Shantytown

by Cesar Aira

  “I didn’t recognize you,” he said. His vision was at its weakest in that night-like day. “It’s not you,” he hastened to explain, “it’s my eyes.”

  “Sir, it’s hard to see anything!”

  “What? For you too?”

  “Sir, I recognized you by your height, not your face.”

  In Maxi’s bewilderment, a new world was beginning to open. Later in the day, he would take the time to develop that inkling and come to the conclusion that perhaps — this was a mere hypothesis, but a specially rich and promising one — perhaps it was true for everyone, not just him, that brighter light meant better vision. After all, that would be logical; he couldn’t understand why it hadn’t occurred to him before.

  “I got up early today . . .”

  “Sir, yes, I see.”

  He was going to say: “Today you won’t be able to see me from the mirror in my room,” but he didn’t dare. He opted for something more ambiguous:

  “You go to work so early!”

  “Sir, that’s how it is.”

  The conversation had played itself out, and with the subtlest hint of a smile, she signaled that she was about to continue on her way, as if he had been holding her up and she was going to be late. Which reminded him that he was losing time as well, and his thoughts returned to the hobo. That was when an idea that he had been vaguely toying with for ages finally crystallized, and, on an impulse, he decided that this was the perfect opportunity to put it into practice.

  “You’re in a such a hurry to go and get in the mirror! But there’s something I want to tell you. When do you go home?”

  “Sir, at half-past seven.”

  “Mmm . . . that’s a bit early. Are you busy at nine?”

  “Sir, no.”

  “OK, listen. Tonight at nine, meet me at 1800 Bonorino, on the wide street there, you know where I mean?”

  “Sir, yes.”

  “Make sure you’re there, OK? Don’t forget. I want to introduce you to someone.”

  And then, with a resonant “See you!” he walked on, finally. He went as fast as he could, almost running. He didn’t want to be late, now that he’d committed himself. He was so preoccupied that he didn’t notice anything on the way. He was thinking that his plan couldn’t fail. If the hobo was awake, he’d talk to him anyway. It didn’t even occur to Maxi that he might not be there. But as it happened that was the case. He wasn’t there! Maxi froze, incredulous, staring at the place where, day after day, he’d seen the skinny figure of the hobo in his blue jacket and trousers, silhouetted against the wall. He couldn’t believe his bad luck. The boy was always there; he’d been there every day for months. . . . But not today! Today of all days!

  Luckily, curiosity prompted him to do what he had never done before: that is, to step through the weeds and venture into that “private” space, the hobo’s “bedroom.” It was almost as if, in the depths of his disappointment, he was identifying with the boy, taking his place so that he would be “at home,” even though he was out. But it turned out that he was at home. Maxi almost stood on him. His mistake was partly due to habit — he’d been expecting to see an upright figure, as usual, and hadn’t even looked at the ground — but it was also caused in part by something that Maxi should have expected: the boy was very well hidden. He was lying in a dip, a sort of niche in the ground, and was all covered in newspapers, even his head. Unless you were really paying attention, it looked like any old heap of papers.

  Maxi breathed a sigh of relief, as if all his problems were solved. “That’s lucky!” he thought. And it seemed an appropriate thought because since he had taken to passing that way, he had come to feel — without expressing it in so many words — that the hobo was bringing him luck, which was why he was so punctual. It would have been harder for Maxi to say why he needed luck in the first place. Wasn’t he lucky already? It was the others who needed luck: the collectors, for example, or the people who lived in the shantytown, or this homeless kid. But him? Why him? And yet he too needed luck. In fact, that was the reason for everything he did, all his strange and futile rites: they were meant “to bring him luck.” And in a way, they worked.

  In that state of relief and release, Maxi felt as if time had stopped, or as if he’d been chasing after time for an eternity and had finally caught up. He put his bag down and sat on it, next to the sleeping boy.

  Maxi couldn’t see the boy’s face, but it must have been him. He wasn’t going to wake him up. Let him sleep a bit longer, poor kid. Why should he have to get up early, if he didn’t have to go to work and there was no one expecting him? Let him enjoy the merciful oblivion of sleep for as long as he could. True, he was normally up by that time, but Maxi guessed that the cold of the early morning had been waking him (or maybe the fear of being discovered), so perhaps he had gone on sleeping for a change because the gathering storm had led to a rise in the temperature. Maxi, after rushing to get there, was covered in sweat. He sat still and kept perfectly quiet.

  He admired the care that had gone into making the cocoon of newspaper, which enveloped the sleeper literally from head to foot. The boy must have had a lot of practice. Maxi could confirm that he had held out, in those conditions, night after night, all through that bitter winter. And now the winter was coming to an end. It was amazing how quickly it had gone by, he thought; almost like in a film, when there’s a big gap in time between scenes, and the viewers have to use their imaginations to fill it in. But in this case it had been real time, and the boy had endured, with the mettle of an unknown hero. Maxi felt proud of him, perhaps because he identified the hobo with his own luck. What a brave kid! No one else he knew would have dared to do something like that and gone through with it, and so discreetly, too, with such humility. People with far less to brag about went around posing as heroes. It was an exclusive test, perhaps for just one person in the world. Gently, Maxi placed his hand on the newspapers and felt the warmth coming from inside. He would have to content himself with that sensation because it looked like he wasn’t going to see the boy asleep, in the end. Unless he lifted one of the sheets very carefully, by a corner, and took a quick peek. Why not? He rubbed his hands and flexed his fingers, like a thief getting ready to crack a safe, or a card sharp about to go for broke. Then he leaned forward stealthily.

  The pages were from an old issue of Clarín, or two or three different issues, because there were so many. As he looked for an edge to peel back, a familiar name caught his eye: “Bonorino.” But that wasn’t all; he noticed that the name was preceded by a number that was also familiar: “1800.” He had pronounced that number and name himself just a few minutes earlier; he was so thrown, he couldn’t remember where or why, but those syllables were still ringing in his ears. Was it a coincidence? Or was it magic? Intrigued, he began to read, which was unusual for him; after the last set of exams in July he had thought that he would never read anything again. And in fact, as this little exercise revealed, he was already forgetting how to do it. He made very slow progress, deciphering word by word. But it wasn’t just him: the paper was dirty and faded, and the cocoon’s uneven surface made the lines twist and turn, so Maxi had to keep tilting his head to follow them. Nevertheless, he got the gist. It was a letter of some kind from the father of the girl who got killed in the neighborhood a while back, in summer or autumn. He knew about it because the girl, Cynthia, had been at school with his sister; and for weeks it was all they could talk about at home. Echoes of the incident came back to him one by one, and, by a series of strange coincidences, resonated with the present situation. For a start, he’d forgotten that Cynthia had lived at 1800 Bonorino and died there. But there was something else: Cynthia Cabezas was a poor girl, shanty trash as his sister put it (he’d never met her), the kind of girl who’d normally be working as a servant, not going to high school. Especially not an exclusive, super-expensive school like Misericordia. She had a scholarship; she was the “fly in the pail of milk,” the odd one out. Maxi’s sister and her friends hadn’t exclude
d Cynthia, but only because discrimination was unfashionable, and they were slaves to fashion, especially Vanessa. All the same, he’d noticed the satisfaction in their voices when they talked about her mediocre grades, and the covertly festive fatalism with which they greeted her sad demise. What the crime had showed was that your origins always catch up with you in the end.

  Anyway, that death, which was still unexplained, cast long shadows, and now Maxi remembered an argument that he’d had with Vanessa about it, when she had said that she was being followed by Cynthia’s father . . . the Ignacio Cabezas who had written the letter. Cabezas had also led a movement against the evangelical pastors who were recruiting in the shantytowns. In this he had been discreetly supported by the Catholic Church, and that was why the nuns at the Misericordia school had given his daughter a scholarship. But after the crime, a rumor went around that in fact he was working for a rival Protestant group, and then the sects began to accuse each other of being fronts for drug-dealing gangs. What Maxi found most surprising, when he came to the end of the letter, was the timing. Why, he wondered, was Cabezas writing to Clarín now? It didn’t occur to him that the paper could be six months old. He didn’t even know that newspapers had the date printed at the top of each page, so he didn’t think to look. For Maxi, who had never read one in his life, every paper was “today’s.”

  He emerged from this cogitation with a doubt. He knew what the letter was about and who had written it, but he was still wasn’t sure to whom it was addressed and why. He thought he must have missed something and was about to reread it, but when he looked down again what he saw, in the place where the letter had been, was a pair of eyes looking up at him.

  He got such a fright he almost fell over backward. He didn’t quite lose his balance, but he drew back abruptly and lifted his hand (rather than letting it hover idly, he put it to work scratching an ear) and curved his lips in an apologetic smile, all without taking his eyes off the hobo. With a great scrunching of papers, the white chrysalis came apart all at once.

  “Did I frighten you?” asked Maxi. “I was waiting for you to wake up.”

  “Sir, good morning.”

  Oddly, the light had continued to dwindle instead of getting brighter; the clouds had darkened and descended so far it seemed you could reach out and touch them. Maxi’s eyesight was functioning poorly in that gray dimness, but he was close enough to get a good view of the boy’s face, which, he now realized, he had never actually seen before. He had recognized him by his silhouette, in the context of a particular place and time, and had he seen him somewhere else, in different clothes, he could easily have taken him for a complete stranger. Maxi was shocked by what he saw. The boy had come through the difficult trial of winter, but what a price he’d paid! His face was gaunt, dirty and drawn, his hair all stuck together, and if not for the gleam of hunger and anxiety in his eyes, they might have belonged to a corpse. Luckily he had no facial hair. It occurred to Maxi that, for once, he’d arrived just in time.

  That was why he decided not to beat around the bush but to get straight to the point. Anyway, it was better to start with something practical and concrete rather than trying to start a conversation because he wouldn’t have known what to say:

  “There’s this place I’m going to tell you about. Be there at nine tonight, and I’ll introduce you to someone.”

  The hobo nodded seriously and waited. Maxi’s mind was a blank; he didn’t know how to continue.

  “Sir, what place?”

  “Oh, yes.” He giggled. “What a dope. I tell you to go there but I don’t say where it is.” He looked around, trying to orient himself, with some difficulty. In the end he pointed in a direction, more or less at random. “1800 Calle Bonorino. It’s a street that widens out. There’s a vacant lot and a big empty space . . .”

  “Sir, yes, I know.”

  “OK, that’s where, at nine. Do you want me to lend you my watch?”

  The hobo glanced at Maxi’s Rolex and shook his head energetically.

  “Sir, no, I’ll ask.”

  “OK then.”

  “Sir, is it for a job?”

  The question took Maxi by surprise. He dodged it with a prevarication:

  “Something like that. But better. You’ll see.”

  And off he went. He continued to the gym on autopilot, thinking about what he’d done. And what he hadn’t done: like giving the boy a few pesos for something to eat, or saying something more enticing about the appointment to make sure he’d turn up. . . . But he didn’t know what he could have said, and maybe it was best to stick to the minimum; for someone who had so little, the minimum was probably enough. And Maxi had only a vague idea of what was going to happen. He would introduce them: the hobo and the mirror-girl, his two best friends. . . . He felt that they were made for each other, they were complementary; together they could make their way in the world. Each had what the other lacked. She had a job, a home; she could give him shelter. He had the courage and the experience that she needed to emerge from the mirror’s ethereal waters and the dark heart of the shantytown, and take her place in reality. There was no predicting what would happen later on, but they might fall in love, why not? Anything was possible.

  Maxi rushed on, blind and deaf to his surroundings, completely absorbed in his thoughts. No one noticed him because all the people who crossed his path were in a hurry too, rushing to beat the storm, which looked as though it was about to break.

  He was walking on air. He couldn’t believe it had all worked out so easily; he didn’t stop to think that, in fact, nothing at all had worked out yet. But results were secondary. The masterpiece came first. In the end, after all the time he’d spent thinking about it (or not: it came to the same thing), the operation had performed itself; he’d barely had to intervene. After all that thinking, and promising not to let what he did be governed by impulse or circumstances, it had been an improvisation on the spur of the moment. That’s why it had been easy; that’s why it had seemed to happen all by itself.

  And yet Maxi felt that what he had done had grown out of the most patient and careful deliberation. Even though he had improvised.

  Either this was a contradiction or the term “improvisation” would have to be redefined. People always assume that to improvise is to act without thinking. But if you do something on an impulse, or because you feel like it, or just like that, without knowing why, it’s still you doing it, and you have a history that has led to that particular point in your life, so it’s not really a thoughtless act, far from it; you couldn’t have given it any more thought: you’ve been thinking it out ever since you were born.

  VII

  Maybe it was still very early — with all the back and forth between “early” and “late” Maxi had lost track of the time — or maybe it was because of the storm; in any case, when he got to the gym, it was empty. He wasn’t surprised; he was usually the first to arrive. The members started turning up around eight-thirty, and the instructors and receptionists came at nine. Saturno, the man who worked at the bar and usually opened up, was nowhere to be seen. Still, he must have come, because the place was open and the lights were on. Maxi guessed that he’d gone out, as usual, to buy fruit for juicing and milk and croissants. . . . He must have been a very early riser because Maxi had never beaten him to the gym. And there was another minor or maybe not-so-minor mystery that Maxi had never been able to fathom: when he arrived, the cleaning would be already done; the place had been swept and mopped and tidied up. He would have assumed that it was done at night, after closing time, except that when he got there, first thing in the morning, the dressing-room floor would still be wet from being mopped. And he was sure that Saturno was the one who opened up. That’s what he’d heard people say. But his puzzlement never lasted longer than the few minutes it took him to change and begin his exercise routine; once he was pumping, he thought about nothing else.

  So he went into the gym and headed for the dressing room, but as he was walking past the little
curved bar, something behind it caught his eye. It was Saturno, lying on the floor. Maxi dropped his bag and kneeled beside him, unsure what to do. The recumbent body was not quite still, indicating that Saturno was, at least, alive. “Don’t move him,” Maxi thought, remembering instructions that he had once heard; but he also remembered that those instructions applied to people injured in accidents, which didn’t seem to be the case here. Anyhow, he had to call an ambulance.

  Looking more closely, he realized that the movement he had noticed was concentrated in Saturno’s lips: he must have been trying to speak. His eyes were closed. Maxi bent down but still couldn’t hear anything. Maybe the movements were twitches or spasms. Even so, he wanted to be sure, so he bent further down, turned his head and put his ear to the mouth of the fallen man. Then he did hear something: a few words or phrases that seemed very clear and distinct, but so faint that only someone with auditory superpowers could have understood them. It was like what happens when you have the impression that a switched-off radio is still transmitting, but even if you put your ear right into the speaker, you can’t hear a thing. Luckily, the gym was absolutely quiet, otherwise Maxi’s experiment would have failed straight away. He concentrated as hard as he could. Finally he recognized or thought he recognized a word:

  “. . . Maxi . . .”

  He recoiled and looked at Saturno in amazement. The barman’s face was still inert, except for the twitching of his lips. Maxi lowered his ear again, and resumed his concentration.

  “. . . don’t be scared, it’s nothing. It’s my heart again. Sit me up.”

  “What?” He had meant to whisper, but it came out as a shout because he couldn’t control his thundering voice.