The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios. Yann Martel
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idea. And then—why not?—War and Peace.
I had left his room, was stepping into the elevator, when a long shout exploded in the corridor.
“Helsinkiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!”
I smiled. You see, Paul and I were on the same wavelength. We were young, and the young can be radical. We’re not encrusted with habits and traditions. If we catch ourselves in time, we can start all over. So the story would take place in Helsinki, the capital of Finland. A good choice. A faraway city where neither of us had been would be much easier for our fancy to play with than one that was right in front of our eyes. I returned to Paul’s room. His face was still red from shouting.
I asked him about the name of the family. He pouted his lips and narrowed his eyes and thought for a moment. Then he expelled a sound: “Roccamatio”. What? “The Roccamatios—Rok-kah-MAH-tee-ohs.” I wasn’t keen on that one. Not very realistic. Something more Nordic-sounding might be better, no? But Paul insisted: the Roccamatios—Rok-kah-MAH-tee-ohs, he repeated—were a Finnish family of Italian extraction. So be it. The Helsinki Roccamatios were located and baptized. Their story was waiting to be told. We agreed on the rules: I would be the judge of what was fictionally acceptable; transparent autobiography was forbidden. The story would take place nowadays, the mid-1980s. Each episode would be related in one sitting and would resemble one event from a consecutive year of the twentieth century. We would alternate in telling the story; I would have the odd years, Paul would have the even years. We discussed what we knew about Helsinki and agreed on the following: one, it had a population of one million inhabitants; two, it was the capital of Finland in every way—political, commercial, industrial, cultural, etc.; three, it was an important port; four, it had a small but fractious Swedish-speaking minority; and five, Russia always weighed heavily on the mood of the nation. Finally, we agreed that the Roccamatios would be a secret between the two of us.
We decided that after a period of reflection and research, I would start with the first episode. I brought Paul a pen, some paper and a three-volume work called A History of the 20th Century. His father set a small bookcase with wheels beside his bed and filled it with all thirty-two volumes of the 15th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Now understand that you’re not going to hear the story of the Helsinki Roccamatios. Certain intimacies shouldn’t be made public. They should be known to exist, that’s all. The telling of the story of the Roccamatios was difficult, especially as the years went by. We started brave and strong, arguing all the time and interrupting each other constantly, surprising ourselves with our cleverness and originality, laughing a whole lot—but it’s so tiring to re-create the world when you’re not at the peak of health. Paul wouldn’t be so much unwilling—he would still object or redirect me with a word or a scowl—as unable. Even listening became tiring.
The story of the Helsinki Roccamatios was often whispered. And it wasn’t whispered to you. Of these AIDS years, all I have kept—outside my head—is this record:
The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios
1901—After a reign of sixty-four years, Queen Victoria dies. Her reign has witnessed a period of incredible industrial expansion and increasing material prosperity. In its own blinkered and delusional way, the Victorian age has been the happiest of all—an age of stability, order, wealth, enlightenment and hope. Science and technology are new and triumphant, and Utopia seems at hand.
I begin with an ending, with the death of Sandro Roccamatio, the patriarch of the family. It is dramatic, and it allows me to introduce the family members, who are all at the funeral.
1902—Under the forceful leadership of Clifford Sifton, Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier’s Minister of the Interior, the settlement of Canada’s west is in full swing. Sifton sends out millions of pamphlets in dozens of languages and strings a net of agents across northern and central Europe. Ships that have just dumped their Canadian wheat on the Old Continent bring home the catch. In less than a decade the population of the Prairies increases by a million inhabitants and wheat production jumps fivefold. Laurier proclaims to the booming country, “The twentieth Century belongs to Canada.”
1903—Orville and Wilbur Wright fly at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. Their powered machine, “Flyer 1” (now popularly called “Kitty Hawk”), stays in the air for twelve seconds on its first flight, fifty-nine seconds on its fourth and last.
1904—As a direct result of the Dreyfus affair, Prime Minister Emile Combes of France introduces a bill for the complete separation of Church and State. The bill guarantees complete liberty of conscience, removes the State from having any say in the appointment of ecclesiastics or in the payment of their salaries, and severs all other connections between Church and State.
A routine to our storytelling has already developed. It’s nearly a ceremony. First, and always first, we shake hands every time we meet, like the Europeans. Paul takes pleasure in this, I can tell. If there’s a need, we deal with health and therapy. Then we small-talk, usually about politics since we’re both diligent newspaper readers. Finally, after a short pause to collect ourselves, we get on with the Roccamatios.
1905—The German monthly Annalen der Physik publishes papers by Albert Einstein, a twenty-six-year-old German Jew who works as an examiner in a patent office in Bern, Switzerland. The Special Theory of Relativity is born. There is energy everywhere. E = mc2, as Einstein puts it.
1906—Tommy Burns defeats Marvin Hart to become the first (and only) Canadian to win the world heavyweight boxing championship. Burns defends his title eleven times in three years, notably knocking out the Irish champion Jem Roche in 1 minute and 28 seconds, the shortest heavyweight title defence ever.
Paul is nearly well. He is plagued by minor ills—night sweating here, diarrhoea there—and a lack of energy, but it’s nothing unmanageable. He is at home, and as he has never been sick a day in his life until now, the routine of illness has an exotic appeal. He is started on a program of azidothymidine (AZT) and multivitamins, and he visits the hospital every week, sometimes staying overnight. He likes the hospital. The omnipotent men and women in white, their scientific jargon, the innumerable tests, the impeccable cleanliness of the place—they exhaust and reassure him. His mood is good.
We make plans. We speak of travel. I have travelled some, Paul less, mostly with his family, and we both see travel as essential to growth, as a state of being, as a metaphor for inner journeying. Disdaining the well-worn path, we hardly speak of Europe. We are magi, not tourists. After touching on Iceland, Portugal, Bulgaria and Poland, our star leads us to other lands, to Turkey and Yemen, to Mexico and Peru and Bolivia, to South Africa and the Philippines, to India and Nepal.
1907—A new strain of wheat, Marquis, is sent out to Indian Head, Saskatchewan, for testing. It is the result of an exhaustive scientific selection process, the credit for which goes to Charles Edwards Saunders, cerealist at the Ottawa Experimental Farm. The new strain’s response to Saskatchewan conditions is phenomenal. It is resistant to heavy winds and to disease, and it produces high yields that make excellent flour. Most importantly it matures early, thus avoiding the damage of frost and greatly extending the areas of Alberta and Saskatchewan where wheat can be grown. By 1920, Marquis will make up ninety per cent of prairie spring wheat, helping make Canada one of the great breadbaskets of the world.
If I’m not distracted by my job or by thoughts of food, transportation and the like, I think of the Roccamatios. They are my mind’s natural focus. I have to find historical events. Then I have to think of plot and parallel, of the way in which my story will resemble the historical event, whether in an obvious way or a subtle way, for one symbolic moment (at the beginning or at the end?) or all along. These thoughts pester me, challenge me, make me go