33 Revolutions

by Canek Sánchez Guevara

  “Do something!” Father would shout, unable to comprehend, but Mother, always Mother, would tell her husband that he shouldn’t get upset, that maybe the boy would become an intellectual.

  “An intellectual?” Father would bellow, convinced that artists (and similar people) are a disaster for the country. And he was right, decades earlier he had followed with interest the debates with those so-called intellectuals who seemed more like agents of the enemy—deviationists!—people who suffered from the original sin: lack of revolutionary spirit. “And you’re not going to be like them! No way!” (Behind him, Mother would be making signs that meant: Don’t mind him, son: Don’t mind him at all).

  He read a lot—quite unaware, in no particular order and with no particular intention—and continued with his studies because he had discovered a private universe much vaster than the one around him. As it turned out, that universe highlighted the narrowness of everyday life and made him dream of unknown, missing expanses. That was when everything started to seem like a scratched record.

  11

  The needle gets stuck in a groove and the tropical avenue seems full of Urals, Volgas, Moskviches, and Polskis. Inside, the air conditioning and the diplomat store full of nice things. Outside, the scalding tar of the street, the nonexistent breeze, and the thirst; inside, cold beer, consumer goods, and food; outside, the hunger and the silence. Two worlds in one, two dimensions, two universes: Two nations and two deaths, he thinks: The needle crackles, jumps, and falls here, where nothing is permitted but everything is decided and done.

  “What blockade?” he asks himself, gazing at the shelves full of foreign products at prices incompatible with the national economy, and he’s amazed, not by what there is, but by what there isn’t outside this consumerist enclave.

  He has a slight hangover and with slow movements, close to cramps, he reaches out his arm and grabs a cold Coke: He opens it there and then, whistling “The March of the Fighting People,” and devotes himself to it with almost aesthetic—even ideological—delight, smiling like a child doing something wrong when nobody’s looking.

  12

  He doesn’t go to the diplomat store alone, but with the Russian woman from the ninth floor, the one who’s in charge of the black market in the building. She’s the one with the passport, the one who legally has foreign currency and the right to buy. When they come out, they part affectionately (he pays her a commission to get him in): Father didn’t get to see this, he thinks. He died years ago, when it was discovered that in the agricultural concern that he ran there was a big shortfall, and they blamed him.

  “Misappropriation of funds!” was the expression used during the trial, and he, always so pure, kept angrily, indignantly proclaiming his innocence:

  “For fuck’s sake, nobody calls me a thief!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, red in the face, until his heart burst.

  “Massive heart attack,” said the doctor.

  The night of the funeral, getting drunk with his friends, it struck him that his father had died of innocence (and he said, by way of farewell, showing his white teeth in a sad, inebriated smile, that he had been pig-headed but honest, ignorant but idealistic). Mother, after a few months of grief—wandering from home to work and from work to home—decided to process her Spanish citizenship (on her father’s side) and left for Madrid: She is the one who sends him a bit of money and a few books every now and then.

  He doesn’t like to walk down the street with shopping bags, that’s why he puts everything in his backpack. Actually, he hasn’t bought much: a bit of meat, rice, eggs, oil, bread, two or three beers, a bottle of rum, cigarettes, toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo: the basics (don’t even mention the ration book): He eats little and his taste is limited; besides, he has lunch at work: What more can I ask for in this world? he asks himself sarcastically. On the outside, he seems a normal guy, shabbily dressed, with an ordinary face and eyes that say nothing: One more scratched record, he murmurs to himself.

  And on the inside?

  He asks himself lots of questions. He’s afraid he’ll discover that in reality he’s a long-suffering narcissist enchanted with his own existential misery: Like a damned poète maudit, he thinks (he looks at the people at the bus stop, focuses on their absent looks, so similar to his, and starts walking along Fifth, downcast and smiling).

  Like one more . . .

  13

  At times in his youth he thought about changing course, giving up engineering and switching to philosophy and letters, or history, or even social science, but he constantly put his father’s judgements and values before his own plans. When his father was alive, he was afraid he would kill him with fright, and once he was dead he decided to respect his wishes: But that was his fault, not Father’s. On the other hand, he’s never been able to write—he knows he’s incapable of putting together a single sentence: he considers himself simply a reasonable, inquiring reader, and makes no other claims. His work at the ministry is boring but encourages reading: he covers the books with newspaper and if anyone in the office asks what he’s reading, he invariably replies: Agatha Christie (although it’s actually Kundera).

  But the most important discovery of the past few years has been music—before, he didn’t have music; he listened to what his friends listened to (if he was with timba fans, timba; with trova fans, trova; with jazz fans, jazz; with rock fans, rock . . . and so on, without dwelling on anything in particular). Without any preferences. He found no meaning in that explosion of sounds: Sometimes he danced, more out of an instinct to be sociable or as part of the mating ritual than out of true, autonomous pleasure. Music, in short, meant nothing to him.

  It happened after he and his wife separated: He decided to go to the theater to listen to the symphony. There was no curiosity in that decision (or maybe only a little), rather, the other options struck him as worse—baseball at the stadium, a comedy at the movie theater, TV with its two channels: No, thanks. The program included pieces by Roldán and Brouwer. For the first time he was able to dream while music played. Those sounds—those twisted chords—made him jump for joy, with an inexplicable happiness, closer to neurosis than spiritual calm. For weeks he lived with that sensation in his body; suddenly he knew that he had encountered the music he’d been missing. Over time, he’s managed to put together a modest but well-organized collection of avant-garde, serial, aleatoric, mathematical, modernist, and minimalist music, and every now and again he wonders what he’s done to deserve this—to have tastes so alien to the tropics and yet live here . . .

  14

  He pours himself a beer, switches on the TV with the volume very low—voices in the background: a bit of company—and puts on a Varèse cassette at full volume. He goes back to the kitchen and fries himself a steak; he gobbles it down on a piece of bread with oil and garlic, sitting at the little table. He synchronizes the end of the sandwich with the last note of the recording. He grabs a book and tries to concentrate, all the while fighting against the heat. He needs company: After the separation he decided that never again would he have a woman in his home, at least for more than one night. He leads a healthy sex life with himself, and he only mates when necessary—if he wants to smoke and talk while looking up at the ceiling—not every time he needs to ejaculate: He’s convinced it’s healthier this way. He feels particularly attracted to women over forty, but they have to be married or recently divorced. He can’t stand spinsters: Too maternal, he thinks.

  It was around the end of his matrimonial crisis (at the age of twenty-five) that he started to develop a taste for older women; at first out of curiosity—morbid curiosity?—then out of conviction. Everything started with a neighbor, the wife of a soldier who spent more time in his unit than at home. They met while on guard duty for the committee, and they talked and talked for hours about things as intimate as delays in meat distribution or the limited variety of food available in the market. Somehow they ended up involved in a s
ecret relationship in a building full of gossips (actually, the threat of gossip was the least risky part of the affair: The one danger was the husband, a man who—he thinks—wouldn’t hesitate to put a bullet in his balls).

  He gets up slowly and goes up to the ninth floor in search of the Russian woman. She opens the door and leans back against the doorframe, as if she had guessed he was coming. The night passes slowly—they know each other, they’ve learned to delight in prolonged, stuttering spasms—and toward the end, he snorts loudly. He smokes, lying in the dark against the woman’s naked back—powerful buttocks that wear out sheets and dreams—and he thinks that metaphors are unnecessary at this moment in which the smoke drifts up to the ceiling, slithering amid the aromas of sweat, sex, and tropicalism.

  She sleeps and he devotes himself to sniffing her body (the smell of her hairy underarms burns his nostrils and jangles his neurons). Without putting pressure on her, he makes her turn—her tits point up at the ceiling; he buries his nose in her pubis, filling his lungs with the unmistakable acidity of that lush blond cunt, full of socialist realism. She smiles in her sleep—she murmurs something in Russian (she’s back in the steppes)—and he lies down to smoke once again, letting himself be borne along by the scratched record of pleasure and tiredness.

  15

  His peace is broken by a shower of nightsticks and boots. He tries to wake, shaky, eyes imploring, naked, he wonders what he’s done, what he’s said, and he yells at the top of his lungs. His body is burning and he feels every muscle atrophied by fear. He’s flung down the stairs, and as he goes down he bumps on a surface that’s not very pleasant to the touch. He’s surrounded by insults, anger, madness. More kicks, many more. Now he weeps. He doesn’t want to, but he can’t help it. His teeth. His teeth hurt. Downstairs, they bundle him into a new Mercedes that jolts in time to the blows.

  Villa Marista. They drag him to an interrogation room. A shaky doctor certifies that there’s no serious damage to this weary, skinny individual who’s trembling as much as he is. Two officers come in and threateningly demand that he tell them everything. One of them hits him full in the face; the other insults his mother, calls him a fag, and gives him a thump in the sternum.

  “Talk, for fuck’s sake!” they both roar simul­taneously.

  16

  They lock him in a cell with two unsavory-looking characters. He crouches in a corner, sniffles, and tries to come to terms with the pain. He looks up; the prisoners are watching him and smiling.

  “Did you talk?” one of them asks.

  “Talk about what?”

  He’s on the verge of despair. He doesn’t understand why he’s here, and has no idea how to get out. Everything is fear at that moment. A fear that eats away at him, humiliates him more than the blows, the shouts, the insults. He doesn’t care whether or not there are witnesses to his panic, his paralysis: I’m the witness, he thinks, judging himself harshly now that he can finally breathe a little more easily. The cell stinks. It’s cramped and gray and there are stains on the wall that look like dried blood. There’s a small window, just enough to bring in a little air; it’s almost at the level of the ceiling, unreachable for a man of medium height.

  He lies down on a concrete cot, as cold and hard as the cemetery. He can’t close his eyes. He’s afraid to do so. A long series of distorted images unfurls on the ceiling, reminding him of A Clockwork Orange. Three short but well-built guards shove him out and force him to walk along endless corridors. They come to a dark room lit by a single dim bulb. In it, a high-ranking officer (it’s unmistakable) is waiting for him; they sit him down on a chair and before he can open his mouth a thick volume of Das Kapital crashes into his left parietal.

  “Talk!” the man with the stripes murmurs from the semidarkness.

  “About what?”

  “You know.”

  “I don’t know anything. I don’t under­stand . . . ”

  The guards look at each other, one murmurs something about a son of a bitch, and the other lets fly with the second volume, this time full in the face and with the spine. Blood spurts from his nose (nasal septum shattered). Unbearable pain, tears that burst against his tightly closed eyelids, real howls.

  Then he wakes up, soaked in sweat, next to the Russian woman, who at that moment grunts something untranslatable.

  He dresses quickly.

  He escapes to reality . . .

  17

  Eight A.M. The heat and humidity are already unbearable (the atmosphere surpasses any instrument of measurement: Something indescribable hovers in the air). The bus advances toward the slaughterhouse of the everyday (people hanging from doors and windows, men rubbing up against women in the interior—the morning hard-on) and at last stops at the intersection of two avenues trapped in time. Already tired, he walks to work with the certainty of futility—the discontent, the atrophy, the silence of everyday life. The office awaits him like last week: There are no surprises or changes or novelties. Once the epic is exhausted, all that remains is the boredom, the absenteeism, the indifference (consciousness is unpredictable; without feedback, it scratches, the needle jumps, and it becomes incomprehensible, inscrutable, impossible to grasp). Everything lacks definition; dirt erases the most basic forms (theft is a legitimate practice): Blackmail unites, decline disguises itself as progress, and even so the record keeps turning (the needle sticks, jumps, and goes backwards): Confusion is the one certainty.

  He knows: Today nothing will go well. On days like this, life seems to him a vain literary exercise, an experimental poem, a treatise on the pointless and the unnecessary, and he walks slowly, his eyes glued to the ground, wishing he could fall onto the curb and die crushed by habit. He lights a cigarette, blows out the smoke, and looks behind him (beyond time). He thinks that, after all, reality is a strange place, at least here. Determinedly, he turns and walks in the opposite direction. He gets in a battered old heap that stinks of kerosene, squashed between six strangers.

  Through the windshield he sees the scratched world pass by, like a record in which everything happens (the city, white with so much light, the people on the staircases, in doorways, and on balconies staring into space; people standing in line, breakdowns). The driver keeps complaining: the gasoline, the tires, the spare parts (the grammar of movement, words in perpetual motion). The Capitolio: itinerant photographers, tourists, teenage tearaways in trendy clothes, police officers with their eyes peeled, adults engaged in the unequivocal dialectic of idleness . . .

  He walks. He listens to conversations:

  “Down with the union!” someone cries.

  “Everything’s for sale here, man.”

  “Fuck off!” another replies.

  “Fuck you! You’re a fucking faggot, you know that?”

  “Scram, pal,” the crowd is getting worked up (indignation): the ethics of fists and guns.

  “Just get the hell out of here, things are turning ugly . . . ”

  Cops in a patrol car. He gets to the stop and asks to be dropped at the end of the waiting line. People on all sides—scratched records that nobody listens to (statistics for a speech or a balance sheet): But they aren’t the ones who’ll be left, he thinks: I’m the one who’ll be left.

  18

  Santa María, burning hot sand, scratched records in tangas or Bermuda shorts. He watches a group of young people who look out to sea with a mixture of fatalism and anxiety (the distance seems so distant from here): Schizophrenia is normal in this scratched record—side A, side B—a mix that leads nowhere, bipolar phenomenology. He walks barefoot with the bottoms of the pants rolled up (shoulders slumped, eyes down)—there isn’t a single shadow anywhere on the beach (the smell of the salt residue is particularly seductive)—, swinging his frame, and sits down at the far end, a long way from the commotion.

  He smokes facing the sea, thinking that there’s nothing to keep him here—and there and then, sitting on
the sand he wonders why (for what?). His life is passing with incredible, Tarkovskyan slowness, and all his old dreams have faded with the relentless competition of reality. If at least he was happy in his work—but he doesn’t even have that: He’s a minor bureaucrat, having to tolerate bosses infinitely more second-rate than he is, he thinks. It isn’t even a matter of material comfort: His needs are few: He’d live more or less the same way in any part of the globe. It’s all about the shock between reality and him: The inertia that stops him from breaking free of his stagnation; the false dilemma that ties him to nothingness.

  The heat is criminal—it melts neurons, incites to violence, multiplies fertility tenfold. There isn’t a beer for miles around (or water, or a barley drink, or anything that can be bought with the national currency). Nothing belongs to me, he thinks. And what about me, do I belong to anything? (The scratched record plays insistently.) All at once a group of young people appear carrying a strange object halfway between a ready-made and a broken wardrobe (there are six or seven carrying it); they pull the artifact to the water and get on it. The spectacle attracts a crowd of onlookers.