Juan Villoro
About twenty-five years ago, I wrote a piece about the elusive threat of nighttime, the mosquito that announces its arrival with its unbearable noise. I remembered Paul Müller, inventor of DDT, who received the Nobel Prize in 1948 and contributed to unleashing the passion for fumigation that dominated the second half of the 20th century. A peculiar idea of health led housewives to spray poison in every corner without taking a cigarette out of their mouths. When Cuban novelist Eliseo Alberto asked his grandmother what had been the most important event in her long life, she replied without hesitation: “Insecticides.” Nothing surpassed the pleasure of killing bugs in the tropics.
The air was sprayed with toxins, and the mosquitoes lost ground. Still, they continued to transmit serious diseases such as dengue, malaria, and the chikungunya virus, which in the euphonious language of Tanzania means “to bend over in pain.”
The hatred of flying insects is mainly due to acoustic reasons. They ignored Darwin’s advice to survive by being more fit. They would fare better if their atrocious buzzing did not force us to walk around the room with a slipper in our hands.
Curiously, the chirping that comes from anxious wing flapping is not a sign of attack but an invitation to mate. The short life of flies is one long horniness.
That unpleasant noise has led me to my strangest addiction. I understood it thanks to two pest exterminators. The first promoted his trade with his pointed moustache: he fought mice. Before taking action, he wanted to learn about the family’s habits; for everything I said, he found a reason to attract rodents: our carelessness was inversely proportional to the cunning of the invaders. After years of studying his resilient enemies, the exterminator had come to admire them. I thought he ennobled his profession by extolling the difficulties of his work. He refused to be a mere executioner and felt like a chess player challenging the Russian champion. However, his mustache revealed something that I only understood years later, thanks to another exterminator.
My house was taken over by termites that devour paper and wood. The inspector who came to see the problem was a circumspect, stooped man with the dark circles under his eyes of a sleepless reader. He spoke of the habits of social insects with the reverence of one who knows them to be indestructible. Far away, in some neighboring garden, was the superior commander who sent his disciplined troops into battle. Each little animal had a solitary function; it had to dig deep, without any help, aware that after much effort, this unwitnessed dedication would allow its own kind to enjoy the tasty sawdust. I felt like a scoundrel for wanting to kill these heroes.
This fumigator had also blended in with his adversaries and fought them with the integrity that only someone fighting against himself can have. Like his colleague who chased mice, he struck me as an eccentric being, immersed in a gentle delirium that allowed him to do his job well. Only now do I understand what he really represented to me: an example.
In 2020, the coronavirus caused me to lose hearing in my left ear. This increased my visual acuity, but only to discover flies and pounce on them. The phenomenon did not require an ophthalmologist, but a psychologist. Every fly on the wall became the possibility of a noise.
The key to the matter was given to me by the fumigators fighting against their own reflection. I clarified my question: what is it about me that is like a fly? I then noticed my most pronounced habit: I cannot write without rubbing my key ring. Keeping my hands busy frees my mind. I make a metallic noise that can be as annoying to others as the buzzing of a fly. At a university where I worked, they called me “Campanitas” (Little Bells).
Discovering my similarity to mosquitoes did not lead me to exonerate them. Understanding the size of my prey increased my desire to fight it. Does that mean that by killing flies, I am correcting myself? Nothing could be further from the truth.
I am hostage to a magical object: if I don’t rub my keys, I can’t write. Eliminating this dependency would mean something worse than writer’s block: it would mean giving up on myself as a person.
In order not to suppress my buzzing, I suppress that of the flies, my fellow creatures, my indispensable enemies.
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