He heads to the adjoining living room and places the mini-recorder in a vase, hidden from Ruth's view. She will know that she is being taped, but if the device is out of sight she won't be intimidated and, he hopes, will talk freely. Two glasses of water are on the table. He straightens an impressionist painting of a cockfight. One of the cocks is blind, with rivulets of blood streaming from his eyes. Extricate the pus and rise above so much mediocrity, transcend such corruption, hands that are stained, consciences that are bought. It's all so easy, the past doesn't exist, it is erased in one fell swoop when it isn't really past, it's alive, it pulses each second and we pretend to ignore it, circus acrobats, lost in our splendid promise, human failure, a half-open window onto the room of the self.
There is a knock at the door. He lifts his gaze toward a spider that is hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room, rubs his sweaty hands together, lowers his gaze, and walks to open the door for Ruth.
Chapter 6
NICOLÁS TESLA SCHOOL was located near the main plaza in Rio Fugitivo, in a sprawling, decrepit house that dated back to colonial times. The rooms on either side of the rectangular patio—now a futsal and basketball court—had been turned into classrooms crowded with students. The walls were covered in political and scatological graffiti.
He was fifteen years old and did not remember anything about Oruro, where he had been born. He was four when the government closed the mines and his dad became one more of the "displaced" who had to look for work. His mother's cousin in Quillacollo had helped them for the first few years. Then came Rio Fugitivo. His dad was tempted to go to Chapare, to plant coca as so many other ex-miners had, but a friend of the cousin's had offered them a house in tenure, cheap, in Rio; his dad had some savings, and so that is where they ended up. A mechanic, his dad repaired cars and bicycles. At least they had enough to eat.
He was the best student in the class and especially quick at mathematics. When the teacher put complex exercises on the board, he would often correct him without a trace of ridicule or arrogance, as if knowing more than everyone else were part of the natural order of things. He had been chastised for going forward in the lessons, for studying on his own ahead of the class. It had been that way since the first grade, when, thanks to a neighbor who had also taught him how to play soccer, he arrived at school already knowing his multiplication tables. He was generous with his homework: classmates would line up to copy from him before the bell rang. He was a tall boy of few words, and this attracted the girls, as did his sparkling coffee-colored eyes. He had lost his baby fat, become an awkward adolescent, and had a long, thin neck upon which his head seemed to turn independently of the rest of his body.
Tesla was a state school. He wished it had a computer lab like the one at San Ignacio, a block from his house, near a park dotted with graceful jacaranda trees. The San Ignacio students would come to his house so his dad could fix their bicycle tires or put air in their soccer balls. They would joke around, speak disdainfully about girls, and have money in their wallets. Behind the door, through a cracked window, he watched these well-dressed boys, who would sometimes drive to school, insolent in their belief that the world belonged to them. He hated it that his dad had to serve them.
He had also gone with his mom to wash clothes or clean immense houses with porcelain-adorned living rooms and backyard pools. He will never forget the house of a particular doctor: the children's bright rooms, the Macintosh computer, posters on the walls of Maradona, Nirvana, and Xuxa. It was from the "good classmate" awards on the walls that he discovered that the children went to San Ignacio. He did not want to divide the world so simply, but he was hardly a child anymore and was beginning to learn about injustice.
He used to play pool with his friends, until one afternoon he passed a video arcade and curiosity propelled him inside. The sounds of explosions, the intense, flickering colors ... There he spent the few coins that he earned by occasionally helping his dad. He was extremely adept at pinball and Super Mario. He was obsessive; entire afternoons would go by as he tried to beat a record.
But the money disappeared quickly. What was he to do? One sunny morning when he had skipped school, he approached the entrance to San Ignacio. A Brasilia was parked outside with the window half open. He turned his head left and right; he was alone. He reached his hand in through the window, opened the door, and found a twenty-dollar bill in a compartment next to the gearshift.
That was his first robbery. There would be others. At first his victims were San Ignacio students. Later he expanded his area of operations. When he went with his mom to the houses she cleaned, it was easy to slip away from her and put anything that might be worth a few pesos at the pawn shop into his pockets: earrings, a ring, a fine ceramic ashtray that he hoped the owners wouldn't even miss.
He earned a reputation at the video arcade as the pinball king. When asked what his name was, he told them it was Kandinsky. He had liked the name ever since he saw a poster for an exhibit at one of the houses his mother cleaned. It was a sonorous name, there was rhythm and harmony in the combination of vowels and consonants; it was a name he liked to repeat as he walked the streets of Rio Fugitivo alone, the first and third syllables explosive, the second a bridge that is stressed, the tone rising.
Soon he switched to the Internet cafés that began to pop up all over the city. For the equivalent of fifty cents he could play on the computer for an hour, war and strategy games in which he would compete with other players in the same café, or others on computers in the same city or in other cities, even on other continents. He soon learned the stratagems that made him a fearsome opponent. He was quick with his hands, and his mind was quicker still. He seemed, on a certain level, to understand the games or, more accurately, to understand the programmers who made the games. Asheron's Call was his specialty. The hours would fly by and he continued to miss classes, lost in the medieval scenery of fantasy.
At the Internet café he frequented most regularly, near Suicide Bridge, he was admired by several teenagers. One of them, older than he, called himself Phiber Outkast: freckled, full lips, well dressed, never without his Ray-Bans. One night Phiber Outkast was waiting for him at the café door and walked home with him in silence. As they neared his house, under the glow of a streetlight in the small square, Phiber said that his ability shouldn't be wasted on games. He said that a lot of money was to be made on the Internet.
Kandinsky looked at him without saying a word. Insects buzzed around the streetlight. He asked Phiber to explain. Exactly that, said Phiber Outkast. A lot of money can be made on the Web. It's a question of focusing your knowledge appropriately. If he wanted to develop his talent, he could take classes at the same computer institute that Phiber attended.
Kandinsky would have liked to resist temptation. By this time he was seventeen years old, in his last year of high school. Shouldn't he graduate first?
He thought of his dad's clothes, always stained with grease. Years had passed and he still hadn't gotten ahead. He would inflate soccer balls and repair tires for the rest of his life. He would take refuge in his house, light a few candles to the Virgin of Urkupiña—there was an altar with a plaster effigy of her in the kitchen—crossing his fingers that his luck would improve. He would be content with the victories of San José, soccer triumphs that were seen as necessary, just redemptions.
Kandinsky's mom would continue to work for a pittance at homes so big they were obscene. In such a poor country, there were those who lived as if they were Americans. Or like the vision they had of life in the United States: the land of plenty, of glorious materialism.
Esteban, his younger brother, no longer went to school. Instead, he helped his dad repair tires and sometimes went to the Boulevard, where he would earn a few pesos watching over cars parked outside an empanada shop.
At home the cold seeped in through the broken windows each night.
"Let's talk tomorrow," Kandinsky said under the streetlight. Phiber Outkast sighed, relieved. He knew
what that meant.
Located in the Enclave, the institute was a shabby three-story building that at one time housed the El Posmo newspaper offices (when it was called Tiempos Modernos); there were cracks in the walls and rubble on the stairs. You had to be one of the first to arrive in order to get one of the few computers, all assembled locally. In an atmosphere like that, Kandinsky learned more from his classmates than from his teachers: several computer languages, a little about programming, dozens of tricks for Microsoft software and online games. His classes, paid for by Phiber Outkast, were at night; he always went home as soon as they ended.
His classmates were hackers who specialized in minor jobs—free phone service for a month, access to an Internet porn site, illegal copies of software, the occasional credit card scam. They would tell him their secrets freely and then look at him suspiciously when he showed them, without trying, that he knew more than they did. It didn't matter. He wasn't interested in making friends; he had decided to leave the institute at the end of the semester. His final project consisted of a program to acquire the passwords to private accounts on the Net illegally. He justified it by writing in his final essay that the flow of information on the Internet should be free and there shouldn't be any secrets. Passwords infringed on this free flow of information and should therefore be attacked. The director called him into his office and, returning his work, said, "This is not an institute for hackers, young man." They expelled him the next day. Phiber Outkast didn't need to console him; Kandinsky was elated.
Phiber and Kandinsky's first mission was to access private computers and steal the owners' passwords. They did this from an Internet café where a friend of Phiber's worked. The friend was paid a few pesos to let them work in peace on a computer in the farthest corner of the room. At first Phiber gave the instructions: he knew a bit about programming. Kandinsky would follow and improve on them, playing with them, twisting them, taking them to their breaking point, as if the equations on the screen were made of pliable metal.
With his first stolen password, Kandinsky went through the records of some unknown individual like a thief in another man's house, roaming through the rooms in search of objects to steal. Emotion overcame him; on the surface, he had to remain calm.
He would never go back to stealing from cars and houses, putting himself in physical danger. He much preferred to key in the correct characters that pulse on the screen, to steal from a distance, to obtain access through a rented computer and appropriate the numbers that make up a life: credit cards, bank accounts, insurance. Numbers, numbers everywhere, violated with impunity.
Phiber Outkast slapped him on the back and told him that before he knew it, he would be one of the best hackers around. Kandinsky liked the sound of that mysterious word, hacker. It lent him an air of danger, intelligence, transgression. Hackers abuse technology, find uses in artifacts for which they were not intended. Hackers enter territory that is forbidden by law and, once there, laugh at power. It was, perhaps, a metaphor for his life.
One afternoon he arrived home to find his dad at the door, brandishing a letter from the high school. Too many absences had led to his being expelled. His dad was furious. Hadn't he been the best student? And now he wasn't even going to graduate from high school? What had he been doing?
Kandinsky was at a loss for the words that would excuse him.
His mom was in the kitchen chopping onions, and he avoided her gaze. He couldn't bear the look of disappointment welling up in her eyes.
He entered the room he shared with his brother. Esteban was reading a book that he had borrowed from the municipal library: a biography of the man who was the leader of the Workers' Union for forty years. He was a bright kid and liked to read. Would he one day have the chance to go back to school? Unlikely. Would he have to continue helping his parents? Most probably.
Why continue with the charade? Kandinsky's parents had seen him as their only hope for a dignified retirement. Perhaps the best thing would be to run away...
Kandinsky fled the house in silence, accompanied by his father's shouts and his mother's sobs. He crossed the park, stirring up the pigeons, passing a boisterous group of San Ignacio students seated on a bench in front of the school. Soon the house, the school, the park, were behind him.
Chapter 7
LIKE SO MANY OTHER NIGHTS at the end of a long day, you cross Bacon Street in your gold Corolla and immediately think of William David Friedman, the American cryptanalyst who was convinced that Shakespeare's work contained secret phrases and anagrams that referred to the true author, Francis Bacon. Friedman was the man who had deciphered Purple, the complicated Japanese code from World War II. It's no coincidence that Bacon Street is on my way, you think, and without noticing you nearly run a red light at an intersection four blocks from the El Dorado.
The streets converge in utter darkness. Every now and then a window lights up in a building like a flickering eye or a taxi with a blinking sign crosses a street with a fearsome rattle. A shortage of electricity has plagued Rio Fugitivo for some time now. The city has grown in a disorderly fashion; no one thought to plan a power plant that could keep up with demand. GlobaLux had arrived to fix the problem but had quickly made itself extremely unpopular: blackouts with no prior warning, continual surges, and, in spite of all that, a shocking rate hike. It is the first time that both the working class and those who are better off have come together in protest. Would the electricity shortage trigger Montenegro's demise? How ironic, after having weathered much more ferocious storms and so close to the end of his mandate.
You pop a piece of gum into your mouth. Spearmint Chiclets. Luckily, there are only four more blocks until you can finally relax. Naked and protected by the night, a glass of whiskey in a dusky room, the television on, wishing that time would slow down, that the clock would stand still. Carla, Carla, Carla. There will be shadows on the walls, shadows that mingle yet fail to find one another.
It's not the first time and it won't he the last, you murmur, stepping on the accelerator. You wish you could stop thinking from time to time, let your mind go blank, avoid the overlapping thoughts that are always with you. To thrill with pure sensation, to let yourself be lulled by the nothingness of the day, to leave the exhausting analogies, the frantic associations of ideas, the obsessive readings of a reality reverberating with the echoes of another reality. Everything in moderation was what you wanted your motto to be; you have now resigned yourself to the fact that your thoughts are not in moderation.
Carla, Carla, Carla. Who would have imagined?
You park in the lot next to the building. Four cars: a quiet night. You spit your gum out. A billboard has been hung on a molding wall at the back of the lot: Built Ford Tough. An anagram in the last word: Ought. An ominous sign: imprisoned within those five letters is the word go. Ever since you were a child, you have felt that the world speaks to you, always, everywhere. That sensation has intensified in the past few months, to the point that you cannot read a sign or a word without thinking of it as a code, as a secret writing that needs to be deciphered. The front page of a newspaper can make you dizzy with the sheer volume of messages shrieking your name, asking you to free them from their precarious packaging. Most people think literally and assume that Built Ford Tough means Built Ford Tough. You suffer from the opposite and spend entire nights awake, mourning the loss of the literal.
Under a red neon light, the receptionist is playing blackjack on the computer, the screen showing a closeup of his hand. The blackjack table is in a casino in the virtual city of Playground. All of Rio Fugitivo is addicted to Playground, where thousands waste countless hours making millionaires of the three young men who bought the rights to it for Bolivia. You are one of the few who are immune to the virus. Nonetheless, and despite Ruth's protests, you still finance the unhealthy number of hours that Flavia spends glued to the screen. She said she was going to stop, that she was tired of all the advertising, and yet she can't help logging on one more time, just once more...<
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The receptionist greets you with a mere nod of his head, as if it is an effort to lift his eyelids and move the muscles in his neck. With a click of the mouse, the cards on the screen—stolen hearts, kings in decline—give way to a calendar. He hands you a gold metal key numbered 492. Four. Nine. Two. D-I-B. BID. You mumble thanks knowing he won't reply. You have known him for a while now and have never heard the sound of his voice. What for, really? The transaction already took place earlier, using your credit card online. There's no need to speak; he knows it and so do you. And yet you feel nostalgic for the sound of a voice. You're not interested in the message itself but in the means of communication, which is increasingly rare. You most certainly are from another century.
The red carpet is stained—every kind of fluid spilled in sticky intimacy. The elevator is ancient, the metal rusted and the glass cracked in two; still, it glides upward in silence. It is how you imagine the ascension to heaven: broken bits of the world in conversation with the perfection of infinity. Slowly, the world is left behind and the elevator stops. The door opens, and, your steps suddenly light, you approach the heart of harmony.
You used to frequent these sorts of places when you were young. It was impossible to hear an echo of any kind there: every sound was devoured by the continuous murmur of laughter, clinking glasses, loud music, drunks arguing. At the back, behind a curtain made of wooden rods, the rooms were lined up, the beds creaking in frantic arrhythmia. For a few pesos you were happy, at least for a few minutes—always quick, always fleeting.
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