A Zero-Sum Game Read online

  The following morning Mauricio went on a spree with his unexpected earnings. He went to the public baths to wash for the first time in weeks: the crusts of grime were stubborn, and without his coating of filth, the woman at the cash register didn’t recognize the brown-skinned, wily kid who came out. He bought a pirated T-shirt with the circular logo of a famous punk band and spent his last coins on a breakfast consisting of a chocolate-flavored concha soaked in atole.

  Maso decided it was time to become independent of his guild and start working on his own, even if it meant renouncing his daily ration of glue. He sought out a stretch of the metro system far from the monopoly of his previous organization and, at night, went back to sleep among the trash in Villa Miserias. With his savings he bought a blanket, which he carefully hid each morning before sneaking out to work

  Juana Mecha suspected something was going on when she began to find bloodied T-shirts in the trash. One day she arrived earlier than usual and managed to grab the arm of the frightened Mauricio before he could make a run for it. Vigorously shaking her broom as she walked, she spat out: “Better to eat humble pie than live like this.” Maso agreed to work as her assistant. His task consisted of separating out the trash for recycling before the truck arrived to mix it all up again. Mecha lent him a thin mattress and a pillowslip stuffed with a green housecoat; she regularly came by to take him to the leftovers canteen. In the afternoon, before setting out on her long journey home, she would give the kid a pat on the head, saying nothing more than: “Behave yourself.”

  That was when Mauricio Maso’s second shift began. With increasing frequency, the youths began to return to request more supplies. The first time, it took him a few days to find what turned out to be oregano. When the unwary kids smoked it, none of them wanted to be the only one to own up to its lack of effect, so they pretended to be high as kites. Mauricio had kept some back for himself and on realizing he’d been conned, he changed his supplier. His clients congratulated him of the potency of his new crop. They were soon requesting powders and pills. His efficiency produced a rapid expansion of his client base: anorexic models bought amphetamines from him; hangover hippies danced to the beat of the sledgehammers on his acid. As part of his transformation into a businessman, Maso set himself the rule of only consuming his own merchandise.

  His appearance was the first thing to change. He smartened up and acquired the first pair of the iguana skin boots that would become his trademark style. He took his rest on a real mattress and bought a portable, battery operated television set. Every night he went to bed in the narrow space between two garbage containers, watching the late-night repeats of primetime cartoons. He got hold of a sheet of acrylic and suspended it like a roof when it rained. He’d never before lived in such comfort.

  One night, he was woken by a slight tug on his gray tweed pants. The light of his torch showed a female client kneeling beside his mattress. A few days before, she’d bought supplies from Mauricio for a party her bosses—advertising executives—were throwing to celebrate a lucrative contract for snack commercials. Speaking at full speed, her jaw juddering, she told him they had run out of supplies. And the party was just getting going. Did he have any more? The thing was that they had run out of cash. What could they do? Still sleepy, Mauricio had hardly had time to process the situation when he felt an electric charge rising toward his crotch. The torch went out at the same moment as his zipper came down, liberating his hard-on. He felt a hand skillfully exploring. Then the moistness of a mouth initiating him. Overwhelmed by pleasure, he rummaged in the garbage until he found the sack where he kept his stock. He extracted a few small bags without counting them and the girl left triumphantly. A new method of payment had just been set up.

  There was one obstacle in the way of his frenetic business career: Joel Taimado became aware of the activity, at strange hours, around the trash. When he saw Maso going out on an order, Taimado took a look around his territory. He was about to admit defeat when he noticed an anomaly: in one of the overflowing containers there was a slight bulge. He dug around in the bags, smearing his uniform in the thick liquid pouring from them, until he met with a diagonally placed plank, camouflaged to match the color of the receptacle. As soon as he raised it, his jaw dropped with the excitement of his find. Maso’s cache contained his merchandise, his savings bound in rubber bands, his television, radio, and torch, his growing wardrobe, and the old photo of Juana Mecha he placed under his pillow each night. All this under the protection of a heavy-duty pickaxe and a Swiss army knife. Taimado closed the lid of the container and treated himself to a first fix right there. As a finishing touch, to leave no doubt about the person responsible for the confiscation, he pissed on the photo of the sweeping woman.

  When Maso returned from his chore, he heard singing coming from the room—known informally as the Chamber of Murmurs—where the security squad kept their things. In a melancholy mood, Taimado and his colleagues were singing along, out of tune, to his old radio. The Black Paunches were showing the effects of several hours of drinking cheap liquor, with the addition of the white avenues of cocaine snorted from their truncheons: they were vying to see who could do the whole line in one go. One of them was out for the count in a corner, having attempted to organize a bit of fun. It was a homespun version of those games where the participants hold hands and a machine administers mild electric shocks, causing the muscles to contract, until someone can’t bear it any longer and drops out. As he didn’t have the appropriate equipment, once the circle had been formed, he asked one of his companions to use his electric prod to administer a shock to the back of his neck, thinking that the effect would be shared equally between them all. This obedient colleague happily let leash the fury of the prod, intending to stop when the chain was broken. The recipient of the shock—his brains nearly burnt to a crisp—writhed to the sound of the guffaws from the others, who were soon able to attest to his body’s zero capacity as a conductor of energy. The entertainment came to an end when he stopped moving. The people holding his hands let go and he fell face down on the table, smoke coming from his ears. Between tears and laughter, they slapped his back in appreciation of the show and dragged him to the corner to sleep it off. Every so often Taimado asked them to check he was still breathing. Some pranksters shaved his eyebrows and made up his face, without it even occurring to anyone to wonder why a member of the security squad would have the necessary cosmetics among his personal belongings.

  With enviable calm, Maso turned and left to check out what he already suspected. He discovered trash scattered on his bed. When he opened up his cache, he found just a transparent piece of card lying in a pool of multicolored liquid: the image on the photo had washed out. He had no desire to throw it out or replace it with another. Nor even to rinse it to get rid of Taimado’s acrid smell. He would continue to put it under his pillow each night.

  16

  Max Michels had imagined the journey to complete his self-appointed mission would be less protracted. When, for the third time, he passed the security booth where the Black Paunch on duty was sleeping with his feet on the table, he realized that he’d been walking around in circles for some time. The booth and its occupant, the barrier marking the boundary between Villa Miserias and the outside world, the howling of the dogs in the charge of a professional walker about the cross through that boundary, the blaring horn vainly trying to wake the guard, and anything else his eyes and ears were capable of attracting to the attention of his conscious mind, suddenly seemed like incomprehensible elements, completely alien to him. He knew they formed part of a specific configuration, produced by forces—as intangible as they were real—that for centuries had been laughing uproariously at anyone who dedicated his life to explaining them.

  “Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable,” the fat man who signed his book with the name of the mythological navigator had written. How right he was, thought Max Michels, or at least the everyday habits of the majority would see
m to attest to its truth. Few people grappled with the unendurable without the temporary escape valve of some form of external assistance, anything capable of extricating them for a few moments from the limitations of the body. Hey, smartass, look at the shitty state your drug’s gotten you into: you’re blind and you still keep going back for more. Say when you’ve had enough. We’d be delighted to go on fucking your head.

  When the Many were in the right, Max was the first to admit it. But he couldn’t turn back now. Not that he wanted to. Better the danger than the pure, simple unendurable reality. Why did he have to be different from the rest? Didn’t the moronic Many remember what happened when Taimado had brought about a situation even the authorities didn’t, at heart, want?

  That was when Mauricio Maso had decided to close the preferred escape valves of the residents of Villa Miserias once and for all. In a single stroke, he cut off the supply of all merchandise, including the pharmaceuticals he supplied without prescription. He pretended not to know his clients. He was, once again, a simple assistant scavenger. His pay was recycled foodstuffs and a place to sleep. At night, he returned to his previous occupation to make a little pocket money. And to not forget where he came from. He threw himself on the broken glass with such vigor that passengers in the metro would give him bills on condition he stopped until they had gotten off. Each new slash was proof that he wouldn’t be so naïve again. Juana Mecha offered her support: “They’re going to understand what it means to see yourself in the mirror as you really are.”

  The atmosphere on the estate bristled. The environment creaked. The cart that was Villa Miserias continued to advance at its sluggish pace, but the wheels needed greasing. The principal whiplashes fell on the mules, in particular the potbellied mules in black to blame for the massive, involuntary rehab.

  However, the majority of the other employees also suffered from the ill humor of their bosses. Housewives would fly into a temper with the servants if the orange juice was too bitter, if they laddered their pantyhose, if their husbands weren’t up to it in bed, or if their lovers asked for a new credit card. They missed the tranquilizers they had been secretly taking.

  For a prominent banker and, what’s more, member of the administrative board of Villa Miserias, the drying up of his supply of narcotics came at the worst possible moment. His superiors were aware of his unflagging ambition and so assigned him the task of preparing a report that would secure a crucial injection of capital. The deadline was ridiculous. He accepted, confident that his long, cocaine-fueled nights—brought to a close by sleeping pills and a few toots of marijuana to ensure the necessary three hours of rest—would do the trick. Everything was going to plan when Maso took his radical decision. The banker first tried financial inducements to persuade him to change his mind. Then came the threats. And finally the pleas. Nothing worked. His pride prevented him from asking for help: his self-destruction was undignified. On the day of the meeting, he turned up with dark shadows under his eyes; the greasy sheen of the extra layer of gel on his hair accentuated his pallor. The report was unfinished and full of inconsistencies. The investors didn’t even waste their time letting him finish his presentation; they politely apologized before leaving the meeting room without even finishing their coffees. His furious bosses also acted quickly. They made him sign his letter of resignation there and then. During the next meeting of Villa Miserias’ board, the banker tabled a motion prohibiting employees drinking from the communal water fountains. It was passed unanimously.

  To the list of those wronged was added a ballet dancer thrown out of her company for putting on ten ounces; a surly university graduate found himself once again without friends when he stopped bringing ecstasy pills to parties; a couple addicted to amphetamines were unable to bear the crisis caused by the tense tranquility of their nights.

  Taimado’s boys began to feel the pressure from a number of sides. The people they protected didn’t miss a single opportunity to point out the differences that separated them. Their minuscule wages made them dependent on the gratuities they received for almost any action: keeping an eye on the children playing outside, washing cars, helping with shopping bags, repairing broken chairs. The amounts offered didn’t decrease, but the guards began to receive them in handfuls of coins of the lowest possible value. During the transaction, these coins would be accidentally dropped, so that the Black Paunch in question would have to get down on all fours to collect them. Some neighbors would enter and exit the estate several times a night just for the pleasure of directing their headlights on the security booth and sounding their horns frenetically to startle the sleeping guard. If the water was temporarily cut off, or there was a power outage, they received peremptory calls demanding they solve the problem immediately; that’s what they were paid for. The final humiliation appeared in a circular informing them of the hours they were allowed to watch television in their booth. Apart from these times, it would be locked.

  A different threat came from outside; Maso’s retreat opened the way for others. Two rival gangs disputed the right to dope the people of Villa Miserias. Since there was a need for substances to make everyday life more bearable, the demand was still there. For the great majority of the residents, the situation was inevitable; there was nothing to be done. Every so often crusades were organized to warn of the risks but, to tell the truth, this was a ritual carried out through force of habit with no real consequences. It often happened that the publicists who organized the campaigns were under the influence when they thought them up. What really got on the residents’ nerves were the frequent outbreaks of violence and extortion resulting from the all-out warfare between the rival gangs. Taimado intervened either too late or too little, making the situation worse. It was one of the darkest periods in the history of Villa Miserias.

  The initial contacts were carried out discreetly. But the battle for a larger market meant that boundaries were increasingly transgressed. As in any other business, the bosses demanded ever-higher sales figures from their dealers. The principal of savage competition didn’t vary; the specific methods of the industry did. The leader of the first gang to establish itself was a respectable impresario in the toy business. As part of a training course offered by his company, he read an article explaining the importance of generating compulsive habits. It was a matter of capturing minds as early as possible and then never letting then go. Toys appealed to the childish side of every sort of personality, forming part of a chain of the perpetual substitution of one artifact for another. The more he thought it through, the more he was intrigued by the possibility of transferring these principles to the drug trade. Just as with toys, the attraction of drugs was universal. It was a case of capitalizing on the mechanisms of instant gratification. He guessed that once the habit had been created, the adherence to it would be lifelong.

  The number of habitual users was considerable. Their needs just had to be promptly catered to. The real challenge consisted of widening the client base. The toymaker concluded that the best publicity was the users themselves. In his company’s offices, he set up a sort of pilot group composed of kids of various ages, selected by means of a combination of fair complexion, good appearance, tastefully ripped clothing, purchasing power, sociability, and chronic stupidity: the in-crowd of Villa Miserias. They listened to his simple plan. They would receive all the drugs they wanted under the single condition of not revealing they were getting them for free. They were immediately given their first samples. Still under the effects of the euphoria, they asked about the possibility of becoming sales representatives. This was an ideal situation for their boss: When before had a brand image personally sold what he should have been advertising? It wasn’t long before some jealous wit nicknamed them the Psychedelic Lolitos; they adored it. All the young dudes wanted to emulate them. The girls clawed for their attention. Teenage consumption soared.

  To keep tight control on the workforce, the company created a kind of informal membership badge, a decal designed for the exclusive us
e of the Psychedelic Lolitos and their ardent followers. It was a voluptuous, mirror-image inverted P barely separated from a stiff, upside down L. The brand soon became the emblem of the juvenile class. With an eye on the future, the organization began giving away decals for younger children. Despite the urban myths circulating at the time, they didn’t contain any drug; their power lay in a sense of belonging. They were a means of recruiting future customers early.

  There was one important niche to attend to: the kids on the margins. They weren’t much interested in having fun. The Lolitos had a natural hatred for them. It wasn’t that they refused to sell to them—business came before the revulsion of seeing them wearing their insignia—but it was like setting out to grow a desert plant in a tropical climate. They simply had no place in the bacchanalian carousing encouraged by the clan.

  A rival gang capitalized on this gap in the market by faithfully copying the profitable scheme with one modification: everything was less brilliant, worse quality, and cheaper. Anemic kids with hair hanging down over their faces and sadistic T-shirts trafficked substances destined to make them even more depressed. Their empty-eyed meetings were punctuated by incoherent bouts of speech; they spent languid hours listening to the instrumental wailing of prog rock groups. To distinguish themselves, the Marginals had an inverted, barbed M tattooed on their forearms. They were such a close-knit group that when a fifteen-year-old died from inhaling what turned out to be detergent, they put it down to his desire to end his suffering. Anything was better than weakening the brotherhood by admitting how harmful the substance was.