“I have an appointment here with Flemming Petersen at midday,” I said in Danish. “Is he at home?”
“Dad just rang from work. He asked me to tell you that he’ll be here in half an hour, that he’s been held up a bit, and could you please wait for him,” she rattled off in one breath as if she was used to acting as her father’s secretary and had learned the message by heart.
“Fine, then I’ll wait,” I replied, accepting her invitation to come inside.
“Could you give me a hand in the meantime?” she asked in her shrill voice as she led me down a hallway with white wooden floorboards. The house was decorated in a simple, almost naïf style, and one could sense a troubling lack of feminine touches. Did Flemming have a wife? I had no idea. So far our conversations had been limited to medical matters.
“Of course. What’s involved?” I replied as naturally as I could. I was still digesting the fact that Flemming had a daughter with progeria; he’d never mentioned it.
“I need someone with more muscles than I have to move some blocks of ice from my studio to the garden.”
“What do you use them for?”
“Sculptures.”
“Sculptures?”
She pushed open a heavy metal door and put on a pair of gloves as she entered a room that must have been several degrees below freezing. With her back to me, she began to work with a saw on a half-carved block of ice until I could see that it was acquiring the form of the most famous sculpture in Denmark, The Little Mermaid.
“Do you like mermaids?” I asked her.
“I like any mythological being that doesn’t age,” she replied as shards of ice fell to the ground with astonishing speed under the pressure of her assured strokes.
I looked around me more carefully then and realized that we were surrounded by other life-size figures, each one of them transparent and so smooth and polished that I couldn’t resist the temptation of walking up to one of them and staring into its eyes.
“And who are these?”
“Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew,” she said, pointing to the figure of a hunched-over old man with a long beard and gnarled walking stick.
He’d been carved in the pose of a man purposefully setting out for a particular destination, and it was precisely that determined expression that made him seem even more pathetic.
“I assume you know the legend. He was condemned to wander the earth eternally without ever stopping, and wherever he went he would leave misfortune in his wake.”
Touché, little one, I thought.
“He’s known by other names: Cataphilus, Larry the Wanderer, Samar, Ausero, Michob Ader, Joseph Cartapilus—”
“Of course he’s known by other names,” I said, interrupting a list I knew far too well. “Any immortal deserves an extensive catalogue of names, don’t you think?”
“Do immortals interest you?” she asked, searching for my complicity.
“Not really, to be honest,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “But keep going. It will keep us entertained until your father arrives.”
“Ma Gu, the famous Chinese immortal who hides in the mountains,” she continued, pointing her saw at a young woman with long fingernails and Asian features.
“And who’s he?” I asked, pointing to another figure. He was tall and bald and had an athletic build. The only clothing he was wearing was a finely pleated skirt and sandals—all carved in ice.
“That’s Gilgamesh, king of Babylonia five thousand years ago. He lived in the walled city of Uruk and was obsessed with searching for immortality. Dad took me to the British Museum to see the tablets detailing his history. He told me that The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest surviving poem we have.”
“I think that sounds vaguely familiar,” I murmured, unable to avoid a secret smile.
We meet again, wise old man, and so far from your accursed city in the middle of the desert. You’ve had a long life after all. The world still remembers you.
“And what do you do with your immortals when there’s no space for them and they start to jostle one another?” I asked as I noticed how little space remained in the cold store.
“I take them out to the garden and watch them melt.”
“That smacks of revenge,” I pointed out.
“Freud isn’t fashionable anymore,” was her sole response.
I hid my smile. Her brain was as quick as her father’s.
“And shouldn’t you be at school right now?” I asked her, forcing myself to change the subject.
“No. My father has always been in charge of schooling me at home. Anyway, why should I spend my time studying math and geography if I’m already past my use-by date?”
“I don’t understand,” I said to her, although I knew perfectly well what she was talking about.
“The average life expectancy for my illness is thirteen, and I’ve already exceeded that by two years. Right now I have the record for longevity. So tell me, why should I bother studying?”
“You should be doing what you most enjoy, but don’t discount your studies just because the statistics say you’ve run out of time.”
“And who are you to give me advice?”
“No one. It’s just that you asked.”
“Of course, life is simple for you. You think you’ll have that physique for the rest of your life, but just wait till the first wrinkles start to appear.”
“I can’t wait, believe me,” I said quietly.
Luckily, we were interrupted by the sound of the door behind us opening. A small man came in, rubbing his hands together, his chubby cheeks reddening from the cold in the room.
“Isaac, give me a hug! My apologies for being delayed.”
“No problem,” I replied, allowing myself to be hugged. His energy was pure, like everything else in that place.
“So you’ve met my daughter, Rebekka. Quite an artist, isn’t she?”
“Without question.”
“Now that you’re both here, could you get rid of Gilgamesh? There’s no room for him anymore,” the girl interrupted us.
We said good-bye to her after we’d transported the block of ice outdoors, and I followed Flemming down the narrow corridor until we reached what should have been the garage. I glanced around quickly and realized it was a home laboratory, although far better equipped than the one Kyra had. Some of the equipment was state of the art. Despite the fact that we were alone, he lowered his voice and leaned toward me as if he was afraid someone might overhear us.
“Look at this beauty,” he said, pointing at the eyepiece of a powerful microscope.
The image certainly was beautiful. I saw blue chromosomes with fluorescent tips at their ends looking just like the stars in a summer-night sky.
“What you can see shining are my telomeres. I’ve forced the DNA double helix apart and highlighted the telomeres by attaching fluorescent molecules to them. Now take a look at my daughter’s cells.”
The tips were much less brilliant, as if the stars were much farther away.
“We’ve found it, Isaac! We’ve found it! I’ve cultivated a sample of my daughter’s tissue in the lab and compared it to mine. If you relate the intensity of the fluorescence to the length of the telomere, the conclusions are obvious: her telomeres are much shorter than mine. Her biological age is much greater than mine, and that’s taking into account the fact that I’m not a young man anymore.”
My hand flew up to my mouth. When I was able to speak, all I said was, “I’m impressed.”
But my friend was even more emotional than me.
“You were right. If we could reverse that tendency and repair her telomeres, we’d have the cure for progeria, and we’d be able to act early, as soon as we had a diagnosis.”
“Stop,” I said forcefully, holding up my hand. “Let’s proceed step by step. First we have to test more samp
les in order to be able to generalize the theory. Then we can’t play with telomerase just like that. We have to start at the level of cells. There’s a long way to go before we get to individuals.”
“Individuals?” he yelled at me. “By individuals, are you referring to my daughter? I don’t have time to begin that whole process. Rebekka is already fifteen.”
“Speaking of Rebekka, why didn’t you tell me you had a daughter with progeria? And since we’re asking questions, since when have you been carrying out research on your own in your home laboratory? Don’t you have what you need at the institute?”
“Everything moves so slowly at the institute that it would have taken me several years of proposals, permissions, and budgets to achieve what I’m showing you now, and paradoxically, the fact that everyone knows I’m the father of an affected child doesn’t help. They say that I’m in too much of a hurry to get results, that I’m not objective, that I skip stages . . . I’m more and more isolated, and I feel more and more overlooked. I’ve had to divert some funds in a none-too-transparent way, shall we say, in order to get the equipment you see here. I won’t lie to you, Isaac, we’re on our own with this.”
I pretended that I needed a few minutes to digest this new situation, but if truth be told, it was to my advantage that my friend was working outside official channels.
“Okay, you can count on me. But you can’t just launch yourself into it like this, playing with telomerase—”
“Rebekka has already had two coronary crises,” he interrupted. “Last week we were at the cardiologist’s, and he wasn’t very optimistic.”
“There’s no reason why it should happen in the near future,” I said, trying to persuade him. “There’s been the odd patient who reached the age of forty-five.”
“That was decades ago, and it was a rare exception. I’m tired of going to funerals of children who haven’t reached their tenth birthday. You have no idea what it’s like.”
“Don’t forget that I’ve lost a daughter, too.” It was a lie. I hadn’t lost one daughter; I had lost so many that I should have stopped counting centuries ago.
“Then let me do what I can for mine.”
I silently nodded my agreement and allowed Flemming to reveal his discovery to me step by step while, outside in the garden, the most famous king of Uruk slowly melted in the midday sun.
40
ADRIANA
Friday, June 15, 2012
The weeks that followed Iago’s revelation were perhaps the toughest of all. Every movement called for a greater effort, as if the air were heavier. And despite everything, I carried on. What else could I do?
Just as we’d agreed, we both tried to ensure that the work at the museum wasn’t influenced by the new status quo. Iago treated me with icy propriety, unmoved by anything that wasn’t to do with the Prehistory Department. For my part, I focused to such an extent on solving practical matters that I barely raised my head from whatever I was doing. I had to learn to relax in his presence and attempt to make our conversations less tense so that my facial muscles would hurt less. I summoned all my social skills and learned to live with a new boss, an Iago del Castillo who bore no resemblance to the close colleague I’d gotten to know months earlier.
Thank God Héctor was around to make the transition easier. He got into the habit of coming down to the exhibition gallery where we were setting up the Interpretive Center on the pretext of lending a hand. His company—always friendly—made our everyday routine much more bearable. Sometimes, when Iago was off at a meeting, we’d be on our own and he’d ask me, “Do you want to talk?” I’d shake my head with a smile. On other occasions he’d ask the same question with just a look, and I continued to refuse, although I think he also knew how much I appreciated his gesture.
I convinced myself that routines and a blatant campaign to open myself up to the outside world would keep me sane. I looked for natural allies at the MAC. I turned to Salva when I felt like spending a bit of time laughing at his wisecracks, sought out the soothing company of Paz, who always welcomed me with her maternal smile, and, to my great surprise and that of all of the staff, Kyra became accustomed to sitting with me in BACus, and we got into the habit of having lunch together almost every day.
I discovered that if I was able to breach the barrier Kyra typically inserted into the first few sentences of her conversations, she had a fine sense of irony, which made her addictive. I felt a growing sense of affinity with her with each passing day, although I thought we also shared a tacit agreement: to carry on as if nothing had happened. One midday, to my regret, she broke our pact. After checking that there were no other staff around in the museum, she made me accompany her to her office.
“Come on. Close the door and sit down,” she said, gesturing as she switched on her computer. “Do you have a delicate stomach?”
“Are you going to invite me to have some bad seafood?” I said, attempting a joke that didn’t go down well, so I opted to be serious. “Okay, what are you talking about?”
“What I’m going to show you isn’t pleasant. They’re not nice images, but I want you to look at them,” she said, accessing the Internet. “Are you familiar with genetics?”
“I absorbed everything I could about it at the El Sidrón dig.”
“Well, I’m not going to talk to you about Neanderthals, but it’s a useful starting point. Right, sit down here beside me and listen. I’m going to give you a master class.”
No, not again. I could sense what was coming.
“Look, Adriana, as a starting point, all of us are born with mutations. You, me, your parents—it makes no difference whom you pick. The generation of every embryo of its own accord creates three or four mutations harmful to its health, and if that weren’t enough, it also contains an average of three hundred potentially harmful mutations passed on by its ancestors. In other words, we’re all mutants.”
“I know where you’re headed,” I said. “Iago delivered the spiel about immortals; now you’re giving me the one about mutants. Fine. Come on, Kyra, don’t do this to me. I was really starting to like you.”
She totally ignored me. “Have you read The Odyssey?”
My expression said, What do you think? She smiled.
“Three thousand years ago, Homer described cyclops. Tell me, do you think they really existed, or are they mythological beings?”
“In other words, your story isn’t about mutants. Now you’re going to convince me that we live in a world of cyclops.”
By way of an answer she hit the Enter button, and a dead baby with a deformity appeared on the screen. It had a single eye in its forehead. The image was current. All she’d done was type “cyclops” into Google Images. I held back my nausea.
“Cyclopia, a form of holoprosencephaly, one of the abnormalities that can occur as a result of trisomy of chromosome 13. I’ve worked you out, Adriana. What you need is to give everything a scientific name, to find an article about it in a respected scientific journal, right?”
I didn’t answer. The sight of that baby’s deformity had left me feeling ill.
“Let’s continue: mermaids.”
She typed in “child” and “mermaid.” This time she was looking for videos. There was a little six-year-old girl who had been born with her legs fused together.
“It’s a problem with the gene that ensures we’re symmetrical. In other words, another disastrous mutation. If we pursue the topic of sirenomelia, you may have heard of the fish-man of Liérganes, an urban myth of some standing in seventeenth-century Cantabria. Francisco de la Vega turned up one day entangled in the nets of some fishermen. He was confused and his whole body was covered with a crust—it was probably an acute case of psoriasis. Look at this photo; they look like scales. Right now there are hundreds of studies underway trying to identify the mutations in the genes that regulate the skin and its underlying immune system. Soo
ner or later they’ll find the mutation that causes psoriasis.”
I swallowed hard again when she showed me more pictures.
“Do you want more myths: giants, dwarves, monsters with two heads . . . ?” Well, here we have another case to consider: bicephalic Siamese twins.”
She showed me a video on YouTube: Siamese twins joined from the neck down; adolescent girls who led a normal life in a North American institution.
“And what I’m showing you are current cases,” Kyra went on. “Do you have any idea of what we’ve seen throughout our lives? Deformed babies stillborn right through to those who survived infancy and went on to be exhibited, persecuted, or worshipped because of their strange mutations. It continues right up to the present day. There’s a girl in India with eight extremities. Her family and her village believe she’s the reincarnation of a goddess, so they can’t decide whether or not to operate, and in the meantime she’s lying prostrate on a bed. To her village she’s the reincarnation of Lakshmi, the goddess of abundance. To the doctors she’s an example of a parasitic twin.”
Okay, this was becoming weird—really, really weird. I almost preferred the Héctor/Lür-hunting-the-cave-bear version. Anyway, we’d gone way past the limits of my tolerance. I leaned over and switched off the monitor.
“I’ve had enough, Kyra. What are you trying to tell me?”
“That the hypothesis we’re considering now, in the twenty-first century, is that we have a mutation that paralyzes our aging process. I’m convinced that’s the explanation, although if we don’t find anything now, maybe science will resolve the enigma for us in five hundred years’ time with an answer we don’t even suspect at the moment. Either way there’s an explanation that we haven’t even thought of. You need to give what we have a scientific name, Adriana, so I’ll give you one: the LGV gene. Does that sound serious enough for you? Iago and I christened it with that name, and we hope to find it soon. What would you need in order to be convinced? That we publish it in Nature Genetics? Because you know that if that happened, you’d believe it. And don’t try the line that what we have is impossible; we’re a case of extreme longevity, nothing more.”