Yet I had no desire to become a sailor when I grew up. Even as a child I was a coward.
At 2:47 the inhabitants of twenty republics rush out of their houses and shacks. The streets overflow, screaming children are trampled underfoot. In the countryside the frantic livestock break down fences and stampede into the fields.
When I was small, and even after my boyhood was over, I often fled from people, things and situations that I didn’t like or that scared me. Sometimes for no apparent reason. For example, I have never found a rational explanation for my determined avoidance of church services, unless it was the annoying slowness of the Protestant ministers I encountered when I was still young and a keen observer. Unlike the Catholic fathers I had watched, who rattle off everything as quickly as possible to the accompaniment of careless movements and gestures, ministers are extremely sluggish and drag proceedings out for as long as possible. With measured Old Testament solemnity, they stride towards the pulpit, mount it with dignity, stare for a few seconds over the heads of the congregation at a blank wall, and then spend thirty minutes expounding a two-line biblical text that is as clear as crystal.
When I did my military service, those not yet twenty-one were regarded as underage and had to attend church on Sundays. I was eighteen, and very much a minor. With the exception of two other Protestants, all the men in my company were Catholics; they had it easy, since after attending a brief mass in the gym they were free to go. The Protestant trio were loaded into a weapon carrier and under the supervision of a sergeant driven to the fort church in town. The vehicle stopped in Government Square, and under the watchful eye of our chaperone we had to walk through the arch of the governor’s mansion. Once we had reached the church steps and the surveillance ceased, I would always take my leave of my comrades and march briskly out of the square through a narrow alleyway near the old post office. On the way home I had to keep a sharp lookout to avoid bumping into the sergeant with whom I should have been sitting in church.
Sometimes there is no escape from unpleasantness. I once lay on a bed in a neurological clinic in the freezing capital of Colombia while a gay male nurse shaved off my pubic hair very professionally and with obvious pleasure. I’ve never felt so humiliated and helpless, but in such circumstances it’s difficult to make a getaway.
At 2:48 am God embraces the continent with his gigantic arms; with one hand on the Atlantic east coast and the other on the Pacific west coast, he squeezes with all the fearsome geological strength at his command. The continent creaks from top to bottom.
The great cities, the tall governmental towers and the skyscrapers of the industrialists collapse, and an avalanche of concrete, steel and glass devastates the smaller buildings; the church towers of all the towns and villages crumble, burying everyone who has sought sanctuary in the house of God. Enormous tidal waves smash the coasts and engulf the towns and villages along the coast of South America. Fishing boats, freighters and oil tankers are tossed ashore; thick black blood flows from the tankers back to the sea. High walls of water, mud and rock rush down the mountain slopes, burying every living thing in the valleys. The noise of insects continues to swell and soon drowns out the roar of the landslides and the toppling mountains, a diabolical cacophony that bursts the eardrums of all surviving vertebrates. Cries of pain from men and beasts resound through the continent, but, all being deaf, no creature hears another. Only now do the crickets and grasshoppers fall silent and, together with the beetles, the earwigs and the springtails, they descend upon the emptying forests, where they devour everything green. At the same time, multicoloured butterflies and hideous moths invade the cities in endless swarms and attack the struggling humans and animals; the big butterflies cling to their burning-hot eyes, while the smaller varieties and the moths wriggle, scores at a time, into the nostrils of men, women, children and animals and choke them. Light-hating termites leave their colonies in vast armies, devouring the stripped trees and the timber in the wrecked houses. Stinking cockroaches and giant spiders crawl from their dark hiding places on the forest floor to partake of this final meal.
I shudder at the growing hideousness of the spectacle. I can hear the voice of my Venezuelan uncle saying that God speaks to men through earthquakes, that they shall be visited with winds, storms and devouring flames. I must quickly redirect my thoughts.
From far off I hear music, antique music played on horns and shawms, and very close to me I feel the breath of a young woman. As clearly as if in broad daylight, a procession of beautiful creatures passes before me, their rhythmically swaying bodies immaculate, eyes shining with pride at their nakedness, each with a crown of white flowers, their private parts decked with evergreen. They rise up from the earth and are received into a merciful black hole beyond the luminous ribbon of the Milky Way. My grateful heart rejoices when I see among the chosen ones the long-haired blonde girl who ages ago, in a distant country, ignited my only true passion.
At 2:49 am dead birds begin to rain down on the ravaged earth; only the vultures remain hovering in prayer in the sky. Suddenly they too dive down at lightning speed and plunge their bald heads ravenously into the swollen human and animal carcasses. When the heads reemerge, great chunks of intestine, dripping with blood and fat, are hanging from the curved beaks. Among the ruins of the towns and villages insects with bloated stomachs swarm over the human and animal remains, now stripped of flesh. The ants leave their shattered dwellings and advance in countless disciplined armies for the final reckoning. The gorged vultures and insects they find among the skeletons offer no resistance and are all destroyed. Once the task of retribution has been accomplished, each ant grabs another and after a ritual death dance each mortally wounds the other with its mandibles and injects its deadly poison. Nothing on the continent is left alive.
It is finished; the entire history of the old continent has been written. And at 3 am precisely there will be light, because the sun will be ignited. This tropical sun, murderous rather than life-giving, hangs in the splendid blue sky that succeeds every natural disaster, casting its even glare upon the universal putrefaction. The vast land is empty and lifeless; only in the deepest recesses of a gigantic ice floe that drifts up from the Antarctic is there a faintly throbbing, slimy mass, from which one day an amorphous, translucent creature will be born. Perhaps one day a new continent will emerge from it. A new territory that this time will not be linked to the north by a twisted umbilical cord and will not have Spanish as its lingua franca.
I go inside; the Caribbean islands have yet to be destroyed. I do not lock my door, I do not let the dogs out, I do not turn off the lights, I do not brush my teeth. I take the pistol from its hiding place in the wardrobe and lay it on the bedside table to the right of my bed. I switch on the air conditioning and, without undressing, lie down on the bed. With fading recognition I look at the familiar things around me: the wardrobe full of clothes, most of which I have never worn; the big curtain over the window, lined with thick material to keep out the light when I sleep all morning; the small, brightly coloured vase that I have been looking at for twenty years and which every Wednesday I am always afraid the cleaning woman will smash, as she has done with most of the glassware; the orange rug next to my bed, on which I sometimes let one of the dogs spend the night when it is ill or sad. The feeling of oneness with these things has vanished — it is as if they already belong to others. I light a cigarette. The smoke I exhale is sucked up to the ceiling by the air conditioning and then snakes lazily back down the wall. Outside I can hear the crowing of the cocks. The roar of morning is here once more and is not to be trusted.