COMMON FACTOR

Sergio Gaut vel Hartman

 

The house wasn't bad. Perhaps it had more rooms than necessary and a gloomy character that could be corrected with flowers and plants and some children running through the hallways and the patio. I wondered if I would have the opportunity to find something better and also how many other cloying real estate agents they would have to endure before finding the ideal house, the dream place.

"What do you think?" said the salesman, rubbing his hands. He had fashioned a smile so false that it threatened to perpetuate itself on his face, condemning him to rigor mortis in life. "You won't find anything better," he insisted after reading my thoughts. Salesman's tricks, I suspected; I'm too childish in such matters. I was going to retort, I swear, but at that moment the guy's cell phone rang, and after muttering an apology, he withdrew to the adjoining room to answer the call.

I was left alone and dedicated myself to observing the high, white ceilings. Plaster moldings clearly marked the separation from the ugly, hastily painted walls. I thought it was an original, extravagant house, perhaps concocted by a snobbish architect. I took a few steps towards the next room, moving away from the salesman. The place seemed illogical in a way, and it reminded me of a story I had read some time ago. For a moment I thought I could get trapped in that singular geography, lost in spaces I was completely unfamiliar with, but I immediately dismissed those silly arguments. The salesman was still talking, perhaps arguing or receiving instructions to close the deal, so I refocused my attention on the house. There were too many rooms, I repeated to myself; the walls oozed dampness, the floors were uneven, and ventilation was scarce. These reasons led me to decide that I had enough to end the whole matter right there. I approached a door and opened it. It led to an empty room. I retraced my steps and opened another door. This smaller room was populated by moth-eaten, decrepit, foul-smelling furniture; I felt nauseous. Just about to emerge into a patio where a mass of golden light had accumulated, I noticed a door disguised behind a tattered, dirty blue curtain. I hesitated between going out to the patio, clearly the blind end of the line, since an unlimited number of rooms couldn't exist, or concentrating my attention on that door. The second idea won.

I fumbled for the doorknob behind the curtain and felt the coldness of the bronze; as I imagined, it wasn't locked; none of the house's doors were, after all. I opened it and faced the first surprise.

The natural assumption, I don't know why, had been to think that the room was empty and that the light from the patio was obliquely filtering through a window, illuminating dust particles and delineating a trapezoid of clarity on the dark floor. It wasn't like that.

The room had no windows. The stark white of several fluorescent tubes shone on the objects, denying them the right to shadow. But these details were nowhere near as extraordinary as the rest. Sitting in a high-backed chair, with his elbows resting on a wooden table and his fists under his chin, was a man of indefinable age, with graying hair and a network of wrinkles on his face that seemed to mimic the labyrinth of the house. He looked towards the door, as if he had been waiting for me, but upon seeing me, he didn't even blink.

"Good afternoon," I said. "I didn't know anyone was here."

"Evening. I'm Juan Salvo," he said, slurring his words. I mentioned my name and he shrugged. I remained rooted to the floor for a few seconds, paying attention to the noises, barely rustles, coming from an adjoining room that communicated with ours through a doorless opening.

"Is there anyone else?" I said, pointing to the opening.

"Yes," Salvo said, "Guevara; he's preparing mate. We're waiting for Rosa to start." He seemed to observe me more closely for a second, but immediately lost interest. "We weren't expecting you. Were you supposed to come? Who sent you?" The words denoted suspicion and distrust, but the tired tone belied any nuance in that direction.

I didn't know what to answer, so I put myself on the defensive, with my guard up. "Who are you people?" I asked, always attentive to what this Guevara was doing in the neighboring room; apparently, he was in no hurry. Two or three times I heard clinking, as if a teaspoon was hitting a glass.

"I already told you: Rosa, who will arrive any moment, Guevara and I, Salvo. Sit down, don't stand there. Are you sure no one sent you? Maybe Guevara knows."

I spotted a chair identical to Juan's and dragged it unceremoniously to place it next to the table. I sat to one side, with my back to the wall facing the patio and facing the archway through which, at any moment, Guevara would appear.

"You mention the names of these people," I said, "and your own, but they mean nothing to me. Should I know them?"

"Yours means nothing to me either," Salvo said. "What does it matter? If I told you that Guevara and Rosa are fighters, people who have imagined a better world and are trying to force things to make it happen, would anything change?"

I looked at Salvo disoriented, searching my memory for a logical reason to fit the nonsense the man suggested. "Wait a moment," I stammered. "If what you say were true, you'd be talking about people who died years ago. That Guevara died in Bolivia, in the mountains, a long time ago. And I don't even dare to think that the Rosa you mention is the revolutionary, the German woman from the early 20th century who fought..."

"She's Polish, not German," Salvo said.

"She isn't, she was. She's dead," I insisted. "Rosa Luxemburg." I savored the name, an epic name, like Dolores Ibarruri, like other quixotic ladies of history. The guy was crazy.

"Alive, dead," Salvo said, shaking his head. "What do you know?"

"You don't expect me to believe he's a ghost." I tried to laugh, but my lips twisted abnormally and formed a sneering grimace.

"For now, my friend," Salvo said, "I expect nothing." Salvo seemed at that moment overwhelmed by a weariness greater than any man could bear, as if a long and useless struggle had consumed him. I was going to retort; I am a rational person and that kind of superstition disturbs me beyond words, but things didn't turn out as I expected. A crash forced me to turn my head. The windowless wall opened as if it were the diaphragm of a camera. Click, clack. The patio was never seen, and in any case, what I could perceive was, like a flash, a dark volume crossing the iris with a firm step, as if the wall simply didn't exist.

When I could turn my whole body, I discovered next to me a young woman, about twenty-five years old, perhaps less; she was petite, with very white skin, and moved nervously, as if she lacked time to do everything she had planned.

"Hello, Rosa," Salvo said, as expressionless as ever.

"Hello, Rosa," I repeated; I could afford to be polite. I was fascinated by the idea that this woman was the mythical Rosa Luxemburg, the founder of Spartacism. But Rosa had been assassinated in 1919, how was that possible...?

The girl looked at me, surprised and irritated. Apparently, she didn't like an intruder occupying a place around the table, much less being treated with familiarity, as if I had known her before. She put her arms akimbo, in a pose so affected that it seemed like a movie heroine, and pointed at me by moving her chin.

"Where did this one come from, who is he?" she said with a strong German accent, which confirmed, in a way, what Salvo had stated.

"He must be someone visiting the house to buy it," Guevara said, coming out of the other room with a thermos under his arm and a leather-covered gourd in his left hand. He didn't look at me; perhaps he was looking beyond the wall, the patio, or beyond the house, a landscape invisible to me. Apparently, these people knew and could do things that were forbidden to me. Guevara sat down and gestured to Rosa to drop that austere gesture, similar to that used by a fanatic when with someone who does not profess their faith. Then he placed the gourd in a tiny wicker basket and poured the water in a single, precise stream, showing that his pulse was trained; he took three long sips without moving the container and refilled it, pushing the gourd towards Salvo.

"Is he useful to us?" Rosa said. Although her features had softened a little, the girl's hostility could have been caught in the air with a slap. I felt the urge to jump up and leave without saying goodbye, but the mystery was too precious, like a gem.

"Do you have a mission?" I said without thinking, a pure intuition like pure water; an absurd and unfounded intuition. But all three raised their heads and fixed their eyes on me. Even Salvo seemed to lose the skin of apathy that enveloped him, and Guevara put down the thermos, and Rosa leaned her small body forward, almost touching me.

"What do you know about all this?" Guevara said. "Who told you about us?"

"We all have a war to fight," I said, blindly, hoping that path would lead somewhere. "I'm looking for mine."

They all sighed with relief; it was almost comical. Salvo shook his head and I thought he smiled. Rosa put her hand on my arm and squeezed, as if wishing to erase all previous distrust with that gesture.

"I highly doubt this is yours," Guevara said. He poured water into the gourd again and offered it to me. Although I don't usually drink mate, I accepted. I sensed that if I yielded to these people's ways, my chances of understanding what was happening would increase.

"To know if we are in the same war," I said, at random, "we would first have to define who the enemy is."

Contrary to what I expected, none of them answered me. Perhaps my question had been too direct, and that put me under suspicion again. Was I spying on them? I knew I wasn't. Rosa released my arm; only then did I notice that she had been squeezing so hard that her nails had pierced the fabric of my shirt.

Guevara prepared himself as if he were about to lecture a group of anxious and ignorant young people.

"Do you know what happens?" he finally said, though without looking at me, after taking two long sips. "The enemy... it doesn't matter much who the enemy is. We can put our heads together and believe that the enemy is one, and in a way it is, but the struggle must take place at every point, at every intersection, do you understand? Then it matters less. You fight your own war and each of us will do something similar. We have met by chance; perhaps we don't even belong to the same time, we haven't been able to find out yet. In reality, we just get together to drink mate." He laughed strangely.

"It doesn't escape you that I don't understand what you're talking about," I said.

"No, it doesn't escape me," Guevara said. "It was a possibility. Do you know who I am?"

"Should I know? Are you someone... important? If you were the same Guevara... it would be impossible." I didn't want to say that that Guevara was dead; it seemed rude to me.

Guevara smiled. Then he patted his thigh.

"Juan knows much more about this than Rosa and I because he exists on another plane, independent, closer to central knowledge," he said. "He says that in some lines I am someone important, perhaps decisive, or at least influential. But lines are just that, lines. You walk down a hallway, open a door, and enter a room. Maybe I'm there, maybe not. Maybe I triumphed or was assassinated or wasn't born, do you understand?"

"No. Why doesn't he explain it to me?" I said, pointing to Salvo. "If you yourself admit that he knows much more than you."

"We're wasting time," Rosa said. She had regained her previous expression, though intensified by an urgency that came from fear, as if the whole scene risked bursting like a soap bubble.

"Time is not lost," Salvo said, "we are the ones who get lost in time." I was getting tired of those empty, deliberately enigmatic phrases, designed to impress me. I began to think that, beyond the trick of Rosa and the wall, of the mentions of war or whatever they intended to do, a terrorist act, an ambush, an assassination, these people were concealing a concrete operation: occupying the house to use it as a base for their activities, or something similar. The memory of the Process times suddenly came to me and I was afraid.

"Do you have authorization from the owner or the real estate agency to be in this place, or are you common intruders?" My phrase sounded insipid, and they, all three, even before I finished the paragraph, began to laugh.

"If you only knew how defeated your words sound," Guevara said when he could compose himself. "This is an inflection point, an anomaly. Do you think something as trivial as squatting in a house can prevail over the phenomenon that brings us together, here, now, all four of us?"

"You spoke of a war," I said, trying to regain my footing.

"You spoke," Salvo said. "For us, war, any war, took a back seat a long time ago. What kind of war do you imagine? One with soldiers, planes, tanks, missiles? I'm sorry to disappoint you; we don't have those kinds of wars in existence." Juan's words were accompanied by such a high degree of bitterness that for a moment I thought he was going to explode, splashing me, soaking me in blue, lethal poison.

"Is any of you going to tell me clearly why you are in this place?" I half-rose in my chair; I was determined to press them and define, even at the cost of leaving some shreds in the attempt.

"I already told you," Guevara insisted, "we just got together to drink mate." Rosa was even more eloquent: she drew her finger and pointed it at me, accusingly, although I suppose she didn't even know what she was accusing me of. She said two or three words in German, I suppose; they sounded like an insult.

"Rosa, please," Juan Salvo said wearily, "let's leave those silly things."

"If you explain the trick of the wall," I said, not paying attention to the girl who kept gesticulating, despite Salvo's reprimand, perhaps stuck for lack of words in our language, "I'll leave and let you be. I found you by chance and I'm not interested. I'd rather be in the library, reading a good book. Do you realize? Besides, the salesman must be looking for me."

Salvo looked at Guevara, as if asking for help, but he made an eloquent gesture, downplaying its importance.

"The salesman is dangerous, he is the enemy, since you wanted to know," Guevara said.

Then Salvo stood up and, placing his fists on the table, spoke like a political leader negotiating support for his worst adversary.

"It's time, sir, the greatest impostor, a fiction. Get out of here, while you can, before you get caught in the web of facts. Do you think I was always this pale shadow? I am a man of action and I await my opportunity. But you disturb me, you hinder me."

"Who are you?" I repeated for the umpteenth time, almost furious. I also had my fists clenched, and despite always having been a peaceful person, I felt like running them over, forcing them to explain the whole story to me.

"We already told you," Guevara said; he seemed to be very patient, a guy accustomed to complicated ventures.

"Names are not enough for me; I don't know who you are by knowing your names, which, by the way, could be mere pseudonyms. It's very common lately."

Rosa seemed, for the first time, at peace with herself, but she refrained from speaking.

"Let's suppose for a moment," Salvo said, "that we are independent avatars who met, who by pure chance found the common factor that allows them to coincide in a fictional space, is that enough for you?"

"Avatars? They talk as if this were a game. No, it's not enough for me," I said, and I was sincere; I was as much in the dark as at the beginning. Perhaps I am a limited person to understand the abstract or the fantastic, but I couldn't connect these three people; perhaps I wouldn't have been able to even knowing their motives and passions. "Okay, tell me your stories, one of the three stories, at least."

"No," Guevara said, breaking a silence of several minutes, "we don't have time left." He tried to pour water into the gourd and discovered that the thermos was empty. Without hesitation and without looking back, he headed towards the other room. As I watched him disappear, it occurred to me that he had the answer and was hiding it, or that he was provoking me. With a jump, I crossed the space that separated us without Rosa or Juan trying to stop me. I reached the archway and received a devastating impact: Guevara was walking towards a mountain of oxidized bushes, under an ashen, weak sun; beyond, by a stream, a kind of camp was visible where some men and women surrounded a bonfire. I called out to him, but he didn't even turn around, as if he were traversing a space without connection. I realized that I had lost a third of reality, perhaps forever, or perhaps it wasn't real at all, it never had been, how to know? I turned abruptly, prepared to discover that the archway leading to the house I had intended to buy had disappeared, but no: the archway was still in the same place; fortunately, I wasn't lost in an alternative universe, with no possibility of return. I hesitated for a second. I would ruin everything if I didn't make the right move, but I also couldn't continue living with the doubt on my shoulders.

However, when I looked back into the room, Rosa and Salvo had disappeared. The room was empty, like so many others in the house. There were no traces of the table and chairs, and a huge window overlooked a patio where the last vestiges of a coppery light wrinkled like the skin of a rotting fruit. The door opened and I heard the voice of the real estate agent.

"Sir?" he said hesitantly. "Are you here?"

It wasn't possible, nothing was possible. I went outside and looked towards the camp. Guevara had already gained a good hundred meters on me. But reality is tied to logical laws, I told myself; people can't just appear and disappear like that.

"Yes, I'm here," I said, entering the room resolutely. The salesman sighed with relief. "I was just looking around," I added.

"This leads to the park," he said, pointing to the archway through which Guevara had left. I adjusted the idea in my head. Calling a mountain of bushes with its own stream a park seemed absurd to me, but it was the real estate agent's logic, not mine or the others'.

"Beautiful park," I said for lack of anything better. I moved to get past the salesman, but he grabbed my arm.

"Did you see something you shouldn't have?" The guy's expression had changed drastically. The plastic smile gone, he looked at me harshly, brazenly, as police often look at a suspect. The pressure on my arm intensified; I thought of Rosa and how everyone seemed interested in keeping me restrained, not just in that house and at that moment.

"Are you going to let me go? What do you think you're doing?"

"No," the guy said, stubborn; now it was hard for me to think of him as a simple real estate agent; he was something else, no doubt, as Guevara had said; the salesman is dangerous, he said, he is the enemy. The salesman confirmed it immediately, with four enigmatic and conclusive words: "Who is the woman?"

"What woman? I didn't see any woman."

"Don't be an idiot." He increased the pressure on my arm even more and with a dizzying movement pulled out a weapon and pressed it against my forehead.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm not playing; neither are they. Didn't they tell you this is a war?"

I laughed as naturally as possible. "You're crazy! I came to buy the house."

"That was the original idea, but things changed since you met those three." The forcefulness of the statement shattered my scheme. He knew everything, it wasn't a trick; he could read minds with absolute efficiency. I decided to make a drastic change, a desperate move.

"Oh, those people, I was just going to ask you. Is the house occupied? How do I get them out of here? If I buy it, will I get involved in legal issues?"

The guy let go of me and stepped back, though without ceasing to point the weapon at me.

"What were they doing?"

"They're out there, drinking mate," I said as naturally as possible. "Didn't you know? Weren't you the one who reads minds?"

"Me? How do you know?" The hesitation lasted an instant, but apparently in free zones, that's enough. A wall opened again like a diaphragm, click, clack, not the same one, where there was now a window, but the one leading to the hallway, but this time I could see it without difficulty. Rosa jumped like a panther and grabbed the salesman's hand that held the weapon. But that wasn't all. There was another click, clack, on the ceiling, and Salvo descended in slow motion, as if sinking into a large volume of swan feathers. That slowness didn't seem important, as the salesman was paralyzed. His face had frozen in an expression of astonished terror, as if his brain was incapable of ordering anything else. Salvo brandished a wide-bladed hunting knife, and used it to open the guy from navel to neck.

"Watch out, it's coming out!" Salvo announced.

From inside the salesman came a monstrous creature, a saffron-colored spheroid, a being unlike anything that lived on Earth. The monster had no limbs and clumsily fell to the ground without making a sound. I didn't know whether to be surprised by what I was seeing or by the way Rosa and Salvo handled the situation. It seemed incredible to me that the creature was housed inside a human body and that, perhaps, I don't know, I conjecture, it had taken possession of it to manipulate it.

"Leave, if you're impressionable," Salvo said. "I'm not lying if I tell you that what follows is quite unpleasant." I was about to ask what he meant by that, when Guevara re-entered through the same place he had used to leave. He carried a black plastic bag and without any explanation poured its contents over the creature. A white cascade fell over the spheroid, which began to shrink, while it broke apart, turning gray and emitting a nauseating smell, the same one I had perceived in the room full of furniture.

"Is it salt?" I said, stupidly.

"It's cocaine," Guevara said. "It's not a cheap war. Each of these bugs costs us a fortune." The creature soon dwindled to a pile of ashes.

Salvo crouched to remove the remains with the knife. Rosa took care of the salesman, but I had to look away; it seemed as if the monster that had harbored inside him had devoured his organs. To say the guy was dead was an understatement.

"So this is the war," I said.

"One of the wars," Salvo said.

"They used me miserably," I protested. "They knew the guy would come looking for me; they were baiting the trap."

"Baiting traps, brewing mate," Guevara said. "What can you do? There are worse things. Do you know what would happen if these things managed to reproduce?"

"No, but I can imagine. I see a legion of real estate agents advancing on the great capitals."

"Are you stupid?" Rosa said. When she got angry, her German accent became very noticeable. For a moment I thought I might know who these three really were, although history was never my strong suit. Perhaps they were just the ones from the books, with full names and surnames and deeds.

"I'm not one to give advice," Guevara said, "but I'm going to give you one: don't buy the house if you don't want to live in the middle of a battlefield." He gathered what remained of the creature using the plastic bag in which he had brought the cocaine and wrapped it without touching it with his hands. Then he took out a roll of packing tape and gave it several turns. The whole package was not much bigger than a soccer ball.

"You took away my desire." I tried to smile and couldn't.

"Then I don't know if we'll see each other again," Salvo said, extending his hand to me. I shook it. Rosa shook her head and was the first to leave the room. Click, clack, you know.

"Mine is a bit more complicated," Salvo said. "It only works when no one is left." I didn't ask any more; surely the ceiling, converted into a large mouth, would swallow him. I saw Guevara leave through the archway, as all the other times, and a couple of pieces clicked: they could only meet in that place, at that intersection point, and that's why they had needed me to attract the salesman. I still felt like garbage.

I left the house and resolved to follow Guevara's advice to the letter.