33 Revolutions (3 page)

He gets up slowly and goes up to the ninth floor in search of the Russian woman. She opens the door and leans back against the doorframe, as if she had guessed he was coming. The night passes slowly—they know each other, they've learned to delight in prolonged, stuttering spasms—and toward the end, he snorts loudly. He smokes, lying in the dark against the woman's naked back—powerful buttocks that wear out sheets and dreams—and he thinks that metaphors are unnecessary at this moment in which the smoke drifts up to the ceiling, slithering amid the aromas of sweat, sex, and tropicalism.

She sleeps and he devotes himself to sniffing her body (the smell of her hairy underarms burns his nostrils and jangles his neurons). Without putting pressure on her, he makes her turn—her tits point up at the ceiling; he buries his nose in her pubis, filling his lungs with the unmistakable acidity of that lush blond cunt, full of socialist realism. She smiles in her sleep—she murmurs something in Russian (she's back in the steppes)—and he lies down to smoke once again, letting himself be borne along by the scratched record of pleasure and tiredness.

H
is peace is broken by a shower of nightsticks and boots. He tries to wake, shaky, eyes imploring, naked, he wonders what he's done, what he's said, and he yells at the top of his lungs. His body is burning and he feels every muscle atrophied by fear. He's flung down the stairs, and as he goes down he bumps on a surface that's not very pleasant to the touch. He's surrounded by insults, anger, madness. More kicks, many more. Now he weeps. He doesn't want to, but he can't help it. His teeth. His teeth hurt. Downstairs, they bundle him into a new Mercedes that jolts in time to the blows.

Villa Marista. They drag him to an interrogation room. A shaky doctor certifies that there's no serious damage to this weary, skinny individual who's trembling as much as he is. Two officers come in and threateningly demand that he tell them everything. One of them hits him full in the face; the other insults his mother, calls him a fag, and gives him a thump in the sternum.

“Talk, for fuck's sake!” they both roar simul­taneously.

T
hey lock him in a cell with two unsavory-looking characters. He crouches in a corner, sniffles, and tries to come to terms with the pain. He looks up; the prisoners are watching him and smiling.

“Did you talk?” one of them asks.

“Talk about what?”

He's on the verge of despair. He doesn't understand why he's here, and has no idea how to get out. Everything is fear at that moment. A fear that eats away at him, humiliates him more than the blows, the shouts, the insults. He doesn't care whether or not there are witnesses to his panic, his paralysis: I'm the witness, he thinks, judging himself harshly now that he can finally breathe a little more easily. The cell stinks. It's cramped and gray and there are stains on the wall that look like dried blood. There's a small window, just enough to bring in a little air; it's almost at the level of the ceiling, unreachable for a man of medium height.

He lies down on a concrete cot, as cold and hard as the cemetery. He can't close his eyes. He's afraid to do so. A long series of distorted images unfurls on the ceiling, reminding him of
A Clockwork Orange
. Three short but well-built guards shove him out and force him to walk along endless corridors. They come to a dark room lit by a single dim bulb. In it, a high-ranking officer (it's unmistakable) is waiting for him; they sit him down on a chair and before he can open his mouth a thick volume of
Das Kapital
crashes into his left parietal.

“Talk!” the man with the stripes murmurs from the semidarkness.

“About what?”

“You know.”

“I don't know anything. I don't under­stand . . . ”

The guards look at each other, one murmurs something about a son of a bitch, and the other lets fly with the second volume, this time full in the face and with the spine. Blood spurts from his nose (nasal septum shattered). Unbearable pain, tears that burst against his tightly closed eyelids, real howls.

Then he wakes up, soaked in sweat, next to the Russian woman, who at that moment grunts something untranslatable.

He dresses quickly.

He escapes to reality . . .

E
ight
A.M.
The heat and humidity are already unbearable (the atmosphere surpasses any instrument of measurement: Something indescribable hovers in the air). The bus advances toward the slaughterhouse of the everyday (people hanging from doors and windows, men rubbing up against women in the interior—the morning hard-on) and at last stops at the intersection of two avenues trapped in time. Already tired, he walks to work with the certainty of futility—the discontent, the atrophy, the silence of everyday life. The office awaits him like last week: There are no surprises or changes or novelties. Once the epic is exhausted, all that remains is the boredom, the absenteeism, the indifference (consciousness is unpredictable; without feedback, it scratches, the needle jumps, and it becomes incomprehensible, inscrutable, impossible to grasp). Everything lacks definition; dirt erases the most basic forms (theft is a legitimate practice): Blackmail unites, decline disguises itself as progress, and even so the record keeps turning (the needle sticks, jumps, and goes backwards): Confusion is the one certainty.

He knows: Today nothing will go well. On days like this, life seems to him a vain literary exercise, an experimental poem, a treatise on the pointless and the unnecessary, and he walks slowly, his eyes glued to the ground, wishing he could fall onto the curb and die crushed by habit. He lights a cigarette, blows out the smoke, and looks behind him (beyond time). He thinks that, after all, reality is a strange place, at least here. Determinedly, he turns and walks in the opposite direction. He gets in a battered old heap that stinks of kerosene, squashed between six strangers.

Through the windshield he sees the scratched world pass by, like a record in which everything happens (the city, white with so much light, the people on the staircases, in doorways, and on balconies staring into space; people standing in line, breakdowns). The driver keeps complaining: the gasoline, the tires, the spare parts (the grammar of movement, words in perpetual motion). The Capitolio: itinerant photographers, tourists, teenage tearaways in trendy clothes, police officers with their eyes peeled, adults engaged in the unequivocal dialectic of idleness . . .

He walks. He listens to conversations:

“Down with the union!” someone cries.

“Everything's for sale here, man.”

“Fuck off!” another replies.

“Fuck you! You're a fucking faggot, you know that?”

“Scram, pal,” the crowd is getting worked up (indignation): the ethics of fists and guns.

“Just get the hell out of here, things are turning ugly . . . ”

Cops in a patrol car. He gets to the stop and asks to be dropped at the end of the waiting line. People on all sides—scratched records that nobody listens to (statistics for a speech or a balance sheet): But they aren't the ones who'll be left, he thinks: I'm the one who'll be left.

S
anta María, burning hot sand, scratched records in tangas or Bermuda shorts. He watches a group of young people who look out to sea with a mixture of fatalism and anxiety (the distance seems so distant from here): Schizophrenia is normal in this scratched record—side A, side B—a mix that leads nowhere, bipolar phenomenology. He walks barefoot with the bottoms of the pants rolled up (shoulders slumped, eyes down)—there isn't a single shadow anywhere on the beach (the smell of the salt residue is particularly seductive)—, swinging his frame, and sits down at the far end, a long way from the commotion.

He smokes facing the sea, thinking that there's nothing to keep him here—and there and then, sitting on the sand he wonders why (for what?). His life is passing with incredible, Tarkovskyan slowness, and all his old dreams have faded with the relentless competition of reality. If at least he was happy in his work—but he doesn't even have that: He's a minor bureaucrat, having to tolerate bosses infinitely more second-rate than he is, he thinks. It isn't even a matter of material comfort: His needs are few: He'd live more or less the same way in any part of the globe. It's all about the shock between reality and him: The inertia that stops him from breaking free of his stagnation; the false dilemma that ties him to nothingness.

The heat is criminal—it melts neurons, incites to violence, multiplies fertility tenfold. There isn't a beer for miles around (or water, or a barley drink, or anything that can be bought with the national currency). Nothing belongs to me, he thinks. And what about me, do I belong to anything? (The scratched record plays insistently.) All at once a group of young people appear carrying a strange object halfway between a ready-made and a broken wardrobe (there are six or seven carrying it); they pull the artifact to the water and get on it. The spectacle attracts a crowd of onlookers.

“Where are you going?”

“We're getting the fuck out of here.”

“Nonstop to the USA.”

“Have a good trip, guys.”

“Take me with you, pal, don't be mean!”

By some miracle, the contraption floats; With a cry of Eureka, they set out to sea, rowing with broomsticks. Everything is crude (the raft, the oars, the crew, the country). The onlookers make a tremendous racket (some smile, others look worried) and he ends up going closer too, with a mixture of anxiety and envy. He's surprised there are no accusations—
gusanos!
traitors!—or other similar insults; on the contrary: The people appear to be part of the odyssey (the enthusiasm is contagious). The waves rock the boat, caressing what should be the keel, and six or seven faces laugh like kids with a new toy: They won't make it, he thinks, seeing the raft move away and disappear amid the waves.

F
or an hour, the onlookers stay in the same place, talking among themselves, recounting what they've seen to other people who approach (flies, he thinks, surrounding the scratched record of shit). He chose this spot thinking it would be quiet and now he's seen himself overtaken by reality. There have always been crazy people who throw themselves in the sea in unbelievable rafts; The unbelievable thing now is that it happens in broad daylight. He asks himself if he's been too immersed in his own thoughts to the point of not seeing what's happening around him, or if things are happening too quickly and he, wrapped up in his metaphysical crap, is unable to keep a grasp on events. It's as if his memory has also been subordinated to the great scratched record that governs life: Selective memory, rabbit-like memory, clear memory, correct and filtered of impurities.

He heads back home. He enters the apartment, takes off his shirt (he puts on a Mussorgsky cassette), and calls the office, inventing an excuse. The manager reassures him.

“It's all right, son, but make sure you go to the doctor”—he's never missed work (even though he hates it) so his absence is a cause for concern: “Are you sure you aren't sick?”

“No, comrade, it's just . . . a little discomfort.”

He hangs up: Rum, cigarette, couch. He picks up a book at random, opens it to any old page, any old paragraph, any old line, and reads from there, without paying attention.

The scratched record of daily life superimposes itself onto the story and, of course, onto any hallucination about the future (the only thing that really matters is today): The rest is mental masturbation. He shuts himself in the bathroom with the Russian woman in his head (taking advantage of the fact that there's water, he takes an unhurried shower): He ejaculates, spattering the walls (he goes weak in the knees). He dries his body with an old, frayed towel; then he defecates: He's already a new man.

H
e wakes with a ray of sunlight tormenting his left eye, the hum of the fan settled in both eardrums, and the stickiness of summer soaking the sheets and the pillow. Without thinking, he calls a doctor friend and asks for a medical note (they agree to meet in a park they know from their childhood); he takes his camera, a few rolls of old film, and goes out. He walks along the seawall all the way to the end (he crosses through the tunnel on Fifth) and sits down to wait. To wait for what? For the scratched record of the inevitable to play out.

An hour later, a group of teenagers approaches the shoreline with planks, ropes, and empty barrels. In just under forty minutes, they put together a floating contraption of limited dimensions (they make a mast out of a pipe, and a sail from a number of sheets). A few gallons of water and cans of cookies will serve as sustenance for the crew. The kids prepare the raft—he photographs the process—until one of them (no older than seventeen) approaches and, with all the insolence of the barrio, asks him, “Man, you a cop or something?”

“No, no, no, me a cop? Forget it.”

“It's like, I see you taking pictures, man.”

“I'm just a witness of my time . . . ”

The teenager looks at him as you would look at a misunderstood poet. “You're a fucking stoolie, that's what you are,” and he turns, leaving him standing there, camera in hand, and no time to tell him to go fuck himself.

H
e's finishing the first rolls when the floating artifact sets off with its cargo of kids who are sick of it all and don't have anything to hold them back. While the raft heads for the straits, he sets off for home (dragging his feet) wondering at what moment the dream of the future got stuck in the past: Everything it was assumed we had left behind—he thinks—returns again (all the vices of the old regime, but today) like a screw that's lost its thread, or a record that gets scratched and turns around and around in the same place.

Everything is violence, he thinks: People are always on edge and any excuse, however minor it is, is enough to trigger crime. Hunger feeds us, despair is the one hope, he thinks. He gets to the park (across from a theater) where he meets his old friend. Sitting on the rim of the waterless fountain, the doctor hands him the paper that makes him officially sick, freeing him from work for a few days. They both smoke and watch the children pass and remember the days when they too were children and played at being agents of the security forces