Amado Nervo - "The Last War" (~1906)

TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION

Amado Nervo was born on August 27, 1870 in Tepic, Nayarit, Mexico. After attending the Colegio San Luis Gonzaga, he moved to Mexico City in 1894 where he worked for the magazine "Azul". Over the next several years he worked as a journalist for several publications and was a co-founder of the magazine "La Revista Moderna", "Azul"'s successor.

Nervo lived in Paris between 1900 and 1904, and upon returning to Mexico was appointed to a diplomatic post in Spain which he held until 1918, when he accepted a diplomatic post to Uruguay. His health rapidly declined and he died on May 24th, 1919.

Nervo was one of the most important Mexican literary figures of the late 19th and early 20th century. Many of these stories are science fiction adjacent, and despite his national importance, few have been translated into English. One exception of note to science fiction is "The Soul Giver", translated in 1999 by Michael F. Capobianco and Gloria Shaffer Melendez, which appears to be out of print and difficult to find.

"The Last War" was written somewhere between 1898 and 1906. In Rachel Haywood Ferreira's 2011 "The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction", she states that Molina-Gavilán place it at 1898, but was first published in the 1906 anthology "Almas que pasan" ("Souls that pass"), and Ferreira notes she cannot locate an earlier version.

For further discussion of Nervo's works, including a full bibliography of science fiction adjacent titles, see Ferreira's excellent book.

- Chrononauts translation office, 03/01/2021

THE LAST WAR

I

Three were the great revolutions which were so well-known: what we could call the Christian Revolution, which in such a fashion, had modified society and life throughout the entire planet; the French Revolution, which, eminently justified, came, by way of the guillotine, to equate rights with heads, and the Socialist Revolution, the most recent of them all, although it could be traced back to the year two thousand thirty of the Christian Era. It would be pointless to dwell on the horror and the unanimity of this latest revolution, which shook the earth to its foundations, and which in such a radical way reformed ideas, circumstances, customs, splitting time in two, so that from now on it could no longer be said but: Before the Social Revolution; After the Social Revolution. We will only note that even the very physiognomy of the species, thanks to this great shock, had been modified in a certain way. To speak of, in fact, the time before the Revolution there were, especially in the final years which had preceded it, certain very visible signs that physically distinguished the so-called privileged classes from the proletarians, namely: the hands of the individuals of the former, especially those of the women, had sharp, long fingers of a delicacy superior to a petal of jasmine, while the hands of the proletarians, apart from their remarkable roughness or the exaggerated thickness of their fingers, usually had six of these on the right hand, the sixth can be found (a bit rudimentary, to tell the truth, and formed rather by a semi-articulated callus) between the thumb and forefinger, generally. Many other marks betrayed, what we can call, the differences between the classes, and we would very much fear fatiguing the patience of the listener by enumerating them. We'll only say that the drivers guilds, operators of vehicles and locomobiles of any kind, such as aeroplanes, aeroships, aerocycles, automobiles, magnetic expresses, direct transetheralunars, etc., whose characteristic of work was a perpetual immobility of the legs, which had come to an absolute atrophy, to the extent that, when finished with their shift, they had directed themselves to their homes in special small electric cars, using them for any personal transfer. The Social Revolution came, however, to change the human condition in such a way that all these characteristics gradually disappeared over the centuries, and in the year three thousand five hundred two of the New Era (or, five thousand five hundred thirty-two of the Christian Era) there was not a trace of such painful inequality among the members of humanity.

The Social Revolution matured, there was not a single schoolchild who was not aware of it, being several centuries antecedent. In reality, the French Revolution had prepared us for it, it was the second link in the chain of progress and freedom that began with the Christian Revolution; but it wasn't until the 19th century of the old Era when the definition of the unanimous movement of men towards equality began. In the year 1950 of the Christian Era the last king died, a king from the Far East, seen as a outright curiosity by the people of that time. Europe, which, according to the prediction of a great captain (who indeed, is considered today by many historians to have been a mythical character) in the early 20th century (post JC), would become republican or converted Cossack, and in fact, in the year 1916, in the United States of Europe, a federation was created in the image and likeness of the United States of America (whose memory in the annals of humanity has been so brilliant, and in that they so exercised an all-embracing influence in the destinies of the old Continent).

II

But let's not digress: we have already used more than three phonoteleradiograph cylinders to think these reminiscences,[Author's note: The vibrations of the brain, when thinking, were communicated directly to a special recorder, which in turn transmitted them to their destination. Today this device has been completely revamped.] and we have not yet reached the main point of our narration.

As we have said at the beginning, three were the great revolutions that were so well-known; but after them, humanity, accustomed to peace and an immobile stability, both in the scientific fields, where, thanks to the definitiveness of the mastered principles, and in the social fields, where, thanks to the wonderful wisdom of their laws and high morality of their customs, had lost the very notion of vigilance and caution, and despite its very lengthy lessons in blood, did not suspect the terrible events that were about to take place.

The ignorance of the immense plot that had been forged everywhere is explained, like everything else, perfectly, by several reasons: in the first place, the language spoken by animals, a primitive language, but picturesque and beautiful, was known to very few men, and this fact was understood; living beings then had been divided into two unique portions: the men, the upper class, the elite as they could be called, of the planet, all equal in rights and almost, almost in intellectuality, and the animals, an inferior humanity that had been progressing very slowly, traversing through the millennia, but one that had found itself at that time, for this can be seen in the mammals, above all, in certain conditions of a very appreciable relative perfectibility. Now, very well: the elite, the man, would have judged it unbecoming of his dignity to learn any of the so-called inferior animal dialects.

In the second place, the separation between the two portions of humanity was complete, because even when each family of men had accommodated two or three animals who executed all the labor in their own habitations, even the most difficult, such as the kitchen (chemical preparation of pills and juices for injections), cleaning the house, cultivating the land, etc., it wasn't common to deal with them, except by giving them orders in the patrician language, that is, that of man, which all of them had learned.

In the third place, the sweetness of the yoke in which they were held subject, the relative slack of their recesses, had given them time to conspire quietly, especially in their meeting centers, on their days of rest, centers which were rare for any man to attend.

III

What were the determining causes of this fourth revolution, the last (I hope) of those that have bloodied the planet? In a general thesis, the same ones that had caused the social revolution, the same ones that had caused, it can be said, all revolutions: old famines, old hereditary hatreds, a tendency towards the equality of privileges and rights, and the aspiration towards greatness, latent in the soul of all beings...

Animals could not complain, certainly: man was paternal to them, much more paternal than the proletariat were to the great gentlemen after the French Revolution. They were forced to perform relatively rough tasks, it is true; and because of it, due to the excellence of their nature, they preferred dedicating themselves to contemplation; but a noble exchange, magnanimous even, rewarded this work with relative comfort and pleasure. However, on the one hand, the atavistic hatred of which we speak had accumulated through so many centuries of poor treatment, and on the other, the longing, perhaps just now, for repose and rule, determined that this struggle was to become an epoch in the annals of the world.

So that those who hear this story can give an account more accurate and more graphic, if that word can be valued, of the events that preceded the revolution, the rebellion, we should say, of animals against man, we'll have you all attend one of those secret assemblies which had been convened to define the mission of the tremendous struggle, an assembly held in Mexico, one of these great directing focal points, and which, fulfilling the prophecy of an wise old man from the nineteenth century named Eliseo Reclus, had been converted, due to its geographical position in the middle of America and between the two great oceans, to the center of the world.  [Translator's note: Eliseo Reclus (1830-1905), French geographer, an anarchist member of the First International, creator of Social Geography.]

In the skirt of the Ajusco, where you arrive at the most remote city districts, there was a gymnasium for mammals in which they met on holidays, and almost next-door to the gymnasium, was a large concert hall, very much frequented by the same. In this hall, with perfect acoustic conditions and considerable amplitude, the assembly in question was held on Sunday, August 3, 5532 (New Era).[Translator's note: Ajusco, a volcano located south of Mexico City]

Equs Robertis presided, a very beautiful horse, certainly; and the first designated speaker was a celebrated propagandist at the time, Can Canis, a dog of remarkable intelligence, though highly impassioned. I should note that all parts of the world were reverberating, as it were, with the speech in question, thanks to the special emitters which recorded all the vibrations, and transmitted them only to those who had corresponding receivers which used certain magnetic currents; these devices have already fallen into disuse now for their impracticality.

When Can Canis stood up to address the audience, the noise of approval was heard everywhere.

IV

"My dear brothers" - began Can Canis:

"The hour of our definitive liberation is near. At our signal, hundreds of thousands of our brothers will rise as a single mass and fall upon the men, upon the tyrants, with flashing speed. Man will disappear from the face of the planet and even his footprints will vanish with him. Then we will be the masters of the earth, or so we will be again, it would be better to say, because first of all we were like no other, at the dawn of the millennia, before the anthropoid appeared in the virgin forests and their howls of terror reverberated in the ancient caves. Ah! we all carry the organic memory in the globules of our blood, if the phrase permits me, of those blessed times when we were the kings of the world. Then, the sun, still matted with flames to the naked eye, enormous and parching, warmed the earth with love in all its surface, from the forests, to the seas, the ravines, and the hills, a mist had been exhaled, thick and warm which invited laziness and bliss. The Divine Sea was still forging and destroying its inconsistent archipelagos, woven of seaweed and madrepores; the distant mountain range was smoking from the thousand mouths of its volcanoes, and at night a fiery region of a vibrant red, lent it a strange and fearful glory. The moon, still young and lush, shaken by the continuous bombardment of its craters, appeared enormous and red in space, and in its mysterious light, the lion saepelius rose formidably from its cavern; the auroch raised its powerful head among the bushes, and the mastodon contemplated the profile of the mountains, which, according to the expression of an Arab poet, deceived him as being the silhouette of a gigantic grandfather. The flying saurians of the early ages, the iguanodonts with short heads and colossal bodies, the slow and clumsy megateriums, felt not their repose disturbed except by the sonorous murmur of the genesis sea, which forged the future of the world in its entrails.

"How happy our parents were in their warm and pious nest in the land of that time, enveloped in the soft emerald hair of its immense vegetation, like a virgin coming out of the bath...! How happy...! To their roars, to their inarticulate cries, only the echoes of the mountains responded... But one day with curiosity they saw the appearance of, among the thousand varieties of quadrumanes that populated the forests and filled them with their unpleasant cries, a species of blond monkeys that, more frequently than the others, straightened themselves out and maintained a vertical position, whose hair was less coarse, whose jaws were less rough, whose movements were smoother, more rhythmic, more undulating, and in whose large, curly eyes burned a strange and enigmatic spark that our parents hadn't seen in any other eyes on earth. Those monkeys were weak and miserable... How easy it would have been for our gigantic grandparents to have exterminated them forever...! And indeed, how many times when the horde slept in the middle of the night, protected by the flickering light of their bonfires, a herd of mastodons, frightened by some cataclysm, broke through a weak fence of fire and passed by, crushing bones and smashing lives; or a mob of felines who stalked the bonfires' extinction, and once their firey guardian had disappeared, had entered the camp and were offered a feast of memorable succulence...! Despite such catastrophes, those quadrumanes multiplied, those fragile little beasts, with mysterious eyes, who knew how to light the fire; and one day, a disastrous day for us, it occurred to a male of the horde, to defend himself, to lay hold of a tree branch, as the gorillas did, and sharpen it with a stone, as the gorillas never dreamed of doing. From that day our destiny was fixed in existence: man had invented the machine, and that pointed stake was his scepter, the king's scepter that had been given to him by nature... Why remember our long millennia of slavery, pain and death...? Man, not content with making the roughest of tasks our destiny, rewarded with us poor treatment, and made many of us his habitual delicacy, condemned us to vivisection and analogous martyrdoms, and hecatombs followed hecatombs without any protest, without any movement of mercy... Nature, however, reserved higher destinies for us than to be eaten in perpetuity by our tyrants. Progress, which is the condition of everything that it animates, did not exempt us from its law; and through the centuries, something divine was in our rudimentary spirits, a luminous germ of intellectuality, of a future humanity, that sometimes glowed sweetly in the eyes of my grandfather the dog, whom a wise man called in the eighteenth century (post J.C.) a candidate for humanity; in the pupils of the horse, elephant or monkey, it had been developing in the most intimate breasts of our being, until, centuries and centuries past, it flourished in unspeakable manifestations of cerebral life... The language emerged monosyllabic, rude, timid, imperfect, from our lips; thought opened up like a celestial flower in our heads, and one day it could be said that the new gods were already on earth; for the second time in the course of history, the Creator uttered a fiat, et homo factus fuit.["and man was created"]

"They did not look upon this gradual emergence of humanity with benevolent eyes; but they had to accept the fait accompli, and not being able to extinguish it, they chose to make use of it... Our slavery continued, then, and has continued in another form: we are no longer eaten, we are treated with apparent kindness and respect, we are sheltered, we are accommodated, we are called to participate, in a word, in all the advantages of social life; but man continues to be our guardian, he scrupulously measures our rights... and he leaves the roughest and most painful parts of all life's labors for us. We are not free, we are not masters, and we want to be masters and free... This is why we met here long ago, that is why we've pondered and planned our emancipation many centuries ago, and that is why very soon, the last revolution on the planet, the cry of rebellion of animals against man, will explode, filling the universe with dread and defining the equality of all mammals that populate the earth..."

Thus spoke Can Canis, and this was, in all probability, the last speech delivered before the dreadful conflagration which we have related.

V

The world, I have said, has already forgotten its history of pain and death; its armaments were rusting away in museums, it had found itself in the bright age of serenity and peace; but that war that lasted ten years like the siege of Troy, that war which had had neither similarity nor parallel because of its frightfulness, that war in which terrible machines were used, which when compared with electric projectiles, gas-filled grenades, radium's frightening effects used in a thousand ways to kill, formidable currents from the air, microbe-injecting darts, telepathic shocks... all the factors of combat, in short, that humanity had used in ancient times, were laughable children's games; this war, we say, constituted an unexpected, new, unspeakable lesson in blood...

The men, despite their cunning, had been caught by surprise throughout all the regions of the world, and the movement of the aggressors was so unanimous, so accurate, so skillful, so formidable, that in no one's spirit was even the possibility of preventing it...

The animals operated machines of all kinds which prepared for the needs of the chosen; chemistry was eminently familiar to them, since they used its secrets on a daily basis: they also owned and guarded all the supply warehouses, they directed and used all the vehicles... imagine, therefore, what that struggle must have been like, which was fought on land, in the sea and in the air... Humanity was on the verge of perishing completely; it was believed its absolute end was certain (we certainly still believe it is)... and at the time that I, one of the few men left in the world, am thinking these lines before the phonoteleradiograph, which I don't know if I will conclude, this incoherent story that perhaps tomorrow will constitute a very useful piece of history... for the humanized of the future, scarcely a few hundred survivors live on the face of the planet, slaves of our destiny, already dispossessed of all that was our prestige, our strength and our glory, and despite the incalculable power of our spirit, our small numbers are incapable of regaining our lost scepter, and are full of a hidden instinct which strongly affirmed the cautious and enigmatic behavior of our victors, that we are all called upon to die, to the last, in a mysterious way, because they feared that proper arbitration of our sovereign mental resources would lead us once again, despite our small number, to the throne from which we have been usurped... It was written thus... The natives of Europe disappeared before the Latin vigor; Latin vigor disappeared before the Saxon vigor, which had ruled the world... and the Saxon vigor disappeared before the Slavic invasion; this, before the yellow invasion, which in turn was overwhelmed by the black invasion, and thus, from race to race, from hegemony to hegemony, from pre-eminence to pre-eminence, from domination to domination, man arrived perfectly and stately in the bounds of history... their mission was to disappear, since they were no longer susceptible, through the absolute of their perfection, to be perfected any further... Who could replace them in the empire of the world? What new and vigorous race could replace them in it? The first humanized animals, whose turn it was on the stage of time... Come, then, congratulations; to us, for having reached the divine serenity of complete and definitive spirit, we have nothing left but to die sweetly. They are human and will be pious in order to kill us. Later, in their turn, perfected and serene, they will die to leave their place to new races that today ferment in the dark bosom of an even lower animality, in the mystery of an active and impenetrable genesis... All this until the old flame of the sun is gently extinguished, until its enormous globe, already dark, revolving around a star in the constellation of Hercules, is fertilized for the first time in space, and new humanities emerge from its immense bosom... so that everything begins again!