Shantytown

by Cesar Aira

  Anyone in the habit of walking around in cities will have wondered, at some point, what there might be in the space behind the houses; and the rare opportunities to find out (by looking out from the back of a tall building, or down a long hallway when, for some reason, a door has been left open) are never disappointing. On the contrary, discovering that our fantasies have fallen short of reality, we are spurred on to imagine spaces that are even stranger and more exotic, more hidden, more mysterious. There are manicured and overgrown gardens, woods that have sprung up unbidden, fountains, statues, swimming pools, or huge constructions, sheds built for indeterminate purposes, workshops, the follies of hobbyists: miniature reproductions of castles or cathedrals, complete with scaled-down details, lovingly crafted and accumulated over the years, tricking the eye, distorting the overall perspective, which cannot be corrected from within the block for want of reliable reference points. All such fantasies were out of place in the shantytown. But precisely for that reason, they took on another dimension, at least in Maxi’s mind. “Façade fantasies” always begin with a suspicion that treasures lie hidden, and the camouflage could be utterly banal. It was absurd to imagine literal treasures there, but in the depths of poverty, where money plays no role at all, other kinds of wealth emerge, for example the wealth of skills. This was intimated by the shantytown’s wiring system. And there was no knowing what creative skills might have developed among people who had come from faraway places, and who, for the most part, had plenty of free time because they were unemployed.

  There was another aspect of the layout that didn’t conform to rational geometry, and that was the angle of the streets. If the overall shape of the shantytown was circular, then the streets should have run perpendicular to the edge, in a radial pattern, all converging at the center. But no: they ran off at an angle of forty-five degrees, all in the same direction (to the right, for someone facing inward). Which meant that none of them led to the center, or came out anywhere. Where did they end? Maxi never found out. His own incursions were limited to the outer rim; he went as far as the dwelling of the family he happened to be helping, but that was never more than a hundred yards in, always within sight of the perimeter. And since there were no cross streets, he had to go back out the same way. So the center, if indeed there was a center, remained a mystery to him. By the time he reached the shantytown it always seemed too late to ask about it, and he was too shy anyway. For some reason, the lighting, so lavish around the edge, diminished in intensity as one went further in, and toward the center the shantytown seemed to be quite dark. From this it might have been supposed that the middle was empty, but no: the density of settlement increased, the little streets became narrower and the shacks more tightly packed, although it was hard to see far. Even someone with good night vision would have found it difficult because the streets weren’t exactly straight. As for Maxi, half asleep and practically blind (passing under the crown of light always left him dazzled), he would keep looking up and peering ahead as he hauled his load, and whether he was imagining things or misinterpreting what he saw, far off, on the way to the inaccessible center, he thought he could make out towers, domes, phantasmagoric castles, ramparts, pyramids, and groves.

  Another thing that he had noticed was the abundance and variety of dogs: aloof, skinny, and mostly quite big. Luckily he wasn’t one of those people who is afraid of dogs. Despite the late hour, they were out and about: rarely alone and sometimes in large packs, they came and went and slipped in everywhere, even running between his legs, or between the wheels of the cart. They were after food, presumably, and since it was so scarce, they had to keep searching night and day. No one paid them any attention or even noticed their existence. But they stayed near the edge, either outside the perimeter or in the first few yards of the little streets. Further in, they were rare, and Maxi never saw one heading for the inner depths or coming back.

  III

  If Maxi had been worried (though he never was, not even for a moment) that someone he knew might see him with the collectors, he could have set his mind at rest. None of his friends or acquaintances ever saw him. This, perhaps, was partly due to chance, which sometimes chooses the path of abstention and follows it all the way through the intricate labyrinth of possibilities, and partly due to one of those blind spots that are so typical of big-city life. Not that he had gone completely unnoticed: someone had seen and recognized him. Only one person, who told no one else. And there was a reason why it should have been this person in particular: he was a policeman.

  As I said before, Maxi lived on the corner of Bonorino and Bonifacio. One hundred and fifty feet away, on Calle Bonorino, was Police Station 38, and that’s where Inspector Cabezas worked; he had been appointed to supervise the restructuring after the station had been taken over the previous year and all the senior officers dismissed (a judge had burst in one night, leading a special squad of judicial police, and discovered evidence that suspects were being tortured). Cabezas had completed that assignment a few months back but had continued to use the station, which was now functioning normally, as his personal headquarters. One night he saw Maxi hauling a collector’s cart and recognized him. He’d often seen the kid coming out of the building on the corner and been struck his physique. But he would have recognized him anyway; his memory for faces was prodigious.

  Once his curiosity was aroused, Cabezas began to keep an eye on Maxi. Since he didn’t have to account for how he spent his time, he’d go out at night in his car, and was able to find Maxi without too much trouble. Cabezas would watch from a distance, sometimes parking for a while and sitting in the car, sometimes driving around the block, following the progress of the meathead and the scavengers. Before long he had more or less worked out Maxi’s routine. At first he assumed that the kid was helping a particular family but he soon realized his mistake, and that intrigued him even more. On several occasions he followed Maxi into the depths of Lower Flores, to the end of his route, where he said goodbye to the collectors and set off home. A couple of times, late in the afternoon, he sat in his car, waiting for Maxi to step out into the street, then tailed him at a safe distance, keeping out of sight, all the way to the point at which he finally turned back, three or four hours later. The time this took was not an issue. Cabezas didn’t do it every day; usually it was enough for him to catch a distant glimpse of Maxi, and see that he was still at it. Sometimes he let days and even whole weeks go by without checking, but then he returned to his observations. . . . And that was how he noticed Maxi getting closer to the shantytown. After the onset of winter, he would sometimes go to where Bonorino widened and wait for Maxi to stagger into view, at the end of his shift. One night he saw the boy actually go into the shantytown, which inflamed his curiosity and plunged him deep in thought.

  Maxi and Inspector Cabezas were different in every way. In age, for a start. One was just beginning his adult life: he didn’t know what he would do with it, and was always reacting on the basis of that uncertainty. The other had passed the age of fifty and begun his decline: he knew exactly what he’d done with his life, and assumed that the fabric of a man’s destiny is woven by every one of his actions, no matter what his age. That assumption was the source of a deep misunderstanding, which was to have serious consequences. The gulf between the two men was evident in the forms of their respective enterprises, which although superposed were incompatible. Maxi’s was linear, an adventure open to improvisation, like a path disappearing into the distance. The inspector’s enterprise, by contrast, resembled the deciphering of a structure. Policemen, whether or not they are influenced by detective fiction, tend to see things as aspects of a “case.” As soon as Cabezas began to take an interest in Maxi’s comings and goings, they constituted a case in his mind. Which meant that nothing could be left unexplained, and each explanation would have to be linked to others, to form a system, which in turn would have to be connected to other systems, until the whole of society was covered.

  This was not a purely intellectu
al problem. In fact, Inspector Cabezas was not an intellectual at all. If an explanation was difficult to find, or he couldn’t be bothered looking, he created one. That’s the way he was: a man of action, not a speculative thinker. And how do you “create” an explanation? By pressing on and improvising. In that respect his method did coincide with Maxi’s, but at a different level and with different objectives. To him, “the case of the generous giant” was completely inexplicable, which gave him the widest possible scope for action. He had to create an explanation out of nothing, as it were.

  The structure was based on real events: a rash of violence had broken out on the edge of that circular shantytown, known to the police as “the carousel.” And the incidents had taken place precisely where Calle Bonorino widened out, which was also where the police station had once stood, long before. Providing, as ever, for fugitives and delinquents, the drug trade had intensified, raising the level of violence in the shantytowns, partly because of the serious money involved, but also because of the psychological disturbances produced by the drugs themselves. The situation in “the carousel” was particularly acute. And of course (this is where the inspector’s procedure came in) it wasn’t one case but a myriad, all of them interrelated. For instance, the violent trouble spot that was causing anxiety in the neighborhood didn’t lie within the shantytown itself, where no one could be sure what was really going on, but outside, in its “vestibule.”

  That autumn, the newspaper Clarín had published a letter that read as follows: “Over recent years, the residents of 1800 Avenida Bonorino, in Lower Flores, have been subjected to an escalation of violence, instigated by a mafia whose headquarters are situated in the neighboring agglomeration of temporary dwellings. Firearms and drugs have become a daily presence in what was, until recently, a quiet working-class neighborhood, where children played in the streets. Now we live behind closed doors, day and night, held hostage in our own homes by rampant lawlessness. On the fifteenth of March, in an incident that is yet to be clarified, this deplorable situation lead to a fatality: a shot fired by an assault weapon ended the life of a fifteen-year-old girl. She was an outstanding student, her parents’ pride and joy. She was my daughter. We are still waiting for an explanation; the culprits are still on the loose, terrorizing the local community; our family has been destroyed, and it is only a matter of time before this tragedy is repeated.” Like all the readers’ letters in the papers, it was signed, with an address (which was, predictably, 1800 Avenida Bonorino) and a National Identity Document number.

  Inspector Cabezas had the cutting in his wallet, not because of its content — any number of such letters had been published — but because the signatory shared his surname: Cabezas. That, on its own, would not have been enough to make him cut the letter out and keep it, but the man’s first name — Ignacio — was the same as well. This was a truly amazing coincidence because neither name was especially common. The inspector would have been very surprised just to learn that there was another Ignacio Cabezas, but the fact that his namesake also lived in Lower Flores, on his patch, and had made himself known to the public in that way, was something he could never have imagined, and it was enough to suggest the existence of a mechanism in which he had a part to play, though what that part might be he didn’t know. He had been carrying the cutting around in his wallet for months, just in case, without showing it to anyone.

  He had made no effort to meet the other Ignacio Cabezas, nor had he bothered to check the file on the killing because he knew what he would find. What interested him lay further afield, in the shantytown, which he had examined without, so far, discovering anything useful. Drugs were sold there in large quantities, everyone knew that, but no one knew how they came in and went out. It could have been done in a thousand ways. Long hours of surveillance, to which the inspector was accustomed, had revealed that buyers came at the oddest hours of the day or night, always in cars. They would pull up for a moment, ask something (what?), drive on again, and end up doing as many as ten full laps of the circular road that bounded the shantytown. It was extremely difficult to follow them without being noticed, especially at night, when there was no one else on the road, and it was brilliantly lit by the profusion of bulbs. The actual sales seemed to take place after dark; the daytime visits must have been exploratory. Cabezas was not the only one to have noticed; some of his colleagues had also been discreetly observing this activity, and they had come up with the apt and eloquent nickname, “the carousel.”

  The moment finally came to make use of that newspaper cutting. Cabezas knew that the meathead had a sister because he had seen the whole family coming out of the building on the corner, next to the police station. And he knew (police: what don’t they know?) that the girl was mixed up with some bad sorts in the neighborhood. In fact, he had a more detailed picture of her than of her brother, who was a completely unknown quantity. So one day Cabezas followed her on foot, and waited until she was a fair way from home, in the middle of an empty block, before accosting her. He called out her name, and she turned around, alarmed. She was a pretty little blonde, with a sour look on her face. There was a chance that she’d recognize him; she might have seen him going into the station or coming out. But he decided to risk it because he knew how inattentive teenagers are, wrapped up in their own little worlds.

  “I’m not trying to threaten you,” he began. “I was going to talk with your parents, but then I thought we could come to an understanding, just the two of us. I don’t want to upset them unnecessarily; I’m a father too, I know what it’s like. They don’t need to find out about anything, as long as you cooperate.”

  “Me? How? Who are you?”

  The viper inside her reared up, but she couldn’t hide the fact that she was nervous and afraid. “Gotcha, little whore,” thought Cabezas.

  “Do you have a minute?”

  “No, I’m in a hurry.”

  “Here, read this,” he said, giving her the cutting. This was such a strange and unexpected move that she found it paradoxically reassuring. The gesture itself was utterly familiar: the streets were full of jobless people handing out flyers. Except that it wasn’t a flyer this time but a piece of newspaper. She looked at both sides and began to read. Although she maintained a neutral expression, Cabezas could tell, as he studied her face, that she knew what it was about and that her twisted little brain was getting to work. When he reckoned that she had reached the end, he pointed to the sender’s name, and with his other hand held out his identity card, so she could see that the names were the same.

  “That’s right,” he said, putting the cutting and the card back into his pocket, “I’m the father. For months now, I’ve been carrying out my own investigation; I wasn’t going to hold my breath waiting for the police to do something. They’re incompetent and corrupt,” he added, to give his speech an authentic touch, which anyone who’d watched a bit of television could recognize. And to cover himself, in case she happened to see him entering or leaving the police station later on: “I go to Station 38 every day to see if there’s any news, but they never do anything. I’ve found out all sorts of things, though, making my own inquiries.” Here he paused and looked at her steadily. He could tell that she wanted to say, “And what’s all this got to do with me?” but she couldn’t because fear had paralyzed her lips.

  “I know you used to see those layabouts from Commercial College Nine who went to the shantytown to buy proxidine. But don’t worry, I’m not going to tell on you; like I said, I don’t want to upset your parents unnecessarily. All I want is for you to help me find the bastards who killed my daughter. I quit my job so I could focus a hundred percent on finding them; it’s all I think about . . .”

  “I never went to buy anything! I don’t care who you tell!”

  “I’m not going to tell anyone. I’m just asking you to have some compassion for a father in despair. Look, I know you didn’t go to the shantytown to score. But you knew those kids; you used to hang out with them. People can do what
they like, as far as I’m concerned. We’re all free, and everyone wants drugs, that’s obvious. What I said in the letter, it’s not exactly true. I know my daughter was no saint, but that’s no reason to kill her, is it?”

  His question produced the desired effect. She nodded remorsefully.

  “I want you to find out how the dealing is done in the shantytown. That’s the only thing I haven’t worked out, and until I do, I won’t be able to unravel the mystery. I don’t want you to tell me what you already know. You go ask your friends, as if you wanted to buy some yourself. I know where you live and where you go to school, and all the rest, so I’ll be in touch. Remember this is a good deed you’re doing. You help me, and I’ll help you.”