at the signs.
“No trespassing. Danger of death”.
“You are only authorized to get water and cheese”.
The man walked up to the chest, opened it and studied its contents. He chose a piece of the toughest cheese, raised his hand in gratitude and left the way he had come.
“I’m glad I didn’t have to shoot him; I’ve got a friend who used to work for him and who held him in the highest regard.”
“Is your friend still alive?”
“I don’t know, but wherever he is he’ll be grateful that I fed the man who once gave him enough to put food on his table.”
Aurelia did not wish to ask what her father would have done had it been his friend standing by the fence, because she knew the answer too well. Bonds of friendship no longer existed, in that regard the villain’s victory had been thorough, placing the question of whether it was worth to carry on fighting.
If the pandemic had not made its appearance it would have been that very month at the beginning of summer when Aurelia would have packed her suitcases and left her home to study Fine Arts and become a woman as fabulous as her aunt.
Except for the accordion, of course.
No accordion, no guitar, not even a bandurria, because there was no need to be an orchestra conductor to know that her family’s fate was nowhere close to the path of music.
Aurelia was not sure that her aunt had ever got any close to being a competent restorer, but the mere fact of feeling close to Anabel and grasp a small part of her wonderful “art of living” was enough.
Maybe Anabel could even help her achieve her secret dream to become a magician.
It was not really “secret”, since she had used every member in the house as audience to test her newest tricks; from making eggs disappear to turning a bunny into a chicken or having them take out the same card of the deck every time.
When she was still a little girl, her grandfather used to tell her:
“Don’t place too much trust in your fingers’ abilities; they are deceitful things. I had three that abandoned me in a single day.”
Despite all, she still trusted her fingers, although now that she lacked an audience, she could hardly practice her tricks.
The only one who showed some enthusiasm towards her tricks was Coco, but the poor beast was so dim that he even had a hard time learning to bark threateningly.
If a stranger, no matter how bad they looked, turned up at the other side of the fence, all Coco did was wag his tail and wait for his “bosses” to join him. These were two massive mastiffs who really knew how to make an impression by snarling and baring their teeth.
Even if the heat encouraged the sick to stay in their homes and await their fate with resignation, it did not dissuade the hungry, who left in search of anything that might soothe their pangs.
But there was nothing left.
Five weeks after the first alarms set off, and even though it happened within Chinese borders, the citizens of the world’s largest cities threw themselves like a plague at the supermarkets, leaving the shelves so empty that looking at them was painful.
Many had not seen an orchard in their whole lives and some even believed that carrots grew on trees.
Admittedly, these city people were very good at technology.
Little did it help when companies started closing, first out of fear of infection and then because of lack of supplies.
Around the world, stock markets had plummeted by the billion during a tragic spring and summer in which swimming suits disappeared from beaches.
A beautiful three mast yacht with red sails that belonged to a banker from Panama left to the Pacific Ocean with provisions to last him six months and the logical hope that the whole thing would be over in that time.
Authorities used its GPS location to see that it had not docked in any port nor disembarked in any island, but by September, an Australian cargo ship found it floating in the middle of nowhere.
No one answered their calls, so they left them to continue their way, even though there was not a breath of wind and yet their the helixes were still.
When she read the news, Aurelia thought of an old Samoan song:
Still and speechless drift the Dead,
the sail’s shade protects them.
Beneath the keels the sea laments
and the sun points Westward.
You will be merrier in Noa-Noa,
by the fires of Tehemaní,
hearing the voice of Taharoa
fall soft over the eternal sea.
She could not remember more of the song, other than an allusion to the paradise that awaited the audacious sailors who had dared to defy waves and wind as they advanced into the largest of oceans, with the intention of populating all its coasts, from New Zealand to Isla de Pascua.
Aurelia missed the early mornings spent reading books with exotic settings, before her mother told her to tidy up her room and feed the animals–the latter she hated on account of a damned cockerel that had developed a certain animosity against her ankles.
Their fierce feud ended with the vicious bird’s transformation from troublemaker to pepitoria sauce, but the girl did not feel all that happy about the way their quarrel was settled; with a swing of the axe perpetrated by her mother, who then delegated the task of plucking its feathers to Aurelia.
***
Óscar was born in a farm and had grown up among animals; he spent hours with them, tended them, petted them, named them, so that as soon as he learned how to read and write, he saw that he would have to learn a lot more if he truly wanted to become a veterinarian doctor.
He devoted himself to his dream, was first in school, and won a scholarship that would allow him to dedicate the rest of his life to dogs, cats, pigs and horses.
He was lucky to have crossed paths with a professor who knew how to give proper guidance to his students; a man who could ask a wolf what was hurting him and have the animal reply.
In fact, Mr. Dionisio did not really ask, nor did the animals really reply. He just watched them, spoke to them as if they were old friends, whispered soothing words and tickled them behind their ears–what he called the “G spot” for tranquility.
“If you make an animal feel relaxed, it well end up telling you one way or another what its problems are. However, if it stays tense, you’ll probably just get bitten.”
When the rumors started about a strange disease that had started in a remote region of China, many voices denied the virus the right to be called a living thing, as it could only reproduce by infecting foreign cells and hijacking their metabolism.
However,
