I have ten days left before I’m demobilized. I’ll finally get out of this dump and be able to go to university, far from this shithole of a pueblo. The other recruits have been congratulating me, they wish they were in my shoes. But they never studied, never did anything, and you can’t go through life like that and expect it to throw you a bone. They’re all my age, more or less, and they think they still have a chance because that’s what they’ve been told, when self-evidently they have none. For a man, the margin between being drowned and saved is a narrow one, and usually occurs at an age—fourteen, maybe fifteen—when he is unaware of it, has no idea what is at stake, which explains why humanity is little more than an endless parade of the disappointed, of bastards being led to the stocks, living through day after day for no particular reason, watching in disbelief as their experience, I think, is no different from that of the rest of the species—growth and maturity, minor aches, major traumas, the gradual loss of physical faculties, gray hair and wrinkles, lameness, deafness, and ultimately decay and disgust.
By eighteen, nineteen, twenty, a man is already irrevocably what he is, his path has already been traced, and he can do nothing to change it. It would be healthier if everyone optimized their lives based on the role assigned to them rather than spending time trying to transform themselves into something they can never become. I’m not saying it’s fair, but that’s how it is. The absurdity of life is not that it comes to an end. That it ends is, actually, less absurd than the preposterousness of it beginning. The absurdity of life is its uneven distribution, I think, the manifest internal imbalance of episodes, the uneven distribution of major events. Before the age of twenty, a transcendental maelstrom is continually bubbling, a stew that never ceases to reverberate, and we cannot digest everything that life serves up to us. There are constantly new signs to interpret, signals and feints flashing past, third and fourth dimensions. At twenty, at precisely twenty, everything is in place.
After that, I think, comes a stretch of barren years: the thirties, the forties, the fifties, the sixties. Then, supposedly, man acquires wisdom. I can’t comment, since I haven’t reached that point, but I can’t help but wonder what purpose wisdom serves a man if all that he can do with it is look back on the things he didn’t do before he had that wisdom, and torment himself with all the things he might have done if he’d had it. In the end, the whole thing is a waste, if not of time, then of incidents that, before twenty, come so thick and fast it’s impossible to truly experience them. Honestly, a thousand things have happened to me that I did not truly experience.
Right now, I’m sitting on the edge of my cot bed; I’ve just masturbated in the latrine fantasizing about damp underwear, a damp stain of urine, genitals constantly dripping. I am lacing up my boots, preparing for the 8:00 p.m. guard duty, an easy shift, one of my last in this shithole, when another soldier comes up to me, a skinny guy, a raw recruit whose name I don’t know, one who is forever asking stupid questions, probably just to shock, but I don’t like being asked questions, or being idolized, I have no desire to mentor or to take pupils under my wing the way so many strapping old soldiers did and still do with soldiers who are scrawny or new. Even so, the skinny guy says, Hey, Diego, is it true what Solano has been saying? And I ask what’s Solano been saying, and he tells me what Solano told him, that I’ve been disguising my voice and phoning my mother to insult her. I don’t lose my cool, naturally; I carry on doing up my boots, threading the lace through one eyelet, then the next, zigzagging like a lizard, and without looking up, I ask the skinny guy when Solano said this, and the skinny guy says just now, and I ask him if Solano is on Sentry Post Two, and the skinny guy says yes, and then he asks me whether it’s true or not, and I say no, it’s not true, I want to call him by name but I don’t know it, of course it’s not true, I say, and the skinny guy asks if it’s serious, my mother’s illness. Everyone in the unit knows my mother is ill, and I tell him I don’t know; I finish threading the lace, pull it tight, get to my feet, readjust my uniform pants, ask the skinny guy again if he’s sure about what Solano said, and the skinny guy says, Yeah, Diego, I’m sure, he says you call her in the middle of the night and sometimes during the day and you put on a fake voice.
The skinny guy cannot gauge the magnitude of what he is saying because he hasn’t been here long. When I was like he is now, a raw recruit, Solano showed up an hour late to relieve me from a sentry shift. Solano is twenty now, he joined the unit before I did, but I’ll be leaving before him. When he got back, I was waiting for him back in the dorm. I knew the drill. He was going to brazen it out, try to convince me it was an induction ritual, and if I gave in, he would carry on taking advantage of me along with the rest of the older recruits. My shifts would get longer. I didn’t give him time to speak; I grabbed my zambrán and lashed out, brutally driving the buckle into his back. He was winded. His body creaked and he let out a snort, like a castrated animal. He doubled over, but I didn’t let up. I kicked him in the face and broke his nose. Then I whipped him across the back again. His skin instantly rose in two vicious welts. I thought about the hour this fuckwit had left me at my post just because he thought it was funny, and I felt blind rage sweep over me again. Even so, I didn’t carry on, there was no need.
I spent several weeks waiting for a revenge attack that never came. I realized that Solano was a coward and that my brutal beating did me no credit, but I wasn’t looking for credit. I’d just wanted it to be effective, and it had been: no one dared mess with me, the relief guard turned up on time, and Solano decided to stay out of my way. I had the opportunity to abuse him, crush him, destroy him, but I don’t do bullying, so I left him to stew and be eaten up by fear. This gesture of magnanimity simply reinforced the respect that the beating had earned me, but eventually time and routine destroy or desecrate everything, you let down your guard, and after a few weeks I was just another grunt, subject to the same jokes as everyone else. It didn’t bother me, I didn’t need to control things, all I wanted was for no one to have control over me.
Little by little, as these things happen, Solano started to creep closer, at first joining in group conversations, then asking me the occasional question, later chatting with me normally, until finally he was completely reinstated. From time to time, someone would mention the beating I’d given him, and I would intervene to defuse the comment. I didn’t want the relationship to go off the rails again. I was just trying to survive, to get a bit of peace in this military cesspit, hoping against hope that the war really would not come, because I didn’t believe in the war, just as I don’t believe in it now, but it was mentioned so often, announced so often, that I began to have doubts. I remember I came back from leave without a flicker of humor in my body after the debacle with Armando; I got through my day on duty, twelve whole hours, and the next day off was one of the worst because they shipped us off in a truck to a quarry on the outskirts of the town, on the way to the beach, to gather quicklime; we were to fill a couple of fifty-five gallon polyethylene tanks, and when we got back, we were supposed to whitewash the walls of the barracks.
After two hours in the quarry, I lay down on a couple of cardboard boxes in the shade of the truck. I couldn’t sleep, because the rest of the soldiers moved closer in and the constant drone of conversation was impossible to block out completely, and so I floated in the shallows of consciousness, not very deep, about a foot below the surface. Then I felt a freezing jet that made my heart stop, a cold, viscid, burning substance, and instantly I knew it was quicklime, there was nothing else it could be. I scrabbled to my feet, the soldiers were laughing, they were all laughing and joking, but I wasn’t laughing and joking, I was furious and serious, and now the quicklime was trickling down my chest, soaking my shirt, and there was Solano. He didn’t look as though he had done it maliciously, and even at the time I didn’t think he was the confrontational type, but he’d encroached on my interests again and I had to teach him a lesson. It must have been obvious from my face, because the atmosphere was suddenly tense. The laughter gave way to silence, and someone said, Just leave it, Diego, but I strode over to Solano, gripping my zambrán belt, and he stood stock-still, a flicker of defiance in his eyes, a faint glimmer none of the other soldiers could see. But I could see it, and, to be honest, I didn’t want to fight, but I knew that if I lashed out, I’d have to fight. Solano looked like he was about to say something. What if I toss you into that hole? I said, nodding to the pool of quicklime a few meters away. What about that? He didn’t say anything. I could still see the glimmer, but he didn’t say anything, and in the end that was enough for me, for him to say nothing, for the soldiers to think that I could have tossed him into the quicklime, that I was capable of and prepared to do it and that, if I wanted it, that was the most likely outcome. But I wasn’t so sure that I could do such a thing and I didn’t want to risk it: I saw something in Solano that I did not like one bit, and I stopped threatening him. I’m not going to do it, I said. I grabbed him by the collar and gave him a gentle little headbutt, one that was friendly and aggressive at the same time.
We haven’t spoken since then, haven’t exchanged a single world, and now this skinny guy comes and tells me what Solano has been saying. I buckle my zambrán, leave the dormitory, and head to Sentry Post Two; I see him in the courtyard, sitting on a stool, chatting with a bunch of other soldiers; this is the time of day when no one sleeps. I walk over and confront him, ask him what he’s been saying, and Solano, who’s learned his lesson, does not reply, lands a vicious punch to my nose, and I feel an electric shock spread across my face. I hurl myself at him and we both go sprawling, I can’t see a thing, we roll on the grass, twisting and struggling, me in my zambrán, my boots, and my uniform, he in his zambrán, boots, and uniform, we are not doing each other much damage and we know it, we stop throwing futile punches, we are too close, too entangled for our punches to complete their trajectory and inflict damage, quite the opposite, we are a writhing mass of snorts and insults, I call him a motherfucker and he calls me a faggot, I try to bite him, he tries to do something with his elbow to my back, I don’t know what, sometimes I’m on top, sometimes he is, none of the soldiers get involved, the sentry on duty doesn’t intervene, a real man wouldn’t do what you’ve done, Solano says, you’re a sick faggot, he says, you’re a cocksucker, he says, I heard you, he says, I heard you, you faggot, I don’t say anything, our energy quickly burns out, I can feel the fatigue in my muscles and I know that Solano must feel it too. It’s at this point that the fight becomes aware of itself, realizes it cannot draw on resources better suited to a different form of confrontation, one where there is space between the adversaries, rather than the tangle of limbs to which all these months spent as soldiers waiting for war has reduced us, and so we shift to street fighting, battling over every sector of our bodies, a small-scale war in which close-combat weapons, the fingers and the mouth, take on a fundamental role; I stare into his eyes and he stares into mine, but his hand finds my mouth and tugs at the corner of my lips, I manage to sink my teeth into his index finger but fail to latch on tightly, and he jerks his hand away. Even so, he howls. Then his hand scrabbles for my eyes, tries to gouge them out, and it feels as though he just might succeed, I am completely shattered and he’s still screaming faggot, and what he’s saying no longer riles or angers me, it simply makes me sink deeper, I feel a wave of real fear and this makes me go limp, Solano is gripping me, I feel as though I am floating, drifting away, but I’d rather he punch me than gouge an eye out, anything but that, and then, thank God, the duty sentry finally shows up, pulls us apart, and saves me.
This is what I am thinking as I scrabble to my feet, my nose gushing blood. You’ve got ten days, Diego, then you’re out of here. Nothing matters. You managed to fool them all and come through this whole thing unscathed. Ten days and you’re gone. But I don’t have ten days left. The duty sentry will report this incident to the lieutenant colonel in charge of the unit, who will defer my discharge by three weeks, through which I’ll practically float. During this enforced extension, I am made of helium. I am a noble gas, and meanwhile the other soldiers no longer show up on time to relieve me. I end up doing five-hour sentry shifts, but I don’t protest, I don’t say a word. The brawl was so absurd, a lightning flash I cannot get my head around. I know I’m the victim of a conspiracy. The skinny guy gives me looks of pity and disgust, the sort of look you might give to cynics or to vanquished powers.