A Hundred Million Years and a Day Read online

  I have not seen any children here. Either they are pacing the playgrounds of distant boarding schools or the people are born old. If I were from here, I too would want to stay as long as possible inside my mother’s womb. I would only emerge when I had run out of space, in a crumpled suit, happy to have spared myself twenty or thirty years of vertigo under these steep grey mountainsides. And then I would leave, like the Capolungo cousin.

  By 10 a.m., the heat is oppressive. A large plane tree breaks up the light. Alone in the mountain’s closed fist, I lean against a fountain, my fingers in the water. Everything around me seems poor: the air, the earth, all of it. Pure illusion. A voice speaks to us across the centuries, whispering in the crevasses and in the weft of the wind. A treasure awaits … But there are so many tales of treasure. So nobody listens. Nobody believes. Nobody but me.

  21 July 1954

  The village’s only telephone rings in the mayor’s office. The mayor, who is feeding his chickens, runs in to answer it. He puts his sash back on to bring me the news in person. Someone is arriving on that day’s shuttle bus.

  Umberto, finally.

  The bus deposits him with a hydraulic sigh before heading back towards a sea that, after a few nights here, I feel sure I have only imagined. My friend has not changed: the same corduroy suit with the same walking boots that made us laugh twenty years ago, the last time we saw each other. Nobody could look so much like a landscape – his native Dolomites. Umberto is a cliff face leaning over the world, a pile of geological strata that move with the slowness of a continent. A smile splits the vertical fractures of his face. His hand, enormous, envelops mine with surprising, almost submissive gentleness, even though he too now answers to the grand-sounding title of Professore in Turin.

  When he moves and the valley reappears behind him, I notice that he is not alone. A smiling young man stands beside him. The bus slowly shrinks into the background, its rear windscreen a dazzle of sunlight, and the golden haze behind him gives the boy the dazed look of a character that has fallen from a fresco. Peter, announces Umberto: his young assistant at the University of Turin.

  I do my best to hide my anger. Yes, anger is what I feel: one of those good old bristling rages that have forged my reputation. I did not explicitly ask Umberto to come alone, of course. I thought he had understood that this was important. A childish conspiracy, perhaps, but a conspiracy all the same, and you shouldn’t bring your neighbours’ son along just because he happens to be there and you think he might be bored, alone on his seesaw.

  I turn to Peter, hand held out. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  My first words to this kid are a lie.

  Umberto has blue fingernails. Peter has blue fingernails. And so, of course, do I. We spent our childhoods on all fours on chalky plateaus, sifting through rocks on mountainsides, our fingers getting crushed when a mallet slipped. Our secret greeting, our sign of recognition, is to be found in those missing nails, bruised so many shades of blue – Prussian, cobalt, turquoise – from being soaked in the subterranean nights of a fossilised continent.

  Sitting on a chair that trembles under his weight, in the mist of the fountain, Umberto pinches the handle of a coffee cup. Silent, he waits. I called him just a few weeks ago: could he give me two whole months? He asked only one question in return, the same question that everybody has been asking me recently: ‘Destination?’

  I told him about the cirque in the mountain. I recommended that he make all his arrangements as discreetly as possible. He did not ask why; he simply explained that he had to be back in mid-September for a routine operation. For all the rest, I could count on him. That was Umberto.

  Beside him, Peter sizzles with impatience. Everything about him is narrow: torso, shoulders, face, his upper lip fringed with a little red moustache that you want to shave off against his will. Peter is German, on secondment from the University of Marburg. When he explains something (and he explains everything), his hands turn on his wrists like mad sunflowers.

  ‘At fifteen, I entered a seminary, ja? At seventeen, I gave it up for science. I thought I was changing my life. And you know what I chose?’

  Palaeoclimatology. Palaiós, ancient. Peter is a historian of fire and ice, of the sky’s influence on the earth, beasts and men.

  ‘In fact, nothing changed. I still spend all day long talking about fire and brimstone!’

  Once you get him started, he won’t shut up. But he is an excellent recruit, as I am beginning to realise.

  ‘I am very honoured to be part of this expedition, Professor …’

  ‘Stan.’

  ‘Stan. I was just wondering … Was suchen wir? What are we looking for, exactly?’

  I wanted to answer him, I swear I did. I even heard myself saying: very good question, young man, we are looking for …

  A fly is trapped in the thick air of my bedroom. Sprawled on my bed, I watch it struggle. If it died, if it fell at just the right spot into a drop of resin, if that resin hardened, fossilised and became amber, hard and transparent, if that amber survived a few million years, somewhere safe where it wouldn’t be damaged but not so safe that it would never be discovered, then that fly would, one day in the distant future, deliver to a researcher the secrets of our world. A simple fly that nobody cares about; a simple fly that contains the universe. The fauna, the flora, the sky of 1954, and you could casually smash it with your hand.

  ‘Tutto bene, Stan-eh?’

  Umberto’s head pokes through the half-open door, floating above me like an anxious balloon.

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘You suddenly got up and left in the middle of a sentence. Peter is very worried.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’

  Perhaps my secret has become too heavy to be shared. Or perhaps it’s fear, the fear that my prize will be taken from me, that someone other than me will be able to name him, another guy with blue fingernails and oversized ambitions.

  ‘Tutto bene, Berti. Tell Peter I’m sorry. I needed to lie down. I’m just a little tired because of this heat.’

  Umberto laughs like a pipe organ, the low vibrations transforming my small bedroom into a cathedral.

  ‘We’re not getting any younger. But it’ll be like the good old days up there, won’t it, Stan-eh?’

  Yes, like the good old days. Minus our meagre wages, our eyesight ruined by dim lamps, the lectures that nobody listened to. And if I’m wrong, if my theory is proved false, this time it will not simply be a case of closing a file, of burying it in a cemetery of paperwork and starting over. My future depends on the success of this expedition. The chic neighbourhood, the mouldings, all of it, you understand? No, of course not, you can’t possibly understand.

  I just pat my former assistant on the shoulder. We will meet again at 8 p.m. in the lounge of the locanda, where the guide hired by Umberto should be waiting for us.

  ‘Stan-eh, the kid’s right … You’re going to have to tell us what we’re looking for.’

  So here we are. No turning back now. Do you really want to know, Berti? I breathe in the air that sings like metal through the open window. If I had known the value of that heat, I never would have let it go.

  ‘A dragon. We’re looking for a dragon.’

  ‘A dragon? What do you mean?’

  I stared at the little girl who had just invited the creature into the conversation. I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly.

  The university bigwigs had chosen me to accompany them that evening, I didn’t know why. I hated social events. I spent my days in the basement, in the drab glare of ceiling lights, a thousand leagues from the bronzed adventurer I had once imagined myself becoming. The existence suited me, the peaceful mole’s life far from the great carnivores that prowled the surface. They had probably asked me along to inspire pity – you see, dear donors, how badly we need more money? – even if my worn elbows and my badly stitched hems owed more to Madame Mitzler’s failing eyesight and trembling needle than to my university salary.

  I arrive
d early outside the prestigious address. Chaos reigned in the building’s courtyard – someone was moving out. I felt at ease in that disorder, and I lingered for no apparent reason among the piles of cardboard boxes. As a good scientist, I should have known that there was no such thing as chance. Behind each event were two hands rubbed together, a wandering star, a dog that leaves and does not return, billions of cogs spinning for aeons. Ever since – bang – nothing became something.

  A little to the right or a little to the left, a second earlier or a second later, and I would have missed it. A fragment of bone. There, on the corner of a crate, ready to fall back inside at the faintest breath of air, to return to the oblivion from which it had come. Solid, broken along lines that complicated its identification, at least without more sophisticated analysis tools. A piece of tail or vertebra. Shiny brown, absence of porosity, advanced fossilisation. Cretaceous or Jurassic. Triassic? Unlikely.

  I jumped when a removal man approached to close the crate’s lid. The concierge was dead, an old man found after three days in his lodge, his body stiff. He had no family and his belongings were now the property of the State. The man took the bone from my hands, put it back in the crate, and stood there watching me suspiciously, waiting for me to leave before he got back to work.

  Our hosts told me nothing more during dinner. The concierge had been there for ever, an old Italian who never spoke to anybody and who, in recent years, had not been entirely sane. He was lazy, grouchy. ‘He smelled,’ said the mistress of the house. ‘He used to hit the bottle very early,’ her husband added. They couldn’t fire him because he received a disability allowance. The only thing they didn’t reproach him for was being dead.

  I would not be in this little room in the back of beyond, five years later, balanced precariously on the edge of the world, had I not wandered through the apartment that evening in search of the bathroom. But wander I did. A little girl appeared in an explosion of freckles and tugged at my sleeve.

  ‘Are you a friend of Monsieur Leucio’s?’

  In response to my frown, she added: ‘I heard you talking about him with Papa.’

  The old concierge? I shook my head.

  ‘He was nice. He had a dragon.’

  ‘A dragon? What do you mean?’

  She whispered so that her parents wouldn’t hear. When the adults were away, the old concierge would gather the building’s children in a circle, under a single bare bulb in the cellar, and tell them stories. The most popular story among this juvenile secret society was the one about his dragon. Ora, ascoltatemi bene ragazzi, now listen closely, children … As a teenager, Leucio had got lost after sneaking away from home to go and see a girl. For three days, he had wandered. A huge storm erupted and he ran beneath an electric sky to take refuge in a cave. There, he found himself face to face with un drago di tuono e di lampo, a dragon of thunder and lightning.

  The old man was speaking: I could hear his gravelly voice behind the little girl’s high-pitched squeak. He talked about an immense skeleton, a body sunk in darkness, stretching out so far that he could not see where it ended, a surprisingly small head at the end of an enormous neck. The dragon had protected the young man from the storm. It had spoken to him.

  A familiar pain roared through my veins, an old pain that I knew well. It was life stirring within me, as it had that time when I’d had the idea of walking across the frozen lake so I could get to school more quickly, and had fallen through the ice into the water. It took them a quarter of an hour to resuscitate me; the doctor even told me afterwards that, technically speaking, I had been dead for a few minutes. All I remember is a big crack, and then the blood roaring through my white veins. That is the pain I am talking about.

  Where did he come from, little one, that concierge? Did he mention the name of the valley where he lived? But the girl knew nothing. I asked for other details – what cave? How could I recognise it? The kid’s face lit up beneath the red freckles. The cave was at the base of a glacier, she recited in her chiming voice. From there, you could see three mountain peaks shaped like pyramids and crowned with lightning. That was all she could recall, her short memory saturated with tragedies and wonders.

  Over the next few days, I managed to find out the concierge’s full name. He had barely left a mark on the world that he had exited one spring evening, in a lodge that stank of sewage. He had no family. But every man leaves behind him a sticky trail, a series of administrative traces, which I followed with the obsessive patience of someone whose profession forces him to think in terms of millions of years. I wrote to the registry office, the town hall, the immigration office, asking where this old man had come from, attempting to discover the valley where his dragon was sleeping. I didn’t get any further than Melun. The concierge’s official existence began there, in a military hospital, on a yellowed form. Twenty years old and a heart murmur: Exempted. What had come before this, nobody knew.

  Years passed. My letters went missing, dried out on shelves, or returned to me intact, stained with foreign dust. My phone calls rang in empty offices. In the end I gave up, convincing myself that it was nothing more than a story for adventure-deprived Parisian children invented by a homesick old man. I focused on my work; I applied for a grant that I felt sure I would get, and that would involve me spending a few months at the Natural History Museum in London. Case closed.

  And then, six months ago, a parcel arrived, accompanied by a letter of apology. The postmark was edged with transalpine flourishes, ink lions whose phoney roars frightened nobody. The letter came from an Italian government office, signed by an obscure bureaucrat who assured me of his highest consideration. It mentioned a lost stack of folders, a fire that had destroyed some official documents. Except this one, enclosed in the envelope: Leucio D.’s birth certificate, with the name of his village. And his marriage certificate in the same valley, eighteen years later. Well, almost the same valley: the annexation of the County of Nice, in 1860, had made it French.

  I ran from the university to the Rue des Écoles to buy a map. There, I found the three mountain peaks, backing onto Italy. Sentinels watching over the glacier, folds of pink lines on a grey background, between Mercantour and Argentera. To someone who could read maps, those contour lines evoked a hostile, terrifying verticality. One false step to the right, you would die Piedmontese. To the left, you would die French. The dragon was well protected, at the centre of a stone cirque that men of old must have believed inhabited by the gods.

  There were no gods, up there or anywhere else. But an expedition would have only two months, three at the most, to work at that altitude. As soon as the first snow fell, the place would be cut off from the rest of the world and would return to nothingness. I caressed the map, imagining the beast beneath my fingertips, asleep in his paper cave.

  Less than an hour later, my telephone rang. Despite the renowned quality of my work, the grant had been given to someone else; it was a delicate matter, rather political in fact – you understand, don’t you, Stan? The university vice chancellor promised me his personal support. I was sure to receive the grant the next time it was awarded. As sure as one could be of anything in such a profession, anyway. In other words, not very.

  The yellow walls of my tiny apartment fell apart like a rickety movie set.

  ‘Hello? Stan?’

  A meadow stretched out as far as I could see all around me, rising gently towards misty foothills. I was sitting on a chair behind a ridiculous desk. I had become reasonable without even realising it.

  ‘Stan, are you still there?’

  I stood up and disappeared into the mist.

  While we wait for our guide, I explain everything to Umberto and Peter. At last they know why they are here: to make history, to hunt it down instead of waiting like scavengers for whatever remnants are thrown their way.

  ‘An apatosaurus?’ suggests Peter. ‘A diplodocus? Or …’

  His eyes light up. I guess what he is going to say, because we have the same fingernails.
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  ‘Or a brontosaurus.’

  The same fingernails, and the same dreams.

  ‘Or a unicorn,’ Umberto said tersely.

  Umberto was banned from Sunday school at a very young age, he once told me, for asking what God’s shoe size was. A scientist does not unquestioningly swallow a tall tale without demanding some proof, some concrete detail. Doubt is our religion.

  ‘Imagine a kid of thirteen or fourteen, Berti. Imagine him alone in a storm, frightened, exhausted. He finds a perfectly preserved dinosaur skeleton. He is completely uneducated. The creature is huge. It looks like nothing he has ever seen.’

  ‘Why keep it secret if it’s true?’

  ‘Because the dragon spoke to him. Because he had a fever, hallucinations. Because he was superstitious. I don’t know why! Who cares why?’

  Umberto grimaces. His fingers knead his cheeks and work his jaw as if to punish it for what he is about to say.

  ‘Or he just invented it. A story for some bored Parisian kids.’

  ‘Except that …’

  Follow the dots. There’s one detail that has escaped everybody.

  ‘Except that, if it was a story for children,’ Umberto murmurs, ‘why not describe the head as enormous, frightening, with huge sharp teeth? Why would a simple countryman describe the head as being too small for the rest of the body, anatomically correct for a diplodocid?’

  I slam my palm down on the table, so hard that the other two jump. ‘Exactly!’

  ‘There have been no major fossil discoveries in the region,’ the giant objects.

  ‘A stupid, unscientific argument.’

  For an instant I fear I have upset him, that I have counter-attacked too hard in my excitement, but Umberto accepts defeat with good grace. Peter leans unthinkingly towards whoever is speaking before seeking out the other’s response in a pendulum movement that would have made me laugh were it not for the irritating creaking noise that his chair makes each time he does this.