Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘No,’ I answered.

‘How can the relationship that keeps the world going be so flimsy? How can the whole edifice of civilisation be built on something that may very well have been a mistake? We never truly deceive women because we can never make them believe that their child is someone else’s. What comparable weapon do we have to instil in them the terror of the beyond? I was tormented by thoughts like these in the days leading up to my marriage. For two months I kept myself pure — except my arse, which will never be very pure anyway — without touching her — it didn’t take much effort; it was worse than stroking a plucked chicken. In the end it was Dr Wigenschaft who helped me find the solution. Dr Wigenschaft had also emigrated from Germany after the war, when he had to interrupt his promising experiments into fertility and inheritance. The ideal thing would have been to clone myself, but even in Germany experiments brought no conclusive results; even less so here, on the edge of the pre-adamite forests. The path we chose was as follows: we waited for the night of greatest fertility, when, after checking her to confirm her virginity, he inseminated her with my recently extracted seed (all before my eyes: the certainty I needed was so absolute that not even in him, a man of trusted loyalty to my father, could I fully trust) and then he closed her up, stitched her like a roll of stuffed pork and, hermetically sealed, we sent her to my house to rest and incubate my heir while we celebrated with a bottle of Ruhr wine and some boys. Two months later, when there were no doubts about the pregnancy, the doctor unstitched her and let her go about her life; she could do it with the Bolivian gardener now if she wanted to: as a sexual possession, her value to me was always less than nil. The months of pregnancy were no less feverish. I could do little more than lie in bed thinking all day, with dreadful dizziness and headaches. I thought and thought and thought, I did nothing but think over those nine months, and at the end of them my head felt bigger than my body, like a foetus’s, floating in space, trailing its tiny doll’s body behind it. How, I thought, can the divine substance pass from father to son without being corrupted in the process? How to neutralise the call back to nature that maternity opens the door to generation after generation? Because your problems are just beginning with conception. It may not be some other fellow’s, but it is hers. That little dribble in the pipette is the full extent of your contribution. Look at her holding her belly and smiling at you. What was the use of two months of wire fences when she had nine to drown with the litres of her circulating blood, with layer after layer of her enfolding female flesh, every last vestige of your evaporated signature? Three times I emptied her of every last drop of her blood and filled her with mine until it came out of her ears. In the meantime I pumped hers into my veins and, though its scarcity and wateriness left me weak and wan for days afterwards, they were the happiest of my life because I could feel my son’s blood running through my veins. I even begged Dr Wigenshcaft to join us at the hip like Siamese twins until the moment of birth, and only separate us after the umbilical cord was cut. I only gave in when he explained it might involve a risk to the child. Do you know the theory of the homunculus?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes?’

‘No.’

‘People in the Middle Ages believed that the spermatozoa was a little man, tiny but fully formed, issuing whole from the father, and that the mother was merely the vessel where it grew until it was big enough to join the world. You understand? It was a theory that worked , like that of the Sun going round the Earth. They saw the world not as it was but as it should be. And so, after all those centuries, their dreams come true. The homunculus will be the torch that the one and only immortal superman will hand on to himself! He himself will gestate it in his belly; after all, what matures in mud can just as well mature in crystal!

‘In the days leading up to the birth I felt ever stronger pains, but I assumed they were hysterical and didn’t consult the doctor. On the last night the ambulance that came for her ended up taking me and they had to send another for her. Peritonitis it was, and as everything was performed at Dr Wigenschaft’s clinic, they operated on us side by side, a local for me and a general for her: for a moment — the happiest moment of my life and of all mankind — I raised my head to see the blurred vision of my open belly and, suspended above it, the clenched and bleeding figure of my immaculate son. Who has ever been more entitled to call himself a father than I? Only someone who has carried his son in his very own innards all nine months, but that man doesn’t exist — yet. One Italian assures me that in five years he’ll be able to clone me, implant me with my own embryo and carry the pregnancy through to a happy term. But he may just be a quack; my father always warned me: “Don’t repeat our mistakes: never put your arse in the hands of an Italian.” Anyway, I digress. But you do follow, don’t you?’

No one could follow him where he was going, but I nodded anyway.

‘I’m not content to achieve the superman in here, in my head, as Dr Canal sometimes tries to console me. I only hope I live long enough for medicine to bring me all the mutations necessary. If I do achieve it, the boy this time will probably come out just like his father and, though his father may not live to see it, he would die a happy man. But why keep dodging death when I know there’s a younger, stronger, more passionate version of myself burning to live? Sons … should fit like a glove, a glove we don to grasp time — and run it.

‘My first desire was for them to bring me my son, to cradle him in my arms, to confirm that he was in every part as perfect as I had conceived him in my mind. Seeing him lifting his little hands, shutting tight his beautiful eyes the colour of cloudless skies, shaking his blonde mane soft as down, my eyes filled with tears, but they were tears of pain. How could I manœuvre him through the obstacles of the next twenty years to prevent him colliding with others while skilfully steering away from me? How to secure in the blood everything the blind eye of genetics cannot hold? Everything that matters passes from father to son, and we’re forced by dumb nature to play Chinese Whispers with our most valuable thing. The very concept of education, something so precarious and humiliating! Social insects, with their genetic patterning, are more advanced than us. What’s the use of fighting for our freedom when it’s going to last so short a time? You might think I’m rebelling against society and its rules, but that isn’t true. The present-day order gets by pretty well, though it could do with a little touching up. It’s nature itself that’s out of joint!’ he said, stepping with his unfeeling rubber sole in one of the messes of blood and feathers that decorated the ground. ‘Is there nothing but void between us? And how can that dream of the imagination that we call fatherhood leap the abyss instead of navigating the dark streams of the bloodline? The one thought that kept me going during my captivity was that I, or someone who to a great extent was me, was out there to carry on if I never emerged from that pit. Canal was a great help to me in that difficult period, and even more of a help in the other infinitely worse one, following my release. Because if the torture’s inside you and you carry it around with you everywhere you go, where can you escape to? My son’s blood had clotted in my veins. The son rises up against the father. You understand what that means, don’t you? A toenail growing in on itself, digging itself into the flesh that gives it life, is no more painful. And it wasn’t his political or ideological motivations, as people were wont to call them in those days, that made his betrayal any less bearable. It wasn’t his ideals, it wasn’t his adolescent delusions of grandeur (I’d let him put up his Che Guevara poster if that was what he wanted). No. He swapped me for the lowest thing in creation: the cunt of that little whore. His father, more of a father than any father ever has been, for what can be bought new or second-hand on any street corner or any whorehouse! The tarantula leaped on its prey and devoured it in one gulp! They weren’t ideas! It was the black blood of woman manifesting itself again despite my best efforts, disfiguring the purity of my creation with its stain! The viper paid dearly for her sin, but the evil was already done! My son began to spread inside me like a cancerous growth, growing arms and legs like polyps: the same betrayal, the cells of my body agitated against me, the profusion of life become death; a child romping through my body as through a garden all his own to destroy.’