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

Mauricio-Jose Schwarz

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.

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.

This morning I went shopping. That pastime is perhaps the most hypocritical of all, but, like the store manager said to me, even the shopkeepers have to do something.

The old guard lady took my five thousand dollar bill to protect it while I browsed. Later she walked towards the men's wear area while I went to the book section. The book that I wanted was there. Of course it was there. There were fifty copies on the shelves, and, according to what they told me, a hundred more in storage and a thousand in the publisher's warehouse. It was another one of those books that would never disappear.

I turned around towards the guard lady and saw her across the store, with someone named Juan or Joan or something like that. She was helping him try on a coat. The game was beginning. Furious, I strode over and faced her.

"Where is my five thousand dollars?" I burst out.

"In the register ... please," she answered without turning to look at me.

"The service here is worse every day. I want a book and you have the nerve to sell suits. And you don't even have my five thousand dollars."

"They'll give it to you at the register."

I snorted a few times and turned around indignantly. At the register I was attended to by another woman, even older. I asked for my money and she extended a ten thousand dollar bill.

"Five thousand," I told her refusing the note. "Mine is five thousand and I won't take anything else."

She searched without any hurry and gave it to me, with two one hundred dollar bills stuck to it with gum. I returned to the book section to turn the book I wanted into the day's bestseller. There was nobody else in the area. Only one clerk was in the toy department, and the manager was strolling through the atrium. With Juan or Joan and I, there were six people in the huge department store, designed to hold as many as six thousand people during Christmas season. I left with the book. Without paying, of course. I waved to the old saleswoman on the way out and she responded with a smile.

That night Marquez decided that we'd eat out. When it's his turn to cook, he often decides we should eat out. I don't like to, but on the other hand Perro loves restaurant meals. We loaded everyone up and left so we'd arrive exactly at eight. There were already other parties at the tables, and Marquez disappeared into the kitchen promising a surprise. He had already told me about a recipe exchange he had made with a friend. I feared the worst, because Marquez was capable only of the simplest meals.

There were five parties and, for them, five chefs. It was odd to think how everyone had formed groups after. In general terms, we were five or ten intermingling clusters. Each independent except in food. Our cleanliness, our tastes, they weren't a group matter. But we'd get together to eat communally, like the herds have done forever. That's why we lived close together, often in the same hotel or in a mansion. And on the big nights everyone would go to a restaurant and cook for various groups and talk--always about the same stuff--and we drank, almost always plenty.

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.

"The Pleasure Palace," he said with a vague expression, "was the best brothel in the country. Maybe on the continent. All luxury, all entertainment, all happiness. To go there was not to buy a woman, no. It was to buy a ticket to a paradise where there was concern, passion, understanding, and friendship. Not just sex. It was for the men and women who loved holistic, total pleasure, not just of the body, but which for lack of adequate words we'll call spiritual. Afterwards, some survivors renovated it, changed a few things, and opened it to the public. Every now and then it's nice to refresh the memory of your mind and your hormones; that's why we're going to the Pleasure Palace tonight."

Max wasn't our leader, but people listened to him more patiently because he was the oldest. He was barely over forty, but in a world of youth he had learned to be patriarchal. Esteban, however, looked at him in horror, imagining, like everyone did the first time, something repugnant.

"Nobody's making you go," said Perro in a friendly, mocking tone, "but you don't lose anything by going and looking. If you don't like it, you leave and it's done."

We finished eating in silence. Esteban and Perro washed the dishes and Perro said in too loud a voice, as if to show us that he was capable of profound observations:

"Without any prejudice, Esteban. So much deliberation on good things will make everything else look bad."

We left the house at five and went to the Pleasure Palace.

The Pleasure Palace is located in the old residential zone of the city and is, in fact, a little marble palace. Esteban took it all in with poorly concealed terror. Max opened the bronze and crystal door and brought us into an empty little room. Marquez took out four bottles of champagne and went to the kitchen. Within a minute he returned, with the beverage chilled.

"It's not magic," Romero explained, catching sight of Esteban's expression, "each group that comes brings at least three bottles, takes those in the refrigerator, and leaves theirs chilling for the next group."

Perro put on a record. Baroque, composer unidentifiable. We drank.

Max nostalgically recounted the glories of the Pleasure Palace. Esteban's terror kept increasing. I was watching him and saw in his eyes the unsettling images that one's fear associates with the unknown. Perro told us about a girlfriend he had, the second and last, who, before, was just barely eighteen. I changed the record.

The walls resonated with sadness, reflecting the outside emptiness more than the songs and sex found inside years ago. I felt a cold shiver and decided to go up. They followed me silently. I entered a room and the atmosphere seemed to metamorphose the palace into a ceremonial temple. On the walls, on the ceiling, dozens of photos. The playmates of years past, all surely dead by now, movie stars, innocent pictures of college girls in mini-skirts, with fifteen-year-old outfits. In the center, a bed with a purple quilt and a tape recorder. Through the windows a cold, clear sun was visible. Esteban retreated when Romero asked me:

"You staying here?"

"No, first let's see," I answered.

We went to another room, equally furnished, except it was dominated by an imposing wall picture of a girl with enormous breasts looking innocently at the camera. In yet another, before the photos, we found a man on his knees with his eyes cast downward as if in prayer. I closed the door trying not to make a sound.

Romero opened one more door and on the bed we saw a man crying and masturbating desperately. He turned to look at us.

"Pardon," breathed Romero.

"Forgive me. I forgot to close it. Wait a second. I won't be long. I'll finish, clean up, then you can come in."

Now Esteban seemed bewildered. It wasn't what he expected. No transvestites grotesquely disguised with fake breasts and full smiles with lipstick-stained teeth. No men making a mockery of halfwaylove, or anything. Only rooms full of memories and dark incense.

"You can take whatever room you want," Max told Esteban. "You can take as long as you need. You can look at them, dream, masturbate, cry, pray like the man we saw. The rooms are full of memories. Records by Billy Holiday, Janis Joplin, Nana Mouskouri, Madonna, and a lot of others. When we rescue something special we bring it here, where we keep all our memories, even if it only means hurting more."

Esteban looked at us, turned around, and went into the room dominated by the huge wall photo.

"Wow," said Perro, "and I thought that we were going to have to recommend him to some homosexual group like the one from Carma."

"That's why there's no use thinking, Perro," I commented, "We've made enough mistakes."

We each chose a room and, once more, shut ourselves in with the past.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Fairleigh Dickinson University
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group