Kamchatka Page 21

  ‘Tell your abuelo he’s mad,’ said papá.

  ‘That’s what he said you’d say, and he said, tell your papá I taught him when he was a year younger than you!’

  Papá smiled. We’d got him. And mamá got her photo.

  Flash.

  70

  OF THE STARS

  For as long as he has existed, man has gazed up at the stars. The Egyptians believed the heavens were the goddess Nut, separated from her lover Sibû (the Earth) by the god Shu; Nut’s feet lay in the west and, through the night, the stars moved along her body. The Chinese, believing their emperor to be the Son of Heaven, made him head of their official religion. The Aztecs identified the god Quetzalcóatl with the Morning Star, otherwise known as the planet Venus. In The Odyssey, Homer compares Athena to a shooting star and imagines that the night sky is a dome of bronze or iron, supported by pillars.

  If the gods live up in the heavens, then surely they must determine the fates of those below. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún writes that the Aztecs sacrificed prisoners to Venus as it appeared in the east, scattering the blood in the direction of the Morning Star. Van der Waerden argues that the rise of astrology in ancient Greece derives from Zoroastrianism: if the soul comes from the heavens, where it plays a role in the movement of celestial bodies, then it is logical that when the soul enters the human body, it continues to be governed by the stars.

  The identification of the heavens with the divine survives even with the advent of science. In 340 Bc, in his book On the Heavens, Aristotle argues that the Earth is a sphere. During lunar eclipses, the shadow of the Earth on the moon was always round. The longest chapter in his book is devoted to explaining that the universe is a celestial sphere with the Earth at its centre. Later, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle gives a more detailed explanation of his celestial mechanics. The universe, he writes, is made up of a series of nested spheres, each fulfilling a different function, some functions being associated with planets. He no longer justifies the movement of these planets in terms of Platonic Necessity but proposes a physics of motion, of cause and effect. But in following this chain of cause and effect back to the first cause, Aristotle refers to the one who set in motion the first heaven as ‘the Unmoved Mover’: in other words, God. Certain early commentators considered an Unmoved Mover sufficient to explain the whole system, though Aristotle actually suggests that each planetary sphere has a mover, which implies that for fifty-five spheres there are fifty-five movers, in other words, fifty-five ‘gods’. Terrified by the implications of this polytheism, his translators in late antiquity and during the Middle Ages substituted the name of ‘God’ for the words ‘intelligences’ and ‘angels’, without in any way diminishing the power of the original.

  There have been those who believed that the heavens govern our lives in ways more overt than those proposed by astrology and theology. The North African tribes that settled in the valley of the Nile noticed that there was a correlation between the behaviour of the river and that of the star Sirius, known to them as Sothis. The rising of the Nile coincided with the first appearance of Sothis on the horizon just before dawn. The Egyptians believed that, during the night, Ra, the Sun-god, journeyed through the underworld, a journey that could be followed by the movements of the stars, which they divided into twelve ‘houses’. Later, the day too was divided into twelve houses, resulting in the day we know, divided into twenty-four hours: twelve hours of night and twelve hours of day. Our hours, minutes and seconds are a legacy of Babylonian civilization which used a sexagesimal system because the number sixty has a lot of prime factors. (God made a mistake in not giving us twelve fingers.)

  Over the centuries, the course of science moved it further and further from organized religion. Religious persecution of free thinkers for years drove Copernicus to remain silent about his theory that the Sun rather than the Earth was at the centre of the celestial spheres; Kepler was similarly reticent and Galileo paid a terrible price for not being so. But in recent decades, no science has discussed God more than astronomy. Einstein once asked: ‘How much choice did God have in constructing the universe?’ Stephen Hawking has justified the need to arrive at a unified theory of the cosmos by saying: ‘For then we should know the mind of God’. Scientists have described their response to the ‘ripples’ in the microwave background radiation discovered by the COBE satellite by saying: ‘It is like looking at God’. On their lips, the word God relates less to organized religion than to their quest to find an order and a meaning to all of existence; a quest that had once been the province of philosophers and theologians, but is no longer. Obviously they have stopped looking at the heavens.

  Sometimes I think that everything you need to know about life can be found in astronomy books. They teach us our place in the universe: we are a chance phenomenon on the surface of a planet which happens to be neither too close nor too far from the Sun, one of many millions of stars. They teach us that the stars, like us, have a lifecycle; the Sun, for example, will die in about 5,000 million years when it has burned up all its hydrogen, at which point it will begin to grow cold and shrink. It is unlikely that the human species will survive this death and thus, just as Moses did not live to see the Promised Land, will not see this incredible spectacle. Our universe will cease to expand within 10,000 million years, at which point it will begin to shrink, to fold in on itself, and time’s arrow will run backwards – broken glasses will fly up to become whole, rain will fall upwards, the numbers on the petrol pump will run backwards.

  Astronomy teaches us that God, if he exists, acts with great discretion: a gravitational collapse – for example, the universe beginning to contract – can only occur in places that, like black holes, let no light escape and consequently cannot be witnessed from outside.

  The books teach us that time is relative and that it passes more slowly near a large mass like the Earth: if a pair of twins is separated, and one is sent across the galaxy at half the speed of light, the twin aboard the spaceship will age more slowly than the twin who stays behind on Earth. Astronomy also leads us to the uncertainty principle, formulated by Werner Heisenberg in 1926, which proposes that it is impossible to know both the position and momentum of a given particle – the more precisely one property is calculated, the less precisely the other can be known. This pretty much destroys any possibility that we can know the future. We can’t even measure the present precisely. It takes time for light to travel; consequently the stars we see are not as they are but as they were: when we contemplate the universe, we are not seeing its present but its past. (Time is relative, but more than anything it’s weird.)

  In the concluding pages of his book A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking wonders: ‘Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?’ The time when we imagined that we were the centre of this phenomenon is long past, but however infinitesimal, we continue to be a part of the universe and its echoes are present throughout our lives. The answer to Hawking’s question, therefore, is the same answer we mere mortals give ourselves to explain our impulse to triumph, to overcome our limitations and strive to create a better version of ourselves before our lifecycle comes to an end, before we grow cold and begin to shrivel, before we gutter out like the Sun.

  Five thousand million years. That is how much time we’ve got to get it right.

  71

  IN WHICH WE CONTEMPLATE THE STARS AND DISCOVER MORE THINGS THAN CAN BE CONTAINED WITHIN THIS CHAPTER TITLE

  According to grandma, star-gazing is almost a family tradition. Papá got the telescope she still keeps up in his room as a present for his tenth birthday. Seized by a brief obsession for astronomy, he named one of the farm dogs Kepler. It’s important to think very carefully before giving something a name, because a name points to a destiny. According to the Salvatierra boys, who knew him when he was old, Kepler was not allowed in the house because he constantly trailed a cloud of gas.

  When he was engaged to mamá (who had spent time seriously studying astronomy, given that
it is a component part of physics), every time they came down to the farm, they would go out into the field after dinner and watch the stars. Grandma used to say that back then, the heavens were full of tourists. According to her, not content to fight over the Earth, the Russians and the Yanks felt they had to flood the sky with capsules and satellites, with dogs and monkeys and discarded rockets and astronauts dreaming of the White House. Grandma swore that one night she had seen a satellite, a story that always made papá laugh.

  ‘Oh, stop calling it a satellite, mamá. It was a shooting star!’

  ‘But the little light was red!’

  ‘The only thing red was the wine you’d been drinking,’ interrupted grandpa.

  I never saw a sky like the sky over Dorrego – so vast, so black, with stars in an infinite array of size and brilliance. Maybe it seemed vast because the Earth didn’t get in the way: the countryside around Dorrego is flat, there are no big cities to blot out the stars with their own clouds of gas, their artificial starlight. (Cities have a terrible tendency to try and imitate starlight, you only have to see them from a plane.) The sky above Dorrego was so vast it was impossible to take in at a glance; you could twist and turn until your neck felt like rubber, scanning the sky from north to south, east to west, then up again without covering half its span. There were stars so tightly clustered that they formed white pools against the night sky; simply gazing at them made you a brother of the first man who first looked up and saw spilled milk.

  Before Dorrego, I had always thought of the sky as a black screen on which a handful of scattered stars twinkled vaguely, but were no more enthralling than the ceiling of the Cine Opera. Dorrego revealed the other sky, the boundless dome that sends you rushing to a dictionary for synonyms for ‘infinite’; stars that clustered, not into constellations, but into galaxies; stars like swarms of bees which suggested not stillness or permanence but movement, the trail of something, of someone that passed just now, a moment ago, when you weren’t looking. A sky that seemed to suddenly reveal the meaning of all things: Man’s need to create language to describe it, geography to explain his place within it, biology to remind him that he is a newcomer in this universe, and history, because everything is written in the sky above Dorrego: intimate and extravagant stories, love and loss, the miniature and the epic.

  Mamá unfolded a blanket on the grass and the four of us lay down on it. The Midget immediately fell fast asleep; I pulled back his eyelids and shone papá’s torch into them but he didn’t even move.

  ‘Back when your parents were courting, we always used to come out here after dinner to look at the stars,’ said grandma from her armchair, the proud curator of the Museum of Our Happiness.

  ‘Hey, look – a shooting star!’ said mamá.

  ‘Where? Where?’

  ‘There, look… It’s gone now. That’s why they’re called shooting stars. If you don’t pay attention you miss them.’

  ‘What’s a shooting star?’

  ‘Sometimes, when you look up at the sky, you’ll see a star moving at a thousand miles an hour and… zzzzzzt it disappears,’ said papá.

  ‘In fact they’re not actually stars,’ mamá explained, ‘they’re rocks, fragments of asteroids that burn up as they enter our atmosphere…’

  ‘No, no, no…’ said papá, ‘No science, no!’

  ‘Why science no?’ protested mamá.

  ‘Because kiss yes.’

  He leaned in and kissed her, but I had other things on my mind.

  ‘I can’t see anything!’

  ‘You have to be patient. You have to keep watching.’

  ‘Good night, people,’ said grandpa.

  ‘Don’t go, abuelo,’ I said and tugged on his arm until he fell down on the blanket next to us.

  ‘And who’s going to help me up again?’ asked grandpa, laughing.

  ‘We’ll get the AA to send a crane,’ grandma teased him, still stung by his barb about the red wine.

  ‘Your grandson will help you up. He’s the strongest of the family,’ said papá.

  ‘I’ll help you up,’ I said, ‘but then you have to stay here with us.’

  ‘What if I freeze to death…?’

  ‘Is that the Southern Cross?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘If you see a shooting star,’ said papá, ‘you can make a wish.’

  ‘What have stars got to do with wishes?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I do know that I once made a wish right here, and it came true.’

  Papá gave mamá a soppy look and they started playing kissy-face again.

  Suddenly the Midget sat up, rubbed his eyes and started yelling: ‘I dreamed about a light, I dreamed about a light!’

  I don’t know how long we sat there: the Midget, on grandma’s lap, telling anyone who would listen about his dream, papá and mamá still flirting with each other, grandpa telling me the story of Orion the Hunter, while I lay on my back staring at the sky, trying hard not to blink.

  Shooting stars are rocky fragments of meteors that burn up as they come into contact with the Earth’s atmosphere. In that, mamá was right. They’re also somehow related to wishes; you’re supposed to make a wish as soon as you see one streak across the sky. In that, papá was right.

  I looked and looked until my eyes were burning, but I didn’t see anything.

  Maybe that’s why my wish didn’t come true.

  Playtime

  * * *

  Quien sabe, Alicia

  Este país no estuvo hecho porque sí

  (Who knows, Alicia, This country wasn’t made just because.)

  Charly García, ‘canción de alicia en el País’

  Fifth Period: History

  * * *

  Noun. 1. The aggregate of all events that have occurred in the past: ‘Humanity has progressed throughout history.’

  2. A continuous, systematic narrative of past events: ‘History teaches us about the most significant events in the human story.’

  72

  CONCERNING (UN)HAPPY ENDINGS

  I don’t like stories with unhappy endings. That’s my problem with Houdini, for example. Tony Curtis is suspended upside down in the Chinese Water Torture Cell wearing a straitjacket, his ankles shackled together, and he doesn’t have the energy left to struggle. A few last bubbles of air escape from his mouth. Someone screams: a woman, I think. Someone else breaks the glass and the water gushes out all over the stage, splashing the people in the front row. Tony Curtis says a few last words to Janet Leigh and then he dies. It would have been better if he’d been run down by a car, or died in a motorcycle accident like Lawrence of Arabia. (The good thing about Lawrence of Arabia is that it starts at the end; that way you get the unhappy bit out of the way at the beginning and the story ends where it should, in the desert.) Houdini dying during one of his escapes because, for once, he wasn’t able to get out of his shackles in time, is like a trick of fate: a particularly cruel trick, like the punishments that gods visit on mortals who try to fly or steal the sacred fire. It is a way of saying: you may well be able to escape from anywhere, Harry, but there’s one thing that no one can escape from.

  I remember how I felt when I found out that the Robin Hood stories I’d been collecting ever since I could read (if I liked a story, I collected every version of it I could find – I had at least eight versions of Robin Hood) had an odd tendency to stop before the end. They usually ended with Richard the Lionheart coming home, giving Robin a pardon, restoring his lands and his title and giving his blessing to Robin’s marrying Maid Marian. But in grandpa’s library I found another version, a big fat book published by Ediciones Peuser, in which the story continues. According to this version, one of the bad guys sneaked into a banquet and stabbed Maid Marian and her little son Richard. This was terrible, but it wasn’t the end. The book ends with Robin Hood, who’s sick and depressed by now, arriving at a convent, helped by Little John, looking for medical help. He is taken in by a nun, who suggests that he needs a course
of bloodletting. Robin, whose faculties are diminished and who has lost the will to live, doesn’t recognize that the nun is actually a woman who’s always hated him. Given the perfect opportunity to avenge herself (back then, people accepted that monks and nuns had the same emotions as ordinary people), the woman opens his veins, makes some excuse and leaves the room. By the time Little John decides to go and look for her, it is too late: Robin has bled to death.

  I didn’t mention my discovery to anyone. I put the book back exactly where I found it, slid it into the gap on the shelf so no one would notice anything different.

  But everything was different. For the first time I realized that being a good guy didn’t mean you were guaranteed a happy ending. It was as if someone had suddenly abolished the law of gravity: I was no longer connected to the Earth, ‘up’ was suddenly a bottomless abyss, ‘to fall’ was a sentence with no full stop.

  From then on, even the expression ‘happy ending’ seemed somehow poisonous. ‘Happy’ is carefully added to help us to swallow the ‘ending’, like a bitter pill coated in sugar. Nobody likes to think that they will die. If it were up to us, we’d go on forever like the Duracell bunny.

  My belated religious education did everything it could to afford some consolation. Our good deeds could earn us a happy ending… after the end. That’s why the fat priest cried tears of happiness when Marcelino died: because the kid had a first-class ticket to heaven. That was why Richard Burton and Jean Simmons walked happily to their martyrdom in The Robe, because they imagined that in a few minutes they would be in Paradise, whose splendour would outshine even the glories of CinemaScope.

  Father Ruiz’s explanations were never enough for me – perhaps because, inadvertently, my parents had planted in me the seed of agnosticism. Papá believed in earthly justice – he worked for happy endings here and now. Mamá believed in the principle of causality but only in this world, since it was impossible to know if other worlds existed, still less how things in this world might affect that one. I imagine that they did not want to demean their love for this world by making it dependent on some other world. Everything they did was intended to effect change in this world; the rest, if anything existed, was gravy.