Hello?
Barely hear you.
Why don’t you shut your vacuum? Unplug it, if that’s the less strenuous option.
Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Which you’re interrupting.
Here to end your end times. So to speak.
The hell’s this? Hello?
This, Gargamel, is your father.
Microphone Head?
Drool?
Microphone Head!
Drool!
So a vacuum is your best metaphor for avant garde music? Surely nonretrogradable rhythms haven’t reached your village yet. Rarely has the term yet been used so dubiously.
Pardon me for neglecting to profit by your remark. Leopoldo hears Antonio laughing. Antonio remembers that quip. Of course he remembers.
Oh Drool. Always shortchanging your kind. Is your window open?
Is his window open? Yes. Right. Leopoldo’s buying time to prepare a comeback. A common tactic from Who’s Most Pedantic, their game from San Javier. During recess by Don Alban’s cafeteria they would refute each other about everything, spoofing the pompous language of demagogues, priests, themselves, digressing manically upon premises like compatriotas, let us applaud León’s proposal to privatize our toilets, compañeros, let us consider that if El Loco wins, Facundo’s maid will lop off his maid killer in his sleep, if she can find it, although rules are rules, digressions earn you top points but they have to eventually boomerang to the original premise, the audience permitted to interrupt only to call out for vocabulary clarifications: badinage!, what is?, sapidity!, what is?, and they halt their sciolisms and provide definitions, magniloquent inventions, on the spot. Is his window open? Antonio chooses not to block Leopoldo’s question with a question. He wants to hear what Leopoldo comes up with.
Why yes, my window is indeed open.
You see my friend, well you don’t really see, that’s why I’m about to inculcate you, your vacuum not only absorbs the detritus on your carpet but also the particles that float through your window, particles that carry inside of them the alarm of ambulances, the clang of cans, the tenor of the toll collector, all your troglogradables that are, in short, inside your artifact of . . .
Troglo what?
Gradables.
Chanfle. Do you own a vacuum?
Why yes. Indeed I do.
And you change its filter often?
Every two months.
You see, Microphone Head, well you don’t really see ’cause you’re as blind as a microphone, I haven’t changed the filter of my Red Devil in years. Therefore it has ceased to absorb anything. Neither detritus nor particles and absolutely no clang of cans. Oh Microphone Head: always faltering between the general and the specific. You know the one about Glenn Gould and the Hoover? Of course you don’t.
On the Salado side of the Calderón a domestic appears along Bolívar Street, too far from the busted phone for Leopoldo to know if she was one of the expelled. It is likely that more people will appear again soon. At San Javier their Who’s Most Pedantic game had served them well. On the national academic quiz show broadcasted by Channel Ten they had excelled in the debate section. And the Q&A section. They’d swept the city rounds and the interprovincial rounds and the finals against Espíritu Santo. At school everyone recognized them. During recess the appeal of Who’s Most Pedantic widened. Why I’m a better presidential candidate than you became a favorite premise.
Still flatlining the currency at the Central Bank, Microphone?
Been following the news?
About the twilight of the IPOS?
About the recent coup.
Another one?
Rumors that the interim president might be loosening the electoral requirements so El Loco can run.
El Loco’s returning again?
And the stronger candidates . . .
Stronger? You mean burlier? Dollarized at the gut, if you will.
. . . don’t want to run. The situation is irredeemable, so what’s the point? They’ll get ousted anyway. Ever considered returning?
Absolutamente never. I’m too busy wading in stock options. Money? Paper, yes.
There’s massive protests all over the country.
Again?
The indignation of the people has reached its limit.
Now that definitely hasn’t happened before.
Leopoldo doesn’t respond. Antonio interprets Leopoldo’s silence correctly. Leopoldo isn’t playing anymore. Antonio turns down Messiaen’s Abyss of the Birds.
And yet with the right strategy someone . . .
–Juana we’re out of eggs!
I think the lines are crossed, Leo. Typical of our backward . . .
. . . an outsider could sweep the elections and effect real change . . .
–Juana I gave you enough change for eggs.
He yells at you because he loves you, Juana.
. . . at last our chance to . . .
–Juana, carajo, quit eavesdropping on the politicians and go basket some eggs.
Hello?
Barely hear you.
–Quit clowning and hang up already. Juana?
Vote for us, Juana’s husband.
We always wanted an audience and here at last . . .
–How much for my vote?
Free milk?
Free housing?
–I’m voting for El Loco.
El Loco’s not coming back, sir.
–That’s what you people said last time.
How come we haven’t heard from Juana?
Juana’s husband and his imaginary wife, Juana, are voting for El . . .
–I’ll track you two conchadesumadres and . . .
Hang up and call again?
I think we have a chance, Antonio.
–Quit my phone line already!
Hello?
Everyone thinks they’re the chosen ones, Masha wrote on Antonio’s manuscript. See About Schmidt with Jack Nicholson. Then she quoted from Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam, because she was sure Antonio hadn’t read her yet: Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him. In San Francisco, besides the accumulation of wealth, what does the age ask of your so called protagonist? No wonder he never returns to Ecuador.
Why had her comments in Antonio’s manuscripts been so mean spirited? She’d been transferring the contents of her closet to boxes that will be transported to her new apartment in New York soon and she’d come across Antonio’s manuscripts inside a hatbox, where she’d also come across the compendium of contemporary classical music he had recorded for her, which she was listening to as she read his manuscripts again. She hadn’t seen Antonio or thought about him in at least twelve months, since around the time of his farewell party, and