Dinner

by Cesar Aira

  So I tried to set her straight. But the specifics she started telling me made me doubt that she was wrong. I told her that my friend had his construction company, that he had a lot of work . . . She refuted me with absolute certainty: No, not in your dreams. He never worked, they were under water, construction was at a standstill. Moreover, the company didn’t even belong to him anymore; his partner had cheated him and left him out in the cold. She backed up her statements with names and more names, the names of those who’d hired him and hadn’t paid him, the names of his creditors, the names of those who’d bought the few properties he’d still had and that he’d had to sell in order to pay off his debts. The names made the story believable though their effect on me was to provoke more admiration than conviction. I was impressed that my mother always had the names right on the tip of her tongue; it’s true, she had a lot of practice, because all her conversations (and presumably all her thoughts) revolved around the people of the town. I didn’t even know the name of my friend’s business partner. The names of the families of Pringles were familiar, I’d heard all of them before, thousands of times before, but for some reason I’d always refused to associate them with the people I saw on the street. Never having made those associations as a child, I never did thereafter. As the years passed, I became daunted by the amount of work it would take to learn them, especially when I saw everybody else’s virtuosity. It couldn’t, however, be that difficult. I had to admit that obstinacy played a part in my refusal. But it wasn’t that serious. One could still live and interact with others, though in the long run others would eventually notice my shortcoming. I didn’t operate with a shorthand list of names and a web of family relations and neighborhoods. I needed supplemental explanations, and my interlocutors—if they didn’t write me off as mentally deficient—might think that it was out of disdain, or indifference, or an unjustifiable feeling of superiority. Perhaps that’s why I’d done so poorly in business. Someone who didn’t know the name of the neighbor he saw every day couldn’t possibly be trusted.

  Mother and my friend had spent the whole dinner spouting names. Based on this rapport, I assumed she had enjoyed the evening, but apparently that was not the case. She was in a bad mood when she got home, in the elevator she kept sighing impatiently, and when we entered the apartment she went straight to the bathroom to take her sleeping pill. Before going to bed she had time to complain one more time about how late it was and what a terrible time she’d had. I plopped into an armchair and turned on the TV. She walked past me one last time carrying a glass of water on her way from the kitchen, said good night, and closed the door to her room.

  “Don’t go to bed too late.”

  “It’s early. And tomorrow is Sunday.”

  My own words depressed me. Not only because Sundays were depressing but because every day had turned into Sunday for me. Unemployment, the awareness of failure, the anachronistic relationship between a sixty-year-old man and his mother, my long-since confirmed bachelorhood, all of it had enveloped me in the typical melancholy of dead days. Every morning, and every night, I resolved to start a new life, but I always procrastinated, acquiescing to my ailing willpower. And Saturday at eleven o’clock at night was not the right moment to make important decisions.

  Television had become my only real occupation. And I didn’t even like it. When I was young it didn’t exist (in Pringles), and when I lived alone I didn’t have a TV, so I never got into the habit and never learned to like it. But ever since I’d moved into my mother’s apartment, it was all I’d had.

  Whenever I was alone, I channel surfed. I always did the same thing, and from what I understood, so did many others, and systematically; for many, “watching television” was the same as channel surfing. That’s what it was for me. I never got into movies, maybe because I always tuned into them when they’d already started and so I didn’t understand the plot, and anyway I never liked movies or novels. The news channels weren’t any better, because I was also never interested in the crime stories currently in the limelight, and much less in wars and natural disasters. And it was the same with everything else. There were seventy channels, and I would often surf through all of them, one after the other, then go back and surf through them again, until I got tired (my finger pressing the button would fall asleep), and then I’d leave it anywhere I happened to be. After a while, out of despondency or plain boredom I’d summon up enough energy to change it again. Since I spent whole afternoons in front of the TV, I couldn’t fail to notice, at some point, how futile and irrational this activity was. Mother would urge me to go out and take a walk, and I often intended to, but my indolence would always win out. I remembered what my friend had recounted earlier that evening, about the short old man who would walk to the Cemetery in the mornings. That in itself could have motivated me: not the example of a healthy and active almost ninety-year-old (even though he was a good example), but rather the curiosity of running into him. He said he did it only when he woke up depressed or in pain, that is, he didn’t do it every day. But I would have to do it every day if I didn’t want to miss him when he did it. Of course, the possibility of watching an old man take a walk wasn’t very compelling, but I was slightly intrigued by the chance of finding out if the story was true, and I was used to making do with very little. The stories my friend told always had, as I said, the feeling of fables; to confirm one in reality might be exciting. At this stage of my life, I had reached the conclusion that I would never be the protagonist of any story. The only thing I could hope for was to make an appearance in somebody else’s.

  Be that as it may, I couldn’t see myself getting up at dawn the following day, nor any other day, either to take a walk or for any other reason. Which was a pity, because I didn’t go out at night, either. Night in Pringles was for the young, especially a Saturday night like this one. On our way home I’d seen the activity in the streets, and now sitting in front of the television set, I remembered that the local cable channel had a show that was a live broadcast of Saturday nights.

  These days every town, even some much smaller than ours, has its own cable channel. It must be a good business, requiring a small initial investment and plenty of side benefits. But it’s difficult to fill the schedule with more or less acceptable programming. The Pringles channel came up against a definitive impossibility in this respect. It was a true disaster, even though it broadcast only a few hours a day: a news show at noon, another at night, after which there was a program about farming hosted by an agronomist, another program about sports, and depending on the day of the week, a movie, music videos, a musical event at the Teatro Español, or a session of the Town Council. The news was mostly about local school events: deadly boring. Everything was precarious, poorly lit, badly filmed, badly edited, as well as predictable and repetitive. It didn’t even have the charm of the ridiculous. And even acknowledging that it is easier to criticize than to do, we Pringlesians had good reason to complain. There was no creativity, no imagination, no feelings, not even a dash of audacity.

  The new program on Saturday nights offered a glimmer of hope within that context. María Rosa, the young newswoman, was the star of the show, and the idea was that she went out on her scooter, accompanied by her cameraman, to make the rounds of night clubs and restaurants and parties. I’d seen a few episodes on previous Saturdays. The poor results could be blamed on a lack of fine tuning, only to be expected in a new show. But there was a general atmosphere of ineptness that led one to think it would never improve. It was as if they didn’t care how it turned out, which is all too common and in itself can become intriguing. There was either too much or not enough light, and the sound didn’t work. If you could see or hear anything, it was almost by accident. They wanted to make it seem improvised, informal, youthful, but they were so naïve that they believed this could be achieved by behaving in an improvised, informal, and youthful way; the result was unintelligible. Anyway, what were they thinking when they entered a discotheque or burst in on a membership dinn
er at the Bonfire of the Gauchos Club and asked people if they were having a good time? It seemed they hadn’t asked themselves that question. If it was a sociological survey, it was poorly done; if they wanted to show how the rich and famous enjoyed themselves, they were barking up the wrong tree because in Pringles there weren’t any. They couldn’t even count on people’s desire to see themselves on television because the show was broadcast live so they wouldn’t be able to see themselves; the only thing they could hope for was that some relative would stay up late to watch it and the next day say, “I saw you.”

  It had already started when I turned to it, and I amused myself for a while analyzing all its defects. Now I was watching the main part, which was the live broadcast itself: there was endless dead air between one event and another, no matter how fast María Rosa drove her scooter. They hadn’t thought of that, either. Since they didn’t have any advertisers, there were no breaks; the cameraman rode as best he could on the scooter behind María Rosa, and with wildly jerky movements the camera kept showing whatever it happened to catch—the starry sky, the streetlights, houses, trees, paving stones, all in a convulsed waltz. He had to hold onto the driver with one hand, and hold the heavy camera on his shoulder with the other, and this went on and on. María Rosa would try to fill the interlude with commentary, but in addition to not having anything to say and having to pay attention to the road, her poor diction and the sound of the engine made it impossible to understand anything.

  Right when I tuned in, they were in the middle of one of these lapses. And when I had finished formulating my stringent and resentful critique (as if I really cared), they were still going full speed ahead. It was impossible to know where they were going: the swaying of the camera was frenetic, and the few blurry images that abruptly broke through the darkness didn’t give me any clues. The noise of the scooter’s engine, pushed to the max, drowned out the voice of María Rosa, who talked nonstop, made jokes, laughed, and seemed very excited. I tolerated it for a few more minutes, and when they still hadn’t arrived anywhere, I changed channels. I surfed through all seventy channels, and when I returned, after what seemed like a very long time, they were still riding the scooter. This was the last straw.

  Where were they going? Might they have finally convinced themselves that they couldn’t squeeze anything out of nighttime in Pringles, and they had decided to explore a neighboring town, like Suárez or Laprida? Suárez was the closest, but still it would take them an hour and a half to get there, and they couldn’t be that unreasonable; moreover, the road there would have been smoother; judging from the bumps and jolts, they were driving on dirt roads, around curves, and in one or another of those vertiginous diagonal screenshots, the light on the camera hit on some trees and, every once in a while, a house. They must have been on the outskirts of town, or maybe they’d gotten lost. Maybe a nightclub had opened up out there, or in the neighborhood around the train station, which was some distance away. It seemed unlikely. There was a truck stop next to the roundabout on Route 5, the famous La Tacuarita, where the gourmets of Pringles used to go, but the highway went there, and they clearly were not on the highway.

  Then I thought of another explanation, which was much more likely: there had been an accident, María Rosa had heard about it, and they were rushing there, turning their backs on the frivolity of nightlife in favor of real news. Saturday nights were the most prone to automobile accidents: half of Pringles had lost their lives or been crippled in accidents. The strange thing now was that I didn’t hear any sirens. But that was the best explanation for why the reporter was driving so far. She must have wanted to get there to take pictures of the dead bodies and talk to the witnesses or a survivor.

  All my suppositions turned out to be wrong, except one: the nocturnal camera really was going in pursuit of a startling news item that it had heard about while making the rounds of the nightclubs. Though it was neither a traffic accident nor a fire nor a crime, but something much stranger, so strange that nobody in their right mind could believe that it was really happening. So they were going (they couldn’t not go) to expose the lie and unmask the pranksters. The prank might have been the phone call, or the information that had made them go, and if so, they wouldn’t find anything.

  Anyway. They were on their way to the Cemetery because they’d been told that the dead were rising from their graves of their own accord. This was as improbable as an adolescent fantasy. It was, however, true. The guard who sounded the alarm first heard some rustling sounds that kept getting louder and spreading across the graveyard. He came out of the lodge to take a look and hadn’t even made it across the tiled courtyard to where the first lane of cypresses ended when, in addition to the worrisome rustlings, he began to hear the loud banging of stone and metal, which seconds later spread and combined into a deafening roar that reverberated near and far, from the first wing of the wall of niches to the rows of graves extending for more than a mile. He thought of an earthquake, something never before seen on the serene plains of Pringles. But he had to dismiss this idea because the paving under his feet could not have been more still. Then he managed to see, by the light of the moon, what was making the noise. The marble gravestones were moving, rising from one side and breaking as they came hurtling down. Inside the crypts, coffins and iron fittings were spliting open, and the doors themselves were being shaken from inside, the padlocks were bursting open, and the windows were shattering. The covers of the niches were being forced off and were crashing loudly to the ground. Concrete crosses and stucco angels flew through the air, hurled from the crypts as they violently flung open.

  The thunderous roar of this demolition had still not ceased when there rose from the wreckage—one could say from the earth itself—a chorus of sighs and groans that had an electronic rather than a human timbre. That’s when the guard saw the first dead walking out of the nearest vaults. And it wasn’t two or three or even ten or twenty: it was all of them. They appeared out of tombs, crypts, vaults; they literally rose out of the ground, an invasion, legions of them, coming from every direction. Their first steps were shaky. They looked like they were about to fall but then straightened up and took one step, then another, waving their arms about, moving their legs awkwardly and stiffly, as if they were marching in place, lifting their knees up too high, then letting their feet fall any which way, as if even the laws of gravity were new to them. But they were all walking, and there were so many of them that when they reached the pathways, they crashed into one another, their arms and legs got tangled up, and for moments they formed compact groups that shook in unison and separated with violent stumbles.

  This lack of coordination was understandable after awakening from a long immobilized sleep, especially since each sleep had lasted a different length of time. They all looked too tall, as if they’d grown while dead, which surely contributed to their clumsiness. No two were the same, except in how horrible they were, in the conventional way corpses are horrible: shards of greenish skin, bearded skulls, remnants of eyes shining in bony sockets, sullied shrouds. And groans, both hoarse and shrill, every time they breathed.

  The first victim was the guard. This civil servant with long years of experience had never seen anything like this, but he didn’t just stand there watching the show. Once he realized what was going on, he made an about-face and took off running. Looking back, he saw the dense crowd of corpses with creaking bones and cartilage pressing down the side corridors of the walls of niches, while others were still climbing down from the top-most niches like “the spider dead,” otherworldly greyhounds oozing slime. There, the rooftops shaded the moon, but a silvery phosphorescence emanating from the bones lit up the scene, making the tiniest details sharp, all in ghostly black and white. The guard didn’t hang around to observe the details. He ran across the atrium, and when he reached the fence railings, he remembered that a few hours earlier he himself had wrapped the thick chains around the heavy gates and closed the padlock. Damn security! The keys were hanging on the wa
ll of his office, so he took off in that direction after deciding against the facing door, which was the entrance to the chapel (even though he was already placing himself at the mercy of all the saints). Luckily, the office had metal doors, and luckily he arrived there before the corpses, who were already marching through the atrium. He got a jump on them thanks to how slowly they were going, that there were so many of them, and that in their hurry they were getting in each others’ way. How many dead were there in the Cemetery? Thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Nobody had ever bothered to count up the entries in the register, those handwritten manuscripts that had sat for a hundred years in the archives. And they were all moving en masse toward the door, without any coordination, like water flowing toward the drain.