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  8.

  Anyone who’s ever set foot in a Vakapý stadium knows that what the fans really get off on are the stats. The implications and ruptures, the chance to give yourself entirely to unpredictability, to pour body and mind into an order composed of unforeseeable confluences and divergences; moves, plays, stats. So here it is, dearest larvae of mine: the Vakapý stadium as such no longer exists, but Vakapý will never die. It’ll outlive us all, just like the Bug. It was around long before us and will be around long after we’re gone. Money has a similarly never-ending quality, an immortal aspect even, in its deferred promises: so sweet, and at the same time so dissonant. That was certainly how it sounded on the track that separated the stands from the court, across which the crowd roared out their speculations, bandying about sums that would never become the reality of cash in their pockets but that reverberated off the court’s trio of walls regardless, over the heads of the multitude, over the mantle of smoke that lay above their heads, over crumpled slips and cocktails held aloft. Thus money: little more than a knock-on effect, a necessary evil in adding extra spice to the vices associated with unforeseeable chance. The ultimate explanation for Vakapý’s astonishing and long-lasting appeal lies in random probability distributions and patterns that, for all their (considerable) susceptibility to statistical analysis, can never be foretold with any precision. Though different both in nature and provenance, the plaýers and the gamblers have become fully interdependent, the upshot being a kind of resistance to that irremediable, wearisome will to improve, the throat-gnawing need to always get better in some way. Progress is a word much used in Atlantika, and its presence in our motto and on the town crest is no coincidence. It undergirds bridges, rivers, and ports, even the seas, just as it runs through sermons and so many elegant speeches, lends its neat little trochee to the ancestral rite of the inauguration of public works, because men of vision know to align themselves with the certainty evinced by progress, by godsends, Cređits from heaven, and the kind of blessings we are obviously due, rather than with the mean past, which, by dint of being the past—or having taken place under another administration—no one wants to think about anymore: to lay that foundation stone with one eye on the horizon, to cut the inaugural ribbon like a person cleaving two worlds, to pose for the photo with all the glad-ragged VIPS and their Botoxed ladies who will occupy the tabloid pages for days on end, nobody bothering to mention that the cement was shoddily laid, roof joists were loose, the sleepers and steel frames used for wing x of pavilion y were little more than figments of some con man’s imagination, or that the cardiology team was still waiting at the border for the work permits to come through, or that—never mind, I hereby announce, fellow citizens, with heart and mind fixed unerringly on the tremendous service these facilities will provide for generations to come, as I unveil the all-new Hospital of Progress, the unprecedented Progress Avenue, the state-of-the-art Progress Boulevard, the highly progressive Progress Quarter. And flash go all the cameras. Progress also, of course, figures prominently in the deed poll as one of our most popular male names. After Juan, Progress is the most popular name for boys. Truly, truly, this is the land of Vakapý and all its attendant wretchedness. And don’t just take my word for it: ask the first person you meet in the street around here (chances are he’ll answer to Juan Progreso Pérez). He’ll back me up: Vakapý first, worry about dinner later. Thus has it always been: even in times of famine or plague, even when the Ź-Bug was at its most virulent, never would a weekend pass without all the Vakapý stadia along the coast, from Las Huertas to San Martín Jagua, full to the rafters. Each of the principal cities had its own team, comprised of the galaxy of journeyman foreign plaýers who were always the main attraction. Inside the stadium things worked differently: when a match merited it, whether because the plaýers were superstars or rivalries were sufficiently intense, entire towns would mobilize, traveling in rented buses or in great processions of smaller vehicles, clogging all B-roads and earthen tracks as yet unfamiliar with the technology of cobblestones, so the pride of these far-flung places made its way to the stadium in question, the scene of the showdown, no matter the distance, no matter the cost. They say it’s about identity. The world being what it now is, though, identity is just about the last thing your average gambler cares about. Or they care about it if they can use it in the game as part of a double bluff. The only thing left to identify with is the numbers. In spite of everything, the odd illegal field still exists, in remote corners of the country, listing into the sea in some cases, all of them out of reach of league officials. Low-level betting takes place in these semiderelict locales, nothing more than loose change—a question, more than anything, of some people not wanting the game’s beginnings to be forgotten altogether. And even in the beginning it was very clear: what goes up must come down, and sooner or later everyone loses. That is the game, that is its defining contour: an arc. And that is not progress. Anyone who says they play to win only feeds the beast, the incontestable nature of which is loss.

  9.

  I remember starting back to school one year after the winter vacation. The stone remembers it too. During vacation one of the novices hanged herself in the school chapel. We heard about it through Zermeño: Zermeño had a little business stealing copies of the local newspaper from his father’s barbershop and then selling the Page Threes to other children at recess. His own little racket. Everyone had one. Mine consisted of making myself as inconspicuous as the cracks in the walls, whereas Zermeño peddled previously perused pornography, an unintended consequence of which was that we were sometimes apprised of happenings in the world. The paper in question was printed on stock so cheap that when you held it up to the light the words, classifieds, and nude females on either side would intermingle. For my part, Mondays meant handing over most of the money I’d stolen out of Grandma’s purse during the weekend. In exchange I got the results from all the games and the plaýer trading cards that usually came with the Sunday paper. I remember it well: it was the start of a new year but the end of the holidays, that difficult contradiction to which we gradually had to become accustomed. The bell had barely gone for the first lesson of term, Zermeño took out the paper with the article about the novice’s suicide, and a knot of children gathered. The article was one of the many that told of the near-daily hangings in Atlantika; at a time before the Ź-Bug came, and for want of anything exciting to relate, these always occupied column inch after column inch. Suicides, obituaries, and the weather on the Atlantik seaboard: therein the pith and marrow of our new journalism. Zermeño gave a hurried, nasal reading to the gathered kids, but there wasn’t a picture of the young woman’s corpse. The article did have a picture of the chapel exterior, a black mourning ribbon over the entrance, the school crest, the traffic posts along the pavement, a policeman smoking his fourth cigarette of the morning—but not the novice, not even the coffin. The photo would have been taken early one Saturday morning, or just before midday. It always seemed strange to me that the photographer didn’t bother getting a close-up of the body. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that we readers prefer a corpse over stones every time.

  10.

  The Bug. , B, Ć, and so on: every twenty or thirty years, it comes back. At times it stays away for as long as half a century, at others, outbreaks occur every half decade. It takes many, many different forms, which is why in this city it has never been properly dealt with. There’s just one thing we know for sure: our destiny is not to be avoided. And, it should also be understood, it is a destiny not so much concerned with damaging us as with leaving us utterly confounded. The stone sucks the light from the room. In the last few days its behavior has changed, throbbing with a deep blackish light that seems to signal a new life brewing inside it. The nun would have come up with all manner of names for such an entity: spirit, substance, essence, psyche, psyches, awareness, sensation, will, intelligence, imagination, memory, conscience, comprehension, understanding, inner life. I believe it is anything but: it’s the
dregs, the overspill; it’s all that nobody wants. Clara doesn’t believe in those kinds of superstitions either. But she now suspects that, if the stone did come into existence with such an intangible, fragile entity inside it, it isn’t there anymore. If it had any physical reality, and could therefore have been made available to buy or sell on some kind of market, someone would have acquired it long ago. Now she thinks she’s found something: the first discovery to suggest all the effort has been worth it. I agree but say nothing. She, however, along with the stone, seems convinced. The true treasures, she says, are never things you look for; either they come to you or they don’t, or maybe you convince yourself that they’re going to come and then a day arrives when you happen upon a jewelry box or a sepia scroll marked with a cross: a signal, or something you at least take as a signal, that allows you to dream of better times, better climes, only eventually, after so long at the bottom of the pile, to end up feeling it’s better to give up all hope, to come round to loss as your standard setting, to believe that the treasure will arrive only by sheer fluke and at a time of its choosing, which in turn means that it, as well as any hope for it, must be securely stowed away, for it is ultimately easier to take responsibility for one’s own frustration, to become accustomed to the frustration, or at least to deal with it in the same way you might deal with some known quantity (like the metric system, like an electricity transformer), than to let yourself be trampled by certainty, the utter crushing certainty that there’s nothing inside the box apart from nothing—a million tiny bits of nothing. Anything but that. And Clara—dear Clara—is nearly nothing, for all that she may still be in one piece—just about. How battered her body looks. Surely she can’t go on much longer. She bares her teeth, and not in a smile: and what teeth, so white, so even! They are all the more eye-catching given the weight she’s lost. The little that remains of her emaciated arms seems but one more facet in the inventory of objects in the room: stone, bra, vase, dog, flesh, coins. All present and correct. Time, or the sequence of intervals otherwise known as time, is no longer of much use to her: for her, all time is deposited in the stone. My time and her own. Has the stone grown over the course of the days? Clara has been shrinking, that much is clear, and in comparing the two of them it is possible to say, Yes: there’s no way she can go on much longer, her abandonment to the mineral world is well advanced, whereas the stone is like a bouncing child of about three. Aside from the stone, all that remains of Clara is her hunger. The blotches on her hands; the dull, lusterless hair; the odd string of saliva at the corner of her mouth. It is today: she does not say this in words, simply shakes her head. We use words now only for things that aren’t truly urgent.

  11.

  The government trotted out the line, “Vakapý: a tradition of innovation.” According to this mantra, endorsed by those for whom Vakapý, betting, and all denizens of Atlantika comprise a fundamental trinity, our town is the very crucible for the clash—and eventual fusion—of three strands of Vakapý history: the Vakapý of the natives, who long before the arrival of the first settlers were playing a kind of ritualistic hipball (the ball itself usually a shrunken human head, by and large that of some vanquished foe, placed inside rubber casing, and the aim being to shoot it through the seven side-on hoops in the walled temple-cum-stadium); the Albýno Vakapý, an underground version in which the plaýers had to roll their balls along a sloping sidewall on the way to hitting a jack; and finally, that of the invaders, which, with its use of paddles and curved, wicker basket-gloves (not so dissimilar to our modern-day aħaka), has roots most clearly in the leisure pursuits of Numidian tribes. The rules, ways of winning, and materials, the use or otherwise of a wall or a slope, are, however, secondary in importance. In these pastimes, as with any of the ways in which we choose to squander our time on planet earth, the important thing is and has always been the chance to win money in wagers.

  12.

  Morgan spoke not a single word for a long time—six weeks, two months. A sadness that had knocked him sideways. Nor was this just his usual crestfallen attitude to the world, far from it. Not the crooked, yellow teeth; not the distinctive sound he used to make when sucking his bifurcate tongue against his palate, the click that disguised and revealed his spleen—I don’t mean these things, but another kind of silence, one issuing out of some faraway place, a future-contaminated place, verging on the adult. A solid silence, corpulent even, with physical qualities and a tenor that varied according to the distribution of the desks: sometimes all it took was being seated near Morgan to feel that desolate charge, more akin to the disfiguring effects gravity can have on certain materials, like us, or like a colony of rats or mound of trash—anything at all—than to the absence of sound. It was, I am certain, a form of resistance. Of quelling the outside noise. Out of all our classes, an hour of national history was the best bet for disappearing completely. Our teacher, a grizzled priest, miser, and drinker rolled into one, always came in reeking of pastis. The few words he deigned to speak in class tended to come out as grunts. He had a fishhook for a right hand. Morgan claimed he sustained the injury in the War of 910, long before any of us was born, during a brutal crackdown on the Faith: all icons and scriptures, anything deemed to play a part in fomenting it, were destroyed. The temples were closed down, and the ensuing, all-encompassing dust cloud swallowed every single chalice, cincture, and hunk of consecrated bread in the land. In spite of the danger, men of faith flocked to town squares to be blessed by priests who went around disguised as agave farmers. Precisely one month after the initial order had been given, new ones were issued, and by the time the sun came up next morning, the renegade priests had all been relieved of a limb. It went down as the Night of the One-Handed Cocoons and was the start of a little over a decade of hostilities between army and church. Thousands upon thousands died. Any time Grandma drank (cognac her poison), she’d weep and tell us of the terrible atrocities committed: how the Spaŵn Tanks were shut down, too, how you’d come across dead soldiers in fields on a daily basis, how blood flowed through the streets, not to mention the sharp increase in infections; the young larvae were hidden away in basements to learn the catechism by the light of a few votive candles, but the true light continued to illuminate them: our radiant Lady of the Chrysaliđs. The youngsters studied scripture and memorized the Canticle of the Caterpillar; our Recuźant great-great-grandparents ferried the priests to these underground prayer rooms like contraband, risking their lives in the process, but what kind of life would it be anyway, one’s soul in perpetual darkness? A soul that never transforms, never emerges from its cocoon, a dormant, untapped soul. In order that life could at least be a project of self-liberation, and though people had to hide away like poachers and night thieves, instruction in the arts of the Spirit continued. Just like in the olden days, when the true faith could be proclaimed only in the Katacombz. The novices hurried to enter the Order of the Lepidoptz, becoming the Padres who went out to preach in the moonlit agave fields with guns at their hips. Their fervor was great, and they defended the faith with all the dignity of true believers: they’d sooner fall with pupae spilling from their fists than forsake the chance to inculcate. The maimed priests were later dubbed the Martyrs of Saint Źirconium, though their elevation was, and still is, a matter of some controversy. Sometimes I wonder how utterly rotten Grandma would feel if she could see how the ranks of the Magnetiźed have swelled, glorified ragpickers shuffling around in their maize-colored shawls, rooting for scrap metal with their long grabbers and clanking metal detectors. Logically enough, for the priest who taught our history lessons—Fish Hook to us—military discipline and religious formation went hand in hand. Just as unsurprising was the inability of any of our teachers to quell talk of the novice who hanged herself. The week began—as every week did—with readings from the Settlerz Scripture. But the ancient nun, ringing the bell at the end of recess, and without bothering to consult the parent body, felt the need to do something about the images that had been incubating in our minds o
ver the winter, that conflagration fueled by the holidays and tabloid newspapers.

  13.

  It’s important to follow instructions. Sometimes the numbers freeze momentarily, but if you discońńect without first hitting PAUSE, there’s a chance they’ll stay planted in front of your retina for hours, or even days. Static statistics, numb numbers, signifying the square root of nothing—like the old clocks outside the Brigađe barracks or the unmoving chrome timepieces on the refinery ovens at the mill. Visual details of the Vakapý matches that are incredibly hard to shake, or fragments of visual details: the floorboards, the baskets, marks left by the ball, bits of bodies. I sometimes wonder whether this residual mosaic is generated on the basis of any predetermined order, some glitch in the memory that nonetheless obeys certain laws, or whether it’s purely random. Each gambler has a dedicated drone-camera in the stadium that they personally control; obviously the shots you choose give a sense of your personal take on the game, what aspects you set store by, and even your conception of space itself. You will also never be presented with any images you did not previously select from among the thousands comprising the match—for all that such a selection may have been unconscious. But even so, among the many different things that may cause the Sýstem to freeze, only a few very specific ones will get stuck like this, will really refuse to budge. Take today: the last shot I saw was of a portion of one of the plaýers’ arms, possibly the hydraulic elbow, as the final point of the match was being played. It was a Super Close Up, everything in Hyperdetail™, and the ball was just on the verge of being slung out of the midfielder’s aħaka, so it looked ever so slightly squashed. I remember, or seem to remember, the play in question: the position of the plaýer’s knee in respect to the rest of his body, the V-formation of his team around him. The stoop to gather the ball, the hurling of the ball back at the wall. So why an elbow? Maybe I focus on that only now because the image has stuck inside my vision, because it happens to be within reach—maybe all it’s really good for is dazzling my sight and dragging my memory down alleys just as blind. I have also at times imagined, due to the similarities between so many of the images you see in Playback, that the games and the ways in which the gamblers can participate—the two indispensable, interdependent pillars of Vakapý—are the slightest variations on one single, far, far longer game, a game previously watched from a variety of different angles, and that if it has any point, it’s the fueling of a process of infinite recreation. I think this, and a second later forget it. I forget it because I have to remember it—fleetingly—the next time I cońńect. The floating images gradually dissipate, breaking up into less nuanced blocks and lines, then simply a succession of dots, and I eventually feel the ciliary muscles loosen and, finally, am able to blink. The audio takes longer to fall in line with itself: I hear faint voices, the murmurs from the other gamblers. They’re going absolutely nowhere, my gambler brethren. In spite of government recommendations, the average session goes on for 336 hours. (I imagine the poor bastard who had to do the counting started to feel pretty sorry for himself at about hour 14.) A crypt-like darkness comes down, obscuring the passageway in which I find myself, while another out-of-kilter frequency comes trickling in: the rebounds, the sound of the plaýers’ footfalls as they dash this way and that across the synthetic wood boards of the court, the time-out advertisements, the unmistakable jingle of the Department of Chaos and Gaming. Then I know it’ll be only a few minutes before the world rights itself again.