Album familiar - short story - Latin America: Private Eyes & Time Travelers

It was my turn to be waiter for half an hour, and I could see the groups were getting old. Old inside. However, we ate well. We drank without much enthusiasm and, finally, the moment came to clean, close up the room, and leave. Once, six months ago, we had had to use another of the eight rooms because nine parties showed up. However, we all felt uncomfortable that time, because every now and then when a few people talked at once the place seemed full. Almost fifty men in one luxurious restaurant designed for eight hundred customers.

We arrived home in silence. Everyone went to his room to try to sleep.

Perhaps because of the cognac I drank or the emotion from having a new book, I started to think about the guard lady from the department store, about women in general. That's what everyone missed the most. Clearly, it was expected that the groups that formed would share some homosexual activity. It had also been expected that out of desperation, violence would emerge. That we'd go out like a pack of wolves crazily driven to rape women like the guard lady or the salesclerk, who doubtlessly had old husbands whom we should envy. Or that we'd attack the city until we found the few women who, so it was said, were hiding out, waiting for the end like us. All that was to be expected and, like so many other things, hadn't happened. The strike had been too violent, and had jolted us. But its true terror resided in its silence and coldness. In only one week, without any explanation, not that it matters, humanity had died. At least ninetynine percent of it, according to Esteban's estimation, when he mixed grief with drunkenness and a pocket calculator. But even more painful was that death hadn't followed the rules of chance, the rules that we believe so blindly it scares us, even now, when they are broken over and over each day. Practically all the survivors were young men, and the few women left alive were rendered sterile. Children didn't even have a chance. They closed their eyes in the morning and by nightfall they had become a fistful of grayish dust, like the product of cremation: ash, calcium coal. Even the fanatics had no chance to cry that it was a punishment from above. Doctors couldn't study that which wasn't even a disease. That's how the new world started.

The next day Romero cooked. Just like Marquez, we only knew him by his last name. We didn't need any more. Before, none of us knew each other. Chance threw us together, mutually un-losing ourselves in the streets, keeping company around a bonfire that smelled like dog consomme. That was before discovering that we were the universal heirs of luxury and comfort.

All day long I read my book. Twice. I don't know what everyone else did, but I'm sure that, like me, they frequently interrupted themselves to think about a woman, or about all of them. That's why, when we got together to eat, Max said without hesitation:

"Tonight let's go to the Pleasure Palace."

No one knew if it was a question or a statement. No one responded because we knew we were going to do it and the soup was getting cold. Only Esteban shivered and looked around at us. Max waited for Romero to sit down then started, between each spoonful and slice of toasted bread, to explain something that Esteban did not yet realize and the rest of us mostly ignored.