A Zero-Sum Game

by Eduardo Rabasa

  As he set out, Max weighed up the situation, taking into consideration the reasons that, in their moment, had been behind Severo Candelario’s actions. In comparison to Max, who was aware—precisely thanks to Candelario's misfortune—of the insurrection involved in his decision, the teacher had lacked the necessary guile to understand the magnitude of his actions. Candelario had been able to appreciate the texture of the details but not the whole picture. He’d seen the chance to add his voice to something that worked, and so had decided to take an active part in it. His enthusiasm had prevented him from correctly interpreting the obstacles put in his way when he asked for the registration form, or the fact that he was the only male candidate without a mustache in living memory. His campaign had been anything but radical; he helped carry the old ladies’ shopping bags, asked the children about their favorite superheroes. At several years’ distance, the outcome of the story rested on a single detail, his electoral slogan: “With your constant help we’ll get better and better.” It was based on pedagogic principles such as the importance of each cell playing its part for the good of the whole and the notion that untiring repetition leads to perfection. Without realizing, he was attacking the very foundations of Quietism in Motion.

  Candelario was in the habit of taking things calmly. Years of teaching had taught him that the task of molding souls required perseverance, a quality clearly expressed by his most treasured possession: a growing collection of yearly albums of black and white photos. On each odd-numbered page, a photograph was pasted in exactly the same place. Always the same image, taken every day at 7:19 in the morning, from the same angle. Even when he caught pneumonia, he managed to persuade the doctor to allow him his daily expedition to photograph the tree growing in the green area behind his building.

  He had begun to portray the tree when it was still a timid shoot. With the passage of time, it became a proud willow, weeping majestically in all directions. If adjacent photos were compared, it was impossible to see any differences. But then, with an expression of childish glee, Candelario would take the album in his hands and rapidly flick through the pages. The metamorphosis of the willow caused him a spasm of tenderness. With ant-like diligence, Candelario used to say, his camera had captured the unfolding of the tree’s soul. After taking his photograph, he would stand, rapturously contemplating the willow, hunting for a tangible difference from that other tree, portrayed the day before. His perpetual failure to find one left him in ecstasy. Then he would set off for school, ready to add a pinch of education to the young minds in his charge.

  He was a man of singular ideas. After the years spent studying the great masters, what could he say that was new? It seemed to him blasphemy even to attempt it; the future was set in stone. This was the basis of his decision to join the march of Villa Miserias’ progress. It wasn’t that he considered that progress to be either appropriate or desirable, but rather it was as definitive as the development of the willow he venerated and he thought it a duty to add his modest abilities to the project. Without any greater pretensions than being a single heartbeat more in the pacemaker determining the pulse of his community, Candelario put down his name for the Villa Miserias presidential election. When he was leaving the administrative office, his candidacy duly registered, Juana Mecha welcomed him to the contest with, “Skinned chickens had feathers once.” Candelario took this as an unmistakably good omen.

  Neither Perdumes nor the members of the board feared for a moment that Severo Candelario would be able to beat the usual pair of throwaway candidates. They initially took his registration as an act of insolence. However, when they heard his slogan and gauged his potential for causing a breach, they resolved to destroy him without mercy.

  “With your constant help, we’ll get better and better” constituted a threat on a number of fronts. The word “help” had been exiled from the collective lexicon. It was an anachronism. Time and again, it had been proven how useless it was to pull someone out of the swamp when he was determined to be there. The slime ended by soiling even the rescuer. This couldn’t be allowed in a community of high-flying individuals. Moreover, “we’ll get better and better” suggested a collective enterprise. The effort needed to get across the message of the individual’s responsibility in his destiny had been enormous…It was heresy to allude to their general impact. Candelario was a puppet of himself who could be ignored. But not his slogan. That same night, they asked Joel Taimado to start proceedings in the process of destroying the schoolmaster.

  Candelario was so absorbed in his new mission that he didn’t notice his neighbors’ strange glances or the almost undetectable pauses before they returned his greetings. It was his wife who first made him understand something was wrong. On the second floor of their building, a young insurance salesman shared an apartment with a colleague. Almost every morning, he would take the same minibus as Señora Candelario to the metro station on their way to work. He began to leave a few minutes later, just in time for Clara Candelario to see him get to the main road as she set out through the asphyxiating exhaust fumes of the pedestrian walkway. One day, to clear up her concerns, she decided to wait for him. During their entire walk, the young man spoke on his phone to a client he’d woken up to remind that the policy on his old scooter was due to run out in four months. Once aboard the minibus, he refused to let Señora Candelario pay for them both—something they normally took turns in doing—despite the fact that he was clinging onto an external grab rail with just one foot on the first step. With his free hand, he managed to pass his crumpled bill to the driver, who was annoyed at having to give him change. Each time the bus stopped, he would get off to let new passengers on, without losing his place. When they arrived at the metro, he was the first to disembark and immediately disappeared into the station entrance. His neighbor saw no more of him.

  Señora Candelario lost no time in discovering what was going on. The following morning, she planted herself in front of Juana Mecha and asked if she’d heard anything. Without in the least diminishing the trsssh trsssh of her broom, the latter simply responded: “People don’t like being reminded they’re people.” She pointed the handle of her boom to the façade of the building where someone had written the piece of graffiti Candelario would see repeated ad nauseum during the following days: “Candelario, you cunt, who are you going to humiliate next?” Taimado’s squad had done its job. The handwritten report detailed an incident the teacher thought had been long forgotten.

  The official letter informing him he was to be relocated to a different school had stated that his only sin was naiveté. And possibly overzealousness. Each year a call went out for the Children’s Science Olympics, an event the authorities of the state primary school where Candelario worked as a fifth-grade teacher mostly ignored. In the year of the scandal, Candelario had among his students a very bright girl with a great talent for abstract thought. It was she who had brought the competition to Candelario’s attention. He began to pay her more attention in class, working with her on specifically designed tasks. As the difficulty of these tasks increased, the girl always rose to the challenge. Candelario put the case before the headmaster, who—after having made sure it wouldn’t involve any additional effort on his part—agreed to the teacher’s proposal: during the remaining month, the girl could stay behind for a couple of hours each day to prepare for the competition. The next step was to obtain the family’s permission.

  The best procedure would have been to get this from the mother. The problem was that her job as a secretary prevented her accompanying her two children, so that it was their grandmother who took them to school each morning and collected them afterward. Even though Candelario’s proposal would mean taking the boy home and then returning for his elder sister, the grandmother signed the authorization without hesitation. Candelario promised to bring an extra sandwich each day so the child would not go hungry.

  The children’s father had given up work at a very young age due to an accident in the laundry where he was working
: he’d lost an arm in a supersonic rotary dryer while trying to demonstrate to a workmate there was no great risk involved in placing it there. The proprietors of the business had given him a modest payoff in order to avoid a lawsuit that was, in the end, completely groundless. From that time on, he’d spent his days at home, drinking in front of the television. His evenings alternated between episodes of violent behavior and yearning monologues related to the days when he’d been a whole man.

  His children did their best to avoid him. Happily, he didn’t even notice the eldest wasn’t getting home from school until late afternoon. The dispute began during the week before the completion, while she was going over her exercises one night. The father staggered into her room to ask what the hell she was doing at that hour. No point in working hard just to get screwed like him. The child kept her eyes down. She attempted to defend herself from his invective by solving the problem with a trembling hand. The father tore the page from her notebook and left the room muttering incoherent insults. The child’s grandmother came out and he pushed her against the wall with his remaining arm. He then sat in the kitchen to finish off his plastic bag of pulque in giant gulps. Later, when the children and the old lady were deep asleep, it was his wife’s turn. She tried to control the explosion by explaining that the girl was preparing for a competition. Her teacher had chosen her and no one else. He couldn’t give a fuck. What did those frigging old ladies think? That they were better than him because they could ride a bicycle through the park? They were only good for one thing. His daughter wasn’t taking part in any competition.

  His ban had little weight. First, because, by then, he had no practical authority. For his wife, he was like one of those intoxicated prophets of doom who shout in the streets, under the effects of a solvent-soaked rag. What’s more, he wouldn’t remember the episode the following day. His mornings were hostage to the hangovers that awaited the eggs his mother-in-law prepared for breakfast.

  The tragedy was that the child had heard it all. Her mind paid no attention to the actual words and only processed what was not said: her dad had lost an arm and it was her fault. She stealthily hurried to her closet, being careful not to wake her grandmother or brother—with whom she’d shared a bed her whole life—took a plush turtle out of the plastic bag where it lived, and went back to bed, lying as near the edge as she could. She spent the rest of the night retching up acidic spume into the bag. In the morning, she got up early to rinse the bag out, but no longer had the strength to hide her trembling, the cold sweats and fever. Her grandmother put a damp towel on her head before taking her brother to school. The girl closed her eyes when she heard her father’s unsteady steps in the passage. She might as well not have bothered. He did nothing more than grab hold of the doorframe and then continue to the kitchen to sprawl in a chair and await his food.

  On the third day of his pupil’s absence, Candelario begun to worry. At the close of classes, he asked the grandmother if he could accompany her home to see how the girl was doing. The elderly lady thought that was fine: she was delighted to be able to talk nonstop the whole way and slightly exaggerated her arthritic gait so the teacher would take her arm when they crossed road junctions. As they were nearing the dirt track where the family lived, they saw the girl playing with her dolls outside the house. Her grandmother’s shout brought her back to reality. When she realized who was walking beside her, she ran back inside. The schoolmaster picked up her two rag dolls before going into the kitchen.

  “Who the hell’s this jerk and what’s he doing here?” was the father’s greeting to his mother-in-law.

  “A very good afternoon to you, sir. I’m Severo Candelario, your daughter’s teacher. Delighted to meet you. It’s just a few days to the Science Olympiad and I wanted to see how…”

  “My daughter’s not taking part in any competition. Get the fuck out and leave us in peace.”

  “Sir, forgive the impertinence, but please allow me to tell you your daughter has studied hard and is very excited about the Olympiad.”

  “Listen, you bastard, no one makes me look small in my own house.”

  “Would it be asking too much for me to at least say hello to her?”

  “Why the hell should you worry about us?”

  “Sir, with all respect, it’s a good opportunity for your daughter. If she wins the Olympiad she can travel and get a scholarship.”

  On hearing this last remark, the father lunged at Candelario. The teacher and the dolls leapt to one side and their aggressor tripped on a chair leg. He was unable to put his single arm out in time to save himself and his face smashed into the edge of the kitchen sink. The girl heard the noise and came in to find her teacher attempting to help her father to stand up. Seeing him there, his left eye closed and bloody, she gave such a shriek that the teacher’s reflex action was to let the victim fall again to attend to the child, who only stopped screaming long enough to take a breath and start again. The grandmother took her to her bedroom. Candelario attempted again to assist the father, who, in an effort to clean himself, had gotten blood all over his face. He lashed out one last time, with an accompanying stream of insults. The schoolmaster understood that it was time to throw in the towel. He managed to mumble, “I’m extremely sorry,” before hurrying out of the family home, consoled by the two sad rag dolls he still keeps as a souvenir of the only stain on his record.

  Perdumes planted the story on a few fertile tongues. It immediately put out roots in multiple directions. In one version, Candelario had forced the girl to bring him a steak and cheese sandwich every day. In another, he’d tied the invalid father’s remaining arm and one of his legs behind his back. It was the most widely broadcast version that broke Candelario: he’d touched the grandmother and the girl in inappropriate ways, obliging them to carry out the fantasies he mimed with the rag dolls.

  The haggard teacher abandoned the campaign without giving formal notification. He was so depressed by the silent disdain of his neighbors that he practically never left his refuge, except to take his daily photo of the tree. And then came the final insult. On the same day as it was announced that the winner of the election was one of the two usual faces—Candelario would go down in history as the only candidate not even to win in his own building—a handwritten circular, without any official signature, was slipped under his front door. It stated that the tree in the green area behind Building 23 was a threat to the safety of the residents and so would be immediately felled. One member of the condominium was required to supervise the team of technicians who would carry out the task. The board was notifying Severo Candelario that he had been assigned this responsibility. He was to present himself in the green area at 7:19 the following morning to undertake this task.

  Candelario turned up a few of minutes early to take his farewell photo. Taimado’s Black Paunches, dressed up as tree surgeons for the occasion, were ruthlessly punctual. Their electric saws were indistinguishable from their twisted grins. The schoolmaster signed the order unleashing the carnage and they inexpertly began lop the defenseless tree, brutally attacking even the fallen branches, brandishing their saws like obese ninjas finishing off the enemy. The trunk was attacked from several angles. It was hours before they managed to penetrate it, but when the tree was unable to hold out any longer, irregularly shaped chunks began to tumble down. As darkness fell—Candelario had not even moved when the Black Paunches had interrupted their work to eat their usual leftovers—they called it a day, leaving just a few inches of the base, scarred by the teeth of the saws. Candelario didn’t notice when the last of the saws was switched off; he could still hear the roar in his head when Clara finally came to take his hand and lead him back to their apartment.

  The schoolmaster continued his usual routine. Every morning at 7:19, he would go out to take a photo of the mutilated trunk that would never again grow. He continued to fill albums, continued to flick the pages for visitors. It was now an ode to the decomposition of matter. After his retirement, he would spend hours sitti
ng on his bench, mentally visualizing every detail of his tree. He was never alone; the two tattered rag dolls, by this time without eyes or hair, accompanied him. Severo Candelario became a melancholy statue symbolizing a remote era, almost totally erased from Villa Miserias’ collective memory.

  12

  And what if they heap shit on me too?

  Yeah, you bastard. But would it be any worse than this?

  Stop talking, you jerk. Just go put your name down. Get it over and fucking done with.

  Shit! There she is talking to Perdumes. That great asshole’s dazzling her with his smile.

  Sure it was really them?

  Positive. I’d better get a move on and stop imagining all this trash.

  Imagining trash? If you say so. We’re always here, ready for any eventuality.

  13

  It was also a breach for Perdumes, a signal that the time had come to close the polygon, so that all its points led to the same place. The bulldozers arrived and with them the dust. The dust that, from then onward, would so thickly coat the existence of Villa Miserias that the inhabitants only noticed it when it wasn’t there. Outside the estate, they found breathing a strange experience, as if something were missing, until they returned to the customary dose of irritation the air administered to their lungs.

  His plan to limit the horizon began with territorial expansion: Perdumes acquired an enormous vacant lot adjoining the estate. The founders of Villa Miserias had, in their day, met with a complex ownership regime that had made any form of financial transaction impossible. But Perdumes knew who to talk to and how much to offer. A solemn ceremony was organized to inaugurate the works, during which Perdumes’ alabaster smile hit the intervening wall without shaking it, signifying the beginning of the future. After the demolition of the wall, the present-day limits of Villa Miserias were traced out. With the machinery came the hands needed for the construction of the future. The plot was to be fitted out as a commercial zone with office space. The Villa Miserians would soon be able to realize their most hidden fantasies. Up to that moment, the reach of Quietism in Motion had been limited by the rigidity of its structure, which made it hard to separate the residents by value. From that moment a reverse order process began: Perdumes had traced out the course on which the tide of those with the possibility of grasping a lifejacket would travel.