Dinner

by Cesar Aira

  From the top of the Palacio’s tower, one-armed Artola, “El Manco,” watched the invasion advance. With his one hand he brought the walkie-talkie up to his mouth and reported on the latest developments; the receiver, with the volume turned all the way up and the channel open, was in the mayor’s office: with one ear they listened to El Manco and with the other to the reports and opinions of the crowd of polite volunteers who were coming, going, or staying put, in addition to those calling on the phone. The commotion was becoming extreme. To move from his desk to the wall map in order to record the data coming in from the tower, the mayor had to elbow his way through, and by the time he got there, somebody else had already moved forward the line of red-headed pins, which left him confused.

  Up there alone, El Manco was no less confused. He had to admit that the view was splendid and defied the imagination; beyond that, everything was ambiguity. The full moon spread its white light impartially over the darkness of the town, making it seem to rise to the surface, like the checkerboard skin of an antediluvian sperm whale. The plain stretched out and beyond, as did the phosphorescent ribbon of highway distorted by the curvature of the horizon. The sector he was watching was much closer, though he was well aware that at night the illusory plains of contiguity could become stuck together, like the pages of a book. His attention separated the pages, and there the aberrations of nocturnal vision coincided with the monstrous fantasies of nightmare.

  Nevertheless, they seemed so inoffensive, those grasshoppers in perpetual motion. He watched them flapping around like madmen, leaping from the street to the cornices, running across the rooftops, slipping through every crack—even where there weren’t any cracks. They crowded together, they dispersed, they stopped and spread out their arms like antennae. Suddenly they would all gather in angular shadows; an instant later they were legions swarming in the silvery glow through which their passage left a green, pink, and violet wake.

  There was one thing they never did: retreat. The advance was uneven, as was the blotch of invaders across the checkerboard of houses and streets, but there was a method, and it was a very simple one: to continuously advance, to keep moving in the same direction. Everything was uneven: the movements, the leaps, the meetings and separations; that chaos, by contrast, highlighted the strict mechanics by which they were “covering” territory. It was the irreversibility that gave the scene its threatening oneiric tone. Like in a dream, everything seemed to be on the point of vanishing but at the same time ablaze with persistent reality. It was as if at every point in the unevenly illuminated darkness, valves opened, letting in impossible beings, then closed with a velvety plunger that stopped them from turning back.

  El Manco had to keep reminding himself that this was not a game and that he wasn’t there to amuse himself but rather to monitor events and issue warnings, so he rushed to transmit the coordinates of the incoming tide; he also reported on which points were vulnerable along the barricade of automobiles and marksmen, though these were fewer and fewer. The impression he got, from his privileged perspective, was that the entire town had gathered at the Line of Defense, where there was an extraordinary amount of activity. People were arriving in their cars and leaving them parked two or three deep, often blocking the side streets completely. He sent a warning out over his walkie-talkie: it would be impossible to effect a quick retreat, in case that became necessary. He insisted, because he had the feeling that they weren’t listening to him. Then came a fairly hysterical exchange of opinions with somebody down below.

  But when he turned back to look beyond the Line, at the neighborhoods that had already been invaded, he really had a fright. The advance had taken on a new dimension, had changed both quantitatively and qualitatively. All of a sudden the army of the living dead showed itself to be much more numerous. The huge mass of stragglers had reached the ones in front, overwhelming them like a solid, majestic ocean wave washing over drops of dew. And it continued advancing, destroying everything in its path, now without pausing, which was understandable because the last blocks before the Boulevard and the Plaza had already been evacuated, and perhaps also because they could smell the throngs waiting for them . . . He shouted into the radio: they were coming, they had arrived, hand-to-hand combat was imminent.

  He wasn’t lying. He was still talking when the first shots rang out. The people lying in wait behind the vehicles, who’d already had their fingers on the triggers for some time, started shooting as soon as they had the first living dead in their sights, and since there were so many people aiming at the even more numerous capering ghouls pouring forth from the deserted streets, there were multiple salvos, and after the first few, they started firing continuously. The crowd that had gathered in a compact mass behind the marksmen let out a unanimous shout, like the audience at a rock concert when, after a long wait, they see their idols finally coming out on stage. And there was something about the dead that was similar to rock musicians, with their disheveled appearance, their stringy hair, their spastic stride, and the arrogant self-confidence of knowing they are stars and that their mere presence satisfies everybody’s pent-up expectations. That’s where the similarities ended and the differences—horrific—began. Somehow everybody, even those keeping a Winchester rifle with nine rounds warm in their hands, and even more so the bystanders crowding behind them, had sustained doubts about the truth of what was going on. Nobody liked their doubts to vanish; the truth threw them off. And by stepping into the white circles shed by the mercury lightbulbs of the streetlights along the Boulevard, the arriving swarm showed off a reality that was frankly disagreeable. Rotten rags, exposed bones, skulls, femurs, phalanges, strips of cartilage hanging off like the remnants of an old collage. as well as the determination, the hunger, the race to see who would get there first.

  At the beginning nobody was too surprised that they just kept advancing. After all, that was the direction they’d been going in, and those waiting were doing so in the hope of seeing them: the closer they got, the better they’d see them. But at the same time as their curiosity was being satisfied, an alarm was raised, preceded by fleeting incomprehension. What was going on? Although everybody knew what was going on, the question was justified: the irresponsibly festive atmosphere that infused the crowd (because it was Saturday night, because it was an occasion for a large community gathering, so much less frequent since they’d stopped celebrating National Independence Day and the decadent activities of Carnival had begun) led everyone to think that the marksmen would only have to show off their marksmanship and be rewarded with applause and bravos; the older people were making associations with outdated images of shooting galleries at the now-extinct fairs of the Spanish Pilgrimages, the young people with the facile annihilating clicks of video games.

  But it wasn’t like that, not at all. The bullets passed right through the dead, without causing them the least disturbance, not even an extra tremor in their steps, which already were so clumsy. Taking aim and shooting at their heads caused them no more consternation than shooting at their bodies: their skulls got cracked, pierced, splintered, but stayed in place, and the shabby mannequins on whose shoulders these sat continued to move forward.

  If they had “seen” them a few seconds before, now they really saw them, saw them leap in one bound onto the hoods of the cars that were supposed to be an insurmountable barrier, saw one lean over to drink the brains of a marksman who, with one frenetic finger on the trigger of his Luger or Colt, kept firing bullets at the fingerboard of ribs, bullets that were as futile as a wave of welcome. Nobody stayed to watch that operation to the end, not only because it was too disgusting but because the second row was already jumping over the ferocious vampire lobotomies now in progress and throwing themselves at the bystanders.

  A general stampede began all along the Line. There were many casualties during those first few moments because of the sheer size of the crowd that impeded dispersal. As soon as the living saw an opening, they ran, and if they turned back to look and saw the dea
d chasing them, they ran faster. They also ran faster, and even faster still, if they saw that one of the dead had caught up with somebody and was sucking his head. Those who tried to get into their cars and start them up lost. Friends abandoned friends, children their parents, husbands their wives. Not everybody. Overcoming their terror, some went back to help their loved ones; in those cases, instead of one victim, there were two.

  The streets were filled with shouting and running, and the darkness increased, psychologically: those who were fleeing were afraid that Death, or one of its representatives, would appear out of every shadowy volume, something that was in fact occurring with implacable frequency. There was nobody who didn’t regret the community’s insistence on lining the streets with trees. Now they were all thinking that the authorities had been too responsive, because the town had turned into a forest of gruesome foliage. The Plaza, one of the places where the Line of Defense had first collapsed, was empty, and its pathways became the unobstructed corridor down which legions of corpses of all shapes and sizes marched toward the cobblestone streets of downtown Pringles.

  On an oval-shaped islet between the two square blocks of the Plaza stood the Palacio Municipal, that famous art-deco slab, that inside-out piano of white cement, and from its windows the mayor and his cohorts were watching the catastrophe. For some reason, the attackers had skipped it. The moment they saw that the Line had been breached, the occupants of the Palacio took the precaution of turning off all the lights. Even so, they knew their fate hung by a thread: if even a small group of the corpses they were watching pass through the Plaza decided to pay them a visit, it would all be over. The flight of the crowd probably worked in their favor—they constituted so much more visible and numerous prey than could possibly be concealed inside the wings of the Palacio. The police headquarters across the street hadn’t been so lucky: the policemen had tried to put up a fight, and were annihilated, along with the drunkards sleeping it off in their cells. The same thing happened at the church, on the other side of the Plaza, though with fewer victims. Only the priest was in the rectory, along with his wife and two children (in open rebellion against the archbishop of Bahía Blanca, the parish priest was defiantly living with his family).

  The mayor did not have a Plan B. It would have to be improvised. The lines of communication with the police having gone dead, there was nobody with whom to coordinate emergency measures. Out of the confused discussions taking place at the windows emerged the only course of action that seemed reasonable: to evacuate Pringles, using all available vehicles. But how would he give the order? The cell phones were functioning at white heat, but for the first time, word of mouth didn’t appear to be fast enough. One news item that reached them that way made even more urgent the need for overall coordination: many people, most in fact, were making the mistake of locking themselves in their houses, which then became fatal traps. They had to find a way to warn those who still had time to escape. An old civil servant had the idea of using the Propaladora. This ancient system of communication hadn’t been used for exactly fifty years, to the day, but they trusted it would still function, considering that in the first half of the last century electrical equipment was built with craftsmanship, with a view to permanence. The fact that it was still in place (though unplugged: but that could easily be remedied) was due to historico-sentimental circumstances: the last transmission by Propaladora was made on the night of the sixteenth of September 1955, when the last Peronist mayor of Pringles, in an heroic gesture, ordered the Marcha—the national anthem—sung by Hugo del Carril to be played throughout the blacked-out town in order to drown out the sounds of the bombs being dropped by the air force on nearby Pillahuinco. This mayor’s unforgettable civic courage, this posthumous proof of loyalty after the popular regime had already fallen, guaranteed that nobody would dismantle the device nor remove the cables from the metal loudspeakers, which continued to rust away atop the town’s cornices and electric poles.

  And, in effect, it worked. The evacuation order, a concise and appropriately alarmist message, echoed through the night of the living dead, and all Pringlesians heard it. Not everybody obeyed, which saved many others because it was no longer easy to flee. The streets were infested with thirsty corpses, who fell upon the head of anybody who came out of their house. And the only thing it achieved was to save them the trouble of breaking down doors and tripping over furniture—which they did whenever necessary.

  Scenes of horror and trepanation were repeated over and over in a terrifying chaos of simultaneity throughout the downtown area, and they spread further and further into outlying areas by the minute. In the Palacio, deliberations got mired in defeatist anomie. Nobody dared leave, but they also couldn’t find anything practical to do besides worry about their families. Among those gathered was the police medical examiner, a distinguished and highly respected Pringles surgeon, philanthropist, and scholar—he had come when the first alarm was raised. They asked him if there was any explanation for the strange events they were witnessing (and suffering).

  No, of course there was no explanation, just like there were no antecedents, as far as he knew. According to what they’d seen till now, the dead had risen from their graves because of a sharp craving for active endorphins; Nature, or a post-Nature of unknown characteristics, had provided them with the motor skills necessary to acquire it themselves, in the quickest and most efficient way possible.

  At the request of those in attendance, he briefly described endorphins, the substance produced by the brain for its own use—an optimizer of thought, or the thoughts of an optimist. He employed the hackneyed metaphor of the glass half full or half empty.

  Were they necessary for life?

  No. Extending the metaphor, one could say that the glass contained liquid to the midpoint, and that was life. The fact that it could be seen as “half full” or “half empty” didn’t change the concrete situation—that is to say, organic life as a real process—it only made this life livable or unlivable. The lack of antecedents for this event could be due to the fact that science had never been curious enough to measure hormonal secretions once organic activity stopped at death. It was possible that a kind of syndrome of abstinence took place, and that this was the equivalent, like a simulacrum, of life, after life. In reality, he said, after thinking about it for a moment, it wasn’t entirely true that there were no antecedents. Perhaps, on the contrary, they abounded. Perhaps that was all there was, and they were suffering the consequences of an overflow of antecedents. Hadn’t they seen the same plot in countless movies, in stories and popular legends that hailed from the oldest antiquity and from all the peoples on Earth? Perhaps ancient and latent wisdom deep in humankind knew what science still did not.

  From there, he could only speculate, and respond with hypothetical speculations to the questions they were asking. Above all, to one question, which was of burning importance: Was there any way to stop them? A priori, no, there wasn’t. The final and definitive means for stopping danger that came from another person was death. And in this case, that wasn’t applicable. He didn’t deny that there could be others. If death was the final means, it meant that there existed all the others that came before it, making it “final”; these spanned from verbal interventions (“Please, I’d prefer that you didn’t”) to incineration or exorcism, for example. Any of those might work, but which one? Sooner or later, someone would find one through the method of trial and error. Unfortunately, he didn’t think it would be them; they wouldn’t have time.

  At this point he repeated that he was speculating in a vacuum, adding that maybe by now new information would be available. He called the cell phone of a colleague and found out that at the Clinic, where this colleague was, the doctors were meeting to analyze the situation, just as they were doing. The same thing was happening at the Hospital, which was further away, almost on the outskirts of town on the way to the Station. The Clinic, more centrally located, was at the other end of town from the Plaza and the Palacio; the attac
kers were approaching it, and a brave group of people from the neighborhood had set up warning relays along the adjacent streets, and the doctors were preparing, with the help of some burly male nurses, to capture one of the ambulatory corpses and submit it to a dissection that would, with any luck, reveal the secrets of its functionality in the afterlife. They were already in touch with the Hospital, which had more advanced diagnostic equipment, in order to coordinate the effort.

  This was encouraging news for the refugees in the Palacio. They were not alone, and something was being done. There was a certain irony, which nobody noticed, that it would be the members of the medical profession who would be leading the Resistance. Under less dramatic circumstances, someone would have been able to say, “Not satisfied with killing the living, now they want to kill the dead.”

  The host from the Beyond had occupied the entire town, as well as outlying areas, small farms, ranches, even the caves along the cliffs where the tramps found shelter. Their tempo had increased, and all precautions had failed. What had happened? When they reached downtown, the living dead had simply changed their strategy: they abandoned the step-by-step approach they’d been following till then, and instead of pursuing a scorched-earth policy, they shot out in every direction to the periphery of the urban sphere, only to return, now exhaustively, from the countryside, into the nucleus of the more densely populated zone. There were so many of them that they were able to do this, and even so, they had spare troops. The maneuver, which the terrorized Pringlesians could not fail to notice, was even more overwhelming in its diabolical cunning for not having been organized by a central command. In this army of corpses, nobody gave or received orders, which seemed to come from a collective mind, an infallible automatism against which no defense was possible. Everywhere, between shouts and cries, people were simply giving up.