The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  A few examples:

  The DJ Tomás Pincho (who found success in the U.S., recording Iron Martin, a rap-dub-clank version of the national and telluric poem about a fleeing gaucho).

  The young and acerbic blogger, alias Florida Boedo (writing posts where she reveals embarrassing details about intellectual life and reproduces the phrases of others that she makes her own, like what Saul Bellow said in Stockholm, in 1976, receiving the Nobel, that thing about, “We must not make bosses of our intellectuals. And we do them no good by letting them run the arts. Should they, when they read novels, find nothing in them but the endorsement of their own opinions? Are we here on earth to play such games?” and over and out and I hate all of you, all of you).

  The successful and popular barrio writer Rigoberto Paponia (who starts out writing about his neighborhood, then about his street, then about his house, next about his room, later about his desk, and who, these days, is working on a macronovel about his hand and the pen that his hand holds, without that preventing him from pretending not to know any of the residents on the street where he still lives).

  His nemesis, the academic Edith “Ditta” Stern-Zanuzzi, who, clutching her lectern at the university like the rudder of a ghost ship, combats Paponia’s costumbrist-existential zeal. Ditta, with her throwback bohemian look that makes her not passé but vintage. Ah, Ditta: to whom The Young Man devotes special attention, not at the time of creating her but of re-creating her. Because Ditta (unlike a good part of his mythology) is inspired by someone real. Someone who laughed at him when—wandering from one literary workshop to another—he attended one of her canonical lectures. And, raising his hand to ask about The Writer (absent from the complex diagram that Ditta just finished presenting and imposing on the audience like an unmovable Table of the Law), she burst out laughing and made fun of him, in front of everyone, for daring to mention such an absurd name, so out-of-place on her Parnassus. Ah, Ditta: her colleagues accuse her of “copying” foreign ideas for her publications. Ah, Ditta: glimmers of Susan Sontag and Joan Didion and a pinch of Nora Ephron or Fran Lebowitz (that’s where she ends up and that’s where she takes a stand and that’s where she stays; because Ditta will never read Deborah Eisenberg, Renata Adler, and so many others because “I have no time for what gets written outside my country”) when, every so often, she has to create/insert “something ingenious” somewhere. So, to her young and beautiful followers, the so called dittettes, Ditta—feared and admired—is “a genius” and “gorgeous,” and she seduces them sapphically yet platonically, with small but intense home seminars, on her floor where, between one theoretical jab and the next, she serves “homemade croissants.” After a while, one veteran dittette, tired of making the pilgrimage to that three-room Mecca, feels she has the necessary support and attempts a coup d’état, which, inevitably, fails: Ditta is seemingly always two steps ahead, not due to intelligence on her part but to ineptitude on everyone else’s. So, in addition, fearing reprisals that always come from the most unexpected angles and always via some intermediary, the majority of her detractors only dare to whisper, off the record and after one too many drinks, that “in her essays, Ditta is always rehearsing and never performing and it’s possible she’ll never even make her debut.” At most, at very most, she gets parodied in some end of semester performance where students in the upper level courses put on a little vaudeville. And, of course, only a man can play Ditta.

  The fashionista Facundo Anastasia (who one afternoon, armed to the teeth, goes into a Global Congress of Literary Workshops and shoots up some two hundred proto-storytellers “because they wear striped and faded T-shirts over their guts; and their sweaters are horrible; those light blue V-neck sweaters, like big and fat and old schoolboys, those sweaters writers in my country wear until the day they die.”)

  The gay performer Maximiliano Persky (another blogger, who thinks that everyone is gay even though they don’t know it and, there, on the screen, demands they come out of the closet “right now, or if not . . .”).

  The author of “absolutely realistic” detective novels Bang-Bang Comisario, in whose books the killer is never one of the characters and only appears on the last page, passing by, stopped for a minor crime, turning himself in, tired of waiting in vain to be caught and locked up.

  The Octogenarian Esfinge Tevas (whom, in the beginning, he considers the typical awkward woman who, at book presentations, asks to speak in order to torment the audience with eternal and amorphous sermons, not letting go of the microphone for long minutes before being silenced and reduced by whistles and forcibly removed from the place. Until one of Ditta’s enthusiastic and ambitious students in the Department of Entropy and Numbers decides to follow her from bookstore to bookstore, to record each and every one of her interventions over the course of a couple years, to transcribe them, to put them in writing, and she discovers that Esfinge isn’t ranting, she’s reciting an ingenious and avant-garde “post-finneganian” novel. A novel that’s published under the title Questions for the Author and becomes one of those inexplicable bestsellers that everyone buys and talks about without ever reading).

  The Sumerian cyberpunk GygaMesh.

  The bon vivant and happy few Apollo Dionisio, whose storylines pause for pages and pages every time that one of his creatures eats and drinks.

  The omnipresent and inevitable supporting actor, everywhere and in every group photo, Constancio Tiempos (who specializes in writing obituaries that always begin with an “I met X . . .” and who, it’s rumored, also wrote up his own obituary, with a first line that reads, “I knew Constancio Tiempos . . .”).

  The cultural supplement soldier with literary aspirations, Epifanio “Snoopy” Williams-Taboada (whose articles and reports about other cultures began, invariably, with long and heartfelt descriptions of the climatic state of everything around him, even concluded with the next day’s meteorological prognosis. The thing about “Snoopy” came to him from “It was a dark and stormy night,” supposedly).

  The mysterious and anonymous and multimedia MacTypo (whose books, with their artisanal designs, were nothing but a chaos of different typographies and random photos that “the reader has to reorganize according to her own life experience and later upload to a secret site that she came to by following clues I leave in the hollows of trees in different parks in different countries.”)

  Cash Krugerrand, the literary agent whom everyone derides in public but dreams of having (and being possessed by) in private.

  The illustrious Lucián Vieytes (who suffers from a narcissistic form of arteriolosclerosis that causes him to remember only himself and his own work and, with time, even to believe that he’s the author of books like The Brothers Karamazov and The Magic Mountain, from which he recites entire pages from memory).

  The Intellectualoid (a surprising masked fighter who emerges from a troupe on a successful TV show and becomes a reporter-printmaker celebrated by Edith “Ditta” Stern-Zanuzzi and by Rigoberto Paponia; who, in forums and magazines, devolve into a kind of “I saw him first” and “He’s mine” argument).

  The compulsive anthologist Bienvenido “Come Together” Tequiero (who is putting together an “anthological anthology of anthologies”).

  Baby Valencia (avant-gardist/terrorist who threatens other writers so they’ll write his books for him and who even kidnapped the daughter of one writer, and put a bomb in the car of another) . . .

  The list is enormous—the names and faces get mixed up and confused more than once—and it keeps on growing. And, of course, it includes a symbolic clone of The Writer: one Arturo Merlín who inhabits the catacombs of an abandoned metro station where, presumably, he continues coming up with stories that nobody can read. And tonight, his eyes growing heavy, The Young Man arranges and composes something terrifying in the air under his eyelids: for once Paponia gets up the nerve to leave his house and go beyond the borders of his neighborhood, and climbs to the top of a tower and throws himself off (though it isn’t entirely clear that
it’s a suicide; there are those who venture that Paponia might have had a dizzy spell caused by the vertigo of going up, for the first time, in a building over one story tall) only to, fatal coincidence, crush Stern-Zanuzzi. Ditta, who—with her disarrayed blonde mane of de luxe homeless, always whipped not by the wind of history but by the fan of her hysteria—was passing by on her way to a conference organized by and about her. Ditta who—her obituaries will emphasize that she was working on compiling her kitchen recipes, Chicken a la King with interpolated apples and all of that—insists on claiming that she’s been in all the right places and present at every transcendent moment, to bear witness and provide testimony. Ditta who, having been, if you believe her, just passing through, was in the radiation and on the battle fronts and at the ground zeros, wrote books about herself and Chernobyl, about herself and the toxic Tokyo metro, about herself and the fall of the World Trade Centers, about herself and shopping malls erected with narco money so the narcos can blow them up later—falls victim to the most barrio and absurd of deaths, almost a joke, a bad joke. This puts The Young Man in a tricky dilemma: are Paponia and Stern-Zanuzzi now united and reconciled by the connection of that fatal coincidence? Massive double funeral or a reigniting of hostilities between young factions, the followers of one and the other, at odds more than ever? Has practice buried theory or has theory precipitated the fall of practice? High culture crushed by low culture? Someone jokes that it’s too bad that Ditta isn’t alive so she can write a book about herself and Paponia’s death.

  And one thing begins to become murkily clear to The Young Man: almost without realizing it—he realizes now—he has begun to depopulate his landscape. The Young Man strolls through his literary world as if he were trimming new buds and withered growth, wrapped in a yellow wind. The Period of Contraction has begun. Soon, he understands, the only one left will be the poet (never poetess, because The Young Man suffered greatly seeing The Young Woman’s face when he called her a “poetess”) and underground beauty Miranda Urano, in whose name many colleagues have taken their lives or given up writing verse. The Young Man’s idea is that, in the moment of the reverse Big Bang, in the return to the absolute moment of the beginning now translated into the end, into a Genesis of apocalyptic modalities, Miranda Urano, in light of the revelation that he was the secret god operating that machine, falls to her knees and gives herself to him like an offering. And they live happily ever after. But we’re not there yet, dreams The Young Man who’s already dreaming, almost asleep. In that borderland moment when the eyelids seem transparent and what’s lived fades into what an insomniac brain freed from the bonds of logic can imagine. In that silvery instant, all of us are experimental, avant-garde. And, just before descending toward those heights, The Young Man relives faithfully and in detail his encounter, months before, aboard an airplane in trouble, with The Writer. Remembering the internal turbulence and the storm outside, The Young Man grinds his teeth in embarrassment (few things are worse than the inerasable and increasingly detailed memory of something that made you feel really uncomfortable, trapped in the air) and, luckily, immediately, the airplane is a different airplane. An airplane piloted by Miranda Urano, wrapped in a tight, black latex outfit, her body oh so aerodynamic. An airplane full of atomic bombs that she’ll drop on all the writers The Young Man created. And the Earth will burn, enveloped in the radiation of black and white explosions. And, then, a handful of survivors. Not his creations, but castaways from his increasingly distant childhood: protagonists of movies he saw some Saturday afternoon, on TV, in the days of only four channels, days when you had to stand up and turn a dial to watch something else. He sees it for the first time and he sees it several times on a cycle, a Saturday afternoon broadcast, where various random titles from different genres play in succession. The program starts just after midday and shows a western, a war movie, a comedy, a historic movie, and in the evening, a horror movie. And the horror movies are his favorites and, among them (classical and aristocratic monsters of the Old World of Universal Studios and, from the New World, tentacular monsters of American International Pictures, where everything grows or shrinks), there is one that stands out, set on one of the small Marshall Islands called Bikini Atoll where, in the aftermath of some nuclear tests, a group of men and women—the men with lab coats and military uniforms; the women, who at first seem serious and disciplined, but always have bathing suits close at hand that they won’t hesitate to model for the enjoyment and distraction of the scientists and colonels—are besieged by giant telepathic crabs that devour not only their bodies, but also their minds. One by one, without any hurry. The Young Man dreams about this and, in the dream, he remembers what frightened him most when he was little, in his nightmares, in an immense little bed with room enough for every terror: the creaking conversations between the crabs and the way in which their voices (in The Young Man’s dream, one of the crabs already has the unmistakable voice of The Writer’s Mad Sister) infiltrate the brains of humans and drive them mad. Convincing them that nothing could be better than a walk on the beach. Tempting them, tempting him, with a “Don’t you want to know what gift the tide has brought you? Is it a good story that you want, that you’re looking for, that you need? We are the greatest story of all! Something worth dying to be able tell and to write.” Deep and salty voices inviting you to a party of open pincers poised to snap shut. Voices near the reefs, under the moonlight. Mutant voices on a beach, on another beach that, beyond the years and the distances, borders this beach, where these crabs sing now for him alone and they sing come, come, come, here I am, I’ve been waiting for you for so long, where have you been, it doesn’t matter, you’ve come back at last, welcome home.

  II

  Sing, O goddess, the wrath of Penelope. A ruinous wrath that caused her family countless sorrows; but that was, it seems, of great inspiration to her brother, who’s now more particular than ever. A brother transformed into particles, courtesy of the God particle and now, all of him, stardust, blowin’ in the wind, floating here and there and everywhere, high above in the Big Sky looking down at this little Earth. * And like the dysfunctions in satellites provoked by hysterical solar storms, he appears, without warning, like those parentheticals directing a histrionic and operatic ghost to enter and exit the most innocent of crime scenes. Lo, here he is, incorporeal yet omnipresent, interfering and interceding and—sheltered by the alibi of le mot juste and all that—obsessively repeating ideas and judgments. Projecting himself like the loop of a video that no search engine can locate to download and edit; a video from a security camera where he enters the frame and, after overpowering a fragile scientist, shuts the door and, alone and inside a laboratory, as everyone first orders and then begs him not to, presses a button so that everything, including him, is set in motion and spins and spins and spins until it provokes a nauseating vertigo behind the eyes. Being a nuisance, yes. Polishing a single piece to excess—tactical interventions?, voodoo pins?, inserts of more or less precious stones?, invented parts?, asterisks like jagged little black holes, like little gears looking for something to turn and set in motion?, warpath footnotes that don’t resign themselves to the bottom of the page, climbing through lines to insert themselves wherever they like, wherever is most convenient?, parentheses that here are the pure present, the right now, the unexpurgated material that later will be organized and, consequently, distorted for the best possible understanding and structure?—like, appearing again, in those other stage directions, not for the actors but for the audience, soliciting or demanding laughter and tears and applause. Here then, mixing his indeterminate present with the precise place and exact time that already passed, that already was. History is nothing but an agreed-upon hallucination. The colorful wallpaper that distracts from and conceals a gray wall covered with damp stains that reveal very different things, depending on who is looking at them. A passing order, an attempt to evade the idea that, in reality, everything happens uninterrupted and with endless sequencing problems and—because rea
lly there is no time—with all times at the same time, with everything happening at the same time. So, History—miniscule subgenre of capital-T Time—like a collective and recollective madness that millions of people agree to believe in to keep from going mad. Dates of birth and death, names of battles, surnames of prophets and dignitaries, celebrated and bronze-etched phrases, taglines as props to lean on and stand up and repeat to achieve the automatic Nirvana of a good student, repeating day after day what gets repeated to you, so you don’t have to repeat the year. But it’s one thing—a sure thing—to memorize, and another entirely different and more dangerous thing to make memory. So that’s why remembering what happened is more like rewriting than rereading. Memory is a receptacle of opaque crystal. Impossible to discern against the light how full or how empty it is; how much is missing and how much is left of the past it contains. And the past is so much easier to recount if it is taken out from inside—from that past that itself contains the same past in an insatiable exercise of self-cannibalism—with the forceps of a complex and always meager and slight and fleeting present. Pulled out from inside screaming. Wrapped in the moist placenta of a first cry or one of those laughs that sprays saliva onto whoever’s not laughing and who won’t be laughing now: because—warning, warning—this is the most inside, the most secret of jokes. Nothing more and nothing less than that instant, suspended between nothing and everything when a writer spends an eternity of seconds thinking of what he’ll subsequently put down in writing. A map of unfathomable distance separating the measures of the cerebral score from the arrival of the fingers to the goal of the keyboard. Coming out of the same body but from a different source, in a different font. And, to state the obvious, that font is American Typewriter, right?; because that was the script on his first typewriter. And because Penelope’s brother was (is?) a writer, always, with a particular and often criticized interest in American literature, and over and out for a while and . . . Receive in your eyes a postcard from the always irascible and redheaded Penelope, years ago but as if it were right now, coming across the ocean, descending from the Olympic heights of an ancient continent to the, by comparison, juvenile underworld of a city called Abracadabra. A city built on the ruins of a civilization that one fine day—without an explanation or goodbye note chiseled in black stone or engraved in green jade—up and left, abandoning temples and pyramids and altars where offerings of warm hearts were made to gods with long names made up almost entirely of consonants. * And, ah, poetic and intuitive justice of the names and places, their irony so urbane right from the start: because—Penelope is about to discover—nothing happens, nothing really moves, the hand that reaches into the magic top hat comes out empty of rabbit or any trick at all, there, in Abracadabra. And, suddenly, Penelope remembers a song from her adolescence. One of those catchy songs, so catchy in fact that you never remember the singer, but always the chorus. How’d it go? Ah, yes: “Abra-Abracadabra . . . I wanna reach out and grab ya . . . Abra-Abracadabra . . . Abracadabra.” Who wrote it and who sang it? A mystery. * “Abracadabra,” written by Steve Miller and performed by the Steve Miller Band (from the eponymous 1982 album, number one in several countries). Fasten your seatbelts. Turbulence. Deploy the landing gear. Flaps down. * Here we go. Flashes and sparks and turn off all electronic devices except, of course, the unpluggable brain that, they say, keeps on functioning for an eternal instant after the heart has broken forever. * Unceasing. Flat line. Straight lines, one after another and all in a row. No paragraph breaks, like a rolling stone with no direction home, like something—another reference to another song—“really vomitific,” like something asking time and again how does it feel, how it feels, if it feels something and then, there, the nausea of Penelope—her heart wrecked for as long as her brain can remember—tied to her seat like Ulysses to a mast. Penelope tied to the seat of a latest-generation air ambulance, specially hired by her new family-in-law. * And Penelope, who never excelled at the oily and slippery art of diplomacy, never saw two words less suited to go traipsing around holding hands than “family” and “in-law.” Or maybe she has, but probably not, the family should be the site and sanctuary where the law doesn’t enter, where it’s left outside, asking to be let in and, of course, the problem is that someone always opens the door and invites it inside and welcomes it “like another member of the family.” Not long now, just a little while, all landing is inevitable, and Penelope’s ears are covered, and, in back of the aircraft, watched over by a doctor and nurse, her husband breathes mechanically, deep in a coma for two weeks now. * The story, of course, doesn’t begin here. But this is a good starting point, as good as opening—like in those black and white films of Hollywood’s golden age—with a map filling the whole screen and, across it, a line that draws itself from one point to another. And, like in those same movies, lines of text rising from the bottom of the screen and climbing, like a sunrise, to the highest point, explaining everything that happened before, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. But all at the same time, as if all times were the same time. Backward and forward and up and down and, also, to the right and the left and at oblique and sharp and steeply ascending and descending angles. A lot like the tumbling, head-over-heels deluge of speech that spews forth after drinking multiple liters of truth serum, but, also, like the panoramic and encompassing way the gods think, leisurely reflecting on a landscape where past and present and future occur simultaneously. “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” Who said that? Francis Scott Fitzgerald? In a letter to his daughter, Scottie? If that’s true, then reading this is like drowning, like not breathing, like discovering that when you stop breathing (or breathe in that cosmic and abysmal way that astronaut David “Dave” Bowman breathes in 2001: A Space Odyssey) there’s another way of life, a strange way of life, narrated from that even stranger way of life, the one he’s living now. Penelope’s brother. The way that Penelope’s brother—deified thanks to science—watches her, from everywhere and nowhere. In person but absent, in the third-person. As if in telling her story he were reading his own mind. As if his most intimate thoughts had the external texture of a voiceover. Thus, Penelope in a summary of lived experience that can’t get too far going in reverse. Because, to do that, would be to run the risk of falling into that delirium of summarizing sci-fi sagas where we understand absolutely nothing of what we claim to process and comprehend: billions of light years, everything taking place on a planet whose name is something that sounds like an onomatopoeia followed by a number, from the boom of its Big Bang to the terminal moan of its Little Crash. Information overload. For that reason, he—the also exceedingly cosmic—will have to resign himself to explaining how our heroine ended up aboard this airplane with a man whom, presumably, she still loves, though he’s floating between the two ellipses of a deep coma. And love, definitely. But not love like love in Jane Austen’s novels (where marriage is that ocean of happiness into which the complex river of falling in love spills out), but love like love in George Eliot’s novels (where love is nothing but that tidal wave awaiting the go-ahead to break over the supposedly solid ground and transform it into the quickest of sands). It all depends on where you land on the wheel of fortune of feelings. A matter of luck or justice or chemical forces whose elements haven’t yet been synthesized. There’s no instruction manual, no list of ingredients, no precise formula—love is the most inexact of sciences. And love can be the well just as easily as what fills the well, without ever filling it entirely. In Penelope’s case, love isn’t one thing or the other. Penelope’s love is a heavy and ominous spade. Pure exercise to exercise the musculature of the heart, aware how difficult it is in this life to be granted the gift of being able to say, like Catherine Earnshaw, that “I am Heathcliff!” The nonreturnable gift of loving someone so much, to the point where you end up feeling that you’re them and they’re you. An inseparable whole. A warm and symmetrical two-headed monster. A miracle for the two lovers that is an aberration of nature for everyone else. B
ut no. * It’s not that these kinds of things don’t happen outside of books: it’s that these kinds of things don’t happen in any book that isn’t Emily Brontë’s 1847 Wuthering Heights. Penelope’s bible. And, also, her declaration of ultimate principals and her rebellious battle-hymn against Tender Is the Night, which her parents never stopped reading and stealing and tossing over their heads and that, now, her brother never stops studying and shaking and putting together and taking apart in search of some secret meaning and order that’ll help him understand everything. There inside, running through fog and moor, like in Fitzgerald’s novel first and then in her parents’ telenovela, another pair of oh so fou lovers. But compared to Dick and Nicole, Heathcliff and Cathy are much more active and seem always seconds away from exploding or blowing up. The tempestuous always imposing itself over the tender and, for her, Wuthering Heights is more than a book to always return to—it’s a book to never leave. Penelope has read everything that the Brontë sisters wrote and even what the Brontë brother wrote, and a good part of what’s been written about them and him; but she always goes back to Emily and her single novel, her singular novel. The only novel that poor Emily wrote; though there are rumors, corroborated by the latest investigations of biographers, that she wrote a second one and that Charlotte threw it into the flames. Pages too wild, wilder even than those of Wuthering Heights, they theorize. And so the older sister decided to protect the posterity and reputation of the younger sister; but there are some who think she did it out of pure envy. And Penelope agrees: there’s nothing more dangerous than older siblings who claim to be protecting you and who, to keep you from falling down, chain your foot to a wall and, yes, can even end up burning inside your head the first novel that you never managed to write. And nothing bothers Penelope more than those interpretations claiming that Cathy and Heathcliff are actually stepbrother and stepsister. And that their passion is nourished by something as coarse as second-degree incest when, actually, it’s a love beyond love. A love for which love is nothing more than the gate to a labyrinth of straight lines, or a launch tower to the stars, or the highest diving board from which to leap to the bottom of all things. “You have killed me,” says Cathy, more alive than ever and just before dying, to an agonized Heathcliff. Here outside, for Penelope, as far as feelings go, everything is more crass and insubstantial and fleeting and as if anesthetized. Ordinary love is, in the words of Cathy, “like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees” and it bears no resemblance to the “the eternal rocks” beneath the roots. Here, in the real world, Penelope likes to say that “if the heart could think like the brain thinks, the heart would stop immediately.” Voluntary victim of a sudden heart attack. Tearing open the shirt, sending all the buttons flying, to flip the secret switch that marks the end of all heartbeats and of the immediate echo of the next heartbeat. Heartbeats like footsteps on a stairway that climbs and climbs and climbs to, in the end, open on a wall with no exit. A wall that, when you fail in your effort to tear it down, ends up breaking your heart in a thousand pieces. And this last thing is what Penelope says in a bar called Psycholabis—after the presentation of a book by her older brother—to the man who will be her imperfect and immediate future husband. He has the air not of a Hollywood leading man, but the look of one of those variety show actors who used to entertain spectators between one movie and the next around the beginning of the past century. “Live Number,” they called it. Real people like a special effect contrasting with the false two-dimensional realism of locomotives pulling into French train stations or cowboys robbing American trains. The man is named Maximiliano Karma and not Heathcliff (and oh how it fascinates Penelope that Heathcliff is at once both name and surname, and even breed of a single being, and unique sex). And the man—Penelope will soon realize—is closer to an unstable and pendular Edgar Linton, who’d have felt much more fulfilled and happy and at home, not far from there, dancing and strolling from one house to another in a Jane Austen novel. Nothing then of an “I am Maximiliano!” And Maximiliano asks Penelope for her phone number and Penelope (somewhat out of boredom, mostly to annoy her older brother, a little bit also because she lives in a state of perpetual sexual arousal, one of those smoldering fires, small but impossible to entirely extinguish) gives him a long kiss, with tongue, in and out, transmitting her mobile phone number in Morse Code. Penelope learned the little taps and dots and lines of the S.O.S. at a very young age, so she could communicate with her brother through a wall, in the adjoining room, in the engine room of their childhood, the shipwreck of their parents’ marriage, she and her brother clinging to a lifeboat, children first, the woman going down with the man, and save our souls. And, surprise, Maximiliano decodes it and, at the end of the kiss, enters Penelope’s number into his phone (one of those crazy-expensive satellite phones) without taking his eyes away from hers. And Penelope’s mobile phone rings and vibrates at the height of her left breast, just above her unexpectedly and unconsciously pierced and electrified heart. * And, yes, such small yet simultaneously immense acts are sometimes more than enough (because his anecdotal valor is almost inexhaustible) for that eternal spark to become a forest fire of variable duration and beds burn day and night. A little water after a while, not to extinguish anything, but to learn about the flames. Who are you? Where’d you come from? How’d you get here? Those things. Penelope is, of course, the sister of The Writer. And Maximiliano Karma idolizes him, not so much because he likes his books, but because he wants to be like him, without really knowing, of course, what he’s like. Maximiliano Karma belongs to that generation of kids who’re dying to be writers and to be read but who don’t really bother to read or write. And Maximiliano wants to earn that diploma that justifies him and at the same time definitively transforms him into the black sheep—but a well-combed and sweet-smelling black sheep who wins awards and appears on TV—of his affluent family. Maximiliano Karma is the piece that doesn’t quite fit in the puzzle of their tropical dynasty. An anomaly in the system, an error in the programming of his family who believe that to stay is to succeed and the failure is to leave, to create distance and to distance yourself. Or something like that. The Karmas don’t know how to deal with the subject and they prefer to think that: “Maxi is on vacation.” But Maximiliano has come to this city to a) to establish himself as a novelist, b) to leave behind unsavory and narcotic company in his home city, and c) to meet girls who are less repressed—of their own volition or from their parents and uncles and aunts having implemented an efficient brain- and body-wash—than his cousins and cousins’ friends. So far, a lot of c) and little or nothing of a) and b), because, let’s be honest, what Maximiliano writes is not very good and what he puts up his nose is superlative, courtesy of a friend who, long distance, from his big little homeland, sends regular shipments of chemical powders to season his physical exploits. Back home Maximiliano was and continues to be here what is commonly referred to as “a social user.” And, of course, the problem is that his social life is a size XL and his successive stints in rehab don’t shrink it. One day, at an exclusively family baptism (where the godfathers and godmothers are, always, other Karmas, giving birth to bicephalous relationships like godfather-uncle and godmother-cousin; anything to avoid bringing in an outsider or someone external to the family and thereby degrading the purity of the increasingly tangled ties, or provoking the discomfort of “having to meet strangers and learn new names”), Maximiliano Karma is revolving and evolving in one of those synchronized country dances. What do they call those dances that are kind of a competition, or sport, or it-seems-like-we’re-doing-something-all-together-and-having-fun-but-really-we’re-fighting-to-the-death-for-something-but-we-don’t-and-never-will-know-what-it-is? * Square Dance: popular dance with four couples (eight dancers) arranged in a square, with two on each side, starting with Couple 1, who faces each other and moves to the left until they get to Couple 4. Couples 1 and 3 are referred to as the “head,” while Couples 2 and 4 are the �
��side.” Each dance begins and ends with a sequence of “called-moves” in the square formation. Almost a Karma family tradition. Penelope (who’s of the school that we-dance-separately-everyone-on-their-own-but-together-in-a-way-almost-spiritually-and-in-perfect-harmony) won’t believe her eyes or her muscles when, at the weddings in Abracadabra, she’ll see all of them move out as if onto a battlefield, smiling, showing their teeth, ready to win just so someone else loses, while in the background, but everywhere, a song plays in which an imbecilic cowboy without a rodeo asks you not to break his heart, his “achy breaky heart.” And Maxi, his nostrils white, yells to his cousin, asking “how many grams” her little premature baby boy weighed, born just seven months after the wedding, but with the unmistakable and healthy appearance of a full-term, ninth-month old baby. That’s when the family intervened and sent him to “study abroad” in The Old World. As far away as possible. Far enough to allow his immediate family to tell other relatives and acquaintances that Maxi (as his family refers to him; Penelope prefers to call him Max) is making it big in the salons of ancient and cultured cities. And, ah, Maximiliano Karma’s life is so frenetic that his work isn’t enough for him. And so he starts several blogs under different names, and leaves himself infinite comments—insults, praise, offers to meet up and get to know himself at bars and beaches—with so many different personalities and sexes and ages. Automatic and alkaloidic writing. Fast and almost stamped with a style that—reading between black lines and, above all, between lines of white—reveals itself to be inseparable from the rhythm of lines and inhalations. Thus, the experimental subterfuge of a series of “(In)complete Stories” (to wit: stories that begin but never end). And a series of short “Elementary Novels” that, due to their pathological obsession with detail, courtesy not of deep readings but of surfing the oil-slick waves of Google, Maximiliano Karma likes to define—though he’s never opened one of the Frenchman’s books—as “Proustian.” What are they about? They’re about things like the incremental growth of the iceberg that the Titanic ends up running into. Or about the slow yet constant growth of the tree in Bois de Boulogne (check whether it was a walnut or a chestnut) where, leaving Jimmy’s, the mega-endowed playboy Porfirio “Rubi” Rubirosa crashes his Ferrari 250 GT, and dies. * For a second, Penelope wonders why Max chose that tree and not, for example, the much more literary tree (a banana tree, spinning through the air, and another tree) struck by the Facel Vega Sport driven by Albert Camus, who thought there was nothing more idiotic than dying in a car accident. A good question indeed. A more than pertinent question. And yet like most questions of the kind that contain their own illuminating answer, the question soon dissolves and allows whoever formulated it to go on as if nothing happened, blowing in the wind where there are no answers, just wind. Or about the tongues of fire slowly and feverishly licking the body of Joan of Arc. Or about the blank fifth bullet that’s loaded in every firing squad (so that each shooter can convince himself that his is the dead round and that it’s not his turn to kill) and that flies to bury itself in the chest of Gary Gilmore’s smile. Or about the eternal and placid time of the horse when, one day in 1568, the dull Michel Eyquem de Montaigne mounts his steed only to be thrown off and get to his feet transformed into simply Montaigne—into something brilliant. Maximiliano Karma, of course, has never read that thing William S. Burroughs said (Penelope will hear the phrase for the first time, several months later, from Lina’s lips, in another bar, on another night, on the other side of the ocean, in Abracadabra) about how “they call something experimental when the experiment has gone wrong.” But the members of the latest and juvenile generational avant-garde, who don’t hesitate to adopt Maximiliano Karma as one of their own, haven’t read William S. Burroughs either. Why? Because talentless people tend to come together to create and seal off small and sectarian worlds, in an attempt to convince themselves of their own genius by having it reflected in the narrow and inexact mirror of others just as mediocre as they are. A mirror that’s nothing but a thin layer of mercury, not magic, but a deception, always telling you you’re the brightest and even the prettiest and that you look so much like it. You look just like people who don’t seem to find it sufficiently experimental and avant-garde—could there be something more avant-garde and experimental?, what more do they want and need?—that entire worlds have been built, worlds more perfect and daring than the one in which they themselves were created, with slightly less than thirty letters and slightly more than ten symbols. Because, for them, Maximiliano Karma functions as a kind of rare specimen and—last but not least—as a generous payer of ethylic and ancient bar tabs and almost compulsive purveyor of maximum-purity controlled substances in the bathrooms of those same bars. Maximiliano Karma and Penelope go into just such a bathroom in just such a bar. Then, while snorting straight white lines, cut out across the lowered top of the toilet, Maxi tells Penelope that he’s “working on” a novella titled The Russian and the Butterflies and that it’s about the bizarre relationship of an FBI agent, whom J. E. Hoover has given the mission of spying on Vladimir Nabokov during his Lepidopterist wanderings through the hills and forests of the United States. Maxi never read Lolita or Speak, Memory—though, like with all his previous works, he’s gathered all the information he needs from Wikipedia entries—he explains to Penelope with that strange and savage pride of those who haven’t done something, who haven’t done anything. * And maybe—why not write it instead of describe it—Maximiliano Karma is much more inspired when it comes to the act of inspiring through his nose. “The first time I got high it was like being kissed by an angel,” Maximiliano Karma tells Penelope. “There are some people who take drugs to be somebody else and there are some people who take drugs to be more themselves. That seems to me like a good way to divide and classify the human race, right? . . . Me, on the other hand, I take drugs to be the person I used to be. That person who I was the first time I got high. When I knew everything and understood everything, really. And the best part is that you keep taking drugs, more all the time, seeking to recover that first feeling of the first time. But soon you realize that it’s something irretrievable. From then on, you continue taking drugs to keep from believing that it’s irretrievable. Taking drugs turns into the search for something that you know you’ll never find . . . ‘Pura vida, hermano,’” continues Maximiliano Karma, with the voice of someone who is quoting but convinced that few will recognize the quote, an uncredited quote tossed into the air by the voice of the man whom Penelope already thinks of as Max. And from there, coked up and vertical (now it’s his tongue that plays at line-dot-line between her legs), to the horizontality of the flat that the parents of the obligatory child prodigy bought for him in a counterculture but designer neighborhood, with an immense bed in the middle of the living room. Is Maximiliano Karma a great lover or did Penelope previously have bad luck when it comes to sex and its positions? Neither the one nor the other. But, for her, hooking up with Max is an anatomically and geographically and economically functional relationship: moving in with Maximiliano Karma allows Penelope to escape the (for her) oppressive vigilance of her older brother, to leave behind the forest and the sea and install herself in the big city, to rely on limitless funds for her vices and pleasures. And, along the way, to learn—while correcting her boyfriend’s disorganized and barely original originals on the screen of a gigantic latest-generation computer—that she, though she doesn’t write, is a much better writer than he is. And that consequently Maximiliano Karma, Max, could end up becoming a good part of the novel of her life that, maybe, one day, when she has nothing left to live for, she’ll decide to relive in writing. Meanwhile and in the meantime, at some point (it’s impossible for Penelope to pinpoint a date and day and month; surfing the crest of a designer psychotropic wave) they decide to get married so that, thereby, Maximiliano can consummate, while consuming and consuming himself, what, for his family, is the ultimate transgression—a civil and nonreligious wedding, without relatives, without even notifying the
family. It’s worth pointing out an additional provocation: Penelope (though she looks eighteen) is almost thirty years old, and no matter how counterculture or transgressive you are, the third decade is a complicated age for women when it comes to what they’ve not yet done, when it comes to what they have yet to do and what they might never get to do; get married, for example. Whereas Maximiliano Karma is twenty-five. The festivities (dubbed by Maximiliano as the Release the Kraken! Party, to which a literary fanzine devotes a special issue and which ends up being possible to follow live on the blog of the rather retrograde avant-garde, already mentioned) last many nights. On the fifth or sixth, Penelope and Maximiliano collapse—like vampires running from dawn but also from night—in a room with the blinds drawn. Twenty hours later, Penelope wakes up and Maximiliano does not. A week later, the air ambulance, carrying the new bride and the husband-in-suspension, lands at the airport in Abracadabra. And there is the whole family-in-law. All of it. The Karmas. All of them. Indivisible. United. Half a degree of separation between one and the next and, with the passing days, Penelope will never comprehend if they’re together because they love each other, because they need each other, because they need the other’s gaze to be themselves, or because—following that dictate of mafiosos and courtiers—it’s best to keep your enemies close at hand. Nor will she ever understand what fluctuations determine the rotations of the enemy-of-the-moment or the fool-to-belittle among the Karmas. Week after week, the role of the guilty or the klutz will be passed from one to the other, like a relay race, and one or the other will carry it for a few days until they can pass on their “title” to the next to be condemned and slandered. No matter what, everything stays and will stay, always, within the family. The family that now is, presumably, hers or the one she belongs to. Either way, the Karmas, like one of those hallucinatory hallucinations coated in that humid and vertical heat (in the airport the hot air envelops Penelope like a gift, like an offering to be sacrificed) that always seems to grow in the distance where planes land and take off. The Karmas, like one of those mythological creatures with too many heads saying and thinking the same thing. Better to speak a lot and say little. And not to ask questions so they don’t ask questions. The answers are always flammable material. So the Karmas function like an echo chamber. The Karmas, like an acoustic social network, but in person, always plugged in and preferring to say “We must go” rather than “I must go.” The Karmas—pluralistic, gestaltic, more like subsidiaries of a constantly expanding franchise than members of a family—always move in groups. In small but overwhelming migrations. Filling entire theaters when they decide to go see a movie. One night Penelope almost believes she’s going to be able to escape and go see the closest thing to an “art” film ever shown in Abracadabra (nothing too extreme; not Andréi Tarkovsky or Terrence Malick, but, at best, Woody Allen or Wes Anderson). But, somehow, in a way that she doesn’t entirely understand, as if abducted, she ends up being dragged along in a Karmatic tide, from the door of the shopping mall multiplex to a theater showing a movie where cars race and explode or an animated movie, both in 3-D (hard to tell them apart, maybe the point of separation being those girls wrapped in racing latex or those fierce princesses ready to do whatever it takes not for a prince but for a kingdom). While, in the seats, everyone speaks loudly and chews with Dolby dentures and gets up over and over again. It’s clear—Penelope already learned this, sitting down to watch TV with a handful of Karmas—that their ability to concentrate for more than a minute or two is nonexistent, that they don’t care how the movie begins and how it transpires and how it ends, a story can begin or end at any moment. And, a mystery to Penelope, none of the kids take the opportunity to make out or cop a feel in the darkness; instead they ceaselessly consult their small and glowing screens, sending one-hundred-forty character messages from one theater row to the next. But she doesn’t complain either—she’s been lucky. After all, the Karmatic tide has pulled her into a theater. Because, more than once, as if blown off course by a secret, idiot wind, they all end up in some random place. An amusement park or a popular bar, whose attraction lasts a month or two at most. And when they get home and their parents ask them what the movie was about, the young Karmas respond: “Sex on the beach” or “A rollercoaster.” No, it doesn’t matter where they go. The important thing is to go somewhere other Karmas have been before and to be the first to arrive somewhere other Karmas will come later. Like sliding across the echo of an echo. Many. All of them. Together. The final destination is just a temporal and geographical accident. But there they go, taking over an entire restaurant (generally in a golden and grandiose hotel) when, once in a great while, they go out to eat. Or, on occasion, howling as they board the first or business class of a Jumbo 747, or the first class deck on a Caribbean or Mediterranean cruise: the latter being the Karmas’ preferred mode of transport (they come aboard with suitcases full of autochthonous foods and regional ingredients “so they won’t miss them”) because there, all together, they feel that they’ve commandeered the ship, that the voyage belongs to them and is under their command. And that corners and stairways abound where they can bad-mouth—on the sly, but with soft and affectionate voices and wide eyes, an awkward simulacrum of astonishment and incredulity—that one Karma who took forever to come down to dinner. Or to come lie out by the pool. Or who swears someone pushed him down the stairs. Or that someone slipped a powerful laxative into his multicolored cocktail with its little paper umbrella. They rarely disembark on solid ground, and when they do, it’s only to occupy an expensive and bad restaurant, a tourist trap where the maltreatment they receive from the wait staff is understood by the Karmas as a demonstration of prestige and quality and sophistication, which they remunerate with exaggerated and absurd tips. And, yes, when they return to the port of embarkation, they discover that one of the Karmas who boarded with them is missing; but nobody seems that interested in or worried by the disappearance. Or when, once a year, all the Karmas gather on Mount Karma to stage a kind of family Olympics with sports and party games where more than one person—something to do with catharsis and the fact that, for once, anything goes; preferring to compete among themselves because, they intuit, outside of their own circle they’d always be losers and so better to be taken down within the family and inside that controlled environment where the winners alternate so that nobody feels too bad—ends up crying with rage or with broken arms or panic attacks or minor concussions. The places, in reality, are what matter least and before long they acuire, for the Karmas, the poor resolution of those illustrated backdrops in front of which photos used to be taken. What matters is that familial multitude that—within a few centuries, in order to perpetuate its existence—will teletransport en masse to Jupiter and beyond. But that’s still a long way off. Now, in the airport, in Abracadabra, Penelope remembers having seen fewer people at Hitler’s rallies in Berlin or Beatles concerts in New York. Maximiliano’s family (her family now) receives Penelope at the foot of the runway, in a pyramidal and pre-Colombian formation, lined up in generational order. And at the apex, the point of the pyramid, far above all the rest (and nobody can be so tall, thinks Penelope as they carry Maximiliano’s stretcher down a ramp at the backside of the aircraft) smiles a woman, a cigar in her mouth, her body small yet absurdly tall, wrapped in a blazing red and yellow poncho. A woman with silver hair, cut short, almost shaved, a few glints of gold in a smile more teeth than smile, fixed in the center of a senescence, but of a senescence like that of Clint Eastwood. A vigorous senescence. A vintage senescence. That woman hasn’t aged so much as fossilized into someone who will endure for millennia. It’s not that she’s shrunk, rather that she’s been distilled to her most pure and powerful essence. And she’s a woman who, Penelope discovers and learns, is that tall because she’s mounted on a horse. And she doesn’t even consider getting down. “I am Mamagrandma Karma, I am ninety-five years old, I think; my birth certificate was lost and never found. In an earthquake or a revolution or a fire. Knowing wh
en I was born is unimportant, because that only serves to specify your age when you die. And I’m not planning on dying. Life is very short, but also very wide,” the woman says to Penelope. “And this is Horse. Yes, the name of my horse is Horse. And period. Because I like to call things by their names,” thunders Mamagrandma while patting her steed. And it’s difficult for Penelope to tell where Mamagrandma ends and where Horse begins, and from then on and until her last day in Abracadabra, rare will be the time she’ll see the immortal old woman not moving around on four feet. Then—another Hollywood reference, because maybe everything is starting to acquire a particularly irreal air, irreal for Penelope—it occurs to her that Mamagrandma is like a bastardized cross of Bette Davis and Emiliano Zapata, Marlon Brando’s Zapata. And it’ll become more than obvious to Penelope that this chronobiological aberration has had a devastating effect on the wide and winding family circle. Mamagrandma should be dead and buried already. But Mamagrandma has the vigor that many have at fifty. So, the second row of her children, almost in their seventies already, appear to have the mental maturity of capricious adolescents. Maximiliano’s parents suddenly seem to Penelope like blurry and imprecise sketches: a mother who appears to be floating behind a stupefied and stupefying smile, and a father who looks like he’s always more than ready to take off running to anywhere that isn’t here. While Mamagrandma’s grandchildren, in their forties, have the envious and competitive mannerisms of insatiable children who never make it past the age of ten and spend their lives looking at the other, at what the other has, at what should, always, be theirs and only theirs. On the other hand, all the great grandchildren (nearly all of them premature until, as already mentioned, Penelope realizes that this is nothing but a euphemism thinly veiling a “shotgun wedding”) seem to be the age they actually are. But it’s impossible to be totally sure, because they live inside that atemporality of people plugged into social networks and comparing models of mobile phones with more applications all the time, dreaming of the day when they’ll be able to do everything between one screen and the next, without the interference of flesh and blood. Meanwhile and in the meantime, they use their tablets to enter virtual boutiques and buy things almost blindly, stumbling around, “because it’s the best when boxes of clothes and devices show up at home and you don’t even remember what you bought and then it’s like they are presents from somebody else and . . .” Their almost lyrical eloquence when it comes to spending money and their command of technology is as astonishing as their lack of knowledge about almost everything else. Some of them—the girls—think they can get pregnant if there are sperm floating in the pool water, or, of course, when they make love for the first time, punctually and implacably fertile, or if they’re not married, like all the innocent yet equally culpable girls in all the novels they don’t read and all those telenovelas they do see. The boys think that the Star Wars saga takes place just after the fall of the Roman Empire “or after King Arthur.” Their parents love them automatically and remind them unceasingly that they’ve never “bad-mouthed” each other in front of them. Which doesn’t imply that they haven’t bad-mouthed all the other parents. That’s why these great-grandchildren—every Sunday, leaving mass, Penelope will watch them the way one looks at an alien species, a deep-sea phosphorescent fish—never stop sending each other highly classified electronic messages, exchanging information that might end up being useful for blackmailing their progenitors. So happy that technological progress has advanced, but at the same time descended to the almost subterranean levels of their language, with moronic abbreviations, short words (and even so it’s still hard for them to find and give voice to these words, and, when searching for them, they always look up at the sky, their pupils suddenly beatific, as if expecting divine intervention), and the legitimization of orthographical errors. Communicating phone to phone even though they’re right next to each other. * The faithful and written transcription of a phone conversation between two Karmas—read and take the plunge at your own risk—is like Beckett floating through the smoke of an opium den. Nothing is straight, everything is sinuous and, on occasion, the true reason for the call (generally to hatch a plot or report a scandal or confirm a lie or deafening rumor) finally shows up forty minutes after the first ring, after absolutely everything else has been discussed. From the state of the weather to courteous and cloying exchanges before the bile and the hemlock and the thunder and the lightning are released, always striking those who are absent, those not participating in this conversation because they’re having another one, talking about those who are talking about them. The modus operandi is always the same: 1) One Karma bad-mouths an absent Karma to another Karma; 2) if that Karma doesn’t seem in agreement or complicit with the comment about the Karma who isn’t there but shines in absentia, the first Karma will slip in a tentative jab aimed at the other for being a “coward” or for “not being up to date on the situation” to, subsequently, 3) call that Karma who had been badmouthed at the beginning of the cycle to say that the other Karma, the one who wanted no part of the scheme, had been the one to say what he himself had initially and originally said. It seems complicated, but this infectious and toxic cycle is of a monstrous simplicity and efficiency. Soon, a frenetic vaudeville ensues, everyone has taken shots at everyone else, but nobody wants to admit they’ve been hit or wounded, much less take responsibility for the twisted shots they fired from the shadows. And so the monthly phone bill of one Karma would easily be enough to feed a small African village for an entire year. Exchanging—like trading cards or comics—classified and top-secret material that they’ll be able to use to blackmail and threaten their progenitors if their demands are not met. They’re like scale models—more modern—of ancestral perfidy and malice. They’re ready to bloom like those heavy-scented flowers that blossom in the middle of the trash. Uncontainable growth that their parents—knowing what their kids are like because that’s how they were; knowing how their kids will turn out because that’s how they are—attempt without ever really succeeding to control, pruning back excess shoots and removing thorns, like undisciplined bonsais with delusions of grandeur. Opening and closing—without interruption, arbitrarily—the sluicegates of gifts and privileges, turning them into nervous creatures, worried that their many siblings and numerous cousins might have more than they do. As a result, each and every one of them, through the years and experiences, is sunk to varying depths in a domestic terror of complex protocol. * Nobody says what they think, though “to think” might be one of the most-thought verbs and one that will, inevitably, be brought back over and over, never really being set aside, as we’ll see here, thinking about the Karmas. One says only what one is supposed to think in line with what’s supposedly thought of one, or better, in line with what one thinks others think of one. Thinking of others—something that can be understood as a form of generosity, but also as an avaricious deformity—is not the same thing as thinking about what you’d like others to think, especially about you. But that’s what they think about. Nothing else. But all the time. Before long, Penelope will realize that she’s never thought so much in her life as she has in Abracadabra. And that she never thought about so many people who are, at the same time, so insignificant: the Karmas. All the time. Them and about them. The Karmas like a leitmotiv and like a mental block that rejects all thought that’s not its own or about it. Thinking about what their personas are thinking about. Constantly. In a transparent yet palpable silence that can be studied—against the light, with squinted eyes and almost flat-line pupils—like one of those X-rays that reveal something unexpected. The Karmas thinking that saying what you think is the same as chewing with your mouth open. So, for them and from them, the bare minimum: random and figurative phrases. Nothing abstract. Everything figurative. The cloying sweetness of postcard illustrations. Hearts, kisses, flowers, never permitting the uncomfortable quirk of a double meaning. Norms so white they appear transparent. Simple things like “It’s cold” or “It’s warm” or “Too bad” or
“Good” or “What time is it?” or “Is it warm or cold?” and, the automatic and public invocation of good wishes for all and, in a whisper, the hope that theirs are the only wishes granted, even the ones that wish the worst for everyone else. And, of course, absolution every Sunday, at mass, kneeling but with heads held high, which shouldn’t be taken to mean that they look up and tremble and beg forgiveness from the heavens. So, the added sensation of hearing the distant sounds of an old machine being operated by someone who forgot long ago what the machine was meant to do. It doesn’t matter: they keep checking it over and oiling it because there’s nothing more frightening—more panic inducing—than thinking that at some point it’ll be replaced by a new machine and a new instruction manual. And the sound of the machine, because it’s familiar, is so relaxing. No one says anything to the person who wants to tell them something. Everything arrives via bizarre swerves, the unanticipated ricochet, laterally and sinuously, never in sincere, straight lines. If you concentrate, Penelope swears, you can even see trajectories of the slivers of dotted lines, where a name does or doesn’t go. Or the poisoned arrows that, as if suspended in midair, connect or separate the initials of some to or from the initials of others. An always-alarming tom-tom, taser and laser, weaving a red spider web, like the ones that surround and enclose cursed relics in museums. Leave no trace and don’t touch, yes. But nothing is safe from being torn apart by the always-soiled hands of evil thoughts. Penelope can never decide whether their mode of communication is very primitive or very sophisticated: A tells C what he or she really wants but doesn’t dare tell B, hoping that, almost right away, C will communicate it to B as something that A said and, when B confronts A and asks if A really thinks it, A will respond that it was something he or she overheard D say when Z . . . Like that, everyone repeating what’s been said, nobody saying anything. But they never stop talking, making sounds. And, as the weeks pass, Penelope mistakes the fact that—one at a time and always alone—various Karmas approach her and entrust her with things they’d never even tell the priest on Sunday, for a kind of privilege. But in the end, she’ll learn that they tell her these things because they think of her as something like the tower in a castle where nobody ever ascends, or worse, the sewer where nobody ever descends. There, in her ears, they discharge the sewage of their forbidden thoughts and desires, convinced that, even if Penelope says something, nobody will believe her anyway, because she’s not a true Karma, whatever the papers say. So, Penelope emerges from these confessions like someone submerged in a fever, and they force her to take long and heavy naps. The kind of nap that she wakes from with a saliva-soaked pillow and the aftertaste of nightmares where she’s always like Vincent Price in those demented and libertine Poe adaptations, running down the stairs of a castle in flames—what could the curtains in Roger Corman’s films be made of that burns so long and so well?—and reciting flammable lines and embracing corpses buried alive, while everything sinks into the cursed swamps in the depths of a B-movie studio. And during her first weeks in Mount Karma—as a hobby, or therapy, or whatever—Penelope, as if driven by a fever, writes and traces initials and lines on the walls of her room. A diagram where the Karmas are connected by the power of their hate and envy. An arrow connecting one of the boys who said this or that about one of the girls. Different colors to calibrate the varying intensity of their statements. Green, yellow, orange; but never achieving red; because self-destruction is poorly regarded and sullies everything, and who will tend the gardens then and, finally, because it’d spell the end, and for the Karmas the idea of anything ending results in vertigo, ending is for the unwashed masses—why end when you can go on. But before long, for the recently arrived Penelope, it’s impossible to retain true clarity, the arrows crisscross and skewer each other, the diagram grows and expands like metastasis of the most terminal variety, like those allegedly simple instructions for assembling impossible furniture. And Penelope can’t help imagining travelers of the future arriving to Earth and discovering this carnivorous family tree and wondering what it means, but suspecting that it must be a manual of military strategy developed during the great battle that brought about the end of everything in the world, or something like that. Mamagrandma and Horse approach Penelope and, from above, hard riding crop in strong hand, the woman says to her: “I don’t know who you were before, but I know who you are now—one of us . . . I imagine you’ll be tired from the trip. What would you prefer: to go to a hotel or to come home with us? Perhaps you’d prefer to be alone for a while, to take it slow. We’re a bit much, aren’t we?” Penelope smiles, exhausted, and answers: “Maybe it’d be best to go to a hotel, because . . .” “Say no more,” Mamagrandma interrupts, “we’re headed home right now.” And she adds: “Welcome to the Karmas.” * And Mamagrandma says that word, “Karma” not like it’s a surname but like it’s a whole planet or, maybe, a black hole of dark matter capable of devouring entire galaxies in seconds. And, in that brief initial dialogue, Penelope glimpses the molecule of everything to come, the Karmas’ essential protocol—force you to do what they want while attempting to convince you it’s what you want; always say “thank you” with the inflection of “you’re welcome”; tell you again and again that you’ve arrived not to the end of the world, but to the purpose of the universe. For Mamagrandma—and everyone who lives under her regime for that matter—Karma is the Alpha and the Omega. And everything that exists between one point and the other—and everything else, everything outside—has no meaning and no reason to be. What’s outside (those outside) doesn’t make any sense (don’t make any sense) because it isn’t (because they aren’t) like what’s inside. Its only utility is that of being, when the moment arrives, opportunistically blamed for some untoward thing that one of the irreproachable and untouchable Karmas has done. The Karmas never admit fault and, finding themselves forced to do so—and only in front of other Karmas—they offer explanations the way someone asks for the court’s understanding because they’re an orphan, never mind the fact that they’re on trial for murdering their parents. And soon they’re absolved, there inside, by those on the inside, where it matters and by the people who matter. The outside world and the people in it are nothing, forgettable and dispensable. A lower world. A vulgar antechamber to the paradise they inhabit and have created in their image and semblance. And the Karmas—Penelope discovers—are like the characters in The Exterminating Angel but without any anxiety about not being able to leave the room, not caring if they ever get out. Why? What for? We’re just fine in here, where there’s no chaos, where everything has an order, where everyone knows everyone else and the variables of disaster—the sins, the shame, the betrayals, the S and M and L and XL miseries—are covered up and kept under wraps and contained. Yes, the Karmas are content to be who they are. But Penelope never trusted that oft-cited opening of Tolstoy’s that talks about the uniformity of family happiness. Family happiness doesn’t speak in Esperanto, but in very different and, sometimes, incomprehensible and irreconcilable dialects. Tongues sharper and even harder to listen to and understand than those of the supposed and also Tolstoyan singular plurality regarding what unhappiness does to bloodlines. For it’s well understood that the most miserable and egotistical acts are often committed and forgiven in the name of the family itself, no intermission or drop of the curtain, always soliloquizing with a choir in the background and for the supposed good of all. “I did it/I do it/I will do it for your own good” is the malevolent phrase that some fire at others, never face-to-face and point-blank, but stabbing each other in the back while exchanging those little Christian love pats as mass draws to an end. Again and again. Smiling and with the best intentions, and best intentions are never wrong, never in error. For that reason, at least in public, nobody can reproach anybody for anything. And so the apparently invulnerable happiness of the Karmas is a turbulent happiness, full of cracks. The happiness of the Karmas is like the happiness of a volcano that knows it’s always on the verge of erupting, when least expected, at any
second or whenever it feels like it. A happiness that, just in case, it’s better to avoid getting too close to. And Penelope is too close for too long, and she feels dizzier all the time from the subterranean fumes of that toxic and asphyxiating happiness. A happiness that’s more an inertial, automatic, and mechanical reflexivity than a learned manual and muscular reflex. For Penelope—who always thought that happiness was something you achieved after a long race, after crossing the finish line—that kind of happiness, ready-made at the starting line, like a trophy to be claimed without any effort or prior training, strikes her as something suspicious and almost indigestible, capable of provoking visions, of making you hear voices or see things that aren’t there. And, yes, more than once, Penelope is almost certain she’s seeing things she doesn’t hear and hearing things she doesn’t see. But there they are and there they ring out on Mount Karma. Absurd ideas, unbelievable beliefs. Listening to give them interest-free and limitless credit. Seeing to believe them, to follow them with blind and uncertain footsteps. Penelope writes down everything in notebooks, on pieces of paper. Putting all of it in writing, she thinks, is a way, for a few seconds, to cast the spell of convincing herself that she’s there for a reason—to bear witness and warn humanity about what’s going on there. Some days she feels like a chronicler of antiquity, wandering past broken temples and twisted columns, when the whole world—it was enough to travel a few kilometers—was another world entirely, a new world. Strange customs and foreign commandments. For Mamagrandma and her progeny, Karma traditions are law and Karma laws are tradition. So, as a word, “Karma” is black and magic. Like a possessive and possessing symbol. Like a standard waving in the wind and, yes, there are flags flying on high in Mount Karma—a K crowned by a pyramid. And all “foreign” (which is to say: of a different surname) men who marry a Karma girl have to sign a document authorizing the inversion of surnames. So that, immediately upon the document being stamped by the notarial seal, the bride’s surname will precede the groom’s—their children will always be, first and foremost and when all is said and done, Karmas. And now Penelope (by law, not religion; “We’ll work that problem out and the problem of getting you impregnated by Maxi too, of course,” smiles Mamagrandma, revealing perfect, sharp little teeth, like the mouth of a dangerous rodent was living inside her mouth) is a Karma. Also, it’s true, the recently landed Penelope is experiencing the effects of being suddenly exposed to such sensationalistic organisms and substances. Penelope—dizziness and cold sweats—feels like one of those bewitched fairy tale, or witch tale, heroines. Princesses or village girls who can point to the exact instant they were ensnared by the words of a spell, but who find it impossible to figure out when and how the knot of the curse that keeps them there, captive, will be untied. And it’s clear that she’s not awaiting the arrival of some Prince Charming. Because, here, in her case, Prince Charming is also Sleeping Beauty. Penelope, suddenly, it’s not that she’s Cinderella; but she has more than enough stepsisters. And—among and above all of them, like one of those hysterical and perfidious blondes at the head of a pack of blondes in those teen movies—Hiriz. “Hiriz with an H and a Z,” Hiriz clarifies; the first thing she says to Penelope, as if indicating a decisive difference between her and all other Irises, properly written, that might exist around the world. It won’t take Penelope long to realize that the Karmas’ orthographical liberties, when it comes to their names, are a kind of barely subliminal revindication to justify their awful orthography. The Karmas always felt that writing was a reactionary form of the telephone and now, again, they are delighted by the arrival of all the small cellular screens where writing badly is looked on favorably, using fewer letters, spelling words as if they sounded like sounds from comic books and dog-call whistles and snapping fingers and grinding teeth and names and surnames and nicknames (Penelope has witnessed conversations where all that was said was one noun after another, pure predicating of the subject, no verbal predicate). And one of the few orders of the outside world that the Karmas obey without resistance or complaint, as mentioned, is that of never exceeding one hundred forty characters, when speaking or writing. For the Karmas, writing more than one hundred forty characters is almost like writing a novel. Conversations between Karmas correspond to a nearly immobile script, perfectly practiced and with minimal alterations. Names and private events annulling planetary milestones and thus September 11th, 2001 was “the day of Carmelita Karma’s debutante ball, which her father was unable to attend because he was in New York, and because of the thing with the planes and the towers they suspended all the flights; and when he called to tell her, his wife didn’t believe him and still doesn’t believe him.” A succession of eternal and circular and perpetual-motion conversations, subjects that you get on and off of like the cars of a train going nowhere, going around and around unceasingly, by rote, along rails where it already passed and will pass many times more. So, an isolated question like what time is it—depending on internal moods and external climates—can result in a brief and decisive answer of “No” or, sometimes, in long and sinuous monologues where what ends up being discussed has nothing at all to do with the hours and the minutes. Example: “The time when—you remember?—Aunt Inmaculada came out to feed the chickens and Concepción shouted to be careful because there’d been a fox loose and then Uncle Evangelio . . .” There are afternoons when Penelope feels that what she hears is an epic and absolute form of déjà vu: not the sensation that she heard all of this before, but the absolute certainty that she heard it just yesterday, and that she’ll hear it again tomorrow, in the same place, at the same time, in voices that are the same or different, it doesn’t matter. The people can die or change, but the roles inside the Karma family drama, the characters, will always be the same. The ones who start singing all of a sudden for no reason. Or the ones who declare that, “We must go to Israel to see some Jews” and then ask “Why did the Jews settle for being the chosen race? We’re better because we’re the chosen family. And we chose ourselves, without the help of any God.” The same thing happens with the storylines—the names change, but the surname and what is said and done stay the same. And, no, the Karmas don’t read novels; novels are why television was invented, telenovelas, which they all watch every night, at home, and it’s like taking a break from the exceedingly closed-circuit telenovela of their own lives. For the Karmas there’s nothing more real than their own reality and nothing more irreal than external reality, except when that reality is invoked, of necessity, in order to—again, never forget it, keep it clear, you can’t take too many precautions against it—accuse somebody who isn’t a Karma of having done something to a Karma. So their own bad and shameful thoughts are assigned to some more or less distant person. Projection of projectiles as a kind of variation of a Voodoo ritual where there’s always a doll at hand to be stuck with needles and tattooed with responsibilities. Is Penelope a doll? Seeing and analyzing her for the first time, in the airport, her nose quivering like the nostrils of bloodhounds picking up a fresh scent, the Karmas never really figure it out. Penelope is a new mixed breed. A coin suspended in the air and nobody knows—heads Karma, tails not Karma?—on which side it’ll fall. One thing is definitely clear—Penelope is strange. And the news that (when they ask about her family to see what and how much this newcomer is worth and whether she’ll be able to contribute any valuable relatives to the lush and endogamic and forever burning Karma family tree) Penelope’s parents died years ago because of “political issues” makes her stranger still. And that Penelope’s brother, her only living relative, is a somewhat well-known writer, prompts the Karmas, unsettled, disconcerted, to change the subject, as if changing the channel with the remote control of their highly controlled existence. Some of them, secretly, keep watching for a while, a few minutes more: the idea of having a writer in the family makes them feel a little perverse. And, in the end, special: none of their acquaintances know a writer, much less have a writer close to their family. But then they change the channel, in s
earch of a better show, something less complicated, more entertaining, with a laugh track. Because to say “writer” to a Karma is to provoke an immediate eruption of the word “bohemian.” In the beginning, Penelope finds the marker charming in its innocence. And she’s almost tempted to tell them, to further enhance the “bohemian,” that her brother rides a horse and doesn’t even know how to drive. But Penelope finds out quickly that the Karmatic definition of the term “bohemian” doesn’t correspond to fin de siècle European salons, but to a cocktail made of a mix of “alcoholic,” “atheist,” “sissy” (never gay or homosexual; and there are no homosexuals or gays among the Karmas, not because they don’t exist, but because they don’t acknowledge them as such, preferring to categorize them as “bachelors with many girlfriends we never see”), “intellectual,” and, worst of all, people with limited economic means and nonexistent social standing. Provided that it isn’t the person responsible for that popular book—never the writer, because the author doesn’t matter at all—that everyone’s reading, turning its pages, as if by social dictate. Moving their lips. As if having a conversation. Because, if reading can’t be made into a topic of conversation or status symbol, what’s the point? And besides, reading is an activity the Karmas immediately associate with boredom, melancholy, and, even, the preliminary symptoms of a suicide. Books—which “are all in black and white”—are, to the Karmas, even worse than black and white movies. * (One night, Penelope gets excited because a TV channel is showing Citizen Kane and she tells Hiriz that she has to watch it, and, after a few minutes, Hiriz stands up and says goodnight with a: “I’m really tired of watching tennis. Besides, Rosebud is definitely his mother, his mommy, right?”) And seeing Penelope reread, over and over, as if it were the Old Testament, her worn copy of Wuthering Heights, produces in the Karmas a feeling of anxiety and wariness they’ve never felt before. They have rarely seen someone they know well up close in the act of reading. An act that, the Karmas know intuitively, is nothing like paging through society magazines full of big photos and brief captions. They can only understand Penelope’s apparent attachment to that book by thinking of it as a thing she must have inherited from her dearest grandmother (the Karmas formulate this hypothesis aloud, in affected voices) or been given her by a secret lover (the Karmas venture this possibility in authentically conspiratorial whispers). And then they wonder (in medium-volume voices and with average prejudice) if Penelope might be bored or depressed (which she is, in fact, but not because of reading) and even go to the trouble of striking up conversations that they deem literary. Ah, the poor Karmas who, so devout, never read the Bible, which is the best thing that the religion they’ve chosen has going for it. The best part of what they believe in is a book, but they resist believing in it, because the Karmas don’t believe in books. The Karmas listen to the Bible at mass, like a radio transmitting from who knows where, what do they know. Some of them even prefer to close their eyes, because watching the priest read disturbs them. They prefer not to see him, and to think of him as a very skilled and inspired ventriloquist’s dummy. One Karma girl approaches Penelope and confides in her that “I read a book, but it wasn’t a good experience. So I didn’t do it again. It was traumatic.” Right away Penelope picks up the Karma girl’s emphasis when she says “traumatic,” and the embarrassment accompanying just saying the word “book”; as if it were wrong, transgressive, unfit for a young lady. For the Karma girl, “traumatic” is clearly a complex word that she doesn’t often say (and that’s why she says it with the sort of pride of a good student more graced with a good memory than blessed with authentic interest or curiosity) and “book” is something she thinks only every so often, and it makes her wonder why such strange things—like thinking about a book—occur to her. Penelope, interested, can’t help wonder what the title of the volume was that expelled her from the world of reading forever. Some cryptic or experimental title? Something long and winding and full of nooks and crannies? “I don’t remember,” responds the Karma girl with a trembling sigh, her eyes the deepest blue of the most superficial contact lenses, long hair dyed blonde, vainly invoking the ghost of Farrah Fawcett. And that says it all, no point going beyond that microstory. But then Penelope, more dazzled than dumbfounded, thinks: Ah, this is just the type of being for whom the concept “air head” was invented; the idea of a cranium inside of which spins, tirelessly, a wind that moves nothing but vibrates everything, a Transylvanian and thereminic wind, like an old Universal film . . . The Incredible Empty Woman, who one night, in a laboratory in black and white . . .” * And yet, with a shiver, like every time she confronts the absolute, doubt and fear rise inside her: “But maybe it’s me who is the primitive specimen,” Penelope says to herself. “Maybe this girl—who’s like a character out of Jane Austen, who’ll never know who Jane Austen was—is much wiser than I am; much happier and more carefree, able to remove and discard, without doubts or second thoughts, entire pieces of history and art and music and in this way contemplate, with equal interest, a sublime painting by Leonardo or that infamous Korean ballet dancer on YouTube. And decide that the Korean is much more pleasing and less complicated. Because there’s no need for context or prior knowledge to enjoy the Korean. The Korean begins and ends in himself and isn’t part of any Renaissance or belonging to this or that school of painting. And, yes, maybe there’s nothing better than not feeling the obligation to read all of Shakespeare. Or Dickens. Or Dostoevsky. Or Stendhal. Or Borges. Or James, where those prekarmatic ladies exclaim things like ‘Oh, I must confess; I don’t want to know any more . . . The more you know, the less happy you are.’ And avoiding the temptation (James again) to go around asking questions, to classify and divide people, thinking of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady as an innocent, ingenuous victim of the vampires who surround and corner her, or, to the contrary, as a proud fool who’s beyond saving and deserves everything that happens to her and much more. Or thinking of Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove as someone who may not be a bad person, but just a person who behaves badly. And, ah, the sudden complication of understanding (of reading and understanding) that being bad and behaving badly frequently have the same effect on everyone else. And that if you behave badly more than two or three times in a row then you’re already a bad person, period. Being able to walk through Vienna thinking only about apple cakes and not about The Third Man or about Hitler or about Freud or, even, about that Klimt poster kissing dorm-room walls. Turning down, already at the port, without even coming aboard to inspect the cabin, a voyage to so many places, but a voyage that’s understood and acknowledged to lack a final destination. Saying no to the frustrating experience of knowing that there will never be enough time to know everything.” Penelope wonders if some Karmas might not benefit from an encounter with a Buddenbrook or a Forsyte or a Salina. If Hiriz would, for example, recognize herself in the voracious and insatiable Undine Spragg, in the noble and well-written reflection of some of her unsavory defects; and if this might not help her correct them or, at least, recognize them, seeing them written better in the elegant third-person of a character than in her own vulgar first-person. Probably not. And, of course, there was always the possibility that the confrontation with the far better written portrait of a different surname would have a, yes, traumatic effect on the Karmas. “So, who knows, maybe it’s better to stay home and become a total expert on where you came from and ignore everything else, unless it’s something that, once in a great while, crosses paths with that minimal yet graspable experience. Not trying to find yourself in the universal, but sitting down and waiting for the universe to come find you. And if it doesn’t, no problem: could be that the universe isn’t all that interesting, and not that you don’t interest it. ‘Once upon a time . . .’ Again and again. Focusing a telescope on the microscopic. Being a wild dwarf star, and maybe being someone who is better and more fully capable of facing his own life, without so many complications and instruction manuals drawn up by minds vastly more powerful than our own,” Pene
lope trembles, she trembles all the time. And she recalls one long night of cocaine and the Discovery Channel when she saw, between one line and the next, a documentary claiming that a study of African tribes had determined that the life expectancy of the tribes’ members had diminished notably after they learned to read and write. Also—an incorporeal voice informed over a landscape of huts and desert—they slept less and worse. All because, suddenly, they were able to live other lives, to think more. And Penelope thinks too much, trembling more all the time—the Karmas like a new and impossible-to-synthesize drug on which it turns out to be difficult to be succinct and of which Hiriz is its most pure and powerful strain—almost terrified by how much she thinks like this, more all the time: in concentric and ascending and descending circles, as if a slow spiral staircase had been injected into the high-velocity elevator of her brain. And besides, Penelope says, giddy, a notable difference: that Karma girl, traumatized by a single book, is not like Hiriz. That girl doesn’t know what she wants, but she’s perfectly acquainted with what she needs (a husband, money, children, more money); while Hiriz believes she knows what she wants and couldn’t care less about what she needs. And what Hiriz wants is absolutely everything. And she wants it to be more and better than what the other Karmas have. There are even moments when Hiriz wishes not that she’d read all the books Penelope has read, but, yes, that she knew enough about them to be able to make a certain impression on the eventual “bohemian” from the capital or foreigner who might fall across her path. But it’s not like that diminishes her dream either. For Hiriz, that’s just a battle to be fought once a great war is won. * Meanwhile and in the meantime, for the rest of the Karmas, Penelope’s case (having a writer as a brother) is even more disconcerting (mildly disconcerting, like everything external and alien and that, for that reason, fortunately, can be forgotten right away) but ultimately insignificant. A two-person family? That’s not a family. Parents disappeared over “political issues”? Boring and, of course, they must have done something and it wouldn’t be a surprise if they had it coming, and period, and moving right along. Limited possible storylines. Just a few drops of false piety and a sound like oooh . . . And that’s it. No space in the mega-micro world of the Karmas for external matters. Everyone is occupied—in a baroque flowchart fit for one of those unbearable sagas with gnomes and wizards and kings and dragons—with betrayals, rumors, competitions, barely hidden enmities, and shameful secrets. Secrets everyone knows and discusses as if they were discussing the always changeable state of the climate’s constant fluctuations where a summer storm or a hurricane, with a woman’s name or the label of something that’s desirable and de luxe just because one or another of them possesses it, is always on the verge of breaking out.