Shantytown

by Cesar Aira

  She was already turning around to ask the waiters when she remembered that there was a cell on the table. Both girls laughed at her distraction; Vanessa picked it up and called. Her mother answered. Vanessa said that she and Jessica had been caught by the rain and taken shelter in a pizzeria where they were waiting for it to stop. They were fine; there was no reason to be worried. Yes, they’d got a bit wet, but it was no big deal. She didn’t lie much, in the end, and given the circumstances a little white lying was justified. Her mother said something, and she pretended to remember Maxi (and actually remembered him), and said that her brother, whom she’d run into by chance just as it was starting to rain, had gone to a friend’s house and would probably spend the night there. She hung up with a sigh and passed the phone to Jessica, who called her mother and told her more or less the same story.

  “Mothers . . .” they said to the other two, with a resigned smile. “You know what they’re like.”

  “You’re lucky to have them.”

  “But you have each other,” said Jessica, “and you don’t have to talk on the phone because you’re together.”

  “Everyone has a mother, whether they like it or not,” said Vanessa. “It’s a mother’s world. That’s the only conclusion we can come to, in the end.”

  She looked at Jessica. Jessica looked at her, with a melancholy air. They were still living in a mother’s world. Speaking of “conclusions,” it was obvious that for Adelita and Alfredo, the adventure had come to an end, and it had ended well. They loved each other; they would get married and have children: they were home safe. But Vanessa and Jessica were still up in the air, faced with the never-ending choice between following the advice of their mothers and doing exactly the opposite. The only conclusion that this or any other adventure could have was to let it be a lesson . . . or not. That was the sole and dubious privilege of the middle class: not to learn from experience, to go on making mistakes, covered unconditionally by maternal insurance.

  XIII

  Maxi was sleeping in a big folding bed that the shanty dwellers had constructed months before and stored in readiness for the time when it would come in useful. They had made it for him when they noticed how, as soon as night fell, he was overcome by sleepiness, rightly supposing that sooner or later he would end up staying a bit too late and be unable to go home. They might not have spoken to him but they had observed and studied him carefully, and so they were able to build a bed to measure. It was a sort of camp bed, made of coarse elastic fabric stretched over an aluminum frame, with four sets of hydraulic hinges. It had solid metal detachable feet, two feet high, arranged in three rows, one at either end and one in the middle. The shanty dwellers made a folding bed because it would have taken up too much space otherwise, and naturally they didn’t want anyone but Maxi to use it. Plus it was easier to hide. They had also set aside a pair of linen sheets, and a vicuña-wool blanket, dyed bright red. These were never used either, in spite of which they were periodically taken to the laundry and the dry-cleaner’s to keep them immaculate. They also carried out simulations every so often, to be sure that when the moment came they could unfold the bed and make it up in a few seconds. And there was always a shack empty somewhere to house it; they had a roster for every day of the year.

  That night, when the Pastor came back from the esplanade with Maxi, who was wet and exhausted after having reunited the fiancés, the operation commenced immediately. They led him to the designated shack, and by the time he got there, stumbling along, seeing nothing, thunder crashing overhead, the bed was ready. He was fast asleep before his head touched the pillow.

  The shack was an almost regular cube and the folding bed just fitted into it, pressing on the front and back walls. It was one of a million similar cubes, juxtaposed with or without gaps, sometimes crammed together in rows or bunches, haphazardly arranged in a vast collective improvisation. The amateur builders preferred simple forms, not for their aesthetic appeal or utility but precisely to simplify things. Simplification had a special meaning in the shantytown, as distinct from the rest of the city. In waking life, simple forms are very intellectual or abstract, but in the world of dreams they are simply practical or convenient. And this enormous ring belonged by right to the unconscious. The electricity cables, as numerous and chaotic as the buildings they connected, reinforced the shantytown’s allegiance to the world of dreams.

  Cabezas was driving around the ring road: the metaphor of the moth and the flame could not have been more apt. With the windshield wipers overwhelmed and the headlights under water, he could barely see where he was going. But the huge illuminated diamond of the shantytown was on his left, so he couldn’t get lost. He had been around that circuit so many times, with the uneasy feeling that the mystery was just eluding his grasp, but all he had done was to make himself mysterious, without realizing! Now that he knew what he was looking for, he scrutinized each inward-leading street, checking the configurations of light bulbs suspended between the shacks. The bright patterns made him squint, even though he was seeing them through massive curtains of water. Everything was light in there, to the point where the light was reflecting itself.

  Although his attention was narrowly focused, he couldn’t help noticing that the “designs” formed by the light globes were “inside” others, which always had more or less the same shape, something like a lung. The attribution of a particular shape to a group of lights was disputable: they had to be joined up by an imaginary line, and with half a dozen lights or more, the joining could be done in many different ways. . . . If the idea was to indicate a location, it was paradoxical or counterproductive, but by the very nature of the medium, it couldn’t be as simple as a sign saying HERE IT IS. Also, he had to remember that this was a part of the overall proxidine system.

  He realized that the almost exaggerated brightness of the shantytown was due in part to the contrast with the surrounding darkness. Naturally, the electricity in the general area had been cut off because of the storm. But the shantytown wasn’t affected because its power was diverted from the high tension cables that supplied the whole city, which never went down. And that was handy for the dealers, since their only method for guiding the buyers depended on electricity.

  Finally Cabezas found the “duckling,” as clear and obvious as a sunny day. He pulled up immediately. When he opened the door, the water was up to his waist; he almost had to swim. No sooner was he out than ten thousand bucketfuls of water came crashing down on his head. But it didn’t bother him in the least. He had already adopted an amphibian attitude, and it all seemed perfectly natural. Everyone else was apparently reacting in the same way; it’s amazing how quickly people adapt to extraordinary circumstances.

  As soon as he entered the street, the news girls assailed him; they were everywhere. Wrapped in voluminous plastic capes, like the cameramen who were following them, and equipped with bulging goggles, they were indefinable monsters. The microphones they were holding out were also protected by waterproof hoods, and this abundance of plastic reflected the spotlights, turning the whole scene into a mobile accumulation of structures that seemed to be made of soft, crunchy glass. Guessing that they had mistaken him for one of the judge’s men, Cabezas tried to throw them off the scent. Over their inept questions, he shouted:

  “We’ve got him cornered on the other side of the shantytown, directly opposite here. I came to cut him off in case he slips through the net.”

  They rushed away, leaving him very satisfied with his trick. Indeed he felt that it vindicated his decision to be bad because now he had television on his side. But there was a risk that he hadn’t considered: someone recognized him from the photos in the live coverage, and the police fell on him like hungry dogs. There were shots, and everyone started running. The images on the television screens went haywire, as they always do in this kind of situation. The cameramen took cover wherever they could, and aimed their cameras at an empty scene, interminably. This unchanging fixity was exacerbated by the fact that because
of the suspense, and the fear of missing something important, the channels held off the ad breaks and kept the screen free of superimposed titles or images, leaving only the pure scenography of danger, in which, by definition, nothing could happen. For some reason, it was generally accepted that the lives of the cameramen were too precious for them to run the slightest risk. The only distraction was provided by the panting voices and nervous whispering of the news girls, hidden elsewhere, watching different scenes.

  In this case there was, however, some movement: the movement of the water. It was flowing as well as falling. The streets of the shantytown had become foaming torrents, rushing away from the center toward the edges in a continuous cascade. This might have led one to suppose that the center was higher, but it was not. And in fact, it is not correct to say that the origin of those turbulent currents was “the center,” since the streets did not converge toward the center of a circle, but ran obliquely, intersecting with the circumference at an angle of 45 degrees.

  A couple of shots had cleared the way. Like an obese alligator swimming against the current, Cabezas went from shack to shack, gripping his pistol in both hands, staring at the roughly painted numbers on the doors. He didn’t have to go very far. Just beyond the main garland of bulbs, in the shape of a duck, was number seventeen, in clear view. It was a cube like the rest, patched together from wood and tin, without windows or guttering. Inside lay the key to his dream of impunity, or perhaps simply to happiness.

  Meanwhile, Maxi was sleeping more deeply than ever. If it’s true, as people say, that nothing is more soporific than the sound of rain beating on a roof, conditions were ideal, though he didn’t really need any help. And the natural process had not been interrupted. No one had come to bother him; no one had entered his cubicle. But he must have been dreaming as never before. Unfamiliar beds make for more abundant dreaming because there are more physical disturbances for the dreamwork to interpret.

  Cabezas hurled himself at the door, and the impact burst it wide open. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Inside there was . . . simply nothing. There was no room. It was a door in a facade, behind which stretched a desolate scene full of rain, with other shacks, near and far, illuminated by the lightning. It was similar and different at the same time: outside, but also inside. His first thought was that he should have expected it: nothing’s ever that simple. But what could have gone wrong this time? The only explanation that occurred to him was that the Pastor had lied; but he hadn’t, Cabezas was quite sure of that. “The dead don’t lie,” he said to himself. And yet the truth was also an abyss. He didn’t have time to explore it because the judge appeared suddenly from the mouth of a dark alleyway, followed by her samurais. He raised his pistol thinking, “Goodbye proxidine,” but before he could pull the trigger, she emptied the magazine of her submachine gun into his body, riddling it with at least a hundred bullets the size of dates. As he fell down dead, his eyes closed on the vision of that mysterious patio-like space.

  What had happened? The Pastor had not lied, and no one had shifted Maxi. So? The boy’s protectors had adopted a solution that was rather more complicated, but possible and logical in the circumstances. They changed the configurations of the lights in all the streets. Since they didn’t know if Cabezas had memorized the series, they had to change them all so that he wouldn’t get suspicious. They preserved the order, shifting everything six places, so the “duck” ended up shining over the entrance of the sixth street to the right, which is where the killer policeman went in hoping to find his treasure and found his ruin.

  But did that mean that the shantytown could “spin”? Could that be possible? Perhaps it had been doing just that from time immemorial. Perhaps it had only ever existed as an endless rotation. Perhaps it was the famous “Wheel of Fortune,” not standing up, as everyone imagined, but humbly laid on the ground, which would mean that it was no longer a matter of some riding high while others were cast down: everyone was low, all the time, simply changing places at ground level. There was no escaping poverty, and life was made up of little shifts which were insignificant in the end. Anyway, those tiny fractions of a revolution were extremely rare; they occurred once in a blue moon, by a combination of circumstances so complex that no one could unravel it. That was what had just happened, and no one had noticed. It was the only thing that the television couldn’t cover, but the news teams had plenty to keep them busy.

  News girls and cameramen had gathered around the body (the second one that night) and were waiting for a statement from the judge, who was quietly giving orders to her men. Finally she faced the cameras, and they thrust the microphones at her. Someone had opened an umbrella and was holding it over her head. Her words were broadcast live to the whole country:

  “What we have seen here tonight is the demise of one of the most dangerous criminals to have threatened our national security in recent years. Let it be a warning to us, for the death of Inspector Cabezas does not mean the end of the proxidine problem; far from it — the problem has barely begun. He was a man of superior intelligence, perhaps the finest mind in Argentina: had he been able to use his gifts for good, he would have achieved great things, but he chose the infernal path of artificial contiguity. Many have been lured as he was, and sadly we can be sure that many more will follow. It is an endless slippery slope: people begin out of curiosity and end up killing in order to get to the “mother of all drugs.” Everyone is drawn to her, rich and poor, men and women, old and young alike. The mass media have a categorical duty to make it clear to society as a whole that the “mother” cannot be reached. All efforts in that direction are futile, at least within a human lifespan. You and your colleagues have repeated over and over that it is a “one-way street,” and that is not a metaphor, because proxidine’s effect on the user is to make the trajectory literally infinite. There is no point searching for the “mother” outside ecstasy for she is within it, implicitly, and all along the path of drug use she changes, taking on every conceivable form, in an incoherent and irresponsible succession, which leads the user astray as dreams abuse the sleeping mind.”

  July 29, 1998

  Copyright © 2001 by César Aira

  Translation copyright © 2013 by Chris Andrews

  Originally published in Spanish as La Villa by Emecã Editores S.A., Argentina, in 2001; published in conjunction with the literary Agency Michael Gaeb/Berlin.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  First published as a New Directions Paperbook Original (NDP1268) in 2013

  Design by Erik Rieselbach

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Aira, César, 1949–

  [Villa. English]

  Shantytown / César Aira ; Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews.

  pages cm

  “A New Directions Paperbook Original.”

  ISBN 978-0-811-22158-0 (e-book)

  I. Andrews, Chris, 1962–, translator. II. Title.

  PQ7798.1.I7V5513 2013

  863'.64—dc23

  2013027464

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, NY 10011

  ALSO BY CÉSAR AIRA FROM NEW DIRECTIONS

  An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

  Ghosts

  The Hare

  How I Became a Nun

  The Literary Conference

  The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira

  The Seamstress and the Wind

  Varamo

 

 

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