Kamchatka (2 page)

Papá would be surprised if he knew how like the real Kamchatka is to the landscape of my dreams: a frozen peninsula, which is also the most active volcanic region on Earth. A horizon ringed by towering, inaccessible peaks shrouded in sulphurous vapours. Kamchatka is a paradox, a kingdom of extremes, a contradiction in terms.

On the Risk board, the apparent distance between Argentina and Kamchatka is misleading. When these flat dimensions are mapped onto a globe, this journey, which had seemed impossible, suddenly seems simple. There is no need to traverse the known world to get from one to the other. Kamchatka and the Americas are so close, they all but touch.

Similarly, the goodbyes we said on the forecourt of the petrol station and the beginnings of my story are superposed extremes, each nested inside the other. October sun melds with April sun, this morning blends with that one. It is easy for me to forget that one sun is the promise of summer and the other its farewell.

In the southern hemisphere, April is a month of extremes. Autumn begins and with it comes the cold. But the flurries of wind do not last and the sun always returns in triumph. The days are still long, some seem to have been stolen from summer. Ceiling fans begin their last shifts and people escape to the beach for the weekends as they try to outrun winter.

April 1976, in all its glory, was just like any other. I had just started sixth grade. I was trying to make sense of timetables, to decipher the lists of books I had to get hold of. I still packed
more into my schoolbag than I needed and complained that I had to sit too close to Señorita Barbeito's desk in class.

But some things were different. The military coup, for a start. Although papá and mamá didn't talk about it much (they didn't seem angry or upset, simply uncertain), it was obviously something serious. Meanwhile all my uncles were disappearing as if by magic.

Up until 1975, in our house in Flores, people came and went at all hours, talking and laughing loudly, thumping the table when someone said something interesting, drinking
mate
and beer, singing, playing the guitar and putting their feet up on the rocking chair as though they'd lived here all their lives. Most of them were actually people I'd never seen before and would never see again. When they arrived, papá invariably introduced them as ‘uncles' and ‘aunts'. Tío Edward, Tío Alfredo, Tía Teresa, Tío Mario, Tío Daniel. We never remembered their names, but it didn't matter. The Midget would wait for a few minutes, then amble into the dining room and, in his most innocent voice, say, ‘Tío, can I have a glass of Coke?' Five men would leap to their feet to get it for him, and they would come back with glasses filled to the brim just in time for us to watch
The Saint.

Towards the end of 1975, these uncles gradually began to disappear. Fewer and fewer of them visited us. They didn't talk so loudly now; they didn't laugh or sing anymore. Papá didn't even bother to introduce them.

One day papá told me Tío Rodolfo had died and asked me to come with him to the wake. I said I would, because he'd asked me and not the Midget, given my superior status as older brother.

It was my first wake. Tío Rodolfo lay in the back room in an open coffin. The three or four other rooms were full of angry, single-minded people drinking sugary coffee and smoking like chimneys. I was relieved. I hate it when people cry, and I'd figured that everyone would be bawling their eyes out at a wake. I remember talking to Tío Raymundo (I'd never met him before; papá introduced us when
we arrived). Tío Raymundo asked me about school, about where I lived and, without even thinking, I lied. I told him I lived near La Boca. I don't know why.

Out of sheer boredom, I went over to look in the coffin and discovered that I
did
know Tío Rodolfo. His cheeks seemed a little more sunken, his moustache a little bigger, or maybe it just looked bigger because in death he appeared thinner, more formal, or maybe he just looked more formal because of the suit and the shirt with the wide collar, but it was definitely Tío Rodolfo. He was one of the few ‘uncles' who had been to our house more than once and he had always made an effort to be nice to me and the Midget. The last time he visited, he'd given me a River Plate football shirt. When we got home from the wake, I looked in my wardrobe and there it was in its own coffin, second drawer from the bottom.

I didn't even touch it. I shut the drawer and tried to put it out of my mind, but that night I dreamed the shirt had somehow crawled out of the drawer by itself, slithered over to my bed like a snake, wrapped itself around my neck and tried to choke me. I had that dream several times. And every time I woke up, I felt stupid. How could a River Plate shirt strangle me when I wasn't even a River Plate supporter?

There were other signs too, but this was the most frightening. Fear had taken root in my own house, in my drawer, carefully folded, smelling of fresh laundry, nestling among the socks.

I didn't ask papá what Tío Rodolfo died of. I didn't need to. You don't die of old age when you're thirty.

My school was called Leandro N. Alem, after the gentleman who glowered down at us from the gloomy portrait every time we were sent to the headmaster's office. The school was a nineteenth-century building on the corner of Yerbal and Fray Cayetano, opposite the Plaza Flores in the heart of one of Buenos Aires' most traditional neighbourhoods. It was a two-storey building set around a central courtyard lit by a skylight whose shabby marble staircase bore witness to the generations who had taken it in their ascent to Learning.

It was a public school: its doors were open to everyone without distinction. For a small monthly fee, anyone could come to class, get a mid-morning snack and participate in sporting activities. For this notional fee we were granted access to the engine room of our language and to mathematics, the language of the Universe; we were taught where on the globe we were situated, what lay to north, to south, to east and west; what pulsed beneath our feet in the igneous core of the Earth, and above our heads; and before our virgin eyes unfolded the history of humankind, the history of which, for better or worse, we were at that time the culmination.

It was in these high-ceilinged classrooms with their creaking floors that I first heard a story by Cortázar and first opened Mariano
Moreno's
Plan Revolucionario de Operaciones
and learned of the part it played in our independence. In these classrooms I discovered that the human body was the most perfect machine and thrilled at the elegant solution to some problem in arithmetic.

My class could have served as a model for any campaign promoting peace among the peoples of the Earth. Broitman was a Jew. Valderrey had a thick Spanish accent. Talavera was two generations removed from his black ancestors. Chinen was Chinese. Even those boys who were more typically Argentinian – a mix of Hispanic, Italian and indigenous tribes – were noticeably dark-skinned. Some of us were the sons of professionals, others of working men with no education to speak of. Some of their parents owned their houses; others rented or still lived in their grandparents' houses. Some of us spent our spare time studying languages and playing sports; others helped their fathers to fix radios and televisions in their workshops, or kicked a ball around on whatever piece of waste ground they could find.

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.

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.

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.