Requiem began to search for the needle in the haystack. The scrawny students, overwhelmed by the goings-on, and angry too, brandished theories like spoils of war. The miner-diggers, or digger-miners, it depends, voiced imprecations we shall refrain from expressing. Every evening, the same opera. They eyed each other up, balked, traded insults, and even came to blows. A legend suggested the figure of one thousand seven hundred dead in the most recent clashes, without counting suffocations and other serious injuries.
Weary from the noise, and the alcohol he’d just consumed, Requiem leaned against a pillar, waiting for them to vacate the field. They loitered on the platforms till late into the night: the students with their strike, the miner-diggers with their stinking rusty breath.
“I’m a free woman, but I’m still looking for the man of my dreams.”
He was already thinking of the silicone breasts of the girl waiting for him at Tram 83. But after so many years apart, how could he abandon Lucien and slip into the folds of the night with that doll? The students and the diggers of mines were still squaring off. As the flurry of insults reached its peak, they headed off on the same road to nowhere. Requiem sensed a presence. He raised his eyebrows: Lucien, in the flesh but skeletal. Requiem stepped forward. He realized that his friend had lost all his weight. That an era was on the wane. That a civilization was champing at the bit. Lucien was dressed all in black, the harmony broken only by a red scarf, the wad of papers under his arm, and an imitation-leather bag, worn thin, slung over his shoulder. Tousled hair. Crumpled face. Mustache intact. Cold gaze. Hoarse voice. They embraced without much enthusiasm.
“The bastards, don’t tell me they’ve mangled your brains.”
“What’s your news?”
“What about Jacqueline?”
“Long story.”
“How did you get out?”
“I’ll tell you.”
“The bastards, the bastards, they …”
“Shall we go?”
“Yes,” replied Requiem, coldly, no doubt haunted by the girl dressed for a Friday night in a station whose metal structure is unfinished, where dissident sex-starved rebels, students, and diggers head off on the same road.
“I’m a really sensitive girl.”
Two fat tears slid down the face of the man who’d arrived by train in this station whose metal structure … In silence, they crossed the concourse and the other fragments of the station, where neglected single-mamas roamed, along with professors selling their lecture notes, intellectuals reeking of salted fish, and Cuban musicians performing salsa, flamenco, and merengue for no reason at all.
FIRST NIGHT AT TRAM 83: NIGHT OF DEBAUCHERY, NIGHT OF BOOZING, NIGHT OF BEGGARY, NIGHT OF PREMATURE EJACULATION, NIGHT OF SYPHILIS AND OTHER SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES, NIGHT OF PROSTITUTION, NIGHT OF GETTING BY, NIGHT OF DANCING AND DANCING, NIGHT THAT ENGENDERS THINGS THAT EXIST ONLY BETWEEN AN EXCESS OF BEER AND THE INTENTION TO EMPTY ONE’S POCKET THAT EXHALES CONFLICT MINERALS, THIS COW-DUNG ELEVATED TO A RAW MATERIAL, IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE STONE …
“We walked through the darkness of history. We were the cash cows of a system of thought that profited from our tender age, that crushed us completely. We were a piece of shit.”
“We had an ideal, innocence …”
“Innocence,” echoed Requiem, bursting into laughter. “You really mean innocence? Innocence is cowardice. You have to move with the times, brother.”
“You haven’t changed a bit.”
“You don’t age here. You simply exist.”
“Requiem …”
“It’s New Mexico, here. Every man for himself, and shit for all.”
Tram 83 was one of the most popular restaurants and hooker bars, its renown stretching beyond the City-State’s borders. “See Tram 83 and die,” was the regular refrain of the tourists who blew into town from the four corners of the globe to conduct their business. During the day they wandered zombie-like through the mining concessions they owned by the dozen, and at night they ended up in Tram 83 to refresh their memory. This gave the place every appearance of a true theater, if not a massive circus. Here’s the kind of thing you might hear as background noise:
“I want to massage you by way of foreplay, then slowly suck you off, suck your whole body, suck you till my mouth runs dry.”
Not only at Tram 83, but even at the university and in the mines, unmarried women didn’t hold back from accosting potential clients with the same psalms.
Inadvertent musicians and elderly prostitutes and prestidigitators and Pentecostal preachers and students resembling mechanics and doctors conducting diagnoses in nightclubs and young journalists already retired and transvestites and second-foot shoe peddlers and porn film fans and highwaymen and pimps and disbarred lawyers and casual laborers and former transsexuals and polka dancers and pirates of the high seas and seekers of political asylum and organized fraudsters and archeologists and would-be bounty hunters and modern day adventurers and explorers searching for a lost civilization and human organ dealers and farmyard philosophers and hawkers of fresh water and hairdressers and shoeshine boys and repairers of spare parts and soldiers’ widows and sex maniacs and lovers of romance novels and dissident rebels and brothers in Christ and druids and shamans and aphrodisiac vendors and scriveners and purveyors of real fake passports and gun-runners and porters and bric-a-brac traders and mining prospectors short on liquid assets and Siamese twins and Mamelukes and carjackers and colonial infantrymen and haruspices and counterfeiters and rape-starved soldiers and drinkers of adulterated milk and self-taught bakers and marabouts and mercenaries claiming to be one of Bob Denard’s crew and inveterate alcoholics and diggers and militiamen proclaiming themselves “masters of the world” and poseur politicians and child soldiers and Peace Corps activists gamely tackling a thousand nightmarish railroad construction projects or small-scale copper or manganese mining operations and baby-chicks and drug dealers and busgirls and pizza delivery guys and growth hormone merchants, all sorts of tribes overran Tram 83, in search of good times on the cheap.
“Would you gentlemen care for some company?”
Barely sixteen, trussed into a couple of tiny corsets, the two girls welcomed them with inscrutable smiles. Requiem settled on the one with hair like wooded savannah.
“Your breasts quench my thirst.”
“Sir.”
“How much for a massage session?”
The girl stated a figure.
“You know the Tokyo stock market is in freefall?”
She held him by the wrists.
“Profit equals retail price plus wholesale price minus packaging.”
A large sign on the Tram’s frontage stated:
ENTRY INADVISABLE FOR THE POOR, THE WRETCHED, THE UNCIRCUMCISED, HISTORIANS, ARCHAEOLOGISTS, COWARDS, PSYCHOLOGISTS, CHEAPSKATES, MORONS, THE INSOLVENT, AND ALL OF YOU UNLUCKY ENOUGH TO BE UNDER FOURTEEN, NOT FORGETTING THE ELECTED MEMBERS OF THE TWELFTH HOUSE, PENNILESS DIGGERS, SADISTIC STUDENTS, POLITICIANS OF THE SECOND REPUBLIC, HISTORIANS, KNOW-IT-ALLS, AND SNITCHES. Requiem took the girl’s phone number. They entered the establishment. There was nothing special about Tram 83. It was dark all around, like the Lascaux Caves. Men. Women. Children. All with glasses and smokes. At the back, a combo was shamelessly massacring a Coltrane number, “Summertime,” no doubt. They headed toward the bar. Two girls with massive-melon-breasts immediately followed them; it’s called “shadowing.”
“Do you have the time?”
Nothing. Requiem’s eyes patrolled