Читать книгу ARN, The Forbidden Fruit - Frank Pedreno - Страница 7

Jimmy was the only child of a humble Danish family that had fled its country during the Nazi occupation. His mother, Sarah Rothschild, was a free thinker who at the young age of 20 had married Magnus Andersen contrary to the wishes of her traditional Jewish family. His father – ‘the Viking,’ as Magnus liked to be called – belonged to a Protestant family, but like Sarah had never been a believer. However, the family history of freedom of conscience and opinion did not seem to interest the Nazis much. In late 1943, several SS battalions arrived in Denmark bearing Hitler’s order to arrest and deport all Jewish families to Germany. The mandate was clear: apply the final solution.

Teachers at the school in Nyhavn where Sarah worked as an aide alerted her that she and her husband were to be deported. The fatal destiny of the Andersens seemed a fait accompli, but thanks to the help of friends they were able to flee to Sweden, and from there to the United States. Magnus procured a job at the Cambridge Post Office while Sarah started teaching elementary school at a small school in Somerville. They chose to live in a small wooden house in the suburb of Lechmere, east of Cambridge, very close to the Charles River, because it was so much like their beloved Nyhavn, and although they possessed no wealth, their small house and their humble jobs allowed them to live a dignified life. After trying for a long time, Sarah finally got pregnant and on February 10, 1960, Jimmy was born. Life passed peacefully in safe surroundings for a few years, but those moments of happiness only lasted until Jimmy had just turned 12, when the tragic and sudden death of Magnus to pancreatic cancer marred his childhood, stole his adolescence, and catapulted him into adult life. He maintained almost no recollection of his father, and although he tried again and again, was only able to recall one autumn day when they had gone fishing at Walden Pond. With a certain sense of nostalgia he recalled his father’s words that day as they had fastened their life jackets and climbed into the little boat – “The best trout can be had in the weeks before the first snowfalls; they’re fat and strong, almost ready to spawn.” The little boy had complained and lost his balance because he would not stop rubbing his cold hands. “Look at you, your cheeks and ears are red! Put on your hat, lille Jakob, come on, your mother will be mad at me if you catch a cold. Where has this ever been seen, a small freezing Viking? Come on, get into the boat and shut up…” Back home later on they gave his mother the bucket full of fat, iridescent trout which she fried in butter and served accompanied by one of her creamy mashed potatoes dishes. Over the years, whenever Jimmy passed Walden Pond on one of his walks he would hear those words again, as if the cold north wind had pulled them from the interior of the lake and carried them into his ears.

Sarah repeated on a near daily basis that she and his father had worked themselves to the bone, toiling and saving, so that he could go to college and become the first physician in the family. The dream of the old Viking and the atheistic Jewess was for their son to graduate from Harvard, the mecca of knowledge, although they were aware it would be very difficult to save the more than $500,000 required for five years’ tuition. In spite of that, they never relented. Out of pride and naivety, Jimmy told them not to worry – he would get a scholarship to enter Harvard so they would not have to save and sacrifice for him any longer.

“Only the best university in the world will do for our lille Jakob,” he heard his father say, bedridden during his last days of cancer. That temple of knowledge, however – although located just a few train stops from their old house in Lechmere – orbited in a different universe, accessible only by geniuses who also happened to be rich. With the death of his father, so too died the Harvard family dream, and once again a sad reality found its way into the lives of the Andersens. The family’s savings predictably ran dry, and Jimmy had to put himself to work to help his mother cover the monthly expenses. Despite these obstacles, Jimmy decided he would not disappoint them. Although his great efforts did not earn him a scholarship to Harvard, working by day at a supermarket and studying by night allowed him to enter the University of Massachusetts Boston, the city’s only public university. After eight difficult years he obtained a degree in Medicine in 1987, having just turned 27, four years older than normal for the degree. That same year after hardly any down time he married Laura, a middle-class young architect who had been crazy about him since high school. Little Xavier arrived a few months later, and then over the next few years Jimmy completed various academic qualifications including a specialization in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, a master’s degree and a doctoral thesis.

At the age of 38, he finally landed the long-awaited job and economic stability after having worked for more than 11 years as a fellow, research student and postdoc. After a very tough selection process he was chosen to fill a position as Principal Investigator at the prestigious MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The position afforded him a shared office with two other researchers in the A-120 building on Ames Street as well as a small laboratory where he could develop his projects, although in exchange for these privileges he was obligated to teach Biochemistry and Molecular Biology two days a week to Boston University medical students. He had never aspired to more than living in Massachusetts and working at MIT, yet despite having succeeded, his salary never spared him from struggling to make ends meet. Why an exceptional mind like his could not keep his expenses under control remained a mystery. Evidently the economics of the home was not among his talents, and his wife never forgave him for the fact that his dreams as a badly-paid researcher always came before her and little Xavier.

It took 13 long years for him to understand that marital felicity would never return in their irretrievably broken marriage. Therefore he decided that the first of January in 2000, when Xavier was 12 years old, would be a good time to start a new life, only this time alone. Laura, as expected, furiously lashed out against him, accusing him of having wasted the best years of her life. The arguments of the neglected wife were the final straw. Jimmy, who had the impression of having been a loving father and a dedicated husband and who wanted to avoid conflict at all costs, gave up ownership of the house they had acquired in Newton, custody of Xavier, and a hefty alimony, all of which he would later regret. Xavier had inherited his father’s scientific calling and wanted to pursue a degree in Medicine from Harvard. To this end, Jimmy started saving what little money he had left in order to pay for the loan he would surely need to take to pay his son’s tuition. At last it seemed that the old Viking Magnus was going to have his doctor, licensed by the mecca of knowledge.

Jimmy was odd for many reasons, but mostly because of his childhood and adolescence. The absence of a father figure had blended with the fact that he had never known any of his grandparents, since they had all died during the Second World War. Big ideas, unattainable goals and above all a lack of prudence were forever his sad companions, and he never had an adult to help him modulate his excessive frenzies. There was always someone around calling him a megalomaniac, and he despaired because he did not comprehend why people were unable to understand him. Crushing failure always blanketed him, and he felt it was simply a matter of time before it dragged him into the depths of Hades, as he liked to refer to Hell. The absence of family roots had endowed him with an amazing ability to accept and negotiate frustration; he lived so close to it that it had transformed into but a simple setback. Few people so insistently claimed the right to fail. As a scientist, he obsessively searched for failure and as a human being, he needed it in order to grow.

These characteristics made Jimmy belong on a professional level to that group of scientific doctors who despite their unquestioned brilliance, struggled to obtain funding for their projects. Furthermore, in his situation as a molecular biologist specializing in the field of species evolution, he was atypical at best and at worst, a freak. Nevertheless, he was highly respected in the academic circles of the best universities on the planet, backed by the more than 300 papers he had published in the most prestigious of research journals. Yet despite his achievements, he had always worked alone and could never count on collaborators. The reason for this loneliness was his manic obsession with questioning the scientific establishment and the biopharmaceutical companies above all, whom he accused openly and without reservation of plundering the planet’s biodiversity under the pretext of discovering new drugs, and shamelessly marketing them to obtain obscene profits. His lectures were famous; in them, he said that of the more than 2,000 medicines thus far obtained over the last 100 years from the exploration of the Earth’s biodiversity, each one without fail was owned by the countries of the Northern Hemisphere, i.e. countries rich in technology but poor in biodiversity, and that none of the medicines belonged to the countries of the Southern Hemisphere where they originated, namely the countries poor in technology but extremely rich in biodiversity. The problem was not that his arguments did not make sense; no one could question that he spoke absolute truths, and the facts that he provided were easily verifiable and irrefutable without exception. The problem was the contentious way he presented them. His tactic of drilling the brains of those he called ‘the dark mediocre’ with absolute truths, of not quite absolving those listening to him, was what made him provocative but at the same time irritating, caustic, and most of all, tiresome. In some scientific circles he was referred to as ‘the insufferable Mad Viking,’ although in others he was regarded as nothing more than a charismatic and passionate fool. It was nothing short of extraordinary that his way of thinking and of vehemently exposing himself clashed entirely with the interests of biopharmaceutical companies around the world, especially those of the technology cluster in Cambridge and Boston. Thus it was easy to understand that Jimmy would never receive funding from biopharmaceutical firms, who were not in the business of distributing future royalties from the commercialization of new drugs to the poor countries of the Southern Hemisphere, and even less in the business of financing the combative and insufferable Dr. Andersen.

When Jimmy got divorced, the brilliant idea of going back to his childhood neighborhood struck him, and he mulled over renting a small apartment on the top floor of an old house at 2 Gore Street for $800 a month. The flat was next to Lechmere station, the last stop on the green line of the T, and Jimmy considered $800 a month a bargain compared to prices in the area. The flat had the added advantage of being close enough to his office at MIT that he could walk, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays he could enjoy an additional leisurely stroll of nearly three miles along the Charles River Esplanade to his Biochemistry and Molecular Biology classes at Boston University. The walk along the Esplanade lasted at least an hour and mitigated the pain that teaching what he called ‘the plasticized freshmen of medical school’ caused him. In reality the long walk helped him arrive a bit fresher, as he could flush out, through his urine, the funereal cocktail of pills and cheap wine he forced upon himself nightly. If the public toilet on the way was closed as usual, Jimmy figured that at least the bushes on the Esplanade would appreciate it, although the public servants of the law did not see it the same way, which is why he was fined several times.

…

It was a Tuesday and therefore his students would be waiting. Jimmy would have done anything for the ability to suddenly change the day of the week, including make a pact with the devil, in whom he did not even believe. All these morons ever think about is the day they’ll get their degree and can finally get their two-hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes S Cabrio convertible, the only thing they’ve been dreaming about since they walked through the goddamned doors of the university, he thought to himself while walking and noticing how worn out the toes of his old shoes were. Useless pieces of shit! Every last one of them thinks that when they finish med school an obscene salary is waiting for them along with the easy life, luxury, social recognition, and everything else I shit on. He felt like an endangered animal living inside a zoo ruled by a misfit, sociopathic species. When he spoke in his boring classes about what he called the ‘medical vocation’ – standing up for just causes, perpetually going against the grain, pondering and questioning everything – his students would smile and respectfully let him speak while ignoring him. Even though he could not help noticing the sarcasm in everyone’s eyes, he would say to himself every day during his journey through the Esplanade, Come on guy, keep going, someone will commit! No matter that in five long years you haven’t managed to get anyone to come to work with you, who’s to say you won’t get someone this year? Almost 1,000 students had passed through his hands in the preceding five years. It was very difficult for Jimmy to keep the illusion alive, and although year after year he tried, demotivation had recently begun winning the game.

The indignation he felt at the thought of his students prevented him from breathing normally as he searched for a bush in which to empty the toxic contents of his bladder while thinking aloud. Perfectly trained by his criminal record, he began by looking around to see that there were no police or public servants in the park; it was the end of the month and he barely had enough money to pay for food, so he had to be a little more careful regarding fines for urinating where prohibited. He looked for a sufficiently hidden tree which could adequately camouflage his large stature. His great height, broad shoulders and fair hair flowing down to his shoulders gave him an authentic Viking-like appearance. Had it not been for such obvious bad taste in clothing and an inability to match colors, everyone would have agreed he was an Adonis. Instead, Jimmy’s body was like an accordion enduring constant volume changes and fluctuations around his ideal weight. His appearance that morning was truly regrettable; no better idea had occurred to him than to don the first thing he found in his ramshackle closet. As he had begun a diet that was just becoming fashionable but would not be truly popular until years later, his pants were inappropriately sized for his present moment in reality. The extremely effective diet consisted of fasting at least 12 hours a day, and through it Jimmy had dropped more than 25 pounds in three months. However, more than just shedding the weight, Jimmy’s real reason for starting the diet was to balance the expenses of his battered domestic finances. To keep his pants from falling off he had to tighten his belt as much as possible, but since his belt was now too big, he had rifled through the many other belts he had to find any old one that better suited the circumstances. The required cinching of the belt formed unpleasant-looking pockets at his waist which made him look deplorable. This look could have been mitigated if he had worn a shirt and an appropriate jacket, but far be it from Jimmy to do so; no better idea had occurred to him than to pair those disgraceful pants with a plaid lumberjack shirt and an old blue coat that would have delighted a vagabond.

A short while later he spotted a tree near the edge of the river that could be useful for his needs, hidden by a thick undergrowth of bushes and ferns. The bitterness of his thoughts and the quantity of cheap wine that his body had been transforming into urine for several hours prevented him from seeing a group of ducks behind him heading towards the river. The first specimen, a male with large brown spots and a green head, was leading the way. Five small hatchlings formed a near perfect line behind the male, and a proud brown female controlling the brood brought up the rear of the formation. They contemptuously passed behind the shameless urinator making hardly any noise, slowly entered the river, and floated away in search of the sun’s rays. As always, disappointment and demoralization had taken their toll on Jimmy, preventing him from enjoying the beautiful moments that life offered him from time to time.

…

In mid-July of 2003, the University of Massachusetts Boston hosted an International Symposium within its Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainability Program. Amongst the lectures, one that stood out for its high degree of controversy was to be given by Dr. James Andersen of MIT, with a clearly provocative title: The Plunder of Biodiversity by Biopharmaceutical Companies and Resulting Health-Economic Implications in Southern Hemisphere Societies. The degree of vitriol on the part of biopharmaceutical companies in the Greater Boston area biotech cluster was evident, and they exerted all the pressure they could to prevent the polarizing professor from giving the lecture. However, environmental organizations in the area were fascinated and full of anticipation at the idea that a prestigious MIT researcher dared speak with such a level of sincerity, and hoped that he would put the powerful biopharmaceutical companies in their place. This was true for Helen, a 35-year-old Argentinian anthropologist who worked in New York for a Non-Governmental Organization involved in development programs in Latin America. When she saw the title of the conference she caught a train to Boston without thinking twice. That day in the UMass Boston auditorium the petite, raven-haired rebel-with-a-cause Helen, as her friends called her thanks to her small stature of barely five feet, beautiful black hair and intrepid nature, was captivated at first sight by the absent-minded, ill-dressed doctor who dropped pearls of wisdom even though the audience was clearly hostile to his message.

Once Jimmy had finished the conference, Helen found an opportunity to approach him on the pretext of posing a question.

“Dr. Andersen, congratulations on your excellent talk! It was very stimulating to hear a professor from MIT speak at length as you have just done,” she said, employing all of her charms.

“Did you really like it?” asked a nervous Jimmy, his eyes roaming all over her body.

“Did I like it? Dr. Andersen, I was blown away!”

“Please don’t call me Dr. Andersen, call me Jimmy.”

“Okay sure! But only if you call me Helen,” said the one who from that day forth would be his soul mate, flashing a beautiful smile and tilting her attractive neck a little.

In that moment an intense chemical attraction appeared between them, although what truly united them was an unwavering commitment to the conservation of biodiversity, a relentless battle against the exploitative biopharmaceutical companies, and a spontaneous vision of life – in most moments impulsive and always totally instinctive, as they liked to describe it.

Their relationship was based on a passionate love and unbridled sex. However, when Helen saw the depressing apartment in which Jimmy lived, she told him in no uncertain terms not to expect her to spend time in that hovel. She insisted over and over again that he leave it and find another more dignified and less noisy place, even raising the possibility of living together. “I could request a transfer to Boston and we could look for a nice place, split the expenses, and don’t worry, I would turn it into a home,” she said. Since his traumatic divorce, however, Jimmy had vowed never to make the mistake of sharing his miserable life with anyone ever again. As he himself put it, his many defects and few virtues would not ruin his life a second time, and Helen had become too important a person for him to be wrong again. She did not insist much either, because the dreadful symphony of metal noise in no way generated the appropriate atmosphere for sleeping, much less for making passionate love in the way that she liked to do. Between them they decided that she would continue living and working in New York, which had the added benefit of allowing them a higher degree of independence, which proved vital for the stability of an especially intense relationship. With things standing thus, Jimmy had to make a provision in his battered domestic economy to be able to go to New York at least three times per month. That was the only alternative Helen offered him and obviously Jimmy accepted with no negotiation of terms whatsoever. Three weekends in his beloved Helen’s small apartment represented more than 100 hours in which to make love and rest in tranquility without noise, although she was not able to say the same due to the continuous grinding of teeth of her favorite scientist. At any rate, she was willing to make the sacrifice and put up with anything to avoid the insufferable cacophony of the Lechmere apartment.

Nothing served to mitigate Jimmy’s total and absolute lack of emotional intelligence – not his 145 IQ, nor his height of well over six feet, nor his attractive Viking physiognomy and fantastical hair, so inappropriate for his age. Jimmy was one of those human beings who wander through life believing that it is others who have an obligation to understand what they are like. He never considered that these ‘others’ also had feelings and that their hearts also beat from time to time. It was evident that Jimmy was not fit for the domestic lifestyle and much less for the social. The Mad Viking was crude and rough around the edges. Helen would laugh and tell him that in terms of family and social life, he was not house broken. True cretin that he was, he would respond by saying that domestication was a fallacy, since it had never happened to him.

It took Jimmy a long time to understand the complicated emotional universe of Helen and, above all, the enigmatic pull that her untamed beauty exercised over him. It was her instances of sudden aggressiveness followed by imperceptible but extremely intense bursts of sweetness that left him completely disoriented. Helen was his first experience with a Latin American woman, and the poor fool did not know that to survive that type of relationship in which wave after wave of the intense and pronounced ups and downs of a never-ending roller coaster would toss him about incessantly, he would have had to have been much stronger emotionally.

The NGO where Helen worked collaborated with several Latin American countries in a recently-created project of the United Nations with the objective of exploring the biodiversity of the Southern Hemisphere for the discovery of new medicines. The purpose of the project was for the benefits derived from the pharmaceutical development of newly-discovered products to remain the property of the country where the natural resources were found. Project Darwin-Lamarck, the project Jimmy had created, fit perfectly with the one Helen had begun to develop in the real world with several Latin American countries; therefore, the two were able to quickly unite their efforts and illusions into a common objective. In the near future, Jimmy was to begin receiving biological samples from Argentina on the condition that if a compound able to be converted into a new medicine or a natural resource useful in biomedicine could be identified, its commercial exploitation would yield benefits for that country. In this way, hardly attracting any attention from the pharmaceutical companies of the Boston and Cambridge cluster, Project Darwin-Lamarck began to see the light.