A Bloody Ritual

It’s three o’clock in the morning and I’m wide awake. Outside, a tropical thunderstorm pierces the night’s dark quietude with intense flashes of lightning and booming drumrolls of thunder. Because of the storm, the electricity’s gone out and the fan that usually propels me back to sleep is suddenly and helplessly dead in the corner of the room.

It’s not the heat that bothers me this morning, though. No, it’s the cult of seemingly invisible mosquitoes swarming around my head that prevents my sweet repose once again; mosquitoes that, under normal circumstances, would be expeditiously exorcised by the fan’s firm and reassuring breeze.

The only sensible evidence of the disease-carriers’ despicable presence is a soft low buzzing next to my ear, eerily reminiscent to the sound of a dentist’s drill. Making matters even worse, I can neither see nor feel the pests until it’s too late to object and they’ve sucked my life right out of me, like so many tiny demons drawing the blood from a helpless sacrifice. They fly an evil and complicated dance around my head for what seems like hours as I, with body hastily covered by the protection of my light cotton sheets, frantically pray for them to go away. Occasionally, I madly but vainly protest their diabolical ritual with a wild and desperate flailing of arms.

Under these hallowing circumstances and in the daze of half-sleep, I ponder the import of an eternally significant, yet so often neglected, question: why don’t Paraguayans use screens in their windows?