Three Messages and a Warning (21 page)

Avellaneda led him past behind the shelves to a part of the warehouse filled with herbicide tanks. One of them, lying horizontally, was the one she used to sleep in and keep an eye on the main entrance. They sat on upside-down buckets. The floor was strewn with cardboard pieces and wrapping material. They remained silent for a while, staring at each other awkwardly, like a couple of patients in a dentist’s waiting room.

“I’m José. José Durruti.” He extended his hand toward Avellaneda, but she didn’t notice it, staring down at her own shoes, which were too large for her. They belonged to a stranger lying dead on the sidewalk. She removed them from the dead woman before her body disappeared. The shoes had high heels, broken ones, tortuous for walking.

“I’m Avellaneda,” she finally said, and looked him in the eye to show him she wasn’t afraid. But she was actually shaking inside her overalls that she found in the warehouse and were now her daily outfit. She wore anything underneath but always covered herself with the overalls the workers used in the warehouse when everything had been normal. Her secretary dress was now a small lump that doubled as a pillow inside the tank where she slept. Durruti. The man looked familiar to her. She straightened her back and wrung her hands. “Are you hungry, Durruti?”

Asking that question under the circumstances was unforgivable. It was obvious. Everyone was hungry. But it was also a courtesy of the past, an anachronistic kindness. José Durruti nodded, trying to hide his desperation, and she said she could offer him something if he waited there. She had her back turned toward him while she removed cardboard pieces and cans that hid a small metal door. Another chance to kill her if he wanted to do it. But when she turned back around, he was still there, like Monterroso’s dinosaur. The difference was that he was one of the terrorists who had started it all. She was sure, not just from his last name, which wasn’t very common, but also from his burnt hand, a large reddish white scar that she pretended not to notice. When the authorities were searching for him, using all the mass media, they always mentioned that particular mark: a homemade bomb had exploded and left him scarred when he was a teenager and began to make explosives and put them in ATMs. Avellaneda sat on her bucket again and handed him a plastic container filled with dog pellets.

He thanked her with a nod and began to gobble. She gave him a bottle of the rainwater that she had caught from the flat roof. While she watched him wolf down the dog food, she told him that the warehouse belonged to a company that sold things for farming and livestock, Monsanto, Dow, etc. She said the company names slowly, trying to see Durruti’s reaction. After all, wasn’t he one of the terrorists who had destroyed the labs, factories, and headquarters of the large transnational corporations? Wasn’t he the one who torched the CEOs? At least that was what the papers said, when they were still in circulation. But Durruti’s face didn’t change. He kept eating, stopping only for sips of water. The she asked:

“Who are you?”

“I told you already.”

“You don’t seem like him,” said Avellabeda, taking a few pellets herself. Some were round and others bone-shaped. She was always careful to ration her meals, for when her stash of dog food ran out, she would have to leave her hideout and behave like the others. So far she had survived on food for cats, tilapias, pigs, chickens, shrimps, dogs, and cats. Perhaps she shouldn’t have shared her scarce resources with a terrorist.

“You forget who you are when you’re alone for a long time.” He struck his chest a few times, trying to swallow. “Is this all you’ve got to drink? It’s horrible.”

Avellaneda remained silent, without chewing, like a daughter-in-law who forces a smile when her mother-in-law makes one of her uncouth remarks. She thought about a bottle of pink lemonade she had kept since everything began. It was a new brand that used real pink lemons, genetically engineered using blood oranges and other fruits. “No artificial colors, same taste,” the label said. The ads were geared toward feminine women dressed in pastel colors of the eighties of the last century. Many times Avellaneda had been tempted to drink it, but, after ogling it for a long time, she decided to save the bottle, as if it were a sort of assurance that she would survive until the next morning. She felt that sharp pain that ripped through her spine every time someone burst into the warehouse, while she crouched down, holding saliva in her mouth, praying her heartbeat wouldn’t betray her. But he roared with laughter when he saw her scared. Then he laughed the way men do when they’re enjoying being men, as though watching a soccer game with friends with a beer in his hand.

“Why don’t you tell me about yourself?” His words were friendly but his tone was authoritarian.

Avellaneda wanted to run away, but the streets weren’t much safer. On the contrary, outside there were those who preyed on the weaker and cooked them in metal containers. So she told him about her secretarial job in that company, and how she had been working overtime when everything began. When she went home, she found her house looted, her mother dead, and her father gone. She took only a few things, a blanket, clean clothes, the little food that was left, and returned to the warehouse. The houses and supermarkets were the most obvious targets, and the most dangerous places. She also brought a small radio that worked until the batteries ran out or the stations ceased broadcasting, which happened at more or less the same time. Since then she had lived there.

“There’s nothing more to add,” she said, forcing a smile. Her throat was dry and her thoughts strayed to the lemonade. Durruti ordered her to take him where she kept the animal feed. Avellaneda stood up and walked, feeling as though her joints were broken. She heard a blade slip out of its sheath. She felt it close behind her. Just as she opened the small door, the knife ripped into her right shoulder blade and tore through her rib cage. Blood and air gushed out of her at the same time. By the time her head hit the floor, she felt nothing. She couldn’t see how he, rummaging inside the tank, found the bottle of pink lemonade. Obeying his instincts, he opened it and gulped it down.

They headed east. Together they traveled hundreds of fields and dark valleys, until the first bat to sense the stone stopped. There should an alternative, abandon freewheeling and discover if there is something else besides air, he said. They descended and noticed that their eyes did not need light. Nocturnal vision presented a unique spectacle: thousands of bodies lying like abundant fruits. The mammals flew around and touched them with their membranous wings and, little by little, poised on backs and hides. There were no rejections or tremors to the invader’s weight. Nor for their lips’ contact on skin. For the animated creatures it was easy to take a bite, bury their fangs into the flesh and experiment the unknown. They discovered novelty. The following bite endorsed a sense of pleasure, the surprise of warm blood running down the fat neck of one of the cows. The bats gathered to eat, to devour the victim. When it was emptied, they looked at themselves and their surroundings. Nothing had changed. The world continued paralyzed. The bats had just finished a life before it began, and nature did not complain, the eternal night did not weep, the other animals did not stop to condemn the murder.

The bats took once again to the heavens; they had just discovered that the surface sheltered a fruitful terrain belonging to them. From that moment, the bats’ flight became slow and wide. They moved in a straight line to the east and fanned out towards the south and the north, looking for different landscapes, multitudes of beasts and fruits to bite. It was a steady advance of territorial conquest, lacking an enemy to subdue. It was enough to swoop down to the surface and proclaim their sovereignty over untouched property, where they, the small hirsute vertebrates with sharp ears, represented the omnipotence of a species beautiful and free from the hoards trapped in darkness. Any bat could take the lushest tree to sleep in, parade among giant beasts or crush an insect with the scorn of someone who already has everything. And then, calmly, continue to the east in search of more, of another space to reignite its curiosity and satisfy the sentence life had imposed on them:

to lick blood, to feel the saliva in its snout, to savor the juices of motionless organisms. This ritual was consummated by the taking over of others and accepting the earth’s unselfish generosity. It consisted of the exploitation of an environment that did not resist abuse, even less that of a mass of thirsty creatures, of newborn, eager for sensations different than those they had in their past dreams of emptiness.

The bats’ drive for appropriation was limitless and then, the sea appeared. The wall of water extended and became lost on the horizon, forcing them to halt their advance. The creatures were hit by the sound of the waves and shown the existence of other uncontainable powers, stronger than muscles and invisible radars. They found something that exceeded and overtook them, an enemy whose vitality they couldn’t bite nor drain. A few went to inspect and discovered it was one more element that would not attack them nor contest their throne. However, with its disclosure, they were forced to react in a different manner. The bats began to revise their experiences to see if among them was a strategy that would help them get around the problem. Since they found nothing that would help them continue in their conquest, they thought of two possible solutions: They would turn around, or realize, at that very moment, whom they were. They had learned to quench their hunger and curiosity and they had succeeded in taking over the earth, the skies and the beings yet unborn. Being themselves was now important, but they needed to control their plundering instinct.

Sitting on the sand, the night creatures carefully looked at themselves. Although they knew themselves to be different, they accepted their collectivity. They were bats. The ones chosen to rule. And if they had to learn anything about themselves, they would have to get closer to what most resembled their being, and this was in the gender that had accompanied them since leaving the tree that gave them life.

Without doubting, a female bat stretched her wings to stroke a male’s face and with her long fingers absorbed the essence of her species. There followed a pleasure that she did not wish to consume, but possess and nurture within her to transform her into something unique, an internal lighthouse capable of lighting up the soul. They carefully joined their limbs, sweat stimulated their sense of smell. They let the hairiness of their skin enter the intimate space of the other in a dark caressing of their bodies, an initiation that led to an instinctive penetration, full of doubts and curious to know what more there was beyond the opened female and the erect male penis, which entered nervously and with haste. The bats filled the beach with their forms. They swayed, they screeched. They imitated the rhythm of the tide that died on the sand and returned to the ocean’s lungs to be reborn in a new breath that extended again towards the coasts and the sharp rocks, where it exploded in the shape of foam and millions of white drops.

The male sheltered his mate with an embrace, while he confessed in her ear the sensations he had noticed since opening his eyes. She believed him, she threw away the fragments that reminded her of her own history and wove an essence renovated with the leftovers of his discourse, with the same pleasure, with the same echoes that the sex between her legs had left. The intercourse was an exchange of profound impressions, like their exploration of that boundary. The bats became a community, a loving shape; they had an awakening of themselves. From their shared emotions an impulse was born, a decision that did not come from their natural tendency towards flight but from an ode to each other’s partner. In pairs they rose and took to the sky; they turned several times and then moved far across the ocean, increasing their speed. The creatures felt a defiant vigor. They wanted to reach the other side of infinity without touching the liquid surface.