A dark-haired young man with a name tag reading “Germán” and a Mickey, two Minnies and a Ronald pinned to his tie—the equivalent of a condestable in the Napoleonic army—introduced himself as their guide, and led them down the line of cash registers. The other McTour guests were five eleven-year-olds in private school uniforms; they looked Kamtchowsky slowly up and down to make it clear that she didn’t belong. Germán appeared not to have noticed the polarities that were destabilizing the group of humans under his command, concentrated as he was on more basic issues. He spoke about the unique qualities of cheddar cheese and barbecue sauce, about maintaining the integrity of the cold chain, about the division of labor and the importance of creating value in order to build a better world: the very pillars of the McDonald’s philosophy. Kamtchowsky listened carefully, calmly eating her French fries; from time to time she slipped in sarcastic questions of cryptic relevance, such as, Where exactly does Ronald McDonald live? and, What are the earliest symptoms of an Escherichia coli infection? Then out of nowhere, Miguel pressed his incandescent organ up against the Kamtchowskyan rearguard.
The indulgence often employed to mitigate the frenzy of such desire—the danger implicit in this type of lust—is downright legendary. Kamtchowsky turned to him in slow motion, but before she could raise a hand to slap him across the face, his bionic lips clamped on to her upper arm, and he began rubbing himself rhythmically against her near leg. The McTour had left them behind; even the slowest of the children had turned the far corner toward the refrigeration units that kept the chicken-based foodstuffs in optimum condition. Kamtchowsky brought her hands down, trying to protect herself, to parry his desperation. Miguel whipped out his private parts; seconds later he ejaculated onto Kamtchowsky’s palms. Then, seeing that the McTour and its host of children were coming back, Miguel flew like a meteorite to the soft-serve ice cream machine, pushed the red button, and came back with a vanilla cone; realizing that he hadn’t brought her any napkins with which to tidy up, he lowered his little pink mouth to her sticky hands and sucked them clean. Kamtchowsky was reminded of Proposition IX, Part III of Spinoza’s Ethics: Desire is “appetite accompanied by the consciousness thereof.” Unable to exit the lane of pseudo-erudite mental associations down which she’d been swept, she also recalled an homage to Spinoza: the Borges sonnet about the Jewish hands. Miguel’s gesture had been both ironic and protective, and she accepted the vanilla cone.
It amused her, the wisdom with which everything returned to normal. Thanks very much, she murmured, still shocked by what had happened. Then Miguel asked for her telephone number.
Kamtchowsky’s hand was twisted brutally up behind her back, all the way to her shoulder blade; the rest of her body slipped off the toilet seat cover. She couldn’t control her movements. She imagined that she was dead at the medullar level, that her body was being held hostage, captive to an optical nightmare, her eyes bisected by a plane that distorted her vision, as if she were watching the scene from two meters behind herself. She instinctively wanted to cover up, to protect her intimate parts; at the same time, something in the lower half of her body seemed to enjoy being exposed to the elements. Beanie, his pants down around his knees, worked his penis this way and that, trying to fit it into one or another of Kamtchowsky’s holes. Curls, more pragmatically, took her by the hips and flipped her around, then drew her toward him. Suddenly Kamtchowsky’s thoughts began to see themselves spatially: a burst of mental gunfire sprayed against a vortex where Curls had one eye open wide and was gasping, his teeth bared. Hidden in the glowing fist of her very selfhood, she watched out of the corner of her eye. There was something sweet and triumphant in all this. She couldn’t move. A strange peace came over her, a protothought in italics: They are like bears, and I am the honey. The door had been left half open, and here come even more kids unbuckling their belts (italics Kamtchowsky’s). It was her body that attracted and distributed these vectors of manhood: this certainty lit her up inside. The fact that they were so desperate to intersect with the geometry of her flesh, that the vectors might crisscross in and toward her, that she might be the center of projection—all this made them in some way subordinate to her. One of those who’d just entered took out his cellphone and started recording; a few days later a video labeled somegirl.avi could be downloaded from any number of blogs and webpages.
Over at the bar, Mara and Pabst took their time eating their choripanes. It was the first time they’d ever found themselves alone together against the masses. Andy had wandered off to buy drugs or sell them, they weren’t sure which; Kamtchowsky, they thought, was standing in line for the bathroom, which is why she was taking so long. Now there were shrieks, people running, others perking up their ears—a performance was about to start. The stage lights spun until they were shining directly into the audience’s faces. Pabst instinctively closed his eyes; he found people expressing themselves enormously troubling.
On stage, the light came to rest on a young guy, his face decorated with glitter and brightly colored paint, his naked torso lined with lengths of Scotch tape. He began rubbing his chest with a piece of paper, muttering, “Text, text,” louder and louder. Then five guys in yellow raincoats came to stand in a row facing the audience, unmoving. At the command “Gesture, gesture!” they opened their raincoats wide, showing bikini briefs hung with black ribbons. The Text guy shouted orders and the Gesture guys obeyed, throwing themselves to the floor, spitting on one another, biting each other, playing dead.
Pabst thought he recognized a certain Gallimardian odor coming off one of the texts, and said:
–At certain times of crisis, all myopic dwarves can be swapped out for priests who read Céline.
The kid in the bowler hat walked across the platform in his underwear, laughing. He tested the microphone that hung down over an array of soft drink bottles, fifteen of them or so. The stage lights made the bottles glow. A fat guy from Holland supervised the action; he wore a black T-shirt with a white skeleton on it, and a piano tie. Pabst took advantage of the pause to slide a few xenophobic notes into Mara’s ear:
–These poorly educated Europeans emigrate in search of a culturally backward paradise where they can display whatever leadership qualities they possess against a background of urban third-worldness. They’re just neighborhood demagogues pretending to be part of the vanguard here where it’s easier to be such a thing, and then bragging about how cheap the rent is to their supermarket manager friends in Münster or Riga or Rouen. This is how they propagate the private mythology according to which the crest of their lives still hasn’t completely passed them by.
Mara agreed delightedly.
The cap on every bottle had been tightened to a different degree, such that the gas escaping from each hissed out at a different frequency. The Dutch guy placed a little plastic chair in amongst the bottles; he took a seat, and very calmly removed his T-shirt. The kid dressed as a native stuck a number of sensors to the Dutch guy’s belly, highly sensitive microphones that caught the sounds emanating from his intestinal domains.
The fat guy’s stomach began to emit a series of subtle alien complaints; minor chords, meek at times, like someone doubting something, or asking a question. The thesis statement of his message to the human masses curled its way around to their delicate eardrums. On an electric signboard the little red lights spelled out:
oh come, board the train of consciousness of the inanimate. oh, can’t you see that people and personalities are only fallacies? completely overvalued fallacies! you are nothing more than an organ, an organ inside a pure sentence, an organizational chart. feel the organicness of the organizational chart, the public-private hymn that speaks within you.
Andy returned to the environs of the bar accompanied by a pair of enthusiastic drug addicts (“I’m telling you, there isn’t a single party, I promise you, not a single party in the world that is better than this one RIGHT NOW, nowhere in the world!”) A guy who introduced himself as a �
�self-taught alchemist” offered them homemade absinthe, natural amphetamines, and cocaine made from animal placentas, all of which Mara politely declined. Andy glowed with sweat, which served only to highlight his firm, harmonious musculature. Mara covered his face with kisses, and they both laughed. I hope they don’t start feeling each other up right in front of me, thought Pabst, who was starting to hate Kamtchowsky for leaving him alone so long.
His tongue still inside Mara’s mouth, Andy handed Pabst a little plastic bag. Pabst took a disdainful look, and saw the pills inside.
–This the very coinage of your brain, quoted Andy, radiant. This bodiless creation, ecstasy, is very cunning in.
Pabst groaned something unintelligible; he enjoyed being difficult. A capsule slid into Mara’s mouth while he was still whinging and trying to make up his mind.
–Ecstasy! My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time.
Andy closed the little bag, abandoned Hamlet and became more specific:
–I took a tab of ketamine, three pills, smoked two joints, did a little popper, two lines, a shot of grapita, a couple of—
–How can you even fit all that stuff inside?
There was no disdain in Pabst’s words now; nor was their admiration, or even neutrality. Andy put a hand on his shoulder.
–Don’t worry about it. The only neurons that die are the ones that got left behind, the stupidest ones. Drugs are natural selection’s neuro-chemical means of determining the fastest and fittest members of the cerebral ecosystem.
Andy winked, and threw his head back for a drink of water; then he said hello to young Ludwig, who was likewise intoxicated. The kid now standing beside Pabst was panting hard. Everyone called him Woody Woodpecker—he didn’t have red hair, but he did have a very wide forehead, and eyes that were perpetually on the verge of popping out. Pabst briefly imagined him pecking at a tree trunk; it wasn’t pleasant. He was tempted to say Rajá, turrito, rajá but was afraid the kid would think he was quoting Tango feroz (1993) rather than the living-dead Roberto Arlt. He remembered the movie’s plot with a fierce clarity: Tanguito smokes a joint, spends some time in jail, tangoes naked to “Malevaje” while pawing at the backside of his romantic interest, a chica bien, i.e. a rich, blond, treacherous snob. Basically he gets the shit beat out of him for being filthy, a drug addict, and a lover of Argentine rock and roll, all of which are more or less the same thing in this case. Near the end, a home movie shows him surrounded by his gang of filthy friends, and he secretes a posthumous rumination: “Not everything can be bought, and not everything’s for sale.” Cecilia Dopazo’s high boots had caused quite a stir—she waved them around in the air each time they fucked. In addition to being a professional failure for the actors involved, the film was also a macabre premonition of the times to come. Pabst took Woody by the shoulder and let slip a reflection:
–Nothing is as disgusting as the theatrical capitalism developed by the left to sell their products. It’s the kind of banality you often see in victorious sociological models: the practical syllogism according to which the truth is, by definition, on the side of the poor and afflicted for no reason other than that it flatters the reigning “democratic ideal” and a whole string of other euphemisms which must likewise never be interrogated. And the presence of a triumphant left in the cultural realm has consequences that are much worse than just bad movies. We watch bad movies because, as spectators, we’ve been condemned to the role of self-obsessed bourgeois ethnologists; downwardly self-obsessed. The victim’s story is transformed into fable, and the poisonous air that envelops all notions of hierarchy and authority—notions that one so obviously must reject—now enfolds a fresh new operation: being victims protects us from any and all moral or ethical judgments regarding our actions. Police violence erases all previous acts, granting automatic sainthood to the unimpeachably virtuous victim. It’s a good way to lose a war; in return one achieves a moral victory built on a philosophically flawed foundation.
Pabst fell quiet. The monologue had gotten him so worked up that his hands were trembling. Woody looked at him for half a second; Pabst noticed just as the kid was turning away, and kindly started talking again, in case anything hadn’t been clear:
–Actually, it doesn’t matter whether they’ve got their fist in the air (like in the ’70s) or whether they’ve withdrawn all their threats (not that they could have made good on them regardless)—the left’s lack of any real political strategies or texts served as nesting grounds for a Zeitgeist of settling for a stack of mediocrities, which is clearly all they were ever going to have to offer anyway.
And where had Kamtchowsky gone? He didn’t like it when she wandered off alone for so long. She wasn’t with Mara, who was dancing cumbia up near the stage with B. and some girlfriends who taught in the French Department. Woody and Andy headed off to the bathroom for a snort of ketamine, and Pablo followed along behind.
2
Andy’s shadow poured water over its head as it walked across the room—an obvious nod to Sigfrido Cutzarida’s legendary Colbert Noir cologne ad. The lesbian modality of Andy’s girlfriend was stretched out next to Pabst’s girlfriend, their four long legs stretching up the wall, encaging the image of the 9 de Julio Expressway cut in two.
Pabst was curled up in a beanbag chair; he blinked as his dreams fell away, and pawed at his pants to make sure that his dong, flecked with dried semen, was safely out of the light. Outside it was sunny, probably; the Persian blinds were always closed, and the only light inside was electric. Andy widened his stance, stuck his hands in his pockets; his shadow now fell over the empty section of his desk where the CPU should have been. A few seconds passed.
Pabst opened one eye. There before him was Andy’s crotch, its oblique geography elegantly arranged. Zarpe Diem was over and Kamtchowsky was asleep with Mara; Andy had fucked them both, Pabst hadn’t, and there wasn’t anything left to say. Spilled green tea had seeped into the flooring, and there were grains of rice stuck to the carpet. The television was on—the cheesy showgirl Moria Casán at the dawn of her mammiferous career. She was wearing a fuchsia wig, and had her fingernails buried in the wig of another showgirl, who looked a little like Luisa Albinoni. Without taking his eyes off the screen, Andy sat down on the floor.
–Our national sickness is definitely the hair weave.
Pabst looked at his friend, whose eyes were still boring into Moria; he remembered Sarmiento’s bald pate, and let loose a spontaneous laugh.
Beside him was a stack of photocopies and a few effusively underlined books. Farther back, something shone in the dark, a piece of foil paper from a box of Sweet Mints, signaling the side entrance—far from the end—to the third chapter, the key to the evolution of the Theory of Egoic Transmissions.
3
I built the temple of Mars Ultor on private grounds and the forum of Augustus from war-spoils. Three times I gave shows of gladiators under my name and five times under the name of my sons and grandsons; in these shows about 10,000 men fought. I celebrated the Games under my name four times, and twenty-three times in place of other magistrates. Twenty-six times, under my name or that of my sons and grandsons, I gave the people hunts of African beasts in the circus, under the open sky, or in the amphitheater; in them about 3,500 beasts were killed.
The Deeds of the Divine Augustus abounds in passages where the words bestia and venationes are continuously intermixed to refer to Roman Games involving predators. In Suetonius we find damnare aliquem ad bestias, condemned to be torn apart by wild beasts. Bestia (in its first Latin declension, typically feminine) means of obscure origin, but its lexical importance to the Games led to the addition of human suffixes. Bestius and bestiarius, in Seneca and Tertullian, are those condemned to be devoured by beasts; Cicero’s usage refers to the gladiator who fights against them. Augustine of Hippo uses the adverb bestialiter—as would a beast, in a beastly manner—and keeps bestiarius separate to refer to the attributes of t
he beasts themselves; bestius is that which is ferocious, beast-like.
On the side of the beasts, one finds the lion of Biledulgerid, the leopard of Hindustan, the desert antelope, the British stag, and the Arctic reindeer; the albino bull of Northumberland, the unicorn of Tibet, the hippopotamus of the African coast and the elephant of Siam; ibex from Angora, the wild ass, dwarf giraffes, ostriches and zebras. “Their savage voices ascended in tumultuous uproar to the chambers of the capitol,” (writes De Quincey) before the majesty of Jupiter Tonans—Caesar Augustus. On the side of the beasts, men crouched and ready for combat.
From a grammatical point of view, there is nothing keeping a man from converting himself into a beast; bestius, the ferocious beast-like creature who flaunts his beauty and deformity on the vast blood-fields of Rome, relies on his syntactic position to tell him which side he is killing for, which beast to strike. The name of the victim coincides with that of the aggressor—in the arena every beast is alike. It is thus only the beast’s place within the sentence that determines its ontological nature, indicating what it is that one is. Beast can refer either to the one representing the State’s power of Reason (in which case the spectacle consists of ripping apart some enemy of Rome—a Christian, a barbarian, et cetera), or to the one who is to be chased down by the sovereign human (in which case the human victor is celebrated by the multitudes, and what he annihilates is merely prey supplied to him by the Games).
The beauty of the beast—she of obscure origins—is displayed diachronically. In Latin, bello, -avi, -atum is the verbal form meaning to wage and carry on war, to make war. The dictionary follows these bellicose forms of bello with the adverbial forms of belle, used to indicate that something has been prepared deliciously well (Attica belle se habet); exquisitely, with good taste and elegance, praediola belle edificata—small possessions built with taste (Cicero). We proceed past “Sweetly, softly, deliciously, delicately; in a kind, funny, friendly manner” to Bellerophon, grandson of Sisyphus, and from there to bellicum: in Cicero and Justinian, the word refers to a signal—a call to arms, to battle stations—which, in the field of rhetorical operations, is the moderately disdainful slap in the face that Cicero delivers with bellicum: “to strike a haughty tone.” But bellua (of obscure origins) is the ferocious beast, the savage animal; fera et immanis bellua—cruel and ferocious beast. A monster, a monstrous thing; in Livy (a contemporary of Caesar Augustus), we find Volo ego illi bellua ostendere, meaning “I want to show this savage, this great beast, what goodness is” (note bellua at the center of the threat). Bellipotens (the God of War in Virgil) rests on bellitudo: loveliness, grace, beauty.
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