Shantytown

by Cesar Aira

  Another thing that they must have noticed was the sleepiness that overwhelmed him toward the end: it was massive and irresistible. They might have been worried that he would actually fall asleep: what would they do with him then? It was an infantile characteristic: he was a child in the overdeveloped body of an athlete, whose energy was spent in weight training instead of play, and in voluntarily hauling loads of trash. Then there was his very marked diurnal rhythm, determined by a chemical imbalance in his hypothalamus, which affected his pupils (thence his “night blindness”). And as if that were not enough (but all these factors were interrelated), he always got up very early. Earlier than he should have, in fact, because of something that happened by chance. Well before eight, when the gym opened, he was up and dressed and had eaten his breakfast. In summer, when it was light at five, and he didn’t feel like just waiting around, he had got into the habit of packing his bag, leaving an hour early, and filling in the time with a walk. On those walks he had noticed a boy who clearly had no home or family and was sleeping under the freeway. The place was strange: one of those gaps that the freeway had created when it cut a brutal swathe through the city, a triangular area bounded on two sides by streets, which the council had turned into a little gravel park. They had put in cement benches and flower beds, but it wasn’t the right place for a park, and it fell into neglect straight away. It was completely overgrown with tall grass and weeds, except for a narrow path which people in the neighborhood must have used to go from one street to the other, cutting the corner. The freeway loomed over it like an enormous curved cornice. One day Maxi happened to pass by first thing in the morning and saw the boy sitting against the wall, putting on his sneakers. As he walked past, the boy watched him warily, and Maxi realized that he had spent the night there, sheltered by the freeway and the place’s dereliction. Among the weeds, Maxi glimpsed some newspapers, which the boy must have been using as a bed, and a bag, which must have contained his possessions. A few days later he went past again, at the same time, and again the boy was about to leave. That abandoned space was his bedroom, apparently: nobody passed that way at night, and he left at the break of day. Only Maxi had seen him there. The first few times, the boy seemed to resent the intrusion, but after that he let Maxi go by without even looking up. Maxi got the feeling that the boy didn’t mind him walking past each day, now that his secret had been discovered: it could become a part of his routine, and even provide a kind of company — although they didn’t speak to each other — a makeshift substitute for the family and friends he didn’t have. Perhaps when the boy saw him go past, he thought, “There he is again, my anonymous friend,” or something like that. You never know what people will fasten onto, when they’re all alone and they have nothing else. And that boy had as little as it was possible to have. Maxi called him “the hobo.” What he did during the day, how he fed himself and how he spent his time were mysteries; he must have stayed fairly close by so that he could come back and sleep in the same place every night. A few steps away, toward the edge of the little triangle, was a place where the weeds were higher and thicker, and it gave off a nasty smell; that must have been where the hobo did his business. It was hard to tell his age, but he didn’t have a beard, so he couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen. He was thin and small, with jet black hair, pale skin, sunken eyes, and the face of a frightened animal. He wore a kind of blue suit, which was dirty and crumpled.

  Maxi wasn’t absolutely sure that the hobo actually slept there; he’d always seen him up and dressed, except for that first time when he was putting on his sneakers. But that didn’t prove anything: people often take their shoes off to remove stones and things; then they have to put them back on again. Also, memory had transformed that first time into something strange and uncertain, as it often does when a situation is repeated over and again. There were other clues of course, like the newspapers laid on the ground, the bad smell, and most importantly, the fact that the hobo was there without fail every morning. But that in itself was perplexing. The timing of Maxi’s morning walks was irregular, and yet the boy was always at the same point in his routine: awake already but not yet gone. It might just have been a coincidence, but still it was strange. Maxi started setting out earlier, to see if he could catch him sleeping. But he never did. The only explanation was that the hobo got up at cockcrow, with the very first light of day. But why was he always standing on his newspapers, as if he had just woken up? Was he waiting for Maxi? Was he using him as a sign that it was time to leave? Maxi might have tested this hypothesis by going past later in the morning, to see if the hobo really would wait, but he preferred to pursue the opposite strategy of passing earlier each day, in the hope of finding him sound asleep. And that was why he got up so early, bolted his breakfast and left; and then in the evening he had to pay the price: as soon as it got dark he could barely stay awake.

  II

  As winter came on, night fell slightly earlier with every passing day, and the scavengers stopped a little sooner, and Maxi went a few steps further toward the shantytown before turning back. Since the garbage trucks kept doing their rounds at the same time, there was really no reason for this acceleration, unless the collectors were rushing through their work because of the cold, eager to get back to their shelters, or maybe people were bringing out their trash earlier, reacting automatically to the failing of the light. It was also possible that Maxi’s help was making a difference. His action was individual, spontaneous and technically primitive, but perhaps it was having an overall effect and lightening the burden for all the collectors. If so, it was inexplicable and could only be attributed to the mystery of charity. In any case, they were now reaching Directorio by eight (whereas in summer it had taken till nine), and as Maxi approached the place where Bonorino opened out, he was less sleepy and had more energy in reserve. It also helped that he wasn’t getting up so early, because the sun was rising later. These advantages were counterbalanced by an accentuation of his diurnal rhythm, and a heavier, thicker sleepiness; the body consumes more energy in cold weather, and he was an eminently physical being.

  No matter what the load, Maxi hauled without effort, like a faithful workhorse never shrinking from the yoke, and each day he ventured one step further into sleep. . . . No one had made any effort to discover Maxi’s social function, but he had found it on his own, without looking, guided by chance and the need to occupy his time. The reason why he had been left to his own devices was simple: society works with classes far too broad and crude to capture the variable properties of an individual. No one was to blame, of course. How can you tell what a person is capable of doing? There is no science of vocations. Each person’s place is determined by chance, and inadaptation is the norm. If there were a procedure for deciding what people should do by taking every one of their qualities into account, it would determine their maximum utility, both to those around them and to society in general. For a young man like Maxi, disinclined to study and endowed with an impressive (and, in its way, decorative) physique, the obvious occupation would have been to work as a bouncer or a security guard at a nightclub. He could have walked into a job like that; they were hiring just about anyone — the demand was insatiable. But here we can begin to see how this kind of selection and placement is based on generalizations. Maxi’s particularities rendered him unsuitable: for a start, his “night blindness” ruled out working at night. And then he didn’t have the gift of violence. So the only remaining option, in the system of general categories, was to work as a gym instructor. But that possibility was ruled out too, by less obvious particularities. He couldn’t accept or even consider a job like that. To him, there was something monstrous about the idea of someone who worked out in a gym becoming an instructor: it was like a patient becoming a doctor. He had a deep and instinctive aversion to systems that fed into themselves (he wouldn’t have been able to say why). It was as if, in order to exist at all, his strength and, in a sense, his beauty, had to operate outside the structure that had
produced them, engaging with the real world. His “work” with the families of collectors was an improvised, spontaneous solution, which he adopted without a second thought, as if it were a gift from heaven. He had no doubt that in time he would find his real work, his vocation. And perhaps this was not just a stopgap measure, to fill in the time, but a path.

  Every new cart he pulled was different. But in spite of this variety, all of them were suited to the common purpose of transporting loads as quickly and easily as possible. Carts like that could not be bought, or found in the junk that people threw away. The collectors built them, probably from junk, but the bits and pieces that went into them came from all sorts of things, some of which were nothing like a cart. Maxi was hardly one to consider things from an aesthetic point of view, least of all these carts; but as it happened he was able to appreciate them more intimately than any observer because he was using them. More than that: he was yoked to them. He had noticed how they were all different, in height, capacity, length, width, depth, wheel size . . . in every way, really. Some were made with planks, sticks, or pipes, others with wire mesh or canvas or even cardboard. The wheels were from a great variety of vehicles: bicycles, motorcycles, tricycles, baby carriages, even cars. Naturally, no two carts looked the same, and each had its own particular beauty, its value as folk art. This was not an entirely new phenomenon. The historians of Buenos Aires had traced the evolution of the city’s carts and their decoration: the ingenious inscriptions and decorative painting (the renowned fileteado). But now it was different. This was the nineteen nineties and things had changed. These carts didn’t have inscriptions or painting or anything like that. They were purely functional, and since they were built from assembled odds and ends, their beauty was, in a sense, automatic or objective, and therefore very modern, too modern for any historian to bother with.

  As Maxi’s hauling brought him each night a little closer, the light the shantytown gave off gradually came into focus. One night he finally reached the point where Calle Bonorino opened out. That was when he realized that it really was an avenue, like the signs said. . . . But only there, and that was where it ended: on one side there was a row of little houses and stores; on the other, some kind of warehouse with a yard. In fact, the avenue was so wide and so short, it was more like a big square parking lot. On the far side, a sealed road led off into the distance, gently curving away. To one side of this road lay the shantytown, shining like a gem lit up from within. The strangeness of this spectacle brought him to a halt. The father and the mother (who had been riding on the cart) climbed down and took hold of the handles, supposing that his assistance had, for that night, come to an end. He yielded submissively, took his leave with a shy smile, and set off homeward. Before re-entering the narrow part of Bonorino, he turned to look back: the cart’s receding silhouette stood out against the brightness. He was very sleepy and had a long walk ahead of him, and yet somehow he was reluctant to go home. It may have been a purely physiological reflex; perhaps his dysfunctional pupils were attracted to that excess of light.

  It might seem odd that a shantytown should be so abundantly lit. But there was a perfectly reasonable explanation. The connection to the grid was illegal; everyone knew that the shanty-dwellers “pirated” electricity. Since they weren’t paying, they could use it as lavishly as they liked. It’s easy enough to run a line from a high tension cable, but someone has to do it, someone who knows how to make the connections and distribute the current. There were, as it turned out, plenty of electricians in the shantytown, as there were plenty of people skilled in all the other trades, to a basic level at least. You could almost have said that everyone there had all-round basic skills: poor people learn to make do; they have no choice. They didn’t fear electricity like middle-class people, and there was no good reason why they should. But there was something odd: whenever Maxi managed to get a brief glimpse into the shacks, through open doors or windows, those spaces were much more modestly illuminated. In contrast with the blaze outside, the interiors were dim.

  Up until then he’d thought that the scavengers were ashamed to let him come right up to their dwellings; but now he began to think that they’d been acting out of kindness: noticing how sleepy he was, they had been letting him go. He resolved to be more alert and extended his siestas; in vain, because nightfall still had the same effect on him. Nevertheless, by hiding his tiredness, he was able to get closer, and finally, one momentous night, he finally crossed the shantytown’s perimeter, and ventured just a few steps into that enchanted kingdom of unstinting light.

  The streets were very narrow, barely the width of a car, and the few ancient, rusty cars there were, often stripped of wheels or windows or doors, completely blocked the way. The strangest thing was the layout of the streets: they weren’t perpendicular to the edge of the shantytown, but ran off at an angle of about 45 degrees. Their relative straightness was also strange, given the haphazard way in which the shacks had been built. The edge of the shantytown curved away gradually, suggesting that its overall shape was an enormous circle. It was densely populated. How many people would have been living there? Tens of thousands. The streets were more or less evenly spaced, and all ran off at the same angle. And it was down one or other of those streets that Maxi went in, the first time and the following nights, depending on the address of the people he happened to be helping, who were different every time.

  The overall brightness resulted from the number of light bulbs suspended in the streets. Since the electricity was free, why skimp? They were ordinary 100-watt bulbs, hanging from cables tangled in the air. It looked festive: a garland of ten little bulbs, a bunch of half a dozen, a circle of fifteen or twenty, or rows — single, double, triple — or just two bulbs and a third above them, making a triangle. . . . Every kind of combination, all jumbled up, in a display of fanciful creativity. It was like a natural growth, as if at this level of society — the lowest — technology had been reabsorbed by nature. As the days went by, Maxi began to realize that the number and arrangement of the bulbs was never the same from street to street: each had its own pattern of lights, which must have functioned like a name. It would have been easier to number them, but if the shantytown really was circular, as Maxi thought, numbering the streets would have been no use, because a circle has no beginning or end.

  Every time he went down one of those oblique alleys, under the bunches of light bulbs, he was filled with a feeling of wonder. He felt privileged, but he didn’t know why. It was no privilege to enter that malodorous labyrinth of tin shacks, where the poorest of the poor huddled for shelter. But that was just it: he wasn’t poor, so if they invited him in, it was proof that they trusted him. He would have been willing to bet that no one he knew from school or the gym or his neighborhood and none of his family friends had ever set foot in a shantytown, or ever would. And yet they lived so close to one! It was just around the corner, really. So maybe it wasn’t a big deal, except that, in a way, it was. Outsiders never went there, for a number of reasons, which all came down to one thing: fear. It’s true that there was no real reason why outsiders would want to go there in the first place. But that was a part of the fear. And fear is the key to all places: social, geographical, even imaginary. It is the matrix of places, bringing them into existence and making it possible to move from one to another. Being or not being in a place depends on a complex system of actions, and it is well known that action engenders and nourishes fear. And besides, there must have been something to it: he’d heard that not even the police dared to go into the shantytowns.

  Maxi’s feeling of wonder completely overturned an earlier belief. He had assumed that the inhabitants of the shantytown had initially kept him out because they were ashamed, and finally allowed him in when they had come to trust him and felt that they no longer had anything to hide. But that reasoning rested on assumptions about familiarization, communication, the growth of trust, or some psychological process of that kind, and any such process would have required a constant
subject: that is, it could only have occurred if he had been helping the same collectors every time. But in fact they were always different.

  No. It must have been something else. He began to think it might be just the opposite. It wasn’t shame or embarrassment, as he had stupidly supposed, projecting his middle-class values — why would they be ashamed of their homes, when he’d seen them rummaging through trash, looking for things to eat? — it was the other way around: they hadn’t considered him worthy, because of what he was: a rich kid with fancy clothes. And it was only by hauling carts for months and making himself useful in a thousand different ways, putting his strength and kindness at their disposal, that he had earned the right to set foot in their domain. This was like a revelation for him, and it made him see things from a different point of view.

  For a start, although he wasn’t at all observant, he noticed that all the streets (if you could call those alleyways “streets”) led inward and were never intersected by others running crossways. When one street intersects with another, it means there’s a network, which seems natural: that’s the way cities have always developed. But perhaps it isn’t necessary; perhaps it’s just a convention. This destitute city within the city might have been subject to laws of its own. But the layout did seem to be rather wasteful, considering how fiercely space was saved in every other way. The overcrowding was incredible; the shacks were absurdly small and crammed together, for reasons that apparently applied to shantytowns everywhere: these settlements sprang up in strictly limited spaces, and the population was continually growing because of unplanned reproduction as well as migration from the inland provinces and neighboring countries. So great, indeed, was the pressure for space that the mere existence of streets, narrow as they were, might have seemed surprising. But rational city planning saves space by multiplying streets, not by getting rid of them. The proof of that was close at hand, in the council estate with its little houses, which the collectors had to pass through on their way back to the shantytown. The streets there were only a hundred feet apart, which meant that each house was on a plot of land fifty feet deep. In a conventional grid where the streets are a hundred yards apart, there are large unused areas at the backs of the properties. In the shantytown, the streets were forty or fifty yards apart, and if the shacks that fronted onto them had a maximum depth of sixteen feet, as it was reasonable to suppose (their size was limited by the scarcity of materials), what occupied the space between the back of one shack and the back of the corresponding shack in the next street? The answer could only be: more shacks. There must have been even poorer families living back there, who reached their dwellings via narrow passageways between the shacks with street frontage.