A Zero-Sum Game

by Eduardo Rabasa

  “According to Pascual Bramsos, the moment before the destruction of a world.”

  “So you really do know him?”

  “Yeah, I think I still do.”

  For the following few hours, Max had alternated between wondering if his anxious desire was going to be satisfied, and continuing to feign a genuine interest in the story of that apparition. With respect to the latter, his lack of autonomy was calming: Nelly was like an orchestral conductor directing the entrances and exits of an evening’s music, and for the moment she wanted to talk. Even so, Max had the impression that the words she spoke—issuing spontaneously from some other place—were laboring under the obligation to match up with her metallic voice. As soon as they were out of her mouth, they were free again. At times, Max allowed a number of them to pile up unheard so as to snatch instants of contemplation. Then, when he was on the point of losing their meaning, the threads of the narrative meshed together. Despite this distraction, the various passages of Nelly’s tale rammed into him like concrete blocks, leaving him in a pleasurable state of bewilderment. With maddening assurance, she was building to a climax.

  3

  “It’s like I grew up on a small farm, where the six children were seen as just one more species of the badly treated animals we made a living from. My dad was always saying he didn’t make any profit on us. Can you believe it? Saying we were too delicate to eat the pigswill; that it would be at least ten years of outgoings before we started to be useful; that the village doctor charged more than the veterinarian and did a worse job. And then, just to top it all off, he’d complain that the law said he had to send us walking two hours to school to waste our time with learning those letters that didn’t even help balance the books.

  “And the thing is, my dad didn’t believe in God either, he was just afraid of him. Like, in his way of thinking, just doing the religious stuff was enough to get God’s approval. That’s why he regularly attended mass, took communion, went to confession, gave small change to beggars, had his children baptized, and didn’t curse or anything. But in return, he was free to commit any other kind of cruelty that wasn’t actually prohibited. His main punching bag was my mom. He was always going on about how she’d given him four bitches but only two dog pups. Where was he going to find the money to pay four different punks to take them off his hands? Like, for years, it disgusted him to see her with a kid hanging from her boob the whole day. And that’s not all. The bastard used to rape her every night, and there was my mother, letting it happen, just giving a few sighs while she waited for him to finish. And the rest of us, listening to him bellowing and the bed creaking. The only good thing was that Dad was quick about it. It was only when Mom had a vaginal hemorrhage that he stopped knocking her up. Can you imagine how it would have been if he hadn’t? But the thing is that without a womb, she was hardly human for him. Even though she went on cleaning, sweeping, ironing, cooking, and putting up with his badmouthing, he didn’t see her as a woman any longer. And—what do you think of this?—he used to torment her, saying that God hadn’t made a mistake; that there was a reason why he’d sterilized her with that red flood. But the stupid cow kept her mouth shut. I never heard her complain or answer him back. Every time I go to visit, she’s just the same. Only more sickly, looking worse. Her face more worn and haggard.

  “You city folk always imagine you find out about sex when you’re pretty young, but I’d say the opposite, that we learn about it earlier on the farm; and not because they teach us about it in school with little diagrams. My brothers snicker about their first time, saying it was with some she-goats and a can of condensed milk. Does that sound like a joke to you? It does to me. Just from listening to the mules, I knew what my dad was doing to my mom every night. And then—you won’t believe this—when I was nine, some frigging farmer stood there gaping, just imagining what my boobs would be like in the future. Instead of saying something, my dad gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder and they went off to play cards.

  “But, like, I already knew I was different. Even as a child, I could see that with a body like mine I was going to be different from my mom and my sisters. Take it from me, we stopped going to school as soon as we were old enough to milk a cow and carry a pail of milk. It’s a miracle we even learned to write our own names. My sisters were already well and truly over the hill before they were even grown up.

  “Dad used to get together the money to give them quinceañera parties, and then let everyone know he had a head of cattle for sale. You can’t imagine how pathetic it was. Now, I think it was like auctioning off a worn broom—they were like skin and bone from malnutrition. Take it from me. They hardly had eyes, just two dead marbles crying out to be owned by someone else. When the oldest got pregnant by a drunken skirt-chaser, he put her out there in some hovel to starve in the cold. The other two went on drudging away for Dad. Nice job that; busting their guts to serve him and getting paid with insults.

  “So that’s how it was, but in my case, something took pity on me and made me different. I don’t know why, because we all came from the same place, but I was made of more solid stuff, and so I was sharper. It’s just that thanks to the flesh between my skin and bones, I could see the world didn’t begin and end at our farm. When I was around thirteen, I started noticing a kid a bit older than me—one of his jobs was to collect the dung we used as fertilizer, and even his once-weekly wash couldn’t get rid of the sour smell. He was the first person to be hypnotized by my black eyes. I thought about him back there in the bar, because he was just like you, getting real close, trying to see if there was some trick. No way. Anyway, I wasn’t a kid anymore, so I let him do whatever he liked. One day, somewhere between riled and horny, he picked me up and threw me onto the straw in the stable. Can you believe it? He didn’t just want to fuck me; he looked at me as if he wanted his eyes to get inside mine. When he’d finished, he sunk his head into my shoulder and cried. To tell the truth, I didn’t even enjoy it, but it didn’t bother me either. I cleaned myself up a bit and helped him to feed the pigs.

  “Ugh, you’ve no idea how it was. Whenever we could, we escaped to the stable and got down to it. I even started liking the way he smelled. Gloomy though that farm was, there were contraband tastes and smells there in the hay we rolled around in. But the day my dad saw me looking happy, he knew something was up. Even though he’s the stupidest man I’ve ever known, the old fool is sure good at spotting any attempt to get out of the cage—if you’d seen the number of dolls and toy cars he stamped into the dust, just because he saw us playing with them—and by that time, he was keeping a close watch on me. He wanted to know why I didn’t just play possum like the others. He checked my hands and my clothes. He knew something was going on and he was convinced he could find out what.

  “On the farm, everyone got on with his own thing. Imagine, we’d walk past each other without saying a word. The others were like part of the landscape, especially my sisters with their blank expressions. That’s why we didn’t bother much about hiding ourselves away, but now I come to think of it, me and that boy were pretty stupid. We only ever waited till Dad was asleep or had gone to the store. One day he snuck up on us at just the wrong moment. Jeez, if you’d seen the beating he gave that poor kid. He went on hitting him with a shovel until two of the farm hands stopped him. Then he told Mom he didn’t talk to prostitutes. And you know what? After that I was even more invisible to him.

  “You see, that’s when I really found out what it was like to become one of them. All the long years to come suddenly weighed down on me. In a mirror in my head, I saw myself deformed. I used to lie in the stable and try to masturbate, but when I finally managed it, I felt even sadder. What I think now is that it wasn’t pleasure I was looking for, just to escape for a moment.

  “And that’s how it was. Like, I was used to living as if I had a layer of paste numbing me to outside contact. My dad was right, we were just another species of animal he struggled to raise on the farm. And the worst was when th
e kid snuck back one day. At first, I didn’t even recognize him. He told me a bonesetter had pummeled him all over—and him howling with pain—trying to heal the damage my father had caused. He was lame in both legs, and on his head he had a bald patch from the blows to his skull. He stood looking at me with something like hate and just told me to grab my stuff, that we were going to the city on the tomato truck that left in the early morning.

  “I watched him walking off with his new limp. Then, without even giving it a second thought, I packed my few clothes into a bag and waited nervously for the hours to pass. At the time we’d agreed, I went to the kitchen—walking on tiptoe for fear my dad would hear—like I was crossing a minefield. I heard the sound of the truck waiting for me on the dirt road. When I was about to go out the door, the light came on. Jeez, I can’t describe the frigging panic. My whole life was going down the fucking drain. Thinking there was nothing for it, I turned round to face him and saw my mother with a shawl over her head, like she was a spy trying to hide her identity because of what she was about to do.

  “‘Hurry up, my girl, he might wake up. I’ve written my cousin Orquídea’s number on this envelope. God bless you and care for you. If anything goes wrong, call my cousin.’

  “I can’t tell you just how surprised I was. She handed over the money she’d been secretly saving, together with a pretty empty hug. My knight in shining armor was waiting for me in the tomato truck. The great idiot didn’t even get out to help me in. I’d never left the farm before. I was like under a spell, watching that whole dry landscape pass by. For the first time, after all that nothingness, there was something.

  “We came to a market that looked to me like the biggest one in the whole world. I gave the envelope with the money to my new boss; he gave the driver a couple of bills and we left. He already knew the city a little. With my money, he paid a month’s rent on a small room in some poor neighborhood. The door was hardly shut before he was good and horny, and started stripping my clothes off to celebrate our new life.

  “The next morning, we went out, looking for work for him. As he was ambitious, he wanted to try his luck first in a department store. Boy, you should have seen it! When he wouldn’t give up, the assistant threatened to call the store security team if he didn’t leave. As for me, it was the usual, you know: Would I like to meet him for a coffee when his shift was over? So we spent the whole day walking. We felt like the frigging city had already calculated just how many ants it needed to do its drudgery. It was like other people didn’t even move to one side if they wanted to pass where we were standing.

  “One night, he told me he wanted to take a walk round the block on his own. And what do you know? He never came back. With my last few coins, I phoned my aunt, Orquídea. What with all the crying and confusion, I felt like every car, building, policeman, street seller, tram, and beggar was part of a machine trying to tear me to pieces. Luckily, I spotted the plaque on an old palace and my aunt was able to locate me. She came hanging on the arm of a bearded guy with a beret and hugged me like we’d known each other all our lives. She took me home, making me feel like it was no big deal. And that’s how she started looking out for me. What do you think of my arrival in Villa Miserias?”

  4

  Max dressed hurriedly so as not to be late for his first day at work. He hesitated a little on seeing his long hair in the mirror: Ponce hadn’t mentioned anything about appearance. As he jogged down the stairs from the third floor, Max considered the two possibilities related to his change of status to a proprietor of a prestigious apartment: upward, on his own steam, or downward with someone else’s help. Without having done a thing, he was now worth more than the residents below him. Even the apartment on the second floor that hadn’t been split had degraded through contagion: the owner couldn’t charge the same rent because of the washing hanging in the neighboring windows.

  Max was aware there was no way of stopping the leap into nothingness. His only doubt was whether, when he pulled the ripcord, a parachute would appear or an iron block. Juana Mecha saw him leave with his air of radiant misfortune.

  “Watch out for the holes with another hole in the bottom,” she said with genuine concern.

  “Don’t worry, Juanita. I’m not afraid of the end of the world.”

  He crossed Plaza del Orden and went into Villa Miserias’ commercial zone. There, the dominant aesthetic was functionality: each of the individual premises had its own particular lack of personality. Taken as a whole, they were like a giant piece of discolored bait, designed to attract short-sighted fish. In The Daily Miserias, Max had read an article by his new boss on the factors determining the behavior of regular customers. He was surprised to find they were the opposite of what he’d expected: nowadays, the stores were using negative emotions like anxiety and inadequacy as hooks. In the past, they had promised a cosmeticized form of happiness, a better life brought about by the product in question. Things had changed: the prevalent mood was more like putting on your best finery to go to a funeral. No brand now offered paradise. Rather, they communicated the idea that their non-essential products lightened the burden. Max stopped to breathe in the atmosphere. It didn’t even smell clean. G.B.W. Ponce had rounded off the article with his usual figures: 87% of purchases generated greater unease; 91% of customers made themselves unhappy imagining there was a better, cheaper version of the thing they had just bought; 79% suffered heartburn on seeing new residents laden with bags of who knew what; the cleaning staff collected a weekly average of a cubic foot of fallen hair from below the ATMs; 98% dreamed of their next spending spree before having finished the present one.

  Max meandered until he came across the arrogant, slime-green sign, commissioned from Pascual Bramsos. The words were formed by a fine layer of bills glued on a white background:

  $UPERSTRUCTURE

  WE TELL YOU WHAT YOU DIDN’T EVEN KNOW YOU THOUGHT

  He also noted a small metal plaque assigning the design of the internal space to the architect Horacio Rorka. Inside, the employees moved freely between plasterboard cubicles with comatose workstations. An artificial plant flourished in each corner; Rorka had explained to Ponce that they saved water, avoided termites, and, anyway, the air conditioning system made up for photosynthesis by recycling the air they all breathed. It had also been shown that plastic plants contributed to lowering levels of labor unrest. G.B.W. Ponce reigned over an accountant, a secretary, and a team of six young economists who their boss affectionately called the Crushed Humps. They spent the twelve hours of each working day performing regression analyses on their computers until the lenses of their glasses had tripled in thickness. Panic fueled their search for infallible causalities.

  Only the director of the company had an individual space: a circular abomination, assembled from tinted glass panels, situated in the heart of the $uperstructure offices. It contained only a desk and two slender chairs with backs curving slightly forward: a technique for keeping the spine alert and reducing the proclivity for wasting time on mental strolls. Ponce didn’t even need to oversee his employees; the level of paranoia on its own was enough to meet his aims.

  Max entered warily and stood by the disciplinary chair marked out for him. He found Ponce in the stage prior to making a new rip in the veil: after having interrogated his tables for hours, he lent an ear to the numbers, waiting for them to whisper a new maxim to him. Then he entered into dialogue with them, expressing his level of agreement or incomprehension. Max listened to the low monologue.

  “So they’re ready to accept the naked truth? Yes, yes, I see. But they’ve been inoculated against nausea. Great. We’ll go with it then.” Ponce raised his head and scrutinized Max through his dark glasses, as if wondering who the hell he was and what he was doing there.

  “I’m Max Michels. Yesterday, you told me to turn up for the job.”

  “Tell me about yourself. I’ll order a coffee. Your place is out there with the others. I’ll explain what I want you for. I need you to start today.”<
br />
  “May I sit down?”

  “The list of candidates for the presidency of the colony closes in two weeks. They’ve all contracted us. First we give them an edited version of this document. Read it. Apart from the last part—that’s internal and confidential—everything else is a report on how things stand. It functions as an equitable starting point. Then, depending on the style of each of the candidates, we give personalized advice. We track the changing opinions of the voters during the campaign: they only tell us what we’ve known from the start. There’s rarely any great difference between the photos at the starting and finishing lines. The ballot box simply reflects the preexisting irrationality. It’s to do with charisma, physical appearance, or what people think will happen if the candidate wins. But you shouldn’t underestimate the relevance of the process: it distracts the residents for a while and legitimizes authority.

  “The last time round, I came across a kid crying with rage because he didn’t come of age for three weeks, and so, couldn’t vote. I tried to console him by explaining that no individual vote mattered, but he answered with the commonplaces his parents had instilled in him. The same old argument that if we all thought the same way, no one would vote, and then you couldn’t complain, and all the rest of it. Did you hear about that girl’s suicide last week? I asked him. Of course he had; she was a classmate. Do you realize that if we all thought like her, and all committed suicide at the same time, Villa Miserias would cease to exist? He told me to fuck off and left even more furious than before, though calmer too, because he had a specific target for his frustrations.

  “Max, I want you to understand the psychological importance of the vote. The crucial point is that each and everyone feels he decided. Or that he lost because the boneheads didn’t listen to him. Because they didn’t understand the things he did. It’s a unique mechanism. The whole is condensed in each consciousness. The illusion of having an effect is key. It’s the basis of the system. Without it, the whole thing would collapse. Or maybe not. Could be it’s the last annoying foothold. That’s exactly what we want to verify.”