Autor:    Julián Silva Puentes

NOISE

The clic clic of the oven in my house for the past two weeks is no laughing matter. Neither is going out into the street and noticing that you miss it like crazy. My cousin Luis Fernando told me that a few years ago he felt a ringing in his left ear for more than two months. “When it left me ―which happened, just as it arrived― I thought I was going to go crazy from missing it so much.” “The ringing?”, I asked him. “The lack of it”, he replied. The lack of it is the presence of the other, that is, of silence (silentio est aurum). To hate something that we will later miss is part of the human condition.

In a changing society like ours, the inability to adapt means extinction. I come from a city where midday in summer can easily reach 30 degrees. In Bucaramanga you have to sleep with a fan because mosquitoes attack at night. The same thing happens in San Gil. One of the things I liked about living in Bogotá was that there were no mosquitoes and no heat. Now it is different. When I first arrived in this city, about seven and a half years ago, I would come across enormous Permian-type mosquitoes, stumbling against the walls. “Did you see that horrible thing?”, I asked Diana the first time I saw one of these creatures. “Sometimes they come out”, she replied. “From where?”, I asked her. “From where what?”. “Where do they come out?”. “Who?”. The mystery of the Permian mosquitoes has remained intact since then, because I had not thought about it again. In fact, this is the first time I have talked about mosquitoes and the heat in Bogotá. It could be the title of a novel along the lines of Germán Castro Caycedo´s "Lost in the Amazon," but it´s not the same case. The thing here is that during the day it´s very noisy and at night the mosquitoes and the heat keep you from sleeping.

This isn´t the first time I´ve fantasized about abandoning the world (civilization) to let it devour itself with all its noise, chaos, and never-ending evil. Diana isn´t as much of an escapee as I am, but after two weeks of the oven clic clic and building repairs (7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday), she´s started thinking about it.

The oven (the part that gives off a spark when you turn the dial to release the gas) starts clicking and you have to turn off the gas to avoid a tragedy. That´s what you tell the gas people with the first of many calls asking them to fix the problem before it´s too late.

―We can schedule it for two weeks from now ―they answer me.

―In two weeks the house is going to explode! ―I shout back.

―We can schedule it for two weeks from now ―the voice repeats with a cadence similar to that of the “Bots” that answer customer service calls.

―Are you a Bot ―I asked.

―No sir. My name is “…” and I have been working at the company for two years…

―Well, they should replace you with one! ―I shouted and hung up feeling ashamed of speaking like that to a poor devil who every person who calls has to shout it at.

A few years ago (unfortunate years) I worked in a call center. “Welcome to the Macy´s and Bloomingdale´s collections department. What can I do to help you today?” Even after all this time I remember that mandatory greeting. We had to adhere to every word of the script, or else we were “reprimanded” in writing. There was always someone listening to the calls, so there was plenty of opportunity to get fired. Three reprimands were enough. I didn´t make it to the second one, because I got my first job with the district as a lawyer and was able to resign with a huge smile.

The American writer William Faulkner was not always the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949. There was a time when nobody knew him when he worked in the postal service. At the end of his term there (he quit before he was fired), he signed off with a letter that read: “As long as I live under the capitalist system, I expect to have my life shaped by the demands of the wealthy, but I´ll be damned if I agree to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to buy a stamp”. I´d like to say I did the same thing when I left the call center, but, scared as I am about the hell that is losing my job, I signed off with a rather forceful (and servile) handshake, but not before thanking them for the opportunity to be insulted day and night by peasants from the south of the USA (they call them rednecks) because I called to charge them for whatever they bought on credit at Macy´s and Bloomingdale´s.

“Thank you for believing in me ―I said to the person who was going to fire me anyway―, but I got a job related to my profession and I just accepted it”. I hadn´t been to work for two days because I went with Diana to the coast and I didn´t bother to make up an excuse. The HR man I spoke wanted to get ahead of me, even after hearing me resign, and told me that, given my unjustified absence, they had to terminate my contract with them. “I understand, sir”, I replied, giving him time and the pleasure to fired me. “Thank you in any case for the opportunity. It changed my life”. “Uh-huh”, he replied in that superior tone of voice typical of people who have all the influence in the world over you, especially if it involves the power to take away your means to keep from starving to death. That´s why I left there as happy as if I had escaped from a dungeon. And in a certain sense it was, except that a year and a half later I found myself in the situation of looking for work in a call center again thanks to the 2020 pandemic.

―Sometimes I have nightmares about one of those rednecks insulting me because I was calling to collect ―I tell Diana from time to time.

―I promise you that will never happen again ―she answers me on each occasion.

―I shouldn´t have spoken to the guy from the gas company like that ―I say, changing the subject.

―In fifteen days we can explode with everything and the house ―Diana answers me.

―It´s true ―I say, and I feel like calling again to tell whoever answers me “pissant” (piss ant) ​​and “fucking Indian”, both recurring insults in the vocabulary of the very elegant people who answered me in my days as a collector for Macy´s and Bloomigdale´s.

“Fucking Indian”. For many people outside of Latin America, India and America are the same thing. They are the same thing because people from Latin America and India are often pejoratively called Indians. I was called Indian a couple of times even though I don´t have an Indian phenotype and I don´t live in South Asia. Of course, over the phone, no one knows what you look like, whether you´re a native of this or that country, or whether you live in a place called Beaverton, Alabama, and you call anyone who doesn´t live in that corner of the US a "piss ant," which means "useless" or "worthless." Even so, and despite having served “body and soul” for two call centers in my adult life (2017 and 2018), and the terror that I feel when I find myself in a situation so difficult as to fall into the clutches of the “call centers,” nothing can be worse than coming home from work and having them disappear you from the world on the way to take your bank account, your will, and your life. It is not that disappearing from the world is bad, because if you decide so, if for example you decide to become an anchorite to go live on a mountain in a state of isolation and contrition, it is fine. It would be even more so if I were one of the millionaires who built their mansions in the forest reserve of the eastern forest of Bogotá, because from there you should be able to see the city without having to overcome the noise of the street, or the fear of being scopolamine-doped on your way home.

Either would be fine if you decide so. Deciding on your own, even if it means going crazy and giving up everything to live by looking at clouds and trees on a mountain, is fine if that´s what you want. Imagining myself living on a mountain makes everything that is out of your control (life) seem more benign. Less terrible.

For several years now I have learned to spend ten minutes (sometimes more) a day dreaming about a cabin in the woods doing nothing other than being present in the moment. Right now, for example, I am more present than I could ever be in any other activity in my life, because telling stories about the time I did this or that, or what I would like to do if I won the lottery to tell Diana to go wherever, to a mountain, to the coast of Santa Marta, or to sell trinkets to the tourists who arrive in Finisterre at the end of the route to Santiago de Compostela, is a recurring dream in my day.

“Dreaming is for the brave”, said a great wise man once. That “great wise man” is me, even though the phrase is not mine. I am not very wise either. I am not much of anything because I have nothing (Non habet nihil. Me habeo mundum) except what I am wearing and my fantasy head which does not need much to escape from the world (mentally), especially if the oven in the house, the repairs to the building, the mosquitoes and the heat make the day to day a difficult challenge to overcome. I have reached the point where I wake up wanting to go to the office to have a little peace. That does not stop me from walking with my senses alert, like an animal, to run away at the slightest presence of danger. “Friend, I am not a thief! I came from Ibagué to see a soccer game at Campín. Can you help me with a coin?”. The person who told me this yesterday afternoon had an undeniable thief look and kept following me even though I told him I didn´t have any coins. He kept insisting that he wasn´t a thief, asking why I was looking at him that way, why I was walking so fast, and telling me that if I didn´t have any coins it was because I had bills. For those who aren´t from Colombia and read this (is there a world outside of Colombia?) when someone asks you for coins and follows you insistently, it´s because they want your possessions. And your life too.

Needless to say, I wasn´t murdered. I must have gone into a store and asked for coins to give to the demon that was chasing me. “Do you see that I´m not a thief?”, he said, and walked away very quickly, perhaps to really rob the next victim or at least to kill him. Fortunately, I didn´t find out on my own. I only know that today I´m afraid to go out because I don´t want to be killed. I want to live forever. That´s the truth. I am not speaking in the sense of “you will live in the hearts of those who loved you”, but from the physical point of view, of the flesh and bones that will never perish. Imagining my own death terrifies me so much that I decided long ago to never leave this world. I don´t care what the laws of God and men say: I will never die! I will be present in this world until the floor under my feet runs out and then I will leave. I will leave when the world of the heart and mind rules over that of men and all those evil things that they do to each other with the insistence of the mosquitoes that ineffably attack us on hot nights in the summer Bogotá of 2024.

―Shall we go to a hotel? ―Diana asks me, taking me out of this story.

―What do we do with the cat? ―I ask her back.

You are aware of how old you are when you include the house cat in every conversation and talk about the advantages of drinking almond milk over whole milk (Miss, does the dessert have lactose-free milk?). My question is no less valid: what do we do with the house cat? As long as it has food in its bowl and water in its bowl, the house cat doesn´t care what happens to us. “Ego sum summa voluptarum,” which means “I am” (ego sum) the summa of my pleasures (voluntarum), refers to the fact that the house cat is like that king who called himself the Sun King (je suis le roi soleil), because Louis XIV of France imagined himself to be a huge, shining thing around which the world revolved.

The writer David Foster Wallace said in an interview for Esquire Magazine in 2002 that this is the most self-centered generation since King Louis XIV. Foster Wallace had no way of knowing the turn the world would take with the globalization of social networks (dumblization), even though he lived to see the birth of Facebook in 2004. That didn´t stop him from prophesying the impact the Internet would have on our lives. Before, we had “reality TV” to learn about how music and movie stars live. With the proliferation of social networks, we learned that we didn´t have to be famous to have our own “reality TV.” Suddenly, someone like you and me could go live in Spain and talk about what they do from the time they wake up until they go to bed: “Today we will have a special episode: I will tell you how I learned to cook fried eggs without bursting the yolk (here in Spain they call them fried eggs), and then I went to the barber to get my hair cut. The end”. Hundreds of thousands of people eagerly watch the son of an actress who hasn´t acted in a decade eating cake, because he looks so cute with his face covered in cream. A millionaire couple from somewhere on the Colombian coast travels the world making videos of what they eat, drink and think (they record themselves watching the sunset and in solemn silence so that we can sense the deep feelings they harbor), a Bogotá councilman who has the gift of ubiquity because he is a lawyer, an airplane pilot, a medical student and an “influencer,” speaks to us from a restaurant where he shares time with his friends and asks his audience to go and visit him, so that, very casually and intimately, they can talk to him about the problems of the city and the world. He also records himself driving his sports car with a woman sitting next to him, asking him his favorite food, his favorite color, his favorite book (they always talk about the biography of a millionaire who tells us how he became so rich), and other questions of great interest to the district, such as: who is your favorite influencer?

“Content generators” is what they call the act of telling even the smallest detail of your life (what I ate, what I drank, what I´m afraid of, what face I make when I´m afraid). Twenty years ago, it would have been inconceivable that someone would be interested in a “reality TV” of yourself recorded from your cell phone. Now it is inconceivable that you don´t film yourself going to a restaurant to rate the quality of the food. Every moment of your life serves to “generate content,” even if the content is standing in line at the Oxxo and taking advantage of the fact that you have two minutes without recording yourself saying something that enlightens humanity. “Friends, I´m taking advantage of the fact that I´m not doing anything to talk to you about the potatoes they sell at the Oxxo on Carrera 13 and Calle 55. Hmmmmmmmm, I like these, but I don´t like that they´re a foreign brand. You know that I´m a patriot and I support the national industry. I´m also an animal rights activist, an environmentalist, a humanist, a Dadaist, a Nadaist, a allist, a Taoist, a trapeze artist, an orthodontist, and I recycle bottles to give them to people on the street so they have something to eat; you know that I don´t like giving alms because of the idea of ​​​​“teach a man to fish and he can feed himself forever”. Who said that? I remember that I heard it in an audiobook that I ´read´ yesterday in fifteen minutes, but I´ve already forgotten the title of the book or the author because I have to take advantage of every minute and do a thousand things at the same time, besides… what was I talking about? That´s it! The brand of potatoes they sell here at Oxxo versus those at Éxito and… is it my turn? Thanks. Well friends, it´s my turn to pay and I don´t know if I can afford it! In fifteen minutes, I´ll do another live to tell you what it´s like to be a 24-year-old woman with four million followers on tic toc, single, with a mansion that I bought two weeks ago and seven sports cars and who doesn´t have three thousand pesos in cash because I have it all in a virtual wallet and I forgot the password… I LOVE YOU!”

“Infinite Jest”, the novel that brought David Foster Wallace worldwide recognition after its publication in 1996, tells of a film titled like the book itself, so entertaining that the audience dies of starvation, dehydration and in their own filth, because they can´t get up from the place where they started watching it days and days ago. I´m not saying that in 2024 we´ll all be facing humanity´s greatest “Infinite Jest”, but I do believe that the Sun King that we all carry within us has his own stage from which he can tell the world that you don´t have to have talent or unique characteristics that define you as an autonomous individual, to receive from the world whatever you want, because it´s enough to have a good sense of market trends to know what content has the best chance of gaining followers. I´m not saying that this generation of Louis XIV of France has made commonplaces a comfortable and quite profitable niche, because I would be speaking from ignorance. What I really hope to say here and now is that Wallace´s Infinite Jest is about (depending on the edition) 1,100 pages long and I highly doubt anyone will read it. I highly doubt that if it´s not a 15-minute audiobook summary (the new trend), anyone will read it. I don´t know why, but it makes me very sad. All of this makes me very sad, and by talking about it out loud I´m doing nothing but shouting at the clouds, like the old fool I´ve become, without any effort, but rather voluntarily and with eyes wide open.

…

Click click, the oven goes off just before we head out with the cat and all to a very nice hotel where pets are allowed. We booked for two days to see if we could get a break from the oven, the building repairs, the heat and the mosquitoes. We got to the point of asking for air conditioning in our room, like when we travel to the coast. We haven´t traveled to the coast for a long time. At least in Taganga we have the sea, a jacuzzi, micheladas at ten in the morning and all the ceviche you can eat without getting indigestion. Will we ever see the sea again? I don´t know. We have another, much more ambitious trip in mind, but that will be next year. For now we´ll spend two nights in a hotel to pretend we´re foreigners in our own city; we´ll go out on the street in Hawaiian shirts, shorts, dirty tennis shoes and greasy hair and take photos of the museums and old churches that we´ll go into to make three wishes (you have to make three wishes when you first enter a church), and then we´ll go to a theater on the Parkway that we like a lot. Maybe we´ll see the 7 pm show and then go straight to the Patio to drink wine and eat stake pepper and rice a la Garzón. The possibilities are endless when you are a foreigner in your own land, and even more so when the place you live in, your apartment, explode with all your possessions inside while you are somewhere else, acting like a tourist. Bah! We take everything we need with us and…

―What do you say?

―The keys?

―Yeah, I have them here.

―Ready, let´s go. Let´s go now.