Edificio Mayor, Level 10

Translated from the Spanish by Lilit Žekulin Thwaites.

‘Edificio Mayor, Level 10’ was translated for the 2025 Melbourne Writers Festival translation slam. Translators Alice Whitmore and Lilit Žekulin Thwaites translated the same text independently, without consulting each other or the author, and then presented their finished work for the first time at the event for live discussion with Mariana Enríquez, moderated by Gabriel García Ochoa. Alice Whitmore’s translation is available to read in the print issue of HEAT 20.

The light from the disinfection cylinder is beautiful. I go out to look at it every night; staying out on the balcony on Level 10 is banned, but the female guard knows I wouldn’t jump over the edge. Not me, not any one of us who live in Edificio Mayor, the main building. The ban is an anachronism, imposed on the first generation of immunes – although they weren’t ‘jumpers’; they just tried to escape. We know that escape is impossible. Edificio Mayor is one of the most guarded buildings in Sector Sur, and any escape attempt is suppressed in a matter of seconds. I, for instance, don’t even know where the exit is, or if there is one. And I have no idea if the staff sleep on site or have their own accommodation.

Since the guard knows I won’t throw myself off the balcony, she lets me go out there to look at the city. I’m usually on my own, but sometimes, very rarely, a few other immunes come with me. The only one I wait for is NJC. I’d never met him before; we didn’t study together. The first time I saw him, I thought he was a girl, an adolescent, until he spoke. He identifies as a male, and his voice is very deep; I know that doesn’t mean a lot, but it does totally alter your perception of him. He’s very skinny, because he’s already made two significant donations. His hair is thin and sometimes blows over his face when the wind musses it up. He once removed a lock from his mouth, and roared with laughter in a way I’d never heard before, an explosive joy in the silence of Level 10. I laughed too, and then I cried for the first time, surprised at the salty taste of my tears.

NJC returned to the balcony three days later, and we again observed the path of the disinfection cylinder. It spins quickly and changes size as it traverses narrow streets, avenues or the freeway. It adjusts. The light it emits, combined with the disinfectant it sprays, kills the virus, which, as we all know, lives in the air – or at least remains suspended there for so many hours that you could almost say that’s its habitat. A blue neon light initially forces you to close your eyes; the light pierces the transparent buildings and the city shimmers as if it were made of stars. Then, in its second phase, the blue darkens, and it’s as if black birds were flying down to touch the buildings and the cars that never stop circulating. Walking outside the buildings is prohibited; so is visiting each other, which is why the walls are transparent. And the light is so beautiful when it turns violet and combines with the thousands of screens and the illuminated people and the red harvest moon – that’s what my doctor calls it. She’s a survivor of the first virus and remembers the tales of her great-grandparents who lived through Year 0. They believed things would go back to normal, my doctor says. She doesn’t know what they meant by ‘normal’, nobody remembers. Movies, audiovisual material and books were destroyed because they say nostalgia for a different world leads to rebellions. There are myths about open parks and faces without masks. They make me laugh. NJC says it’s true, that years ago, masks weren’t worn outdoors because the air didn’t carry viruses. But NJC is feeling frail, and when we immunes become frail we tend to imagine lost paradises.

The blue lights of the disinfection cylinder are followed by the red lights: the hunters. They are used to trap the sueltos, those on the loose, especially the protesters, who want to liberate us, who believe that our fate is unjust. They hold secret meetings, we are told; they design outfits to evade the hunters. The virus attacks vital organs, and transplants are the only solution, the only cure; and we immunes are the donors. We immunes are very small in number and very valuable. Everything else can be cloned, of course – food, animals, people – but they can’t clone us or our organs. The researchers don’t know why, and they work tirelessly to be able to achieve this, but with no results so far.

The protesters believe that this inability to clone us is a matter of divine intervention, a miracle, and that it’s our right to live in the world: there’s no reason why we should have to supply organs for the immense majority that falls ill. Sometimes, the protesters hack the systems; five years ago, a group tried to get into Edificio Four. I wonder when we’ll stop being needed. Every day, new announcements are made about the possibility of relocating to another atmosphere on another planet, but despite the optimistic tone of the reports, you can see in the eyes of the Diffusers, the Broadcasters, that if it’s ever achieved, it won’t be as quickly as they thought. There’s not much time left, we know that, and not just because of the virus. Our guard doesn’t talk to us a lot, but she once told us that a select group, which included her husband, would be in the first fleet. I asked the guard if she was rich, because I understood that the Leaders would be the first to go in search of another atmosphere. She became nervous and said ‘No’, that her husband had been working for one of the Leaders for a long time, when California still existed, and he had, in fact, been evacuated from California during the final fire. I don’t know where California is, I could find out, but maps don’t interest me. The name of the place is beautiful. California. It’s the loveliest name among the lost territories. Some of them have the weirdest names: like Buenos Aires, ‘good airs’, which is almost ironic; or Finland – Earth has a final place?; or Vietnam, which sometimes appears on the labels of clothing, although there are no textile workshops anymore.

NJC says they’ve been talking about migrating humans to another planet for decades; I have no idea where he gets this information from. In any event, he can say what he wants. We immunes are the only ones who are forgiven everything, and we’re neither sanctioned nor supressed. We can talk and write about the craziest issues, any taboo. They need us.

There are virtually no active protesters left. Just the same, the red rays sweep the streets every night, detecting uncontrolled physical movement. The red lights are as beautiful as the cylinder, but much more hair-raising. They get into corners, illuminate moving shadows, slide like drops down a wet wall. At times, the city seems to be on fire, at others, to dance.

If they find someone wandering, that person is suspected of being a protester. One night, on the balcony, NJC told me that they’re just people who break the rules, that the real protesters have already been eliminated, that the hunt is just an excuse. Why do they want to go out? I asked him. Not everyone is happy with a life of confinement and transparency and screens and transplants, he told me. You can’t actually see people in their houses, just the movement of their bodies, but it’s impossible for me to capture any non-conformity from the Edificio. And I don’t understand why being isolated with a screen isn’t seen as desirable, if that’s the norm.

One hot night, NJC and I, together, were lucky to see how the lights trapped a wandering body. NJC, excited, took my hand and we watched the strange dance of the red light with the body. It found it. It encircled it. It seemed to size it up, touch its shoulders, then its back. The body barely resisted. The red light lifted it up in the air, and once it was far enough away from the buildings, even higher than our Level 10 balcony, it made it explode. The red light doesn’t cut or separate body parts; I don’t know how it does it, but the bodies are turned into a pulp that floats for a few seconds, and then falls. This particular body wasn’t shouting, but it was saying something, very calmly.

They could kill in other ways, without this shower of blood and entrails, NJC explained to me, but it would be less spectacular. It wouldn’t serve as a lesson. We watched how the blood mixed with the rain. All the lights were on in the other buildings. All eyes were on the body, now scarcely human remains, as red as the moon. That night, NJC made me promise that, at our next get-together, I would describe in detail where the cylinder was wandering, what play of lights it was making, if the red rays found any rebel, if the moon continued to be blood-red and enormous. I understood that he was asking me to do this because his next donation was approaching, and I was overjoyed because I realised that he was only going to surrender his corneas, so we still had time. There would still be nights together on the balcony for us, breathing in the poisoned air that can’t kill us.

Lilit Žekulin Thwaites is an award-winning Australian literary translator (Spanish to English), and Adjunct Professor (contemporary Spanish literature) at La Trobe University and current President of The Australian Association for Literary Translation (AALITRA). Her book-length translations include Crossing Waters (Luisa Etxenike), the bestselling The Librarian of Auschwitz (Antonio Iturbe), Australian Connection (multiple authors), and Rosa Montero’s futuristic Tears in Rain, and Weight of the Heart.