Dinner

by Cesar Aira

  Now they were returning, and this time it would be impossible to keep them out. Clearly there was a reflux back toward downtown—they were swarming like storm clouds down Stegmann Street. Even with the bottle pelting and the somersaults and the resulting avalanches created when the bravest attempted hand-to-hand combat, the stairs were soon left unobstructed. The first walking corpses that entered the hall provoked a tumult of shouting and mad dashes that, due to the lack of space, could only result in the tracing of a circle, the classic figure of terror. And even if some might have preferred to leap into the void, they would have been preemptively dissuaded by the doors onto the balconies filling with those inconceivable beings, which they now saw close up and under bright lights. And they kept entering; their sheer numbers rendered defensive attacks futile, for anybody who attacked one was in turn attacked by others. They always won. The worst part was not only that they could see them close up, but since there was no place to escape, they had to watch from close up as they performed their dreadful brain surgery; many people had never thought about having a brain, and now they were seeing them from a few feet away, stripped naked, gouged out and sucked up by a strange tongue, and they even heard the liquid sound of the slurp. Even though they were terrified, they didn’t stop twisting and kicking and ducking. It looked like a dance, with one partner dead and the other alive.

  The shouts quieted down little by little. What had begun as a bedlam of shrieks and roars, warnings and pleas for help, slowly drained out into isolated death throes punctuated by silences. And, out of one of the last screams there emerged, unexpectedly, the cure.

  An older woman, cowering in a corner at the back of the hall, watched as a slurping corpse—drooling and majestic in its own way—lifted its head up from a child’s open skull and set itself upright on green-splotched tibias with ornate bunches of dried innards hanging down and shaking like the tails of a frock coat, with disconnected remnants of face stuck to its skull, and she saw it look at her, choose her, and take a step toward her.

  Then . . . she recognized it. It came to her from the depth of her being, independent of any mental process; it came to her from the substrata of life in Pringles, from the erudition of many years and a lifelong passionate interest in the lives of others, which in small towns is equivalent to life itself. What came to her was his name.

  “Schneider, the Russian!”

  It rang out in an interval of silence, then echoed throughout the hall. Some turned to look. The corpse (which was indeed that of the German immigrant Kurt Alfred Schneider, dead for fifteen years), stopped moving, spurned—in an unprecedented gesture—a defenseless prey, turned, and began to walk calmly toward the exit. Next, everything went very fast, as is always fast or even instantaneous the “realization” of something obvious that everybody has thus far ignored.

  It had taken all night, or the entire terrible fragment since midnight, as well as the almost entire collective drainage of endorphins, to realize that the dead who were returning were the town’s dead, its parents and grandparents, friends and relatives. Happen what may to the deceased after their final moments, they still continued to be themselves, since otherwise their demise wouldn’t have been theirs. Why hadn’t anyone thought of this sooner? Probably because they hadn’t had time to think of it, or they hadn’t thought it would be of any use. They also had the excuse that those thirsty monsters, who seemed to be guided by diabolically powered remote control, had violently expunged any familiar idea of neighbor, of fellow Pringlesian. They seemed to come from too far away. They came, however, from the Cemetery, where the living went every Sunday to bring them flowers, and, while there, to take a stroll that reignited their will to live. And, there in the Cemetery, the gravestones guaranteed that the horrendous metamorphosis of death did not alter identity, and identity was a name. If not, what good were the gravestones? Things began to fall into place, began to “coincide.” The fact that the dead coincided with their names, as did the living, was mere logic, but suddenly it seemed like a revelation. Which is why the witnesses were surprised when the name put a stop to the killer impulse and made them return to the Cemetery where they belonged. If it was true, if it worked with all of them the way it had worked with Schneider, the Russian, the cure was easy, because everybody (except me), as I already said, knew all of them. Of course they had to recognize them, which a priori did not appear to be that easy.

  But it was easy. Until that moment they had seen them only as the post-human monsters that they were, but now, remembering that they were also their fellow Pringlesians and that they had been given Christian burials, the optics had changed. In minutes they would be able to find out just how much. Because they recognized them at first sight. They were surprised to recognize them, and that very surprise made the names pop out. The older women, who had initiated this method, were the ones who could say the most names, pointing to this or that skeletal ghoul, who, upon hearing its name, became obedient, and left. The men didn’t lag too far behind; some more some less, but everybody had done business with everybody else. Age helped. The young people, whose strength and agility gave them an advantage in war, had to defer to the knowledge and memories of the older people during this phase of the war.

  It was as if they had opened their eyes and seen them for the first time. That was Whatshisname, this was Youknowwho, and that was so-and-so’s father who had left such-and-such widowed, the wife of that one who had died so young . . . And their name was the magical and infallible key that made them desist; they heard it and left, their impulse checked; it wasn’t necessary to shout at them—they heard their names no matter what; they seemed to be attuned to the sound that belonged to them. Even more so: they seemed to have been listening for it the whole time, and wondering why nobody had spoken it.

  Very soon, they were descending the staircase, followed by those who were shouting their names (it wasn’t necessary but they did it anyway), repeating them just in case, even though once was enough. And outside, the party guests, now emboldened, spread out in all directions, looking for more living dead—who weren’t hard to find—so they could confront them decisively, recognize them, and name them. News spread fast. The Pringlesians came out from under their beds, and now they were the ones hunting, without sticks or stones or rifles, armed only with their knowledge of the old families and their losses.

  Some may have been amazed by the infallibility of the method. But only if they hadn’t taken into account that family names were the language of the town, and that the inhabitants spoke it from the minute they learned to talk. It was as if they had been preparing for this moment their entire lives. Or it might be amazing, or seem implausible, that they would get them right each and every time. Some had been dead for a hundred years—little more than clumps of dust stuck together somehow or other. But this could be explained: family names had become so interconnected over the years that the entire population was related by blood; apparently, the dead accepted any last name that belonged to any branch of their family tree.

  From the streets, where a short while before the silence had been interrupted only by shrieks of horror and snorts from the hereafter, there arose a chorus of names that reached the heavens. Everybody was shouting them through the streets, out doors and windows, from balconies, out of cars, and from bicycles. The dead marched away in silence, retracing the steps they had taken earlier. They converged on the Plaza, and from there formed one compact mass down the transverse streets that led to the road to the Cemetery.

  The retreat was like that of the tide. They were taking with them all the endorphins of the town, and the following morning the Pringlesians would have to produce more, from zero. They no longer pursued them, except out of curiosity, nor did they shout their names, except for one or another that had been forgotten, the name of a family that had died out, a name some old man had to dig out of the depth of his memory and say out loud as an extra precaution. Moreover, it didn’t take any effort and they didn’t even have to dig very deep in
their memories. Their everyday conversations were full of names, the town was made up of names, and that night, names had saved the town.

  A few people followed them out of curiosity, but the majority preferred to watch the procession from their rooftops; those with the best views were the owners of the only three tall buildings in town, and their neighbors who’d invited themselves over. They saw a dark mass, swarming but orderly, flowing back toward the edge of town. The only incident worth noting took place when the crowd of living dead passed the Chalet de la Virgen. At that moment, the five Virgins who lived there appeared at the door, one behind the other. Nobody could explain how they had acquired the ability to move, perhaps through some kind of religious miracle; and not only that: they had also acquired light, an intense golden radiation that made them glow, and made them visible from far away. They separated from one another and joined the rear of the great march, like shepherds herding their flock. And they herded it to the end, in other words, to the Cemetery, and they entered after the last dead, and though nobody saw this, they probably made certain that everybody went back into his own and not his neighbor’s tomb.

  That’s how it all ended. Except for those who were standing on the rooftops of the tallest buildings, where they could see everything, even beyond the Cemetery, all the way to the perimeter of roads that surrounded the town. On the MacAdam ellipse of highway that surrounded Pringles, unreal under the white light of the moon, two cars, driving in opposite directions, looked like toys from that far away. One was going at full speed “as if it were racing”; the other went very slowly, like a tortoise, so slowly that if some small feature in the landscape wasn’t used as a point of reference, you would think it was standing still. Those who saw the two cars took it as a sign that life carried on, and that the following day the families of Pringles would again take up their habit of going out for a spin, thereby taking up the task, difficult and easy at the same time, of recapturing their lost happiness.

  III

  The following morning I woke up depressed, even before I realized that I was depressed. Then I remembered that it was Sunday, the most difficult day for me to endure. Sunday depression is classic, and how could it not be for someone without a job, without a family, and without prospects.

  I stayed in bed for a while. It wasn’t even late; it was early; I wouldn’t be spared a single drop from the overflowing cup of afflictions. I remembered the old Catalan saying about the three things you can do in bed: “Pray to God, fantasize about your future prosperity, and scratch your butt.” I was never any good at fantasizing, so I didn’t have even that source of comfort; any compensatory flights of imagination were always downed by a well-aimed shot of reason as soon as they took off. I had fully incorporated the prosaic reasonableness of my fellow townsfolk, but in a way that was useless for conducting business. In solitary contemplation I managed only to amass self-recriminations for my failures, reliving them, and making myself even more depressed. There did exist, however, the possibility that my situation was simply a matter of bad luck. In other words, it might depend on chance. If this were the case, the bad luck could vanish the same way it came, and I didn’t need to consider myself a failure. Maybe I was just going through a losing streak, and once it passed, things would turn around for me. The famous “seven years” . . . I preferred not to count up my years of misfortune, since I suspected there were more than seven. I didn’t remember breaking any mirrors, but maybe I had without realizing it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because that’s just a crass superstition. When people say that breaking a mirror brings seven years of bad luck, a fiction is created and chaos is geometrified; luck varies, and in the course of a year (why am I saying a year? a day, an hour) there can be many turns of the dial from good to bad and vice versa. It’s true that sometimes there are losing streaks, longer or shorter, and even if this supposed streak of seven years is very long, almost excessively long, it remains within the limits of the possible. During that interval, the magical power of a broken mirror holds all variations in suspense—luck ceases to be luck and everything turns out badly. But once those seven years are over, luck has no reason to necessarily become good luck; it becomes just plain luck—changeable, voluble, good and bad. And subject to streaks. And immediately after the term is over, there can come—why not?—a streak of bad luck, which can last a month, a year, five years, fifty-five years. In the end the solution was not to either trust luck or not.

  Finally, I got up and got dressed. I would have liked to go out, to see how people were recovering from the night’s ordeal, but in the end I didn’t. My mother had gotten up before me, and as soon as she saw me cross the threshold of my bedroom, she asked me if the food had “agreed” with me. Had it “agreed” with me? Yes. Or: not yes or no. It hadn’t “agreed” with me or not. I’d eaten it and forgotten about it. I didn’t say anything, but she didn’t care, because she had asked me that only so she could tell me that it had disagreed with her, that she was nauseated and disgusted. What was that he fed us? What was it called? Had I liked it? She’d eaten it so as not to be rude, and now she was regretting it. She’d had to drink some boldo tea as soon as she got up, and her stomach was still upset.

  She kept being bellicose. Everything about our dinner had been bad for her, and the food couldn’t be an exception, but in reality it was an excuse to speak badly of what really seemed bad to her, which was my friend himself, his house, his collections, his life, his existence (in contrast to mine). The topic filled her to the brim, and gave her a lot to say. In that sense, and only in that one, the dinner had been good for her, because it allowed her to relaunch her newly inspired and persuasive discourse.

  Her idée fixe was that I was not a failure, that I had no reason to be dissatisfied with my life, that I could be happy, and that in fact I was. According to her, I had always done the right thing, and I continued to do so; I was an exemplary man, a role model, and, moreover, I was young, good-looking, and intelligent. The objective facts contradicted her categorically: I was approaching sixty; I was fat, wrinkled, stooped; I was alone, without any family (except her), or money, or work, or a future. Mother overcame this discrepancy by closing her eyes to reality, and since this didn’t suffice, she blamed the rest of humanity. In other words, she didn’t “blame” but rather limited herself to criticizing, to finding defects, to seeing everything bad about everybody; the comparison to me was implicit, as it was implicit that I couldn’t hope for anything good to come out of the contrast, and if anything bad had happened to me, the fault lay in those degenerate and evil others who surrounded us. But she also didn’t admit that anything bad had happened to me: I was just fine where I was, things in my life had turned out well and would get even better in the future. In short, a complete denial of reality was in play. And her life was reduced to that denial; I had reduced her to that. Her maternal instincts had always been strong; the years and the horrendous unreality of my life had twisted her into this caricature.

  She returned to the same topics as the night before. What did my friend want with all that junk he’d collected? He was broke, he had nothing but debts. And that useless garbage must be very expensive, it must have cost him an arm and a leg . . . She looked at me, seeking affirmation. That was the worst part for me: being part of a dialogue that wasn’t a dialogue, participating in a conversation that had no room for me. I told her that he would have bought some of those objects more cheaply, others more dearly. And I added that in any case, they were an investment. They had value. He could sell them if he wanted to.

  Then came the sneer I knew so well. Who was he going to sell them to!? Who would want such atrocities!?

  It was typical. One of the contradictions I had to get used to: I was always right except when I talked to her, and then I wasn’t, no matter what I said.

  In this case, Mother was being guided by the mind-set of the town, the people she knew, her world, in which nobody would ever spend a single cent on an antique or a curio. A practical, concrete,
reasonable, anti-aesthetic, wholesome world.

  She returned to the subject of the atlas. Before she returned to it, I realized she was returning to it, from the glance she threw into a corner of the apartment where she kept her own atlases, the ones she consulted when she did crossword puzzles; there were two or three old, shabby ones (one of them she’d bought for me when I was in school), but of a reasonable “normal” size. It was the abnormality of my friend’s inordinately large atlas that had impressed her, not its antiquity. Curiously, it was the antiquity that could have impressed me, for a very specific reason. Without being an intellectual, or anything of the sort, or having the least interest in politics, I kept myself up-to-date on the names of countries and their disintegration; it was a kind of loyalty to my childhood pleasure of drawing maps at school, and making each country a different color. If I’d told Mother that her maps were out-of-date, she would have answered that my friend’s inordinately hefty volume should be even more so; and it wasn’t worth telling her that seeing as how all countries were now returning to their old borders, that antique atlas might end up being more up-to-date than hers, which were simply out-of-date.