III

 

The following days went by without a stir. Work went well, there were no mishaps, accidents, or conflicts. My supervisor recommended me for a promotion that never seemed to come. I didn’t care. Promotions were voted on in the union and they always seemed to vote for someone else; to be honest, I didn’t vote for my own promotion because I didn’t want to be promoted. I was fine the way I was, I’d gotten used to doing my duty without complaint and happily, of course, as there was no other way. I took part in endless votes on other matters: on our section representative, on the chief of command, on something or other related to the cleaning service. Every two or three weeks there was a vote about something, so much voting that you ended up losing interest. On the other hand, everything in the city worked, basic necessities were well handled, and I couldn’t think of any better way to run things. All of this made me more apathetic when it came time to vote.

Julio’s young and handsome tutor adapted smoothly to the new arrangement. So did she. Only once did it occur to me to ask her whether she missed me. She said no, because when it came down to it she still had me close by; she also said that these things happen to couples and there was no need to give it much importance. Lastly, she said that I’d changed a great deal, that I wasn’t even the shadow of the man I’d been. I thanked her for her frankness.

Since I had plenty of free time and little to do at home after work, I signed up for a brief course on personal growth. There I was taught to express myself properly and organize my priorities. The class was free, as was everything in our damn city, but you learned a great deal very rapidly. Once I’d learned how to organize my priorities I realized that I had no priorities to organize, but my teacher told me not to worry, that the course would still come in handy for organizing other things—my sock drawer, for example. Nothing could have been truer, my four pairs of socks were perfectly organized from then on. When I grew tired of organizing and admiring the way things looked in their organized state, I signed up for a ping-pong tournament through the union. It went swimmingly. My self-esteem rose. My trainer told me that if I got serious they might put me on the national championship team representing the union of excrement drivers. I asked him where that championship took place, and he said, all over the country. The idea sounded marvelous to me, because I still didn’t really know what country I lived in, or how the other one out there had ended up, and this would give me the chance to see a thing or two. I was excited to see the countryside, or what remained of it, and maybe—since I was already dreaming big—I could even visit my old region. I started training like a man possessed, and one after the other I beat all my coworkers fair and square, and, of course, my popularity took a downturn. Barely anyone spoke to me in the dining hall. Some people are sore losers. Over time, I started letting my coworkers win a little, to see whether they’d stop ghosting me, but it was too late, because some people not only are sore losers but never let go of a grudge. In any case, the whole ping-pong thing didn’t do me any good, and it infuriated me, because I think I had a natural talent for it. All that letting other people win made my scores drop without getting me back into my peers’ good graces. I saw clearly that the ill will my victories had inspired would not be erased by my humiliation. The union’s national championship was held without me, and someone else won. Still, I kept playing every afternoon, because, whether I won or let others win, it kept me entertained.

I wasn’t the only one who made extraordinary progress during that time, though in my case it didn’t get me far. Julio started at his special school and blew all his teachers away. They gave him so many certificates of achievement that we didn’t know where to put them. He was growing up healthy, happy, and strong. He was still very affectionate with me, and although he spent most of his time in class or with the young tutor who lived in our home and slept with my wife, he still knew I was his father. Or, at least, the closest thing he had to a father. Sometimes he came to see me at ping-pong games, and he clapped like crazy even when I lost on purpose, maybe because he didn’t know.

We were proud of each other.

My tremendous happiness was gradually seeming more and more natural, though it was nothing of the kind. Or, at least, my inability to get upset was starting to feel less strange.

I was becoming tired, I suppose, like an old dog, accepting that things are as they are and will continue that way until something or someone changes them. And, why deny it, I knew I was not that person. Just as old dogs lie down and accept their circumstances, I too lay down, half asleep, complying with the invisible orders of fate.

Once you admit that God hasn’t chosen you to do anything extraordinary, you start to really live the way you should, with your hands and feet inside a circle marked in the sand, not stepping out beyond your terrain or hankering for what isn’t yours.

My unjustified happiness and I were making peace with each other, as I mentioned, so that I barely noticed anymore that I was constantly happier than I should be.

At night I slept serenely. I went to bed on the sofa, across from Julio’s bed, and we looked at each other before putting our eye masks on and surrendering to sleep. I’d say good night and he’d smile and say nothing. He still didn’t talk, but the doctors assured us that there was nothing wrong with his vocal cords, that he simply preferred to be silent. It seemed odd to me that anyone would truly prefer never to speak, but I’m no doctor and the kid seemed to be doing fine. She, on the other hand, didn’t seem very happy, I suppose she did what she did and slept with the young tutor because she thought it the best thing for Julio. We didn’t speak to each other much, she and I, as she was almost always with the handsome young man, who no longer struck me as so young or so handsome, and who, of this I was sure, had begun to go bald.

For my part, I had a few flings, two to be exact, with women from the relief services, the kind who used to be called whores, but not here and rightly so, as they didn’t charge for helping you out and were very warm and polite. If I didn’t go more often, it was because I couldn’t adjust to fucking in full view of everyone in one of those transparent brothels, and also because she received a report every time. For some reason that escapes me, in the transparent city reports must be drawn up on everything you do, even though everything is completely visible and there’s nowhere to hide.

I also had a flirtation with a coworker, but it never went very far; we groped each other a bit in the showers and that was it. The thing is, I can’t really pull it off in the shower, people are watching and I lose what I have going. Others don’t care, and in fact it’s a rare day that you don’t see a pair of coworkers putting on a show, but as I said, I can’t get used to it. I suppose it’s because I’m old-fashioned and the type to do it with the lights off, which, in this place, is clearly impossible.

And that’s something that exists in the transparent city like no other place I’ve known: visibility. You can have a good or bad opinion about visibility, but when it’s as excessive as this and becomes the only available condition, it devours all secrets, all mysteries, and all desire. And so much of seeing everything makes you lose your impulse to pay attention to anything. I remember that in the countryside, during the harvest, we’d look for shade without giving it much thought, as the natural thing to do. Nature had its nooks and shadows, and it seems to me that the architects who built this city could learn a thing or two from it. Those architects who built this crystal city, so perpetually full of light, so clear, so perfect.

Sometimes, back on our land, the sun bore down and made it unbearable to be outside or inside. We’d open the windows at night and drink lemonade, but nothing eased our sweat or discomfort, and as the seasons turned we lived a very different life, a world naturally becoming its own opposite. During the harsh winters, we took refuge under blankets, dined near the hearth, and wrapped our hands in rags to keep from getting chilblains. Rural life teaches you the limits of things, of strength and of people’s character; it teaches you that the earth is in charge.

In that other life, nobody seemed to be in charge. In the life that I considered mine before, nothing seemed to control behavior, and yet people behaved decently and obeyed, even if they didn’t know exactly what they were obeying. It could have been the red embers in your fire, or the bedbugs hiding in your wool mattress, or the grime under your fingernails. Cold and heat. And obeying nature, to my mind, organized things, or at least gave them an order of some kind. Red and black and white are more obeyed, and better obeyed, than all this transparency. You respond to things that are real, that are solid and offer cover, since whenever one thing is covered, another is revealed. But the clear sight of everything weighs down a person’s spirits. Nobody wants to go hunting and discover that the animals, against their own better instincts, no longer hide. By the same token, I imagine nobody wants to be exposed all the time once he knows he’s the prey. That’s all to say that this life without storms or torments was beyond my understanding, nor did I have any desire to understand it.

Aside from that, I can’t deny that in the transparent city we never wanted for anything and they even allowed us to exchange gifts at Christmas. One per person, taken from a list of useful items provided in advance: nail clippers, trivets, small cups for holding boiled eggs, an ointment for muscle pain (I was occasionally sore from playing ping-pong), things like that. All you had to do was mark a box with an X for the appointed person to receive the selected gift, so it wasn’t anything out of this world, nor did it bring much joy, but they were still gifts when it came down to it and they made the holidays more cheerful. I received enough ointment for a lifetime, considering I had only a small injury on one elbow, but that’s how everything went in the transparent city: they gave you a lot of what you didn’t want, and none of what you really missed.

The only two holidays were Christmas and Victory Day. The truth is that Victory Day commemorated the day of defeat for all of us who lived inside, but nobody seemed to remember this, not even me. Large tables were placed on the street, and sausages and beer were given out; it was the closest thing to a popular festival in the city, and everyone had a blast, including me, or at least we all gave the appearance of being very happy. If you ask me, it should have been called Evacuation Day or Permanent Removal Day or End of Life As You Knew It Day, but nobody ever asked me, so I kept my opinions to myself.

We didn’t really make friends, at least I didn’t, because she and that dandy of a tutor sometimes went to meetings for a kind of book club, where it seemed that they discussed what they’d been reading with other educated people like them. I wasn’t invited, but if I had been, I wouldn’t have wanted to go. I’ve never had much use for books unless they include pictures of animals or nature, and I don’t understand why so much importance is given to stories that are all made up and thin on truth. My guess is that people who are short on courage enjoy fantasy, and that men who are as manly as God intended prefer what we can see and touch, but to each his own.

As for my coworkers, I’ve already said that the more I excelled at ping-pong, the worse they treated me, and my trainer, who at first held me in high esteem, turned his back on me when I started letting others win. So in the end I was alone, between one rejection and the other. For entertainment, I went to the movies once in a while, but the movies were old and almost always musicals, which make me a little nervous, as I also can’t understand how people could spend their days dancing and singing when what’s normal is to walk and talk. Once or twice I tried to remark on this, but there was always someone in the audience who shushed me, which I can understand. If you’re enjoying a movie, it’s annoying for someone else to spoil it, and when it came down to it, the fact that musicals bored me was nobody else’s fault.

Going to the movies was just a way of killing time and avoiding my home, since, though no one said this aloud, I felt unnecessary there, though that feeling didn’t rub me the wrong way or sadden me, nor did I give a damn. I did feel good around the kid, and it seemed that he felt the same way about me, but with him being mute and me not being much of a conversationalist I can’t say we did much chatting. We laughed a lot, it’s true, but I’m not sure about what. We kept each other company like a boy and his dog, who can be best friends without exchanging a word. Nothing else really mattered to me.

I think that, without realizing it, I’d been losing interest in almost everything. I couldn’t care less about politics, local or international, and not even at work could I care much about the union’s intrigues, because despite the fact that they asked our opinion and took votes on every little matter, they seemed perfectly organized without any help from me and I didn’t have the ability or intelligence—much less the urge—to try to improve on what anyone was doing.

Sometimes I took long strolls, not going very far, but tracing long circles through the crowds, watching other people’s lives through walls without finding them to be very different from mine, without envying anyone or harboring any resentments. Only occasionally, at the sight of a particularly affectionate or passionate couple, did I miss what she and I had had before we were torn from our land. I also recall that, on hearing a man shout wildly on the street during one of my walks, I longed for a second to be that man, though he was clearly deranged. The poor guy was hollering into the crowd without anyone paying him the slightest attention, completely enraged, and I suppose it was his anger that I longed to find inside myself, that I suddenly missed.

A long time went by almost without my realizing it, and I would have gone a lot longer without anything worth telling if it hadn’t been for one afternoon when, I couldn’t tell you why, I decided to skip ping-pong and, instead of going to the sports center for my daily practice session, I found myself walking toward the old bar. I hadn’t had a beer in ages, nor had I missed it, but that day my thirst was back. They say you can easily take a man out of his home, but it’s much harder to take the home out of the man. They may be right.

It took me a while to find the bar, in this city everything looks so similar that you immediately forget how you got somewhere, but after a few false turns through those identical streets, I came upon it. There it was, as transparent and lively as always. I found a spot at the bar and asked for a nice cold one. I was enjoying my first sip—there’s nothing in this world or the next one like that first sip of ice-cold beer—when someone touched my shoulder. I turned, and who was standing there? My friend, my only friend, the former zone agent. What a hug we gave each other! It goes without saying that he sat down next to me and ordered another beer. We started chatting like old pals, though we’d never been such a thing. Neither his life nor mine had much to show for the lapsed time, but it didn’t matter. The forced bond of people from the same region kept the conversation going. He was enormously happy to hear all the good things that had happened to me—the ping-pong, the special kid who kept getting certificates as rewards for his singularity. He didn’t have children, and people without kids often see them as possessing magical qualities, as if they couldn’t possibly grow up to become like us, so he couldn’t stop repeating that children are a treasure and a good fortune and a gift from the Lord and the salt of our lives. When I asked him about his life, I realized how little I knew about him. For one thing, I didn’t know what he did for a living before becoming a zone agent during the war, nor, of course, what he did for a living now. He told me that before the war he’d been a thermostat technician at a foundry, but there was no use for those skills here, since there was no heavy industrial work in the transparent city, so the first year he’d been assigned to work as a glass cleaner, for which there was plenty of need, and after the first year he was given a management position at the arrival camp in return for his good service as an agent during his region’s evacuation. I had no idea that the arrival camp was still in operation, I’d thought that we’d all arrived long ago, but he told me that it wasn’t so, on the contrary, every day at least one or two stragglers showed up. These stragglers were the few who in some way or other had escaped the evacuation. Sometimes they were old people who’d disregarded orders, or, more often, members of the defeated army. Soldiers who’d sought refuge in the mountains or desert caves so they wouldn’t have to turn over their weapons. It wasn’t an organized resistance, but rather small, rebellious clusters that were being eradicated little by little. Every once in a while there were those who were unarmed and had no bad intentions, who simply preferred not to live in the transparent city. Suddenly I thought of my sons, Augusto and Pablo, and wondered why I hadn’t thought of them more often, or every second of every day, and I wanted to know whether they might have come to the arrival camp. The former zone agent told me that since he’d been assigned there, they’d received more than two hundred stragglers, so it was impossible for him to know from just a first name, and, what’s more, the information was confidential. I asked whether a father could try to find his own children, and he told me that it wasn’t common but he could inquire, though he didn’t seem too hopeful. We left the matter there and agreed to see each other again, and I reminded him that he still owed me a visit, as I’d invited him for Sunday dinner a long time ago and he’d never come. He apologized, saying he’d been very distracted, but then he confessed that soon after he saw me he’d met a good-looking woman and the whole thing slipped his mind. I then asked him about the woman in question, and he replied that it didn’t work out, that she went off with another man. I followed one confession with another, saying that my love life wasn’t exactly at its best either, and I told him about the imbecile who lived in my house and slept with my wife. He told me that this was normal here, and he brought up the joke about the horse who turned out to be a lawyer and the poor man who found him in bed with his wife when he arrived home from work. I didn’t remember the ending of the joke, but since he was now laughing his head off as he recalled it, I laughed along, and soon we were both in stitches without knowing why, and the more we laughed, the more beer we ordered, and vice versa. So when we headed out to the street we were pretty damn drunk and we parted ways with an embrace and a promise to meet up again the following day, same time. After all that, I still didn’t know the ending of the joke.

Since not much happened during my days, the next morning at work I had trouble concentrating, caught up as I was in my excitement about returning to the bar with my friend and thinking he might bring some information about my sons. It’s not that anyone could tell, as by now I did my work with my eyes closed, literally, but I felt different inside. It wasn’t happiness, as this, unfortunately, was my feeling all the time, but rather, finally, interest in something, which was unusual. To do things right this time, at the end of the workday I stopped in at the sports center and falsely claimed I had an injury, and the trainer, who I don’t think really cared about this whole ping-pong business, let me go without asking any questions. I went to the bar and sat down with a beer, to wait. And I waited and waited, but the former agent didn’t show up. I wondered whether it was possible that every time I made a plan with this man he actually forgot or got swept up in a love affair. It didn’t seem likely. I then wondered whether the former zone agent could be avoiding me on purpose, but this didn’t fit with the enthusiasm he’d shown during both our encounters. When the time arrived at which I’d be missed at home, I left. It’s not that I was too concerned about her scolding me, since when it came down to it she was sleeping with another man right before my eyes, but I couldn’t bear the idea of having to explain myself to that damn tutor. Ever since he’d moved in, he put a lot of effort into protecting us and acting as if he were ultimately responsible for all our lives. Yet I couldn’t understand what she saw in him, beyond his gorgeous appearance and dazzling intellect.

I fell asleep worried that night, thinking of Augusto and Pablo more than I had in recent years, and I rebuked myself for not having done so more often, and for not having tried to look for them. It seemed inexplicable to me all of a sudden that she, their mother, hadn’t urged me to do so, that she herself hadn’t sought information about her sons. I didn’t understand how we’d gone all this time without talking about our own children, or how we’d been able to forget them so—at least in my case—happily. Nor could I comprehend why I was always so glad about everything and why I couldn’t muster a single complaint. For a long time now I’d wanted to worry about that, but I hadn’t been able to. I concluded that this transparent city had done something odd to me and to my thoughts, and I deduced that, given that nobody had forced me to think this way or that, it all must be related to the water, since as soon as we arrived they made us undergo those crystallizations to avoid who knows what bacteria, and from that moment on I hadn’t been the same, and every time I showered, I emerged less worried, and happier.

That very night I decided to stop showering.

Since I didn’t want people to see that I wasn’t showering, I decided not to change my alarm clock, which I didn’t need anyway. It was enough to simply focus, before going to sleep, on the goal of waking up half an hour earlier. Back when I tilled the land and hunted and had a real life, I never needed an alarm clock, nor did I need dawn or a rooster’s crowing to get me up. It was enough to decide it. Nor did I bathe every day before or during the war—much less twice a day as we did here, or even three times, as we also had to shower after ping-pong—and nothing bad had ever happened to me. And the water back then, gathered in the well when it rained or purchased from the water owner and his tanker trucks, was very different from the water here and didn’t crystallize you outside and in, all the way to your core, nor did it steal your smell or change your way of being.

My mental trick worked as well as before, and I made it to the shower without being seen, and before my neighbor arrived in the adjoining bathroom, as he did every morning, I covered myself in ointment and petroleum jelly and let the water run without wetting me. Then I got dressed and sat down to wait for the others to get up and come to breakfast. They were surprised to see me awake already, but at the same time it’s not as if I’d killed anyone; each person has the right to wake up the way they choose, so I suppose they didn’t pay it too much mind.

At work, however, things got complicated. When our day was done, I tried not to go to the collective showers, but I ran into the supervisor. I told him I didn’t feel well and might be getting sick, and he told me that he’d take me to the doctor as soon as I finished my shower. I told him I preferred to go home in hopes that rest might take care of it, and he said that was fine, as soon as I showered I could go home. Then I told him that just for this one day I’d rather shower when I got home, and he said that was perfect, as soon as I’d showered I could go shower at home. Since the conversation was becoming futile, I showered.

As I did so, the supervisor watched me through the glass wall.

That night I slept splendidly, without a single trace of worry, without thinking about my sons or about anything at all. Even so, the following day I made another attempt.

As I said, it wasn’t hard to escape the shower at home, so my effort went into evading it at work. The only thing I could think of was to apply a thick layer of ointment on my naked body, so the water wouldn’t enter my pores easily and wouldn’t do whatever it had been doing.

After work, I parked my little worm of excrement and casually headed to the shower. To avoid raising my supervisor’s suspicions, once there I tried to spend as little time as possible under the water and to pretend that I was getting wetter than I was, keeping my head out of the stream and talking nonstop with my coworkers, to conceal, as best I could, my true and sinister intentions. Of course I didn’t drink any running water all day, as there was no point in avoiding the shower only to then let myself be crystallized from the inside, so when I finally arrived at the bar, I drank my first beer dying of thirst and my second beer dying of fear at the possibility of losing the little progress I’d made. One can suppose that the beer was also made from the same water, but I had to drink something if I didn’t want to die, and if I had to drink something, it might as well be cold beer.

Despite the water I’d downed with my two or three or maybe it was four beers, that night I was able to observe the first effects of my diabolical plan. Rather than falling asleep completely happy, I fell asleep only halfway happy and was able to recall my children and miss them a little. I was glad not to be so glad, and I thought that if I repeated the whole operation each day, I might finally manage to not be happy at all and, what’s more, in the best possible future, finally get really and truly pissed off. I fell asleep embracing my growing dissatisfaction, though I’ll admit that I didn’t rule out the possibility that I was going insane.

 

The next day, I hewed to my new routine like a nut to its bolt: ointment, lies, half-showers, and a lot of beer. No trace of the former zone agent at the bar. That night, though, was even better than the one before. During dinner I felt the urge to strangle the young tutor, not an uncontrollable urge, it was too soon for that, but let’s say the idea crossed my mind.

Julio’s smile, before he fell asleep, consoled me of all my misfortunes. Under my eye mask, ferocious nightmares, and they were welcome. That’s how it was all week, until Friday. On Friday I decided at my own risk not to show up for work. It was the first time I did that without being ill, without a signed doctor’s note in hand. I thought they might arrest me on the street, that they might call her, that they’d come in search of me, that they’d mobilize the secret police—there was no other kind—but to my surprise none of that happened. I stood in front of the recycling and waste management center, and, after a few seconds of hesitation, I passed it and kept going. As I went, I realized that I’d never walked in the city without having somewhere to go, and I also realized that I didn’t know this city. Of course I knew my section of it—the recycling center, the bar, the sports center, the identical and transparent buildings that surrounded each of my familiar places and the places that she or her lover chose for our rare moments of leisure, the nearby movie theater that only screened old musicals from long before the war, my section’s park, my section’s public library—but I’d never ventured outside my section. In the years I’d spent inside, it had never occurred to me to roam, just like that, until I’d seen it all. Walk all the way to the border—if it had one—of this strange crystallized city.

That morning, which was just like any other morning for everyone else but which for me was different because I’d decided that it was, I set out. And without thinking too much about it.

I suppose the water in the showers had something to do with that, too, because once you were crystallized you lost your urge to do things just because you felt like it, on a whim. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d come up with a plan on my own, other than my few escapades to the bar, although that, I’m afraid, isn’t much to take heart in. Men, here and anywhere else in the world, tend to seek solace in beer at the end of a workday, and that doesn’t exactly set them free. So I took a long walk through the city that beautiful and identical Friday morning, without an explanation that could justify my behavior in any way. I felt like I was turning a heavy ship around in the middle of a long voyage, disregarding the route marked on the map.

What a large city, how it shone, how monotonous it was, how boring. My walk could not have been more different from my expectations. Section after section there was nothing but the same, street after street, warehouse after warehouse, bar after bar, movie theater after movie theater, all with the same old musicals I’d already seen a hundred times. No matter which direction you went, you arrived at one of its borders, from which you could see, through the walls of the transparent dome, the rest of the world, close and yet impossibly distant, and you could go for hours that way without discovering anything new in the city or its borders. I went this way and that, without seeing anything that surprised me, until by accident, as it was easy to get disoriented in all those repetitive neighborhoods, I found myself at the main gate, the one through which we’d arrived after abandoning our home. Beside the gate, just as I recalled it, stood the arrival camp. Through the large transparent tent I saw the miserable wretches who, like us so long ago, were starting their lives in this new world without the slightest suspicion of what awaited them, happy to be alive and sad to be so far from home, and I also saw those who ran the camp, as polite and cold as before, and two dead people hanging from a post beside the checkpoint. Two dead people I didn’t know, two among the many who would never set foot under the crystal dome, doubtlessly condemned for their crimes during the war, for their treason, for their attachment to the old earth or their distrust toward this transparent life.

I couldn’t help but approach, and as I did so, as if he’d been expecting me, my old friend the former zone agent came out to meet me. First, of course, a strong embrace, and what are you doing around here, and all the chitchat of false friendship, and although, why deny it, by this point I’d already fallen prey to the deepest distrust, my work had worn me down and maybe for that reason I let myself tell the truth.

When he asked me where I was headed, I replied that I was going to see my sons, when he told me they weren’t here, I replied that I didn’t believe him, when he called the guards, I told them they’d have to kill me to stop me, when they finally raised their fists, I stopped.

Sometimes a man says such things—You’d have to kill me to stop me—to gather his courage and without giving it much thought, and when he does give it thought, it’s already too late.

Surrender! all those men said together, and I have to admit that when I saw all those fists I lost my courage and gave in. I fell to my knees and lowered my arms, and that was when they descended on me.

Two blows knocked me down from my knees, blows that stabbed my ribs like burning arrows. There’s no ointment to protect you from such blows. I prayed badly and very fast, the only shred I remembered of a childhood prayer, and I gave myself up for dead. I’m dead! I thought, but then realized I was thinking this over and over again and understood that I was still alive. I was dying, or so it seemed to me, and I recall that the former zone agent, merciful as he was, tried to raise my spirits during what I thought was my last breath by telling me that joke one more time about the horse who’s a lawyer and who screws some poor man’s wife, but this time I passed out before he made it to the end. I didn’t pass out the way I imagine dead people do, because my head spun with images and songs, familiar landscapes and all kinds of animals of a thousand colors like the ones I always looked at in Julio’s book. I don’t know whether the dead still dream, but I don’t think so. So in my dream, and thanks to my dream, I could be sure that I wasn’t dead.

 

They say that after the turmoil, I slept for over two months.

It’s possible, I don’t know. It’s hard to measure the time that goes by while you’re asleep, but still, it didn’t seem like that much to me. In fact, I only remember one dream, though it was a very long one.

In my dream, I was burying my two shotguns again, and carefully marking the spot with a stone, and then I was with the boy Julio, dousing the old house with gasoline, and we watched it burn down to its foundation, and then we were being taken on a bus, and a fighter-bomber attacked the line of buses and destroyed the one right behind ours, killing everyone, or so it seemed, because we barely dared to look, and soon after that our bus got a flat and we took refuge in a hotel with the water owners, and they abandoned us, taking the canteen with them, and we arrived at the crystal city and, in the end, the whole thing went on and on exactly as I’ve told it until, beside the arrival camp, where I’d gone with the wholesome goal of asking about my sons, the guards pounded me, and I thought I’d die but didn’t die, and in a coma or between dreams I told this whole story. That is, in my dream, in that dream, the only thing that happened was me telling everything that had taken place. But to whom? To Julio. And the boy Julio, who was almost a man by now, sat by my side and listened without saying a word, but I could see in his eyes that he understood everything.

When I woke, the hospital room was empty. Just a few flowers in a crystal vase beside the bed, lit by the midday sun. For a second I thought everything must have been a nightmare in which I was recounting that very same nightmare, until I leaned toward the flowers and realized that they smelled of nothing, until I saw that the light was the same constant yellow light of the crystal city, until I saw the adjoining rooms through the transparent walls, and the rooms below me through the transparent floor, and the ones above through the transparent ceiling. With my hands, I felt the bandages over my ribs, which were surely broken, and felt the pain of the blows again. That, at the very least, was real. Scum! To beat me so brutally when I’d already surrendered. Who would do such a thing? I only wanted to learn something about my sons, and maybe a thing or two about this damn city. It’s not so much to ask. I didn’t find out anything about my sons, but I did get clear, once and for all, what these people are really about. I’ve been warned. It’s always the same, all pretty words until you want to do something for yourself, and then the problems start. This place is a living hell, and yet nobody seems to realize it. Why did I realize it? Am I some kind of sick man, have I lost my patience, am I so attached to my own ways that I can’t manage to forget them? Why does it suffocate me to see everyone around me, to never stop seeing them, not even in my own home, nor here in a hospital room, why am I irritated by their presence through the glass? Why is it so hard for me to bear that it never gets dark, that there’s nowhere to hide? Am I a traitor to the collective cause? And if so, why haven’t they hung me face-down, once and for all, as they did with the water owners? Why wound me without killing me? As I asked myself these questions, it dawned on me that I was actually seeking a different answer. How do the others bear it? Is it enough for them to put food on your plate for you to put up with everything? True, I had never seen anyone go hungry here, and there was always a doctor at the ready to cure what ailed us, and there were no bosses, no force, no command, and because of the water or whatever it was you felt protected and happy, even against your own will, but was that enough to live? Why did I miss the blood of animals I’d shot down in the forest? Why did I actively seek out this punishment and not let up until I found it, and why was I touching the sore surface of my wounds beneath my bandages as if stroking treasure? What kind of madman am I that when I think of them, all of the people around me, I feel nothing but the deepest scorn? Why don’t I feel the same scorn for myself? Where does it come from, this strange fondness I have for myself, when I’m neither different from nor better than the rest of my absurd fellow city dwellers?

The old days weren’t perfect either, I didn’t live the best of lives, but back then not even war or fear could poison me like this perpetual well-being did. And I loved her then without giving it any thought, and now, since we’d arrived here, to be precise, I see her as an enemy or a stranger. It’s not that I came to think of her differently, it’s that she’s changed toward me. If I can’t blame her, it’s because I don’t know for certain whether to trust the truth of my own eyes or the truth that doubtlessly exists on the other side, and because my eyes, from so much seeing without questioning, no longer know how to calibrate trust. There’s nothing about her to justify my betrayal or the betrayal I’ve surely committed by letting her grow away from me without putting up any resistance, without protest, without a peep.

Nor did my dawn-to-dusk labor on the land ever disgust me as my job here does, without ever varying, something to do and little else, and the people of our town for whom I felt no affection nevertheless did not repulse me like the people of this city, and I wasn’t wary of the water, nor did it ever cross my mind that it could be rotting me from the inside, and I even paid for water when rain wouldn’t fall and never complained about the price, and that’s how I paid for everything, more than it was worth, without complaining, and I accepted the bombs and the shadow of death falling over my own family without thinking for an instant of rebelling. Nor was I attached to my country, nor was I a patriot, nor did I hate enemy nations, indifferent as I was to their fate. This is all to say, there in my other life I was a nobody, I didn’t care much about other people’s misfortune, I didn’t feel part of anything beyond the forest and the land and my own home and family. Only she, Augusto, and Pablo truly mattered to me, until that boy wandered out of the forest alone and infiltrated the tiny circle of my affections and concerns.

Whereas here, in this place where I’m part of something functional that assures my well-being and calls for my participation, I feel inexorably excluded from the common good. What malice lurks in the soul of a man who won’t recognize himself as one among many? It’s hard to understand that this place has changed me so much. It’s hard to blame the transparent city for all my troubles. A man should be able to travel from one place to another without losing his soul. I don’t know for sure anymore whether the man I am now—constantly poisoning the happiness that surrounds me—is the result of our transfer here, or whether I was always like this and it’s only here that I’ve come to see it. Maybe I deserve everything that’s happened to me, and that’s why I enjoy my wounds more than I did the health I was given. Maybe I brought the trouble with me and these people are entirely innocent. It’s hard for me to believe, but it could be. Ever since I was a kid I’ve been slow to trust, it never seemed that life gave enough to go around sharing, only with her did I enjoy some intimacy, the kind that’s normal between two people married before God, and together we cared for our land and our sons, but I didn’t open my heart to her—why did I have to? It’s not as if I had reason to think there was much inside. Nor did I hide much worth writing home about, there were no secrets. She and I loved each other the way people do, without giving it too much thought, until the war began, and maybe during the war we loved each other even more, or at least that’s how it was for me, probably because there were bombs and threats outside, and because we both felt the same fear of never seeing our children again, and then later, in the strange peace of the transparent city, little by little we came to not love each other at all. It could be because we weren’t allowed to smell each other, although, if we’re something more than animals, and I hope we are, it can’t only be that.

To be honest, I wasn’t aware back then of being more or less than what I am now, and in none of my other lives—as a boy, as a laborer, as a foreman, as an owner, as a lover—was I anything else, nor do I see myself as different enough to warrant panic in this new life as an exile or a prisoner or whatever I am. And if this is the little I have now, the wounds caused by blows to my ribs and a few memories, I suppose that it’s the little I’ve earned, and in truth I’ve never had much more, so, really, why complain? I won’t be the one to shout at the heavens.

And that’s what I was thinking about—accepting the sentence I had imposed upon myself without blaming anybody else and, therefore, forgiving these good people for the way they treated me—when Julio came in and pulled up a glass chair and sat down beside me and, to my astonishment, began to talk.

“How are you, Father?”

Before I answered, I realized two things: these were the first words I’d ever heard Julio speak, and this was the first voice I’d heard outside my own head for a long time.

“Fine,” I answered, without knowing whether it was true.

“Don’t be too worried, it’s harder for some people to accept than others.”

“Accept what?”

“The adaptation. That’s why they brought us here, so we could start to accept the idea of adapting, but some people can’t deal with it.”

“Since when can you talk?”

“Since you’ve been here. After your accident, I had no choice but to talk. Without you in the house, someone had to take care of the family.”

“What about that other guy? Your tutor?”

“He’s an idiot.”

“I knew it! And by the way, I don’t know what they’ve told you, but it was no accident. I was beaten up.”

“I know. But that’s what they call it.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

“They, all of them. Here nobody is different or better than anyone else, nobody’s in charge, everything is organized by us collectively. There isn’t anyone who tells us anything, we all tell each other.”

“I’ve never been in charge of anything, nor have I organized much, nor have I said anything very important . . .”

“Nobody does, that’s the trick, that way there’s no one to blame. In this city there’s no authority, no complaint to make or anyone to take it to, nothing to fight for or explain, no one to fight or explain things to . . .”

“What about the provisional government?”

“The provisional government is us, everyone we see through the walls. Those people who vote at union meetings. All of us, every one of us.”

“They were right at your school. You sure are bright.”

“Thank you, Father.”

“I’ve been dreaming about you. I dreamed that you were sitting right here and I was telling you a story.”

“You’ve told it to me.”

“Then I wasn’t dreaming.”

“Yes, you were dreaming, but you talked in your sleep. And I was listening.”

“Did anyone else hear me raving?”

“No, just me.”

“And whose side are you on?”

“The same as always: our side.”

“And which side is that?”

“The one for people who are going to get out of here and return to the old region, and go up the hill and into the forest to dig out two shotguns. The one for people who haven’t yet surrendered. And now, try to rest, because I need you strong. We’re leaving.”

“What about her?”

“She’ll stay, she likes this. Mother thinks you’ve failed her, that you’ve fallen apart, that you don’t want to improve.”

“I don’t blame her.”

“She’s made her decision, she’s free to make it. We should make ours.”

“I made mine a long time ago, then I forgot about it, but now all of a sudden I remember it clearly. When the hell are we getting out of here?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Perfect. How?”

“In your shit worm, Father. I’ve stolen it from the garage in the shit recycling center and I’ve hidden it in the grass just beyond the transparent wall.”

“And nobody saw?”

“Nobody sees anything here.”

“They saw me, and they beat me.”

“You went head-on, Father, and that’s no way to go about it, you have to attack from the side.”

“Now I get it—from the side. One more thing, that shit worm I used to drive, you may have noticed it isn’t very fast. You really think we can use it to escape? Maybe if we unhook the containers full of shit . . .”

“No, the shit is essential.”

“For—?”

“For throwing them off our trail. I’ve got everything ready, don’t worry, you just rest, I’ll come for you in the morning.”

“It sounds too easy. It won’t go well.”

“It’s even easier than you think, Father, and it’ll go fine. Nobody really wants to leave here, and it’s not even forbidden. So everything is poorly guarded.”

“If it’s not forbidden, why don’t we leave through the main gate, fair and square?”

“Just in case.”

“Oh . . .”

After that, I fell silent. It was clear that the kid was much smarter than me, and there was no point in doubting his ideas or trying to line them up with mine.

Julio kissed me on the forehead and left. I watched him go, confident and sure of himself, a man. Through the walls I watched him walk, just as I’d once watched my real sons go into the forest on their way to war. He wasn’t my son, but I’d cared for him as if he were, and he called me Father and everything, and in any case he was all I had left. I have to admit that I felt awfully proud.

The excitement of our upcoming escape made it hard to sleep. I closed my eyes and tried to recall the exact place where I’d hidden my guns; as always happens when you need it, my memory didn’t fail. It was like walking on our land again, each tree in the forest present and alive, and the scent of fresh moss and the small pools and the rustle of weasels hidden beneath branches flooded my senses, and in the deepest part of the forest where the pines barely let in light, I saw the rock that marked my hiding place. The forest was the same as in my memory, and this made me calm, but not like before, when I couldn’t help but feel that way. This was a different calm, the kind that comes when you understand the threat but feel protected from it.

 

I woke up early, though it was impossible to know the exact time. In this place where daylight never changed, it was hard to know when things took place, how much effort each person put into things, how patient or rushed you should be. Urgency was lost in this constant, sinister light.

The sick people around me were still sleeping in their eye masks. I stood up and waited for Julio to come.

I waited and waited without knowing for how long. Nurses came in with food, followed by a couple of doctors, who gave too many explanations about my delicate condition that I didn’t remotely understand. I wasn’t really paying attention, to be honest, and wasn’t sure that those were the right words for having had the crap beaten out of me, but of course I’m no doctor. I think one of them said that I’d gone mad, that the hospital’s walls were actually made of concrete, that the city wasn’t crystal or glass at all. That everything still had its odors, above all me, as I refused to shower. They also told me that Julio didn’t speak, and that he was no exceptionally gifted child but rather developmentally delayed, and that this was why he’d been removed from school, and that the man who lived in my home looked after him because I was not considered equipped to care for anyone, and that my other sons, the real ones, had disappeared in combat and had been given up for dead. They said all of this to me in a very serious tone and without hesitating for a second, which was how I knew they were lying.

I wasn’t offended, though I knew none of it was true; I didn’t even care, I’m not one to pay strangers any mind, no matter how educated they might be.

When all those strangers entered the room I got into bed, and when they left I stood back up and waited.

I waited—standing there in my glass room, for days, surrounded by sick people lying in their beds—for Julio, who was now a grown man, to come for me.

But he never came.

Not so much as a note, not a signal, nothing.

I guessed that he’d been captured. Maybe he wasn’t so bright after all. Perhaps he’d tricked me, who knows, though he didn’t seem the type. I preferred to think that these people, who seem to decide things on their own, had decided to finish him off. Or he was even brighter than I thought and he’d set off without me. I’d never blame him for that, he was young and strong and had his whole life ahead of him. Why should he carry the dead weight of an old man? It almost made me happy to think he might have abandoned me. I’d be of little help to him out there.

I pictured him mounting my little shit tractor with the shit worm hooked up behind it, advancing slowly but firmly toward a better life. What Julio would never be able to find, no matter how bright he was, were my shotguns, because I’m the one who buried them and only I can find them.

 

Julio wasn’t coming and that was probably best for him, the most sensible thing.

It made me sad to think I might not see him again, but I was still happy, convinced that he’d never come back for me. How could I ask such a special young man, with so much to discover on his own in this godly world, to drag his old father along on his adventures, and not even his real father, but his almost-father, who would be nothing more than a dead weight, a burden, a terrible bother?

If he wanted to save himself, the poor kid had no choice but to cast me off along the way.

I kept standing in wait, just in case.

One day, she came with a lawyer and I don’t know how many divorce papers and other, more confusing documents that would give her full custody of Julio. As soon as I saw them approaching, I got into bed and put on my best sick-patient face. I told them that I didn’t care about the divorce, but when it came to Julio they could forget it. I told them that Julio had fled without looking back, he was already gone from this stupid city and its ridiculous laws thanks to his vast intelligence, and those papers full of small print made me laugh, because the boy they were trying to gain custody of was already a free man on a flight of his own.

They said no, that Julio wasn’t flying, that Julio didn’t even talk, that poor Julio was as calm today as he was every day, at his special school for the developmentally delayed.

If they’d pierced my soul with a spear they couldn’t have hurt me more. So it seemed that according to these idiots the boy wasn’t a genius. I wasn’t prepared to believe that, not for anything in the world. In any case, it seemed to me that the most urgent matter in that moment was to get rid of them.

I signed the papers without protest and they left immediately. People leave very quickly once they have what they want.

And of course, as soon as they were gone I stood up again.

And I kept waiting.

And I waited so long, in my pajamas, that time stretched out and a lot of it passed, and then I waited a little longer, because you never know. When it came to patience, fate couldn’t hold a candle to me, nor could the devil.

In short, I waited a very long time and for nothing, and in the end I had no choice but to start devising my own escape, alone, without anyone’s help. Trusting in my own intelligence, my own instinct, and my own fortune.

I’d be lying if I said it didn’t cross my mind to surrender.

 

Leaving the transparent city wasn’t as hard as I’d imagined, there was no need for a plan, all I had to do was gather the courage I had left until I was ready, like scraping crumbs off the ground and mashing them together in your hands until they look somewhat like bread. So one fine day, with that small lump of courage in my arms, I walked in my pajamas, past distracted patients and nurses indifferent to my fate, all the way to the hospital doors, and I continued on the streets that separated me from the city gate, past the arrival camp and then the checkpoint, without any opposition whatsoever. I suppose that when they saw how firm I was, how determined, and how unusually dressed, they took me for a madman. What I can’t understand now is why they beat me when I asked about my sons and then, later, let me leave without opposition, it must be that in the crystal city people were highly bothered by questions but not at all upset by escapes. I don’t think what I did can even be called an escape, this openly leaving a place where no one and nothing is forcing you to stay. In any case, I walked out as calm as can be and circled the perimeter of the dome without any trouble from the guards, and I searched the undergrowth for the little tractor Julio said he’d hidden, but it wasn’t there, I don’t know why, whether it was because the kid didn’t want to help me or because he couldn’t, it didn’t matter, it wasn’t really his problem whether his almost-father wanted to be inside or out, near or far, so without holding anything against the boy—what fault could he have, the little angel?—I went back to the highway and walked straight to the field and from there to the mountain until I was very far away, and I kept walking and walking and leaving more and more land behind me. And finally I arrived at the only logical conclusion: I’d dreamed my conversation with him. I had no doubt about it anymore, the boy couldn’t talk. And if he did talk one day, God willing, it wouldn’t be with me.

Three days later, I’d reached our region. On the way, I hadn’t bumped into anyone, and one could say that I’d been lucky. Instead of going the same way I’d come, I decided to follow my intuition and go around the mountain, disregarding the highway we’d walked on when we traveled together, she, Julio, and I. When it came down to it, the last thing I wanted was to run into anyone.

I had nothing with me. The first night I slept out in the open, without food or water. On the second day I found an enormous garbage dump where I foraged all the essentials for my journey: not only warm clothes, but also a large piece of tarp with which I could build a tent, blankets, empty bottles that I filled with murky water from a puddle, and boots missing their laces but whose soles were in decent condition, no holes, and they were almost my size. The good boots of a dead soldier, like the ones my sons wore in that war. I found nothing to eat except plants and berries, arbutus and juniper, but it was enough. The clothes I put on—pants torn at the knees and a wool sweater in pretty good shape—stank, but given that I was sick and tired of not being able to smell anything all those years in the city, I must admit I was grateful for the stench. I felt accompanied by the sweat of those who’d worn these clothes before me, and though it wasn’t yet my own, that borrowed odor was familiar in a lost, distant way.

On the third night, it rained, and I was able to exchange the puddle water in my bottles for clean rainwater that tasted like glory. When I woke the next day, I could see my region in the distance, and the joy it gave me to recognize the contours of what had been my land would be hard to imagine if you’ve never been forced from your home, and easy to understand for anyone who’s been exiled. I set out very early and soon reached the town, or what was left of it. Nobody came out to greet me, as there was no one left, not a soul. No men, no rats, no dogs. Weeds grew in the streets and between the charred stones of houses. The stores, the bar, the post office, all of it burned and in ruins. The ground covered in broken glass, the church still almost in one piece but blackened, the public pool full of stagnant, putrid water. The fountains silent. The bell tower was missing its bell, God knows why, maybe they’d melted it for cannonballs or bronze coins. I walked through the town without seeing a single animal or insect or ghost, nothing remotely alive or dead, and headed toward my land. I saw the house burned down to its foundation, the wild garden that no longer looked any different from the surrounding land, the barren orchard, the empty stables, the dry wells. Nothing of ours had survived. I consoled myself by passing what was no longer my home and putting it behind me until I reached the forest. At least the forest was still what it had been before. I searched for the rock that marked the place where I’d hidden my weapons, but I couldn’t find it. Floods and bombs had changed the terrain, or perhaps my memory failed me, or someone else had dug them out and they weren’t my guns anymore. Maybe I’d been a fool to think I’d find my own mark before others did. I dug with my hands here and there, like a mole, without success, until I sat down in exhaustion to rest under a tree as night began to fall. For an instant, I missed the crystal city, my transparent walls and ceiling, and I missed her, the boy Julio, the little I’d had there, but I decided with more rancor than enthusiasm that I’d never return. I’d never go back, and never again would I long for my past captivity. I swore never to set foot in the transparent city again. Not to see everyone else if I could avoid it, nor let others be condemned to see me. I also decided that, should I ever encounter anyone, I’d warmly greet only those who, like me, were able to hide.

I swore to live here, in the forest, for whatever life I had left, and to die here when the time came. Alone or accompanied, that remained to be seen.

I looked for thick branches and built my tent. The place that, from this moment on, would be my home. Under the tarp, surrounded by the deepest darkness, alone and permanently disarmed, I felt the renewed stirring of my old, healthy, and longed-for optimism.

Familiar voices shrouded that strange moment before sleep, imagined or remembered, but, in the end, known to me. Voices that knew nothing of collapse, displacement, and defeat.

Finally close to the only victory, or at least to the recollection of my voice, the one that had been with me—and only me—since I was a boy, before everything and everyone else.

I don’t know how long I slept, nor do I remember what I dreamed, but when I woke the sun was high, and when I stood, as I stretched, I thought I saw a man in the distance. Without thinking, I grabbed a stick and waited to see whether he was coming in my direction. And soon I saw that he was, in fact, headed directly toward me. But that wasn’t what worried me most, the worst part was that, little by little, as he approached, his figure started seeming vaguely familiar, and then very familiar, and after a while I knew for sure that it was Julio.

This must have been the way she saw him arrive that first day, only now he was bigger and not wounded, not defenseless, but armed.

He was carrying a crossbow, the kind that could kill a wild boar from three hundred meters away and hit a moving target, and there I was, still as a post from surprise, and maybe also out of joy.

I cast the stick aside, because no matter what happened, I had no intention of hitting Julio, and to be honest I couldn’t have bested him anyway, crossbow or no. So I sat there and waited like a man who’s accepted his destiny, come what may, and the closer he got, without knowing why—intuition, I imagine—the more certain I was that he was not bringing good news.

When he was two hundred meters away, he waved in greeting, and I responded, reflexively.

Finally he arrived, and before saying a word he sat down, not beside me but in front of me. Without letting go of the crossbow, which he held firmly, his finger on the trigger. It sent shivers up my spine. When I met his gaze, I could barely see in this man the boy I’d wanted to make my own, who ran through the house dying of laughter, who so loved to draw exotic animals, who was without a doubt the only person whose company I could trust during those insufferable and transparent days in the crystal city.

I sensed that he wasn’t here to join me, but to hunt me down.

Since I knew he wasn’t going to say anything, I asked the relevant questions.

The following three:

Have you come here to take me back?

He shook his head.

Have you come here to kill me?

He nodded.

What am I accused of, exactly?

To this he did not reply, as is logical, so I reframed the question as best I could, in a manner that would let him answer without opening his mouth.

There won’t be any more people like me in the world you’re all building, right?

He nodded again, with the barest gesture, and I want to imagine that it was not without some pain.

Then he raised the crossbow to hip level, there was no need to raise it all the way when he had me so close.

At that moment I gave in, and as for the fate of the others in that new world, there’s little I can tell. I imagine they’ll do splendidly and that people like me, with no faith in the future, were always the enemy.

One thing is certain. When it comes to me, they’d won.

All I longed for—before it all clouded over, the visible and the invisible, the transparent and the most secret—was for my real sons to be on their side too, and not on mine.

You have to know when your time has passed.

And learn to admire other victories.