“And what exactly did you hear?”
“Héctor was calling you and Kyra ‘Son’ and ‘Daughter,’ and you and she referred to each other as brother and sister. Also, something about telomeres and the Kronon Corporation, and all that mad stuff about Héctor and Kyra teaching at the Complutense in the seventies. And please will you finally explain to me what TAF is, because I couldn’t find any reference anywhere to it.”
And you won’t find it, either, I thought to myself, totally demoralized.
It was worse than I had imagined; she’d heard too much. There was nothing that could be left out, not with Dana. She’d get to the bottom of it with her questions.
“Well, so what the devil is it?” she insisted.
Just as I’d thought.
“First you have to tell me how that image ended up on your laptop.”
“I guess if we’ve got to this stage, I have to put all my cards on the table.”
“Please,” I urged her.
“Okay,” she muttered, as if she was embarrassed by her confession. “The first thing I did was search for any reference to the Kronon Corporation and telomeres in the thesis databases on our intranet, as well as in biotechnology and genetics journals. From what I’ve been able to deduce so far, it all has to do with cancer research. I still haven’t formulated any clear theory about all this, other than that your amnesia crises are the result of some sort of brain tumor and that you’re all searching of your own accord for a cure for a cancer you might have.”
She glanced in my direction as she was talking, looking for confirmation from me, but I denied it with a shake of my head.
“I’m sorry to have worried you, especially after seeing me in that state when I returned from California, but I wasn’t lying to you when I told you my amnesia crises weren’t linked to any illness. You’ll understand later but, believe me, we’re not searching for a cure for any cancer.”
I have to confess that I felt happy inside when I saw from her face that a weight dropped from her shoulders when I ruled out her tumor theory. Dana had been worried about me, and even though my reaction might seem egotistical, her concern was just what I needed at that moment.
“Go on. What else were you looking for?”
“When you went to the conference the following week, I had absolutely no doubt that you were going to San Francisco, just as Kyra had said the day I overheard you, so I took the plunge and went to the Complutense to check things out. The first thing I did was go to the administrative office of the Biological Sciences Faculty. I told the oldest administrator I could find that I was from the alumni association, and we were retrieving the photographs of some of the graduation classes we were missing. She looked for the photos from ’76 and ’79 and it just so happened that those years had disappeared from the archives. By the way, the administrator wasn’t at all pleased.”
“Terrific,” I murmured.
“So I asked after Héctor del Castillo and Kyra del Castro, although I imagined she wouldn’t find anything. She hunted among the personnel files and naturally there was no trace of those names, but she did find an ‘Yra,’ an unusual name, of course. And then there was also the matter of the surname.”
“What was wrong with the surname?”
“I’d spent a lot of time mulling over a crazy theory, but when she told me that Yra’s surname was Zelaya, I asked her if there was any other professor whose surname also started with the letter Z. And there was. Her husband, Professor Víctor Zeidan. I asked her for a photo, but the folders with all their personal and academic details were empty. I couldn’t go any further with that line of investigation. But I was really intrigued by the coincidence of the names.”
“And what was that theory?” If she’d worked it out, she was the first person in two thousand years to have done so—ever since we’d all imitated Lyra’s habit of making use of the Latin alphabet for our names whenever we changed identities. That enabled us to locate each other much more easily.
“Well, your initials and those of your supposed brothers always seemed curious to me. Héctor, Iago, and Jairo del Castillo: H. C., I. C., and J. C.—your names go in alphabetical order. After the day I overheard you, I realized that Kyra’s did, too: K. C. Don’t tell me I mull things over too much in my head. I’ve always been in the habit of looking for acronyms in people’s initials. They called me ‘Triple A’ at school because I was Adriana Alameda Almenara. I guess that helped make me who I am, though it never bothered me.
“Anyway, when I discovered that the coincidence with the initials of the names and surnames was also happening at the Complutense in the seventies, I got in touch with my mentor, Mercedes Poveda. When I was studying for my degree in the nineties, she was an emeritus professor, and we’ve maintained our friendship ever since. I went to visit her at her house. She’s very old, but you and I could only hope to have a mind like hers when we’re ninety. Mercedes remembered them; they were colleagues of a friend of hers in the Biological Sciences Faculty. Anyway, she gave me a vague description of a man who was in his forties back then, dark-haired, and married to a blond who was a bit younger than him. I asked her for some photos, and she spent some time hunting through her albums but didn’t find any.”
“And what were you thinking?”
“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head and looking down at the carpet. “Maybe that those professors were your parents, and that the four of you were siblings. I really don’t know, Iago. Nothing fitted. When I got the photo this morning, it was the first thing that occurred to me. But when I zoomed in and saw Kyra’s marks . . . No, they’re not your parents. You have to understand that I have no idea what’s happening with you, nor what this is about. Don’t ask me for theories. There are too many loose ends that I don’t know how to explain.”
I looked at her and realized the burden she was carrying on her shoulders. She was serious, shaken, and worst of all, there was an enormous gulf between us. And right there in front of me I now had the explanation for it. I didn’t have to ask her the reason for what had happened the Night of the Museums; I already had all the explanations for her behavior.
So I poured myself a glass of water and began. For once I raised the eternal barriers that I always imposed on myself with every conversation; I shook off the layers and layers of lies, deceptions, and deceit. For once I put aside my self-censorship and decided to answer whatever Dana might ask me without any beating about the bush.
“Your first question was about TAF, so I’ll start there. They’re the initials that stand for the ancient family.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything.”
“I know,” I said, draining the glass as I followed the flight of a seagull on the other side of the window.
I turned toward her. I wanted to see her face when I said it: “We are the ancient family. We think we’re the oldest living family in the world. Héctor is our father; Kyra, Jairo, and I are half-siblings from different mothers and different eras.”
“I was asking you a serious question,” she said, frowning.
“I’m not joking.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Héctor isn’t old enough to be your father.”
“Héctor is the doyen of humanity, as far as we know. And he’s old enough to be the father of every living Homo sapiens walking the planet today. Maybe he actually is.”
“Iago, I’m not following you, and I really am trying,” she said, squirming nervously.
“I think it would be best if you let me tell you everything without you asking any questions, because if we go on like this we’ll never finish, and believe me, with all that I have to say, I mean that literally.”
“Fine. I’m listening.”
34
IAGO
Venus Day, the twentieth day of the month of Uath
Friday, June 1, 2012
Never before had I tried to synthesize the t
wenty-eight thousand years of my family’s history, so what would be the best way of doing it? Patching together an inventory perhaps?
Maybe something epic along the lines of:
I have been a thief and a murderer, a slave and a master, a lover and a husband, sometimes loyal, sometimes unfaithful. I’ve healed and cut short lives, but I’ve never whispered in the ears of kings, nor have I run empires from the shadows. If I ever left for the battlefield, it wasn’t to lead armies but to fight among the troops; discretion necessitated this. One of my identities appears in the Calendar of Saints’ Days, curiously, as a martyr, without ever having died or been martyred in the name of any god. But I have most certainly been tortured for other reasons, many more times than my memory has been able to accept.
I stopped remembering all the languages I knew when I reached a hundred. Now I can only speak sixteen living languages, but sleep sometimes brings back the dead ones. I’ve had four hundred and four children, many of them bearing my eyes. I abandoned all of them before they reached their tenth year if they didn’t die before then; that’s why I avoid women with bright-blue eyes, because they might bear my blood. I don’t expect you to understand, but they’re taboo for me.
I only ever had one longevo son, who died before he reached eight hundred.
I’ve had about a thousand identities, one for every decade. I’ve never been with any woman for more than ten years, and I’ve been widowed dozens of times, one hundred and forty-eight to be precise, although I’ve been separated a few times too, to be sure. I’m not immune to the havoc wreaked by the absence of love.
I’ve completed fifty-three university degrees, the first one in Salamanca in 1504, when all that was offered was humanities. I’ve been president of a university on four occasions, and a full professor about fifteen times, though never of history—I can’t stand the inaccuracies of the official versions . . .
No, Dana would prefer a chronological account; it would sit better with her structured view of the world. I should put dates to our births and limit our childhoods within the artificial and simplistic historical periods she has studied. So, without further ado, I began to talk.
“I’ll begin with my father. I think it’s the most logical starting point. Héctor was born in the antechamber of the Monte Castillo cave at the beginning of the Gravettian period.” I had to ignore the expression on Dana’s face in order to be able to continue. “We’ve had to deduce that time from the dated objects that were already in the cave when he was born, since we can’t do any dating on ourselves. He lived through the rigors of the Würm Ice Age; his clan was seminomadic, and they followed the macrofauna in accordance with the seasons. Luckily, I don’t have to provide all the details, because you already have a mental image of them.
“They had contact with other clans, and yes, he did coincide with the Neanderthals, although back then they were just another clan, each one very different from the rest, just as, when he traveled toward the south, he found men of different statures and skin colors. Everything we suspect today about Neanderthals—they were redheads, they did or didn’t play the flute, they may have had language—Héctor has to pretend he doesn’t know, just as all the members of my family do, each and every day of our lives.
“When Héctor was born, babies had mothers, but the notion of a nuclear family didn’t exist yet. They still didn’t understand there was any direct link between sex and what happened ten lunar cycles later. I say this because Héctor knew who his mother was, but his father could have been any one of the hunters in the clan, or even in one of the other clans, since they often intermingled, especially when the clans in the area gathered together for the solstices, either in Altamira on this side of the Pyrenees, or in the Lascaux cave if the snows didn’t prevent them from crossing over to the other side.
“Some time after Héctor had become an adult hunter, he began to realize that his former playmates were growing old. They were losing their teeth and hair and becoming wrinkled, while their female companions were no longer menstruating and no longer having children. He, on the other hand, continued to be a vital member of the clan’s hunting parties; he wasn’t losing either his vigor or his aim, and he wasn’t becoming stooped. He was a source of pride for his clan. The shamans followed one after another, but Lür—his original name, which means ‘bonded with the earth,’ or just ‘earth’—had learned to be as wise as them by endlessly observing human nature. He became the natural leader, the one who made decisions and mediated in difficult situations. But there came a moment when there was no one left in the clan with whom he’d shared childhood or adolescence, or even old age, which eventually touched everyone except him. The younger generations mistrusted him; no hunter could aspire to become clan chief while Lür was there and didn’t age. He decided to abandon Monte Castillo when all he could see around him were evil looks and women who refused to let him under their fur-skin blankets at night.”
I took a deep breath and continued. The morning sun was spilling over the rock profile of Peña Cabarga, and I seized on it as a mooring point. You know that what I’m saying is true. You’ve always been out there, controlling the cycles, and you’ve watched us wandering for millennia.
“My father found new clans in the surrounding region,” I continued, “at a time when it was easy and common to abandon your own area if you didn’t feel comfortable there. Lür got into the habit of moving on before he had to provide explanations about his appearance. He traveled south toward a more benign climate, always on the lookout for other people who didn’t grow old, but he never found anyone else who was like him. He used to allow several generations to go by before he returned to the same place. He’d measure the passage of time from the thickness of the most notable trees in each location, or he’d grow a very long beard, or put a notch in his spear with each solstice that passed. The only constant in his life was Monte Castillo. It was always easy to find: a conical hill next to a river a day’s journey from the sea. That hasn’t changed.
“What did change, about ten thousand years ago, was the climate and, because of that, the animals. The coastline and his Europe of snowfalls and glaciers turned into a continent of forests. The Mesolithic period was beginning. When he met my mother’s clan, Lür had returned to Monte Castillo for the umpteenth time and had joined a clan of shell gatherers on the coast. The day he saw them arrive—people from what is today the north of Europe, extremely tall, men and women alike, with their blue eyes—he thought that some spirit of the sea had possessed them.
“My mother led the group, and she was the first one he communicated with. She and her group had been on the move for many years from what we believe is present-day Denmark, because in a short space of time—less than a generation—all the northern coastal clans saw how the melting of the ice was swallowing up their communities beside the sea. Some of the clans reestablished themselves inland. My mother’s clan, on the other hand, followed the coastline, moving south through what is now France until they came across my father. According to their beliefs, they always had to be able to see the sea; otherwise, they’d lose their link with it, and their eyes would stop being blue, which was the identity marker of their clan.
“My mother had been on the road almost from the time she was a child. They would exchange goods along the way. Some of their number would remain with the clans they came across, while people from other clans joined them on their journey. My mother’s father had been their guide, but he died of old age during their travels. He had sat down with his back to the clan one morning and allowed them to go on without him, as was their custom.
“As you can imagine, I was born not long after their first encounter on the beach, although something unusual happened. I was born after twelve lunar cycles rather than the usual ten. I know that these days you say that a pregnancy lasts nine months, but it’s more accurate to say forty weeks or ten lunar cycles. I know what you’re going to ask me: Did you know how to count t
en thousand years ago? We used to count by twenties, just as the Mayans did eight thousand years later, and who knows how long ago our neighbors did in their primitive language, ancient Euskera, or Basque. Every finger and every toe had its own name, and I guess those were the first numbers. Anything beyond twenty was ‘many.’ ”
I continued to speak despite her silence. I forced myself to go on. She was keeping her side of the bargain, no matter how hard that might be, so I had to keep going.
“I had two brothers, but they both died when they were still almost babies, and I barely remember them. Part of my mother’s clan stayed in these parts, because Lür’s clan took them in, and more blue-eyed children were born. According to my father, when my mother went into labor with me, she went down to the beach and positioned herself in such a way that the first thing I would see was the sea, as they did traditionally in her clan. That’s how I inherited the color of her eyes.” I didn’t even dare to glance in her direction as I quietly added, “They named me Urko, ‘he who comes from the sea,’ a wonderful coincidence with your name, the way I see it.”
“I grew up in the forests, the cliffs, and the cave of Monte Castillo. My father stayed with us until my mother began to show the signs of old age. Lür never told us anything about his true nature, but because no one spent more time together than the two of us, father and son, I had picked up that his vigor was unusual, thanks to odd small signs. We always got on; living with him has always been easy.
“I now believe he stayed with us longer than he normally did. I was almost twenty years old, a mature youth, a tested hunter, and possibly the next leader, when my father went missing. My blood united the two clans, and my decisions were already respected. My first wife had died during childbirth, but she gave me my first daughter, Eder, who died not long after while she was going through her first teething.
“On that day, after the first thaw, I headed out to hunt with the men of the clan. Lür had gone on ahead of us a few days earlier, following the tracks of a bear, but on this occasion he didn’t return. We found his bloodstained clothes in the forest. It looked as if the bear had attacked him, but we didn’t find any trace of his body. And when I say ‘bear,’ I mean a cave bear, Ursus spelaeus. They usually measured about fifteen feet, as you know. But it’s one thing to reconstruct a skeleton you’ve dug out of a site and quite another to see one in front of you, standing upright and enraged. All fifteen feet of it, Adriana. If it found you on your own, you didn’t have a hope.