The Kissing Bug

by Daisy Hernandez

  Tía Dora hated bichos, too. Watching my mother squish a roach on the stovetop with a paper towel, Tía grimaced, then closed her eyes, as if the mere sight of the cucaracha offended her sensibilities. When she peeked in my mother’s direction, she said, “Ay, mi vida,” as if it pained her that my sweet mother had to do such work. I had already fled to the other side of the room and did not move again until the cockroach was officially dead, its six legs cracked.

  It was not that Tía and I were special. Some women could kill a cockroach, and some, like Tía and me, could not. Auntie Biblia shook her head sadly at the two of us. She smashed cockroaches without comment. She had seen worse. When Tía Dora was not around to hear, she told me a bicho had come after another auntie in Colombia. “Her name was Margarita,” Auntie Biblia said.

  “Who was she?”

  “Tío Guillermo’s wife. She had Chagas too.”

  My auntie didn’t talk about a parasite, only a bicho, and how after Tía Margarita was infected, her heart turned into a rock inside her chest. “She had to sleep sitting up.” Otherwise her heart, so heavy, so much a piedra, suffocated her. She had five grown children, and her last one, a boy, was only a baby when the doctors realized the bicho had gotten her.

  No one knew why the doctors in Colombia diagnosed Tía Margarita with the kissing bug disease but not Tía Dora. Maybe doctors were like bichos: a matter of chance.

  One day, the stories about Tía Margarita stopped.

  “What happened to her?” I asked Auntie Biblia.

  “She died.”

  …

  The aunties and my mother did not speak to me about public health policies and the mechanics of capitalism. They did not explain that the roaches in our kitchen had to do with the working-class town where we lived and with not wanting to pay for a monthly fumigator. They did not know that kissing bugs are usually found in warm, rural areas in South America, Central America, and Mexico, in houses made from branches and mud and the fronds of palm trees. That only certain species of kissing bugs carry the parasite that causes the disease.

  Instead the women in my family constructed a private mythology. While other girls my age were taught to fear rabid dogs and horrible men, I learned to be terrified of an insect the size of my fingernail, an insect that could kill a woman’s heart. And as with all private mythologies, this one began before my mother was born.

  …

  Peeling an orange one day in the kitchen, when it was only the two of us, Auntie Biblia said, “Pobrecita la Linda. My mother suffered so much.”

  “Who’s Linda?” I asked.

  “The girl who died.”

  “What girl?”

  “Your grandmother’s daughter. She died when she was only two. Worms got her. One day, the worms just started coming out of her nose, and she died. Poor girl.”

  Auntie Biblia said the gusanos dropped from Linda’s nose, spilling onto the ground, coiling and wriggling. My grandmother wailed. Neighbor women hoisted the toddler away from the pile of worms, but it was no use. She died. Auntie Biblia never used the word “disease,” and I never learned what worms Linda had.

  This happened when my family still lived hours from Bogotá, in Ramiriquí, a town that looks today as the Spaniards constructed it in the 1500s: a square ringed by a stone church and local government offices and houses with second-story balconies. The year Linda died, the women in Ramiriquí still monitored each other’s movements, their marriages and children. When my grandmother gave birth to my mother a year or so after Linda’s death, the women in the town told her, “Dios te la mandó.” God sent her to you.

  Linda was the tía I did not get to have. The tía who died before she could become a tía. Because she died, my oldest tías took precautions with my mother. They chased my mother around the house and out of the house and forced the purgante down her throat, determined to prevent the worms from getting her. The medication worked. Mami survived the worms.

  …

  These stories pinched my heart every time I heard them. Worms could fall from a child’s nose. A woman’s own heart could kill her, and no doctor could stop it. Still, without realizing it, I was writing a myth too, an American one. If anyone had suggested that Tía Dora might die one day from the kissing bug disease, I would have said, “Don’t be ridiculous. We have the best doctors and hospitals and medicine.” As long as my auntie stayed here with us, she would never die.

  …

  Years later, when I started reading about kissing bugs, I did not know what I would find, but I absolutely did not expect to come across Charles Darwin.

  In 1835, Darwin was twenty-six and four years into his trip through South America—the one that gave him the basis for his book On the Origin of Species. In March 1835, he and his guide rode mules through the plains of Argentina. The land was flat and the air hot, and for a full day, Darwin found no water and only a few houses. When they neared the village of Luján de Cuyo, he noticed a field the color of blood. A locust invasion. People raced from their cottages and set branches on fire and waved the torched bark at the locusts. They shouted, hoping the noise and smoke would turn away the tiny beasts, but nothing worked. Darwin rode on.

  The men had ten mules with them, and when they all finally escaped the locusts and reached Luján de Cuyo, Darwin expected to sleep well. The village was nestled among gardens. It boasted a river and rows of poplars and willows. Who doesn’t sleep like a king under a willow tree?

  But when Darwin closed his eyes that night in Argentina, the kissing bugs crept out from their hiding places, and the insects did not care if it was Charles Darwin or not. The sun had vanished. Ravenous, they set off for the evening, creeping onto his body. They expected him to be asleep. They expected to feed on him. But Darwin was awake and horrified, and later, despite being a man of science, he wrote how “disgusting” it was to feel all these bichos “nearly an inch long & black & soft crawling in all parts of your person—gorged with your blood.”

  …

  In 1959, nearly eight decades after his death, doctors began debating whether Darwin had suffered the kissing bug disease. He was certainly sick for most of his life, after his epic trip to South America, and in the quest for a diagnosis, doctors and others have speculated that he could have had any one of more than forty conditions including malaria, arsenic poison, Crohn’s disease, psychosomatic illnesses, lactose intolerance, and the kissing bug disease. The only fact we know for sure from Darwin’s notebooks is that he met face to face with kissing bugs in Argentina and Chile. Today, the insects would be classified as Triatoma infestans.

  In Chile, the kissing bug was “flat as a wafer,” Darwin wrote. It was starving. An officer offered to let the insect bite him. Darwin watched as the kissing bug charged, plunging a needle from its mouth, a proboscis, into the man’s finger, stabbing his flesh. Permitted to feast, the insect did so for ten minutes, growing to five, maybe six times its own size. It turned as fat as a grape.

  Darwin stored the insect along with his other specimens. Eighteen days later, it wanted to feed again. Darwin refused it, and he and his servant, Syms Covington, kept meticulous notes. How long could a kissing bug live from a single feeding of a man’s finger? Four and half months. “A most bold and fearless insect,” Darwin finally observed in his notebook.

  In the 1500s, three hundred years before Darwin traveled through South America, the Spanish soldier Gerónimo de Bibar also noticed the kissing bugs in Chile. He wrote that they have a fondness for warm temperatures and “sting very badly.”

  …

  In 1855, twenty years after Charles Darwin encountered the kissing bugs in South America, the entomologist John Lawrence LeConte traveled across the United States documenting some five thousand species of beetles and found a species of the kissing bug in Georgia. He named it Conorhinus sanguisuga and kept detailed notes about the insect (it had hairy legs). “It is remarkable,” LeConte wrote, “. . . for sucking the blood of mammals, particularly of children.” Once bitten, the chi
ldren developed welts on their skin that sometimes persisted for a year.

  Kissing bugs came to be called triatomine insects and classified in the family of assassin bugs, or Reduviidae, for their vampire-like tendencies. All over the Americas, though, people adopted other names. In Texas and the Southwest, people have called the kissing bug a bloodsucker, and in Argentina and Bolivia, people say it’s a vinchuca, a word that probably comes from Quechua, a language millions of people speak today in South America and that dates back to the Inca Empire. Vinchuca means “bug that lets itself fall” and is probably a reference to how kissing bugs slip out from the crevices in the walls of mud houses, falling toward the bodies of their sleeping victims.

  In Central America and Mexico, people say the kissing bug is a chinche, a name also used for bedbugs. Years after I had grown up and left home, a man from Mexico tried to explain it to me this way: there are little chinches and big chinches. The kissing bug, he told me, is a big chinche.

  …

  I did not grow up hearing any nicknames for triatomine insects. We didn’t even use the word pito, which is what Colombians call the kissing bug. In our family, the only word we had for the kissing bug was the same one we used for every other nasty insect: bicho.

  And we certainly did not know that at the end of the nineteenth century, the kissing bug was almost named for a Black man in Washington, DC.

  …

  It began when an elderly man woke up in DC one hot June morning in 1899 and found his nose and his cheeks swollen to such grotesque proportions that he couldn’t open his eyes properly. In the emergency room, doctors figured a bug must have bitten him during the night. Had the man seen an insect? No. Another man dashed to the same hospital with his upper lip puffed up like a baseball painted the color of rubies. No, he had not seen a bug or felt a bite. Other patients arrived in the same condition—their upper lips inflated into startling red balloons.

  A Washington Post reporter began following the mystery bug bites. “In the absence of a scientific name for the creature,” he wrote, “it has been suggested to name it Dorseyfoultz, on account of the skill and persistence with which it evades observation and defies capture.” That summer, Dorsey Foultz, a Black man, had eluded local police who wanted him on murder charges. The reporter apparently did not find it problematic to name a potentially dangerous insect after a Black man. Despite the article in the Washington Post, the name did not stick, probably because news of the bug bites was spreading beyond DC and no one outside of the district had heard of the suspect.

  People began arriving that summer at emergency rooms in other cities with terrible bug bites. In New York City, Bellevue Hospital admitted six people and Boston alone had a dozen cases. One Delaware newspaper reported that kissing bugs were attacking policemen on duty. In Washington, DC, men with bandaged faces begged for scraps and coins, claiming that the bug had attacked them and they could no longer work.

  The patient narratives repeated: an insect appeared, usually near dusk, sometimes later in the night. The victim didn’t see it, only felt the bite to the mouth, and then the insect fled. By morning the person’s lip had swollen.

  Newspapers named the mysterious insect the kissing bug. What else to call a little devil that only wanted to suck on a person’s mouth?

  Then the reports of deaths began to appear. In Philadelphia, a six-year-old boy woke on a Tuesday morning with his face swollen and a “purple spot” over his lip. Two days later he was dead, and the kissing bug blamed. A two-year-old girl died in Trenton days after her mother noticed bug bites on her legs. In Chicago, a doctor wrote “kissing bug” as the cause of one woman’s death. The doctor had not seen the bicho, but his patient, Mary Steger, had died at the age of thirty-three with an injured lip. Chicago’s health officials, however, handed the death certificate back to the doctor. Take it to the coroner, they told him. He did. The city coroner examined Steger’s body. Her face was badly swollen, and the bruise still appeared on the woman’s lip. The coroner concluded that she had blood poisoning, but he could not say for sure what had killed her. Maybe it was a kissing bug.

  Warnings about kissing bugs appeared in newspapers as far away as El Paso and Las Vegas. Newspapers did not include drawings of the swollen faces. The terror pivoted towards the possibility of the lips deformed, the human face unmade. One entomologist insisted that the insect bit people on the mouth because it found the movement of human lips “irritating.” A doctor proposed that it was probably a “nervous disorder” which had nothing to do with insects, and in Washington, DC, a man penned a letter to a local paper, arguing that the kissing bugs were innocent. The giant, swollen lips, he wrote, were due to “the excessive eating of strawberries.”

  Not all reactions were serious. Shopkeepers sold kissing bug jewelry. Poets wrote lyrical odes to the insect. The Chicago Daily Tribune ran a story on how to craft a mock kissing bug from wire and paper for the purpose of eliciting “feminine shrieks.”

  Leland Ossian Howard, the head of entomology at the US Department of Agriculture, finally addressed the issue in a paper published in Popular Science Monthly, explaining that the bites could be from six different insects. The one best known to entomologists, he observed, was the “ferocious” insect called the “blood-sucking cone-nose,” usually found in the southern and western states. It bit people everywhere: on the arms and legs and feet. It was the insect LeConte had identified a few decades before. But Howard argued that the bites during the summer of 1899 were a matter of mass hysteria inflated by the media. He did not explain why some people had died after the bug bites.

  The summer ended. The stories vanished. Then, more than a decade later, in the early twentieth century, news arrived from Brazil. The “blood-sucking cone-nose” insects there had been found to carry a parasite that could kill the human heart. Newspapermen evidently didn’t remember the name bloodsuckers or even “cone-nose.” They turned to their archives, it seems, found the stories from 1899, and christened the insect the “kissing bug.”

  DR. CHAGAS

  By the time I turned sixteen, Tía Dora had started watching wrestling matches on television. She sank into the sofa one day, her thin body under a ruana, and cheered for what looked to me like a long line of bulky men in Speedos and capes. “Qué cuerpo que tiene el hombre,” she said almost breathless. What a body the man has.

  She looked at me with an expectant face until I finally said, “They’re big guys.”

  Satisfied, she turned back to watch Hulk Hogan waving at the crowds. I picked at my fingernail and said, “All they do is hurt each other.”

  “No, they know what they’re doing,” she said with confidence and without taking her eyes off the television, where Hulk Hogan’s giant mustache almost filled the screen.

  I thought about language and how even these white men did not choose their words but had, if the news accounts were true, been given scripts. Their words had been orchestrated and also their pain and their bodies, and so they flew across the stage, bruising each other to the cheers of the audience at Madison Square Garden and my Colombian auntie in Jersey. At the end of the show, the men left the stage, their bodies intact. Only decades later would we read the reports of professional wrestlers with brain injuries. It was akin to the kissing bug disease. You did not see the body in ruins at first.

  Tía Dora never called her illness the kissing bug disease. It was always Chagas and sometimes El Chagas. It occurred to me that the word might have its own story. Tía had several dictionaries. Maybe she knew. “Why is it called Chagas?” I asked her.

  “It was the name of the man who discovered it.”

  The news stung. I had thought the name might be Latin in origin and refer to the body being ripped apart by a bicho or that it might be a kind of stage name, like Hulk Hogan, whose real first name was Terry. But Chagas was the name of an actual man, and when I learned this, the story of what had happened to Tía Dora grew legs. I imagined the man, this doctor, in South America. I decided that he was
still alive. He was a man with black eyes, strolling the streets in Bogotá or maybe in Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro or Havana. Later, when I begin to read about the disease, I found that he had, in fact, been born in Brazil at a time when everything people knew about infectious diseases and bichos was changing.

  …

  At the end of the nineteenth century the superpowers cracked the world into pieces—the United States snatched Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and Britain and other European nations grabbed most of Africa. Building an empire meant encountering pathogens transmitted by insects and the diseases they caused: yellow fever, malaria, sleeping sickness. At times, the colonial powers used these illnesses as a reason for invasions like in 1898 when US politicians, newspapers, and the surgeon general argued that battling yellow fever required seizing control of Cuba. It was also during this time that the British started two schools, one in London and the other in Liverpool, devoted to a field they called “tropical medicine.” Some doctors served the medical needs of white British families; others focused on the diseases of the empire, which these doctors associated with Black and Brown bodies.

  Physicians thought that contaminated air called miasma made a person sick—-that malaria, cholera, and other diseases came about and were transmitted when rotting matter generated polluted air. By the 1890s, though, they had embraced germ theory. Louis Pasteur showed the world that living microorganisms existed and caused fermentation. Robert Koch demonstrated that bacteria leads to tuberculosis. And when Ronald Ross determined that the Anopheles mosquito carts around the parasite for malaria, insects in the colonies came under suspicion.