Phiber and Kandinsky's first mission was to access private computers and steal the owners' passwords. They did this from an Internet café where a friend of Phiber's worked. The friend was paid a few pesos to let them work in peace on a computer in the farthest corner of the room. At first Phiber gave the instructions: he knew a bit about programming. Kandinsky would follow and improve on them, playing with them, twisting them, taking them to their breaking point, as if the equations on the screen were made of pliable metal.
With his first stolen password, Kandinsky went through the records of some unknown individual like a thief in another man's house, roaming through the rooms in search of objects to steal. Emotion overcame him; on the surface, he had to remain calm.
He would never go back to stealing from cars and houses, putting himself in physical danger. He much preferred to key in the correct characters that pulse on the screen, to steal from a distance, to obtain access through a rented computer and appropriate the numbers that make up a life: credit cards, bank accounts, insurance. Numbers, numbers everywhere, violated with impunity.
Phiber Outkast slapped him on the back and told him that before he knew it, he would be one of the best hackers around. Kandinsky liked the sound of that mysterious word,
hacker.
It lent him an air of danger, intelligence, transgression. Hackers abuse technology, find uses in artifacts for which they were not intended. Hackers enter territory that is forbidden by law and, once there, laugh at power. It was, perhaps, a metaphor for his life.
One afternoon he arrived home to find his dad at the door, brandishing a letter from the high school. Too many absences had led to his being expelled. His dad was furious. Hadn't he been the best student? And now he wasn't even going to graduate from high school? What had he been doing?
Kandinsky was at a loss for the words that would excuse him.
His mom was in the kitchen chopping onions, and he avoided her gaze. He couldn't bear the look of disappointment welling up in her eyes.
He entered the room he shared with his brother. Esteban was reading a book that he had borrowed from the municipal library: a biography of the man who was the leader of the Workers' Union for forty years. He was a bright kid and liked to read. Would he one day have the chance to go back to school? Unlikely. Would he have to continue helping his parents? Most probably.
Why continue with the charade? Kandinsky's parents had seen him as their only hope for a dignified retirement. Perhaps the best thing would be to run away...
Kandinsky fled the house in silence, accompanied by his father's shouts and his mother's sobs. He crossed the park, stirring up the pigeons, passing a boisterous group of San Ignacio students seated on a bench in front of the school. Soon the house, the school, the park, were behind him.
L
IKE SO MANY OTHER NIGHTS
at the end of a long day, you cross Bacon Street in your gold Corolla and immediately think of William David Friedman, the American cryptanalyst who was convinced that Shakespeare's work contained secret phrases and anagrams that referred to the true author, Francis Bacon. Friedman was the man who had deciphered Purple, the complicated Japanese code from World War II.
It's no coincidence that Bacon Street is on my way,
you think, and without noticing you nearly run a red light at an intersection four blocks from the El Dorado.
The streets converge in utter darkness. Every now and then a window lights up in a building like a flickering eye or a taxi with a blinking sign crosses a street with a fearsome rattle. A shortage of electricity has plagued Rio Fugitivo for some time now. The city has grown in a disorderly fashion; no one thought to plan a power plant that could keep up with demand. GlobaLux had arrived to fix the problem but had quickly made itself extremely unpopular: blackouts with no prior warning, continual surges, and, in spite of all that, a shocking rate hike. It is the first time that both the working class and those who are better off have come together in protest. Would the electricity shortage trigger Montenegro's demise? How ironic, after having weathered much more ferocious storms and so close to the end of his mandate.
You pop a piece of gum into your mouth. Spearmint Chiclets. Luckily, there are only four more blocks until you can finally relax. Naked and protected by the night, a glass of whiskey in a dusky room, the television on, wishing that time would slow down, that the clock would stand still. Carla, Carla, Carla. There will be shadows on the walls, shadows that mingle yet fail to find one another.
It's not the first time and it won't he the last,
you murmur, stepping on the accelerator. You wish you could stop thinking from time to time, let your mind go blank, avoid the overlapping thoughts that are always with you. To thrill with pure sensation, to let yourself be lulled by the nothingness of the day, to leave the exhausting analogies, the frantic associations of ideas, the obsessive readings of a reality reverberating with the echoes of another reality.
Everything in moderation
was what you wanted your motto to be; you have now resigned yourself to the fact that your thoughts are not in moderation.
Carla, Carla, Carla. Who would have imagined?
You park in the lot next to the building. Four cars: a quiet night. You spit your gum out. A billboard has been hung on a molding wall at the back of the lot:
Built Ford Tough.
An anagram in the last word:
Ought.
An ominous sign: imprisoned within those five letters is the word
go.
Ever since you were a child, you have felt that the world speaks to you, always, everywhere. That sensation has intensified in the past few months, to the point that you cannot read a sign or a word without thinking of it as a code, as a secret writing that needs to be deciphered. The front page of a newspaper can make you dizzy with the sheer volume of messages shrieking your name, asking you to free them from their precarious packaging. Most people think literally and assume that
Built Ford Tough
means
Built Ford Tough.
You suffer from the opposite and spend entire nights awake, mourning the loss of the literal.
Under a red neon light, the receptionist is playing blackjack on the computer, the screen showing a closeup of his hand. The blackjack table is in a casino in the virtual city of Playground. All of Rio Fugitivo is addicted to Playground, where thousands waste countless hours making millionaires of the three young men who bought the rights to it for Bolivia. You are one of the few who are immune to the virus. Nonetheless, and despite Ruth's protests, you still finance the unhealthy number of hours that Flavia spends glued to the screen. She said she was going to stop, that she was tired of all the advertising, and yet she can't help logging on one more time, just once more...
The receptionist greets you with a mere nod of his head, as if it is an effort to lift his eyelids and move the muscles in his neck. With a click of the mouse, the cards on the screenâstolen hearts, kings in declineâgive way to a calendar. He hands you a gold metal key numbered 492. Four. Nine. Two.
D-I-B. BID.
You mumble thanks knowing he won't reply. You have known him for a while now and have never heard the sound of his voice. What for, really? The transaction already took place earlier, using your credit card online. There's no need to speak; he knows it and so do you. And yet you feel nostalgic for the sound of a voice. You're not interested in the message itself but in the means of communication, which is increasingly rare. You most certainly are from another century.
The red carpet is stainedâevery kind of fluid spilled in sticky intimacy. The elevator is ancient, the metal rusted and the glass cracked in two; still, it glides upward in silence. It is how you imagine the ascension to heaven: broken bits of the world in conversation with the perfection of infinity. Slowly, the world is left behind and the elevator stops. The door opens, and, your steps suddenly light, you approach the heart of harmony.
You used to frequent these sorts of places when you were young. It was impossible to hear an echo of any kind there: every sound was devoured by the continuous murmur of laughter, clinking glasses, loud music, drunks arguing. At the back, behind a curtain made of wooden rods, the rooms were lined up, the beds creaking in frantic arrhythmia. For a few pesos you were happy, at least for a few minutesâalways quick, always fleeting.
Carla opens the door for you, her skin white, incongruous dark circles under her eyes, wearing a yellow sweatshirt with an enormous white
C
on it, a blue miniskirt, and running shoes: she is dressed as a University of California cheerleader. She lets you in. "Good evening, darling, good evening." Her short blond hair, her full lips, her smile so wide it is threatening, the soft, experienced curve of her breasts, the miniskirt revealing her thighs. She has perfected the requirements of your none-too-original fantasy of a California girl. The ruined beauty of her face, her red eyes, and the intense blue veins on her pale cheeks contrast with the apparent image of health and vigor that her body projects. Some things cannot be hidden.
You sit on the round bed and let yourself be reflected in the mirror on the ceiling. The room is dark, making the furniture look faded in the ash-colored light. At last, a few minutes for you to relax. Will you be able to? You look at Carla again and tremble. If her hair were brown and she were to wear it like Flavia, they could be sisters. Perhaps the resemblance is in her lips. You try to banish the thought from your mind. Your daughter has the sweetest face, not yet marked by excesses.
You close your eyes.
You open them again. When she's not smiling, Carla's similarity to Flavia becomes indisputable. It's her age, you tell yourself; it's because you love your daughter so much that you see her everywhere you go.
You had the same feeling the first time you saw Carla. It was lunchtime and you were leaving McDonald's with a bag of French fries in your hand. Sitting at a table near the door, her elbows resting on a plastic tray full of napkins and what was left of a hamburger, she looked at you through teary eyes. She was wearing a red dress with a mustard stain on it, hoop earrings, and a necklace made of brilliant green stones. Something made you stop. You asked if you could help her. "My parents just kicked me out," she replied, sniffing and pointing to a bag of clothes on the floor. You had to get back to work, but she was almost the same age as Flavia, and there was something about her face that awakened your paternal instinct. "If you want to help, you could pay for a night in a hotel," she said, her tone firm all of a sudden. "I have ways of thanking you."
On the walls are two somber lithographs by someone who digitally combined Klimt and Schiele. The gold-framed mirrors, the Jacuzzi that has been broken for a month now, the blood-red bedspread, the television mounted in a corner of the room. The El Dorado tries to go unnoticed and not publicize what business it's in, but one look at any of the rooms is enough to tell you that it's an hourly-rate motel. Even though your relationship with Carla is now stable and you could meet elsewhere, you use the El Dorado so she can pay off her debt to the owners. They have helped her out of more than one difficult situation. Carla has room 492 every day from five until ten o'clock; you try to use at least two of those hours. You have never asked her if she sees other men after that; you would rather not know.
"You seem pensive, darling."
"Iam."
You remember the message you received that morning.
Murderer, your hands are stained with blood.
What murderer? What hands? What blood? Who could have sent it to you? How had they managed to get into the Black Chamber's secret communication network? You couldn't evaluate how important that message was and had decided to ignore it. You don't know whether you did the right thing. Nor do you care. You are tired of your boss and his paranoia about security.
Carla hands you a glass of whiskey and sits down next to you. Hastened by her determined look, by the eloquent expression of desire on her face, you put a hand on her left thigh, pliant and speckled with red blemishes. She places her lips on yours; her warm, inquisitive tongue skillfully parts them. Frightened and trembling, you let yourself be led. That's how it happened the first time. You took her to a hotel, paid for her room, and helped her to get settled. You were about to leave when you were surprised by the urgency of her kiss, when she pulled you onto the bed, her hands hurriedly undressing you. Only afterward, when she told you to meet her the next day at the El Dorado, did you realize how she made her living and begin to understand her parents a little. But it was too late.
"Is this how you like it? You're so tense, darling."
Your time with Carla is your great escape to a way of being that has led you to see a psychologist on more than one occasion. Still, it's only a partial escape. Carla may caress and make love to you dressed as one of your wildest fantasies, but your mind is still elsewhere. You should let yourself go, let your mind take part in the experience as much as your body, but you can't be something you're not. In photos, you are always to one side, looking down at the floor, trying not to be noticed, never looking into the lens of the camera.
"If you don't want our time to slip away, you should stop thinking about your wife."
Your:
the unbearable lightness of an
r
pronounced by a California girl, at least in that word. She is taking the imitation very seriously.
"I haven't thought about her in years."
It's strange but true. You have been meeting Carla on a regular basis for two months now, and you don't feel like you're being unfaithful to Ruth. Devoid of desire, your marriage has become a quiet friendship. She lives her life and you live yours. You have stimulating conversations, the product of an affinity for the same topics, but sleeping together has ceased to be an adventure and is instead a tolerable inconvenience.
The way Carla unbuttons your shirt or plays with the zipper on your pants is evidence of her skill. Your socks fall to the floor in the shape of an
x.
You are naked and your reflection in the mirror on the ceiling is deformed. Those can't be your chubby legs, nor that disproportionate torso. And all those wrinkles on that face ... The years take their toll.