Read Three Messages and a Warning Online
Authors: Eduardo Jiménez Mayo,Chris. N. Brown,editors
Three Messages and a Warning (15 page)
Bernardo Fernández
Translated by Chris N. Brown
Now we flee, hiding in the dark, moving away from the light of day. But it wasn’t always so. There was a time when they were our plague.
The first lions appeared in the public parks. They always took refuge under the cover of darkness, hiding where the trees were thick enough and the grass grew tall enough to hide them.
Fleeing from us, they sensed that we were the ones responsible for the disappearance of their habitat, who took them into a captivity that quickly exceeded its capacity to house them.
At first we noticed the sudden decrease in stray dogs in the city. After a while, we started to see their gnawed bones scattered near the public gardens. As always, we didn’t pay attention until it was too late.
If they had been an endangered species like gorillas, the panda bear or manatees, surely our zoos would have fought to have examples in their cages. But they had an overpopulation of lions.
And so they started throwing them out in the street.
The process went like this: in all the city zoos they gave the order to eliminate the excess lions, arguing that it’s better to maintain fewer examples of a species so well-known and of such little interest to visitors.
There were dozens of cats sacrificed in order to keep budgets within reasonable limits.
That measure was quickly abandoned given the difficulty of eliminating a predator of such dimensions; the costs were almost the same as the original plan to save them, not taking into account the protests of the Sanitation Department, whose workers refused to dispose of cat corpses, nor the dumpster divers’ rejection of the foul taste of lion meat.
But the orders were ignored, without discussion.
So that was how the first lions ended up with their claws in the streets, clandestinely removed in the middle of the night, near the public parks where at least they could leave their feces without being too obvious.
It’s impossible to know precisely how many were left to their fate in this manner. The archives that contained the official numbers were destroyed when the political scandal broke. But the most conservative numbers estimate that there couldn’t have been as many as the sensationalist media wanted us to
believe.
The real problem is the high fertility rate of lions. A macho adult male has the ability to copulate up to five times in a single day.
Five copulations with five ejaculations included.
More than one was likely to be a success. This, without considering the absence of natural predators.
Although we ignored the parks where the early ones were released, now we know that at night they were emigrating to every green zone they could find, occupying all the available space bit by bit.
We didn’t discover our new neighbors until much later. The morning joggers, unemployed old people, children, young couples, and drug dealers who populated the public gardens at all hours were observed by attentive amber eyes, whose owners hid under the shade of the trees.
The cats changed their habits, turning themselves into nocturnal beings. Dogs and rats were the principal component of their new diet. Food that, although modest, was never in short supply.
If it hadn’t been for their showy dispositions, no one would have noticed anything unusual.
Until the famous incident of the lovers.
An anonymous couple went into one of the biggest parks of the city, looking for a cheaper intimacy among the trees than they could find in the hotels on the boulevard.
They say that they were so wrapped up in their making out that they didn’t notice the policeman who snuck up on them quietly, trying to surprise them. The lawman’s success was thwarted by an eight-hundred pound lioness who, stepping out of the shadows, charged before he could blow his whistle.
Terrified, the lovers fled half-naked.
The next day, the remains of the policeman and the clothes of the lovers were found in the middle of a big pile of blood.
The forensic investigators appeared at the scene of the crime and determined without a doubt that they were dealing with a common workplace accident.
Two days later, in another park, a drunk woke up torn to pieces. And the next day a retired postal worker was mutilated: he lost his legs while taking a little nap.
It was the beginning of the attacks. Surely the authorities could have done something so that they wouldn’t have found the others on the fourth day nibbling on a cadaver whose fingerprints (the ones that were left) matched those of a famous serial killer. This time the men in blue determined suicide and attributed the earlier deaths to him. Later they created a large file on the subject.
And so, perhaps urged on by the official indifference, the lions left their refuges to cynically strut their manes down our streets.
Without hunger, they are as tame as a little cat. But they eat all day, which is why it was impossible to know at which moment they would bite off the arm of a balloon salesman or swallow a kid.
Don’t even mention their shit.
We tried to complain, to organize neighborhood committees that demanded the immediate elimination of the cats. But we only found deaf ears with the authorities, who felt that the more practical—and economical—solution was to avoid the public parks and cross the street if you saw yourself coming across a lion.
The media aired the news when it was of interest, but the World Cup and the minor triumphs of the national team sent the lions into media silence.
And they would have been permanently forgotten if it hadn’t been for the time during the tumultuous celebrations over a tie with the Bolivian national team when a horde of lions attacked the fans at the Angel of Independence.
They didn’t wait for the statements of the government and the opposition, nor the television debates and the newspaper editorials.
In the middle of it all, the lions were settling into their new habitat. Soon they began to move into the big boulevards.
Crossing the street became a dangerous feat.
The advisors to the mayor, more preoccupied with placing their boss among the presidential candidates than coming up with a solution for the root of the problem, opted for an immediate treaty of limited scope and declared the entire city an ecological preserve dedicated to the preservation of lions, with the additional intention of controlling the population and adding a tourist attraction to the metropolis.
By then the cats had decided to occupy every green area they encountered; in no time private houses, schools, sports facilities and cemeteries were invaded by the city’s new patrimony.
You could get up in the morning and discover that in the yard, whatever size it was, a family of lions had moved in, looking for breakfast. The occupants of the houses usually ended up being eaten.
Bones bigger than those of dogs and rats began to litter the streets, many with shreds of meat still attached. In little time swarms of flies became part of the urban landscape.
The rumors started to spread: that they attacked in packs, that they were intelligent, that they were taking over the city, that there was no way to control them. The authorities denied it all, calling the media alarmists and asking the public to tolerate their new neighbors.
Until one day the cadaver of a child appeared.
The dawn broke, as if nothing, in the center of the Zócalo, at the base of the flagpole. This time, the city government couldn’t deny anything because the news cameras got there first. It was an official provocation.
We were scared.
The mayor’s aides decided that there could be opportunities to take a stand at the rear of the presidential palace, that they had to declare war with no quarter against the lions. And so that’s what they did.
But it was already too late. There was no resulting program with which they could confront the plague. Firefighters, police and soldiers could accomplish little against the thousands of cats that lived in the streets.
One day a lion came into the center of the Zócalo and scornfully spit out the remains of a head. The skull turned out to belong to the mayor of the city. He had been attacked by a pride during an official ceremony in Alameda Central Park. The lions had been careful to leave it barely recognizable. Just enough.
And then the lion roared, as if proclaiming victory.
He didn’t need to do it, by then they were already the landlords of the streets, of the parks, of the gardens, of everything.
Every day there are more of them and fewer of us. We have to take refuge in the shadows, while they sleep, now that they have gone back to being active during the day. We hide in the shadows, looking to steal some of their scraps to eat.
Sometimes the lions organize hunting parties to eliminate us. Their nose guides them to our refuges. Sometimes we manage to evade them, but not always.
But where they hunt one man, another one turns up. Once they trap one another one appears.
We have decided to retake our city, even though we don’t know how.
Now we are the plague.
Yussel Dardón
Translated by Osvaldo de la Torre
Two melting tablespoons of butter in a saucepan at mid-flame resembled the process by which Lou had grown accustomed to being alone, respiring a sense of deficiency, sleeping on only half his bed at night. His dissipated condition was spread throughout his home with deliberate sluggishness—just the way that butter gradually turns from solid to liquid on the saucepan, eventually melting to the point of almost complete evaporation, leaving in ascendance thin columns of caramelized smoke.
Lou knew that sweetness replaces sadness. The mere honeyed aroma of the desserts he prepared rescued him from the abyss, blending him with the universe as yet another ingredient seasoning the cosmos.
His wife’s departure had shattered him. The tears and anguish that accompanied the consciousness of his loss drove him to prepare hundreds of desserts, one or two each day, all of them in hopes of her return. Yet since this did not occur, he threw them away, for when the aroma of a dessert vanishes, it no longer makes up for what is lost, becoming instead a simple, vulgar mix of flavors.
As he combined the sugar with the softened butter, Lou imagined his wife embracing him, sprinkling, in the midst of the desserts’ fragrance, his face with kisses; as if it were all real, he saw her enraptured by each scintillating food particle, fusing with him into the Milky Way.
All for naught: neither the hundreds of aromas hovering about his kitchen nor the pieces of parchment paper infused with the smell of each dessert which Lou hung with religious care on the door could bring her back. None of the multiple aromas, no matter how exotic, were able to conjure her return. It made no difference how many times he prepared sponge cake with milk caramel, apple pudding, baked apples, mango mousse, Bavarian cream with soursop, imperial torte, or Peruvian blancmange: he was no closer to Alina.
Tossing in some lime and orange shavings, Lou cried as he dwelled on his feelings of abandonment, the bitter taste they left in his mouth—as if his teeth had been capped with in copper. When he closed his eyes, his wife’s face appeared to him, a reminder that her absence was the very proof of his nothingness.
Lou didn’t find it strange that, as he walked around, his body left behind a trail of bread crumbs, for he had been feeling frail for days. Sometimes, while sautéing fruit, he could actually sense his body crumbling; for instance, when he poured half a glass of orange juice onto the pan and a drop fell on his hand, he immediately felt his fingers softening and turning milky.
As the mixture on the stove thickened, he sat on the chair and observed the table. He saw his wife there, sitting and eating her French toast, as she had done each morning, humming a song and reading the newspaper. Reminiscing, Lou wondered why Alina did not want to have any children, and thought she must have felt embarrassed that he was a man who wanted nothing more in life than to be close to someone for whom to cook. He prepared every recipe and every dessert with her in mind, thinking of the smile she gave him on the day he told her he knew how to cook, of the mocking gesture Alina made when he said that ramen noodles is not real food, and of the intense gaze she gave to the veal in red sauce he prepared during their first week together.
As he thought of his life with her, a few warm caramelized tears rolled down his face, breaking minute crumbs off his skin. Lou observed the crumbs on his chest and brushed them off, as he did with the little milk curds dribbling from his lips.
Witnessing the bread rising up from his lungs, Lou got up and added to the mixture some slices of pineapple whose core he had cut out to avoid a harsh flavor. As he did so he felt alien to his house and understood that Alina’s abandonment was meant to maintain a portion of sweetness in his life, the necessary amount to become in some way transcendent, even if it meant losing everything.
