The root of all happiness depends on sleeping the required number of hours at the time of your choosing. There’s no guarantee that you’ll be happy if you do sleep properly, but if you don’t sleep enough, or sleep at the wrong time, you haven’t got a chance. At the core of world angst, at the heart of mediocrity, lies the fact that this shapeless mass of men and women, boys and girls are daily forced to wake at dawn, at five thirty, or six, or six thirty in the morning, and grudgingly go off to work or to school, heads bowed, like cattle daily led to the slaughter, to institutions they despise with every ounce of somnolence and lethargy, yet which they dutifully continue to attend.
The day dawns twisted out of shape. Everything that follows must inevitably go wrong, because what could go right for someone who was woken up in the early hours? Is there any routine more terrible than to hear the alarm clock, reach out to shut it off, get up in the dark, give that sad series of yawns, wipe sleep from our eyes, breakfast on stale bread and a little milk, brush our teeth, change into social prison uniform, all without being totally awake, while the day is still murky and the dawn chill washes over our skin?
The routine of soldiers doing military service in the army is actually worse. Four hours on, four hours off, one day on, one day off. The days without sentry duty we spend at some routine chore, always some backbreaking task, like moving silos of antitank mines or crates of Kalashnikovs, cleaning and greasing dozens of magazines, whitewashing a large section of the two-and-a-half-meter-high peeling wall that surrounds the barracks, or spending six hours scrubbing the parade ground, or scraping away the caked-on soot in the kitchens.
This is the military sector of town. We are on the outskirts. The surrounding streets are not paved, and only the section of road directly opposite the front gate is lined with ramshackle houses occupied by housewives, coachmen, farriers, silage vendors, and emaciated horses and mares that, when not saddled, rest up in dirt-floor stables. The rest of the surrounding wall is ringed by a dense scrubland in which no soldier has ever been lost, a wasteland of few sounds, which makes it seem all the more sinister and terrible at three o’clock in the morning.
There we store crates of rifles, gas masks, land mines, shovels for digging trenches, ammunition of every caliber, and a supply of uniforms. Everything we need to equip the populace when war comes, though I think most of the stock has long since corroded. But our mission is to guard it, to protect it. There are two sentry duties: the day shift involves manning the checkpoint, opening the gate for incoming cars, standing to attention and saluting officers; the night shift involves patrolling the central courtyard, guarding the equipment stores and the parking lot. Both day and night, the sentry is required to prowl around the back of the barracks, between the mango trees and the avocados, guarding the weapons cache and the kitchen.
Some soldiers are required to do two years’ military service and others, like me, who have been accepted to university, only have to serve one. Lately, the other conscripts have been giving me black looks because I don’t have much time left. Today, they were badmouthing me in the barracks. I know because I came back unexpectedly and everyone suddenly shut up. I rested for half an hour after lunch, then went out to start my shift. Sentry duty runs from 8:00 a.m. to noon, noon to 4:00 p.m., and so on. In the army, the hours constrict like the jaws of a vise.
Right now I am wearing thick Coloso boots with steel toe caps that lace up to my calves, an olive-green uniform, zambrán belted at the waist, bayonet hanging from the zambrán, cap set lightly on my head as though it had just landed there, and I am covering the shift that runs from noon to four o’clock that we soldiers call the “great yawn.” Even standing, simulating the gait of a sentry digesting his lunch, we can be asleep, and asleep we can carry on walking. Everything we do we do while sleeping, as though we were still inside the same receptacle but were temporarily a different, more viscous substance.
An officer pulls up in a jeep. I go to the gate. I open it as quickly as possible, doing my best to ensure that the officer notices how efficient I can be opening the front gate, although in fact there is no real way for one soldier to prove that he is more efficient than another when it comes to opening a gate, except, of course, by doing it as quickly as possible, a feat in which, ultimately, the officers take little interest or, let’s be honest, no interest whatsoever.
My thighs and the crown of my head are soaked with sweat. I’m sweltering. It’s not always like this. I have a body clock that never fails me. In the morning, the light hovers over everything and sometimes there is a breath of wind. There is little heat; day has barely materialized. Later, the light swells and any trace of humidity disappears. By noon, the brightness becomes slightly darker, light does the opposite of what it is supposed to do, and shapes lose their contours. Then, for a few seconds, the sun reaches its zenith and the light acquires a liquid quality. It splashes, floods, flows, creates waves, spills over, drowns. By now, the sun has finally become an iron sun, hard, that rolls like a rock, and upon this bed we rest.
But day is routine to an old soldier. It is night that tests the strength of our mental health. In the early hours, contrary to what you might think, every object is awake and every one of them is watching. A soldier can listen to what the walls and the columns are saying to him, but he must never answer. The most basic solution is masturbation. My quota is to jerk off three times per shift. I always leave the first one until at least two hours into my sentry duty, so I can get to the midpoint without a dopamine rush. Knowing you have three hours left and three pajas in reserve is not the same as knowing you’ve got three hours’ sentry duty left and you’ve already wasted one. The second option means you’ve got more time reserved for yourself.
There are other techniques: overcoming your fear of the night or of the darkness, shaking off the fear of noises, realizing that noises are your friends, that your real enemy is silence, welcoming pleasant memories, driving out bad memories, and, if you don’t have many pleasant memories, keeping your mind blank and taking every minute as it comes, shift after shift, until the war comes.
There is also a secret weapon that every soldier has, depending on his circumstances and the kind of person he is, a weapon nobody ever talks about, a devious act each of us perpetrates only in absolute solitude. If you manage to discover this secret weapon, everything is more bearable. So, for example, with all my duties here, I don’t have time to think about my mother. Busy as I am doing nothing, I don’t have space to think about much else.