Dinner

by Cesar Aira

  Nowhere was safe. Not inside or out, not in front or behind or to the sides, not up or down. There was only night, shadows convulsed by fear and traversed by random rows of streetlights; around the edges of this light, which only made the darkness denser, slipped unshrouded goose-stepping killers, preceded by a sour scent and heralded by the panting of hungry beasts.

  Doctors and city officials (those who were left) were not the only ones looking for a solution. There were those who believed that all one had to do was wait for dawn, and then the danger would pass, as do all fantasies and fears engendered by the night. It was difficult to convince oneself that it was not a dream, and only the speed of the action prevented that idea from sinking deeper; if there had been time, every single Pringlesian would have argued in the depths of their hearts in favor of the oneiric, and they would have felt guilty for having involved their relatives and neighbors in their own nightmare. Some gathered in the living rooms of their homes in bathrobes or pajamas, woke the sleeping, turned on all the lights, conferred, talked on the telephone, played loud music: they emphasized the human, the familiar, and waited. For what? For the most part, they didn’t have long to wait. Even contrary to their most reasonable expectations, even shouting to one another: It can’t be! It can’t be! the doors would open and the oozing scarecrows would appear, those beings from the shadows who did not fear the light, equipped with their platinum straws, and then parents had the occasion to watch their children’s skulls being cracked open; husbands, the draining of their wives’ endorphins; all within the super-familiar and reassuring atmosphere of home.

  There were also acts of resistance. In fact, they abounded, needless to say if one could overcome first impressions and take note of the rickety fragility of those poorly-assembled bags of bones scantily covered by the remains of entrails and putrid jellies. The passivity of terror had its limits. A town of farmers and truck drivers hardened by their daily encounters with Nature and man being wolf to man couldn’t surrender without putting up a fight. Some waged improvised struggles during the desperate fury of contact; others waited and readied themselves with sticks, irons, chains, and furniture to hurl. Half a dozen sons in the prime of their youthful vigor defending their old parents against one moldy arthritic corpse didn’t necessarily have to be battles lost before they began. Yet, they were.

  Large defense groups were organized in certain nightclubs and restaurants, where they holed up in basements and on balconies, or in rooms whose doors were barricaded with piles of chairs and tables. The number of the living offered hope for salvation, but the number of the dead was always greater. “They will pay dearly for our endorphins,” they said, but ended up giving them away. And those who escaped could do nothing but run. Run blindly through dark streets, seek out open spaces, gain an extra minute, then another one, maybe it could be repeated, recover the instincts of deer, let the legs and lungs respond. But the streets, the street corners, the vacant lots were also responding; and the only response they gave was a proliferation of assailants swathed in old death and new terror.

  As for the plan of the Clinic doctors, it had the advantage of initiative, but that was about all. From the get-go it was doomed by both intrinsic and extrinsic flaws. Moreover, they didn’t even manage to put it into practice due to an unexpected event that ended up providing the attackers with extra nourishment. It just so happened that while everybody was trying to get out of town, there arrived quite inopportunely a nourishing caravan of cars and SUVs packed full of dressed-up people: men in suits and tuxedos, women wearing long furs over low necklines and jewels. They had driven from an estate on the road to Pensamiento, and they were guests at a highly publicized wedding. The estate belonged to a rich and prolific French family; the bride was one of the eleven daughters of the owner, and the guests had come in from their other large estates in the south (the ones near Pringles were used only in winter), from Buenos Aires, and even from France. Right in the middle of the reception the patriarch suffered a heart attack, and without wasting any time, they piled him into an SUV and started off toward town. Since the others had no desire to continue the celebrations, they followed behind; his condition appeared to be serious; they feared he would die before they arrived, so the caravan sped up as if they were racing. On the way there, they tried to get in touch with the Clinic, and with doctors they knew, but all the numbers were busy, or didn’t answer. Thus they arrived, totally oblivious, in the middle of another “party,” which would end even more badly than the one that had just been ruined for them. They were in such a hurry that they didn’t notice anything strange when they got to town. The vehicles, around forty of them, reached the Clinic without any problem. Seeing family members pour out of the cars, shouting and demanding a stretcher and medical attention for a patient who was seriously ill surprised the doctors and nurses, who were expecting anything but that. The explanations they tried to give managed to only further confuse the already flustered minds of those who’d just arrived; admittedly it was difficult to explain out of the blue. The wedding guests were just starting to understand what it was all about, and to take measure of their colossal inopportuneness, when their skulls were being opened and their brains slurped up. The dead, who appeared in great numbers, worked from the outside in: first the relatives who had remained on the sidewalk out front, then those who had entered the hallways and waiting rooms, offices, rooms, laboratories, the intensive care unit, until they reached the sancta sanctorum of the operating room. Not even the heart-attack victim, with but a thin thread of life remaining, was spared. It was one of the best banquets of the night, that defenseless conglomeration of rich French partygoers—a class of people who make the production of endorphins their life’s work.

  They didn’t all fall at once, however, because one car had separated from the retinue before reaching the Clinic (by prior consultation on cell phone with those driving the first vehicle), and it started to drive across town, utterly ignorant of the ongoing coven. It was on its way to the Church to get the priest. The entire family were fervent Catholics, and they had anticipated that they would need the succor of the final sacrament if the worst came to pass (how naïve). The person in charge of this mission was a brother of the dying man, the one with the most easygoing relationship with the ecclesiastical hierarchy; the bride and groom were riding in his car; they had climbed into it in the same way they could have climbed into any other, rushing as they were. They drove across town at full speed, without stopping at intersections, and, in part because of their speed, in part because they were distracted by their own emergency, they didn’t notice anything strange. If they saw a drooling corpse emerge from a house, they thought there was a costume party; if they saw another one tottering on a rooftop, they took it as an advertising gimmick. A group of young people running down the middle of the street? They were in a hurry. The brightly lit dining room of Hotel Pringles was full of lifeless bodies draped over the tables and sprawled on the floor. They didn’t look.

  They stopped in front of the Church. They got out of the car. The uncle went straight to the rectory. He wasn’t concerned about it being too late. The groom accompanied him. They found the door broken down and entered, intrigued. Two tall shredded shadows crossed the Plaza and entered behind them. The bride, in the meantime, had seen that the doors to the church were open, and she entered, thinking that maybe she would find the priest presiding over a nighttime service. That was not the case. The nave was empty; solitary candles were burning on the altar. She walked down the central aisle in her long dress of white tulle: the repetition of the same scene, this time in a different register. She’d gotten married just hours before, in the chapel at the estate, and there she had also proceeded “white and shining” down the central aisle, but then the aisle had been flanked by smiling faces, and the “Wedding March” was playing, and there were lights and flowers, and there, in front of her, her groom had been waiting. Now, on the other hand, the only figure she was approaching was Christ presiding over the
altar, and she continued precisely because of how fascinated she was by that statue, which she didn’t remember ever having seen in the church in Pringles. It was a Christ Crucified, suffering, expressionistic, twisted, frankly putrefied—the work, one might say, of an insane imagination that had melded the concept of Calvary with that of Auschwitz and the aftermath of a nuclear or bacteriological apocalypse. In the tremulous half light, more than see him, she imagined him, and it was too late when she realized that she had imagined him wrong, when the Crucified One leaped at her and snorted—with diabolical bellowing—and fell upon her; they rolled over together, the bride unable to shout because at that precise instant the false statue ripped open her skull and was slurping the rich little drops, a substance filled with the expectations of honeymoon, children, and a home.

  At the Palacio, in the meantime, pessimism had given way to desperation. Some final phone calls, which were cut off, led them to deduce what had taken place at the Clinic. At the Hospital, in spite of its distance from downtown, things hadn’t gone any better; even the Old People’s Home for the Indigent, adjacent to the Hospital, was the site of a ravenous visit, and they didn’t spare a single head. Didn’t they respect anything? Wouldn’t they turn up their noses at the poor, the old, or the infirm? From the look of things, no. The police medical examiner, who was still at the mayor’s office, shared his reflections on these questions with his comrades in misfortune. In their search for endorphins, he said, the barely resuscitated dead had nothing to lose; the human nature of their living cohorts worked in their favor, it wanted the living to stay alive; that’s why it provided its organisms with an inexhaustible source of the substance of happiness, so that they would never stop believing that it was worthwhile to continue in this world, and to multiply. Given this premise, everybody had some. The beautiful, the rich, the young all secreted endorphins constantly, not only the passive ones, the product of the happiness in which they spent their lives, but also the active ones, since the rich want to be richer, the beautiful more beautiful, the young younger. And these active endorphins, the ones the nocturnal slurpers most valued, were the speciality of the majority of the rest of the population: the old, the poor, the humble, the sick. The last scraps of human detritus, people who hadn’t enjoyed a single moment in their entire life, had to produce tons of endorphins in order to keep that life going.

  He continued for a while, reasoning along those lines. Very interesting, but very useless. Or maybe not, because a little later this reasoning produced a practical result. Some suspicious sounds coming from the dark recesses of the Palacio, as well as the certainty that their situation was unsustainable, made them decide to attempt an escape. It wasn’t that harebrained. The Plaza looked deserted, and the mayor’s Cherokee was parked in front, and was intact: all they had to do was run about fifty yards, jump into the powerful vehicle, and floor the gas in the direction of the Cemetery and Route 3. The already devastated neighborhoods along the way shouldn’t be too dangerous. Abandoning their families, by this time, was already a fait accompli. It had been a while since anybody had answered their home phones. Anyway, they wouldn’t go very far. If they drove toward Bahía Blanca, they would, perhaps very shortly, meet up with the reinforcements they had requested and that had been confirmed were on their way. In fact, the best thing they could do was wait for them there, since it was clear that it would be impossible to launch any effective action from the town itself.

  All good, in theory, but when the words “let’s go” were spoken, there was tremendous vacillation. The process of running those fifty yards out in the open to get to the vehicle was difficult for them to digest. What if just one of them went to start the car and bring it to the esplanade in front of the Palacio to pick up the others? They didn’t even bother to propose it—nobody was in the mood for sacrifices. At that moment the medical officer remembered what he’d said, and a solution occurred to him. El Manco. Was he still at the top of the tower? Yes, certainly, but what did El Manco have to do with it? Simple: if we all need endorphins to overcome the animosity and tedium of the world, a cripple would need them that much more. The idea, pretty cunning, was to get El Manco to accompany them on the way out; if they attacked, they’d attack him first, giving the rest of them a few precious seconds to escape.

  They didn’t question the humane aspect of this ploy. Since half the town had already perished, what did one more victim matter, especially if he was useless, defective, and semi-moronic? They called him on the walkie-talkie and went to meet him at the little door at the bottom of the winding staircase. They had a good excuse to request his presence: they didn’t want to leave him behind. Once he was with them, they explained their plan of escape—omitting the detail that concerned him—armed themselves with all the blunt objects they could find, and then left. There was nobody to be seen in the Plaza. The moon was very high and very small, like a pale little lightbulb that was difficult to connect to the silvery brightness that bathed the trees and the flower pots. Tonight more than ever, the fountain, the famous Salamone fountain, evoked the oft-made comparison with Babylonian flying saucers. “Ready?” “All together!” “Run as fast as you can!” “The keys?” The mayor was holding them in his hand.

  “Go!”

  Had they been waiting for them? Had they fallen into a trap, set especially for them? The fact is, they hadn’t even covered half the distance when there appeared about twenty living dead—fast, precise, implacable in spite of their disjointedness— who stood in their way. What happened next took only seconds. The medical examiner’s prognostication was right: all twenty of them fell upon El Manco, cracked open his head, and latched on like piglets taking suck. The others scattered in momentary confusion that didn’t last long because more attackers were approaching from behind the cars parked across the street and the fountains to the sides, so they retreated, running back to the Palacio. They didn’t turn to look at poor El Manco, who had become a pincushion, still standing (he hadn’t had time to fall).

  The Palacio had ceased to be a refuge. In fact, several corpses had entered behind them, sending the group racing every which way through dark rooms, up and down staircases, and along corridors. After a few minutes of this “lethal blob,” everybody was thinking that they were the last survivor, and a few seconds later everybody was right, or one was. The mayor, having lost all dignity, was curled up in the back of a wardrobe whose door he closed from the inside, and there he stayed, still and quiet, holding his breath.

  Unfortunately, right at that moment, the phone in his pocket, which had been ominously quiet for a while, rang. To make matters worse, it took him a while to find it and silence it, what with the state of his nerves; he looked through all his pockets before looking in the right one. When he finally had it in hand, he answered the call. Precautions were no longer worth taking, and the company of a voice was preferable to nothing.

  It was a man calling from Primary School #7, in the name of the School Association, to tell him that they had decided not to support him in the upcoming elections.

  He didn’t manage to ask why. The voice sounded resolute and bitter and not at all friendly, even though it belonged to someone he’d known for years, and on whose electoral loyalty the mayor would have bet his life just hours earlier. With what remained of his political reflexes, he tried to stammer out something about it not being the moment to discuss the election, or that he would continue to serve the people of the town in whatever role he could be most useful, without any personal ambitions, but the other man interrupted him before he began, telling him that all the people of the neighborhood shared the opinion he had just communicated, and probably the whole party did, and that he might as well bid the mayor’s office goodbye. After which, he hung up without saying goodbye.

  The first thing the mayor thought was that they were blaming him for what was happening. That was unfair in the extreme but could only be expected. He suspected, however, that there was something else going on. He remembered that Primary School
#7 had been one of the first sites affected. The person who called him, it would seem, had been one of the victims, and the ill humor expressed in his voice would be the effect of the loss of endorphins, a loss everybody around him would have suffered, the whole damn School Association, and at this point, the whole town. The first thing that had occurred to them in their new state of mind was to initiate a motion against the mayor. Would this be the end of his career? He’d already won three elections, this would be his fourth—he’d been leading the City for fifteen years—and he always won by a large margin. Neither the long years of laissez-faire, nor suspicions of corruption, nor the increase in taxes had put a dent in his popularity or his well-oiled system of cronyism. And now this, the disappearance of a few insignificant mental drops, was going to spell his doom. Did this mean that his tenure could not be attributed to his skill as helmsman of the administration, to his charisma and connections, but rather to the happiness of the voters? Bad moment to discover this. The door to the wardrobe was already open and a silhouette, both inhuman and human, outlined in black against black, leaned over him. In a split second, in fast forward, there raced through his mind all the public works and urban improvements he owed Pringles.

  In the meantime, the hunt continued through the streets, in the houses, on rooftops, and in basements, out in the open and hidden away in the most secret of lairs. Night continued. The moon followed its path across the sky, not rushing anywhere. One of the last reservoirs of blessed living and throbbing material persisted, miraculously, right downtown. It could be found on the top floor of the Teatro Español on Stegmann Street, in a large hall that the Sociedad Española rented for special events. On this occasion, it was for a wedding reception, less elegant than the French one, but just as well attended. The bride was the daughter of a farmer, the sort who breaks the bank in order to impress his new in-laws. They had eaten vast amounts of lamb and suckling pig, and drunk wine like there was no tomorrow. The alarm reached them in good time, and since nobody had yet left, they were all privileged witnesses to the invasion, thanks to their elevated location, and the room’s many balconies. The fact that they hadn’t been attacked could have been due to many reasons, or none, or perhaps they were being saved for dessert. One of the many possible reasons was that they’d fallen between two crowds that had received, early on, a visit from the slurpers of the hereafter: behind them and down below, the moviegoers at the Teatro Español, who were taken by surprise as they left, crowded in the entryway and along the sidewalk; to the side, the hotel guests and the diners at its restaurant. They’d witnessed all of it from the balconies, and they’d had time to prepare themselves. The hall, whose safety arrangements for evacuation would not have passed any kind of inspection, had only one access, a narrow and steep staircase, which would have caused a holocaust in case of fire but was easy to defend. The attempts at invasion by the living dead were repelled by a barrage of bottles thrown from the top of the stairs; they had drunk enough to have an unlimited supply of these projectiles. The attackers had dispersed, and there ensued a long period of tense calm.