The spiders hid under my legs, and I, aimless, with tired eyes, and carrying a lesion on my right cornea. Could feel myself stepping on them, and they crunched, and I cursed myself for not being able to stop stepping on them because they were so small.
If the smoke hadn’t surrounded me like a cancer. I would have been able to see them sheltering beneath my feet, running because, like me, they felt the cursed circumstance of the smoke everywhere.
Although I didn’t believe it, I knew of the constant discomfort. That guilty conscience of squashing them would have been better. First came the usual cold, then everything escalated into pneumonia. Later, the auras circled around my head, and I couldn’t see them because of the unbearable fog of gases that engulfed the house.
While three greasy bodies burned garbage to the sound of some inaudible song in the background, putrefaction surrounded more than 400 houses. They enjoyed sweating gallons of grease, opening their mouths, swallowing smoke, flies, and spiders, their five senses focused directly on the arduous task.
Each one sang Paganinis or Vivaldi’s seasons like a typical classical concert where cockroaches and mice played the soft melodies of Perfume, a bit of the France that rises during Suskind’s story, the one that doesn’t smell like Chanel, but it doesn’t matter; I grew accustomed to the stench of the port as Jean-Baptiste Grenouille grew accustomed.
By the sixth month in a state of decomposition, I was becoming completely senseless.On the bed, my lungs were blackened, scorched, like the garbage that greasy bodies continued to burn with impunity. It all began at the end of January, with the gentleness of the cold air.
In June, almost at the dawn of the flamboyant trees, that will-o’-the-wisp had consumed three hectares of infertile land. Where waste had always accumulated, where the neighborhood people had always gathered to burn their respective garbage piles, a bit like burning your little piece of land.
Then that senseless inhaling of smoke became a drug. It was virginity beginning to fade into unconsciousness, a state brothel written back in 1769 by Restif de la Bretone and carelessly brought to Cuban shores, which began to settle thanks to the ineptitude of other, no less greasy bodies.
The garbage prostituted itself and multiplied, and with what strength I had left, I closed doors and windows, discarded cigarettes, and stored as much water as I could.
So, when my house became part of that border of waste and my body decomposed from so much smoke, the only thing that would save me from those five putrefied senses would be the purity and clarity of what would one day surround me on all sides, the cursed circumstance of water.
By: Yeema Martínez Yee
Translated by Aliani Rojas Fernández
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