(I’ve been sent another)

Carlos ordered a bottle of wine immediately after taking his seat. He took off his mask and flashed a knowing smile at his bejeweled wife. She followed suit and leaned over the table, her bracelets ringing as if to remind him of the odd social convention of wearing shiny objects to distract from boredom. He pursed his lips, thinking that he must have had this unpleasant reminder a million times, each time being more unbearable. His wife was a perfectly decent looking woman, her fifty years holding up a solidly build frame. Her wrinkles grew perfectly symmetric on the sides of her mouth, her bare arms still firm and her chest wide and smooth. And yet Carlos felt a sense of restiveness about her. She was a perfectly adequate partner but her chatter had become unbearable lately. She would drone on about minute details of information that had no content, she was either slowly losing her intellect or she really never had it but he had been incapable of surmising.

Two musicians approached his table singing a cumbia. Carlos rolled his eyes at his wife and took a sip of wine. The older of the two seemed exhausted, singing out of sheer will, his lips moving as if to prevent total physical collapse. The younger one played the guitar with indifference, throwing notes out into the world with a sense of contempt. The two had probably spent months in quarantine and had nothing but bile left to share. Carlos turned his chair as the two approached their table. He stood up and directly addressed the singer.

• Amigo, I don’t think anyone here wants to listen to your music. We’re out for the first time in months and just want to hear the sound of humanity chatting around us. Your music is making it difficult to do that.
• We have to earn some money compañero – the younger musician was taken aback, he had never had to deal with such a situation
• And we’re trying to have a nice evening compañero – Carlos responded almost immediately. The left side of his upper lip formed a half arch, what his wife called “furious sarcasm lip”.
• You can’t talk to us like that anymore man – the older musician intervened aggressively. It seemed clear that he was not in the mood. Most likely he had been living on whatever government assistance was thrown his way and was probably stretched too thin. – I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Chile woke up to you people and the dirty tricks you use to keep this country poor and starving.
• Are you kidding me? – this was the last straw for Carlos, he had no appetite for moral posturing from some street urchin. He was the champion of the people, he had spent his life waving his fist at the powers that be, the think tank that he directed was considered the most active left-wing NGO in the country. He was rabid with rage. – Do you know who I am? Do you? How dare you talk to me like that? I have given my life to defending the people of this country from capital and its nefarious ways. I have travelled the world telling anyone who would listen about the crimes of the dictatorship and how the little guy suffers from its legacy. I am a paragon … – at this point Cecilia, his wife, was tugging at his shirt sleeve. She seemed embarrassed at the negative attention, after all this was a stylish restaurant and most patrons were either part of their social circle or overlapped with it. Someone they knew was bound to hear of the fracas, but Carlos was not about to stop. He jerked his arm away from Cecilia and continued his tirade. Aware that the crowd was paying attention, he modulated his rant as if he was standing on a soap box. – I understand your frustration compañero, but your anger is misdirected. I am not the one who left you to starve during the pandemic, this government of knaves and thieves has left you with nothing but a guitar and begging for scraps from our table. Just because they left you starving, I don’t have to ruin my dinner to listen to your mediocre music… Here Carlos lost his thread, he had much more to say but he could feel the crowd turning against him. The couple dining next to them was clearly displeased with his speech, and, he recognized a businessman with ties to a large company that donated to his think tank. He had clearly overindulged. Carlos stopped talking for a second, collected his thoughts and sat down breathing heavily. His nostrils flaring, he took out a luca and offered it to the young man. He had to back down, this was not a good look for a man of his stature. His wife was nearly in tears and the waiters had stopped serving, taking in the spectacle, unsure what to do.
• No thank you – the musicians refused his money – since our music is mediocre you clearly don’t want to pay for it. – they moved on towards the end of the patio.

On their way home Carlos was fuming. He had been humiliated by a couple of street musicians. He considered it a calumny worse than death. His wife had tried to calm him down by stroking his ego, reminding him of his years of service to the cause. Despite her attempts, he was inconsolable. They drove all the way home arguing; her point being that he had done what he could for the poor of this country, if they could not understand his sacrifice, well, it was their own blindness and pettiness that did not allow them to see him for who he was. Carlos on the other hand continued to argue that it was the system that pitted the poor against those who were fighting tooth and nail to wrench them from the jaws of feebleness and ignorance. It was not a coincidence that those two had argued with him specifically, they must have secretly known who he was and were paid to embarrass him.

Cecilia could not abide this level of paranoia, she feared he was slowly sinking into narcissistic madness. Their old friends did not call as often, she had already heard whispers that they avoided him like one avoids the evangelical preachers with the little amplifiers and ugly short sleeve shirts in downtown Santiago. He had even alienated the few who thought like him. His preaching had become self-serving and his complaints that he should have been at the head of the revolution and that no one appreciated his sacrifice, a bit much. He would often take to Twitter to vent his complaints, but even his closest associates often failed to defend him in public. His public rants felt unhinged, one day he would praise the USSR openly and brazenly and the next he would complain about some architectural eye sore in some eastern European capital. He had become a floating foam of errors on a river already polluted by egos and icons. Cecilia had to try to keep his reputation intact, although she feared it was already too late. His fevered ego had taken over and was poisoning whatever rational faculties he had left. To her he was a pulsating sore of a man, more rage than human. She feared it would be impossible to tame the chaotic centrifugal forces that were tearing him apart.

That night Carlos had gaudy and intense dreams. He dreamt he was giving a long speech in front of a soviet style May 1^st crowd, his arm outstretched towards the heavens. The podium was filled with indecipherable faces of generic miners, all dressed in work clothes. Their faces were black from soot, and they were lacking both eyes and a mouth. The crowd of generic faces with Mapuche features looked at him with adoration, in complete silence. Thousands had gathered in uniformed unison, all to hear him speak. They formed large rectangles, one after the other. The square was perfectly symmetrical, with the podium the only object that broke that symmetry. He was wearing a wide fedora, with a colourful feather strapped to its sash, a tasteful suit and eyeglasses. He was the only one in full colours, the rest were drab and gray with only their faces showing a hint of hue.

As he rambled on in long drifting sentences, a mosquito landed on his sizeable nose. Carlos tried to ignore it at first, pretending it was not there. But his nose started to itch, so he tried wrinkling it to force the fly away. Those in the podium began to notice, some barely suppressing a laugh. As Carlos was ending a long sentence with his beloved “the will of the people” phrase, the itch became unbearable. His rambling continued on autopilot, he had given this speech in his dreams multiple times, but all of his concentration was on the fly. It sat there, at the tip of his nose, indifferent of the moment and the grandiloquence. It had its own agenda, it was not constrained by norms of polite behaviour. It wanted nothing from him other than a place to land. To the fly, Carlos was simply a rock for resting, a stop during a routine flight that would quickly be forgotten.

A fly is a fly – he said to himself as if repeating a mantra – but it is infuriating to be something’s resting place. So he swatted at it in mid speech, and, even though he had made the gesture a thousand times, because his concentration had taken the better of him, he ended up smacking his own nose. The audience immediately burst out laughing, and as they did their faces acquired both eyes and a nose. The miners were now fully formed humans, bending over with laughter. The crowd, once adoring and attentive, was now in complete disarray. The entire square lost its symmetry and the rectangles of worshipers at once became a chaotic mass of mockery. Some began to lightly hit their noses, imitating his gesture and feigning pain.  He had broken protocol and had at once moved from spiritual leader to entertaining clown. He flew into a rage, spitting obscenities at anyone near him. But the show was over, he was now the man who slapped his own nose.

Carlos woke up the next morning drenched in sweat. His wife was worried. She called their children and told them that their father was not doing well. He was delirious, quietly muttering about some fly. They called their family doctor who said that it was just an unthreatening fever and he would be fine in a few days. But Cecilia was unconvinced, she knew where this was heading. She would not tell a soul but that day she started preparing for a divorce. In a few years I’ll have this house and possibly the summer home in Cachagua – she reasoned. He will either improve and move in with one of the young activists that he has already fucked in some boxy downtown Santiago apartment, or deteriorate and become a warden of the state.  Either way, I’m out – she thought – it’s been a long time coming.

Raul Barahona-Svartz

Santiago, 10 November, 2020