A Zero-Sum Game. Eduardo Rabasa

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      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.

      Each gang blamed the other for unleashing the war. The s accused the s of having cajoled a group of its plastic girls into their den by the use of conceptual maps. Once there, they were given goods that had earlier passed through the dealers’ sweaty balls. The s didn’t deny it. They had been responding to provocation: the s had bribed the avaricious owner of the skate store where the s bought their uniform Gore T-shirts and managed to persuade him to stop stocking the gigantic sizes that almost came down to their knees. The s looked ridiculous in tailored T-shirts that didn’t even cover their stomachs: a distinguishing feature of the Psychedelic Lolitos. No one was frightened by their death’s head logos when they were printed on stretch cotton. The s looked like out-of-work actors. Their most fanatical devotees accused them of selling out to the seduction of appearance.

      The inhabitants of Villa Miserias suffered the effects of these confrontations. The price of the laced drugs went up to absorb the increasing costs of arming the combatants with knives, nun-chaku, and brass knuckles. Expeditions to avenge insults spiraled. There were no-go areas. The rival groups searched any unwary person who passed through their zone; if someone was wearing the symbol of the enemy gang, they were forced to buy merchandise then and there.

      Both gangs made forays into other related activities, such as robbery and extortion. The Lolitos stole imported aftershave lotions from apartments; to impress the girls, they borrowed—without permission—the flashiest cars. Either from carelessness or as a sophisticated form of torture, they would leave tapes of their sickly-sweet romantic ballads in the stereos.

      The s, in contrast, developed a telephone extortion network. They would ring repeatedly, at inconvenient hours, and list the names and occupations of the members of the family. In exchange for doing nothing, they asked for pornography to satisfy their onanism. The victims were supposed to leave packages of magazines, movies, erotic photonovelas, papayas—perfect for masturbation—or analgesic sprays to be used in the practice known as the deadhand.

      There were also psychological terror tactics. One morning Villa Miserias awoke to a gruesome scene in the Plaza del Orden: blond-haired heads with well-defined features, impaled on posts, surrounded by a wash of red stains and severed limbs. They were the remains of a well-known brand of plastic doll and represented the violent dismemberment of the s. The latter responded to this aggression by destroying the ’s games consoles, tearing up their collectable comics, and leaving them scattered around the green areas. There were warnings to the owners about what would happen next. Confused, hunched under the weight of the gazes trapped in the crossfire, the Black Paunches collected up these messages.

      The naked violence exasperated the residents. It wasn’t the same as knowing awful things happened in other places where the victims were always far away. The horror was no longer abstract and now it was very close to them all. The routine nature of the violence periodically mobilized those affected into action. When some wealthy member of the community suffered the effects, it was considered more serious than if it happened to the habitual poor wretches. Inflammatory meetings were organized, demanding the resignation of the board, the cleaning up of the Black Paunches, increased security and harsher punishments, the creation of neighborhood groups to oversee the implementation of these demands…The criminal gangs would turn down the heat for a short time. In reality, the excesses that triggered the fury of the moneyed classes didn’t suit them either, but it wasn’t easy to ask their scorpions not to sting frogs if doing so went against their instincts. The situation would stabilize until the next rocky patch merited a fresh outbreak of the same drama, but with different protagonists.

      Joel Taimado felt under pressure to intervene, but the juggling act required was beyond him: in essence, a community with high levels of addiction was asking him to combat the people who were supplying the very thing they didn’t want to live without. Even he realized that the demand would be satisfied one way or another. It was a matter of taming the bronco not canceling the rodeo. The provisional solution consisted of a few, very public crackdowns, almost with the agreement of the gangs themselves, as a necessary sacrifice to keep the wheels rolling. This triumph was attributed to a careful intelligence operation. For a couple of nights, people slept more soundly, until the organizational chart of the stricken villains was reconfigured. Taimado was aware that he was just putting temporary caps on molars destroyed by caries. In consultation with Selon Perdumes, they opted for the best of non-solutions: the time had come to talk to Mauricio Maso.

      Taimado waited until Maso returned from his night shift. He found him sitting on his mattress between the containers, sucking out pieces of glass from his arms and putting alcohol on his wounds. In his own particular way, Taimado asked Maso to return to his old occupation. In exchange for a cut of the profits, he would turn a blind eye. What’s more, since the workers had just been moved to Building B, they could offer him a shared room that would be a haven from the dry winds.

      “Sorry my friend, other bastards are taking care of that now,” murmured Maso without letting his attention stray from his surgical task.

      “Uh-huh. The thing is that the boss is pushing harder and harder for us to do nothing and we’re going to end up with sweet FA again.”

      “The solution’s obvious, you son of a fucking bitch. Give me back what you stole and I’ll get started with that.”

      Hearing this demand, Taimado held out the envelope he’d been given in anticipation of just such an eventuality.

      “Right. I’m already on the case,” said Maso before spitting a gob of blood mixed with alcohol onto Taimado’s shoes.

      Maso began announcing his return through his appearance. He started washing again, his hair was combed and he had new