The Seventh Candidate (4 page)

“Good!” he said heartily, as the door banged
shut behind the last of the ex-applicants. “We require serious,
motivated men.”

He nodded at his assistant. She fetched a
knapsack from a corner and approached the ladder, prepared to
synchronize her gestures to his words. The knapsack, the director
explained, contained exactly what was visible on his table. The
bottles and jars, however, were smaller, like those on their
tables. The purpose of his large bottles and jars was purely
pedagogical. When he said “White 2”, for example, he would point to
it on his table. The director’s pointer touched the empty jar. It
gave out a crystalline whine.

“I hope that the candidate in the rear has
good eyesight,” he added waspishly.

His assistant laughed warmly at this, not
only to get back in the good graces of her employer after what she
had or hadn’t done, but also to take the edge off his implicit
criticism of the thirteenth – now seventh – candidate’s seating
choice. She was good-hearted to a fault. A new worry occurred to
her. Wasn’t her employer’s remark indirectly aimed at her?
Shouldn’t she have asked the candidate to sit up front with the
others?

At that moment the director turned
whitish-green. He clutched his stomach. His assistant hastily set
down the knapsack. She hurried over and touched his arm. “Sir, is
there something wrong?” she said for the second time that morning.
“Can I help you?”

Unable to summon breath for speech, he shook
his head fiercely. She remained there for what seemed ages. His
pain seemed aggravated by that close intrusive brown gaze into his
unshielded eyes. Her hand was on his arm. He pulled away. “Let’s
get on with it, for holy Christ’s sake, woman,” the director
managed to articulate between clenched teeth. He waved her back to
her knapsack. The burning slowly subsided.

It was replaced by distress at his loss of
self-control. Clearly the Cycle was worsening. He’d never insulted
her before. It was the first time he’d ever called her “woman.” She
took things to heart. When it was all over he must remember to make
amends, ask about her cat and her childhood farm. Her face always
lit up at questions like that. She was efficient, unassertive,
eager to please, a respectful listener most of the time and she
lived for the concern. And also basically good, he felt. The
director was very sensitive to manifestations of goodness. He saw
so little of it without and within.

The candidates shifted about restlessly in
their chairs. Still very pale, the director returned to his
introduction. He explained that the knapsack could be worn on the
back of the operator. To make sure they grasped the point, he
signaled to his assistant. She struggled into the straps. He told
them that the aluminum stepladder telescoped into manageable
dimensions and could be easily carried on either shoulder thanks to
the broad canvas strap. He had her illustrate that too. On arriving
at the underground tunnel from the street, he said, the operator
must immediately set it up. The director’s assistant hurriedly
shrugged off the telescoped ladder and developed it. She was
beginning to perspire.

Her employer explained the necessity of the
stepladder. Graffiti could be scrawled at a height well above the
head but successful effacement required at least eye-level
intervention. He called their attention to the ladder’s tray with
hollows to hold five of the bottles.

His assistant knelt and extracted five
bottles from the knapsack. She fitted them into the hollows with
slow pedagogical movements. She was still blinking from the blow
but smiled bravely for the candidates.

Once set up, the director went on, the
ladder was rolled down the underground corridor from poster to
poster as rapidly as possible. Rapidity was essential to cosmetic
intervention. But it must never, never be at the cost of security,
he warned, never. He stressed the importance of locking the wheels
before each intervention. He had his assistant repeat the locking
operation twice.

In very simple language the director now
tried to explain the matter-of-fact economics that underlay poster
cosmetics. The advertisers were at the mercy of the vandals, he
said in effect. Their message was subverted by the intrusion of
graffiti, often of an obscene nature. At best, the graffiti
distracted attention from that message. At worst, it created a
disastrous connection between the brand and the scrawled obscenity
in the mind of the potential customer. The vandalized poster
couldn’t be left in that state. In a great number of cases
Ideal
could repair the poster in a
fraction of the time required by the traditional method of total
replacement. But not always.

The first task of an operator was,
therefore, to be able to recognize at a glance if it paid to
restore a given poster. Naturally if the repair job took as long as
the classical method of total replacement, nothing was to be gained
by utilizing cosmetic techniques. Hence the constant question posed
to the operator by a defaced poster: feasible or not feasible?

“In the case of this particular poster,”
said the director, pointing over his shoulder at the sailor-suited
girl on the wall behind him, “the answer is immediate:
feasible.”

Feasible, he explained, because of the
localization of the aggression and because of the chemical
composition of the graffiti media utilized. The center of
attraction, the young lady’s face, was fortunately unscathed.
Facial repair-work, while not impossible, was a highly skilled
operation. In extreme cases, the cutout technique could be
utilized. From another identical poster the whole head or even
individual features could be substituted. This was demanding work
which, the director reassured the candidates, they would not, at
first, be called upon to perform.

“As for the chemical properties of the
graffiti substances employed on posters, I have seen blood used as
a vehicle for graffiti and worse than blood …”

The candidates snapped alert at that. Some
snickered. The director rapped on the lectern and went on. He
explained that ninety-eight percent of all graffiti was produced
by: 1. the pencil, 2. the ballpoint pen, 3. the felt-tip pen, 4.
the crayon, 5. the redoubtable spray-can. Some of these graffiti
vehicles required an application of sizing-fluid such as XL 54. His
pointer touched a bottle on his table. Half a minute to dry. An
expenditure of precious time. Nothing of the sort here.
Ball-pointed, felt-tipped graffis, not to mention simple stickers
and lacerations. A run-of-the-mill case.

The director turned toward Miss Ruda. Step
by step, he explained, his assistant would illustrate the
techniques of restoring the vandalized poster to its original
state.

Dorothea Ruda clambered up into hopeless
competition with the girl’s giant loveliness. Her plain but
expressive face was painfully concentrated. She must make no
mistake, nothing that would add to her error or oversight or
whatever it was that had aroused her employer’s discontent.
Normally she loved these pedagogical sessions like everything else
about her job. After the art-school fiasco and then the
acting-school super-fiasco and then the screaming boredom of a
secretarial school, she’d answered the
Ideal
ad. Her test-performance had been brilliant and
she’d been hired, reluctantly.

But despite her sex, Dorothea Ruda had
turned out to be the most expert and dependable of all the
operators. She’d risen from the ranks and now took care of the
correspondence, the book-keeping and canvassed clients. Concealed
behind pillars and vending-machines, she shared in turn with the
director the all-important task of surveying the operators, for the
most part an untrustworthy lot. She also swept up and prepared
coffee. The business was no more conceivable without her than
without Basic White Stock, 00 emery paper and E 34 wetting
agent.

The director introduced the chemicals and
tools to the candidates. He showed them via his assistant, who
translated his words onto the sheet tacked alongside the
sailor-suited girl, the gamut of shades obtainable by the addition
of Basic White or Basic Black. Next, the range of brushes, the
choice dependent on the thickness of the graffiti line. Finally,
how to produce a trembling effect (in their jargon, the “palsy
line”) in order to avoid too clear a demarcation between corrected
and uncorrected areas.

The director paused as his assistant chose
the correct items to cleanse the boyish sailor-suited girl of his
own graffis. She was his favorite among the female poster-models.
For years he’d followed her growth on the posters from childhood
into touchingly gawky adolescence and then into the radiance of
young unemphatic womanhood. He knew her as “Helena.” He didn’t know
her real name.

In the sixty-three stations of the capital’s
underground network she’d stood exposed for days, delicately
holding that cone inches from her parted lips, her sky-blue eyes
shining with anticipatory pleasure, only it was no cone after the
vandals had finished with it. None of them had chosen the
director’s own innocent transformation of the cone into a child’s
man with stick arms and legs.

How was it possible to desecrate certain
things? The director had a theory about that. He’d once tried to
convey it to his assistant, in simple language. Despite her claims
to college, he doubted she had more than a high-school diploma.

In those endless windings of vaulted
tunnels, from
Central Station
to
East Gate
,
from
Victory
Square
to
Three
Nuns
, from
Armory
to
Crossroads
, windows had been opened for them in the grimy
tiles, he’d said more or less. Windows on a world where the dirt
and disorder, the meanness and vulgarity of their real world were
banished. In a sense, weren’t the posters, beneath the surface
mercantile inspiration, metaphors of a desired state of being?
Wasn’t it out of secret despair that the world below vented its
destructive rage on those ideal images of beauty, harmony,
affection and love? His assistant had asked him to explain
“mercantile” and “metaphor.”

The director started with the easiest
operations. First, the mending of the lacerations: a quick
application of paste followed by a sweep of the moistened sponge.
Next, the removal of the political stickers. These were black on
red and called for a general strike and the overthrow of the
government. They infested all the walls of the capital. His
assistant’s hands, like an extension of his will, instantaneously
illustrated his words. A quick touch of 00 emery paper to abrade
the impermeable gloss, a daub of E 34 wetting agent, a number 3
spatula and off it slipped. The micro-sponge dipped in alcohol
removed the residual gummy rectangle.

Six seconds, announced the director
triumphantly, looking up from his watch. Joyous at the implied
compliment, Dorothea Ruda barely had time to lean back and glance
at the negative evidence of her brio and clap her hands once with
loud satisfaction like an Italian. With her large dark eyes and
mobile face, the director suspected she had southern blood.

Now, without giving either of them a
moment’s rest (although stiff and motionless at the lectern, he was
sweating even harder than his assistant), the director introduced
another elementary problem: the eradication of graffiti applied to
a solid-color background free of surcharged detail. This was
fortunately the most common configuration. Sweeps of white and
blue, the traditional hues of purity, he reminded them,
irresistibly attracted the vandals. Obviously the masking medium
must be of the same shade as the background. The ball-pointed
slogan to eradicate was “Long live disorder!” The director had
trouble thinking up authentic-sounding slogans for the tests. “My
assistant,” he said, “will now demonstrate the result of using
Basic White, that is, pure white, on an off-color white background
such as this.”

Deftly her no. 4 brush dipped into the pure
white and obliterated the appeal to disorder. A rectangle paler
than the background betrayed its former position. “Still there, as
you can see,” commented the director. With a certain tenseness in
his voice he ordered his assistant to repeat the operation, but
this time with White Stock 1, a shade darker.

As the sub-ministry toilet cascaded again
behind the rear wall, she performed the task in pure virtuoso
style. It was almost a single uninterrupted movement: a quick dip
of the brush into the bottle of water, a squeezed passage through a
cloth on the way to a redip into White 1 and then a second
rectangle over the first. It had taken three seconds. There was an
expanse of pure white now.

She glanced at the director for more
approbation. His face was set in hard lines as he stared at what
she’d done. She blinked and looked back at the poster. A perfect
expanse of pure white.

She looked at the director again, in alarm
now. In the big windowless room the only sound was the whirring of
the giant ventilator and the ticking of the wall-clock which marked
thirteen minutes to nine.

He stood there, Basic White himself, sweat
pouring down his face. Then he staggered off the podium and
collapsed into an empty chair. One of the bottles on the table
before him teetered dangerously and a brush fell to the floor.

His assistant dropped her aching arms. She
checked her impulse to abandon her ladder and rush to his side. She
feared a second rebuff. The candidates stared at the director. He
sat doubled up, clutching his stomach. They started whispering. One
of them reached back for his leather jacket. She saved the
situation by clapping sharply and regaining their attention. She
continued the lesson where the director had broken off, but at a
slower pace.