Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (17 page)

“That’s enough,
Mama.”

“And it’s your turn to go
to the Committee meeting.”

“What?”

“Your friend the president
wants you to talk about zombies and the work you’re doing in the
CIDEZ. It’ll always be better if you talk than if they argue about
another meditation on Fidel, no?”

“Damn it all to hell! As
tired as I am...”

The meeting was as absurd
as any other that I’d already attended. In fact, all of them have
been equally absurd since they were created. In some house, whether
because the owner is a militant of the party or needs a letter from
the Committee for a telephone to be installed, a table is set up
with a tablecloth as corny as one used for a one-year-old’s
birthday party. The Cuban flag is hung up and behind the table sits
the comrade president of the CDR, the comrade from the Vigilancia,
and someone who holds a position called “the ideologist,”, which
can sound like someone who brainwashes people but in practice is
the person in charge of updating the mural.

The mural is something
that needs its own explanation. Every CDR has one, therefore in
theory every neighborhood in the city should have one. It is a
piece of wood, pasteboard or thick cardboard, decorated with all
the bad taste of a young girl’s quinceñera dress. Then fragments of
stories from the newspaper are pinned to it. Stories that everyone
has read, which are usually old because no one updates it and no
one cares about it.

Before them, standing and
randomly spread out across the sidewalk and the street, is the
audience. Old people who have nothing to do or belong to the
Association of Combatants, housewives who constantly check their
watches so they don’t miss the start of the Brazilian soap opera,
officials from companies and state organizations that need an image
of militancy although they only care about the prices of automotive
parts on the black market. The classic CDR members. The living
image of the neighborhood.

So, the meeting began like any political
act: by singing the national anthem. The song is not just a symbol
of the fatherland but it is also an hymn to the war of
independence. Now imagine an almost pathetic group of housewives
concerned about their telenovelas and workers who are dying to go
to bed, trying to sing a patriotic song that was conceived as a
battle hymn.

Al combate corred bayameses

Que la Patria os contempla…

You can’t sing an hymn
like that while hoping that it’s over before you start. You just
can’t, or the result is the living image of decline. With each
stanza, the poetic battlecry dwindled in tone until it resembled a
bolero.

Que morir por la Patria es
vivir.

By the final stanza, the song was now a
whisper.

There is nothing more decadent.

“Well, we’re going to
start the meeting of our CDR number 23,” Ramón, the president,
started to say. “Comrade Felipe, block ideologist, will read for us
a fragment of...”

And thus began a
long-winded speech that didn’t do more than repeat what was said
all the time on television and in the newspapers. First they read a
pamphlet explaining how bad shape the world is in and how well
things are going for us. Then they spoke of the need for neighbors
to stop turning on the lights in the doorways at night. There were
some protests by those in attendance. These murmurs ended when the
president said that, if the electric company couldn’t resolve the
public lighting problem in our neighborhood, it was the duty of the
revolutionaries to illuminate the street with the light from their
homes. There were a few complaints about the price of electricity
and the president wound up speaking badly of the embargo and the
president of the United States. I didn’t understand the logic of
his thought process, but the end result was that the discussion was
concluded.

As a second agenda item,
the president introduced me and told them that I would speak to
them about CIDEZ’s work. He had no need to introduce me, of course,
because everyone had known me since I was little. And they knew of
every stone I threw that broke a window, of every university
girlfriend that I kissed in my doorway. They even knew the grades
of every course I passed, both for my degree and my post-grad
degree. It’s what’s awful about all living in the same
place.

I began to explain to them
about CIDEZ’s efforts to develop a vaccine against the Z virus. I
told them that we treat the zombies as infected persons and not as
walking cadavers. I spoke to them about how incorrect it was to say
zombie when in reality people say zombí, a word in Creole, the
language spoken in Haiti. I told them the story of Bokor, a sort of
dark mage with the power to revive the dead, who had formed a
brigade of sugar cane workers from the dead which he used without
paying them. The families of the dead recognized their loved ones,
who they had thought were buried. They persecuted the dark mage for
converting them into zombies and returned the dead to their
tombs.

I had barely finished the story when the
problems started. It seemed as if no one had understood anything.
Especially not the president of the CDR, who got up from his chair
and stared daggers at me.

“One moment, Comrade. Are
you trying to say that in our country, a dark mage governs who uses
the living dead as slaves?”

“I never said such a
thing, Fernando... what I meant to say was...”

“Everyone knows that the Z
virus was created by the CIA to attack third world countries.
There, in the United States, things got out of their control. But
we knew, as the Comandante said, to turn the setback into a
victory. Now the zombies are a weapon of the Revolution. They’re
used to cut cane during the sugar harvest, but they’re not slaves,
no... They’re zombie revolutionaries!”

“But I...”

“We are not going to allow
any attempts to destabilizes us with those absurd stories invented
by the enemy...”

And he kept talking. And
talking. Or rather insulting. And repeating stock phrases about the
revolution, socialism, and zombies. First I tried to explain to him
that precisely the use of the zombies in the sugar harvest or in
the May first parades was possible thanks to the CIDEZ serum which
allowed the living dead to slightly develop their primary reflexes,
diminishing their uncontrollable impulse to eat and thereby
allowing the zombie to react to certain simple orders. But I was
wasting my breath. He didn’t understand anything. Then I tried to
retract myself a little. I said that a parallel with the Haitian
legend could never have occurred. That the intention of the
Revolution was right in trying to assimilate the zombie problem in
a dialectic fashion. In the end, a legend is just a legend. He
didn’t understand any of it. He merely stopped, with his arms
crossed, and said, “And, moreover, everyone knows that in Haiti
they speak Patuá.”

Patuá is the most-racist
and colonialist way to describe Creole. It began as a joke about
the way the Haitian slaves spoke and wound up becoming a custom
among the white men. In many places it was even a joke. There was
nothing more to add. Well, yes, there was the phrase
Me cago en el coño de tu madre, you fat
racist
, but the television at home was
broken. Rumors had leaked out that they would deliver Chinese
televisions to those people whose units were very old or were
broken, another campaign of the Revolution. Of course, like
everything else, the distribution would be through the CDR and if I
made the unforgivable mistake of calling our CDR president a
racist, or what’s worse, fat, there wouldn’t be enough televisions
for abuela to get one. All that without taking into account the
tiny detail that Rafael wasn’t a real zombie. Things could get
complicated, and I could even lose my job if the flames reached the
CIDEZ. So I decided to bite my tongue and endure his insults in
front of the entire neighborhood.

Before I went home, I went and stood at the
corner were Panchito was playing zombie with some friends from the
neighborhood.

“So, how did the meeting
go?” Julián asked while he loudly placed a tile on the
table.

“I was this close to
telling off Ramón.”

“That would’ve been great.
You sending that guy to the
carajo
. Come on, tell us, this is
better than the telenovelas.”

And I told them. In part,
because I had to tell someone or I was going to explode. I needed
some understanding or I’d wind up throwing stones at the house of
the president of the CDR until it fell down, something that wasn’t
a very good idea from a rational perspective, but at that moment I
wasn’t a rational being. That’s why I needed to talk, so I could be
reasonable again.

But it’s also true that I
was giving in to the adolescent within me. I, the person with the
highest scientific cachet in the neighborhood, the only one who
went to university and who wound up working in the most-prestigious
institute of the scientific area, had been publicly humiliated by
that fat informer. That’s why I was there, talking loudly late into
the night, with the layabouts, the losers, the antisocial elements
that neither studied nor worked, with the people who were looked
down on because they lived by the hustle, by black market dealings,
by selling what they stole from the state warehouses. They are
always looked down upon because they play dominoes on Monday
morning when everyone goes off to work even though they don’t want
to go they go. Because they have to. Because they have no other
choice. Because that’s what decent, hard-working revolutionary
people do.

But no one ever reprimands
them for making a racket until late, no one goes for the police or
points their finger at them, no one is that good a revolutionary.
Because no one is crazy. Some fear the scandal, others a violent
confrontation, but all fear them because when the milk for the
children runs out at the bodega, they need to turn to them. Just
like for meat or oil. Because they “solve things.” They look here
and there, without caring how legal things are. They’re
delinquents, but they’ve fed half the neighborhood.

“My brother, you’re crazy.
How did it occur to you to try to explain to that group of die hard
commies what a bokor or a zombie is? And even less, to tell them a
story where there’s an old man who exploits zombies. You know that
they’re looking for double meanings all the time, combing through
your words for some offensive comment against Fidel to earn points
at your expense. If you tell them the story of the hunchbacked
little pony, they’re not going to listen to the Russian epic,
they’re going to say you’re making fun of Fidel by calling him El
Caballo.”

“My bad. But I learned my
lesson.”

“That’s it, my man. Low
profile so they don’t mess with you. Don’t draw attention. You’re
smart and you studied. In the end, you’ll get a hang of
this.”

I returned home tired and
didn’t hear the dog in the house next to ours. I don’t mean Ramón’s
Doberman but Amanda’s dachshund. It was strange for it not to bark
at my appearance at this time of night. The bulb of the street lamp
was broken, so the street was dark. I looked around, a little
lightheaded from sleepiness. The night was cool and clear. At the
end of the street, I noticed someone walking. With slow steps. Like
someone dragging their feet. Zombie steps.

I live at the end of a
dead-end street and those steps came from the wall at the end of
the street. If something, or someone, was walking from there it
meant that they’d spent all night waiting to start walking now. But
waiting for what? Or for whom? If it were human, I would think of
an attack, but a zombie... there was no reason for a zombie to
spend all night waiting for someone living. At least unless... no,
it couldn’t be. Our zombies are peaceful. I myself work where they
inject them with the serum that makes them docile.

The footsteps continued,
becoming louder, coming closer. Toward me. The hair on the back of
my neck stood up. An irrational fear came over me. I hurried to
open the gate. As is natural, the more you hurry and the more
nervous you are, the more you wind up fumbling with the iron grate
and the longer it takes you to get inside. As I undid the lock, I
looked behind me and managed to glimpse a silhouette wobbling
toward me. Its glassy eyes reflecting the light of the moon. I
opened the door. It was, in effect, one of them. Someone infected
by the Z virus, a walking dead, a zombie. I withdrew into my house
as he continued walking toward me. I slammed the grate shut. The
door shut in his face, but he didn’t care. Clinically, they’re
dead, they don’t care about anything.

In other countries, they
only think about eating, in biting everything before them and,
along the way, infecting you with the virus in their saliva. Ours
are not like that. They have a little more cerebral activity, which
dulls their hunger and aggression. At least, unless this one wasn’t
inoculated with the serum.

He bumped against the
grate, bumped again before stopping. Normally they don’t see
anything, but they have a strong sense of smell. He made no sound,
didn’t bare his teeth against the fence. He remained there, pressed
against the grate, watching me with his empty eyes, unable to see
me. Just an ownerless zombie, lost or abandoned. A zombie without
ownership papers, without a CIDEZ certificate. But inoculated with
the serum at some point. I stood there watching the street zombie
for a while. It tried to advance and again crashed against the
fence.