Why do bed bugs bite several times in a row?

Scientists are the only people who get woken up in the middle of the night. Something like that is said by one of the characters in *The Anomaly* (Seix Barral), a delirious novel written in a state of inspiration by the mathematician and science journalist Hervé Le Tellier . With it, Le Tellier won the Goncourt Prize in 2020; a prestigious award with a ridiculously small cash prize: a check for 10 euros, a symbolic amount for a prize that lends merit to a literary work.

Despite its current relevance, we won't delve into literary prizes here. Far from it, although what we're going to discuss here is related to books, in this case a novel by Teju Cole, a Nigerian author. Titled * Open City * (Acantilado), it narrates—in the first person—the journey of a psychiatrist through the urban landscape of Manhattan. With this premise, the protagonist wanders its streets and reflects on the present, guided by memory —a scientific memory, let's say, since it encompasses various aspects of science, from mental illness to the cellular mutation that causes cancer, including the biology of bedbugs and their parasitic relationship with humans. In this last respect, Teju Cole sometimes manages to make us feel a tingle, employing the magic of a stark prose, translated into Spanish by Marcelo Cohen. The power of the narrative becomes so strong that it reaches the deepest sensations of our skin.

Despite being tiny insects—oval-shaped, flat, and reddish in color—that can be crushed with a fingernail, bed bugs sting us with their bites , turning their attack into a torment. What makes them so harmful is their need for warm blood. Our fluids serve as their food, leaving their bites in lines or clusters. This is because they have needle-like mandibles that they use to pierce capillaries and obtain blood. However, they don't usually get blood on the first bite; they make several attempts before finding the capillary that will serve as their food source.

The story of our relationship with theseinsects dates back to ancient times, to when we lived in caves and told stories around the fire; tales that accompanied the ebb and flow of the shadows cast by the flames on the walls. Those were remote times when bedbugs sharpened their mandibles to celebrate our arrival, tired of the monotonous diet of bat blood that sustained them until our appearance in the caves. From then until now, we have been nurturing them, carrying them through the centuries through each and every transformation that has marked our journey across the world.

Thus, through his urban journey, the protagonist of Open City interprets our passage through this world, while Hervé Le Tellier achieves the same with a whimsical novel where literature becomes a game. Both novels are different ways of explaining what happens when science maintains an organic relationship with the imagination , and bedbugs—like ghosts—wake us up in the middle of the night.