The Unworthy

by Agustina Bazterrica

This filth, nesting in the servants’ skin, in their cells, is the anger of the sea, the fury of the air, the violence of the mountains, the outrage of the trees. It’s the sadness of the world.

Maybe one day, in some future now, someone will read what I have written and learn of our existence. That we were part of a Sacred Sisterhood and lived on a sliver of land that remained pure, resplendent, thanks to the piety of the Enlightened. Or maybe they’ll become dust and return to the earth, fertilizing it, nourishing the roots of a tree, and our story will be understood through the leaves that oxygenate the collapsed world.

There are times I think that none of this matters. Why put myself in danger with this book of the night? But I have to because if I write it, then it was real; if I write it, maybe we won’t just be part of a dream contained in a planet, inside a universe hidden in the imagination of someone who lives in the mouth of God.

Mom said there’d never been a good year while she was alive. Her great-grandparents had been the last to experience a sense of well-being. She had always lived with ecological disasters, which worsened day by day. At least we can still feed ourselves, she told me, live in peace at home. Our home where swallows nested in the roof. Mom believed that swallows only nested in happy homes. How do they know, Mom? How can they tell a happy home from a sad one? Because there’s a brilliance to happy people. It expands and things become imbued with it. What does imbued mean? That the light lingers on what they touch. The swallows can see it.

It was then that I asked myself why I wanted to be Enlightened. Did I really want to be an emissary of the light? To live locked up? To be an intermediary between God and this contaminated world? Was my help necessary, my participation? Escaping from the House of the Sacred Sisterhood means death in the devastated lands. Are the miracles in this blessed space real? Or is it the water in the Creek of Madness that causes us to believe? To question means living in the desert. In a heaven with no God?

I cried in silence because words can’t capture a sacred moment. What to say when you’re in the presence of something majestic? No one had seen a firefly in decades. My mother had told me about them, because her father had told her about them, like a myth passed down through generations. The pesticides wiped them out, my mother told me, which her father had told her, which her grandfather had told him. But there it was, tiny and powerful.

The truth is a sphere. We never see it whole, in its entirety. It slips down our throats, through our thoughts.

The truth is changeable, it contracts, implodes, it’s powerful like a bullet. And it can be lethal.

I found a box of mobile phones that were turned off. My mother had told me about them, from when there was internet, she’d said. When the world still believed the internet was going to last forever. Now the phones are worthless. Black screens and silence. That’s what Mom had said, black screens and silence, and she’d showed me her useless mobile, told me what the world had been like before, how people had done everything on those screens, how they believed that in some countries the electricity had been cut because of artificial intelligence, to prevent its advance, the spread of its power, its independence and hunger to dominate its creator. How after the final blackout the world did not recover, rebuild, restart, because nature finished things off with a new degree of devastation. I didn’t remember this because I was a newborn, a tiny human who had arrived in a world in pieces, a world where entire continents, islands, countries were now below water. I don’t really understand what artificial intelligence is about. It was something intangible, Mom told me, that controlled a large part of the world. She said there were groups of people who worshipped it.