finish his presentation; they politely apologized before leaving the meeting room without even finishing their coffees. His furious bosses also acted quickly. They made him sign his letter of resignation there and then. During the next meeting of Villa Miserias’ board, the banker tabled a motion prohibiting employees drinking from the communal water fountains. It was passed unanimously.
To the list of those wronged was added a ballet dancer thrown out of her company for putting on ten ounces; a surly university graduate found himself once again without friends when he stopped bringing ecstasy pills to parties; a couple addicted to amphetamines were unable to bear the crisis caused by the tense tranquility of their nights.
Taimado’s boys began to feel the pressure from a number of sides. The people they protected didn’t miss a single opportunity to point out the differences that separated them. Their minuscule wages made them dependent on the gratuities they received for almost any action: keeping an eye on the children playing outside, washing cars, helping with shopping bags, repairing broken chairs. The amounts offered didn’t decrease, but the guards began to receive them in handfuls of coins of the lowest possible value. During the transaction, these coins would be accidentally dropped, so that the Black Paunch in question would have to get down on all fours to collect them. Some neighbors would enter and exit the estate several times a night just for the pleasure of directing their headlights on the security booth and sounding their horns frenetically to startle the sleeping guard. If the water was temporarily cut off, or there was a power outage, they received peremptory calls demanding they solve the problem immediately; that’s what they were paid for. The final humiliation appeared in a circular informing them of the hours they were allowed to watch television in their booth. Apart from these times, it would be locked.
A different threat came from outside; Maso’s retreat opened the way for others. Two rival gangs disputed the right to dope the people of Villa Miserias. Since there was a need for substances to make everyday life more bearable, the demand was still there. For the great majority of the residents, the situation was inevitable; there was nothing to be done. Every so often crusades were organized to warn of the risks but, to tell the truth, this was a ritual carried out through force of habit with no real consequences. It often happened that the publicists who organized the campaigns were under the influence when they thought them up. What really got on the residents’ nerves were the frequent outbreaks of violence and extortion resulting from the all-out warfare between the rival gangs. Taimado intervened either too late or too little, making the situation worse. It was one of the darkest periods in the history of Villa Miserias.
The initial contacts were carried out discreetly. But the battle for a larger market meant that boundaries were increasingly transgressed. As in any other business, the bosses demanded ever-higher sales figures from their dealers. The principal of savage competition didn’t vary; the specific methods of the industry did. The leader of the first gang to establish itself was a respectable impresario in the toy business. As part of a training course offered by his company, he read an article explaining the importance of generating compulsive habits. It was a matter of capturing minds as early as possible and then never letting then go. Toys appealed to the childish side of every sort of personality, forming part of a chain of the perpetual substitution of one artifact for another. The more he thought it through, the more he was intrigued by the possibility of transferring these principles to the drug trade. Just as with toys, the attraction of drugs was universal. It was a case of capitalizing on the mechanisms of instant gratification. He guessed that once the habit had been created, the adherence to it would be lifelong.
The number of habitual users was considerable. Their needs just had to be promptly catered to. The real challenge consisted of widening the client base. The toymaker concluded that the best publicity was the users themselves. In his company’s offices, he set up a sort of pilot group composed of kids of various ages, selected by means of a combination of fair complexion, good appearance, tastefully ripped clothing, purchasing power, sociability, and chronic stupidity: the in-crowd of Villa Miserias. They listened to his simple plan. They would receive all the drugs they wanted under the single condition of not revealing they were getting them for free. They were immediately given their first samples. Still under the effects of the euphoria, they asked about the possibility of becoming sales representatives. This was an ideal situation for their boss: When before had a brand image personally sold what he should have been advertising? It wasn’t long before some jealous wit nicknamed them the Psychedelic Lolitos; they adored it. All the young dudes wanted to emulate them. The girls clawed for their attention. Teenage consumption soared.
To keep tight control on the workforce, the company created a kind of informal membership badge, a decal designed for the exclusive use of the Psychedelic Lolitos and their ardent followers. It was a voluptuous, mirror-image inverted P barely separated from a stiff, upside down L. The
There was one important niche to attend to: the kids on the margins. They weren’t much interested in having fun. The Lolitos had a natural hatred for them. It wasn’t that they refused to sell to them—business came before the revulsion of seeing them wearing their insignia—but it was like setting out to grow a desert plant in a tropical climate. They simply had no place in the bacchanalian carousing encouraged by the
A rival gang capitalized on this gap in the market by faithfully copying the profitable scheme with one modification: everything was less brilliant, worse quality, and cheaper. Anemic kids with hair hanging down over their faces and sadistic T-shirts trafficked substances destined to make them even more depressed. Their empty-eyed meetings were punctuated by incoherent bouts of speech; they spent languid hours listening to the instrumental wailing of prog rock groups. To distinguish themselves, the Marginals had an inverted, barbed M tattooed on their forearms. They were such a close-knit group that when a fifteen-year-old died from inhaling what turned out to be detergent, they put it down to his desire to end his suffering. Anything was better than weakening the brotherhood by admitting how harmful the substance was.
Each gang blamed the other for unleashing the war. The
