Chapter I

A woman appeared on the path. She looked exhausted, pained, gone, as if drugged, drunk or deep in some world to which her surrounding landscape did not belong.

She did not pay attention to the flowers, trees, or birds, and she barely flinched as she stepped ankle-deep into a puddle, getting her shoes soaked.

Finally, she stopped in front of a tall wall, crowned with a thick mess of barbed wire with razors like shaving blades and upon which every few feet hung a skeleton and a warning sign:

“No trespassing. Danger of death”.

“You are only authorized to get water and cheese”.

She did not notice the fountain, nor the chest or the dogs that barked threateningly, but lifted her eyes to the main building of a great farm where she could see all sorts of fruit trees and animals.

The woman, visibly pregnant, took one hand to her belly and pushed the gate with the other.

She fell back with the bullet in her head before she even heard the shot.

Two men ran out of the building carrying bottles of gasoline with lit wicks that they threw at her.

They threw bottle after bottle until there were only ashes left.

From behind a large window on the top floor of the house, Aurelia, who had watched the entire scene, turned inquisitively to her mother.

“What if she wasn’t sick?”

The reply was immediate:

“What if she was?”

The girl, barely a teenager, fell silent. It was the same painful question that was on everybody’s lips, and had been hammering everybody’s mind for over a year:

What if she was? The old lady sitting on the third row in church, or the truck driver eating at that neighboring table, or the kid who came running after his ball–what if they were all sick?

Who could guarantee that none of them, that none out of the hundreds of thousands of elderly people, truck drivers or children who wandered the face of the Earth, carried the invisible seeds of death?

Seeds that had proven capable of taking root in any human being, regardless of their age, race or color. Victims who instantly became the propagators of an evil that was spreading like the waves of a pond where someone just dropped a pebble.

Where the pebble had come from, nobody knew. Despite the efforts of thousands of specialists who spent whole days and nights searching for an answer.

In fact, for them there was no difference between day and night, because they were so many, scattered across the length of the planet, that not a single second went by in which somebody did not try to contain the bloodbath.

Suddenly, there came the monotonous rumble of the tractor and Aurelia watched with bitter sadness as her father dug outside the farm, under the old oak tree, a grave where he would drop the burnt remains of that woman, to then smoothen the earth above until there was no trace of the existence or the future life of the child that she had born inside.

“It’s unfair.”

“Darling, you’re right, it isn’t fair,” said her mother, who was also watching the scene, “but justice vanished the moment we were all equal before her.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“It’s very simple, honey. See, now that we’re all exposed to this sickness, rich and poor, humble and powerful, lawful and criminal, we’re all the same. No one tries to pressure a judge or bribe a jury because they know that it could be their father, daughter or brother carrying their death sentence.”

“Not here.”

“No, certainly not here, and that’s why it has become our duty to defend ourselves. My heart breaks every time we bury one of those poor people, but there would be no end to my sorrow if it was one of you whom I had to bury instead.” The devastated woman paused, “I’m still not sure that your brother ever got a decent burial.”

“We still don’t know if he’s dead.”

“You’re very right; even I don’t know. A mother is supposed to feel those things deep inside her chest, but time goes by and the chances of him being alive grow smaller and smaller. But please don’t tell me that hope is the last thing we should lose because if that were the case, then what we’re doing here is unforgivable.”

“Dad and uncle Samuel believe that we have the right to defend ourselves.”

“Yes, if we’re attacked. But, who’s attacking us? Until now it was tramps trying to force their way into the house, but today it was a woman. She was pregnant, for God’s sake!” She looked pleadingly at her daughter. “Don’t make me talk any longer.”

Aurelia respected her mother’s silence and returned to her task of mending her uncle’s work pants. She tried hard to push away from her mind the image of the woman who was taken down by a single shot.

Perhaps someone somewhere had shot her brother too, as he walked up to beg for food or water. Perhaps, but at that point nobody could tell for sure since the victims had gone from having a name to owning a number, until even that was taken from them and they became percentages.

It was like the times when her father had bet at the races. He would place the schedule on the table, arm himself with pencil and paper and argue with her mother about the likelihood of this or that animal reaching the finish line first.

“Takataka’s jockey is very good.”

“But this distance favors Ponycat.”

“He only pays three to one.”

“It’s not about trying to become rich with the horses; that’s what the cows and pigs are for.”

“Cows and pigs give us a living, but they will never make us rich–I would put twenty euros on Ponycat and five on Takataka.

A year had passed and winning no longer mattered, being last was better, now that the crown earned by the champion was the one reserved to the deceased.

For some time, florists’ businesses had boomed and each day was as profitable for their macabre enterprises as the Day of the Dead. Then came a time when even greenhouses were not enough to cover the demand and when there was not enough labor for the job.

And customers dwindled.

Not the deceased, naturally; their number went in crescendo. It was the living who were scarce, those who once bought flowers to pay homage to their loved ones were no more.

About a month before the television signal stopped reaching people’s homes, one of the channels had emitted a program in which a psychiatrist with an owlish face and a deep voice stated that the human brain was so complex that family members no longer viewed their dead as innocent victims, but as accomplices of the disease.

Where could Ponycat and Takataka be now?

They most likely had ended up in a roast, and the question of which had the tastiest meat probably never even crossed their owners’ minds.

One could imagine that taking half a second less to gallop one mile would not influence the meat’s flavor.

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m sewing, not thinking.”

“You can sew and think at the same time.”

“I prefer remembering things.”

“I’m your mother, I’m almost triple your age and have three times more memories than you do–my advice is that you stop thinking of times that will never return. It’s painful.”

“It’s also painful to watch bodies burn. I dream of them.”

“I would like to forbid you to dream, but that’s something only God may do.”

“You believe God can decide what I dream?”

“He can do anything.”

“In that case, why does he let the sick reach our gate making Dad and uncle Samuel intervene? Why doesn’t he stop those people before they try to get in? Or even better–why doesn’t he heal them?”

“Sometimes his ways are inscrutable.”

“That’s exactly what Father Luis, may he rest in peace, used to say, but I never really understood what he meant, and whenever I asked him about it he’d tell me to keep praying.”

“And that’s exactly what we must do.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem to be doing any good.”

“Don’t blaspheme.”

Aurelia did not think that saying the truth was a blasphemy, but resolved to keep on mending her uncle’s pants, knowing that her mother was holding onto faith even though the rest of the family did not share her beliefs.

Her father had been very strict about it:

“We’ve got enough problems as it is, we aren’t going to argue about religion. If it’s written that we must die before our time, we’ll do it with dignity and together, as what we’ve always valued the most, as a family.”

Her father had always been an honest man, but now he did not hesitate to shoot pregnant women.

Did that mean that he was no longer honest? Or did concepts change when circumstances did?

Her grandfather, who, thankfully, did not have to witness such apocalypse, would tell bitter stories about bloody wars in which beard-less boys became hateful slaughterers.

His grandchildren listened in silence because it was forbidden to talk while the patriarch was speaking, and there must have been some truth in his words for he was missing three fingers on one hand and had a deep scar traversing his forehead.

Mutilated in body and spirit, still he managed to get by, start a family and turn an abandoned wasteland into a fertile orchard.

He had gone against the trend and resisted rural exodus, perceiving that moving to the city was a mistake. He refused to become cheap labor, besides, he could only offer one hand.

The owner of what once constituted a prosperous estate that had become a desert after the draught, thanked Saint Pancracio for putting a poor devil in his path who would willingly give him all his savings in exchange for a handful of dirt.

However, when twelve years later he walked past the place again, he had to admit his blunder.

“I’d always felt a certain guilt because I believed I’d ripped you off. Now I see that it was me who got the worst part of the deal.”

“I never ripped you off, because the true value of all this isn’t in the money that I gave you, but all that time and work it took me to find the aquifer. Now people swear you won’t find better water than mine in the entire province.”

“Whoever’s got the good water will have the good life.” the old tenant replied. “I’m happy for you.”

The term “patriarch”, which has fallen in disuse these days, fit the grandfather like a glove. Now, the old man rested among apple trees a few feet away from the woman who had borne him three children–perhaps as compensation for the three fingers he had lost.

After a few adventures and diversions, the two eldest, Saúl and Samuel, followed their father’s steps, while the youngest, Anabel, insisted on studying Fine Arts and ended up as a restorer specialized in Flemish paintings.

Aurelia adored her aunt and was always impatient for summer, when Anabel appeared with a mountain of paintings to restore and an enormous accordion that horrified the whole family and made the dogs howl.

She had an eye for detail and a firm pulse but lacked an ear for music.

Aware of her limitations but deaf to discouragement, every morning and every evening she left the house and walked into the woods–where even squirrels scampered away–to play her music.

Funnily enough, her sister in law, who loved milking the cows, swore that whenever Anabel played, the cows gave more milk and farted less–details which she felt grateful for.

It was widely known that animals enjoyed music but not that cows had such bad taste; although, perhaps the fact that they spent their days ruminating made them more sensitive to certain nuances that the human ear could not perceive.

Aside from the disproportionate love for the accordion, which had earned her a handful of enemies among their neighbors, the offending musician was so chirpy and charming that her niece begged her parents to let Anabel sleep in her bed. Aurelia loved the hours she spent listening to stories about her aunt’s love affairs and the reasons why she had rejected five marriage proposals.

“The one I liked the most snored and the second on my list was Siberian.”

“And what’s wrong with being Siberian?”

“He insisted that we moved to Siberia. One spring he even took me there and my fingers went so numb that I couldn’t paint or play. I think he did it on purpose.”

“Did what on purpose?”

“Be Siberian; it was a shame because I actually loved him.”

Aurelia missed her aunt dearly but was glad that she was away at that time, especially on the dreadful morning in which her father felt forced to kill a pregnant woman.

The poor man was so troubled by what he had done that he refused to eat for three days, and if he ate again it was only because he knew that if he disappeared, so would his family.

His brother could not manage on his own and would eventually break down too, just as he had when he was widowed.

Forgetting lively Tatiana had taken Samuel three years of wandering the world dragging his sorrow. During that time he worked any job that came his way, anything that would not even closely remind him of the happier times when they still lived under the roof of the patriarch, to whom they almost gave a grandson.