Shantytown

by Cesar Aira

  She was an extraordinarily short woman and obese, aged somewhere between forty and fifty, with dyed-blond hair (it was naturally dark), and Indian or perhaps partly African features. Very confident, well-groomed, commanding and decisive. She had earned her reputation. She inspired fear. The tabloid journalists loved her, and so did their huge audience, who felt it was time for a tough and energetic justice, unhampered by wigs and precedents, ready to take to the streets and fight crime on its own turf.

  A few die-hard liberals criticized Judge Plaza — under their breath, mind you, and among themselves in their ivory towers — for being a “media celebrity.” But that wouldn’t have stopped them approving of her if she hadn’t been so vulgar, so in tune with the bloodthirsty instincts of the masses. In fact they had a very good reason to approve of her, which was that she always chose her prey among the masses that had made her a star. And once she had chosen and the hunt was on, she was as fierce as a wild cat: relentless, vengeful, truly bad, of that you could be sure. There was no escape. The public cheered and cried out for more. It’s odd that it never occurred to those citizens, not even for a moment, as they sat in front of their televisions following the judge’s exploits, that one day she might target them. After all, anyone can end up looking suspicious, given the complexity of modern life in a big city, and she was not the sort of judge to bother with gathering evidence, or comparing witness statements, or giving guarantees; her specialty was destruction, annihilation, and the slightest suspicion or rumor was enough for her to go on. She was a woman to be feared, yet none of her fans was afraid of her. Maybe it was because of her status as a media personality. The villains she was after were personalities too, at least as soon as she was on the case, and the whole operation remained within the kingdom of images. Why would the viewers feel that this spectacle had anything to do with their physical reality? They might as well have believed that someone from the TV was going to call them and give them a huge cash prize or a car or a trip to the Caribbean. Nobody really expects that to happen. It’s often said that television has changed people’s lives, but the truth is that life has maintained its autonomy.

  The water was almost up to her knees, which were closer to the ground than those of ordinary mortals. She started walking forward. Her men gathered around her. The judicial police officers under her command were an elite group: experienced, incorruptible, bound together by a samurai mysticism and a blind obedience to the judge, who rewarded their loyalty by providing them with the latest, most sophisticated arms and granting them an autonomy that they exploited to the full. According to the legend, each of the judge’s men had a thousand revolvers.

  The corpse was floating at the vortex of the group’s collective attention, the judge’s having magnetized that of all her men. It was something more than attention. They had never seen her like this before, although they weren’t actually looking at her. The floating point in the dark water reflected everything.

  One of the judge’s most famous and frequently misunderstood declarations was that her only aim in life was to bequeath to the world, at the end of her brief sojourn, something it had not possessed before. It sounded like a throwaway line, the kind of thing that people trot out when they’re stuck for something to say, but it was more subtle than that. For a start, it’s not so simple to bring something new into the world: it’s a bit like bringing a rock back from the moon, except that these days the moon is really a part of the world. And she wasn’t referring to a combination of pre-existing elements or a rearrangement, but to something really new, a new element, which could enter into old combinations, if anyone so desired. This was a strange ambition for a judge: justice is like a zero-sum game; you could say that its mission, the essence of what it does, is to transform a situation without affecting the overall number of elements. Adding something new is more like what art does.

  On the other hand, no one could have been surprised by the judge’s evocation of life’s brevity. She wasn’t old (around fifty and well preserved), but she was at the center of the action, right in the line of fire. Hundreds of criminals were out to get her, and whatever precautions are taken in such a case, they are never sufficient. At that fateful moment, on the flooded esplanade, a thought occurred simultaneously to each of her men: “They’ll have to kill us all to get to her.” And yet, at the same time, they knew that someone, inconceivably, had breached the protective wall.

  The lightning was intensifying. The storm had not abated; on the contrary. Wild shudders ran back and forth over the surface of the water, and the floating corpse danced, as if on a short-circuiting electric bed, arching and writhing like a sleeper in the grip of a horrible nightmare.

  “To leave something new and different in the world, after my brief residence, something to enrich the lives of those to come . . .” Yes, but to do that, wouldn’t she have to die? And wasn’t death the destruction of everything, the new as well as the old? The judge’s aspiration associated the old with the individual, while the new was seen as a legacy to the species as a whole, which meant that death, when it came, would be something positive.

  But death, in this case, had arrived ahead of time, nobody really understood how. . . . And precisely because they didn’t understand, they knew that a revelation was imminent. Just at that moment the television crews arrived, and the news girls, followed by cameramen, came rushing and splashing up to the judge, who had begun to walk toward the corpse, stiffly upright as if in a trance.

  Thanks to some miracle of communication, the event had already been “deciphered” by the time the ad hoc retinue reached the dead man’s feet, and big red phosphorescent letters appeared on the television screens, over the images from the live coverage: JUDGE PLAZA’S SON MURDERED or MURDER VICTIM JUDGE’S SON, or something like that. This was a real news story, sensational and surprising, especially since until that moment no one had even suspected that the judge had a son, or that she had been married. It had been assumed, in fact, that she had no family or friends, or any kind of private life: she slept on a sofa in her office at the courthouse, never took a day off or a vacation; it was inconceivable that she might be subject to commonplace emotions or enmeshed in conventional relationships. And now, suddenly . . . an amazing turn of the screw had confirmed her superhuman capacity to generate news, this time with a revelation that went “straight to the heart”: she was a mother, a mother facing the ultimate loss, the loss of her only child.

  The news girls thrust their microphones at her mouth, shouting barely audible questions over the roar of the storm. The rain, falling more heavily than ever, bounced off the big black foam covers of the mikes, and splashed in the judge’s face, which was white as chalk. The cameramen kept turning from the judge to the corpse and back, and the glaring spotlights attached to their cameras made shadows dance on the water.

  Any creature equipped with a rudimentary cerebral cortex would have been able to deduce the inner workings of the crime. But the news girls didn’t operate like that. It’s not that they were stupid (not that stupid anyway), but in their work, for the truth to count as true it had to emerge laboriously from a background of error. There was a logic to it as well: they had to get everything wrong to keep people talking and thereby justify their role. That was why they asked:

  “Did your son, the Pastor, have a real religious vocation, or was he using it as a cover for dealing drugs?”

  “How could he have sunk so low? Where did you go wrong, Judge Plaza?”

  “Were you aware of your son’s illegal activities?”

  “Who do you suspect, Judge Plaza?”

  The questions were calculated to provoke a declaration. Such was the violence of the rain that as soon as the judge opened her mouth, it filled with water. But she spat it out vigorously and shouted:

  “He wasn’t a drug dealer! He wasn’t a Pastor! He wasn’t anything like that! He was my son! He was helping me with the investigation, in spite of the risks. He was brave and audacious and he was prepared to lay down h
is life to protect the community. He was the first to fall because he was in the front line.”

  “Did he have time to tell you what he had found out, Judge Plaza?”

  “Everything! Everything! Now I’m the target. But it won’t be so easy to kill me! From here on out, we’re calling the shots, and he is the one who will have to die.”

  “Who, Judge Plaza? Do you know who was responsible?”

  The judge hesitated almost imperceptibly, but quickly recovered her composure, and her voice became more guttural:

  “It was a man well known to the police, a corrupt officer: Deputy Inspector Cabezas, from Station 38. It all goes through him, and we’ve had him under surveillance for some time. Up until now, I’ve treated him with respect because he’s a father too. When his daughter died, I knew that the loss would eat away at him and sooner or later he’d slip up. Now he has made a fatal mistake, and we’ll get him before the night is out, before it stops raining. He’s cornered.”

  “Is he dangerous? Is he extremely dangerous? Will he kill again?”

  “The man’s a wild animal, he’s desperate, and he’s kidnapped two innocent teenagers!”

  Then the judge broke down and bowed her head, seized by an uncontrollable fit of weeping. The cameramen stepped back to get her body into the frame, and the shadows rearranged themselves. The news girls withdrew their microphones because everything had been said, and they knew that the headlines would be coming up on the screens: CORRUPT POLICEMAN FATHER OF MURDERED GIRL. COUNTDOWN TO REVENGE. ALL WILL DIE.

  The pause provided an opportunity for the obligatory shift to the other breaking story: the rain. The record for precipitation was about to be broken, and all the mobile news teams that the TV channels had sent out around the city were equipped with portable gauges made of transparent plastic, marked off in inches. The hourly rainfall had exceeded sixteen inches already, and was climbing to unprecedented levels. All the stations had diagrams in the corner of the screen showing the water level in the gauges rising in real time. In a city as large as Buenos Aires, rainfall is often heavier in certain areas than in others, and at that moment, by a curious coincidence, the heaviest falls were occurring on the esplanade at the end of Calle Bonorino. The news girls made the most of this, especially since the record for the volume of water that had fallen on the capital would be broken in a few minutes’ time. Nature happened to be making history at precisely the point in space and time where this particular story was unfolding.

  And there was blood in the water. The blood of a son. A single drop. As in the most potent homeopathic remedies, one drop was enough to alter the chemical and philosophical composition of that nocturnal Styx. The water took on a shadowy pink overtone, visible only to the mind’s eye in the prevailing blackness.

  Certain incidental shots elicited other reflections, albeit in an unconscious or subliminal way, particularly the ones that showed the judge standing in the rain without an umbrella or any kind of protection. Except in the movies, no one stands out in a downpour like that, as if they hadn’t noticed; it’s a basic human reflex to seek shelter. Therefore she wasn’t human. The story was taking a new turn.

  The TV channels were in a frenzy. They had found photos of Cabezas in their digital archives and they were alternating them with the live images. For some reason his face was horribly distorted by the electronic medium, becoming more grotesque with every passing second. It must have been because they hadn’t yet been able to find real photos and were making do with artist’s impressions. Meanwhile the archives kept providing images: an identity photo of Cynthia Cabezas; shots from her funeral, with the girls from Misericordia, and her parents in tears. And then, all of a sudden: old photos of Cabezas and Judge Plaza at some night spot, looking young, holding glasses of champagne; the Pastor preaching to a congregation; the judge with her son in her arms, when he was just a few months old; Cynthia as a little girl on the beach with her parents. . . . And the night, the rain, the city seen from helicopters — all the channels had sent one out — an ocean of confusion, from which the ghostly face of Cabezas reemerged, grimacing, it seemed. . . . A birthday party ten years ago, with Cynthia and the child who would grow up to be the Pastor at the head of the table, wearing paper hats. . . . It was the theme of life’s brevity again, but in the world of images this time. And it was taken to an extreme by the fantasy that was hovering over the viewers at that moment: an intergalactic traveler arrives in a strange world without any kind of protection (what protection could he have?). The environmental conditions are totally hostile to life: he’s doomed, obviously; he’s going to die in a few tenths of a second; you could say he’s as good as dead. . . . And yet, for the time being, he’s alive, arriving in the world, in the world’s horrific reality. And “the time being” is all there is.

  XI

  Meanwhile, Cabezas hadn’t gone very far with his two passengers. In the end, the edge of the world was too remote; it couldn’t be reached within this life, and after the first moment of panic, he hadn’t really intended to go that far. He went around behind the cemetery and the Piñeyro Hospital and headed east on Avenida del Trabajo. The land sloped steeply down toward what is appropriately called “Lower” Flores, and as the water rose to the tops of the wheels, Cabezas realized that if he couldn’t drive at top speed, he didn’t really feel like driving at all, so he might as well stop. He thought that perhaps he should make a decision before getting too far away. Or maybe it wasn’t as rational as that: something was holding him back, keeping him within the circle where things were happening. There was still a lot to be sorted out, and the further away he was, the harder it would be. So he pulled up at the corner of Carabobo and pointed to the little pizzeria:

  “We’re going to have a coffee and calm down,” he said, as if they’d gone out for a spin. The girls were too rigid with fear to react, so he invented a detail to make it more convincing: “You can walk back home from here when it stops raining.”

  This sounded plausible, even though the end of the rain seemed a world away. They got out and made a dash for it. The place was empty, except for a pair of sweethearts holding hands and talking in whispers, their gazes oscillating between the windows and the television over the door. The newcomers sat down at a table and stared at the screen. The show was just beginning.

  They saw it all. Cabezas was so fascinated by what was happening on the television and by his own thoughts that the girls could have slipped away without him noticing, but oddly enough it seemed that they were in no hurry to be gone. It was still raining just as heavily, and they didn’t want to get wet; in the state they were in, a trivial consideration like that mattered more than being at the mercy of a man described by the reporters as a dangerous criminal. Also, they didn’t want to miss any of the dramatic events unfolding on the screen.

  Although Cabezas had been waiting for the judge to pronounce his name, when she did, he couldn’t help whispering, “The bitch!” But what came next was more surprising. It was obvious that they really were getting him mixed up with the father of Cynthia Cabezas; they’d spun a whole plot out of that misinformation. For some time he’d been haunted, as the hunted often are, by the old idea that he was caught up in a case of “mistaken identity.” When he heard the judge’s words and saw the old pictures on the television, the idea took on monstrous proportions: not just huge, but deformed. It wasn’t that they had mixed him up with another man, leaving his true identity aside; they knew who he was and they were still mistaking him for someone else. If he’d been a better sport, he might have admitted that he had it coming because he was the one who’d started the confusion. But he wasn’t in the mood for subtleties like that.

  He looked on helplessly as the images followed one another, and the error reinforced itself and spread. He began to wonder how far it could go. Could it go all the way round and come back to bite the tail of the truth it had left behind? The only way to stop it expanding would have been to impose a universal silence. . . . And the human race wasn
’t going to stop talking. There was no point trying to set the record straight. Once a misunderstanding was out there, it couldn’t be reeled back in. The only solution was to make the best of it and press on, improvising all the way. Somehow, things worked out in the end, mysteriously enough. Even so, a feeling of deep despondency had come over him, due in part to the fierce insistence of the rain, both on the television and outside the windows of the pizzeria. The water was still rising. That sea of error: the world. And he had to keep going, on and on, burdened with all the solipsisms of his sloppy thinking and a mass of information drawn exclusively from television, bits and pieces as random as the sequence of episodes in a dream. He had to keep fleeing forward, but to where? What would become of him? Was he destined to be an eternal fugitive, eternally forbidden to look back? His despondency was deepening and coming to seem inflexibly ordained. This line of thought led him to the conclusion that his case was irremediable; after all, only the human could be remedied . . .

  Meanwhile on the esplanade, where everyone had paused to respect a mother’s pain, the action was resuming. The cameras focused on Judge Plaza again, and she regained her fighting spirit. The manhunt was beginning: the judge and all her officers disappeared into their cars, in one of which they stowed the corpse, and drove off leaving boiling wakes in the big choppy lake that had covered the avenue. The breathless commentaries of the news girls, who were following the police in their various trucks, explained that they were heading for the nearby shantytown, which was still crowned with a great dome of light. According to the television — which is the very essence of action and therefore never wrong — the judge had ordered her samurais to take up positions all around the edge, and as soon as the perimeter was secured, she would go in herself, leading the way, armed to the teeth, ready to kill or die.