Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (19 page)

“They’re asking for your
brother,” Mama says, opening her eyes widely as she looks at me,
“they say they need to inspect him. I already told them where you
work, but they insist.”

“Look, boy,” the taller of
the two women interrupts, “we’re house inspectors. We’ve been told
that there is a registered zombie in this house. We need to make a
physical exam of him to verify that he’s really a zombie and not a
fake.”

“Look, comrade,” I begin
to say, “I work in the CIDEZ. Believe me, I would recognize a
zombie when I see one. I work with them all the time
and...”

“Look, sonny, the thing is
we need to see him with our own eyes and report him, otherwise we
have to give you a fine of one thousand five hundred
pesos.”

“What are you going to
give us a fine for?” Mama is about to lose her cool.

“Look, comrade, those are
the rules. Without the approval of the Housing Office, none of the
authorizations are worth anything. Because there are lots of people
who are falsifying zombie certificates in order to get the extra
meat ration and that’s illegal...”

“Are you accusing me of
falsifying a document?” Mama is already shouting and things can get
dangerously out of hand. I look to the house next door and don’t
see the president, yet. “This is a lack of respect. My son is a
CIDEZ researcher and...”

“I don’t care if he works
in the Central Committee, lady,” the other woman says. “If we don’t
see the zombie, there’s no meat ration. How do you like
that?

“Mama, do me a favor.” I
take her by the arm and signal to her by opening my eyes widely.
“Why don’t you go inside and look for my CIDEZ ID. I think it’s on
the dresser.”

“You listen to me,
muchachito,” the shorter of the two women starts to say. Mama is
already inside the house. “I don’t care where you work because I
need to...”

“How much do you
want?”

The woman remains frozen
as if I’d pulled out a weapon.

“What?”

“How much money do you
want?”

“No, comrade,” the tall
one starts to say, “you’re very mistaken if you think that
we...”

“Look, I’m not up to date
on all the bureaucracy, but I know by heart all the zombie
protocols because I was there when they were written. Believe me,
while you were watching innocent Brazilian telenovelas about what
went on the world, I was quarantined taking samples of the living
dead. The Housing Office doesn’t look after zombies and I’m sure
that if I were to go to the Poder Popular right now, you’d be in
big trouble. Am I wrong?”

Silence. Now I’ve got them
where I want them. Now everything needs to be done quickly before
Mama comes back.

“But I don’t want any
problems, least of all an uproar at the door of my house.” Out of
the corner of my eye I look at the house next door; still no one
there. “So it seems to me that three fulas should take care of our
problems, shouldn’t it?”

I furtively pulled out a three dollar
bill.

It’s important to clarify
two things. The first is that it wasn’t three American dollars, but
three convertible pesos, the equivalents for a dollar, which in
practice were worth 24 ordinary Cuban pesos, the pesos with which
the majority of salaries are paid. The other is that Fula was the
name of an African tribe that was sufficiently belligerent enough
as to give a bad reputation to the slaves that belonged to this
ethnicity when they arrived on the ships. Since no one wanted a
Fula slave, the term became linked with something bad or dangerous.
How a term like fula came to become the equivalent to strong
currency is intimately related to the traffic of money in the 80s,
the depenalization of the American dollar in the 90s, and the
creation of the convertible peso or CUC. But that’s another
story.

The women kept silent. The taller of the two
furtively took the three fulas and both of them left in silence. By
the time Mama came out with my magnetic work ID, they were already
at the corner.

“They left?”

“I finally convinced
them.”

“Those two are shameless,
I’m sure they wanted money. But they’re crazy if they come to try
and blackmail me because I won’t give them even a kilo.”

“By the way, Mama,” I
said, trying to change the subject. “Isn’t it strange that our
president of the CDR didn’t stick his nose out to see what was
going on?”

“He’s at the hospital. I
think the dog bit his wife. I think they’re going to put it to
sleep.”

Shouts and cheers from the
bottom of my heart. It was a shame they weren’t going to put him to
sleep, too.

VI

It was always strange when we were alone in
her room and sat on the bed with our shoes on. María might possibly
be the only Cuban woman who is not obsessed with cleanliness. After
all, she has other things to think about.

I’ve been her friend since
our University days. I’ve been a shoulder to cry on every time she
had an emotional failure and her confidante every time she began a
new romantic relationship. I’ve seen her one night a week, we’ve
slept in the same bed all night, we’ve talked until we were
exhausted... and nothing more.

Which is really a bitch if
you keep in mind the fact that I’ve wanted to be with her since we
met. But when a woman tells you her secrets and treats you like her
little brother or her gay best friend, well, there just aren’t a
lot of options.

“So tomorrow you’ve got to
go to see the director?” I say, almost shocked, lying back against
the headboard.

“That’s right. Like in
school, when you’ve misbehaved.” María seems almost delighted by
the idea.

“You don’t seem very
worried.”

“Why should I be? If they
kick me out, I’ll find somewhere else to work. At the end of the
day, I have a degree in Physics and I’m used to these kinds of
rejections.”

That’s how she is,
eternally optimistic and unconcerned, as if her problems were not
of this world. As if it weren’t important to eat well or have a
good house. The most likely explanation is that in her brain there
was only space for complex numerical sequences and quantum
theories, mixed with some Zen Buddhism.

“So what’s going on with
your trip? Finally, you’re going to Spain.”

“If everything works out,
then yes. Tomorrow I’m going to see about the passport and the
tickets and those things. I’ll miss your scolding at the Institute,
but I promise to call you at night to find out how it
went.”

“That’s OK, then. Where is
it you’re going?”

“Malaga.”

“What part of Spain is
that?”

“Andalusia.”

“Interesting. Are there
zombies there?”

“There are, but very few
of them. They’re creating some autonomous communities. Not just
with solar energy and their own water source, but truly autonomous
in a legal sense. As if they were a separate country, but with the
same Spanish laws.”

“And who rules it, who’s
in charge?”

“I suppose there’s a
council or they choose a leader. The idea is to create an isolated
space that’s free of zombies.”

“A bunch of armed people
who don’t need to fear the law, with the justification of an
external enemy and under a dubiously democratic mandate. That
sounds suspiciously like the Cuban Revolution to me. I don’t think
it will work.”

“A guy can’t even dream
with you around.”

VII

I got to the corner and
luckily there was no one on the phone. The day had been terrible
and exhausting. I’d spent half the day in lines to get into the
offices of the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment.
The other half in interviews with bureaucrats who treated me as if
trying to travel were a crime and I the prime suspect. That, plus
turning in photocopies of my passport and visa, seals and signing
mountains of paper, summarized my day.

Now I had to fulfill a
promise made the night before. I had already walked more than four
blocks, finding only telephones that were broken or out of service.
Finally, one worked that was on one of the walls of a bakery. There
was no privacy because there were always people coming in or out.
And when there was a line, the person on the phone might find
themselves talking on the phone in the middle of the shop to get
their bread. My call was not so private either. I dialed the number
for María’s house. It rang.

Across the street, on the wall of a repair
shop, there was a new poster with the slogan:

ZOMBIES IN DEFENSE OF SOCIALISM.

Suddenly, for some strange reason, I
remembered the processes of zombification and the zombie soldiers.
A chill ran down my back.

“Yeah?” It was María’s
voice.

“Listen, it’s
me, Ricardo Miguel.”

“Oh, hi.”

“Tell me, how did it go
with your bosses?”

“Fine.”

“What did they want to
talk to you about?”

“Nothing
important.”

“Did they threaten to kick
you out of the Center like the last time?”

“No.”

“Are you OK?”

“Of course. Everything’s
fine.”

“Well, I guess I called at
a bad moment. Ciao.”

“Ciao.”

And I hung up.

That had been the
strangest conversation we’d had by phone since we met. Normally,
one needs to pay her to shut up and now she was strangely laconic.
My mind began to fill with wild ideas. Had they finally threatened
her and had she given in to the pressure? What could terrify Iron
Annie, who had so often confronted the scientific directors, the
administration, and the
sindicato
?

Because in Cuba to say
“sindicato” is the same as saying administration. It’s acronym is
CTC and means Central de Trabajadores de Cuba, Cuban Workers
Central. Theoretically, it should be a united guild that worked
everywhere, but in practice it’s just another organization one
needs to pay and which doesn’t fix anything.

I returned home a little worried. When I
reached my block, but still on the road, the police were checking
the papers of a zombie. Its owner was calm, neither gesticulating
nor moving his hands in front of the official. He only spoke when
he was asked something, he seemed as much a zombie as the real one.
One of the cops approached me and pointed a finger at me. I showed
him my CIDEZ card without saying a word, barely stopping. He nodded
and turned toward the patrol car. An inexplicable act for a cop. As
I turned the corner, I looked back just to check out his gait. The
police officer walked slowly, looking at the ground, dragging his
feet. As if he were another zombie.

“I think I need a
vacation,” I thought.

I reached the door to my house worn out with
worry. This time, only a dog barked. Then Ramón came out of his
house and intercepted me before I could close the gate.

“Ricardo!”

“What is it,
Ramón?”

“I want to talk to you.
We’ve received instruction to prepare conditions for a voluntary
massive zombification. Each
cuadra
must present a volunteer to be zombified. Those
converted into zombies will be the shock troops of the Revolution.
Your family has been chosen to present a volunteer.”

“But there is already a
zombie in my house,” I didn’t even stop to think about the madness
of a zombification. “There must be a lot of houses full of useless
people who are already zombies and don’t know it.”

“Watch your language,
comrade. Your family has been chosen by the CDR. If you refuse, you
could be seen as an anti-revolutionary attitude. Now tell me the
name of the person who will be the volunteer zombie. … “

“Let me think, let me
think. I’ve got it. Why don’t you send your dried-up old mother to
be zombified?”

“Comrade,
look...”

“Look, Ramón. I’ve had a
difficult day because some of us in this country still work instead
of sticking out noses into the lives of other people. Do me a favor
and get out of here with that list before I make you eat
it.”

“What you are is an
anti-revolutionary!”

“And what you are is a
lousy squealer!”

Contrary to what I
expected, he remained quiet. Ramón is much larger than I am,
physically, and it’s not like I think of myself as a violent kind
of guy. In a fight, he would unquestionably win, but against all
prognoses, he retreated in silence and looked at the ground as if
he were ashamed.

Suddenly, sounds could be heard in his
house. As if a large dog scratched its nails on a door. The
president of the CDR turned pale, turned around and entered his
house.

“Didn’t you put down your
dog last week?” I said, but he didn’t bother to answer. “Now you’ve
decided to keep the nasty dog inside your house, you
SQUEALER!”

“Ricardo Miguel” my mother
shouted. “What’s going on?”

When she says that, I feel like I were seven
years old.