Читать книгу One Hundred Years Later - Alberto Vazquez-Figueroa - Страница 6

Chapter II

She dreamed of dead children, and not because her father had stopped one from entering this world, but because some kind of “thing” or virus, call it what you will, was stopping millions of children from arriving at this world.

But what would they come here for? They would die suffering or live terrorized…

Someone once wrote that fear of death was worse than death itself, and Aurelia could confirm the truth in that statement even though she had never herself died.

When she woke up at dawn and gained consciousness of the world’s happenings, her heart sank so deep that she wondered how it could keep finding its way back to her chest.

At those times, she sought refuge in books, especially in those where women and men throughout History, braved the most terrible adversities. It sometimes cheered her up, but there were days when she felt disheartened as it dawned on her that none of these characters had ever faced an enemy of such cunning.

This enemy did not fire canyons, or carry a sword, it did not drop bombs or poison; neither did it shoot from behind or burn people at stakes. All it did was let his chosen ones move freely in search of new chosen ones who could continue to move around freely.

Its canny soldiers, true members of the fifth column, infiltrated in the enemy’s lines. They had no faith or flag–or maybe it is fitter to say that they belonged to all faiths and kneeled before all flags, unaware of the fact that they were unflinchingly and blindly following the orders of a quiet general that never tired of winning battles.

Alexander conquered Persia, Julius Caesar, Egypt–including its Queen–, and Napoleon occupied half of Europe, but a despicable virus who had never pronounced a single order or word, had become the absolute owner of every existing nation, as well as of all of those that had ever existed in History.

Only a ridiculous bastion resisted surrender, but it was just a matter of time before it fell too. After all, there was no Asterix or Obelix in that farm, nor any old druids capable of making magic potions that increased ones’ strength and courage.

The only potion in that fragile stronghold was the chicory coffee that Aurelia’s mother made, because real coffee was no longer available. This had deeply affected her father and uncle, who scowled and cursed under their breaths every time they drank the bitter thing.

As compensation, her father returned to smoking and Aurelia found this relapse somewhat funny, as he had spent the last three years congratulating himself every night at dinnertime for having had the courage to give up the damned vice.

In the afternoons, he often sat on the rocking chair out on the porch, lit his dark, wooden pipe and rested for a while, wrapped up in even darker thoughts.

Aurelia watched him from her window and interpreted his mood in the rising smoke, like a Native American reading a message in a faraway fire.

Slow and paced combustion followed by a soft puff told her that he was in peace with himself and that it would be matter of minutes before he drifted to sleep. If he breathed in all at once and then followed it with a nervous cough or a thick stream of smoke, it meant that a wave of fear, anxiety or bitter memories of the death of the innocent had come over him.

How many had fallen already?

At home, nobody wished to count.

***

One rainy morning a man stopped by the fence, his face had once been in the cover of every newspaper cover and appeared of often on TV.

He had become immensely rich and was known for his generosity with the least fortunate, but now he stood there with a ragged jacket and ruined shoes.

He stared immobile at the signs.

“No trespassing. Danger of death”.

“You are only authorized to get water and cheese”.

The man walked up to the chest, opened it and studied its contents. He chose a piece of the toughest cheese, raised his hand in gratitude and left the way he had come.

“I’m glad I didn’t have to shoot him; I’ve got a friend who used to work for him and who held him in the highest regard.”

“Is your friend still alive?”

“I don’t know, but wherever he is he’ll be grateful that I fed the man who once gave him enough to put food on his table.”

Aurelia did not wish to ask what her father would have done had it been his friend standing by the fence, because she knew the answer too well. Bonds of friendship no longer existed, in that regard the villain’s victory had been thorough, placing the question of whether it was worth to carry on fighting.

If the pandemic had not made its appearance it would have been that very month at the beginning of summer when Aurelia would have packed her suitcases and left her home to study Fine Arts and become a woman as fabulous as her aunt.

Except for the accordion, of course.

No accordion, no guitar, not even a bandurria, because there was no need to be an orchestra conductor to know that her family’s fate was nowhere close to the path of music.

Aurelia was not sure that her aunt had ever got any close to being a competent restorer, but the mere fact of feeling close to Anabel and grasp a small part of her wonderful “art of living” was enough.

Maybe Anabel could even help her achieve her secret dream to become a magician.

It was not really “secret”, since she had used every member in the house as audience to test her newest tricks; from making eggs disappear to turning a bunny into a chicken or having them take out the same card of the deck every time.

When she was still a little girl, her grandfather used to tell her:

“Don’t place too much trust in your fingers’ abilities; they are deceitful things. I had three that abandoned me in a single day.”

Despite all, she still trusted her fingers, although now that she lacked an audience, she could hardly practice her tricks.

The only one who showed some enthusiasm towards her tricks was Coco, but the poor beast was so dim that he even had a hard time learning to bark threateningly.

If a stranger, no matter how bad they looked, turned up at the other side of the fence, all Coco did was wag his tail and wait for his “bosses” to join him. These were two massive mastiffs who really knew how to make an impression by snarling and baring their teeth.

Even if the heat encouraged the sick to stay in their homes and await their fate with resignation, it did not dissuade the hungry, who left in search of anything that might soothe their pangs.

But there was nothing left.

Five weeks after the first alarms set off, and even though it happened within Chinese borders, the citizens of the world’s largest cities threw themselves like a plague at the supermarkets, leaving the shelves so empty that looking at them was painful.

Many had not seen an orchard in their whole lives and some even believed that carrots grew on trees.

Admittedly, these city people were very good at technology.

Little did it help when companies started closing, first out of fear of infection and then because of lack of supplies.

Around the world, stock markets had plummeted by the billion during a tragic spring and summer in which swimming suits disappeared from beaches.

A beautiful three mast yacht with red sails that belonged to a banker from Panama left to the Pacific Ocean with provisions to last him six months and the logical hope that the whole thing would be over in that time.

Authorities used its GPS location to see that it had not docked in any port nor disembarked in any island, but by September, an Australian cargo ship found it floating in the middle of nowhere.

No one answered their calls, so they left them to continue their way, even though there was not a breath of wind and yet their the helixes were still.

When she read the news, Aurelia thought of an old Samoan song:

Still and speechless drift the Dead,

the sail’s shade protects them.

Beneath the keels the sea laments

and the sun points Westward.

You will be merrier in Noa-Noa,

by the fires of Tehemaní,

hearing the voice of Taharoa

fall soft over the eternal sea.

She could not remember more of the song, other than an allusion to the paradise that awaited the audacious sailors who had dared to defy waves and wind as they advanced into the largest of oceans, with the intention of populating all its coasts, from New Zealand to Isla de Pascua.

Aurelia missed the early mornings spent reading books with exotic settings, before her mother told her to tidy up her room and feed the animals–the latter she hated on account of a damned cockerel that had developed a certain animosity against her ankles.

Their fierce feud ended with the vicious bird’s transformation from troublemaker to pepitoria sauce, but the girl did not feel all that happy about the way their quarrel was settled; with a swing of the axe perpetrated by her mother, who then delegated the task of plucking its feathers to Aurelia.

***

Óscar was born in a farm and had grown up among animals; he spent hours with them, tended them, petted them, named them, so that as soon as he learned how to read and write, he saw that he would have to learn a lot more if he truly wanted to become a veterinarian doctor.

He devoted himself to his dream, was first in school, and won a scholarship that would allow him to dedicate the rest of his life to dogs, cats, pigs and horses.

He was lucky to have crossed paths with a professor who knew how to give proper guidance to his students; a man who could ask a wolf what was hurting him and have the animal reply.

In fact, Mr. Dionisio did not really ask, nor did the animals really reply. He just watched them, spoke to them as if they were old friends, whispered soothing words and tickled them behind their ears–what he called the “G spot” for tranquility.

“If you make an animal feel relaxed, it well end up telling you one way or another what its problems are. However, if it stays tense, you’ll probably just get bitten.”

When the rumors started about a strange disease that had started in a remote region of China, many voices denied the virus the right to be called a living thing, as it could only reproduce by infecting foreign cells and hijacking their metabolism.

However, two American biologists compared the protein structures of several cells and viruses, finding types that were related to each other but separated by centuries. According to them, viral families that belonged to the same order had originated in a common ancestral virus.

Part of the confusion was due to the abundance and diversity of viruses, because, even though only five thousand had been identified, some experts claimed that there could be almost a million of them.

The ones that caused the diseases imitated the system of fabrication of proteins of the cell they invaded and then made copies of themselves until they finally owned the person.

Seeing that, Mr. Dionisio asked his students to conduct an exhaustive study on the fauna of the region where it had all started, considering the possibility that some imprudent local had eaten the wrong animal for breakfast and thus created the disease. According to the professor, the possibility of new diseases being transmitted from animals to humans had real foundations.

Dogs, monkeys, rats and bats were some of the animals that became suspects the moment there was an outbreak of a new disease. The latest accused, the Asian pangolin, had been freed of all charges, which was more of a reason to redouble their efforts to find the original transmitter.

“We must center our focus in the animal market,” said Mr. Dionisio, who had decided to put all his students’ knowledge as well as his own at the service of that urgent cause. “After research was done on bird flu, experts located the origin in some chickens that had been infected by fecal remains; excrements that had fallen from higher cages. Even though China has forbidden the consumption of wild animals, I doubt the prohibition had any real effect.”

“Why?” asked Óscar, who was fascinated by the topic. After all, his family lived in a farm surrounded by forests that were full of wild animals.

“Because it’s simply impossible to control fifteen hundred billion people with such deeply rooted traditions. Markets like the one in Wuhan, where wild and domestic animals mingle in the worst hygienic conditions, constitute the perfect habitat for viruses such as this one, which are astonishingly smart.”

“Viruses can’t be ‘smart’.”

“They must be. They were around thousands of years before us, and will still be here thousands of years after they finally finish us. Humans have hunted since the beginning of their existence, although not the numbers that they do now, and the ‘Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species’ has no jurisdiction in China, Vietnam or those African countries where people eat the uncooked meat and brains of dogs. That’s why the danger doesn’t lie on the consumption alone, but mostly on trade, and this could be a fantastic opportunity for the revision of laws on animal rights.” Mr. Dionisio was an expert in the topic and after a brief pause in which he caught his breath, he continued. “In many regions of Africa, Asia and South America, food stalls have a part that is visible from the street but also keep a back room where they hide forbidden species. The problem is that we can’t just tell the natives to stop eating something without providing them with an alternative.”

“And does that alternative exist?”

“It is said that humans use three thousand animal species for their consumption, but these numbers are wrong because it only registers the twenty types of insects, when we know that these ascend to two thousand. If the hungry have to turn to desperate measures, those whose stomachs are full should not complain when their own greed ends up killing them.”

That last sentence made Óscar wonder who the people with the “full stomachs” were.

The “full stomached” are those who always need more.

Not long ago, the scientist, Peter Hotez, appeared before Congress to announce that four years before the crisis he had been very close to obtaining a vaccine that could have worked against coronavirus, but that he never received enough funds to finalize it. His research started after the damage caused by the “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome” that had caused seven hundred dead, but the large pharmaceutical companies were not interested in developing a product that, according to them, would never be used.

At first, many students decided that in times of epidemic, it was unwise to attend those classes where they dissected animals considered to be dangerous. Soon after, they stopped attending at all because they were either dead or seeking refuge in remote places. Still, Óscar carried on going with the hope that men as brilliant as Mr. Dionisio would eventually win the battle to those beings who were considered to be merely “smart”.

Eventually, there was barely anyone left at university, and seeing an old man wandering around campus in company of an attentive student, became a strange sight. However, until their species finally disappeared, there would always be a human ready to teach and another willing to learn.

Such disposition had always been at the essence of humans, just as the ability and speed at which they assimilate knowledge had set them apart from other beings.