valve which kicks in whenever I start to delve into my memories, and find myself staring at the only certain image I have of Haiti, though it isn’t even mine; it’s a newspaper cutting with a photo of a child crying amidst the rubble. I still have it, in my missal. Secretly, I have always wanted to believe that that child was me, and I have often tried to recognise myself in that weeping face. But I don’t cry like that, I have never cried like that. It was dusk when we got back to Amsterdam, and all in all we were glad to see its tangle of lights, to hear its raucous din. We’d had enough of the bucolic emptiness of the Markermeer.

  20 May

  Guntur had never told me that he is a great skater! He has even done the Elfstedentocht – all two hundred kilometres of it. When there’s no ice, apparently, you train on rollers. Today I followed him on my bike, and by the end I was more exh
austed than he was. I haven’t done any serious sport since I left the academy; all I have done is wear myself out doing weightlifting. I should take up fencing again. I’m always telling myself to join a club, then laziness gets the upper hand.

  22 May

  Today was the start of the new herring season, as we learned from the papers yesterday. Guntur and I were not going to miss the opportunity of a first tasting. We went to supper on a restaurant-barge belonging to a friend of his from Friesland who makes his own beer and who spends more time drunk than sober. A tankard of wheat beer with maatjes herring, the sun setting over the Singel and a wind bearing the sweet scent of grass: it was perfect. To crown it all, Guntur seemed so happy. That man has a kind of ebullience which strikes me as typically eastern, and which must be linked to his capacity for amazement. Nothing seems to dishearten him. He does everything with a kind of lightness which is very refreshing. I myself always feel that I am in the firing line, that I’ve spent my whole life in the trenches; I see an enemy in everyone who doesn’t share my views. That is what I’ve been trained to do, it’s true; that is my trademark. He too was trained as a soldier, of course, but he sees things with more detachment. All in all, for Guntur nothing seems important; at times I find his freedom of thought positively frightening. He makes me feel that, were I to be set free, I wouldn’t even dare to leave my cage. Where would I fly to, in this empty, senseless world? I need a mission. When all is said and done, it isn’t even a question of faith. Sometime I actually wonder whether I have any faith at all. As my guardian in Bologna used to say to me, ‘Salazar, you don’t believe in anything except your own survival. But we shall put your defects to good use – along with your good points.’ I wonder what they are.

  25 May

  Guntur has an amazingly thorough knowledge of the Christian tradition. I don’t think I know anything like as much about Islam. He claims that Islam was founded not by Mohammed, but by a sect of monotheistic Christians, Jews and Arabs. It is no coincidence, in his view, that Saint Mark’s Gospel is contemporary with the writings of Ibn Ishaq. But then he is syncretism incarnate! Though I’d be interested to hear what an imam thinks of his interpretation of Islam. All in all, I do feel that the Islamic mindset is more inclined than the Christian one to skate over differences. According to their teachings, our prophets were holy men; we treat theirs like so many Bedouin.

  27 May

  Today, coming back from prayer, Guntur and I walked through the Vondelpark.

  ‘This year the camellias will still be out when the rhododendrons come into flower!’ he said, with childlike glee.

  ‘It’s been a cold spring, so the blossom lasts longer. Look at the Japanese cherry, how frothy the petals are. But if the wind gets up then they’ll all fly away, together with the rain. You’ll see, it will be as though there’d been a heavy snowstorm. One day I must show you my bulb collection; I grow them in the university greenhouse; I’ve even managed some cross-breeding.’

  28 May

  Guntur’s laboratory is in an old building on the Nieuwe Diep Basin. The windows look straight on to the canal embankment, but to the right of it there is a strip of land occupied by an old disused greenhouse, separated from the entrance by a brick wall; and that was where we left our bicycles, chained to some railings. As we went in, a violent storm was brewing over the Jimeer; the dark sky was flecked with strips of grey and orange, and there was a rumble of distant thunder out at sea. In the restaurant, Guntur had started to tell me more about his experiments. At one point he had looked at the wall clock as though he were waiting for some particular moment in time. Now he had switched on the computer and opened the safe where he kept his data banks. He linked up the hard disk and started the programmes. His large room on the ground floor is crammed with various kinds of apparatus and oddities of the kind he likes to surround himself with, including an old barber’s chair.

  ‘When I started studying mirror neurons I immediately felt that I was standing at a door that would give me access to a new scientific dimension. Mirror neurons alert us to the existence of an empathy that is all pervasive: they are found in men and monkeys, but we are also discovering them in other animals. So why should they not also exist, in other forms, in plants? Perhaps mirror neurons are fragments of a unity which once suffused all creation. In part, we humans function in the same way as all other beings, and the more contact there is between us, the more we interact. In a word, we think together! And perhaps every being is capable of some form of thought. So your Teilhard de Chardin was right when he talked of a noosphere. The whole subject has begun to interest me deeply: mirror neurons might be a step towards the scientific proof of the existence of God; of intelligent design, do you see? The world on its way back to a journey towards the divine!’

  As he talked, Guntur had his eyes not on me, but on the computer screen where his data was coming up. Now he gestured to me to come closer, as he brought several photographs of a monkey up on to the screen.

  ‘This is Django, a young adult chimpanzee we brought back from the forests of Kibele. I started by doing transcranial magnetic stimulation tests, and nuclear scanned encephalographs, in order to locate the mirror neurons. So far, so unremarkable: we already know that chimpanzees have mirror neurons in the inferior parietal lobe and frontal cortex. But Django had another apparently sensitive area – I could see vaguely on the scan but had difficulty bringing it into focus. From the reactions to the neuronal stimuli, I began to suspect that it was a sort of Broca’s area proper to the chimpanzee. In the human brain, Broca’s area is the one concerned with speech. Do you see what this means? That chimpanzees too are capable of speech, or at least they’ve got the brains for it! I carried on stimulating the area in question, and getting Django to do exercises which I hoped would make it more responsive. Until, one day, the incredible happened: I was adjusting the apparatus when I suddenly realised that Django’s usual grunts were now interspersed with clearer sounds; intermittent ones, but definitely phonetic. I taped the lot, and played it back a thousand times. It was then that I made my great discovery: Django speaks Swahili!’

  Wide-eyed with emotion as he told his tale, Guntur seemed to be keeping the air down in his lungs, as though afraid of running out of breath. Usually so mild, his face, now drained of colour, was twisted into a grimace, his eyebrows suddenly more prominent so that he resembled a mask in an ethnographical museum. He carried on:

  ‘He speaks ready-made phrases, mangled and incomplete, but it’s definitely Swahili! He must have learned them from the scientists who reared him in Nairobi. Django was born on a nature reserve and has always been in touch with human beings. I wrote to a neurolinguist from the University of Leyden whose name I was given by an imam. Professor Aren De Smet will be coming to see Django next week, but for now the whole business is completely hush-hush. I haven’t mentioned it to anyone, apart, obviously to this same neurolinguist from Leyden, who is completely trustworthy and an observant Muslim. Do you realise what atheists would do with this discovery? If Django can speak, then he must have a soul. Does that mean that every living being has a soul? And, if so, what is the difference between life and matter? We have to find out more, and get there first.’

  As he was speaking, Guntur took a bunch of keys out of the safe.

  ‘Come on, let’s go and see Django. Then you can make up your own mind.’ I followed him through a gate, then down a wrought-iron staircase leading into the basement, from which the greenhouse was entered through a passageway beneath the boundary wall.

  ‘You’d better stay on this side of the terrarium, you’ll be able to hear him well enough from there. He doesn’t know you, and he might take fright,’ said Guntur as we went into the greenhouse. It had begun to rain, the drops were drumming on the glass and blurring the outlines of the tugboats riding at anchor on the quays of the Nieuwe Diep. The art nouveau building was divided into two by a grille, leaving the chimpanzee ample space to move around on the side nearer the water, from which it was s
eparated by panes of thick glass. The interior of the enclosure was fitted out with ropes and raised walkways, and there was a sandpit in the middle of the concrete floor. The space was crossed by a channel containing a stream of running water, flowing out into a drain. I took up my post behind the terrarium and watched Guntur as he walked forwards towards the cage among the flowering plants. The chimpanzee was sitting on the ground, his back against the grille; he turned his head as he heard Guntur’s voice.

  ‘Habari ya jioni, Django! Habari yako?’ I heard Guntur repeat. The chimpanzee seemed intrigued by the showers of rain against the glass; he was looking around him as though puzzled, surprised that he could hear the rain beating but could not see it fall. After some coaxing from Guntur he finally bounded up to the first walkway, which was some two metres above the ground, where he stayed, huddled, fixing Guntur with an alert but distant look. He seemed somehow sad, perhaps even worried. He grunted, yawned, dug around in his fur with his nails until he found something which seemed to be annoying him, removed it and put it in his mouth. He sat still for a few moments, looking listless, then suddenly turned his head to look at Guntur. Now his eyes really did seem to be saying: ‘What do you want from me?’