EDITORS’ NOTE: We are excited to announce that “War of the Worlds” is the first SwR Soundstory. Access the audio experience through a streaming service or read the story as text below.
I just thought I’d make some money. That’s all I was aiming for. The invitation to the station manager’s office, his proposal—I thought they would put some cash in my empty bank account, so I accepted the idea right away. Who could fault me for that? Given what happened afterward, I guess anybody could. Anybody could ask what the hell I’d been thinking. I was an adult, after all. Not a senile septuagenarian, not a wayward child. I was a man who said yes without thinking it through. When you’re not used to being given anything, getting handed something comes as a surprise. I accepted the proposal at face value, which was purely monetary as far as I was concerned. It wasn’t exactly ethical, but ethics were not on my mind. Being offered three times my monthly salary to take a stab at announcing a boxing match, that’s what I was thinking about. Okay, I was going to narrate the match three days before it happened, but who lives in an ideal world? I was thirty-seven years old, with only a bed and two changes of clothes to my name. It wasn’t like Cordobés asked me to kill somebody. At worst, he proposed that I stretch a possible truth. When I stepped into his office, no black hole swallowed me up. I was in a room well lit by the mid-morning sun, where no conspiracy was being hatched. After two days of torrential rain, the sky had cleared and the city shone like a freshly polished gold ring (spit polished on a coat sleeve, maybe, but glowing nonetheless). That’s how I remember the day—the city wasn’t just a promise, it was an opportunity served up on a platter. I grabbed at the chance before it could disappear. The “afterward” is a different story.
When Cordobés summoned me to his office, I was putting the finishing touches on that week’s serial. I stopped in the middle of a sentence because his secretary said the station manager wasn’t a man to be kept waiting. Cordobés offered me a seat and a cigar, but he launched right into what he wanted before I could take either one. He told me he’d been thinking about some changes in the station’s programming. He said I was the right guy to make them happen.
“We want to grow,” he added. That was all.
While I was trying to get rid of my cigarette, he lit up his cigar. The only ashtray was on the other side of his enormous desktop, and I couldn’t toss my butt on his office floor, so I put the thing out against the bottom of my shoe and stuck it in my pocket. I found myself staring at the tips of my fingers, the dark stains on my fingernails that, it occurred to me, must match the discolored enamel of my teeth. All in all, this was testimony to how uncomfortable I felt. I didn’t know where this conversation was headed. It was the first time Cordobés had called me to his office. I had no idea he knew I existed. I was just a scriptwriter, without my own office, just some space the news staff shared with me. But that morning, wonders never ceased. The manager said those few words, lit his cigar, and pulled a bottle of cognac out of his desk.
“In this new era, I want you to do the sports reporting,” he said while extending a glass in my direction.
He didn’t give me time to answer before he assigned me my first task.
“I want you to announce next Sunday’s fight between Bull Guzmán and Gold Gloves Jurado. And I want you to have it written and ready by Thursday.”
My throat tightened, so I had to spit out the cognac to keep from choking. Watching that imported booze hit the floor made me shudder, but I pulled myself together because Cordobés took a long puff on his cigar and then walked over to me as if nothing had happened.
“Of course,” he said, “thing number one is that we’ll triple your salary.” He pushed a chair in my direction, which was followed by an uncomfortable silence, and then he seemed to take a careful look at me. That’s when I realized that so far I hadn’t said a word. He added, “We’re the new official broadcasters of the federation.”
When he left it at that, I understood how our relationship was going to work. It wasn’t going to be his job to explain things, but mine to figure them out. And I figured out, from the moment he offered me the cigar, that there would be no turning back. If I left his office without accepting his proposition, I’d lose my job. If, on the other hand, I said yes, then I’d be pronouncing sentence on myself. It seemed like a simple choice, though in hindsight it wasn’t. He also told me I was to report only to him. I’d be dropped from the regular payroll of the station, and I wouldn’t have to come to the studio on any set schedule. All I had to do was wait for his calls. There was no point in confirming my acceptance or offering any thanks. He knew I’d do it. When I stood up, he saw me to the door, put a hand on my shoulder, and, as he turned the knob, he told me he was sure I’d handle the assignment very well and the program would be a success. Then, as if adding a comment of trifling importance, he said that, given Gold Gloves’s evident ability, surely he’d win the match in the final round.
In the skies over Plaza Belmonte, updrafts of wind are twisting the white clouds into arabesques, but in the distance, by the towering summit of the Pichincha volcano, more ominous, dark, and heavy clouds are headed our way. Ladies and gentlemen, the approach of the storm is as rapid as the footwork of Saturnino Guzmán, known to all as the Bull. Will his speed be enough to defeat Soldier Jurado, Gold Gloves to his fans? Will the fight come to an end before the last scheduled round? Only time will tell. Time and the skies . . . But wait, Jurado has just connected with a jab to the Bull’s jaw. The Bull is tottering, no, now he’s got hold of the ropes. The referee gets between the fighters and holds Jurado back. Gold Gloves wants to finish off the fight and his opponent before the skies open up. We thank him for that idea, but the Bull seems to have a different one. And he must have an in with St. Peter because right now, at four in the afternoon, the rain is threatening but something is holding it back. Just like us, the rain is waiting for something to happen in the ring. Maybe the Bull thinks today is his day, and maybe he’s not wrong.
Ladies and gentlemen, I can’t explain what’s going on. Gold Gloves is all brute force, no technique, while Guzmán has technique in spades—but there he is, back against the ropes. He can’t get away. He’d better fight his way out of that corner, or he’s doomed. He’s got to rethink his tactics, and right away, here in front of the hundreds of spectators jamming Plaza Belmonte. He’s got to surprise his opponent with speed and the movement of his hips. Otherwise, his end is in sight. Gold Gloves Jurado’s frenzied attack is battering the Bull without mercy. Guzmán tries to get away, to protect himself in the north corner of the ring, but Gold Gloves has landed a series of hooks, followed by a half dozen jabs. But wait, the Bull isn’t giving up! He’s hitting back with a hook of his own and now two more. The bell! Belllll! The two fighters collapse in their respective corners while their trainers fan them with towels, trying to revive them or—at least blow some confidence their way. If I could offer a few words of encouragement, I’d tell them the world is made of nothing but energy and movement. That’s the ticket—energy, movement, and control. To go forward, what you need is control. That’s the only way to advance with the power of a Ford automobile, now for sale here in Ecuador. Never lose control, boys, and victory will be yours. Today and tomorrow. That’s what I’d say, my friends, but enough advice because now the break is over. The bell rings and we’re on to the fifth round. Gold Gloves and the Bull stand up, approach the center of the ring, grapple, and pound each other’s kidneys. Listen to me, gentlemen, neither of the two is offering any quarter, it’s incredible what’s going on. They break loose, and here comes a brutal assault. The only way to recover from such a shock is to take Dr. Ulrici’s Cerebrine Cordial solution. Gold Gloves is launching jab after jab to the Bull’s belly. The Bull tries to protect himself with feeble hooks that can’t find their target. Jurado’s hitting back with hard lefts, and now an uppercut, and now a straight knockout punch, but the Bull mounts a spectacular response, he’s got Gold Gloves back against the ropes. This fight is over, I tell you it’s nearing the end. It’s the Bull, the Bull, the Bull, coming for Gold Gloves, who can’t recover, but wait, there’s the bell. Bellll! It’s the bell closing the round, gentlemen, with the thunder right alongside. Now we’re just seconds away from the eighth round. Either this round will be the last, or the downpour will swamp us. It’s now or never. This fight is going to end with a knockout, take it from me. That’s the only way.
This is a day full of surprises, the saint’s day of San Modesto, but there’s no modesty on display. Each of the pugilists pitted against each other in this match is showing off his best work. Moments ago I would have said the Bull was about to finish off Gold Gloves, but now I’m ready for anything. We’re in the tenth round, and Soldier Jurado just landed an uppercut with his left hand, right to the chin of the Bull, who’s falling like someone going backward in time, back before the day of his birth, and there he is, dropped flat on the canvas. He lifts his legs but they drop back like branches torn from a tree. Can he recover? Hold on, he’s summoning all his spectacular strength, I cannot believe it, ladies and gentlemen, but there he is—what willpower, what aplomb, what control. It’s a struggle, but he’s getting up while the referee counts—one, two, three, four—he lifts his glove to his temple and holds it right there—five, six—he gets to his knees, kneeling there—seven, eight, nine—gentlemen, he’s on his feet. He did it! This fight is going to go on and on like the Chimbacalle railroad, because the indomitable Bull refuses to throw in the towel. Bell!! Time for everyone to take a breath, and time to remind you that, in order to offer better service to its valued customers, the Pichincha Pharmacy is now open till 10 p.m. every night of the week, Sundays and holidays included.
Ladies and gentlemen, the first drops of the storm are now upon us. Nothing, though, to faze the true boxing fan, nothing to drive us away from this contest, which is shaping up as the best fight of the year. Maybe life is a battle, but this match is a true feast for the eyes. We’re about to open the eleventh round, and if the fight is going to be decided on points, it’s beyond me to say who will win. It’s been a constant back-and-forth, a give-and-take of willpower. No one who walks out onto Calle Antepara today will be leaving disappointed. Everybody here is hanging on what the next few minutes will bring. Guzmán has allowed Gold Gloves to take the initiative. Jurado challenges his rival with a solid punch and then follows with a downward hook while the Bull counters with an effective jab, but Gold Gloves backs away and then launches another hook. I’d say fatigue is starting to take its toll on Soldier Jurado. Blood is flowing from his nose and he’s losing speed. It looks bad for him, but he’s holding on to his composure to stave off the looming catastrophe. Who knows what hiding place the Bull is pulling strength out of now. He advances with a pair of skillful steps and lands a right that has his opponent staggering. Now he follows up with a hook and a jab directly to the jaw. All Gold Gloves can answer with is a weak cross, it looks like he can hardly guide his glove to its target. Bell, gentlemen, there’s the bell!!
And now the sky is really letting loose, and along with it comes a whirlwind from Gold Gloves, now it’s his turn to summon all the strength he’s got left, charging out of his corner like a locomotive, headed straight for the Bull. He raises a fist, and with his last burst of energy, which is more than a little, slams it into his opponent’s face, giving the Bull no time to duck. The Bull falls backward. But now the rain is falling so hard it’s impossible to see what’s going on. There’s a virtual pillar of water obscuring the ring. Wait, someone is moving, it must be Saturnino Guzmán, still drawing on whatever he’s got left, trying to confront not just his opponent but the elements too. We’re moving right up to the ropes, in the hope that we can see more clearly, and . . . Gentlemen, I have never seen anything like it before! The Bull is completely without a nose! His face is a mass of bruises surrounding two eyes and a mouth. Where his nostrils used to be, his septum and cartilage, where he used to have a nose, all that can be seen is an enormous, endless hole!
When Cordobés okayed the cloudburst and the annihilation of Gúzman’s nose, I knew I could do whatever I wanted. According to what he told me, our new stations were out in Bolívar, Los Ríos, and Tulcán, but even so, anyone who wanted to check could have discovered whether what I announced happened or not. Anyone could have investigated whether sheets of rain inundated the capital that Sunday, or they could have looked into the health of Bull Guzmán, but those possibilities didn’t even make Cordobés blink. I figured, at this point, that he had decided no one was going to doubt what was announced on the radio, although it did also occur to me to wonder whether there could be something else in play. Maybe it was just a test, and they never actually broadcast my version of the fight. Be that as it may, I took him at his word. Or, better put, given that he’d paid me an advance, I believed in the power of the money at his disposal. With cash in my pocket, who was I to entertain suspicions? I mean, in a perfect world there would have been perfect alternatives, but in this world, there was what Cordobés was offering me on the one hand, and nothing on the other. Put that way, all I did was choose something over nothing.
After turning in that first script, I stopped working on the regular broadcasts. I don’t know who took my place writing serials. I didn’t have any friends at the station, or well I did have one, but he worked on the news desk, not with the scriptwriters. Yet Elias—that was the name of my only friend in the city, who had achieved that status because we lived in the same rooming house when we first came to town—wasn’t someone to really miss once I stopped having a job with regular hours. I’d never known when I would see him anyway, and when he did show up, he’d disappear as soon as I glanced away. Since I’d come to Quito, eleven years before, I had promised myself that I’d concentrate my energies because that was my path to triumph. Triumph could be measured in a cash equivalent, which in turn equaled dreams come true. That twisted equation I’d accepted as my goal didn’t leave much room for friendship. I had decided years before that I didn’t have time to socialize with anyone, just time to make something of my life. And if it had taken me a decade to get to the point of sitting at a desk in a tiny office shared with seven other people, that was simply proof that I had no time to waste. Now, Cordobés’s invitation reminded me that the world owed me something. Accepting his offer meant it was time to collect on that debt. The only obstacle that I saw in the way of my complete success, my ascent to heights I’d never before thought possible, was that Cordobés continued to repeat that my promotion, my new salary, our arrangement as he called it, was just that—ours. I couldn’t talk about it, and in that sense it was as if it hadn’t happened. I had learned something over those years, which was that mere existence is not enough. To succeed, to really succeed, you have to get up on stage, with the flashbulbs popping and thousands of fingers pointing your way while someone announces your name. I’d done that for a nineteenth-century patent medicine, and thanks to me Dr. Ulrici’s Cerebrine Cordials had become a fad and quadrupled their sales. I knew the value of words, their value and their power. I knew how to use them to manipulate, and that made me fear them. Or respect them. Or something halfway between. So I thought—wrongly perhaps, but what matters is that I believed it—that having a way with words would give me control over my life and, therefore, power. I was, I recognize now, an idiot.
After a month without seeing hide nor hair of Elias, I ran into him on the street. He was wearing a jacket two sizes too big, and he seemed to me to have lost some thatch on his head. Seeing him always threw me because he felt like my double. The same wide forehead, the same pointed jaw, like an inverted triangle. He was taking fierce drags on a cigarette held between thumb and index finger. He was more nervous than usual, hands shaking, unable to stop moving his right foot while he talked. We went for coffee, but after the first cup we moved on to something stronger. When he started to order aguardiente I interrupted, said I was buying, and ordered two whiskeys. Whatever he’d been wanting to tell me since we bumped into each other, he decided to hold on to it until he could find out what was up with me and, especially, how I’d gotten the money to buy those whiskeys.
“What have you gotten yourself into?” His foot kept on fidgeting under the table.
I didn’t beat around the bush. I told him about Cordobés and the new radio stations, the boxing match, and the disappearance of Bull Guzmán’s nose. Elias listened silently, drained his glass, and then asked for two more, this time aguardiente, for which he paid.
“If there were new stations, I’d know about them. I have a friend who works on the transmission towers.” He gave me a searching look, and only after draining the second glass did he resume the conversation. “If I were you, I’d keep my eyes peeled. Why did Cordobés choose you for his accomplice?”
I didn’t pay too much attention to what Elias said, because Cordobés’s money had allowed me to erase any remnant of guilt I might have had while writing my script. Still, I had plenty of time to think, so much so that I spent most of the day looking out the window and daydreaming. That morning I was trying to figure out why I kept up a friendship with Elias, because, when all was said and done, he always made me feel bad. He was such a straight arrow, while I preferred zigzag paths. Maybe that was it, maybe having him as a reference point was a way of keeping a life preserver at hand, or maybe it was just that I liked him and enjoyed our drinking together. Anyway, it was no big deal. The sun shone in, and I went to the kitchen for a beer. When I came back I saw the cat, and immediately thought of Alcaraz. If I’d been in the midst of something useful—I was sure of this—that never would have happened, but I didn’t have anything to do, so I free-associated any idiocy that went through my head. The cat fell to the street from a zinc roof. It was not a graceful landing, so what fell with feet splayed out on the cobblestones didn’t even seem like a cat. I could almost hear the plop of its landing, and then I watched it run away down the street. It was the sound, more than the cat itself, that brought Alcaraz to mind. I hadn’t thought about him in years, and it was strange how his image welled up so easily and lodged in my head, making me wish he were with me in the house right then. He was the only one who might have been able to understand what I was feeling. If I’d listened to him way back when, maybe by this time I wouldn’t have been a ghostwriter hanging on the whims of his boss, but the owner of my own station. Yet when I met Alcaraz, all I could see was a dirt-poor charlatan. Because when he showed up, four years earlier, in search of the programming director, I let myself be swayed by his patched and threadbare pants, the torn cuffs of his suit, and the scraps of newspaper covering the holes in the bottoms of his shoes. Not to mention the heels, which lifted him an inch and a half above the ground, elevating him to a status this side of dwarf. He waited all morning and part of the afternoon for Cordobés to see him, even though the secretary told him several times, in the course of the day, that it wasn’t going to happen. At 5 p.m., more worn out by the tiresome wait and hunger than disappointed that he hadn’t been seen, he stood up and left. I don’t know why I went after him, but I was done for the day, and the man’s obstinacy had awoken my curiosity, as had the crazed expression in his eyes. He walked hunched over like an anarchist hiding a bomb under his coat. I couldn’t imagine what he was doing in Quito, because he was no Ecuadorean, though I couldn’t quite figure out where his accent was from. As dusk fell, he reached the Central Market. I followed him through the passageways, watching him steal two oranges and four bananas and slip them into his pockets. When he was about to stick his hand into a garbage can, I tapped him on the shoulder. He didn’t jump. It was me, not him, who found myself trying to explain what had brought me to this dim passageway. I told him I’d recognized him from the radio station and I’d be honored to invite him for a meal. He took my arm and asked where we should go. Making my excuses, I said all I could afford, on my salary, was someplace right there in the market. With a show of magnanimity, he accepted that offer. He downed three plates of pulled pork with mote, never taking his eyes off the food, and then ended up staying at my place for a week. On the fourth day of eating my food and sleeping in my living room, he told me about the script he was trying to sell to Cordobés, because he thought I could serve as a go-between. It was a big disappointment when he learned I didn’t know the station manager personally, and a worse one when he dropped the name of Orson Welles and I didn’t so much as blink. He tore into me, even at the risk that I’d throw him out. “Ignoramus” was the least of his insults. How could I call myself a scriptwriter if I didn´t know about Welles and his feats? He went on to cast doubts on the morals of my mother, to try to kill me with a sneer (which didn’t get him very far), and finally to explain that if I didn’t know what Welles had done in ’38, I might as well quit my job. At that point, since I was somewhat accustomed to his outbursts after four days together, I left him talking to the air and went to the kitchen to rustle up something to eat, which I was sure he’d be willing to share after he appeased his demons by himself.
When Alcaraz popped into my mind because of the cat, I thought that in truth he wasn’t just some failure that I once put up in his hour of need, but rather a manipulator; he wasn’t pursued by problems but rather created them so as to later dangle them like carrots in front of the unwary to get them to bite at his schemes. In those seven days that we lived together, I listened to him cook up countless plans that would turn us into magnates of the airwaves. All of those plans included me. And though all I did was listen, I couldn’t decide what to believe or what to be suspicious of. His arguments followed an implacable logic, until you focused your gaze on those thin lips that always had a backlog of dry saliva sticking to the corners. He talked and talked, evidently entranced by the sound of his own voice, never ceasing to build castles in the air. But who could take him seriously? He had a high, reedy voice, and nonetheless, according to him, the first step along his highway of successes was going to be a speech academy we’d set up in our station. His plans spun a sense of comradery that I was sure would dissolve into a stab in the back if they started to stagger, or into a farewell pat if they actually worked out. I never found out what he did during the day. After joining me for a breakfast, he’d go out, saying he had to tie up the loose ends of some contracts he was about to sign. These accords involved, in general, the highest authorities of the city. At night he’d tell me of his accomplishments, and sometimes he managed to shake my certainty that he was a swindler, because he’d have all the names down right or he’d describe to a T the office or reception room where he met with a certain cabinet minister. Had it not been for his thin, oily hair and the fact that his only shirt was stamped with an impenetrable ring of grease around the neck, I might even have believed him when he told me he’d slept with the wife of the minister of defense. Because when he wasn’t talking about businesses, he was boasting obsessively of his amorous conquests. The last time that happened, I laughed in his dirty, gnomish face while we emptied the final bottle of aguardiente that had survived his visit. But later I was sorry: my last of image of him was of his back as he jumped out my window in his underwear after a group of soldiers broke down the door and pointed six gun barrels at his face. Then came the plop, just like with the cat. The soldiers just wanted to scare him, because they could have blown him to smithereens in my living room if they wanted. After they left, and before they had a chance to come back, I tossed his pants and shoes out the window after him. He never came back, and I knew he must have been pretty scared because he didn’t come for that script of “The War of the Worlds,” which I’d seen him clasp to his chest every night as he slept on my couch, and which was the only thing he truly believed in. When I remembered all this, I went looking for the script. Not having anything better to do, I started paging through it while waiting for my next call from Cordobés.
The fourth time I went to collect my check at the station, without having done anything to earn it and still waiting for a new assignment, Cordobés called me into his office. He didn’t pull out any cigars this time or offer me any foreign liquor to drink. He just sat me down in front of him and, after a deprecating look, asked me how I liked being a worm. I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“How long do you expect to go on doing nothing?” he asked.
I still didn’t understand. He had told me to wait for his orders. He hadn’t asked me to put together any kind of plan.
“You’re not irreplaceable. You know that, don’t you?” he went on. “Right this minute I could find three other guys to do what you’re doing, which is to say nothing, and at a much lower price.”
Then he stopped talking and gave me another one of those looks. What came into my head were Alcaraz and his script. Without hesitating, I tossed that ball of smoke in his direction.
“We could broadcast ‘The War of the Worlds.’” His eyes met mine again, but he said nothing, so I kept going. “It would be a smash hit.” More silence. “It would raise the station’s ratings.”
“We don’t need to raise the ratings,” he replied. He opened his desk drawer and poured himself a drink, but didn’t offer one to me.
“We’d make history,” I plowed ahead.
“What do I care? Tell me what I’d get out of doing this.”
“More sponsors,” I told him, and that did get his attention.
Or at least it put a dent in his thirst, because he let his drink sit there and waved his hand for me to continue. I improvised on the basis of a ton of garbage. Or, really, I repeated everything Alcaraz had told me those nights we sat drinking till dawn. And, against all odds, Cordobés agreed with every detail. The number of actors, the budget, me as director, the lead time needed, the secrecy that would have to surround the project. That was the only area in which he asked to have a hand. He told me that he himself would write up a confidentiality clause so that no one who joined the project could “betray” it. That was the word he used, and only because it was such a stretch in relation to something I’d just made up on the fly did it catch my attention. Maybe it should have set off an alarm, too, but it didn’t. A month went by in which I never slept more than three hours, adapting the script to the Ecuadorean context, auditioning voice actors, commissioning the musical score, contacting sponsors. Nothing came easy, some new complication always arose. When I finally had a full team working against a looming deadline, one of the actors, the one who was supposed to speak the part of the archbishop of Quito, disappeared for three days. On the fourth, I personally went to find him. It was too late to get a substitute, and I managed to convince him to come back only by giving him more flexible hours, because after the story he told me, what else could I do? On his way home, one night when we’d been working till the wee hours, he found a woman lying in the street. She had been assaulted and was unconscious. He picked her up, brought her to his apartment, and called a doctor friend of his. After making some inquiries among his contacts in the police, he discovered that no one had reported her missing, and he decided to take responsibility for her. His problem wasn’t exceptional. Complications like that came up every day and needed to be resolved.
The hardest thing was getting sponsors. Next to that, crafting the show itself was a breeze. No potential advertiser had ever heard of Welles or his Martians, and everybody I approached thought I was a nut. All but Cordobés, who was, after all, the only one that mattered. I managed to get everything I needed. With the help of a call from Cordobés, I even got the Orangine soft drink company to take an interest in the project. This convinced me of my own value. I came to believe that I had organized the greatest feat in Ecuadorean radio history (though, in some hidden corner of my atrophied brain, I knew it was also the greatest fraud, and the idea wasn’t even mine, since all I’d done was steal it). That didn’t curb my enthusiasm or shrivel my ego. I believed in my own genius.
Late one night, defeated by insomnia that only grew worse as the date of the broadcast approached, I went out for a walk. In a dive near Avenida 24 de Mayo, I ran into Elias. He looked as bad as I did, and, when I got close, I could have sworn that he was carrying a dead rat in the pocket of his jacket. Elias told me he hadn’t been home for several days. He said that the last time he’d slept and changed clothes, he’d barely escaped being killed. That story didn’t surprise me, because I’d heard so many from him over the years. Only this time, I had to say, Elias looked more bedraggled and, if possible, still balder than the previous time I’d seen him. He told me he was tired of hiding the big scoop that, according to his editor, would carry him to glory. Without lifting his eyes from the table, he muttered that glory was no good if you had to die for it, and the way things were going he would end up in a mausoleum but not exactly one for heroes. He asked me for a cigarette, drained the aguardiente in front on him, and began to talk, as if that would carry him away from the real or imagined danger sitting in the bottom of the glass he’d just pushed aside. He didn’t seem to pay me any attention. He was talking to unload because if he didn’t, he’d be doing a favor for those who wanted to put a bullet in his forehead. He told me that when he’d been assigned his most recent story, it had seemed routine. The city had a plan to fill in some ravines for a new street layout, and he was supposed to interview the people who would have to give up their homes. But once he’d interviewed a half dozen families, he realized that there was a pattern, that something was distorting the minor news item that his editor was likely to bury somewhere in the third section of the paper—the eviction of a group of families who didn’t even have legal title to their land: all these families spoke of a person who appeared two weeks before the official notification. They told Elias this man showed up and offered them money, a pittance but still real money, in return for their signature on a blank document. He spoke of a threat of eviction and offered them cash as compensation. Everyone gave the man their names and signed or put thumbprints on the paper. Everyone took the low-denomination bills that were given to them and started thinking about where they would move. It seemed strange to them, but anything that got them involved with legal documents was always strange. They couldn’t see why anyone would want to kick them off these lots that, with every downpour, slipped a bit farther down the slopes. Nobody but people as poor as them would want to build homes on these cliffsides, but they didn’t say a word about this, because what good would it do? When the city officials came to tell them they’d be evicted, it came as no surprise, nor did they request time to pack their belongings. They picked up their bundles, which they had already packed, and went to the south of the city, where it stopped being called Quito at all. I was sure this was only the beginning of Elias’s story, but his mood started to plummet for lack of liquor. I asked for another bottle of whatever he was drinking, and he revived. He told me that he’d gone to the registry of deeds and found more than sixty-five land sales legally processed and accepted in the last week. They were all for land in the ravines. He was surprised by the speed of the transfers, but after seeing the name of the new owner, he understood the bureaucrats’ efficiency. Elias had been in this business for more than fifteen years, so nothing shocked him anymore. Along with his press card they should have pinned a medal for cynicism on his chest. That was the only way he managed to survive his work, that and the half bottle of aguardiente he drank every day. But this wasn’t what he told me. What he told me was that all the properties, the ones that had been inhabited and others that had also been bought up in recent weeks, were now in the name of the city’s current mayor, Arnulfo Baca. Elias’s next step had been to go interview the mayor. At that point in the story I took his arm and asked him whether he wanted to be killed. He told me no, not yet. He did not confront the mayor or say anything about what he’d discovered. The interview merely focused on the new street plan. Elias noted everything the mayor told him about the need to fill in the ravines for reasons of sanitation and in order to build a modern street grid for the city. He asked why not broaden and improve the existing streets and forget about the fill plan, which, it seemed, brought no great benefits and, on the other hand, implied an enormous drain on the municipal finances. Baca then gave a speech, as if his life depended on it, about all the benefits that the fill project would bring, and he urged the journalist not to oppose the modernization of the capital. He ended by saying that the mayor’s office had no intention of negatively affecting anyone, and that the city council had voted in favor of not expropriating the land but rather paying the best market price to the owners. And that was just what Elias needed. I congratulated him. On the article, and on what it would mean for his career, since the few newspapers that existed in the city would fight each other to hire him. But he told me the article would be about as good for his career as stepping into quicksand would be for a man lost in a swamp. I didn’t get it. Before he continued, he emptied a third and then a fourth glass. He told me he took the article to the paper, but found that his editor was not there. So, given the importance of the piece, he went looking for the editor in chief, who likewise couldn’t be found. The only person who was free that afternoon was the managing editor, who was also the man in charge of the radio station. That didn’t matter to Elias. All he needed was an order to stop the presses and rewrite the next day’s banner headline. The managing editor was Cordobés, my Cordobés. Elias sat there in front of him and explained what he had discovered. He said he had the article written and ready to go to press. When he told me this, he took hold of the tabletop and banged his forehead against the edge. I had to stop him, but by that time he had already broken open the skin, and a line of dark, thick blood was running from his eyebrow to his cheek and then to the center of his chin. I took my handkerchief, soaked it in aguardiente, and pressed it against the wound. While I was doing that, Elias leaned his head against my chest and began to snore. Who knew how many sleepless nights he’d had? By now dawn was approaching and I couldn’t leave him alone in that dive. I took hold of his waist and lifted him up, getting him to put one of his arms around my shoulder. In the process I reactivated the stench of that rotten animal holed up in some cavity of his body. When we got out on the street, a fine rain was falling like mist over the city. I had to stop several times along the way to clean my glasses with my fingers. Only when I managed to lean Elias against a wall and take off the frames to rub the lenses with my shirt could I, at last, make out more than silhouettes. When we got to my house, I stretched Elias out on the couch and collapsed into bed.
When I woke up, Elias had disappeared and I had less than two days to finish all the preparations for the Martian landing. I quit worrying about what I’d heard, which, after all, was none of my business. I went right to the station, without letting anyone know I was coming. I got to Cordobés’s office, and, since his secretary wasn’t there, I headed for the boss’s door; but when I was about to knock, I stopped because I recognized a voice from inside. I don’t know how long I stood there. I just remember that Cordobés’s secretary touched me on the shoulder, and I jumped. She asked whether she should announce that I was there, but I turned around and ran. I didn’t stop until I reached the tram line and hopped a southbound car, which I rode to the end of the line. The whole way I couldn’t stop thinking what a fool I was. How could I possibly not have tumbled to this earlier? I got off at the end of the line and wandered aimlessly till it started to get dark. Then I walked the whole way back on foot, turning the same things around and around in my head. I hadn’t run away as soon as I heard that voice, because I wanted to be sure, I didn’t want to have the slightest doubt that Alcaraz was there in the office, talking with the person who had hired me for my insuperable brilliance. The person who had accepted every absurd request I made about the program. During the walk back, a hole in my stomach grew bigger and bigger. How long had the two of them been working together? When had they decided I would be a useful pawn? Why me, and for what? Did Alcaraz leave the script in my house on purpose? Why wait so long? It was clear to me that I wasn’t going to come to any conclusion. I don’t remember how I got home, or what time, or how I got to sleep with that noxious brew decomposing in my brain. I slept badly, and the next day I woke up around noon with a faint hammering inside my head. I didn’t pay it much attention till I heard shouting from outside and I realized the hammering was out there too. It was a messenger pounding on my door, with a note from Cordobés for me. Very brief, very diplomatic, very to the point. He asked me to sign a document, and he told me that from then on he was taking charge of the radio play, and that if I signed the paper, I could come and collect my severance pay. I was too dazed to argue. Anyway, the messenger told me he wasn’t leaving till I’d signed the document, so I did. I knew I was buried up to my neck and the document couldn’t make things worse, only perhaps set them in stone. I signed without reading, kept a copy, and went back to bed. When I woke up, I drank two cups of coffee, read what I’d signed, and realized it was my own death warrant. The document said that I was the sole author, inventor, and creator of the radio play that would air the next day. I didn’t even have a right to protest. I got dressed and went to collect my money. After all, that was what had brought me into this game. At least I wanted a big bankroll filling out my pants when my life disappeared. Cordobés didn’t want anything to do with me, but his secretary gave me an envelope. With that in hand, I went up to the studio. I didn’t go in, but I could see Alcaraz giving instructions to my actors. I stood there in the hallway for a good part of the afternoon, until they took a break. When Alcaraz came out for a smoke, he looked right through me. That’s when I left. I had sowed the whirlwind, and it was only fair that I would be swept up in it.
I took myself to the registry of deeds. Maybe if I could learn something more about the ravines I would understand Cordobés’s need to silence Elias, because, even though he never finished telling me what happened, his article had not appeared in the paper. I wasn’t doing this just to help my friend, but because Cordobés had to have something bigger up his sleeve. Otherwise, why take the risk of covering up the land deal? And whatever that something was, I was pretty sure it was connected with the sudden reappearance of Alcaraz, and my being fired. I confirmed that the sales had gone through and all those lots now belonged to Mayor Baca. Then I went to the office in charge of handing out radio frequencies. I asked to see the documentation for the stations within the city. There was one new station, frequency 104.2, registered under the names of the partners Cordobés and Baca. My boss, and the mayor of the city.
Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our regular programming to read an urgent telegram that has just arrived at our studio. A few seconds ago, in the area of Latacunga, it was reported that a blinding flash of blue light crossed the sky with incredible speed, with such force that it felt as if a gigantic long-range rifle had been discharged. We will keep you informed. Now we return you to our scheduled program of night music sponsored by the refreshing beverage Orangine:
There’s pain in my soul I can’t rise above
Your memory is a thorn that tortures me
Come back, come back, come back to me, my love
Let my torment end, please nurture me . . .
Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt again to bring you alarming news. The city of Latacunga has been destroyed. It disappeared, moments ago, under a cloud of smoke and flame. It was attacked by a fleet of flying objects firing potent and highly destructive rays. Our sources tell us this fleet is headed toward Quito. Attention! We repeat, they are headed for Quito. Given the gravity of this news, we will remain on the air to keep you informed.
When the second interruption came (after the announcer reported that the city of Latacunga had disappeared in a rain of fire), several windows opened and some heads emerged, looking up at the sky. No windows closed after that. The effect of hundreds of radios tuned to the same station, with volume at full blast, created a strange sensation. You could almost see the expanding wave as it grew.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been handed a note from our correspondent in the town of Sangolquí. Dear radio audience, we are told that at least forty people, including six local police, are lying dead in the pastures to the east of the city, their bodies so burned and deformed as to be unrecognizable. These macabre and alarming events, both those of Latacunga and those of Sangolquí, must be connected to reports issued this afternoon by the Observatory of Mount Jennings in Chicago, in the United States. That report confirmed several explosions of incandescent gases that occurred at intermittent intervals on the surface of Mars. This afternoon’s reports, to which we are paying utmost attention, note that spectroscopic readings showed alarmingly high concentrations of hydrogen; they also revealed that fireballs, stemming from these explosions, were nearing the Earth at high velocities. Ladies and gentlemen, imagine what speed must be involved if those occurrences took place this very afternoon on Mars, which is located forty million miles from Earth. We have asked for someone here in the studio to convert that figure to kilometers, but in any case, we can assure you that the number is very high—too high to imagine that the vessels that destroyed Latacunga could be Martian. But, for the moment, that is all we can deduce them to be. What is most alarming is that these vessels are making their way to the capital. It should not surprise us. The magnetic force of the center of the world is well known. If an extraterrestrial attack were to come, it is logical that it would be focused on Ecuador. That seems to be what we are experiencing now.
When the announcer read the report sent from Sangolquí, I saw a woman in a window opposite mine faint. Sangolquí was right next to the capital; it was a place people went for weekend excursions. If the spaceships had sped the forty miles from Latacunga to Sangolquí in just a few seconds, they would reach Quito in no time at all.
We are waiting for contact with some civil or military authority who can inform us about what is happening and how the population should respond. Don’t touch your dial, because the latest information can be found only here. Attention, ladies and gentlemen! I have just been handed an official communique from the Mariscal Sucre Air Base in Cotocollao, in the northern part of Quito, which states that several unidentified objects have landed on the airport tarmac. In a few seconds we should have a live feed from there. Meanwhile, we are continuing to seek contact with some authority to make a public statement over this station . . . Yes, yes, we’re listening . . . Good evening, we are here outside the Cotocollao air base, where a large number of neighbors who have been listening to our report have gathered, as well as several police patrols. The Victory Battalion is here in full strength, and we have been told by unofficial sources that several military tanks are on their way. We don’t know, yet, how many . . . Excuse me, Jorge, for interrupting your valuable report, but what can you see? . . . Dear listeners, all we can make out are some enormous holes in the ground and, around them, scorched grass. Inside those craters are several cylindrical objects. Each one must be twenty yards wide, to give you an idea of the proportions of their awe-inspiring presence; each one—and there are several—is the size of two tennis courts side by side. They give off a strange glow, a kind of milky color. Now some spectators are pushing up against the police lines in an effort to get closer, and they are blocking our view. Please sir, ma’am, could you move to one side? Thank you. While the police are trying to establish some kind of control, I have here at my side a resident of this area, Señor Quintero, who perhaps can share with us some important information.
When the report from the air base in Cotocollao began, that new voice belonged to the regular newscaster of the morning news. I could see, through my window, how everyone drew closer to their radios. This was a voice they recognized and trusted, one that, they thought, could bring them relief. I won’t deny that I was enjoying this: the public was falling into my trap, even if I had fallen in another. I was smiling and kept on listening just to be able to pat myself on the back. I had done it, I was doing it. Those were my words that held the city captive in their grip.
Señor Quintero, could you please tell us, what happened a few minutes ago? . . . Well, I was listening to the radio . . . Could you come closer and speak louder, please? . . . Oh, sorry. Let’s see, I was telling you that I’d just poured myself a little drink . . . Yes, yes, Señor Quintero, but what happened? . . . I’m getting to that, I had my drink, in front of the radio . . . Yes, and then, what did you see? . . . No, first I heard something . . . What did you hear? . . . A sound, like, it was like the sound a snake makes . . . A snake? . . . Yes, you know, ssssssssssssssss . . . Like a tire letting out air? . . . I’ve never heard a tire letting out air . . . All right, Señor Quintero, you heard that sound and then, what happened next? . . . I looked out the window and I thought I was dreaming, because I saw a blue light but it was sending out sparks as it flew through the air . . . And? . . . . BOOM! It exploded right here, it was so strong the impact knocked me against the wall and the glass in my hand, the one with my drink, it shattered . . . Were you afraid, Señor Quintero? . . . What can I tell you? . . . Thank you very much, thank you . . . Don’t you want to hear more? . . . No, no, that’s enough. Ladies and gentlemen, I wish I could describe what’s happening, now the tanks are here and more and more residents of the area are arriving too. The police can’t stop them, some are walking right up to the objects and trying to touch their surface. But there’s something else, something I haven’t said because of the confusion that’s setting in around here. There’s a sound, maybe some of you can make it out, it’s been getting more and more intense since we started this broadcast. Can you hear it? It’s a murmur that’s growing and expanding, that seems to be coming from the center of the Earth. Let me bring the microphone closer . . . Now we’re about thirty yards away. Can you hear it? Wait a minute, something’s happening. Ladies and gentlemen, something completely new is going on. The upper part of the object is turning, as if it were a separate piece. The vessel must be hollow in the center.
When I recognized the sound of a jar with a metal cap being unscrewed inside a bucket (that was the programmed effect for the moment when the top of the first flying saucer would open), I saw that the panorama on the street had changed completely from less than ten minutes before. I couldn’t believe what I saw. I felt like my face was melting and dripping like wax toward the ground. The street had become a runaway river on which hundreds of salmon were trying to swim upstream to save their lives. Women and sleepy children were dragging bundles, baskets, and barely closed suitcases up the steps of Calle Esmeraldas, up toward the lava caves on the flanks of the volcano, where they thought that maybe, protected by the darkness, they could escape the extraterrestrial attack. Down the same channel, en route to the city limits where the electric lines ended, were men armed with clubs, torches, and rifles. It was not hard to imagine they were marching toward their deaths. Their faces were marked by resignation. I had been so stupid, unable to look several moves ahead on the chessboard. If I had done so, I would have known which pieces would advance, which would remain in place, and how the checkmate would be achieved. Only now could I see it, dazzlingly clear and impressive. Cordobés had done it, had set up the chessboard months before, knowing my moves long before I did. He’d planned things so that, when the landing occurred, it would be the radio station he managed that would be placed in check. So that his own station, the new one he’d set up together with the mayor, would take off—just as soon as he’d eliminated the only real competition, the most important in the capital. When what was going to happen happened, the entire city would no longer believe a single piece of news from the microphones of the station that had broadcast the extraterrestrial landing. Cordobés was counting on something more than the truth: he was counting on the pleasure that comes from hearing the knuckles of the powerful crumpling as they fall. His ploy would destroy not only the station, but also the newspaper that owned it. Even if Elias’s article managed to get into print, even if the scandal was exposed, it wouldn’t matter. The mayor would have his landfill project, and, soon, he’d have in his inside jacket pocket a thin, discreet check given to him by the city he governed in exchange for the land he had managed to acquire. Also, he’d have a radio station that would broadcast his accomplishments in case anyone had any doubts. Cordobés would take care of that.
It’s changing color, it’s turning red as a kettle over a hot flame. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I’ve seen in my life, the lid has now come off and something—or someone—is coming out . . . I can see two luminous spheres that are peering toward the horizon from the dark hole . . . Can they be eyes? It could be a face. Do you hear the crying and wailing of people around, ladies and gentlemen? They are crying for a reason. We have to put ourselves in God’s hands. Something is slinking out of those shadows—it looks like an enormous gray snake. Or several of them. Or tentacles. I can see the body of that thing. It’s big, as big as a bear and it shines like wet leather. But its face is . . . it’s . . . ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I almost can’t look at it, that’s how horrifying it is. Its eyes are yellow and glow like a cobra’s eyes, its mouth is shaped like a V and a long string of saliva is drooling out. Its shapeless lips are trembling. But it’s not moving, maybe the Earth’s atmosphere prevents that. No, I’m wrong, here it comes, and the people are moving back. Some are running to get away, but we’re holding fast in our posts, as is our duty, to keep you informed. We’ll stay here as long as we can. Here come the soldiers, some of them inside their tanks. Wait, what’s happening? The figure is straightening up, it’s pointing something that seems, from where we are, like a mirror. A flame is darting out toward the tanks! My God, I can’t believe it. The solders are burning like paper dolls. I can’t find the words to describe it, but the screaming around me speaks volumes. The whole field in front of the cylinder is in flames now. The gas tanks of the cars are going up, the trees, there are four dead bodies only thirty feet from where I stand. GRZZFJKKKK. Ladies and gentlemen, we are back in the studio. Due to circumstances beyond our control we can’t continue with the live broadcast from Cotocollao. We’re taking you now to another live broadcast, this time from the Ministry of Defense . . . Citizens of Quito, this is the defense minister of the Republic of Ecuador speaking to you. I’m addressing you in these moments of great consternation to ask you to stay calm, because we need your help to organize the defense and evacuation of the city. And to the forces of order, with whom we’ve lost contact, I ask you to come to the air base to reinforce the battalions now defending the entrance to the city. GRRZZFKKKKK. We interrupt this broadcast to return to the studio, where the mayor . . . People of Quito, we’re depending on you for the defense of the capital. I’m asking all able-bodied men to take action against the invader. GRRZZJKKKKK . . . Now a communique from the archbishop of Quito . . . We pray to God for His blessing and protection and put our fates in His hands. I ask the parishioners of our churches to ring the bells to send our common prayers to the protective heavens in this hour of great bewilderment. GRRZZFJKKKKK . . . Ladies and gentlemen, I have just received a note informing me that from the Previsora Building, the tallest in the city, a ball of flames and smoke can be seen advancing toward the center of the capital . . .
That was the moment, as planned, to shut down the radio signal. In such circumstances, nothing could induce more fear than a total lack of information. I went down to the street, which was bathed in fog, but I hadn’t gone more than four steps when I heard a moan and saw a glow across the street. That was the same moment in which the city’s bells began to toll all at once. The Martian invasion had worked to a T. After the archbishop came on the air, the ringing should start, and it did. The ecclesiastical community responded to his call. On the street, I could feel more sharply the panic that had taken hold of Quito and its inhabitants. When the truth came out, their belief would turn to uncontrolled rage. I wanted to get to the station before that happened, but the moaning was so continuous and agonized that I made my way through the blanket of fog to the glow. Some girls were kneeling in front of a row of candles on the cobblestones. A woman in a flimsy nightgown was pacing nervously behind them. The girls were praying, what prayer I could not tell, while the woman went up and down the street unconcerned with her clothing or her half-naked breasts. When I started to move away, I heard, over all the other noise, the sound of rapidly approaching footsteps. They belonged to someone with the look of a madman, who threw himself into the woman’s arms. The girls stopped praying when their mother crossed the street with a cry so full of panic that I had to stop in my tracks. I don’t remember the exact words, or who said what, only that faced with the imminence of death, the threat of dissolving in the flame of a Martian ray, decorum no longer counted. Or it had slid into an underground fissure from which it could no longer dictate daily life. Throughout the city, the ugliest of words issued from people’s mouths. Since there was no tomorrow, nothing had any consequences, and everything became terrifyingly real. As real as death. I felt another shudder in my spine. This night was not going to end well. How could it? The woman grabbed the two youngest girls, and in the same shrill voice, she informed them that the man standing in front of them was their father. She could have told them that pigs were flying through the sky, or that in two weeks the fields would be full of forget-me-nots, because the result would have been the same. The concept of a father disappeared under the woman’s hysterical screech, the man’s lost gaze, the impossibility of associating this night with happiness of any kind. The scene was still frozen like that when a second woman appeared. She ignored the man, presumably her husband, but tore at the hair of the mother of the girls, whom she evidently had never met before. The man watched them, a spectator with vacant eyes. It was not clear who was the victim, who the victimizer—only that the mother had a much more developed and practiced repertoire of reproaches. I left them there: the girls crying, the women screaming, the man watching. I passed similar scenes breaking out across the city. People in nightshirts and nightgowns dragging their sins through the street, prayers of atonement, pleas for forgiveness for small and mundane offenses. This was the real invasion: the torrent of words that crisscrossed the city and rendered everything darker and more destructive. As I descended the twisting streets of the mountainside neighborhoods toward the Plaza de Independencia, I saw how the restraint so characteristic of the city had ceded completely to piercing invective. All Quito had poured into the streets, and the sound was ominous, like that of some monster with multiple, gaping maws. Once I reached the station, I tried to enter, but someone had ordered the guards to bar the door. With good reason, because a crowd was gathering. The dank air could barely support the rage of those who now began to surround the building. All conversations were variations on the theme of the deception that had been practiced on the citizens. I saw one of the linotype operators from the newspaper smoking a cigarette under a lamppost. Nothing in his appearance indicated surprise. His expression was that of someone who knows that reality will not go away just because you stop believing in it. He seemed to know that the delicate membrane that held together the structure of the city had dissolved, and now its most acid instincts were fermenting up a storm, catalyzed by a current of the highest intensity.
Cordobés crossed in front of me, not looking upset in the slightest. I followed him and, once face to face, asked for an explanation. He didn’t say anything, just laughed in my face. Then, as he walked on, he warned me in an almost friendly way that I should get away.
“There are flammable chemicals inside,” he said. He paused briefly. “When the first bomb gets thrown, it’ll all explode.” He didn’t wait for another question. “Because someone’s going to throw it. I swear to God, that’s what’s going to happen.”
Cordobés’s sworn word wasn’t much to go on, but what he said made sense. I turned back toward the building that housed the station and, in the basement, the printing presses of the newspaper. Right then I heard the roar of the first explosion, just before its shock wave threw me to the ground. The shards of glass that now covered the street reproduced the image of the flames, creating the sinister effect of a city floating on a river of fire. With the bellow of the second explosion, the whole night lit up, as the roofs of all the neighboring buildings caught fire.
Night fell, the fog lifted, and the streets emptied. I set off to look for Elias. I didn’t find him, but I couldn’t go home, couldn’t do anything that I would normally do, so, when dawn broke, I went back to the station, or what was left of it. Cordobés was still there. His face was a chalkboard on which any emotion might be drawn. His shoes were smudged with soot, as were the cuffs of his trousers. He was walking through the rubble as if in search of something. As I approached him, a feeling of moral superiority rose up from some hidden place inside me. But Cordobés annihilated it with the smallest shrug of his shoulders. Still, I asked him again why he had done it.
“Done what?” he asked me.
I didn’t know how to answer. There were too many things about which I was still in the dark, especially the contours of the circles in which he moved. So I looked at him and waited— in vain, because he didn’t say a word. Across the street I spotted one of the actors from the night before. He was slumped against a wall, with what looked like three days’ growth of beard and a gaze as opaque as a tar pit. I crossed the street, and when he opened his mouth to tell me something, out poured a good portion of the alcohol he had consumed during the night, which must have been working on his conscience for hours. Then he asked me whether it was over. His will to go on seemed to hang on my response. Whether what was over, I asked him back. Without changing his expression but in a tone of tranquility that belied his state, he said, all of it. I managed to get my arm around his waist, lift him up, and drag him over to a mound of dirt where at least he’d be free of the river of vomit he had discharged. Nothing is over, I told him. I felt my answer had taken a metaphysical turn that the situation did not deserve. He covered his head with his hands. Maybe he was right, the sky was about to fall in on us. He shook his head, which seemed to help him focus, but the sudden clarity only added to his distress, as if a severely nearsighted man had put on a pair of glasses for the first time. He launched into a speech and didn’t stop even when he stood up, or when he started to walk, or when he was seated with a cup of coffee in front of him, or when I got him to the door of his house. No questions from me were needed. He told me how they had begun the broadcast at nine on the dot, and twenty minutes later, when the actor playing the archbishop asked the churches of the city to ring their bells, he was shocked to hear all the bells of the city responding on cue. He said this as if he’d been the only witness, and again covered his head with hands, as if only then recognizing his own role, and mine, in that night’s events. He launched a fist at my shoulder but the blow landed with the consistency of a raw egg, and I barely felt it. I didn’t try to dodge, I wanted someone to hit me, I needed to make it clear that I wasn’t washing my hands of the thing, that part of what happened was the direct result of what I had imagined when I had written and staged the arrival of the Martians in Quito. Otherwise I would have remained paralyzed, assailed both by my sense of guilt and by the lack of recognition of my role. Regardless, he kept going. He said that after the ringing of the bells, Cordobés had yanked out the wires and disconnected the microphone. No one objected. At first the commotion in the streets was so deafening as to dissipate any sense of danger. Then the radio silence itself became a threat. He didn’t know how to explain it. He started to shake with fatigue and fear, and asked for a cigarette that would allow him to go on. When he finished his smoke, he was ready to continue. He said that when he realized what had happened, his thinking got lost in a maze of white noise. He watched the radio station crackle in flames without the firefighters lifting a finger to douse them, without the police or the army trying to hold back those who were throwing Molotov cocktails and rocks, and he lost count of how many bottles of aguardiente he downed until he fell onto the patch of sidewalk where I had found him. As I left him in front of his house after a walk that used up a good part of the morning, he took me by the shoulders and asked whether everything was going to be okay. With a toneless voice and looking through him as if he weren’t there, as if what I was doing was answering the question I hadn’t been able to pose to myself, I told him no, nothing was going to be okay. And with those seven words I left him propped against his door and went on my way.
When the list of those who had died the night of the broadcast was released, Elias’s name was on it. He was found among the incinerated bodies and twisted steel of the pressroom, one more piece of collateral damage, and I thought of Cordobés sifting through the rubble in front of the station with his feet. I considered going to the police, I thought of making a formal accusation, and then I realized that from the moment I accepted his offer to announce the boxing match, I had lost that right. I shut myself in my house with my pockets full of money. For two weeks I didn’t go out, expecting the police to come for me at any moment. But something strange happened: silence took possession of the city. It must have been, I thought, that if the people admitted how they’d been deceived, they would also have to admit that the confessions, betrayals, vulnerability, mob violence, and deaths had really occurred. And that was unacceptable. So nobody was going to push very hard to identify guilty parties or clarify events. What for? Nobody came after me, or at least not the police. Other radio stations, yes, but I rejected their offers. I spent part of the money I’d saved over the past months on a funeral for Elias. With the rest, I bought a plane ticket. I dropped all the money that remained onto the counter of a travel agency and asked the woman behind it how far that sum would take me. She picked up a globe, twirled it, and told me to make it stop wherever I wished. That was how far I could go.
I closed my eyes and touched my finger to the sphere. Venezuela was where it fell. 
Gabriela Alemán lives in Quito, Ecuador. Her literary honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship; member of Bogotá39, a 2007 selection of the most important up-and-coming writers in Latin America; and finalist for the 2015 Premio Hispanoamericano de Cuento Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia) for her short story collection La muerte silba un blues, from which “War of the Worlds” is taken. Her novel Poso Wells and her story collection Family Album are both published in English translation by City Lights Books.
Dick Cluster’s translations from the Spanish include Gabriela Alemán’s Family Album and Poso Wells (both from City Lights Books), Paula Abramo’s Fiat Lux (FlowerSong), and Kill the Ámpaya (Mandel Vilar Press), a collection of Latin American baseball fiction. Cluster is the author of History of Havana (a social history of the Cuban capital, from OR Books) and a detective novel series.
Illustration: Sam Ward
