33 Revolutions

Europa Editions
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2015 by Jesús Alberto Sánchez Hernández
First publication 2016 by Europa Editions
Translation by Howard Curtis
Original Title:
33 revoluciones
Translation copyright © 2016 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
ISBN 9781609453558

Canek Sánchez Guevara

33 REVOLUTIONS

Translated from the Spanish
by Howard Curtis

B
eyond the window, everything moves: paper trees, toy cars, stick houses, straw dogs. Foam spreads through the streets like a stain, leaving water, seaweed, and broken things in its wake, until the next wave, when everything will start all over again. The tide uproots what the wind is unable to demolish. The building withstands the battering. Inside, the corridors seem full of frightened faces and people reciting instructions and obvious truths (“We have to keep calm, comrades: nothing is eternal”). Everyone talks at the same time (twenty scratched records playing at the same time): they all say the same thing in different words, like when they're standing in line or at a meeting—an obsession with talking: twelve million scratched records blathering on without stopping. The whole country is a scratched record (everything repeats itself: every day is a repetition of the day before, every week, month, year; and from repetition to repetition, the sound deteriorates until all that is left is a vague, unrecognizable recollection of the original recording—the music disappears, to be replaced by an incomprehensible, gravelly murmur). A transformer explodes in the distance and the city is plunged into darkness. The building is a black hole in the middle of this universe that insists on loudly breaking down. Nothing works, but it's all the same. It's always the same. Like a scratched record, always repeating itself . . .

T
he wind comes in through the cracks, the pipes hiss, the building is a multifamily organ. Nothing can compare with the music of the cyclone; it's unique, unmistakable, exquisite. In the small apartment, the walls, painted a nondescript color, with no decorations or images, combine with the sparse furniture, the wooden TV set, the Russian record player, the old radio, the camera hanging from a nail. The telephone off the hook, books on the floor. Water seeps in through the windows, soaks the walls, forms pools on the floor. Mud. Grime and more grime. A grimy scratched record. Millions of grimy scratched records. The whole of life is a grimy scratched record. Repetition after repetition of the scratched record of time and grime.

In the kitchen, two cans of condensed milk, one of meat stew, a bag of cookies. On the side, an egg, a piece of bread, a bottle of rum. Some food past its expiration date, with mold on it. The whisk on a corner of the little table; the frying pan on the stove (grease on the wall); and the refrigerator from the Fifties, empty and switched off, with the door open. The bed is in the middle of the bedroom. The bathroom is tiny, dark, without water. The shower is hardly ever used: the bucket and the jug have replaced it. The tube of toothpaste, the deodorant, the razor. The broken mirror paints a scar on his reflection.

He goes out onto the balcony and is hit by a gust of wind. Anonymous in the immensity of the storm, abandoned to his fate, replaying the scratched record of life and death, he lights a cigarette and looks out at that apocalyptic postcard. Time and again, like a scratched record, he wonders why everything appears unchangeable even though each mutation brings upheavals. The building withstands, yes, but everything else sinks into the seaweed and the dead things left by the tide. Finally, he smiles: with the passing of the days, the sea will recover from its tropical illness and the repetitive cycle of routine will return, like a scratched record, to meet normality.

T
he scratched record of work. The office, the photograph of the leader, the metal desk, the chair that gives him hemorrhoids, the fat old typewriter, the ballpoint pen to one side, the yellowing papers, the rubber stamps, the telephone. The manager appears. He flaps his double chin, smooths down his white shirt, and clears his throat before speaking. His voice is like a flute when he receives orders and a trombone when he gives them. Like now. The manager walks out of the office, leaving behind him the echo of a slamming door. At last, he is alone in his office, blacker, skinnier, and more nervous than usual. Slightly more subordinate too.

The telephone rings, and the skinny, nervous black man replies without much conviction. All he can hear through the wires is noise—far away, like a scratched record—and he hangs up. He goes to the window and lights a cigarette. Life stops in front of his eyes, and doesn't surprise him at all. When it comes down to it, he thinks, it's always been like this, stasis disguised as dynamis. He glances at his self-winding Soviet watch: Ten in the morning, and already he can't stand his job. Of course, he's never liked it, but now he's truly sick of it (and immediately, in parenthesis, he wonders when this started). Evening after evening he goes back to his solitary apartment, and morning after morning he leaves it to its solitude. The neighbors are a bunch of scratched records, devoid of interest. As for the committee, you just have to obey silently, come out with a few
Vivas!
, and everybody's happy.

In reality, nobody cares about anybody else.

L
unchtime. The dining room is filled to the brim with technicians and bureaucrats, and the line is so long, it's like there's a movie premiere happening. The food is as cheap as it is limited, but it's better than nothing and everybody's grateful for it. “What are they giving us today?” those waiting ask those coming out. “Same as yesterday,” they reply apathetically. When at last it's his turn, he looks lazily at the military tray: the circle of vegetable stew, the square of rice, the rectangle of sweet potato, the glass in its ring, and the knife, fork, and spoon in their groove. He eats it all in ten minutes and goes out to look for cigarettes. What little shade there is from the noonday sun is unable to allay the heat, let alone the humidity of this jungle of decaying structures and centuries-old beauty. The sea can be glimpsed in the distance, but today its breeze is pure absence. He sends a moan up into the sky and stops outside the store on the corner: A handwritten sign says, “No cigars or coffee.”

Like a scratched record, he moans once again.

D
uty and desire. Angrily, he bangs out his dilemma on the typewriter until the paper is perforated with periods and commas. His desire is to be alone in this office, in this city, in this country, and never to be disturbed. Monotony is expressed in a thousand ways and acquires various signs. Work, radio, news bulletins, meals, free time: I live in a scratched record, he thinks, and every day it gets a bit more scratched. Repetition puts you to sleep, and that sleepiness is also repeated; sometimes the needle jumps, a crackling is heard, the rhythm changes, then it sticks again. It always sticks again.

He hears loud footsteps beyond the door, and he knows who they belong to. Where's the report? I'll have it ready in a while, he replies. The manager glares at him, veins in his nose, a surly look in his eyes, the son of a bitch. The manager reprimands him without a single hair falling out of place (a lot of gel, a lot of cologne, a lot of talcum on the neck, he thinks). He feels like telling him to go fuck himself, and fuck his mother, and while he's about it, go fuck his whole life, but all he can do is move his head from side to side with no rhythm or meaning, unable to understand why he's being reprimanded and for what.

“Listen to me!” the master roars. “Are you listening to me?”

T
he day's work is over. Eight hours of checking and stamping papers, signing memos, writing reports, making copies, putting up with the manager, and not much more. Eight hours as interminable as summer or solitude. Eight hours devoted to nothing. But today is payday, and that seems to give meaning to the everyday nihilism, the farce of making a contribution, the madness of giving service.

He sniffs the envelope of rough yellow paper with his name handwritten on it and counts those colored bills whose value, as he well knows, is as relative as our reality. He doesn't want to go home. He thinks he'd rather go get an ice cream; he walks unhurriedly, watching the scratched records pass with their end-of-month smiles, full of wage-earner's pride. There's no silence in the city: Everyone talks at the same time, more than usual, echoing the buzzing of bumblebees—and the women, the buzzing of the queen bee. All the women think they're queens here. At last he gets to the ice cream parlor, and the length of the line destroys his craving. He walks on past (should he go into the movie theater? Forget it). He turns onto San Lázaro, plunges down a side street, and runs aground in a corner bar, dark and perfumed with men's urine: a long bar counter, dirty tables, cheap rum: nothing more. Nobody smiles, nobody greets him. Everyone minding his own business.

In a corner, four guys are playing dominoes, as they do every day of the year and every year of time. There's never any variation in the parade of white pieces, black dots, double nines, cries, curses. Next to each player, the eternal glass of rum; in the middle, the ashtray full of cigarette butts. This, he thinks, is the scratched record of national culture. In another corner, a taciturn woman, dressed in synthetic polychrome clothes, talks to herself as she leafs through yesterday's newspaper. Four pages, all the same, with the same tone, the same glibness, the same old song, the words, the anger.

The woman grumbles.

He sits down at the bar, orders a rum, lights a cigarette, and rambles to himself; the universe is a scratched record with no relativity or quanta, full of grooves down which this life of cosmic dust, industrial grease, and common tar passes, he thinks. He takes a swig of his drink, makes a noise with his throat, and tilts his head, nauseated and grateful.

Rum is the hope of the people, he thinks.

T
he moon is full when he comes out of the bar, but its light barely filters between the buildings. He walks, avoiding narrow alleys and dark corners. On the avenue, there's a concert; the crowd is like a tide, moving to the rhythm of congas and trumpets, and he melts into it. He dances alone in the midst of a commotion that isolates him as it surrounds him, and he wonders what it means to belong, to be united. Is the communion of other people's bodies merely the alienation of the ordinary? In any case, he thinks, here again is the scratched record of fortuitous encounters or failed encounters, anonymous and indifferent (without forethought or calculation: pure nocturnality), on this avenue where sensuality, equality, and the urge for human solidarity converge. The only thing that works here, he thinks, is partying, promiscuity, phallocentrism, an obsession with sex (erotic materialism). The rest is speechmaking to confuse the masses. Sex is the beginning and the end: History as one big fuckfest, he thinks.

And there, amid the music, the sweaty bodies, and the cans of beer, he remembers his ex-wife, always sick with frigidity. The marriage didn't last long: a scratched record of arguments and grievances whose gradual deterioration ended in rigor mortis. Her asexuality led him to impotence, blackened his mood, poisoned his already limited optimism. At first, he thought it was reserve, shyness, and that time and trust would put an end to these blemishes. But it was something deeper. Far from improving, the situation got worse. They spent weeks with no more intimacy than you get in a meal you eat by yourself, until sex disappeared entirely from their lives (along with caresses, smiles, and words). He made up his mind to leave her after a disturbing dream: fed up with her, and taking advantage of her sleep, he slashed her to death with a machete as she lay in bed, spattering the walls of the room. He woke with a start, realized that he had ejaculated, and the following morning, very early, left home and never went back—months, maybe years later, they negotiated a divorce, when the resentments and grievances had faded away.