Stories in English

Translation by Zsuzsi Stankey de Troya

THE WATCHMAN

The watchman's lighthouse stood on the peak of a mountain. The mountain was located at the confines of the world. It was said that the watchman was as old as memory itself; others claimed he was not a being of this world, though no one had ever had the courage to look him in the face.

The watchman was charged with keeping the lighthouse lit, so that all travelers would know they had reached the ends of the earth, and that beyond lay only a valley from which no one could return.

After a long and weary journey, the rider finally arrived at the edge of the world, but raising his eyes to the lighthouse, he saw only the rocks of its formidable foundations, for a thick mist hid its summit.

The rider shouted at the top of his lungs: "Watchman! Are you still there?" "I am still here, and here I shall remain until the end of time!" replied the watchman from above. "Haven't you been told that the world has ended?" "No. But if that were so, I would have been the first to know." "The world is already over! Perhaps the mist prevented you from seeing the end! I am the only one who managed to escape the terrible cataclysm!" "Are you sure?" asked the watchman with a voice from beyond the grave. "Your mission has finally ended; there is no one left in the world!" "My mission is not yet over," said the watchman. "In truth, I was only waiting for you."

Only then could the rider see the skinless face of the watchman and his long, fleshless arms. Through the mist flashed the glint of a sharp scythe, and the rider fell lifeless, along with the beast he rode.

"My mission has finally ended," said the watchman, "there is no one left in the world." And having said this, he vanished into the mist. Little by little, on the horizon, the sky and the earth began to fade away.

ABBADON

It was a recently discovered planet. The reason for its name, Abaddon, was a mystery from the start. The Destroyer, or The Exterminator; that is what Abaddon means in Hebrew. It was the astronomer who discovered it who gave it that name. Shortly after, the astronomer was found lifeless under strange circumstances. Some claimed it was suicide. But before that, he had gone so far as to affirm that a malignant spirit dwelt upon Abaddon.

Years later, the first exploratory capsule finally descended on Abaddon. Bill Morgan, the capsule’s sole occupant, would become the first human being to set foot on that planet. A massive mothership with seven other crew members waited high above, outside the planet's gravitational field.

When Bill Morgan stepped out of the capsule, he had the impression of being in a shadowy rocky desert in some unknown region of Earth. So strong was this impression that he unconsciously wanted to remove his space helmet. Of course, he did not do so.

Bill Morgan moved away from the capsule to install an ultrasensitive thermometer. The planet's gravitational force pinned him heavily against the ground. But suddenly, he detected a flicker on the ultrasensitive thermometer's indicator. Bill Morgan attributed it to his heart rate; he was nervous; the tension of the moment was inevitable, and perhaps this influenced his body heat, which was in turn detected by the sensor. In any case, he moved a little further away to install a spectrometer and an inert gas decoder. With the equipment installed, it would finally be known if Abaddon's extreme aridity could be reversed by scientific means, since the first colonists would possibly begin arriving in thirty years.

Bill Morgan had been selected for his great intelligence and skill, even though his record held some charges of abuse of power and excessive ferocity. However, a few months of inner rehabilitation had transformed the young pilot into a stable and serene person, competent to carry out the mission.

Finally, Bill Morgan bent down to collect some soil samples. And then, something grazed his back.

Bill Morgan stood up in terror. The somber landscape of Abaddon remained immutable, but in the distance, he saw the light of the ultrasensitive thermometer blinking, as if a warm-blooded animal (or a very cold one) were prowling nearby. Bill Morgan hurried back to the capsule, but upon entering, he sensed that someone was there, waiting for him. Yet, he saw nothing strange. So Bill Morgan closed the hatch, normalized the oxygen pressure, stabilized the interior temperature, and removed his space helmet.

And then, he inhaled a thing.

It was as if a volatile being penetrated his lungs and passed from there to his brain. Bill Morgan entered a kind of eon, a time outside of time, and experienced an insane pleasure in darkness, in total destruction, in chaos.

"Who are you?" asked Bill Morgan, shuddering. "You know who I am," replied the being pulsating in his brain. "I am the death that glides in the darkness; I am the war that devastates at noonday."

But a sort of partial amnesia erased that incident from his memory, and after firing the engines again, he began his return to the mothership.

The captain and the ship's crew gave him a warm welcome. After the toasts and the respective praises, the captain placed a third of the ship's crew into hibernation, including the pilot Bill Morgan. Finally, and without wasting a minute, the captain set a course for Earth; it would be approximately seven years of flight.

The ship's captain was a passionate reader; reading the classics occupied his leisure moments. On this occasion, he opened his virtual Bible and found a passage at random. They were verses from the Gospel of Luke:

“When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first.”

Suddenly, and without knowing why, the captain thought of the only crew member who had descended onto Abaddon, the young astronaut Bill Morgan, but he did not know why he related that passage to him, nor why that charismatic young man filled him with such deep unease. The sarcophagus where Bill Morgan hibernated was just a few steps away.

The captain smiled vaguely and closed his virtual Bible. He could not imagine, even remotely, what kind of being he was taking back to Earth.

THE WASP IN THE SPIDERWEB

The afternoon I met Irina López Aguerre was full of premonitions in which one is not sure if what is happening has happened before at one point in one’s life and was forgotten and some casual deed reminds us of it again. I say this because when I called at her door (I have not met Irina nor did I suspect her name) an image came to my mind in antique white, or better, an image in yellow white, as the white of a washbasin stained with iodine. It was a memory from my childhood when I was a small boy no more than five years old.

I found myself standing in front of a white wall, dripping a tartarous dye, when I heard a voice. I could never remember what it said and was never sure if it was the voice of a man or that of a boy imitating the voice of an adult. Many times I wanted to think that it was the voice of an archangel confirming the existence of God. What is certain, however, is that for me the world stopped in that moment and it became fixed in my memory as if it were to be the initial point of endless repetition.

To one side of that wall there was a pale spider web and a wasp flew   into it. Immediately the spider appeared and trapped it in its web.  The wasp fought bravely and buried his sting: the spider suddenly contracted and died instantly. To see the wasp trapped and the spider dead by its side was a very disturbing and tragic sight for me to contemplate; I suppose it was my first encounter with the cold reality of death.

Only now, after so many years, I believe to know the reason that this thought crossed my mind the afternoon I stopped, without thinking, in front of Irina’s door.  Irina Lopez Aguerre lived in the western part of the city, in a middle-class neighborhood, was motherless and her father went to live with a wretched woman whom Irina hated with all her soul.  The reason that justified this hate was that this woman didn’t wait for her mother’s corps to get cold before trapping her father.  

How could people like such exist? Irina asked me that afternoon, obviously referring to her father and that tramp. It would have been a normal question between two people who knew each other for some time, but I have just called at her door and without asking her anything she started to talk about her life and a quarter of an hour later we were conversing like old friends and I even smoked three of her cigarettes.

All said up to now, would seem something taken from a surrealist motion picture, but it wasn´t like that at all, because the afternoon I met Irina I was conducting a survey for a very important firm, questions like if you have internet, if you are satisfied with the service they give you and if the house you live in is yours or you rent it ….things of that sort.

It was two or three in the afternoon, I’m not sure, but when I rang the bell I could not have imagined that a girl in pijamas would open the door. Her hair was uncombed but she looked pretty, and it seemed to me that I have seen her before someplace, maybe walking on the street, even though I was not sure if it wasn’t just my imagination.   

The truth is that I was impressed by her white toasted skin, her lazy eyes and straight, chestnut colored hair that shone like gold in the sun. What do you want?, Irina asked, and that’s when I told her that I was doing a survey for an important company. Would you like to come in and take a seat? Irina asked me smiling and I was just about to say no, that it was not necessary, when I realized that it would be foolish on my part and I accepted gladly.   

We sat down and she lit a cigarette, smoking in front of me. It was obvious that she had not eaten anything as she just got out of bed, and I thought to myself, this girl must be brimming with health to be smoking on an empty stomach. She started answering the questions on the survey and we got to the question of whether the house was hers or was simply renting it.  

I am the owner of this house, she said. My mother worked day and night to build this house and she left it to me. That is how our conversation began about her father, and before I realized I already smoked three cigarettes, knew her name, her likes and dislikes and felt I have fallen in love with her.

Here I said to myself You never imagined meeting a girl like this, did you? Irina started to talk of her father. He was selfish, incapable of making himself a cup of coffee, or even to flush the toilet. You should have seen him when my mother died, Irina said. He was pulling his hair, banging on the floor, throwing himself down crying like a baby, his friends worried that he would get a heart attack. But just a week later, he picked up this woman and went to live with her. Actually it was for the better, she said, cause men like that make me sick.   

I agreed with her and told her that on the contrary, I was very much able to take care of all domestic chores and was not inconsiderate like her father.  This seemed simply divine to Irina.  I can’t believe that you cook, iron, do the laundry, she said, you are really enchanting.

I was ready to tell her an endless number of my virtues, but I saw in  a moment that perhaps it was not appropriate because I had the impression  of falling into a mortal trap. Look sweetheart, whispered Irina in my ears, my mother built this house and I’m going to tell you the truth, cause I don’t like to beat around the bush:  I like you and I know you like me, so lets not say anything more; I’m sure you understand what I’m saying.

She said this after at least three hours of conversation, when we have gotten to know each other better, become quite close actually and now our knees were touching.  Look sweety, she whispered in my ear, I don´t think it was an accident that you rang my bell this afternoon, because while I was in bed I was thinking: Ah, if I only had someone to talk to, someone to love and someone I could surrender to body and soul!, and it so happened that the bell rang and there you were.

This was another déjà-vu, and I was not sure if I have lived this before or if it was something I imagined. Something inside was warning me be careful, be smart, go slowly! But another voice was encouraging me not to fear and to go ahead. Surely enough two weeks later I was married to Irina.

She would not even let me get up to make coffee; she would bring it to me in bed. Later she found a job and would get up early, while I stayed at home cooking, ironing and doing the laundry cause I couldn’t find a job. However, I got bored after a while and that is when Irina decided to do everything by herself, so I would have time to see my friends.

Irina smoked too much, worked too hard and did all the chores at home and this was deteriorating her health to the point that she became very thin and one day she couldn’t get out of bed.  I took her to the hospital where they told me that she was not only exhausted but had a fatal illness and it was impossible to save her. Irina faded away and died one afternoon in March, when the sun came through the window and painted the white tile of the living room an iodine yellowish color.

I couldn’t help recalling the image of the black spider receiving the fatal sting and the slight tremor of its posterior before it lay immobilized, dead with its legs contracted. And I couldn’t forget the wasp either in the spider web. I am sure that Irina and I were predestined; we were born for each other.   

Today I am alone in Irina’s house. Each day that goes by I am more paralyzed and I have no will to go out on the street. Irina did everything for me and without her I feel lost.  Each day my space becomes less. After the death of Irina I used to go for a walk at night, but later I was even afraid to turn the corner. Making a heroic effort I managed to walk a few blocks, but later I didn´t have the courage to go near the door.  I am afraid to face the world, feel terrified to confront life, I can’t overcome it, it’s something psychological I think. I have lived these last days between the bathroom and the living room, watching television all day.

With each day that goes by I need less space in the house and today it is limited to the bedroom which I shared with her; I don’t want to leave it, not even to go to the living room. Finally, I don’t have the courage to leave the bed even for a moment; I am afraid to put my feet on the ground.  I don’t know why I am so sure that at last it will be here that they will find my corps, here, in my bed, in Irina’s bed.