Authors: Eva García Sáenz
District 7
IAGO
I strolled along the seventh district of Paris for a couple of hours until I reached the
rue du Bac
. There, in the
Patisserie des rêves,
they baked delicious
macarons
in a thousand different colors.
Dana would love these
, I thought, in a vain attempt to convince myself that my life was still following the routines of a married man.
My wife had a sweet tooth, and for her, the best gift you could give her were the assorted puff pastries, which I managed to get from a friend from the Brotherhood of the Torrelavega Puff Pastries. I'd bring her some on Sunday mornings for breakfast and we'd eat them before the humidity of our city made them go soft.
I then headed to a building that I hadn't been to in a long time. I had to have it re-built following the German bombings in the Second World War, but the architect managed to restore it to its former glory thanks to the original plans that I had kept in a safe place during the ordeal. A discreet company kept it spotless without asking too many questions, and whenever I was in Paris and needed a place to stay, I had an apartment that I could call home. Dana still didn't know it existed, as with many of my properties or the balance of my bank account. I didn't want to intimidate her too much. I let her think that Nagorno was the billionaire of the family, that was the best for everyone. An ostentatious and rather indiscreet longevo husband was enough for her to deal with.
I took the key for my spacious apartment from my jacket and went straight to the dining room. After my meeting with Pilkington and his boss, I had made arrangements to have my dinner waiting for me that night. My staff had left the meal that I had requested and a Provencal floral bouquet on the table, in a very French manner.
Soupe de poisson
, a fish puree soup, a
coquille St-Jacques
, a scallop gratin with a cream sauce, and a
tarte tati.
I dined alone, as I had done many times throughout my life, in front of the building's oval skylight, looking from afar at the lights of that cold and serene Parisian night.
Then I took out my brown contacts. What was the point in using them if Manon knew me with my original eye color?
The doorbell finally rung. I splashed my face with bottled water from an exclusive Swiss spring and I went to face my past.
I opened the door. Manon had changed. She no longer had the boring executive hairstyle, and her black hair fell across her shoulders, just as I remembered when she had taken off her Puritan bonnet in the intimacy of our home.
"Manon..."
"Ely..."
"So you didn't die in the epidemic of 1630?"
"No, of course I didn't. I dug a grave, I carved my own cross and I left it empty. Our son got sick the same night that you left. I thought that the epidemic had reached you too, and that's why you didn't come back to us. But our son only survived a few days, and the time had come for me to change my name, location... I really enjoyed our time together, my love.”
I closed my eyes when I heard those words, stuck in the doorway, with one hand on the knob.
"You faked your own death and left our son's body to rot in the open," I managed to say.
"That's right, and what happened to you?"
I was going to abandon you, I went back when I heard of the epidemic, I burned our farm to the ground when I thought that you had died...
"I didn't get sick, Manon. But I did hear of your death, and I escaped from there as quickly as possible and as far away as possible."
We stood in silence, facing each other, digesting the words.
"So you're..." we both started to say, in unison.
"You say it," I urged her.
"I don't know what I am, I just know that I don't age."
"So you're a longeva, like me..."
"A longeva..." she smiled. "I'd never thought to call myself that. Yes, I suppose I am a longeva, as you say."
"How old are you?" I wanted to know.
"Have you still not learned that you should never ask a woman her age?" she replied, with a slight smile, almost seductive.
"Come on, Manon. We've shared enough intimacy in the past to be able to talk about your age, and much more."
"So you should be a gentleman and invite in, don't you think?"
"You're right," I said, letting go of the door knob and leaving room for her to pass. "Come, let's go up to the attic. The views of Paris in winter are worth a Petrus from 99."
"Are you drinking again?"
"No, I've been toasting with water for the last four centuries."
I took the ice bucket and we climbed the oval staircase to the top floor of my building. She didn't seem to be intimidated by the opulence. She moved gracefully, accustomed to the architecture from more magnanimous times.
We went onto the balcony and I poured her a cold glass of wine, and we talked about the old times, just like acquaintances who had met up again.
Like friends who had once loved each other dearly.
"So, are you going to tell me your age now, or shall we keep discussing the weather in Europe?"
She leaned back into her chair, took a sip of wine and looked out over the gardens of the Champ de Mars.
"Perhaps it was a premonition, but I was born when written History was born. Mesopotamia, 6000 years ago."
"You don't have Sumerian traits," I pointed out.
"I know. And you, Wistan Zeidan, what is your age and origin?"
"10,311 years. Pre-history, in Northern Spain."
"Wow," she muttered, and then she laughed. On my way over here in the taxi I was wondering whether you were a mere 400 year old boy. But no, you are Ancient then..."
"Ancient?" I repeated. "Does that mean that you've met more people like me?"
"No, it's not that," she replied, distracted. "It's just that I have a huge amount of respect for the ancients," she said, winking.
Why are you lying to me?
"What was your first name?" I wanted to know.
"Maia, but call me Marion. What about you?"
"Urko, but call me Iago."
"Iago?"
"It's my other identity, the real one."
"Do we have real identities, Iago? Or are we simply masks with an expiration date?"
"Is that how you feel, Marion?"
"Sometimes. Too often, maybe. That's the way I feel, always changing, always starting over from scratch, always ending without goodbyes or explications. It's an almost cynical process. It's like living the life of a double spy."
"You've defined it pretty well. I feel like that too, but what other option do we have?"
"You know that there are other options, come out to the media, tell the world..."
"And start a dystopia... doesn't that scare you?"
"It terrors me just to think of the consequences," she whispered. "It needs a lot of thought, a lot of thought," she muttered to herself.
And she lost herself for a moment in the streets of Paris. I respected her silence, as I had once respected her nights of vigil, writing the chronicles of the beginning of the colony of New England.
The temperature of the Parisian night was dropping, but neither of us seemed to be uncomfortable. There was a calm in the air that I had felt a thousand times.
We both raised our eyes to the sky, like animals sniffing out a pleasant scent.
"It's going to snow," we whispered at the same time.
And we look at each, somewhat surprised. Everything would be so easy with her...
"Why did you say that it was a premonition, being born at the same time as writing? Has that been your profession, a writer?" I forced myself to ask her, to break that increasing climax.
"I've had a thousand professions, like you I would imagine. But whenever I could and circumstances allowing, I've always gone back to my vocation, which is writing. I've been a historian, a scribe, an editor, a writer, a novelist, a journalist...
What are you, Iago? What's your talent? Have you found it?"
At last. Someone speaking my language. Without false modesty.
"I've cultivated my intelligence to a point where I've been able to stretch it. I keep challenging myself: more studies, more languages, more knowledge, more areas of science... That's my talent."
"Your field, as they say now," she summarized, and we laughed.
We laughed like children at being able to share anachronistic jokes, because we now knew someone to talk about the past with without having to put any restrictions, and because she wasn't part of my conflicting family. Someone who understood me without having to explain why they should understand me. Someone who understood it all because they had also been through it.
"You say that you're a writer, but have you ever been a queen at some point in history? I've always thought that you have the poise of the monarchs. Even dressed in dark clothes, with your bonnet and square lace collars, in Puritan style. Tell me Marion, because something's been gnawing at me ever since I saw you at the Procope. Were you ever a Sovereign?"
"I've had subjects, yes. But I don't wish to dwell on it in case this revelation makes you uncomfortable."
She leaned on the table we were sharing and her white blouse opened slightly, insinuating elegant lines that I once knew. Was she doing it on purpose?
No
, I thought.
She's too much of a lady to be insinuating on a first meeting.
And it was true, Marion didn't need to play that game, she was much better than that.
"Do you remember the Travelogues, the travel books?" she asked, changing course.
"Yep," I said.
"They're my specialty, I began writing them in the 9th century. I went from Gallaecia to Jerusalem under the identity of a rich and cultured woman, Egeria. My job was to describe the routes of the pilgrims to make a record of everything that happened so as to help travelers."
"So you're Egeria," I muttered, picking up my glass of water. "I have a late copy of your chronicles in my house in Santander. 13th century, I remember purchasing it, I don't know why I remember such an insignificant detail, but I do."
"13th century, I had to flee from the Black Death of Bohemia. There I found colonies who had not been infected. Now they think that it's down to their blood type. There was an abundant number of people with 0+, which is more resistant to the strain of the black rat flea, and it was easier to avoid the disaster. How did you avoid it?"
"Southeast Asia," I smiled, remembering that time. "What else have you written?"
"Perhaps you've read about the legendary meeting in which, a hundred and twenty-five years ago, the National Geographic magazine began. I'm not in the famous photo of 1888 for obvious reasons. The fact is that I took the photo, and I drew up the Order of the Day. I thought it was a fabulous idea, in the wave of those times. The work of the 19th century explorers was being lost, traveling to the exotic colonies was no longer a national obsession in Europe and the United States. I thought that a periodic publication of travels would keep the flame burning. I managed to convince several voluntary journalists, those that ended up being the founders for the history of the Magazine, and I covered the costs of their first expeditions."
"National Geographic," I mused, thinking about the expeditions that the high-profile emporium could still uncover. "Do you still have connections?"
"In the shadows, of course, but I still manage it, yes. Name a country and I'll give you a contact. Tell me a closed boarder and I can cross it. It's useful if you're a... longeva, don't you agree?"
"Please, continue," I urged. “With six thousand years of literary travel production, you must have a lot to talk about."
"The
Grand Tour
of the supposed Thomas Nugent. Do you remember that his chapter 'Ruins of Pompeii' made archaeological visits to those ruins fashionable in the 18th century ?”
Pompeii, my father has always been obsessed with the ruins of that city
, I was about to say. But upon remembering my father, I kept quiet to be on the safe side, and the spell I was under abruptly ended, bringing me back to reality, to the unnerving reality: my wife, who I had left for dead four hundred years ago, was in front of me, drinking a glass of wine in 21st century Paris.
How many possibilities in a billion could there be that two longevos could find each other for a second time in their passing through the millennia?
"So you've earned your living as a travel writer, but what is a writer doing at the Kronon Corporation?"
"I've been working there for a while. Science isn't exactly my field, but I can't stop wondering what I am, what made me this way... and I read an article about aging signed by them and found it rather significant. I reinvented myself once more, I studied, I filled the gaps in my CV and finally went through the selection process. I started as Media Director, but over the years I have worked there, I have specialized in the field of telomeres. And now, my dear Iago, tell me what you're doing sniffing around the Kronon Corporation."