‘You don’t want to put on some socks?’

  He said no. He had just finished adding a second yellow wing to his flying castle.

  I sat next to him on the floor. I touched one of his feet; it was cold, and he didn’t pull away. His bulbous instep looked like a gasping fish out of water.

  ‘Let’s take a look at that belly,’ I said, leaning over to lift up his shirt a little. He didn’t have any bruises, just a faint scratch on his side. I, on the other hand, had an enormous bruise sprawling across my hip like the map of a new country, and my shoulder was a bit swollen. I stayed there, next to him, with my head between my knees. Mauro muttered something.

  ‘You go in here and here you drive and here you leave.’

  I looked over at his window, a rectangle with protective grating.

  ‘The fog is back,’ I said.

  ‘The castle can fly in fog,’ he said.

  ‘And who’s the pilot? You?’

  His head wobbled as he lifted the castle and made it turn in the air, making sounds like a motor. They should have come to pick him up by now, but the roads were probably still closed.

  ‘Do you know what’s above the clouds?’

  ‘Boats,’ he said.

  ‘No, not boats. There are stars, lights. And other planets.’

  He remained transfixed by his game, cocooned in a space I couldn’t enter. Years of life and mistrust separated me from that realm where everything was possible, from those fantasies that made the world a better, kinder place.

  ‘Are you excited to see the horses?’ I asked. ‘Your mum is on her way here to get you. You’ll ride horses and visit the donkeys.’

  Mauro didn’t react at all; it was as if he didn’t hear me, as if he didn’t remember life in the countryside. He never mentioned his mother. He never talked about the time we were apart. I wonder what his memories must be like, whether he has a sense of the past or if his illness holds him captive in an eternal present, a here and now made of hunger and craving. I left him playing and went back to the kitchen. As I passed, I picked up the telephone. The line was still dead.

  You’re angry.

  I am.

  Are you angry because you left, or because you want to return?

  A team of divers went into the river to investigate why its waters had expelled the fish like a giant stomach. They had orders from the Ministry of Health. They had instruments and maps. They were to take samples of the riverbed, the seaweed, the mystery lurking in the depths. But the stomach expelled the divers, too, coated in its acid. It did this silently. The divers thought everything was fine, they emerged from the water with their little jars and their big smiles and posed for the requisite photo that appeared on all the newscasts. It wasn’t until a few days later that the symptoms began, first with José Luis Amadeo, a horrific omen of what awaited the others.

  There were no miracles for the divers, who were laid to rest with full state honours. They aired the funeral live: three caskets draped with the flag. The cameras focused on the cemetery, its beautiful tombs, the flowers stirring in the stiffening breeze, the serious expressions on the faces of the ministers. Their hair was being blown around and the President’s tie refused to lie flat; he needed to secure it with one hand as if he were holding his heart and lungs in place. We’d known a storm was coming since that morning, but we all thought it would hold off until after the funeral. Why did we think that? The families were there. I recognised José Luis’s mother in the first row; she hadn’t changed much, she just looked shorter and broader, less imposing than the thick arms that used to pass us fritters through a side window. Beside her were other wives, mothers, sisters, and other sons of San Felipe’s divers — sons grown into men, grown into divers, themselves. We saw their clenched fists, the coffins reflected in their sunglasses, the stripes of the flags. The only eyes visible were the President’s: dry. Before the ceremony had ended, the storm broke. There was lightning and wind, but not a drop of rain. The flowers were sucked into the air and the flags began to flap wildly like sheets on a clothesline, baring the glossy wood of the coffins. One of the three held the body of José Luis, my childhood friend, the first diver to go into Clinics and never come out. We saw a man run over to anchor the flags, which were about to come loose, as if the wind wanted to take their souls with it, as well; then we saw the President rushed to safety, surrounded by his guards. He and the ministers were escorted into the presidential motorcade and driven away as lightning flashed on the horizon.

  The first red wind, a fierce electrical storm, ruined the divers’ funeral. The next day, the President called for an evacuation of the coastal region. The heads of state built new houses on the side of some small hill in the low, endless countryside and started giving orders from there. This is how our new official story begins.

  When you read a history book, you often forget that someone was there, someone of flesh and blood. In this story, that someone is me. I was there when the fish appeared; I went down to Martínez Beach and saw how they covered the sand like glittering trash, pieces of cans and glass washed up by the tide. I saw children playing down there, walking on that new sand made of flesh, treading carefully, bending over for a better look at the open mouths and dry eyes. The tiny waves would lift and tug at them, giving them the momentary appearance of life, only to drop them back on the sand like so many old bottles. There were also fish floating in the water; the sand was so full that the waves couldn’t get rid of all of them. I saw the children playing without facemasks or suits, and I saw the adults sorting through fish on the shore looking to fill their buckets with the ones still struggling to breathe. It wasn’t until a team from the Ministry arrived that they got the children out of there and cordoned off the area. That’s what they aired on the news: the yellow tape surrounding the beach and the crowd on the other side, curious but safe. I saw the President announce the evacuation of the coastal neighbourhoods on the emergency broadcast system. The most important thing is to stay calm, he said, the Ministry of Health is working on this. But no one was listening, because they were too busy running around their houses, packing suitcases, unplugging appliances, gathering money and jewels; money in fat rolls stuck between clothes and sweaty skin, bills growing soggy in underwear, bras, and socks; fingers that couldn’t hold another ring, wrists a riot of bracelets. By the time the broadcast was over and the national anthem began to play, people were already loading up cars, boarding up windows, taking seascapes down from their walls. They were buckling in their babies and dragging along their elders, even the ones who said they were born there and wanted to die there. Why do we all want to die where we were born? What’s the point, if nothing stays the same, anyway, and the place will have become unrecognisable by then? They dragged along their elders even if they had to break their hips in the process, and then the city came to a standstill: all those cars got stuck in the only massive traffic jam in the history of our country. I saw it. I was there. I watched it from the sidewalk, standing there with a bunch of other people who’d come out to witness the spectacle, to be part of something we still didn’t understand. How many of those people are still alive? How many ended up in Clinics? It was a spectacle, all right: an upside-down sofa on a truck bed here, a vacuum poking out of a window there; a tricycle tied to a mattress tied to a luggage rack. Faces framed in car windows, the dirty hands of children pressed against rear windshields. Dogs barking, noses poking out above glass. And a symphony of car horns.

  The caravan remained stalled like that, moving so slowly it created the illusion of complete stasis. But it was moving. Three days later the streets were empty again; news cameras transmitted silent highways littered with the trash people had thrown from their windows, and the chaos moved on to another place, somewhere I wasn’t. Somewhere I’m not. It became a distant story told by others who also said: I was there.

  That’s how it happened.

  Two more weeks had to pass before I accepted that Mauro’s parents weren’t coming for him. That it wasn’t because of the fire, or the roads, or the dead telephone lines. They had abandoned him. Can I say I was surprised? In retrospect, there were little warning signs everywhere. I spent the next few days rationing food and waiting for the poison in the air to thin enough that I could go out to search for an underground market. We ate little; I ate even less than Mauro, who was strangely docile despite his constant hunger and our shrinking portions — despite the dry, monotonous food and the pink slime permanently ground into our palates. All things considered, those were peaceful days. Days when I didn’t think about my mother, or Max. Life focused in like a funnel on Mauro, his stomach, his nocturnal whimpers. My exhaustion had begun to feel like an abscess, a contained ache filled with pus that could only be soothed by slicing. There was no room for anything else. I had no plan B, and part of me imagined that our new life would be exactly the same. Why wouldn’t it? Besieged by the algae, sinking in a swamp of fog.

  The air toxicity levels were still so high that not even the patrol vans were out. That’s what they said on the news. The national network drones flew over the streets, unable to pass above the first ring, transmitting images of desolate neighbourhoods, dirty foam from the river tumbling across the rambla like dustballs. We resigned ourselves to waiting, and the waiting we did somehow seemed a lot like faith. Faith that the fog would return. When? Someday. Until one day it did.

  I asked so little of you.

  But you wanted everything.

  I asked so little.

  But you never allowed me to ask anything of you.

  I went out in the afternoon when the fog was at its most dense. I walked the first two blocks slowly, hunting for signs, adapting to the opacity and its stench of fermented garbage. The desolation of the place wasn’t defined anymore by the absence of people: all sound had been sucked into a padded box. The fog pressed firm as a muscle against my body, forming a kind of amorphous suit. In the distance behind me, a motor broke the tomb-like silence. It was impossible to ignore, but I pretended not to hear it until a red car with white splotches eating into its paint drove up to me slowly. The connective tissue of fog seemed to resist its movement, but the car pushed its red snout, its splotch of colour, forward through the grey. The driver looked at me through the window. He gave me a bad feeling: his face like an undercover cop’s, too square and too neat; his thick arms stretching the sleeves of his shirt; his soft hands. No one had enough food to look like that anymore. Word was spreading among the taxi drivers about clean-up squadrons that rounded up vagabonds and disappeared them. Maybe they took them to Clinics, which was nearly the same thing; either way, those men and women were never seen sleeping on the street again. I quickened my pace and waved a no at him. He stayed a few metres back with his headlights on. He’d placed his bet and I held the losing hand. The crunch of his tires on the pavement, like a snake gliding through scrubland, cracked the air. But I knew the neighbourhood, its cartography of doorways and dead ends, and I remembered that after the corner there was a building that hadn’t been bricked over. I kept walking, playing it as cool as my body would let me, until I reached the front door of the building: two tall panels of faded wood.

  I was received by the uninhabited cold inside, where the fog thinned like a trail of smoke arriving from far away. I took a few steps across the trash and rubble and stood there, hidden behind one of the doors, listening to the hum of the motor. Each sound was distinct, sharp and clear like a landscape. I heard the engine cut off and the car door open, then slam shut. For a moment, the silence absorbed the man’s footsteps; maybe he was standing there, waiting for a clue. Then I heard them again. They were getting closer. Just when I thought he was about to come inside, the footsteps grew porous and went silent. Holding my breath, I tried to peek through the line of light above the door’s hinge, but it was too thin to see anything except a shadow that interrupted the glow for a moment and then vanished again. The man was moving around out there. Had he not seen me enter the building? Now the sound of plastic crinkling and again the muffled footsteps, the trunk swinging open. Plastic. A plastic bag being gripped. A hand closing around a plastic bag and then a thud, like a shovelful of sand. It took me a moment to understand that the man was carrying something, and that the something was bags of garbage. He went back and forth until, I guessed, he’d filled the trunk, because I heard him slam it shut and then get into the car and start the engine. The tires crackled over the crumbling asphalt and the car drove slowly away.

  I waited until long after he’d been absorbed by the egg carton that the city had become; I waited an absurdly long time. I didn’t try to guess what was behind the black market for garbage, but I did think how the city was like a vast free trade zone with a volatile, mysterious economy. I couldn’t hear anything at all now. The silence was painful. Who could have imagined the sonic emptiness of a city without the buzzing of insects, but also without the slow grumble of elevators or the murmur of radios through the walls, all those artificial things that — I realise now — were what we called life. Just then, I thought I heard footsteps in the building. They seemed to come from upstairs. It could have been an auditory hallucination, an aural mirage, because silence has that effect on the ear, but there at the end of the hallway a half-collapsed staircase twisted upward into the shadows. I skirted around an upturned chair and a few pieces of burned wood. There was ash on the floor from old cooking fires, blackened sticks crumbling into coal. Traces of pillage, the fate of all these abandoned buildings. I climbed the stairs slowly, straining my ears. The silence had returned in all its savagery, and each step I took released a chunk of plaster or shard of glass. What was I looking for? I obviously wasn’t going to find an underground market there. The front doors of all the apartments on the first floor had been ripped from their frames. Their interiors: outlets and baseboards and faucets missing, graffiti and broken glass, hinges rusted by the humidity. I pressed on into the heart of the building; no one could possibly live like that, without windows or any other protection against the red wind. When I turned to leave, I sensed a movement in the stairwell, near the second floor.

  ‘Is anyone there?’

  Not even an echo.

  ‘I want to buy supplies,’ I said. ‘Food.’

  I approached the stairwell and looked up at the steps covered in rubble and scraps of metal. A nauseating smell rose from the floor. I began to climb, anyway, trying not to touch the walls even when I struggled to keep my balance. I felt around with my foot for a stable surface before taking each step. A crimson moss was growing in the empty window frames. Could that be what stank? I pulled my scarf over my nose and immediately felt the damp air of my own breath. The reddish moss was made up of tiny round leaves plump with water.

  The scene on the second floor wasn’t much different: trashed apartments, all except one of which were missing a front door. As I got closer, I saw that what had looked like a door left ajar was in fact a graft that didn’t quite fit the frame. I couldn’t see anything through the crack, but thought I could make out the rustling of fabric, as if someone had crossed their legs or turned over in their sleep.

  ‘Anyone there?’ I asked, pushing the door with my foot.

  I kept pushing until I’d made an opening big enough to pass through sideways. I stuck my shoulder in first; when my body was halfway inside the room, its walls sooted by countless fires, I saw the cage. Next to a window with a heavy black garbage bag where the glass would have been, a big white cage with thick bars and fancy ornaments, a bit banged up but still elegant. Inside, an animal — a bird? — motionless, frightened.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Nice to meet you.’

  I heard the rustling sound again, clearer now. The bird had moved, a slight and monstrous shake of its wings. On the floor, among the rubble: charred pieces of wood and empty plastic bottles, some of them cut to make bowls; a mattress without sheets or blankets, sunken in the middle and torn in places where bits of foam rubber poked through. The stench got worse as I approached the cage. Then I noticed — not far from the mattress, and not far from a small pot black with soot, either — human excrement on the floor. The bird seemed like another hallucination, but when I was finally standing in front of the cage I knew that it was real, that it was dying. It had white growths on its beak and eyes. It couldn’t see me because that festering substance prevented it from opening them, but it sensed my presence and shifted nervously.

  ‘Who is it that needs you so badly?’ I asked, and my own voice terrified me.

  The bird shuddered and made that hushed sound again with its dull feathers, which must once have been blue, maybe iridescent and exotic as pearls, but which had gone ashen and barely moved with the tremor that ran through its body, its only sign of life. I unfastened the little wire that held the cage shut and swung back the door. The opening was tall enough for the bird to pass through without bending, but it didn’t move. Its wings were clipped, dead. I stood there a moment, looking at it, and immediately rejected the idea of taking the cage with me. My nose had begun to itch and I felt like my throat was burning, like I had that whitish substance clinging to me. Like my eyes would soon be covered over, consumed by the fungus, shut forever to the putrefaction around me, finally, finally rotting alongside it all, sores in my throat, the skin of my nose eaten away. How many more winds until that bird was free? How many until I was?

  I left the cage open and backed away. I hurried down the stairs as fast as I could without stumbling, and the street welcomed me with its monochromatic gleam. The air felt fresh compared to the stench cooking inside. I started off along San Jerónimo. The fog kept pace with me like a loyal dog, though I could only catch partial glimpses of its vast grey flank, pressed always between me and the things around me. I turned again, this time onto Asunción Norte. Not one window open a crack, not one lookout, nothing that could be read as a sign of illicit activity. One door had a white skull painted above it. Others had been forced open. The street was impassable, a tangle of fallen electrical wires, and no other car followed me.

 

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