Kamchatka Read online

  In the classroom, none of these distinctions meant anything. Some of my best friends (Guidi, for example, who was already an electronics wizard; or Mansilla who was even blacker that Talavera and lived in Ramos Mejía, a suburb so far out of the city that it felt even more remote than Kamchatka) had little or nothing in common with me, and the life I lived. But we all got along.

  We all wore a white school smock in the mornings and a grey one in the afternoons, we drank mate at playtime and we jostled and shoved to get our favourite pastry, which the janitor brought in a sky-blue plastic bowl. Our uniforms made us equals, as did our youthful curiosity and energy. Our childlike passions rendered our differences insignificant.

  We were equal, too, in our complete ignorance on the subject of Leandro N. Alem, the school patriarch. With his beard and his intimidating scowl, he looked a lot like Melville. Maybe because he was tired of the two-dimensional confines of the painting in the headmaster’s office, he seemed intent on pointing to something just outside the frame. The obvious interpretation might suggest that he was pointing to the future path we would travel. But the nervous expression the painter had given him made it seem more likely that Alem was saying that we were looking in the wrong place; that we should not be looking at him but at something else, some mystery that did not appear in the painting and, being ambiguous, could not be but ominous.

  In all the time I spent in these classrooms, nobody ever taught us anything about Leandro Alem. Many years later (by which time I was living in Kamchatka) I discovered that Alem had rebelled against the conservative administration of his time in support of universal suffrage, taken up arms and wound up in prison though he lived to see his ideas finally triumph. Maybe they did not mention Alem to us because they wanted to spare us the inconvenient fact that he had committed suicide. The suicide of a successful man can only cast a pall over his ideas – as it would if St Peter had slit his wrists or Einstein had swallowed poison while living in exile in the US.

  So it would be naive to imagine that it was only by chance that I attended the school that bore his name every day for six years – until the morning that I walked out and never went back.

  5

  A SCIENTIFIC DIGRESSION

  That April morning Señorita Barbeito closed the classroom blinds and showed us an educational film. The film, in washed-out colours, with a voice-over dubbed by a Mexican narrator, discussed the mystery of life, explaining that cells came together to form tissue and tissues came together to form organs and organs came together to create organisms, though each was more than the sum of its parts.

  I was sitting (to my frustration, as I’ve said) in the front row, my nose almost pressed against the screen. I only paid attention for the first few minutes. I registered the fact that the Earth had been formed in a ball of fire 4,500 million years ago. I remember it took 500 million years for the first rocks to form. I remember it rained for 200 million years – that’s some flood – after which there were oceans. Then, in his deep voice and his thick Mexican accent, the narrator started talking about the evolution of species and I realized he had skipped the bit of the story between the Earth being barren and the first appearance of life. I thought maybe there was a section of the film missing and that this was why the Mexican kept banging on about mystery. By the time I’d finished thinking this and tried to go back to the film I’d lost the thread, so I didn’t understand anything after that.

  But this business of the mystery of life stuck with me. I raised some of my questions with mamá, who explained to me about Darwin and Virchow. In 1855 Virchow had proposed that omnis cellula e cellula (‘all cells from cells’), thereby stipulating that life was a chain whose first link, mamá had to admit, was not a trivial matter. It was also mamá who filled in some of the holes in the Mexican narrator’s calendar. She explained that the first single-cell life forms appeared on Earth 3,500 million years ago in the shallow oceans, produced by the longest thunderstorm in history.

  Other things I discovered later while I was living in Kamchatka among the volcanic eruptions and the sulphurous vapours. I discovered, for example, that we are made up of the same tiny atoms and molecules as rocks are. (Surely we should last longer.) I discovered that Louis Pasteur, the man who invented vaccinations, conducted experiments that proved that life could not appear spontaneously in an oxygen-rich atmosphere like that of our Earth. (The mystery was getting bigger.) Later, to my relief, I discovered that a number of scientists contend that in the beginning the Earth had no oxygen, or only trace amounts.

  Sometimes I think that everything you need to know about life can be found in biology books. They discuss the way that bacteria reacted to the massive injection of oxygen into the Earth’s atmosphere. Until that point (2,000 million years ago, according to my chronology), oxygen was fatal to life. Bacteria survived because oxygen was absorbed by the planet’s metals. When the metals were saturated and could absorb no more, the atmosphere was filled with toxic gas and many species died out. But the bacteria regrouped, developed defence mechanisms and adapted in a way that was as effective as it was brilliant: their metabolism began to require the very substance that, until then, had been poisonous to them. Rather than die of oxygen toxicity, they used oxygen to live. What had killed them became the air that they breathed.

  Perhaps this ability that life has to turn things to its advantage doesn’t mean much to you. But let me tell you that, in my world, it has meant a lot.

  6

  FANTASTIC VOYAGE

  Five minutes into the film, I wasn’t thinking about cells or mysteries or molecules at all – I was playing. I discovered that if I looked at the screen and let my eyes go out of focus, the images became 3-D: psychedelia for beginners. After I’d been staring at the little moving circles and bananas of cell tissue for a while, the edges of the screen began to disappear and it was like I’d fallen into magma.

  At first it was fun. It was like being in Fantastic Voyage, that film where they shrink a submarine down to microscopic size and inject it into the bloodstream of a human guinea pig. But after a while, I felt dizzy. If I didn’t stop, I was going to throw up my breakfast.

  I turned around in my seat, looking for somewhere to rest my tired eyes. In the half-light of the classroom, Mazzocone was eating the sandwich that was supposed to be his lunch, Guidi had fallen asleep and Broitman was playing Six Million Dollar Man with a toy soldier. (Making it run in slow motion and jump like a cricket.) Bertuccio had his back turned to me. True to form, he had leapt to his feet and was telling Señorita Barbeito that he was not about to swallow the idea that once upon a time there was just a single cell in the ocean, then time passed and – boom! – that cell turned into us.

  7

  ENTER BERTUCCIO

  Bertuccio was my best friend. It might sound like bull, but I swear that by the age of ten Bertuccio was reading Anouilh’s Becket and claiming he wanted to be a playwright. I had read Hamlet, because I didn’t want to be outdone, and because we had a copy of it at home (we didn’t have a copy of Becket) and even though I didn’t understand a word of Hamlet, I wrote an adaptation that I planned to perform with my friends in the alcove between the kitchen and the patio, which would make a fantastic stage if mamá moved the washing machine.

  But I was only trying to seem grown up; Bertuccio actually wanted to be an artist. He had read somewhere that an artist questions society and ever since he had been questioning everything, from the cost of school fees and the point of wearing a white smock in the morning and a grey one in the afternoons to the veracity of the story about French and Beruti handing out blue and white ribbons to the rebels of the revolution of 1841. (How could they have known that Belgrano would make the Argentine flag blue and white? What were they, psychic?)

  Bertuccio was forever embarrassing me. One time we went to the cinema to see Gold, which was over-fourteens only and the guy on the ticket desk asked us for ID. Bertuccio admitted that he was underage but said that he had read the book and hadn’t fou
nd anything liable to deprave or corrupt in it and informed the guy that no one had the right to presume that he was too immature to see a movie. When the ticket seller tried to interrupt him, Bertuccio solemnly announced that he, my dear sir, had already read Becket, The Exorcist and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (or parts of it, at least) ‘which is more than many adults can say, or are you calling me a liar?’

  Whenever he got me into this kind of mess, I was the one who came up with the solutions. When Bertuccio got tired of talking and the guy on the ticket desk couldn’t stand it any more, we went up the marble staircase to the first floor of the Rivera Indarte Cinema and hid in the toilets, waited until the usher had punched all the tickets for the Pullman seats, then, when he went into the cinema to show a latecomer to his seat, we snuck in behind him and hid behind the curtains. We’d missed the first fifteen minutes, but at least we got to see the film.

  Gold was shit. There weren’t even any naked women in it.

  8

  THE PRINCIPLE OF NECESSITY

  On this particular morning, while Bertuccio was challenging Señorita Barbeito over the very foundations of the temple of science, I was looking for a pencil and some paper to play Hangman.

  Señorita Barbeito sighed and told Bertuccio that of course there was a principle that explained everything: cell division, cells combining so as to develop complex functions, creatures leaving their aquatic environment, developing colours and fur, seeking new sources of energy, evolving paws, moving about and standing erect. Mazzocone was getting upset now because he realized he would have nothing to eat at lunchtime; a thread of drool was trickling down Guidi’s chin; Broitman was explaining to me that his Action Man cost $6 million and I was thinking how cool it would be to actually throw up and splatter the screen while Señorita Barbeito was explaining to Bertuccio that this principle that explained how an organism develops and adapts to changing circumstances is the principle of necessity.

  Bertuccio wanted to stand his ground; he was determined not to let Señorita Barbeito twist his arm on this, so I twisted his arm, literally. He asked what I wanted and I said would he like to play Hangman. He looked as though he was considering the possibility; his philosophical debate could always be resumed later. (I had come up with a word with lots of Ks that I knew would baffle him.) Bertuccio agreed but only if he could have the first go. He marked out an eleven-letter word while I was drawing the gallows. I said ‘A’ and he started filling in the blanks. There were five As in Bertuccio’s word.

  ‘You’re crazy’, I said.

  ‘Just wait,’ he said, ‘you’ll see,’ theatrical as ever.

  I said ‘E’ and he drew the head.

  I said ‘I’ and he drew the neck.

  I said ‘O’ and he drew one arm.

  I said ‘U’ and he drew the other arm.

  This is hard, I thought. An ill-fated ‘S’ earned me the body and after a suicidal ‘T’, I was hanging by a thread.

  Then there was a knock at the door and mamá came in.

  The only thing I learned from the whole cell business: people change because they have no alternative.

  9

  THE ROCK

  We used to call mamá the Rock. In the Fantastic Four, a Stan Lee comic, one of the Four is this guy made of rocks called ‘The Thing’. That was where we got the idea. Mamá wasn’t exactly thrilled about being compared to some bald, knock-kneed guy, but she was flattered that the name acknowledged her authority. She was happy as long as it was only me and the Midget that used the nickname. When papá called her the Rock – and papá did it more than we did – it was like everything was happening in Sensurround, the effect they use in disaster movies where all the seats shake.

  To us, mamá had always been blonde, but from old photos we could see that she had become blonder over time. She was slim and full of life, the complete opposite of the Thing. When I was little, she liked movies and doing crosswords. There was a photo of Montgomery Clift on her bedside table from back when he was still handsome, before the car crash smashed his face up. She was a Liza Minnelli fan too. Every morning she would wake us with the soundtrack from Cabaret. Mamá had a good voice and she knew all the words by heart from ‘Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome!’ at the beginning to ‘Auf wiedersehen, à bientôt’ just before the cymbal crash at the end. Given the stars she idolized, it seems obvious I was supposed to grow up to be gay, but that’s just one of the things that didn’t pan out.

  I thought mamá was beautiful. All boys think their mothers are beautiful, but in my defence I have to say that mine had the Searing Smile, a superpower Stan Lee would have paid good money for. Whenever she knew she was in the wrong – like the time I asked her to give me back the birthday money she’d asked me to lend her – she would use the Searing Smile and something inside me would melt and I would suddenly feel too weak to insist. (Actually, she never did give me that money back.) Papá said we were the lucky ones; he said that in the bedroom she used the Searing Smile for sinister purposes but refused to say anything more, leaving the details to our feverish imaginations.

  But her other powers, the powers that earned her the nickname the Rock even the Thing would have envied. Mamá could wield the Glacial Stare, the Petrifying Scream and, in exceptional circumstances, the Paralysing Pinch. Worse still, if mamá had an Achilles heel, we never discovered what it was. No kryptonite worked on mamá. This, however, did not stop us from trying her patience every day, exposing ourselves to the Stare, the Scream and the Pinch. Weaklings that we were, we always succumbed. There was something atavistic about our confrontations. They were like battles between man and wolf, between Superman and Lex Luthor, a larger-than-life struggle that we played out over and over, aware that it was a drama written to delight some deity with Elizabethan tastes. We fought because fighting defined us, one as much as the other. Because, in conflict, we were.

  Mamá had a doctorate in Physics and worked as a professor at the university. She always claimed that she had actually wanted to study biology and that the blame for her changing courses and studying the laws of the universe lay with her equally intractable mother, grandma Matilde. You’d have to know grandma Matilde to realize how ridiculous that was. I don’t think my grandmother was much concerned with mamá’s future beyond her ability to ensnare a man of good pedigree. (Another expression that tickled the Midget: was this the same Pedigree you feed to dogs?). This was a dream grandma Matilde had to give up once my father appeared on the scene – papá had a pedigree all right: mongrel. But I don’t think grandma Matilde cared a hoot whether mamá studied biology, physics or acupuncture. Besides, I couldn’t imagine mamá falling in with grandma Matilde’s master plan anyway. I don’t know where this primal family legend came from, but what I do know is that my love of science, what the Mexican narrator referred to as the mystery of life, I owe to mamá.

  That, and my passion for Liza with a Z. Got a problem with that?

  10

  A SHORT FAMILY PARENTHESIS

  When mamá met papá, she was already engaged to some other guy. Breaking off the engagement caused a huge scandal in the family. But mamá, who was not yet the Rock but the stone in David’s slingshot, was not one to give up easily.

  Not long after, she organized a dinner to introduce papá to the clan. Legend has it that mamá’s family had adored her previous fiancé. But papá went one better. He arrived, all serious, set on playing the part of the lawyer with a promising future (which is, incidentally, exactly what he was). Papá carefully dropped references to his ‘cases’ into the conversation and mentioned the offices he had just opened in Tribunales. By the time dessert was served, everyone had relaxed and mamá and her cousin Ana got up to dance a cueca or a samba, some dance that involved them flicking handkerchiefs. Papá shouted, ‘Watch where you’re flicking that snot!’ It was this comment that finally tipped the scales. Mamá’s family breathed a sigh of relief. Papá was one of them.

  They married the same year. I showed up a year later. If the sto
ries are to be believed, I was born after a ten-month pregnancy. Mamá’s due date was 1 January. The 10th (her birthday) came and went and still nothing. The 20th: still nothing. Regular check-ups revealed that I was perfectly healthy: I was still breathing, still growing normally. Nevertheless, by the end of January, the doctors decided to induce labour.

  Papá claimed that the whole thing was just a mix-up, that the obstetrician had simply got the dates wrong – a logical explanation – but whenever mamá disputed this, papá would get nervous as somehow he sensed that all that separated him from the unthinkable was a piece of card and a doctor’s illegible scrawl.

  As for me, the story of my birth gave me a taste for stories of other extraordinary births. According to tradition, unusual births are noteworthy. Julius Caesar, for example, was ‘born by the knife’ (cut from his mother’s belly, hence the term caesarean), and died by the knife on the Ides of March. Pallas Athena was – literally – the product of the worst headache Zeus ever had. I suppose I could have tried to come up with some reason for my refusal to be born, but something always stopped me. Midwives say that no one ever knows anything until the time is right and that is the tradition I respect above all others.