HIERVE EL AGUA
The morning the gel shortage was declared, he flew into a panic.
“The future, it’s over!” he cried and started smashing the china. She stepped aside. She had never seen him like this. When they lost the child to the heat, it was he who’d upped and moved them to the mountains, he who’d danced the tarantella in his underwear until she had to laugh, had to stay alive. But now she felt strangely poised at the sight of him losing it. It was a bit like having the child back. She worried only when he approached the drums where every day, painstakingly, they distilled their urine. It was a rudimentary system and likely wouldn’t withstand a blow.
“If you stop this right now,” she said, “I’ll show you a waterfall.”
He couldn’t have believed her, of course. The rivers were dry and it hadn’t rained for decades. Still, he stopped. He followed her uphill. They paused only once, to eat and to share a government-distributed gel blob – for all they knew, their last.
At dusk they reached a plateau and the ruins of an old spa. It was crowded because of the spring that gave the place its name: Hierve-el-agua, where the water boils. Like all the springs, it had been covered with stainless steel a long time ago and had died shortly after. Yet it still attracted treasure hunters – men were hacking at it with chainsaws – and mystics – an avid group sat around a preacher.
She guided him through the pools. Where once they had brimmed with crystalline water – a turquoise colour like the pictures of the Caribbean now many claimed were a hoax – now they were covered in tents and locked sheds where the loiterers kept their distilling drums.
Reaching the edge, they looked across the valley and saw it.
“Nothing but minerals,” he said after a while, “a water fossil. So beautiful.” Her heart sank. She feared he’d choose to dry up there, with that view, rather than go back home with her.
He stood up. He stretched. He said, “I can see it again, now.”
“The water?”
“The future.” Born in 1983, Laia Jufresa grew up in the cloud forest of Veracruz in Mexico, and spent her adolescence in Paris. In 2001, she moved to Mexico City. She is the author of the short stories collection El esquinista (FETA, 2014) and the novel Umami (Literatura Random House, 2015).