Everyone tallies what else they are willing to part with. Should they send the boy again? No. One by one for greater impact? Who should go first? Who will account for their place in line? Malena rips a page from her notepad, hands numbers to everyone in line. The boy claims he and his father should receive a better number because of their cap collection idea. But it didn’t work, someone says. One by one they deposit their belongings in front of Leopoldo. Green mangos, ripe bananas, photographs of their loved ones, plastic rosaries, a bag of lentils.
If Leopoldo were Antonio he would cry of embarrassment and hurl their belongings back at them and leave them to their ridiculous phone calls. Why don’t they just assault him? Wouldn’t that exonerate him from deciding anything?
I don’t take bribes. Please vacate the premises before I summon the squadrons.
No one moves. In line someone shushes someone until everyone’s shushed. The crowd seems to be waiting for something to happen. For someone to appear before them and rectify this.
Let’s get out of here, Malena says. We’ll find some other way to call our families.
A collective groan. Whistling. As they collect their belongings some are muttering desgraciado, others holler descarado, malparidos like him are what’s sinking this country, rata de pueblo, moreno de verga, just wait till El Loco returns.
No one’s left at the Calderón but him. From his wallet he tries to pull out his phone list, which includes the numbers for his grandmother, for his friend Antonio, for the economics department at the University of Indiana, where according to his contacts, scholarships for Ecuadorians might be available through the ministry of finance. The phone list’s lodged inside a pocket where his fingers almost fail him. He pulls the list out but drops it, swatting for it in vain on the way down. If you ask him about it he won’t show you his muddied phone list. Or tell you he was surveilling the withered ceibos of the Calderón to check if Little Jaramillo was lurking behind them, checking the sky for lightning too, although this telephone does not look as if it has been struck by lightning. Not that he would know what that looks like.
Leopoldo dials his grandmother.
No estoy, deje un mensaje, y si no hablan español me importa un pito, por su culpa mismo estoy aquí así que no voy a aprender su inglish del carajo.
Leopoldo’s relieved that her answering machine picks up. He would have been embarrassed to talk to her. He hangs up without leaving a message. He has expelled those people for nothing. Does the mud beneath him smell like vinegar, sulfur, or piss? Did the mud already absorb Little Jaramillo’s piss? Was it softened by it such that children could frolic in it? Make mud balls and snowmen benosed with carrots? The next number on his list is for his friend Antonio, known at San Javier as the Snivel, Gargamel, Drool, Saber Tooth. Leopoldo hasn’t talked to him since he left to study abroad, a month after their graduation, almost ten years ago. At Stanford, Antonio was supposed to breeze through a double major in public policy and economics and then return. At the Universidad Católica, Leopoldo was supposed to enlist the luminaries of their generation and then run for office with Antonio. Together they were supposed to do — what? what did you think you were going to do? — so much.
Leopoldo dials Antonio. Through the decrepit phone line Leopoldo hears the first ring, the fourth, and then an alien blare interrupts the sixth: banging on a piano, frantic strings, the crackling of shortwave.
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.