Excerpted from the novel Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva, out on February 4th, 2025 from Astra House, and published in the UK by Serpent’s Tail.
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Upon arriving in the Santa Rosa Financial District, Dengue Girl was overwhelmed by the monumentally tall skyscrapers, and all the frenetic office workers to-ing and fro-ing, going nowhere. Of course, during her brief, childish life, Dengue Girl had known little more than the corrugated iron shack she lived in with her mother, and the precarious hollow brick building of the school she attended daily. Up until that moment, the maelstrom of the big city, with all its bright lights, lavish luxury hotels, and enormous buildings, had been sealed off to her. She thought about how humiliated her mother must feel, having to compare her shabby hut with the opulence of this rich city.
Then she remembered why she had come.
She took flight and landed right at the door of the imposing and emblematic building of the La Pampa Stock Exchange, a tower of infinite glass with a screen at the top, displaying the stock indexes of the most respected and highly listed corporations in the Argentinian plains. Her mother worked at this prestigious financial institution during the week, cleaning the shit and piss of office workers and brokers who were so lost in the numerical speculation of stocks and shares that they barely registered her miserable existence.
Soaring above the lobby of this huge tower, covered from floor to ceiling in screens that showed endless, cascading torrents of digits and percentages, Dengue Girl gazed down at the frantic brokers her mother had described. These besuited, highly presentable men never took their eyes off the screens that wallpapered the room, running around like lunatics, here and there, in every direction, randomly and aimlessly, like gas particles in chaotic expansion or cows bumping into each other on their way into the slaughterhouse. But the strangest thing of all, she thought, were their faces: as they contemplated the unhinged spectacle of the torrent of numbers, which might as well have been Greek for all Dengue Girl knew, the brokers’ faces dilated and contracted, as if a system of nodes were transmitting electricity into their muscles in sync with the furious rhythm of the constantly changing listings, transforming into indecipherable expressions so grotesque that Dengue Girl could not even tell if they conveyed terror or joy, as if they were sinking in a swampy mire of intense horror and frenzy, with a violence that evoked the cruel guffaws of her classmates jeering at her in the school cafeteria.
“Hey, Dengue Boy, does your mom know how to sew?” one of them used to ask him (back when she was a boy), looking knowingly at the ten or twelve other kids huddled together at the table as he sat down to eat his insipid plate of stew. It’s worth explaining that, because of Dengue Boy’s (as he was known back then) horrendously disproportionate torso and the wings that erupted from it like spewing vomit, he could never find a blazer to fit his peculiar anatomy, meaning the only way of complying with the school uniform rules was to go to a bespoke tailor. But this service (needless to say) was so expensive that his mother could only afford a single blazer each year, which the poor wretch paid off in suffocating installments over many months, the result being that the blazer, specially designed for his repulsive physiognomy, was, invariably, the only outfit he (when she was still a he) wore from Monday to Friday, at which point he would hand it, neatly folded, to his mother, who would wash, perfume, and iron it. Yet, although both the boy (as he was back then) and his mother looked after the uniform as if it were the most cherished possession they owned, inevitably, as the months passed, the blazer’s fibers would begin to show signs of wear and tear. And, whether it was the time of year (this was November, just before the events now being narrated), or whether it was because he had just come out of gym class, or perhaps the strange angle at which the dull white light from the lamps in the cafeteria struck his body, on that day Dengue Boy’s blazer was looking particularly haggard and threadbare. The yellowing fabric was spotted with stains that covered a wide palette of brown and green, but it was on the sleeves and pockets that the signs of wear and tear were particularly notable and difficult to conceal, resembling spiderwebs with little balls sticking out from them, the result of too much rubbing with soap or detergent. But the most egregious thing (after all, up to this point, it resembled all of the other miserable brats’ blazers) was the holes: it was as if there was an oil field on his back, upon which an army of machines had left not a single well unperforated, or as if, in an industrial act of vengeance on behalf of their entire species, a squadron of hungry moths, hungrier than the children eating their stew, had ravaged every last fiber of the delicious uniform, turning the poor boy’s clothes into a filthy, gnarled rag.
This was why, at that precise moment, all eyes in the school cafeteria had been drawn toward the insect’s bedraggled aspect.
“Hey, Dengue Boy, can your mom sew or not?” this rascal asked again, giggling, in response to the boy’s (she was still a boy back then) pained silence as he sucked up the insipid stew. Tears streamed down his face as he contemplated the threads that hung from his grubby, shit-colored sleeves and the missing buttons, and he mulled over a retort that was never uttered out loud, because just as something was about to leave his mouth, a comeback or perhaps an excuse, the other boy quickly interrupted him with a well-planned pun:
“It’s obvious your mommy’s not much of a seamstress . . . but she sure is a mistress, like when she went with that massive fly who rammed her up her asshole and made you, filthy, nasty, raggedy bug boy!”
The next moment, like a fire stoked by a jet of kerosene, the entire cafeteria burst out laughing, hahaha, hahaha, hahaha, a rhythmical racket that sounded like a thunderstorm, submerging Dengue Girl into a nightmarish fog of howls and animalistic hurt and idiocy, a supreme fog, yes, in which the arithmetic of all that laughter blended into one great, indistinct bellow stretching across space and time, collapsing Dengue Girl’s perception, and suddenly she was no longer in the dimly lit, foul-smelling basement of her school in Victorica, but rather in the great lobby of the La Pampa Stock Exchange, where suit-wearing brokers shouted loudly and raucously about the huge rise in shares on an unforgettable, record-breaking day.
“Paraguayan encephalitis, ascending, ascending, ascending!”
“Going up like a diver’s fart!”
Then one of them, looking excitedly at the new indexes, shoved some sort of fork doused in benereoTT into his nostrils, as he panted heavily and screamed:
“Long live the temporary immunity of drugs!”
“Long live the great La Pampa Stock Exchange.”
Dengue Girl did not know that these brokers were, indeed, celebrating the fact that the value of Paraguayan encephalitis shares were rocketing to record, unsurpassed highs, for just minutes ago it had been revealed that this infectious agent, recently originated in Paraguay, had just emerged in Angola, as well as, to a lesser extent, Zimbabwe and Gabon, and as a result those African countries would find themselves urgently needing to buy vaccines, medications, and other raw materials and services associated with the disease.
Dengue Girl, still soaring above it all, making sense of the confusing reality that these people were celebrating a disease, directed her ommatidia toward the enormous hall in which the brokers were shouting and laughing uproariously. These speculators had crowded together in the lobby to whoop and jump for joy as they watched the Paraguayan encephalitis shares rocketing sky-high, cloud-high,higher still.
“One hundred and thirty-six?”
“Two hundred?”
“Three hundred and twenty-six points, gentlemen! Three hundred and twenty-six!”
This was something completely unprecedented, a 326% increase in the value of these stocks in the space of a few seconds. The noise was overwhelming, with more and more people appearing in the hall to celebrate this rapid hike in the share price. The terrified Dengue Girl was counting the number of brokers in the lobby, staring at the screens, one two three, four five six, seven eight nine, ten eleven twelve, thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen, seventeen eighteen nineteen, twenty twenty-one, twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four twenty-five, twenty-six twenty-seven twenty-eight, twenty-nine thirty thirty-one, thirty-two thirty-three thirty-four, thirty-five thirty-six thirty-seven, thirty-eight thirty-nine, forty, forty-one forty-two, forty-three forty-four, forty-five forty-six, forty-seven forty-eight, forty-nine forty, forty . . . At fifty she shuddered and lost count, since not only had Dengue Girl never learned to count past fifty at school, she had also never in her whole life seen so many people in one place—only the fifteen to twenty ruffians crowded around her in the school cafeteria. She felt an awful sense of panic, which was soon mixed with a vengeful rage born out of an uncontainable urge, or loathing. These exultant men, so elegantly dressed, without so much as a stain or a blemish on their impeccable shirts and bags, were the same ones who mistreated her old lady every day and who, despite earning obscene sums of money, well into the millions, paid her a rate that barely covered the single measly blazer he (back when she was a boy) had to wear all year round, no matter how worn it got.
Dengue Girl, yes, girl, felt a strange fever sprouting from her bi-colored legs and running up her green abdomen toward her thick, hairy antennae, and suddenly she was no longer in control of herself. Before her sharpened beak, the overjoyed brokers of the Exchange become nothing more than succulent chunks of flesh, delicious mouthfuls of bloody meat. She proceeded to graze on the brokers. One of them was a man with a nauseating smile and face who used to fondle her mother in the bathroom, so she bit his balls; another one had a haughty, arrogant way of walking and a face that watched her mother cleaning the toilet with smug, demeaning contempt, so she bit his ass; another one had a mean, arrogant smirk and eyes that made her feel invisible, blathering on the phone and tossing trash on the floor as she swept up around him, so she bit his pupils; another one had whispered “filthy Indian mutant” to her mother as she walked past him in the corridor, so she bit his tongue. And so on, patiently, biting their balls, asses, pricks, eyes, tongues, ears, biting hundreds of them, thousands, hundreds of thousands? She was so completely absorbed in her rage that she soon lost count. Revenge, when it burns like fire, is incalculable, she told herself, or perhaps calculable but uncountable, she pondered further, with a surprising level of philosophical astuteness, while the brokers, still absorbed in their febrile toasts, had yet to notice the bites, imperceptible as they were at this early stage.
But it wasn’t long before the effects were felt.
Suddenly, the cries of celebration and joy in the Exchange lobby became howls of blood and death, and the few who were not already succumbing to the dreadful epilepsy stampeded toward the exit, bones and skulls crunching beneath their feet as they fled.
Within a few minutes, a trail of victims was spread out across the crammed lobby of the La Pampa Stock Exchange, bodies clad in expensive suits piled up like trash and contorted in convulsive gestures which, like some bestial dance, almost appeared to be moving in time with the numbers still being fired off by the screens, colored green or red depending on the constant movement of the listings going up and down or down and up or down and down and down in spiral form, in cascade, precipice vertex right angle lightning bolt:
Thud!
And that’s how the great La Pampa Stock Exchange crash of ’72 began!
Because of a mosquito!
A deadly, female mosquito!
A monstruous, filthy insect which introduced an unknown, sinister, and highly contagious mutation of the dengue virus, sowing terror and panic in the markets of one of the most flourishing capitalist paradises anywhere on Earth or in its orbit!