The Vigenère Room is empty. The hands of the clock on the wall
read 6:25 a.m. Ramírez-Graham hadn’t been thorough enough and had left
mechanical clocks in the building. Surely he would soon replace them with
red numbers in quartz, analogue with digital. Such useless modernization.
Seconds more or seconds less, precise or imprecise, time will continue to fl
ow on and in the end have its way with us.
The building at this hour is still chilly. It doesn’t matter: you like to
be the first to arrive at work. You learned that from Albert, your boss for over
twenty-five years. Continuing on with the tradition is your homage to the man
who did more for cryptanalysis in Río Fugitivo than anyone else. Albert is
now confined to a medicinal-smelling room in a house on Avenida de las
Acacias, delirious, his mind unable to respond. He is proof that it’s not good
to overload the brain with work: short circuits are the order of the day. You
like to walk down the empty hallways, to see the desks in the cubicles piled
high with paper. In the still air your eyes rest on file folders and ghostly
machines with the disdainful arrogance of a benevolent god, of someone who
will do his work because some unknown First Cause has ordained it and it’s
not wise to defy destiny.
You press the elevator button and enter that metallic universe
where the strangest thoughts have always occurred to you. Will the elevator
malfunction and plunge you to your death? You are heading to the basement,
to the archives, to the ends of the earth, to a death chamber that only you
inhabit. It is even colder down there. Suspended in the air by thick cables,
you move without moving, in peace.
There is something special about this elevator. Its green walls,
simple efficiency — a solid nucleus of stable movement. What would you do
without it? What would people do without them? Otis, six passengers, 1000
pounds. You stare at the name. You spell it out: O-T-I-S. Backwards: S-I-T-
O. It is a message striving to break free, and it is destined only for you. I-O-T-
S. I’m Obliged To Say. Who’s obliged to say what?
The general archives are in the basement. You are the link
between the present and the past. You hang your jacket on a broken coat
rack. You take your glasses off, clean the lenses with a dirty handkerchief,
and put them back on. You pop a piece of spearmint gum into your mouth,
the first of many. Never chewed for more than two minutes, they are thrown
out as soon as the first flavor is gone.
You feel the need to urinate. That sense of having to go
immediately has been with you since adolescence. It’s one of the worst
manifestations of your anxiety, the way in which your body compensates for
your apparent immunity to emotions. All of your underwear is stained the
color of burned grass. You suffer from it even more now that you work in the
basement; the architect never thought to put a bathroom on this floor.
Perhaps he assumed that whoever would work in the archives could take the
elevator or stairs up to the bathrooms on the ground floor — a normal human
being, someone who might go once or twice a day and not be bothered. But
what about someone who is incontinent? How insensitive.
You open the bottom drawer of your desk and take out a plastic
cup with a smiling Road Runner on it. You head to a corner of the room, your
back to the archives. You lower your zipper and urinate into the cup: six,
seven, eight amber drops. That’s why you don’t like to go to the bathroom;
the result is usually incompatible with the sense of urgency. It’s better to
accumulate drops in the cup and then casually pass by the bathroom to
dispose of your fragrant treasure at lunchtime.
You put the cup back in the drawer.
The pile of papers on your desk seduces you; bringing order to
chaos, partially winning the battle against it, and being ready for the next
onslaught is a game that lasts for days and months and years.
Cryptanalysts’ desks tend to be impeccable, with papers stacked on either
side, pens and reference books lined up one next to the other, the computer
monitor standing guard, the keyboard on the shelf hidden beneath the desk.
It is the reflection of a pristine mind that does its work with great dedication
to logic.
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