Melodrome Read online

  Now, down on the plain, the backroads zigzag between estuaries connected by canals. On one side of the ditches there are reeds; on the other, vegetables and babayu beds. Although there is spontaneous activity – the skimming flight of ketterlings, the leap of a toad among wild lilies, reeds wavering against the sky’s pink blush, the wake of an otter – none of this dissipates the impression that the Clearseers have imposed a design on nature, in order to represent the regulative forces of the universe and serve as a support for meditation. At least that’s what Suano says, and Lerena agrees with him. But where did they get this idea? In any case, their meditation is neither very broad nor deep: any thought the landscape might prompt is mangled by the effects of the kayfra that they have been smoking continually. In Munava’s realm, residential planning, community production, rational logistics, mafia-style finance, a gambling monopoly controlled by a sect, and the sect’s hermetic, intoxicating dogma, are all layered one over the other with a stomach-turning efficiency. The revealed law that Munava embodies is manifest in the region’s grey, almost elegant prosperity, like a sunken desire barely rippling the surface of still water.

  For the moment, however, the travellers are fairly indifferent to Munava’s regime.

  The density of the atmosphere, on the other hand, is exhausting them.

  And yet they keep on going, because it’s not the mincar transporting them, or Lerena’s foot on the accelerator, but the manifold vehicle of action itself. They are unaware of their growing enthusiasm. The risk of failure is distracting Lerena and making Suano concentrate. They still haven’t realised what a great time they’re having: Suano with Lerena; Lerena with her sincerity; and both of them with the unknowability of the outcome. They are a little more aware that as long as she’s on her best behaviour and he sticks to his guns, this purgatory will not lead to a diminution of pleasure,

  nor to the death of a nascent passion,

  as anyone who has resisted the call

  of rapid satisfaction knows,

  but, on the contrary, to a growth of desire,

  which is in itself a tremendous delight.

  The only thing preventing them from delighting in the delay is fear. Fear that all their perseverance might serve only to put the money back into circulation.

  They need to loosen up. Deep down, Lerena believes that they will be entitled to love when they have proved their courage. Suano is unaware of this.

  But now the path on which they have been set brings them to a village square.

  There’s a market, but it’s not a market day like any other. Among the stalls selling preserves and vegetables, or papetex garments and minbots for the house and farm produced by workers’ cooperatives, among the gambling games and lottery kiosks, a commotion has broken out and overwhelmed the security forces. A band of gangsters was collecting protection money, as usual, when a squad from the anti-extortion brigade appeared, a very rare occurrence, given that gangsters and brigadiers alike belong to the Clearseers. Punches, chases, truncheon blows, blasts of airbike exhaust, fragments of bottles and casings, cries, a stall kicked over, a torn shawl. Doctors, stretcher-bearers and distraught onlookers complete the lacklustre cast.

  But the thing is, the gangsters are all extras. The blood is paint.

  The scene is a Simulacrum of Crisis Containment organised by the local office for the management of the region. Although the tumult soon dies down, and is followed by applause, hugging and cork-popping, there are people who have fainted, and others who are bruised. An exasperated monitor is yelling: Where is Coreline? A girl fans herself with a piece of cardboard. A guard with a megaphone informs the public that in the next set of drills they will practise dealing with a variety of critical situations. That’s it. Sellers and buyers are already forming groups, sitting in circles, holding hands, ready to immerse themselves as one in harmonic breathing.

  Although she has a faint idea of how this system works, Lerena can’t quite get her head around it. With a swing in her step, she approaches a coordinator and asks him what’s going on. I have to process the incident data now, says the man; I’ll explain in a few minutes.

  Botilecue points to an old lady who is slumped sideways on a bench: Boss, that lady’s having a heart attack. The woman sits up and looks at him mockingly.

  You two don’t get it, do you? says the coordinator, prodding Botilecue with the barrel of a fake handgun; why don’t you tell me what the petch you’re after? Suano replies: I think you know that, my friend. The lady here has a present for Dona Munava.

  Come with me, both of you, another guy says abruptly.

  He takes them down a street away from the square to a children’s clothing store that the Clearseers have just raided. If this too was a simulacrum, they weren’t averse to smashing shelves to make it look convincing. What happened? But what happened here? Lerena asks before Suano can silence her. This was a secret gambling den, that’s what happened, they are told by an official in blue overalls. It’s the eleventh case in thirteen days, according to the prosecutor; fifty people have been charged, including Led Broguco’s mother. No idea who you’re talking about, says Lerena. That I don’t believe, young lady, however ignorant you may be. Well, there’s a lot of money in play, Suano says cooperatively. There’s always too much money; that’s why it never means anything, says the man with the fake gun.

  Silence. The whole dramatic set-up is waiting to judge Lerena’s response. There must be about twenty-five extras in the room. All watching her. With moral support from a determined Suano, supporting his backside against a counter, Lerena withstands this inscrutable onslaught for several minutes. Suddenly a guy comes in from the street, shoulders his way through the crowd – his broad but angular body entirely covered in beige imitation leather, like a walking sofa – and bursts out laughing, genuinely enough. He takes Lerena and Suano by an arm each and leads them up a metal stairway to a mezzanine. The others remain behind, below, like figurines in a historical museum. At the far end of the mezzanine, there is another set of stairs, made of concrete, descending into a basement. On one wall of the basement, in a niche, a candle burns in front of the inlaid image of a tree. When the leather-clad man touches the treetop, a wall-hanging beside the niche opens like a door. They proceed along a wide passageway. This secrecy reassures Lerena; Suano finds it ridiculous; wherever it is they’re going, he thinks, they could just as well get there via the street. He’s right: after climbing one last ramp, they reach the dressing rooms of the village theatron.

  This is probably the theatron in Cordilen, at last. The exhausting roundabout route of the last few days seems to have brought them to the destination that they were forbidden to approach directly.

  Shaken by the rushed march, Lerena asks Suano if this whole show has been put on to confuse her. What show? he asks. All this, she says and reaches out to him, falling behind. To his slight regret, he doesn’t take her hand, but replies: Don’t be a nong, and the word that he used, and his regret, awaken a tenderness in him. Meanwhile, the guard’s annoying paw directs them into a hallway. At the far end there is a door. They step out into a paved courtyard enclosed by the back walls of old houses and the apse of the theatre.

  A courtyard, yes. A dimly lit place: old, calm, shoddily sombre, with an orange tree planted in a garden bed, and five or six small metal kegs, which no doubt serve as seats; in fact, a woman is sitting on one.

  She’s a sturdy woman, wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt and brown linen shorts; her legs are unshaved; on her feet, rubber thongs. She looks up at the newcomers, and her face has the smooth pallor of magnolia and marble tombstones. She sweeps back her blonde hair, which is starting to go grey; and, the better to look over the rims of her glasses, pushes them down to the end of her nose, where there is a pimple, which she squeezes briefly, unselfconsciously, like someone whose merit is so well established no foible can make a dent in it. Her eyebrows are straight, her eyes lime green, and she smells of smoke.

  She’s peeling potatoe
s, and although she sets the bowl of peel aside, she doesn’t invite the newcomers to take a seat.

  There’s a seam in the air between them and the woman. Botilecue is exasperated by Lerena’s devotional swoon. Only eagerness to pay what is due might give her the strength to snap out of it. But Munava speaks first:

  What have you come to ask of me, cousin?

  The primordial voice flows over them, smoothing and scorching their bodies like hot sand.

  Lerena faints.

  It’s genuine.

  Maintaining his composure, Suano crouches down to revive her. But a gesture from Munava is enough to make him stand aside, and almost immediately Lerena comes to and gets up. She totters, but stands unaided. Even if it was hypnotically induced, this climax of hysteria leaves Suano speechless.

  What have you come to ask of me? repeats Munava, and the two thanksgivers feel as though her voice is choking them.

  Bowed down, as if leaning into a powerful wind, Lerena replies that she has come to thank the Dona for the stroke of great luck that she had after their chance encounter, and then she goes into the details that we already know. Halfway through the story, Munava points at her with the potato-peeling knife: That’s right, cousin, I remember pretty clearly seeing you in that lift. But how, Lerena’s gaze inquires, how is that possible?

  Because in our dominions, cousin, remembering is a diamond cup adorned with fans of gold.

  Suano blinks. He realises straight away that it will be hard to counterattack with the same degree of eloquence. Munava is miss and hit, threat and promise, protection and damage, all so thoroughly blended the palate can distinguish no single ingredient. Shaken up together, Lerena and Suano are intermixing too.

  I have brought something I would like to give you for your people, Lerena declares, because I owe you a tremendous debt. Opening her backpack, she feels for the bundle of panoramic bitcards. Chsst, cousin, what kind of debt are we talking about? A debt of courtesy, madam. Munava rubs the top of one foot: Courtesy? Look, cousin, at judgement time, you will be held to account for each word spoken idly. For a word to be truthful, it must be divined from silence.

  But you’re talking, aren’t you? Lerena points out. What do you want me to do? Get down on my knees?

  Munava considers the implied accusation of arrogance. She insists: The thing is, cousin, silence has no meaning in itself; but speaking plainly is not the same as keeping quiet. Lerena clicks her tongue. Suano takes the opportunity to intervene: Yes, Dona, but using silence as a power is no part of sincerity.

  Almost before he has finished speaking, Munava straightens her torso, raises her hands to her chest, and tilting her face to the fragment of sky that crowns the courtyard, sings:

  I am the one who paints the grape

  Then I paint its colour out

  The one who dries the green stick

  And makes the dry stick sprout

  Stick or dick? It’s hard to tell. Rising from that violet, delicate voice, acetylene dragonflies crackle and burn out in the air.

  Dona Munava has reverted to the famous singer Dielsi Munava. Although she no longer wears mascara, she cries as if to make it run. Then she sings a little more.

  It’s a masquerade and a sacrament. The song colonises the courtyard, and for anyone within earshot it is like being pulled from a river, with tongs, and left to dry in a solar glow. Although he can’t help being overwhelmed, Suano tells himself that this is a counterfeit miracle. Lerena takes refuge in her old personality, the executive manager. She says:

  Dona, I believe that the soul has accounts to keep, and sings better when the books are balanced.

  That’s true, says Munava, without the slightest inflection.

  Botilecue feels a knot tightening in his stomach: this battle will not be over soon, for both women are champions of manipulation. One is refusing to live or to let live until she has proven her will to repay; the other lives to prove that her indifference comes from a higher power.

  Munava has lit a kayfra joint. The smoke is a message to the foreigners, telling them just how filthy, worn out, cowed and lost they are. Increasingly fierce, the Dona suggests that since the money fell into Lerena’s lap by chance, she should keep it until the sky gives her a better reason to be grateful.

  Ah, Suano jumps in, so you don’t believe in God, but you think he might be useful occasionally.

  Blowing the smoke of the spliff to one side, the Dona replies: There are no limits to what can be done, mister; but we can speak only of what can be spoken of.

  Then she sends for an assistant, an older woman who smells of face cream even at a distance, and asks her to find lodgings for the visitors in an agapythium.

  As they are leaving, the Dona catches their attention with a psst. She reminds them that they came to Cordilen in a mincar. If it’s all right with you, says Lerena, we’ll leave it where it is. Okay? It doesn’t matter. Whether this is a ploy or a real renunciation, Suano is moved by her reply.

  The agapythia are collective dwellings that Munava has set up in former temples, brothels and factories taken over by the Clearseer brigades. In accordance with an ideology that is simple enough to decipher, their function is to forge communities based on meditation, sex and productive labour. They are financed by the fines that the anti-extortion forces extract from racketeers and mafiosi. The Clearseers maintain control over what is produced in the various agapythia, the machinery used, how the products are sold, and the distribution of the profits. The level of security is high, not because of the solid walls but because the inhabitants willingly keep each other under strict mutual surveillance; and yet there’s a way to feel free inside, which is to relinquish freedom of choice and personal opinion.

  Lerena needs, and urgently, an order of some kind; so she gives up her freedom of choice straight away. Suano doubts that a system like this can really order the soul. At the entrance to the agapythium where they have been sent an inscription reads: This is a multiflex workplace. From materials supplied by other agapythia, this one produces umbrellas. The workers cut the silkose into panels for the canopies, fit aquasensors and thermosensors into the shafts, and examine the rings, springs, ribs and tip cups, which have already been assembled by minbots. This results in callused fingers, since it is the norm to work without gloves, in direct contact with the materials. The rest of the time is chiefly spent in fornication to relax the body. Suano thinks that multiflex refers euphemistically to the round bed, a supposition that leaves Lerena puzzled and not a little shocked. But the bedrooms, it’s true, are nothing like cells; the fact that they only have three walls favours fluid coupling and a wide range of interactions from mutual caresses to concatenated or polygonal penetration.

  Neither Lerena nor Suano is shy or faint-hearted, but both are so unreconstructedly straight that the pansexual vibrations put them off sex altogether for the moment. The climate of licence affects them, unavoidably, but only as a foil; it favours the restoration of the erotic tension between them, a project that will require lengthy debate before it can be approved.

  Nevertheless, already something is promising to come undone, or threatening to release itself; and that something is sexual desire.

  Confined to the agapythium, they accept the work assigned to them and the company of their fellow workers; they join the common people.

  They resign themselves to waiting in a frenzy of activity. It doesn’t matter that they are submitting to Munava. At night, in their respective berths, they sleep like a pair of drunks. During the day, they take their places, ant-like, on the production line. The ascetic Suano considers freedom: what makes a person free? After three days, Lerena has worked so hard her whole body is stiff and her mind in anguish, and yet there’s a spark of joy in her heart, of freed, unconscious joy. Pain, she tells herself, is proof of work; it teaches something, and the glaring pain she feels is utterly new to her. She touches the cracked and hardened skin of her fingers, extracts a splinter of metal from her right hand, accepts the condescens
ion of the fraters when she fumbles in the workshop, and the cheerful obedience of the minbots. The sobbing that sometimes overcomes her only reaffirms her determination to wait.

  Through her, Suano learns that workers, too, acquire a surplus value: patience.

  It’s true that as she becomes more accepting, Lerena suffers a loss of desire, and thus of freedom to shape her future. But she is also ridding herself of anxiety and distress.

  She has stopped drugging herself with Quellax. Botilecue notices that this unburdening has given her greater psychic strength. Physically, of course, it has weakened her. Lerena is wasting away. She’s washing less often than before, making no effort to hide the bags under her eyes, and rarely combs her hair. He’s not going to point this out to her. He’s still not talking to her much, but not because of shyness, or professional scruples on his part. It’s because he is no longer just a travelling companion. Seeing Lerena so weak, he feels that he must be her protector, her saviour if it comes to that. The trip, he reflects, is beginning to take a very strange turn, which he declines to analyse. He is saving his analytical skills for their meetings with Munava.

  Every evening, at the lemon hour preceding dusk, they walk a hundred metres along a paved street, accompanied by guards. This is an obligation. The Dona is waiting for them in the theatron’s quiet courtyard. However exhausted Lerena feels after eight hours of assembling umbrellas, she goes to each meeting happy to lean on Suano’s arm and leave the agapythium behind as orgying takes over, with a remnant of stubbornness in her still, although it has taken the form of perseverance and self-denial in the cause of giving thanks. It’s as if her place had been occupied by thankfulness itself; as if when she laughs, which is rarely, the laughter came from a mirror that she had emptied of her own reflection.