The Entomologist

Osaka, Japan. August 2015.

I

On August 8th 2015, approximately ten months after my father’s death and five years since I had become a father myself, my two daughters Sola, Luno and I received a pair of beetles from the entomologist.

The study of insects had regained adepts in the archipelago since associate professor Joji Otaki and researcher Chiyo Nohara from Okinawa University made public the first results and conclusions of their team’s research entitled Ingestional and transgenerational effects of the Fukushima nuclear accident on the pale grass blue butterfly (Pseudozizeeria maha), from specimens collected and studied near the areas of Iwaki, Takahagi and Fukushima, three years after the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown of March 2011, results the foreign press had immediately exploited with enticing and dramatic articles that talked of mutant and radiated butterflies, genetic mutations and deformities, severe abnormalities, the Japanese nuclear disaster, fear for the future, naturally, and even ironically mentioned Mothra, a popular Japanese movie monster in the shape of a giant moth who acts like Earth’s guardian and sometimes fights the world-famous Godzilla. Nohara died as the result of illness eighteen months after the publication of the research paper.

Reading this piece of news called to mind that when I was three or four, every night, before I went to sleep, I used to hear what I thought was a giant butterfly flapping its wings against the walls of the room next door.

Wake up! Wake up! — I will make thee my comrade, thou sleeping butterfly.

I was brought back from sleep minutes after three in the morning, sweating, head spinning, heart beating hard against my insides, by a dream in which I was hugging father as he went to sleep just to realize when coming to my senses that the only thing I was hugging was the empty space inside my arms. As the apartment I inhabited at the time had no curtains, the first thing I found when looking out the window was lonely Sirius in the middle of a terribly black sky. There it was, the brightest star in our visible universe, the star the Greeks saw as the tip of a canine’s nose, staring right at me, reminding me that the Dog Days, those summer days when Sirius comes out before the sun, were in full bloom.

The 5.37 am train from Gotanda to Shinagawa station stank, as it did every Sunday dawn, of half-metabolized alcohol escaping from the mouths and pores of my fellow riders. I boarded the bullet train at 6.07 am, the same train I always take when I go to see our daughters in Osaka, the city where Matsuo Basho, the famous Japanese poet who composed the Haiku I wrote above, died of stomach illness in November 1694. The many reds, yellows, blues and pinks of the sunrise came just after the symmetrical silhouette of Mount Fuji appeared to the right of the wagon I was in. I tried to sleep a little. In what I can only describe as a hallucination, Father, attired in a peanut colored suit, a crisp white shirt and black leather moccasins, came again to occupy the empty seat next to mine. His hair was as white as it was the night he died, but he looked stronger, healthier. You will do fine, he said after moments of silent meditation, his green eyes fixed on the back of the seat in front of him, in a voice that was neither coarse nor sick, but only filled with sadness, I do not worry about you in the least. Take care of Batista, take care of your sister, please, she will need you more than you think. That has not been the only railway apparition. On a different day, same hour, same train, same destination, I saw a piebald cat pacing around the fast-moving wagon, a cat like the many who are killed and cooked in several city markets in Vietnam, China or Korea, to name some of the countries still attached to such culinary practices. Tomohon Market in Sulawesi, Indonesia, for example, offers the voracious shopper not only the heads and carcasses of pigs, chickens, cats and dogs, but also the meat and bones of bats, bush rats, monkeys, turtles and pythons. The bicolor cat my tired brain created looked at me, got on one of the seats, leaped onto the windowsill and jumped out the window.

Sola and Luno ran out from around the corner of the shopping arcade next to their mother’s family residence, a two-story house my ex-wife asked me not to ever approach again after our divorce. Their maternal grandmother, a sixty-something-year-old woman with a conspicuous mole on the left side of her chin, was hiding behind a dark-blue vending machine. Seeing her granddaughters off from such a distance and from that sheltered position eliminated the need for an uncomfortable exchange of greetings with me. I still said hi and waved as the half-concealed woman swiftly disappeared back into the shopping street. Sola wore a white and red stripped sleeveless top, her chest adorned with a tiny sky-blue ribbon, and a deep royal blue ruffle-skirt. Luno wore a red top with yellow, pink, white and red dots printed on it and a ruffle-skirt the color of rain clouds. In addition to these simple and practical outfits worn to spend the sultry Japanese summer days, heat which the lack of greenery and the excess of concrete in the city seem to intensify every new summer, both covered their heads with light straw hats that I had found and bought in Yokohama’s Chinatown weeks earlier, hats designed to look like the face of Pandas, the charming giant black and white bear of which there are no more than a couple thousand left due to the ever-growing population and the ever shrinking natural habitat of the Pandas and so many more mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, fish, insects and flora in the suitably named People’s Republic of China.

We started the day with a ritual breakfast at a café near their home. Since divorcing their mother I can only meet our daughters in Osaka, even though I live in Tokyo, outdoors, two Sundays per month and only for the day. In this respect, I consider myself amongst the fortunate ones. The great majority of divorced fathers in this country, both Japanese and foreign, due to an antiquated and ingrained set of laws and beliefs, see their children, depending on the judgement and the mother’s will, once a month or once a year for some hours at a time, or just never see them again. It is not rare to find news of fathers who, not being able to bear the separation, opt for suicide.

Breakfast consisted of thick fruit juice, toast, salad and sunny side up eggs, a name I still find evocative of the better days, for us humans, not for the fowl in any case. Those breakfasts, as many other things we used to think about, do and say have changed as they age. And it is fine that way. We talked and joked and ate. Sola pretended to grow a thick pale yellow juice mustache and Luno, who was wearing her napkin on her head, forked the leaf of lettuce next to her eggs a hundred times before deciding she would not eat it.

It was a morning of intense blue skies, skies like the ones in that October afternoon when father had died less than a year earlier. The air-conditioned train ride to our destination, a relief to Sola whose hair and nape were already drenched in sweat, took us three quarters of an hour. As the gigantic locomotive transported us from one place to another, a feat that has always seemed to me like the small miracle of an elongated time machine, the girls and I exchanged mysterious glances, smiling, as if trying to telepathically communicate, and commented to each other on how good breakfast had been, on the shapes of the clumps of clouds in the sky, some like hippopotami, some like dolphins and one like a lazy, massive whale, counted how many stations were left until our point of disembarkation and discussed those other menial subjects that fill our daily existence with meaning.

Whenever I find myself unaccompanied in this massive city, among its sterile, dormant neon lights, oversized and excessive billboards, quasi total lack of parks or any sort of green spaces (the few ones the rambler gladly runs into feel to him or her like much desired islands for a castaway), architectural and urban lack of grace, dark alleys and streets made by the arrangement of oddly shaped blocks of concrete that seem to take one nowhere, or at least nowhere rewarding to the senses, light posts and light wires in absolute disarray, a river of black waters which crosses across its heart like an artery clogged with filth and the out of reach neighborhoods where live most Burakumin, the Hamlet people, formerly called Eta — Filthy being — or Hinen — Non-being — , the outcast, mostly men but also a small number of women whose ascendants used to be or who are themselves executioners, animal slaughterers, butchers, tanners or gravediggers, a professional list subsequently expanded during the Tokugawa shogunate, one of the three military dictatorships, the form of government which ruled the archipelago for almost seven centuries practically uninterrupted, to gardeners, cleaners, comedians, fortune-tellers, prison guards, panhandlers and lepers, the latter not a profession but still a reason for exclusion, I feel suffocated, consumed and oppressed. In addition, the nature of the inhabitants of the metropolis, most of whom express a strong feeling of pride for the arbitrary fact of having been born and raised within its arbitrary limits, inquisitive and intrusive, who speak loudly, dress flashy, carry extravagant hair styles and ravenous appetites, and even the sight and smell of the local cuisine, batter balls filled with chopped bodies of octopi, roasted bovine or porcine offal, panned sliced beef flesh and innards covered in dark sauce, egg pancakes stuffed with slices of pork, skewers of chicken meat, cartilage, heart, liver, intestines and skin, can easily become vexatious to my general well-being.

I only find Osaka, the second largest city in Japan and the port that used to be the commercial heart of the archipelago, appealing in a numbing way when I am with Sola and Luno. For some uncanny reason, from the moment I hold their little hands, Sola’s always dry, Luno’s almost always clammy, smell their hair, kiss their cheeks, mouths and foreheads and listen to their animated voices, my feet seem to float one or two inches over the gray, hot asphalt, I spot a hopeful, white, solitary crane gliding over the waters of the Yodo river as it reflects the clouds and sun rays as a black mirror, the scarce patches of nature swell like lungs, the ugly and packed concrete structures seem to breathe and acquire a rhythm of their own, the rain stops, the skies open, and the only thing that’s missing is a choir of angels singing and playing harps and trumpets descending from heaven.

II

The disfigurement of the city of Osaka came, at least partly, when the American military men bombed it from the skies repeatedly, starting with a few bombs here and there between November of 1944 and January of 1945 and intensifying their attacks in March, June, July and August of 1945, the last months of the Second Great War, a subject that has interested me close to the point of an obsession for some time. In the first days of March came a drizzle of leaflets warning the civilian population of the upcoming raids and criticizing the Imperial Japanese army, blaming it and its commanders for having started the war the day they bombed Pearl Harbor. A week later came a very different kind of rain.

Incendiary M-69 cluster bombs, steel pipes filled with napalm weighing close to 3 kilograms each, dropped in groups of 38 bombs from the open pregnant bellies of Boeing B-29s, were the weapon of choice. The bombs separated in the air covering a wide area like a drizzle of dark and hungry beetles. The fuse burned for five seconds after hitting the ground before the phosphorus charge ignited the bomb, sending flaming napalm in all directions. Unbearable waves of heat burned it all and everyone.

American chemist Louis Frederick Fieser, a bald and plump chain smoker, and a team of researches under his command at the prestigious Harvard University created the compound and named it by taking the first syllables of the naphthenic and palmitic acids, its two main chemical agents. Napalm, an inexpensive, highly flammable and of slow combustion mixture of petrol and a thickener, burns continuously unless submerged in water or fully deprived of oxygen. Victims suffer third-degree burns as the gel sticks to the skin and asphyxiate when the chemicals deplete the air from oxygen and replace it by CO and CO2. If the injuries do not kill the affected, acute renal failure caused by the rapid dehydration of the body will. Survivors’ limbs are left deformed, chunks of charred, scarred meat and bone, or are simply lost. During wartime, the difficulty to efficiently perform blood transfusions and skin grafts on the ground ensured a brand-new level of mortality in the Japanese civilian population. The first time I read about the bombings, the smell of half cooked fat and meat and the stink of burnt human hair, the smell my brain relates to the one of a slaughtered pig, stayed stuck to my throat and followed me for days. The Japanese cities burnt all day and night. Most of the civilians who died in Osaka, and in the other 64 cities or so bombed in Japan, died burnt or suffocated. Napalm was used again in the Korean War, the French-Algerian War, the Israeli-Palestinian War, the Nigerian Civil War, against the Matses indigenous people in Peru, during the Indo-Pakistani Wars and infamously in the Vietnam War in unprecedented amounts. Other countries, too many to mention here, have followed the American example. When asked about his invention, a guiltless Fieser responded he had no right to judge the morality of napalm just because he had invented it.

Not only people vanished because of the sticky gasoline. Of the seven sunflower vases Vincent van Gogh painted in Arles between August 1888 and January of the next year as a present for his friend and also painter Paul Gauguin, or so the story goes, there are six left in museums and collections in Germany, England, Japan, The United States and Holland. The seventh one burnt and its ashes disappeared.

Koyata Yamamoto, a neatly dressed entrepreneur and amateur poet from Osaka, bought Vase avec Cinq Tournesols inspired and aided by his friend, writer Saneatsu Mushanokoji, an adept of Leo Tolstoy and the Russian writer’s humanitarian philosophy. Mushanokoji pursued his societal view not only in his books, but also in his Atarashiki-mura, the intentional community he founded and established in the mountains of Hyuga, in Miyazaki prefecture, a town famous for the production of the black and white stones, made out of slate and clam shells respectively, used in the game of Go, the most ancient board game still played. Our ideal is that the entire world’s people should fulfill their own destinies, and that the individuality residing in each one of them should be allowed to grow fully, reads, as an example of Mushanokoji’s idiosyncrasy, the first of the six principles of Atarashiki-mura.

The painting arrived from France in December 1920 on board of the vessel Binna, after more than six months of journey at sea, and stayed in Japan for the next twenty-five years. Yamamoto, worried by the American bombings over Japan, and after failing to store the painting in the vaults of the banks of the city, took it home to Ashiya, a small city over the hills between the Osaka bay and Kobe.

When I was telling this story to my ex-wife, when we still talked, when we were still married, she replied by commenting that she had woken up ten minutes earlier and was in the bathroom of her house in Osaka, half awake and sitting on the toilet, when the Great Hanshin earthquake struck Awaji Island, twenty kilometers away from Kobe on January 17th 1995. It was felt throughout the region, she said, twenty seconds of tremors that left six thousand dead, forty thousand injured and hundreds of thousands displaced.

I visited Kyoto and Kobe with Yumi, a gracious waitress with a white smile of evenly arranged teeth I was dating then, in April 2014, just before flying again to Bogota to see Father. I remember from those days seeing Yumi ride a bike in front of me, her long hair waving like the tail of an extinct bird, her long, pale legs bathed by sunlight, her sudden absences when she received calls from other suitors, the way she stuffed her pretty mouth with strips of grilled meat and chunks of potatoes which she washed down with glasses of cold beer, our walk side by side next to the port of Kobe, where some of the ruins left by the earthquake have been preserved, and her melodic but somewhat distant voice as she told me how men from the Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest Yakuza group in Japan, had handed out bottled water, bread, eggs, powdered milk and diapers to thousands of survivors affected by the disaster. The severe urinary tract infection she was enduring those days, for which she had to swallow a strong dose of antibiotics every night, eliminated any thought or intention of intimacy during our time together. For this, I believe, and other reasons I cannot recall, Yumi and I stopped seeing each other shortly after that trip.

But let us go back to my ex-wife. I met her at the terrace of a small bar in front of the Vieux-Port of Marseilles. She wore a navy blue t-shirt with white letters on her rounded chest that read Oui, a cream-colored skirt and red plastic slippers. She told me her name and also that she liked to eat cheese sandwiches, drink fizzy water and dark Guinness. She had the most beautiful smile I have ever seen. I fell in love that night and courted her for days until she accepted to go for a walk in the afternoon and for a drink after sunset. At a bar in front of Place Castellane she ordered a dark beer and I ordered a cuban-style cocktail. We kissed that night and I told her I wanted her and her life to be a part of mine. I asked her to marry me six months later after buying an inexpensive ring with a diamond so small it could hardly be seen, the rock of which fell off and got lost just a couple of days later, and a bottle of cold Taittinger champagne I got from the neighborhood’s supermarket. We walked up the road that takes to the église of Notre-Dame de la Garde, the basilica erected on top of a hill, overlooking the whole of the port-city and its people, and which took the Marseillais more than two decades to complete. We used to take our time in order to build these edifices dedicated to our gods, our madness and to all those who are gone or dead. Neuschwanstein Castle in Hohenschwangau, in a much simpler version than originally planned by King Ludwig II, took its makers twenty-four years. The Taj Mahal in Agra took the efforts of twenty thousand workers and twenty years to complete. It took humanity close to two centuries to finish building Notre-Dame de Paris. La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona has been under construction since 1882 and it is still a work in progress. In comparison, the Burj Khalifa and the Tokyo Sky Tree, built exclusively for commercial purposes and to this day the tallest building and the tallest tower in the world, took its builders six and four years respectively to complete. How this unstoppable fever for rapidly built, unattractive, practical structures, resulting in monstrosities like the Saffron Square, the Orbit, the Shard and the Walkie-Talkie, just to mention some, has forever devastated the aesthetics of the city of London, a city we visited in July 2007 with my ex-wife, is hard to conceive, understand and believe.

The church was the first place I visited when I arrived in France on August 13th of 2004, the day that marked the beginning of my permanent exile. My stepfather Sylvain was telling me how happy he was to see I had finally arrived while I intently watched the pious, the visitors and tourists going up and down the chalk-colored stone steps, the golden virgin Mary, the quiet granite angels, the bullet holes on the exterior walls, a reminder of the Liberation of France, and the immensely blue Mediterranean sea populated by hundreds of calanques and islets. I was self-centeredly sure that that woman was a present from the heavens and the gods. I popped open the bottle of champagne, we drank the fizzy liquid directly from the bottle and from each other’s mouths and when I felt I was sufficiently brave and inebriated, I pulled out the ring from the inner breast pocket of my winter coat, showed it to her and asked her the crucial question. She said yes without hesitation with that smile I still so much like and which is now forever missing from her face. I was 23 and she was 28. Sola, our first daughter, came to the world on September 22nd 2010, fat and shapeless, head like a football, nostrils too big for her face, one eye open, looking at an empty spot in the labor room, and the other one closed, her purple skin covered with whitish lumps and blood clots and a section of her clipped and yellow umbilical cord still hanging from her belly button. She was the most beautiful baby in the world. I missed Luno’s birth in November 2012 since the relation with my ex-wife was already reaching its end and she had decided, once again, to give birth far away from where we lived, at a hospital near her parents’ home in Osaka. I couldn’t feel the same ecstasy I had felt two years earlier when I saw Luno five days after her birth. Routine, this warring enemy of time, the ways to manage money and recurring disagreements regarding our sex life, or better said, the lack of it, were what I thought made us drift apart and the love we used to feel to gradually vanish and be replaced by a muted kind of frustration that for a while transformed itself in hatred. There was more to it, of that I am sure. There is always more to it.

As I was saying, Ashiya was bombed by the men under the orders of American General Curtis Lemay once in May, twice in June, and once again in August of 1945, the same day the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. LeMay, a hog-faced man who liked to chew on and smoke cigars he lit with a Ronson lighter, was a man busy with killing. Both Yamamoto’s house and Van Gogh’s painting were destroyed by fire. In 1987, almost a century to the day Van Gogh had finished the Sunflowers paintings, Yasuo Goto, also Japanese, president of, ironically, the Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance, approved the acquisition of another of the canvas depicting a number of sunflowers in a vase, one of the three containing fifteen flowers, for an amount close to forty million American dollars during an auction at Christie’s in London. Van Gogh, on the other hand, died poor and somewhat crazy on July 29th 1890 after receiving a shot of revolver in the torso. If the shot was or not self-inflicted is still a matter of debate. The burning of the Sunflowers makes one wonder how many more priceless words, sculptures, paintings and exemplary men have been turned to ruins and ashes and lost forever without a trace, either destroyed by our own hands and idiocy or by the rage of God and nature. Surely many more than the scarce ones we have managed to preserve. Some things never come to light, reminded us Sir Thomas Browne, many have been delivered; but more hath been swallowed in obscurity and the caverns of oblivion. Much was destroyed by the Spanish in Mexico and the rest of Latin America during the decades of slaughter, rape, larceny and conquest, the earthquakes of Tokyo and Lisbon, the floods of Florence, the Nazis and the allies in Europe, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic State in Palmyra and the explosion of the city of Delft, where both Fabritius and most of his work were blown to pieces.

Fabritius, whose name carries the same number of letters as mine, whose dark brows, fleshy nose and full lips look at me as if reflected in a mirror, who was said to be not only a colleague and an inspiration to Johannes Vermeer but the most gifted of Rembrandt’s pupils, was painting the portrait of a sacristan when the forty tons of black gunpowder stored in wooden barrels exploded. The Dutchman was merely thirty-two years of age at the time of Der Delftse Donderslag, The Thunderclap of Delft, as the explosion has come to be known, same age as I was when a cirrhotic liver decided to put an end to my father’s sorrow. Both father and Fabritius died in the month of October with 360 years of separation, a number that brings to mind, at least in degrees, a full cycle or rotation. One of the many anecdotes recorded after the morning of the charring of Delft says that a baby girl, whom I imagine pale and red headed like a woodpecker, still sitting in her high chair, smiling and playing with an apple, was rescued a day later. What became of that red headed baby girl, if she survived childhood to become a wife and a mother, a potter or a painter or if she honored the deceased Fabritius in any way, has also been lost or unremembered.

A woman who introduced herself as Kaori boarded the wagon four stops before ours. Shoulder length black hair, creamy white skin, narrow eyes that seemed to hide secrets and wonders. A young, beautiful woman by all means. Kaori wore an amethyst colored blouse, a navy pinstripe skirt, black heels and a pearl bracelet wrapped around her left wrist. She carried a French designer handbag on her shoulder, dragged a cumbersome black suitcase with her right hand and carried some plastic bags in her left. She greeted us in English and sat next to us. You are a good father, she said all of a sudden, her eyes still fixed upon a spot on the floor. Something was wrong. Kaori’s hair and shoes were dirty and greasy, her skirt was stained in different places, the plastic bags were filled with empty plastic bottles and what looked like wrappings and miscellaneous garbage, her legs and feet looked scraped and she smelled like old sweat and urine. She rambled, switching between English and French, both languages spoken with practically no accent, about having worked for a long time as the Chief Financial Officer for the world’s largest French Cosmetics firm’s branch in Tokyo and about having left her job some months back due to exhaustion. Too many people, too many brands, trop de choses a faire, jour et nuit, she said. It was a nice place to work but the people weren’t. I am Kaori, and what’s your name? My pleasure. Good girls, very good girls. You are a good father. Life is short. I only want to spend time with my husband and my two children now. I asked her if she lived in Osaka and if she was going to see them. I live in Shinjuku, she answered, in central Tokyo. They live there too. I am going there now, she said, even though both Osaka airport and the bullet train station were in the opposite direction. Things go and come, and people too, waves high and low, mais on doit vivre, tu sais? The little Mermaid, she said when she noticed the picture book the girls were looking at. La Petite Sirène.That is good. You have beautiful teeth. That is good too. She then lowered her eyes and for a while stopped talking. Kaori left her seat at the same stop as us. As we got off she asked for help, to no one in particular, in order to carry the black suitcase off the wagon. It is full of books, she said. It is only books, there is not a thing to be afraid. As I grabbed the handle and lifted the bag I wondered how a woman of her size and build could have carried until then such a heavy suitcase. Whatever was in it were not books in any case. Have a nice, have a nice day, she said without looking at us, waving the hand with the bracelet as she walked away dragging her belongings.

III

The air conditioning inside the complex hit our sweat-drenched faces like the slap of a cold hand. After paying the entry fee to the young, businesslike lady at the front desk, a woman whose eyes we never met, we found that the entrance to the Giant Insect World exhibit was a short tunnel, indigo walls rolling on its axis over our heads and under our feet, intended to represent perhaps a black hole, a time warp or a space tunnel. I could not tell the mysterious tunnel’s relation to the robotic insect mannequins we were about to see. Only the gods know in what strange ways all matter in space and time is connected and related.

The entomologist, bathed in the white neon light of the indoor complex which made him look like a modern returnee prophet, was waiting for us at the end of the intergalactic cave. He was a tall man, much taller than the average Japanese, had thin, long limbs that randomly moved as if each one of them had its own and separate will, wore a couple of thick black rimmed glasses on the long bridge of his nose and the traces of age and a certain sadness on the rest of his face. I could not guess his age. He had a head of thick black hair, thick black brows combed to the right over big bright eyes which were too large for his face, the curious eyes of an insect who seemed to be absorbed in the comprehensive study of our gestures and intentions, small cocoon shaped ears and a smile that often came but was never strong enough as to reveal his teeth. He was wearing a turquoise t-shirt with Haeckel’s famous symmetrical arachnids printed on his chest, which helped conceal the flakes of dandruff falling off from his head, plain blue denim pants too short for his long legs, royal blue and bright yellow striped socks that looked like the flag of Sweden and plain white sneakers. The man smelled of fresh soil and of autumn grass that has recently been moistened. The entomologist smiled and bowed to salute us in such a delicate manner that it was almost imperceptible. He then tapped the girls’ heads in a way that seemed forced, shy and somewhat distant and softly smiled again before asking them in Japanese what their favorite insect was. Butterflies! They both shouted. Of course, said the entomologist, who does not love them! Even Vladimir Nabokov collected, drew and studied butterflies!

The girls, as it was natural for their age, had no idea who the entomologist was talking about. I did remember reading that the Russian author of The Defense, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Lolita, apart from being a chess player and a chess problem composer and solver, had collected butterflies since he was a kid, considered becoming a full time lepidopterist and had even been for a period of his life the butterfly curator at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.

Butterflies are vibrant insects, they look like colorful flowers in flight, said the entomologist. Besides, many of them have mastered several dazing types of mimicry in order to avoid being devoured by their many predators. Each butterfly, to me, is like a short good dream you have at night. And the one insect you don’t like? He asked. Cockroaches! They shouted and grimaced in unison and skipped as if they had just seen one or two running across their little feet.

I also remembered that Nabokov concluded, based on his entomological experience, that Gregor Samsa, Franz Kafka’s famous protagonist of The Metamorphosis, was a black beetle and not a filthy cockroach like many still think.

Cockroaches have remained attached to the memory of our first escape. I was nine. Father had either cheated on, beat mother or threatened to kill her again, or the three at the same time, what seemed to have become his favorite pastime during the last years of their marriage, which resulted on mother’s emptying of the house where we lived, hiring a large, sky blue colored moving van with a driver, packing what didn’t fit in the van in three suitcases and several black garbage bags which she threw inside her car, an ivory white Renault Nevada father had bought her, kidnapping us from school and paying a friend of hers to take turns with her and drive all the way, over a thousand kilometers which we covered in two days, from Bogota to Cartagena. The story of the escape and of our lives during those months is also one I need to tell, but perhaps another day.

Father seldom hit Batista and me. He punished us once with a rolled newspaper when we were taking a bath with sister and spent the whole bottle of neon pink bubble soap. He slapped me once when I shouted at him to stop shouting at mother. I cannot recall any other time. On the contrary, violence against mother reached new levels during those last years. All his rage and frustration seemed to have fallen on her like a natural disaster made of flesh and anger. He slammed her face against the black door of his Mitsubishi Montero and broke her nasal bridge. He punched one of her eyes and the golden ring around his finger helped detach her retina. She spent weeks in a hospital after father kicked her stomach and the injuries in her prolapsed uterus caused an internal hemorrhage. Mother’s left arm was a mix of blue, purple and yellow after father crushed it with the door of her night blue Malibu Classic, another of the many cars he gave her to appease her fear. One afternoon mother, Batista and I were forced to hide behind parked vehicles and to walk crouching in zigzag between the cars up to the interior of a hamburger shop where the employees offered us shelter behind the white counter and called the police. Father had been hiding behind a yellow telephone booth, the old ones that looked like hairdresser dryer hoods, armed with the butcher’s knife he kept in the glove compartment of his car. Father was not the only man I saw abuse a woman. Our neighbors, the Malavers, were a family of five: Graciela, the mother, the father, whose name I can’t recall, the elder son called Mario, a small boy whose face was covered in moles and whom we all called Tata, and a beautiful pale girl named Heidi, the first girl I can recall being in love with. I remember the day was cold and sunny. We were resting in one of the hallways of their house after having played for a while in the small backyard when we heard Graciela wail. The reaction of the three kids was not to go and see if their mother had had an accident, if she had hurt herself or seen or heard something scary. The three of them covered their heads and ears with their arms and shut their eyes as if getting ready for the imminent impact on board of a plane or for the arrival of an earthquake. I then saw Graciela pass in front of me, her face disfigured by terror, swollen eyes and tears, followed by her husband, a bulky man in his late forties, coiled black hair, a thick mustache, holding a bed plank in his right hand. Graciela and her husband turned left at the end of the bleak hallway and the man shut the door behind them. Then we heard the thumps, Graciela’s pleads for mercy and her husband’s screams of anger. Thump, plea, scream, thump, plea, scream, over and over again. It lasted for too long until the door opened. The last thing I knew of the Malaver was that the husband became the Mayor of some town, Heidi lived in London, and Graciela was still alive.

Violence against women in Colombia goes much further than insults, blows, and punches. The case of Natalia Ponce de León, and the hundreds of many women like her, came to light the same year Father died. A man obsessed with de León threw sulfuric acid at her, burning her face, arms, abdomen and one of her legs. Shreds of de Leon’s skin mixed with blood and acid were found on the floor in front of the apartment complex where the attack occurred. The jets of acid fell on her face, lips, back of her tongue, eyelids, left ear, forearms, abdomen, hips and legs. Her nose turned tar black in a matter of minutes. With no skin on her face, everything left was fat and muscle. Once she was back on her feet de León initiated an intensive communication campaign to expose her case, created a nonprofit organization to defend, promote and protect the human rights of acid attack victims and gave interviews and statements nation and worldwide.

In November 2015 the Colombian congress approved the Natalia Ponce de León law. The law provides prison sentences of between thirty and fifty years for the attackers, aggravated if the victim is a woman or an infant. The practice of maiming and disfiguring another person with acid, out of jealousy or searching for revenge, is not exclusive to Colombia. There are hundreds of cases every year in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Nepal, Iran, Uganda, Pakistan and Italy. Humiliating, insulting, hurting and even killing women, children, peoples of other races, animals and in general all those we consider in one way or another our inferior seems to be an inherent characteristic to our species.

The first place we lived in when we arrived in Cartagena, the back room of an old colonial house in the neighborhood of La Manga, was infested by an army of black ants the moment we forgot to seal a bag of sugar or close the lid of a can of powdered milk. Black and long cockroaches that resembled hard-shelled eggplants, almost impossible to squash with regular shoes and sandals, and some of which were prone to aerial exploration, were a common sight in the second room that mother, aunt Diana, grandmother, my sister Batista and I inhabited, a small, warm, humid and cramped studio on the fifth floor of a rundown building named El Conquistador, in honor of the Europeans who obliterated the indigenous peoples of the American continent, in the neighborhood of El Laguito.

Many years later I understood the importance of choosing the right bait during a cockroach extermination campaign at one of the apartments I used to inhabit in Tokyo. The disgust I felt at finding them inside the bathroom cabinets and kitchen drawers and the fear that one of the women I used to invite to sleep over soon after my divorce would wake up screaming in the middle of night with a flat, brown, wriggling cockroach on the tip of her nose or exploring the insides of her open mouth drove me to it. I learnt that sprays and one time killers do not work; there will always be a large crowd of young and active roaches, milky nymphs and bronze colored eggs waiting back at home. Given that cockroaches are prone to emetophagia, coprophagia and cannibalism, the best is to choose bait with a delayed toxic agent that will ensure the rest of the inhabitants of the nest will eat not only the feces and the vomit of the poisoned roach, but also feast on its rotting corpse. So there you have it. Now you know how to get rid of the little noxious creatures.

IV

The entomologist asked the girls their names, introduced himself as Matsuo Jumpei and asked us to simply call him Jumpei. Father named me after the main character of Kobo’s novel, he said in a strangely distant voice, like the voice of a man drowning or a balloon that is deflating. Suna no Ona, he said in Japanese, before shifting again to English. I believe they translated it in English as The Woman in the Dunes.

The Jumpei in the book, he said to me, while the girls, who had lost interest when the entomologist had started expanding on the origin of his name, played next to the giant foam frog at the entrance of the exhibit, was a school teacher and an amateur entomologist who went to the yellow seaside dunes in Shizuoka looking for a special kind of beetle, a beetle that would allow him to engrave his name in history. He was just looking for, I guess, like us all when we try to discover something new, make art, build things or make babies, a way to be immortal. The teacher in the novel ends up trapped inside a sand pit where there’s only a dilapidated house inhabited by a beautiful and simple woman who is, well, peculiar, to say the least. I have to say, though, that he does find in there much more than the beetle he was looking for. But I won’t spoil the book for you, it’s worth reading if you are having a good day and want to ruin it, or fix it, with some serious thought.

My dad, the entomologist continued, was also a teacher and an amateur lover of bugs. The man could not escape seeing all the little things other mortals prefer to ignore. He was fascinated by their small shapes, colors, textures, behaviors and details. I still conserve memories of our first holidays abroad. I was seven, eight at the most, and can still hear the melody of the French voices, each word spelled like a musical note, and smell the sweet odor of decay of the Seine River. So many have drowned or been dumped in its brown waters that a morgue was built in 1804 on The Île de la Cité to allow relatives or friends to identify the dead Parisians and the unrelated visitors to stare at the unrefrigerated dead before the advancement of decay forced the authorities to remove the bodies from sight.

We visited Notre Dame, where Victor Hugo’s hunchback lived, not out of religious conviction, but simply because father wished to show me the stone gargoyles hanging from the roof ready to pounce upon and eat the heart of the first distracted tourist. On the contrary, we saw the Eiffel tower tiny like a die-cast model toy only from afar and I had to wait until I was an adult to walk the busy halls of the Louvre in order to see the Winged Victory and the Mona Lisa.

Dad, my resigned mother and I spent five days, from dusk till dawn, visiting the dingy apartments of at least a dozen entomologists. Most of them were European. I remember a colossal German gentleman who mentioned Alexander Humboldt every two sentences and insisted, after producing several wooden cases filled with butterflies and beetles from his wardrobe and from under his mossy looking bed, on giving us a tour of his Wunderkammer, his cabinet of wonders.We stepped inside a small room which strongly smelled of dust and moth balls at the back of his small apartment. All over the red oak wood walls, on the black and white checkered floors and even hanging from the wine colored ceiling the man managed to squeeze the shells of turtles, crabs, clams, scallops, snails and nautilus, the stuffed body of a polar bear cub who seemed to be smiling at us, the yellow mummies of nightmarish marine creatures, half a dozen stuffed birds, among which a short gingerbread colored penguin-like animal he assured us had been the last one of its species, a hairy armadillo that looked as if it were about to scream at us, the mounted head of a jackalope, three mice preserved and dressed in little three piece suits, their heads adorned with little hats and little glasses, to look as if they were little businessmen lost in an agitated conversation, very much à la Walter Potter, the English taxidermist who created all sorts of grotesque scenes with animal corpses, assorted faded corals in the shape of trees, asteroids and mountain ridges, a handful of dried hippocampi, the open jaws of a white shark, a cerise colored starfish with only four arms, antlers, teeth and horns of two dozen animals, including the long tusk of a narwhal labelled as the horn of a unicorn, and other old fashioned paraphernalia which consisted of dry animal skins, heads, limbs, bones and organs that completed his museum of death and horror. Standing in one of the corners was a preserved little black man with empty eye sockets holding a spear. The giant rarities collector assured us that Petit Pierre, as he had baptized the little black man, was, after the French law had become more insensitive and intolerant toward scientific exploration, the only dissected pygmy left in Paris. There was also a hyperactive Frenchman whose apartment, clothes and himself smelled like ripened cheese, an Italian who didn’t show us a single insect but made us listen for hours, as he drank glass after glass of red wine with father, a dozen violin concertos, including the whole Quattro Stagioni and reciting along with the music the sonnets Vivaldi wrote to accompany his pieces, E de mosche, e mosconi il Stuol furioso! is the only line that I remember, a Swiss lady with a magnificent head of curly blond hair who seemed to be immersed in a profound and unsurmountable sadness and a somewhat proud and arrogant and certainly condescending little Austrian gentleman.

I remember clearly the only other Japanese, Takagi san, whose tanned, leathery skin seemed about to crack with each of his gestures, a solitary old man who had sailed around and across the world, from the Panama Canal to the one in Suez, from the tip of Patagonia to the Nordic fjords, from the port of Dar es Salaam to the harbor of Hong Kong on board of many merchant vessels, and who died a few years later in a fire he apparently ignited, and a charming Chinese couple living in the tenth arrondissement who, as my father explained me later that day when we left their domains, traded parts and organs that would soon drive turtles, manta rays, all kinds of sharks, seals, tigers, bears, pangolins, elephants and rhinos to the edge of extinction. Their son, as Chinese and kind as the two of them and whom they had named Leonardo, in honor of the Venetian polymath, showed me how to play ping pong on the table they had in the living room while the adults drank strong tea and discussed their intricate taxidermic business.

The last day of our holidays, following Takagi san’s advice, we visited Deyrolle, the now world famous taxidermy and entomology store on the No 46 Rue de Bac, a couple of blocks away from the chapel on No 140 where Virgin Mary allegedly came to visit sister Catherine Labouré, the apartment on No 120 where writer Francois-René de Chateaubriand spent his last years practically in reclusion, and the apartment on No 108 where writer Romain Gary would shoot himself in the mouth with a caliber 38 in December of 1980, just some years after our visit. It is said that Gary left a letter saying that his own death had nothing to do with the death of his former wife, actress Jean Seberg, whose half decayed body had been found naked, wrapped in a blanket in the back of her car a year earlier. Her death, as it was to be expected, was ruled by the competent authorities as a suicide. Nothing like books, women and the ghost of one’s own mother, said Jumpei, to drive a sane man to the border of the abyss and push him off the ledge.

The taxidermic preservation of the dead, as dad told me during those holidays, is nothing new. We know that the Egyptians used to embalm their departed. It was the French entomologist Réaumur, though, who a little less than three centuries back came up with the first modern processes to preserve dead birds and their dead eggs. Which makes me think of how much I revel in the songs of tree sparrows, brown-eared bulbuls, tiny blue-headed tits, olive green white eyes, orange-breasted bramblings, black and white wagtails and especially in the cawing of the omnipresent large-billed crows at dawn, fiery males singing to attract their future brides or to guard their domains from intruder birds, even though I know as well that for my little insect friends each one of those birds is the worst of nemesis.

What you see when facing a mounted animal is not its body, as one would think, let alone its soul. It is just its tanned skin wrapped around a wool and wire mannequin. I felt scared at first and then just sad when I saw the giant brown bear, the couple of polar bears, the many striped tigers, the small puma, the elegant couple of lions, the befuddled ostrich, the defeated Tasmanian devil, the innocent lizards, the pygmy elephant, the horse, the antelope, the onyx, the young moose, the camel colored ox, the deer, the zebra, the hogs, the foxes, the smaller gray marsupials, the frightened-looking rabbits, the hares and the monkeys, the so many sublime, colorful birds and the thousands of breathtaking beetles and butterflies frozen in time, arranged inside their cases in geometric patterns, every one of them so quiet, and their eyes, most of them replaced by crystal and plastic beads, so dead and soulless. If the dead could talk, we would promptly realize that they hold the pain of the world inside them.

I felt angry at dad and thought, but could not tell him, that only a madman would make the capture, murder and collection of innocent beings his pastime. Father, on the contrary, didn’t blink an eye during our stay in the shop, sweated profusely, even though it was the middle of November, and seemed to have momentarily lost the capacity of speech. He went from notebook to notebook, drawer to drawer, cabinet to cabinet and from wall to wall taking notes, sketching and bothering the staff with a thousand questions, of course, about beetles and other insects, but also about the herbs, the shells, the corals, the eggs and the many samples of stones and minerals carefully arranged across the floors of the shop. Luckily, I didn’t see the corpse of any animal preserved in formaldehyde. I think that such a sight would have ended right then and there my future relation with animals and death. The animals that father showed me were all empty, dry, stuffed and rigid.

Months before our Parisian stay I had incessantly asked dad to buy me a pet bell cricket, like the ones that were traded in Japan for centuries and are to this day kept in throngs at the altar of the Suzumushi, the Bell-cricket temple in Kyoto. Instead, Father spent hours filling out custom related documents and thousands of francs and yens in order to bring back the flat crystal formicarium we bought in Paris. The bright red ants in it belonged to the Amazonian Allomerus decemarticulatus species, an aggressive type of ant that builds traps in the form of pitted false floors on the stems of plants and mercilessly ambushes its victims. Once the hapless fly, termite or grasshopper falls into the trap, a first ant will lunge and grab the poor soul by one of its legs. A release of pheromone will call the rest of the cavalry. While a group of ants violently bite and sting to paralyze the fallen, more ants will grab the prey by the remaining legs and piece by piece dismember it. If we learnt from them this form of torture or they learnt it from us is hard to tell. In any case, it is us who have been by and large much more creative. We added axes, swords, ships, trees and even elephants and horses to the mix. Latin American revolutionaries like Túpac Amaru and Tiradentes, who both rebelled against their Europeans subjugators, met their ends this way.

But let us go back to the ants. I spent the hours of flight scanning an old edition bound in a velvety red cloth, kindly offered to me by Takagi san, of the exhaustive Observations on Ants, notes on the different species and their lives, characters, bodies, wars, nests, reproduction, division of labor, senses, friendly ties, uttermost intelligence, power of communication and their relation to plants and animals and the rest of the natural world recorded by Sir John Lubbock. The mounting expectation drove me close to the loss of my composure. I felt anxious, antsy, if I may say. I think there could not be a more excited child than me that day. But catastrophe was meant to happen. Father failed to cover the sides of the ant farm with a layer of petroleum jelly, as the diligent French woman at Deyrolle had kindly and repeatedly explained to him, and all the ants escaped by the time the airplane landed back in Tokyo. Such courageous prison break brought to mind fantasies of Exodus. I saw the ants full of hope being led away from slavery, not from Egypt but from their modest formicarium, by a wise and holy ant-prophet chosen by their ant-God for such a dangerous endeavor. A six-legged God who paused, held his breath and stared smiling from his vantage point at the tiny beings he had created. The ants’ journey takes them through wild lands, most of them inhabited by monsters who live in castles of steel, glass and concrete, and over dozens of mounts resembling Sinai carrying all along the sections of the ant-tabernacle on their backs, before reaching the land promised by their ant-God as part of their covenant.

Even now I some nights see those ants in my sleep. In my recurrent dream they find shelter in the airport warehouses and hangars, camouflage and hide for years concealing their true intentions, feed off the cargo boxes and catering trays, prolifically multiply their numbers and patiently await the right moment to strike. The ants come out victorious after a vicious lighting war, eat our flesh and food, rape our women, slaughter most of us, enslave the few survivors and rule for the next era the Japanese archipelago.

During a new stay in Paris in February 2008, after visiting Saint-Léons, Toulouse, Montpellier, Marseilles, Avignon and Ajaccio in an attempt to follow in the steps of Jean-Henri Fabre, one of my most revered entomologists and writers, and entirely by coincidence, as it often happens, I read in the pages of Liberation, the paper I had found abandoned on the table of the café of the 11th arrondissement where I was having black coffee, orange juice and a croissant not far from the concert hall of Le Bataclan, where tragedy struck years later, that all the preserved animals, plants, shells and insects that the founders and members of Deyrolle had been collecting since 1831 had, like Takagi san, also been consumed by smoke and flames. Dozens of Parisians and foreign collectors donated funds and pieces in order to replace, even if only partly, the forever lost collection of the store. Although there was a thorough investigation by the competent authorities, the causes of the fire remain unclear to this day. If there was anyone responsible, he or she has yet to be found and judged. I have often dreamed that it was I who broke into the shop at night and after saying my goodbyes to the empty eyes of all of them set all the stuffed dead animals, birds and insects on fire, offering them the rest and peace that they so much needed.

But I digress, said the entomologist, Where was I? Oh, yes. Kobo’s was dad’s favorite novel, and he loved the movie too. Dad disappeared sometime between November and December of 78, three or four years after those French holidays, during the civil war in Rhodesia, now the country of Zimbabwe, while looking for a couple of local Cetoniinae, a rare metallic blue and magenta flower chafer the size of chestnut that he was planning to bring preferably alive to the entomology department of Osaka University. It was for him akin to capturing in film the monster of the Loch Ness, riding a unicorn or solving Taniyama’s conjecture. The night before he left he told us that the last black hair on his egg-shaped head had finally been replaced by a silver thread. He had just turned fifty.

The memory of dad’s loss is forever linked to a dream I saw during those days, possibly the same night dad’s heart stopped beating. I found myself inside the ruins of a nuclear plant, and that was before the Three Mile Island accident and many years before either Chernobyl or Fukushima, which had been transformed in what seemed to be a movie theater or something of the sort. I clearly remember the burr of the projector in the middle of the room, like the engine of a race car accelerating, the particles of multicolored dust, the regular whiffs of pungent gas and a rainbow of glow spread across the space, making its way to the naked wall which served as screen at the end of the room. I recognized myself inside the screen, naked, holding a long knife in my right hand. The location seemed to be one of the classrooms of an abandoned university building, like those one often sees in British or American movies. In the next scene, for reasons that only the ones who make the fabric of the dreams will understand, I saw myself stabbing a fallen naked man in the chest a multitude of times. From the gashes burst not blood but spiders, thousands of minuscule black spiders that erratically and swiftly crawled out from the dead man’s chest onto the wooden floors like an ever-expanding oil spill and from there up the wooden cabinets, the blackboard, all the walls and sealed windows. All of a sudden the spiders came to a halt and their bodies started shaking, changing. The black spiders were replaced by juniper green flies that started to rapidly flap their wings. The high-pitched noise they made threatened to bring the ruins of the decommissioned plant down and make me lose my head.

Mother, who was barely taller than a twelve-year old child and looked even shorter due to the exceptional length of her abundant black hair, traveled three times before the war in Rhodesia ended. She was looking for clues of father’s whereabouts at the beginning and after, when she desisted from the idea of seeing him alive again, she traveled two more times trying to find his grave or his remains. As it was the case with the colorful beetle dad was looking for, this little long haired lady never found her husband either. Like most of those who lose their sanity out of sorrow, mom never accepted to be either properly diagnosed or treated. She became anxious, nervous and overprotective, signs that we ignored and which were undoubtedly the first symptoms of her illness. A year after dad’s disappearance she locked my younger sister Miyuki in her room without food or water until I arrived from school in the evening to unlock her. Miyuki, silent by nature, a girl who seemed to express more with her strange gray eyes than with the words leaving her almost invisible thin lips, was only five when it all started. Mother’s condition grew worse as we grew old. I found mom more than once, a side of her face against the wall, trying to listen to our conversations or hiding behind a tree when Miyuki and I went to the park to play with our friends. Mom sang and whistled, her hair swinging in threatening waves behind her, while juggling with a kitchen knife. She smashed with her hands the ants she found walking in a straight line on the table and licked the rests off her palms, stepped on worms and cockroaches barefoot and pulled off the legs, wings and heads of live grasshoppers we had brought home to play with. She lost her temper for no reason. She called us names like bigot, chauvinist, dissident and other complicated words for children our age. She bought a short legged white cat, even though she hated pets, and named the animal Hideo, like my dad. Mom often talked to Miyuki about me, harshly criticizing various aspects of my behavior, as if I were not in the same room as them. She played Shoji, at first, I thought, against herself, until the time when she started chatting with the empty space in front of her, sometimes smiling, sometimes laughing, sometimes insulting it under her breath or shouting, calling the man or woman she imagined was in front of her a bastard, a thief and a cheater. One day she said she had become a Jew, the next an orthodox and the next she talked to us about the seven sacred Buddhist principles. Mother used to laugh at Miyuki when all her milk teeth rot and smelled due to her maternal lack of care. Miyuki, out of shame, became entirely mute. Mother shaved her head once. Her hair grew to its original length, just above her knees, in a matter of days, as if brought back by the black powers of an incantation. Mother used to say, more than once a day that what mattered was not the present but the past. The past, children, the past is all we have, she used to tell us. Mom talked about the Christ, the circle of light, men in yellow overalls who followed her or came to warn her of who knows what in the middle of the night, about Shiva, about the Lamb of God and Nostradamus, about the beast, the end of times and the inevitable war and nuclear Armageddon, about the crusades, about the inevitable demise of the American continent and many other things that escaped our comprehension. One morning, when Miyuki chan was eight or nine and still not talking, I sent her to school alone, got off the bus a couple of stops away from home and, worried about mom, went back to see her. I found her there, at the bus stop where she had seen us off, hands on her lap, mumbling to herself, just waiting. I hid behind a vending machine to see what she would do and stayed there watching mom do nothing, just wait, the eight hours it took for my sister to return. I often thought it was a dream, but now I’m sure she also spied on me when I was in the toilet or the shower. Mother stood up from the table one night as we were having dinner, I remember clearly the main dish was fried mackerel she served with baked potatoes, said she was going to the store next door to buy some things she had forgotten to buy that morning, took some coins in her right hand, left through the front door wearing her indoor slippers and never came back. We almost starved waiting for her. Keiko san, dad’s only sister, and her German husband, a quiet man who had lost an eye during the years of the war and who wore a thick leather patch that made him look like a brave retired sailor, took us under their wing and provided for our needs until we were able to stand on our feet. We have always run into people like Keiko, a beautiful small woman with butter-soft skin and a limp on her right leg, and Herr Koenig when we most need them, when the last trace of hope is about to be extinguished, people who seem to be, well, who seem to be mysteriously heaven sent. Both Keiko and Herr Koenig are now long gone, but still come to watch on us now and then in dreams, never opening their mouths to say a word.

I had to wait till I was thirty-two to find about mom and her whereabouts. In December of 1996, twenty one months after the terrorist attacks to the Hibiya, Chiyoda and Marunouchi metro lines, mom and her partner, a forty-five-year old man who, according to the news broadcast, held degrees in Artificial Intelligence and Chemical Engineering, had studied yoga in Chennai, become a member of the sect in 88, climbed the ranks rapidly and become one of the masterminds behind the attacks, were captured by members of a Special Assault Team in the smallest of the Yaeyama islands, two-thousand kilometers from Tokyo and just a stone’s throw away from Taiwan. The man was sentenced to the death penalty, a sentence to which he immediately appealed. I saw mom for the last time, arms cuffed behind back, her head covered by a brown leather jacket, being escorted into a police car. I didn’t even try to get in touch with her after that.

Miyuki lives in Munich and is fine, or so it seems, but never married and never had any children. She resumed speaking after months of living with Keiko and Herr Koening but only in German and English. My sister never spoke a word in Japanese again. She works part time, six days a week, at a government bureau as a translator and spends the rest of her time walking around the city and hiking in the mountains near her home during the weekends. Rest assured, said Jumpei, she has yet to buy her first cat. Once she does, I will know the beginning of the end has come.

So, as you can see, my fate had already been written by my parents by the time I came into this world. I think that some of us are here, some of us are born, only to fulfill the dreams of others. Follow me, he said smiling, this way, Mesdemoiselles, s’il vous plait.

Sola smiled with all her teeth, a view that would last barely another year. She was six when they started falling one after the other. I still keep one of her tiny teeth in a pill-box inside one of the many boxes full of souvenirs. I loved to hear her talk with more Ss than ever and to see and touch with the tip of my fingers the soft gums and the empty space between her canines. She walked next to the entomologist as if she had known the man for ages. Luno, on the contrary, held my hand tight somewhat embarrassed or frightened. Polystyrene ladybugs the size of watermelons welcomed the four of us from their vantage point on top of grey and red brick walls made of the same material.

V

I struggled to recall when I had seen a real ladybug for the last time and the memory, or the lack of it, provoked in me a short-lived burst of nostalgia. As we walked through the artificial maze, I realized that not only the ladybugs, with their brilliant red coats and patterns of black spots, were missing. I hadn’t seen earthworms, snails, grasshoppers, wasps, mantis, millipedes or centipedes in years.

Our new friend tried to smile as I mentioned this. You know girls, he said, there is a common superstitious misconception that says that a centipede can enter your ear, penetrate your brain and kill you. Luno stood still and looked as if she were about to faint. But do not worry, he said this time grinning, the worst an insect can do when it gets into your ear is to take a rest or lay her eggs or larvae in there. I tried to reassure the girls by messing up their hair and telling them that it was indeed covered with a squirming layer of white eggs. They screamed, laughed, forgot all about the centipedes and kept on playing.

Takeda Shingen, said Jumpei, one of the fiercest and cruelest Samurai the people of this country have ever seen, and the men under his command used to have Mukade, the giant Japanese black, carmine and yellow centipede considered by our elders as god Bishamon’s messenger, emblazoned on their war flags. They called themselves the Mukade-Shu, the Centipede Warriors. The descendants of this race of men were eliminated and the few survivors neutered after the Japanese defeat and the American occupation of our land.

The only bees I have recently seen, I told Jumpei after a long silence that was most likely uncomfortable only to myself, were the captive tiny slaves of the ever more demanding honey factories. Franklin’s bumblebee seems to be forever gone and the Rusty Patched bumblebee is critically endangered. Caterpillars and butterflies, previously ubiquitous in kind and number, have become a rare sight, mostly limited to smaller species, confined to certain public parks and green spaces. The metallic Xerces Blue, The Maderian Large White, The Dutch Alcon Blue, the creamy yellow Deloneura Immaculata, the black, orange and white Libythea Cinyras and the black and green, red-tailed Sloane’s Urania, a day moth that could beat in terms of beauty almost any butterfly, are all gone forever, and the stain of decay and depletion continues its seemingly unstoppable expansion. Most butterflies are now members of an endangered species lost in flight in the middle of an ever-growing man-made wild fire. All this I had read and learnt at The Butterfly Garden I once visited inside Singapore’s Changi Airport, where about a thousand butterflies from at least three dozen species live inside a glass room. This was, at least to my eyes, the most beautiful of the world’s prisons.

The beauty of the butterflies, said Jumpei, has been their doom. In the almost incredible act of our constant degradation, we have passed from chasing them with nets, killing them with drops of ethyl acetate and collecting their dried pinned bodies on sheets of cork surrounded by naphthalene balls inside glass and mahogany cases, to creating whole deviant artistic exhibitions with their living eggs, caterpillars, pupas, imagines and corpses. Damien Hirst, the famous British contemporary artist, killed around nine-thousand butterflies for a single exhibition. Hirst has bisected, dissected, flayed, disemboweled, crucified, stabbed, dismembered, and conserved dozens of cows, veal, pigs, sheep, birds, zebras, bulls, horses, fish, tens of thousands of butterflies, tens of thousands of other insects, and even bears and sharks in formaldehyde for his own depraved, aesthetic pleasure. His pieces sell for millions. It’s amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw, were the words this so-called artist said when given the Turner prize, a supposed aesthetic honor named after the genial English painter. It is not collectors, and not even twisted men like Hirst, who have driven so many species of butterflies to the brink of extinction. It is us and our lives, what we wear, how we travel, what we eat and the heated and air-conditioned glass and concrete cities you and I dwell in.

Moths are apparently doing better, said Jumpei, at least when seen from a certain perspective. The Bombyx mori, a species of moth that due to its domestication can no longer fly and has been drained of all its colors, has been forced to produce silk for us humans for thousands of years. The Bombyx mori, even if forever handicapped and with a very short lifespan, can be today counted in the millions. Alessandro Baricco spun his novel Seta, Silk, around the white cocoons and Sebald dedicated almost entirely the tenth chapter of his Rings of Saturn to the subject. Sebald even walks the reader through what he calls the killing business, that is, the way in which the caterpillar, who has spent three to eight days building its nest and is at that moment going through its metamorphosis inside the cocoon, its body deconstructing and reconstructing by means of complicated biochemical processes inside the private tranquility of its egg, is killed by steam, sun light or the method used most often, since it is the most lucrative and efficient, which consists in boiling the chrysalis alive.

Virginia Woolf wrote, referring to a hay-colored moth she saw on a window pane, that it was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers had set it dancing and zig-zagging to show us the true nature of life. Thus displayed, I could not get over the strangeness of it. A tiny bead of pure life that we boil to death in order to ensure we have our elegant scarves, neckties, robes, handkerchiefs and ribbons of silk. It is paradoxical that the very demand for the animal with the purpose of its exhibition, collection or domestication or for the obtainment of products and by-products like eggs, milk, hair, flesh, fat, skin, wool, rennet, resins, pigments, feathers, oil, isinglass, bones, ambergris, pearls, wax, honey, silk, ivory, musk, and even venom, blood, saliva and manure, and not its beauty, its irreplaceable place in nature’s order or the respect for the fundamental principle of life itself constitutes the main opportunity for the long-term survival of its species.

I told the entomologist how Father and I used to watch the clouds of fireflies in the warm towns in Colombia, the same towns were father ate roasted hormigas culonas, big-bottomed ants, that tasted like ash as a snack and where their cousins, the flesh loving red fire ants, once covered my right leg with bites after I stepped on their anthill by mistake. I could not help smiling when I witnessed such an incandescent miracle of nature. I ignore what father thought of the fireflies or if he missed seeing the luminous insects during his final years. The woman I now love and share my life with, who also thinks that dragonflies are powerful, spiritual creatures and stares at them lost in thought when they come to visit our balcony during the afternoons of the warmer months attracted by the flourishing bunches of magenta cosmos, dwarf sunflowers, pink, purple and yellow pansies and lavender twigs she keeps and tends to with care in that tiny garden, told me it is still possible to see fireflies in remote parts of the Japanese countryside. I have been to many towns and villages in the decade I have lived here and have yet to see the first one.

Cicadas, fortunately for the sparrows who prey on them, for the female cicadas impregnated by the males after such a long wait, for those among us who cherish the intense mating cries of their furious cymbals and for Sola and Luno, who love to go to parks and gather the dry exuviae, the discarded nymph shells of the cicadas, that they find glued to the tree trunks, are omnipresent every summer. Perhaps the fact that they spend most of their lives hiding underground, from one to seventeen years depending on the species, has helped them escape the ongoing carnage.

Luno, who was not even three at the time and couldn’t correctly pronounce the Ss, the Chs and The Ts, gasped when she saw the first giant robot, an artichoke-green leaf insect from the family of the Phylliidae, and wouldn’t approach the moving machine for anything in the world. Sola watched in awe for a few seconds before standing in front of it with arms wide open, posing, waiting for me to take her picture.

Jumpei offered me a cup of coffee. He had his with lots of milk and two sachets of sugar, a better alternative to the cup of black mud I sipped with discreet disgust, while the girls ran, played and laughed with other kids they had just met in the compound. Many have heard of Magellan, said the entomologist, in a tone that indicated he still hard a hard time making peace with what he was about to say, but only few know the name of Italian explorer and self-proclaimed zoologist Antonio Pigafetta. Pigafetta, born in Vicenza around the time when Christopher Columbus and his companions first arrived in the American continent and gave start to the theft and destruction of the property and the rape and slaughter of the native populations, was one of the first to comment about the curious leaf-insect during the stay of explorer Ferdinand Magellan and his crew in the Philippines, one of the many stops of the first circumnavigation of the world in record. In the island of Cimbonbon, now renamed Balabac, a name at least as curious as the original, Pigafetta, a thin man with melancholy eyes and a nose pointy like a shark snout, wrote of trees, the leaves of which, when they fall, are animated, and walk. And he also wrote: I kept one for nine days in a box. When I opened it the leaf went round the box. I believe they live upon air. The journey, recorded in detail by Pigafetta, took the sailors three years to complete. The crew of two-hundred and thirty-seven men in a fleet of five ships, Concepción, San Antonio, Trinidad, Santiago and Victoria, sailed on August 10th 1519 from Seville.

I learned from Jumpei that on September 26th, the day of my birthday, they arrived in the Canary Islands, which, coincidentally or not, had started being conquered by a Frenchman named Jean, the oldest of my ancestors I have found trace of, and his crew from 1402. Guanches and Bimbaches, the aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands, were defeated in a series of battles, made into and sold as slaves or simply exterminated. The few survivors were progressively absorbed by the Spanish and the Kingdom of Castile as from 1495.

Pigafetta mentions passing the Cape Verde and the coast of Guinea in October and the apparition of St. Anselme in the form of a bright fire at the summit of the main mast during the sixty days that followed. The records describe the physical appearance, attires, customs and behavior of the peoples found, exotic fruits, vegetables, nuts, roots, plants, resins and spices among which are mentioned bananas, oranges, lemons, breadfruit, sweet potatoes, mirabolans, melons, cherry plums, sugarcane, cucumbers, celery, incense, onions, pumpkins, coconuts, ginger, areca, guavas, myrrh, cloves, tons of these, pomegranates, nutmeg, sesame, mace, benzoin, storax, pitahayas or a similar fruit, rhubarb, pepper, sandal wood, camphor, cinnamon, melons, cucumbers, cabbage, figs, gourds, palm wine, betel, almonds, plantains, rites and ceremonies, the constellations of the night sky, the abundant fauna of bees, leeches, gams of sharks, whose flesh Pigafetta found inedible, turtles and tortoises, doves, geese, footless birds, colorful parrots, clouds of flying fish, sea wolves, pearl oysters, horses, boars, elephants, ostriches, buffaloes, crows, foxes, pig-faced fish, sardines, dorades, albacores, bonitos, silk worms, sparrows, birds-of-paradise and white-shelled, black skinned animals named carniolle which, according to Pigafetta, when swallowed by whales, came out of their shells and ate the whales’ hearts. In Brazil, which is called Verzin in Pigafetta’s diaries, he talks of men who live over a century and of black people who look like enemies of hell. In Rio de la Plata the sailors met red-faced, athletic giants, their short hair dyed white, and the contours of their eyes painted yellow. They even baptized one with the name of John. It is said that the Patagons, as these giants came to be known, were most likely representatives of the Tehuelche, some of whom still inhabit remote regions of Argentina, or of the Selk’nam people.

Romanian-born conqueror Julius Popper, who appears in photographs taken as proof of his “achievements” in 1886 during his expedition to Tierra del Fuego, was one of the many bounty hunters and mercenaries who, paid by local farmers and gold miners, perpetrated the Selk’nam massacres and genocide. A group of Selk’nam was also sent to be exhibited, along with hundreds of Africans and American natives, in the Negro village of the Exposition Universelle de Paris in1889, held in that year to commemorate the Storming of Bastille and the beginning of the French Revolution, the very same fair that unveiled La Tour Eiffel. Ángela Loij, the last full-blooded Selk’nam and whose tales and testimonies were documented by Franco-American anthropologist Anne MacKaye Chapman, died in 1974. The Selk’nam are just one of the thousands of races or species we have recently driven to extinction.

Pigafetta and the rest of the fleet arrived in March of 1521 to the Mariana Islands and here they met, fought and killed a number of Chamorro aborigines and, just in case, burnt their houses before leaving. The climax of the perilous European adventure came with their arrival to the Philippines, where Magellan was killed in battle against the Filipino natives on April 27th. Pigafetta also described the death of Magellan writing that an Indian succeeded in thrusting a cane lance into the captain’s face, that one of them with a great sword gave him a great blow on the left leg and that finally the Indians threw themselves upon him and ran him through with lances and scimitars. The chief Lapu-Lapu, ruler of Mactan, decided to keep Magellan’s body as a monument to their victory.

Two of my uncles, continued Jumpei, like Magellan and so many of his men, also died in combat in the Philippines many years later. Uncle Takashi was killed by, or killed himself with, like so many of our indoctrinated men did in order to avoid capture and humiliation, a grenade on the third night of the American Philippines campaign of liberation. If anything was left of his body it was either hastily buried or thrown to the pigs. One can easily find photographs showing when Mc Arthur, who had escaped from the Philippines in 1942 when the Japanese had invaded the country, escorted by General Sutherland, Lieutenant General Kenney, the President of the Philippines Sergio Osmeña and other men whose names have been forgotten, lands and walks into the beaches of Palo in October 20th 1944. Some of the Americans, including Mc Arthur, and the Filipino president, show stern, determined faces and are wearing sunglasses that make them look like angry giant flies in camouflage.

It was in the Philippines, during the last months of the war, said the entomologist, that the Japanese army started the famous Kamikaze attacks, a term referring to the Divine Winds that our people had first used when two typhoons saved us in 1274 and 1281 from being invaded and probably exterminated by the Mongols. Uncle Ryoji, the second gone, was on board of one of those Kamikaze planes. According to what Honda san, another one of the chosen pilots who due to bad weather at the time of his appointments could not fly and ended up not blowing himself up for the Empire, told dad, and dad later told us, the date was October 25th and the sky over the Philippines was as clear as a mirror. Honda san saw how the bomb-laden Zeros of Ryoji and four other men commanded by the young Yukio Seki took flight, traced slow arcs in the sky only to nosedive against the American battleships minutes later. Three of the planes were shot by the Americans seconds before impact and fell wrapped in smoke and flames into the sea. The bodies of the men and their names were neither recovered nor remembered. The plane piloted by a young man named Sugawa merely brushed the deck and took in its fall into the sea an unlucky American soldier. Uncle Ryoji’s Zero hit the side of one of the destroyers, and even though it didn’t sink the ship, he was still considered a hero. What Seki did, though, impacting the deck of the St.Lo, killing over a hundred American soldiers and making the ship explode and sink half an hour later was, in the strange world of violence and war that we humans seem to praise, unprecedented. The flight, the arc, the dive, the balls of smoke and fire, the attacks, said Honda, apparently, were almost too beautiful to see. Other attacks of the kind followed in the midst of the Japanese Army’s desperation. Funerals at sea increased in frequency and number. The Philippines, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaya, Korea and all the other territories of the empire were liberated, Hiroshima and Nagasaki evaporated, millions of lives and the war were lost, the country occupied, children starved and our women raped for years. Grandmother, whose short-cropped hair and small frame made her look like a prematurely aged schoolboy, received two small, empty wooden coffers from the army with the characters of her two children’s names burnt onto it. She remained alive for forty-two more years after that day in a kind of absent-minded limbo. One night she died in her sleep and that was the end of it.

But once again, he said, I deviate from our subject. The Europeans were also told of hairy warriors in Cavite, located in southern part of the island of Luzon in the Philippines, who ate their enemies hearts marinated with citrus juice, of kings with six hundred offspring, of small men and women from the Moluccan archipelago of Indonesia with ears so long and fleshy that they slept on and cover themselves with them and of Garudas who would prey on buffaloes and elephants near the Gulf of Siam. After final stops in Java, where the wives of the aboriginal chiefs threw themselves into the flames of the funeral pyres where their deceased husbands were being cremated, Timor and Cape Verde, after almost sinking, drowning and dying of malady and starvation, eighteen men on board of Victoria, the last of vessels, arrived in Spain in September of 1522. Even though Pigafetta and the few survivors did not stop in China, they heard many stories told by the country’s neighbors. Musk, Pigafetta tells us, is extracted with leeches from castors that feed on Chamaru wood. When the leech is well swollen with the castor’s blood it is crushed, its blood collected, set under the sun and moistened with urine. Musk, from the Sanskrit word for scrotum given the shape of the gland it comes from, has been for many years extracted mainly from the male musk deer, a handsome, stocky animal that instead of antlers has two long saber-like canines. Even if synthetic solutions exist, the natural one, the odorous gland next to the genitals that the deer uses in order to attract female deer during the mating season, and for which the deer is hunted and killed, is still preferred for the fabrication of perfume and medicine.

The process recounted by Pigafetta through the voice of the entomologist brought to mind a dream in which dozens of black leeches, fat and big as piglets, crawled on the black-tiled grounds inside the house I inhabited in the dream. I soon realized, skipping over them in an attempt to reach the other side of the room without doing them harm, that one of them was my daughter Sola. My ex-wife was looking at Sola, the other leeches and I, standing under the doorframe of the exit I was trying to reach for. I told her, holding in my arms the heavy leech our daughter had become, that I thought Sola looked unwell. She, as customary in both the waking life and dreams, did not answer.

VI

Luno found the giant robotic grasshopper less threatening and less agitated than the leaf insect and posed in front of it for several photographs even as the mechanical insect slowly buzzed and spread its wings. This came as a surprise. Swarms of locusts, grasshoppers turned into overexcited, excessively fecund, hungry, gregarious insects, constantly on the move due to a surge of serotonin in their bodies, have terrorized humans, particularly farmers, causing famine and even forced migration.

Jumpei told us, while we licked cones of vanilla flavored ice cream we had bought for the girls and ourselves after a snack of salted rice balls wrapped in dry seaweed filled with kombu and dried plums, that from August 1874 until the second half of 1875 a vast swarm of Rocky Mountain Locust, estimates describe the group as larger than the area of California, invaded the United States, affecting mainly the central regions of Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri. Witnesses spoke of a snow storm, an ominous hail-storm, a dust tornado, of whole fields destroyed in a day, of numbers so big as to darken the sun, of a country left bare as if scorched by fire. Like Agur son of Jakeh, the obscure biblical man, said: The locusts have no king, yet all of them march in rank. Although the massive cloud of insects was a remarkable event, its importance falters when we know that the insect went suddenly extinct less than three decades later. Of a species that one could count in trillions, there is not a single one left. Once again man had prevailed.

I have always liked spiders, the next arthropod, technically not classified as an insect, as Jumpei explained us, but instead along with mites, ticks and scorpions, as an arachnid, that was represented as a mechanical marionette in the exhibition. As a child, when I woke up in the morning and went to bathe before going to school, I used to find groups of five or six thirsty or simply lost and confused jumping spiders partly submerged, their hairy legs like whiskers limp, their empty coal eyes wide open, who had found their demise in a corner of our shower room.

In addition to the spiders, running into white and red or black and neon green hairy funambulist caterpillars walking on the thin wires of the fence that surrounded the property, green flies I used to crush with rolled newspapers, Black Witch moths large as bats or open hands that remained motionless for days and nights glued to high walls and dark corners waiting for the right moment to scare the oblivious passerby and groups of pale, violently hungry termites chewing the timber columns of the house and the beams of its ceiling was also part of our day-to-day. Those encounters lasted until the house in the suburbs, the house in which my sister Batista and I grew up, caught fire and burnt to the ground. Theories abound on what caused the fire. Mother blamed father, saying he was seeking revenge on her. Father blamed the illegal armed guerillas, paramilitary and common delinquency groups that had taken over control of the country during the 80s, 90s and the early 2000s, saying that they (who they were, we never knew) wanted us to vacate the land in order to take it over and settle, perhaps following The Lord’s example when in the book of Numbers God asks Moses to Speak to the sons of Israel and tell them that, when they crossed over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, they should drive out all the inhabitants of the land before them, and destroy all their figured stones, and destroy all their molten images and demolish all their high places, and they shall take possession of the land and live in it, for he, The Lord, had given the land to them to possess it. Many are the ones who have apparently read that extract of the Christian holy Scriptures and, in the midst of a terrible misunderstanding, have done nothing else ever since. I do not remember living in any other place before that house. The other dwellings must have been bland boxes of concrete where we lived surrounded by complete strangers in the middle of the gray capital city. The house in the suburbs was something else altogether.

Father bought the house from a middle-aged German woman whose blond hair had already started graying. She and her husband were leaving the country and were selling the house and the land under it at a very reasonable price because of that. A wise decision. Those three decades in Colombia, from the 80s until the early 2000s, precisely the period where I was born and lived there, were the zenith of a world of theft, corruption, drugs, murder, terrorist attacks on people and infrastructure, torture, kidnappings and every other kind of violence imaginable. Massacres of peasants, soldiers, police officers, guerrillas and aboriginal people in faraway locations were every day events. Many disappeared in mass graves or were thrown, full or in pieces, into rivers. Tacueyó, 1985–86, one-hundred and sixty-four dead, La Mejor Esquina, 1988, twenty-seven dead, La Rochela, 1989, twelve dead, El Nilo, 1991, twenty-one dead, La Chinita, 1994, thirty-five dead, Trujillo, between 1986 and 1994, at least two-hundred and forty-five dead, Las Delicias, 1996, twenty-seven dead, Mapiripán, 1997, forty-nine dead, El Salado, 2000, more than a hundred dead, Macayepo, 2000, fifteen dead, Rio Manso, 2001, thirty-three dead, Chengue, 2001, twenty-seven dead, Bojayá, 2002, more than a hundred dead.

The list is still long. According to the newspaper El Espectador, in the region of Catatumbo alone, now inhabited by slightly over a hundred thousand people, between 1983 and 2013 there were over sixty-six massacres. But some still say that coffee, emeralds and flowers are reasons to be proud and people still enjoy watching soccer games and going drinking and dancing at night. One of the most violent countries on earth has also been, according to mass media surveys, one of the happiest.

The day we met the German lady presented me with two magazines of Batman and Robin and a small wooden Pinocchio that she had brought from Italy. The House was set apart from the world and its people by a brick wall and a black iron gate. Once inside, one could find a front green yard where two enormous pines that made me dream of Jack’s Beanstalk stroked the blue cold skies with their branches, a small pond where goldfish lived and multiplied, a playground made of steel and light wood with swings, slide and barrel, dozens of slender eucalyptus trees, its leaves to fight the common cold, its trunks to hang the red and yellow handmade hammocks. From the dark soil of the land surrounding it sprouted Chilean lemon trees, black cherry, guavasteen and a succulent, giant plant of aloe. On the grounds rambled dogs of half a dozen breeds, a cat, a goat and a cow and her calf. On the dark waters of the ditch that went around it, protecting it as if it were an ancient secret fortress, swam two couples of ducks, frogs, toads and two turtles. On the branches of its trees reigned songbirds, a green parrot named Lorenzo and a red-and-green macaw named Roberto. The main building itself was an ample cottage of naked light red brick walls with enormous windows on its front facade. The edges of its triangular thatch roof went so low that they almost touched the ground. Inside were three ample bedrooms, two bathrooms, a bright living room, a dining room and a kitchen Mother said was the one she had always dreamed of. Two more cottages, these ones independent, housed the man and woman helpers. In the backyard were the houses for the dogs, a kiosk from whose wooden walls hung the stuffed head of a sad gray bull, subsequently eaten by the moths, and a barbeque grill in front of which Father used to murder hens and pigs. Thoreau said that there is some of the same fitness in a man’s building his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest. Father and Mother built the house, they built our Life, until it burnt as hit by a curse or a fallen star and all that was left of that house and that life were ruins and ashes.

On the right side of the house was a dark green corn field cared for and guarded by Cayetano, an old man made of strings of muscle and skin burnt by the sun. His face, dark and withered, was always half-covered by a straw hat that made him look like a scarecrow. Cayetano quartered his crop of thousands of cobs armed with his brown hands and a long hoe. After tongues of fire licked the house until it was no more and decay and misery took its place, we went to the edge of the land with Adal, my childhood’s friend and brother, a short and muscular boy whose hairline started prematurely receding when he turned fifteen, crossed the barbed wire fence that stood between the golden kernels and us and stole handfuls of tusk-like corncobs. I think the old man knew of our felony from the beginning, but he just preferred to blame the crows and pigeons for the missing corn. Cayetano’s face radiated light when he saw Mother. There was no favor from her lips that was left unattended. After a brief chat between them, they decided that the cow and calf could roam and graze in the fields once the last cob of corn had been picked and the land had to be freed from twigs, roots, grass and weeds weeks before the new harvest.

It was during one of those nights when Adal and I had to fetch the animals that I think I saw the Devil. The cow was hungry, or so I thought, and wouldn’t bulge. So we cursed and punched and kicked the beast in front of her child and I think that’s why the Devil came to see us. The cow screamed and went wild, jumping and kicking in pain and anger. Fearing to be crushed by the hooves of the mad animal, we let go off the rope around her neck and ran in different directions. I ran and ran through the dead corn fields, and ran into the house through the open gate and ran through its gardens until I saw the light of the backyard shed. Faster, faster, I kept telling to Adal, whose quick steps I could hear, and whose darkened feet I saw between mine. I jumped around to face my friend and make sure the wicked cow was nowhere to be seen. I saw his shadow pass in front of me and disappear behind the shed without a noise. Adal? I called his name surprised at his behavior. Behind the shed there was nothing but a fence of barbwire. What he was doing there? I was about to say his name again when Mother and Adal came walking and chatting without haste from the partially rebuilt main building. Who was he who had just run in front of me, I asked them feeling my spirit break in tears. Mother smiled. Adal pretended not to listen and said that now the cow was calm.

These kind of unexplained phenomena abounded in the house. For a period of some weeks first pebbles, then rocks the size of golf balls and even some as big as fists, fell from the skies onto the roof and planters. It never lasted too long but still forced us to hide inside the house until the rain of stones was over. We often heard hasty, heavy steps going up and down the wooden stair steps. Some months after the bovine incident Batista went to hang the laundry out to dry in the middle of the night and saw a woman dressed in white floating in the same spot behind the same house where I had seen the shadow. She came back into the house in tears.

To the left of the house one could see a vacant yellow lot. In its middle only stood the ruins of an old Indian house made of mud where Adal and I used to play with other kids. Night or day, the inside of the ruins was always in darkness, as if sun and light were afraid to even cross its empty threshold. When it did not rain, we played unexpected soccer matches or flied kites if the day was windy. When it did, the lot became a wetland plagued with mosquitos. You shall not go there, Mother said. The mosquitos carry cholera and dengue. You will vomit, get a fever and die a couple of days later. A certain year it rained and rained and rained so much that what was left of the ancient mud house came to the ground with a thump nobody heard and melted to a blurred memory, like a mirage, like the memory of father’s face and voice and life with the unstoppable passing of the seasons. We frequented just two shops in the neighborhood after the fire, the two which offered us some credit, given that we usually ran out of food and mother ran out of money during the last week of the months of most serious scarcity. An old woman named Rosita, a soft mustache on her upper lip, curly short gray hair, long and wiry body, and her daughter, a gentle single woman around her forties who never married and who judging from her plain clothes, washed face and hairy armpits had either given up or had no interest in the matter, were our saviors during those periods. We could take home bags of milk, eggs, yoghurt, toilet paper, bars of soap, bags of detergent, oil, butter, flour, salt, sugar and even snacks from the store of Rosita and Cayita without immediate payment. The women took note of the articles and their prices with a short pencil in a simple notebook and allowed us to pay later. Beyond the vacant yellow lot was the second humble shop were we used to buy bread, coffee, cocoa and sausages, the dish made of flesh and sinews, hair and bone of pigs and cows, the pink bright mix of which is stuffed in their own intestines.

The older daughter of the shop’s owner was Astrid, an Indian woman of dark skin, dark and greasy hair, dark eyes and a dark mole on her upper lip. Astrid was the first woman who let me kiss and bite her lips, who met her tongue with mine and explored inside my mouth like a snake in search of prey. I still remember the smell of her sweat. Against the house’s iron-gate I kissed Johanna, seriously concerned about hurting myself with her dental braces, and fondled the fresh breasts and pink nipples of Maria Jose. Maria Jose, who was fifteen years of age at the time, took turns letting Adal, Diego, another of our close friends, and who knows how many other kids of the neighborhood, kiss and play with her breasts and touch her sex before me. Inside one of the rooms rebuilt after the fire, wrapped in the hammocks, on a picnic sheet on the ground and on the dining table, I slept for months with Anna, my first long-term girlfriend. She was the second woman I slept with. The first was a plump and gentle prostitute paid by Father. She took good care of me and guided me step by step through the sexual process. I think her name was Isabel.

The neighbors who lived behind the house had a weekly ritual which can only be described as a religious bonfire in the middle of the garden. More or less two dozen men and women dressed in white robes from head to toe helped light the bonfire and the ceremony started. Hours of walking, dancing and chanting around the bonfire usually lasted until sunset. Mother once protested in an agitated fashion against that act which she considered pagan and our neighbor, a short and stocky man with black hair and a small mustache, responded by throwing a rock at her which crossed the fence and hit her thigh leaving a bruise for weeks on her flesh.

Adal and I still talk, even though it’s rare and mainly through written messages. I met him at the basketball court of the town’s public school. Adal, apart from basketball, practiced extreme skating, jumping over rows of bicycles and motorcycles, skateboarding and karate. Mother loved him almost as one of her own children from the moment she met him. His family had too many members and too little money. Adal’s mother worked cooking and cleaning in the kitchen of a countryside restaurant. His two little sisters went to public school. His young brother suffered meningitis when he was three or four and the seizures left him mentally and physically handicapped. When he could not go to a special school partly subsidized by the government, the boy spent his days cloistered, staring at a wall, grunting and shouting. His brother Harold, who blatantly exhibited his Nazi tendencies, worked filling car tanks at a gas station. His sister Carolina worked in a factory which made polystyrene. His brother David was a Government soldier who spent ten months of the year trying to capture, injure or kill Guerrilla fighters in the mountains. Adal once told me he had seen some photographs of a police station after an attack by the Guerrilla which his brother David showed him. He spoke of blood all over the walls and floors, of burnt furniture and bodies, of body parts, a leg here, an arm there, spread all over the place. War is an unwinnable, cynic manipulation. An inexcusable waste of life. The glamour of explosions, the intensity of the green, the gray, the red, the black, the ochre, the saturation of centuries of flesh, feces, urine, gunpowder, tobacco, gasoline, blood, sweat and affliction, the metallic taste of blood in the mouth, the slow loss of warmth and life and the enjoyable beat of shell bursts do not justify the loss. Drones in Pakistan, missiles in Iraq, bombs in Colombia, chemical weapons in Libya, tanks and rifles all across Europe, swords in Japan, machetes in Rwanda. Man is a violent being. Wars have become so similar to one another, have become not many but a single one, every episode ending always in the same way.

Adal did not like his home those days and he spent more and more time with us instead. His elder sister, Liliana, with whom he never had the best relation, died of Lupus, while the town celebrated with music, alcohol and dance the birth of the prophet, savior and son of God on Christmas day. I met Harold, David and Adal in the middle of the unpaved road. The night was cold and Adal had no jacket on. I offered him my white, black and green winter jacket and asked him to keep it. He took it and did not answer. Or maybe he did and I just do not remember. Then they left to meet the body of their lifeless sister. Adal almost died some months later in a motorcycle accident. He was going too fast and crashed against the body of a milk-truck (which proves that milk is, in more than a way, a hazard to us humans). The motorcycle broke in two halves. He rolled under the truck in motion and landed on the other side of the street where, luckily, there were no cars waiting to crush him. We took revenge by going to the patio in front of the house of the milk-truck driver and stealing during two or three weeks as many bags of milk as we could carry in our backpacks.

In one of the town’s parties we befriended Medardo, another boy everyone called simply The Grasshopper and Alvaro, whom we used to call Scarface, three young guys from the city of Armenia who used to work feeding, washing and training somebody else’s horses at the stables in front of the house. Medardo had white skin, bright blue eyes and the vocabulary of a ten-year old child. The Grasshopper used to breakdance and smoke weed during his free time, which was plenty. I heard years later that he was shot and killed when he went back to Armenia. Alvaro, who was wrapped in mystery, told Mother and I one night, after we had finished praying a rosary to the virgin Mary, a parrot-like repetition of a prayer and one of Mother´s favorite pastimes, that he was the only one to blame for his disfigured face, half of which looked like as if covered in strips of fried bacon. One night, lonely, drugged, drunk and sad, Alvaro took a shotgun to his chin, pulled the trigger and failed. The powder scalded his skin and flesh but didn’t kill him. He had trouble chewing and drinking from then on and when he spoke he drooled and didn’t feel the spit running like a snail trail down the burnt side of his chin. Alvaro, like Santiago Nassar in the novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, died holding his intestines in one hand while he fought a group of butchers with the knife he held in the other. They said the butchers provoked him, they said they made fun of his face and he responded with violence. They said he wrapped the hand holding the knife with a cloth to protect himself from the attacks, killed two of the butchers and injured two more, but they were six, and they were butchers and all of them had longer, sharper knives than him.

Christmas season meant the house filled with guests, music and laughter. Fireworks and Chinese lanterns took the place of the voices of birds, animals and insects and of the thick night darkness. The main event during this day of equinox was the sacrifice of a young swine whose blood, skin and meat served to feed the diners. The head and the bones went to the dogs. The music stopped and all the present watched in silence, bloated with anticipation. Two of father’s employees held the pig by the legs and shoulders against the ground while a third one stabbed its armpit with a long blade. It has to pierce the heart, the employee later told me. The dying pig cried and screamed like a child. Even though I covered my ears, his final squeals pierced my hands and reached my brain and remain lodged there to this day. The other children also watched the animal shake and squeal and bleed to death in horror while the adults drank and joked about it. The blood of the pig was a black waterfall that crashed against the bottom of a pair of light-blue plastic buckets and filled them to the rim in seconds. With the blood and bowels mixed with condiments, onions, rice and peas the women cooked blood sausages. The men threw the corpse of the pig on the grill to roast the layer of fine white hair, opened it from chest to belly, gutted it, threw the smoky innards into new plastic buckets and took it to the kitchen so that two pairs of female hands could cut it into pieces. Minutes passed before what used to be a pig came back chopped in little chunks of pale skin and pink meat. Father sprinkled salt and showered beer on the raw meat and set it on the grill next to yellow corn and buttered potatoes. Father’s sense of humor made him offer me the roasted, curled tail of the pig served next to a handful of fresh guacamole when he saw me crying.

Father’s favorite soups contained the boiled legs of a hen, the ribs of a cow or the stewed bowel of a pig. Watching him kill fowl was not any better. He grabbed the bird, caressed her feathers gently and when the hen had lowered her guard and thought she was safe in the hands of the giant man, he grabbed her neck and twisted it with tremendous speed three, four, five times. The animal did not have time to scream. When the head remained attached to the broken neck, not all the time, the eyes remained open for a while looking at those who did neither raise a finger nor opened their mouths to protest, the good-for-nothing witnesses of her murder, as if in order to remember their faces for when payback time finally came. The bird’s neck hung limp, bloody drool leaked from her beak. Father tried once or twice to change his killing method. He set the throat of the bird on the ground, put the handle of a broom on it, held the broom with his foot and pulled the animal by her legs. The head remained on the ground, the headless body in his hands. He promptly decided to go back to his old ways. It is too much of a mess, he used to say, and the dogs go crazy.

As I was saying, as if by magic, fire made the upper half of the house vanish into thin air. To see one’s home, the house one has spent a considerable portion of his life in, a monument made of bricks and wood to the times and people of the past, burning, expelling smoke from its head like a volcano, is a feeling hard to describe, a sensation beyond reason, space and time.

In the book Der Untergang Hans Erich Nossack shares with us his thoughts and feelings on the days before, during and after the bombing of Hamburg by the English Royal Air Force, eight days and seven nights that started on July 24th 1943. Whatever happened outside of us simply did not exist, he wrote. A phrase that closely resembles how I felt that day. Thinking of Nossack reminded me of another chance event. In the afternoon of January 18th 2017, I went up the stairs from the fifteenth to the sixteenth floor of the building I used to work in. From the staircase I could see the sky and a stretch of the surreal skyline of the city of Tokyo. I looked that day through the large window, lost in thought and trying to catch a cloud iridescence for the third time, a rare phenomenon most people never see in their lifetimes and which I had seen once in Tokyo and once again in Melbourne during the past month. Instead, I saw two large birds flying in circles, one behind the other, doing somersaults and pirouettes in the tempera thickness of the clear blue sky. I watched them for a long time, amazed by the beauty of their flight and movements, went upstairs and forgot, or so I thought, the whole thing. That same night I read in Nossack’s book, But now I remember having felt deeply disturbed sometime in May of this year, when two large gull like birds circled the church soundlessly and almost without a stroke of their wings. So many are the signs we fail to see.

A mob was waiting for me at the bus stop that afternoon. Some faces I knew, most I had never seen before. As soon as I got off one of them said, ¡Se le quemó la casa! ¡Se le quemó la casa! Your house burnt! Your house burnt! And I think I smiled since I had no idea what the boy meant. The others’ comments were akin: Hurry up, Your house burnt, It’s a tragedy, Hurry up, It’s still burning, and skipped excited next to me and showed me their hands stained with soot and talked words that my mind could not process. I saw a black worm of smoke trying to make its way across the sky. I looked for the sun, I do not know why, and it was nowhere to be seen. I walked like this the five minutes it took me to get home from the bus stop, crossed the black gate and saw the house, dead and burning like a crematory. I dropped my backpack to the ground and fell to my knees like bad actors do in the bad movies, covered my face and started crying. A man was standing next to me. I did not know his name and as much as I try, I cannot yet remember his face. The man did not say Don’t worry or Everything is going to be fine or You will get through this. He just stood there by my side and kept me company while I cried until he vanished. I remember the retreating firemen and the dozens of strangers pacing around the lands which surrounded the house on fire like packs of hungry wolves. The roof of hay and logs was almost gone and was replaced by a black, smoking, gaping hole that looked like the tongueless, toothless mouth of a leper. The inside of the house did not look better. Broken glass and broken mirrors, black walls, black floors under a black pool, charred remains of wood, fabric, metal and plastic. The staircase burnt to the middle and its final step stood halfway in the air, like a staircase drawn by M.C. Escher built and burnt to take us nowhere. Everything smelled of a mixture of mud, smoke and ashes, a brown olfactory mass like the one a child makes when mixing several colored bars of play dough.

I had to go up through the backstairs. Burnt and soaked piles of tailored suits, silk ties, cashmere pulls, cotton and linen shirts, leather shoes and leather jackets. A blown-up television screen, a charred bed, the paintings of sad clowns ruined by the holes the flames had opened on the canvas. Every object on the floor was blackened, wet or broken. Father was there. I might be wrong, but I think he was about to cry. I remember the birds from the aviary that had to be set free, the many dogs we loved and had to give away. The only thing I extracted from the ruins was a book, a copy of the Decameron of Boccaccio that was inconsequentially wet and only burnt in the upper right corner of its white front cover. What became of that book, I do not know.

The Decameron contains a hundred tales a group of ten young men and women told each other while fleeing from the black plague. I was expecting fleas or the European circuses where these small creatures used to perform or at least for the deadly plague they brought to Europe to be on display or mentioned in the exhibition. Daniel Defoe, Herman Hesse and Albert Camus all followed the literary interests and steps of Boccaccio. In the Pneumonic type of plague bacteria settled in the lungs, made them liquefy in days and the host coughed pieces of them until he or she died. In the Septicemic kind the bacteria inhibited blood clotting and the body of the ill bled from every orifice.

In downtown Marseilles, the first city where I lived when I arrived in France, near the central avenue of La Canebière, one can find the quartier Belsunce, a popular neighborhood inhabited mainly by Maghrebis. The district owes its name to Henri-François-Xavier de Belsunce, Marseilles bishop at the time of the arrival of the plague. While the members of the monarchy left the city as fast as they could, Belsunce stayed with the people, both the living and the dead who he considered his herd. Francois-René de Chateaubriand, French writer and politician, wrote about the plague and about Belsunce in his Mémoires d’outre-tombe, the multi-volume memoir he wrote from 1809 until 1841. Chateaubriand dedicates one chapter to the different pests. 22 great plagues in record before the one in Athens in 431 before Christ, followed by Constantinople, the modern Istanbul, during the 5th century, the European black death in the 14th, Milan in 1575 and again in 1629, all Europe a nouveau in 1660 and finally Marseilles and Provence in 1720 carried by the fleas carried by the rats carried by the merchants in their vessels, traveling all the way by sea, according to Chateaubriand, from Syria to the French port. The pest was able to spread at such a frightening velocity because the superstitious men and women of the old continent had slaughtered throughout the years most of the cats in Europe, believing them to be the maleficent helpers of witches and demons. Every single action or decision can, like it happens to the calm surface of a lake disrupted by a thrown-in pebble, expand its waves in ever larger concentric circles. Chateaubriand writes of windows open only to throw the corpses down onto the streets, walls painted with their blood and street dogs waiting to devour their remains, of an entire neighborhood where everyone died and all the dead were left inside their houses, streets covered with the sick and the dying, half rotten bodies on the ground, corpses against walls in the place where they expired, bodies melted after being exposed to the heat of the sun for weeks, a biological reaction which produced a lake of liquefied meat where the only thing that moved were the white worms eating the soft flesh. During times of plague whole cities were closed. During times of plague hundreds of kids were buried alive under suspicion of the illness. During times of plague fear pushed the living to open lazarettos to keep the living away from the penitent.

Years later, once the house was halfway built and I was again living there with mother, we also experienced a rat infestation. The rats, apart from the few less clever ones, quickly learnt to distinguish the smell of poison in the food rations we left for them in the corners of the house. Half a dozen rat-traps we placed around the house offered us three or four plump rat corpses, necks and spines broken, dark blood oozing from their mouths, every single morning. Javier, a country side man sent by grandmother to help us with the house chores, showed us a new rat-slaughtering technique which proved much more efficient. Javier placed the simple device, an orange bucket which came up to his waist, out in the open, filled three quarters of it with water, and set a thin wood-plank in the middle of the bucket’s mouth. On the middle of the plank he left chunks of raw meat, thanks to which I found that the rat’s cheese diet is nothing but a myth. The rats climbed the bucket sniffing, looking for the feast, stepped on the plank and, given their generous size, inevitably lost balance and fell into the water. Rats, especially wild ones, are excellent swimmers. They gave up and died, as the experiments of American psychobiologist Curt P. Richter showed in the 1950s, only once they realized the situation was hopeless. The giant bucket had sometimes up to a dozen corpses in the morning. Thanks to Javier and his pirate-plank technique the pest was finally eradicated.

VII

Spiders, like most insects, said Jumpei, are complex and beautiful creatures. Their intricate sight is made of four pairs of median and lateral eyes, arranged differently on their heads depending on the species. How they perceive the world is something else we will never see. And these are the kind of mysteries that keep me awake at night and alive during the day. Many among them can walk on walls and windows and upside down on ceilings. They use silk not only to build webs for hunting prey, but also as strand bridges to move from place to place, to make sacs to conserve the eggs containing their unborn and as parachutes to transport the infants. The much smaller males hypnotize the larger females during courtship rituals to avoid being eaten, which does not mean they are always fortunate or agile enough to escape the sexual struggle, and at least one kind of male, the Redback spider, voluntarily assists the female to murder him and consume his body during intercourse, a sacrifice that will hopefully result in the successful fertilization and post mortem passing of his genetic material. As I said before, all species would do anything to be immortal. The design, geometry, characteristics and functionalities of their protein-based webs have made us dream and question reality for ages. The way in which the prey is liquefied with digestive enzymes before the spider eats it is morbidly enthralling. How spiders molt, shedding their old exuviae in order to keep growing, how some mimic ants, changing their anatomy and using theatrics like zigzag walking or waving their frontal pair of legs in front of their faces pretending to have antennae to lure the ants and eat them has always been astonishing to me. Complex and beautiful creatures that humans fear and consider pests even though the great majority of them are altogether harmless.

Not surprisingly, said the entomologist, the Spider Grandmother is a fundamental part of the myths and folklore of various among the Native American peoples. The Hopi, Choctaw and Navajo all have their version of the story. Ojibwe and Lakota mothers created the now disrespected and commercially successful Dreamcatchers, the woven webs inside wooden hoops they hang over their infants’ cradles in order to catch harm and evil as the sacred Spider woman Asibikashii would have done in ancient times.

In a famous photograph you can easily find in the interconnected information web you will see resignation and something close to peace on the expression of Spotted Elk, chief of the Miniconjou Lakota Sioux, as his mortally wounded body freezes. You will also feel the pain and the sting of ice as it burns his skin and muscles. You will smell and taste the metallic tang of blood spilling. You can only imagine, though, the mental, moral and physical exhaustion, the frustration and sorrow. After a series of defeats during the Sioux wars, after the tribal dances of the sun, scalp and war, the Medicine Men and the consumption of alcohol by the Native Americans had been prohibited by the Code of Indian Offenses, after the Sioux survivors who surrendered had been forced by the United States government to resettle within Indian Reservations each year notably reduced in size in South Dakota and Nebraska, after Spotted Elk, a handsome round-faced man who at the time was already over sixty years old and ill with pneumonia, surrendered when intercepted by the 7th Cavalry Regiment and obliged to camp near Wounded Knee Creek, after the American soldiers placed rapid-fire Hotchkiss Mountain Cannons around the camp and after they confiscated a number of weapons from the Native Americans, on December 29th 1890 Spotted Elk and dozens of men, women and children of the tribe, estimates run between a hundred and fifty-three and double that number, were shot by soldiers of the American Army after a scuffle that until now remains unclear. The frozen bodies were interred in a mass grave when the on-going blizzard only subsided three days later.

Thinking of Spotted Elk’s frozen body immediately brought to mind the corpse of Swiss writer Robert Walser, found by children, half-frozen, in December 25th 1956, when millions were celebrating Christmas, not far from the buildings of the mental hospital he called home.

Walser was seventy-eight years of age, which means he lived six more years than my father. Most agree that he was crazy. I do not think so. He was quiet and reserved and simply wanted to be far, in more than a way, from the world and from the people that inhabit it. Or perhaps he was indeed insane, an assumption which does not really matter. His body, attired in a three piece dark suit and a dark overcoat, beautifully contrasting with the absolute white of winter, was found lying on the snow not far from the Appenzell Herisau sanatorium where he had spent the last twenty-three years of his life. In the series of pictures a police officer most likely named Hans or Peter, like a large proportion of men in Switzerland were named at the time, took of him, Walser’s eyes were open and looked at the dull immensity of the sky above him, waiting for the white sun to fall from the sky like a bird who has just been shot down by a hunter. Walser’s right hand rested on his abdomen, like that of a man who has just heard a good joke and can’t stop laughing. His left one was extended, as if he wanted to show the police officers something or someone hiding in the woods around them. Perhaps Death, dressed in white snowflakes to go unnoticed, was behind the trunk of an old pine holding Walser’s still warm soul by the hand as a Mother holds the hand of an impatient son, waiting for someone to offer Walser’s body the well-deserved dignity and repose that belongs to the departed. Walser’s dark Homburg hat, laying a couple of steps above his head, waited for the snow to fill its emptiness. Walser, apart from the few pieces of clothing he wore, had no material possessions to speak of. Karl, a thin man who seems to be melting in the only picture I ever saw of him, and Lisa, a blonde who makes one think of a Dutch milkmaid, Walser’s closest brother and sister, had died before him, Karl in 1943 of a heart attack and Lisa in 1944 of reasons I have yet to find. There was no relative to claim his frozen body. He was buried in a lot at the Friedhoff Herisau under a waterfall of green bushes. The scarce visitor can read on the plain tombstone, Ich mache meinen Gang — der führt ein Stückchen weit / und heim: dann ohne Klang / und Wort bin ich beiseit,which translated reads, more or less, I make my way, which leads a little way and home: Then without a sound / and word I am aside.

My own father also died on the 25th, two months earlier than Walser, six days before the Christian celebration of the Hallowtide, the three-day observance of all souls and saints that we now call Halloween. I was by his side, all in all, not a year, not a month, but just less than three weeks spread in three different occasions during the last decade of his life. Excuses, I had many. Mother’s intense panic, fear for her life and ours if we were anywhere near that country and that man. The fact that I lived in France and then Japan and he refused to leave Colombia. That I had become a working man, a husband and the father of two children. Excuses, all of them excuses nonetheless. I could have been there earlier, I could have offered him a helping hand, an attentive ear or simply a presence that would have made the abandonment, solitude and decay of old age somehow easier to bear. But I did not, and now it is too late.

I often saw small yellow butterflies, Pieris rapae their scientific name, fluttering in the space in front of me the months following his death. They made me think there must be some true to Lafcadio Hern’s stories about the Japanese butterflies said to represent the soul of the soon to be gone or the already departed. Gabriel García Marquez wrote about Mauricio Babilonia, a handsome mechanic apprentice, and the cloud of yellow butterflies that preceded him wherever he went in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Babilonia dies a tragic death, the death of those who are lonely and invalid, many years and a few pages later. Toshiko Yokoyama also thinks her dead son has come from the realm of the dead to see her when a yellow butterfly enters the family home at night in Kore Eda’s film Still Walking.

Naturalized Japanese writer Lafcadio Hearn died the same day of my birthday, September 26th, only that he did so in 1904, seventy-eight years earlier.

On September 26th 1580 the pirate Francis Drake and fifty-nine of his men completed, after Pigafetta and the other seventeen men Jumpei told us about, the second circumnavigation of the earth. The journey also took him almost three years. Drake and the men under his command sailed from Plymouth on December 13th 1577 on five vessels, The Pelican, renamed Golden Hind months later, The Elizabeth, The Marigold, Benedict and Swan. Only the Golden Hind, Drake’s own vessel, returned to Plymouth pregnant with gold and precious stones. Drake went to Cartagena de Indias in February 1586, then part of the Spanish overseas territories called The Spanish Main, which included what is today Florida, Texas, Mexico, the whole of Central America and the North Coast of South America, after plundering and burning the town of Santiago in Cabo Verde Islands and Santo Domingo in The Dominican Republic. Drake and his men defeated the Spanish in battle, occupied the now Colombian city for almost two months, thought and discussed making Cartagena de Indias an English overseas protectorate, negotiated ransom, burnt part of the town to put pressure on the Spanish and finally left with their ships full of slaves, guns, the bells of the city, random goods and a substantial ransom in gold. Drake died of Dysentery at the good age of fifty-five. His remains were buried at sea near the coast of Panama. His body has not been found to this day.

On September 26th 1791 Théodore Géricault, Painter and lithographer and author of Le Radeau de la Méduse, was born in Normandy. Géricault was a curious man and a surprising painter interested to the point of obsession with heroism, see Officier de chasseurs à cheval de la garde impériale chargeant, horses, like my father, see Cheval arabe gris-blanc, mental illness, see Les Monomanes, five remaining paintings of his series of ten portraits of the mental patients of his psychiatrist friend Etienne Georget, and death. French historian Henry Houssaye wrote a short biography on the painter published in 1879. Houssaye wrote, Il avait loué un grand atelier au haut du faubourg Saint-Honoré, près de l’hôpital Beaujon. Il allait souvent dans les salles des malades pour suivre sur le visage des agonisants toutes les phases de la souffrance, pour étudier toutes les expressions de la douleur et des suprêmes angoisses. Son atelier devint la succursale de la Morgue. Il s’était entendu avec les internes et les infirmiers qui lui apportaient pour ses études des membres coupés et des cadavres; Géricault les gardait jusqu’à ce qu’ils tombassent en pleine décomposition, or in English, He rented a large workshop at the top of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, near the Beaujon Hospital. He often went into the rooms of the sick to follow on the faces of the dying all the phases of suffering, to study all the expressions of pain and supreme anguish. His workshop became the branch of the Morgue. He agreed with the interns and the nurses who brought him for his studies cut limbs and corpses; Géricault kept them until they fell into decay. Géricault died at the young age of thirty-two either of Pott’s disease, another name for vertebral tuberculosis, or of complications after falling from a horse. Painter Eugène Delacroix wrote after visiting his friend, qu’on a fait toute la vigueur et la fougue de la jeunesse, quand on ne peut se retourner sur son lit d’un pouce sans le secours d’autrui!, Where have vigor and youth’s fire gone, when one cannot turn over on his bed one inch without someone else’s help!

On September 26th 1872 Max Ehrmann, writer and poet, author of the poem Desiderata, was born in Terra Haute, Indiana. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. He died aged seventy-two, like Father, on September 9th 1945.

On September 26th 1938 Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany’s Chancellor and Fuhrer, declared during a speech in Berlin, Meine Geduld jetzt zu Ende ist! Which roughly translates as My patience is now over! The Second Great War, and all the death and ruin it brought, started in September a year later and ended, also in September, six years later.

On September 26th 1983, Stanislov Petrov, lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defense forces, the Voyska PVO, saved the world from a nuclear war when he judged as a false alarm a supposedly imminent American attack.

Life follows death follows life follows death and like this time and again until the end of time. And good things also happen in the meantime, more often than not.

Hearn, like Jumpei, had been, in a slightly different way but with similar results, left behind by his both parents. Born Greek, he was sent to Ireland, France, England, the United States and Martinique, where he might have crossed or not the path of French painter Paul Gauguin, who was living in the island at that time. Hearn ended up in Japan when he was forty years old and there, reminiscent to Jumpei’s mother, went from Orthodox to Catholic before becoming a Buddhist. Hearn’s elusive regard, a consequence of the shame his blind eye, lost after an accident and an infection, caused him, makes him appear in all photos he is in either melancholic or pensive. Kazuo, one of the four children his Japanese wife Setsu gave him, seems to have followed his father’s photogenic example.

Hearn’s lost eye makes me think of my cousin and friend Mauricio, whom I met at a restaurant in Bogota after many years of separation during those last days I spent with father. Mauricio was twenty or twenty-one when, after months of suffering painful headaches, doctors discovered a craniopharyngioma growing inside his head. The tumor, about the size of a golf ball, was sitting on his sella turcica, the depression that holds the pituitary gland inside the skull. The pressure the tumor exerted on his optic nerves left him blind. Four days after the surgery Mauricio had two brain attacks. He was in a coma for several days and I have never felt the courage to ask him what he saw during those days of darkness nor to ask him what he sees today. The left side of his body and his speech are also partially impaired. To keep Mauricio functional and to avoid further complications, including the violent convulsions that can kill him if left unattended, he must take regular doses of testosterone, a steroid called Prednisolone, Euthyrox for his thyroid hormone and Tegretol and Keppra to decrease nerve impulses and avoid convulsions. He must also visit every six months an endocrinologist, a neurosurgeon and a neurologist, and this for the rest of his life.

Father, unlike Walser, was not surrounded by the frozen lakes, snowy mountains and quiet countryside of Herisau. He had lived the last decades of his life under the gray skies and in the gray streets of Bogota. He was neither wearing a suit nor died alone of a fulminant heart attack while taking a long walk in the middle of a cold day. He died semi-naked, his yellow skin covered by a pale blue gown, with tubes, wires and cannulas protruding from his arms, neck, chest and nostrils in a hospital bed surrounded by his older sister, his ex-wife, his only daughter and two other women he barely knew. None of his other four children was there when Death came to get him. I was nine thousand miles away and saw him die and dead through the screen of my telephone.

Father hadn’t worn a hat in many years. The toxins and ammonia that his scarred liver could no longer eliminate travelled through his bloodstream and up to his brain and made him forgetful, confused and also at times insane. He was not sure where he was, what month and year he was in or who was the person he was talking to. I caught him once trying to throw a curtain rail out the window of the third floor apartment he lived in. I lost sight of him once at the supermarket as I paid to the cashier and found him in one of the alleys desperately looking for my stepbrother Sebastian, even though Sebastian had not come with us that day. Two or three times he convulsed like an epileptic. Father, unlike Walser, used to own plenty. For a big part of his life it seemed that owning things and people was all he cared about. He shared his life with four different women, at least the ones I met or heard of, slept with a lot more and fathered at least five children. He had lost his fortune and possessions and almost everyone around him by the time he had started dying.

The first thing I saw the day of his funeral was the royal mauve ribbon that traversed diagonally the rear tinted window of the hearse, which looked more like a modern sports Chevrolet than a funeral vehicle. On it, written on golden thread letters, was the full name of my father. The license plate read DDR051, Bogota D.C, and the number made me think of us, Javier, Nicolas, Sebastian, Batista and me, his five children, now preceding our single gone father. My stepbrother Nicolas, tall and notably obese, the result of a diet of computer games, compulsive social networking, pornography, disorganized eating, erratic sleeping patterns and the fact that he lost ninth grade three times in a row and ended up not finishing high school to instead stay home doing nothing apart from going to and fro the refrigerator and the toilet and seeing the hours pass on his bed in front of the screen of his portable computer, who was eighteen at the time, pitied by a few members of the family and abhorred by most of us, and three of Father’s acquaintances, old men who used to be his friends and employees, one of whom had found father more or less a year earlier inside the bathroom of the office, his face going from pale to purple and back to pale again, leaning against the wall supported by one of his big hands, the other one wrapping his sex, close to the point of fainting, and had driven him to the hospital where the doctor who saw him in the emergency room confirmed he not only had a hernia next to his right testicle but also that his urethra was enlarged to the point where not a drop of urine would be able to exit and which would result in rapid intoxication if a catheter was not immediately inserted (It was the worst physical pain I have ever felt, father said as he told me about that day, it was as if someone was charring my insides with acid), carried the black coffin and placed it in front of the altar of the modest church, floors of cheap wood, walls of naked red brick and a crude ceiling made of zinc sheets, where the funeral rites took place. Sister made a speech and cried. Then she read mine on my behalf and cried again. Mother took her place minutes later and in the midst of her grief assured the present that she and father had renewed their marriage vows, even though they had been apart for almost twenty years, and told some other lies and nonsense for minutes that painfully stretched and tortured all those brave or courteous enough to listen to her words.

When mother told me on the phone that father was dying, I asked her to cut off a lock of his silver hair, conserve it in a plastic bag or inside the pages of a book and hand the relic to me when we met some months later. She said yes, gave me her word and like so many other times forgot her promise the moment she hung up. Mother is obsessive and compulsive. She often lies or confuses her statements. She has aggressive tendencies and used to throw things aiming at the heads and chests of her targets and seized knives or other homely weapons when she was angry. She swiftly makes friends as soon as she arrives to a new place and gets into arguments with them some days or weeks later, arguments that are sometimes serious, sometimes violent, because those people, like everyone else in the world, as she insists when justifying her acts, wish her harm. She overmedicates herself and all her children. She is a hoarder, her bedroom being the dirtiest and busiest room in any house she inhabits. She believes in and used to practice, I ignore if she still does, all sorts of esotericism. She visited spiritualists, sorcerers, a woman who supposedly spoke to angels and archangels and palm and tarot readers. She used to smoke cigars as thick as sausages which she sprinkled with sugar in a ritual of ashes fortune-telling. Mother read the future and the luck in playing cards, always had a tarot deck on her, and spent hours on the phone with her most gullible friends and clients. She saw memorable events and tragedies in raw eggs immersed in glasses full of water and empty cups dirty with remains of black coffee or hot chocolate. The cries of certain birds meant the soon-to-come announcement of someone’s certain death. When a member of the family felt unwell, which was often due to the poor sanitary conditions of the house and the many hungry animals sharing the premises with us, mother used to set a glass of water, cotton balls, clean white towels and a glass of alcohol on the bedside table and prayed to José Gregorio Hernández, a quasi-saint and doctor born and dead in Venezuela, for his intervention. One of the times she read my fortune in the cards, she said I would meet and marry a pale skinned, dark-haired woman who lived abroad. I must admit she got that one right. I am still convinced that most of her behavior is the result of a mental fracture caused by father’s violent acts. Mother is also full of love, even though it is an unusual kind of it, for her four children.

I saw father’s body for the last time the same way I saw him die, through the screen of my phone. He wore a cheap gray suit and a cheap blue shirt, both of which were too big for the shriveled body lying inside the black casket. His calm face, or what was left of it, was the color of wet ash mixed with yellow mud. I could not recognize in that dead body the man whom I had taken showers with when I was a kid, who had driven me to pools and warm towns, who had fed me slices of watermelons and chunks of pineapples, who asked me to kiss the stubble of his cheeks, showed me how to swim, cooked for me an infinity of meals, paid for a large part of my education, told me jokes that made me laugh most of the time, bought me a vapor train, a remote control boat, bike and car, skates, soccer balls, video games and many other Christmas and birthday presents, fought with mom, asked me to come to his office just to keep him company, got drunk and showed me the old pictures of mom and us he kept hidden behind the false bottom of his briefcase, walked by my side in silence during those last days of his life, dragging next to his leg the bag full of urine, the man with whom I ate a pastry filled with guava paste and dulce de leche and drank half a glass of orange juice looking at the ugly streets and houses of that ugly city where he had lived and died, a city I loathe as much as I loathe everything it contains, who sat on a bench, wearing a red cardigan that suited him well, and looking at the infinity of a white sky told me, This is it, I know I am running out of time, the man I hugged, lying behind him on the narrow bed, for the good part of an hour in silence until it was time to say goodbye, since I had a plane to board that night, the man who did not, could not, get up from that bed to see me walk away for the last time. What father was thinking during those last moments we were together, if he already knew that was the last time we would see each other again, I will never know.

Sister told me he had read the letter I had left for him over and over again. What Batista could not remember was if he had read or not the only book I bought for him during those thirty-two years we were in each other’s life, The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges’ best friend. I bought another copy of the book months after he had passed away to either read the words that he had read, in a morbid reenacting of the past, or to read it whole on his behalf. Bioy Casares writes, Creo que perdemos la inmortalidad porque la resistencia a la muerte no ha evolucionado; sus perfeccionamientos insisten en la primera idea, rudimentaria; retener vivo todo el cuerpo. Solo habría que buscar la conservación de lo que interesa a la conciencia, or something like, I think we lose immortality because our resistance to death has not evolved; its refinements insist in the first idea, rudimentary; to keep the whole body alive. One should only look for the conservation of what interests the conscience. Someone closed the coffin’s lid and a square void opened in one of the red brick-walls of the funeral home and swallowed the coffin. The flames licked the wood and a couple of hours later it was over and my father’s life turned into an everlasting absence.

Adal was also there that day to keep company to Batista and mother during the funeral and drive them from the city to the church and back. They dialed again my number when the ceremony ended. I saw through Adal’s phone how the weather in that city of the damned had taken a turn for the worse. The day was gray, as if there was a wild fire and the streets were filled with smoke, and the downpour came as if God or the Devil had decided to empty his bladder on their heads. Lina, the girlfriend I left in order to marry my ex-wife was also in the car. She is still, after more than a decade of having been together, a good friend. I stayed in her apartment for some days, as she traveled on a boat across the Magdalena River, dressing and preparing beauty queens for one of the many national beauty contests, the third and last time I went to visit father. We slept next to each other just one night, like a brother and a sister offering our respective backs to each other. I met Lina in College. I studied Publicity and she studied fashion design. We became inseparable for the best part of a year, until life and I decided I could at last escape the country and go meet Sebastien, mother’s new companion, mother, sister, grandmother and my two step brothers in France. Lina joined me in Marseilles less than a year later.

To her surprise and mine, I had already been dating Marie, a Danish girl I met during the period I spent studying French in the University of Aix-en-Provence, for over three months. Those French classes in Aix-en-Provence started in September 2004, one month after my arrival in the country. Our class consisted of our teacher, a small French woman named Brigitte, Madame Brigitte Malraux, who always wore black hats, black dresses and black shoes which made her look like a witch about to cook a potion, two Americans, a handsome one and another dull but kind one whose names I did not even try to recall, Mareike from Germany, Marie from Denmark, a quartet of Spanish girls, I can only recall the names of two of them, the pretty ones, Marta and Mari-Carmen, a handsome Italian couple composed by a short blond girl with a gap in her front teeth and a wiry man with waves of black hair on his head, the kind of charcoal hair only Italian men can have, who were arguing all the time, a young Mexican man, whose name I have also forgotten, who had a handsome face, long black hair, a long white nose and who always wore checkered shirts as if he were about to go chop down a tree at any given time, Chihiro, a forty-something-year old woman from Japan who looked like a girl of fourteen, David and Camilo, who also came from Colombia, and Sabrina, a young girl from a wealthy Venezuelan family. Our after school parties, a dozen people sitting on sofas and on the floor eating bread and cheese, drinking cheap red wine and sharing stories in at least three different languages, always took place in Sabrina’s spacious apartment.

Sabrina and her family had been in exile from the first months of the first presidential term of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. A single man suffices to bring ruin to a nation. Many Venezuelans, by the time I write these words, are starving. Sabrina and her parents watched the news of Bassil DaCosta’s murder, a young man of twenty-three and a student of the University Alexander Humboldt, from their temporary living room in Paris. They listened to the reporter telling all those who wished to listen how a bullet had pierced DaCosta’s skull and spilled his brains on the asphalt. A second young woman called Génesis was shot a week later. Many more came next. We watched the protests, Sabrina told me, we heard the chants, smelled the smoke, and looked with tears in our eyes the photos of the killed, at least of those whose names were still remembered. We read their names with care, hoping not to find among them neither relative nor friend. Basssil Da Costa, Alejandro Bruno, Johny Carvallo, Juán Montoya, Alejandro Márquez, José Ernesto Méndez, Robert Redman, Génesis Carmona, Edgar Carrasquel. Honks, whistles, cries, the clanking of a thousand frying pans and the tricolor waves of a million flags. Two more faces, Luis Felipe Boada and Leopoldo Eduardo López, and below them the word FREEDOM. And the people sang, No More Dead, No More Dead. A young fat man with a thick beard got on the stage armed with his heart in his right hand and a loudspeaker in his left. Peace! said the bearded man, addressing the young audience. Instead of teargas grenades, rubber bullets, harassment, threats and murder. Peace! answered the youth in unison. Peace! said the bearded man, instead of hitmen riding bikes, instead of pellets, martyrs, instead of fallen young men. Peace! replied the youth in unison. Inflation like Sudan’s, misery, never ending lines to buy cooking oil, toilet paper and flour, illness, hunger, and all of this while we walk and sleep over huge reserves of oil. Peace! said the bearded man. Peace! Peace! Peace! chanted the crowd. When the first military cars could be seen coming, half a dozen students dragged the fallen arm of a tree to try and slow them down. One could smell the fear, the evil things to come, as one could smell the rain in a day of storm. Protest, said Sabrina, has always been the last resource of the hopeless. The first grenades rolled, spreading their green tails of mustard gas. The first shots, not rubber bullets, came an hour later. The television also showed the remains of La Torre de David, David’s Tower, the megalomaniac work of David Brillembourg, the powerful president of the powerful financial group that disappeared after Brillembourg’s death and the financial crisis that followed. The project was abandoned.

The tower, a forty-five floor, almost two hundred meter tall building left unfinished over two decades earlier, was illegally occupied by more than a thousand families who squatted the gray, windowless apartments from the first to the 22nd floor. From the 23rd upwards there was no electrical power, no sewer, no water supply and no decent way to survive. The Police forces left the settlers alone. The tenants, in exchange, supported Hugo Chavez’ government. And they were not the only ones. The people living in Los Barrios, the poor neighborhoods built on the mountains that surround Caracas, districts made of thousands of small brick walls and roofs of zinc, their glassless windows like gauged eyes, were also grateful to the president because, as some of them said when interviewed, in spite of the poverty and violence they witnessed and suffered every day, they no longer felt forgotten.

Venezuela was a country of thirty million souls sharing the same flag, same land, same culture and language and a country divided. It has happened before. What we fear most, said Sabrina, is a civil war. We were so close to one after El Caracazo in 89. Your country suffered one over fifty years back. Also Argentina, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, México, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Dominican republic. And Spain, of course. Unless my memory betrays me, said Sabrina, none of those ended up well.

Marie was nineteen at the time, blond and slim, broad hips, silly smile, especially when tipsy. We started going out after I touched and massaged her feet during a night out on the beach of Le Prado in Marseilles. I must confess I wanted to sleep with Sabrina that night, but things almost never happen as one expects them to. I have only slept with seven other men, Marie once told me while we waited for a bus in the neighborhood of Castellane, also in Marseilles. That makes you my eight one. How many women have you slept with? She asked. She also used to say that if I travelled to Copenhagen with her, many of her friends would like me. Why? I asked. Because you have black hair, she said. How much of this world I had yet to see! I visited blonde and beautiful Marie almost daily in her second floor apartment at the end of the Cours Mirabeau, the paved heart of Aix-en-Provence. I remember that the walls of the spacious interior were painted of an immaculate white, her shower was tight and her bed was double. We drank red wine and talked and laughed and always gave each other oral pleasure before we had sex, often from behind, her favorite position. We then went to eat two-euro pizza slices from the pizza truck in front of her apartment. She used to scold me when we ate and drank out because I ate too fast, especially the squares of bread and olives and pieces of feta cheese I so much liked to eat. We often went to a nearby club with David, Camilo, Mareike, Sabrina and the Spanish girls to a bar inside a cave. We sat and drank and kissed and fondled in the dark since Marie could not dance. The men I have slept with, Marie used to say, never caress my hair, skin and body after they have finished. I love that about you. I love that you are so tender. I used to kiss her lips and breasts in empty streets, stair cages and behind the doors of restrooms belonging to the apartments of our mutual friends. I broke off our relationship when Lina, as I said before, decided to come to France. Lina found out some days later that I had been sleeping with Marie and slapped my face in front of everyone else. I learnt that Marie lived for several years in Paris together with a French man, that she worked as a translator, that she broke up with the French and married a Danish and gave birth to a blond white baby boy whom she named Max, like the writer I admire and love the most, at least I like to think so, after which she returned to live in Copenhagen.

I only dreamed of Marie once. In the dream, I was standing on a deserted beach at dusk or night, the sand under my feet was gray and the sky was thick with a musty darkness. Two derelict buildings, which looked as if they had been recently bombed in Tokyo or Hamburg by American or British bombers, stood in front of me in the horizon. I noticed the trails of footsteps painted red and blue that parted from the tip of my toes to each one of the two buildings. I heard Marie’s whisper tell me, I wait for you in one of them. I can’t recall which one I chose, but in any case it was the wrong one and I never saw Marie again.

Lina dated David, one of the two other Colombians, for a while, finished her studies and when her visa expired, went back to Bogota. As if the city was waiting to condemn the defeated returnees, Lina noticed a lump in one of her breasts, the right one if I am not mistaken, just months after her return and received confirmation of cancer some weeks later. Chemotherapy and surgery ensued. She started losing her hair and decided to cut it short and shorter progressively. One of our common friends contacted her, after seeing a picture of her new hairstyle in a social network, and asked her if she had become a lesbian. I have cancer, she wrote back to him. I still wonder what the idiot felt when reading those three words. The man she had been dating told her he didn’t have the heart or the stomach to see her like that and left her. Some of us are plain and simple cowards.

Batista and Victoria, father’s youngest sister, the one who used to live in Miami all her life until a lung cancer killed her husband and she could take the solitude no more, took the urn with his ashes and emptied it, it was either January 5th or 6th, in the stream of a waterfall in Antioquia named El Tequendamito where father used to play as a kid. Flesh in fire to make earth, earth in water to make nothingness. Our patriarch expressly asked Batista not to bury his corpse after his demise but to burn it to the marrow. Father was conceivably repulsed by the thought of an infestation of white worms nibbling at his flesh and softer organs and the putrefaction following the four melodically-named stages of mortis (pallor, algol, rigor, livor). Scatter my ashes, he requested her, in the modest, mountain-locked waterfall still flowing after all these years near my birthplace. He used to steal delicious oranges from the trees in that farm, said Victoria pointing with her bony index finger to an empty lot next to the chosen waterfall. Father’s siblings had once been ten. There were four left after he stopped living and two months after that, when the sister they all simply called Blonde got sick and died the day of Christmas, they were down to three and counting. Heart attacks, stomach and lung cancers were the habitual ways chosen by the mountaineer siblings to pass to the next realm from this arduous, physical existence. Father opted for a different path, he had been a stubborn, idiosyncratic individual after all, and left this world wasted, crying tears of blood in a pool of yellow bile after his cirrhotic liver stopped serving its purpose. Batista collected the brown funeral urn from the funeral office of the funeral parlor in the early hours of the morning two days after our father’s corpse, hair, skin, nails, teeth, fat, bones and muscle, dressed in modest clothes too large for his shriveled body, an inexpensive dark suit and a royal-blue colored shirt that I suspected was borrowed, was cremated inside an unpretentious oven. There is no more time in our gray cities of concrete for a fragrant wooden pyre drenched in oil or to quench the thirsty fire with fresh wine. A bitter, and by all means excessive struggle, took place the day before the burning of the body. Both mother and sister aspired to be the one to carry father’s last wish to completion, the scattering of the ashes inside the urn into the waters of the waterfall. Sister ensured victory by the simple means of remembering when the urn was to be ready for retrieval.

In January of the following year, three months after the funeral rites, sister travelled by road from the rancid capital of that rotten country the three-hundred miles that separated her from father’s requested point of departure from this world that we have shaped into this appalling, wicked form. Victoria volunteered to join sister in this dispiriting adventure. It is done, wrote Sister in a brief message sent to my attention. She attached a photograph in which I could see her and aunt Victoria, both of them pale, drawn and defeated, in front of a pleasant waterfall in the midst of a day of clear skies where reigned no one but the sun. We opened the container, she wrote, and scattered the ashes and the bones. There were some big lumps, you know, like small, black meteorites that burnt after they fell from heaven and tried crossing the planet’s atmosphere.

Once the flames had done their transformation-of-the-matter and purifying job (were not even the witches in the days of the European Inquisition and some provinces of British North America burnt at the stake to expiate their sins?), the flowing, crystal waters of the stream proved to be the smartest grave of all. And thus father, his sins consumed by fire, his ashes inhabiting the rivers and the seas, tasted full freedom from his urn.

What Walser was thinking, or not, during that last slow walk in the middle of a cold, white day, what he felt when his heart stopped, pain or relief, anguish or renunciation, if he faced death with the little dignity he still had, as the photographs would want to hint, we can only guess. Another mystery left unattended was who the children who found Walser were, in what strange way they were related to the solitary walker-writer or how their discovery affected the rest of their lives. I think they had a plate of black and white sausages, potatoes and choucroute, put on their newly knitted winter hats, scarves and mittens and went out to run and play and throw snowballs at each other. After they found the body, one of them took off his right mitten, touched Walser’s face and felt the rough and frozen skin on the old man’s face. One of them became a writer, the other a poet, the third one a painter or an artist of some kind. By now, I strangely and firmly believe that both Walser and father dreamed with locusts, centipedes, leeches and other vermin often.

A month before father died I dreamed I was in a meeting where his fate was to be sealed. The lawyer, a plump, white-haired man dressed in black, nervously toyed with the fountain pen in his hand. He and I were talking, sitting face to face at a long table, while father, also seated, waited quietly, staring at his shoes or at the floor, in a corner of the unheated room. I strongly recommend you to become the main intermediary, the lawyer told me, in the voice of a man seemingly exasperated. The best is for you to handle the negotiations from a certain distance, as far away as possible from the eye of fire. Why are we paying for a lawyer then? I asked him. The lawyer stopped playing with the pen and placed it on the table before saying: Why do we do everything we do? Father, his face reddened because of the intense cold or the ravages of time, listened to our conversation without saying a word. Red veins like spider webs covered his nose and cheeks. The dark blue suit he handsomely wore matched his silver hair and white shirt. The lawyer opened his mouth and closed it without saying a word, and then he repeated this gesture two more times. He looked like a fish who is slowly drowning on the deck of a boat. Let us liquidate the assets then, which aren’t many, he finally said. We will open a fund and leave the money there. It will be enough to pay for the days you have left on earth. I stood up and stormed out of the room leaving father alone with the lawyer. I got in the blue sedan parked outside the building and drove, a feat I am incapable of in waking life, through the green and coastal roads of a city I knew was Malmö. After driving a couple of hours, I stopped the car by the edge of a cliff and watched the sun set in the horizon and the white naked tourists aided by black guides jumping off the overhang into the sea. The black guides laughed, joked and boasted about the faraway places they had come from. I came to the edge to take a better look of the world beyond the cliff. The surface of the sea was covered by layers of golden algae that reflected the last rays of the sun. The sky turned pink, orange and mauve by patches. The mustard-yellow moon came out and with it came along the high tide. I kept on driving. Time, I do not know why, was of the matter. I drove through nameless towns, towns I thought of naming had I had the time. The dirt road crossed a golden hay field like a scar. The tower, a giant anthill with eyelike windows by the thousands, stood on the right side. I could see a decrepit woman staring in my direction, as if she were judging me, from one of the windows. I drove and saw not a thing and not a soul until I saw the sea again. A metal bridge stretched, for what seemed to be miles, from the shore I drove on into a city on the other extreme. The buildings on the other side rose in queer harmony, like musical notes on a scale. People, many of them of advanced age, walked and laughed and played on the frozen waters between the two shores. Had I spoken Swedish, I would have told them to stop, I would have made them realize the impending danger. I decided to park the car next to the only wooden bench facing the sea. Driving backwards, disturbed and distracted by the always latent possibility of tragedy, I nearly ran over a shrunk, old lady dressed in yellow, like a wrinkled sun watching the dome of the sky and the sea, who was standing by the bench. She looked at me and before I could say a word presented her apologies in a whisper. Wait! This is all my fault! I said as I watched her run away, if her rushed, quirk steps can be called running, evidently afraid of my presence. Only then did I notice she was the same old woman who had watched my actions from the window of the tower in the middle of the field. I melted on the bench, drained after the meeting with the lawyer, the long drive, the double encounter with the old woman, staring at my shaking hands for a while. It was this same numbness that made me drop my red notebook in the only part of the sea that wasn’t frozen when I was I fumbling inside my bag looking for my camera. A woman so pale she seemed made of frozen milk came by my side and stuck her hand and arm up to her shoulder in the waters. She produced the notebook and handed it back to me with a smile. A second woman, blonde and short, was now standing next to her. She said: Do not tell me you have come all the way down here just to take a picture. Her voice was husky, like my father’s. It started snowing. They waited in silence as I went to the edge of the road in order to, at last, take that much desired photograph. I was just about to release the shutter when the pale woman got off the chair and like a gazelle jumped inside my car. The small one followed and took a seat as her copilot. I ran as fast as I could and barely got on the car through one of the rear doors. I was a passenger in my own car and I had not been able to take the picture! Here comes adventure! Said the pale one, laughing. She sank her foot on the accelerator and the car went off backwards like a lightning. We avoided three or four passersby by a few inches, among them a police officer who wore on top of his yellow mane an enormous orange top hat. We ran out of luck right after that. A speeding car hit the tail of ours and a second one its frontal bumper. All the crystal in the car blew up in fragments that looked like sugar. We span round and round. When we finally stopped there was only silence. The short blonde opened the door on her side and dropped on her hands and knees. Drops of thick blood fell from her nose and ears onto the pavement. The milky one, bleeding profusely from a gash that made her shoulder look like a ripe watermelon cut in half, helped me get the blond one on her feet and, dragging her, we left the scene on foot, making our Via Crucis through the terrified crowd. Seconds later, the car exploded in a ball of flames. Sometimes when I wake up, I wish I could stay asleep and just keep on dreaming. I have often wondered where those dreams come from. Perhaps they come from madness, from madness and nowhere else.

VIII

Have you seen the movie called The Fly? Jumpei asked the girls, bringing me back from my mental wanderings. It scarred my childhood and gave me nightmares for life, almost as much as when mom discovered a settlement of lice in my head. It took me weeks of ointments and a shaved head to get rid of them. Flies, little girls, that is what Spiders eat. Disgusting, isn’t it? Luno stuck out her tongue and Sola frowned in disbelief. I was still a kid, Jumpei said, this time talking to me. It was the first time I had seen the possibility of genetic manipulation and of jumping through time and space, of blending one into the other, of merging the two with this we call us and the material world, and the whole in a big screen and sitting next to dad, eating popcorn, as if in the most sublime of Einstein’s dreams. Flies do more than scare kids and introduce us to quantum physics, though. After death, you see, he whispered, a body commences to decay and, well, to smell. And it is that particular smell which attracts the flies just after posthumous minutes. The flies lay their eggs on the rotting flesh, tiny, wriggly sticks that look like fresh butter, and let the maggots feast and grow on it. That is how forensic entomologists, my colleagues standing on the dark side of the world, know when someone died with impressive precision.

The entomologist’s movie comment brought back another dream. In the dream, the flesh of my right arm and the palm of the same hand were full of small dark holes that made the skin look like a cluster of bubbles in a cup of black coffee. I picked at and scratched the painless surface until I saw the red head of the first maggot. The rest of the white, buttery slugs followed, sticking their heads and half of their soft wriggling bodies through the openings.

It also reminded me that in the small Colombian town where I spent several years of my childhood, a young hired criminal nicknamed The Fly slit the throat of an alderman during a sunny afternoon for a risible amount of money. The boy was caught by the police just to be released a couple of days later since he was a minor and the authorities were either not capable enough or did not know how to handle such cases. My friends and I often saw that boy they called The Fly. We never found out his real name. The kid was always alone, roaming up and down the town streets. We always crossed the street to the opposite side or entered the nearest store shaking.

Irish William Butler Yeats penned a poem named the Long-Legged Fly. Some lines of it read, That civilization may not sink, its great battle lost, quiet the dog, tether the pony to a distant post; Our master Caesar is in the tent where the maps are spread, his eyes fixed upon nothing, a hand under his head. Like a long-legged fly upon the stream his mind moves upon silence. That the topless towers be burnt and men recall that face, move most gently if move you must. In this lonely place. For some reason, I find to this day these lines strongly evocative and even foreboding of the terror attack on the honeycomb structure of the Manhattan twin towers. I visited the now empty grounds where the towers stood, the first time alone, in May 6th 2017. I sat in front of the two black pools that have replaced the buildings after reading some of the stencil-cut names in the dark bronze parapets, Mr. Burns, Mr. Burke, Mr. Stack, Mr. Quinn, Mr. Casoria, under the canopy of oaks and sweetgum trees that line the fields and had a pot of Greek yoghurt and toasts spread with almond butter as I reflected on the unnecessary and massive loss of life that seems to be an innate and inextricable part of our nature. When I was leaving, I looked up to the sky trying to see the top of the Freedom Tower, the one that has replaced the twin ones, concealed that morning by stubborn rain clouds, just to find and snap a scene of remembrance. A commercial plane went flying silently behind the Freedom tower and disappeared inside the clouds. I visited the place a second time two days later, this time with Lina and her sister Kika, who were visiting their mother, a resident of New York, for a couple of weeks. We ended that good day at a restaurant in little Italy having grissini, cannelloni and red wine. Lina is still undergoing treatment and is thankfully doing well.

The fourth place in the exhibition belonged to a motorized honeybee, another one of those thousands of species we have so successfully domesticated. Do you know how honeybees communicate? Jumpei asked the girls. They dance, he said, awkwardly moving his hips from right to left. Herr Wilhelm, my apiology professor during my now long gone German exchange years, himself, even if in an intermittent an almost private fashion, a former student of the Austrian Professor and illustrator Paul Pfurtscheller, told me the story of Karl Von Frisch, a Viennese gentleman with pale skin marked by red blotches often seen dressed in a shirt as white as his hair, short brown Bavarian lederhosen, long ashen socks and soft black leather shoes. Von Frisch studied bees with profound care and dedication. We know, for example, thanks to his research, that the little bees see the world in tones of blue, white, violet and yellow. And that isn’t the beginning of it. When an explorer bee finds a source of food she, generously, since she knows that only by means of cooperation can the hive survive, comes back to the hive to inform her peers. By dancing in circles if the source is close or in an eight-shaped dance if the distance is a greater one, by drawing an angle in relation with the hive and the sun’s position in the sky and by wiggling her abdomen and tail at a certain speed the explorer bee can tell her bee friends where the food is. The intricate communication system also involves the bee’s internal solar clock and compass, which help estimate the sun’s location, even in the darkness of the hive and in spite of latitudinal or seasonal changes. Von Frisch was a patient man. He started his observations and research in the early 1910s. He finished assembling his final theory by the mid-1940s. The academy granted him the Nobel Prize in 1973 when he was eighty-seven. He died in 1982, five years before the celebration of his first century. The kind of patience that makes one think of Charles Darwin, who boarded the HMS Beagle in December 1831, returned five years later, after circumnavigating the planet like Magellan, Drake and Pigafetta, and only published On the Origin of Species after too many drafts and corrections in November 1859, twenty-eight years later.

Even the Quran, another act of patience, this time both human and seemingly divine, said the entomologist, revealed progressively by God to Muhammad through the archangel Jibril during a period of twenty-three years, mentions the mighty bees. I memorized the lines from a pocket royal blue and golden copy of the holy book a gentle Turk offered me as a present as I was leaving the Rüstem Pasha, one of the many mosques of the city, during my only visit to the ancient and mysterious Constantinople. The Rüstem Pasha, built on a terrace, seems to have been erected by Thrones and Cherubs directly on the clouds of heaven. Its interior walls, enlivened with the manganese purple, red Armenian bole, sage green and the distinctive cobalt blue of the thousands of Iznik tiles covering them, seem to confirm my opinion. The passage in the Quran goes like this: Your Lord inspired the bee, saying, ‘Make your homes in the mountains, in the trees, and also in the structures which men erect. Then feed on every kind of fruit, and follow the trodden paths of your Lord’. From its belly comes a drink with different colors, which provides healing for mankind. Indeed, in this there is a sign for people who give thought. I thought I could only agree.

Listen, girls, said Jumpei frenetically touching the screen of his mobile phone, have you ever listened to this one? I knew the song coming from Jumpei’s phone. I had listened to its frenetic rhythm, its frenzied ups and downs in a thousand movies, TV shows and TV and radio commercials. It’s The Flight of the Bumblebee, said Jumpei, composed by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, member of the Saint Petersburg Mighty Handful, five Russian composers who changed the face of music in the 19th century. The members of the group were, let us say, colorful, to say the least. Balakirev, their leader, suffered a nervous breakdown that drove him away from music for half a decade. Borodin, apart from being a talented musician, was also a successful chemist and physician. Cui, who lost his sight two years before he died, was a military instructor who specialized in fortified structures. Mussorgsky, an aristocrat and my personal favorite, drowned his fears and last years in alcohol and died when he was just 42. Rimsky-Korsakov, who at the early age of 27 became professor of orchestration at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, tried, successfully, I think, to capture the motion and emotion of the aerial adventures of our black-and-yellow stripped friends. The five composers, as well as the more popular Tchaikovsky, rest today in the grounds of the Tikhvin Cemetery.

Honeybees, admired by Charles Darwin for the hexagonal efficiency of their hives, are dying around the world by the millions, said Jumpei almost in a whisper and slightly tilting his self forward, as if the weight of the news he was about to tell was too much for him to bear. Colony Collapse, they call it, a disorder possibly caused by a combination of factors like malnutrition, stress and the resulting immunodeficiency, loss of habitat, electromagnetic radiation, loss of genetic diversity due to human manipulation, global warming and the use of antibiotics and pesticides by farmers. When the disorder hits the colony most Workers, the infertile females that sustain the hive, he said showing the girls a dead bee he extracted from a small metallic case he produced from his pocket, vanish, abandoning the Queen, the only female capable of procreating, with some Nurses, one of the many roles of the Workers. The Drones, the third class of bee and the only few males in the colony, do nothing else than eating and mating with the Queen. Sola asked him what mating meant. I will let your dad explain you that later, little lady, he said, winking at me. Apart from nursing baby bees, Workers clean the cells that house the eggs, nectar and pollen, dispose of the dead, care for the Queen, forage and collect food, fan the hive in order to control humidity and temperature, produce wax and protect the hive against attackers and intruders. They are busy little girls. A hive cannot survive without the Workers. This man made phenomenon has also been named the Mary Celeste Syndrome. No, Luno, not the virgin Mary. Mary Celeste was a merchant ship, and ships always carry female names. Luno asked why. It is a good question to which I really do not know the answer, said the entomologist. I once read that they are named like that because they are vessels, like the female womb, the place inside your mother’s tummy where the two of you came from. This might not be true, though. The girls looked dumbfounded. Mary Celeste sailed from New York on the 7th of November of 1872. Over a hundred years ago, indeed, Luno.

The sailors on board were going to Genoa. Yes, Sola, in Italy! Aren’t you a clever girl? Green, white and red, that’s right. The mysterious thing is that when the Mary Celeste was found by the sailors of a Canadian vessel near the Portuguese islands there was no one on board, not a single soul. The cargo was there and untouched, so it wasn’t pirates, as were the personal belongings of the crew. There was also still plenty of food and water. The only missing items were the lifeboat, the eight crewmen, a mix of American and German men, Captain Briggs, his wife Sarah and their daughter Sophia. Even though many legends about the fate of the crew have seen the light of day, even that of a man eating giant squid, what made the men abandon the ship in such a frenzy, never to be seen again, is a question that remains unanswered.

It was also Professor Wilhelm who told me about the Telling of the Bees. In ancient Europe, when places like Moravia, Bohemia and Prussia still existed, beekeepers knew they needed to inform the bees under their care about family events like births, deaths, journeys, marriages and other matters of importance. Were the beekeepers to forget to convey such information to the insects, the bees would stop working, fly away or die out of grief, anger and frustration. The hive was to be draped in shreds of white or red crepe depending on the occasion. If the keeper died, his wife or children would wrap the hive in black, leave a piece or two of the funeral bread and gently sing to the bees the tragedy that had just happened. The end of this communication, the burning of this bridge between the bees and men, might be another explanation for their sudden vanishing. Professor Wilhelm must have lost his mind thinking about mysteries like this and many others. He started hearing the whisper of the muses, as he called the many voices in his head, some days after his 82nd birthday. The professor still lives in Munich, where we first met, alone and practically secluded.

Sola went quiet after the entomologist finished telling the Mary Celeste’s story and fixed her eyes on her shoes and on the patch of floor underneath them, just like my father had in my Swedish dream. She barely glanced at the Mantis and waited in silence while Luno, having lost all fear, posed for a new picture in front of the automated puppet. Will you also disappear? She asked me with her head bowed down. I tried my best to explain her how the cycle worked, how death ends life to keep everything in nature fresh and new, how it is necessary to preserve the balance, how everything, from the stars and planets like bright fireflies in the black rivers of the sky to the forest trees like the legs of giant mantes, those trees that, as I realized only days after father died, are always vibrating, moving, whispering secrets to each other even in the complete absence of wind, from the wild birds in the sky to the animals who roam the land and the fish who fill the seas, how everything that’s born will die one day only to make room for a new being. How about me, she asked again, will I also disappear?

Do you know how long a grasshopper lives? asked Jumpei, coming to the rescue. She shook her head. He crouched, placing his oversized black eyes at the level of her face. Five or six weeks, same as the drone bees. The worker bee lives for about half a year if she doesn’t work herself to death before that. And a mantis? He asked. She shook her head again. About a year, said Jumpei smiling. Same as the little ladybugs. Leaf insects live from one to two years, which is already quite long for an insect. Now remind me how old are you? Sola showed Jumpei her open right hand, her little fingers showing red traces of the atopic dermatitis that has bothered her since she was a baby. That’s how many years the queen bee will live if she is very, very lucky. I’ll be forty-nine this October, he said, which makes me way older than your father. That means I have lived the life of almost ten Queen Bees and I am still counting. You still have a lot of time, beautiful, he said, softly pinching one of her cheeks, but it goes fast if you do not use it right, so do not waste a second of your life.

IX

Before we said our goodbyes, Jumpei offered the girls a pair of the beetles that were sold as pets in the last section of the exhibit, next to the tarantulas, ants and scorpions sold as exotic canned food, the corpses of majestic butterflies and colorful giant beetles sold as home ornaments inside their own decorative glass coffins, plastic snakes, insect-themed picture books and puzzles, insect-shaped balloons and stuffed toys.

These are my favorite insects, Jumpei told them, and the favorite of my dad. Khepri, the Egyptian god of the morning sun, had the head of a scarab beetle. The Egyptians wore small beetle-shaped protective amulets made from faience, turquoise, lapis lazuli and other very colorful precious stones on rings and pendants. Heart scarabs, large as a fists and cut most often from precious green stones, were often placed over the hearts of the deceased. I want you to keep these guys, young ladies, to share their lives with yours, and I want them to protect you, at least for a while.

The slow moving beetles, magnificent creatures in a multitude of shapes that, apart from the pearl black expected by my preconceptions, presented to the viewer tons of sandstorm orange, lemon and mustard yellow, bottle green, silk and slate blue, deep orange and heavy crimson patterns, spots and stripes, sometimes accentuated by silver, white and steel blue metallic hues that made the beetles look as if they were covered in powdered precious crystals and metals, were stored in small plastic containers. Some were either perfectly still out of exhaustion or had already suffocated. The survivors looked at us, legs against the walls, voiceless, like the interns of a prison or a concentration camp, quietly praying, supplicating us to rescue them or at least the infants in their bellies. As if guessing what I was thinking, or at least a part of it, Jumpei told me how his wife Sachiko had lost her voice from the moment she had found that she was pregnant. It is as if she feels that now that a new life is growing inside her, words and other banal things that make up our routine can be made to wait. Some nights, when I come home, I find her looking out the window, perfectly mute and still, like a dying moth or butterfly, waiting for the end of the world or at least the end of her own days. What if, asked Jumpei to no one in particular, each child we have, and each child they’ll have themselves, is nothing but a cast-off shell in the fabrication of our perfect self?

As I congratulated Jumpei for his child, Sola christened the two chosen ones, naming the female Arisa and the smaller male Nami. I insisted in buying a larger plastic container, the clear wooding sheds the man at the counter recommended and the milky jelly that would feed my daughters’ pets for the next months.

We crossed again the intergalactic tunnel, this time accompanied by Jumpei. We tried to represent the Butterfly Nebula, said the entomologist, almost shouting amidst the neon darkness. As you can see, our attempts ended up in failure. A nebula, he continued, is nothing but a cloud of gas or dust floating in the immensity of space. That makes it similar to us in more than a way. I cannot tell you if I trust or not the photographs I have seen of the butterfly-shaped one, allegedly taken by the various space telescopes we have sent into space. Still, if even the thought of something as beautiful and large as that multicolored nebula exists, this particular one measuring over three light years, according to the scientific estimations, I am more than happy to give my skepticism a well-deserved break.

Jumpei muttered his farewell, told the girls, and perhaps also me, not to forget there was a whole universe above our heads and underneath our feet and bowed several times as we took our leave. The entomologist and I, for no reason in particular, refrained from exchanging electronic addresses, phone numbers or any other contact information. He came into our lives and stayed for a brief moment in the illusion we call time, carved his memory in our minds and then, like the beetles he kindly bought for the girls, was gone forever.

I took the kids to their mother after we finished our slices of chocolate cake and our cups of hot chocolate, our evening ritual. The sky was black and starless and the moon was at the beginning of its waning crescent phase. I kissed Luno’s cheek, she said goodbye and was quick to get on mom’s bike. Sola’s teary eyes lingered longer on my figure. She waved goodbye and waved goodbye again until they turned around the corner and disappeared for the next two or three weeks. Each time I see them go, I look at my empty hands in order to confirm my fingers are no longer wrapping theirs. And then, as I walk across the crowded stations or ride the subway and the train, I strongly feel their presences walking by my side or sitting next to me.

A couple of weeks later their mother wrote in one of her brief messages, most often simple monosyllable words among which yes, no, ok are the most frequent, that Luno had played with the beetles for a while and then quickly lost interest. Sola, on the other hand, slept with the box containing the beetles next to her pillow until the day her grandmother protested and asked her to move the insects to the patio.

While the beetles lived the greatest part of their existence inside a plastic container the size of two shoe boxes, I left home to visit the deer and temples of Nara with the girls, Kamakura with my friend Hidemi, whose grandfather was the first Japanese person to set foot in the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, the cold forests and stone museums of Hakone by myself, where I wandered around the exhibit dedicated to the French designer and maître verrier Émile Gallé, a man obsessed with poetry, botany and yes, insects, thousands of which he carved and sculpted in wood, glass and ceramics in the form of vases, lamps, furniture and other decorative vessels, the green beaches of Shimoda and the snow-covered temples and demons of Akita accompanied by the woman I was living and sleeping with during those days, the country-city of Singapore, where I met my old Indian friend Ganesh, whom I love like a blood brother, Ho Chi Minh, another of those many cities where the acrid smell of war is still present in the air, as well as Paris, the castles of La Loire and the beaches where the Normandy landings took place in a sort of honey moon with my grandmother. I also commemorated by myself, at a temple in Tokyo, a hidden beauty a few steps away from Meguro train station, the first anniversary of father’s earthly absence.

The beetle named Arisa died the second week of February of 2016. The male passed away a few days later, undoubtedly under the weight of sorrow caused by the loss of his sole companion. Sola told me the next time we met that his movements slowed down gradually until they reached complete stillness. It was as if he froze in time, she said. We held hands again and boarded a train to a zoological park in the suburbs of Osaka. The remains of Arisa and Nami, stored inside a pink cardboard coffin made from a box originally used to hold a jar of their mother’s facial cream, traveled safely inside my backpack. We decided to bury them at around two in the afternoon, after we had finished seeing the giraffes, the elephants and the dolphins’ show, when the wind was calm and the winter sun was at its peak. Sola sobbed as she dug the soft soil with a plastic spoon while Luno cried and shouted the names of the beetles to the wind. We placed the little card with the beetle’s names in red ink, which served as well as a paper tombstone, hugged and cried and after a while, when our sadness had abated, went to jump on the elastic beds and to eat some warm broth and noodles.

That night, as I munched on a edamame beans and a couple of salted rice balls stuffed with sea weed and washed them down with apple juice, I decided to leaf through the pages of the magazine I found in the back pocket of the seat in front of mine in the train back from Osaka to Tokyo. The article that mentioned the entomologist covered half a page. Jumpei, the only representative from the Kansai Entomological Society, and a group of three researchers from Spain, The Netherlands and Malaysia had discovered six new species of beetles in the depths of a hitherto unexplored area of a cave in a remote area of the Maliau Basin in Borneo, the same region of the world where thousands of orangutans, also an endangered species, either lose their homes or are slaughtered when the land they live in is scorched each year in order for hectares of oil palms to be planted. The Colenisia Matsuo, wrote the reporter, a perfectly round, bright, copper-colored beetle the size of a grape, displaying three horizontal bands of light blue, green and red on its back, named in honor of the only Japanese explorer’s father, was one of the three beetles named so far. The journalist also made sure to offer his congratulations to the Japanese entomologist for his 50th birthday and the recent birth of his first daughter.