The Vatican Games

by Alejandra Guibert

  The police, the emergency coordinators for each State, finally issued a red alert by radio and TV. The terrorist alert was severe, although apart from being bacteriological, it was not clear what the threat was. There were no areas to be evacuated because it seemed to affect them all. As a preventive measure some schools were turned into shelters, simply to accommodate children whose parents did not come home or did so to die. In the shelters there were provisions, nurses, police. Nobody could guarantee protection.

  The undoable had been done in the simplest way. In only eight American cities, little bags had been thrown carelessly into rivers, sewers, reservoirs and dissolved in a matter of minutes on contact with water. They were filled with poison designed with DNA synthesis technology. Science had gone beyond itself. Years of research, millions invested in progress, the brilliant minds of the experts, and the hunger for scientific advancement had resulted in the efficient synthesis of pathogenic genomes. This great discovery had given free rein to a new pocket Frankenstein.

  The basis of the murderous compound was botulinum. The toxin used in the infamous Botox, advertised and adored by celebrities fearful of the sagging of unsupported flesh, killed millions at a stroke. In small doses it had become the most famous invention for cosmetic treatment, smoothing out wrinkles in a few hours by preventing muscular contraction. But for the purpose of terrorism in a matter of hours it induced respiratory failure, paralysis of the body and death. Rather more than a facial injection. Victims’ faces, frozen in a contorted expression could no longer be compared to the smiles of the fans of Botox. This world Botox party had been organised by young terrorists not the least interested in the world of fashion. The bacteria in the compound would continue to grow and develop, preventing its destruction or elimination for decades.

  In Bari, the community of Poor Clares was so shaken by the alarming news that they did not even dare to drink the water from their own well. The Mother Superior decided to call Father Zillo. He was not only their mentor, but the founder of the new community. Ten years earlier he had saved the Santa Chiara convent from closure, following an infamous brawl between the Mother Superior and three resident nuns. The violent nuns were transferred putting an end to the disputes, leaving the Archbishop with little choice but to close the convent building.

  ‘All convents are necessary,’ Father Zillo had insisted to the Archbishop. ‘A closed convent is a historical monument, an open one is a home for worship and the opportunity for new callings.’

  The Archbishop agreed with the priest’s logic, although he still thought his solution to the problem was a little peculiar.

  ‘Archbishop, the Convent of San Leonardo de Montefalco is overpopulated. If I may, I intend to nominate a Mother Superior from there who will choose the nuns who wish to go with her.’

  Father Zillo soon found new residents for Santa Chiara at Bari. Mother Teresa, chosen as the new Mother Superior, arrived along with twelve sisters. Sister Benedita was the last to be chosen. Sister Leopoldina had nominated her, although sister Eulalia and other nuns who had already been accepted by Mother Teresa had their doubts, due to Benedita’s young age and impulsive personality. But they all trusted Mother Teresa and were grateful for having the chance to start together their own community in a historic convent building like Santa Chiara. Their enthusiasm was too holy to reject a keen applicant like Benedita, and Mother Teresa reminded them to be united in their task of sanctifying through their behavior a place that had been disrespected by its previous occupants.

  As financial investor for the Vatican, father Zillo even volunteered to take care of the “nitty-gritty” of the formalities, as he had put it to the Archbishop. Being from Bari himself, father Zillo had a special attachment to the monasteries and churches he had been brought up to admire, and was determined to help the Poor Clares settle down in their new monastic life. He had developed a weakness for the newly formed community. When Mother Teresa called him that morning, he had already advised them to stay in the convent until which time he could return from Rome to join them.

  ‘I’ve asked Sister Benedita not to go out, but she doesn’t listen. It’s now the second time she’s sneaked out to help at the health centre.’

  ‘Reverend Mother, we’re witnessing the unwitnessable.’

  The detailed information Zillo was receiving from the Vatican showed it was mainly in the US where bodies were piling up like carcasses.

  ‘We know the scope of contamination is immeasurable. We live a life of retreat, Father, and I cannot allow Sister Benedita to be exposed to risk.’

  ‘Above all, we must remain calm, Reverend Mother. I’m on my way.’

  Father Zillo reached Bari to find that Benedita had left the convent early.

  ‘Sisters, I have specific news. Contagion between humans is not possible.’

  ‘It’s the water, Father. Everything is contaminated… everything depends on water. The poison can reach any of us,’ Sister Eulalia rubbed her reddened hands.

  ‘I know. They’re investigating the sources. We must all remain calm.’

  ‘People are dropping like flies. The roads are blocked by cars with drivers dead at the wheel! Airplanes full of passengers have dropped out of the skies!’ Despite her best efforts, Sister Eulalia could not control herself. Sister Leopoldina’s embrace helped her contain the shaking which had taken over her body, while she struggled to suppress the fright which came out of her in short whimpers.

  ‘Those reports come from abroad, Sister. The situation here is less serious.’

  The sisters spent Christmas in prayer, living on minimal rations sourced from the vegetable garden. They could not be sure, but the water from the well was their best chance of avoiding contamination. There was no reason why it should contain the poison, Father Zillo had concluded. Sister Benedita continued to help out at the health centres, with the blessing of the Mother Superior. As long as she took a lunch box and bottle of well-water.

  On American territory death was striking in quick, merciless succession. With the threat of cholera looming, ovens were quickly installed for instant incineration. Bodies with wallets in their pockets, with photos of their loved ones, with credit cards and driving licences, club and store cards. So much burning plastic relieving the sinister smell of burnt flesh. Some had barely learnt to recognise the signs in others before symptoms began to appear in their own body: lack of coordination, increased body temperature, photophobia, blurred vision, palpitations, confusion, sometimes vomiting and then the final collapse. Death on every corner. As if a ghostly exterminator invisibly brushed past its victims. The uncertainty while waiting for a relative. The certainty of hours without any news. Confirmation at the end of the day. Fear of falling victim oneself at any moment. Those who were helping to pile up corpses, to transport or incinerate them; those who had miraculously survived the cataclysm could not escape the bitter punishment of remembering the dead, the dying, bodies strewn all over the place. There would be no need of monuments for their collective memory to share the horror that lived on privately in the minds of the survivors.

  After a few weeks, searching for the terrorists became as pointless as it was absurd. They could easily be among the dead – among the hundreds of thousands impossible to identify for lack of time. It was a déjà vu of 11th September – when, despite the most basic security measures, the towers collapsed before the world’s eyes like crumbling sandcastles. Everybody wondered where were the operating systems, the preventive measures, the planning, the hundreds of employees and strategists, the scientists, the millions of dollars invested in defence programmes. This time, when the alarms sounded, everyone started running around in their offices like headless chickens while the millions of unemployed or the destitute in the south fell like black flies, their open mouths hitting the dust roads where long-promised asphalt had never materialised. The failings of organisational bureaucracy were there for all to see. Mobile supply points and emergency shelters were of no use. People were still dying in the
shelters. Police and firefighting departments were hard pushed to coordinate their efforts to keep public order and provide a minimum level of assistance. All shelters were eventually closed down and individuals were left to their own devices.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, Alina spent her days in the rented room, getting to know her daughter and learning how to look after her. Vera’s fragility made her mother apprehensive on seeing her so lively. With so much time on her hands, watching Vera so closely made her feel as though the tiny baby were an extension of herself. The world between the four walls of the room was large enough for her. The white walls appeared luxurious behind fading prints of landscapes even though the paint was cracking, even when the occasional gap painted over in white could not hide the deteriorating masonry. Alina did not mind that the wooden floor creaked nor that the bed would sink in the middle a little bit more each night. Neither was she bothered by the starkness of the cold light from the neon lamp. The love she felt for Vera rose above the austerity of the place. For the first time she was enjoying her own life.

  The money she had been given by the men clad in white coats was a small fortune compared to what her mother’s husband paid her for ten hours of hard labour each day on the farm. Alina kept the roll of money inside a little sewing box given to her by her father on her eleventh birthday, weeks before he died. The accident on the farm had changed everything. She was determined to give Vera a better life.

  She asked the young man at reception to help her write a brief message to the old lady giving details of where she was staying. People in the city behaved with a generosity she had not known before. The young man’s simple gesture of slipping her message into a white envelope surprised and confused her. Alina was not sure whether she should pay him for it. She thought it best to keep quiet and go along with it. She checked several times that the house number was the same as the one on the scrunched up scrap of paper the foreman had given her. Later she made sure that the number on the front of the house was the same as the one on the envelope. The young man had confirmed that it was close by. Just a few blocks away. She pushed the envelope through the letterbox and then went shopping with Vera strapped behind her. Her euphoria was restrained only by feeling the imprint of years of oppression she was leaving behind. Alina almost felt mischievous buying soap, oil and baby ointment, choosing products in the supermarket without worrying about the price. A cot and the luxury of a bath to avoid having to use the hostel’s communal bathroom. Her silent shyness barely hid her excitement on laying out all the products on the bed like an unexpected bounty. With Vera on her back she seemed to glide back and forth carrying jugs of hot water from the bathroom to mix with the freezing cold water of the tap in their room. She rubbed her hands with the foamy soap. She had never smelt such a delicate perfume. Alina enjoyed the daily bath just as much as Vera did, chatting continually to her baby. Her new life with Vera was meaningful and made it easy to forget. She had adapted wholeheartedly to so much happiness.

  The little television remained unplugged on a high shelf in a corner of the room. As the days passed by so did the danger now that Vera had her new rubber helmet protecting her. At night Alina would hear people coming and going in the street. Sometimes she sat in front of the window to watch them wander past in the distance. Sometimes she exchanged a few words with the neighbour who worked all day and went to bed early to take her little boy to school before going to work. When he came home from school in the afternoon the boy would visit Vera. He would touch the ball on her head and smile at her before running off to have his tea and play outside with the new ball.

  At night the city felt lonely in her room just as at the farm where the television, which used to be in the living room, had ended up in her mother’s bedroom, after her father had died and the new husband had moved in. They would eat in the kitchen in silence, the man devouring his food like a voracious animal. Her mother would get up from the table every so often to clear the kitchen. The man would send Alina to bed after supper. From her room she would hear her mother laughing with her new man. Those few minutes before collapsing exhausted into bed were devastatingly lonely. Having to share her precious moments of leisure with the couple was abhorrent to her. Not that she had many such moments. She avoided them. Apart from the enforced minutes in the kitchen at supper each day, her time was spent putting up with the man’s peremptory orders or her mother’s indifference.

  Alina had never had a television in her own room. Although an unforeseen luxury, she ignored it for the first few days. When she eventually plugged it in it reminded her of her father. They would sit and watch cartoons at the end of the day’s work. Life had changed so suddenly. If only her father could see how this violent man had taken his place and had imposed his will. He would have punched his lights out. She used to dream that her father returned to take back his home. She was also used to the fact that her dream would just remain precisely that: a dream.

  Alina was one of many who would never have the opportunity to travel to the United States. For several days most of the news on her television came from America. The flag in the background was unmistakable. The images flashed intermittently across her face. She was soon aware that the cans of soft drink which had been circulating could have turned her into a mere statistic among the hundreds of thousands of people who were incinerated in America. Every night, and sometimes during the day, she would turn on the television. Later she would unplug it telling herself it was the last time. The next day Alina could not help herself. After leaving Vera asleep in her cot, washing up and making soup on the hob in her room -even when looking for something else to do, she ended up turning on the television. Time after time she took in the figures, the images, the consequences, the forecasts. Life in the rented room seemed not to offer her the kind of protection she had thought it would. She would gaze at Vera for a long while before going to bed, making sure she was breathing. Nobody was safe. Alina feared not only for her baby but also for herself. The thought of being unable to look after her baby brought a new kind of disquiet, a feeling that came back every time she watched TV. The horror could happen to anybody.

  As Vera slept she witnessed the news panel guest adjusting his tie in between questions. No, he was not adjusting his tie. He was trying to loosen it. Trying to breathe. He soon began to twist and leant forward in front of the cameras. This was not the physical presence of stiff corpses in the wheat fields or the men in the truck. Those bodies were lifeless. It had for her the immediacy of the screen, seconds before the final moment. Inevitability, which opens life up to death through the fine line that separates them. An almost transparent veil which, when withdrawn, restores the nothingness which had preceded existence. The TV crew had not had time to react and cut the broadcast. The guest appeared to recover and sat upright. And there he remained. Staring riveted at the camera still fixed on him as if it were inquiring about the beyond.

  The nurse had warned her that on the news they talked only of death. Alina had looked into that stare and could not get it out of her mind. She sought answers to questions she hardly knew existed. She would lose herself in her thoughts for increasingly longer periods of time. The world outside the room appeared distant but had touched her closely. Alina had been in the fields. She had lived in the flesh the initial awareness, being first to witness the obscene truth. She was haunted by recurring thoughts. Feelings of precariousness returned once more. Days spent alone in the room began to feel unfamiliar. Vera seemed like a different being, as if she were no longer a part of her, or of the reality of which she was unaware. A reality concentrated inside the small television and expanded throughout the room to be concentrated once again in her mind. So densely that she thought her head would explode.

  When she thought the worst was happening in the USA, reports soon began to emerge of deaths in Israel, Russia, Italy, the United Kingdom, France. Other affected countries suffered isolated cases of only a few thousand. It would later become obvious to her that the hundreds of t
housands of deaths in each country were just the tip of the iceberg. In these instances there were no direct attacks. The toxins arrived in the imported syrup for making soft drinks. In many cases routine water testing had been omitted from the manufacturing process. Spokespersons for the soft drinks companies were interviewed on television. Explanations were hazy. They said that expert analysts would not have been able to identify the presence of such a complex agent. In defence of their companies they claimed that quality controls had been performed as well as regular bacteriological testing. Several top executives did not make it, whether by contagion or at their own hands was left unsaid. Soft drink factories were closed down by court order. Weeks later the only talk was of the possible death of the entire defenceless worldwide population, arbitrarily under the sun or the moon. The same moon which had witnessed Vera’s birth on the Day of Judgment.

  When Vera was old enough to understand what had happened the day she was born, the cataclysm was no longer mentioned. Some sort of taboo had emerged from the deep-seated fear within those who remembered the events and the feeling of unease of those who, like Vera, had been born since. Once the last corpse had been incinerated, a tacit silence reigned among the population, like a final seal that put paid to the horror.

  Alina had all but given up on ever receiving the call when the young man from reception gave her the message. It felt like she had been living in the rented room for months, not weeks. She was worried that the money would run out. She had bought a few expensive items. The sewing box seemed larger every time she opened it. She spent hours stacking coins, counting the days, doing sums and apologising to Vera. She would take out the rolled-up bills and show them to her.