Marcelo Birmajer’s new story: The scrambled channel

Biniamín sank down sadly on the bed. The wood of the back looked like a coffin. The worn red carpet on the floor complemented the aura of the trail. The walls, lined with wood-like plastic, reminded him of the fate of the only hotel in town. He was veiled and was his only invited relative.

In those rooms, the television was placed on a stand, top, bottom, right. But this hellish artifact from the 1970s (square, luscious, gray, expansive), like those robots that ruled the Earth in the 1950s, watched over him from a desk. The remote, moldy as it was, was from the future by comparison.

Why had Fernanda abandoned him? “I can’t,” she wrote. “I do not come. I don’t want to. ”The words are so simple, the result so devastating. He had considered it his last chance to love.. He made a movement as if to disappear: neither to live nor to die, only not to be. But she was still there. The small rectangular soaps in the bathroom were proof of his awful existence.

He thought about buying liquid soap at the nearest pharmacy, went back to bed and turned on the television. A series, after five minutes of action, presented the sign: “two years earlier …”, and Biniamín changed the channel, bored. For ten years all the series have done the same: 48 hours ago, a month ago, ten days ago … The resource was exhausted!

On the desk that contained the bulky television, a New Testament peeped out of the second drawer on the right. In his entire adult life dealing with hotels of this category, he had never even glanced at the front page. Was it his time?

He changed the channel. An ageless cook advertised a potato stew as an innovation. “Two hours earlier”, they will tell in her life story, “she had thought of going down to buy some liquid soap. But he stayed to watch TV.

In the first hours after Fernanda’s guaranteed absence he had looked for a casual female face, a woman’s body, a stranger, on the street, in the city, who would remind him of the possibility of being alive.

Usually, when he reached the last threshold of his solitude, the mere sight of an enigmatic woman could bring him back to the rhythm of life. Inertia pushes him to a new adventure, not necessarily with the lady in question, but on the path of waiting, trust in ignorance of the future.

But no one had crossed his path: neither past hope – already expired – nor misleading novelty. Searched for the scrambled channel, a hangover from the past that might work on that 20th century TV. Those grid channels, which you had to pay extra to decrypt.

Could it be that unexpected beauties now work in those neorealistic fictions, without bragging or overdone gestures? But the grill only featured a series of chefs grilling fish, vegetables, offal. He was not hungry and they were indifferent to him.

Suddenly, on an unknown canal, a boy caught her attention, sitting at a table in a garden in Temperley. It took him less time to discover that it was his grandfather’s house than to recognize himself. That child was him, Biniamín, at the age of five. His father and mother were also alive.

His aunt Raquel, his mother’s sister, brought the tray with the empanadas. His grandfather joked by bringing him the glass of wine, and his mother cautioned him once again. What was your family doing there on that channel? Who smuggled that video back in time? Did vh exist in that decade? But who had filmed them, and how did they get on screen?

His mouth went dry. The whole situation was an unearthly strangeness.. Could he be dead? No, it couldn’t be death. He dared not change the channel, because he was afraid of losing the miracle. The images, the story, continued, passed.

I had read so many times that before death, the crucial scenes of one’s life were mechanically revised in seconds. But not on television!

It was not impossible that someone could simulate their childhood and circumstances, and find a way to broadcast them exclusively on this television. But for what? It didn’t make any sense. Nobody would do such a thing, for any reason.

His father rose from the table, walking upright, satisfied with himself. Benjamin had never felt like this before. His childhood accelerated on TV. He was soon ten years old. The journeys between Capital and Temperley followed one another; the games with the parents, the dialogues with the mother. The death of his aunt Raquel. Grandfather’s fishing prize in Monte Hermoso.

It had been a happy, balanced childhood. Nothing that happened to him in adulthood could be attributed to a mistake in his origins. He had been dealt the best cards a player could ask for: he had arranged them badly.

In any case, the mystery of the channel of his childhood surpassed all other reflections. What was I supposed to do? To ask? Depict? Call a friend? What if they showed up with an ambulance and a straitjacket?

He remembered the wonderful fable of the goose laying golden eggs: no more should be asked of wonders. She watched her channel until sunset. Liquid soap should wait. At that moment there would be no more pharmacy open. But even if there were: who would guarantee that if he left, his channel would continue to function when he returned?

He was even afraid that just trading with another person, the caretaker or a maid, would undo the spell. It was channel 63 on I don’t know which cable. Would she have been the asset of an international espionage organization, before hiring him as an agent, knowing that his life was no longer worth a damn? He smiled at the thought, but didn’t take his eyes off the screen.

His 12th birthday was approaching and his childhood sweetheart, Ariela, was giving him one last kiss, on the cheek: I remembered it as a sunrise or a wood fire.

Early in the morning she surprised him with an unusual light in that decadent room. But she could barely appreciate it because he fell asleep. A knock on the door woke him. He didn’t know what time it was, much less who was knocking or why. An unread gospel character, who came to take revenge? A fire? An earthquake? An earthquake in that country is impossible: not even the wind has passed.

Had his childhood relief channel conjured up irrevocable misfortune? Did a female voice respond to her “Quo Vadis”? The Christian Bible had made him ask that bizarre question in his sleep.

“It is I,” replied the intruder, like God to Moses.

It took him a long time – indeed, a few seconds – to decipher where it came from, as he got up to open it, murmuring and dissatisfied with himself.

It was Fernando. She had completely forgotten it. He had fallen asleep without thinking of her, for the first time since he had known her. But, as he lowered the latch, he thought that with Fernanda he could truly share the spell of that channel from his childhood, without her taking him for a fool, or not believing, or seeking an emergency explanation for him.

Fernanda was as casual and crazy as that projection itself. But, as Biniamín himself guessed, the canal no longer circulated. In 1962 Jacques Cousteau appeared. Even from his childhood, but quite another thing. Fernanda began her impossible discussion.

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