Mother and my friend had spent the whole dinner spouting names. Based on this rapport, I assumed she had enjoyed the evening, but apparently that was not the case. She was in a bad mood when she got home, in the elevator she kept sighing impatiently, and when we entered the apartment she went straight to the bathroom to take her sleeping pill. Before going to bed she had time to complain one more time about how late it was and what a terrible time she’d had. I plopped into an armchair and turned on the TV. She walked past me one last time carrying a glass of water on her way from the kitchen, said good night, and closed the door to her room.
“Don’t go to bed too late.”
“It’s early. And tomorrow is Sunday.”
My own words depressed me. Not only because Sundays were depressing but because every day had turned into Sunday for me. Unemployment, the awareness of failure, the anachronistic relationship between a sixty-year-old man and his mother, my long-since confirmed bachelorhood, all of it had enveloped me in the typical melancholy of dead days. Every morning, and every night, I resolved to start a new life, but I always procrastinated, acquiescing to my ailing willpower. And Saturday at eleven o’clock at night was not the right moment to make important decisions.
Television had become my only real occupation. And I didn’t even like it. When I was young it didn’t exist (in Pringles), and when I lived alone I didn’t have a TV, so I never got into the habit and never learned to like it. But ever since I’d moved into my mother’s apartment, it was all I’d had.
Whenever I was alone, I channel surfed. I always did the same thing, and from what I understood, so did many others, and systematically; for many, “watching television” was the same as channel surfing. That’s what it was for me. I never got into movies, maybe because I always tuned into them when they’d already started and so I didn’t understand the plot, and anyway I never liked movies or novels. The news channels weren’t any better, because I was also never interested in the crime stories currently in the limelight, and much less in wars and natural disasters. And it was the same with everything else. There were seventy channels, and I would often surf through all of them, one after the other, then go back and surf through them again, until I got tired (my finger pressing the button would fall asleep), and then I’d leave it anywhere I happened to be. After a while, out of despondency or plain boredom I’d summon up enough energy to change it again. Since I spent whole afternoons in front of the TV, I couldn’t fail to notice, at some point, how futile and irrational this activity was. Mother would urge me to go out and take a walk, and I often intended to, but my indolence would always win out. I remembered what my friend had recounted earlier that evening, about the short old man who would walk to the Cemetery in the mornings. That in itself could have motivated me: not the example of a healthy and active almost ninety-year-old (even though he was a good example), but rather the curiosity of running into him. He said he did it only when he woke up depressed or in pain, that is, he didn’t do it every day. But I would have to do it every day if I didn’t want to miss him when he did it. Of course, the possibility of watching an old man take a walk wasn’t very compelling, but I was slightly intrigued by the chance of finding out if the story was true, and I was used to making do with very little. The stories my friend told always had, as I said, the feeling of fables; to confirm one in reality might be exciting. At this stage of my life, I had reached the conclusion that I would never be the protagonist of any story. The only thing I could hope for was to make an appearance in somebody else’s.
Be that as it may, I couldn’t see myself getting up at dawn the following day, nor any other day, either to take a walk or for any other reason. Which was a pity, because I didn’t go out at night, either. Night in Pringles was for the young, especially a Saturday night like this one. On our way home I’d seen the activity in the streets, and now sitting in front of the television set, I remembered that the local cable channel had a show that was a live broadcast of Saturday nights.
These days every town, even some much smaller than ours, has its own cable channel. It must be a good business, requiring a small initial investment and plenty of side benefits. But it’s difficult to fill the schedule with more or less acceptable programming. The Pringles channel came up against a definitive impossibility in this respect. It was a true disaster, even though it broadcast only a few hours a day: a news show at noon, another at night, after which there was a program about farming hosted by an agronomist, another program about sports, and depending on the day of the week, a movie, music videos, a musical event at the Teatro Español, or a session of the Town Council. The news was mostly about local school events: deadly boring. Everything was precarious, poorly lit, badly filmed, badly edited, as well as predictable and repetitive. It didn’t even have the charm of the ridiculous. And even acknowledging that it is easier to criticize than to do, we Pringlesians had good reason to complain. There was no creativity, no imagination, no feelings, not even a dash of audacity.
The new program on Saturday nights offered a glimmer of hope within that context. María Rosa, the young newswoman, was the star of the show, and the idea was that she went out on her scooter, accompanied by her cameraman, to make the rounds of night clubs and restaurants and parties. I’d seen a few episodes on previous Saturdays. The poor results could be blamed on a lack of fine tuning, only to be expected in a new show. But there was a general atmosphere of ineptness that led one to think it would never improve. It was as if they didn’t care how it turned out, which is all too common and in itself can become intriguing. There was either too much or not enough light, and the sound didn’t work. If you could see or hear anything, it was almost by accident. They wanted to make it seem improvised, informal, youthful, but they were so naïve that they believed this could be achieved by behaving in an improvised, informal, and youthful way; the result was unintelligible. Anyway, what were they thinking when they entered a discotheque or burst in on a membership dinner at the Bonfire of the Gauchos Club and asked people if they were having a good time? It seemed they hadn’t asked themselves that question. If it was a sociological survey, it was poorly done; if they wanted to show how the rich and famous enjoyed themselves, they were barking up the wrong tree because in Pringles there weren’t any. They couldn’t even count on people’s desire to see themselves on television because the show was broadcast live so they wouldn’t be able to see themselves; the only thing they could hope for was that some relative would stay up late to watch it and the next day say, “I saw you.”
It had already started when I turned to it, and I amused myself for a while analyzing all its defects. Now I was watching the main part, which was the live broadcast itself: there was endless dead air between one event and another, no matter how fast María Rosa drove her scooter. They hadn’t thought of that, either. Since they didn’t have any advertisers, there were no breaks; the cameraman rode as best he could on the scooter behind María Rosa, and with wildly jerky movements the camera kept showing whatever it happened to catch — the starry sky, the streetlights, houses, trees, paving stones, all in a convulsed waltz. He had to hold onto the driver with one hand, and hold the heavy camera on his shoulder with the other, and this went on and on. María Rosa would try to fill the interlude with commentary, but in addition to not having anything to say and having to pay attention to the road, her poor diction and the sound of the engine made it impossible to understand anything.