THE COCKROACHES WILL INHERIT THE EARTH

The cockroaches will inherit the Earth. (Apologue).

Two cockroaches, male and female, a lovely couple, talk - in their idiom - on the sewage, while they nibble rotten remains of food. His name is Glutof and hers is Kiti.

“Why such enthusiasm?” – asks the husband, suspiciously. He is septic, solemn, hard shelled, cult, repulsive, with eyes of a focused owl. A nourished glutton, he resembles a dark and obese date, gifted with slim but brawny and hairy – or whatever is the right name for its bristles – legs. Fortunately, Glutof does not gain any weight on his small thighs, what allows him to go off at an incredible speed in moments of danger; namely when hunted by the darned triad of men, rats and cats. The last of them, carousers, that only kill for sport because they don’t chew their victims. They feel too disgusted.

Glutof is proud of the brunette, almost black, shine of his wings, which he can frill with tremendous success, provoking a raving between the opposite sex. Although fat, he is a womanizer, or “cockroachizer”, a word he intends to include in the first dictionary of the language of cockroaches, in concoction and with him as a coordinator. He likes very much to philosophize and takes pleasure with the nonsense of his colleagues of species, all of them very dumb when compared to him. A genetic mutation has occurred, one which provokes greater longevity and a bigger size of the brain. But not all the cockroaches have been equally endowed with the increase of intelligence. By the way, also a human problem, though way older.

“You, critical and cocky, as usual!”, Kiti protests. “What a terrible fad you have of diminishing me, of spoiling all my fun! It isn’t enthusiasm, goddamn! I was simply amazed, or rather, horrified – is that good for you? – with the loathsome cleanness of the new restaurant around the corner, that enormous one. I only got in there once, under the door, in the inauguration eve, and I peeped. Last night, after the inauguration, I tried to go back, to pinch a few things, sneaking through the corners, but I was really scared. Too busy. The only crack that could help me get in has already been closed. The prevention against us, from the selfish mean-spirited ones, is just perfect. Entrance, only through the front door, but with the risk of being squashed by the doorman’s sole.”

“I still think you look rather euphoric, almost happy, unconsciously approving the abominable cleanliness”, insisted the husband, an academic very respected for his zeal in the protection of the values of sludge. He interrupted the little sucks he was giving in a moldy bread to sip, as he snapped his lips, a little cup of mucus, dripped from a nursing home of pauper elders.”

“It’s just that I, although not approving, of course, any kind of neatness – what do you think I am, huh? – like to see things well done. You know how perfectionist I am…”

“Well, relatively”, interrupted the husband. “at home, you relax. There are still many things clean here and there… the tidiness is becoming unbearable. You are not such a good housewife, pardon me for my candor…”

“But you do not cooperate, either!”, she raised her thin and squeaky voice, wrathful, flapping her antennas. “You just stand there, in that old lawyer’s cabinet, nibbling old greasy books, bought from second hand shops. You, my dear, I’m sorry to inform, is a salt and old human tallow addict.”

“It’s you who can’t see a palm distance ahead your nose. It is not just gluttony, my dear. I study. My idleness is only apparent. Well, indeed, it’s true that I enjoy eating. However, I study as much as I eat. Most of all, I relish, slowly, tasting not only the grease from the fingers of Adam’s decadent offspring, but also the abstract part, the printed ideas themselves. The reason for that is not to walk around speaking rubbish, as do many of our husky and slender legged companions. One day we will inherit the Earth…Remember the prophecy? I have read that, in case a nuclear conflict takes place, only we will remain alive. We will be well guarded here, underground, while the biped scoundrels toast at the surface, deservedly. Can you imagine our carousal afterwards? It will be all ours….From litter to all of the computers…”

“Well, that is if we have time to hide down here. If you are at the library when the “Big Boom” comes – where you probably will be, you greasy book addict – then you won’t inherit anything at all! You will be just one more toasted date. Besides, to which nuclear war do you refer? The only two giants that could make it to us have already made peace! It is all demoralized now! The Russian chief, that blond cardiac bear (she meant Boris Yeltsin) with Mongolian eyes – his mother must have had a Japanese neighbor way more attractive than her own husband – has turned into a capitalist! Instead of using his plump fingers to push the missiles’ launching button, he has fun just pinching his secretary! It is discouraging…”

“Don’t lose your hope, Kiti” – She is gracious, “eyelashy”, a brain full of mad and right intuitions, all mixed. A hottie, she is basically just pheromones and reproducer organs. She has a fame of being frivolous, but up to now no one has ever had the courage to bear witness against her, because she is influential and revengeful. It is the owl face academic’s fifth marriage, who proceeds, doctoral:

“Parodying what an American businessman has already said, no one, up to this day, has ever lost money when betting on the stupidity of the ruffian state leaders. Or rather, in the stupidity of the human species, with no exception, who claims to be so rational. We, who know them well, and who eat everything they throw away, we know what they really are deep inside, what is behind them. Especially what is on “behind”…”

He made a pause to nibble a piece of putrid banana and continued, erudite, pleased to hear that voice that he knew so well to modulate with such authority:

“Fortunately, the so called emerging powers are there, concerned with mastering atoms and, with that, scaring their neighbors. Therefore, do not dispirit yourself. One day, they will be making atomic bombs on their backyard. Our day will come, Kiti. I have always believed that our ideals of justice and supremacy will end up prevailing. The power of the empires goes up and down, just like a seesaw. It is written on the history books that I lick – I mean – I read. The Power switches his address. I feel it in the air, especially in the polluted air – this pleasant and perfumed aerial garbage can – the signs that our turn is coming! The current system of domination is summarily unfair! Any human being, be him smart or dumb, barely sees us eating a miserly crumb in the kitchen floor – even when we are at the verge of inanition – he instantly opens his eyes wide like a mad assassin and runs up, with his paws up. Why such prejudice? In the end, we are cleaning their kitchens, without even charging for it! They would save up a lot with house maids! We could all get along, in harmony! At night, the humans would lay their dirty clothes on the floor, they would go to sleep naked, and we would break in, eating all the digestible dirtiness left on cups, bodies, plates and silverware. The clothes would be instantly dry cleaned. We would rinse everyone in the house, sparing them from the morning shower. A grand economy! They would wake up totally laundered! However, all the beasts do is squeeze us!”

“What if we set up an underwear buffet? We could make some money out of it…”, Kiti proposes, her eyes gleaming, always mindful to get some profit out of any idea. She considers herself a great entrepreneur.

“Well, you would be the one to take care of it. I do not enjoy involving myself with money affairs…I feel as if I would lose my dignity.”

“It is all fine with these theories of yours. You know I don’t make a fuss about these readings. I personally only enjoy express readings; nevertheless I’m interested in knowing what we would eat, in case of a nuclear war. Wouldn’t the supplies be contaminated by the radiation?”

“Oh, well…” – he sounded surprised. He had never thought of that. He labeled his wife’s lightings of good sense as “sparks from the beast’s horseshoe”, as once said a famous Brazilian critic. But he did not admit he was wrong. “Indeed, of course, hum, in fact, I had already thought about that… For some time, which our technicians would determine, we would not eat what is in the surface. We have, in the sewer, a gigantic and delicious natural supermarket stock, all of it ready and seasoned for our consumption. Therefore, we would only have to wait a while in the drain, until the radioactivity decreased.” He made a pause again to lick, snapping his lips, a type of chocolate mousse extracted from a white piece of paper – square and of soft texture - and concluded:

“That would be the Glory!, as if we were at Cambodia right now…”

“Why Cambodia?”

“Because there has been a juicy civil war in Cambodia that lasted 25 years. During this period, between 6 and 10 millions of earth mines were planted. The result is that now, every month, between two and three hundred people “go to Space” in Cambodia. And not on airliners. It is the country that – though tiny – has the highest level of amputations in the world. Let’s say, it is an earthly paradise, ‘isn’t it? If there was tourism between our species… wow, can you imagine that? Yummy….just the thought of it makes my mouth water! What about the flamethrower? We would be able to even choose between raw meat, well done, saignant, rare, medium…”

“There you go with your polyglot exhibitionisms…”

“And the specialists say it will be necessary about three hundred years to detect and dismantle all the mines.”

“Why did they grow so many bombs? Wasn’t it possible a more traditional type of agriculture?”

“Kiti…You need to read more carefully. No one plants bombs, my darling, they stuck explosives on the ground! Each group, when withdrawing, would spread the mines to fuc… – I mean, to mess (he did not approve of dirty language on the mouth of great leaders) - with its rival. And since there were many comings and goings in the ongoing skirmishes, losing and regaining territories, the result is that Cambodia turned into a vast slaughterhouse, supplying legs, heads and arms in separate pieces. To us, a paradise, because we are really tiny and we can walk around without raising the mines’ alarm. Our Cambodian cousins, those lucky bastards, have blood and fresh meat at hand, at all times. It is even making a damage to their liver now, they say, due to the iron excess on their alimentation. It’s just like wine breakers, it gives you that big headache on the next day. The “tremendous intelligent” humans, ha! ha!” – he laughed, raising his eyebrows, frilling his wings in disdain – “never thought that, one day,  the firing would end? They forgot that old definition that they are “human bipeds”? Since they can’t fly, they tread…and then they fly.”

“I’ve heard that a terrible little English princess – I think it was Lady Di her name – had been preaching the prohibition of earth mines. Do you think this misfortune will come upon us as well?”

“Unfortunately she is dead now.”

“Unfortunately?”, Kiti opened her wings, surprised. “What is wrong with you? It is a good thing that she died, because this disgusting campaign stopped.”

“You have no vision whatsoever, Kiti…I say unfortunately because with her death the press started venerating her; and as a consequence, strengthening what she defended. I’d rather have her alive, only pestering…She would be – alive – less threatening to our cause. They persecuted the infamous for years and years, surveying her, taking pictures of her from a distance, criticizing and gossiping all the time. They even wanted, because of her, the fall of monarchy. Now, all it takes is for the malefic reformer to die and there you go! She becomes a goddess! And within this lies all the danger to us! Henceforth, in a consciousness crisis – such a sickening thing among humans – and specially to sell more magazines, the media will want to put into practice her preaching. It works this way between human beings. Only after the person is dead – no longer arousing envy on others – she can be cherished. All I hope for is that the little English princess, uglier than hygiene – and I’ve heard humans saying, seriously, the contrary – does not have posthumous success in her absurd campaign to the abolishment of earth mines. But, even if there isn’t a nuclear war, they will die anyway, only slower, cooked in the slow fire of the greenhouse effect or poisoned by the carbonic gas. They are too dumb and ambitious to stop in time.”

“Do you think that one day we will be like that too, I mean, with these character flaws that the humans have?”

“Probably…” Glutof sighed. “I’m sorry to inform…But it is the price of civilization.” – He felt proud of his coldness of statesman. “Unless we create a new Ethics, on which I have been working for years, with the deepness everyone can see. To start with, we need to invent a reinforcement of coaction, a cockroach-god at our image and similarity: husky, with large antennas, powerful and revengeful. You know, not everybody will obey directors, presidents or chiefs. But a cockroach-god, with a true power of life and death, the planetary cockroaches will fear…and follow. I will talk in private with “it” – my own self, of course – once a week on the rooftop of a tall building” – he smiled, ironically, closing his owl eyes – “and then I will transmit to our people the message that only I was allowed hear. What do you think about it?”

“And you really think that our people will believe this, in this divine private conference? Our people are more suspicious than the humans, because they have suffered way more than them…”

“They will believe, because it’s good for the soul to believe. One always believes in what one wants believes.”

“But do you believe it yourself?”

“Of course not. However, no one will ever be able to prove that I don’t believe it. Unless you open your little pretty mouth, of course; but in that case you know what awaits you. I only sell a truly necessary product. I’d even say essential, as long as there is fear in the heart of the cockroaches. It’s only business. And speaking of fear, the human race is sinking exactly by lack of fear. Their vogue right now is the deep comprehension of the motivations of human actions. The dotards want to “understand”, mind you… The result: they have learned that, for example, it is no use filling up jailhouses, because prison does not recover anyone. Of course it doesn’t! But does impunity recover it, by any chance? They walk around, like dizzy cockroaches – oops! I meant, dizzy humans - not knowing what to do. And astutely they find a way of reconciling the old desire of drawing back from circulation the detestable thief at the same time that they can praise themselves, saying that they are making a tremendous good deed, they are “reeducating him”. Me, once I’m giving the orders, I already know how I will solve such a problem: immediate death penalty to all the cockroaches who commit a serious crime. This will be a great example to all. We won’t spend money and time with processes, paper, jailhouses and specially food. To small infractions we torture the guy, by keeping him in a morbidly clean place for a few days. To him it will be like death! He will never wish to do wrong ever again. In case he does, then, back to the neatness.”

“Wow! How much finesse!  When you want it, you can be real mean… Maybe it would be better to just kill them all at once…But how would we kill the most perverted criminals anyway, since we don’t have any weapons, teeth or even hands?”

“We would master the rats. They are clever, but dumb. There is a great difference between cleverness and intelligence. All they think about is gnawing and fornicating. Unless they also suffer a mutation like ours. Then we will be damned because they have a bigger brain…and teeth…By the way, I have already oriented our staff to inform me about any radioactive material found on the sewer. We will immediately isolate the area because, with the radiation, anything could happen. If the rats become like us, well, goodbye to our future millennium of glories! It would be them the true substitutes of men in the dominance of Earth.”

“But back to the new restaurant around the corner, you should see the neatness of the kitchen! All sparkling! Not even a little dirt spot capable of…”

“Stop it! Stop it!” – he interrupted her, shouting, tapping, shaking, rudely, kneading and throwing away the toilet paper chocolate-stained. “I can’t take this dirty talk of yours no more, especially now, right at meal time! Do you want to make me throw up?”

“Geez…Did you need to yell like this? You’re disgusted by the cleanliness? Hummm, what a delicate sensibility…You sound just like a little girl…”

“Hey, you watch your tongue” – his antennae vibrated with indignation. He had never beaten his wife, but he was about to.

“You’re getting the poets’ nervous fits, from reading too many human books, turning into an ivory tower sensitive. Watch out, huh…I know one that has turned over his hand…”

“What books would you like me to read, you stupid ass? Have cockroaches got editors and graphical industries? Now we are smart, of course – so much that the humans don’t even suspect, because we know how to disguise it. But we have to, for the time being, draw the available culture, until we can elaborate our own, which will be, of course, way superior than the human one.”

“I only said that to upset you…Because you were rude to me.” With her two specially gracious big antennae she stroke Glutof’s antennae, smoothing it, at the same time she emitted pheromones that turned him on. But he soon controlled his impulse because he found it dangerous to have sex right after large meals.

“Sweetie…”, she asked, with tenderness, “why do you read so much? Don’t you think your exaggerate? It can damage your sight… And we still haven’t got oculists among us. Speaking of it, I think you would look super cool wearing turtle glasses. A more intellectual look would just be impossible. Aw, you’re my molded bread, my putrid apple pie. There are many husky scampies around that envy me; you think I don’t notice it?”

“I read because in case of a global cataclysm I want to be prepared to organize our species toward the new millennium. We, cockroaches, will not repeat the same mistakes that the humans made.”

“What mistakes, my darling? Excuse me, but with or without mistakes, they are on top…They are millenniums ahead of us. Our genetic mutation - thanks to the praised radioactive dirt that they throw around – is too recent. The humans still squash us anyway. Or they poison us with those mortal squirts. I almost died the other day, didn’t I tell you? You are close to almost being taking to a ghost right now. I think I even have sequels. I haven’t been the same you know; I have a weird sensation in my womb…The housewife, despicable and promiscuous – probably recently coming back from a party -  because she had huge shadows around the eyes – had just turned on the light and then she saw me there, dizzy because of the brightness; she run and got a tube of insecticide. The cruel woman didn’t want to dirty her rich shoe sole. At this moment I fired in circles, until I remembered that it would be better to scape under the door that opens to the backyard. Meanwhile, the assassin beast, panting, whirling, afraid that I would climb on her, tapped a warrior dance, trying to squirt the insecticide towards me. Fortunately, it barely hit me, but still, just with the fog, I instantly felt a terrible colic. I think I had an abortion…It came out all mixed up. They don’t make mistakes, my dearest one. The world is theirs, no matter what we do…I still regret not climbing up her legs, up to their end. I would give a little bite with care right there. I assure you that the vagabond would pass out from dread.”

“When I talk about mistaking, Kiti, I’m referring to the human behavior towards their own species. They will eliminate their own race, be it through bombing, pollution, or urban criminality. We do not need to interfere. All we need to do is waiting. In Algeria, some fanatic guys – who won an election but did not assume the post - are beheading hundreds of people in remote villages. These victims - including children - just have nothing to do with the political illegality. They also raped young women because no one is made of iron. And they kill with axes. Our Algerian cousins are the ones who regale with these devil humans.”

“Regarding us”, Glutof continued, because he felt specially inspired, “and also the rats, for example – these resistant rabbles, clever but short sighted, that also attack us when esurient -  they, the humans, are really efficient…Well, partly efficient, because I have heard that in the Pentagon building there once was a plague of thousands of American cockroaches, right there, at their nose, the ones that are absolute computer warriors. Yes, humans know how to kill, but, fortunately for us, they hate each other. They love each other during small intervals in life; but, once vexed, they turn this love into hate. One disagrees and is instantly screwed. A father hates his son and vice-versa. Amazing, isn’t it?”

“Excuse me, but I don’t find quite same…”, Kiti felt a subtle pleasure every time she found a flaw in Glutof’s arguments, “Some human beings are not aggressive, even with us. Last week, me and about fifty friends were down at the sewer’s roof, talking, gossiping, when a worker, from the public system, went down there through a little ladder. Seeing us, away from his head just a few centimeters, he shouted over to his colleagues, who were just above, at the surface: “It’s clear, guys! No danger!” And then he started working on the tubing, without causing us any damage whatsoever. A saint, an exception. I was shaken… I almost flew to his lips to give him a kiss… Really, human beings can be astonishing… They are not always evil.”

Glutof smiled, with a superior air, amazed by his partner’s innocence. “So the pretty girl thought that the man spared you because he liked you? None of that, my darling. He let you live because the fact that there are cockroaches down in the wastepipe means that there are no toxic gases around. It is when there are none that there lies the danger. If there are cockroaches, they can work with no further habdabs. They only spare us when we’re useful, get it?”

“Dear God! They do not point unknotted.” Disconcerted, Kiti scratched her right armpit, as she always did, when she felt ridiculed. “How you know it all, sweetie… Why don’t you, with all this knowledge, organize a mass attack against humans? They are frightful. They eat a lot and have a tame life. I have seen a big man jump like a monkey, panicky, just because there were two cockroaches in his shirt, which he dressed in the dark. Or just because an innocent little colleague of ours flied and casually entered into an old man’s mouth. He was practicing respiratory exercises, making a profound movement of inspiration. It was indeed the death kiss. The poor little one was spilled as if she was a disgusting thing and…crumbled! The scariest of all is that the old man then went off to prey!”

“I know that humans are craven, but they have death’s technology. In a war, we would be defeated. We would only win a few initial skirmishes, by giving them a few shocks. Flying, for example, in their eyes, or into their mouths, or hiding ourselves in the underwear of a few big shots, vibrating our wings near their testicles. But that would be all…Scares, little things. At most a few heart attacks, because these big shots, full of power, pizza, lasagna and filet mignon won’t go too far anyway, they have tubes – what is the name of it, again? Oh yes, arteries! – full of fat, just as much. Nature has been a stepmother. We do not even have stingers. If a mutation towards this was possible….But they occur with no control whatsoever. Now we have intelligence, but you have noticed that not all of us possess that. We are really far from being able to manipulate genetic engineering. Without hands, little beings that we are, what could we do for now? Just thinking and organizing ourselves. And waiting for them to kill each other, which is almost certain that will come. For those who love action, we have IRA, ETA, the Middle East. They will never, I hope so, come to an agreement of living together because the greed for lands and power does not allow it. Peace does not interest them, actually. All those terrorists warlords will never conform in returning to their quiet life, with no shine, tedious, earning little, in factories, offices or departments. What, exchanging an exciting life, full of ideological charm, easy money, for crafts such as postman, cooker, shopkeeper, marketer, etc? No way! That would be a demoralization!”

“But, my darling, some of them even explode with their bombs…They sound real idealistic.”

“Right, right…but only the gaby ones…The big ones, the intellectuals, the bosses, they never do that. Terror warrior explodes; big boss does not explode. Never! After all, “the cause” needs its powerful brains. Correct? On the other side, what did the opposite flank, which has been spread throughout the world, imagine? That they would retake their old land, hundreds of years later, expelling the locals in turbans, occupying, without any kind of reaction? I don’t know, they are the humans, so I let the agreement to them, I have nothing to do with it. Maybe they will never come to an agreement, actually! I, at least, wish for that. Besides that, we must never forget the sacrosanct AIDS, the nectar of the Gods! It is a plague that, I hope, will make a large mop-up because we are immune against it. And the drugs, then, our revengeful allied, that once caught is impossible to get rid of! Being weak as they are - and they know they are - the human clowns still try them, only to check out and in the end verify that it was just like how they said. Maybe they do it to roguishly be in the position of victims, poor ones, addicts; actually a good idea, because then everyone cockers them. An addict doesn’t need to go to work, nor study, nor do anything at all. He only needs to remain an addict. A stroke of genius! Speaking of it, I have had an involuntary binge because, when the police arrives, the first thing which a drug dealer remembers is to flush all the white powder down the toilet. Without the minimum concern with our health, for we live down on the sewer. I saw that light powder floating and I soon thought it was sugar. I sucked all of it. When I realized it I was jumping all over the walls and challenging big rats to arm wrestling.”

“Let us not forget” – Glutof continued – “the wonderful hospital infection, one of the few segments in which we can personally collaborate to the success of our cause. We are organizing courses of orientation on how to suck the infected tissue and then nibble the internees’ food. Especially the children’s, because it is much better to kill the enemy at its root. While the maids keep on pretending they mop the hospital floors and their bosses pretend that they supervise it – because in fact they are afraid of the cleaners, or afraid of sounding “authoritarian” – things will go wonderfully. But, back to what I was saying before, we, cockroaches, need, above all, to varnish our recent intelligence. Have I told you about what happened to Horace?”

“I don’t think so…You talk so much, darling, that I get giddy sometimes…”

“Well, that is normal on you anyway, actually…Horace is a cockroach as well, he was a friend of mine. He has been one of the first mutants. But, instead of dissembling it and pretending to be stupid, he yielded to the temptation of exhibition. And it ended up really bad, of course. One night, he embarked on a journey through long wastepipe he didn’t know – ah! The illusory appeal of the unknown – a real long, long one and he ended up in the drain of a solitary cell. When the prisoner saw him, he had an idea: “I’m going to gait this cockroach. Otherwise, I will go insane. I still have three years in.”

Glutof continued: “This prisoner had murdered his wife, imagining that she had betrayed him – and he was right – but then he thought that he had committed a mistake – which he hadn’t – but then it was too late anyway. The sorrow he felt at the jail was in doubled, for he was regretful. So, he patiently – he had once been a dog trainer – taught Horace to write famous quotes from great retards, that is, human thinkers. Horace would dampen his little leg on the ink-pot and then he would write a deep thought. Sometimes he would mix the source, but who would check it? The fact that a cockroach could write was a phenomenon for itself.”

“How could this Horace demote himself so much? Human philosophers! It gives me nausea!”

“For interest, naturally. Horace soon learned to write the trite phrases, but he would dissemble his speed at learning because each time he would write a certain philosophical thought he would get a candy. Being gluttonous as he was, he stretched his process as long as he could, pretending to be assimilating it all very slowly. He could not show his geniality at being a mutant cockroach. If he would write it all down at once, he would only eat one single time. And so six months passed. Then, since there was yet a long time for the “reeducating” to be released – another of the human stupidities, for in prisons no one alters for better, only for worse – he taught Horace to dance upright, on his back feet, imitating Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain…”

“Wow, that is certainly extraordinary…”

“And that is not all! He also taught Horace something else really astonishing: dancing can-can, just like those French dancers, with vigorous leg kicks, kicks that many times brought Horace down to the floor. After all, our short little legs were not made for Folies Bergère. If nature has given us six legs, how to cope with just two? And yet, Horace, extremely vain and inebriated with prima-donna, would turn his back to the invisible audience and tremble his little wings and cram his backside, just like those ballerinas that pulled up their dresses and showed their butt. I think the prisoner even thought that Horace was a female. And, finished the exhibition, Horace would take bows, sending kisses to the audience and screaming with a feminine voice, almost inaudible: “Je vous aime! Je vous aime!” I think that, with a few more rehearsals, Horace would be able to have his sex changed.”

“Darling, I’m sorry to interrupt you. I was concerned with the time…Don’t you think we should be going home right now? Soon the rats will awaken…Tell me right away how your friend’s story ends, please.”

“Well, when the penalty ended, the prisoner left the jailhouse, taking Horace on the pocket of his suit, inside a little box…He wanted to look out for a manager. He was hoping to become very wealthy because never, in the history of business show, there had been a similar spectacle. He would win rivers of money, he thought to himself…But, unfortunately, the thing just didn’t quite work…”

“I know it, I know it!”, Kiti anticipated herself, euphoric, clapping her hands. “The manager fooled Horace!”

“No! Damn it! How lousy your mind is! What a nasty type of joy! No, but it was in fact something much worse that happened…There had been a long time since the ex-prisoner last drank a good beer, an ice cold and good one. In the prison all he could get was a “Crazy Mary”, worthy of its name because in its composing there was even varnish. So, he headed to a bar with the goal of regaling with a “blondie”. But he ended up drinking four or five glasses. And he simply could not refrain from showing off a little bit. He took the little box from his pocket, told Horace to come out and put him on the counter. He was about to tell him to dance and sizzle some excerpts from the song La Vie en Rose. He then called the barman and proud, half drunk, pointed to Horace with a finger, while saying “See that?” But the barman, annoyed, as soon as he saw that husky cockroach on the counter, crushed it with a rackety slap. And so, stupidly, died a great artist…When us, from the Committee, heard about the case, we transmitted an instruction forbidding, until second order, intelligence demonstrations of any type in the presence of humans.”

“What a sad, sad story…a martyr! How did the ex-prisoner react?” Kiti wanted to know.

“He jumped  over the counter at the same time and strangled the barman, crying and guffawing at the same time, like a madman. It was the fastest case of criminal relapse in the history of Criminology. Criminologists, not having knowledge of our mutation, spent liters of ink dissertating about this case, getting to the point of suggesting possible passional and Freudian attachments between man and cockroach, this one symbolizing the man’s mother. All of this mental disequilibrium a consequence of the brutal isolation of the prison regime. These criminologists even made analogies with a guy named Kafka, a nut who wrote drivels about a man that went to bed as a human and woke up as a cockroach. As if such an abrupt amelioration was possible. No one believed the defendant story that the cockroach danced can-can and sang in French.”

“If we come to dominate the Earth, you should, as a way of paying tribute to this great hero, institute a “Horace Prize”, equivalent to the human Oscars. Even I would love to compete on it…I love the stage, any type of stage…”

“It is not your case, but actors – all of them – can’t help but having a real bad character. How could it be possible to spend one’s whole life pretending to feel something that is not actually felt, without having a screw missing, at least in the character.

“Well, I am starting to get real dizzy. You are so profound that after about ten minutes listening to you, a great somnolence engulfs me…I’m going to sleep just a bit and afterwards watch the television news to update myself.”

“Watch out, don’t believe too much on the news! The press is also our big ally; unconsciously, of course. Once they constantly need to increase their selling to humiliate the rivals, they either investigate or manufacture scandals. Whatever provides them headlines. The congressmen and senators, for being numerous, are the most aimed by the press. With that, people come to wish for a “strong man” who, as soon as he takes ownership, can provide a nuclear or bacteriological power reinforcement - something that increases our chances of one day dominating the Earth. Viva ! then to the power of the press! Have you ever noticed that…” and he stopped, for he heard Kiti snoring, gently.

He felt sorry for her. She seemed so foolish and helpless…He gently waked her. The time for going home had passed already.

Entwined, they slowly walked towards the hole down the sink of the house in which they lived. They did not notice that two big rats, esurient and with evil eyes, were coming right behind them, at their tiptoes, already with water in their mouths for the “dates” that they could almost taste in their stomach.

Kiti, lighter and less gluttonous, miraculously escaped the attack, but lost two of her legs, an antennae and a wing. She cried copiously the next day, in mourning, at her husband’s funeral. Or else, at the two little hairy thighs and one wing’s funeral – all that was left from “Glutof, the Rescuer”, the great leader that had already joined history.

But she was pregnant, and soon – very soon, indeed – all those projects of hero, still numb in their eggs, would be born, replacing their father on the heroic creation of a new civilization.

THE END