A Zero-Sum Game

by Eduardo Rabasa

  “Young comrade, I’m giving you the only treasure the people can afford. Let’s see if you can tune in to its hidden essence.”

  To consolidate his idea, Bramsos accompanied the professor to his car. He observed him standing by the back door as the driver hurried to open it. The professor got in without giving him a glance. Once the driver was ready, his employer raised his hand in a signal to depart. He made his farewells to Bramsos, forming a V-for-victory with his fingers.

  Bramsos created a plaster mold—to be filled with the molten coins—for a scene in an outdoor market. The stallholders were selling offal, herbs, and serapes to passersby. One trader had left his pea stall to walk to an adjoining space, where the scene underwent a drastic change. An old man with a goat-like beard and sloping shoulders was standing almost directly in front of a number of closed doors. The pea seller appeared behind him and, with one hand, held open a door, inviting the cornered old man to enter. The other was raised, on the point of bringing down an icepick to relieve his victim’s suffering with a lethal blow to the head. Behind the open door some kneeling monks, their heads bent and hands held high, were waiting to adore him as soon as he crossed the threshold.

  He poured the liquid metal into the mold and, when it had hardened, broke the plaster shell revealing the tragedy. The smoothness of the metal surface gave the figures an ambiguous anonymity. When the professor saw the work, he observed the scene for some minutes before saying:

  “Young comrade, I don’t know if you’re being insolent or profound. Help Fernando to put it in my car.”

  This time the professor went to the front door of the car and got in, clearly disgusted to have to travel next to the driver. He didn’t give Bramsos the victory sign, but pointed a single finger at him, wagging it up and down.

  He placed the sculpture in the garden of his house, explaining to visitors that he had commissioned it from a young, undiscovered artist, who had simply given his idea material form. The professor would them embark on grandiloquent explanations of its meaning. His audience would be instantly lost in in an intellectualized thicket: twilight, idols, false consciousness, the dance of commodities, permanent revolution, woolen serapes, interpretation, hegemony, immortality, goat stew, social engagement, artisanal mescal, deconstruction, past elegance, and various other concepts surfaced for air before returning to dive into the solemnity of the orator.

  Growing fame and the earnings from what he called his green period allowed Bramsos to become financially independent. Remaining in the same residential estate, he moved into a unit that—in honor of the oddballs that inhabited it—soon began to be known as the Others’ Building, and converted the entire apartment into a studio. He was, however, scarcely able to make ends meet until, one day, Beni Mascorro, the inseparable friend of the wealthy scavenger Mauricio Maso, turned up with four suitcases filled with paper money from a variety of countries. Mascorro wasted no time in explaining the purpose of his visit, adding: “My boss has clients all over the place. If you need a bit more, just tell us.”

  Bramsos counted his share incredulously: it was enough to enable him to live comfortably until he finished art school. If he put special effort into the piece, he could negotiate a life pension of marijuana when it was done.

  He laid a large canvas on the floor of his studio and, using the bills at his disposition, created over ten different hues of paint. He forcibly reduced the paper to a pulp in oiled mortars. He then put the mixture into metal cans containing paint of opaque tones: bright yellows, reds, and oranges. It was as if the dominant ashen green of the money infected the bills of other colors with its desolation.

  He dipped his paintbrush at random into the various pots, splattered paint in all directions, and covered the diagonal axes of a canvas in figurative shapes. Next, he perforated the bottoms of various cans, and left paths of dripped paint on the surface. He borrowed a neighbor’s ferret and had it run over the multicolored pool; the pet contributed to the painting by leaving a confusion of small pawmarks flanking the wake left by its belly and tail. Bramsos then used a fan to spray centrifuged paint on another part of the work: the medley of different techniques was focused on texture rather than form. He laid layer over layer until he’d squeezed out the last drop of paint, then stood on the table to view the result from above. He was satisfied with his motley ode to multinational extravagance.

  Bramsos let Mascorro know that the work was ready, and his client requested a home delivery so he could meet the artist. Once the painting had been hung, covering a whole wall, Maso came in to view it, wearing his cleaner’s uniform.

  “Hey, you bastard! What the fuck is this meant to mean?”

  “Nothing in particular. You see, I usually ask my clients to comment on what money means for them first. In this case, I had to guess.”

  “Yeah? So, ’cording to you, what’s money mean for me?”

  “Splattered shit we accumulate so we can swallow it, and so the others can’t swallow it.”

  Maso laughed quietly as he gave Bramsos a pat on the back.

  “Frigging artist, you don’t know the first thing. But I like it. I want another, double the material this time. But words aren’t my thing. I’ll draw something so you’ll get it.”

  Maso made a quick scrawl, folded the sheet of paper and handed it to Bramsos. On his way back home, the artist threw it in the first trashcan without even unfolding it.

  Mascorro came by the next day with twice as many suitcases. Bramsos separated his supplies from his pay and shut himself up to work. This time he emptied the contents of the bags on the floor and mixed the bills as thoroughly as he could. He created children like small angels flapping their wings in snow, swept them from side to side, threw them at the ceiling so he was showered in the acid rain.

  When he’d eliminated all trace of discrimination in terms of value, point of origin, color, and graphic style, he began taking bills one by one, sticking them precisely onto a canvas, the same size as the first. After completing a first mosaic, he immediately began to apply another layer, and continued this ant-like task until the last bill had been pasted on. On inspection he had the impression of a heterogeneous battalion of mercenaries, awaiting the order to earn their pay in blood, and decided to get in first: he used his strongest steel-blade Stanley knife to break their ranks with firm incisions; he made a circular cut, as large as, the canvas could bear; with a spatula, he took the skin off the damaged surface, leaving an expanse of injured bills. This done, he traced out a new, concentric circle with his knife and again scraped it with his spatula until it was lower than the previous one. This operation was repeated with increasingly smaller diameters, deepening the scraped area each time. The culmination was a small orifice, through which the white of the canvas could just be seen. The piece was a kind of inverted circular pyramid, like an eddy, incrusted in the block of pasted bills.

  “And what’s in the frigging hole?” asked Maso when he saw the piece.

  “If you look carefully, you’ll see that at the very bottom is everything that exists in our world. After so, so many turns, we arrive back at the infinite, but by a different route. A very different route.”

  “No way, you bastard! Look frigging Beni, come see my present for your new home. Give my friend here another suitcase as a bonus.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can only accept the amount stipulated in the contract.”

  Before leaving, Bramsos shook hands on the deal that assured him an unlimited supply of free drugs.

  17

  After a while, Sao and Max suggested that their friend hold a retrospective exhibition of his wealth-work in the gallery belonging to a group of ladies who organized art classes in the newly inaugurated commercial zone of the residential estate. They were certain of obtaining permission from the owners: the name of each piece was the amount employed to create it. The owners were credited for the loan of their works: it was an elegant way of announcing their acquisitive power. Sao and Max curated the exhibition, saying
they were surrounding wealth with poverty without fear of friction. The opulent pieces stood proud, looking down on the expanding belts of misery of other realities with the minimum of necessary goods.

  Part of Bramsos’ artistic policy was never to refuse a request. An enlightened beggar had commissioned a piece to remind him of his much-loved years as a poverty-stricken student. With the six one-peso coins he received, Bramsos decided to make a series representing the man’s descent in the world. All of them showed an identical coin, placed on the sill of a window, looking on to a building with eight windows. Even the first coin had a squalid, if serene integrity. It contemplated the windows opposite, occupied by scenes of everyday grayness, scattered with various white fantasies. There was a family having dinner in silence; a man alone, watching television with a beer in his hand; a boy playing piano, and, naturally, the scene of a woman undressing. The next in the series showed the same coin—a little tarnished, and slimmed down in terms of both thickness and width by Bramsos—looking from the window at the same building, but now with one pair of curtains closed. The tone of the scenes was slightly different: two children were fighting over a toy; a couple was arguing about bills; a little boy was memorizing the dialogue from a gangster film. As the series progressed, the coins became increasingly tarnished and meager. Their view was reduced by the number of closed curtains. The paintings became increasingly sordid; injection marks on arms; battered women being dragged by the hair; gamblers losing everything they had on a single hand; teenage girls hiding in bathrooms, taking abortion-inducing remedies. In the last painting, the coin was only recognizable as such because the viewer already knew what it was. It was almost a smooth, curved piece of wire, with barely the strength needed to look out its window. The figures it saw seemed condemned: a wino in rags, reeling and throwing up while rooting in the trash for something to eat; a woman being stabbed in the abdomen as muggers stole her purse; a pervert sodomizing a hen in front of his eight children, with hardened snot around all their noses and mouths; a domestic employee throwing a pan of boiling water in her boss’s face. The other windows were dark with desolate hermeticism.

  The vagabond agreed to allow the series to be shown in the exhibition on condition that his name was omitted—it was the only anonymous loan—and the curators arranged the six pieces around Maso’s miniature infinite, too absorbed in its abundance to realize what was happening.

  Visitors were given salon notes for the exhibition, written by Sao and Max.

  Ladies and gentlemen,

  Welcome to this first retrospective of the work of the well-known artist Pascual Bramsos, whose green period has caused a stir among art lovers and specialist critics. We hope that it will also be to your taste.

  Some relevant data to help you appreciate the collection:

  –5% of the pieces represent 84% of the total value of the exhibition.

  –The sum of the three most expensive works would be enough to buy a folding bicycle for every resident of the estate.

  –Pieces of medium value make up only 14% of the total.

  –The most marginal works have been the subject of numerous academic studies. Critics highlight the social conscience of an artist engaged with his community, with no trace of elitist frivolity.

  “Bramsos inverts and juxtaposes the bifrontal values of an obtuse representation that both attracts and repels the viewer toward the oblong abyss of his own ethereal identity, blurred by the most recondite interstices of the omnipresent panic of contemporary society.”

  The Happy Seal Magazine

  “A load of filthy shit.”

  I’ve Got the Talent, art supplement

  “With the skill and originality of the great masters and the unashamed freshness of every deconstructive avant-garde movement, Pascual Bramsos has opened a channel through which future generations, condemned to live in his dazzling shadow, will pass.”

  Information Bulletin of the Foundation for the Friends of Falconry

  The exhibition was a success, although Sao and Max had to bite their lips to stop themselves bursting into laughter at the sight of the solemn reading of the salon notes. Bramsos took the liberty of selling the vagabond’s series at a thousand times its original value. When he handed over the bulging envelope with the proceeds, the former owner calmly counted the bills, divided it in two in accordance with the artist’s work code, and returned the whole intact so Bramsos could create a new piece for him.

  18

  Since she was a small child, Sao had defended herself from the pus of scars with an instant smile. It was the only thing she’d been able to bring with her from her native jungles. She’d forgotten her mother tongue to the point of learning to pronounce her r’s normally. When her father celebrated the anniversary of the horror by getting drunk on rice liquor, Sao didn’t understand a word of his pent-up ravings. The alarm bell for helping him to bed was the shrieking produced when the burning powder fell from the sky. Señor Bac-Do would wave his hands in the air, attempting to brush off the string of incandescent ticks buried in his skin.

  It was as if Sao never lost the hope of healing her own open wound by trying to provide what others lacked: she volunteered to bathe infants in an orphanage; she took hot food to the estate’s security guards; she lent money she never asked to be returned to ex-boyfriends. Max would laugh when reminding her of the time she burst into tears on being shown a cartoon of a spider hanging from its own web, in which it had woven its farewell message.

  Now that she was able to formulate what she’d felt as long as she could remember, gratitude expanded her inner black holes. It sucked in with a voracity that shrunk her spirit. She had become a walking pincushion enclosed in her skin. The tension invariably materialized into the two questions she had never been able to answer: Who? Why?

  She wanted to discover the mechanisms behind the complex planning of uniform discipline. Millions of people linked in a common mission, ready to destroy life for abstractions based on other abstractions. Like a mechanic dismantling a machine in search of the principle generating its movement, Sao wanted to learn to take apart the rhetoric guiding the people possessed by the abstractions. What was hidden behind the feverish squandering of energy? What was the cause of so much expense, so much sacrifice, for the sole purpose of reaching into others’ way of being in the world? She would imagine a chessboard with irregular squares. They had indentations and hills, thick vegetation and sandy deserts. They were ruled by armies using diverse tactics. The objective was the same in all cases: to impose a way of life on the other colonists before the colonists imposed theirs on them. The crudest battalions attempted to assert their supremacy by force; they doled out beatings, dressed the wounds, and readied their victims to be instilled with their customs. Others carried exotic products whose novelty enchanted the locals to the point where they were very soon doing somersaults just to acquire them, and began to resemble the suppliers as they merged with their merchandise.

  The most astute battalions were the ones impossible to resist. They didn’t have to do anything; they just existed. Period. They exuded an aura of such charm, such enviable candor, that people would beg to imitate them. Whatever their age, character, appearance or level of physical coordination, they all appeared young, kindly, handsome, and expert dancers. They played a flute that, instead of sounds, emitted images. The followers would see examples of their most memorable moments: a dramatic soliloquy, some sporting feat, a million-dollar deal, or a disinterested aide during a famine. They obtained the surrender of entire territories without firing a single shot. They were the vanguard: the promise of terrestrial glamor without cares.

  The scene would dissolve in Sao’s mind when the whole chessboard descended into pitched battle. She was dazed by the anarchic flight of grenades, juicers, designer shoes, speeches to the oppressed, missiles, insipid comedies, torture chambers, tax exemptions, patent medicines, killer drones, and electronic music. Each band utilized its finest weapons. They overran territories in search
of beings to colonize, classifying them according to the basic dichotomy of friend-enemy. Both received the same treatment. The only difference was that they made a favor of forcing the friends to obey; the enemies were first raped, and then afterward had the usual orders barked at them. All the graphic, sonorous, commercial, or ideological violence was concentrated in a few knotted lines that sent Sao’s teeth over the edge. In the end, nothing was new. The same old turbulent enigma: Who? Why?

  She decided to study the history of regimented aggression. Perhaps if she understood the different ages, forms, wrappings, and justifications for broadening the range of fear by transferring it to others, she could calm her caffeine-fueled melancholy. Sao easily passed the exam to study international relations.

  19

  Max was experiencing his own personal future dilemma. His father had for years encouraged him to follow in his footsteps, but along a different path. The doctor finally hammered in the nail during a family dinner. Taking care that Max would overhear, he commented to a distant relation:

  “Quite true, dear cousin, at the level of the law on which I practice, there is no place for anything but genius, and I very much fear I have so successfully taken my place on the pedestal that Max will have to carve his name in some other sphere. He’s not a bad boy, just a little soft. Maybe if life hardens him, he’ll become a competent administrator. Though it remains to be seen what he might learn to administer.”

  Max put great care into planning his revenge. Where would his defiance hurt his father most? What he needed was something vague, subjective, useless: a profession disdained by society. The greater the possibility of financial failure the better. Against the diminutive might of the law—his father dreamed of a world in which every single possibility had been foreseen, codified, and sanctioned—he had to pose the ungraspable; some anarchic, subjective sphere. For hours he searched for the answer in the book so often used to indoctrinate him with lies, staring at pages, awaiting certainty. One sheet of white muteness hurled him to the next until he arrived at the end of the book and firmly banged it shut. At last, he had it: literature.