Rico and I are looking at a featureless, bright bitter-green wall. After looking long enough, I get bored and start examining the filament circuit of the old Siemens television I broke years ago. I had hung the parts I liked from the television, which I dismantled for no particular reason, on the wall. From above, this circuit looks like a metropolis. Despite being a functional part of something larger, it was like a haphazardly grown, crooked city formed by bringing together pieces that could be called irregular on their own. Rico got bored too, turned his back, and focused on something relatively more meaningful: the Dracaena cintho on the console, which I constantly forget to water but continues to live to spite me. In a moment, he will jump onto the table, then onto the console, approach the plant as if nothing is happening, smell the leaf first, then bite it, and wait for my reaction. I won’t get mad. Because I can’t. I can’t help it. One day, you forgive such a thing that, from that moment on, you realize you have actually forgiven everything; there is no possibility left in the world that could anger you. Just a scar, a clean cut. You are left with a scar that splits in two all your skin, muscles, bones, the tissues connecting them, the veins, and especially your reality and your time. The wound separating before and after is nothing but a perpetual now. This is what being trapped in the now means to me.
*
What makes the stifling heat in San Pedro unbearable is this rain that hasn’t stopped for weeks and the midnight. Everything in this crooked city is on the verge of rotting. Running from Nat Turner Boulevard, I took a left into Manson Street, the Sierra Leoneans’ territory… A black mastiff lunged out of the doghouse they placed at the street’s entrance, throwing itself at me as if to break the chains binding it; fortunately, when there was less than a span between us, the chains managed to stop this black monster. I was racing against time, smuggling the life I carried inside me away from my pursuers, and the threat of this dog was the final straw. As I stepped back, out of breath, the voices of the Nazis chasing me were also getting closer. I fell right on my ass when my foot caught on the leg of a white man lying behind me. The Sierra Leoneans must have been feeding the dog with their enemies. I grabbed an empty beer bottle that came to hand to use as a weapon. I was running from one death to another, like a mouse trying to reach the cheese placed at the exit of a maze. As a white man fleeing from the White Bastards Gang, a Nazi group, I had sought refuge in the territory of the Sierra Leoneans controlled by a black supremacist group.
About a hundred years ago, when the United Nations decreed that everyone in the world gained the right to reside anywhere without a passport or visa, history books say that developed countries receiving immigrants assumed they would help the emigrating countries develop and reach humane conditions so that people wouldn’t migrate to their own countries. It hadn’t gone as planned at all. As soon as the law was accepted by the entire world, property owners in developed metropolises multiplied the rents, causing regular citizens to become impoverished and look for more economical cities to migrate to. The rich of Africa and Asia switched places with the poor of Europe and America. Mostly, it was the poor who migrated. The world faced a new wave of migration that lasted some sixty or seventy years. Everyone was everywhere, and the oldest world promised three pleasures in exchange for a life: drugs, sex, and anarchy.
In San Pedro, skin color was ideology. Blacks were Marxist, whites were Nazi. Being white and an anarchist, I knew I couldn’t convince the blacks that I wasn’t a Nazi; even if they didn’t kill me, I was sure they would cut off one of my limbs for fun. As for the group chasing me, I knew exactly what they would do: they would flay me, hang me from a tree by my feet, and nail a piece of cardboard on me that read “traitor”. While the whole continent writhes in this pandemonium of violence, knowing that one day the factions might reconcile or that one side will eradicate the other doesn’t help. I am living in San Pedro’s hell phase, and unfortunately, I do not have a time machine.
As I backed away from the giant dog with small movements, it must have decided not to drag the matter out any longer; breaking the shinbone of the white man in front of it with a single bite and dragging the corpse toward its kennel, I noticed the man’s hands had been severed at the wrists. I had no intention of venturing deep into Manson Street—which was three meters wide in total—and getting caught by a black man. I would hide in the shadows and hope that the Nazis, who I assumed would be wary of the dog that wanted to kill me and the owners of the street, wouldn’t enter here. Leaning my back against the wall, I pulled my legs to my chest, tucked the beer bottle under my left hand, and started watching the wall opposite me, its plaster peeling off in places.
I should regret getting out of Autrom’s car in this time and country, but I don’t. Tahabes got off here too, and me right behind him. Yet, despite searching all of Bas-Sassandra, I couldn’t find him. Years later, I found Autrom sitting with an attractive prostitute in a Nazi bar called Wilhelm Keitel. While the woman looked with dead eyes at the area swarming with uniformed customers covered in Nazi symbols, Autrom was running his long, thin index finger around the rim of his whiskey glass as if there was no one around him. The fact that he hadn’t taken off his hat was a sign that he wouldn’t stay long. I approached him; he was expecting me. “Do not look for him in vain, Mr. Oahc. The fact that he alighted at the same time as you does not mean you landed in the same reality,” he said. We spoke of nothing else. As he finished his whiskey and stood up, he said, “Be careful, Mr. Oahc, after tonight, things will be difficult for you.” I was furious; Autrom had thrown me into the wrong reality and left, letting me search for Tahabes in vain for years. I got through the night with the prostitute who had been sitting next to him. It was, of course, impossible for the prostitute—whom I violently slept with until morning to take out my anger—not to see the letter “A” within a circle carved into my chest. Even though she was paid in full, there was nothing stopping her from telling the organization what she knew about me to take revenge for her busted lip, her bruised flesh, her difficulty sitting down, and the fact that she perhaps wouldn’t be able to work tonight.
For the rest of the day, the chase had long since begun, and my order for execution by torture had been relayed to all the factions. I had successfully maintained this chase—which almost anyone could only endure for a few hours—for a week, but this was the end of the line. At best, I would die at the foot of the wall I was sitting against.
As the rain lightened, the clouds began to be painted red. The cracks between the peeling plaster on the wall hadn’t been visible in the dark, so now there were already new things to look at. The Nazis had set up camp at the entrance of the street; they thought I couldn’t venture further inside. Thanks to the symbol on my chest proving I wasn’t a Nazi, perhaps I could be saved. Even though I knew the Marxist butchers wouldn’t think highly of me, I might avoid being sliced to pieces. I decided to keep moving inside, unbuttoning my shirt so I could show it when they came. The street intersected with Bundy Drive at the other end. When I reached the avenue, they were right in front of me; without speaking, I slowly opened my front to show the tattoo. The black woman standing right in front of me, with large breasts and hips, drew her machete and, yelling “petit-bourgeois,” slashed me diagonally; as I was blacking out, I heard the sound of a stagecoach and horses.
*
Rico and I are looking at a featureless, bright bitter-green wall. After looking long enough, I get bored and start examining the filament circuit of the old Siemens television I broke years ago. I had hung the parts I liked from the television, which I dismantled for no particular reason, on the wall. From above, this circuit looks like a crookedly built metropolis…
Yazan: Chaotica
Çeviri: Umberto
ANARCHISTALES 