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warmth of her hand, something that might have united us before she disappeared. I would have liked to know everything about her, but now there wasn’t anyone I could ask.
    How did she look, who was she, what did she like, and – perhaps the most pressing question of all – why did she bring me into the world?
    I started calling out to her as I wandered through the empty rooms.
    I was ashamed of speaking that name – somehow it seemed as though I were betraying you. Up until that day, I’d always said ‘Grandma’, and now, all at once, all I wanted to say was ‘Mamma’.

Genealogies

6
    WHO ARE OUR parents? What’s behind the faces of the people who begot us? Out of billions of persons, only two; out of hundreds of thousands of spermatozoa, only one. Before we become the children of our mother and father, we’re the result of billions of combinations and choices – both made and not made – but no one’s in a position to shed much light on them. Why that spermatozoon and not this one right next to it? Why does only
that
one contain the characteristics of the necessary person? The unborn child could turn out to be Leonardo da Vinci, or a plumber, or a ruthless murderer.
    And if it’s true that everything’s already predetermined, as in a restaurant menu, if Leonardo has to become Leonardo and nobody else and the same with the plumber and the killer, what sense is there to our entire existence? Are we really just put together from various parts, like pieces in an assembly kit? Is there a number on each kit that determines the project it contains?
    Maybe, up in heaven, someone – like an industrious housewife – is bustling about and deciding: Today we need four hundred plumbers, eighty or so murderers, and forty-two scientists.
    Or maybe heaven’s empty, as many people claim, and things go forward in a kind of perpetual motion; matter started to aggregate distant aeons ago, and now it can’t stop; the forms it produces are more and more complex. And it’s exactly this complexity that’s opened the way to the great fiction that would have us believe in the existence of Someone up there in the sky.
    Why can two people, a couple who perhaps hadn’t even met until a few hours before, by performing an act that lasts no more than a few minutes, become our parents? Is this our destiny, to be half one and half the other, even if fate decrees that we’re to be adopted and sent to live on the other side of the world?
    In any case, we’re part of them, and vice versa.
    Part of them, and part of their parents and of their parents’ parents, and so on, farther and farther back, until the whole family tree is covered – one grandfather’s passion for insects, great-grandmother’s love of singing, great-great-grandfather’s flair for business, the other grandfather’s alcoholism, various cousins’ efforts to bring the family to ruin, the suicidal instincts of a couple of uncles, a great-aunt’s obsession with the spirit world – all of that is closed up inside us as though in a time bomb. But we don’t set the timer; it’s been set from the beginning, and we know nothing about it. The only wisdom is to be aware that there’s something uncontrolled inside us and that at any moment it could explode.
    And so a man and a woman – among billions of their kind – meet each other at a certain point in their lives, and after a period of time that can vary from a few minutes to decades, reproduce themselves in another living individual.
    According to the most advanced studies, the origin of this coupling probably can be found, once again, in the sense of smell, as is the case with migratory birds.
    In fact, the human nose is the instrument through which we understand that the gametes of the person before us must be united with our own. There are no whys or wherefores, only the law of life, which seems to require that biological considerations trump all others.
    It’s the nose, therefore, that suggests copulation,