“And the serpent said unto the woman, ‘Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil’.”
(Genesis 3, 4-5)
For the last thirty days I’ve been finding it harder and harder to wake up.
Out of the corner of my eye I note with resignation the absence of the imprint of Daniela’s body on my sheets. I get out of bed to go and urinate. The liquid crystal display on the wall reminds me:
"10/01/2054, appointment with Prof. Dolly, 9:00". The bathroom walls send back the image of a black-skinned man, no longer very handsome, with grey hair like a hedge decorating his growing baldness. I note in passing a double chin and crow’s feet at the corner of the eyes. I avoid looking at the three folds of fat I carry around my paunch like a lifesaver, or at the start of an overhang I insist on calling"love handles". I look at myself with a wave of sadness welling up inside: after all, I used to be fond of this body. There was a time when it pleased Daniela, too. I haven’t seen her for a month, and I miss her terribly.
As if brushing off an annoying fly, my right hand passes mechanically over my face to drive away the memories. Despite myself I have to admit that I’m still in love with her. I get dressed slowly. My appointment with Prof. is in an hour. For love of Dany I’m prepared to do anything.
I’m just in time to swallow a couple of sticks of chocolate-croissant-flavoured gum, then I rush into the panoramic lift, eyes closed as I descend from the 121st floor. I’ve always been prone to vertigo (my legs shake even when I take an escalator). I lift my eyes to focus on a small patch of grey sky covering the space between two skyscrapers. The dense, foul-smelling city air is trapped in the lift as soon as it touches the ground. Before merging into the rush of the crowd I quickly tap my nostrils with filters.
When I arrive at Prof. Dolly’s study, he greets me with the words:
"So, my old wreck, you’ve finally decided?"
I answer him with silence. He takes my silence for consent.
I follow him, putting the thoughts roosting on the pentagram of my brain into a flattened key to avoid hearing anything but my heart. The heart that starts playing a mix of rap hip hop, exactly like when I embraced Dany or even thought about her...
In the operating theatre someone takes my clothes off. I’m hot. The nurse’s blond hair is peeping out of her blue cap, framing a pretty little face with hazel eyes that look me up and down without showing any sympathy. With a pang, I read my physical decay in the me-indifferent, me-ironic look she gives me, while at the same time she can’t help taking a peek – in all likelihood it’s the effect of gravity - lower down. No doubt she’s comparing my family jewels with the ones she jealously keeps secure inside her lover’s briefs, only taking them out under the sheets of her alcove. My African macho pride takes a few somersaults and sets off some fireworks when I note in the short, almost imperceptible widening of her lashes the confirmation of a legend that has endured for centuries in the collective imagination of whites. It had been some time since my Daniela had lost these illusions: my proboscis-shaped appendix no longer held the happiness-and-ecstasy-bringing position with the spontaneity and frequency I’d have liked.
"Ah! The irreparable outrage of passing years! "
My observation all at once makes me see myself as old, decrepit, senile. This thought doesn’t fill me with the joy and serenity it used to. As a matter of fact, I’d always dreamed of old age as a goal, a victory. I wanted to become one of those people who at the moment of death have become "a library in flames". No doubt I’d made a rotten choice of where to grow old and die... and even worse, where to be born. I spent my childhood under the weight of buckets of water and loads of wood, twisting my neck, naked feet in the hot sand, a Nestlé box for a leather football because Santa Clause had obviously lost his way in crossing the Mediterranean Sea and his reindeer-drawn sleigh had got caught in the sands of Ténéré. Or more simply, as it flew over the scorched earth of our savannah the white-bearded old man’s bob turned back because there were no chimneys to be seen on the horizon. His sweaty reindeer, smelly and depressed by the damp heat, had declared an open-ended strike that put Santa Claus into the minority at the table of union negotiations. Their demands challenged the stability of the currency, causing the GDP to precipitate from Scylla to Charybdis. In short, we’d never seen so much as a hair of Santa’s white beard pointing towards the horizon of our tender desires. In any case it was impossible for us to hang up gift-stuffed dreams on the fireplace mantel or on the beautiful-pine-king-of-the forest for the simple reason that we had neither one nor the other. Where I’m from, in the land of Cam’s grandchildren, we had only the great-baobab-palaver tree, as large as wisdom itself, too large for the arms of a single man to embrace. Under this tree by night and by day our elders, the rightful possessors of the above-mentioned wisdom, drooled toothless cola-nut-tinted words. Our childish dreams (to fly to never-never land on an iron bird) got trapped in the branches of the ironwood trees, where they grew old without ever blooming like the vermilion flowers of the bougainvilleas covering the walls of our house. We had to make do with running behind the exhaust pipes of the sputtering Citroën DS cars we’d pompously rechristened “ground planes”.
I’d complained about this often enough to Daniela – my sweet, uncoloured better half – at the least squeak of the chain that united us in the course of our eight years of life in common, during which we’d never deemed it useful to be lawfully married.
My voice made an effort to be cutting and hurtful:
"You can’t understand me because you’ve always been mollycoddled!”
"Oh, here we go with the same old poor-little-black-boy story! "
"Don’t make fun of me... pink girl!"
She shut herself up in one of the pious silences that pretended to wave a white flag on the tip of her lips so as to avoid getting enmeshed my instinctive outpourings, which had neither head nor tail. Genuine diatribes in real paleface fashion. Living among whites, I’d learned to refine "the art of winning without being in the right".
I’d thought it best to go on in an indignant, vindictive tone:
"It’s immoral! Santa Claus brings gifts to children who are already greedy for their own whims!"
She pretended to give in, purring:
"Of course you’re right, my darling! Life has been unfair to you. But, my dear, do you know what the real problem is?"
"No... clue me in!"
"The real problem is that at your age you still believe in Santa Claus!"
Throwing back her neck, she accompanied her words with the throaty laugh that made my skin thrill and my hormones dance.
She knew it all too well and, coming up close, embraced me. I pretended to resist and we both started laughing. I tired to get in one last word, unsuccessfully: she knew how to trip me up at my Achilles’ heel. Her hungry mouth devoured mine, and my ears were drowned by a long chain of “I love you”s. I surrendered as our blindly groping hands found the habitual furrows of our mounts and valleys, the wells and fountains where we lapped up caresses to slake our thirst for tenderness.
Later, while I was drying the sweat beading her temples and she was suffocating my bearded sperm in a hanky, I went back to the subject indirectly.
"I made a bad choice of where to be born, and an even worse one of where to grow old."
"Me, I’m just afraid to grow old!"
"Why? Every season has its fruit. Old age is beautiful! "
"Old age is beautiful my foot! After thirty, every day you wake up you feel a pain somewhere, your skin begins to sag, your tits become pancakes, cellulites turns your hips into orange peel, your teeth rot and fall out. You choke at the least effort and your joints creak...what a horror! And old people have the odour of unhealthy piss and sweat, too! I don’t want to be old. "
"My sweet, you are merely the fruit of your culture!"
"How! Big old African wise man has spoken."
"Yes, your society... "
"Which has also been yours for half a century!"
"Your culture sees in man only the metaphorical image of the machine. Doctors divide up our bodies like the spare parts of an automobile. The hepatologist only takes care of my liver, the cardiologist of my heart... "
"The gastroenterologist of your gut. "
"That’s the way it is! And if the body’s engine doesn’t work, you take out a bolt here, you tighten a screw there. Little by little, the body engine has lost its mystery thanks to the optical fibre revolution – they penetrate everywhere with ultrasounds, CAT-scans, magnetic resonances and all their devilish devices. "
"That’s progress, old man!"
"I don’t give a damn about this progress if it doesn’t see me as a whole. I’m not only a body, I’m not!"
"What else then?"
"Hell, I don’t know – I’ve got a spirit, too, and feelings, maybe a soul… "
"Where are you living, my dear? We got beyond that phase a century ago. From the body engine we’ve passed on to the body computer to create bionic man, with every imaginable sort of artificial spare part. If your hip is crooked they fix it in a jiffy with a replacement. If you heart doesn’t pump any more, they put in another one, if your prick succumbs to gravity, they straighten it... "
“True enough.”
"And that’s not all! You can’t stop progress! Man can become eternal!"
"Sure, the man who wants to take the place of his creator! No! Dany, no! I want to grow old!"
"I don’t! As soon as I feel old, I’ll go to Prof. Dolly to have myself cloned!"
"Do what? "
"Have myself clon-ed!"
"Have yourself cloned? You must be joking?"
Yet the message could not have been clearer:
"Old man, it’s time to go and have yourself cloned!"
I cursed myself for having started up a relationship with a woman twenty years younger than I was. Have yourself cloned! I’ve always been terrorized by the idea of duplicating – photocopying -- a human being. The law on human cloning had been passed by referendum. After they’d invented the "Scratch and Vote" system reaching a quorum was no problem at all. To encourage voter participation, at the poll exit they offered voters the possibility of a free bet on the results. All they had to do was scratch out the precise percentage they predicted of “pros” and “cons” on a two-column card. The winners divvied up the astronomical sum of four billion euros. For the referendum on cloning the affluence at the polls was close to ninety per cent: the prize at stake was up to eight billion euros because there had been no winners in the previous referendum.
Lately the debate on this subject had on one side people who were convinced that the dignity and nobility of human beings was linked to their unrepeatable uniqueness. Medical science had made giant passes forward since the failure of Prof. Vieri Senantinoro’s experiments. By now the "copies", as they were called, had become fashionable. Cloning also found strong support in economic globalization, which had discovered it to be a panacea for the joint problems of the declining birth rate and of old-age pensions. Thanks to replication, in a short time old people became young and efficient again and were eager to be back at work, adding their contributions to the coffers of social security. But competition on the job was keen and it increasingly fed the generational confrontation between the OYs (Old-Youngs) and the YYs (Young-Youngs), who were left to grumble about flexible unemployment. The new duplication method developed by Prof. Dolly, though not yet absolutely perfect, permitted the recovery of the memory of past experience, thereby giving an advantage to the OYs.
Comforted by this, Dany on her part supported the thesis that the value and dignity of a human being were not linked to the uniqueness of inherited genes but to the uniqueness of experience and personal history, which according to her were more important than biological reality.
I would have forgotten all my Latin and Greek in all of this, if I’d ever studied them. For me, man was a whole, both biological and experiential, and cloning was a violation of the rights of nature. My culture had taught me to accept life as a gift, old age as a privilege and death as an inevitable crossing over to the opposite shore, to the land of our ancestors, even if you can’t swim. But here in Euroland we ROs (Real-Olds) were definitely considered archaeological remains.
Dany and I had discussed the subject thousands of times and each time we wound up at square one, with each of us staggering back to his or her corner without throwing in the sponge. The topic irritated us like a fishbone between the teeth every time one of our friends became a "copy". Our rows grew more and more frequent, and their tone was less and less detached and intellectual.
She never lost an opportunity to point up my physical decline. She took close-ups with her fisheye super zoom and adorned them with dialogues and captions. She launched her innocent voice as a prelude to the attack with harmless-sounding phrases such as: "Old man, you’re neglecting me." "You should eat a bit less at your age and pay more attention to your shape!" "You know, darling, I’m telling you for your own good!” nailing me in the end with a charming "You know, at your age... !"
I have to admit it was true. I’d lost the habit of taking care of my body the way I used to. When I was young, at the very first sign of summer I couldn’t help but imagine myself on a fine-sanded wave-rocked deserted beach, bathed by the admiring gaze of young and not-so-young sirens in ecstasy at the sight of my statuesque body. Afterwards, like every other evening, I inevitably stuffed myself with belligerent proposals aimed at my number one enemy: fat, the puffy fruit accumulated during copious winter meals. “Starting tomorrow” I’ll park the car further away so I’ll have to walk a bit more and I won’t take the lift but only the stairs, and most of all I’ll stop smoking. “Starting tomorrow” I promised myself, I’ll skip breakfast so I can go jogging. "Starting tomorrow" I’ll eat only fruit or vegetables at noon, and in the evening just a small bowl of soup, then two hours of cycling and a nice shower before bed. Everything "Starting tomorrow": enough to bring on nights full of bad dreams and stomach cramps and the company of starving green rats about to attack Mount Gruyere.
Every time summer grew near I went to the wardrobe to contemplate the beautiful shirts that by now I could only button up by sucking in my breath. Full of hope, I looked at the old trousers that were too tight around the thighs and stubbornly insisted on gaping open at the waist, but which I conserved for “when I’ll get my old form back.” “Tomorrow” I’ll recover the physique I was so proud of and which was, in my opinion, what had conquered Daniela at first sight.
Inevitably the next day at breakfast I forgot the whole thing, buttering my toast before spreading it with a generous layer of jam to satisfy my ancestral hunger.
The flesh is weak... and fat is hard to melt off!
Already back then the cult of the model’s body was in fashion – there were no more children with crooked teeth or flat feet. I inveighed uselessly against the risks of this idea, this idolatry of the perfect body that led to pathologies like bulimia and anorexia. Daniela was always feeding her fetish for her body. She spent hours and hours in the gym burning effort and sweat on the altar of the gods of fitness, step and bodybuilding. She’d even gone so far as to have tattoos and piercings on every square metre of her skin.
Tying to be ironic, I commented:
"When I think that you called us savages because we used to do the same things!"
She merely shrugged her shoulders indifferently.
The unrelenting insistence of her paranoia finally convinced me to go and meet her hero, the famous Prof. P. Dolly.
After all, a preliminary examination wasn’t a promise and a promise is no more than a yes conjugated in the future tense.
He was a man of uncertain age, with strange grey eyes that pulled you in like a magnate, as though they could penetrate and dry up your inmost being. Prof. Dolly, the world-renowned scientist, had developed the famous NT-CNT method (Nuclear Transfer – Cloning with Nucleus-Transfer), which he undertook to explain: "The method of cloning is extremely simple. All that is needed is an egg from the HEB (Human Egg Bank) and a cell from your skin. We empty the egg of its original DNA. Then we will fill the egg that has been enucleated and substitute nuclear extracts taken from your skin cell. The new egg obtained in this way will be nested into the Uterustronic-Velox, a growth accelerator, which after three days will reproduce you exactly as you are, but younger -- and we can also decide at what age to regenerate you.”
I stopped breathing to whisper:
"Incredible! It sounds like science fiction!"
When I caught my breath, a question popped out of my mouth:
"And what becomes of me?"
"You -- you are still yourself. Your DNA conserves everything that is you, even your memory."
"Yes, I know, but me, I mean my old body, what will happen to it?"
"At the beginning it will be hibernated while we wait to see the results. If everything goes well the old model will be incinerated and you can keep the ashes as a souvenir!"
"It’s horrible!"
Dany was in seventh heaven:
"It’s fantastic! It’s progress!"
"Progress, progress! That’s the only word you know how to say! I don’t know why, but your progress makes my hair stand on end! My stomach is tied up in knots!"
Silence. A terrible doubt gripped me:
"And if it doesn’t work? If I’m transformed into a monster?"
"There are absolutely no risks! On the contrary! Duplication opens the door to the improvement of humanity because in a certain sense it allows for the development of the best parts of you."
My irritation grew:
"It’s insanity! Who can say what’s the best part, who can set the standards of what’s the best type of man, the right dimensions for human nature?"
"Don’t by silly! It’s marvellous! One day we’ll be able to create a perfect man, to predict his illnesses and prevent them. "
"Can you imagine the advantages for humanity?" Daniela chimes in.
Questions as thorny as cactuses crystallize into thoughts that attach themselves to my brain: "What are the risks for future generations? In the past we’ve already seen the damage caused by GMOs. Granted, they have allowed us to overcome hunger in the world, but at what price! We’ve seen a sudden inexplicable growth of strange allergies in children, widespread sterility in couples, the increase of cancer and a serious overall weakening of the immune system."
My voice grew warmer as it pronounced, without convincing them:
"No! The day when you start creating men better than others, our entire principle of equality, of equal opportunity among humans will go out the window! "
An unbelieving silence reigns.
"Can’t you see? cloning is in a certain sense a kind of violence against the foundation of life itself -- adventure. What sense would life have without the wonder, the marvel that gives it spice? Isn’t existence also this continuous, surprising, amazing discovery of yourself and your own destiny? Where will my liberty go without my personal history? How sad life would be without unexpected happenings, without surprises!"
All this took place a month ago.
"Dogs bark...the caravan passes."
Recognizing my refusal, Dany looked at me without seeing me, as if I were a transparency made of PVC, then she shrugged her shoulders and walked out of the surgery without saying a word. That was the last I saw of her.
I open my eyes and my glance meets the nurse’s. I recognize her at once. She smiles at me and murmurs:
"Welcome back! Here are your clothes!"
I feel fit... I feel young. Here I am, a "copy". I am filled with anxiety. I lift up the sheet and observe my naked body: I’m at least twenty years younger and it’s clear to they eye! The nurse has noticed, too, and her face turns bright red before she turns it away, stammering:
"I...I’ll…call the Doctor."
Prof. Dolly comes in just as I’m finishing getting dressed.
Seeing my inquisitive look, he answers:
"Everything is fine! I’ve notified your girlfriend, as you asked me to: she’s here outside. She’s waiting for you."
I hurl myself out of the room. I can recognize her profile in the corridor. I start walking, then running towards her. She comes over to me and we embrace. Where has the intoxication of her odour gone? She hugs me and covers my face and then my lips with her kisses. I no longer recognize their taste. I look deeply into her eyes and I understand that she is the same, but my heart no longer starts up the rap-hip hop beat. My heart beats only like the bloody muscle it is, period! I don’t feel anything else! I feel lost. It’s as though my head was spinning. I look around for something tangible to hold on to.
I can make out the nurse behind Daniela. Her fingers make a tiny sign of hello and she winks at me.
Then she turns around and moves away. My eyes follow the dance of her well-modelled curves as they perform a rhythmic balancing act, and then and there my cardiac muscle suddenly starts humming a rap-hip hop.
Kossi Komla-Ebri was born in Togo nel 1954. A medical surgeon, he has lived Italy since 1974. He is a member of the editorial board of "El-Ghibli" and director of the "Migrant Literature" series of the publishing house Ediarco. He has published: Imbarazzismi-quotidiani imbarazzi in bianco e nero (Ed. dell'Arco-Marna, 2002), the novel Neyla (Ed.dell'Arco-Marna, 2002), the short-story collection All'incrocio dei sentieri (EMI-Bologna, 2003), I nuovi Imbarazzismi-quotidiani imbarazzi in bianco e nero e a colori (Ed. dell'Arco-Marna, 2004), and his stories have appeared in numerous anthologies. He recently published the novella La sposa degli dèi (Ed. dell'Arco-Marna, 2005). For further information, visit his Website www.kossi-komlaebri.net