CUCO
Cuco is the mysterious member of our gang, a dark-complected guy, tall and slim, Ronald Colman mustache. I hooked up with him in the queue at the INEM, the Employment Office. I wasn't there looking for them to find me a job, God forbid! I was collecting unemployment, my life raft on a stormy economic sea. My gravy boat, shall I say? The stock dividend of the proletariat, what the hell!.
My economic credo calls for a bit of explanation. I started life as a Red. But flaming, a diehard university sectarian. I ran around in my revolutionary chariot, a Fiat 600. The goal was straight ahead, the way clear. Simple: "All to the people."
Then, it dawned on me that if socialism was what the people were going to have, they wouldn't be getting much. Better to give them capital, which was cool. But, time after time, the people kept voting for the right-wing parties. So, I ended up convinced that the proper thing for me was to be given capital, not those vultures. Those dumb brutes became capitalists, didn't they? Okay
then, surplus value for them and the dough for me. Besides, since our setup here in Spain was pure state capitalism the state is the source from which all funds must flow. Pure revolutionary orthodoxy. The wealthy sharpies operate on government contracts and the poor wage slaves-me-go on the unemployment line.
The truth is I have a regular job, translating for a publishing house. Free lance. Off the books, of course. The boss, delighted. Me, too. Let the jerk next door pay taxes. I wasn't translating James Joyce which is what I would have liked to be doing. Then people could know what that cat can sound like in Spanish. But neither did they push best sellers onto me and that grade of crap. So, I was a legally unemployed person who happened to be collecting unemployment. I had a buddy on the inside at the office who for a small consideration kept recycling me in the computer. This guy had a list of departed citizens whom he "enrolled," to use the technical term. That is to say, the dead kept getting jobs.
Being a sensitive soul, when the Socialists came in my conscience began to bother me. However, it didn't take very long to wise up and see which way the wind was blowing and to unfurl my sail. Socialism or not, the politicians who go out of office get the best unemployment deal...housing, a car, and a bundle in their pocket monthly. How about that for popular capitalism! However, the suckers are the toiling multitudes of the early-morning metro, the taxpaying workers (ever fewer)...they who gobble up everything offered them on TV. No sooner do they have ten thousand pesetas in blood-soaked savings in the hand than they run like sheep to sock it into government bonds. Or they dream of making a killing in real estate by selling off the parcel grandpa left them out in Pisswater Springs. What suckers!
But compared to Cuco my operation was penny-ante stuff. Cuco organized a big deal for himself. The sonofagun got a lump sum. Eighteen months at a crack. Took a breather. Cranked the computer and another eighteen solid. That's how to play your cards, not my petty thievery.
Okay, let's dim the house lights. Curtain. Setting: The INEM line. Cast of Characters: The universal working class, that is the poor downtrodden, the workers, the wage slaves, the third estate, the Martyrs of May Second, the Heroes of the Defense of Madrid (still without a public square or street to remember them by, and if things keep on as they are, they'll soon be digging up their bones to incinerate them and throw away the ashes), in short, the people, and that's it: The people, dammit!
All the chicks at the INEM were short, grimy, and homely. I've yet to see a good-looking one on the unemployment line. That kind always have somebody who pays their insurance and without standing around or up, either, for that matter. The people you find there are the ones without options, if you know what I mean. Nowhere to turn except away, and an odd rascal or two like me among them.
A Wailing Wall, the INEM, a vale of tears: "I got canned after three months on the job and the bastards collected the first-job, start-up bonus that was coming to me."..."I worked eight hours straight without a lunch break and the foreman caught me once eating on company time"...”After twenty years I was fired without compensation. The sonofabitch boss didn't pay in and do you know where he is, now? In Rio toasting his ass on the beach with the garotas. That's what they call the chicks there. Did you know that?” Leave it to me, that's the one word in Portuguese I learned from Brazil."..."In my case," a woman says, "it's that the foreman(always a foreman, the dirty fink) made passes and when I wouldn't put out he had me fired for stealing. Can you imagine?" I can, I can. But, the working-class libido is something phenomenal! This lady could have been Rosa Luxemburg's granny! That's how they get to be the Workers of the World. They spend their leisure time fucking and stock the earth with little workers. There she goes, now, busting into tears! That they made passes and fired her she could live with, but calling her a thief...! I hand her some tissues out of the packet I bought from a kid at a stop light. That's the worst, the most vicious kind of exploitation, youth unemployment of rage and hate.
The old woman blows her nose and as she rummages, out pops a lottery ticket. Oh, those tickets! Everybody in the line ponies up for lotteries for the blind, for orphans, for animals, for the government, forks over for the horse races, the slot machines. A frenzy, a vice, a holocaust, these visits of the Goddess of Fortune. Impossible to imagine that such a minor goddess would be so popular in the twentieth century. The established order would collapse if not for the weekly lotteries. The more tickets sold, the tighter the control. The poor are a pack of Godots, while the treasury bulges with money, and all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. It's obvious that Orwell was no Latino, or he would have made Big Brother the CEO of the national lottery, for sure.
The men...the old men...those are the worst off of all. Twenty, twenty-five years on the same treadmill day in and day out and suddenly, whoosh! out on their asses on the cold sidewalk. The end. Take Seve, for instance. A good worker, a man of dignity, a warehouse superintendent, responsible in his job and in his life, retired at fifty years of age. Which is to say, "Go push up daisies." And that's the way he ended. Eliminated like a stray dog. Seve, in his eternal woolen pullover, a white shirt immaculate as the one Octavio Paz described the poet Cernuda as wearing, and polyester trousers always newly pressed...I remember him so clearly...I would imagine him as having stepped out of one of those proletarian novels, the worthy symbol of a class, of a people. His open, clear-eyed expression, a touch of sadness in it, as if the misfortune that he called his life and that of his comrades had seeped into his body and his soul. So many Seves in this churlish Spain, so many upstanding workingmen, dignified, well-spoken, genteel...! Ay, surly homeland, arid and sad, you don't deserve those good people! You're sweet only to certified public accountants and Mother Superiors. What a shit!
Seve, poor guy, would speak to me of customers, the stock room, deliveries... what else could he talk about? And he wanted to take me home for a meal because every time he looked at me he saw an ill-fed, untidy, hungry bachelor. "You fellows are the worst off, you young folks," he would say. "I'm out of it, lived my life. But, you all..."
Seve had lived so much of his life! The thing is he didn't know that it was about over. He complained of an ulcer. Some ulcer! A cancer the size of a soccer ball! That was reality. Seve's cancer, not Cuco's speculations. Piss on the stock market! Buy Matchboxes at 400, sell the next day at 4,000, pay not a peseta to the Treasury, and spend a million on a lobster and champagne banquet to celebrate. Deductible, of course. The market! When I hear that word I reach for my gun.
The young people in the unemployment queue are another matter. I get a kick out of them. They become impatient, protest, yell, wave their arms. Obviously, they don't realize what kind of a deal they were born into. I remember one guy. The official was being nice to him, going out of his way to put him straight, hinting that if he knew any person on the inside, he could arrange things for him. A phone call, a word from somebody upstairs...something on that order. And the fellow gets indignant and begins to howl, "So, we're back on how I gotta have pull or else, is that it?" Imagine, in that setting. Touching. His file will linger on there. Et in saecula saeculorum [and forever and ever]. It gets to me sometimes. Gets to me because I'm passing. Passing as a poor man which I'm not. And they think I'm one of them. The difference lies mainly in knowing the score. They haven't the foggiest notion. I know. For instance, if inflation is going to be brought under control, the wretched of the earth will have to wade through deep shit. The price, three million victims. Nothing to do about it. There ain't no other way.
The stock market drops, let's suppose. Watch out, the Fed has it's eye peeled. General alert! The slump in the financial markets mustn't hit the real markets. That would be disaster, everybody on the unemployment line, even the big shots. Okay, lower interest rates, but fast. Up go the prices. Tutto a posto niente in ordine [Everything in place, nothing in order]. Now--and this is not a for instance, it's a fact--what goes down is not the market but employment. Do interest rates drop so that employment will rise? Nyet. So what's the ploy, my boy? You want to know why? Because that would make inflation rise and trigger more unemployment. Aha, then it's not inflationary to lower interest rates so that stocks will go up? That's right, that's what unemployment is for. Unemployment will rise and that will balance accounts. Then, even if you see the sheriff coming down the street because of questions that can't be asked, you insist on wanting to know how come: Isn't unemployment a slump of real markets and one that dumps over the whole apple cart? Not at all, the puppet economist tells you. Real market is that whose slump brings on unemployment. Goddam! Then what the hell is unemployment? According to your friend, a university pal who has a master's from Chicago, it's a variable constant. So you jab him with: Come off it! Dialectical logic in this shrine to Mercury? Dialectical logic, balls! he snaps back. You're the same leftie egg-head you always were. It is a constant because its function--by definition--is to adjust the other components of the model. And for the same reason, a variable, because despite being always present, its percentage varies as a function of other constants, all variable, as well.
Does that clear things up for you? Then, let's suspend the interrogation. Jeeves, show the gentleman out.
A mess, friends! And this guy was the smartest in the class. Imagine the rest! You leave and the first thing you do is roll yourself a joint. Evade or perish.
So, then, you're tempted to think of the politically correct alternative of ten years ago and your hair stands on end. You weren't allowed to ask the time of day then, man. You were asked. And without recourse to dialectics or Socratic maieutics nor any other bourgeois refinements, but by the Asiatic method which is more progressive. The rack or the wheel, then. It was the Garden of Eden and there's no retail or wholesale in Paradise. You believed or you didn't. And if you didn't believe, you'd better start packing. You were an enemy of the people. Of history, I should say. And, it was off to the Siberian Riviera to build socialism on the chain gang. That is, if you were lucky. If not, it was into the concrete mix for the metro with you. An enviable fate. You became part of the foundation of the revolutionary state which was an incarnation of the Vanguard of Humanity. I love it!
Oh, the intrinsically perverse nature of the social order! Always the perch for the weakest, which happens to be most of us. And there's no way out. Take their butlers and Chateau d'Yqem away from the rich and there won't be enough for a noseful. We'll stay in the same rags. But if you screw the underclass, the economy breezes ahead...and the rich get even fatter. That's where we're at.
They're lucky that the poor don't understand economics. If they did they wouldn't stay poor. A dilemma, according to Aristotle. A mystery, the Pope would say. Everybody on his knees and pray, indulgences galore but no birth-control pills!
These moral cogitations of mine leave Cuco cold. A lord among serfs, he was a sight to behold, a young matinee idol encased in Italian loafers and gray cashmere overcoat. He watched me take out my cigarettes and the moocher helped himself, doing me a favor. We lit up with an antique solid-gold Dunhill that the bugger manipulated with more than appropriate elegance and launched into a lecture on investments for my benefit. I was dazed at first for, to tell the truth, it didn't seem like this was the appropriate place for that kind of discussion.
But Cuco knew what he was talking about. He had eighteen months nailed down with securities quoted at 315% which were going to be picked up by the Italians and in six months would be paying 600%. He had a share in a filly at the track that was "weak in the head but strong in the hindquarters" and an angle on a deal for the possible importation of Thailandese buddahs. He sounded like the Minister of Commerce! But nobody in the line even turned around listen. He was talking a foreign language.
At one point he pulled out an inhaler, and whoosh! whacked his pituitary. He noticed my expression of complicity. If that was Vicks, I was Cheeta's uncle. And he passed it to me. Nice stuff, I said appreciatively. Processed with ether, he explained. With nitro, possibly, I noted, for the way it hits. First generation pure, he added the technical footnote.
When we leave, I take the guy to Hermógenes's for a beer and he opens up. He's in a bind and they're on his tail. Would I mind if he slept over at my pad? Ten thousand pesetas for the favor or a gram of the snow I'd sampled. I opted for payment in kind, stood him to a dish of meatballs, we climbed to my garret, rolled a couple of joints, and now, a host in the old-world mode, I got out a bottle of my vintage rum, put on some classical old platters, and off to sleep like kids. Well, here I was, a receiver of stolen goods, in legal terms. Me, a fence. What a life ! And all for a colleague in a spot.
Cuco is the one I dig the least. He comes and goes like the tide and takes pains to keep me posted on what he's really up to. As a matter of fact, I'd rather not know. But, he's a mate and was with the rest of us the night they crowned me King of the Blowout. Actually, I like him, and get a kick out of listening to his millionaire fantasies.