Читать книгу One Hundred Years Later - Alberto Vazquez-Figueroa - Страница 7

Chapter III

From far away came an awful screech, and when she leaned out the window her happiness was immense, because there, sitting on the chest, was her heroine showing off her skills with the accordion.

Aurelia ran towards the fence but her father held her back.

Her mother and uncle also stopped ten yards away from the entrance.

“Hey, kiddo!” cried Samuel at the newcomer.

“Hey, all!” she replied as she stopped playing, which was always a relief for the audience’s ears. “How are you?”

“Good, for now. Where’ve you come from?”

“Everywhere. Nothing stops me these days,” she said pointing at the fence, “except for that.”

“You know we can’t let you in.”

“I know. But I need some clothes, food and a few other things. I’ve moved into the village and am living in the Mayor’s house now.”

“Dead?”

“Not sure. The place is empty.”

“And what are you going to do in the village?”

“Live while we can, that’s the plan. I’ve got an Italian boyfriend now. He’s a violinist and is writing a symphony about the sickness.”

“What’s he doing that for? A symphony about this damned disease?” her-sister-in law asked.

“So that his grandchildren may listen to it one day, if he ever has them; because he believes that this evil will eventually disappear just like the Spanish influenza did all those years ago.”

“He’s too optimistic.”

“That’s the Italian blood in him. By the way, don’t forget to get my red skirt and the striped jumper.”

“You think you’ll make it?”

“If you’re managing then we can try too, although we’d appreciate some rabbits and chickens. We’ve got room to breed them.”

“A third of all the stuff we’ve got here belongs to you.”

“I know that, big guy, and if things go well, I’ll take a cow one day, but I better get going. It’s getting dark and it’s a long way home. I’ll come back tomorrow to pick up the stuff.”

“See you, kiddo!”

“See you.”

Back inside the house, Aurelia ran to the library and searched in her father’s old encyclopedia.

For years now, ever since her uncle Samuel bought their first large and heavy computer, which soon became an endless source of information, those twenty volumes bound in green leather had become a part of their home decoration; the reminder of a past that would never return. But now, without electricity to feed the machines, computers had earned that space as remnants of a time gone.

***

One dreadful evening, while she watched her favorite quiz shows, she complained to her mother:

“Mom, the light’s gone.”

“It’s not gone, darling, it’s just not coming anymore.”

“And what’s the difference?”

“Well, light, in other words, electricity, is not something that belongs to us and that can suddenly decide to pack up and leave; it belongs to others and they send it to us under the condition that we pay them for it.”

“Gosh, you always have to say things in a certain way. So, what do we do now?”

“We wait.”

But as much as they waited, “light” never returned and computers and phones ceased to work, so they went back to the ancient encyclopedia, digging up its corpse from the niche where it had lied for so long.

Its pages were yellowish, its spine was about to fall and the annoying dust that had accumulated in between its paragraphs made her sneeze. And yet, there it was, serene, unchanging, and zealously guarding the information it had been entrusted with ninety years before.

The pandemic known as “Spanish influenza” was of unprecedented gravity and, unlike other diseases which mostly affect children and the elderly, many of its victims were young people, adults and animals. It is considered the most devastating epidemic in History, killing between 40 and 100 million people in just one year.

The disease was detected for the first time in Kansas in March of 1918, although in the previous autumn there had already been a wave of North American military camps. At some point during the summer of that same year, the virus went through a series of mutations that transformed it into a lethal infectious agent. The first confirmed case of that mutation was registered in August of that same year at the French port to which American troupes arrived during the Great War.

It was given the name Spanish Influenza because of the attention it received in the Spanish press compared to the rest of Europe. Spain was not involved in the war, hence the country did not censure that information.

With the objective of studying the disease, scientists used samples of tissue from frozen victims, but given the virulence of the outbreak and the possibility of an accidental leak, certain controversies exist regarding this form of research. One of the hypothesis was that the virus killed through a storm of cytokines, which explained its extremely grave nature and the uncommon age profile of its victims.

Its mortality rate remains unknown but it is estimated that around 10% and 20% of people infected perished. With around one third of the world’s population infected, this rate indicates that between 3% and 6% of the world’s entire population died. Influenza could have killed 25 million people in its first 25 weeks. Certain calculations indicate that between 40 and 50 million people died, while today it is thought that the number is somewhere between 50 and 100 million. It is also hard to compare it to other pandemics of influenza from which it is impossible to obtain any information today.

During the summer of 1920, Spanish Influenza disappeared everywhere all at once and without any possible explanation.

She stayed very still, deep in thoughts or perhaps stunned by what she had just read. These were numbers that forced one to reflect on the fragility of beings who considered themselves to be at the peak of evolution, but who suddenly fell into an abyss from where it took humanity years to climb out. The abyss in which it was now her turn to live seemed endless and she had almost broken into tears when someone knocked on her door. She heard her uncle asking for permission to get in. He sat down at the feet of her bed and patted her with the same affection he would have felt if she been his own daughter.

Samuel and Tatiana were married for less than a year when she died of cancer and according to what her mother had told her, her uncle had been very close to dying of sadness.

“Scared?” he asked.

“Very.”

“Do you think you can overcome it?”

“What else can I do?”

“You shouldn’t overcome your fear because you’ve no alternative, but because you’ve got enough strength to cope with any obstacles. These are hard times in which we’ll have to do things that disgust us but which we’re not guilty of because we had no choice. Have I ever told you the story about the cannibals at the lighthouse?”

“No.”

“Well, I think this might just be the right time to tell it.” He placed a pillow behind his back, knowing that what he was about to narrate would take some time. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but most lighthouses are automatic now, which means that the keepers’ only job is to check that they’re still running. Really, they’re more technicians than authentic lighthouse keepers. Anyway, there was a time when their work was almost considered a sort of priesthood, because for most there was no temple worthier of being preserved than that whose function was to safeguard human lives.”

“I’ve read something about that.”

“Automation saved money and had many benefits, but there were also many disadvantages. Sailors felt safer knowing that someone who was so dedicated to their work would be watching over them and answering all their calls. Nowadays they experiment something similar to what you feel when you dial a number to ask for help and get an answerphone at the other end.”

“I’ve felt that before.”

“But there’s a great difference when the person who calls is lost in the middle of a gale.”

“I guess there is.”

“Shut up or I’m not telling you more of the story.”

“Alright then, go on.”

“They say that nearly eighty years ago, a military patrol shipwrecked in the North Sea and three of its crew members, one of them a badly injured officer, were forced to spend several days in the tiniest rowboat. Finally, they reached an islet upon which rose a lighthouse where they found no humans nor food, nor any of the things that they needed so badly. There was only rain and wind and fog and a sea that rose again and again, claiming its preys. The tempest lasted too long, nobody in land could have ever imagined that they had survived and at last a month later a fishing boat rescued them.”

“Fuck!”

“Would you like me to wash your mouth?”

“I’m sorry. Continue.”

“The sailors confessed that they had eaten the body of the officer, who had ordered them in his deathbed to use his corpse so that he could continue protecting them from beyond.”

Aurelia opened her mouth as if to say something but changed her mind and closed it back again.

“Thanks, I like you better that way. So, what at the start was meant to be a discrete trial, became widely known due to contradictory conclusions that could be reached by looking at the events from different points of view. If it was proven that the sailors had killed the officer then they would have to be judged for murder and would face death penalty, whereas if the officer had died from his injuries and the survivors limited themselves to follow his orders by eating his body, which would have otherwise ended up as food for fish, the case would be seen with a very different light. So, they found themselves before a moral and legal dilemma: the judges had to determine whether as the prosecutor claimed, the accused deserved to be hanged and the poor officer was a victim; or, just as the legal attorney defended, these men were just the subordinates of a heroic soldier who deserved to receive medals for his astounding ability to sacrifice himself for others.”

“I would have believed the sailors.”

“But you weren’t there and you aren’t the one to judge.”

“That’s also true. What did they decide?”

“There’s more still; the wife of the deceased wished to meet the accused with the intention of reaching her own conclusions, as she considered that after fifteen years of marriage she was the best person to ascertain whether what these men said that her husband had done fitted the truth of his character. They spoke long and when it was all said and they asked the widow for her opinion, she replied that she wasn’t the right person to judge.”

“That doesn’t make any sense to me. If she knew something she should have said so.”

“When you think you know something but you’re not sure, the most logical and rational thing to do is to step aside. No doubt, that poor woman did not wish to feel guilty for the execution of two innocent people, but she also didn’t want to be the one to free two murderers.”

“When you put it that way…”

“That’s how she must have seen it. The votes remained divided and the positions irreconcilable, so they reached a decision: God was the only judge capable of dictating such a sentence so it would have to be Him who had the last word.”

“And? What did God say?”

“God never says anything, honey, but in case of doubt, the law says the sentence has to go in favor of the prisoners, however serious the crimes may be.”

“Did they free them?”

“I don’t know what happened after.”

“What? Then your story sucks!”

“I don’t want you to think that this is a story in which nobody knows the ending; you must think of it as a closed fan that looks black and white or blue and red, but firm and compact, and that as you unfold it, it forces you to change your mind. It takes you here and there and you end up swearing that it’s yellow or green, although in the end you discover that what you’re looking at is a sunset in Acapulco.”

“All that is great as a metaphor, but I would have liked it better if they’d been freed.”

“Me too.”

“And how has that story got anything to do with us?”

“It’s got a lot to do with us because we too haven’t got a choice.”

Aurelia felt grateful to her uncle for having saved her from an evening of crying that she would have later regretted, and spent the next hours just staring at the ceiling and wondering if she would ever eat another human even when not doing so meant that she would die.

These thoughts were not comforting, but in the light of current events, she needed to reflect. She thought cannibalism was abominable, but the murder in cold blood of a pregnant woman seemed worse, and there was only one thing that both actions shared: survival at all costs.

Was there anything as important as survival?