Empty Spaces

By Lucas Rodríguez Schwarzenberg

(Spanish version)

That night shouldn’t have had anything weird at all. I was chilling, turning the PS4 on, getting that last slice of Papa John’s pizza. Taking the product for a try in a slow and quite fashion. I saw the smoke go up to the roof with those snake-like twists and turns it likes to do. I find it pretty. Once i thought of making an exhibition with just pictures of the smoke rising towards the ceiling. I took a couple of photos, with the analog camera and all, but then I lost interest, you know? Maybe I’ll pick it up again someday. My method for when someone came to buy some was that he would let me know when he was near, about five minutes removed or crossing the street that leads to the park, so that i could go down like I went for a smoke. From the look of it in TV and movies one might think it’s dangerous, but once you get to do it, you realize that selling weed by the La Reina, Las Condes and Provi axis, is damn easy. There are so many channels, so many social networks and so many high cunts finding out that they do not have enough left to smoke. When they arrive, we get in close together, so that it seems like we’ve known each other for ages and the paranoid old timers who live in the building don’t start to take notice. One who’s an ex-army men came out once to the door in his robe to tell me he had me I.D.’d. That freaked me out a bit, but other than that, I’ve never had any serious problems.

Alfredo’s hands were shaking when he came in the apartment: at one point he leaned against the door and the door started banging against the wall. I’m not kidding you, the marks of the handle are still up there in the wall, those small holes. I already noticed he was weird by his texts: his first message, after asking me how i was doing (who the fuck cares about the health and wellbeing of the dealer? As long as he’s alive, ti’s good enough), he asks me if I «sold marijuana cigarettes». Know what I mean? And the profile picture he had: full body, standing next to one of these electric bikes, huge helmet, elbow and knee pads covered in reflective lights, beige cargo shorts, the way too cautious Dad standard uniform. Most of my weedheads I know from school, so it’s an equal footed relationship. They’re always fighting me over the prices, for hours at a time. The fuckers always have me sweating bullets, most of all because we always end up back on my starting wages. But here comes this loaded middle aged guy announcing that he had thirty lukas to spend. He could have almost said Hello, my name is Alfredo and I’m here to be ripped the fuck off. I thought of handing him half a gram, made up some shit like the market was going under and the Uruguayans were on strike and some other assorted shit. In my experience, the middle agers who come to buy always show up because they have an event, an alumni reunion for the 35th year out of school, those where one got a cabin in the Rapel Lake, another meat and a cook that really knows how to roast a lamb, while the quiet cunts like Alfredo always end being fucked up and left in charge of scoring the drug, said in that same way and with those naughty child gestures: lowering their voices, giggling nervously, looking over their shoulders as if their parents were going to come in and scold them. But our poor Alfredo had a panic attack and ended up looking for weed: in his innocent logic it still counted as a drug. The reason had to be that or your average midlife crisis weekend, that witch cauldron of a plan, stirred up with grass, booze, a motel and a lover. Although between the bald head, belly and that little emasculated voice, Alfredo did not seem to me of the ilk that seduces the recently divorced mom from her daughter’s class, even less so the French teacher. He seemed to me more of the scrupulous type: high class escort, natural blonde, the kind that doesn’t have the need to fuck old timers but does it anyway because she likes it. One so professional that it even writes you a bill for services rendered, something that you could later deduct as a company expense. That i did get right: Alfredo had a company. With all the rest I misjudged him, badly.

I find it very strange to think of him now. Not so much because of how he ended up, but because of what led him to that. And to come across me. Poor Alfredo couldn’t help but be himself all the time. I remember that I made him sit in the cheap armchair I had for my clients, the one with the slash in the armrest that I cut open with the pizza knife the time I went off on a bad trip and took it upon myself to bring in a more anarchic environment to the apartment. Still I never managed to turn it around from the place where my grandfather lived all his crazy-ass life. I tried to take out some furniture, bring down those awfully Nazi metallic eagles and instead hang up some posters of the bands I like, as if to say that in here now lives a crazy motherfucker, instead of an old millionaire who never moved because he was cheap as fuck. Crazy old man. No wonder my mum came out like that if… fuck, sorry, I lost my train of thought. You want to know about Alfredo. It’s just… I don’t know, I feel like his life has intertwined with mine. There’s something about those stories that corners you. Suffering a tragedy forces a meaning to any life, no matter how empty it may be. Tragedies like his, nobody goes looking out for them. Poor Alfredo. And here I was thinking that he wanted to bang the French teacher. I’m ashamed of myself, I swear I am.

So, I have the client coughing like he had caught tuberculosis after the hit he gave to the joint and all that which, by the way, was the first of his life, he confessed to me. I didn’t believe it either. 52 years and nothing. Utter madness. It’s almost like getting to be a virgin at that age. He explained to me that it was because he had had some overprotective parents who drilled in his head the idea that smoking or drinking would make him dumb, short and ugly. As I listened to them, I didn’t ended up being dumb, he said, or something like that. I didn’t get that it was meant to be a joke. It cracks me up now. Everyone has told me that Alfredo had such an amazingly ironic sense of humour. I didn’t get to know him that way. From those ogre parents he went directly to a patient and loving wife who accepted him as he came, with all his shyness and chastity. A couple of years later his daughter came into the picture, with whom he was able to reinterpret all his traumas and shortcomings towards the path of being an exemplary father. I see it this way: Alfredo’s life was a straight, smooth and clear road. He a driver who never exceeds the speed limit and is not distracted by anything, no matter how interesting the landscape gets. Compared to that, I’m a flipper ball bouncing around, only motivation to shoot as many lights as I can. Alfredo told me all those things between one cough and the next. At that time i didn’t get where he was trying to get, so I just told tell him that he had to let himself go, hit the joint and follow the path the smoke clears. Unsensitive, terribly, but what would I know: if you take away the tragic end, his life story is so, so nice. What I got around to do was to light the joint back again (my lighter only listens to my own fingers) and give him some tips om how to properly hit it. It event occurred to me to correct him in the way he was holding it. He held it like how the spoons are held by toddlers. I put the joint back in his hand the right way, even separated his fingers one by one. When he got it right, I told him not to move and I snap a picture. It was amazing. There was so much smoke in the room that it came out blurred, ghost like, but a ghost who knew how to hold his joints. If they hadn’t seized my phone I would show it to you.

I know what you’re going to say, that it’s a good mechanism for locating the trauma and unlocking it (equip myself was the word, wasn’t it?), but i’m still not comfortable with putting myself at Alfredo’s level. I just don’t find it fair. I’m not gonna say my life’s been a water slide, either. I don’t know for how long having a child kept a smile on my mother’s face, but it wasn’t more than five years. Three even. From then on, ass-face all the way. If it were up to her, she’d send me to the coal mines to earn my meals with my own sweat. Keep in mind that one of her «classic jokes» was that they should allow child labor again. Quite a humorist, this little mother of mine. The luck I had that the labour inspection visit matched the first day that she took me to «get to know the family’s trade». The inspector sees me in the corner, cutting sheets with a cardboard knife in one hand while balancing the boiling teapot in the other, my mum three walls away, signing documents and authorizing payments, and he almost shat himself. The old man asked for my age.  Just turned ten, I told him, proud of my brand new two-digit existence. His eyes started to melt behind his hard-rimmed glasses.  Almost knocked down my mum’s door when he came in with me hanging by the arm. She broke down into explanations and excuses to justify my presence in the shed. She even said it was my idea, that I wanted to see what the adults were up to when they left the house. If she had had a younger inspector on her trail, skinny and shy, one of those who fall easily if a classy blonde girl manages to look at them with that pair of blue-gray cold as ice stones, she would have been of the hook. What she got instead was one of those hard-nosed, gray-haired moustached old men with a secretarial position in the union, a smooth, cold-blooded Potemkin battleship, with an unyielding hatred for blonde folk. Apart from fining her for a thousand other troubling shit, the old man warned her that he was going to come back one of these days as to check that she had applied the changes, and that if he caught this kid (me) here again, he would close the whole deal down. With those exact words he said it. The scolding my grandfather gave her, was heard from there to Jupiter. That’s how I managed to get rid of my share of child labor, but in exchange my old mum started to hate me three times as much. I had made her look bad in front of her dad. And that was the deadliest of sins, so she spent the next few years taking it out on me. It wasn’t that she would hit me or anything: my grandfather had raised her anyway, so no matter how much she hated me, decorum came before feelings; no matter what the feelings were. What she did was to feed me this awful food (some half-thawed fish croquettes with a box purée that was worth about 1/10 the value of her wines) and the same every single day. A friend who’s a medical student told me that must have contributed to the fact that I don’t look my age. My old mother came back late to the house and if she ever spoke to me, it was to ask me about my grades. There i was, dying to talk about the football match or the pokemon card that i had traded from a friend, but she only cared about the tests. Of course I sucked: between the fact that I wasn’t interested in anything and the feeling that getting good grades was doing just what the witch wanted me to, there never was room for anything else.

The only fond memories I have of that time are the three years my mum got together with Marcos’ dad. His name’s not important: he was an old cunt. But anyway, there’s no such a thing as being nice and content at the same time that you’re hooking up with someone like my mother. What matters is that the old man moved into our house about a week later and with him came Marcos, my new stepbrother. I guess that guy was the most beloved relative I’ve ever had, he being a surrogate notwithstanding. Maybe that’s why: the blood that runs through my family’s veins is tainted. I am sure that if my great-grandfather had stayed in Germany for the Second World War, he would have ended up as an advisor to the Führer. But Marcos came from somewhere else, he also had only one parent and one that was a huge pain in the ass. A baldie with dollar signs for eyes who’s only trick was to talk about his Audis and how hard it had been for him to bring them over from abroad. Just like my old mother hated me, he hated Marcos. Hated him because he was born a humanist, reader and leftist, but more than anything else, because he had a thick, endless mane of hair (it’s horse hair, he said) that would make his dad go gray if he had anything left to turn gray. Petty, utterly petty. But that’s the way it is with the adults who never grew up: it’s not that they got stuck at 23, they get stuck at 12 years of age. Marcos was lovely, although he didn’t care much for me at first. He was 18, coursing hist first year of uni and interested only in the practical applications of the Communist Manifesto, while I at the time was a prepubescent asshole who slept and woke up with the PS4 pad in his grip. But little by little we began to know each other and to make sense out of each other: he saw my mum scold me and I saw him argue with his old man. From there we went on to share throwaway jokes, watch movies together and after an evening in which I went into his room to ask him for a pencil sharpener without knocking on the door and caught him smoking the tinniest of joints, get high together. Everything opened up from there: our parents would arrive at night, if they didn’t went to a motel where they could fuck without the background noise of my PS4 or the progressive rock of Marcos, so we would lie on the grass, the joint passing back and forth under the blue sky, or in the kitchen, where we would prepare some burned up sausages in order to face the comedown. How we laughed. Everything could be funny when we were high as a kite. Even the saddest things we were able to peel like a banana until we realized how absurd they really were. Fuck, Marcos was funny. He could turn anything into a joke. He said that first was the humour and then everything else. One of his favorite impressions was Karl Marx… ridiculous, obviously. What the fuck did I know at 15 who that guy was, but Marcos made it so funny. Either that or his weed was the strong type. That lasted for three years until my old mother got tired of Marcos’ father and threw him out of the house. She woke us all up with her screams of Lazy! Lazy bald cunt!. It turned out that his company was at a loss and for my mother that was unforgivable. Never mind the Asian crisis, the markets flow or the changes in technology, the only possible explanation was that he was getting sloppy, and she wasn’t there to carry anybody’s load; she had enough with me. The next day my mum came back from her office, turned off my TV and confirmed the suspicion that those years had been more of an exception than the norm. I would have felt more sorry if it weren’t for, 1) by that time i was smoking up to three times a day, and 2) because Marcos had partnered with the great-great-granddaughter of i don’t remember which one of those oligarchs from the times of the colony, a loony bitch with more pairs of shoes than friends. He gave up everything to be with her; he even cut his Horse Hair. Last I heard was that they got married. I came across a picture of the wedding as i was tearing through a Mercurio at the waiting room of the dentist. I sent Marcos a text telling him that I felt very happy for him and that I was going to smoke one in his honor. He answered me three days later with that thumb up emoticon.

I know I lost my train of thought again. But I swear there’s a connection: I told Alfredo the same story. Why? I have no idea. That’s how it is when you’re smoking with someone. The defenses get lowered. You start telling things that you wouldn’t tell anyone and that no one would give a damn about listening. But that’s the magical effect of weed. It kind of brings your heart closer to the other person’s heart, or something like that. I was gonna keep talking. I could have talked for days. But Alfredo had started to weep. At first I thought that he was flying high at an impressive level. There was a lot of smoke in the living room: maybe it had entered his eyes. Add to that the fact that his body didn’t matched what was going on in his face, I don’t know if I’m being clear. Instead of bending over, with his hands on his face and his shoulders shivering because they don’t know how to take charge of what’s going on, Alfredo was sitting motionless, his hands resting on the armchair, his legs stretched out. Inert from the neck down, but with all his life happening into his face. He had the hardest of times putting words together when I asked him if he was okay. I saw the air coming out of his mouth, push the smoke around his head, but I didn’t understand him at all. Then he stopped trying, sighed and apologized to me.

Now that I think about it, I should have taken a little more control of the situation. Asked him if he wanted to lie down for a while, bring him a glass of water. Maybe even call him an Uber. Instead, I told him to stay calm and I turned the joint back on. I took a hit and approached it to him. Alfredo stared at me. He asked me if I hadn’t thought about ending it all, or if I didn’t want to put an end to everything. I don’t remember the exact words. Maybe he didn’t even use the word end, but that was the intention. I replied something like of course, every day, every time I get something wrong or I get wacked in the PS4. That last one, the PS4 one, I know I said it because Alfredo was staring at me, in that way when someone nails it right on the head. Tears no longer ran down his face, but somehow you got the feeling that he was still crying. Now that I know about the accident that involved his family and everything, I think he had actually been crying for years, living while crying and vice versa. 

Between the two of us we started putting words together until we arrived at the idea of suicide. We didn’t get to that word precisely. I mean, who the fuck announces something like that in real life? But that was the idea. We had a clear intention, only that instead of having it in a single term, we had it disassembled into a bunch of smaller words, so that it would be easier to manipulate. Alfredo pointed at the pizza knife, partly stained with cheese, tomato sauce and oregano. Between that moment and seeing him lying with his veins sputtering blood, I can only remember a couple of things: he asked my permission to take the knife and when he did himself in, he screamed. He howled in pain until he could no longer do so. I knew right away that I wouldn’t be able to do so. I thought it was a single slice of the knife, a quick ssshhuuuuuiit, fast and painless and then it was all over. But the scene had been horrific. I had only enough willpower to take the knife, look at it, feel like I was in front of a rabid dog or bear or whatever, and let it go. After that I don’t know if I fainted or just stood still.

Between the weed, the money and the age difference Alfredo and me had, it must have seemed quite obvious what had happened. The ex-military neighbor called the cops and said that he had heard screams, so after a while i had them kicking the door down. From then I guess I operated on auto pilot for the next 48 hours. Maybe I even framed myself. Who knows. I actually felt pretty guilty. No idea how they came to the conclusion that it wasn’t me but Alfredo himself who had done him in. It must have been a combination of me being too shocked to look like a murderer, Alfredo’s background (53 years, impeccable behavior, lost his wife and daughter in a road accident a little over a year ago) and those TV-type things like the direction of the cut and the position of the body and I don’t know what else. They ended up giving me a fine for micro traffic. I’m in psychological treatment here with you, telling the same story every week so that the suicide hypothesis continues to sound right. And I was left under the tutelage of my old mother, who if once used to consider me a failure, the member of the successful Rottschwein family who didn’t last more than a month in any career and who has never had a decent job, now I’m no different from a crippled leg or a congenital deformity, a problem she can’t get rid of no matter how hard she tries. The apartment remains seized as criminal evidence. I understand that if it goes on like this for a couple more months, the state allows them to sell it to the highest bidder, with my PS4 and all. I really hope they do so. I’m not going back in there.

I think Alfredo was capable of realizing something that takes a lot to assume, which is that from a certain point forward, things just do not improve. They always tell you that tomorrow is a new day and you don’t know what’s going to happen, but the truth is that for some people it is enough. Even if you get up with all the confidence in the world, in the long run you will still realize that no matter how hard you try, you have already missed the horizon. It’s extremely frowned upon to come to that conclusion. We see it as giving up, and nothing worse than giving up in a society of winners. I think that from Alfredo’s perspective, I was already at that point. I had landed on it calmly with the idea of being locked up in that perverse apartment selling weed. He must have assumed that someone like me could have shown him how to give up. But when he met me, he realized it wasn’t that easy. You don’t even realize it when you got stuck in this kind of last stop. Getting to the end of the line requires a last effort, just when strength is what you are most lacking. It’s going to sound sick, but Alfredo, what happened to him, his tragedy, made me realize that in order to surrender and to advance in life, you need the same kind of energy. Of course it’s easier said than done, but I feel that if I can put aside the bullshit, stop seeing the faces of my mother, my grandfather, even of Alfredo in every corner, I will surely get my life back on track. Maybe I’ll even go back to school. I’d like to learn how to properly take photographs. Did I mention that I have the idea of taking photographs of the smoke of… Right, I’ve told you already. Well, that. Be able to show the world that there is more than one meaning to things, but sometimes you just don’t see them. Like, Look, it’s smoke, but it can also be a message. I’ll start small, snapping pictures in the street, show them to friends, upload them to my social media. Set up an exhibition someday. One that includes the photo of Alfredo, if I can recover it. Show that where there was a beat fifty something man, I saw someone who for a while managed to live a beautiful life.

I’d like to do that. I hope that I’ll get to do it someday.