A Zero-Sum Game

by Eduardo Rabasa

  Perhaps as a final act of revenge, or maybe a final penance, Nelly decided she wanted some idea of what it meant to see nothing. It was almost a scientific experiment, making me recall the scraping sound of my mother’s pencil as she made notes on insects. Nelly undressed in front of me, taking time to fold her clothes. Her black eyes were fixed on mine with no intention of deviating. I too undressed as if about to undergo a medical examination. Nelly began trying out cause and effect variants, making careful note of what my eyes reflected. A sense of imposture prevented me from relaxing before each new technique. I think she came to the conclusion that the crossover point was further on. She lay beneath me to try it in the traditional position, without the need for fireworks. The last thing I saw was her eyes closing. Even the sounds we made creaked like rusty metal. Throughout the torment, I could sense the palm of her hand feeling out the boundaries of my darkness. She passed it in front of my temporarily nonfunctioning eyes, opened my eyelids, pressed my temples as if trying to reactivate something, anything. A feeble wail dented my eardrum. I was in no mood for crying out anything: neither the truth nor lies.

  I lay face down, waiting the usual period for the blindness to pass. Nelly took her folded clothes and went to the empty study. I dozed for a few minutes, trying to gather the energy to go home. The sun was still in the sky. I noticed concerned expressions on the faces of residents, surprised to see me walking around barefoot, my shirt only half buttoned. Just one day to go. My destiny anxiously awaits me in my father’s hiding place. Maybe he already knows which way the chips will fall.

  DAY 11

  Residents of Villa Miserias,

  Tomorrow will decide if I’m talking to you here for the last time. You all know who I am by now. And at the given moment I’ll hear the decision about my future.

  The first man to encapsulate society in an air-conditioned bubble explained that laws are a reflection of the collective consciousness. Crime and other transgressions express a rejection of the established order. In that way, they have the important function of modifying the rules in relation to changes in the communal pulse. The profound change in the politics of our times has consisted of individualizing the act of taking that pulse. We are not to be a whole made up of innumerable interlinked parts. Instead, each part wants to be a small whole in perpetual expansion. Politics must limit itself to allowing each and every one of those wholes to float or sink, according to their own abilities. We have to state the obvious: the other, as such, is irrelevant; in the majority of cases, it is nothing more than a fly with an irritating buzz. Its only importance is as an appendage to satisfying personal impulses; as a component in a micro-fiefdom headed by each individual. Society has to understand itself as a pact between swarms of those fiefdoms, seamlessly armored against ties that oblige them to be interdependent.

  Just as in other times, homosexuality offended sensibilities—and was punishable by imprisonment—within a few years, formally recognizing the presence of others will be equally anachronistic. The notion of minimum rights will be sentimental hypocrisy, a criminal attack on the satisfaction of purely egotistic desires. G.B.W. Ponce has demonstrated that for 93% of residents, the person most loved and admired is himself. The consequence of positing individualism as the highest value is the insatiable need to express ourselves to others in increasingly shameless ways. The supreme vector is exclusivity: only I and very few others can enter here, and those that do must share my characteristics.

  Like any other political mask, the present one covers an economic base involving highly diverse relationships, including, of course, contemporary variants on slavery. Because what else do you call a relationship in which one side works an extra seven hours without being paid for them; in which his wages are lower because he lives and eats in a dark corner of the gilded cage he has to polish every day; in which he lacks medical insurance or a pension for his premature old age; in which he is ridiculed for his appearance, habits, and language, both on television and in person; in which he is punished for eating the high-class food destined exclusively for the bosses and their offspring? The language that abolishes differences of caste operates as a sedative force against outbursts of unrest. Considering the servants as “one of the family” allows the person who does so to trample those servants underfoot and say it’s for their own good.

  Speaking of equality between unequals, the transparency of the dark, the freedom of prisoners, justice for the illiterate, and, above all, the democracy of the elites, are all supremely effective cover-ups. Positing these concepts in the abstract, expressed solemnly in flowery speeches, is a means of allowing the reality that contradicts them on every street corner to be ignored. Just as in personal relationships, it’s a matter of fooling ourselves into believing no one is cheating on us. Shutting your eyes and pretending things are just the way we want them to be. While playing our role as vigilant citizens, we’re living the fantasy of the mother who thinks that, by spying on her son every day, she really knows his deepest secrets.

  The cost of campaigns is constantly increasing. Consultants go into every detail, plan every gesture and phrase. Slogans are more and more just slogans. When faced with such perfectly produced candidates, can we really believe we learn anything relevant from our mass-produced contests? Ponce has shown that 67% of electoral promises are broken, 74% never fully put into practice, and, on average, 49% of what candidates say is lies. Do any of you have a problem with that? Does it weaken your desire to go to the polling booth tomorrow? The performance has to be played through from the start every time the big top is raised. What would the circus be without its enthusiastic spectators?

  What I propose, then, is an administration without precedents in words, if not in deeds. I’ll gladly accept the task of increasing the tax levels of the lower strata. I’ll cut unproductive spending on such anachronisms as curing illnesses, and so-called spiritual activities that are no use to anyone. Our task will be to construct the market stalls, install electricity and a water supply, organize a transportation system so stall-holders and customers will flock there, and equip the Black Paunches so they can prevent any questioning of the rules of the game. After that, each one of you is on your own. You’ll soon see that one can get used to anything. We’ll add new layers of normalcy over the preceding ones. There’ll be no nostalgia: the only past will be the present, flanked by the specter of a future that threatens to be always worse.

  I offer to put politics at the service of the economy. The rational consumer will be supreme. Exalting the consumer in this way also means exalting the entities, businesses, candidates, entertainers, intellectuals, and sportsmen most skilled in producing cohesive majorities. The more adherents a cause has, the more it can weave them together with the most visceral impulses. Our motto will be to give less and less so it stretches further. It’s the triumph of the unlimited satisfaction of individual consumption over the perverse Utopia of providing essential needs for everyone. Every vote for me is a vote for ostentatious consumption. I promise the floor will be below ground level for the vast majority. Don’t worry, those of you who get a foot on the ladder won’t be able to see them, even with binoculars.

  Let’s get it straight, once and for all: poverty is not an evil to be eradicated by development. On the contrary, it is a vital component of the present social fabric. It is the fuel that keeps society productive. While there is need, there will be no limit to how low we set the standard of what is acceptable. It has to be combated in theory, with crumbs, but never from the structures that create it. Think about it for a minute: how can the millions squandered by the authorities to promote their image be justified in the face of so much basic lack? The poor are an enormous blessing for our societies. It’s about time we at least got that clear. The notion that the market corrects excess is an absurd fallacy: the market is excess. It’s our inalienable right to live any way we want, without limits being imposed by the miserable existence of others. Can you imagine what it would be like if there really was
universal higher education? Who would clean up the shit of those able to pay not to have to do it themselves?

  Big Brother said that the best way to get possession of something is by stating it belongs to everyone. Our age has gone further, it has managed to move beyond the fetish of property: money has understood that the best way to govern in the interests of the few is by convincing the others that this, in fact, coincides with the well-being of the whole. Any sacrifice is justified if it keeps those few safe. As long as they go on getting drunker and drunker, the sweat of their hangovers will drip from their brows. Let’s be ready with a cloth to clean up the wake they leave as we watch them pass at high speed.

  One final warning: there is no other Wonderland than this. Let’s stop projecting its fantastic features onto the one we have constructed together. Let’s dare to look at our own side of the mirror, and no longer fear to confront our own gutted image.

  Tomorrow will tell if we shall see each other again.

  In the meantime, thank you.

  I got back, hoping she would have changed appearance. What would it be like to break the rules for the umpteenth time? I looked around for some article of clothing that smelled of her, but only found my mental snapshots. It seems that the Many have softened their stance. I think they do this so as to be able to go on giving me shit. Now they’re presenting her to me as irresistible. Kind. They’re converting my anxiety into pure longing. Why did I let her go? There will never be another like her.

  I soon tired of listening to them. I needed to open my father’s secret compartment. I went to the bookcase in the living room and removed two heavy books in Latin—a language as unintelligible for him as their content—to reveal the sliding wooden panel. I carefully checked the gun: it was lighter than I remembered. It seems to be in perfect order, the bullets are ready to obey orders. I still have a little time to decide whom to fire them at.

  EPILOGUE

  “Anyway,” Howard, the old fellow, said, “anyway, gold is a very devilish sort of a thing, believe me, boys. In the first place, it changes your character entirely. When you have it your soul is no longer the same as it was before. No getting away from that. You may have so much piled up that you can’t carry it away; but, bet your blessed paradise, the more you have, the more you want to add, to make it just that much more. Like sitting at roulette. Just one more turn. So it goes on and on and on. You cease to distinguish between right and wrong. You can no longer see clearly what is good and what is bad. You lose your judgment.”

  The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

  B. Traven

  1

  Max Michels woke up a few minutes before the alarm clock sounded. It was still completely dark outside. And inside. He made an effort to return to his last dream. Its content was blurry, but he yearned to prolong the sensation. Even though it was present in his consciousness, in reality it had disappeared. He opted for getting up and moving.

  This key decision was as critical as having registered as a candidate. You could say it was his deformed sister, hidden in the basement to protect her from her own abomination. The years of being locked up had made her unpredictable. Max had no illusions about his ability to control her. He would be an active spectator to the last moment. After that would come the uncertain tones. The only sure things were the background colors.

  He attempted to slip past the mirror on his way to the shower. His reflection, however, was waiting to force him to stop. He imagined himself as he had so often been, his nose painted purple. The difference now was that his complexion was less soft, his eyes looked out over dark bags, and there were indelible lines on his forehead. The ink of that tattoo his father had made had sunk into the deepest layers. No treatment could remove it, unless he was prepared to slice off his own skin down to the arteries. Max and his reflection shrugged simultaneously. The book with its blank pages was about to be closed forever.

  Before leaving, he put on his beige raincoat. Although the weather didn’t merit wearing it, it was the only item of clothing in which he could hide the gun for the whole day without arousing suspicion.

  He inspected Bramsos’ purple boat. The inverse gravity that kept it in contact with the wave seemed weaker, tired of struggling to avoid the fall into the void. Looking closer, Max believed he could see an almost imperceptible crack separating it from the wave.

  Only an act of faith had prevented its fall.

  He took down the painting to confront the axiom inherited from his father and ran a finger over each letter, as if wanting to discover if this tactile reading would offer a different meaning, some alternative interpretation that would make him veer from his collision course. There was no alternative. The decision was undaunted. He repeated the sentence aloud before slamming the door: “The measure of each man lies in the dose of truth he can withstand.”

  As he was going out of the building, he met Juana Mecha and immediately noticed that something was different: there were no bristles on her broom to sweep up the waste. With a melancholy air, she was scraping the handle against the ground with a sound that set Max’s teeth on edge. Without interrupting her mechanical movements even to raise her head, Mecha whispered a half-hearted barb:

  “If you puncture the dark, all you’ll do is surround yourself with blacker, louder lightning and thunder.”

  2

  He walked uncertainly to Plaza del Orden. The unwritten rule was for candidates to abstain from participating in the electoral assembly of their own buildings. Etiquette required them not to muddy what should be a foregone conclusion: only Severo Candelario had achieved the feat of losing on his home ground.

  Max stopped before entering the territory where a part of his future would be decided. The outcome would not weaken his resolution; it would be simply an additional factor that inclined him toward one of the possible sides. At least that was what he thought at that moment.

  He stood observing the forty-nine battalions tearing into each other at the tops of their voices. It was going to be a long day. To judge by appearances, the assemblies had more than enough orators. When the last resident of each building had vented his desire to express an opinion, they would proceed to the ballot box. After that came the count that would determine who had won. $uperstructure would be in charge of the final computation, weighing up the relative wealth of the voters. As he watched a Black Paunch haranguing his troops, Max smiled affectionately, knowing Building B’s vote didn’t even count for a twentieth part of the weighting of the wealthiest buildings.

  He went on his way without removing his hand from his pocket. If the lead came out on the side of the chosen target, Max would be absolved of responsibility, although the sin would still have to be atoned for. If there was anyone left standing capable of atonement.

  But first, he had to make a few visits. He smiled to see Candelario in the distance, sitting on his bench. Just as he did at every election, the former schoolmaster was mounting a guard of honor for his fallen tree. Max imagined a series of photos showing Candelario taking his portrait of the tree at the same time each morning. He had aged with dignity. And if his shoulders were slightly shrunken, they could still bear the weight of the head always turned in the same direction.

  When Max sat beside him, attempting to maintain silence, Candelario gave him an affectionate pat that Max interpreted as an apology: If I still believed in all this, I’d undoubtedly vote for you, my boy. In exchange for these words, Max asked the schoolmaster to do the thing that gave him greatest pleasure: to tell, one more time, the tragic story of his tree.

  Candelario gladly gave himself up to the memory of his only passion. He was unstinting in the details of his description of the willow. Muscular but sensitive. It had a wise lightness of spirit. It hadn’t given those Paunches the pleasure of seeing it shed a single tear. Its wood had died in the serpentine form of the glowing embers that had burned in so many hearths around Villa Miserias.

  As the story washed over him, Max thought that, in the end, Candelario had tr
iumphed over his executioners. His tale opened a hole in time: he was capable of seeing the tree with absolute clarity. Once again its flesh was torn by the Black Paunches’ toothy grins. Severo Candelario had achieved the only variant of immortality given to the human species. When Max stood to express his sentiments with an embrace, the former schoolmaster offered him a firm handshake and, to Max’s perplexity, a concise explanation:

  “They destroyed me by slicing up the trunk. But they’ve done something worse to you. They pulled out your roots until you became something different from what you could have been.”

  3

  He walked on to the fountain that had so often gotten him out of a predicament. The deeper his tribulation, the clearer its waters seemed. The problem was that now, even the least trickle threatened to swamp him. Max was unsure if he was raising his head for air, or if the movement in fact tended to pull him down and so diminish any instinct to resist. What could have once been considered lifesaving gulps seemed, at that moment, more like artifices for prolonging the existential torture. Fear of sinking meant remaining, of his own free will, in the liquid mud. The effort needed to get out and breathe wasn’t worth it. Was that you? he silently asked the Many, more from genuine curiosity than any desire to get involved in an argument.

  When Max arrived at the laundry, he took the poem that sealed his pact with Sao from the pocket of his pants. After so much rough handling, the words were almost indecipherable. The passage of time had, however, preserved them in his memory: he had no need for his eyes. He crushed the sheet of paper in a trembling hand then, sensing its weight against his fingers, relaxed the pressure that was asphyxiating it. Looking around distractedly for a trash can, he was relieved not to find one. He couldn’t risk that paper falling into the wrong hands. He began tearing it up and then patiently swallowed every last scrap.