A Zero-Sum Game

by Eduardo Rabasa

  Maso took advantage of the chaos to play his masterstroke. He broke into the Black Paunches’ lockers with a picklock and scattered their belongings around the Chamber of Murmurs, leaving a trail of scapulars of the Virgin, music systems, and cologne. Using leftover leftovers, he attracted a dozen stray dogs and locked them in with the food. As the Black Paunches gradually reemerged from their lava nightmares, they found their possessions chewed and covered in piss and shit. They kicked the dogs to death, knowing that they couldn’t touch the real culprit. When Taimado passed her with his arms full of stinking clothing, he had to impotently listen to Juana Mecha’s satisfied, “That’s for soaking my spare mattresses.”

  18

  Maso’s business career was on the up and up. There were incalculable advantages to his sector of the market: the initiates always wanted more; they were ready to pay any price, there was no need for publicity, and economic crises made consumption soar. Every night, after giving Taimado his cut, Beni Mascorro would stash yet another briefcase safely away in the apartment. Money was no problem: the difficulties were social acceptance and space.

  There was a proliferation of anti-drug neighborhood watch groups who received substantial donations to their cause. They organized courses, lectures, and brigades, and produced videos and pamphlets with heartrending stories of ruined lives put back together again. Maso was the enemy, the iron ball attached to the chain of hysteria that linked them all. When the unrest grew, the usual mechanism came into play: one of Maso’s delivery boys was captured by a Black Paunch. The neighborhood organizations would record the statistic; the annual report would free up funds for the next exercise. Things went on as normal.

  Nevertheless, Maso was still forced to endure the sight of decals showing his face branded with a bleeding cross or the accelerated pace of mothers holding children by the hand when they saw him sweeping up in his beige uniform. His only consolation was one of Mecha’s enigmatic, oft-repeated sayings: “Your burden is that they like their guilt so much.”

  Space began as a practical matter. The briefcases stuffed with cash were squeezed under their beds until not even one more would fit; the other room in the apartment was occupied by a gardener and her grandson. Since none of the owners would rent their properties to Maso, he offered to pay the woman’s rent if she moved into the adjoining building. The owner of that apartment gave way when offered a briefcase full of money. The other residents checked the workers’ regulations in search of a rule prohibiting this abuse: the assessed value of their properties had immediately fallen. When the outrage had been carried to its completion, the residents of Building B expressed their repudiation of the event by painting the corresponding part of their façade with an ochre blemish. The workers thought it was a gesture of cohesion. And while the owners came out publicly against the invasion of brooms, cleaning rags, and truncheons, they privately began attempting to rent out their apartments and move to some uncontaminated area. This was the first foray of the divisive stain that would spread throughout Villa Miserias.

  Mascorro was the next to be recompensed. It took Maso quite a while to process the separation from him. For a time, they went on sleeping in the same bedroom, using the other room for storage. Before sleeping, Maso enjoyed going into the details of his day, unconcerned by the snores of his roommate, who would wake up at intervals to offer some monosyllable showing he was following his boss’s exploits.

  It was almost impossible to walk around the apartment without bumping into some piece of imitation mahogany furniture, the huge television set and sound system, the stuffed moose’s head fixed to the wall, or Maso’s increasingly large collection of clown figures. Mascorro felt intimidated by the clay, porcelain, plastic, plush, and even metal clowns, formed from screws, nuts, keys, pieces of piping, and other odds and ends. However, on Maso’s birthday, he turned up with a flesh and blood clown, to the enormous surprise of the birthday boy and Mecha, who, on seeing him, exclaimed: “It’s not just with bread that saltwater dams overflow.” The clown entertained them with jokes and party games for two hours, and even gave Maso a balloon carousel. When the function came to a close, Maso began to pull out wads of bills to give the clown as a tip, then closed the briefcase and handed it over to him intact.

  Mascorro himself had the second ochre patch painted on the annex of Building B. When he had taken the last packing case from his old apartment, he saw Maso standing firmly in the doorway. Mascorro opened his mouth to speak, but his boss raised a hand; he nodded, gave his subordinate a couple of bone-rattling pats on the back, turned around, and closed the door behind him without another word. While Mascorro was moving his belongings into the new apartment, the neighbors produced a concert of slamming doors.

  19

  The other tenants in Building B also started to benefit from Mauricio Maso’s presence. He had parabolic antennas installed on the roof. These inverted flying saucers were capable of picking up hundreds of channels in incomprehensible languages. But between the linguistic barriers and the hassle of keeping up to date with the new codes for stealing the signal, the end result was that people watched the same programs as before. Even so, several children started to wear baseball caps and T-shirts with the logos of foreign teams; the male members of families blamed each other when the women complained about them having accidentally left the set tuned to porn channels.

  Soda and snack vending machines were installed in the lobby. Mascorro was in charge of refilling a basket brimming with coins every morning so that the tenants could buy whatever they liked. They particularly enjoyed the sound of the cans falling. When the captain of the cleaning staff soccer team asked for help in buying new gear, Maso didn’t hesitate. They agreed to order the same color that already distinguished them.

  The maximum cohesive element was a small altar—also in the lobby—surrounded by black candles, kept alight day and night. They illuminated the image of a religious icon that was particularly characteristic of a certain sector of Villa Miserias. Although the protectress had been born into a different social caste, her mercy was great enough to find a place for those brown skinned sons. Maso and his men repaid her with complete devotion.

  The artist Pascual Bramsos’ paternal relations were deeply religious. In spite of the protests from his historian mother, his grandmother had taken on the task of indoctrinating her small grandson with her beliefs during the regular outings when the parents left him in her care. The child’s bed was underneath a shelf, on which rested an image of the Virgin, surrounded by candles to ward off evil spirits. On the evening of the accident, an electrical transformer exploded, shaking the whole apartment. The candles tipped over and a stream of hot wax fell directly onto the boy’s ear. Despite numerous operations—paid for by the grandmother—instead of an ear, he was left with what looked like a pink, processed-cheese cauliflower with a hole in the center. Bramsos’ childhood was a form of medical torture. Nevertheless, it was not his grandmother he blamed, but the Virgin who had decided to mutilate him. When he was old enough, he honed his technical skills in art school. He was in training to respond to the aggression.

  The first thing he gave form to was an impeccable clay Virgin. Then he intervened in the figure until he attained a syncretism of traditions, affinities, phobias, and hatreds. He allowed her to retain the long habit covering her legs, but undressed the upper half of the torso, leaving uncovered a pair of intentionally augmented breasts. Her proud head was draped in a tunic, hiding her hair. On her face, he placed a black mask with a long, pointed nose. The reddened lips were slightly parted. When he showed the piece in an exhibition at the art school, it had to be kept under guard because of the anonymous threats to destroy it.

  Maso heard of its existence from an employee who supplemented her earnings washing clothes for a number of residents, including the Bramsos family. The description appealed to both his love of bright color and his violent hatred of organized religion. When he was still a child and working in his subterranean slash show, stron
g rains had one night flooded the sewer he lived in and he’d sought sanctuary in a church. The following morning, he woke to find the face of the priest smiling into his delicate features. He invited Maso to his rooms, offered him a shower, food, and clean clothes. He requested that, before leaving, Maso come to the confessional for purification. As Mauricio Maso had never been in a church before, he thought it normal to find himself in the narrow cubicle, on his knees before the seated parish priest. He closed his eyes, as he’d been taught, and listened to a passionate prayer in a strange language. The rising crescendo of the voice frequently faltered. The boy felt a slight tug at his head as the priest said: “Now I’m going to pardon your sins.” When he opened his eyes, Maso understood what that absolution involved. He managed to push the man away from him and crashed backwards through the fragile wooden door. Priestly threats of God’s revenge and eternal hellfire followed him as he left.

  Mascorro communicated his boss’s interest in the piece to Bramsos. The budding artist already had radical ideas about selling his work, but his fondness for the products of the prospective client eased the exchange. Maso reified the representation; his neighbors followed his example. Taimado ordered his men to make offerings of some piece of their personal armory. The altar was littered with knives, ninja stars, truncheons, spiked rings, and sharpened screwdrivers. Other employees showered her with their cleaning rags, bottles of bleach, gardening gloves, toilet brushes. Juana Mecha welcomed her with: “Dispossession can only be covered up by dispossession.”

  20

  And just to fucking cap it all, she has to be a journalist, thought Max Michels as he picked up a copy of the free newspaper in which there would surely be an article written by her, secretly directed at him. While he was aware of how arrogant his paranoia was, it didn’t make it any less probable that he was right. Expecting an attack from the Many, he considered the possibility that the threat lay in her professional intelligence, which openly defied Max’s stereotype of his sort of woman. Confronted with this strategy, the Many decided to attack on another flank: As if you were bothered about that, you sod. What you’re really afraid of is anyone knowing. Don’t trouble your head, you’re already dead meat. The others will find out sooner or later. That’s a cert. But then, who knows? Her interests have got nothing to do with mine. Think so? That’s your problem, smartass.

  Feverishly leafing through that day’s issue, Max had the impression of having read it a hundred times before. The news items, headlines, advertisements, and trivia were decidedly secondary. What mattered was the statement of intent: Selon Perdumes had been convinced that transparent information was a well-calibrated thermometer for measuring the development of a community. As people became masters of their own destinies, the responsibility to know what was going on and offer justifiable opinions increased: the residents had to stop being mere spectators of what concerned them. The reforms had offered an opportunity to crystalize needs: it was the moment to create a newspaper, The Daily Miserias. Perdumes had a clear idea of the appropriate format. Based on a study by G.B.W. Ponce, he knew that Villa Miserians spent 6.8 minutes a day informing themselves of their reality. He had statistical evidence of graphic preferences, type of language, topics of interest, and the ideal length of articles. There had been no time to lose or gaudiness to be stinted.

  The result was a concise newspaper, in which illustrations, photos, and boxes with huge arrows predominated. The house style manual specified rules and proportions: after a given number of words, there should be a box recapping the main points, a smaller box summarizing the larger one, yet another that would continue the compression, and so on until it was condensed into the keyword that was the focus of the entire text. Ponce had demonstrated that this optimized the retention of information because it allowed each individual to go into the text as deep or shallow as he pleased. At first sight, the articles looked like those charts representing the stages of a competition, in which the winning words advanced to the next heat, until the supreme word had beaten the rest. The language was colloquial; the reporters were trained not to insult the intelligence of their readers: they should refrain from using vocabulary not in the daily lexicon of the majority.

  The aim was to attain a delicate balance: gathering the opinions of people so as to then mold them. Perdumes explained it using the allegory of a fountain that feeds on the water of a river, only to then return it, transformed, to the stream before feeding once again on that slightly modified source, in a patient reiteration that eventually modifies the raw material through its own elements.

  The articles should utilize the time-honored inductive technique of representing a general idea by a few individual testimonies. It was prohibited for reporters to explicitly reveal their beliefs. Every case required the support of an impartial witness. In this respect, The Daily Miserias also introduced an innovation: it made absolutely no difference whether or not the witness to an event actually existed. This wasn’t a con or some arbitrary decision. Ponce explained to Perdumes that, from a statistical viewpoint, one person’s opinion in a population consisting of anything over 878 was already irrelevant when it came to representing the feelings of the majority. He’d demonstrated this in practice with a simple exercise: comparing the reportage of four newspapers, each with a different political tendency, on an antiwar march in a distant country. In every case, the testimonies offered to illustrate the mood of those present coincided with the editorial line of the paper in relation to the war. The most progressive reproduced the words of a father, heartbroken at the death of his son—a medical student specializing in epidemiology—who planned to go to a poverty-stricken region to fight a pandemic. The most conservative, in contrast, interviewed an elderly lady waving a placard with a picture of a hippie wiping his ass with a national flag. She’d lost a grandson, but was proud of her “hero who gave his life to protect our freedom.” The two newspapers holding the center ground offered the opinions of people who were against war but understood that it was sometimes necessary, or who supported this war but demanded transparent information in relation to its cost and duration. If this was correlated with the papers’ estimations of the number of marchers, his point was proven.

  What’s the difference, asked G.B.W. Ponce, between looking for someone who expresses the viewpoint you want to transmit and a sensible journalist who captures the atmosphere through the words of a person who doesn’t exist, but is more representative of the collective feeling? Why always use a tangible witness? In statistical terms, it’s the same thing to be one in a million as to be zero in five thousand. Used correctly, the new technique was, in fact, more objective than its predecessor. But it couldn’t be employed lightly: it had to be carefully introduced until there was no longer any noticeable difference.

  Readers were also given a voice. Subscribers were offered the privilege of entering a raffle for the right to compose their own columns in the section called Para-Doxa. The topic could be chosen at will since the idea was to discover the views of the common or garden resident, whose voice was not generally heard. Feedback was important, so the contribution was accompanied by a comment in the leader column. This wasn’t to intimidate the amateur writer; it simply pointed out issues that had been omitted, clarified myths not in keeping with the new times, or cited eminent experts who had demonstrated a particular phenomenon. Gradually, the tone changed. The veiled message slowly permeated the invited contributors. Para-Doxa was a reflection of the change in the pulse of the average Villa Miserian.

  The Daily Miserias became the main media organ on the estate. Its readership was so varied that the editorial staff even organized a competition for the most successful publicity campaign. Talented young creative producers came up with highly ingenious ideas. In the end, a designer rocking chair shop with an abundance of exotic letters in its name won the prize with a strategy based on insulting its customers. The central image showed a young couple relaxing in their stylized rocking chairs; the expression on their faces was one of
vacant surprise, as if they had been caught at a blank moment. The caption above them read: “The Espumas were dumb enough to fork out three months’ salary to experience our exclusive brand of comfort. Are you going to be left behind?” The unpronounceable rocking chairs became the emblem of homes with aspirations to respectability in Villa Miserias.

  Orquídea López had been appointed editor-in-chief of the newspaper. Her combative style fitted perfectly with the braggadocio journalism of The Daily Miserias. Even the first issue had exposed a scandal: embezzlement perpetrated by the estate’s treasurer. As part of the maintenance of the buildings, the board had to arrange for greasing the hinges of doors, cleaning external windows, carpeting halls and stairways, and putting fertilizer on the green areas, among other tasks. It was the treasurer who supplied the necessary products, and the residential estate had an informal arrangement with a hardware store that offered its principal client discounts.

  Disaster loomed when the unfortunate treasurer started dating a much younger girl whose needs exceeded his income. In collusion with the hardware store, he began to buy poorer quality products and used the savings to give her the rubber charm bracelets all her girlfriends were wearing. And there were also dinners at the best taco bars. Orquídea López undertook a thorough investigation to expose this crime to the community.