33 Revolutions (2 page)

Still dancing, he reaches the seawall, buys a bottle of diluted rum, sits down facing the waves, and compares their movement with the movement on the wall, which is full of couples feeling each other up, groups causing a ruckus, and loners like me, he thinks: Watching time pass is the people's favorite pastime. Not wasting it, which would imply that they had it to waste. The years remain, he thinks: Time always passes . . .

He looks down at the sea again and drinks straight from the bottle. Behind him, the dirty, beautiful, broken city; in front of him, the abyss that suggests defeat. It isn't even a dilemma, let alone a contradiction, but the certainty that it's this abyss, this isolation, that defines and conditions us. We win by isolating ourselves, and in isolating ourselves we are defeated, he thinks. The wall is the sea, the screen that protects us and locks us in. There are no borders; those waters are a bulwark and a stockade, a trench and a moat, a barricade and a fence. We resist through isolation. We survive through repetition.

G
radually, the seawall empties. It's nearly dawn and he thinks about going home. He proceeds along an avenue without cars or people, with few trees, and buildings that seem to grow straight up from the curb. Behind him, he hears the rumble of a bus, and he sets off at a run for the next stop. He only has two hundred yards to go when the wail of a patrol car stops him. The cops get out, look him up and down, focus on the bottle, and demand his papers.

“Identity card!”

“Comrades,” he replies, “I'm going to miss the bus.”

“Later,” they reply. “First the card.”

He hands over the identity card, and the other one too. The cops smile. They check the information. They apologize for their procedure.

“Sorry, comrade. You know how it is. A black man running in the dark is always suspicious . . . ”

T
he alcohol wears off, the lights of the bus blink in the distance, and his blackness turns pale with rage. He remembers the day they gave him the card (not the identity one, the other one): The dumb smile with twinkles of pride, the unique sensation of being part of a new, vigorous, redemptive future. But tomorrow is built on the graveyard of yesterday with the workforce of today. Only later would he realize that the image of the future isn't, cannot be, the future itself.

A steady stream of expletives keeps him going until he gets to his building. He sighs when he sees the elevator stuck on the first floor (the scratched record of things that never work) and apathetically climbs the seven floors. In his apartment, solitude greets him in all her nakedness and invites him to lie down beside her. Arrogantly, he throws himself onto the couch alone and puts on an old record that's scratched in the middle and stutters like wayward percussion. He switches off the record player and goes out onto the balcony to smoke, facing the darkness that is the sea.

The dawn blurs. The police have snatched away his dream and something he wouldn't call pride, let alone dignity, but which is doubtless important. He's upset because they let him know (reminded me? he wonders with a smile) that he's a lousy nigger. On the balcony, in his shorts, bare-chested, he thinks there isn't one iota of greatness in any of this, and he makes a gesture that tries to take in the whole city, maybe the whole country. But he's always been immersed in the legend, in all the organizations, speeches, marches, delegations, and commitments. Always with his head held high.

It was during his last years of university that he started to change, even though he can't pinpoint the exact moment or the exact situation, already diffused by time, in which such a thing happened, nor what this change actually consisted of.

The needle jumped, he thinks.

F
ather was what in sociological terms might be called an ignorant peasant; Mother, on the other hand, was a delightful young lady from the city who had been brought up to marry well and not much more—elementary English, basic piano, international cooking: all that's required to get along in society. It isn't hard to understand that in the revolutionary maelstrom a union like that could occur: The country was being rapidly transformed and some barriers fell ostentatiously, fostering relationships that would once have been impossible or unthinkable. Father joined the revolutionaries months before their triumphal entry, and Mother sold bonds for the 26th of July Movement in her smart new car. They met—or rather, bumped into each other—at one of those huge meetings where anger and fervor fused, and further encounters in various associations and assemblies ended up giving rise to an awareness that they were equal, that they had the same dreams, were part of a project that included them and made demands on them equally. Later, Father would work in agrarian reform and Mother in light industry.

There were hardly any books in the house—just the doctrinal works, more out of correctness than to be read—and as for music, the radio was always enough. He was a diligent but not outstanding pupil. He had little interest in the arts or in mathematics, nor was he very good at science. But he always scored highly for conduct, and was unstinting in his participation in patriotic activities, however boring they might be. His studies were technical—including some engineering—almost devoid of cultural, sporting, or work-related interests: The nation comes first, he would always say with conviction. He put his heart and soul into everything and always got the top grades. He was head of his class, of his school, and of various departments and federations, and there are those who remember him informing on comrades who lacked political and ideological commitment. In short, he was a model student: not brilliant but certainly committed. Until one day he started reading; first timidly, almost fearfully—as if it was something forbidden—and then addictively: sprawled on the couch, with cookies in one hand and the book in the other.

“Do something!” Father would shout, unable to comprehend, but Mother, always Mother, would tell her husband that he shouldn't get upset, that maybe the boy would become an intellectual.

“An intellectual?” Father would bellow, convinced that artists (and similar people) are a disaster for the country. And he was right, decades earlier he had followed with interest the debates with those so-called intellectuals who seemed more like agents of the enemy—deviationists!—people who suffered from the original sin: lack of revolutionary spirit. “And you're not going to be like them! No way!” (Behind him, Mother would be making signs that meant: Don't mind him, son: Don't mind him at all).

He read a lot—quite unaware, in no particular order and with no particular intention—and continued with his studies because he had discovered a private universe much vaster than the one around him. As it turned out, that universe highlighted the narrowness of everyday life and made him dream of unknown, missing expanses. That was when everything started to seem like a scratched record.

T
he needle gets stuck in a groove and the tropical avenue seems full of Urals, Volgas, Moskviches, and Polskis. Inside, the air conditioning and the diplomat store full of nice things. Outside, the scalding tar of the street, the nonexistent breeze, and the thirst; inside, cold beer, consumer goods, and food; outside, the hunger and the silence. Two worlds in one, two dimensions, two universes: Two nations and two deaths, he thinks: The needle crackles, jumps, and falls here, where nothing is permitted but everything is decided and done.

“What blockade?” he asks himself, gazing at the shelves full of foreign products at prices incompatible with the national economy, and he's amazed, not by what there is, but by what there isn't outside this consumerist enclave.

He has a slight hangover and with slow movements, close to cramps, he reaches out his arm and grabs a cold Coke: He opens it there and then, whistling “The March of the Fighting People,” and devotes himself to it with almost aesthetic—even ideological—delight, smiling like a child doing something wrong when nobody's looking.

H
e doesn't go to the diplomat store alone, but with the Russian woman from the ninth floor, the one who's in charge of the black market in the building. She's the one with the passport, the one who legally has foreign currency and the right to buy. When they come out, they part affectionately (he pays her a commission to get him in): Father didn't get to see this, he thinks. He died years ago, when it was discovered that in the agricultural concern that he ran there was a big shortfall, and they blamed him.

“Misappropriation of funds!” was the expression used during the trial, and he, always so pure, kept angrily, indignantly proclaiming his innocence:

“For fuck's sake, nobody calls me a thief!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, red in the face, until his heart burst.

“Massive heart attack,” said the doctor.

The night of the funeral, getting drunk with his friends, it struck him that his father had died of innocence (and he said, by way of farewell, showing his white teeth in a sad, inebriated smile, that he had been pig-headed but honest, ignorant but idealistic). Mother, after a few months of grief—wandering from home to work and from work to home—decided to process her Spanish citizenship (on her father's side) and left for Madrid: She is the one who sends him a bit of money and a few books every now and then.

He doesn't like to walk down the street with shopping bags, that's why he puts everything in his backpack. Actually, he hasn't bought much: a bit of meat, rice, eggs, oil, bread, two or three beers, a bottle of rum, cigarettes, toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo: the basics (don't even mention the ration book): He eats little and his taste is limited; besides, he has lunch at work: What more can I ask for in this world? he asks himself sarcastically. On the outside, he seems a normal guy, shabbily dressed, with an ordinary face and eyes that say nothing: One more scratched record, he murmurs to himself.

And on the inside?

He asks himself lots of questions. He's afraid he'll discover that in reality he's a long-suffering narcissist enchanted with his own existential misery: Like a damned
poète maudit
, he thinks (he looks at the people at the bus stop, focuses on their absent looks, so similar to his, and starts walking along Fifth, downcast and smiling).

Like one more . . .

A
t times in his youth he thought about changing course, giving up engineering and switching to philosophy and letters, or history, or even social science, but he constantly put his father's judgements and values before his own plans. When his father was alive, he was afraid he would kill him with fright, and once he was dead he decided to respect his wishes: But that was his fault, not Father's. On the other hand, he's never been able to write—he knows he's incapable of putting together a single sentence: he considers himself simply a reasonable, inquiring reader, and makes no other claims. His work at the ministry is boring but encourages reading: he covers the books with newspaper and if anyone in the office asks what he's reading, he invariably replies: Agatha Christie (although it's actually Kundera).

But the most important discovery of the past few years has been music—before, he didn't have music; he listened to what his friends listened to (if he was with timba fans, timba; with trova fans, trova; with jazz fans, jazz; with rock fans, rock . . . and so on, without dwelling on anything in particular). Without any preferences. He found no meaning in that explosion of sounds: Sometimes he danced, more out of an instinct to be sociable or as part of the mating ritual than out of true, autonomous pleasure. Music, in short, meant nothing to him.

It happened after he and his wife separated: He decided to go to the theater to listen to the symphony. There was no curiosity in that decision (or maybe only a little), rather, the other options struck him as worse—baseball at the stadium, a comedy at the movie theater, TV with its two channels: No, thanks. The program included pieces by Roldán and Brouwer. For the first time he was able to dream while music played. Those sounds—those twisted chords—made him jump for joy, with an inexplicable happiness, closer to neurosis than spiritual calm. For weeks he lived with that sensation in his body; suddenly he knew that he had encountered the music he'd been missing. Over time, he's managed to put together a modest but well-organized collection of avant-garde, serial, aleatoric, mathematical, modernist, and minimalist music, and every now and again he wonders what he's done to deserve this—to have tastes so alien to the tropics and yet live here . . .

H
e pours himself a beer, switches on the TV with the volume very low—voices in the background: a bit of company—and puts on a Varèse cassette at full volume. He goes back to the kitchen and fries himself a steak; he gobbles it down on a piece of bread with oil and garlic, sitting at the little table. He synchronizes the end of the sandwich with the last note of the recording. He grabs a book and tries to concentrate, all the while fighting against the heat. He needs company: After the separation he decided that never again would he have a woman in his home, at least for more than one night. He leads a healthy sex life with himself, and he only mates when necessary—if he wants to smoke and talk while looking up at the ceiling—not every time he needs to ejaculate: He's convinced it's healthier this way. He feels particularly attracted to women over forty, but they have to be married or recently divorced. He can't stand spinsters: Too maternal, he thinks.

It was around the end of his matrimonial crisis (at the age of twenty-five) that he started to develop a taste for older women; at first out of curiosity—morbid curiosity?—then out of conviction. Everything started with a neighbor, the wife of a soldier who spent more time in his unit than at home. They met while on guard duty for the committee, and they talked and talked for hours about things as intimate as delays in meat distribution or the limited variety of food available in the market. Somehow they ended up involved in a secret relationship in a building full of gossips (actually, the threat of gossip was the least risky part of the affair: The one danger was the husband, a man who—he thinks—wouldn't hesitate to put a bullet in his balls).