My cousins earnestly adopted all the hygienic measures their mother imposed. So did I, becoming a stranger to myself. Before, when I saw a spider or Jerusalem cricket in the playground at school, my reaction had always been calm and unconcerned. And now I considered those bugs a matter of life and death. The zeal quickly rubbed off on my cousins. Every time a cockroach appeared in the bathroom or on someone’s pillow, the entire family came to pester it, Isabel and me included. It was no longer a question of social class but a full-on war between species. Those insects had invaded not only the drawers and cupboards, but also the cracks in our mind. Anyone who has suffered them knows I’m not exaggerating when I say that ultimately, cockroaches almost always become an obsession.

Clemencia was the only one who stayed out of the whole affair. Her behavior seemed strange to me, especially after her outburst that first night. I was sure that she knew many things about our enemies, and yet she revealed nothing. She would only speak sarcastically, once in a while, about our aggressiveness:

“That’s the rich for you,” she’d say. “Agonizing over the littlest thing. Look at them, you’d think the blight was upon them.”

She was forgetting that her own daughter was one of those leading the attack on the insects.

According to what she’d said that night, cockroaches have codes and rituals, at least around death. I told myself that it was crucial to observe their behavior more systematically, and that from such observation the keys to how to annihilate them would become apparent.

The enemy seemed unfazed by our attacks. The cockroaches walked around the house so defiantly it seemed like arrogance. Maybe it was because they were, at least in numbers, superior to us or maybe because death to them, unlike to humans, means nothing. It was this characteristic, and not the color of their shells or the hideousness of their nervous legs, that most terrified me. Of one thing I was certain: if we didn’t exile them, they would us.

One Saturday morning Isabel and I sat in the kitchen talking. We had put bread in the microwave to thaw. As the woman was explaining to me the benefits of the new insecticide, we heard an unusual crackling coming from the appliance. When we opened the door we found three cockroach corpses on our snack. Evidently, the top of the microwave (which we rarely used) was one of their main headquarters. The scene horrified me; we had tried everything, and nothing had worked. In contrast, Isabel remained strangely calm.

“Don’t worry,” she said to me protectively. “We’re going to win this war . . .”