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Of course, there is such a thing as “blind translation,” the act of mechanically transposing one language to another, without passing through the content, which is what professional translators do when they come across a technical and detailed description of a machine or a process. . In order to understand what it’s about, they would need to consult a manual on the subject, study something they know nothing about and doesn’t interest them. . But that isn’t necessary! By translating correctly, sentence by sentence, the entire page, the translation will turn out well, they will continue to be as happily ignorant as they were at the beginning, and they will get paid for their work. After all, they are paid to know the language, not the subject matter.

The inverted vortex of the titanic herd of blue worms was located somewhere in the mountains. They emerged from that spot into the light and began to slither — even before they came fully into view — along the broken horizon of the peaks, like a ball circling the top of the roulette wheel, until they stopped, made their appearance, and began to descend. There were so many and their issuance was so constant that they were all descending at once from all points around the circle (in that particular game of roulette, all the numbers came up at once). I could pinpoint the locus of their emergence, and I was the only person who could: it was the cloning machine. It couldn’t be anything else. The years I had devoted full time to the manipulation of cloned materials had so refined my sixth sense that I could recognize it. These worms had all the characteristics; their very excess — where would that come from if not the uncontrolled multiplication of cells that only the cloning machine could generate? Functional beings have inviolable limits. My first thought was that the machine was malfunctioning, had gone haywire. But I immediately corrected myself; that thought was worthy only of a citizen of a consumer society who buys a microwave or a video camera and is overwhelmed by its complexity. This was not the case with me, because I had invented the cloning machine, and nobody knew better than I that it was infallibly rational.

As I have already mentioned, the worms’ color and texture were their most noticeable characteristics. They are also what led me to the heart of the matter. Because that color, that very peculiar brilliant blue, immediately reminded me of the color of Carlos Fuentes’s cell, which my wasp had brought me. . Though when I saw that color in the cell it did not evoke what it was evoking now that I was seeing it extended over vast undulating surfaces. I now realized I had seen that same color somewhere else, the very same day the cell had been taken, one week before. Where? On the tie Carlos Fuentes was wearing that day! A splendid Italian raw silk tie, over an immaculate white shirt. . and a light grey suit. . (one memory led to another until the picture was complete). And this horrendous piece of evidence revealed the magnitude of the error. The wasp had brought me a cell from Carlos Fuentes’s tie, not his body. A groan escaped my lips.

“Stupid wasp and the accursed mother who made you!”

“What?” Nelly asked, surprised.

“Don’t pay any attention to me, I understand myself.”

The fact is, I couldn’t blame her. It was all my fault. How could that poor disposable cloned tool know where the man stopped and his clothing began? For her it was all one, it was all “Carlos Fuentes.” After all, it was no different than what happened when the critics and professors who were attending the conference found it difficult to say where the man ended and his books began; for them, too, all of it was “Carlos Fuentes.”

I saw it with the clarity of the noonday sun: the silk cell contained the DNA of the worm that had produced it, and the cloning machine, functioning perfectly, had done nothing more than decode and recode the information, with the results we were now witnessing. The blue monsters were nothing more nor less than silkworm clones, and if they had been magnified to that absurd size it was simply because I had set the cloning machine to run in “genius” mode. Under other circumstances I would have smiled with melancholic irony upon seeing to what awkward and destructive gigantism literary greatness could be reduced when it was passed through the weave and warp of life.

I came to my senses after having lost myself in thoughts that rushed through me like a hiccup, and I felt an urgency to do something, anything, to prevent the imminent catastrophe. Regrettably, I have no talent for improvisation. But this was the time for action, not regrets. I would think of something. And even if I didn’t, everything would turn out well. If I had started it, I could end it. If it had come out of me, it had to return to me. It couldn’t be that I would be responsible for the deaths of several tens of thousands of innocent people and the utter devastation — no stone would remain standing — of this old city. The very possibility of the disaster cast over my being a demonic splendor. In my role as a writer, I am inoffensive. What more could I want than to be diabolical, a destroyer of worlds?! But it is impossible. Well reasoned, however, therein lie the benefits of the changes in level, because then I could, in reality, be a diabolical being, an evil monster: such things are fairly relative, as everyone knows from daily experience.

I grabbed Nelly by the shoulder, and we left the group under the archway. The entire crowd was dispersing, women and men moving suddenly and without any apparent purpose. What could they do? Hide in a cellar? Make final arrangements? In the end, they had to do something.

Nelly was in shock. I brought my face up to hers and spoke to provoke a response from her.

“I’m going to do something. I think I can stop them.” She looked at me incredulously. I repeated, “If anyone can save the city, I can.”

“But, how?” she stammered, looking behind her.

“You’re going to have to help me,” which wasn’t altogether true, among other reasons because I still hadn’t devised a plan. But it worked, her eyes recovered a glimmer of interest. She must have remembered that I was the hero of the Macuto Line and that performing feats of historical proportion was not unknown to me.

We didn’t have to go far. We literally bumped into an empty car that had its motor running and the door open; its owner must have joined the group watching events from the archway.

“Let’s go!” I said. I got in behind the wheel. Nelly sat in the passenger seat. We drove off. It was a taxi, an old Pontiac from the seventies, as long and wide as only cars in Venezuela can be today.

I feared the streets would be blocked, but they weren’t. The paralysis of uncertainty persisted throughout the city. I sped up, and we came to Viaduct Avenue. The only solution I could think of was to find a way through the new-born beasts, reach the cloning machine, and turn it off. In this way at least I could stop their emergence. I didn’t know if putting the machine in reverse would reabsorb the worms, but I could try. In the meantime, I stepped on the gas. We were soon on the viaduct, where we commanded an excellent view of the blue masses slithering down the mountains.

“Where are we going?” Nelly asked. “I don’t think we can escape.”

“That is not my intention, quite the contrary. I’m going to try to get to the place where they are coming from,” at which point I inserted a tiny white lie, because I didn’t want her to guess that I was responsible for the disaster. “What we have to do is close the. . hole they are coming out of, and perhaps make them go back. . underground.”

She believed me. It was absurd, but in a certain way it evoked the spring mechanism of the Macuto Line, over which I had already been triumphant, and this lent it a patina of truth.