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Album familiar - short story - Latin America: Private Eyes & Time Travelers
Literary Review, Fall, 1994 by Mauricio-Jose Schwarz, Jesse H. Lytle
DAWN CAME WITH AN UNRELENTING RAIN. Unhappily, I woke up and covered myself the best I could before going down to the kitchen, where Max was already preparing breakfast. It's his turn to cook on Fridays.
"Caviar and smoked salmon. Champagne with orange juice." He announced his menu without the slightest interest.
In the beginning we were afraid there wouldn't be enough food for everyone. We thought that without electricity, everything we had stored would rot. We dreaded hunger, but hunger never reached us. After all, you have to do something, and some people kept power up at a few electric plants, more to keep themselves busy than out of any conviction. The word conviction had died along with other victims.
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Even if everyone ate until they weighed six hundred pounds and lived to be one hundred, we would not finish a fraction of the dried, canned, frozen, and preserved food left in the world. That's why we treat ourselves to so many gastronomical luxuries. Especially when Max cooks. He takes a certain twisted pleasure in embittering himself thinking that the finest delicacies will hint of melancholy and sorrow.
The others come down in two shifts. Max repeats himself indifferently for both.
"Caviar and smoked salmon. Champagne with orange juice."
But he does his duty. Esteban is the most affected, doubtlessly because he still has the most vivid memories. He is the youngest of the group, and the most recent arrival after spending a few months in hiding, holed up in the suburbs, full of unmitigated fears. His memories churn in his mind, they push against his eyes and his eardrums. Occasionally, they make his fingers tremble and overpower his tongue. Sometimes we let him talk about his life before and he calms down. But eventually he rouses too many memories before someone swears at him or slaps him or gets up and runs out crying. Only then does Esteban learn to deal a little with loneliness.
This afternoon I went to see an old movie that preached about the potential problems of overpopulation. In the final scene, after a rebel group attempted a revolution, the members were detained, packed into an enormous hall. The Master doesn't pardon them, but he doesn't impose any special punishment either. The prisoners, a few thousand, have mixed demeanors that range from staring dejectedly downward to raising their eyes defiantly towards the Master. They are monitored by security forces, burly men in brown uniforms and orange helmets with gas masks and anti-smog goggles. The Master announces to everyone that the principal rebel commanders have been named generals in the Master's army. The rest are returned to the streets, pushed by the guards. Outside, the masses completely fill the miserable city. The rebels mingle, separate, proceed uncomfortably in an effort to resume life as usual. The palace doors close, definitively separating them from the huge hall and a few rooms reserved for the exclusive use of the Master, his court, his generals, and his favorite soldiers.
After leaving the theater, where another idle survivor has dedicated his time to showing a different movie each day, I'm amazed by the accurate, almost cruel nature of the paradox. It was of course expected that things would turn out that way, that overpopulation or nuclear war would end up bringing about ruin. That's what was expected before.
The streets were empty. It wasn't raining anymore. In the twilight I could make out a motionless figure on a corner. Getting closer, I saw it was Amadeo. We greeted each other leisurely like we do now in this city, where everyone knows everyone else. Or practically everyone. There are various networks of people. We almost always know each other, sometimes not, but we don't bother each other. We get to know each other, but each time we prove over and over that we've exhausted all possible topics.
"Cigarette?" Amadeo offered.
"Thanks."
We smoked for a few minutes, watching three transients go by, perhaps hoping to see a woman. Or rather, as always, hoping to see a woman. And looking for a topic.
"Do you remember that old guy Fritz, the German who had just shown up when ...?" Amadeo didn't have to finish his sentence. Just in case, I interrupted him before it could escape his mouth.
"Yeah, I remember him. The one who was the theater director."
"A show just opened yesterday at the national theater. He got actors and assistants and even sells tickets."
"You have to do something," I commented, repeating that phrase that had already become a ritual among us.
"Well, yeah. He wrote the piece himself. Yesterday, without almost any publicity, there were six people in the audience. Old Fritz expects to put on the show twenty times. That way everyone living in the city will get to see it."
Amadeo's humor is unappealing. Not as unappealing, for sure, as Esteban's fierce sorrow, but it's still grating. It's not the cynicism, even though his snickers do have a cynical edge. Maybe it's because Amadeo is a false cynic. The mask of the mask to delude himself.
