Day 15: The cockroach and the soprano

Last night around ten o'clock I could hear Manuela go into her room as she was talking on the phone. Mid-sentence she screamed. "Aiii barataaa!! Mamae!" Translation: Aaah cockroaaach! Mommy!" I rolled my eyes and put my slippers on. Sigh. No matter what country it is, girls are always scared of bugs. I grabbed one of my sneakers and went next door. I entered Manuela's room just in time to see the biggest cockroach I've ever seen (and I mean ever, even when I worked with Madagascar cockroaches at the Boston MOS) fly from the window of Manuela's room onto her bed, and then scurry away almost faster than my eyes could move. I dropped the shoe and let out a bigger scream than Manuela had, turned around, ran back into my room, and shut the door.

The Cockroach (Dead). Longer than the length of my thumb, not including its antennae.

When I came to my senses I went back out, and Manuela was still yelling for Cynthia. Cynthia took her time coming up the stairs and into Manuela's room. The three of us looked inside. Nothing. Manuela was laughing at my state of horror. She told me that once when she was sleeping, she felt something on her shoulder and it was a cockroach on her body. Great, a perfect way to put me at ease. We slowly crept into Manuela's room like undercover cops looking for a criminal-- peeking under the bed, snapping our heads from one direction to another. We made it as far as Manuela's bathroom, never seeing the cockroach. We turned around and looked out into Manuela's room and there! There it was, in the walk-through-closet between the bathroom and the bedroom-- it ran across the wall the length of two feet in two seconds. "Aiii--yeww eww!" Manuela screamed (okay, and me too), and shut the bathroom door. And locked it. We stood in silence. Manuela looked at me. Cynthia looked at me. "What now?" I said? Cynthia took her slipper off and handed it to me.

"Ehhh" I said, panickedly. I kept telling myself that I could do this, that it was just like any other animal. A June bug, or a carpenter ant, I kept saying. It just happens to carry an unfortunate connotation in its name. "Barata," "Cockroach." In whatever language, it's a disgusting and chill-inspiring word. I thought, "Poor thing, it's just got an unfortunate reputation. Just go out there, kill it, and put it out of its misery." So, I opened the bathroom door and turned on the light. Immediately it moved, sprinting from the wall to the ground, around the corner, and back into Manuela's room. For a minute it was in the corner, resting, then it started to walk back towards the closet room.

I traded my choice of weapon from Cynthia's slipper to one of Manuela's more heavy duty sandals. Cynthia, one slipper on, one off, had crept out from the bathroom, holding the slipper I had dropped, and we both stood there, me blocking the cockroach on one side of the doorframe, Cynthia waiting for it on the other. It turned into the opening of the door and BAM! Cynthia smacked it dead. Manuela and I screamed again, and then I let out a war cry (well, maybe it sounded more like a high-pitched, "Euugh!!!") and hit it again with Manuela's sandal. I felt like I was in the scene from Boys Next Door when Lucien, Arnold, Norman, and then Barry have to kill the "mouse" they find in the house in the middle of the night. How exhilerating-- but how gross. Manuela slept with her mom and I was condemned to my bedroom next door. This time, though I put my slippers up on my desk and hung my pants over my chair.