The Decameron Project

by The New York Times

  What would have happened had Bezi not come back at that exact moment, I really can’t say. We probably would’ve ended up as one of those tragic statistics you read about in the paper that teach you what kind of being is safe and what kind is not.

  “Well,” Bezi said. “Neven’s daughter. Twisted at heart—what a surprise.”

  “Go to hell,” Ena said through her tears.

  My mother never found out, and I guess Ena’s didn’t either. For years, that moment, known only to the three of us, was the first thing I thought about when I woke, and the last thing I thought about as I lay in the dark. I was certain I would revisit it every day of my life. And for a long time, even after we left the Morningside, I did. And then time passed, and eventually I did not. It would suddenly occur to me that a few days had gone by without my thinking about it—which, of course, would break my streak, and I’d feel relieved to find myself suddenly plunged back into that room, with its huge painting, and the dogs around it as though they were waiting to be called back into the world from which they had come. But then that got hazy, too. It became the kind of thing I’d tell lovers after deciding they would probably be sticking around. The kind of thing I hoped they’d forget about me when we parted ways.

  By the time I stumbled on this story in the paper, I hadn’t thought about it in years. A foreign painter of some celebrity died in the city last summer; the problem was, her body couldn’t be retrieved because it was guarded by a pack of starving Rottweilers, who would go wild if anyone so much as touched the door. Experts from all over the coast were brought in, but no one could find a command to subdue the dogs. It was decided that they should be shot, and a brave sniper was hoisted up on a window-washing rig for that purpose. But when he peered inside, he saw only the lifeless old woman, lying with her hands crossed on a tarp at the foot of an enormous painting of a princess and three young men. What exactly was he supposed to shoot? “It’s baffling,” he told the reporter, “but there’s really nothing for me to do here.” After he packed up, the police tried the door again; and sure enough the dogs came roaring back.

  Finally, after about a week of this, a woman who worked across town showed up at the police station. “I used to live there,” she said. “I can help.” The reporter didn’t name her but described her as rail-thin, with huge green eyes, so I know it was Ena who went up there one wild evening with what was left of the city gathered in the courtyard below; Ena who stood outside the door, whispering endearments of some bygone age, of some place that no longer existed, in that language she’d always known the dogs would understand, until she heard them move back from the door, and she turned the knob, saying, don’t worry, boys, it’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.

  Translated by Megan McDowell from the Spanish

  any times over his two years of life, the boy has heard laughter or cries coming from his parents’ bedroom. It’s hard to know how he would react if he ever found out what his parents really do while he’s asleep: watch TV.

  He’s never watched TV or anyone watching TV, so his parents’ television is vaguely mysterious to him: Its screen is a sort of mirror, but the image it reflects is opaque, insufficient, and you can’t draw on it in the steam, though sometimes a layer of dust allows for similar games.

  Still, the boy wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this screen reproduces images in movement. He is occasionally allowed to see other people on screens, most often people in his second country. Because the boy has two countries: his mother’s, which is his main country, and his father’s, which is his secondary country. His father doesn’t live there, but his father’s parents do, and they’re the people the boy sees most often on-screen.

  He has also seen his grandparents in person, because the boy has traveled twice to his second country. He doesn’t remember the first trip, but by the second he could walk on his own and talk himself blue in the face, and those weeks were unforgettable, though the most memorable event happened on the flight there, when a screen that seemed every bit as useless as his parents’ TV lit up, and suddenly there was a friendly red monster who referred to himself in the third person. The monster and the boy were immediate friends, perhaps because back then the boy also talked about himself in the third person.

  The meeting was fortuitous, really, because the boy’s parents didn’t plan to watch TV during the trip. The flight began with a couple of naps, and then his parents opened the little suitcase that held seven books and five zoomorphic puppets, and a long time was spent on the reading and immediate rereading of those books, punctuated by insolent comments from the puppets, who also gave their opinions on the shapes of the clouds and the quality of the snacks. Everything was going swimmingly until the boy asked for a toy that had chosen to travel—his parents explained—in the hold of the plane, and then he remembered several others that—who knows why—had decided to stay in his main country. Then, for the first time in six hours, the boy burst into tears that lasted a full minute, which isn’t a long time, but, to a man in the seat behind them, seemed very long indeed.

  “Make that kid shut up!” bellowed the man.

  The boy’s mother turned around and looked at him with serene contempt, and, after a well-executed pause, she lowered her gaze to stare fixedly between his legs and said, without the slightest trace of aggression:

  “Must be really tiny.”

  The man apparently had no defense against such an accusation and didn’t reply. The boy—who had stopped crying by then—moved to his mother’s arms, and then it was the father’s turn. He also knelt in his seat to stare at the man; he didn’t insult him, but merely asked his name.

  “Enrique Elizalde,” said the man, with the little dignity he had left.

  “Thanks.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I don’t want to tell you, but you’ll find out. Soon you’ll know full well who I am.”

  The father glared several more seconds at the now-remorseful or desperate Enrique Elizalde, and he would have kept it up except that a bout of turbulence forced him to refasten his seat belt.

  “This jerk thinks I’m really powerful,” he murmured then, in English, which was the language the parents used instinctively now to insult other people.

  “We should at least name a character after him,” said the mother.

  “Good idea! I’ll name all the bad guys in my books Enrique Elizalde.”

  “Me too! I guess we’ll have to start writing books with bad guys,” she said.

  And that was when they turned on the screen in front of them and tuned in to the show of the happy, hairy red monster. The show lasted 20 minutes, and when the screen went dark, the boy protested, but his parents explained that the monster’s presence wasn’t repeatable, he wasn’t like books, which could be read over and over.

  During the three weeks they were in his secondary country, the boy asked about the monster daily, and his parents explained that he only lived on airplanes. The re-encounter finally came on the flight home, and it lasted another scant 20 minutes. Two months after their return, since the boy still spoke of the monster with a certain melancholy, his parents bought him a stuffed replica, which the boy saw as the authentic original. Since then the two have been inseparable: In fact, right now, the boy has just fallen asleep hugging the red plush toy, while his parents have retired to the bedroom, and surely they will soon turn on the TV. There’s a chance, if things go as they usually do, that this story will end with the two of them watching TV.

  * * *

  The boy’s father grew up with the TV always on, and at his son’s age he was possibly unaware that the television could even be turned off. The boy’s mother, on the other hand, had been kept away from TV for an astonishing 10 years. Her own mother’s official version was that the TV signal didn’t reach as far as their house on the outskirts of the city, so that the TV seemed to the girl a completely useless object. On
e day she invited a classmate over to play, and without asking anyone the friend simply plugged in the TV and turned it on. There was no disillusionment or crisis: The girl thought the TV signal had only just reached the city’s periphery. She ran to relay the good news to her mother, who, though she was an atheist, fell to her knees, raised her arms to the sky, and shouted histrionically, persuasively, “It’s a MIRACLE!”

  In spite of these very different backgrounds, the couple are in complete agreement that it’s best to put off their son’s exposure to screens as long as possible. They’re not fanatics, in any case, they’re not against TV by any means. When they first met, they often employed the hackneyed strategy of meeting up to watch movies as a pretext for sex. Later, in the period that could be considered the boy’s prehistory, they succumbed to the spell of many excellent series. And they never watched as much TV as during the months leading up to the birth of their son, whose intrauterine life was set not to Mozart symphonies or lullabies but rather to the theme songs of series about bloody power struggles in an unspecified ancient time of zombies and dragons, or in the spacious government house of the self-designated “leader of the free world.”

  When the boy was born, the couple’s TV experience changed radically. At the end of the day their physical and mental exhaustion allowed only 30 or 40 minutes of waning concentration, so that almost without realizing it they lowered their standards and became habitual viewers of mediocre series. They still wanted to immerse themselves in unfathomable realms and live vicariously through challenging and complex experiences that forced them to seriously rethink their place in the world, but that’s what the books they read during the day were for; at night they wanted easy laughter, funny dialogue, and scripts that granted the sad satisfaction of understanding without the slightest effort.

  * * *

  Someday, maybe in one or two years, they plan to spend Saturday or Sunday afternoons watching movies with the boy, and they even keep a list of the ones they want to watch as a family. But for now, the TV is relegated to that final hour of the day when the boy is asleep and the mother and father return, momentarily, to being simply she and he—she, in bed looking at her phone, and he, lying faceup on the floor as if resting after a round of sit-ups. Suddenly he gets up and lies on the bed, too, and his hand reaches for the remote but changes course, picks up the nail clippers instead, and he starts to cut his fingernails. She looks at him and thinks that lately, he is always clipping his nails.

  “We’re going to be shut in for months. He’s going to get bored,” she says.

  “They’ll let people walk their dogs, but not their kids,” he says bitterly.

  “I’m sure he doesn’t like this. Maybe he doesn’t show it, but he must be having a horrible time. How much do you think he understands?”

  “About as much as we do.”

  “And what do we understand?” she asks, in the tone of a student reviewing a lesson before a test. It’s almost as if she had asked, “What is photosynthesis?”

  “That we can’t go out because there’s a shitty virus. That’s all.”

  “That what used to be allowed is now forbidden. And what used to be forbidden still is.”

  “He misses the park, the bookstore, museums. Same as we do.”

  “The zoo,” she says. “He doesn’t talk about it, but he complains more, gets mad more often. Not much, but more.”

  “But he doesn’t miss preschool, not at all,” he says.

  “I hope it’s just two or three months. What if it’s more? A whole year?”

  “I don’t think so,” he says. He’d like to sound more convinced.

  “What if this is our world from now on? What if after this virus there’s another and another?” She asks the question but it could just as well be him, with the same words and the same anxious intonation.

  During the day they take turns: One of them watches their son while the other works. They are behind on everything, and although everyone is behind on everything, they feel sure that they’re a little more behind than everyone else. They should argue, compete over which of them has the more urgent and better-paid job, but instead they both offer to watch the boy full-time, because that half-day with him is an interval of true happiness, genuine laughter, purifying evasion—they would rather spend the whole day playing ball in the hallway or drawing unintentionally monstrous creatures on the small square of wall where drawing is allowed or strumming guitar while the boy turns the pegs until it’s out of tune or reading stories that they now find perfect, much better than the books they themselves write, or try to. Even if they only had one of those children’s stories, they would rather read it nonstop all day than sit in front of their computers, the awful news radio on in the background, to send reply emails full of apologies for the delay and to stare at the stupid map of real-time contagion and death—he looks, especially, at his son’s secondary country, which of course is still his primary one, and he thinks of his parents and imagines that in the hours or days since he last talked to them they’ve gotten sick and he’ll never see them again, and then he calls them and those calls leave him shattered, but he doesn’t say anything, at least not to her, because she has spent weeks now in a slow and imperfect anxiety that makes her think she should learn to embroider, or at least stop reading the beautiful and hopeless novels she reads, and she also thinks that she should have become something other than a writer; they agree on that, they’ve talked about it many times, because so often—every time they try to write—they’ve felt the inescapable futility of each and every word.

  “Let’s let him watch movies,” she says. “Why not? Only on Sundays.”

  “At least then we’d know if it’s Monday or Thursday or Sunday,” he says.

  “What’s today?”

  “I think it’s Tuesday.”

  “Let’s decide tomorrow,” she says.

  He finishes cutting his nails and looks at his hands with uncertain satisfaction, or maybe as if he had just finished cutting someone else’s nails, or as if he were looking at the nails of a person who just cut their own nails and was asking him, for some reason (maybe because he’s become an expert), for his opinion or approval.

  “They’re growing faster,” he says.

  “Didn’t you just cut them last night?”

  “Exactly, they’re growing faster.” He says this very seriously. “Every night it seems like they’ve grown out during the day. Abnormally fast.”

  “I think it’s good for nails to grow fast. Supposedly they grow faster at the beach,” she says, sounding as if she’s trying to remember something, maybe the feeling of waking up on the beach with the sun in her face.

  “I think mine are a record.”

  “Mine are growing faster, too,” she says, smiling. “Even faster than yours. By noon they’re practically claws. And I cut them and they grow again.”

  “I’m pretty sure mine grow faster than yours.”

  “No way.”

  Then they put their hands together as if they could really see their fingernails growing, as if they could compare speeds, and what should be a quick scene lengthens out, because they let themselves get caught up in the absurd illusion of that silent competition, beautiful and useless, which lasts so long that even the most patient viewer would turn off the TV in indignation. But no one is watching them, though the TV screen is like a camera that records their bodies frozen in that strange and funny pose. A monitor amplifies the boy’s breathing, and it’s the only sound that accompanies the contest of their hands, their nails, a contest that lasts several minutes but not long enough for anyone to win, and that ends, finally, with the longed-for burst of warm, frank laughter that they were really needing.

  efore the virus hit, my uncle drove his cab 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week, for nearly two decades. He continued doing so even though every month he had fewer and fewer customers and sometimes spent hours idling outside one of the luxury hotels near the Capitol Building waiting for a fare. He was st
ill living in the same apartment he moved into when he first arrived in America, in 1978, and when I called to ask him how he was doing, he told me, more amused than alarmed, that until now, he had failed to consider the possibility that he might someday die in that building. “Why don’t they tell you this when you sign the lease? If you are over seventy, it should be right there, at the very top. Be careful. This may be the last place you ever live.”

  I assured him there was no chance of him dying, even though we both knew that wasn’t true. He was 72, and every morning before getting into his cab, he walked up and down the 12 stories of his apartment building to warm up his muscles before work.

  “You’re the strongest man I know,” I told him. “It would take an alien virus to knock you out.”

  Before getting off the phone I told him I was going to drive down from New York to see him. It was March 12, 2020, and the virus was about to lay siege to the city. “We’ll go to the grocery store,” I said. “And stuff your freezer so you can grow old and fat until the virus disappears.” I left New York early the next morning to find the highways between New York and DC already crowded with SUVs. On his only visit to New York, my uncle asked me what happened to all the cars buried deep underground in expensive parking lots scattered throughout the city. Before buying his own cab, he had worked for 15 years in a parking garage three blocks from the White House, and he often said that he would never understand why Americans spent so much money to park big cars they never drove. As I passed my first hour in traffic, I thought of calling to tell him I finally had the answer to his question. For all the talk of American optimism, we were obsessed with apocalypse, and those big empty cars that now filled all four lanes of the highway had simply been waiting for the right explosion to hit the road.

  * * *

  When I finally reached my uncle’s apartment, in a suburb just outside DC, he was sitting on one of the concrete benches in front of his building, his palms pressed together with both elbows on his knees. He motioned with his hands for me to stay where I was and got into his cab, which was parked a few feet behind me. He sent me a text message: “Park. I am driving.”