The last two selections have focused on the potentialities of man for immediate, direct contact with (and influence over) the physical environment. “The Red Egg” reverses the field, and examines the capacity for perception and (in a slightly different sense) communication by the (biological, this time) environment.
José Maria Gironella is a Spanish author best known for his trilogy about the Spanish Civil War, The Cypresses Believe in God. This story is from a collection of short works, subtitled Journeys to the Improbable, in which the author recorded a period of what he called “psychic experience”—hallucinations, weird images and insights, obsessive imaginings, which haunted him for two years.
THE RED EGG
José Maria Gironella
The malignant tumor, cancer, flew over the rooftops of the city. It had the shape of an egg. Its flight was slow and solemn. The birds noticed something strange in its proximity and moved away from it, coasting in silence. It was a young cancer, red in color, with bluish bands. It was three years old. It had been born in an experimental laboratory, in the skin of a mouse, near a pit-coal mine. Its destiny—to die with the mouse—had seemed a small glory and it had decided to escape. This it did, breaking away and flying off through a window. Scarcely free, it soaked up the mine’s atmosphere and then allowed itself to be touched by the ultraviolet rays of sunlight. It noticed itself becoming more robust, thriving. It went on molding itself with art, changing position in relation to those rays, until it attained an oval form. Its highest aspiration was to be like an egg, since this would guarantee its fecundity. Once it reached its objective, it gave itself over to the whims of the wind, up and down, seeing landscapes it would never have known in the laboratory. Until it came upon the industrial city.
The Red Egg, three years old, gifted with one large and sensitive eye, understood that the city held in its breast all that appealed to him—paraffin, smoke, etc.—and he breathed with satisfaction. At each inhalation, a band of quills or antennae erupted around his belly, which then contracted when he exhaled. He looked at the cathedral clock: two minutes before noon. Vaguely he remembered that, in the laboratory where he was captive, every morning on the stroke of twelve a bell rang, and first a nurse entered, bringing them food, and immediately afterward came men dressed in white, protected by lead aprons.
Midday in the city was even more spectacular. The sirens of all the factories shrilled, and instantly the streets were crowded. Men and women headed for their respective homes, where there were quick kisses all around and where the babies were lifted into the air like flags. The Red Egg smiled. In the laboratory he’d fled from, he had never heard speak of love.
The passing parade of the city’s inhabitants permitted the cancer to take a look at the bodies, especially those that had passed the age of thirty-five. He immediately observed that his brothers, the tumors, had carried out an intensive labor. In fact, there were already a considerable number of people who carried cancer incrusted in some part of their organism, in the stomach, in the bladder, in the larynx, etc. Some of these people already moved without vigor, coughed repeatedly and had sharpened noses. Others were completely ignorant of the presence of the intruder and seated themselves at the table, unfolding their napkins with good humor. The magnitude of this labor, which had even reached children, and in one case a fetus!, did not surprise the Red Egg, since it was evident that in that city there were abundant accomplices, gestators or transmitters of cancer, such as tobacco tars, anthracite. . . . The Red Egg recognized accomplices of its malignancy even in the jars of beauty products and in the analines that colored certain foods.
The Red Egg, three years old, understood that that city combined in its breast all that was appetizing to him. He could nourish himself indefinitely with the gas tank alone and he could add to that the extreme temperatures of the iron works, alcohol and neon tubes.
Unhurriedly, he roved over the rooftops, asking himself, “Whom shall I attack?” Oh, yes, he must select a victim! The situation was a routine one for his race, but not for him. He breathed voluptuously. Which organism, he asked, would he choose from among so many thousands? Of course, it had to be a human organism, a man or a woman. He could not understand why many of his brothers preferred to adhere to trees, to mushrooms, to fish or to butterflies. And which part would he abide in? The skin and mouth were imprudent. With radio therapy or with a scalpel they could attack him in any surgery. The lungs offered more security and so did the digestive apparatus, whose remote cloisters, yet unknown, constituted a guarantee of impunity. And he must not forget the brain! The Red Egg philosophized in his fashion on the subject. Curious, yes, curious and flattering to be gnawing at the mind, at the faculty to speak and coordinate, to be eating metaphysics, to assassinate the noble potentialities of the being, little by little.
Unexpectedly—the municipal clock pointed to one— something occurred that stunned the Red Egg: as though obedient to an imaginary baton, all the bells of the city began to ring, undoubtedly announcing a forthcoming festivity. The impact of the sound waves hit the cancer point blank, especially those of the cathedral bells that rolled at his side. The fact that these waves were gay and basically contrary to death gave him indescribable anguish. The circle of quills and antennae sprang out round his belly with fulminating aggressiveness but it did not cure him of the nausea he felt. Irritated, he leapt away with decision, toward the west, where it was clear, where there were no steeples. There he recovered. He saw two women hanging out clothes on a roof top. One of them had a carcinoma on one knee! In spite of which she laughed and gestured as though she were eternal. Suddenly, on the outskirts of the city, beyond the ball field, an immense sea of crosses and tombs surged before his green eye. This sight brought back his self-confidence, confidence in his power. A cemetery! It was the first time he had had direct contact with one. In his three years of life he had only seen two cadavers, both of them white mice. It was obvious that many drops in that sea of crosses were due to the action of his brothers. The graveyard constituted, then, a victorious summary, a living testimony of the power and inheritance of his stock.
Certain people in the city discovered that strange presence over their roofs. So strange was it that “a slow oval object” should be seen floating on its own between the steeples, that terror overtook each of these observers, although for the moment none of them dared communicate the news to anyone else. They tried to ascertain if the phenomenon was real, provable. The binoculars sealed their doubts! A red and oval object, gliding smoothly, like certain birds. Occasionally turning upon itself.
The first warning came from the Air Base. Nothing registered on the radar, but the observer on watch, a veteran of the war, discovered the Red Egg. At the same instant that he was focusing his fieldglasses to make sure it was not an hallucination, an old paralytic at the other end of the city, who spent his semi-death close to a balcony, looked up on high and exclaimed to himself, “What’s that?” Whereupon he insisted on binoculars, and a granddaughter obtained them from a nearby store. “A red and oval egg, with something in the middle, resembling an eye!” The paralytic alerted his kin. A group was formed that would go on growing. And the same occurred with the watchman of a factory, installed in his high wooden sentry-box. And with a talkative storyteller, who went up to the roof to feed his pigeons, as usual.