Home sweet home?
When they got home, Sandoval closed all the curtains and went to bed. “I need a nap,” he said. “Don’t let anybody in.” And before falling asleep he asked Sandra: “How far are we in to Green Week?” and he slept.
Green Week, the week that changed the world, had passed into oblivion. Sandra had been about four and Sandoval seven or eight. During that week, in a mysterious crusade, like those of messianic times, governments of all countries decided to organize fairs and symposiums in every country to save the planet. That was a tremendous boon for the tourist and aviation industries. It required more than eighty thousand flights and hundreds of thousands of trucks to transport foodstuffs for the tourists. They say not a single cow was left in some countries. What the organizers did not take into account was that these actions engendered more worldwide pollution than had been created in the past thirty eight years. On the third day of activities seven hundred and two inactive craters began to erupt, creating vast brown clouds over the whole planet and then it rained for thirty eight days and thirty eight nights. There were earthquakes, tidal waves, hurricanes and tsunamis which transformed the whole planet.
Although most of the world population was saved, back then they said 70 or 80 percent, some even said 90 percent had been saved but it was difficult to verify the numbers since from then on air traffic was prohibited.
Sandoval’s father died that week. Three months later the sun came out and the planet was left with ten continents. The North Pole became the most prosperous zone. That is where the two young folks lived. For months the presses reported on what had happened. But one day in spring there was no more talk of anything related to Green Week. It was as though a decree had come from on high. Some thought there had been a prohibition against talking or even thinking about it. The truth is that memories had been repressed. The people themselves, to overcome the crisis, without any orders, repressed their own memories and decided not to remember anything more about Green Week in order to survive. They decided not to write about that week, and not to talk about it with their children. Children understood very well that this topic was not to be mentioned, nor asked about.
Sandoval awoke at three in the morning in a cold sweat. Sandra was not sleeping. She had heard Sandoval talking in his sleep about his dreams and she didn’t understand them. In his dreams he talked about an unknown, extinct language.
Sandoval didn’t notice his girl was awake and went straight to the dark living room, sat down in front of the computer, turned it on and started writing. Today an old man either saved my life or tried to kill me. I don’t know. I don’t know why he invited me to have a drink with him, a strange drink that he called a “War.” Could it be that they were already preparing my body to be decapitated and eaten like I was a fat steer, or giraffe meat? My girl doesn’t understand me, or acts like she doesn’t. Could it be that she was the one who wanted to kill me? Maybe she sold my body? Maybe she has a lover and wants to liquidate me. I don’t know. The only thing I do know is that today they tried to kill me to use my flesh for meat in restaurants so that others would eat me. I also know this is not the first time they do this and that they know a process for making human flesh taste like animal meat. I don’t know why my girl didn’t buy the books, nor who the old lady was that kept looking at the old man and at me. Maybe they both thought about eating me. Maybe that is what they like. There are all kinds in the world and something for everybody.
Sandra got up and walked to the living room. With her eyes half open she asked Sandoval what he was doing. “You know the doctor told you not to sit in front of the screen at night. You could go blind.”
“I was writing.”
“Oh yeah? What?”
And Sandra, streaked to see what he was writing. But Sandoval, panicky, clicked the X in the corner to close and when the question came up whether he wanted to save changes, he indicated no, so everything was erased.
“Nothing, silly stuff.”
“Let’s see what you wrote.”
“Nothing. I told you I deleted it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, look, I closed the program, see.”
“Yes but you can still see it. You can restore what was erased.”
“Maybe, but I don’t know how to do it. Besides, I didn’t want you to read what I wrote. As you can imagine, it was about what happened today.”
“That’s why I wanted to read it.”
“Why don’t you just go back to bed?”
“But first I’m going to the bathroom.”
“Whatever. Just leave me alone.”
“OK, OK you don’t have to be so mean about it.”
“I said it very calmly, just the same.”
She went to bed and he stayed in front of the screen. Now the screen blinded him. It was too blank. If some writers believe in the disappearance of the blank page, the blank page itself was worse. Seven minutes went by and Sandoval got up and want to the bedroom.
“We have to leave here.”
“We do? And go where?”
“Outside the city.”
“But there’s nothing outside the city. It’s unlivable outside the city.”
“But in the city they are going to kill us. We have to get out anyway.”
“You know very good and well there is no way out. Nobody has left here in years. And if anybody has, they haven’t come back to tell us what goes on out there.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“What that means love, is that they are dead. The ones who left and didn’t come back, it’s because they are dead.”
“How do you know?”
“One of my brothers started like this. He was in a cult and left. We never saw him again.”
“Maybe he found happiness in the country, under a tree and doesn’t want to come back.”
“That would have to be an awfully big tree, I say.”
“The size doesn’t matter. What I am trying to say is that he found happiness outside the city.”
“Without stores? How can anybody live without shopping? But you’re sweating, you’re soaked. I think you need to take a shower and get some sleep. Or a bath to relax.”
“I have figured out something, something important. One doesn’t die just like that. The dead person is conscious of his body for months before the soul leaves the body forever. It is a process. That is why many religions are against cremation.”
“Go on. Take a bath. You aren’t well today. You need to calm down a little and get back to reality. I don’t know what’s going through your head. Nothing happened. A little walk through the basement. But you had a bad reaction to it. Tomorrow you need to see a doctor about it.”
“I’m going out for a walk.”
“At this hour? You know it’s not good for you, with the cholesterol that you have, the doctor recommended you not go out before seven.
”Bye.”
Sandoval hits the road
Sandoval went out to the street. The street was empty. A tiny light was visible on the horizon. Dawn is far off, he thought. What one should do is go toward the sun. Leave the city and go toward the sun. On the deserted street a fiftyish, bearded man appeared. They came face to face. They looked at each other for a few seconds. Then the man said: “Don’t ever let them touch your mouth. Stay away from dentists. You and I are made of different material. Each day we are stronger. You will see. And don’t worry so much about death. It’s normal, inconsequential. From the beginning of time men have killed men because that is the way it is. And I know what you discovered today is traumatic but just get through that confusion and you will realize you haven’t discovered anything new. And you aren’t the first to see the truth. The majority, this majority, your brother, your girl, your daughter, your mother and your father that majority could never see. That’s the way the world is. But the one who can see is the one who can’t forget, and can never go back to being the one who never sees. Good Day.”
The stranger disappeared j
ust as he had appeared. Sandoval remembered a writer who had said that writing is the opposite of thinking, that to write one must cease to think. Look at it that way, he had said. You have a nervous system, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. One helps your brain with decision making and the other is the system that relaxes it. Writing is to stop controlling the mind. You never think when you write. When you write, you write.
All of those writers’ sayings always seem superfluous. I thought: you could say the opposite and not be less right. Writing, like living, can be done one way or another and every way in between. But yes, it is true, one should at least keep breathing.
He continued walking and distancing himself from his home as the light began to illuminate the streets and a few cafes began to open their doors. They were the only businesses permitted outside the malls. There had been attempts to close those too but people had risen up to oppose it. The legislators thought it would be impossible for them to live without cafes. That is why they still existed. Sandoval walked two nights, three days, nearly without stopping. Sometimes he would stop at a café to have a ham sandwich, or cheese, or ham and cheese, and to have a latte. Once he fell asleep in a café for several hours. At dawn he arrived at the end of passageway 49. And saw the cemetery. The cemetery was the outer limit of the city. And demarcated as much those who wanted to enter, as those who tried to leave. The graves were in irregular lines and it was difficult to walk between them. Before entering the labyrinth, Sandoval turned around and saw all the passageways into the city for the first time in his life. The buildings increased in size all the way up to the tall skyscrapers in passageway Zero, above which was a chimney, where ceaseless smoke billowed. Everything could be seen very clearly in spite of the distance of more than two hundred kilometers.
Sandoval looked and thought this was the last time he would see his city and that he would never return. And though he was mistaken in his assumption, he was not saddened. Sandoval crossed the fifty rows of tombs unable to make any step in a straight line as each tomb was next to another, sometimes two or three stuck together but he saw the end and it was not difficult to enter the cemetery. Sandoval wondered where so many dead people came from. The cemetery seemed to surround the city and that was thousands of kilometers and millions of tombs. He recalled his friend who had thrown himself through the window when his wife told him she was leaving him for another man. He said that was a day she would remember. He went to his room and was never seen again. At first she thought he had escaped until she heard sirens, the ambulance and the police. Ten floors and a life. Probably later somebody arrived with a covered dish. Later he thought about one of Sandra’s stories. Sandra’s father’s story that she had told him about the black sheep and the white sheep that had gotten rich selling salamis made from wolf meat and decided to take a trip around the world. When they got to the airport the stewardess told them sheep were not allowed on planes. They argued until they were allowed on but they had to pay double because they were four-footed unlike human bipeds. On the plane they ate wolf meat salami. As he thought of this, two hours after entering the cemetery he came to the end. He heard shots fired from an X59 that he thought came in his direction. He looked around for shelter. As he ran, he saw a soldier at his post who greeted him:
“Good morning. Don’t worry, I was shooting over there.”
“Great! That is a relief.”
“Come on up here. Have a cup of coffee if you like.”
Sandoval ascended reluctantly as there wasn’t much choice.
The soldier
“I decided to go on vacation in the country.”
“That doesn’t exist. At the city limits is where the war starts.”
“Against whom?”
“Well, who would it be against? Against the others.”
“And who are the others?”
“I’m not sure. They’re the ones that come from the other side. See over there, there’s about seven all together, a family there.”
He started shooting like crazy toward the treeless valley. They didn’t have any place to hide. Two fell down and the others began running back.
“And why don’t you kill them all? With that X59 it’s not so difficult. It shoots thirteen hundred eight slugs a second.”
“It’s orders. Leave a few to go back and report and then not so many come.”
“What’s on past the valley?”
.They say there is another city but I haven’t seen it. And more wars of course. Here is your coffee.”
The soldier was very young and he loved to shoot. To him it was fun. Well, what was he to do all day? And they always come. It looks like they come to die because none ever gets in, not even by mistake. It’s impossible. Everything is closed off in such a way that it can’t be done. Well, maybe a couple years ago it might have been possible, difficult but possible, but today, with these machine guns and a post every fifty meters, it’s impossible. I live here behind the cemetery. In a half hour I am home. There is a road that is shorter. You need to know it. The best thing you can do is go back. Here there is nothing else but war.”
“I’m not going back there. They want to eat me.”
“Come off it!”
“When I ran, and they were behind me I was sure they wanted my flesh but now it seems an exaggerated fear although I think that they have already eaten my Sandra who hasn’t answered the phone. If they came for me and found her they will have taken her and she will end up on a plate for someone. The thing is, it’s like this. First they ate the unemployed. You see how they all disappeared, in a few months because you see the unemployed don’t produce anything. So therefore they don’t consume, so they are of no use. Just now they would give twenty for a hundred unemployed, and so I’d say in less than a year, it was five for a hundred, then they said it was thanks to the good economic program. Then what do they do, they kill the unemployed so there won’t be any, but killing them isn’t productive, so they found a system where the dead unemployed can be productive by using their hearts, kidneys, lungs, and eyes for transplants, and their thighs are converted into edible meat. They have found the way to make human flesh taste like beef or chicken, with saffron oil. Well, today we aren’t cannibals but you know what they put in the hamburgers. So then they will bury a half a bone and put a headstone on it. Then we eat it thinking it is good lamb, or giraffe, or something.”
“And you believe that?”
“The truth is, in spite of what is clearly happening, and the waiter almost told me, and you, since you have seen people disappear suddenly, cancer, an accident, a war, any excuse, in spite of what is very clear, in spite of everything, and what I tell you here clearly, and in spite of what I have seen with my own eyes, and I am sure they are hunting me to eat my flesh , in spite of everything I can’t believe it myself because it isn’t possible that this could be true, even if it is. It’s not possible.”
“Well, to think about it, it’s true, a few have disappeared. The entire unit. But everything is explained in different ways. What I can tell you is that on this side there is no exit. If you continue looking for the countryside, which I doubt really exists any more, you’ll most likely get shot, if not by me then by someone else. The ones in the city across there are savages and don’t let you off so you don’t have any other choice that to turn around and go home.”
“I’m not going back.”
“I’m telling you it’s that or death.”
“I don’t care, I’m not going back. If I die, I die.”
“Well you can stay here a few hours. I go home at six. Then you have to leave because this is prohibited. And like you say, if they catch me I’m fried.”
Sandoval should have continued on. It was logical, that was the plot, it was normal. Perhaps he could gather a small group of dissidents, guerillas, terrorists. But he didn’t. He remained sleeping at the soldier’s feet and was waked at five. The two left together to go home and the soldier invited him to spend the night. It’s not safe at all for
me but tomorrow at five am I will wake you up and you’ll leave. I don’t like trouble. And you look like trouble.”
“Sandoval, you have to continue, you have to go to the countryside.”
“But there isn’t any countryside. It doesn’t exist. There is only the city.”
“Because a little soldier boy told you so. That doesn’t mean anything. He doesn’t even know what there is. And he’s probably lying.”
“And what do I do, throw myself over there and get shot. Then it’s over. You’re happy. There is no Sandoval and they’ve probably eaten Sandra and you’ll keep on telling your stories with your little sheep.”
“But logically that is the plot. You have to continue.”
“The plot has many logics, not just one.”
You’ll see that I can return.”
“That is for me to decide.”
“You don’t have any choice but to follow me.”
“Yes I do, yes I do, and I can forget you.”
“Could be. But maybe not.”
“You will remember.”
“Could be, but maybe not.”
“I don’t have any choice. Besides, you already wrote it. I thought I would be going but you already knew that I would return. Read yourself and you will see for me it is return or die. I don’t have any other solution. I have to go look for Sandra. Or find out what happened.
The soldier began to think perhaps Sandoval was right. He did remember several Friends who had disappeared, a girlfriend who they suddenly told him had died in the war or in an attack and he didn’t see her again. And the chimney was a good indicator that something was burning in the enormous structure where he had never been, La Catedral. When he had arrived at his post, he was already thinking of other things, the bank account, his mother and her anxieties, his girlfriend, Maribel, his aunt, to whom he owed money, and his father who had disappeared two years before (although that disappearance had little to do with the theories of Sandoval). The soldier’s father had run off with the aunt’s hairdresser who was only twenty eight and was crazy about him.
The Cathedral Mall Page 4
