Kamchatka Read Free Page A

the morning that I walked out and never went back.

5
A SCIENTIFIC DIGRESSION
    That April morning Señorita Barbeito closed the classroom blinds and showed us an educational film. The film, in washed-out colours, with a voice-over dubbed by a Mexican narrator, discussed the mystery of life, explaining that cells came together to form tissue and tissues came together to form organs and organs came together to create organisms, though each was more than the sum of its parts.
    I was sitting (to my frustration, as I’ve said) in the front row, my nose almost pressed against the screen. I only paid attention for the first few minutes. I registered the fact that the Earth had been formed in a ball of fire 4,500 million years ago. I remember it took 500 million years for the first rocks to form. I remember it rained for 200 million years – that’s some flood – after which there were oceans. Then, in his deep voice and his thick Mexican accent, the narrator started talking about the evolution of species and I realized he had skipped the bit of the story between the Earth being barren and the first appearance of life. I thought maybe there was a section of the film missing and that this was why the Mexican kept banging on about mystery. By the time I’d finished thinking this and tried to go back to the film I’d lost the thread, so I didn’t understand anything after that.
    But this business of the mystery of life stuck with me. I raised some of my questions with mamá, who explained to me about Darwin andVirchow. In 1855 Virchow had proposed that
omnis cellula e cellula
(‘all cells from cells’), thereby stipulating that life was a chain whose first link, mamá had to admit, was not a trivial matter. It was also mamá who filled in some of the holes in the Mexican narrator’s calendar. She explained that the first single-cell life forms appeared on Earth 3,500 million years ago in the shallow oceans, produced by the longest thunderstorm in history.
    Other things I discovered later while I was living in Kamchatka among the volcanic eruptions and the sulphurous vapours. I discovered, for example, that we are made up of the same tiny atoms and molecules as rocks are. (Surely we should last longer.) I discovered that Louis Pasteur, the man who invented vaccinations, conducted experiments that proved that life could not appear spontaneously in an oxygen-rich atmosphere like that of our Earth. (The mystery was getting bigger.) Later, to my relief, I discovered that a number of scientists contend that in the beginning the Earth had no oxygen, or only trace amounts.
    Sometimes I think that everything you need to know about life can be found in biology books. They discuss the way that bacteria reacted to the massive injection of oxygen into the Earth’s atmosphere. Until that point (2,000 million years ago, according to my chronology), oxygen was fatal to life. Bacteria survived because oxygen was absorbed by the planet’s metals. When the metals were saturated and could absorb no more, the atmosphere was filled with toxic gas and many species died out. But the bacteria regrouped, developed defence mechanisms and adapted in a way that was as effective as it was brilliant: their metabolism began to require the very substance that, until then, had been poisonous to them. Rather than die of oxygen toxicity, they used oxygen to live. What had killed them became the air that they breathed.
    Perhaps this ability that life has to turn things to its advantage doesn’t mean much to you. But let me tell you that, in my world, it has meant a lot.

6
FANTASTIC VOYAGE
    Five minutes into the film, I wasn’t thinking about cells or mysteries or molecules at all – I was playing. I discovered that if I looked at the screen and let my eyes go out of focus, the images became 3-D: psychedelia for beginners. After I’d been staring at the little moving circles and bananas of cell tissue