40

ADRIANA

Friday, June 15, 2012

T he 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. Sooner 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.”

“And nothing less,” I snorted. “Why are you doing this to me, Kyra? I need to move on if I want to keep on working here. If you keep reminding me of this story, I’ll end up leaving.”

“I’m actually doing this for Iago. I don’t like to watch what he’s going through. He’s the closest person to me that I’ve ever had, my brother, my blood. But more than that, he’s always been my support and my rock. You see, Iago’s the sort of person who never fails you. Do you understand? But more than that, more than the tormented guy overloaded with manias, Iago is a good man. We’re worried about him. I can’t be more explicit, and I shouldn’t give you too many details—I have no right to, and he’d never forgive me—but it’s not good for him to be so agitated, especially after the crisis he had last time . . . To the rest of the world he’s that amazing character who knows everything. You see him as being very sure of himself, and he is, he really is. But he’s very inscrutable. When he’s going through a hard time, he tends not to ask for help; he’s used to shouldering his problems and carrying on. But you two were so close.”

“To what, Kyra? To what? Even I don’t know the answer to that.”

“Look, Adriana, relationships like yours don’t come along too often. You’ve sensed it; he feels it; all of us around you see it. But Iago has put you in a very difficult situation, and your character doesn’t help, I might add. I’m just trying to give you a hand. Tell me you’ll think about all this, consider that it’s possible. It would be simple for me to prove to you that I’m a two-thousand-five-hundred-year-old Gaul. I can convince you without resorting to proof, just with words. I suppose what I experienced with my husband helped me. But I won’t do it, out of respect for Iago, because it would be interfering too much, and he wouldn’t take it well. From this point on the two of you have to travel the road together. Promise me that you’ll do your homework, okay?”

I nodded silently, not very convinced, and left her. When I got home, I immediately switched on my laptop. During her high-speed class in impossible possibilities, a doubt had inserted itself inside my head. I began to search all the scientific journal websites I knew: the e-journals belonging to Revicien, and to the national research organization CSIC, etc. After that I extended my search to databases of doctoral theses: TESEO, and other repositories. My aim was to find any research that had been done recently that might connect aging with mutations.

Four hours later, having followed the wandering trails that led me to links that took me to photos that linked to videos, I found three names—three actual present-day documented cases. The first was a sixteen-year-old girl whose aging process had stopped at seven months. Another similar case was of a girl aged six with the body of a four-month-old baby. And the most spectacular case of all: a forty-year-old man who looked ten. In other words, he was aging by one year for every four years that passed. So that gave rise to an immediate question: Was it possible to age one year every two thousand years once you reached thirty, as Iago had calculated?

Throughout my search I had also come across news items I’d never noticed. The bulk of the national and international media had been writing about aging for years. Headlines like the one in XL Semanal in January 2011: OBJECTIVE: TO LIVE TO 130 ; or Quo in June of the same year, reporting on what they called THE LONGEVITY REVOLUTION ; or a video from a Redes program in 2009, On the Road to Immortality , where they opened up a debate on the topic, which already seemed to have run its course in the scientific community but hadn’t yet reached the person in the street. I read testimonies from Nobel Prize winners working in reliable universities and laboratories, and not one of them seemed to have any doubts: in the next few decades humanity would break the century barrier. What made me take a deep breath was listening to the astonishing calmness with which serious scientists handled concepts like, “We could be the last generation of centenarians,” “Our offspring will be able to choose never to die,” and “Future generations will live in an eternal, healthy youth.”

If science was on the verge of achieving this, why not believe that nature had achieved it earlier on?

“Do your homework,” Kyra had said to me. Was this what she wanted? That I do my own research so that I’d find what anyone else could, if they knew what to look for?