The New Story of Marcelo Birmajer: The Voice of the Dead II

(Previous episode summary: 2006. While in South Korea presenting a book, I receive an e-mail in which I am offered to receive a briefcase full of money at Parallel 38, to finance a newspaper in Buenos Aires in which only the deceased will write about current affairs).

I still had five days in Korea, randomly free, the book presentation activities almost finished: lunch with the editorial staff, visit and signing of copies in the bookstore, contact with Korean writers, press conference. My return ticket gave me a few more days of walking.

Now that the dead had contacted me -whatever the authors of the farce were-, although I did not seriously contemplate the possibility of going to the limit of the two Koreas for this purpose, I nevertheless discovered it through the rudiments of bureaucracy.

Parallel 38 was a kind of roadblock charlie, the intersection point between the two Germanys, a Cold War museum piece in the middle of an open Berlin: but here, actual and deadly. Precisely, only for me that no man’s land represented the armistice field between the living and the dead.

A new email, using Marxist terminology, detailed some of the newspaper’s comparative advantages: “So far the views of the deceased have only referred to the past. But the dead have a future. Our economic position sometimes overlaps with the Keynesian maxim: in the long run we will all be dead“.

“One of the priority objectives of the daily – future daily – is to end the dichotomy between living and dead. The civilians, the military, the repressors and the repressed, the rich and the dispossessed, the living and the dead: all Argentines ”.

I canceled my mail and decided to forget. Although my grandmother had advised me to follow them until the question was exhausted, the slogans assumed an alienating prejudice, excessive even for my always vague contact with reality.

I had to get carried away by the exotic country and my desire to wander, and ignore the convocation of the national and popular holy camp. Violence from below shouldn’t reach the top, at least not within my range of action. (In another email, as a postscript, they made it clear that when my turn came, they guaranteed me a decisive place in the Culture section).

I needed a pair of scissors to break the seal on a pair of shoes I had bought (which should be the best Korean brand for running). But no local in Seoul seemed to understand my request. I resorted to gestures, to my terrible pronunciation in English, to a kind of acting that represented all kinds of situations with scissors. My guests didn’t notice.

It is false that the people who speak understand each other: human beings simply do not understand each other and language is just a subterfuge to hide this inability.

I couldn’t believe that scissors didn’t exist in Seoul: but who knows, perhaps they had surpassed that primitive Western instrument. They already had the posnet to pass contactless cards, which would take them even more than a decade to reach Buenos Aires.

I loved some night tents, in the heart of the city, where they roasted meat, fish and vegetables, to eat standing up. I saw several young Koreans, in suits, drinking alcohol until they collapsed on the impeccable asphalt, in some after office all or nothing.

Two or three writers I met accused the United States of the split between the two Koreas; and although I wasn’t exactly an expert on the subject, I took the liberty of disagreeing. They didn’t feel privileged, as I thought they should, because they were on the south side. In any case, no one was willing to accompany me to the 38th Parallel.

My possible engagement as newspaper coordinator From below it had been replaced by mere curiosity (or so I had wanted to believe myself). But that night, just a weekend away before returning to the Once neighborhood (also inhabited by Koreans), the phone rang at dawn in the hotel room. I was afraid of a catastrophe.

The sky fell on my head. I answered with dry mouth and closed eye, as if not to encourage myself to look directly at whatever news was.

“Hello, this is the voice of the dead”, said my interlocutor.

(In my opinion, imitating Captain Scarlet’s famous opening: “This is the voice of the Martians”).

I remained silent.

– Regarding your question whether there will be relevant signatures, if this could affect your participation in the project, I guarantee you that we have just entrusted the famous singer-songwriter Daniel Viglietti, the author of unhookwho will not only send us specific reports from Uruguay, but from Latin America in general, and will make the concept available to us to tell it with the dismantling of cemeteries and the demolition of the walls that separate us from the living. There is no such division: it is an imposition of finance capital, international synarchy and sepoy interests.

The only thing I could articulate in response was: – But Viglietti is alive.

His throat cleared and there were noises in line, like in that episode of The unknown size in which a telephone cable fell on the cemetery and a deceased communicated with his widow.

The intentional pause questioned whether Viglietti would have lived much longer; tacitly, the aforementioned sentence by Keynes, but severely shortening the duration of the terms (strictly speaking, Viglietti would deny that tendentious silence until 2017).

They cut. How did they get my number? I thought this riddle would make me sleepless, but I only wondered again after several hours of deep sleep (those of us who live in fear for no reason are often surprised by outbursts of unconsciousness just at times when panic would be justified) .

The next day the translator said she was willing to take me to Parallel 38, without me asking. Paradoxically afraid of looking like a coward, I accepted.

In the van headed for that hot border, Hana – the translator – told me a bizarre story: her grandmother had been close, in the 1970s, in El Once, by Arancio Luminelli, the late Italian anarchist, future director of From below; an accident in the metalworking shop where he was his operator had deprived him of his manhood (and doubled his jealousy for his wife, around the age of 12).

The joke I made, stories of castrated men, had offended him in his cold grave. My only chance of redemption was to accept the suitcase full of dollars and transport it to Buenos Aires to finance that venture.

Suddenly the puzzle fell into place: Hana’s mistake on my book cover had been deliberate. They were involving me in an international conspiracy: probably in the service of Pyongyan.

I walked the numbered steps with her to reach the fateful line -as if I were going to an irrevocable altar-, but as soon as I saw a dark-haired man, dressed in guayabera, coming towards me, she called me “comrade” with an accent Cuban, and the briefcase dangling from his left hand, I turned and ran. I have never heard of Hana or the dead again. And I still doubt it.

wd