19.
Though the city stagnates, and any possible works are safely buried under endless red tape, it’s still a place you never fully get a handle on. There is perpetual haze, which the light does little to dissipate: the polluted air and seawater meld to become one single salty airborne solution. That’s often how it is at sunrise, and how it stays until sunset—it’s often pretty impossible to distinguish the coming or going of that astral body. The wind and the constant metallic clatter of the extractors, day and night, are further disorienting factors, filling heads and chests with the sickly stink of deep-fat fryers and cream cakes. I make my way south down Avenida Almirante Ruíz-Cuevas. It’s the longest way home: it takes you down past the docks, you hop onto 14 de Octubre, and that goes all the way to the north side. The docks tend to be deserted at this hour. A group of boys is standing at the railings—on which people have attached a thousand of the little “love locks”—throwing turtle shells out into the bay. They’re drinking and joking, and the intermingled sound of clinking glass and strident, cawing laughter carries on the onshore wind. I guess the love platitudes are the butt of their jokes, messages on padlocks worn and rusted by the salty air, promises made by lovers standing before these marshes in former times. Though it could just as well be nerves, that they’ve heard of another dead peer and it’s dawned on them they probably won’t be far behind. Out beyond the rocky headland you can just make out the half-submerged ruins of the shipyard. Looming, soot-encrusted former warehouses and slips, and dykes whose flooded sluices now host massive flotillas of seaweed and Atlanti-Kola bottles that in turn host flocks of migrating birds. Beyond that, a whole lot of nothing. Solitary wooden planks float about where once, at the beginning of the last century, wood was worked with unparalleled mastery, until an explosion took place—a huge series of explosions—at the tripping of a naval minefield at a nearby base. All the old sea dogs claim it was for the best: business was on the slide, they say, following the influx of contractors from the east and their bargain-basement production costs. The sector was badly in need of diversification and, luckily, along came the Ź-Bug to finish that job. Neither are there any signs of life in the old huts that the sailors built while awaiting the reconstruction of the docks, at which time they weren’t really sailors anymore, but mere tenders of storm lamps, hunkering in futile bunkers, though later on it was they who gave the Fishing Federation its heft, made it a force, versed as they were in the impossible-to-budge Atlantikan sedentaryism, the peculiar force-fulness of those who have run aground inside this slow unfolding of disease and tropics, tropics and disease. The huts, for all their lovely estuary views, appear void of lighting. Rows of identical barred windows, “For Rent” boards, and not a single sign of life, no shadows moving behind curtains or curtains twitching, no one stealing furtive looks at anything. The old Merchant Marine College overlooks this section of the docks (known locally as the Bazaar, since you used to be able to buy and sell just about anything there, especially if you were interested in doing so duty-free), its activities having long since transferred to Puerto Lombardo. Morgan’s father, an ensign with bad eyes who never actually went to sea, used to teach maritime law to second-year students at the college. When it declared bankruptcy and closed its doors, following a vigorous, devastating audit that uncovered a slew of tax-avoiding irregularities—to the tune of eleven million Cređits—Morgan’s father, rather than let it get to him or decide to walk the plank, or indeed just find a job at another maritime institution, took his redundancy as a sign: finally it was a chance for him to realize his dreams by weighing anchor and heading out across the seas. He bid farewell to his loved one, promising he’d return within the year, and adding that he planned to bring back chests full of precious stones and other goodies. He boarded a Malaysian freighter and was never seen in these waters again. He did, though, send Morgan regular postcard updates on his adventures—though they always took months to gain postal service clearance. The messages read like the captain’s log of some legendary corsair, and the last one to make it through was sent from somewhere in deepest Cambodia, where it seemed he had set up as a trader in fabrics and textiles. Every time we broke up for vacation, Morgan announced that his father was about to send him a ticket, any day now, so he could go and visit the palace he was due to inherit, though our vacations always turned out exactly the same: an endless mire of boredom, sand, and sun. Days went by, the seasons turned, and the early hints of summer would once more remind Morgan of his presumptive Eastern expedition. Then a year came when he didn’t mention it, and none of us could bring ourselves to either.
20.
We’d clear away our carpentry tools and drag ourselves back to our normal classroom, fingers bristling with splinters and sweaters covered in sawdust. Each and every particle trapped in the weave of the polyester seemed to cry out Indonesia, and something in each of us called back in unison: Jakarta. In my mind it was a deserted city made of glass, suspended in the clouds. Or a metropolis all of gold, nestled in a snow-covered valley. The palace of Ming the Merciless: Jakarta, Destroyer of Men. That was before. Now all I get in the images the stone gives me are extreme close-ups of the nun’s wrinkles, the high ceilings and the damp spots in the corners, my schoolmates stuck clammily to their high-varnish desk seats. I think of those who felt the call and abandoned this city, of Fatty Muñoz, his shoulders like our pambazo bread—reddish and puffy—from so many beatings, of el Chino Okawa and his army of pet bedbugs, of Morgan and his grimaces, of Zermeño, Sparky, Birdface Helguera, whereabouts unknown: we assumed he had either been made prisoner to an olive-colored uniform and buzz cut, or was banging his head against the padded walls of a different kind of institution, eyes like that of a sated young calf. I think of all who quit the city when the quarantine came down. Of those scattered along the shore, stomachs distended and crawling with maggots, tongues sticking out at bizarre angles. But more than anything I think of those who remain, those who stayed on: forget about streets being named after them; the only thing they’ve gotten is older. Apart from the dockside esplanade, this city is split up into a million minor byways, each lasting no more than a couple of blocks before the roots of some palm tree tear up the sidewalk anyway, so really we could call them by whatever fucking name we want … It’s just organization. Say we start low, one of our many flyblown squares, or some avenue no one really goes down. Even better: a central reservation. The problem being that even these are taken, former health secretaries and safe-seat members of parliament whose contribution in combatting the Ź-Bug took the form of writing out checks from their sterilized fortieth-story sanctums, complete with balconies, a long, long way up, is what I’m trying to say, and meanwhile where were we? In the shitty bowels. No, to get a street named after you around here you either need to have a half-decent Vakapý career behind you, or to have pushed pens in some office with great distinction. Of the exterminators, surprise, surprise: no sign. Not even an anonymous statue to commemorate all that went on, not one.
21.
Farther along the coast, beyond the ravines, the sky glows with a dirty light, like halogen lamps about to give up the ghost. There’re the sailing clubs, then you come to Cabo Frío, then the beaches. That was where I first saw Clara, seemingly recently emerged from the Atlantik, wending her way between palm trees. Where Calle Ruiz-Cuevas meets Avenida Doctor Narváez, it breaks off in ten different directions. One of those thoroughfares, Calle 14 de Octubre, splits off into Matuk-Bayram, and that, as you approach the old mill, becomes Talabarteros, which in turn leads to the Old Town, former ceremonial center of the city and the place where conspirators hid away to do their conspiring, also once the location of the gallows and the place where the heads of criminals and infidels were mounted on stakes—entertainment for the non-criminals and non-infidels—as well as the Źocalo, the huge square bounded on each side by pointed archways evocative of colonial times, a spirit otherwise scoured away by centuries of storms and pillaging. Nowadays the Źocalo is occupied by
the tents of hundreds if not thousands of protestors and lined with government offices, gaming centers, drinking joints and oyster bars alike, phone booths, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Chrysaliđs, with its metal pilings that, according to the Institute of Capture, Processing, and Information Access, sink a little over twelve centimeters into the littoral alluvium each year, and, out in the middle of the square, the city’s flag, the raising and lowering of which take place according to a strict schedule carried out by a group of consecrated conscripts, with all the power their military garb suggests—a group whose labors never reach an end, who raise and lower and neatly fold that flag seemingly nonstop, and who march about the square to the turning of the shadow of the flagpole. I think sometimes of the people who should be here—it’s like they never were, like the sole historical inhabitants are those you see now, the protestors, the street vendors and their children, the endless line of the unemployed whose proficiencies are written in marker on pieces of cardboard, the displaced persons with their tents and signs. Perhaps you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart anyway now; perhaps in this roiling mass of bodies they’d just blend in. They came down from Cordillera Hill because there was no place for them anywhere else. Some decided to stay on after the Ź-Bug passed and by now can’t even remember what they’re doing here. Naturally the Atlantika state of being, the inelegant civility that marks us out, starts to become their way of being also. It would take more than half an hour to walk the full circumference of the Źocalo, so I decide to pick my way directly through the tents instead. From among the canvas sheets hands reach up, trying to rob anything they can, a phone, a scrap of clothing. I quicken my step, though the terrain stays much the same. Perhaps it’s the energy of this old center, its old and new and frenetic vibrations, that explains the fragmentariness of the adjacent streets, the way they endlessly fork and overlap and sometimes come to an abrupt dead-end only to pick up again a few blocks farther on, and in particular the constant and illogical name changes of what are essentially different portions of the same street. An occupational hazard for those of us in the Ź-Brigađe, this unplanned city plan, the aleatory arterial interlocking of the city. We ended up learning to navigate by the sound of the wind and of the extractors, to always have a sense of where we were in relation to the coast and to simply retrace our steps according to that.
22.
Clara, she trembles. I can hardly take my eyes off her. When the fan bursts into life, she falls still, and vice versa, so that by the time a session ends there is a lag between them of nearly half a minute. Then the images suddenly stop—or, in fact, I think they stay precisely where they are, available to her if she wants to call on them, but the moment the link is broken between her and the pink light I cease to see them. After these months of watching, I can now predict exactly when it’s about to happen. The static makes the hairs on her forearms stand up while simultaneously she begins to tremble, at moments so vigorously that her ponytail comes out and eventually the hair on her head hangs loose at her shoulders while a puddle of sweat begins to form around her feet on the lino. The undulating light from the stone ceases; the images freeze. Clara, between me and the stone, gets up and looks admiringly at the bones. And at the vase, and the coins. The dog. She lets me do her hair again. It’s lost its former luster and is beginning to fall out in clumps. This is a job I relish: I begin rationalizing the mussed and tangled locks (though naturally the occasional strand does come away). I proceed as follows: first of all I split the whole head of hair in two with a clean line down the center. Take one thin section and cross it onto the other side, then bring a section from the other side back across, bring the first section over that, repeat. Don’t pull too hard, but also leave out as few strands as possible. Repeat until you come to the faded tips, and finish it off with the tortoiseshell brooch. A handful of loose hair will end up scattered by your feet. All of it, today’s hair and yesterday’s and the hair from the day before, will eventually join together with the grime we bring in on our shoes, grains of sand, and the sleep we rub from our eyes, and make one of those little forgotten clumps of fuzz that go tumbling across the Ĺĺano, the great inland plain. The stone is bigger now. About the size of a six-year-old child. Clara does not know whether it fell from the sky or washed up from the Atlantik. Her idea is that it could have been an instrument, or one facet of a larger instrument, belonging to the true native inhabitants of this place, true children of the gođs, or maybe even belonging to the Albýnos. And because its function wasn’t immediately obvious, she at first interpreted it as part of some fractured symbol: one fragment of a larger, no longer fully available code. I thought she had to be crazy, for all that she was able to demonstrate, through various tests, that it drowned out all sound and the wind itself. That discovery did shake me, above all because though you can live with the noise of this city—or rather, though you have to live with it, by it, have eventually to become it—and though nobody around here actually very much wants to be alive anymore, for once that ambient din came to a halt, and for the first time in as long as either of us could remember we were able to clear our heads. This room has been a space of silence ever since. The stone fulfills two functions, as proof of the overall deterioration, the damage and decline, but also as holder for all our energies—not so much our hopes; we long since gave those up. This was why, or how, Clara tuned in to the stone—about two months ago now. Then we knew it wasn’t just for protection; it was also a message: it had chosen us—or whoever sent it had, whether native inhabitants or Albýnos—and not the other way around.
23.
Then the nun would say: Guyana. And someone would always fall for it and think she meant French Guiana. And the rest of us, idiots that we were, would respond with a sharp intake of breath. Oh, those wrinkles. She’d talk and we’d have no option but to listen, trying to make sense of the sounds that filtered out through the cracks in her face. The soul, she said, is composed of a material that will never degrade: it is housed inside the body but in no way does it belong to the body. Nor does the soul expire in concert with the body, except in the case of suicide. With suicide, the soul stays trapped within this slab of flesh, this greasy wad of meat—and what, children, what is meat without any soul? I’ll tell you: hamburgers. Nothing but hamburgers. And thereafter the meat rots and the soul leaves it behind, but slowly, oh so slowly, falling dim over the eons, like all the many unmoving things.
24.
Groups of the Magnetiźed stream past with heads lowered, minds on their supplications, what it is they will ask for today. They are on their way to the old Anguĵa court. I don’t know in detail what rites they observe or the articles of their faith. To me they all seem alike; I feel like they all hail from the same faraway location, some place human in scale and utterly governed by superstition. Their Ministerź cast mistrustful looks at my bare wrists, this being their attitude to any who fail to display their symbols. To them all Vakapýists are offensive in the eyes of god (their god). All who lay bets, all who drink, all who absent themselves from the consecrated fields in and around the Anguĵa without permission: any who have refused the blessings of magnetiźation. Which makes it strange, to say the least, that they should have chosen the hull of the old Anguĵa as their gathering place. One article of their faith I do know about, though it’s said that rather than converts they seek allies, is that Albýnos are not allowed to join. A cult with neither novices nor a catechism for them to learn. A hint of this new faith’s mercantile roots can be discerned in its practices, which posit the congregation as the clientele. They function more like affiliates than as members of a religion: stakeholders in their own benightedness. While the adults congregate before the homily loudspeakers formerly used by the Mirasol Corporation to promote its wares, the young cluster together like leeches at the approach of any outsider. Their faces are snot encrusted, their ill-shaped clothes hang off their shriveled bodies. They try to foist bracelets on me of all colors and sizes, they want me to buy their prayer books,
their little knapped magnetic stones, knives, daggers, necklaces, ring pulls. The Anguĵa rears up behind them, victim of its former glories. I have never seen it except for in its current state, the walls inches thick in bird shit, top to bottom. By the time I was old enough to start going along to matches, the Department of Chaos and Gaming had set in motion the new Vakapý plan and the very first gaming stations were sending gamblers into ecstasies. The place fell into disuse until the Magnetiźed decided to start congregating there. As boys we used to see the results in Helguera’s newspapers, and the images of the plaýers, striding about the courts or with wreaths and massive champagne bottles after a win, gave us the idea of the Anguĵa as the embassy of some other world, irrefutable proof that a different reality was possible, far removed from the one we inhabited with its constant school fundraisers and constant empty stomachs. In those days we still believed we deserved to be lucky, and that one day we surely would be. The Anguĵa, while completely out of reach, nonetheless seemed to offer a kind of exemption from normal Atlantika life; we’d never get there ourselves, but it was still of this earth, still somehow at hand. Whereas Grandma used to go regularly during the Anguĵa’s golden era. When her first husband died she developed a liking for the game and became a devoted follower, hardly ever missing a Sunday match; the dead man had seen it as a vice, not befitting churchgoing Chrysaliđs, partly in fact because he hailed originally from the Sierra, where Vakapý inspires nothing like the mania it does here. Look now, Grandma, it’s your pupa here: see what’s become of the paragon of our Atlantikan ways, this crumbling and forgotten edifice, lit by the putrid glow of a city that itself endures only thanks to the wholesale submission of its inhabitants to the founding principles: seclusion, indifference, and a stubborn get-powerful-quick mentality.
Jakarta Page 4
