Dinner

II

It was just a little past eleven when we got home. The whole way there, Mother was complaining about how late it was, about the dinner, about everything, and especially about my friend’s extravagances. Where did he get the money to buy all that junk? How could he live surrounded by all that fantasy, those totally useless party games? And they must have been expensive, or did people give them to him? She kept returning to the economic aspect, aghast, offended, as if my friend were buying his toys with her money. I told her as much. Everybody did whatever they wanted with their own money, didn’t they? Anyway, he was a wealthy man. This was hard for me to say; I’d recently been avoiding any mention of finances, for my own had become such a disaster; I was dead broke, they’d repossessed my house and my car, I’d taken refuge in my mother’s apartment and was living off her retirement income (if you can call that living). She immediately responded with something that surprised me. What are you talking about, wealthy? As a church mouse! He was ruined! He didn’t have a penny to his name, he’d lost everything, the only thing he had left was that house, and on top of that, it was full of all that horrendous garbage. I didn’t give her words much credence, or rather, none: ever since my own debacle she’d been saying the same things about everybody, even the town’s most notoriously prosperous merchants and its most affluent small farmers. According to her, collective ruin had descended upon the Pringlesians. She said it for me, out of a blind maternal instinct that didn’t retreat even in the face of the absurd — or a lie — and she’d even ended up believing it herself. If her intention was to console, she was failing. I could see that she had reached the state of wanting her lies to be true, of wishing for others’ misfortune, and this was making her bitter. And in addition to telling me, she told anybody and everybody else, giving herself the reputation of a slanderer or a bird of ill omen; people started avoiding her, and I had to take on, along with my personal failure, the guilt of having spoiled the last years of her life (because the social life of the town was her entire life).

So I tried to set her straight. But the specifics she started telling me made me doubt that she was wrong. I told her that my friend had his construction company, that he had a lot of work… She refuted me with absolute certainty: No, not in your dreams. He never worked, they were under water, construction was at a standstill. Moreover, the company didn’t even belong to him anymore; his partner had cheated him and left him out in the cold. She backed up her statements with names and more names, the names of those who’d hired him and hadn’t paid him, the names of his creditors, the names of those who’d bought the few properties he’d still had and that he’d had to sell in order to pay off his debts. The names made the story believable though their effect on me was to provoke more admiration than conviction. I was impressed that my mother always had the names right on the tip of her tongue; it’s true, she had a lot of practice, because all her conversations (and presumably all her thoughts) revolved around the people of the town. I didn’t even know the name of my friend’s business partner. The names of the families of Pringles were familiar, I’d heard all of them before, thousands of times before, but for some reason I’d always refused to associate them with the people I saw on the street. Never having made those associations as a child, I never did thereafter. As the years passed, I became daunted by the amount of work it would take to learn them, especially when I saw everybody else’s virtuosity. It couldn’t, however, be that difficult. I had to admit that obstinacy played a part in my refusal. But it wasn’t that serious. One could still live and interact with others, though in the long run others would eventually notice my shortcoming. I didn’t operate with a shorthand list of names and a web of family relations and neighborhoods. I needed supplemental explanations, and my interlocutors — if they didn’t write me off as mentally deficient — might think that it was out of disdain, or indifference, or an unjustifiable feeling of superiority. Perhaps that’s why I’d done so poorly in business. Someone who didn’t know the name of the neighbor he saw every day couldn’t possibly be trusted.

Mother and my friend had spent the whole dinner spouting names. Based on this rapport, I assumed she had enjoyed the evening, but apparently that was not the case. She was in a bad mood when she got home, in the elevator she kept sighing impatiently, and when we entered the apartment she went straight to the bathroom to take her sleeping pill. Before going to bed she had time to complain one more time about how late it was and what a terrible time she’d had. I plopped into an armchair and turned on the TV. She walked past me one last time carrying a glass of water on her way from the kitchen, said good night, and closed the door to her room.

“Don’t go to bed too late.”

“It’s early. And tomorrow is Sunday.”

My own words depressed me. Not only because Sundays were depressing but because every day had turned into Sunday for me. Unemployment, the awareness of failure, the anachronistic relationship between a sixty-year-old man and his mother, my long-since confirmed bachelorhood, all of it had enveloped me in the typical melancholy of dead days. Every morning, and every night, I resolved to start a new life, but I always procrastinated, acquiescing to my ailing willpower. And Saturday at eleven o’clock at night was not the right moment to make important decisions.

Television had become my only real occupation. And I didn’t even like it. When I was young it didn’t exist (in Pringles), and when I lived alone I didn’t have a TV, so I never got into the habit and never learned to like it. But ever since I’d moved into my mother’s apartment, it was all I’d had.

Whenever I was alone, I channel surfed. I always did the same thing, and from what I understood, so did many others, and systematically; for many, “watching television” was the same as channel surfing. That’s what it was for me. I never got into movies, maybe because I always tuned into them when they’d already started and so I didn’t understand the plot, and anyway I never liked movies or novels. The news channels weren’t any better, because I was also never interested in the crime stories currently in the limelight, and much less in wars and natural disasters. And it was the same with everything else. There were seventy channels, and I would often surf through all of them, one after the other, then go back and surf through them again, until I got tired (my finger pressing the button would fall asleep), and then I’d leave it anywhere I happened to be. After a while, out of despondency or plain boredom I’d summon up enough energy to change it again. Since I spent whole afternoons in front of the TV, I couldn’t fail to notice, at some point, how futile and irrational this activity was. Mother would urge me to go out and take a walk, and I often intended to, but my indolence would always win out. I remembered what my friend had recounted earlier that evening, about the short old man who would walk to the Cemetery in the mornings. That in itself could have motivated me: not the example of a healthy and active almost ninety-year-old (even though he was a good example), but rather the curiosity of running into him. He said he did it only when he woke up depressed or in pain, that is, he didn’t do it every day. But I would have to do it every day if I didn’t want to miss him when he did it. Of course, the possibility of watching an old man take a walk wasn’t very compelling, but I was slightly intrigued by the chance of finding out if the story was true, and I was used to making do with very little. The stories my friend told always had, as I said, the feeling of fables; to confirm one in reality might be exciting. At this stage of my life, I had reached the conclusion that I would never be the protagonist of any story. The only thing I could hope for was to make an appearance in somebody else’s.

Be that as it may, I couldn’t see myself getting up at dawn the following day, nor any other day, either to take a walk or for any other reason. Which was a pity, because I didn’t go out at night, either. Night in Pringles was for the young, especially a Saturday night like this one. On our way home I’d seen the activity in the streets, and now sitting in front of the television set, I remembered that the local cable channel had a show that was a live broadcast of Saturday nights.

These days every town, even some much smaller than ours, has its own cable channel. It must be a good business, requiring a small initial investment and plenty of side benefits. But it’s difficult to fill the schedule with more or less acceptable programming. The Pringles channel came up against a definitive impossibility in this respect. It was a true disaster, even though it broadcast only a few hours a day: a news show at noon, another at night, after which there was a program about farming hosted by an agronomist, another program about sports, and depending on the day of the week, a movie, music videos, a musical event at the Teatro Español, or a session of the Town Council. The news was mostly about local school events: deadly boring. Everything was precarious, poorly lit, badly filmed, badly edited, as well as predictable and repetitive. It didn’t even have the charm of the ridiculous. And even acknowledging that it is easier to criticize than to do, we Pringlesians had good reason to complain. There was no creativity, no imagination, no feelings, not even a dash of audacity.

The new program on Saturday nights offered a glimmer of hope within that context. María Rosa, the young newswoman, was the star of the show, and the idea was that she went out on her scooter, accompanied by her cameraman, to make the rounds of night clubs and restaurants and parties. I’d seen a few episodes on previous Saturdays. The poor results could be blamed on a lack of fine tuning, only to be expected in a new show. But there was a general atmosphere of ineptness that led one to think it would never improve. It was as if they didn’t care how it turned out, which is all too common and in itself can become intriguing. There was either too much or not enough light, and the sound didn’t work. If you could see or hear anything, it was almost by accident. They wanted to make it seem improvised, informal, youthful, but they were so naïve that they believed this could be achieved by behaving in an improvised, informal, and youthful way; the result was unintelligible. Anyway, what were they thinking when they entered a discotheque or burst in on a membership dinner at the Bonfire of the Gauchos Club and asked people if they were having a good time? It seemed they hadn’t asked themselves that question. If it was a sociological survey, it was poorly done; if they wanted to show how the rich and famous enjoyed themselves, they were barking up the wrong tree because in Pringles there weren’t any. They couldn’t even count on people’s desire to see themselves on television because the show was broadcast live so they wouldn’t be able to see themselves; the only thing they could hope for was that some relative would stay up late to watch it and the next day say, “I saw you.”

It had already started when I turned to it, and I amused myself for a while analyzing all its defects. Now I was watching the main part, which was the live broadcast itself: there was endless dead air between one event and another, no matter how fast María Rosa drove her scooter. They hadn’t thought of that, either. Since they didn’t have any advertisers, there were no breaks; the cameraman rode as best he could on the scooter behind María Rosa, and with wildly jerky movements the camera kept showing whatever it happened to catch — the starry sky, the streetlights, houses, trees, paving stones, all in a convulsed waltz. He had to hold onto the driver with one hand, and hold the heavy camera on his shoulder with the other, and this went on and on. María Rosa would try to fill the interlude with commentary, but in addition to not having anything to say and having to pay attention to the road, her poor diction and the sound of the engine made it impossible to understand anything.

Right when I tuned in, they were in the middle of one of these lapses. And when I had finished formulating my stringent and resentful critique (as if I really cared), they were still going full speed ahead. It was impossible to know where they were going: the swaying of the camera was frenetic, and the few blurry images that abruptly broke through the darkness didn’t give me any clues. The noise of the scooter’s engine, pushed to the max, drowned out the voice of María Rosa, who talked nonstop, made jokes, laughed, and seemed very excited. I tolerated it for a few more minutes, and when they still hadn’t arrived anywhere, I changed channels. I surfed through all seventy channels, and when I returned, after what seemed like a very long time, they were still riding the scooter. This was the last straw.

Where were they going? Might they have finally convinced themselves that they couldn’t squeeze anything out of nighttime in Pringles, and they had decided to explore a neighboring town, like Suárez or Laprida? Suárez was the closest, but still it would take them an hour and a half to get there, and they couldn’t be that unreasonable; moreover, the road there would have been smoother; judging from the bumps and jolts, they were driving on dirt roads, around curves, and in one or another of those vertiginous diagonal screenshots, the light on the camera hit on some trees and, every once in a while, a house. They must have been on the outskirts of town, or maybe they’d gotten lost. Maybe a nightclub had opened up out there, or in the neighborhood around the train station, which was some distance away. It seemed unlikely. There was a truck stop next to the roundabout on Route 5, the famous La Tacuarita, where the gourmets of Pringles used to go, but the highway went there, and they clearly were not on the highway.

Then I thought of another explanation, which was much more likely: there had been an accident, María Rosa had heard about it, and they were rushing there, turning their backs on the frivolity of nightlife in favor of real news. Saturday nights were the most prone to automobile accidents: half of Pringles had lost their lives or been crippled in accidents. The strange thing now was that I didn’t hear any sirens. But that was the best explanation for why the reporter was driving so far. She must have wanted to get there to take pictures of the dead bodies and talk to the witnesses or a survivor.

All my suppositions turned out to be wrong, except one: the nocturnal camera really was going in pursuit of a startling news item that it had heard about while making the rounds of the nightclubs. Though it was neither a traffic accident nor a fire nor a crime, but something much stranger, so strange that nobody in their right mind could believe that it was really happening. So they were going (they couldn’t not go) to expose the lie and unmask the pranksters. The prank might have been the phone call, or the information that had made them go, and if so, they wouldn’t find anything.

Anyway. They were on their way to the Cemetery because they’d been told that the dead were rising from their graves of their own accord. This was as improbable as an adolescent fantasy. It was, however, true. The guard who sounded the alarm first heard some rustling sounds that kept getting louder and spreading across the graveyard. He came out of the lodge to take a look and hadn’t even made it across the tiled courtyard to where the first lane of cypresses ended when, in addition to the worrisome rustlings, he began to hear the loud banging of stone and metal, which seconds later spread and combined into a deafening roar that reverberated near and far, from the first wing of the wall of niches to the rows of graves extending for more than a mile. He thought of an earthquake, something never before seen on the serene plains of Pringles. But he had to dismiss this idea because the paving under his feet could not have been more still. Then he managed to see, by the light of the moon, what was making the noise. The marble gravestones were moving, rising from one side and breaking as they came hurtling down. Inside the crypts, coffins and iron fittings were spliting open, and the doors themselves were being shaken from inside, the padlocks were bursting open, and the windows were shattering. The covers of the niches were being forced off and were crashing loudly to the ground. Concrete crosses and stucco angels flew through the air, hurled from the crypts as they violently flung open.

The thunderous roar of this demolition had still not ceased when there rose from the wreckage — one could say from the earth itself — a chorus of sighs and groans that had an electronic rather than a human timbre. That’s when the guard saw the first dead walking out of the nearest vaults. And it wasn’t two or three or even ten or twenty: it was all of them. They appeared out of tombs, crypts, vaults; they literally rose out of the ground, an invasion, legions of them, coming from every direction. Their first steps were shaky. They looked like they were about to fall but then straightened up and took one step, then another, waving their arms about, moving their legs awkwardly and stiffly, as if they were marching in place, lifting their knees up too high, then letting their feet fall any which way, as if even the laws of gravity were new to them. But they were all walking, and there were so many of them that when they reached the pathways, they crashed into one another, their arms and legs got tangled up, and for moments they formed compact groups that shook in unison and separated with violent stumbles.

This lack of coordination was understandable after awakening from a long immobilized sleep, especially since each sleep had lasted a different length of time. They all looked too tall, as if they’d grown while dead, which surely contributed to their clumsiness. No two were the same, except in how horrible they were, in the conventional way corpses are horrible: shards of greenish skin, bearded skulls, remnants of eyes shining in bony sockets, sullied shrouds. And groans, both hoarse and shrill, every time they breathed.

The first victim was the guard. This civil servant with long years of experience had never seen anything like this, but he didn’t just stand there watching the show. Once he realized what was going on, he made an about-face and took off running. Looking back, he saw the dense crowd of corpses with creaking bones and cartilage pressing down the side corridors of the walls of niches, while others were still climbing down from the top-most niches like “the spider dead,” otherworldly greyhounds oozing slime. There, the rooftops shaded the moon, but a silvery phosphorescence emanating from the bones lit up the scene, making the tiniest details sharp, all in ghostly black and white. The guard didn’t hang around to observe the details. He ran across the atrium, and when he reached the fence railings, he remembered that a few hours earlier he himself had wrapped the thick chains around the heavy gates and closed the padlock. Damn security! The keys were hanging on the wall of his office, so he took off in that direction after deciding against the facing door, which was the entrance to the chapel (even though he was already placing himself at the mercy of all the saints). Luckily, the office had metal doors, and luckily he arrived there before the corpses, who were already marching through the atrium. He got a jump on them thanks to how slowly they were going, that there were so many of them, and that in their hurry they were getting in each others’ way. How many dead were there in the Cemetery? Thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Nobody had ever bothered to count up the entries in the register, those handwritten manuscripts that had sat for a hundred years in the archives. And they were all moving en masse toward the door, without any coordination, like water flowing toward the drain.

He locked the door and called the police. He shouted hysterically into the telephone. With an astuteness that was not wholly his own but rather dictated by urgency and instinct, he realized that it would be imprudent to go into too much detail, which would only lead to an interpretation based on his hard-earned fame as a drunk. It was enough to report the bare minimum and let his shouts and desperation speak for themselves. Moreover, a minimum of information — as minimum as possible — would instill more curiosity and help would arrive sooner. Still holding the phone, he began to hear the banging on the door. The bulk of the dead hoard kept going straight ahead — he heard the large iron gates swing open and crash to the ground. Apparently, no door could stop them. The one protecting him bulged and cracked; it wasn’t mere physical strength they used to force it open, but rather a kind of destructive will. The dead bolt flew off and in they came: tall, resolute, looking at him, and groaning. There were several of them; they seemed to be racing to reach him — his terrified and infinite paralysis. They moved like insects or ostriches. More than groans, the sounds they emitted were like the snorting of a dog sniffing his prey. One of them, the winner, fell on him with an expression on its face that suddenly (his last “suddenly”) looked like a smile of triumph. It took his head in both hands — bones poorly gloved with strips of purple flesh — and brought its horrendous mug up to his right temple. It handled him with ease; either terror had paralyzed the victim or the attacker emanated some magnetic substance of fatalism and surrender; in either case resistance was futile. In one mouthful it removed a chunk of the man’s skull — which broke off with an ominous “clack” and was left to hang off his right shoulder — then sunk its teeth into his brain. But it didn’t eat the brain, though it could have, and it seemed like it was going to. With one slurping action both delicate and very strong, it consumed the endorphins in the cortex and the brain stem to the very last drop. After which, it pulled away its face — if you could call that a face — and raised it toward the ceiling, letting out a super-shrill snort as it released the guard’s body, which fell lifeless to the ground. The others had already left: they must have known that this thirsty beast would not leave them even one endorphin. Once it had had its fill, it followed the others out.

The living dead continued to pour through the iron gate, spilling out onto the road leading toward town. Always pressing forward, their goose steps modified by a thousand limps, they were drawn in a tremendous hurry to the yellowish light in the sky above Pringles. The column remained compact during the first stretch, with some platoon leaders out in front and others fanning out in the rear; it looked more like a column than a triangle, the point of the arrow aimed at a Pringles oblivious to the danger, celebrating its Saturday night.

But the formation did not hold beyond the immediate access road to the Cemetery, where there was open country on either side. As soon as they reached the first houses, eager platoons turned off to one side or the other. The inhabitants of these modest houses were sleeping, many of whom didn’t even wake up when their doors and windows came crashing down, and those who did only had time to see, or to guess at through the darkness, the nightmarish bogeymen who leaned over their beds and opened their skulls with one bite. No house was spared, nor a single occupant therein, not even the babies in their cribs. Immediately after completing the cerebral suction, the corpses left and rejoined the cadaverous march, always in the direction of town.

As they advanced, the terrain became more densely populated. Neighborhoods alternated with clusters of ranches and solitary houses, which the detachments swept through exhaustively. Although the populated areas also stretched out laterally, the dead were satisfied with what they found right next to the road, to which they returned once their attacks were accomplished. They didn’t spend too much time on what they must have considered mere distractions. The important objective was the town, where the density of human material promised a much easier and readier harvest.

Not everyone was sleeping in all the houses they attacked. In some, they were still sitting around the dinner table when they were paid the unexpected “visit.” In those cases, screams and horrified expressions were plentiful, as were escape attempts that were never successful because the intruders came in through all the doors and windows at the same time. Nor did it do them any good to lock themselves in a room, but at least it gave some of them time to make an interrupted call to the police, calls that grew more and more frequent as the minutes passed and that finally convinced the forces of law and order that ”something” was happening.

But before the police decided to dispatch a patrol car, the lethal march had covered about half the distance, and there they really scored. It was at the local school, Primary School #7, where that night the School Association was holding a dance, which they did every month to raise funds for building repairs and school supplies. These dances were well-attended, and included a buffet dinner and a disc jockey. At that hour, just past midnight, things were winding down, but nobody had left yet. It was curtains for everybody, and first of all the children.

In the buffet room next to the auditorium where the dance was being held, two ladies were sitting alone at a table, chatting away. When the screams started, neither paid much attention, thinking that the piñata had been broken, or something like that. Each woman was criticizing her respective husband, benevolently, for their opposite approaches to one of the most popular local pastimes: going for a drive. The tradition started in the days when automobiles were a novelty and gasoline was cheap, and had continued. Families or couples would get in the car on Sunday afternoons or any day after dinner and cruise around the streets in all directions. This was called “taking a spin.”

“When we take a spin,” one of the ladies started, then continued, referring to her husband, “José drives so fast! As if he were in a hurry to get somewhere. I tell him: ‘We’re just driving around,’ but he doesn’t listen.”

“Juan, on the other hand,” the other said, “drives so slowly when we go for a spin, that he makes me nervous. I tell him: ‘Speed up a little, you’re going to put me to sleep.’ But he just keeps driving like a snail.”

“I wish José would go a little slower. He drives so fast I can’t see anything. If we drive past somebody we know, I can’t even say hi before we’re already shooting past them.”

“I’d rather go a little faster. It’s unbearable to go so slowly, the car seems to be standing still, and it takes forever just to get to the corner…”

They were both exaggerating (and it was their last exaggerations), but the “meaning” of their complaints, and the satisfying symmetry they created, must have been the reason their conversation so fully absorbed their attention, expressing their personalities and demonstrating the quality of the endorphins they were producing. These passed, after the brutal opening of their skulls, into the systems of the two corpses who attacked them from behind and emptied their brains. They were the last candies in the great sweetshop the school had become, and once the invaders had gorged themselves, they departed the way they had come, leaving behind some three hundred lifeless bodies where only minutes before merriment had prevailed.

There was something diabolically efficient in their timing. If what they wanted were endorphins, the little drops of happiness and hope secreted by the brains of the living, there was no more propitious time than Saturday night, when the worries of life are set aside and people temporarily indulge in gratifying their need for socializing, sex, food, and drink, which they abstain from during the rest of the week. In their depressing existence in the afterlife, the dead had developed a true addiction to endorphins. What a glaring paradox that Cemetery Road had become Endorphin Road.

On the way from the Cemetery, the town started at about the halfway point. And that spot was marked by Primary School #7, where the invading army had had its first real banquet of the night, especially because of the number of children whose brains were teeming with happiness matter. From then on, there were almost no empty spots in the urban weave. The compact herd of corpses spread to the right, through the grid of dirt streets and onto the first paved ones. They entered every house, lit up and dark, rich and poor, but the bigger and more agile ones went on to the wealthier houses, knowing that the rich were happier. They ran over the rooftops to get to the adjacent streets, their grotesque shapes, silhouetted against the light of the moon, took inhuman leaps, crashing through a skylight with a burst of broken glass. Competition among them made them faster and more dangerous.

They left “scorched earth” in their wake: the only ones who saw them and managed to escape were a few people in cars who didn’t stop out of curiosity and sped away. There weren’t many (most cars were surrounded, the windows broken, and the people “slurped”), but there were enough of them to carry the news downtown. A white police van didn’t have such luck.

Be that as it may, Pringles had been put on alert. Even though the information was spreading quickly, panic was building up slowly. The movies and, before the movies, the ancestral legends those stories are based on, had produced in the population a basic state of incredulity; at the same time it prepared them for an emergency (they had only to remember what the protagonists of those movies had done); it also prevented them from reacting because everybody knew, or thought they knew, that fiction was not reality. They had to see with their own eyes somebody who had seen them (with their own eyes) to be convinced of the terror of reality, and even then they weren’t convinced. It was one of those cases in which the real is irreplaceable and not representable. Unfortunately for them, the real was also instantaneous and without future.

And while oscillations of belief continued, the hunt didn’t let up for a minute in the neighborhoods behind the Plaza, always gaining ground toward downtown. The metaphor of the hunt didn’t actually fit very well; it was more like a flower tasting, or a tasting of juicy statues immobilized by terror and surprise. The element of surprise began to diminish as events developed. Terror increased in indirect proportion, and spread more quickly than the living dead, who moved slowly because of their appetite for endorphins, which prevented them from leaving a single head unturned. That’s when some escaped. The first was a seven-year-old girl who leapt out of bed screaming and scrambled through the giraffe legs of the corpse that had burst into her bedroom, making his loose tibias knock together like castanets and seriously challenging his balance. Two things saved her: her big family, which kept the other intruders busy, and how small she was; she was the size of a three-year-old, but her real age gave her disproportionate agility and speed. She ran down a glass-enclosed corridor. The reflection of the moon through the green diamond-shaped windows lit up the comings and goings of the ragged ghouls to and from the skulls of her family members. The operation included a bloodcurdling slurp, which she fortunately didn’t hear. She dodged two who tried to stop her and slipped through the hole where the door to the patio had been. One of the corpses was already chasing her, as one chases a sugarplum that has rolled off a cake. Outside another, who was roaming around the property, spotted her and leaped in front of her to cut her off. Without slowing down, the girl veered off toward the chicken coop and jumped inside. She sought the protection of the darkness, under the roosts; her friends the chickens were asleep, brooding; she knew her way to the very back corner, which was her favorite hiding place, and she didn’t wake them. But the two corpses who burst in did. This unleashed a phenomenal uproar of flapping and squawking in the phosphorescent-streaked darkness; the whiteness of their bones was mirrored in the feathers of the Leghorns, making the darkness even more confusing. The corpses, too big for the small chicken coop, got tangled up in the poles, and when they spread out their arms to shoo away the chickens, they got tangled up in each other and fell on their backs, as if they were doing acrobatics with feathered balls, all to the sounds of frantic clucking. Hens are not aggressive animals, on the contrary, but their shyness, as well as their limited intelligence, worked in their favor in this instance; their irrational fear made them unmanageable, and in the midst of the confusion, the little girl escaped again.

She was one of the few that escaped the cerebral kiss. Block after block, the harvest advanced. The dead grew emboldened by their own efficiency. But because nothing is wholly predictable in human material, they came up against a couple of bizarre situations, which clashed with how bizarre they were. One such situation was at the Chalet de la Virgen, which from the outside looked just like any other house, with a little front yard, a car in the garage, laundry hanging serenely on the clothesline out back, and a welcome mat by the front door. The door as well as the windows exploded and half a dozen robbers from beyond the grave burst in snorting and taking huge disjointed strides that soon lost direction: their zeal fizzled out because there was nobody home. Or, better put, the whole family was where it should be: the parents in their double bed, the children in twin beds, the baby in the crib, and even the grandmother in her bedroom covered with a blanket she’d knit with her own hands. But they were all exactly like the statue of Our Lady of Schoenstatt, stiff and with impassive painted faces, all the same shape as if they had been cast in the same mold. The corpses stamped their feet in confusion, and some would have tried to sink their teeth into a plaster head if it hadn’t been such a disproportionately small head, like a button. They left in a rage. But it was their own fault. You had to have been dead and spent a long time in the Cemetery not to know of the existence of the famous Chalet de la Virgen of Pringles.

The ones who paid the price were the neighbors, against whom the attackers unleashed their fury. This didn’t slow their advance, on the contrary: they became more hot-headed. They couldn’t get enough to eat thereby confirming the truth of the expression, “Appetite comes with eating.” Moreover, lest we forget, there were thousands of them, and they’d just barely started; legions and legions of them — horrifying waves of limping, spastic corpses that kept spreading chaotically across the nocturnal checkerboard of the town — had still not tasted any happiness drops, and they were sharpening their straws. Those that had partaken of the strange nectar, wanted more; along with their snorts, they burst out in mechanical fits of laughter, something between barks and growls, and they improvised dances in the middle of the street — sarabandes, naked jotas, perforated rumbas — that dissolved the same way they had formed, with stampedes that carried them onto roofs or into the tops of trees.

The truth is, although they worked quickly (and more and more quickly: it was like a sped-up movie), they had a lot to do, and this gave the living forces in Pringles time to organize their defense. The town had been put on alert. At this point, not even those with the most nay-saying mentality could deny it. But even if they didn’t deny it, they were only accepting it on a guarded level of belief. Nobody likes to be the butt of a joke, that’s how the human soul is; everybody trusts that the mechanism of the joke will have a fallback position in reality, which allows them to switch from being objects to subjects.

The mayor was already in his office in the Palacio Municipal, meeting with his emergency cabinet and in direct communication with the chief of police, who was manning his battle station at police headquarters. Representatives of the community were constantly arriving there as well as the Palacio, and urgent deliberations resulted in the issuing of the first orders. Telephones were ringing throughout the larger metropolitan area. Fortunately, everybody knew each other in Pringles, and in turn all the people who knew each other knew everyone else, so the web of communications didn’t take long to start buzzing and producing concrete results.

The first initiative the authorities took was to establish a line of defense at a certain distance from the position of the invasion at that moment, sacrificing a few blocks (whose inhabitants would be evacuated) in order to have time to prepare. The Line was drawn on the map of the City of Pringles that was hanging on a wall: the central section would run along the diagonal, less than a hundred yards long, that went from the police headquarters to the Palacio, passing through the Plaza. It would continue northward along Mitre Street and to the east through the small plaza on the Boulevard, all the way to the Granadero. The idea was to form a line of cars and trucks in front of armed men equipped with all the weapons and ammunition that could be found. And there was plenty of it — a passion for hunting had prevailed in the town since the old days.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…

The roar of engines filled the Pringles night, awakening the few who were still asleep. Police and firemen oversaw the formation of the Line, while a police car equipped with loudspeakers drove up and down the streets of No Man’s Land instructing everyone to evacuate immediately. Those concerned did not need to be told twice: they were already running in their nightshirts and slippers to take refuge on the other side of the wall of parked vehicles, which had quickly formed. They didn’t keep going: they stayed there to watch the marksmen take up position, and they were joined by the curious bystanders who had come from downtown, drawn to what they hoped would be an unforgettable spectacle. Most were young people: the nightclubs had emptied out, and the fun-loving gangs of teenagers brought their boisterous happiness to the battlefield. With them, heavily armed hunters kept arriving and were placed at the weakest points along the Line. They were even hailing from the neighborhood beyond Boulevard Cuarenta, after having been informed of the situation by fellow members of the Rifle Club. The arsenal they deployed was impressive. The pretext for buying it had been the geese, the partridges, the hares, and the pretext had been perfected by the far-away and hypothetical deer and wild boar; even so, it would have been difficult to explain — except as the whim of a collector — the presence of Belgian automatic rifles, howitzers, molten aluminum explosive bullets, and even grenades. Many small farmers have more money than they need, and, with so few opportunities in small towns for social or cultural consumerism, they indulge in the purchase of weapons until there’s no place left in their houses to put them.

From the top of the Palacio’s tower, one-armed Artola, “El Manco,” watched the invasion advance. With his one hand he brought the walkie-talkie up to his mouth and reported on the latest developments; the receiver, with the volume turned all the way up and the channel open, was in the mayor’s office: with one ear they listened to El Manco and with the other to the reports and opinions of the crowd of polite volunteers who were coming, going, or staying put, in addition to those calling on the phone. The commotion was becoming extreme. To move from his desk to the wall map in order to record the data coming in from the tower, the mayor had to elbow his way through, and by the time he got there, somebody else had already moved forward the line of red-headed pins, which left him confused.

Up there alone, El Manco was no less confused. He had to admit that the view was splendid and defied the imagination; beyond that, everything was ambiguity. The full moon spread its white light impartially over the darkness of the town, making it seem to rise to the surface, like the checkerboard skin of an antediluvian sperm whale. The plain stretched out and beyond, as did the phosphorescent ribbon of highway distorted by the curvature of the horizon. The sector he was watching was much closer, though he was well aware that at night the illusory plains of contiguity could become stuck together, like the pages of a book. His attention separated the pages, and there the aberrations of nocturnal vision coincided with the monstrous fantasies of nightmare.

Nevertheless, they seemed so inoffensive, those grasshoppers in perpetual motion. He watched them flapping around like madmen, leaping from the street to the cornices, running across the rooftops, slipping through every crack — even where there weren’t any cracks. They crowded together, they dispersed, they stopped and spread out their arms like antennae. Suddenly they would all gather in angular shadows; an instant later they were legions swarming in the silvery glow through which their passage left a green, pink, and violet wake.

There was one thing they never did: retreat. The advance was uneven, as was the blotch of invaders across the checkerboard of houses and streets, but there was a method, and it was a very simple one: to continuously advance, to keep moving in the same direction. Everything was uneven: the movements, the leaps, the meetings and separations; that chaos, by contrast, highlighted the strict mechanics by which they were “covering” territory. It was the irreversibility that gave the scene its threatening oneiric tone. Like in a dream, everything seemed to be on the point of vanishing but at the same time ablaze with persistent reality. It was as if at every point in the unevenly illuminated darkness, valves opened, letting in impossible beings, then closed with a velvety plunger that stopped them from turning back.

El Manco had to keep reminding himself that this was not a game and that he wasn’t there to amuse himself but rather to monitor events and issue warnings, so he rushed to transmit the coordinates of the incoming tide; he also reported on which points were vulnerable along the barricade of automobiles and marksmen, though these were fewer and fewer. The impression he got, from his privileged perspective, was that the entire town had gathered at the Line of Defense, where there was an extraordinary amount of activity. People were arriving in their cars and leaving them parked two or three deep, often blocking the side streets completely. He sent a warning out over his walkie-talkie: it would be impossible to effect a quick retreat, in case that became necessary. He insisted, because he had the feeling that they weren’t listening to him. Then came a fairly hysterical exchange of opinions with somebody down below.

But when he turned back to look beyond the Line, at the neighborhoods that had already been invaded, he really had a fright. The advance had taken on a new dimension, had changed both quantitatively and qualitatively. All of a sudden the army of the living dead showed itself to be much more numerous. The huge mass of stragglers had reached the ones in front, overwhelming them like a solid, majestic ocean wave washing over drops of dew. And it continued advancing, destroying everything in its path, now without pausing, which was understandable because the last blocks before the Boulevard and the Plaza had already been evacuated, and perhaps also because they could smell the throngs waiting for them… He shouted into the radio: they were coming, they had arrived, hand-to-hand combat was imminent.

He wasn’t lying. He was still talking when the first shots rang out. The people lying in wait behind the vehicles, who’d already had their fingers on the triggers for some time, started shooting as soon as they had the first living dead in their sights, and since there were so many people aiming at the even more numerous capering ghouls pouring forth from the deserted streets, there were multiple salvos, and after the first few, they started firing continuously. The crowd that had gathered in a compact mass behind the marksmen let out a unanimous shout, like the audience at a rock concert when, after a long wait, they see their idols finally coming out on stage. And there was something about the dead that was similar to rock musicians, with their disheveled appearance, their stringy hair, their spastic stride, and the arrogant self-confidence of knowing they are stars and that their mere presence satisfies everybody’s pent-up expectations. That’s where the similarities ended and the differences — horrific — began. Somehow everybody, even those keeping a Winchester rifle with nine rounds warm in their hands, and even more so the bystanders crowding behind them, had sustained doubts about the truth of what was going on. Nobody liked their doubts to vanish; the truth threw them off. And by stepping into the white circles shed by the mercury lightbulbs of the streetlights along the Boulevard, the arriving swarm showed off a reality that was frankly disagreeable. Rotten rags, exposed bones, skulls, femurs, phalanges, strips of cartilage hanging off like the remnants of an old collage. as well as the determination, the hunger, the race to see who would get there first.

At the beginning nobody was too surprised that they just kept advancing. After all, that was the direction they’d been going in, and those waiting were doing so in the hope of seeing them: the closer they got, the better they’d see them. But at the same time as their curiosity was being satisfied, an alarm was raised, preceded by fleeting incomprehension. What was going on? Although everybody knew what was going on, the question was justified: the irresponsibly festive atmosphere that infused the crowd (because it was Saturday night, because it was an occasion for a large community gathering, so much less frequent since they’d stopped celebrating National Independence Day and the decadent activities of Carnival had begun) led everyone to think that the marksmen would only have to show off their marksmanship and be rewarded with applause and bravos; the older people were making associations with outdated images of shooting galleries at the now-extinct fairs of the Spanish Pilgrimages, the young people with the facile annihilating clicks of video games.

But it wasn’t like that, not at all. The bullets passed right through the dead, without causing them the least disturbance, not even an extra tremor in their steps, which already were so clumsy. Taking aim and shooting at their heads caused them no more consternation than shooting at their bodies: their skulls got cracked, pierced, splintered, but stayed in place, and the shabby mannequins on whose shoulders these sat continued to move forward.

If they had “seen” them a few seconds before, now they really saw them, saw them leap in one bound onto the hoods of the cars that were supposed to be an insurmountable barrier, saw one lean over to drink the brains of a marksman who, with one frenetic finger on the trigger of his Luger or Colt, kept firing bullets at the fingerboard of ribs, bullets that were as futile as a wave of welcome. Nobody stayed to watch that operation to the end, not only because it was too disgusting but because the second row was already jumping over the ferocious vampire lobotomies now in progress and throwing themselves at the bystanders.

A general stampede began all along the Line. There were many casualties during those first few moments because of the sheer size of the crowd that impeded dispersal. As soon as the living saw an opening, they ran, and if they turned back to look and saw the dead chasing them, they ran faster. They also ran faster, and even faster still, if they saw that one of the dead had caught up with somebody and was sucking his head. Those who tried to get into their cars and start them up lost. Friends abandoned friends, children their parents, husbands their wives. Not everybody. Overcoming their terror, some went back to help their loved ones; in those cases, instead of one victim, there were two.

The streets were filled with shouting and running, and the darkness increased, psychologically: those who were fleeing were afraid that Death, or one of its representatives, would appear out of every shadowy volume, something that was in fact occurring with implacable frequency. There was nobody who didn’t regret the community’s insistence on lining the streets with trees. Now they were all thinking that the authorities had been too responsive, because the town had turned into a forest of gruesome foliage. The Plaza, one of the places where the Line of Defense had first collapsed, was empty, and its pathways became the unobstructed corridor down which legions of corpses of all shapes and sizes marched toward the cobblestone streets of downtown Pringles.

On an oval-shaped islet between the two square blocks of the Plaza stood the Palacio Municipal, that famous art-deco slab, that inside-out piano of white cement, and from its windows the mayor and his cohorts were watching the catastrophe. For some reason, the attackers had skipped it. The moment they saw that the Line had been breached, the occupants of the Palacio took the precaution of turning off all the lights. Even so, they knew their fate hung by a thread: if even a small group of the corpses they were watching pass through the Plaza decided to pay them a visit, it would all be over. The flight of the crowd probably worked in their favor — they constituted so much more visible and numerous prey than could possibly be concealed inside the wings of the Palacio. The police headquarters across the street hadn’t been so lucky: the policemen had tried to put up a fight, and were annihilated, along with the drunkards sleeping it off in their cells. The same thing happened at the church, on the other side of the Plaza, though with fewer victims. Only the priest was in the rectory, along with his wife and two children (in open rebellion against the archbishop of Bahía Blanca, the parish priest was defiantly living with his family).

The mayor did not have a Plan B. It would have to be improvised. The lines of communication with the police having gone dead, there was nobody with whom to coordinate emergency measures. Out of the confused discussions taking place at the windows emerged the only course of action that seemed reasonable: to evacuate Pringles, using all available vehicles. But how would he give the order? The cell phones were functioning at white heat, but for the first time, word of mouth didn’t appear to be fast enough. One news item that reached them that way made even more urgent the need for overall coordination: many people, most in fact, were making the mistake of locking themselves in their houses, which then became fatal traps. They had to find a way to warn those who still had time to escape. An old civil servant had the idea of using the Propaladora. This ancient system of communication hadn’t been used for exactly fifty years, to the day, but they trusted it would still function, considering that in the first half of the last century electrical equipment was built with craftsmanship, with a view to permanence. The fact that it was still in place (though unplugged: but that could easily be remedied) was due to historico-sentimental circumstances: the last transmission by Propaladora was made on the night of the sixteenth of September 1955, when the last Peronist mayor of Pringles, in an heroic gesture, ordered the Marcha—the national anthem — sung by Hugo del Carril to be played throughout the blacked-out town in order to drown out the sounds of the bombs being dropped by the air force on nearby Pillahuinco. This mayor’s unforgettable civic courage, this posthumous proof of loyalty after the popular regime had already fallen, guaranteed that nobody would dismantle the device nor remove the cables from the metal loudspeakers, which continued to rust away atop the town’s cornices and electric poles.

And, in effect, it worked. The evacuation order, a concise and appropriately alarmist message, echoed through the night of the living dead, and all Pringlesians heard it. Not everybody obeyed, which saved many others because it was no longer easy to flee. The streets were infested with thirsty corpses, who fell upon the head of anybody who came out of their house. And the only thing it achieved was to save them the trouble of breaking down doors and tripping over furniture — which they did whenever necessary.

Scenes of horror and trepanation were repeated over and over in a terrifying chaos of simultaneity throughout the downtown area, and they spread further and further into outlying areas by the minute. In the Palacio, deliberations got mired in defeatist anomie. Nobody dared leave, but they also couldn’t find anything practical to do besides worry about their families. Among those gathered was the police medical examiner, a distinguished and highly respected Pringles surgeon, philanthropist, and scholar — he had come when the first alarm was raised. They asked him if there was any explanation for the strange events they were witnessing (and suffering).

No, of course there was no explanation, just like there were no antecedents, as far as he knew. According to what they’d seen till now, the dead had risen from their graves because of a sharp craving for active endorphins; Nature, or a post-Nature of unknown characteristics, had provided them with the motor skills necessary to acquire it themselves, in the quickest and most efficient way possible.

At the request of those in attendance, he briefly described endorphins, the substance produced by the brain for its own use — an optimizer of thought, or the thoughts of an optimist. He employed the hackneyed metaphor of the glass half full or half empty.

Were they necessary for life?

No. Extending the metaphor, one could say that the glass contained liquid to the midpoint, and that was life. The fact that it could be seen as “half full” or “half empty” didn’t change the concrete situation — that is to say, organic life as a real process — it only made this life livable or unlivable. The lack of antecedents for this event could be due to the fact that science had never been curious enough to measure hormonal secretions once organic activity stopped at death. It was possible that a kind of syndrome of abstinence took place, and that this was the equivalent, like a simulacrum, of life, after life. In reality, he said, after thinking about it for a moment, it wasn’t entirely true that there were no antecedents. Perhaps, on the contrary, they abounded. Perhaps that was all there was, and they were suffering the consequences of an overflow of antecedents. Hadn’t they seen the same plot in countless movies, in stories and popular legends that hailed from the oldest antiquity and from all the peoples on Earth? Perhaps ancient and latent wisdom deep in humankind knew what science still did not.

From there, he could only speculate, and respond with hypothetical speculations to the questions they were asking. Above all, to one question, which was of burning importance: Was there any way to stop them? A priori, no, there wasn’t. The final and definitive means for stopping danger that came from another person was death. And in this case, that wasn’t applicable. He didn’t deny that there could be others. If death was the final means, it meant that there existed all the others that came before it, making it “final”; these spanned from verbal interventions (“Please, I’d prefer that you didn’t”) to incineration or exorcism, for example. Any of those might work, but which one? Sooner or later, someone would find one through the method of trial and error. Unfortunately, he didn’t think it would be them; they wouldn’t have time.

At this point he repeated that he was speculating in a vacuum, adding that maybe by now new information would be available. He called the cell phone of a colleague and found out that at the Clinic, where this colleague was, the doctors were meeting to analyze the situation, just as they were doing. The same thing was happening at the Hospital, which was further away, almost on the outskirts of town on the way to the Station. The Clinic, more centrally located, was at the other end of town from the Plaza and the Palacio; the attackers were approaching it, and a brave group of people from the neighborhood had set up warning relays along the adjacent streets, and the doctors were preparing, with the help of some burly male nurses, to capture one of the ambulatory corpses and submit it to a dissection that would, with any luck, reveal the secrets of its functionality in the afterlife. They were already in touch with the Hospital, which had more advanced diagnostic equipment, in order to coordinate the effort.

This was encouraging news for the refugees in the Palacio. They were not alone, and something was being done. There was a certain irony, which nobody noticed, that it would be the members of the medical profession who would be leading the Resistance. Under less dramatic circumstances, someone would have been able to say, “Not satisfied with killing the living, now they want to kill the dead.”

The host from the Beyond had occupied the entire town, as well as outlying areas, small farms, ranches, even the caves along the cliffs where the tramps found shelter. Their tempo had increased, and all precautions had failed. What had happened? When they reached downtown, the living dead had simply changed their strategy: they abandoned the step-by-step approach they’d been following till then, and instead of pursuing a scorched-earth policy, they shot out in every direction to the periphery of the urban sphere, only to return, now exhaustively, from the countryside, into the nucleus of the more densely populated zone. There were so many of them that they were able to do this, and even so, they had spare troops. The maneuver, which the terrorized Pringlesians could not fail to notice, was even more overwhelming in its diabolical cunning for not having been organized by a central command. In this army of corpses, nobody gave or received orders, which seemed to come from a collective mind, an infallible automatism against which no defense was possible. Everywhere, between shouts and cries, people were simply giving up.

Nowhere was safe. Not inside or out, not in front or behind or to the sides, not up or down. There was only night, shadows convulsed by fear and traversed by random rows of streetlights; around the edges of this light, which only made the darkness denser, slipped unshrouded goose-stepping killers, preceded by a sour scent and heralded by the panting of hungry beasts.

Doctors and city officials (those who were left) were not the only ones looking for a solution. There were those who believed that all one had to do was wait for dawn, and then the danger would pass, as do all fantasies and fears engendered by the night. It was difficult to convince oneself that it was not a dream, and only the speed of the action prevented that idea from sinking deeper; if there had been time, every single Pringlesian would have argued in the depths of their hearts in favor of the oneiric, and they would have felt guilty for having involved their relatives and neighbors in their own nightmare. Some gathered in the living rooms of their homes in bathrobes or pajamas, woke the sleeping, turned on all the lights, conferred, talked on the telephone, played loud music: they emphasized the human, the familiar, and waited. For what? For the most part, they didn’t have long to wait. Even contrary to their most reasonable expectations, even shouting to one another: It can’t be! It can’t be! the doors would open and the oozing scarecrows would appear, those beings from the shadows who did not fear the light, equipped with their platinum straws, and then parents had the occasion to watch their children’s skulls being cracked open; husbands, the draining of their wives’ endorphins; all within the super-familiar and reassuring atmosphere of home.

There were also acts of resistance. In fact, they abounded, needless to say if one could overcome first impressions and take note of the rickety fragility of those poorly-assembled bags of bones scantily covered by the remains of entrails and putrid jellies. The passivity of terror had its limits. A town of farmers and truck drivers hardened by their daily encounters with Nature and man being wolf to man couldn’t surrender without putting up a fight. Some waged improvised struggles during the desperate fury of contact; others waited and readied themselves with sticks, irons, chains, and furniture to hurl. Half a dozen sons in the prime of their youthful vigor defending their old parents against one moldy arthritic corpse didn’t necessarily have to be battles lost before they began. Yet, they were.

Large defense groups were organized in certain nightclubs and restaurants, where they holed up in basements and on balconies, or in rooms whose doors were barricaded with piles of chairs and tables. The number of the living offered hope for salvation, but the number of the dead was always greater. “They will pay dearly for our endorphins,” they said, but ended up giving them away. And those who escaped could do nothing but run. Run blindly through dark streets, seek out open spaces, gain an extra minute, then another one, maybe it could be repeated, recover the instincts of deer, let the legs and lungs respond. But the streets, the street corners, the vacant lots were also responding; and the only response they gave was a proliferation of assailants swathed in old death and new terror.

As for the plan of the Clinic doctors, it had the advantage of initiative, but that was about all. From the get-go it was doomed by both intrinsic and extrinsic flaws. Moreover, they didn’t even manage to put it into practice due to an unexpected event that ended up providing the attackers with extra nourishment. It just so happened that while everybody was trying to get out of town, there arrived quite inopportunely a nourishing caravan of cars and SUVs packed full of dressed-up people: men in suits and tuxedos, women wearing long furs over low necklines and jewels. They had driven from an estate on the road to Pensamiento, and they were guests at a highly publicized wedding. The estate belonged to a rich and prolific French family; the bride was one of the eleven daughters of the owner, and the guests had come in from their other large estates in the south (the ones near Pringles were used only in winter), from Buenos Aires, and even from France. Right in the middle of the reception the patriarch suffered a heart attack, and without wasting any time, they piled him into an SUV and started off toward town. Since the others had no desire to continue the celebrations, they followed behind; his condition appeared to be serious; they feared he would die before they arrived, so the caravan sped up as if they were racing. On the way there, they tried to get in touch with the Clinic, and with doctors they knew, but all the numbers were busy, or didn’t answer. Thus they arrived, totally oblivious, in the middle of another “party,” which would end even more badly than the one that had just been ruined for them. They were in such a hurry that they didn’t notice anything strange when they got to town. The vehicles, around forty of them, reached the Clinic without any problem. Seeing family members pour out of the cars, shouting and demanding a stretcher and medical attention for a patient who was seriously ill surprised the doctors and nurses, who were expecting anything but that. The explanations they tried to give managed to only further confuse the already flustered minds of those who’d just arrived; admittedly it was difficult to explain out of the blue. The wedding guests were just starting to understand what it was all about, and to take measure of their colossal inopportuneness, when their skulls were being opened and their brains slurped up. The dead, who appeared in great numbers, worked from the outside in: first the relatives who had remained on the sidewalk out front, then those who had entered the hallways and waiting rooms, offices, rooms, laboratories, the intensive care unit, until they reached the sancta sanctorum of the operating room. Not even the heart-attack victim, with but a thin thread of life remaining, was spared. It was one of the best banquets of the night, that defenseless conglomeration of rich French partygoers — a class of people who make the production of endorphins their life’s work.

They didn’t all fall at once, however, because one car had separated from the retinue before reaching the Clinic (by prior consultation on cell phone with those driving the first vehicle), and it started to drive across town, utterly ignorant of the ongoing coven. It was on its way to the Church to get the priest. The entire family were fervent Catholics, and they had anticipated that they would need the succor of the final sacrament if the worst came to pass (how naïve). The person in charge of this mission was a brother of the dying man, the one with the most easygoing relationship with the ecclesiastical hierarchy; the bride and groom were riding in his car; they had climbed into it in the same way they could have climbed into any other, rushing as they were. They drove across town at full speed, without stopping at intersections, and, in part because of their speed, in part because they were distracted by their own emergency, they didn’t notice anything strange. If they saw a drooling corpse emerge from a house, they thought there was a costume party; if they saw another one tottering on a rooftop, they took it as an advertising gimmick. A group of young people running down the middle of the street? They were in a hurry. The brightly lit dining room of Hotel Pringles was full of lifeless bodies draped over the tables and sprawled on the floor. They didn’t look.

They stopped in front of the Church. They got out of the car. The uncle went straight to the rectory. He wasn’t concerned about it being too late. The groom accompanied him. They found the door broken down and entered, intrigued. Two tall shredded shadows crossed the Plaza and entered behind them. The bride, in the meantime, had seen that the doors to the church were open, and she entered, thinking that maybe she would find the priest presiding over a nighttime service. That was not the case. The nave was empty; solitary candles were burning on the altar. She walked down the central aisle in her long dress of white tulle: the repetition of the same scene, this time in a different register. She’d gotten married just hours before, in the chapel at the estate, and there she had also proceeded “white and shining” down the central aisle, but then the aisle had been flanked by smiling faces, and the “Wedding March” was playing, and there were lights and flowers, and there, in front of her, her groom had been waiting. Now, on the other hand, the only figure she was approaching was Christ presiding over the altar, and she continued precisely because of how fascinated she was by that statue, which she didn’t remember ever having seen in the church in Pringles. It was a Christ Crucified, suffering, expressionistic, twisted, frankly putrefied — the work, one might say, of an insane imagination that had melded the concept of Calvary with that of Auschwitz and the aftermath of a nuclear or bacteriological apocalypse. In the tremulous half light, more than see him, she imagined him, and it was too late when she realized that she had imagined him wrong, when the Crucified One leaped at her and snorted — with diabolical bellowing — and fell upon her; they rolled over together, the bride unable to shout because at that precise instant the false statue ripped open her skull and was slurping the rich little drops, a substance filled with the expectations of honeymoon, children, and a home.

At the Palacio, in the meantime, pessimism had given way to desperation. Some final phone calls, which were cut off, led them to deduce what had taken place at the Clinic. At the Hospital, in spite of its distance from downtown, things hadn’t gone any better; even the Old People’s Home for the Indigent, adjacent to the Hospital, was the site of a ravenous visit, and they didn’t spare a single head. Didn’t they respect anything? Wouldn’t they turn up their noses at the poor, the old, or the infirm? From the look of things, no. The police medical examiner, who was still at the mayor’s office, shared his reflections on these questions with his comrades in misfortune. In their search for endorphins, he said, the barely resuscitated dead had nothing to lose; the human nature of their living cohorts worked in their favor, it wanted the living to stay alive; that’s why it provided its organisms with an inexhaustible source of the substance of happiness, so that they would never stop believing that it was worthwhile to continue in this world, and to multiply. Given this premise, everybody had some. The beautiful, the rich, the young all secreted endorphins constantly, not only the passive ones, the product of the happiness in which they spent their lives, but also the active ones, since the rich want to be richer, the beautiful more beautiful, the young younger. And these active endorphins, the ones the nocturnal slurpers most valued, were the speciality of the majority of the rest of the population: the old, the poor, the humble, the sick. The last scraps of human detritus, people who hadn’t enjoyed a single moment in their entire life, had to produce tons of endorphins in order to keep that life going.

He continued for a while, reasoning along those lines. Very interesting, but very useless. Or maybe not, because a little later this reasoning produced a practical result. Some suspicious sounds coming from the dark recesses of the Palacio, as well as the certainty that their situation was unsustainable, made them decide to attempt an escape. It wasn’t that harebrained. The Plaza looked deserted, and the mayor’s Cherokee was parked in front, and was intact: all they had to do was run about fifty yards, jump into the powerful vehicle, and floor the gas in the direction of the Cemetery and Route 3. The already devastated neighborhoods along the way shouldn’t be too dangerous. Abandoning their families, by this time, was already a fait accompli. It had been a while since anybody had answered their home phones. Anyway, they wouldn’t go very far. If they drove toward Bahía Blanca, they would, perhaps very shortly, meet up with the reinforcements they had requested and that had been confirmed were on their way. In fact, the best thing they could do was wait for them there, since it was clear that it would be impossible to launch any effective action from the town itself.

All good, in theory, but when the words “let’s go” were spoken, there was tremendous vacillation. The process of running those fifty yards out in the open to get to the vehicle was difficult for them to digest. What if just one of them went to start the car and bring it to the esplanade in front of the Palacio to pick up the others? They didn’t even bother to propose it — nobody was in the mood for sacrifices. At that moment the medical officer remembered what he’d said, and a solution occurred to him. El Manco. Was he still at the top of the tower? Yes, certainly, but what did El Manco have to do with it? Simple: if we all need endorphins to overcome the animosity and tedium of the world, a cripple would need them that much more. The idea, pretty cunning, was to get El Manco to accompany them on the way out; if they attacked, they’d attack him first, giving the rest of them a few precious seconds to escape.

They didn’t question the humane aspect of this ploy. Since half the town had already perished, what did one more victim matter, especially if he was useless, defective, and semi-moronic? They called him on the walkie-talkie and went to meet him at the little door at the bottom of the winding staircase. They had a good excuse to request his presence: they didn’t want to leave him behind. Once he was with them, they explained their plan of escape — omitting the detail that concerned him — armed themselves with all the blunt objects they could find, and then left. There was nobody to be seen in the Plaza. The moon was very high and very small, like a pale little lightbulb that was difficult to connect to the silvery brightness that bathed the trees and the flower pots. Tonight more than ever, the fountain, the famous Salamone fountain, evoked the oft-made comparison with Babylonian flying saucers. “Ready?” “All together!” “Run as fast as you can!” “The keys?” The mayor was holding them in his hand.

“Go!”

Had they been waiting for them? Had they fallen into a trap, set especially for them? The fact is, they hadn’t even covered half the distance when there appeared about twenty living dead — fast, precise, implacable in spite of their disjointedness— who stood in their way. What happened next took only seconds. The medical examiner’s prognostication was right: all twenty of them fell upon El Manco, cracked open his head, and latched on like piglets taking suck. The others scattered in momentary confusion that didn’t last long because more attackers were approaching from behind the cars parked across the street and the fountains to the sides, so they retreated, running back to the Palacio. They didn’t turn to look at poor El Manco, who had become a pincushion, still standing (he hadn’t had time to fall).

The Palacio had ceased to be a refuge. In fact, several corpses had entered behind them, sending the group racing every which way through dark rooms, up and down staircases, and along corridors. After a few minutes of this “lethal blob,” everybody was thinking that they were the last survivor, and a few seconds later everybody was right, or one was. The mayor, having lost all dignity, was curled up in the back of a wardrobe whose door he closed from the inside, and there he stayed, still and quiet, holding his breath.

Unfortunately, right at that moment, the phone in his pocket, which had been ominously quiet for a while, rang. To make matters worse, it took him a while to find it and silence it, what with the state of his nerves; he looked through all his pockets before looking in the right one. When he finally had it in hand, he answered the call. Precautions were no longer worth taking, and the company of a voice was preferable to nothing.

It was a man calling from Primary School #7, in the name of the School Association, to tell him that they had decided not to support him in the upcoming elections.

He didn’t manage to ask why. The voice sounded resolute and bitter and not at all friendly, even though it belonged to someone he’d known for years, and on whose electoral loyalty the mayor would have bet his life just hours earlier. With what remained of his political reflexes, he tried to stammer out something about it not being the moment to discuss the election, or that he would continue to serve the people of the town in whatever role he could be most useful, without any personal ambitions, but the other man interrupted him before he began, telling him that all the people of the neighborhood shared the opinion he had just communicated, and probably the whole party did, and that he might as well bid the mayor’s office goodbye. After which, he hung up without saying goodbye.

The first thing the mayor thought was that they were blaming him for what was happening. That was unfair in the extreme but could only be expected. He suspected, however, that there was something else going on. He remembered that Primary School #7 had been one of the first sites affected. The person who called him, it would seem, had been one of the victims, and the ill humor expressed in his voice would be the effect of the loss of endorphins, a loss everybody around him would have suffered, the whole damn School Association, and at this point, the whole town. The first thing that had occurred to them in their new state of mind was to initiate a motion against the mayor. Would this be the end of his career? He’d already won three elections, this would be his fourth — he’d been leading the City for fifteen years — and he always won by a large margin. Neither the long years of laissez-faire, nor suspicions of corruption, nor the increase in taxes had put a dent in his popularity or his well-oiled system of cronyism. And now this, the disappearance of a few insignificant mental drops, was going to spell his doom. Did this mean that his tenure could not be attributed to his skill as helmsman of the administration, to his charisma and connections, but rather to the happiness of the voters? Bad moment to discover this. The door to the wardrobe was already open and a silhouette, both inhuman and human, outlined in black against black, leaned over him. In a split second, in fast forward, there raced through his mind all the public works and urban improvements he owed Pringles.

In the meantime, the hunt continued through the streets, in the houses, on rooftops, and in basements, out in the open and hidden away in the most secret of lairs. Night continued. The moon followed its path across the sky, not rushing anywhere. One of the last reservoirs of blessed living and throbbing material persisted, miraculously, right downtown. It could be found on the top floor of the Teatro Español on Stegmann Street, in a large hall that the Sociedad Española rented for special events. On this occasion, it was for a wedding reception, less elegant than the French one, but just as well attended. The bride was the daughter of a farmer, the sort who breaks the bank in order to impress his new in-laws. They had eaten vast amounts of lamb and suckling pig, and drunk wine like there was no tomorrow. The alarm reached them in good time, and since nobody had yet left, they were all privileged witnesses to the invasion, thanks to their elevated location, and the room’s many balconies. The fact that they hadn’t been attacked could have been due to many reasons, or none, or perhaps they were being saved for dessert. One of the many possible reasons was that they’d fallen between two crowds that had received, early on, a visit from the slurpers of the hereafter: behind them and down below, the moviegoers at the Teatro Español, who were taken by surprise as they left, crowded in the entryway and along the sidewalk; to the side, the hotel guests and the diners at its restaurant. They’d witnessed all of it from the balconies, and they’d had time to prepare themselves. The hall, whose safety arrangements for evacuation would not have passed any kind of inspection, had only one access, a narrow and steep staircase, which would have caused a holocaust in case of fire but was easy to defend. The attempts at invasion by the living dead were repelled by a barrage of bottles thrown from the top of the stairs; they had drunk enough to have an unlimited supply of these projectiles. The attackers had dispersed, and there ensued a long period of tense calm.

Now they were returning, and this time it would be impossible to keep them out. Clearly there was a reflux back toward downtown — they were swarming like storm clouds down Stegmann Street. Even with the bottle pelting and the somersaults and the resulting avalanches created when the bravest attempted hand-to-hand combat, the stairs were soon left unobstructed. The first walking corpses that entered the hall provoked a tumult of shouting and mad dashes that, due to the lack of space, could only result in the tracing of a circle, the classic figure of terror. And even if some might have preferred to leap into the void, they would have been preemptively dissuaded by the doors onto the balconies filling with those inconceivable beings, which they now saw close up and under bright lights. And they kept entering; their sheer numbers rendered defensive attacks futile, for anybody who attacked one was in turn attacked by others. They always won. The worst part was not only that they could see them close up, but since there was no place to escape, they had to watch from close up as they performed their dreadful brain surgery; many people had never thought about having a brain, and now they were seeing them from a few feet away, stripped naked, gouged out and sucked up by a strange tongue, and they even heard the liquid sound of the slurp. Even though they were terrified, they didn’t stop twisting and kicking and ducking. It looked like a dance, with one partner dead and the other alive.

The shouts quieted down little by little. What had begun as a bedlam of shrieks and roars, warnings and pleas for help, slowly drained out into isolated death throes punctuated by silences. And, out of one of the last screams there emerged, unexpectedly, the cure.

An older woman, cowering in a corner at the back of the hall, watched as a slurping corpse — drooling and majestic in its own way — lifted its head up from a child’s open skull and set itself upright on green-splotched tibias with ornate bunches of dried innards hanging down and shaking like the tails of a frock coat, with disconnected remnants of face stuck to its skull, and she saw it look at her, choose her, and take a step toward her.

Then… she recognized it. It came to her from the depth of her being, independent of any mental process; it came to her from the substrata of life in Pringles, from the erudition of many years and a lifelong passionate interest in the lives of others, which in small towns is equivalent to life itself. What came to her was his name.

“Schneider, the Russian!”

It rang out in an interval of silence, then echoed throughout the hall. Some turned to look. The corpse (which was indeed that of the German immigrant Kurt Alfred Schneider, dead for fifteen years), stopped moving, spurned — in an unprecedented gesture — a defenseless prey, turned, and began to walk calmly toward the exit. Next, everything went very fast, as is always fast or even instantaneous the “realization” of something obvious that everybody has thus far ignored.

It had taken all night, or the entire terrible fragment since midnight, as well as the almost entire collective drainage of endorphins, to realize that the dead who were returning were the town’s dead, its parents and grandparents, friends and relatives. Happen what may to the deceased after their final moments, they still continued to be themselves, since otherwise their demise wouldn’t have been theirs. Why hadn’t anyone thought of this sooner? Probably because they hadn’t had time to think of it, or they hadn’t thought it would be of any use. They also had the excuse that those thirsty monsters, who seemed to be guided by diabolically powered remote control, had violently expunged any familiar idea of neighbor, of fellow Pringlesian. They seemed to come from too far away. They came, however, from the Cemetery, where the living went every Sunday to bring them flowers, and, while there, to take a stroll that reignited their will to live. And, there in the Cemetery, the gravestones guaranteed that the horrendous metamorphosis of death did not alter identity, and identity was a name. If not, what good were the gravestones? Things began to fall into place, began to “coincide.” The fact that the dead coincided with their names, as did the living, was mere logic, but suddenly it seemed like a revelation. Which is why the witnesses were surprised when the name put a stop to the killer impulse and made them return to the Cemetery where they belonged. If it was true, if it worked with all of them the way it had worked with Schneider, the Russian, the cure was easy, because everybody (except me), as I already said, knew all of them. Of course they had to recognize them, which a priori did not appear to be that easy.

But it was easy. Until that moment they had seen them only as the post-human monsters that they were, but now, remembering that they were also their fellow Pringlesians and that they had been given Christian burials, the optics had changed. In minutes they would be able to find out just how much. Because they recognized them at first sight. They were surprised to recognize them, and that very surprise made the names pop out. The older women, who had initiated this method, were the ones who could say the most names, pointing to this or that skeletal ghoul, who, upon hearing its name, became obedient, and left. The men didn’t lag too far behind; some more some less, but everybody had done business with everybody else. Age helped. The young people, whose strength and agility gave them an advantage in war, had to defer to the knowledge and memories of the older people during this phase of the war.

It was as if they had opened their eyes and seen them for the first time. That was Whatshisname, this was Youknowwho, and that was so-and-so’s father who had left such-and-such widowed, the wife of that one who had died so young… And their name was the magical and infallible key that made them desist; they heard it and left, their impulse checked; it wasn’t necessary to shout at them — they heard their names no matter what; they seemed to be attuned to the sound that belonged to them. Even more so: they seemed to have been listening for it the whole time, and wondering why nobody had spoken it.

Very soon, they were descending the staircase, followed by those who were shouting their names (it wasn’t necessary but they did it anyway), repeating them just in case, even though once was enough. And outside, the party guests, now emboldened, spread out in all directions, looking for more living dead — who weren’t hard to find — so they could confront them decisively, recognize them, and name them. News spread fast. The Pringlesians came out from under their beds, and now they were the ones hunting, without sticks or stones or rifles, armed only with their knowledge of the old families and their losses.

Some may have been amazed by the infallibility of the method. But only if they hadn’t taken into account that family names were the language of the town, and that the inhabitants spoke it from the minute they learned to talk. It was as if they had been preparing for this moment their entire lives. Or it might be amazing, or seem implausible, that they would get them right each and every time. Some had been dead for a hundred years — little more than clumps of dust stuck together somehow or other. But this could be explained: family names had become so interconnected over the years that the entire population was related by blood; apparently, the dead accepted any last name that belonged to any branch of their family tree.

From the streets, where a short while before the silence had been interrupted only by shrieks of horror and snorts from the hereafter, there arose a chorus of names that reached the heavens. Everybody was shouting them through the streets, out doors and windows, from balconies, out of cars, and from bicycles. The dead marched away in silence, retracing the steps they had taken earlier. They converged on the Plaza, and from there formed one compact mass down the transverse streets that led to the road to the Cemetery.

The retreat was like that of the tide. They were taking with them all the endorphins of the town, and the following morning the Pringlesians would have to produce more, from zero. They no longer pursued them, except out of curiosity, nor did they shout their names, except for one or another that had been forgotten, the name of a family that had died out, a name some old man had to dig out of the depth of his memory and say out loud as an extra precaution. Moreover, it didn’t take any effort and they didn’t even have to dig very deep in their memories. Their everyday conversations were full of names, the town was made up of names, and that night, names had saved the town.

A few people followed them out of curiosity, but the majority preferred to watch the procession from their rooftops; those with the best views were the owners of the only three tall buildings in town, and their neighbors who’d invited themselves over. They saw a dark mass, swarming but orderly, flowing back toward the edge of town. The only incident worth noting took place when the crowd of living dead passed the Chalet de la Virgen. At that moment, the five Virgins who lived there appeared at the door, one behind the other. Nobody could explain how they had acquired the ability to move, perhaps through some kind of religious miracle; and not only that: they had also acquired light, an intense golden radiation that made them glow, and made them visible from far away. They separated from one another and joined the rear of the great march, like shepherds herding their flock. And they herded it to the end, in other words, to the Cemetery, and they entered after the last dead, and though nobody saw this, they probably made certain that everybody went back into his own and not his neighbor’s tomb.

That’s how it all ended. Except for those who were standing on the rooftops of the tallest buildings, where they could see everything, even beyond the Cemetery, all the way to the perimeter of roads that surrounded the town. On the MacAdam ellipse of highway that surrounded Pringles, unreal under the white light of the moon, two cars, driving in opposite directions, looked like toys from that far away. One was going at full speed “as if it were racing”; the other went very slowly, like a tortoise, so slowly that if some small feature in the landscape wasn’t used as a point of reference, you would think it was standing still. Those who saw the two cars took it as a sign that life carried on, and that the following day the families of Pringles would again take up their habit of going out for a spin, thereby taking up the task, difficult and easy at the same time, of recapturing their lost happiness.