by some snigger-inducing phrase. On one of the days when Orquídea was still hesitating over whether or not to sign up as a candidate, her greeting produced a cryptic barb: “If you put everything in the wash together, the clothes lose their color.” Orquídea had spent the whole morning trying to decipher her words. When she decided on an interpretation, she knew what to do next and hurried to inform Perdumes that she accepted his challenge. She was completely unaware she’d inaugurated the strict custom of consulting the beige-uniformed oracle.
5
Looking back on it, Max Michels realized that Orquídea López’s historical legacy had been, first, to act as a lever in the destruction of the existing structures, and then to be a slightly inefficient steamroller. She had smoothed the path for Villa Miserias to leave Villa Miserias behind and become Villa Miserias.
Her term in office inaugurated the reign of quantity: the will to count everything. She had promised a form of justice tailored to fit each individual’s specific dimensions. This required the residents to provide information that could be statistically represented: the hours of sunlight entering through each window; the number of minutes they spent sitting on the communal benches; their proximity to the green areas that purified the air. A coefficient was created to measure the benefit each individual obtained from the collective services, including such variables as the frequency with which the barrier was raised to let cars through, usage of the entry phone system and even the amount of time the lobby of each building remained dirty due to the order in which they were swept. The residents began to view one other in terms of their numerical values. The premise involved putting a value on the cost-benefit ratio of each and every soul living on the estate.
Orquídea’s other great legacy was the transformation of the security force. The guards were used to busting their breeches watching television in the security booth: they didn’t even have to shift from their chair to raise the barrier; the rounds they made of the estate were more a matter of stretching their legs. Orquídea started by putting them into uniform: the tight-fitting black suits and berets gave them an air more comical than threatening. There was an attempt to have them armed with pistols, but money was short and, in any case, they didn’t know how to use them. Pepper spray became the preferred option. The first week, two guards ended up in the sick bay with their faces burning from the effects of the new security device, one due to a practical joke played by a colleague, and the other from having pointed the can in the wrong direction while testing how far the spray reached.
They had soon caught two petty criminals trying to burgle an apartment in Building 24. The circumstances couldn’t have been more compromising: the petty thieves had broken in in broad daylight, armed with a screwdriver, stinking of Resistol glue, and had gotten stuck in the internal wiring duct while making their escape. It was more a rescue attempt than an arrest. They were left sitting for hours, in full view, surrounded by a patrol of the reinvigorated security squad. The verdict was almost unanimous: the residents felt safer after the professionalization of the forces of law and order.
To mark the end of Orquídea’s term in office, Perdumes organized a farewell dinner. He gave her a token of appreciation, specially commissioned for the occasion: a bronze sculpture on a marble base, with a gold plaque inscribed with Orquídea’s name and the dates. The statue was of an ambiguously sculpted man, leaning forwards, in a position of great strain. With both hands, he was pushing an enormous sphere. The man represented movement. The sphere, impassivity. The New was still far off but Orquídea López had been the piston chosen to set the ball rolling toward it.
6
During the following periods, the outline of Villa Miserias’ electoral ritual was more clearly defined. By means of signals and coded language, Perdumes encouraged or frustrated aspirations. He investigated the most intimate affairs of the candidates. It soon became obvious that the least fruitful way to participate was by demonstrating any intention to do so. Those who put themselves forward independently were subtly destroyed. Rumors would begin to circulate about their habits and proclivities: one left his dog’s urine lying on the living-room floor for days; another had borrowed money from his mother-in-law to get a hair transplant. The rumors were never completely destructive: they were warnings about what would happen if the person in question didn’t desist. He should go about his normal life and simply wait for the appropriate signal.
A dichotomous formula came to be the norm. Its plurality was based on a moving axis, situated more or less halfway between the two candidates. Generally, the contrasts were basic: man/woman, young/old, good-looking/plain. In this way, an impression of difference was transmitted. The reality was that the following two-year periods were almost interchangeable: the same person in a different format. The estate was on a steady course.
At the end of their term, they all received the same statue, with slight updates. The hill on which the figure stood went progressively upward and the sphere advanced a little farther. It was a matter of creating sufficient inertia for it to move unaided, flattening every obstacle that came in its path.
7
The day he decided to stand as a candidate, Max Michels dressed slowly and deliberately. While he was searching every corner of the apartment for his socks, he came across a thick, leather-bound volume on the study table. The night before, he’d been consulting it until the early hours, unable to focus. Irrespective of the content, the shadowy outline of a female figure would begin to form on the paper. Although Max had attempted to quash it by turning the page, each one seemed identical to the last, and the form had gathered new strength to return to torment him.
He aborted his exhaustive search for the socks when he noticed they were in his hand. While he was putting them on, he tried to return to the world of shadows, but a silent voice cut in: Shut up, you moron! Better get a move on before you change your mind. Or don’t you have the balls?
It was no moment for confronting the Many, so he opted for taking refuge in continuing his recollection of the situation he’d so often gone through in the past. He was well aware that the beginning of Villa Miserias’ contemporary history was marked by the sacrifice of Severo Candelario, the only previous person to register his candidacy without Selon Perdumes’ permission. It could even be said everything that had happened before consisted of the construction of a two-level altar. One cosmetic and visible; the other deep and intangible.
The former involved the introduction of the relevant modifications. The majority of buildings already had discussion groups on Quietism in Motion, but the most stalwart had taken things to levels never imagined by its creator, particularly in relation to the degree of scientific precision involved. To differentiate themselves from the many other failed ideologues, they clothed the theory in an almost irrefutable dogma: mathematics. They understood that if one starts from the appropriate assumptions, it is possible to come to the most implacable conclusions. Their minds were like scrap metal balers fed by a particular configuration of reality, and compressing it into a series of theorems that, in essence, proved the same thing: individual destiny can be based on nothing other than a person’s abilities. Hypnotized by the demonstrable, they didn’t realize that their path transformed the very conception of ability. They were like children who create imaginary friends only to then blindly follow their commands. By means of indecipherable algebraic progressions, they reified the virtue of a lack of scruples. From then onward, those who put their own interests first would be the ones to stand out from the crowd. Mathematics expunged any last vestige of guilt. In fact, they turned it on its head: the greater the determination to excel, the greater the benefit to those others. The new common goal was to ensure the cake continued to grow forever. Talking about sharing it out became a poor-taste anachronism.
The process started with the individualization of the service charges, calculated on the base of the coefficient. The apartments on upper floors paid a higher percentage as it required more energy to pump the water from the cistern up there, the gas had to run through more yards of piping, and they were less afflicted by the
