A topographical question that was worth addressing before moving on to “your precious Rolex,” he said with a smile, was the following: all of Ukraine was an immense plain of black soil atop the Podolian Uplands, which leaned gently toward the Caspian Sea. All of its two hundred thousand square miles were arable, making the country a grain producer of the first magnitude. Across this gigantic plateau ran the three national rivers — the Dnieper, the Dniester, and the Dnierer. Irrigated by the waters of these rivers, the land flourished with alfalfa, which fed the cattle, another source of the country’s wealth.
Anyway, given all this, where were the mountains, those mountains that were from time immemorial the site of Ukrainian legends, the famous mountains of coal inhabited by nocturnal demons and hermits and lost races and eyeless beasts? Where were they?
The case of the toxic algae addressed this question with striking precision. These extremely dangerous mutated marine growths had recently appeared in the depth of the Caspian Sea, so deep in its trenches that nobody could see them. Their existence and characteristics had to be deduced from the mortality of deep-sea fish that appeared, floating belly-up, in the surf — fish that were themselves unknown till then. The ichthyologists who identified and studied them found in their intestinal tracts microscopic fragments, sometimes only a few loose cells, of the algae that had killed them. From those minimal traces, they could diagram the algae.
Then, by simply applying a well-known fact, algae that made their home in the depths of the sea should also be found on the mountains peaks. With this, their existence was definitively confirmed.
Here my friend quickly shifted gears and launched right into the next subject, eager as he was to arrive at “my Rolex,” which he must have by now sighted on the horizon from the crest of the argumentative wave he was riding:
Señorita Wild Savage —
But I cut him off sharply with speech and gestures. I threw myself back in my chair and shot both hands in the air, as if I were climbing a wall.
Just one moment!
I sighed deeply, and upon remembering it in bed, I couldn’t resist sighing more weakly, in a kind of mock-up of the one I had released in the café.
How could you keep going, I asked, by using such a crass parody of a syllogism as a bridge? I was sorry to have to disillusion him, but as far as I was concerned the mountains still did not exist.
He retraced his steps without his feathers getting the least bit ruffled: didn’t I know that geologists had deduced important information about the planet’s past from fossils of marine animals found on high mountain peaks?
Of course I knew that. But that didn’t make mountains rise!
I agree, he said, it didn’t make them rise. . in reality. But we had already made clear, or better said, I had made clear, abundantly and effectively, if not excessively, that there is a difference between fiction and reality. And we were in the realm of fiction, right? I myself had said as much, he wasn’t inventing anything. In any case, he had merely fine-tuned it: the terrain on which we were moving was not that of fiction already made and consumed like a bowl of popcorn, but rather of its generation. And in this terrain, which now was becoming metaphoric, the mountains did actually rise out of what I scornfully called a “parody of a syllogism.” Above all, I should kindly remember that the fiction genre we were discussing was that of entertainment for mass consumption. Even children know the fact about marine fossils on mountain peaks. Moreover, it is the kind of information that, outside the restricted world of professional geologists, holds interest only for children. But adults were once children, and they remember. The popular culture industry is built on such memories.
I continued to resist. While remembering the conversation, I already knew what came next: Señorita Wild Savage. In the conversation itself I probably also knew, because he had already spoken her name, but in my memory, Señorita Wild Savage rose up in me like a tide of magnetized currents that swept me away into adventure, youth, the world of passions. This is why I paused with particular complacency on the objection I now presented, and on his response:
How is it possible, I asked him, that the inopportune mutation of algae could have been contemporaneous with fossils that must have been millions of years old?
Another “little anachronism,” right? he replied with an astute smile that indicated that he had been expecting that objection and was grateful for it. In effect, it was another one of those errors that required the labor of verisimilization. The fact that the algae had recently mutated did not mean that they hadn’t existed since ancient times; rather, since then they had contained, latently, the very mechanisms that would make the mutation possible. For an experienced paleobiologist, those mechanisms would be visible in the fossils, and studying them would not only lead to a greater understanding of genetic history but also help deal with the threats posed to life forms in the present day.
But this was a very narrow, very functional verisimilization. There were other, better ones, and if I had the patience to listen, he would elucidate the situation.
Aria was a beautiful young Tatar woman, secretary of the Pig-Iron Foundation, whose president the sinister Forion Larionov had become after the death of the previous president, a kindhearted gentleman and Aria’s uncle. She suspected that the accident that had taken her uncle’s life had not really been an accident at all but rather the result of Larionov’s machinations, and she was trying to find some proof of this in the little time left to her, for the new president was replacing the personnel with his supporters, and her days as secretary were numbered. When she found the proof (all she had to do was stay late, enter her boss’s office, and open a drawer, with that ease so typical of the movies), she realized that she could not use it, for the people implicated in the crime included high officials in the government and the armed forces. What’s more: she discovered that she herself had been targeted as the next victim. That night, she did not return to her house, which was probably already under surveillance. She had no choice but to flee. Because of her years working at the Foundation, she knew the vast resources this complex and powerful institution had at its disposal, and she decided to use one of them in an act of daring that would be much more cinematic than taking a train: she took a taxi to the Foundation’s private aerodrome to board one of the airplanes that flew every night to Moldova loaded with pig-iron. Her personal identification allowed her passage. But once at the airport, the darkness and the rush of some last-minute furtive maneuvers that took her a while to understand created a mix-up between her and someone else, and she ended up boarding a small jet plane that was departing immediately. Just before takeoff, she hid between the last seat and the back wall of the cabin; once it was airborne, she peeked out to get a look at the other passenger: it was the young and beautiful Varia Ostrov, Larionov’s lover, who looked almost identical to her (they were both played by the same actress). Varia was also fleeing, but for a different reason: she was carrying valuable documents she had stolen from her lover, which she planned to sell to the Moldovan secret service.