The Pumpkin that became Cosmos

Just because I think they are things that we are forced to keep in memory, I give you this story, which is bigger than it seems.

The pumpkin that became Cosmos (Growth Story)
by Macedonio Fernández (1874-1952)

Dedicated to the Dean of a Faculty of Agronomy. Will I call you "doctor", or "distinguished colleague"? Maybe he's a lawyer ...

Once upon a Zapallo growing lonely in rich lands of the Chaco. Favored by an exceptional area that gave him everything, raised freely and without sunlight in optimal conditions, as a true hope of Life. His intimate history tells us that he was feeding at the expense of the weakest plants around him, Darwinianly; I'm sorry to say it, making it unfriendly. But the external story is the one that interests us, the one that could only be told by the bewildered inhabitants of the Chaco who were going to find themselves wrapped in the squash pulp, absorbed by its powerful roots.
The first news that was had of its existence was that of the loud crackles of simple natural growth. The first settlers who saw it were to be shocked, for even then it would weigh several tons and increase in volume instantly. Already half a league in diameter when the first axmen sent by the authorities arrived to sever the trunk, already two hundred meters in circumference; the workers gave up more than because of the fatigue of the work due to the lurid noises of certain balancing movements, imposed by the instability of their volume that grew by leaps.
Dread was raging. It is impossible now to approach it because a vacuum is made in its environment, while the roots that are impossible to cut continue to grow. In desperation to see it coming on, he thinks of holding it down with cables. In vain. It begins to be seen from Montevideo, from where we can soon see our irregularity, as we from here observe the unstable of Europe. He is getting ready to swallow the Río de la Plata.
As there is no time to gather a Pan-American conference - Geneva and the European chancelleries are warned - each one goes over and proposes what is effective. Struggle, conciliation, arousal of a pious feeling in the Zapallo, supplication, armistice? It is thought of growing another Pumpkin in Japan, pampering it to hasten its prosperity as much as possible, until they meet and destroy each other, without, however, neither overpacking the other. And the army?
Opinions of scientists; what the children thought, surely delighted; ladies emotions; indignation of a solicitor; enthusiasm of a surveyor and a tailor's measurement taker; clothing for the Pumpkin; a cook who stands in front of him and examines him, retiring a league a day; a handsaw that feels its nothingness; And Einstein ?; in front of the medical school someone hints: Purge him? All these early jokes had ceased. The moment came too urgent when the best thing to do was to move inside. Rather ridiculous and humiliating is getting into it hastily, even if you forget your watch or your hat somewhere and previously extinguishing your cigarette, because there is no longer any world left outside of the Zapallo.

As it grows its rate of dilation is faster; As soon as it is one thing, it is another: it has not reached the figure of a ship that already looks like an island. Their pores are already five meters in diameter, now twenty, now fifty. It seems to have a feeling that the Cosmos could still produce a cataclysm to lose it, a tidal wave or a rift in America. Wouldn't you prefer, for your own sake, to explode, splinter, before being put inside a Pumpkin? To see it grow we fly by plane; it is a mountain range floating on the sea. Men are sucked in like flies; Koreans, at the antipode, cross themselves and know that their fate is a matter of hours.
The Cosmos unleashes, in the paroxysm, the final combat. Desperate formidable storms, unsuspected radiation, earth tremors, perhaps reserved from or origin in case it had to fight with another world.
“Take care of any cell that is near you! It is enough that one of them finds its all-comfort to live! " Why weren't we warned? The soul of each cell says slowly: “I want to take over the entire 'stock', the entire 'square existence' of Matter, fill the space and, perhaps, with sidereal spaces; I can be the Individual-Universe, the Immortal Person of the World, the unique beat ”. We do not listen to it and we are in the imminence of a World of Pumpkin, with men, cities and souls inside!
What can hurt him already? It is a question of the Zapallo serving its last appetites, for its final calm. Australia and Polynesia are just missing.
Dogs that did not live more than fifteen years, squash that barely resisted one and men that rarely reached one hundred ... This is the surprise! We said: it is a monster that cannot last. And here you have us inside. Born and die to be born and die? The Pumpkin must have been said: oh, not anymore! The scorpion, which when it stings itself and annihilates itself, instantly leaves the reservoir of scorpion life for its new hope of survival; it is poisoned only to be given new life. Why not configure the Scorpion, the Pine, the Earthworm, the Man, the Stork, the Nightingale, the Ivy, immortal? And above all the Zapallo, Person of the Cosmos; with the poker players calmly watching and alternating the lovers, all in the diaphanous and unitary space of the Zapallo.
We sincerely practice Cucurbit Metaphysics. We convinced ourselves that, given the relativity of all magnitudes, none of us will ever know whether or not he lives inside a pumpkin and even inside a coffin and if we will not be cells of the Immortal Plasma. It had to happen: Totality all Internal. Limited, Immovable (without Translation), without Relationship, therefore Without Death.
It seems that in these last moments, according to a coincidence of signs, the Pumpkin is getting ready to conquer not the poor Earth, but Creation. Apparently, he prepares his challenge against the Milky Way. More days, and the Pumpkin will be the Being, the Reality and its Shell.

(El Zapallo has allowed me to write its legend and history poorly and poorly for you - dear fellow members of the Zapallería.
We live in that world that we all knew but everything in shell now, with only internal relationships and, yes, without death.
This is better than before.)