The worst possible

What happens when you begin to realise that as a mother, you have no control over anything? Absolutely anything can harm your child. The illusion that you are there to protect her all the time is gone, and you come face to face with the helplessness of being a mother. Fever Dream is the worst possible projection of a mother’s most irrational fears. It finds a terrifying story in the monstrosities imagined by mothers.

Amanda, a patient in an emergency clinic, is being made to recall the precise moment when the poisoning happened. When what “feels like worms” slowly sneaked into her and her daughter’s bodies. In the minutes before her death, she narrates the events of the previous few days. She had come to this town just a few days earlier for a vacation with her daughter, and her husband was about to join them. Amanda meets Carla, the neighbour who has a monster for a son, whom Carla cannot recognise anymore. Amanda and her daughter meet with the same fate: poisoning, dying, or turning into something else. The danger is already anticipated with Carla’s narration of the catastrophe that fell on her son. Fever Dream is a story of estrangement: Carla no longer recognises her own son. As she puts it, sometimes, the eyes are not enough to see what is more important. But what turned David into something so abnormal?

The origins of the disease haunting the town are elusive. It is extremely frightening to understand that there is no diagnosis. This is an infectious disease, or rather, an epidemic. But there is nobody to ask anything about it. The doctors take hours to arrive at the clinic, and when they do appear, they do not know much. This poisoning does not have an aetiology. Nobody knows anything else about it. As a story from an Argentinian author, it possibly resonates with every locale. Until it was discovered that eating litchis on an empty stomach was killing malnourished children in Muzaffarpur, nobody knew what was to be blamed.

Carla turns to the lady in the green house, someone who “reads energies.” The lady proposes the migration of souls as a solution. The poisoning cannot be cured, but David’s soul is shifted to another unknown body. This lack of healing prompts a search for explanation in knowing the origins of how it started with Amanda.

As Amanda waits to die, she is forced to recall everything that she has seen and experienced since she came to the town. Speaking what she remembers is her only way to discover and to know what has happened. In the search for the precise moment when the poison touched her, she recalls several other details: Carla’s sophisticated appearance, her bikini, sunscreen and so on. These are snippets of what any two mothers notice in each other. Amanda talks about her revulsion and fascination towards Carla. In a story from a mother, these insights into how mothers appear to each other seem to be indispensable.

This novel, of novella proportions, is a quick read but extremely slow to write or speak about. The reader is simply thrust into the story. Every sentence and every page pave the way for something worse to come. The urgency does not allow for any relief. As a recounting of events spread over a few days, the novel and Amanda’s narration work in terms of compression: the intense details about certain moments, certain exchanges, certain remembrances, or mostly all of them, are acute in the vividness of their unsettling impact on the reader. After all, the exact moment is what the speakers are after. The dialogue between the two characters brilliantly uses communication as a strategy to reconstruct what has happened. The cry ‘The horses! The horses!’ recalls Joseph Conrad’s ‘The horror! The horror!’ — for what haunts the narrative is equally unexplainable.

The Spanish title of the novel refers to rescue distance, the concept that Amanda, her mother and her grandmother constantly use to calculate the distance between the mother and her child for when, sooner or later, something horrible will happen. The rescue distance is the mother’s strategy to get hold of the child in the event of any catastrophe. As mothers who imagine the worst possible scenario, they are always on toes to protect their children from danger. But as the events in the novel show, rescue distance is useless and no defence strategy applies when anything strikes. Mothers are condemned to worry about the worst, prepare to confront it, and see themselves failing repeatedly.