L3:So you did hear us? That’s precisely what we want to avoid. All this paraphernalia—our suits, the expensive whisky, the fireplace—all of these things have, in essence, a principal aim: to help us forget that, however much we might pretend it’s not so, our existence is just as vain as yours. Now, go. Leave us in peace!
l1:Milords are very, very intelligent. You know about these and other matters. I could well have been one of you. It’s just a trick of fate that I’m not. So you could show a little more empathy.
L2:That’s precisely what leads us to despise you. The consciousness we could be in your place, live your life, wear that ridiculous uniform, sleep badly in your cot, have to shit in your toilet. Not being you is the best incentive I have to go on being me.
(A loud bang is heard and the lights go out. L3 stands up and begins to tremble violently.)
L3:You imbecile! The fuses! How often have I told you to change the fuses?
(l1 loses his cool. He breaks the vase over L3’s head. L3 falls to the floor. L2 struggles with l1, eventually pulling out a clump of his hair. l1 hits L2 with the remaining half of the vase. He goes on hitting them both until he kills them with the last solid shard of the vase. He undresses them with the same parsimony he had once used to dress them. Then he combines various parts of the two sets of clothing until he is dressed as a Lord. He pours himself a whisky, rehearses a profound expression, and sits down on a sofa. Holding up his index finger, he begins to babble nonsense, nonexistent, fragmented words, only stopping to take a sip of his whisky. When he has finished his drink, he stands up.)
L1:Who’d have thought it? The whisky tastes exactly the same.
THE END
The excitement came to nothing. The night before, I’d thought we were making our way together through the shadows. I’d fallen asleep with the bandage still in place, partly through exhaustion, but also because I didn’t want to change the slightest detail. After so much violence, I thought, I’d discovered the unreachable Nelly. The one so many dreamers had hoped to capture. Even before the deadline, fate was pronouncing in my favor. The descent had been worth the effort, a new Max was emerging, things would be different, the Many and I would be reconciled, and endless shit like that. I never tire of getting it wrong. Unless the errors belong to reality, and it’s reality’s cowardice that prevents it from accepting them.
But in the morning, I still asked Nelly to take off the bandage. She snipped at it with a pair of scissors, asking why I couldn’t do it myself. Said she didn’t have time for all my ceremonies. Or something like that. I wanted to explain what had happened. The imperceptible turn of events. When I came back from the shower, she’d gone. One of the Many had a frightening idea. I went to the wardrobe to show how wrong its malicious tale was. To show it that Nelly had slept badly, or was feeling stressed by the campaign. After all, she was as new as me to this game. The asshole was right. Nelly had taken a suitcase of clothes. But she’s left others, I attempted to argue without conviction. I can’t bear the Many’s condescending silence. The fact that they feel sorry for me pisses me off more than their frontal attacks.
I went to Pascual’s apartment to rehearse the play. Sao offered to find someone to take my role at short notice. She offered me a dignified way out, saying I should rest, because there was still a long way to go. Pascual pretended not to be listening. I can understand it: for him this is as serious as any other installation. The person writing this agrees. The ones who live packed in the hole within my brain don’t. They can’t come to an agreement. Some wanted to keep pressing on. Others suggested putting an end to it all, including the campaign. Between all the pushing and pulling, someone close to me learned his lines. The scene with the vase made my blood run cold. I can’t even describe the image that exploded in my head a second before.
The number of residents supporting us is growing. As is their fervor. Sao didn’t even tell Pascual and me about the provocateur she’d infiltrated into the crowd. The Black Paunches dragged him out kicking, frenetically shouting, “It’s a leg pull. His realism is a lie.” People wanted to kill him. They silenced him with insults. The confusion ran over onto the stage. When it was over, the three of us confessed to a pretty similar experience: at the moment when we were most fully in character, it seemed like the action was taking place offstage. That the audience was there to entertain us, to shake us out of our torpor for a while, and not the reverse. Our miniscule staging was part of the theater known as Villa Miserias. While the action’s going on, no one ever asks who wrote the script. When the curtain closed on the last act, they applauded all three actors equally, as if it was unfair to take the side of an isolated element within the obvious order of things.
I returned home, expecting to sleep alone. Nelly, however, was waiting to have dinner with me. She’d changed her clothes; her hair was damp; she asked about my day with genuine curiosity. So she hadn’t attended the play. I gave her a rough outline of events to gain time while finding the courage to ask the obvious question. How interesting, she said. She would have loved to be there, but had had a meeting with her aunt and the chief. Naturally, she couldn’t tell me the details. But he was such an interesting man. If she hadn’t been ashamed to do it, she would have taken notes right there. Everything he said was like an aphorism with different depths.
It seemed she had material to keep going like that for quite some time, so I asked why she’d showered at her aunt’s and not here in our apartment. Her eyes lost their black gleam. She went to her suitcase and took out a pair of muddied jeans. Her shoes were also soaked. Was I satisfied, or was I going to keep on with my frigging suspicions? I felt like a complete idiot: I’d been caught in the mid-afternoon downpour as well. She left her meal half-eaten, and when she went to the bedroom, didn’t even bother to close the door. Such was the measure of her disillusion. I went to the sofa and discovered that it wasn’t so easy to sleep straight through as I had thought the other night.
DAY 6
Residents of Villa Miserias,
Many thanks for being here again with me tonight. We are at exactly the halfway point of the campaign. In the end it will be you who say where you want to take things from here. But allow me to be a little more precise: the direction our community moves in will not be decided here. Villa Miserias is an insignificant component in an automated assembly line. As I have said before, the only thing I will not do is deliberately deceive you. Neither my adversary nor I can choose any path. The plans have already been drawn out on a larger scale. What you, the voters, have to decide in five days’ time is if you intend to walk the plank with your eyes open or blindfolded.
Electoral campaigns are the most visible component of the present day political mask. That mask is made up of millions of small faces content to feel, every few years, that they are participating equally in the collective whole. True. However, if we look behind the façade of equality, we find an extremely obese creature, with insatiable appetites, that will do anything to achieve its single aim: to always possess a little more of everything. The main function of the political eggshell of equality is to protect the most unequal economic base ever known.
Not even the most ambitious conqueror ever dreamed of the power that money has gained in our day. This scrap of paper with its delusions of grandeur has taken on a life of its own to the extent that ours are mere appendages to its uncontrollable instinct for reproducing itself. It has reduced human beings to nothing more than interchangeable objects on which a price can be placed. Aren’t we always hearing people talking about the importance of knowing how to “sell yourself”? Even the majority of artists openly admit a willingness to sell their work to the highest bidder. Money is the source of its own system of values and it admits no competition.
Look around you. Look in the mirror. Life has become one long advertising campaign. And the product to be advertised is oneself. By assuring itself of ideological adhesion, money has managed to close the circle of the most tyrannical dictatorship ever known to ma
nkind. Representative plutocracy is the ideal means of maintaining its rule. Can you imagine a warrior who is able, with just a few phone calls, to overpower whole nations? Money subjugates countries without the need to fire a single shot.
Its generals are anonymous: even those of the highest rank look no different to anyone else in their jeans and jackets with patches at the elbows. They’re one of us. The only difference is that you will never have a super-yacht in which to sail the seas in the company of spectacular models. But that’s an unimportant detail. Money’s foot soldiers are no more than glorified death squadrons in that polymorphous abstraction known as “the market.” Under the pretext of infinite plurality, a single code of conduct is imposed. There is only one basic way of existing in the world: theirs. After a long historical process, I can tell you that code is already, in essence, also ours.
Those bodiless barons aren’t content with just the unlimited accumulation of material possessions: they also use blackmail, extortion, and usury to ensure that vast communities yield to their demands. They are particularly interested in language, although they themselves are often unaware of this. Like all tyrannies before it, the tyranny of money has understood that the best way to make its dogmas unquestionable is through the eradication of any concept that allows them to be questioned. And this is where the supreme importance of euphemism comes in. If the concepts used to name certain things are eradicated, the possibility of discussing them—even thinking about them—is automatically negated. They are not the first people to understand this, they have just put the idea into practice with amazing effectiveness.
Rather than calling them exchanges that benefit the owners to the detriment of the workers, they talk about “making the labor market more flexible.” The right of the most powerful to control increasingly larger portions of strategic sectors is called “economic liberalization.” The abolition of the right to unionize is known as “increasing efficiency.” Usury is the price to be paid to calm nervous markets, so that a society can pay today’s debts with promises of a better tomorrow.
Who are these malign beings determined to make life an affair without nuances or colors, a funereal dance involving interchangeable objects? They aren’t as invisible or distant as they might seem. In fact, they are here, nearby: each and every one of us is them.
The principal mechanism for achieving hegemony is the same one in which we are all most complicit. Its most concrete contradiction is the adoration of low prices, conveniently draped in the luxury goods that situate each of us in his corresponding stratum. The wholesale collapse of prices is only made possible by the removal of mediation, the destruction of the chain of profit margins produced by the common need to meet basic necessities. The ideal situation is a world where one single man buys each product at a price close to the cost of its production. The sales volume achieved by the sum of minute profit margins translates into fortunes greater than the wealth of entire nations. The theology of prices sanctions practices until now confined to organized crime. For example, selling below cost to bankrupt rivals is legal, always under the protection of its benefit for that implacable dictator known as the consumer. Who worries about the poverty-stricken smallholder growing tomatoes when it comes to making a small saving on the cost of the next day’s salad?
Flattening everything in their path, low prices are the ideological weapon that destroys the production chain. The ultimate objective is for the chain to be composed of only two links, of just two types of person: a world divided between the rich with access to luxury goods, who increase their wealth by selling to others—to the poor—at rock bottom prices, using methods that only contribute to perpetuating their poverty. As one important businessman in Villa Miserias’ commercial zone confided to me, “My business is selling cheap to the bottom of the pyramid.” The tendency toward the elimination of the cost-price ratio sounds the death knell for the added value that allows intermediate producers and tradesmen to subsist. They are left with only the minimum necessary to avoid starvation, and to persuade them not to stop producing basic necessities. The problem isn’t the low prices in themselves, but the concentration of wealth through which they are achieved, sweeping aside every obstacle between the monopoly of the few and the end consumer.
The duct between the two new races is organized charity. As donations are tax deductible, the rich are in charge of the competition within the public sphere to decide how the percentage of their profits that should have been handed over to the tax authorities should be employed. And then we’re supposed to go down on our bended knees before their immense generosity. When did that child with worms in his guts ever dream of receiving a kiss on the forehead from the most beautiful women on the planet? The most perverse of status symbols is belonging to a club so exclusive it only admits people capable of throwing crumbs from mountaintops. That act alone is enough to forgive them for the practices that allowed them to accumulate their fortunes in the first place.
Residents of Villa Miserias, it’s no coincidence that what we pray for at the moment is growth, but never an equal distribution. But what use is a larger cake if the new slices are always enjoyed by the same people? Let’s not fool ourselves: the food each and every one of us needs to live is in the hands of vultures. Legal drugs are the only things that keep the factory running. We’ve become cannon fodder, zombies doped to produce the riches we’re supposed to dream of, but never attain.
I promise you one single thing: if you elect me, I will do everything in my power to perpetuate this system. There will be a constantly increasing number of stores where you can buy an enormous variety of products, the majority of them cheap, but also the very expensive ones that will mark the differences between you. I’ll negotiate worse and worse conditions for the workers in the estate, until they get it into their heads that they are pieces of trash clogging the machinery of growth and progress.
Elect me, and I’ll give you what you want: an electoral democracy that allows us to rid ourselves once and for all of the bonds that constrain us in the economic sphere. Because every consumer has the inalienable right to dedicate his life to attempting to buy everything. Let’s do away with the communal restrictions that stop us doing just that. I won’t be the one to oppose the most secret desire of every one of you.
We’re close to coming out of the tunnel into the light. I just need one more push from you to guide you through.
“Hey Max, have you thought about what you’ll do if you win?”
The question caught me off guard. I stood there staring into space as if considering the answer. In reality, I was attempting to work out who it was that was now sitting in my living room, with yet another beautiful face. I’m finding it hard to decide if it’s she who changes, or if it depends on which of all those voices inside me is shouting loudest at that moment. I’m not just saying that. I really do try to limit the annoyance all this might cause her. I sometimes wonder how I’d feel about having a clown inspecting me the whole time, as if I were a statue. But I don’t always resist it. I venture into the black caves without a torch to see how far I can go. I still haven’t found any fissures, but the number of cracks fogs my mind. I know the pupil must be there somewhere. If only it would allow me to set up a base camp. Every time I think I’ve reached a summit, the mountain has moved and I find myself back on the foothills.
“Like, really, Max. Have you thought about it or not? What are you going to do if you win? The thing is that apart from the number of people who came to hear you, they seemed different from before.” For the first time, Nelly was expressing some enthusiasm for the campaign.
“I haven’t had time to give it any thought. Winning wasn’t really my aim. I’m still not sure what it is, but that would never have occurred to me. I’m conscious of being one more variable in the questionnaire.” This new inversion was casting me in the role of a nonbeliever.
“I’m really sorry. I can’t give you any details, but there’s one thing you should hear: they’re nervous. The other
day, I saw Taimado hanging around here. Like, please be careful, Max. Just remember nothing’s a secret from them.”
Did she really say “secret”? The word set the Many swarming. As I wanted to continue the conversation, I did my best to ignore them. Judging by the uproar, some of them thought Nelly knew everything. And not just that, but would be willing to betray me. I’d be known as the candidate who spoke the truth to cover up his own blindness. His humiliating blindness. The least conservative of them would use much worse adjectives. Better to silence them by speaking:
“I’ve only done what I was asked to. They thought the residents were ready to dispense with the sweeteners. The document didn’t specify how to get the message across. I’ve got a right to choose how. And no one’s trying to hide my friends’ role. I doubt if the chief is naïve enough to believe that story about the truth.”
The tumult continued. Now the frigging Many were saying I was pretentious. The night before Nelly and I had slept in separate rooms. I had a feeling she wanted to call a truce, but was afraid the bastards would make life unbearable. There was nothing for it but to knock them out.
“Jeez, Max. That’s just the problem. You know all about the questionnaires. You know that if you go on talking about things they don’t want to come out, I don’t know if they’ll put up with it. Like, please Max, there’s only five days left. Do it for me. You’ve shown what you can do. And don’t try to pretend, I bet you’ve even enjoyed yourself. If you want, we can change things when this is over. I’m begging you not to just throw it all away.”
Come off it, you lying bitch! Are you really dumb enough to believe that poor-little-me stuff? If one single word of it were true, there’d be no need for us.
A Zero-Sum Game Page 30