A Zero-Sum Game. Eduardo Rabasa

helped pay for her painting classes. Marvelous! Don’t worry, replied Perdumes’ smile. I’ll loan you as much as you need and you can pay me back in installments. He was a master of the art of silence. Without moving from his seat, his presence seemed to lose density while the couple made their decision. Of course, they would repay him as soon as possible. It’s just a springboard…Great! No problem. Would you like more coffee?

      He also happened to know that some women in the building were interested in forming a reading group. Why didn’t she organize it? This time the silence was more ephemeral. The girl’s eyes lit up with an enthusiasm her husband hadn’t seen for a long time. Phenomenal! Don’t say another word. Would you excuse me a moment?

      Within a few weeks everything was different. The young man was driving a modest new car; he checked the time regularly on his elegant casual watch. Every week, she listened to the heavily made-up ladies who spoke about anything but the books they had briefly skimmed through. His employers noted the change and began shake his hand when they met. They once asked him to join them for lunch in the small restaurant near the office. She was able to pay for her painting classes for as long as Perdumes’ clandestine subsidy to the ladies of the reading group lasted. Every weekend, the couple turned up with radiant smiles to present their repayments.

      To explain his theory of secrets, Perdumes used the analogy of the reversible red velvet bags used by magicians. The first step is to show the audience that the bag is empty inside and out. Nothing hidden there. However, the trick consists in inserting a hand in the right place. The commonest secrets are as innocent as white rabbits. Then come the shameful secrets, greasy stains that can be removed with a little effort. As he honed his extraction technique, Perdumes became interested in the secrets that could only be invoked by a black magic ritual. They were barbs that gave pain by their mere existence: the smallest movement lacerated the soul in which they were embedded.

      On one occasion, Perdumes noticed that the logo on a young neighbor’s sneakers had an A too many and was missing an E. When little Jorge felt the gleam of Perdumes’ smile scrutinizing his footwear, he knew the secret was out. He subjected his mother to a weeklong tantrum that only abated with the arrival of a box containing a pair of authentic sneakers. There was also the elderly lady in 4B who used to fill the bottles of holy water she sprinkled on her grandchildren on Sundays from the tap. Or the aged bureaucrat in 2C who boasted of his mistreatment of the Villa Miserias cleaning staff: “Better harness the donkey than carry the load yourself.”

      Perdumes’ prying was sustained by an age-old activity: gossip. Having gained a little of a person’s confidence, he was able to access what they knew, suspected or had invented about others. It was an unashamed downward spiral: other people’s dirty laundry covered your own to the point where you created a hodgepodge of stinking gibberish, crying out in a muffled voice: “Deep down, we’re all disgusting, so there’s nothing to worry about.” It made no difference that the secret was an invention. What mattered was the perception of that dark thing and its tangled strata. Everyone had something to hide; other people found out about it. The gossip came alive, spreading like a virus that by nature mutated on infecting each new host. Attempts to deny the gossip gave rise to other, more poisonous rumors. Making use of the most innocent gestures, Perdumes would communicate that he knew the very thing no other person should know.

      Very soon Perdumes had fabricated a network of correspondences woven from founded and unfounded rumors. Whether out of gratitude, respect or fear, the residents in his building adored him: all collective decisions passed through his hands. His indefatigable mind processed the situation until it hit on the two pillars of Quietism in Motion: the theories of the sword and the tea bag.

      The former was based on the equilibrium of unequal things, the distinctive characteristic of a good sword. It may be the blade that cuts, but it’s the hilt that is in control. When wielding a samurai sword, in order to obtain horizontal equilibrium, the extended finger must be placed on the juncture of the hilt and the blade. If the finger bears down slightly harder toward the blade, the greater weight of the hilt is magnified and wins the day. And from this came the Perdumesian maxim: cannon fodder should respect the rank of the person who holds the weapon. Hence the Quietism.

      The motion came from the tea bag. Perdumes would ceremoniously pour the hot water from his antique porcelain jug into a white cup and slowly remove the tea bag from its paper wrapping, allowing his audience to confirm the absolute transparency of the water. The tea bag was then gradually introduced into the cup at an angle of ninety degrees to the surface of the water. Initially, nothing happened. Then, when the tea could no longer bear the scalding water, it exuded a thin, blackish thread that diffused into the water. Perdumes would accentuate the effect by a series of upward jerks. The tea seeped out evenly in all directions until the correct hue was attained. But if one were to move the bag around without rhyme or reason, what would happen, he would ask rhetorically. You might say, exactly the same, he then quickly replied, yet turbid tea is acidic and doesn’t have the same flavor. The motion is necessary, in its proper time and place.

      After his informal conquest of the building, Perdumes’ foot soldiers went out to spread the word. Secondhand samurai swords began to be found everywhere. Others made their own from what looked like sharpened clubs, thus producing an epidemic of three-legged chairs. At times, the tea was replaced by other herbs: toloache, or devil’s weed, diffused like a form of plasma, slowly encapsulating the boiling water. In the end, no one could ever give a precise explanation of what Perdumes was talking about; Quietism in Motion had been born. When a couple of disheveled university types knocked on his door to reprove him, Perdumes knew that his spiritual conquest was complete. It was time to move on to action.

      2

      Why the hell did I shave when she’s said she likes me better with a bit of a beard? Max Michels reproached himself without moving away from the mirror. Did she really say that? Shit, I guess so. It’s no big deal, it’ll grow back in a few days. A few days? As if you’ve got much time left, you moron. We’ll see how much time I’ve got. Things are going to be different now. Yeah? If you say so. Good luck with what’s left.

      By this stage, he’d learnt that the best way to escape from the voices of the Many in his head was to seek a zone of consensus. But those barren wastelands offered only a bitter composure, so instead he dived down into a recapitulation of the events that explained his present dilemma.

      He went back to the time when the presidency of Villa Miserias was passed on by means of a procedure that was as opaque as everything around it: the outgoing president consulted the most longstanding families. The succession was so automatic it was boring.

      When Selon Perdumes became one of the notables with the right to express an opinion, he cooked up a simple strategy for producing a change of tack: first, he gave his blessing to the heir apparent. It was never certain if he was aided by luck or surgical calculation, but the candidate in question was Epifanio Buenaventura, who was due to inherit Buildings 17 and 19. According to protocol, the election could not take place before the stipulated lapse for registration. However, on the last day an extremely unlikely candidate put her name down: a woman in her early thirties named Orquídea López. After a brush with radical ideas on a steep downward path, the costs of everyday life had transformed her into a public sector employee. Orquídea was the nearest thing to dissidence Villa Miserias had ever seen: everyone assumed her to have been guilty of the wave of hood ornaments stolen from the most elegant cars on the estate. Her revolutionary fervor fizzled out as her comrades swapped the idea of guns for shoulder pads and Friday-night Cuba Libres. Orquídea lost her last illusions when the most extreme member of the clan registered for federal taxes: from that moment she changed into a receptacle in search of defining content. Quietism in Motion appealed to her disillusioned side: it seemed to atomize the weight of life in a social setting and deposit it on the individual. Orquídea was tired of moral vestments that didn’t match real human dimensions.

      The paradox is that she didn’t come from that class of people who have a head start in life. And for this reason she tenaciously clung to each new rung of the ladder she managed to ascend to. She didn’t miss a single alteration in the world around her: changes of image, the arrival of new furniture, extravagance at quinceañeras, men going off with younger women. Even things that didn’t concern