Translation by Keith Ellis
“I had not thought death had undone so many.”
- S. Eliot
When he woke up, the pandemic was still there,
and he remembered Monterroso’s short story
somewhat ironically, somewhat terror struck.
In previous days he had suffered several nightmares,
but none compared to this one.
Like all learned people
he recalled Camus’ The Plague, Defoe’s The Plague Years
and Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness;
Carpenter’s cinematografic version
or virus-centred films like Soderbergh’s Contagion
or Pandemic, our ante-room to hell;
even though, for some reason,
he heard resounding powerfully
Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s The Sinking of the Titanic,
that metaphor of ostentatious modernity;
a monstruos boat
petrified at the bottom of the seas.
In his view the proliferation of the virus
expanding thoughout the little world of the human species
leaving its fevered stamp on business cards, coins, cheeks,
administering life and death in hospitals
apart from the biovigilance and the control,
this was only a warning of what would come
when the utopia of an immune community
dreamed up by the new character from the tecno patriarchy
would become the most spectacular reality show of recent decades:
a parade of masked ghosts
with neither hands nor lips nor tongue nor face, almost without skin;
the new untouchables of an invisible sect
who leave messages on machines to which no one listens;
almost disembodied like a cybernetic prosthesis,
barely a mask among other masks,
a face shield that forces you to be quiet,
with different designs to maintain social inequality,
beyond the film clips
of the fox as the masked jockey, or the silver masks
of the dynamic duo Batman and Robin
outside of the empire, outside of the theatrical performance—
barely a barcode, a cloud address, a shadow.
They do not meet with anyone, they have no flesh,
their real home is amazon facebook instagram
a particle of human being consuming itself
in the solitude of a state of permanent exception;
of encapsulated frightened abducted bodies.
Forever?
When he woke up thinking of the monster
but also imagining a different place, city,
a different planet where we would all be immune
without abject and strange bodies, or frontiers, or walls,
he realized and knew for the rest of his days
that thinking was not helping him to awaken
outside of his house not fearful of strangers;
to leave the enclosure of his bedroom,
his second skin with its sterilized gloves,
the fear of becoming infected with the virus
if we touch the door, the garbage, the bread bag,
the saliva that drips from loved lips,
live sounds, airborne particles that stick
to our lungs; fear
floating from one throat to another passing
the migratory barriers, the digital
vigilance and the flow of capital.
Or is it only the metaphor for another, larger text?
Whom will we let die?
The poorest?
The oldest with their underlying illnesses?
The beaten ill-treated murdered women?
The indigenous peoples exiled from everywhere?
The immigrants stacked together in outlying districts?
The marginal ones hidden in their cardboard tents?
The new aimless zombies wandering the solitary streets
of the world’s cities?
He woke up and became aware
of the spectacle of the drama of death.
The fallen ones can no longer be happy or unhappy.
They can’t have a coffin or a farewell ceremony.
They lie there almost without saying goodbye in the middle of the street,
in the middle of the sewers of the half-empty markets,
stiff with cold or sweating through the implacable dog days,
under the intensifying cauldron of a dying sun;
multitudes of corpses rubbing against each other
with rotted meat and dessicated greens
exiled from villages and houses with neither hearth nor food;
spectators blind to their own double agony
surprised by this darkness, this loss of familiarity,
undesired and unlonged for;
by this black petal of madness
already inscribed in the sacred books
like a recollection of forgotten gods.
or a nervous tic of science;
the measured and precise last resort
of the planetary tragedy.
He woke up and said to himself - that’s where we are now:
Confined, controlled, segmented, surveilled;
in fact “normalized” in the micro republic of an apartment,
on the threshold of being outside and inside
in the soft prison of a meter and a half of distancing
accommodative in its tentacles, but concealed from telecontrol
watched over from cyberspace
so that we might keep on being the docile consumers
who are dreaming that we might be
tele fed, all of us.
We are
in the battle of Chile the battle of Santiago
the battle of the Universe “Gentlemen we are in a war”
and we must win it even though we lose
several million “clients” busted from the global map,
made invisible on television and on cellular phones,
where the dead, who were previously disappeared,
have no substance
for the asceptic spectacle of all our days.
We are a number, a quantity, a code snatched away
from the sight of relatives and friends
in perpetuity.
Although he thinks
there is no battle to win or lose,
the virus is a dinosaur, a nightmare, a dream,
a truth that was always there
and is not to be blamed
for our unbearable levity toward living,
for our pretentious way of viewing ourselves
without seeing our faces,
and for isolating ourselves within the heavy weight of fear
in order to keep watch, prohibit, punish:
a struggle in which Thanatos displaces Eros
until further notice.
That is how planet earth became a huge prison:
some of us locked ourselves into the corners of houses, or we stayed overnight
in other places where walls and roofs reduce our view,
anchored to an interminable present
while a multitude of strange beings emerge from the sewers
and wander the directionless streets like mutants
exiled from the networks, the screens, the means of communication,
like residues in transit viruses of the virus
also eliminated from the future
that is not available, that does not belong to them.
What now awaits us?
When can we expect the next pandemic?
a planet without water or food, the irreversible waste land?
the radiation, the war? cold and heat out of balance?
the end of all predictions?
total self extermination?
Will we mutate?
Meanwhile
the coming day slips away from us and disappears
in our society that has no orífices
in the midst of our disposition to boredom
(measuring our footsteps contemplating unemployment
quieting out-of-pitch shouts fearing the sound of the bell)
I you we they in the invisible cage, all of us monsters
coming out of the nightmare changed now into something ghastly,
“squeezing our eyelidless eyes waiting for someone to knock on the door,”
the black sheep abandoned on the shoulder
of globalization’s highway,
the rotted tissue, the tumor that expands,
that is filtered from the earth time and again
invading fields and cities
to retrace the footsteps of our species
(May 12, 2020)