The Revolutionaries Try Again Read online

  Slip him a twenty, someone says. A man takes off his cap and hands it to his son, who begins to collect change from the people in line. Leopoldo did not expect this. In his mind this little caprice of his ended without resistance, with the crowd quickly vanishing from the Calderón. The boy shambles toward Leopoldo and tries to hand him the coinfilled cap.

  Please. Please don’t. No.

  The boy runs back to his father after leaving the cap, asprawl, at Leopoldo’s feet. He could concede. All right, he could say, just this one time, go on and call your families. Later Leopoldo will convince himself that he’d arrived at his decision not by impulse but by deduction, because Pascacio’s sister is here, Leopoldo will think, and Pascacio likes to gossip, and gossip spreads fast at the municipality so León, who does not tolerate corruption in his subordinates, could eventually hear of this, which is unlikely, but perhaps not so unlikely, either way the country’s too unstable for him to allow even for the prospect of León hearing about it so he will have to cover himself and follow through by reporting the busted telephone first thing tomorrow morning.

  I don’t take bribes. Please vacate the premises.

  After securing enough witnesses that she was already at the front of the line, an old woman approaches him, bowing to him as she sets down her pineapple by the coinfilled cap, showing him she has nothing left in her grocery bag except lettuce and a bag of rice, shuffling back to her place at the front of the line.

  Everyone tallies what else they are willing to part with. Should they send the boy again? No. One by one for greater impact? Who should go first? Who will account for their place in line? Malena rips a page from her notepad, hands numbers to everyone in line. The boy claims he and his father should receive a better number because of their cap collection idea. But it didn’t work, someone says. One by one they deposit their belongings in front of Leopoldo. Green mangos, ripe bananas, photographs of their loved ones, plastic rosaries, a bag of lentils.

  If Leopoldo were Antonio he would cry of embarrassment and hurl their belongings back at them and leave them to their ridiculous phone calls. Why don’t they just assault him? Wouldn’t that exonerate him from deciding anything?

  I don’t take bribes. Please vacate the premises before I summon the squadrons.

  No one moves. In line someone shushes someone until everyone’s shushed. The crowd seems to be waiting for something to happen. For someone to appear before them and rectify this.

  Let’s get out of here, Malena says. We’ll find some other way to call our families.

  A collective groan. Whistling. As they collect their belongings some are muttering desgraciado, others holler descarado, malparidos like him are what’s sinking this country, rata de pueblo, moreno de verga, just wait till El Loco returns.

  No one’s left at the Calderón but him. From his wallet he tries to pull out his phone list, which includes the numbers for his grandmother, for his friend Antonio, for the economics department at the University of Indiana, where according to his contacts, scholarships for Ecuadorians might be available through the ministry of finance. The phone list’s lodged inside a pocket where his fingers almost fail him. He pulls the list out but drops it, swatting for it in vain on the way down. If you ask him about it he won’t show you his muddied phone list. Or tell you he was surveilling the withered ceibos of the Calderón to check if Little Jaramillo was lurking behind them, checking the sky for lightning too, although this telephone does not look as if it has been struck by lightning. Not that he would know what that looks like.

  Leopoldo dials his grandmother.

  No estoy, deje un mensaje, y si no hablan español me importa un pito, por su culpa mismo estoy aquí así que no voy a aprender su inglish del carajo.

  Leopoldo’s relieved that her answering machine picks up. He would have been embarrassed to talk to her. He hangs up without leaving a message. He has expelled those people for nothing. Does the mud beneath him smell like vinegar, sulfur, or piss? Did the mud already absorb Little Jaramillo’s piss? Was it softened by it such that children could frolic in it? Make mud balls and snowmen benosed with carrots? The next number on his list is for his friend Antonio, known at San Javier as the Snivel, Gargamel, Drool, Saber Tooth. Leopoldo hasn’t talked to him since he left to study abroad, a month after their graduation, almost ten years ago. At Stanford, Antonio was supposed to breeze through a double major in public policy and economics and then return. At the Universidad Católica, Leopoldo was supposed to enlist the luminaries of their generation and then run for office with Antonio. Together they were supposed to do — what? what did you think you were going to do? — so much.

  Leopoldo dials Antonio. Through the decrepit phone line Leopoldo hears the first ring, the fourth, and then an alien blare interrupts the sixth: banging on a piano, frantic strings, the crackling of shortwave.

  Hello?

  Barely hear you.

  Why don’t you shut your vacuum? Unplug it, if that’s the less strenuous option.

  Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Which you’re interrupting.

  Here to end your end times. So to speak.

  The hell’s this? Hello?

  This, Gargamel, is your father.

  Microphone Head?

  Drool?

  Microphone Head!

  Drool!

  So a vacuum is your best metaphor for avant garde music? Surely nonretrogradable rhythms haven’t reached your village yet. Rarely has the term yet been used so dubiously.

  Pardon me for neglecting to profit by your remark. Leopoldo hears Antonio laughing. Antonio remembers that quip. Of course he remembers.

  Oh Drool. Always shortchanging your kind. Is your window open?

  Is his window open? Yes. Right. Leopoldo’s buying time to prepare a comeback. A common tactic from Who’s Most Pedantic, their game from San Javier. During recess by Don Alban’s cafeteria they would refute each other about everything, spoofing the pompous language of demagogues, priests, themselves, digressing manically upon premises like compatriotas, let us applaud León’s proposal to privatize our toilets, compañeros, let us consider that if El Loco wins, Facundo’s maid will lop off his maid killer in his sleep, if she can find it, although rules are rules, digressions earn you top points but they have to eventually boomerang to the original premise, the audience permitted to interrupt only to call out for vocabulary clarifications: badinage!, what is?, sapidity!, what is?, and they halt their sciolisms and provide definitions, magniloquent inventions, on the spot. Is his window open? Antonio chooses not to block Leopoldo’s question with a question. He wants to hear what Leopoldo comes up with.

  Why yes, my window is indeed open.

  You see my friend, well you don’t really see, that’s why I’m about to inculcate you, your vacuum not only absorbs the detritus on your carpet but also the particles that float through your window, particles that carry inside of them the alarm of ambulances, the clang of cans, the tenor of the toll collector, all your troglogradables that are, in short, inside your artifact of . . .

  Troglo what?

  Gradables.

  Chanfle. Do you own a vacuum?

  Why yes. Indeed I do.

  And you change its filter often?

  Every two months.

  You see, Microphone Head, well you don’t really see ’cause you’re as blind as a microphone, I haven’t changed the filter of my Red Devil in years. Therefore it has ceased to absorb anything. Neither detritus nor particles and absolutely no clang of cans. Oh Microphone Head: always faltering between the general and the specific. You know the one about Glenn Gould and the Hoover? Of course you don’t.

  On the Salado side of the Calderón a domestic appears along Bolívar Street, too far from the busted phone for Leopoldo to know if she was one of the expelled. It is likely that more people will appear again soon. At San Javier their Who’s Most Pedantic game had served them well. On the national academic quiz show broadcasted by Channel Ten they had excelled in the debate sect
ion. And the Q&A section. They’d swept the city rounds and the interprovincial rounds and the finals against Espíritu Santo. At school everyone recognized them. During recess the appeal of Who’s Most Pedantic widened. Why I’m a better presidential candidate than you became a favorite premise.

  Still flatlining the currency at the Central Bank, Microphone?

  Been following the news?

  About the twilight of the IPOS?

  About the recent coup.

  Another one?

  Rumors that the interim president might be loosening the electoral requirements so El Loco can run.

  El Loco’s returning again?

  And the stronger candidates . . .

  Stronger? You mean burlier? Dollarized at the gut, if you will.

  . . . don’t want to run. The situation is irredeemable, so what’s the point? They’ll get ousted anyway. Ever considered returning?

  Absolutamente never. I’m too busy wading in stock options. Money? Paper, yes.

  There’s massive protests all over the country.

  Again?

  The indignation of the people has reached its limit.

  Now that definitely hasn’t happened before.

  Leopoldo doesn’t respond. Antonio interprets Leopoldo’s silence correctly. Leopoldo isn’t playing anymore. Antonio turns down Messiaen’s Abyss of the Birds.

  And yet with the right strategy someone . . .

  –Juana we’re out of eggs!

  I think the lines are crossed, Leo. Typical of our backward . . .

  . . . an outsider could sweep the elections and effect real change . . .

  –Juana I gave you enough change for eggs.

  He yells at you because he loves you, Juana.

  . . . at last our chance to . . .

  –Juana, carajo, quit eavesdropping on the politicians and go basket some eggs.

  Hello?

  Barely hear you.

  –Quit clowning and hang up already. Juana?

  Vote for us, Juana’s husband.

  We always wanted an audience and here at last . . .

  –How much for my vote?

  Free milk?

  Free housing?

  –I’m voting for El Loco.

  El Loco’s not coming back, sir.

  –That’s what you people said last time.

  How come we haven’t heard from Juana?

  Juana’s husband and his imaginary wife, Juana, are voting for El . . .

  –I’ll track you two conchadesumadres and . . .

  Hang up and call again?

  I think we have a chance, Antonio.

  –Quit my phone line already!

  Hello?

  II / ANTONIO IN SAN FRANCISCO

  Everyone thinks they’re the chosen ones, Masha wrote on Antonio’s manuscript. See About Schmidt with Jack Nicholson. Then she quoted from Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam, because she was sure Antonio hadn’t read her yet: Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him. In San Francisco, besides the accumulation of wealth, what does the age ask of your so called protagonist? No wonder he never returns to Ecuador.

  Why had her comments in Antonio’s manuscripts been so mean spirited? She’d been transferring the contents of her closet to boxes that will be transported to her new apartment in New York soon and she’d come across Antonio’s manuscripts inside a hatbox, where she’d also come across the compendium of contemporary classical music he had recorded for her, which she was listening to as she read his manuscripts again. She hadn’t seen Antonio or thought about him in at least twelve months, since around the time of his farewell party, and because she doesn’t remember marking his manuscripts with such virulence, reading them now was akin to discovering that while she was asleep or away someone who turns out to be her had defaced an entrusted room with a red pen. Had she somehow subscribed back then to the asinine notion that one couldn’t just barge into art, as Antonio had been desperately trying to do, without a lineage that justified one’s so called artistic inclination? Her father was a physicist and her mother had been a violinist and unlike Antonio she grew up alongside the Western Canon but she hadn’t become a great painter.

  —

  D Sharp Minor Etude, No. 12, Opus 8 by Alexander Scriabin: Horowitz wrong noted the D sharp etude in Moscow, Antonio said to Masha, listen, toward the end, Vladimir must have been nervous, or overwhelmed, or trying to both perform and watch himself perform because he’s eighty three years old and hasn’t been to Russia in sixty one years, and yet what’s amazing, or perhaps not so amazing, I know you’ll grumble if you don’t think it’s at least mildly amazing that, if you put on your headphones and scan every second of that recording of Horowitz in Moscow, you have to conclude that he’s not crying, unless he’s a silent weeper, now listen to this Valentin Silvestrov piece called Postludium, Antonio said — I absolutely agree with you, Masha, Silvestrov’s concept of the postlude, of a nostalgia for tonality expressed as a dissipation of tonality, sounds more interesting than his music — now listen to this piece by Arvo Pärt called Tabula Rasa, Antonio said, recounting for her what he knew about this music with so much glee that she began to think he couldn’t even believe he knew so much about a repertoire that just a few years ago had been foreign to him. She might have found his glee appealing then, or maybe she hadn’t, but since she had been new to San Francisco and hadn’t known anybody yet she had allowed herself to find his glee appealing (his glee and his excessive focus on researching the music, as if to atone for the deficiencies in his musical training he was trying to become a librarian of sounds — did you know that Messiaen composed his Quartet for the End of Time in a German war camp? — I don’t care I still don’t like his monotheistic bird music, Antonio —), but now she chooses to dismiss his glee and his librarianism as a noxious attempt to differentiate himself from others, no different than a dentist sporting heavy metal tank tops emblazoned with creatures that could extirpate Messiaen’s birds on earth, although the need to differentiate themselves had been what brought Masha and Antonio together: their contempt for those who stopple their lives for the promise of stocks, for instance, their unstated belief that what really matters exists in a parallel San Francisco of performances and paintings and poetry readings and yet unlike Antonio she detested poetry readings: why undermine your quiet text with your loud, needsome voice? At Antonio’s farewell party the loud voices of the women there had confused her. Were these not the same philistines they had targeted with what they liked to call, in homage to Nabokov, their plumed opprobrium?

  All the guests at Antonio’s farewell party had been women. A blond American had opened Antonio’s door. She seemed to know that she needed to pull the door extra hard against the bristly carpet, although she looked confused about why her pull also spilled her drink, and either because she was drunk or because Masha refused to smile at the girl’s performance of cute bewilderment, the girl interrupted the welcoming skit that she’d seemed ready to enact for Masha, and yet as the girl in the tight jeans and pink pumps retreated down the hall, holding her Styrofoam cup as if it were a pet soaked in pee, and as the teleological dance beats coming from the living room concluded in a collective singalong — we want your soul! — Masha didn’t keep Antonio’s manuscripts rolled in her hand but returned them to her messenger bag, stashing them among his copy of A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and her new palette knives and what was left of a bottle of corner store Pinot, the same brand that Antonio had offered her on the night they first met. She shouldn’t have come unannounced. That she’d felt entitled to because she wanted to know if the fictions Antonio had given her were true seemed ridiculous to her now. That she’d been trying to make herself believe that was the real reason she’d come was even more ridiculous. She knew then as she knows now, as she listens to Scriabin’s D Sharp Minor Etude from Antonio’s compen
dium, that her five or six months with Antonio entitled her to nothing. She also knew, because he’d told her, that not only were all of his friends in San Francisco women, but all of his relationships with them lasted less than six months. Why return to these moments at his farewell party then? Just toss his manuscripts and his tiresome compendium. Does she find solace in reminding herself that the moment’s over and she’s become the only spectator of that embarrassing moment, Masha in her black turtleneck by Antonio’s front door, trying to decide whether to leave what turned out to be Antonio’s farewell party, or wade into the party and confront him with absolutely nothing? On the other side of his living room Antonio was dancing in the exuberant way he probably thought American women expected from him, just like his exuberant clothes were probably what Antonio thought American women expected from him, a South American in San Francisco, although his clothes were so outlandish that they looked more like a parody of what Antonio thought American women expected from him, or perhaps his clothes were a rebuff for expecting him to dress like this, or perhaps the extra slim white bell bottoms with the crimson flowers printed on them and his extra tight white linen shirt abloom with ruffles were simply a ploy to make American women think that he wasn’t vain; that he favored the absurd not the vainglorious; that his clothes just happened to be tailored to accentuate his body and just happened to be expensive and that, unlike most Russian immigrants she didn’t associate with, he wasn’t brandishing these clothes as proof of European membership. On the other hand the more obvious possibility: Antonio had been having fun. Don’t you wish Antonio would have taken you to at least one of those all night dance parties, Masha? Yes. Maybe I would have tolerated the dumb trochaic rhythms of his electronic dance music just to watch him twirl in his slim flower pants inside a warehouse in the South of Market, no, I wouldn’t have tolerated it. I would have countermanded the excesses of the evening, which is probably why he never invited me. Or I would have drunk too much to thwart my tirades about his absurd costumes and a generation of young men hexed by, oh, enough, Mashinka. Enough.