—Death to the author! Death to the author!— chanted the voices of the people congregated around there. The place was crowded. I did not want to look at anybody, but I noticed their eyes fixed on me, hatred glances, full of content, and, why not to tell it, some fear in the deepness of their hearts. I did not have certainty of it, but I sensed it. In my heart, I recognized that feeling and listening to them shouting, crying those words full of rancor, corroborated it.
Moving through the crowd, escorted by four policemen, they spit on me, tried to hit me, cursed at me, and all their imprecations escaped from their mouth with sputum that fell on my way. They threw me rotten fruits and vegetables while they shouted “to the fire!”, “burn him!” and many more obscenities, I tried not to listen to. I kept my eyes closed while I struggled for remembering my poems, or some other stories contained in my novels. Those were stories that these people, my readers, used to enjoy until the pandemic razed all over the world.
But there I was, walking to an improvised podium where I will be burned alive. And why? What had I have done to them? What reasons have carried me, have brought all of us to this situation. And I really knew it. It was their fault, my fault. Definitedly, it was the fault of all of us: of the world governments, of the political ideals of each of us, that crashed like full speed trains when we confronted with the disaster, with the pandemic, with the virus and all that made evident the differences that, in normal conditions, we would not have maintained.
The virus started its world destruction in 2019, though it did not expand from the Asiatic country until the beginnings of 2020. That damned year people already knew about it. They named it “the bat virus”. With time, it was discovered it did not have an animal origin. Still, it proceeded from a laboratory located in an unkonwn Chinese region. Some christened it “the Chinese Plague,” and nowadays, it is recognized as such, keeping the name it received in the year 2020.
In the beginning, we all thought it was a question the Chinese had to solve. “They will solve it, let them manage with it,” we repeated ourselves to calm our consciences. But something in our interior told us there was something wrong. Everything did not work smoothly, and we began to be afraid of the possible consequences. We prayed for it to remain contained there, but it was not so. In a few months, it spread throughout Europe. We started to confine ourselves at home in an attempt to stop what we did not initially call pandemic.
Each government did what it could, some better than others, or some more cautious than others. Even there were some so confident that they did not predict the disaster, and when they tried to act and take precautions, it was too late. And due to that, those were the countries that suffered the most terrible consequences, reaching the highest number of victims. Others, more fortunate, were ahead of the disaster confining the population in their houses and gathering a lot of tests, surgical masks, and respirators, which reduced the number of victims. But it did not matter too much because the pandemic was everywhere.
Days passed, and people died. But those who were sane and cloistered survived and were capable of maintaining an idyllic and perfect family life. We struggled each day to make different things encouraged by mass media that provided advice on how to make more bearable the confinement. We practiced sport in the dining room, played every type of board game, watched films, and series. We also went out to the balconies to applause our health personnel and our state security forces and bodies, and especially, we read at ease. Books were consumed by hundreds. Their sales ascended in such a way I had never seen in my life and even less in my life as an author. In those days, we were a cherished and requested guild. Our families and close friends were proud of having an author among their relationships. On social media, we were required for friendship every two for three, and you did not need to be a famous author. It was enough you proved you had written one or several books. What beautiful days were those! Bitter moments because of the circumstances, but, paradoxically, happy ones because society was changing... And how it changed!
That year and the next one, it was familiar authors wrote about the pandemic: apocalyptic narrations, dystopian novels, or stories about a utopian society that grew out of the epidemic. Certain people assured something new was going to happen, “the new world order” they called it, and they were not wrong. Neither those who made their voices heard in the different television or radio programs nor those authors who dedicated their efforts to relate the possible disasters we would have to confront. Then, and only then, people considered those stories were merely entertainment, something that only materialized in the pages of a book. How misled we were!
The confinement and the “few” deaths that took place gave way to a new exit, somewhat staggered initially and very suspicious for many people. Fear breathed with every step you took. Greetings and relationships between people were as restrained as possible. But it did not last so much. Summer arrived, and the happiness of still being alive gave way to greater confidence and, as a consequence of that, to a closed deal between citizens.
When Autumn arrived, and rains started, the cool brought new colds, not only common ones but also that virus that some months ago kept us inside our houses. The “second wave” arrived as they expected, and though we were supposedly best prepared than the first time, it took us too much confidence. We considered ourselves invulnerable, and we were no longer afraid of it. How wrong we were!
If that was possible, if the first wave destroyed part of the world, the second one was worse, even much more lethal, more virulent. And we had not still finished that damned year! Is that the virus that was never going to get an end? Was not it going to give us a break? No, it did not have that intention.
We returned to the confinement. But this time, people were unwilling to accept the same mistakes of the previous period not to have their freedom of expression. They were restricted by employing gag laws or prohibitions that left us without our legitimate rights.
People lost fear and started to get out to demonstrate. The most radical ones dared to destroy the urban furniture, to go against the police, or to rebuke politicians, no matter their party. There were revolts, looting, and even killings all over the world. A pandemic joined to another. While some people were protagonists of those atrocities, others just watched it on TV as if we were simply contemplating a catastrophe movie. It was previously hidden not to disturb the population; it was joyfully displayed as if were not part of our lives. At the same time, you could just see it leaning our the window or out on the balcony.
Many governments fell, ours included, and we thought it was something really positive because a new one would be better than the old one. This new party would bring everything to a successful conclusion. They promised they would fix the mistakes the previous one committed. But they made the same mistakes and fall on the same harmful practices the former did. In the end, all were radicals in their heart. However, people were no longer eager to support more dictatorship practices, so everybody tried to live the way they could.
Furthermore, the pandemic was destroying everybody. Whether you were rich or poor, right or left, from the north or the south, author or reader... Everybody fell under the scythe of the Chinese Plague.
But the decline of the authors came in 2021,
It ran the month of February of 2021 when radicals started to destroy bookshops. They
smashed everything and took the books out to the street, piled them into huge mountains, and burned them. The shavings flew to the sky, impregnating everything with burned paper, small shavings that contained burned letters, half-sentences from different stories that intermingled while they ascended to heaven. I cried helplessly while my daughter told:
—Look, daddy, books also go to heaven! Surely grandparents could read your books!
—But they will have to recompose them before- I told her in a whisper while tears ravaged my face.
She caressed my back to try to calm me down, but she was also very sorrowful.
—Sure they can put them together. Besides, they will mix stories from all the authors, and they will get magnificent novels- I encouraged her.
She looked at me, smiling but with tears still on her eyes, and she hugged me tightly. She also loved books.
What came later was the lived killing of one of the most famous contemporary authors of our time. The author of more than a hundred books, who had dedicated several volumes to pandemic stories and apocalyptic frames, was arrested in his house by a group of Northamerican religious radicals. They accused him of encouraging governments and attracting bad omens to the world with his writing, condemning the world to God´s anger. They pulled him in underwear from his house and burned him in a cross simulating Inquisition´s style. They beat his wife when she tried to stop them and let her, half-dead, burn alive in her house. That event encouraged the fearful masses of Yahve, God, and Ala to initiate a new search of authors. At the same time, they continued burning all books they found except for the religious one. Only children´s books, romantic novels, and comedies passed the sieve. The condition was they accomplished the norms or did not go against the ideological rule of the moment: never inciting hate. How a paradoxical situation was this!
The same criteria were applied to films and series. All them entered in the same category that prohibited books. They were wiped off the face of the earth. Even music began to be censured by those who proclaimed themselves champions of the new morality.
At the end of 2021, many authors had died, and most of the bookshops from all over the world had already disappeared. Individual books were allowed to survive because the guidelines were not always applied. Those were carried to the libraries of the New Moral, as they denominated themselves. The rest of the world books and their authors were exterminated.
Nobody loved us anymore; they were no longer proud of us. Some people betrayed or burned alive to their own relatives if they were or had been writers. It did not matter if they had written a long time ago or were authors of just one single book or a few poems. We became outcasts, weirdos that had to be annihilated. We became responsible for all the evil that devastated the planet.
In the end, our worst fears killed us.
We hide where we could. We still had people who loved us: our children, our couples, our brothers and sisters, our parents, and some friends who always believed in us. On some occasions, they allowed us to escape without betraying us, but many did not like us on their side. We could put them in danger of death, too. So, some of us decided to run away to places where nobody could find us or obtain our locations. But that was something complicated to achieve. They possesed our personal information. Our photos were in all social networks, and they, the Owners of the New Moral, possessed a register of authors.
In the 21st century, there was a new kind of Inquisition. Witches and heretics were no longer prosecuted. The pursued ones were the authors, dissidents of a country where a dictatorship was now ruling.
When the world started to change, that new world order made people began to shift, to move away. The inhabitants of big cities fleed terrified to the villages when food started to scarce. They avoided the confinements, the revolts, and the queues of rationing. And not because governments denied them the food but because food started to decrease and necessary to ration. Never before, there was a communist country in which all were really equal!
With time, the situation was normalizing. And those countries that did not enter in a war during the first years of the pandemic managed with what they had. Even some of them started to negotiate with neighbor ones, propitiating the economy began to reemerge and stabilize the country. Europe did not want to confront China or Russia, Still, EEUU did, what provoked that in 2023 there were many more deaths to add to the devastating numbers of the virus. Its inhabitants suffered even more than the European, the African, or the South American ones that preferred to keep themselves neutral. Not in vain, they had enough penuries to cry as to add the fact of being destroyed by nuclear weapons.
Everything went back slowly to normality. After ten years since the pandemic started, they had forgotten us. Almost nobody thought or remembered the evil authors had supposedly brought to the world. However, it was still possible they could recognize us and that we were sent to the fire. If the New Party for Freedom did not change the laws, we would be forever considered responsible for a curse we were not reliable at all. The virus was the work of a laboratory. The evils it sowed were the result of the inadequate arrangements each of the governments from the diverse countries of the world did.
I am already at the stage.
I open my eyes, and there they are in the first row. Those who one day were my children are going to preside my execution. My son despises me, but my daughter has a frightened look that is going to betray her. The simple fact she feels remorse could make them burn her with me. And that´s the last thing I would wish to happen in my life! My wife, poor her, died two years ago from cancer. With her, I always kept a marvelous relationship. I never stop loving her, she never stops loving me. And that love no regime, no matter how authoritarian it is, or no virus, no matter how virulent it is, can be destroyed.
I keep my eyes fixed on the big wooden cross that awaits me with its open arms. It seems a jerk, a hoax, as they used to call it years ago. Something that stands there though it should not. It was just like if they had prepared me a surprise, a joke, like one of those programs in which a hidden camera records you. But this was not the case. I am not going to be saved by anybody.
My son gets ahead and spits me on my fave. I do not reproach him. I do not expect anything less than that from him. Never ever would I have allowed a son of mine would die for my fault, and this is not going to be an exception. I ignore him and center my look on the cross, without taking a quick look at my dear daughter, so beautiful as she has already become a young woman. And just then, I remember with tears on my eyes that in heaven all those mixed stories from the books she and me contemplated to be burned from our balcony await for me.
I go happy to the other life. I will not have the possibility to write anymore, but I could read a lot. Not in vain, books also go to heaven!
translated by
María Leticia del Toro
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario