Cesar Aira - Shantytown

“What a coincidence, Ma’am Élida. .”

It really was surprising. Not so much the business with the Pastor, a self-styled evangelical minister, who preached in the shantytown and extracted money from the gullible, but only as a cover for his real, paid job, as a police informant. The “coincidence” to which Adelita had referred, picking up on the word “nightmare,” used earlier by her employer, was that her boyfriend had been implicated in the death of that poor girl, and the following day, the sixteenth of March, he had disappeared. Nobody had seen him since. It wasn’t clear what had happened, what kind of accident had led to the firing of the fatal shot. Adelita was sure that her boyfriend was innocent, maybe just a witness, or not even that. But the fact was that he had vanished, without telling anyone where he was going: not his friends, not his parents (with whom he lived), not even her. He was a timid, gentle boy, incapable of hurting a fly, almost excessively childlike and shy. He’d probably been so disturbed by the death that he’d run away in a blind panic, with no idea where he was going. No shock should have lasted that long, but with him it was hard to tell; perhaps he was more fragile than Adelita had thought. She had cried and cried, and looked in all the places where she imagined he might be hiding; she kept visiting his parents at regular intervals to see if they had any news. But there was no sign of him. People from his village in Peru had told her that he hadn’t gone back there. The world was so big. i. .

They had been good together: they were outwardly similar, “made for each other,” but she had the energy and strength of character that he lacked. She was just what a boy like him would need, when he became a man: someone who’d always be there for him, supportive but inconspicuous. Over the weeks and months that followed his disappearance, Adelita had resigned herself to never seeing him again. She’d even found a new boyfriend and they’d gone dancing a couple of times before she decided that she didn’t really like him. Naturally she had told her employers everything. Mornings she looked after Madame Élida’s apartment, and afternoons she worked for one of Élida’s sisters-in-law, cleaning her home and business. Both women had offered support and advice, especially Élida, who was like a mother to her. Emerging now from a private daydream and returning to the topic of Vanessa, Élida said:

“I know her mother. We sometimes chat in the street and she’s told me about the trouble they’ve been having with that little brat. Next time I see her, I’ll tell her about the phone call, just so she knows.”

“Ma’am. .” said Adelita in a murmur and went back to her work, but now she was weeping silently. An old wound had reopened. It was possible, even probable, that her boyfriend, Alfredo, had used the opportunity provided by the crime and his vague association with it to get away from her. He wouldn’t have had the courage to take that step under normal circumstances, but fate had provided him with an easy way out. He really was shy and awkward; he didn’t know how to talk to girls. Somehow he’d plucked up the courage to start a conversation with her, but maybe that was just because she was ugly and insignificant. . He was good looking, though, and in the end he must have realized that he could do better; but because of his shyness and inexperience, he couldn’t find a way to break it off. Maybe that was what had happened. Deep down Adelita suspected as much, and it hurt.

That’s how she was: unassuming, serious, responsible, conscientious. She kept no secrets from anyone, and yet her life was surrounded by mystery. Nobody can tell what lives in the heart of a girl like her. Poor and small as she was, she had her own personal genie, not the standard guardian angel that other people believe in, but a supernatural masculine being of extraordinary proportions, who accompanied her everywhere, protecting her twenty-four hours a day, always wide awake even when she was sleeping. Nothing like those effeminate angels: a giant at least twenty yards tall, with a powerful chest ten yards wide. When he stretched out his arms he was the size of an enormous tree. How could any man approach her, once he had noticed that presence? Which showed how blind that ridiculous “Pastor” was. A wonder the giant hadn’t smacked him dead on the spot. Not that men were forbidden, as long as they didn’t have ulterior motives. She wasn’t planning to be left on the shelf. On the contrary. The plan was to find love.

While all this was happening on the third floor, up on the fifth, a girl called Jessica came home, and was told by her mother that Vanessa, her friend from across the street, had called to find out the surname of the people who lived downstairs. This plunged Jessica into a turmoil of speculation. She knew what a scheming piece of work Vanessa was (they’d fallen out, and it was extremely surprising that she’d called). Something fishy was going on, and Jessica resolved to find out what.

Cabezas would have been surprised to learn that the effects of his Machiavellian initiative were spreading like the proverbial wildfire. He was blinkered: he couldn’t see beyond the structure and its realization. This limitation had worked for him so far, and he had come to believe that it always would. His mistake was thinking that a battle is fought at a single point in space. That is not the case. A battle always covers a large area, and none of the participants can take it in at a glance, not even retrospectively. Nobody can grasp the whole, mainly because in reality there is no whole to be grasped.

Something similar applies to time. The inspector’s error in that regard was a little more justifiable, since, as a policeman, he was supposed to be “an agent of justice” and in that capacity he had to believe that his work was underpinned by a transcendent rationale.

How mistaken he was! If God intervened in earthly justice, crimes would be punished straight away. And that could only happen if it had been happening all along, in which case human beings would have adjusted their behavior accordingly. People would refrain from robbing and killing just as they get out of the way of a speeding bus: they would do it automatically because the species would have incorporated the knowledge that the consequences were automatic and fatal. In other words, it wouldn’t be strictly speaking a matter of deliberation and choice. But in the world as we know it, God waits. When moral rather than physical laws are operating, time has to pass between the act and its consequences. And in that lapse of time other things happen.

In the case at hand, someone was presumably responsible for the death of the young woman, and time had passed without the culprit receiving any punishment. That lapse of time was not empty: time never is, nor can it be. And the strangest thing is that what happens in the meantime is odd and unexpected too — that is, the intervening events occur in a fortuitous order; sometimes the effects even come before the causes. . But since time is defined by an orderly causal chain of events, if cause and effect change places, it’s as if time were abolished. (Here it should be mentioned that the “Pastor,” whom Maxi’s sister had mistaken for a drug boss, had chosen the imminent End of the World as the theme for his preaching that year.)

From the fifth floor, Jessica had seen Vanessa crying by the phone and this made her so curious that she went back to the kitchen to question her mother. What had Vanessa said when she called? Why did she want the name of the people on the third floor?

“How should I know?” said her mother, who was making stuffed zucchinis. “I already told you I didn’t ask. I gave her the name and she hung up.”