The Revolutionaries Try Again Read Free Page B

to run. The situation is irredeemable, so what’s the point? They’ll get ousted anyway. Ever considered returning?
    Absolutamente never. I’m too busy wading in stock options. Money? Paper, yes.
    There’s massive protests all over the country.
    Again?
    The indignation of the people has reached its limit.
    Now that definitely hasn’t happened before.
    Leopoldo doesn’t respond. Antonio interprets Leopoldo’s silence correctly. Leopoldo isn’t playing anymore. Antonio turns down Messiaen’s Abyss of the Birds.
    And yet with the right strategy someone . . .
    â€“Juana we’re out of eggs!
    I think the lines are crossed, Leo. Typical of our backward . . .
    . . . an outsider could sweep the elections and effect real change . . .
    â€“Juana I gave you enough change for eggs.
    He yells at you because he loves you, Juana.
    . . . at last our chance to . . .
    â€“Juana, carajo, quit eavesdropping on the politicians and go basket some eggs.
    Hello?
    Barely hear you.
    â€“Quit clowning and hang up already. Juana?
    Vote for us, Juana’s husband.
    We always wanted an audience and here at last . . .
    â€“How much for my vote?
    Free milk?
    Free housing?
    â€“I’m voting for El Loco.
    El Loco’s not coming back, sir.
    â€“That’s what you people said last time.
    How come we haven’t heard from Juana?
    Juana’s husband and his imaginary wife, Juana, are voting for El . . .
    â€“I’ll track you two conchadesumadres and . . .
    Hang up and call again?
    I think we have a chance, Antonio.
    â€“Quit my phone line already!
    Hello?

II / ANTONIO IN SAN FRANCISCO
    Everyone thinks they’re the chosen ones, Masha wrote on Antonio’s manuscript. See About Schmidt with Jack Nicholson. Then she quoted from Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam, because she was sure Antonio hadn’t read her yet: Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him. In San Francisco, besides the accumulation of wealth, what does the age ask of your so called protagonist? No wonder he never returns to Ecuador.
    Why had her comments in Antonio’s manuscripts been so mean spirited? She’d been transferring the contents of her closet to boxes that will be transported to her new apartment in New York soon and she’d come across Antonio’s manuscripts inside a hatbox, where she’d also come across the compendium of contemporary classical music he had recorded for her, which she was listening to as she read his manuscripts again. She hadn’t seen Antonio or thought about him in at least twelve months, since around the time of his farewell party, and because she doesn’t remember marking his manuscripts with such virulence, reading them now was akin to discovering that while she was asleep or away someone who turns out to be her had defaced an entrusted room with a red pen. Had she somehow subscribed back then to the asinine notion that one couldn’t just barge into art, as Antonio had been desperately trying to do, without a lineage that justified one’s so called artistic inclination? Her father was a physicist and her mother had been a violinist and unlike Antonio she grew up alongside the Western Canon but she hadn’t become a great painter.
    â€”
    D Sharp Minor Etude, No. 12, Opus 8 by Alexander Scriabin: Horowitz wrong noted the D sharp etude in Moscow, Antonio said to Masha, listen, toward the end, Vladimir must have been nervous,or overwhelmed, or trying to both perform and watch himself perform because he’s eighty three years old and hasn’t been to Russia in sixty one years, and yet what’s amazing, or perhaps not so amazing, I know you’ll grumble if you don’t think it’s at least mildly amazing that, if you put on your headphones and scan every second