The Revolutionaries Try Again Read Free Page A

an alien blare interrupts the sixth: banging on a piano, frantic strings, the crackling of shortwave.
    Hello?
    Barely hear you.
    Why don’t you shut your vacuum? Unplug it, if that’s the less strenuous option.
    Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Which you’re interrupting.
    Here to end your end times. So to speak.
    The hell’s this? Hello?
    This, Gargamel, is your father.
    Microphone Head?
    Drool?
    Microphone Head!
    Drool!
    So a vacuum is your best metaphor for avant garde music? Surely nonretrogradable rhythms haven’t reached your village yet. Rarely has the term yet been used so dubiously.
    Pardon me for neglecting to profit by your remark. Leopoldo hears Antonio laughing. Antonio remembers that quip. Of course he remembers.
    Oh Drool. Always shortchanging your kind. Is your window open?
    Is his window open? Yes. Right. Leopoldo’s buying time to prepare a comeback. A common tactic from Who’s Most Pedantic, their game from San Javier. During recess by Don Alban’s cafeteria they would refute each other about everything, spoofing the pompous language of demagogues, priests, themselves, digressing manically upon premises like compatriotas, let us applaud León’s proposal to privatize our toilets, compañeros, let us consider that if El Loco wins, Facundo’s maid will lop off his maid killer in his sleep, if she can find it, although rules are rules, digressions earn you top points but they have to eventually boomerang to the original premise, the audience permitted to interrupt only to call out for vocabulary clarifications: badinage!, what is?, sapidity!, what is?, and they halt their sciolisms and provide definitions, magniloquent inventions, on the spot. Is his window open? Antonio chooses not to block Leopoldo’s question with a question. He wants to hear what Leopoldo comes up with.
    Why yes, my window is indeed open.
    You see my friend, well you don’t really see, that’s why I’m about to inculcate you, your vacuum not only absorbs the detritus on yourcarpet but also the particles that float through your window, particles that carry inside of them the alarm of ambulances, the clang of cans, the tenor of the toll collector, all your troglogradables that are, in short, inside your artifact of . . .
    Troglo what?
    Gradables.
    Chanfle. Do you own a vacuum?
    Why yes. Indeed I do.
    And you change its filter often?
    Every two months.
    You see, Microphone Head, well you don’t really see ’cause you’re as blind as a microphone, I haven’t changed the filter of my Red Devil in years. Therefore it has ceased to absorb anything. Neither detritus nor particles and absolutely no clang of cans. Oh Microphone Head: always faltering between the general and the specific. You know the one about Glenn Gould and the Hoover? Of course you don’t.
    On the Salado side of the Calderón a domestic appears along Bolívar Street, too far from the busted phone for Leopoldo to know if she was one of the expelled. It is likely that more people will appear again soon. At San Javier their Who’s Most Pedantic game had served them well. On the national academic quiz show broadcasted by Channel Ten they had excelled in the debate section. And the Q&A section. They’d swept the city rounds and the interprovincial rounds and the finals against Espíritu Santo. At school everyone recognized them. During recess the appeal of Who’s Most Pedantic widened. Why I’m a better presidential candidate than you became a favorite premise.
    Still flatlining the currency at the Central Bank, Microphone?
    Been following the news?
    About the twilight of the IPOS ?
    About the recent coup.
    Another one?
    Rumors that the interim president might be loosening the electoral requirements so El Loco can run.
    El Loco’s returning again?
    And the stronger candidates . . .
    Stronger? You mean burlier? Dollarized at the gut, if you will.
    . . . don’t want