Voices on the New Diasporas - an MIT student journal
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Étude no.1. The Story of the Cockroach
by Javier A. Hernandez
The story of the cockroach is an incredible tale. I cannot say it is fantastic or unreal, because it proposes something that has happened to me: One afternoon of last year’s December I was in the national library, going over some papers written in Sanskrit. The task was exhausting, due to my poor knowledge of the language. It was almost dark when I found, between the papers, a manuscript in which were drawn the characters of an unknown language. I was perplexed; immediately I remembered having seen some of those figures in an old forgotten book. The book was in the basement, where the useless and meaningless books were kept. I went down with a lantern, because negligence had left unchanged the light bulb that had gone out so many years ago. The air was filled with spider-web-shaped dust. I pointed the lantern toward an old table, on which I had left the book some years ago, the last (and first) time I had looked at it; it was there indeed. On top of it was a huge cockroach, fat and slimy, with giant antennas and hairy legs, and black bulging eyes. The light of the lantern made the cockroach cast an immense shadow. The cockroach did not become perturbed; instead it stood looking at me, as if it were studying me. Then it happened…
This story can have different endings: it would all depend on the preferences of whoever is writing it. I invite the reader to, after having read the following possibilities, dare formulate his own.
- 1. If the ending would have been written by Julio Cortázar, then I would have become fascinated with the cockroach. I would have come to believe that it had human sensibility, and that the way of discovering its mystery was in its eyes. I would have looked at it fixedly and closely, having it just one centimeter away from my face. I would think only about it, but soon I would become uninterested and see a man that goes away and takes the book that he was looking for; and I would comprehend that that man was me and that because of so much thinking about the cockroach my thoughts had remained inside of it.
- 2. If it were a Gabriel García Márquez story, then the cockroach would have the face
of a man. I would sit and talk to it, I would tell some sorrowful story, and then it would, with a moralist tone, tell me its story, in which in some time it had been human, but for killing his mother had been punished by divinity and turned into a cockroach.
- 3. If Franz Kafka would have written the story (and I think he has), this would proceed this way. I would witness a transmutation, in which the cockroach transforms into a man or in which
I turn into a cockroach.
- 4. If the responsible of writing the story would have been Edgar Allan Poe, then the cockroach would have been made out of gold, and its interior would hide the code that would enable me to decipher my manuscript, which would turn out to be a treasure map.
- 5. If the ending would have been written by Jorge Luis Borges, then I would become obsessed with the cockroach. I would write an immense treaty in which I describe with great detail all the aspects of the cockroach, and I would end up saying, in order to complete my madness, that the cockroach contains the whole universe between its wings.
How would I have ended the story? I thought that there was nothing extraordinary (or at least worth writing a story about) about the cockroach; the repugnance I felt made me try to kill it. Immediately I realized that my actions showed suicidal tendencies, because (and then I understood the terrible revelation) I was the cockroach.
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