Carlos Labbé - Navidad & Matanza

ACCORDING TO WITNESS reports, Bruno Vivar would dive into the sea alongside various young women. He’d tell them a charming joke, pretend to drown or swim out a ways commenting on the size of an approaching wave, until one of the girls took the bait. Violeta Drago (27) tells how one afternoon in January of 2001 she saw a boy’s body floating in the surf. It was a cloudy morning on the small beach of Algarrobo, only a few people felt inspired to go in the water. More confused than afraid, she says, she swam toward the body and took it by the waist to pull it back to solid ground. But when she touched it she knew immediately that it was a prank. There in front of the amazed girl, the inanimate body began to move. Bruno lifted his head from the water and smiled at the young woman. I’m cold, he said to her. Then it began to rain. Violeta left him there and swam furiously back to the beach. Those features, childlike and blue with cold, corresponded to the description of Bruno Vivar. His face was contorted, gaunt, says Violeta. If he was trying to act like a corpse, he very nearly succeeded.

THE BAR MIRIADA —just like that, without an accent mark — sits on Matanza’s small square, next door to Don Julio’s butcher shop, on the only urbanized block in town. Before I sat down, I paused for a minute, staring at the name written on a brass sign above the door. As a joke, I asked the man from the service station — who had come along, and was willing to answer my questions about Boris Real, on the condition that I bought the beers — if Miriada referred to the bar’s owner, assuming it was another orthographical error to be added to my list of provincial oddities: miriada for miríada, in other words: myriad, numberless, legion, quantity, abundance, infinity, plethora, excess. Maybe Miriada was the wife of Don Julio, the mother of Julito, or maybe it was the name of a waitress who’d broken his heart. No, said the waitress, who brought four liter bottles of Cristal pilsner for my guest and a brandy with gin and ginger ale for me. There’s no one named Miriada here. It’s what we call the tiny worms that eat the ears of corn, added the man from the service station. The trees used to be full of miriada in August, right at the end of winter. That’s where the name comes from. Used to be, before what? I asked. Before the gringos showed up with their laboratories.

I pretended not to know which gringos he meant. It’s fine, the man told me, wiping away the foam that had fallen from his lips. Do you want to ask me questions or just chat? We can talk about the African musician or about gringos, you decide, I have to work tomorrow and I can’t spend all night drinking, I’ve got someone waiting for me at home: TV and a book. There would be enough time to inquire about the organizers of the “mobile party,” I thought. Under the table, in a pocket of my bag, I pressed the button on the tape recorder, and told him that I didn’t want to be a bother.

During the months of January and February of 1999 the locals had a lot of free time on their hands because the organizers of the Transensorial Beyond Seasons Festival had gotten the city council of Navidad and Matanza, in exchange for generous compensation, to suspend all commercial, civic, and social activity. The idea was to avoid all competition and consolidate control of the towns, forcing everyone to use the corporate logo of the international organization. In practice this meant that the restaurant on the fisherman’s cove became part of a fast seafood chain; the bars and diners temporarily turned into pubs, taverns, cafés, tearooms, cabarets, trattorias, food courts, cafeterias, wine shops, lounges, casinos; and the service station, among many transformations, became a Gas Station. So the man spent those days sitting on a stump across the highway from the service station where he’d worked for so long. Accustomed as he was to spending his days in that place, he just sat and watched as massive tanks, and engines, and generators arrived. I like my job and I didn’t want to be put out like that without getting to see why, he said. Every now and then a foreigner dressed in yellow and green overalls would approach him and attempt, in his words, to frighten him. But he just sat there, not understanding the language, until they left him in peace.

After a week of this routine, a convertible appeared on the highway. It was a small jewel, a collector’s item — said the man from the service station — even though by then every kind of vehicle had already arrived and none would’ve surprised him. One time the ground even shook when a huge truck pulled up hauling a military tank, and then another one transporting several ATVs that had no wheels, they looked like rubber caterpillars. The man from the service station would’ve quickly forgotten the Porsche Spyder if it hadn’t slowed down and stopped in front of him. Before the smiling and suntanned man driving could finish asking him, ridiculously, where he could find a service station, the Spyder shuddered and died. Merde— exclaimed the Congolese. Just what I need: en panne. Where can I get fuel? Maneuvering around obstacles, they pushed the car two kilometers to the man from the service station’s home. They arrived at nightfall. The foreigner was so tired that he fell asleep sitting up, at a chair in the kitchen while spooning sugar into his coffee. Oddly, though he was snoring, he never let go of the case that contained his musical instrument.

They got acquainted while pushing the Spyder, under the pleasant sun of that early summer evening. Dounn told the man from the service station that he’d driven all the way from Miami, he was in a hurry, and he needed an assistant to organize his performance with the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra in three days’ time.

THE MAN FROM THE service station allowed Patrice Dounn — alias Boris Real, alias Francisco Virditti — to stay in his house, in exchange for a little cash, after finding him asleep at the kitchen table. The Congolese had spilled the sugar. He stood up and began talking, in good Spanish, about money and the long hours he’d spent driving. At no point did he realize that his cheek and the right side of his forehead were coated with grains of sugar, nor that the impression of the plastic tablecloth was stamped on his right hand. He asked which room he should take and then disappeared with his luggage down the hallway. While he was preparing some food, the man from the service station heard his guest talking on a cell phone. It’s not that I like to eavesdrop, he assured me, but my house is made of wood, and I was living alone at the time, so I was used to hearing everything.

After more than an hour, Dounn reappeared in the kitchen. He was more composed: dressed in a very elegant dark suit, his hair gelled, and his instrument case in one hand. He tasted the plate of rice with clams and Swiss chard that the man offered him along with a glass of boxed wine. He found everything “very tasty.” Toward the end of the meal, he asked his host to turn down the volume on the television and inquired who lived in the other rooms. No one, replied the man. Before his mother died, the house had been a hostel. After her passing, he explained, he hadn’t wanted any more kind-faced strangers in his house, so he closed the business. Now he had four guest bedrooms. Two matrimonial suites, one narrow bunk bed, and two twin beds. Dounn asked him if he’d be interested in accommodating some of his friends — a family — who were also coming to the festival that weekend. A couple and their two adolescent children. The man from the service station agreed, he needed the money. The Vivar family would be there in half an hour. Later the owner of the house would discover that the Congolese was very precise with his words: he’d only “accommodate” them, whatever that meant, because the Vivar’s kept their luggage at the Royal Lethargy Grand Hotel and also slept — at least the parents did — in the executive suite they’d reserved there.