Dengue Boy
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Reproduced with permission from the novel Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva (translated by Rahul Bery), out now with Serpent’s Tail, and published in North America by Astra House.
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The camp was situated on one of the filthiest and most decrepit public beaches in Victorica. For those unfamiliar with this austral region of South America, let’s recall how, in 2197, the Antarctic ice underwent a massive thawing, and when the sea subsequently rose to shockingly high levels, Patagonia – a region once famous for its forests, lakes, and glaciers – was transformed into a disjointed trail of small, scorching-hot islands. What no one could have foreseen, however, was that this long-predicted climate and humanitarian catastrophe would miraculously give the Argentinian province of La Pampa sea access that would fundamentally alter its geography.
From one day to the next, La Pampa ceased to be an arid, moribund desert at the edge of the Earth, dried out by centuries of sunflower and soy monoculture, and became, together with the Panama Canal, the continent’s only route for interoceanic navigation. This unexpected metamorphosis inflated the regional economy with constant, juicy streams of income collected from port taxes and created new and idyllic beaches which attracted vacationers from across the globe.
However, the best resorts, the ones closest to Santa Rosa, were the exclusive property of private hotels and mansion blocks built for foreign tourists. Common folk, like Dengue Boy, only had access to the public beaches, the ones near the Victorica Interoceanic Canal, which was where all the port’s dregs accumulated: a wretched dumping ground for plastic and other trash, where all kinds of aberrations could incubate.
The boys, with no gods or masters to obey, did whatever they liked.
The camp ticked all the boxes for parents who worked all day long, as was the case with Dengue Boy’s mother. Basically, the bus picked up the boys bright and early, and then returned them punctually, at eight o’clock at night. Because this was the most important service provided by the camp, it was the sweetest part of the deal, and everything else took a back seat. So, for breakfast, the boys would only receive a miserable piece of hard bread with stewed maté; for lunch, polenta with butter and a cup of instant juice. As for the recreational activities promised by the camp, they amounted to little more than a pot-bellied, retired gym teacher standing in the sand, chain-smoking and blowing his whistle whenever he saw that one of the little squirts had swum out too deep or was venturing into a trash heap of jagged, sharp objects.
And so, the boys, with no gods or masters to obey, did whatever they liked, running about and playing football, or swimming and sunbathing on the stinking beach. There was one boy in particular who, in lieu of a responsible adult to take charge, had become the leader of the pack: a chubby, hyperactive twelve-year-old boy everyone called El Dulce. His father worked in a chicken processing plant and El Dulce, who sometimes visited him there, had won the group’s admiration for his intricately detailed descriptions of the birds being gutted and beheaded.
‘My dad,’ El Dulce bragged, ‘is in charge of the plant’s Eviscerator 3000, a remote-controlled super-robot which, at the push of a button, shoves a hook into the chickens’ assholes and tears their guts out.’ At that moment, a reverential and respectful silence settled around El Dulce. ‘The craziest thing is the chickens are still alive when this happens. To ensure the meat comes out nice and tender, they pluck them first using boiling steam, then pull out their guts through their assholes. It’s only at the very end, just before they’re cut to bits, that their heads are chopped off. So,’ El Dulce continued, touching his ears, ‘it’s important to wear earplugs, so that the agonizing screams of the dying birds don’t mess with your head while the Eviscerator destroys their buttholes.’
Once the story was over, the other kids remained silent, imagining the chickens’ frenzied cries. Then El Dulce, who had already become a sort of master of ceremonies for the gang, led them to a concealed corner of the resort and, without further ado, lowered his swim trunks down to his ankles.
‘Speaking of chickens,’ he continued.
Everyone watched as El Dulce began furiously rubbing his wiener between his thumb and index finger. After a few minutes, the enthralled group stared as El Dulce’s prick let forth a thin, transparent, snakelike trail which fell onto the sand like a flying booger.
‘What about the rest of you? Aren’t you going to choke the chicken?’
In their confusion and terror, the other boys, suddenly feeling plucked and gutted like the chickens in the factory themselves, proceeded to imitate El Dulce. Haltingly, they lowered their swim trunks down to their ankles and, standing in a circle, brought their thumbs and index fingers down to their genitals and rubbed vigorously. Naturally, this was an especially embarrassing moment for many of them, since the boys were at that transitional age where some had already begun puberty and others had not, a time when their bodies had begun to change against their own will and a disjointed awkwardness was the order of the day. But, one way or another, they were all human boys and their bodies, despite their differences and specificities, were all ultimately alike. Except, of course, for Dengue Boy. It’s common knowledge that the male mosquito lacks a penis, instead possessing internal testicles in his abdomen, accompanied by an ejaculatory tract resembling a small sewer pipe. For this reason, Dengue Boy, horrified at the thought of having to exhibit his anomalous bits, was the only one who did not carry out El Dulce’s order. This act of disobedience did not go unnoticed by the little dictator, who, with his trunks still down at his ankles and his clenched fists resting on his hips, watched with satisfaction as the boys carried out his orders. But when his gaze landed on Dengue Boy (mortified, he was frozen to the spot, looking down at the sand), he confronted him:
‘What’s up, Dengue Boy? Afraid to show your dick?’
Dengue Boy did not answer, instead hunching over on his four thin legs and using his beak to play with a few grains of sand in front of him to conceal how awkward he felt, which only made El Dulce turn up the pressure. That was when things got out of control.
‘Look, look,’ El Dule pointed and shouted, calling the attention of the others, absorbed until that moment in their onanistic task. ‘The insect is a eunuch!’
Everyone, El Dulce included, suddenly became aware that they did not know the meaning of the word ‘eunuch’, and that precisely because of this it worked even better.
‘The insect is a eunuch!’
‘The insect is a eunuch!’
‘A eunuch is the insect!’ they chanted gleefully, forward and backward, the expression gradually gaining a magical, mysterious significance. Unknowingly, they began to discover the wonders of the language some call poetry, and as they hunched in a circle, their arms around each other’s shoulders and their trunks still down at their ankles, led by El Dulce as if he were Virgil leading them into purgatory, they placed Dengue Boy in the middle of the crowd and began shouting in unison, unleashing glittering gems of word combinations that they would never have suspected they harboured, but which nevertheless surged forth from their hearts, like divine inspiration from a bard.
‘Emasculated grub!’
‘Neutered arthropod!’
‘Castrated horsefly!’
‘Sexless invertebrate!’
And then, in chorus, like a soccer chant led by El Dulce, who was shaking his fist like a hooligan:
‘Eu-nuch bug!’
‘Eu-nuch bug!’
‘Eu-nuch bug!’
And again, in chorus!
‘Eu-nuch bug!’
‘Eu-nuch bug!’
‘Eu-nuch bug!’
Ah, how difficult it was for Dengue Boy to put the exact, fleeting instant of an initiation into words!
She understood that her entire life had been determined by a grammatical error.
Of course, thousands of coming-of-age novels have attempted such a thing, with varying levels of skill. But is it possible to recreate with words the moment, frozen in time, when a creature commits, however clumsily or furiously, the decisive act that will thread together their past and future life into a single braid, that seal made of fire and blood which some call destiny?
What’s certain is that Dengue Boy did not react the same way he usually did when faced with insults flung at him for his mutant condition; he felt neither torment nor a deep longing to be dead, and his hairy little antennae did not quiver in rage or pain. The cruel song (which, it must be admitted, did possess some poetic merit) sung by the circle of boys and led by El Dulce did not shake him one bit. This time, something unprecedented happened: adrenaline pulsed through each of the nerves on his wings. This time, when Dengue Boy placed El Dulce in sight of his ommatidia and watched as he pointed and jeered at him, his trunks still lowered, he no longer saw an antagonist, or a peer, or even a human. Before Dengue Boy’s fearsome needle stood a delicious meat sorbet, nothing more and nothing less than a throbbing chunk of succulent blood sausage. Carried along by the vertigo of this new and unrestrainable urge, a sudden revelation crossed Dengue Boy’s hairy antennae, clearer and more lucid than ever, despite the cacophony all around him: I’m a girl, not a boy, he reasoned, somewhat incongruently. Dengue Girl. Indeed, in the species Aedes aegypti, of which he (or she) was the only specimen, only the females bite, suck and transmit diseases, while the males devote themselves to the mechanical process of copulation and siring. With relief, with childlike awe, she understood that her entire life had been determined by a grammatical error, and that if she was not a boy but rather a girl, she could never rape her mother, nor repeat the crime her classmates accused her father of having committed. And so, her passions inflamed like one who discovered a humbling secret, Dengue Girl pounced on El Dulce’s body, naked down to the ankles, and knocked him onto the sand, immobilizing him with surgical precision. Dengue Girl drew her beak close and, as if tearing open a blood sausage to eat only its insides, disemboweled him. Heedless to the frenzied screaming of the other boys as they stampeded away in search of help (as well as they could given their shorts were all still down at their ankles), their joyous singing now a sinister trance as Dengue Girl placed her beak inside El Dulce’s ruptured belly and lifted up a bloody bunch of insides. The terrified gym teacher, who was in such a state of shock that he was barely able to give a moronic toot of his whistle, looked on as Dengue Girl, like someone offering up a sacrifice to their deity, used her beak to raise El Dulce’s clean, blue viscera toward the sun. Then, as if starting a spinning top, she yanked off a piece. A jet of blood and excrement and foul-smelling bile specked and muddied the gym teacher’s inert face, changing first the colour of the sand and then the waves, which slowly swept into and then out from the shore.
Dengue Girl sucked from the delicious concoction which flowed uncontrollably from the guts of El Dulce, who was trembling in a strange epileptic fit, surely the result of the sinister disease he had just contracted. Let’s not forget that mosquito saliva contains a powerful anticoagulant and vasodilator substance which encourages haemorrhaging. This caused the blood to flow without rest, like some grand fountain.
Once she had drunk the very last drop from what was now the boy’s corpse, she finished things off with a bad joke:
‘El Dulce? More like El Delicious!’
She then gave a defiant look to the gym teacher who, frozen with terror, had stopped blowing his whistle, and continued:
‘Not like the miserable morsel of bread and stewed maté we get in the mornings!’
With a sudden vehemence, the girl took advantage of the gym teacher’s bewilderment and used her beak to open up his forehead, which split apart like a watermelon, and, in just a few slurps, she sucked the brains out of his skull.
There wasn’t much left to be done at this filthy resort.
Out of pity, or perhaps revenge, she reasoned that it made no sense to kill the other boys, who had by now pulled up their shorts but were still running around and sobbing. She simply bit them. They barely felt the pinch before falling to the ground and entering a sinister epileptic state.
She reasoned, as well, that it made no sense to say goodbye to her mother now – she’d find out about the transformation in the newspapers, or from the other boys’ mothers. All that remained was to escape to the beaches of Santa Rosa in search of revenge, to assassinate and infect the rich people and foreign tourists who had caused her mother and, by proxy, her, so much woe.
She took flight and, shaking the blood from her wings, set off, her trademark annoying buzz loud and clear, until she was an imaginary dot on the splendid horizon of the Pampas Caribbean.
All hail, Dengue Girl!
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Michel Nieva is an Argentinian writer based in New York, where he teaches Writing at NYU. Nominated among Granta‘s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists in 2021 and a winner of the O. Henry Award in 2022, Nieva has previously published short stories and essays. Dengue Boy is his first novel.
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