Shantytown

by Cesar Aira

  “Yes.”

  “Anyway, you’re just guessing that she looked in the directory. Maybe she wasn’t trying to call them; maybe she needed the name for some other reason.”

  “No! She must have called them! I saw her crying like anything right next to the phone.”

  Jessica’s mother turned to look at her, intrigued.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes! She was crying with her face in her hands, like this.”

  “How do you know she was crying? You saw her from across the street, through the windows, with all the reflections. How can you be so sure? Maybe she was laughing.”

  “No, I know her.” Her tone of voice had changed, as if a thought had occurred to her. Jessica’s mother noticed this; she knew her daughter well. She also knew that there was no point trying to make her say what it was. Meanwhile, she’d had a thought of her own. To get the lay of the land, she said:

  “Maybe she wanted to tell them that something had fallen onto their balcony or that something was hanging out a window, or whatever. Something she’d noticed. I mean she does live directly opposite, on the same floor . . .”

  Jessica was lost in her own thoughts and it took her a while to process this conjecture. But her reaction, when it came, was impatient:

  “No. What would she care? Why would that make her cry?”

  “Maybe they were rude to her on the phone. It’s awful when you’re just trying to help and someone tells you to mind your own business.”

  “Come on, Mom, that makes no sense!”

  Jessica’s mother concentrated on her zucchini for a moment. The sky had clouded over, and the light coming into the kitchen was gentler. The cream-colored tiles went right up to the ceiling and everything was tidy and spotlessly clean. Eventually she decided to say what she was thinking:

  “Listen, Jessica, I don’t know what’s going on — you know I’ve never liked Vanessa — but I suspect she’s up to something.”

  “Why?” said her daughter defensively, almost too defensively.

  “You must have heard us, your father and I, talking about Mr. Gandulla (though you were probably daydreaming); anyway, this Gandulla, Élida’s husband, has a series of big properties scattered around Buenos Aires, and some evangelical church uses them for worship. One day your father tried to pump him, and he said he just rented the buildings to the ministers and had nothing to do with the church himself. But then he said that he was buying properties in strategic locations, and fitting them out, and that he also had a fleet of buses to transport the congregations, and houses and sports fields for church activities. So he’s involved; he’s not just renting a few properties. Did you know that?”

  “No, I had no idea.”

  “What about Vanessa?”

  “No, no way.”

  “But she might have found out and maybe that’s why she wanted to talk with the Gandullas.”

  Jessica could not have been more completely or sincerely surprised. The mere idea that Vanessa might be taking an interest in religion left her speechless. But her mother still had an ace up her sleeve:

  “What I’m thinking is, one of the church’s projects is a rehabilitation program for young addicts. They have at least two rehab farms on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. It’s supposed to be a charity, but who knows what kind of operation they’re really running out there. Mirta from the second floor is good friends with Élida, and she’s told me all sorts of things. For example: Gandulla is buddies with the superintendent at the police station across the street, so whenever they pick up kids on drugs they send them straight to one of those farms.”

  “And what’s this got to do with Vanessa?”

  “That’s what I’m wondering, darling. The state she was in when you saw her crying, it must be something serious. You don’t have any idea?”

  “What? How would I know? You’re crazy! You never give up, do you?”

  “I’m going to have a word with Vanessa’s mother and warn her. Next time I see her I’ll say something. . . . After all, I don’t know why you two aren’t talking anymore.”

  Jessica got up and stormed out, yelling:

  “I’ve had it up to here with you! Always sticking your nose in. . . !”

  She went to her bedroom, slammed the door behind her, rushed to the sliding glass doors that opened onto the balcony and looked out. The windows of Vanessa’s apartment were dark and empty. Since she was looking down from above, all she could see was a strip of floor. When their friendship had been running smoothly, Vanessa used to come to the window, and they would talk on the phone, looking at each other. The circumstances that had led to Jessica’s decision to go out shopping and therefore caused her to miss the call filled her now with an irrational hatred. She felt powerless in the face of time, paralyzed, yet deeply unsettled. It was almost as if her whole life had been one big mistake, and there was nothing she could do to correct it. Her mother’s suppositions weren’t even worth considering; they were too ridiculous, too fictional. She could make a better job of it and come up with something far more realistic: all she had to do was to think and react in her usual way, in other words, be herself. Because deep down she and Vanessa were the same: each was capable of anything the other one might do. And yet, strangely, when she set about testing this method of “being herself,” she didn’t feel herself at all.

  Vanessa, she thought, had obviously wanted to talk to her. She’d been impelled by some mysterious but irresistible desire. Not because she wanted to make peace, or negotiate, or continue the quarrel with fresh accusations, but for some other reason unknown to Jessica (neither of them knew, nor could have known, what it was). When she hadn’t been able to get through, she’d made up any old excuse to justify the call, the first thing that came into her head: asking for the name of the neighbors on the third floor, whose apartment was right in front of her. And when she’d hung up and realized that the call had been a fiasco, she’d broken down crying. Jessica could understand that too, especially since she felt that she was about to burst into tears herself. None of it made any sense, even if she could make sense of it.

  She was standing there looking at the façade of the building opposite. The two buildings were mirror images of each other. They had been built by the same construction company and were identical down to the last detail, not just on the outside, but in the internal layout of the apartments too. The balconies were full of plants, with big festoons of foliage spilling down to the balconies below. The windows reflected the building across the street: Vanessa’s building reflected Jessica’s, and vice versa. And an attentive observer with a sharp eye would no doubt have been able to see a reflection within the reflection, and so on ad infinitum, as with mirrors set up face to face.

  To think that when Vanessa called, she was coming up in the elevator! It was such a close thing, a matter of seconds! And the way Vanessa had burst into tears, she knew the feeling exactly: an overwhelming surge made up of all the situation’s little details. That’s what life was always like: miniscule, intangible accidents combining to form an immense emotion bigger than life itself. And that was the transcendental justification for the girls’ notorious frivolity; if her mother had been able to understand this, she wouldn’t have had to come up with such far-fetched explanations.

  Suddenly, Jessica’s heart stopped. Her breathing too, and her thinking. She froze like a movie still, pressed against the glass, all eyes. Across the street, on the third floor, Vanessa had appeared. When someone you’ve been thinking about intensely appears and is there in front of you, it seems incredible, at least for the first moment, before you begin to communicate, and the mind is otherwise occupied. On this occasion, however, there was no communication because Vanessa didn’t look at Jessica but left her in a state of pure contemplation, trapped, that is, in the initial moment, confined within herself. Nobody likes being left out. An involuntary expression of horror came over Jessica’s face.

  Vanessa didn’t look up once. She was staring straight a
head. It was Vanessa all right, but somehow — and this was the scariest thing — it wasn’t. She was very pale, “white as a sheet,” except her nose and around her eyes, where the skin was a bright carmine color. She looked like a clown with her face painted white and red. And the face, although still hers, was not a face: it had no outer surface, it was hollowed or sharpened, almost concave. The eyes were independent of it, staring straight ahead, like those of a robot. Her body seemed to be hanging from her gaze, and its stiffness suggested a superhuman determination, as if thought could no longer act upon it, only gravity. For a moment, Jessica had the horrific impression that she was about to jump. “She’s going to jump!” And there was nothing she could do! That tiny shift in time was going to be what killed her. Jessica looked away in anguish, not to find help but because her eyes were the only part of her body that she could move. And she saw a little black figure in the glass door that opened onto the balcony of the apartment just above Vanessa’s. The size of this figure intrigued her: it was too small. A little human figure making gratuitous circular movements, as if performing a strange dance without music, in a space where it didn’t belong, midway between floor and ceiling. It took Jessica a while to realize that what she was seeing was a reflection of someone in her own building.

  She half-closed her eyes, keeping them fixed on the unidentified figure, who must have been below her, on the third floor, and was, she now realized, the object of Vanessa’s spellbound stare. What her mother had said about that mysterious third floor came back to her like a tidal wave and swept all her earlier thoughts away. But what was she doing, that woman in black, moving back and forth within a tiny space, as if she were inside a bubble? Was it Élida, the lady her mother chatted with? No, it was a girl . . . and those little steps backward and forward, opening and closing her arms. She looked like a doll in a music box. Finally Jessica worked it out: they were the movements of someone who is cleaning a room: making the bed, tidying up, vacuuming. The room must have been full of light, and she was wearing black; that’s why only her figure was visible. And that explained who she was: the maid. And perhaps it also explained why Vanessa was watching her with such interest. But why would Vanessa care about how that room was being cleaned? What did that have to do with religion? Maybe it was true that she had tried to call that apartment. For some deeply mysterious reason involving religion and housekeeping. And then the crying, the captivated stupor . . .

  Jessica looked at her friend again. Vanessa was still there, frozen. She lifted her gaze to the reflected figure, then let it drop back to Vanessa. She was beginning to breathe again. The horror was gradually receding, but deepening as well and expanding enormously. Up until now she had been assuming that she was Vanessa’s secret. Her interpretation of this strange scene had been entirely based on that assumption. But nobody owned the secret: it could detach itself from individuals and take over the world, and then there’d be no hope of understanding anything.

  She couldn’t make out the face of the girl in the reflection, but she didn’t need to. Her silhouette, her movements and her general aura were as unique as the features of a face. And they reminded Jessica of someone, irresistibly. She knew who it was: Cynthia, the girl who got killed, Cynthia Cabezas. Poor Vanessa! She’d seen Cynthia from her apartment and panicked. But how could a dead girl be there, on the third floor, making the beds? And not just that: the really unbelievable thing was that Cynthia, a student at Misericordia, like them, was working as a maid, even if she was dead. But if the owners of that apartment belonged to an esoteric cult, maybe they were using dead people as slaves. . . . Vanessa had discovered their secret, and now she didn’t know what to do. Jessica resolved to intervene, though she wasn’t sure how. It had to be something properly planned, she couldn’t simply improvise. In spite of everything, she almost smiled to see how fragile reason was: Vanessa’s crumbled at the first blow, all she’d been able to do was reach for the phone, like a castaway grasping at a plank.

  V

  Rapt, in the pink winter dusk, Maxi was contemplating something . . . something without a name. Action. Or silence. But no, it really didn’t have a name. And then, in the depths of the inexpressible, the work that he had invented began like a melody. Was it work? A service? A way to give meaning to his strength and free time? Or was it nothing at all? It was as if someone had made it his job to give up his seat on the bus. Doing a favor for a stranger in the street is, essentially, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act, almost an improvisation; in any case, not planned ahead, and impossible to integrate into a program. And yet that was what Maxi seemed to have done. But not exactly or entirely. His action hovered in a kind of ambiguity. For a start, it didn’t have a clear purpose. And any purpose it might have had was determined not by him but by the nature of the scavengers’ work. The scavengers themselves were not an eternal given; their very existence was contingent and depended on historical circumstances. Rummaging through garbage is not something that people do out of a sense of vocation: a little socio-economic shift would have been enough to provide them all with alternative occupations. But there they were: rummaging through garbage! It was as if they had adapted instantaneously, from one day to the next. Perhaps sudden adaptations like that were more frequent than they seemed; perhaps they were the norm. And they must have been occurring at many levels, on one of which a niche had opened up for Maxi, who, in his way, had also effected an adaptation, or something similar: he had transfigured an impulsive, spontaneous gesture into a way of occupying time.

  For someone as sensitive as he was to the passing hours of the day, the winter dusk was bound to have a meaning. But what was it? The meaning without a name, in other words: nothing. The meanings all fell away, or revealed how empty they had been from the start. Hardly anything happens, after all, in an individual life: most of the time is spent working to survive and then recovering from work. If someone added up all the time that individuals have spent achieving nothing, just to keep time ticking over, the sum total of centuries and millennia would be overwhelming. By comparison, history is a miniature. But history is a condensation of facts, an intellectual contrivance that artificially gathers together the little that happened in the vast, half-empty expanses of real time.

  The time of day was merely a signal for what was about to begin: the reverse of Maxi’s life, the night. His body eclipsed his consciousness, and from that point on he knew nothing. He didn’t know what happened at night. Against the background of that old ignorance, a newer one emerged: how did the inhabitants of the shantytown manage to survive? He understood the collectors’ system more or less, or could have (if he’d made a more concerted effort), but there weren’t many of them — a dozen, or two dozen, three at the most — and there were tens of thousands of families living in the shantytown. What did they live on? Air? He couldn’t rule it out. Maybe you didn’t need so much to live. Extending the earlier reasoning, it might be supposed that the moments at which you actually need something from outside to maintain your place in society or humanity are sparsely scattered over large empty stretches of time in which it is possible to manage with nothing. Added together, those moments of need would come to two or three minutes per year, and there’s always a way to get through such a short span of time.

  Anyway, what poor people? The few he saw (by the time he entered the shantytown, the doors were closing) looked and behaved like any other Argentines. The only thing that identified them as poor was living in those makeshift dwellings. It’s true that no one chooses to live in a shantytown, but had he chosen to live where he did? And was it really so obvious that no one would prefer that kind of poverty? Perhaps not when faced with an actual choice, but some might find it desirable in a speculative way. Those dollhouse-like constructions had their charm, precisely because of their fragility and their thrown-together look. To appreciate that charm one only had to be sufficiently frivolous. Maxi wasn’t, but for him, the houses had another advantage: they simplified things enormously. For someone wearied or
overwhelmed by the complexities of middle-class life, they could seem to offer a solution. Since their owners had made them, they could just as easily tear them down or leave them behind. After a day, a week, or a year, when the house had served its purpose, the owners could continue on their way. Or rather, make their way. . . . Of course, for this system to work you had to know how to make a house, of a rudimentary kind, at least. And who knows that? Poor people, that’s who. It sets them apart, and maybe it’s what makes them poor.

  There was a moment each night when Maxi found himself alone in the shantytown. He would relinquish the handles and let the cart’s owners take over; they would head off between walls of tin, vanishing after the briefest goodbye, or before. They never invited him into their homes, understandably. He felt as if he were waking up, as if something were about to start. But it was time to finish, to go home, have dinner and sleep. He could barely keep his eyes open or walk straight; his perception was closing down like a clam. Otherwise, it would have been a perfect opportunity to explore. When he went down one of those diagonal streets, he always stayed fairly close to the edge of the shantytown, in the part that was brightly lit. Above his head were strings of light bulbs forming circles, squares, triangles, rows: a different pattern in every street. He kept looking back over his shoulder. Behind him, he could see the white light of Avenida Bonorino; ahead, darkness. The inner depths of the shantytown disappeared into the shadows, and that, along with his sleepiness, discouraged him from venturing further. And then there was the fact that the streets didn’t lead to the center. Because of the angle at which they ran, they would miss it, however far they went. In fact, they led away from the center, not just certain streets but all of them. In the end, he would turn around and head for home.

  The shantytown wasn’t deserted. There were people about, of course: he was surrounded on all sides by a veritable ocean of humanity. And the people weren’t invisible. They did tend to go inside at that time of night, mainly because of the cold, and close their doors, or the sheets of tin or cardboard that they used as doors, but there were still some people walking around, or looking out, or hurrying home, or setting off for somewhere. No one paid him any attention; they didn’t even seem to see him. He didn’t look at them much either; he didn’t want to come across as a sightseer, or a busybody; anyway, he was shy, and by that time of night he wasn’t up to noticing anything much.