Not long afterward, Max arrived home, exuding rebellion and waving the form for enrollment in the university admission examination before his nanny’s eyes. He knew something was going on when she didn’t share his excitement:
“Little Max, your father’s had a very bad turn. He’s been taken to hospital.”
“The frigging bastard. Even in death, he’s found a way fuck me up.”
The doctor and his body were respecting their gentleman’s agreement.
Not long afterward, fearful of wasting the munitions he’d stockpiled, Max communicated his professional decision to his dying father. Without saying a word, Dr. Michels put two fingers to his son’s cheek, he gave it a couple of affectionate pats—followed by a third that bordered on a slap—before resting his head back on the pillow. His eyes fixed on Max, with unbearable slowness, he relaxed every one of his nerves and fell asleep.
Between the related formalities and his ambivalent mourning, Max didn’t take the exam. He was devastated by another nascent loss: in strict accordance with labor law, the doctor had left instructions to pay off the nanny for her long years of service. Her invisibility and tough weathered skin camouflaged the proximity between her and the doctor’s ages. And that was the cause of her serenity in the face of the stingy acknowledgement she received: she knew she didn’t have long to live either. Her exclusion from any public health program had lead her to deal with the blows, illnesses, and habitual wear and tear of being on her feet for fifteen hours a day by visits to bonesetters, herbalists, and other specialists in patching up ailments. Her body understood the limitations of her caste, so it didn’t demand first-class maintenance. The nanny felt that the cracks were about to join up, and she wanted to undergo that generalized collapse in the shelter of the tin roof and dirt floor of the shack where she’d grown up, and return to the starving hens and metal-eating goats of her hometown. Luckily, baby Max was already a man: she didn’t have the strength to protect him any further.
Max helped her to pack her belongings into a cardboard box. Not even some thirty years of service were enough to fill it. As a farewell present, he brought her a shining new transistor radio. Her old one lacked several buttons; the dial had faded from use, so she had to tune it by trial and error.
He accompanied her to the bus that would take her to the station, noting for the first time her hunched back and laborious gait; her furrowed face; the chipped teeth; her leathery flab; her poorly graduated spectacles; the darned dress; her swollen feet; her smiling silent tears. The nanny was crying for the only thing all those years had left her: the memories of a life that had made it possible for the Michels family to live its own.
Max broke down at the sight of the packed bus that would swallow up his nanny forever. He felt as if every one of his organs would make him pay for the years of his family’s miserliness. He desperately tried to think of some formula for returning her life to her, for turning back the clock on the thousands of small acts involved in feeding him, washing and ironing his clothes, tidying his bedroom, and taking and collecting him from school…When he saw her crying, it was as if the step of a staircase were disconsolately lamenting being close to the point when no one would tread on it again. The nanny’s thick lips parted to say:
“Goodbye, Max my child. I’ll be looking out for you from the Valley of Skulls.”
“Don’t say that Nanny. I promise that as soon as I’ve gotten everything organized, I’ll come visit you.”
Limping, she boarded the bus, tightly clutching her box. As soon as she was gone, Max had a numbing sense of foreboding. He ran back to his building, falling flat on his face on the stairs in his hurry. He kicked open the kitchen door to confirm his fears: the transistor radio was still there. He attacked it viciously until it was unrecognizable. Several plates and glasses suffered a similar fate. Still panting, Max flopped onto the kitchen floor among the debris. He cleared a space on the icy tiles to rest his head, and that was how he passed the first night of his future life.
20
Around that time, Max was having difficulty distinguishing between his own and external upheavals. Since the residential estate had first set out on its ambitious expansion project, Dr. Michels had often advised him to prepare himself for the new challenges; only real men, men with balls, would triumph. All types of business opportunities were now opening up. And also opportunities to mold the collective destiny through the only solid nucleus of social life: the individual. The sciences of the public sphere focused on dissolving the dangerous sentimentalism that produced so many calamities. Anything that couldn’t be quantified was ideology, and ideology was equivalent to the absence of freedom. The notion of a total identity only leads to servitude; it had to be eradicated. The way forward lay in boosting the sum of accumulation. Egoism was the most infallible defense against the repetition of barbarity; charity allowed failures to fail. The no-opportunity whiners would be the first great burden to be shed. Better to follow the example of the poor boy who overcame unspeakable hardship to achieve his dream of becoming the fire chief.
Max put his name down for the second round of admission exams. This time his choice of subject was different. Sao and Pascual came round to his apartment to hear his decision. Once they were drowsy on the baked dough and the bubbles in their sodas, he came out with it:
“I wanted to tell you both that I’m not going to do literature. I’ve thought it through, and times are changing. I don’t want to study a completely useless subject.”
“How do you mean?” interrupted Pascual.
“Shit, you know what I’m talking about,” replied Max brusquely.
“Forget it, Max. Those aren’t your own words,” insisted his friend.
“It’s easy for you to say that. You threw yourself off the cliff and landed on your feet. I don’t want to end up giving classes to frigging lazy fatties. I’ve been reading about the new opportunities for participation in the public sphere. It’s amazing, nowadays you can even measure your soul and reeducate it to turn around, move forward.”
“Hell, Max, you’ve forgotten about our pact quickly.”
“What pact, shithead?”
“You really don’t remember? The one about digging in our heels and not toeing the expected line. I just hope you don’t turn into one of them too quickly.” Pascual left hurriedly without saying good night.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with that moron. What do you think?” said Max, turning to Sao.
Sao was unwilling to say anything until she was sure how serious Max was. She sat beside him and hugged him closely, ran her hand down his back as if wanting to ask his shoulder blades what she already knew at heart. Max shielded himself by kissing her, and they started off down a path already trodden. This time Sao was prepared. Before things went too far she took a sheet of paper from the back pocket of her unbuttoned jeans. She lay with her head on Max’s legs, slid her hand down her own belly to her expectant pubes. She then handed him a piece of paper on which was written a poem by one of her favorite writers, a man who had decided to blow his brains out when he was scarcely past twenty, before he could enter an empty world of pure rhetoric. Without having to be asked, Max began to read:
If walking, I walk alone
through deserted, abandoned countryside
if I speak with friends, of drunken
laughter, and of life,
The words organized themselves to form a private enclosure that excluded Max. His voice came from a nearby dimension, located on an inaccessible plane.
If I study, or dream, if I labor or laugh
or if a gust of art transports me
or if I gaze on nature fresh risen
with new life,
Sao began to gently stroke her skin with a fingertip, stopping at every pore of the soft textured surface, moving the finger slowly up and down, down and up.
You alone rule my heart
of you alone I think, for you every fiber quivers
for you alone my thou
ghts thrill
for you, beloved.
Unhurried, she sought out the right fold, the elongated fibrous point that would initiate the flow of moisture. She was a little disappointed on finding it, as that marked the end of her search, so she moved her hand away to purposely lose it and start over again.
I am drawn to you with growing passion
with a force I’ve never before know,
without you, life is empty,
sad and dark.
When the flood was irreversible, she carefully allowed it to spread more widely, including in her generosity her pubis and crotch. Her finger was a convulsed serpent, thrusting in search of more.
If all latent energy in me is awakened
to the powerful appeal of love,
I long to see that burning flame
enter my heart.
Sao’s disengaged hand came in to play, strategically moving in the opposite direction. It passed over the small mounds of her breasts and moved on to her skull, against the grain of her hair, until it reached Max’s jaw, squeezing with mild sadism. She introduced a finger into his mouth, allowed it to be caressed by the tongue before returning it toward her nipple. Then she sketched circles around the nipple until it was thoroughly aroused.
I long to rise toward the infinite ether
and shout my passion to it
I long to communicate rebellion
to the universe.
The moans were like a shrill chorus; they crashed into the boundaries of the invisible field, augmenting in tone with each rebound. Impossible to tell if they came from Sao, or if she were a creation of the moans.
I long for nature to throb
with the pulse the spirit stirs in me
I long for splendorous love
to shine in your unmoving eyes.
The hand alternating between her breasts allowed itself a new flight: it steadily approached Max until his lips were murmuring in her ear. The finger deferred the explosion. Sao’s entire body was beating to the rhythm of his uneven breathing.
Tell me, why do you evade my gaze
my love? Or do you still not understand
the burning ardor that consumes me?
The flame you ignite.
Time and space canceled each other out. Colors merged into one. One luminous hue. There was no longer Max. Nor non-Max. Just a cry, a liberated shudder. A suspended tremor. The restraining hand attempted to prolong it. Just a little. The bow tensed in an instant previous to the firing of the arrow that would release a cascade of exhalations, returning to diffuse normality.
I have no peace if you are not near:
I long to follow you everywhere
to drink the air moving around you
and never abandon you.
Sao resurfaced to satisfied calm, her breathing separated from Max’s. He stroked her forehead tenderly, proud of his role in their meshing. She drowsed for a few seconds then opened her eyes. “We shouldn’t underestimate complexity,” she said before standing to help him gather their things.
21
The beginning of the academic year distanced the three friends on certain levels. There were obvious, practical reasons for this: they were each absorbed in their new obligations and friendships. Pascual formed a rock group called Eidola, specializing in livening up events, playing stylized cover versions of classic songs. Sao divided her time between her studies and the laundry, while Max widely expanded his curriculum both to the left and right, in theory and in practice. He was determined to take a good look at the truths his father had venerated. By now, he was now aware of the farce: it was a cult founded on a lie; his father had used preaching about truth as a means of avoiding having to confront that. Who was soft now? Was it manly to hide behind grandiloquent axioms, designed to enforce formulaic thinking?
At the same time, the link between the friends weakened in the realm of excuses. Their spontaneous meetings were a thing of the past. Trying to coordinate free periods became a tedious exercise. Sao and Max made a solemn pact: every so often they would get together for their secret poetry recital. The sheet of paper became so creased from use as to be illegible. But it was no longer needed: Max knew the poem by heart. They both played their part in jealously guarding this point of resistance against the latent threat that making their individual ways in life would definitively separate them.
22
Max began studying political science at a moment of transition in the paradigm: the intention was to distance the area of study from social anthropology, now seen as an ideology-driven pseudoscience. Based on false foundations, its scaffolding was increasingly skewed. Its vision of the historical progress of societies was reduced to the absurd pronunciations of hypocritical egomaniacs. First they had constructed horrific utopias, and only later elaborated rigged laws to demonstrate the inevitability of that future without chains imposed by the few.
The counterattack of liberty was based on the opposite premise: the only chains were those that attempted to see man as anything but a small creature, with small yearnings and a narrow mind. Man’s principal desire was for an absence of obstacles to achieving his small, utilitarian satisfactions. The crucial pirouette consisted of a new definition of the object of study: human beings passed from being a species determined by the weight of its habits and natural and social structures—most of which it neither knew or understood—to a rational consumer trying to maximize his desires and frustrations. He appropriates as much as possible for his personal use, but also for the pleasure derived from depriving others of what he has. If the earlier paradigm committed the sin of investing man with responsibilities exceeding his stature, the new one tore off all his necessary epidermal layers, until he was reduced to a purely egoistic being who, even in altruism, only desires to satisfy his own vanity.
Differential calculus showed that such a situation was optimal for the whole. The citizen-consumer model was not restricted to the goods and services markets. It also applied to the only relevant political action: voting. That simple act became the common coinage for expressing dissatisfaction with product-candidates who would become entertainer-governors. The political future was determined by the maxim: “The customer is always right.” Rational selection had no limits: it allowed for the construction of models for contemplating works of art; determined the most appropriate time to marry by means of curves representing the inverse relationship between unfettered fun and the stability of commitment; measured the proportional utility—in terms of benefits and obligations—of having pets or children; founded a new mathematical system of ethics for deciding whether or not to commit corporate fraud, taking into account the possibility of being caught. In short, it was an anti-utopian utopia. All that was needed was for thousands of millions of people to learn to behave in the way stipulated by the models. They had to be educated to reasonably channel—fighting any form of radicalism or eccentricity—the unlimited torrent of alternatives that defined them. It was simply a matter of burying the collective ghosts that had, in the past, roamed whole mental continents. Luckily, these were now nothing more than a bitter memory.
Max thrashed as best he could to keep afloat in a pool with no bank to cling on to. The mask with pretensions of not being a mask was warmly welcomed by the majority of the teaching staff and students. In theory. As with any conversion to a new liturgy, it required certain leaps of faith that short-circuited their predecessors. The academic community felt itself besieged by a cybernetic principle: no hardware, no software. Without a certain amount of mental capacity, the transplant was a complex—sometimes impossible—operation. Emptying the brain of its previous contents was easy; the promise of a free future was enough to win hearts. The problem arose in then filling the mind with an ideology that attempted to define itself by pure absence. This soft rigidity posed dichotomies that confused many of the new devotees.
And none so much as the issue of limits. While differential calculus inelegantly resolved the matter from the viewpoint of logic,
its sociological disciples were condemned, before they even started, to babble. Mathematics solved the metaphysical-infinitesimal problem of whether or not limits exist by coming down roundly on the side of existence. Although all previous developments suggested the contrary, limits could be defined and enunciated. The proposition that even the closest conceivable point was always separated from the limit by various infinites didn’t stand in the way of proceeding with a firm step. “As if” became the skeleton in the closet that was never mentioned. Limits went from being a theoretical impossibility to solid rock that could be built on. The system functioned impeccably. And that buried any conceptual contradiction in the premise.
The dimensions of the dichotomy exploded when it was transferred to the field of social organization, where the concept of the limit was even more resistant to aligning itself with some coherent flank. It was a pariah for both hawks and doves. No one could silence its uncomfortable questions: What should free consumers do about those who insisted on not enjoying that freedom? How far could fundamentalist practices and ideas be allowed to threaten the capacity to consume? Was it legitimate to use force to oblige others to be ruled by the ideals of guilt-free consumption? And if not, should the ideology of free consumption sacrifice itself, allow its own destruction before limiting those insisting on not consuming freely?
Innumerable variants on those themes were debated in the international symposia speakers attended in order to be put up in luxury hotels—all expenses paid—and vigorously outline the new theoretical principles of political action. The flow of scholarships, residencies, and research grants was constant. Important newspapers and magazines reproduced learned articles crammed with quotations proving something or other. The aim was not so much to arrive at certainties that would threaten the objectives of the academic industry—that would be opposed to the principles of the new perspective—as to imperceptibly mark out the sphere of discussion. No more debates on oppression, property, injustice, alienation, worldly pleasures, cages, liberation theologies, political kidnapping, or anarchist bombings. Given a fanatical acceptance of certain unquestionable principles on which the rest of the apparatus rested, civilized attack could be encouraged, just so long as it adhered to the monolithic plurality of the cause.
A Zero-Sum Game Page 17