Kamchatka (28 page)

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.

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'

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.'

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.

In time I came to understand that stories do not end. This I owe in part to History (which I owe to papá) and in part to Biology (which I owe to mamá) and in part to Poetry (for this last bit, I alone am to blame).

I believe that stories do not end, because even when the protagonists are dead, their actions still have an impact on the living. This is why I believe that History is like an ocean into which rivers of individual histories flow. Everything that has gone before underpins the present; we continue those stories just as those who come after
us continue ours. We are bound together in a web that spans all of space – all living creatures are connected in some intimate way: a web large enough to include all those alive today, but also all those of yesterday and tomorrow.

I believe that stories have no end, because even when one life ends, its energy gives life to others. The dead (remember the larvae) simply nourish the Earth so it can be fruitful and feed those above who, in their turn, will give life by dying. For as long as there is life in the universe, the story of each single life never ends; it is simply transformed. In dying, the life-story undergoes a shift. We are no longer a thriller, a comedy, an epic; we are a geography book, a biology book, a history book.

The best stories are those that fascinate us as children and continue to grow with us, affording new pleasures each time we reread them. (Each time they make themselves new. Therefore, they never end.) Like the songs of the Beatles, seducing us with the yeah, yeah yeahs of ‘She Loves You', and carefully leading us – keeping pace with our development – to the point where they can offer us a glimpse of the immensity of time itself in the orchestra's last glissando in ‘A Day in the Life'. (The Beatles do not end either. Though the last song on the last side of their last album is called ‘The End'– the song in which they say that in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make – it's not really the last song because there's a song not listed on the sleeve, a short, hidden song in which Paul tells us that Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl and someday he's going to make her his.)

I have lots of favourite stories, but the story of King Arthur is special. I suppose that its initial attraction was obvious: I loved the knights in armour, the egalitarianism of the Round Table, the romantic idealism of the knights, the quest for the Holy Grail – the
chalice from which Christ drank at the Last Supper. It was always a perfect combination of epic adventure and spiritual quest. As I grew up, I left the children's version of the story behind and began to read the original sources: Geoffrey of Monmouth's
The History of the Kings of Britain
, Sir Thomas Malory's
Le Morte d'Arthur
, the Grail cycle,
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Growing up, in a way, is making sense of contradictions. And so I learned that a man like Arthur may have the best of intentions and still be petty, dissolute and selfish. Arthur committed incest, murdered innocent children and, overcome by private grief, forgot the public good.

But the part that always impressed me most was the end. Sir Bedevere helping the dying Arthur onto a barque full of women dressed in black; among them, three queens, Morgan le Fay, the Queen of Northgalis and the Queen of the Wastelands. They are accompanied by Nimuë, the Lady of the Lake. Seeing Bedevere weep, Arthur tells him that he is going to the Isle of Avalon to be healed of his grievous wounds. The barque disappears as it crosses the lake. The following day Bedevere encounters a hermit at prayer next to a freshly dug grave. He asks the name of the man who lies there. The hermit replies: a man whom some women asked him to bury. Bedevere assumes it to be Arthur and decides to live out the remainder of his life here, in prayer and fasting.

Malory then relates a version of the story in which Arthur does not die but will return when the time is right. As he tells it, the inscription on the tomb reads: ‘Here lies Arthur, the once and future king'. But since no one saw him dead, nor ever saw the grave, none can confirm that he died. Malory declines to pronounce on this eventual return: ‘I woll nat say that hit shall be so. But rather I wolde sey: here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff.'

Now I believe, like Malory, that there is nothing more inspiring than the story of a man who succeeds in changing his life; in this dark world where they say that nobody can change, I can think of
nothing more heroic. In 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson railed against the prophets of resignation: ‘It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into Nature; that the world was finished a long time ago.' The world is still not finished. There are still at least 5,000 million years left to go, which is why I am angered by those who claim that all possible stories have already been told, consigning the act of creation itself to the margins, relegating it to the trivial repetition of what has been done before and better, to the crumbs of what was once a banquet. The idea is as reactionary as it would be to say that all possible lives have already been lived, relegating us to the status of second-hand humans living borrowed lives. It strips us of our worth, of our hopes, and makes our passions futile. For our lives are no less important than other lives. On the contrary, our lives appear on the horizon of past lives, the lives that have ceased to be biology and become history, the lives that have cleared the path to this present, which, in that sense, is better than all the past; lives that, just like certain species, trace a path between what was and what is, offer us a bridge across the ravine to the summit of a mountain that is higher than all those that came before, but which is never the last.

There is an image that is often used to underline how intimately the phenomena of nature are intertwined: it suggests that the flapping of a butterfly's wings can set off a chain reaction that can eventually lead a tornado to strike some distant part of the planet. If we grant a butterfly so much power, how much more power has a man who, in taking possession of the life others purport to control, changes it for the better? What tornadoes could be set off by such a change, not only among those closest to him, but in the furthest reaches of the planet? This is why, like Malory, I believe that it is enough that Arthur made good use of his chance of redemption. But when I was little, I preferred the fantastical version of the story, the one that gave me Arthur in Avalon, nursing his wounds and waiting for his time to come again.

For many years, Kamchatka was my Avalon.

When we reached the
quinta
at midnight on Sunday, the whole neighbourhood was blacked out. Block after block, everything was in darkness. Papá parked the car 200 metres from the
quinta
, reversing it into the gateway of another house. That way, if there was any trouble he could easily head off in either direction. Mamá and I watched as he moved away, flashlight in hand, along the dirt path. The Midget was asleep beside me, hugging his two Goofys covered in drool. Mamá had time to chain-smoke two Jockeys before papá got back.

‘It looks like it's just a power cut,' he said, sliding behind the wheel again.

‘What about Lucas?' I asked. That was all I wanted to know.

‘Lucas isn't there.'

But, for some reason, papá didn't sound certain. As soon as he'd parked the Citroën in front of the
quinta
, I scrambled out and started looking all over the house for Lucas. Papá was right about there
being no electricity. I moved around the house, feeling my way along the walls. When I got to our bedroom, a finger of moonlight slipping through the window made it clear that Lucas was not there. His sleeping bag was also gone. If it was just that Lucas wasn't there, I would have been frustrated because I'd been really looking forward to seeing him, but at least he would come back. The fact that he had taken his things prompted a different kind of worry.

Mamá said that he'd probably decided to sleep somewhere else while we were away. We could hardly blame him. When you're on your own, you get to make your own decisions. But she said I shouldn't worry; if Lucas intended to be away for any length of time, he would not have gone without letting us know.