Shantytown

by Cesar Aira

  Nevertheless, one night, at that moment of hesitation when he was left alone and turned his gaze, as usual, toward the interior of the shantytown, he noticed a barely visible figure further down the little street and stayed to watch as it emerged from the darkness, becoming clearer with every step. There was nothing special about that figure, no reason for it to intrigue him, and yet he stood there rooted to the spot, staring. Had he sensed that his gaze was being returned by someone who knew him, and was coming to say hello? Sometimes you can know that much before you know anything else. If so, he should, in turn, have recognized the figure, and he did have a hunch of a sort, growing stronger by the moment. The identification of a tiny moving silhouette, barely distinct from the shadows, seemed an impossible task. But subliminal recognition at a distance is not so unusual either. Because of his poor night vision, Maxi was accustomed to the tricks of perception but also to its exploits. There was an asymmetry because he was right underneath a crown of bulbs, bathed in light, and the unknown figure was still coming out of the darkness, as if dragging it along behind. Was it a man or a woman? Actually, it looked like a child. Or rather it seemed too small to be real, even taking the distance into account.

  A feeling of exaltation suddenly took hold of Maxi. Suddenly it seemed to him that the depths of the shantytown were about to reveal a small part of their great mystery. Why he felt this, he didn’t know. Perhaps just because the figure was coming from that direction and must have known what was there and was coming to tell him. This last supposition was unfounded. But it was possible and that was enough. And it wasn’t the only possibility in play. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it was someone he knew, so they could say hello, and chat as they left the shantytown together! Even if it was somebody he barely knew at all, practically a stranger, it wouldn’t matter. Although it was true that something like that would have to be a miracle.

  Anyone with normal eyesight would already have been able to see the person’s face. Maxi had to wait until the figure came within ten yards to realize that it was a girl: a very thin, short girl, with practically no breasts or hips, completely dressed in black, wearing tight pants, with her hair tied back. There was a big, flat patch of red swinging beside her. It was a garment, a coat or a raincoat, in a transparent plastic bag, the way they wrap them at the dry-cleaner’s. When he looked up again, he could see her face. She was a girl with Indian features, a boyish look and a deeply serious expression that seemed to be permanent. And yet, when she came up to him, she smiled, and although the smile was very brief, it was very encouraging, mostly because it came as a surprise. Maxi plucked up the courage to greet her with a “Hi,” which she did not return. He didn’t know how to talk to girls, he could never come up with anything to say. But she did reply in the end, and he fell into step beside her. After all, they were going in the same direction.

  “Sir, are you going home?”

  “Yes, it’s late already.”

  “Sir, it’s not so late.”

  “For me it is. Very late!”

  Then there was a silence, and fearing that it would go on forever, Maxi said the first thing that came into his head, in a brusque tone that he began to regret even as the words came out of his mouth:

  “What are you up to at this time of night?”

  “Sir, I’m going to buy food for dinner.”

  “Now? Why don’t you go to the supermarket and shop for the whole week? It works out cheaper.”

  He’d put his foot in his mouth again! Poor people live day by day, obviously; they don’t stock up for a week or a month, and anyway there are no supermarkets in shantytowns. But she didn’t take offence, and said exactly what Maxi’s mother would have said:

  “Sir, there’s always something you need at the last minute.”

  “You’re not afraid to be out alone at night?”

  “Sir, I’m with you now.”

  “Yes, because you ran into me by chance. You could get mugged for a peso round here.” He realized that it was rude to talk like that about the people who lived in the shantytown, but it was better than letting her think that he had been imagining the possibility of rape. Attempting to cancel the bad impression, he made a more general comment: “It’s shameful that people who have almost nothing will rob each other of the little they have.”

  “Sir, I don’t think it’s so bad.”

  “What!? So you justify theft? You’d steal too, would you?”

  “Sir, can you see me trying to mug someone? They’d laugh in my face.” And it was true: she was scrawny. “What I mean is, if someone can steal, let him steal. If that’s what he’s made for, what else is he supposed to do? Especially if an opportunity arises.”

  “That’s the law of the jungle,” said Maxi, shaking his head despondently.

  “Sir, all I know is that everyone looks out for their own interests, and they can only do it properly if they exploit all their relative advantages, legal or not, otherwise they’ll lose out.”

  “But someone else will win!”

  “Sir, that’s right, but the thing is, for the overall balance to be maintained, everyone has to exploit their possibilities to the maximum! Otherwise there’d be gaps. If I don’t do something that I could do, because of a scruple, I’m relying on other people acting in the same way, and how can I know that they will? How can I oblige them to have the same kind of scruples as me? This is the source of much bitterness.”

  She spoke with quite a strong accent, which Maxi couldn’t identify, but it had the merit of making her words, and even the situation, plausible. He bent down toward her and said:

  “That’s what I call ‘the law of the jungle’: everything for me, nothing for the others.”

  “Sir, if everyone says the same thing, then everyone will have everything. We are all ‘me.’”

  “You don’t really think that,” he said, in a brusque tone again, as if he were impatient or cross, although he wasn’t: it was just a way of talking, quite common among the shy. And as before, he broke the ensuing silence with a generalization: “There shouldn’t be any poor people.”

  She shrugged her shoulders imperceptibly:

  “What poor people? Sir, that’s an old-fashioned word. In the old days, there were poor people and rich people because there was a world made up of the poor and the rich. Now that world has disappeared, and the poor have been left without a world. That’s why the ladies I work for say: ‘There are no poor people anymore.’”

  “But there are.”

  “Sir, yes. You only have to look around.”

  “And they must suffer as a result,” Maxi hazarded.

  “Sir, I’m not sure. The old world of rewards and punishments is finished. Now it’s just a question of living. It doesn’t matter how.”

  “I just thought of something — maybe you’ll think it’s crazy. Imagine that a poor man comes across a rich man; he pulls out a knife and steals all the cash the rich man is carrying, and his watch while he’s at it. OK. Then they go their separate ways. And what happens? What happens is the rich man goes on being rich, and the poor man goes on being poor. So what use was the robbery? None at all. It’s like it never happened. You probably think that’s stupid.”

  “Sir, it’s a thought that must have occurred to many other people because there’s a story I’ve often heard, sir, which starts in the same way: a poor man comes across a rich man, and attacks him . . . and from that moment on, the poor man is rich, and the rich man poor, forever.”

  “I’ve never heard that.”

  It struck him as a typical “poor person’s story.” Or a typical “rich person’s story.” Once a story gets to be typical, the differences dissolve. Since he belonged to neither group, it wasn’t surprising he’d never heard it.

  At this point in the conversation, he became uncomfortably aware of an uncertainty that often bothers people with a poor memory for faces: did he know his interlocutor? They must have known each other from somewhere, otherwise she wouldn’t have engaged him so na
turally in conversation. There was an additional difficulty because in this case he couldn’t really blame his poor memory for faces: with a girl like her, the face was neither here nor there. His memory would have treated her as a social and human whole. He didn’t have the energy to run through all the possibilities, so he gave up trying to place her. If he didn’t want to make a fool of himself, or worse, hurt the feelings of this innocent girl, he had to maintain the ambiguity, which limited what they could talk about. Maybe the limits had been in place from the start, and that was how they’d got onto poverty.

  As if she had guessed what he was thinking, she said:

  “Here in Flores, we all know each other, even if it’s only by sight.”

  “Really? You know everyone?”

  “Sir, if I tried to keep something hidden, people would find out. There’s always someone watching, no matter where you go. And you can’t go very far, of course, unless you take a bus.”

  “. . . ?”

  “I was thinking of what you said before, about getting mugged.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Sir, someone would see the thieves and go tell the police.”

  “As if they’d care!”

  “Sir, you never know what they’ll care about.”

  They had reached the road and come to a halt. Maxi looked at the large red garment suspended from the girl’s hand. Then he looked back down the little street. Lights arranged in the shape of a star were shining above it. He thought: “This is her street. I must remember the star.”

  “I don’t think anyone pays much attention to me,” he said.

  “Sir, but people do! You don’t realize. . . . That’s what I wanted to tell you. Someone saw you come here and went to threaten your sister.”

  “My sister? Why?”

  “Because he thinks that her friends come here to buy drugs.”

  Maxi was puzzled and lost for words, there was such a jumble in his head. In the end he stammered:

  “The stupid bitch! Sisters, I tell you, she’s nothing but trouble! But. . . ! Jesus Christ!” Finally it occurred to him to ask: “Who is it?”

  “Sir, he says he’s the father of the girl who was killed here.”

  “Cynthia. Yeah. She was at school with my sister. Uh huh . . . I see.”

  “But maybe he was lying. He seems more like a policeman to me.”

  Maxi took a deep breath and said:

  “I’ll take care of it. Don’t you worry.”

  “Sir . . .”

  “You’re right, if he saw me, he must be a policeman. Other people wouldn’t notice.”

  “Yes they would! I see you myself . . .”

  “Me? Where?”

  “Sir, all the time! When you get up in the morning, when you take a nap in the afternoon . . .”

  She couldn’t say anything more because of the lump in her throat. Maxi, who thought she was speaking metaphorically, reassured her with his best smile. He didn’t know what to say. She murmured something and walked off.

  Maxi headed for home, exhausted, asleep on his feet. He had too much to think about, and it was all getting mixed up. Halfway back, he began to regret not having asked her more questions, some of which were blindingly obvious. For example, where she lived. Or her name. Although, of course, if he did know her from somewhere, those questions would have been tactless. But he might have asked about the garment she was carrying. . . . Could there be dry-cleaners in the heart of the shantytown? What if his wildest hunches turned out to be true? It didn’t really matter: his questions could wait until the next time he saw her.

  Suddenly he stopped as if a bolt of lightning had struck him on the head. Now he remembered where he knew her from! He couldn’t believe it . . . but it was her. . . . The memory had been triggered by thinking about her last words: “When you get up in the morning. . . .” He’d seen her, he saw her every day, in the mirror that hung on the wall in front of his bed. A little black figure making meaningless gestures, who turned to face him from time to time. He could only see her from his bed, from a certain angle, and he had always supposed that it was some kind of flaw in the glass of the mirror, which happened to resemble a human silhouette an inch high. But no! It was her! The last person he would have expected to meet in reality. And he wasn’t dreaming. He’d spoken to her, he’d touched her . . . no, he hadn’t actually touched her. But it wasn’t a dream. She had come out of the mirror to warn him. She wanted to protect him. . . .

  Even if she was a magical being, she had given a very intense impression of reality. As well as being a mirror fairy, she was a flesh-and-blood girl: poor, not very pretty, and probably a servant (yes: she had mentioned her “employers”). He resolved to do something for her if he could. He’d show her there were still some good people. He wasn’t sure what, but he’d think of something. He wouldn’t rush; he’d let the situation itself indicate the action required. It wouldn’t be like what he did for the collectors; it would be carefully considered, not improvised. That was the only way to return the favor. In fact, he already had an idea.

  VI

  The idea had taken a very vague form in his mind, and in accordance with his determination not to improvise, he gave it time to mature. Meanwhile months went by. Winter passed. This was one of the happiest periods of Maxi’s life, though he couldn’t have said why. Perhaps because he felt that he had no obligations or plans, just a vague hope, within which something — he didn’t know what — was slowly ripening.

  Sometimes, when he woke up in the morning, he saw the little woman in black moving in the mirror facing his bed. Now that they had met and spoken, it was a delight to see her; she lit up his day. He thought he could make out the features of her face, a millimeter across at the most, and when she turned toward him, he waved. Dreamily, he even thought he could see her smiling at him with a “serious smile,” although, on such a tiny scale, it was difficult to tell. Then during the day, when he remembered, he went to the mirror to look, but couldn’t find her, even when he put his nose to the glass. “She’s working now,” he thought, “or she’s gone home to the shantytown.” Where could she be? What could she be doing? However long he peered, all he could see was his own face: the face of an overgrown child, with its clear, empty eyes. He hadn’t seen her since that night, except there in the mirror.

  One morning he woke up much earlier than usual. It was still dark. Light from the street lamps shone in through the window, and he heard the voices of the policemen changing shifts. All of a sudden he was completely awake and he had a strange feeling. He wondered if he’d been dreaming. That would have been unprecedented: he never dreamed, or always forgot his dreams completely. This time, in any case, he remembered nothing. He looked at the mirror but, of course, she wasn’t there. It was too early; his friend was an effect of the daylight.

  Then he decided to make the best of this brutally early start: he’d finally beat the hobo and catch him sleeping. Over the previous months, they had continued to run their motionless race: Maxi had never arrived early enough to see the boy asleep, and they still hadn’t spoken or exchanged any kind of greeting. All they did was look at each other as Maxi went past. The winter had been very cold, and Maxi wondered anxiously how the poor boy could sleep out in the open like that. He tried to see how he’d managed, discreetly surveying the relics of the night. There were lots of newspapers; he must have wrapped himself in them; they were supposed to be good insulation. But even so. . . ! Maxi never saw any blankets, and the boy was always wearing the same clothes. Luckily it hadn’t rained.

  At the onset of the cold weather, Maxi had resolved to stop and talk with the hobo one morning, on some pretext or other, or just like that. All he had to do was say, “Hi! I keep seeing you here. Don’t you have a home? I’ve got some old clothes that might fit you. Shall I bring them tomorrow?” That was the idea: to give him clothes, woolen socks, for example. Later, he could do something else, maybe help him find a place to live. It was all a matter of breaking the ice, but Maxi ke
pt putting it off, perhaps because he was shy, or afraid of offending or frightening the boy, who knows? In the end, he decided that he’d do it when he saw the boy asleep and not before. Now he realized that the challenge had been futile, like a race against the infinite, because the boy would have been woken by the cold in the small hours of the morning; he can’t have been getting much sleep at all. And however early Maxi woke, he always stayed in bed to watch the animated figurine in the mirror. It was her fault that he never arrived in time.

  But now the mirror was empty, and it was still dark outside. He leaped out of bed. Some association of ideas, favored by the unfamiliar hour, made him wonder if he’d been dreaming and, perhaps, still was. But the breakfast he bolted down was no dream, nor were the gym gear and the towel that he threw into his bag. He was already in the elevator, then down in the street. He started walking toward the freeway, in a hurry, very focused. But having reached the corner and waited for a car to pass, he was struck by a curious fact: however early you go out, you always see people who are out already. Besides, it wasn’t as early as he’d thought. It was a trick of the light: the clouds that had filled the sky were casting their dark-gray shadows over the world.

  Just after crossing the street he ran into his young friend from the mirror, who rushing along, all dressed in black as usual, with her eyes half closed and an enigmatic expression on her face. Maxi froze in surprise and opened his arms:

  “Hi!”

  “Sir, hello . . .”

  It was her! Or was it? Yes, it was; who else could it be? Out of context, he didn’t recognize her. She had no distinctive features. And what was her context, anyway? The mirror? That was too unreal, and it made her look tiny, like a fly. The shantytown? But he’d only seen her there the once, and that was months ago, at night. Whatever the case, she had stopped in front of him because he was blocking her way.