When we got there, we saw it. It was so astonishing it took a while for me to absorb. To begin with, we saw that the alarm was justified, to say the least. I don’t know exactly how to describe it. At first, it was otherworldly; it was still dawn, the sun hadn’t yet appeared, the sky was very clear and very empty, bodies projected no shadows. . and colossal blue worms were slowly descending from the mountain peaks. . I’m aware that stating it like this might bring automatic writing to mind, but stating it is my only choice. It seems like the insertion of a different plot line, from an old B-rated science fiction movie, for example. Nevertheless, the seamless continuity had at no time been interrupted. They were living beings, of this I was certain: I had too much experience manipulating life forms to make that mistake. There are some movements no machine can imitate. I calculated the size of the worms: they were approximately one thousand feet long and seventy feet in diameter; they were almost perfect cylinders, with no heads or tails, although their geometric form had to be mentally reconstructed because they were coiling and twisting and changing shape as they moved across the anfractuous mountain terrain. They also looked soft and slimy, but their formidable weight could be deduced by observing them displace enormous rocks along their way, sunder the mountainside, and reduce whole trees to splinters. The most extraordinary thing, which would have been worthy of admiration had the circumstances not added an extra touch of terror, was their color: a phosphorescent blue with watery tones, like an almost darkened sky, a blue that seemed dampened by fresh placentas.
Nelly grabbed my arm. She was horrified. I swept my eyes along the perimeter of this great Andean amphitheater: there were hundreds of worms, all descending toward the city. From the shouts, which I quickly began to understand, I learned that the same thing was occurring in the mountains behind us, the ones we couldn’t see from where we stood. I’ve already said that Mérida is completely surrounded by mountains. This meant only one thing: very soon we would be crushed by the monsters. The landslides they were provoking were cataclysmic; the entire valley shook as stones the size of houses tumbled down the slopes, and there was probably already vast destruction on the outskirts. A simple projected calculation revealed that the city was doomed. Two or three of these worms would be enough to leave no brick standing. And there were hundreds of them! Moreover, with horror and despair I realized that the quantity was indefinite. . and increasing. It was as if they kept being born, and the process showed no signs of stopping.
The ones in front were already halfway between the highest peaks and the valley floor. That’s why they were descending: their own multiplication was forcing them downhill. It was an almost mechanical destiny, not one due to any murderous impulse on the part of these strange beasts. In fact, they were much too strange to harbor any agenda. Their size was what would destroy us. . If anyone entertained a hope that their size was an optical illusion, and that they would get smaller as they descended until they appeared as inoffensive as cigarette butts under the soles of our shoes, they would have to dismiss the idea: they were very real, and having one nearby would be a terminal experience.
Any hope regarding the relativity of their size was painfully dispelled a few minutes later, when we witnessed the following episode from where we were standing under the archway. Several military trucks, the one we had seen driving past the plaza and others, converged on a road that rose in the direction of the worms. We saw them stop when they reached the one nearest the city. The soldiers got out and fanned out in front of the blue mass. At that moment denial was no longer possible: the men looked like insects next to the monster — and pathetically ineffectual. This became obvious once they began to shoot at it with their machine guns. They didn’t miss their target once (it was like aiming at the mountain itself), but they could have continued for an eternity to the same effect, that is, to no effect. The bullets disappeared into the soft tons of blue flesh like pebbles tossed into the sea. They tried bazookas, cannons, hand grenades, even antiaircraft missiles fired from the hood of one of the trucks, all with the same derisive futility. The climax came when the worm, in the course of its blind march, slid down a steep slope and one section of its body rolled onto the road, crushing trucks and men like an enormous rolling pin, reducing them to laminas. The survivors ran off in terror. The crowd broke their awed silence as they watched the events unfold, and I heard cries and shouts of anguish. Their worst fears were being confirmed. Somebody pointed to another spot, to one side, where another catastrophe was taking place: it was the highway that led across the plateau and out of the valley. Another worm had fallen over a compact line of cars trying to escape, causing innumerable fatalities. Traffic came to a standstill, and people abandoned their cars and ran between the rocks and bushes back toward the city. There was no escape. This was definitive. Eyes turned with fear toward the old colonial buildings around us: the city itself seemed to be the last possible refuge, and it was an illusion to think that its feeble walls could withstand the weight of the worms.
The collective attention turned back to itself, as if to confirm the reality of what was occurring through the reaction of fear. And I was implicated in this reversion. Like so many others, like everybody, perhaps, I have always thought that in a real collective catastrophe I would find the material of my dreams, take it in hand, shape it, finally; then, even if only for an instant, everything would be permitted. It would take something as grand and widespread as an earthquake, an interplanetary collision, or a war to make the circumstances genuinely objective and thus make room for my subjectivity to take hold of the reins of action.
But the subjective was made manifest even in the supremely objective. The examples of cataclysms hereby offered, which in reality are not examples, do not include the invasion of enormous slimy creatures. That would never happen in real life; it rises out of a feverish imagination, in this case mine, and returns to it as a metaphor for my private life.
Here I have again reached the moment to change levels, to make another “translation.” But this one is so radical that it comes full circle and reties the plot line exactly where I left it.
The mental process of the character representing me in the previous “translation,” from the point at which he was contemplating the benefits of a collective catastrophe, apparently dissolved entirely into fiction, then gathered up all the loose ends and elaborated a generalized reinterpretation, not only of the previous “translations” but of the process itself out of which “translations” arise.
Just as when interpreting a nightmare, I was assailed by a sudden doubt: might it be my fault? A priori, this seemed absurd, an extreme manifestation — exaggerated to the point of caricature — of the lack of proportion between small causes and grand effects. But one thing led to the next, and in a vertiginous process this conjecture became more and more plausible. I went back and reviewed my own “translations” until I found the root of them all, the device from which they had emerged. In my mind, the march of the worms became retrograde, and with the same brutal blindness with which they were descending, they turned and climbed back up, destroying my inventions, from whose crushed cadavers rose little clouds of memory, ghosts of memory.
Because I had forgotten everything. The same system that created my thoughts took charge of erasing them, turning them into sinuous white strips that reached across every level. How can there be so much amnesia in a single lifetime? Isn’t this a point in favor of the theory of reincarnation?