8

The four-hands idyll that Mara and Andy played with Pabst and Kamtchowsky included visits to the zoo and a couple of different cinemas. As the latter two didn’t consider themselves sufficiently perverse or attractive to make it worth the trouble of hiding their true personalities in an area as fraught as sex, there too Pabst and Kamtchowsky played their customary roles of lucid, intellectual pessimists. For them, sex was a commodity much like oats or rice; it was expected that someone else would take charge of adding value. Despite the morbid fantasies to which Pabst clung, Andy did not in fact suffer from some strange syndrome that let morons quote Shakespeare with the accent of a British scholar. His golden curls, fabulous shirts (or so they seemed to Pabst—in fact they were rather ridiculous), and carefree aplomb notwithstanding, Andy was a reasonably articulate guy who carefully hated all the things one is meant to hate. He was self-sufficient and far-seeing enough to have taken an otherwise colossal bourgeois failure (he’d dropped out of college) and turned it into a point in his favor: he now worked in the film world and made far more money than any mediocre academic, as he explained one day to Pabst, who sat there gritting his teeth while Andy nibbled on a brightly colored tab of paper.

In general, Pabst preferred to stay off to one side and masturbate. He considered himself to be something of a monk, albeit one with well-whetted appetites: the simple satisfaction of curiosity wasn’t a big enough bribe to convince him to give up the pleasures of misanthropy. He jerked off while walking around the apartment, or let himself drop gracefully into a beanbag chair; here at Mara’s he treated his penis with a long-lost affection, as opposed to back at his own desk, where solitude led him to twist it brutally back and forth in a spasm of emotional helplessness, sadism, and sadness.

Like some retired Nero too lazy to bother lighting the torch of any given desire, at times he laid back under the shifting lights of the mirror ball and let his eyes fall half-closed, his gaze drifting over the photographs of the destruction of Buenos Aires, the long avenues and ornate buildings in ruins, while Poppaea Kamtchowsky, backgrounded by a Puerto Madero laid waste (the A Grosso Modo series), took it from both ends at once. At other times he played the roll of DJ: with his pants down around his ankles and his cock safely in hand, he connected his mp3 player to Andy’s PC. (He’d once managed to awe Andy just by removing the CPU case, leaving all the colored cables and skeletal components of the drives and connectors in plain sight—a science nerd aesthetic that was just starting to catch on amongst hipsters.) Pabst took the role seriously, adjuncting the sessions for all he was worth—the fucking of others, his own jerking off—he and his fabulous alter-ego DJ Milk Blow, brought to you by a.a. cumming, inc.

Once, rubbing himself up with a bath towel, a pair of panties tucked into each nostril—Milk Blow was in charge of the outfits—Pabst saw a massive column of flame shoot up from the gothic fog of Buenos Aires. His mouth twisted, spasmed, he masturbated harder and harder, he murmured Kristeva and Chomsky, hold on tight! and his eyes rolled back. What followed was a disgorgement of theory, a spew of staggering dimensions; he could imagine his classmates from college, who’d always hated him, fighting each other barb and nail to see who would blog it first. The narrative was a recurring fantasy of his, a sort of “Jesus raises a ruckus in the temple”—he could visualize the shocked looks of the students with all their hippy accessories as he stalked the department halls like some justice-dealing tiger, shredding the banners and kicking down all the little stands with the Che Guevara merchandise and the garish Paco Urondo flags, the “We Shall Triumph” signs. In the end everything was in ruins and Pabst couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t stop laughing diabolically and pointing at the spelling mistakes on their posters.

Pabst agreed with Milk Blow that the notion of a masturbating DJ was in fact a redundancy, or an analytic truth, or a tautology—lately, Pabst himself preferred enumeration to synthesis. The songs they chose ran the gamut from “Personal Jesus” (either Marilyn Manson’s cover or Johnny Cash’s) to excerpta from the Guns N’ Roses album Appetite for Destruction, via Alien Sex Fiend, Butthole Surfers, Rage Against the Machine, Pixies, Rammstein and Sepultura. According to Pabst’s theory, the true tip of the sexual peak was the ’80s, when for the first time vanity knew no limits. That said, whenever it came time to choose a musical background for the day’s hump session, he never dismissed the furious, threatening rhythms most appropriate to the unfurling of the historical materialism of vanity: evil just makes you want to fuck.

The other force guiding his musical selections was his loyalty to Kamtchowsky. If he chose more playful songs (“Don’t Talk Just Kiss,” mid-’80s Madonna, Britney) or any of the more specifically seductive offerings, most of them by black singers, (“Doctor’s Orders,” “Love to Love You Baby”) he would be obligating her to demonstrate aptitudes which, all condescension aside, not even the most doting grandparent would be willing to testify she possessed. He took for granted that deep inside one or another of her organs, Kamtchowsky, currently down on all fours and mooing with pleasure, much appreciated this thoughtfulness on his part. The songs that, statistically speaking, were most likely to make adolescent girls spread their legs up on the speakers presented a perverse sort of challenge within Kamtchowsky’s graceless universe. For other girls, each specific motor activity correlated to a series of musical instructions that functioned like a private language hidden deep within a given community; for Kamtchowsky, however, hearing those instructions was like finding herself in the middle of a massive chessboard, and realizing that she isn’t a chess piece at all. It was as if those songs were in a language that Kamtchowsky could understand, but was incapable of speaking.

As for “Mars, the Bringer of War” (Holst’s The Planets, track 4), Pabst decided to hold off until they were all at least thirty years old. Otherwise these idiots would squeal with pleasure thinking that they were listening to the Star Wars soundtrack; they would pump each other furiously, with Pabst left bobbing his head in managerial silence.

After each orgy, they gathered to compare notes. Mara praised the beauty of Kamtchowsky’s feet, politely passing over the rest of her; when it was Andy’s turn to talk, he crossed his legs and pretended to take great huge bites out of the air. Pablo played a fundamental role, and not merely that of the birds that keep the ruins of Tlön from disappearing; his masturbation fulfilled the group’s expectations as regarded yet another metaphor for love. He also brought a number of deeply penetrating sociological insights to the table.

–Nowadays when we talk about the sexual revolution, we’re finally back to using “revolution” the way Copernicus originally meant it. In De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, his treatise on revolutions, it refers to the immovable, reiterated, fixed manner in which the planets trace their routes around the sun. A perfect term for that which is stable and permanent, “revolution” had from the beginning the scientific and etymological meaning of a cosmic status quo. This powerfully conservative meaning held sway until the Jacobin brouhaha started in France. The alleged sexual revolution of the 1970s was a fallacy that has only now acquired its true meaning: conservation as the ideal modality for capitalism. Sex is a stable system of egotistical forms revolving around the sun of vanity. Promiscuity’s spirit of exchange proposes a new version of the foundational myth of democracy: namely, that participating in the exercise of assuming that all are equal should, by definition, enable us to transcend the obstacles of private activity, of mere intimate contingencies. Only now, depoliticized and thus cold and pure and free of all teleological nonsense, does the sexual revolution regain its true Copernican meaning—the conservative instinct of vanity as the moral and aesthetic triumph of democracy.

Mara and Andy had been listening carefully; Pabst and Kamtchowsky were sharing a beanbag chair.

–Yeah, said Mara, that whole ’70s thing was bullshit. You see how fucked up those guys are now, and you realize it was all bullshit. The other day I had a job shooting this extremely cool electro-hardcore group (Andy, remember? We saw them in that little underground club over on Constitución?) called Tradition, Family, and Private Property.

–Ha! Nice name. Go on, you were saying?

–Good, right? Anyway, the singer’s name is Dantón, and he plays with these two other guys—it’s a power trio, guitar and computer and voice. Somebody was profiling them for some crap newspaper supplement, and the singer was driving them crazy, saying that here in this country the only difference between the right and the left is which side their dick hangs down.

Pabst felt almost beautiful in these moments of laid-back sophistication.

–Well, she continued, doesn’t his position seem like an ethical/political option worth highlighting?

Mara stiffened, then joined the others in their laughter.

The scarcity of resources in the neighborhood (two girls, their non-infinite number of orifices) often caused a sort of emergency amongst the males: they kept brushing up against each other. Even in a context of peaceful cooperation, the inclination to compete was unavoidable, albeit generally limited to simply verifying the other’s whereabouts. Accustomed as he was to an existence in which resentment was a form of lucidity, and thus of vigilance, Pabst was extremely conscious of these iterations. Tranquility, on the other hand, was Andy’s domain. If asked about said competitions, he would have laughed at the questioner and dismissed the hypothesis out of hand. His carefree attitude belied the irrevocable superiority that only extreme physical beauty can confer. Andy set his glass down on the floor and ensconced himself in his beanbag chair.

–I’m going to attempt to establish a relationship, he said, surely more modest than that last one, between the tools of sex and the implicit truths of the masses. In the 1960s, a man named Michael Condon undertook a research project whose consequences have been, to this day, insufficiently explored and poorly understood. His objective was to decode a film clip that was four seconds long. In it, a woman says to a man and a child, “I hope you enjoyed the chicken. I prefer it without bacon.” He divided the clip into second-long segments of forty-five frames, and set himself to watching them. It was a year and a half before he made his discovery: the woman moved her head at precisely the moment the man raised his hands. He began to reconstruct other micro-movements that were repeated time and again; in a given frame, a character’s shoulder might move just as someone else lifted an eyebrow or changed direction, and another series would begin. Condon surmised that all group behavior functioned on the basis of communicable, synchronous empathy. According to his theory, people’s actions are driven less by allegedly intellectual motivations than by systems of contagion that have no need of language whatsoever.

Pabst was about to say something (he’d just realized where these ideas were coming from) but Andy, alert to that danger, kept talking:

–What I’m saying is that it’s plausible that the irresistible instinct to act en masse, to replicate the irresistible circuit of empathy, constitutes a sort of private language for our species, one that is older than any spoken language, its source residing deep below the conscious mind. The phenomena of synchrony and contagion may yield only a single visible detail in a vast and complex field of study. Perhaps the implicit languages that modulate our conduct depend on some quality that we’ve been dragging along with us since Pleistocene times. Perhaps those languages . . . perhaps they’re associated with the superimposition of multiple supposedly meaningful messages at a particular time and place!

Pabst scratched his chin, careful not to let his fingertips brush against a pimple that was crowned with a minuscule carbuncle of pus. If he added examples, complementing Andy’s thoughts with a series of Pabstian über-cool opinions—that is, if he assented to the proposed format of literary dialogue—the situation could well develop into something resembling masculine bonheur or camaraderie. Pabst wavered; it was an awfully complex scenario. He had to act carefully, as he didn’t want his narcissistic interest in unfurling his own opinions to lead to some fraternal handshake as regarded the mysteries of the human species—not by any means. His hand settled alongside his balls as he began.

–There’s an extremely common type of amoeba (Dictyostelium discoideum) that, whenever the colony is spread out in the grass or across the trunk of a fallen tree, which is where it’s most often found, looks very much like dog vomit. These amoebas have a simple unicellular structure, and spend most of their time moving around individually, completely independent of one another. But under the proper circumstances, millions of them will unite and coordinate their actions, creating what amounts to a single organism that slides across people’s yards, eating rotten leaves as it goes. The changes that affect the colony can be tiny ones. If the temperature drops two degrees, the great amoeba becomes disorganized, disintegrates back into the myriad unicellular organisms it was before; if the temperature then rises a little, the process of dissolution reverses itself: each one becomes part of a single “them” whose behavior indicates that they are all blindly obeying the unified decision-making I of the Prime Amoeba. Now, what exactly is organizing this myriad of tiny dots that is suddenly acting as if it were a single body, and beyond that, how do they know which direction to go? (I forgot to mention that in August of 2000, Toshiyuki Nakagaki managed to train one of these amoebic organisms to find the shortest route through a maze.) The earliest hypotheses simply correlated to the researchers’ own political notions: they posited that there was a group of elite amoebas who gave orders to the rest, a sort of vanguard that sent back instructions so that the others might follow. This “vanguard hypothesis” was extremely difficult to prove, and for twenty years scientists believed that their inability to find any elite amoebas showed only that they, the scientists, lacked sufficient data, or that their experiments were poorly designed; the commandos had to be somewhere, and if they weren’t, well, that only meant that the means of searching for them was flawed. Later, Keller and Segal proved that the transformation from “one” to “us,” from individuality to coordinated action, is based on a purely chemical process. When the local amount of cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) was altered, the amoebas were carried along on pheromones generated by their comrades—the signal created a positive feedback loop, with each amoeba increasing its own production of cAMP, inciting all the others to do the same. This loop actually combines two types of behavioral rules: syntactic and chemical. The combination of the two results in the phenomenon known as imitation. Same thing with Dante in The Divine Comedy. Take the case of Paolo and Francesca. One day, the two of them innocently start reading the story of Lancelot. When they come to the part where the knight falls in love with Queen Guinevere, both of them blush; when they read that the two characters kiss, Paolo and Francesca have their first kiss as well. They fall deeper and deeper in love as they read deeper and deeper into the book. Their fascination with the written word, with imagining the text’s binary game of “her and him” coming to life through their own bodies, convinces them that they are a chapter in the general history of absolute passion. (Not for nothing does Spanish allow certain verbs to use the same conjugation in both first and third person: decisive detail!) Neither Paolo nor Francesca realizes that they are erasing the mediator—Dante’s book—and the amoebas likewise pass information along without ever realizing that they are obeying a law of general association. The moral of the story appears to be this: the most interesting part of the narrative curve is that which has the greatest number of possibilities for emitting and absorbing warmth; Nature and Dante agree that in heat, contagion is perfectly non-trivial.

Pabst let himself fall sweetly, softly back; he closed his eyes and popped the zit on his chin. He had subtly compared the two theories, leaving Andy with the weaker one; he had connected two authors with absolutely nothing in common; he hadn’t displayed any symptoms of Due Deference Syndrome, or shown any desire to put an end to the discussion once and for all. As for the honeyed glob of pus on his fingertip, at some point he’d find something to wipe it on—at some point Andy would take his shirt off once again, the women’s eyes would lift, feverish; no one would notice anything.

Andy had first heard about the holocaust of the 1970s at the age of five, in Pinamar. Apparently he was pulling at his mother’s skirt because he wanted an ice cream. Susana, his mom, leaned down to him—jangling Balinese earrings, Farrah Fawcett hair. She hooked her fingers through his belt loops and looked lovingly into his eyes. “Do you see that sign up there? All right, now, your grandfather already taught you to read. What does the sign say?” Andy maintains that this was the first time he was ever aware of actually shrugging his shoulders. Looking through the pines he could see a Bavarian-style cottage, where there was a huge cone topped with a pink ball, the image completed by a slender maternal finger, nail gleaming with polish: Massera Ice Cream. “Well, Massera is an evil man who threw a bunch of people out of an airplane, okay? Why don’t we buy an alfajor instead? Look, there’s a Havanna right over there.” Susana ruffled his bowl-cut hair, and reassumed her adult posture. From then on, the boy looked suspiciously at every airplane, but Massera’s dulce de leche remained his favorite flavor until Volta finally opened its doors.

At Mara’s high school, on the other hand, the students were encouraged to contemplate the sort of disturbing issues that would lead them to compose essays about the Disappeared and poems about the dictatorship during their Speech and Drama class. After crying a little and drinking her first few cups of strong coffee, Mara had written a piece called “Song of the Grandmother Who Speaks from the Depths of the Wolf ”:

DAUGHTER: There is an auburn-tinted dream in which I can’t see anything, my head is covered with a hood, and I hear the voice of someone who hates me and yet wishes to paw at me.

GRANDMOTHER: These things that seem made for stabbing, they are men, my little girl. They stab themselves into you. They fear nothing. Your voice nestles inside my ear, without you ever making a sound. Their tongues stab deeply into you as well. I too am wearing a hood, like Little Red Riding Hood. The teardrops of sweat fall from the walls that enclose you, drip onto the back of my neck. My neck bends down, my body a circle, a circle closed in vain.

DAUGHTER: Knock, knock. Who’s there? The stick wants to know if there’s anyone inside my body. There’s nothing inside his because he’s solid wood. Carved from a single piece of painstaking certainty, a macho comic opera: in short, a man. In the evil glow of his presence, I sense that he won’t want the flavorless parts of me. I whisper: that he won’t want. His breath hangs lasciviously around my neck. I have been pressing my thighs so tightly together that they seem to have become one. The dust, motes of imprisoned skin, a cascade of sparkling golden flecks floating down to the pool of water on the floor.

THE END

The heat and the filth—push rivers across, inside my skin—nothing separates blood from other blood. I am nothing but a sense of hearing, porous, awaiting the sharp ring of ironclad footsteps—those who have come to choose me. The blue smoke betrays my presence like a light shining down on the dead. I step forward into his outstretched arms and cannot breath. In this basement, lying beneath this guy, it’s impossible to breath. It’s too dark for anyone to see me shaking my head, but it can be felt. I’m so afraid he’ll kill me that I can’t even scream.

* * *

It was published in the school paper (her classmates suggested changing the title to “Hit Me and Call Me Esma”) and when Mara brought a copy home, her mother hugged her and wept wildly out of sheer pride. She sat down at the kitchen table of their apartment in Palermo Sensible, snug up against Villa Freud, and offered her daughter another cup of coffee. Mara accepted tearfully; an intense chat was clearly in the offing. Her mother opened wide her enormous green eyes and caressed Mara’s smooth, elegant forehead. Mara, she said, when your father and I first met, he had a girlfriend and I had a boyfriend. I was a Trotskyite and he was a Montonero. My best friend and I were always arguing with the Montos. I don’t know why, but they had all the cutest guys—big mustaches and long hair, all committed intellectuals. On the night our department held its elections at the university, we went out to stir up some trouble in the streets. We were already pretty drunk, and Liliana had hooked up with one of the FAR guys. Well, long story short, what a bunch of assholes the PST guys turned out to be. (Remember when I told you, Uncle Robert was with them for a while but then he left?) The thing is, I really liked the one Liliana was with, but there was a blackout, and I ended up fucking the guy’s friend, Martín. They killed Martín two days later, and Juan Carlos (the cute one) got his teeth drilled for the cyanide pill the day after that. He came to the house to see me (I was living with Liliana back then but it was obvious that he’d come to see me instead, because when I went to the corner window he gave me a little signal, and I snuck down and met him a block away. It was a bit cold out and we did it up against a wall, it doesn’t bother you that I tell you all this stuff, right?) and he said that he was headed for Formosa, that a big operation was about to get underway. I told him, I said Juan Carlos, I like you a lot, but I’m a Trotskyite, as Trotskyite as you can get. He told me to go wake up Liliana. The two of them were killed in the same battle, and every time the date comes around I think of you, Mara, and I’m so happy that I held on to my ideals that day, to my way of seeing the Revolution. I think of you and your brother, and what could have happened if there’d been another blackout, if I hadn’t had the presence of mind to say, okay, yes, he’s very cute, he’s a Monto, whatever; but this is about ideology, not about who’s the best fuck.

Cris, Mara’s mother, is still very pretty, and has decided not to remarry. She likes to say she prefers to have boyfriends who aren’t so much “live-in” as “live-out,” in the mistaken belief that “live-in boyfriend” is still something you say. Mara lost her virginity at the age of sixteen, a few months after writing the wolf poem, with one of her mother’s friends. Crying made her more sensitive, and after each session of historical guilt and visions of the boots of brutes crushing the throats of beautiful young girls, it gave her an unnameable pleasure to prostrate herself, eyes closed, mute, imagining those huge hands at her waist, slowly removing what Henry Miller would have referred to as her “panty briefs.” After that she dated a couple of punk rockers. And throughout that time, lying beneath those men, Mara occasionally lamented having been born at the wrong moment, having missed out on that dazzling whirlwind of courage and sensuality, because according to her fantasies—swaddled in quiet murmurs, panting and drool, along with earliest hypotheses as to what an orgasm might be—there couldn’t be anything in this world more beautiful than working for justice and fucking in the name of the Fatherland.

Which is exactly what I’d been doing, as I’m about to explain.