Excerpt:
Manuscript on the Earthquake
I began to feel it again three days ago: the tremors and that low, rumbling roar beneath everything.
I’d rather not imagine what it must feel like up close; closer, I mean. I’d rather not think about anyone anymore (I can’t and I don’t want to), about all those people, all those souls condemned to stand there on the brink—on what the ones on the other side call “the border.” Cynical sons of bitches.
I don’t have the courage Juan had—the strength to accept defeat, to recognize that the end was (is) irreversible and imminent. I can’t. So I’d rather not think, not even about myself anymore. I move like an automaton, waiting for darkness to finally swallow me whole. Real darkness, I mean—the kind no flicker of will can bear, the kind that can’t be fought off by stepping out into the sun. The darkness that seized him after witnessing the relentless advance of destruction up close. The darkness that turned his helplessness into sorrow. A thick, tumorous sorrow that first rooted itself, then spread through every fiber of him, hollowing him out until he grew so frail, so empty, that his body hitting the pavement made no sound. I realized he’d jumped only when I heard the commotion in the street—the shouting, the blows, the fight over who got to keep him. I’m certain that in the split second he hung suspended in the air, he felt peace. Peace in knowing it was all ending (finally), and in ending, he would become food. Sustenance for others who, like me, choose to stay alive simply because—waiting for the inevitable.
“Keep going, Julián,” he told me that afternoon. “There’s nothing to be done.”
“It’s going to stop,” I told him. “They say it’s going to stop.” It was what they said, and what I repeated to him—not very convincingly—every time the anguish and torment overtook him. That it was going to stop.
“This one is enormous,” Juan kept saying. “Long and wide. Worse than the others. It feels endless.”
He was right. About everything. Especially about this one being worse than all the previous ones: the past quakes were bad, yes, each leaving its wounds and scars (some unavoidable, some less so) over the years. We grew used to living among jolts, tremors, and roars; cracks zigzagging across the earth; razed zones reduced to nothing—unreachable, uninhabited or uninhabitable, yet still inhabited by people who had nowhere else to go; evacuations and landslide threats; families losing everything and living on the streets or among the ruins, little more than ghosts. Yes—all of that. But none of them, Juan wasn’t wrong, had been as destructive as this last one. None had literally split the earth in two, dividing the city into “this side” and “the other side.” No earthquake had ever left behind a border (cynical as the term is, it’s brutally accurate): a deep, abyssal trench—deadly, fatally so. And as if that weren’t enough, a living trench, advancing. Like the mouth—the jaws—of a starving beast. A colossal, impossible creature, all-powerful, devouring everything in its path.
Because that’s the worst part: the movement. The advance.
That day—the day Juan jumped—the thunder and vibrations had started again after the beast had lain quiet for a time (two months, or something like that). We knew it was getting closer. Juan had stopped going to the school because the fault was too near and the next advance would likely swallow it whole. The so-called “authorities”* had ordered the school evacuated, along with several blocks around it—already too close to our neighborhood. He’d stopped attending as a teacher, not as a worker: the school wasn’t a school anymore; it had become another shelter. Juan and the other teachers kept going, and besides assisting whoever they could with whatever scraps they had, they tried to keep teaching amidst the devastation.** Of course no one paid them anymore. It was no longer a job.
(*) The only thing the “emergency authorities” ever did was issue evacuation orders for the zones closest to the border as the fissure advanced, and enforce compliance with violence and brute authority. Nothing else. It wasn’t their problem where the displaced ended up.
In the past tense: by the time I write this, these authorities no longer exist (rumor says most were taken to the other side), and no one enforces or orders evacuations anymore.
(**) The things Juan witnessed in the school-shelter I’ll have to write down another time—if I ever can. But they played a decisive role in the anguish that consumed him.
In the months before the school evacuation, Juan had stopped bringing provisions; finding food had become almost impossible and we barely survived ourselves. He brought some clothes and blankets, but we needed those for barter too; we had little left worth trading. So he settled for bringing books—lots of them—since they were worthless in the barter market (no one offering food cared for them). He said at least they offered a way out of this absurd, cruel world—the only kind possible. But paper and ink don’t fill stomachs.
We’d handed over most of our appliances in exchange for a decent supply. There was still electricity, so they had some value (we decided not to give up the refrigerator, which is now nothing more than a metal sarcophagus). But we kept an old 21-inch tube TV we’d inexplicably kept in the laundry room. I don’t know why Juan insisted on building an antenna for it—why he wanted to watch television, when everything being broadcast came from the other side and was always the same. Later I understood: depression is a monstrous, immune, ravenous creature, fed by illusions and false hope.
But he built it—using two radio antennas (a boombox he brought from the school when he knew it would soon be rubble, and a small portable radio that had belonged to his father), stuck into a flowerpot, wired into our old cable, and placed on top of the water tank. And it worked. The signal was grainy, but visible enough. That prehistoric contraption—which in a good day might have been traded for a bag of pasta or a bottle of water—kept us informed of what the people on the other side said was happening here. And what they said was that this would stop (I write it in the past tense, but I suppose they’re still saying it); that help and reconstruction would arrive eventually, but only once the tremors ceased for good and the beast was finally fed—once the fissure stopped advancing, once and for all.
Experts spoke: geologists, seismologists, scientists. With aerial footage of our side—shot from helicopters or drones***—they explained indicators, calculations, data unverifiable and incomprehensible. Some blamed the previous quakes, claiming this devastation, this uncontrollable destruction, couldn’t have been avoided. That it had been known this moment would come, when the weakened earth would yield a living, irreversible fault like this one. That nature is wise, and things happen for a reason, they said.
(***) It’s been a long time since anything has flown overhead—ever since this sector, now closest to the fault, lost power.
But no one ever did anything more than speak. And always from over there—from the other side. From that piece of land which, once broken away and separated from this one (first by a crack, then by an abyss), stayed still and drifted farther away. From the half (let’s forget geography and call it a “half”) that seems less appetizing to the beast. The place where little was destroyed and whatever was damaged was rebuilt; where nothing was wiped clean by death; where electricity still flows and everything glows bright; where food is enough and money still means something; where people don’t have to give up everything they own just to eat; where eating a pet or trading it for food, or resorting to canibalism, is an unimaginable horror—something seen only in documentaries or read in history books or horror fiction.
That was the news. The rest was the usual: game shows, reality TV, idealized dramas.
That afternoon, when the roar began again (not the one I hear now, but the previous one), Juan turned on the TV only to find white noise on all five channels. It wasn’t raining; there was no wind. The signal was simply gone.
“Leave it, love, they’re not going to say anything new,” I told him, insisting he turn it off.
He hesitated a moment, then said, “I’ll check the antenna—maybe it shifted or came loose.”
Neither. The antenna sat exactly where it still sits now—there on top of the tank, like some wilted, skeletal plant from the future.
Juan didn’t fall—he jumped. I know because, though I pretended not to notice, I read defeat in his eyes in that single moment of doubt before he climbed onto the roof.
The commotion—the fight over the body (eighty kilos of flesh and bone in good condition)—I saw only in fragments, through the cracks in the blinds. I chose not to go downstairs; I wouldn’t have made it in time anyway. Weeks before, we’d barricaded the door with a beam and packed the staircase with furniture, and clearing the path would’ve taken too long—not to mention the risk of stepping outside, beyond the cannibal fight unfolding. And truthfully, there was nothing I could’ve done with the corpse. So I let them take him, knowing Juan would’ve done the same in my place.
I write these pages on the roof of the house Juan and I shared for fifteen years. The same roof where he chose to end his life before the destruction—now once more howling and thundering—could do it for him.
I have very little food left, and no idea how I could get more. For the last trade, I kidnapped a girl from the street**** and exchanged her at the station for a large supply, of which only the last cans remain—enough for a few more days (maybe a week if I ration severely). But now, with the end so close, the street is something else—more hostile, more feral. Hungrier. More cannibal.
In any case, this does seem to be the beast’s final march—at least for me. Its jaws draw near.
Dusk is falling; the light is nearly gone. My eyes ache, watering onto the page.
The tremors won’t stop...
..."
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