by Cesar Aira
In the deathly silence reigning in the Fruit and Veg section following the shots (all that could be heard through the loudspeakers was a jingle for instant mashed potato) the noise of the metal shutter to the adjacent delivery bay made a huge clang. It was such a conclusive sound that the padlock seemed unnecessary. To anyone else it would have seemed incredible that two young women could do things like shutting a metal shutter weighing tons, sidelining the dozen beefy truck drivers and porters who must have been in the delivery bay, or taking out one or two professional security guards and seizing their weapons… But to Marcia it did not seem unbelievable; on the contrary, she wouldn’t have believed anything else.
The echo of the metal shutter slamming had scarcely faded away (really, these girls didn’t allow anyone’s attention to wander) when all gazes turned up to stare at the office suspended under the ceiling, where one of the glass panels had exploded. A hail of big and small shards of glass rained down on the aisle between Fruit and Veg and Soft Drinks. In the midst of them fell the projectile that had caused the damage, which was nothing other than a telephone, its cable torn out.
Meanwhile, panic had set in among customers and staff. This was only to be expected, because time does not pass in vain. Some had started shouting; others had seriously begun to contemplate the thought of getting out. Quite a few were heading for the exit, and those already there were rattling the door vigorously but to no avail. There was nothing they could do: to get out they would have to smash the glass. That would not have been too difficult, or even complicated (especially considering this could have avoided what seemed like an imminent bloodbath), and yet it’s incredible the superstitious respect a large pane of glass can arouse. And a few seconds later, when common sense prevailed, it would be too late.
Marcia, whom no one had noticed, huddled with the others by the door. From there she had a view of the whole supermarket. She had no idea if it was luck or careful calculation that had helped the punks during the first phase of the operation. The entrance door, the steps up to the office, the way to the store-room, were all concealed behind the big Fruit and Veg display, which separated the narrow strip next to the street from the rest of the space. From there, the first visible sign that something was going on was the smashing of the glass in the hanging office. The supermarket floor was quite big, some forty metres long by thirty wide. Those at the far end might have thought it was an accident. Some might not even have heard or seen it. The loudspeakers were still pouring out adverts for oil and crackers. Soon, very soon, any room for doubt would disappear.
That was when Mao appeared in the hole created by the broken glass, revolver in one hand and microphone in the other. She looked calm, self-assured, an imposing figure, in no hurry. Above all, in no hurry, because she wasn’t wasting a single moment. Things were happening in a packed continuum which they had perfect control of. It was as if there were two distinct times operating simultaneously: the one the two punks were in, doing one thing after another without any pause or waiting, and the other of the spectator-victims, where everything was pauses and waiting. The recording that had been coming over the loudspeakers had stopped, replaced by the sound of Mao breathing as she prepared to speak. This in itself caused widespread terror. Efficiency often has that effect. It must have been quite simple to cut the transmission of a recorded tape and replace it with a directly amplified voice: no more than pushing a button. But knowing how to do something easy is not easy. The entire clientele of the supermarket joining forces could have been pushing buttons for a whole week without succeeding. And they knew this, which made them feel they were at the mercy of an efficiency that asserted itself so effortlessly.
‘Listen carefully, all of you,’ said Mao over all the loudspeakers in the store. She spoke slowly, carefully controlling the echoes. She had adopted a neutral tone, as though giving information, but it was pure hysteria. So great and pure that the growing hysteria among the customers of both sexes seemed like nothing more than an everyday attack of nerves. It led them to understand that it was not enough for their nervousness or fears to pile up and grow in order to become hysteria. This was something different. It was something that by definition did not grow, a paroxysm reached outside life, in madness or fiction. As silence fell, the beeps from the last tills that had continued to work died away.
‘This supermarket has been taken over by the Love Commando. If you collaborate, there will not be many injured or dead. There will be some, because Love is demanding. The number depends on you. We will take all the money in the tills, and then leave. Within a quarter of an hour, the survivors will be at home watching TV. That’s all. Remember that everything that happens here, will be a proof of love.’
How literary she was! This was followed by one of those moments of hesitation that take place at the expense of the real in reality. A man in one of the queues guffawed. Immediately there was the sound of a gunshot, but instead of producing a hole in the forehead of the man who had laughed, the bullet hit the leg of a small woman who was two behind him in the queue. The leg began to spout blood, and the woman fainted melodramatically. A huge commotion and shouting. Mao waved the recently fired revolver and raised the microphone to her lips again. White and shaken, the man stopped laughing. The shot had been intended for him. It was as if he was dead, because in the fiction related to his earlier incredulity the bullet-hole really was in his forehead.
‘Everybody back,’ said Mao. ‘Move away from the tills; you cashiers as well. Stand between the shelves. I’m going to get down now. I’m not going to give you any more warnings.’ She tossed the revolver over her shoulder, using her free hand to feel for the things she was carrying round her neck. She picked out one, which looked like a small black metal pineapple, the size of a hen’s egg. She said: ‘This is a nerve gas grenade. If I let it off, you’ll all be paralysed and brain-dead for the rest of your lives.’
There was a mass retreat. The people on the far side of the tills rushed through them. The cashiers abandoned their posts; supervisors, assistants, everyone piled up, trying to hide behind the shelves. Those who found the woman who had fainted was in their way trampled over her and the spreading pool of blood around her body. There must have been about four hundred people of all ages and social groups as well as quite a few children, some of them babies in pushchairs. They pushed and shoved in their haste to get away, but what Mao said next stopped them in their tracks.
‘Look over there,’ she said, pointing to her left. Lenin had appeared on top of the dairy counter, holding a bunch of petrol cans in her hand. ‘Anyone trying to get out round the back of the displays will be burnt alive.’
The whole end wall of the store was covered with low meat freezers, a counter for cheeses and cold meats, and finally, separated by a narrow aisle, the milk and dairy fridge that Lenin was standing on. But beyond them was an empty area, in which employees of both sexes were stood in white aprons, staring in astonishment at the back of the arsonist, who wasn’t paying them the slightest attention. Why didn’t they go for her? Most of them had not learned of Lenin’s locking the delivery bay, and might have thought it was still open, with people inside who could come to their aid. And so two men, one of them smaller, the other huge and with a big belly, rushed instinctively to grapple with Lenin, hoping to open a breach and head for the street exit. The fat guy, who must have thought he was a human locomotive, managed to climb up through the yogurts and reach out to the sentinel, who did not move. In the blink of an eye he was doused in petrol, and a well-aimed kick sent him sprawling on his back. He had barely touched the ground when he burst into flames. Had she thrown a match at him? Nobody really saw. By now he was a flaming torch. His plastic overall caught fire spectacularly, and his cries echoed all round the supermarket. He was hit on the head by another petrol can, and since this exploded on the spot, turning his brain into a fireball, he suddenly stopped screaming. Only slightly singed, his colleague did his best to hide among the others. Of all the shouts going up, it w
as curious that the most intelligible were those of the women who for their children’s sake begged for the threat of gas not to be carried out. Some things strike a chord in the imagination.
While this was going on, all the lights had gone off, and the red numbers on the tills, and the sound system. From her perch, Mao had cut off the electricity. In the sudden darkness (their eyes would take a few seconds to adjust and take advantage of the light from the arcade and street) the effect of the burning man and the vast pool of flaming fuel was dazzling.
But the two attackers did not seem to have to wait to get used to the darkness. They had done so earlier, and now they only had to act. Like a bat or nocturnal monkey, Mao dropped down from the office to the first of the tills. She began to leap from one to the next until she reached the furthest one. Curious onlookers had started to gather in the shopping arcade on the other side of the windows. They peered in without understanding what was going on.
Beyond the displays and the customers, the tearful, baying crowd (after all, they had been told to follow orders, but not to be quiet), Lenin was moving in the opposite direction to her friend, along the tops of the freezers, treading on meat and chickens. If this movement were not simply carried out to create an impression of symmetry, it could have no other motive than to dissuade and threaten. Everything seemed aimed at that: there was a threat, but not a simple, straightforward and comprehensible one, rather one confused with the realities it referred to, which in this way no longer functioned as a language but merged in a blurred, illegible whole. And yet a language did exist, because in the bilateral symmetry of their manoeuvres Mao represented the ultimate intention: to steal the money from the tills, whereas Lenin was the threat that existed above and beyond their crimes, since she prevented any escape in the other direction. And she obviously did have something in mind, because she leant over and gathered together the trolleys close to the freezers and launched them towards the back of the store, towards the milk products and the wine shelves.
When she reached the last till, Mao began to empty it systematically. She did so without taking her feet from the conveyor belt, simply bending down from the waist. She pressed the button that released the cash drawer, tore out the tray containing different compartments for change, scooped up the large-denomination banknotes underneath, and stuffed them into a plastic bag dangling from her wrist. This operation took her no more than a second or two; then she jumped across to the next till.
She was leaping from the second to the third till (and the spectators were only just beginning to realise what was going on) when an explosion rocked the supermarket, the arcade it was part of, the surrounding block, and doubtless the entire neighbourhood. By some miracle, the panes of glass at the front were not blown out, but something even better occurred: they were shattered but stayed in place, turning opaque as though covered in vapour, so thwarting the curiosity of the onlookers outside – most of whom had run off anyway when they heard the noise, fearing the whole arcade might fall in. The hostages’ terror reached new heights. The explosion had come from the delivery bay behind Lenin. It must have been caused by a fuel tank. The sudden holes in the wall let in light and the dreadful crackle of the fire. Almost immediately there were another two explosions, perhaps from the lorries’ petrol tanks. Although less deafening than the first, they were accompanied by the screech of bits of metal tearing apart. The lights had gone out in the arcade as well, so that now the scene was lit only by the dancing, flickering flames. Mao had not paused, and by now had emptied another two tills. If it crossed anybody’s mind to take advantage of the darkness to grab her, they must have thought twice about it, because the entire wall between the store and the warehouse area now silently collapsed. Since everything was in flames on the far side, the whole scene was bathed in an intense glow. One person did not consider this properly, and threw herself at the thief. She was a girl in a cashier’s pink uniform; a robust, stocky and obviously determined young woman. The sight of the fire had spurred her on, or had led her to forget the precautions of only a few seconds before. Maybe she thought her example would lead to a general revolt. But that didn’t happen. She ran straight for Mao, who was leaning over a till. She charged like a rhinoceros, as if this were a natural instinct in her, almost as though she made a habit of it, as if in the past this manoeuvre had always brought good results. Mao’s reaction was instantaneous and very precise: she swayed backwards, a bottle of wine in one hand, and brought it down in a wide arc at the very instant the chubby cashier reached her. It smashed on her forehead, and the crack of the poor girl’s skull resounded round the store. It was a brutal death, but somehow in keeping with her bull-like charge. No one else tried to copy her. Despite this, Mao stopped what she was doing for a moment and surveyed the motionless crowd in among the shelves. The light from the fire shone directly on her. She was so beautiful it sent shivers down the spine.
‘Don’t interrupt me again!’ was all she said.
She let another second go by, like a schoolteacher might do after reprimanding some unruly pupils, to see if there were any objection. The four hundred desperate hostages had none whatsoever. Without opening their mouths, they all seemed to be shouting: ‘We don’t want to die!’
But one shrill voice was raised among the mass of shadows where madness might well be brewing.
Although shrill, it was a man’s voice. With a very strong Colombian accent. From the first few syllables, many of those present realised what was going on. The neighbourhood is itself an education. Two blocks from Disco, on the corner of Camacuá and Bonifacio, there was a Faculty of Theology that offered scholarships to students from all over Latin America. They stayed in apartments on the campus and shopped in the area. They were a kind of learned evangelist, with a touch of hippie. In a neighbourhood like Flores, foreigners are always suspected of being indiscreet. It was almost inevitable that this Colombian should intervene.
‘You don’t scare me, Satan!’ he began. And that was practically it.
Lenin had interrupted her manoeuvres by the space between the displays where the voice was coming from. From the opposite direction to Mao, she was silhouetted against the flames, which were very close to her. In her hand a transparent petrol can shone like a gem. There were at least fifty people between her and the protestor, but that did not seem to deter her.
‘Shut up, you idiot!’ shouted one man. Shouts backing him up came from all around, demonstrating an unsuspected hatred of religion.
‘The devil…’ shrieked the Colombian.
‘What devil, for fuck’s sake!’
‘Shut up, why don’t you?’
‘Kill him, kill him!’ a woman shouted. ‘For our children’s sake! Kill him before there’s another tragedy!’
And another woman, more philosophical:
‘This is no time for sermons!’
In reality, the Colombian had not even begun any religious argument, but the others had sensed it coming anyway. In a neighbourhood like Flores, everything is known. And what isn’t known is intuited. The first man who had shouted him down started punching him. There was a tremendous uproar, because the student, who ought to have been feeble, a member of a decadent race, defended himself. But none of this was visible in the darkness. Besides, there were outbreaks of hysteria elsewhere in the crowd. A controlled, cautious hysteria, because no one wanted to overstep the boundaries the attackers had set.
Even so, it did not look as if those boundaries would be respected for more than a few seconds. The fire was really terrifying, and gave the impression it would soon spread to the store itself. Besides, if one wall had collapsed, the roof might come down as well. Mao had begun her looting of the tills again, but seemed to be doing so more slowly now, half-expecting an attack, almost wanting to teach them another lesson.
The reasonable thing would have been for her to finish taking the money, and then for the attackers to flee. Nobody was going to stop them. But their initial warning echoed in the collective consciousness:
if they were doing all this for love, something was missing, some fresh horror. Love always could always do more.
In response to this plea, Lenin took a horrendous initiative. The tumult caused by the Colombian was still going on when the deafening sound of a trolley was heard, launched like a missile from one end to the other of the back aisle. Those close to it could see the trolley was filled to the brim with bottles of champagne, and topped off with half a dozen jerrycans of petrol and an areola of blue flames. It sped straight down the aisle without touching anything, and crashed into one end of the soft drinks display. The blast was unparalleled; the shock wave a dense mass of splinters of green glass and flaming alcohol. The impact also set off the rapid explosion of a thousand soft drinks bottles. A lot of people had sought refuge in among these shelves, and so the accident caused even greater chaos. It was as if the screams were reaching the highest heavens. Mao’s movement between the tills had become supernaturally slow.
The confusion was so great it would be a shame not to take advantage of it, thought one woman who found herself in a convenient spot. She must have thought: what are we waiting for? If this is a nightmare, let’s behave the way we do in dreams. Mao had advanced across six or seven tills already. She was a long way from the first ones, and that must have settled it as far as this impatient woman was concerned. She sprinted as fast as she could from the displays to the gap between the first and second till. She raced through and in the blink of an eye was up against the window giving on to the arcade. If she had put her shoulder to it, she would have got out: it was only by some miracle or other that the completely shattered glass had stayed in place, and it would not have resisted a determined shove. But the woman, either stunned or crazy, wanted to take the logic of dreams that had got her this far to its inevitable conclusion: kneeling down in front of the plate-glass window, she began cutting it with the diamond in her ring. The circle she started to trace was far too small for her body, but that was the least of her problems. In two bounds, Mao had come up behind her, and nobody saw exactly what she did among the madly dancing shadows. It barely lasted an instant. In the first half of this short lapse of time, the woman managed to scream loudly; in the second, supreme half she fell quiet, and with good reason. When her attacker straightened up, like a modern Salomé dressed in black, she was holding the woman’s head in her hands. The spectacle had attracted everyone’s attention. The hubbub intensified, and what emerged out of it, more than the cries of ‘Murderer!’ ‘Animal!’ and so on, were the ‘Don’t look!’ that everybody was urging everyone else to do. This was the second half of what was dreamt: the fear of dreaming, or of remembering, which is the same thing. But Mao had leapt up onto the till closest to her, and threw the head like a bowling ball at the shouting crowd.
