The other building to escape the omnipresent gray was farthest from Plaza del Orden, the social and geographical center of Villa Miserias. Despite being on the margins, it immediately caught the eye. The two façades visible from within the estate displayed an intervention by a young artist, Pascual Bramsos: a paint-rollered giant composed of hundreds of silhouettes of miniscule men. The figure was in free fall, having received a blow from an abacus thrown by a chameleon brandishing a catapult above its head. Bramsos was intelligent enough to start with the colossus, so the board members thought the allegory of union it transmitted funny. Then, working the whole night, he created the homicidal chameleon. It was well before noon when the order to return the building to its gray normality was issued. Bramsos armed the neighbors, and a hail of eggs rained down on the man charged with the eradication of the work. He only got as far as castrating the giant with a brushstroke to the groin. The author of the work decided to leave it that way as a finishing touch. Perdumes used to amuse himself looking out on it each morning when he got out of bed.
The most eloquent thing that could be said about the estate’s residents was that the sum of their parts exceeded, in every sense, their whole. Having pursued imperfect Utopias for some years, they tended to air their bureaucratic frustrations by giving their opinion on anything and everything, just to have something new to spout off about. After Building B, they started on the one with lowest overall coefficient: its influence was close almost non-existent. It was also the only one to have three separate residents’ groups with pretensions to legitimacy, but which never sent delegates to the general assembly.
11
Such was, in broad outline, the general panorama of Villa Miserias when the schoolmaster Severo Candelario became the hinge that would close the door to the past and allow in the whirlwind of dust still blowing at the time of Max Michels’ decision. Before leaving his apartment, he looked contemptuously at his friend Pascual Bramsos’ painting hanging on the wall. For a moment he believed the frame was shaking, that it was trying to detach itself, as if catapulted by some irresistible force. Before this could happen, he took hold of it with both hands and carefully placed it on the floor. For the last time, he stood directly in front of the phrase written on the wall, hidden by the work. The fact was, Max was about to take a quantum leap toward discovering just how big he was.
As he set out, Max weighed up the situation, taking into consideration the reasons that, in their moment, had been behind Severo Candelario’s actions. In comparison to Max, who was aware—precisely thanks to Candelario's misfortune—of the insurrection involved in his decision, the teacher had lacked the necessary guile to understand the magnitude of his actions. Candelario had been able to appreciate the texture of the details but not the whole picture. He’d seen the chance to add his voice to something that worked, and so had decided to take an active part in it. His enthusiasm had prevented him from correctly interpreting the obstacles put in his way when he asked for the registration form, or the fact that he was the only male candidate without a mustache in living memory. His campaign had been anything but radical; he helped carry the old ladies’ shopping bags, asked the children about their favorite superheroes. At several years’ distance, the outcome of the story rested on a single detail, his electoral slogan: “With your constant help we’ll get better and better.” It was based on pedagogic principles such as the importance of each cell playing its part for the good of the whole and the notion that untiring repetition leads to perfection. Without realizing, he was attacking the very foundations of Quietism in Motion.
Candelario was in the habit of taking things calmly. Years of teaching had taught him that the task of molding souls required perseverance, a quality clearly expressed by his most treasured possession: a growing collection of yearly albums of black and white photos. On each odd-numbered page, a photograph was pasted in exactly the same place. Always the same image, taken every day at 7:19 in the morning, from the same angle. Even when he caught pneumonia, he managed to persuade the doctor to allow him his daily expedition to photograph the tree growing in the green area behind his building.
He had begun to portray the tree when it was still a timid shoot. With the passage of time, it became a proud willow, weeping majestically in all directions. If adjacent photos were compared, it was impossible to see any differences. But then, with an expression of childish glee, Candelario would take the album in his hands and rapidly flick through the pages. The metamorphosis of the willow caused him a spasm of tenderness. With ant-like diligence, Candelario used to say, his camera had captured the unfolding of the tree’s soul. After taking his photograph, he would stand, rapturously contemplating the willow, hunting for a tangible difference from that other tree, portrayed the day before. His perpetual failure to find one left him in ecstasy. Then he would set off for school, ready to add a pinch of education to the young minds in his charge.
He was a man of singular ideas. After the years spent studying the great masters, what could he say that was new? It seemed to him blasphemy even to attempt it; the future was set in stone. This was the basis of his decision to join the march of Villa Miserias’ progress. It wasn’t that he considered that progress to be either appropriate or desirable, but rather it was as definitive as the development of the willow he venerated and he thought it a duty to add his modest abilities to the project. Without any greater pretensions than being a single heartbeat more in the pacemaker determining the pulse of his community, Candelario put down his name for the Villa Miserias presidential election. When he was leaving the administrative office, his candidacy duly registered, Juana Mecha welcomed him to the contest with, “Skinned chickens had feathers once.” Candelario took this as an unmistakably good omen.
Neither Perdumes nor the members of the board feared for a moment that Severo Candelario would be able to beat the usual pair of throwaway candidates. They initially took his registration as an act of insolence. However, when they heard his slogan and gauged his potential for causing a breach, they resolved to destroy him without mercy.
“With your constant help, we’ll get better and better” constituted a threat on a number of fronts. The word “help” had been exiled from the collective lexicon. It was an anachronism. Time and again, it had been proven how useless it was to pull someone out of the swamp when he was determined to be there. The slime ended by soiling even the rescuer. This couldn’t be allowed in a community of high-flying individuals. Moreover, “we’ll get better and better” suggested a collective enterprise. The effort needed to get across the message of the individual’s responsibility in his destiny had been enormous…It was heresy to allude to their general impact. Candelario was a puppet of himself who could be ignored. But not his slogan. That same night, they asked Joel Taimado to start proceedings in the process of destroying the schoolmaster.
Candelario was so absorbed in his new mission that he didn’t notice his neighbors’ strange glances or the almost undetectable pauses before they returned his greetings. It was his wife who first made him understand something was wrong. On the second floor of their building, a young insurance salesman shared an apartment with a colleague. Almost every morning, he would take the same minibus as Señora Candelario to the metro station on their way to work. He began to leave a few minutes later, just in time for Clara Candelario to see him get to the main road as she set out through the asphyxiating exhaust fumes of the pedestrian walkway. One day, to clear up her concerns, she decided to wait for him. During their entire walk, the young man spoke on his phone to a client he’d woken up to remind that the policy on his old scooter was due to run out in four months. Once aboard the minibus, he refused to let Señora Candelario pay for them both—something they normally took turns in doing—despite the fact that he was clinging onto an external grab rail with just one foot on the first step. With his free hand, he managed to pass his crumpled bill to the driver, who was annoyed at having to give him change. Each time the bus stopped, he would get off to let new passengers on, without losing his place. When they arrived at the metro, he was the first to disembark and immediately disappeared into the station entrance. His neighbor saw no more of him.
Señora Candelario lost no time in discovering what
