◊

 

 

For months now Sandoval has been promising a strike that will paralyze all of Peru. The longshoremen in the ports and the railroad engineers rising up as one to tear down the foundations of capitalism together. That strike will never happen, but Sandoval keeps menacing the country with it every afternoon at the club, as if it were only a matter of days or minutes before the social revolution would finally break out. The patrons have learned to listen to his long-winded speeches with skepticism. The ritual is repeated every day with little variation, from the time he rings at the door until he loosens his tie to speak: Sandoval handing the waiter his overcoat, hat, and gloves, conspicuously displaying the ink stains and calluses on his hands, looking for a stool on which to prop one of his boots as he speaks, with the grave and somewhat ridiculous expression of a fencing student preparing to deliver a thrust with his foil. They are studied gestures intended to allow time for interested listeners to approach, but most are already tired of waiting for the strike, the revolution that never comes and that matters to no one. Sandoval, undaunted, keeps preparing harangues that can hardly be heard above the clacking of billiard balls and the clinking of plates against the marble tabletops.

Because the strike, and with it the end of capitalism, is in fact already written. Indeed, everything has been set down in the pages of Bakunin and Kropotkin, so the future of nations holds no secret to men of understanding. In Sandoval’s language, a man of understanding means an anarchist. And that hypothetical anarchist would have only to sit and read the writing on the wall for the future of Peru, and really even the whole world, to be clear to him. Perhaps those assembled would like to hear those predictions?

Nobody answers. Usually no more than seven or eight patrons are sitting in his corner of the room, and they pay him only sporadic attention from behind their unfurled newspapers and glasses of whiskey. Sandoval scans their faces, looking for support, a gesture of approval that might spur on the rest of his speech. Not finding one, he simply keeps talking. It is 1904, he says, and from there he spins off into prophecies based on his theory that all of history’s major milestones occur at five-year intervals. So five years later—which is to say, in 1909—the eight-hour workday will become reality. Ten years—that is, 1914—and a great war will break out among all the world’s nations. A war that will go down in history as the first in which nobody goes off to battle because the proletariat has at last understood that its enemies are not on the other side of the trenches; despite Alsace and Lorraine, the wealthy Frenchman will always, when it comes down to it, be the German capitalist’s brother; similarly, notwithstanding Tacna and Arica, the Peruvian sugar tycoon will always be the friend and compatriot of the Chilean landowner. In twenty-five years—that is, 1929—the mirage of capitalism will collapse in an explosion that will push all the millionaires out the windows. Thirty-five years—that is, 1939—and another war will break out, one in which the proletariat will go to battle because for the first time the conflict will be between social classes, not nations. Forty years—that is, 1944, give or take a year—and the communists will square off against the anarchists for the first time. (We must be honest, Sandoval confesses in a murmur, and recognize that the communists are ultimately just as dangerous as the capitalists, not to mention much more organized.) Eighty-five years—that is, 1989—and the last foundations of communism will be toppled. Just a century from the present day—that is, 2004—and nothing of note will happen; everybody knows that reality rarely indulges in round numbers in producing its significant milestones. A century and ten years—that is, 2014—and anarchism will have managed to vanquish the last of its enemies and will hold sway in the remotest corners of the earth. The end of History.

Carlos is not interested in politics. He’s not really even certain that he knows what terms like anarchism, means of production, and Marxism mean. But there is something in the passion with which Sandoval addresses his audience that he is instinctively drawn to. And so he sometimes pauses in his game of billiards or his conversation with José to listen to Sandoval, to learn, for example, when belief in God will finally die off (around 1969, after the final Catholic council, which will be celebrated in honor of Friedrich Nietzsche). And it is in fact while listening to Sandoval that it first occurs to him that, just as History has an end, so too should their novel, and that dénouement, which he cannot even imagine, fascinates and terrifies him all at once.