Savage Theories

by Pola Oloixarac

  05. Marriage to a celebrity, or at least to someone extremely important.

  20. A sense of family.

  29. Your sensuality needs to be expressed.

  21. Be careful around water.

  43. You love your independence.

  30. You’re vulnerable to flattery.

  09. Predisposed to significant blows to the head.

  36. A strong sense of order.

  34. Erotic nature. If it’s close to your nostril, that indicates a eventful fate.

  35. Passionate, willful, irresistible.

  40. Physical love predominates over sentimental love.

  39. Happiness (of every kind).

  It seems to me that #36 and #43 contradict one another a bit. Especially considering that L’s biggest mole corresponds to #20. Unquestionably, though, #30, #43, and #29 all point at the same thing. Even if #29 is maybe a freckle, not a mole. Is #40 dominating his life just because he happens to be going through a particularly shitty period? Or is it the other way around? #9 is so weird. Is that what’s going to happen to him? Will that mole disappear over time? #34 is totally true. L. has always been very passionate (#35) and his eyes glow with the promise of an amazing future. I hope he never reads #5.

  Next I read my horoscope, and copied it down to see what you think of it:

  Miss Sagitarius, and Her Relation to the Other Signs—Week of August 23.

  With Mr. Taurus: You will find it difficult to control his love of independence. Mr. Taurus is extremely jealous, so your relationship with him will be tumultuous. He wants you to be an integral part of his life, to renounce your own independence and rights. You will become furious, and will tell him so. The two of you will wound one another. If your mutual regret is sincere, the relationship may be able to turn the page. But it would not be unusual if within a week you were once again starting from scratch. YOU MUST: leave your whims at the door, and make an effort to control your impulses. Remember this! Danger of the Week: making “intimate” confessions. Be very careful! Advice: date optimists.

  It’s true, Moo, that we have wounded one another. L. and I, and also Fernando and I—they’re both Taurus. I got a little worried, not because of what the horoscope says, but just remembering what happened. I also think that we women have much more responsibility than it might seem at first glance. It’s as if we have somehow been assigned two missions, one of peace and one of class struggle—we’re never allowed to drop our feminine role as the one who provides love and security, yet we’re responsible for destroying the bourgeois structures of alienation that limit us in so many ways (limit us as human beings, I mean). The dentist still hadn’t called me in, and I kept reading. Next was the “Secrets from the Confessional” section.

  Ema, from Barrio Norte: I’m twenty-four years old, married, two kids, a good job. But one day my husband and I had an argument about how much time I spend on the telephone, and since then he’s started drinking too much, and hitting me. What can I do?

  Para Ti: Under no circumstances should you let him hit you. That is a serious crime, and you never should have allowed it. But you also shouldn’t have provoked such a violent attitude. Why do you spend so much time talking on the telephone, and with whom? I would also try to find out why he’s drinking. Did he drink heavily before the marriage—is he an alcoholic? If so, the family doctor must step in, and you must summon all of your feminine prudence and love. Or did he start drinking because he’d stopped trusting you—to choke back his jealousy and disappointment? Accept your responsibility as a wife and a mother, and seek complete reconciliation with him, based on a deeper, more loyal, and fundamentally more serious mutual understanding.

  Dear Moo,

  I found out who Silvina is. Her nom de guerre is Inés. Her comrades call her Inés, or la Flaca Inés. She’s in the Evita Group of the Women’s Branch of Precinct 13. In order to date her, L. has to execute counter-pursuit maneuvers. He met her at Ateneo 20 de Noviembre. She also works with the Union Coordinator. She’s very committed to the hard line within her party. I’ll bet it excites him to have to execute counter-pursuit maneuvers. She must be a very brave girl, no argument there. Each of us has our own form of bravery. She must have excellent contacts. Personally, I’m more, shall we say, discreet. But as for my plan, there’s nothing cowardly about it. Quite the contrary. You won’t find it written in any manual, and it hasn’t been approved by any Party leader, or any horoscope for that matter.

  Ah, so, I went to sign up for Physical Theater but the class was already full, and they weren’t taking any more names. I don’t want you thinking I leave all my projects half-finished, as others might say, others who shall go nameless—perhaps, maybe, because I’ve already named him too often, because I can’t think about anything else, because I’m suffering, and it hurts me, Moo, that I can’t transcend all this, can’t feel that my anguish might some day be transformed into something vibrant, something beautiful, something that will last.

  I know that Inés is working as an activist in Avellaneda, near one of the slums. To get there I’ll have to cross the bridge at La Boca, I don’t know what it’s called. I’ll have to take the 152 and get off at the last stop. I’m going to track her down, and I’m going to say it, I’m going to tell her that L. is mine. Who does she think she is? You know what, Moo? If I go and find her and cuss her out, that’s not violence, that’s justice.

  Kamtchowsky broke off reading; it surprised her to realize that just the mention of the bridge had created in her mind the image of Vivi hit by a burst of gunfire, collapsing on the bridge. (In Kamtchowsky’s imagination it looked a lot like Puente Alsina, which had recently been repaired and repainted yellow. In fact she’d never seen the bridge at La Boca, and the image in her mind was from a music video, the punk band Dos Minutos, their album Valentín Alsina.) But that can’t have been what happened.

  Just then she saw Miguel arrive. Instead of his McDonald’s uniform, he was wearing a loose Eminem T-shirt, and had a little Maradona-style earring. He came across the street and held out a bouquet of freesias. Kamtchowsky noticed that he’d put gel in his hair to get it to stand up straight. His leather pants were quite tight, and he looked very confident, very calm. The sight produced neither fondness nor disgust; Kamtchowsky’s stunned mind was still caught in the imagined landscape of her aunt’s death.

  She smelled the flowers, and Miguel said something that she didn’t quite catch. He mumbled on and on. And now she saw a long thin object emerging from under his belt.

  It was a Luke Skywalker light saber, glowing, greenish. Miguel smiled with satisfaction. Then he let out a textbook Down syndrome laugh.

  –You’re Leia.

  Kamtchowsky laughed too. Maybe having a little fling with a Down syndrome kid wasn’t such a bad idea. She’d read that they tended to be much stronger than average guys. And, she wondered, were they also more in touch with their primal instincts? Less addled by their culture? Her young lover slashed at the air with his light saber. No one had ever compared her to Leia before; she made a mental note of his kind observation and decided not to look at his pants again.

  They rang the doorbell. No one had been informed that they were coming, but Miguel’s presence seemed to explain everything, and they were invited into the main dorm.

  The volunteers who staff the Ronald McDonald House system offer lodging to the families of children from the provinces who have come to the city for medical treatment. People were playing cards and sipping mate, and there was a bulletin board covered with felt-tip drawings of suns, little houses, clouds, rainbows, and other icons of childhood optimism—fruit of the creativity of small organisms riddled with illness.

  Kamtchowsky walked thoughtfully around the premises. She was wearing a black turtleneck that gave her a certain existentialist vibe, and also made her neck itch. Miguel was a bit fidgety, and did a brief rap of observations as they climbed the stairs. An only chi
ld, the word “retarded” was not to be found in his vocabulary; nonetheless, he’d always felt a bit different. Of course, like other kids his age he’d grown up believing he was surrounded by robots. He set little traps for them, leaving things where they didn’t belong; later he’d return and see that once again the robots had put everything back in place. Thanks to his mother, an educational psychologist, he grew up healthy and strong: he played with dogs, drove the maids crazy, and destroyed his toys like any other kid his age. All the same, he recognized that just as his legs were growing too long for his pants, the gap distancing him from the rest of the world was growing wider; perhaps at the chromosomal level he understood what it was that separated him from others.

  Being designated a special kid had allowed him to develop amidst a meticulous and profoundly generous affection which he knew was his by rights. Down syndrome or no, he seemed simply to assume that he was always in control of his situation. Defective synaptic connections notwithstanding, it was his indifference to Kamtchowsky’s mental states that put her at a disadvantage. She decided to open a brief dialogue—maybe hearing his voice would get her back on track.

  –Miguel, don’t you sometimes have unbearable thoughts that follow you around?

  Miguel shrugged.

  –Yeah, sure. Sometimes I talk to my psychoanalyst about them.

  – . . .

  –But I don’t worry about them. She just gives me the sweet pills, the ones that are like Prozac.

  – . . .

  –They help you grow. Look, right now for example, see how my wiener is growing?

  –That’s enough, Miguel, people are staring at us.

  They were walking behind a woman in a blue apron; openings along the main hallway gave them glimpses of the belongings of families crowded comfortably into their little rooms. There were also rows of little beds that hadn’t been slept in, their sheets in stridently bright colors, some of them hardly ever put to use by the sick kids in Ronald’s care. Kamtchowsky walked confidently from one side of the dorm to the other. She felt just like she had the day she first heard the Roxette song “The Look,” and started mimicking it in her gaze and gestures. It couldn’t really be said that the combination of Kamtchowsky and “The Look” was creating a significant fan base or thickening anyone’s warm penile mass; it couldn’t even be said that it was getting her any particular attention from the young patients around her. Kamtchowsky exchanged skeptical glances with the most damaged of them. Would there come a time when they tired of calmly accepting their condition? When they would try to entertain themselves by hurting others, for lack of better options? She imagined that even their healthiest thoughts might occasionally take such a turn as they wove amongst malformed sensations.

  Meanwhile, Miguel was slashing around with his light saber, and making gestures at the back of the woman in the blue apron. Yes, he was the coolest Down syndrome kid in all of Buenos Aires; he had it all, in his way, and not a care in the world. If Kamtchowsky were to accept the task of translating Miguel’s facial expressions into propositional language, the idea of a quick fuck in the supply closet would definitely have gone through her mind. Miguel aroused her, but what was the best way to react? Then she heard an alarm of sorts—the melody of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. It was Miguel’s cell phone, and he set off into a moonwalk, grabbed his crotch, had a look at his phone to see who was calling, and decided not to answer. Kamtchowsky sighed. For some reason, she’d thought that with him things would be different.

  Later on, she would have a very good idea.

  5

  Kamtchowsky’s idea soon debuted on the mental stages of Andy, Mara and Pabst. They organized quickly: Mara would take charge of working up the digital backgrounds, with help from Kamtchowsky; Andy would ask Martin and Q to develop the necessary software; Pabst and Kamtchowsky would write the script. To the extent that their schedules and intellectual gifts permitted, they were all at liberty to pitch in on each other’s tasks. A week later, their first test model was ready.

  The Moral Games genre appeared on the heels of the commercial boom in Christian video games such as Eternal War: Shadows of Light, in which the mission is to travel into the depths of the suicidal mind of John Coronado to fight against the malignant spirits and the climate of destruction that afflict him. John is trapped in a vicious circle of drugs, pornography and self-mutilation. If God really existed, John wonders, would he allow these other things to exist as well? If the player wins, John goes to Heaven; if he loses, John goes to Hell. (The game continues in both places.) John’s lance emits lethal rays of Divine Light which swirl in the air like streamers made of razor wire. In another game called Ominous Horizons: A Paladin’s Calling, we are in 16th century Germany; the Forces of Evil have destroyed Gutenberg’s printing press and stolen his Bible. The mission here is to recover the Bible and thus ensure the spread of Christianity. Weaponry: a piece of wood inherited from Moses that can channel divine energy and destroy the henchmen of the Evil One. There is a high content of explicit violence; the New Age touch consists of a pagan warrior, the Grand Druid. At first, the main idea of these games was simply to provide a decisional context that would complexify the player’s experience of the binary framework of the reciprocal interchange that is war. Before the first of the Moral Games appeared, there had been attempts to develop communities of followers through visually enriched variants wherein the tactical objective was camouflaged—much as in Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros., among other classics—by combining it with more specialized consumption dynamics.

  The Argentine case in question was based on a modified version of the core content of a Christian war game. On the first screen of Stage 1, we see a long-haired young woman in a white nightgown standing on a terrace. The sun is rising over the conurban landscape, and a wind effect makes her nightgown flap around—it’s too big for her thin body. The girl takes up a machine gun and starts shooting. Twenty police officers crowd together below and return fire. We hear the girl laugh.

  (The provisional title of this adventure-style video game was Dirty War 1975; it would prove to be extremely popular.)

  Next, a menu appears; as the girl in the nightgown continues to fire, the player is given the option of skipping the introduction and choosing a character from the following list:

  Che I (black beret, Sierra Maestra uniform, no cigar).

  Che II (cigar, bandana with red star, thin beard).

  Hilda, 2nd in Command (skinny, valiant, her hair now cut short, white nightgown still flapping in the wind).

  Susana, nom de guerre “La Gaby” (skin-and-bones, agile, black eyes, penetrating gaze, a woman of high prestige, Peronist).

  “El Pelado” Flores (tall, green eyes, mustache, twenty-seven years old, dropped out of medical school to take part in the Struggle).

  Father Manuel (angelic face, patrician family, thirty years old).

  “Vladimiro” (could pass for a young Lenin, wears a beret and a red rosette).

  The Revolutionary Author, nom de guerre “Pepe” (intelligent, thick-framed glasses, carries his typewriter everywhere, uses it as a weapon to crush his enemies’ skulls).

  To the left of the character menu is an image of the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, a treatise written by Carlos Marighella, a Brazilian from Bahía.11, xiv Inside, there is a diagram that explains the training process: all players start at the lowest rank, and must accumulate points in order to win promotion. Points are won by fulfilling the military objectives laid out at the beginning of each mission, and can be cashed in for additional recruits; when the mission is complete, the player sees how many new recruits have been gained as a result of his or her gameplay. (The total number of points available varies according to the mission assigned.)

  Meanwhile, the right-hand side of the screen consists of a menu with character options pertaining to the enemy, along with a copy of La guerre moderne, by Roger Trinquier, the French office
r who designed the methodology that would come to be known as “counterrevolutionary warfare,” as practiced in Indochina and Algeria. (Andy had managed to get his hands on a copy of the actual manual.) The characters available here were:

  “El Lobo” Bahndor (swarthy, hair slicked back, strongly built, lifelong Peronist, thirty-five years old).

  “El Jaguar” Gómez (born in Paraguay, his motto is “No Retreat, No Surrender”).

  “El Tigre” Rosca (Argentine, career soldier, salt-and-pepper hair, blue eyes, thirty-eight years old, Chief of Operations).

  Martín Romero Díaz (eighteen years old, conscripted into the Infantry, looks just like Palito Ortega, the singer from the 1970s).

  Mónica “La Piba” Guzmán (fierce, buxom, bottle-blond hair, police officer).

  Monsignor Faustino Orate de Echagüe (mysterious gaze, priestly robe).

  Ranni I (the actor Rodolfo Ranni, thirty-five years old, black Ray-Bans, wearing a dress uniform and tie).

  Ranni II (the same actor, no Ray-Bans, hair slicked back, olive green combat uniform).

  The point of the game is to accumulate the greatest number of points, thus gaining the most new adepts, members, partisans and accomplices. Scores are tallied on displays to either side of the screen—the number of points earned next to the head of the character being played. The military objectives involved might include the destruction of enemy forces, the capture of weaponry, or the successful completion of tactical maneuvers. Each side also has a specific objective to accomplish, such as setting up an ambush in the streets, or taking over the ticket office at the train station. (At the beginning, the war was entirely urban; later on, the developers would add settings from all over the country, including tourist destinations up north and elsewhere.) Players are allowed to choose the musical accompaniment for their operation; there are songs by Palito Ortega (“Un muchacho como yo,” “Se parece a mi mamá”), a deep house version of the Carlos Puebla hit “Hasta siempre, Comandante,” courtesy of Etián, and a couple of Sandro songs. Once each player has made the necessary selections, the characters take their positions and the action begins. Each character chosen evolves in the course of the game, becoming ever more powerful.