The Weight of Temptation [1 ed.] 9780803246171, 9780803239777

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Copyright © 2012. Nebraska Paperback. All rights reserved. The Weight of Temptation, Nebraska Paperback, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2012. Nebraska Paperback. All rights reserved.

The Weight of Temptation

The Weight of Temptation, Nebraska Paperback, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2012. Nebraska Paperback. All rights reserved.

latin american women writers Series Editors Jean Franco, Columbia University Francine Masiello, University of California at Berkeley Tununa Mercado Mary Louise Pratt, New York University

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The Weight of Temptation (El peso de la tentación)

Ana María Shua

Copyright © 2012. Nebraska Paperback. All rights reserved.

Translated by Andrea G. Labinger

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London

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© Ana María Shua, 2007

Library of Congress

English translation © 2012 by

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

the Board of Regents of the

Shua, Ana María, 1951–

University of Nebraska

[Peso de la tentación. English]

Published by arrangement with

The weight of temptation / Ana

Literarische Agentur Mertin Inh.

María Shua; translated by

Nicole Witt e. K.,

Andrea G. Labinger.

Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

p. cm. — (Latin American

All rights reserved

women writers)

Manufactured in the

isbn 978-0-8032-3977-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

United States of America

1. Women—Fiction. 2. Weight

Copyright © 2012. Nebraska Paperback. All rights reserved.

loss—Fiction. I. Labinger, Publication of this

Andrea G. II. Title.

book was assisted

pq7798.29.h8p4713 2012

by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. “A Great Nation Deserves Great Art”

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863'.64—dc23

2012003588

Designed by Mikah Tacha.

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Contents 1. Weighing In, 1

18. The Farewell Party, 98

2. Fast Day, 7

19. The Orgy, 105

3. The Group, 18

20. Elephant Seals, 114

4. Case History I, 26

21. I Have a Lover, 119

5. The Barracks, 30

22. It Had to Be Esteban, 123

6. Case History II, 36

23. The Divine Comedy, 126

7. Beat Your Face, 39

24. Passion, 129

8. Case History III, 48

25. Carola, 133

9. The Clockwork Orange, 51

26. Under Cover, 138

10. Case History IV, 57

27. Betrayal, 147

11. The Inferno, 61

28. At the Finish Line, 152

12. The Phone Call, 68

29. Survival, 158

13. The Campfires, 72

30. The Unforeseen, 165

14. New Friends, 78

31. The Crossing, 171

15. His Own Grave, 82

32. The New Order, 175

16. Food Trafficking, 89

33. Outside, 182

17. Sob Stories, 95

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1

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Weighing In

“How long did you sign up for?” whispered a strange, hissing voice behind her. She didn’t dare turn around to reply. She moved hesitantly, one step at a time, extending her arms to avoid tripping over the woman in front of her, as the voice informed her how the line was advancing. Her eyes were bandaged with an efficient black cloth that kept light from penetrating. As in a nightmare, she was naked among other people. But she knew that the other women, whom she couldn’t see, were naked too. And in nightmares, the others are usually fully clothed. “All right, fatties,” said an affectionate voice. “Let’s see if you can move a little faster so we can all get some breakfast.” The room wasn’t air conditioned, and the accumulated body heat steamed up the atmosphere. Marina felt the sweat oozing in slow rivulets, drops collecting in the folds of her flesh, only to cascade down her entire torso. “I signed up for six months. How long do you have to go?” insisted the woman behind her with her strange diction, as though she were speaking through clenched teeth.

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“Quiet!” This voice was less friendly, shriller. “What do you cows think — that you can burn calories by wagging your tongues?” Marina knew quite well what awaited her at The Reeds. She knew that her confinement there was her punishment for being fat; she knew that many other forms of punishment lay before her and that she had paid for them. A lot. She bowed her head. She was approaching the scale. Even those situations that seemed like pure sadistic entertainment had their purpose at The Reeds. Fat people have a tendency to reward themselves (with food) every time they lose a little weight. And they feel disappointed (and overeat) when they haven’t lost as much as they’d expected. The establishment maintained a daily weight log of its residents, who were informed once a week how much they’d lost. Every morning before breakfast, they were weighed naked and blindfolded. But how can we possibly overeat, locked up in here? Aren’t they going to feed us the correct portions? Marina had wondered a few days before being admitted, when they explained the system to her. To their credit, they hadn’t lied once. The Tutor, a slender, bespectacled woman, shot her a disdainful look, ignoring her question. The entire staff of The Reeds was slender. Maintaining a certain body mass index must have been one of the requirements of their contracts. We don’t use the word “patients,” she said. We prefer to call them “Campers.” She had reached the scale. “C’mon, fatty, step up — lift your little hoof. Very good, that’s it.” With the exception of the weigh-in ceremony, all other activities were shared by men and women together. However, at the breakfast table, there was no mixing. The women (or was it the men?) preferred to sit separately, especially at six in the morning. Under the supervision of the Tutors, they began by drinking a glass of water accompanied by vitamins, plus potassium and magnesium pills designed to compensate for the lack of minerals in the starvation diet to which they were subjected.

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Marina drank tea with artificial sweetener (at least they let her drink as many cups of tea as she liked). As she stared despairingly at her fat-free yogurt — colorless, tiny, and destined to disappear in a single gulp — she once more heard that unmistakable diction, that hissing voice, forcing its way through clenched teeth. It came from the woman seated at her left, a young girl who breathed laboriously through the pounds of fat weighing on her chest, forming her words carefully with her lips so that she could be understood through her dentition. She sipped her yogurt through a straw. “You’re new, aren’t you? Did you sign up for three months? I’m a repeat offender. A ‘Cager.’ My name’s Alelí. There are worse things.” Alelí flashed her a broad smile. Her front teeth gleamed nervously, as if trying to escape through the wire cage that held them and their companions prisoner. “Does that shock you? In the old days, they used to plaster your jaw shut in a cast. That was way more uncomfortable, because you couldn’t talk. Now they sew up our jaws with wire. Great idea, huh? You’re the new one who was ahead of me in the weigh-in line, right?” “How did you recognize me? Weren’t you blindfolded?” “Well, after a while you learn to peek a little. After a while you learn everything.” “You’ve learned too much,” said a woman sitting across from them, in a half-joking, half-reproachful tone. Turning toward Marina, she added, “She’s exaggerating: they don’t sew up your jaws with wire. They put clamps on your teeth, like at the orthodontist’s, and they connect them with wire.” “But how do you brush your teeth?” Marina asked, fascinated. “Mouthwash. But don’t worry — I can’t breathe on anybody, either,” Alelí laughed. Men and women dressed alike, in The Reeds’ general-issue summer uniform: baggy pants with elastic waistband; lightweight cotton, buttonless V-neck, short-sleeved shirt, which slipped over the

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head; comfortable, cool, canvas sneakers. Like monks entering a monastery, they were allowed to bring practically nothing with them from the outside world, the realm of sin. There was a wide variety of colors to choose from, and each person could select whichever he or she preferred, except black. No more black clothing, the Professor would say in Group sessions. No more fat people wearing “slimming black.” It was pleasant to be in a place where all sizes were really available. Marina chose a green uniform and noticed immediately that it had no pockets. “That’s so inconvenient,” she protested. “You have no idea yet how inconvenient it is,” said a very tall, much older woman with a scar on her chin, who must have weighed over 250 pounds. People never give up. No matter what their age, Marina thought, joylessly. She had harbored the illusion that one day she’d be old enough to stop caring, to eat without restriction. But when aesthetic concerns ended, the demands of the arteries, the cry of the joints, began. The dining room looked cheery, with all those bright colors distributed randomly around the circular tables for eight. There were some super-obese people, many fat folks like Marina, and a small but notable number of individuals who were just slightly overweight or even thin. This last group wore white uniforms. “I didn’t know they admitted anorexics here,” she remarked, with a certain amount of indignation. The other women at the table burst out laughing. “You’ll have a chance to hear those anorexics tonight,” Alelí said. Breakfast lasted barely twenty busy minutes. There was very little conversation: everyone was trying to gulp down as much tea as possible. Through the dining room window, a broad swath of green, like a golf course, was visible, dotted with little hills and interrupted here and there by drinking troughs, their drums filled with purified water, and white cubicles that housed the chemical toilets. The diet

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at The Reeds required a minimum of four liters of liquid daily. The neatly mowed lawn invited hands to stroke it. A double thickness of wire fencing around the perimeter cordoned off a corridor where the rottweilers (part of the security system) ran around, barking. In addition to the guard post at the entrance, there were watchtowers at fifty-meter intervals, although they were occupied only at night. To the left were the barracks, and toward the back stood the Clockwork Orange Pavilion. A group of people advanced in formation, marching and singing in chorus, like in a U.S. Marine training film. As the tables were being cleared, Alelí, with a swift, unexpected movement, swiped an empty yogurt container and hid it under her shirt, shoving it inside the elastic waistband of her pants. Marina wondered how many others had noticed, but their indifferent expressions revealed nothing. The management of The Reeds knew how to optimize the Campers’ tuition: part of their required physical activity was simply labor. Only in the kitchen did The Reeds employ their own staff, and none of the residents could enter there, not even to wash dishes. (But it was possible to peek inside from the hallway connecting to the dining room: the cleanliness was absolute, pristine; there were enormous refrigerators and freezers secured with chains and padlocks.) All the other chores were handled by the Campers. Everyone was responsible for making their own beds and for keeping their few possessions clean and tidy. The Tutors carried out periodic inspections. Disorder — a sloppily made bed, any minuscule infraction of the rules — was severely punished by a reduction in rations or an increase in physical exercise. For other routine tasks they were organized into teams. They had to clean the quarters, mow and water the lawns, sew and wash clothing. Men and women performed all the chores equally. When they first arrived, the Campers were clumsy, inefficient peons who frustrated and amused the old-timers. Most of all, they were a source of ridicule for the electricians and the few custodians who supervised their labors. By the time they left, they

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were experts in the area they had been designated. After breakfast, Marina was assigned to the laundry team. As they walked along, they passed the group of people who were marching on command, raising their legs high in a pitiful imitation of the goose step. Now she could distinguish the words of the refrain they repeated over and over, rhythmically, like a rap number, like an entreaty, like a prayer: I’m-a-fat-piece-of-shit, And-I’m-way-way-too-big, It-is-n’t-my-hor-mones, I-just-eat-like-a-pig. One of the Tutors escorting them to the laundry noticed her uncomfortable expression. “Every marching squad chooses its own rhyme,” she explained. “By vote.” Why was she here? Marina asked herself. Was all this ridicule, this humiliation, really necessary? It was. To confirm this, she had only to recall her last day of fasting.

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Fast Day

A scale is a relatively precise instrument. An overweight person has a complicated relationship with her favorite scale. She can simply ignore it. But she can also muffle or tweak its pronouncements without bending its will. Marina would never weigh herself in the morning before urinating. Not after showering, either: wet hair weighs more. She’s never quite gotten used to her bed, which is too low and forces her to rise red-faced from the effort. The piece of furniture doesn’t rest on four legs, but rather on a sort of platform that can be replaced with a higher one. For a few days now, Marina has tried to convince her husband that a change is needed. In her opinion, Tomás is endowed with an overly keen aesthetic sense and an unfair disregard for practical solutions. In the bathroom Señora Marina Rubin produces a weak flow of urine, proof that she’s gotten up at least once during the night to use the bathroom. She’s aware that tonight her kidneys have worked less efficiently than usual, and she knows why. Her swollen eyelids, reflected in the mirror, confirm it: water retention. Last night before going to bed, she had ingested an excess of carbohydrates.

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The whole previous day, Marina Rubin had followed her diet correctly and methodically. The Carletti family’s dinner (Señora Rubin de Carletti used her maiden name) began with an arugula and pear salad, sprinkled with chopped nuts and dressed with olive oil and vinegar. For their main course, they had veal parmesan (with tomato sauce and melted cheese), and for dessert, winter fruit. Marina chose something different from the rest of the family: two “light” sausages (low in fat), fifty-seven calories each, a generous serving of salad without dressing, whose caloric content she didn’t factor in too carefully, and, for an additional eighty calories, a medium orange. After dinner, her daughter Laura, fifteen, medium height, and approximately 115 pounds (from the age of nine on, Laura refused to get weighed in front of her mother), went to the freezer and took out a chocolate cake she had baked herself that afternoon. The cake, an old recipe of Grandma Carletti’s, contained no flour: the batter consisted only of chocolate, sugar, eggs, and butter, and the filling was made of whipped cream and melted chocolate. They had recently discovered that the cake was even more delicious served frozen. Señora Rubin felt obliged to share her daughter’s pride by tasting a very tiny piece. So tiny that when she finished it, she felt justified in trying another — the same size. By the time she went to bed, she had consumed an impressive amount of cake. Nearly half was left in the freezer. Marina tossed and turned sleeplessly in bed. Although she knew it was ridiculous and impossible, she had the feeling that the rest of the cake was calling her name. A force like magnetic attraction wouldn’t let her relax, despite the fullness in her belly. She got out of bed, ate just one more slice and fell asleep, satisfied that she had been able to resist the last piece — the most difficult one. Now she’s standing in the bathroom at her scale, wondering if the instrument is going to reflect only her lapse of the night before or if it will recognize and somehow reward the agonizing hunger pangs she’s endured nearly all day. Señora Rubin slips out of her night-

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gown and carefully places one foot and then the other in the exact spot, leaning slightly forward in order to shift the weight onto her toes. She knows that there can be up to a 7-ounce difference to her detriment if she rests back on her heels. The scale reads 205 pounds, 7 ounces. She steps off, removes the socks she sleeps in and places a pile of books that she keeps in the bathroom for precisely this purpose on the scale to “regulate” it, since sometimes the needle gets stuck on the last recorded weight, especially when the discrepancy is slight. The books weigh 4 pounds, 2 ounces. When she climbs back on the scale, it reads exactly 205 pounds. All is not lost. Marina Rubin is determined to engage in a twentyfour-hour fast. Fasting is a good technique and an excellent way to begin a serious diet. If she keeps it up, she can drop nearly three pounds through water loss. The Carletti children leave early for school. Marina and her husband, Tomás, have breakfast together a little later. Marina drinks cup after cup of tea with artificial sweetener: about one and a half liters altogether. Keeping one’s stomach filled with liquid is a good trick to sustain the fast. Tomás Carletti has a habit of commenting over breakfast on those news stories least relevant to the destiny of humanity. This morning he informs his wife that a baby aguará guazú has been born at the zoo. It’s uncommon for this animal, a kind of local fox with very long paws, to reproduce in captivity. While he talks, he eats two slices of seeded rye bread spread with a very thin layer of honey. Every morning Tomás drinks a cup of coffee with milk and eats two slices of toast spread with jelly or honey. In seventeen years of marriage, his wife has never seen him eat only one slice of toast or tempt himself with more than two. Every morning she watches him eat breakfast with a combination of admiration and annoyance. Señor Carletti is a robust man who has gained about twenty pounds since his wedding, but he’s effortlessly maintained a stable 190 pounds for the last few years. He’s a gourmet who enjoys good

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food in moderate quantities and who adores his wife. He tends to use the word “adore,” less common than “love,” in referring to this relationship. Whenever he thinks about it, or says it, the intensity of his feelings makes his eyes well with tears, which doesn’t embarrass him. It doesn’t matter to him that Marina is so fat, although he doesn’t find her very desirable sexually. Señor Carletti doesn’t subscribe to the idea — brutal and feminine, in his opinion — that sex and love are intimately related. He believes that, for a solid couple, conjugal love is much loftier than desire. Before leaving the house, Marina checks the freezer. She takes out a rump roast and a chunk of smoked bacon and puts them in the microwave to defrost. She glances at the refrigerator to make sure she has the necessary ingredients for lunch and jots down some instructions for the cleaning woman. She writes: “Brochettes with mashed potatoes.” That is, she lists in order the preparation of the skewers of meat with pancetta, peppers, and onions, along with mashed potatoes made with a brand of margarine containing phytoesterol, a vegetable product that helps lower cholesterol. Marina and her husband usually have lunch (or skip it) close to their respective workplaces, but the children come home at noon to eat, sometimes inviting friends. Marina doesn’t drive. Because of her weight and her consequent lack of agility, it’s difficult for her to climb onto a bus, especially at rush hour. To get to work she calls a taxi that stops unenthusiastically to pick up this inconveniently sized passenger. A lollipop stick protrudes from the taxi driver’s mouth. He’s a young man of average build — probably around 160 pounds. “Did you quit smoking?” Marina inquires. “Sure did,” the man replies. “Thank God, I quit smoking. That’s why I suck on these things. Want one?” She rejects the offer, proud of feeling not even a stab of temptation. She feels firm in her resolve. In truth, sugar never tempts her at

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this time of the morning. Sometimes fasting is easier than eating just a little. If only she could give up food forever, like tobacco or alcohol. Marina is a social worker who works for a nongovernmental organization devoted to the problem of domestic violence. Nearly all the employees are women, although there are some male psychologists and lawyers on the interdisciplinary teams. She specializes in cases of children’s violence against parents. A tolerable relationship with her own adolescent children affords her enough distance from the problem to keep her from becoming emotionally embroiled in the cases she sees. The Assistance Center occupies the first floor of an apartment building. As she walks in, Marina suddenly finds herself surrounded by a party atmosphere. Two administrative assistants, two volunteers, two psychologists, and a social worker are celebrating a birthday. The crepe-paper streamers accentuate, rather than disguise, the deterioration of this large, unheated building with its ancient furniture and peeling paint. There are white-bread sandwiches, cookies, diet sodas, glasses, and paper napkins, along with a bottle of cider. Marina drinks a few glasses of one-calorie-per-liter soda and looks indifferently at the food. But when, after a while, her colleagues insist that she join them in a toast to the birthday girl, she deigns to accept a small glass of cider. This is not a loss of self-control. With a clear mind and full awareness of her actions, Marina Rubin de Carletti has decided to modify the total fast plan and replace it with one day of liquid diet, which, in fact, produces very similar results and is easier to maintain. Without deceiving herself, she adds on the 150 calories contained in the half glass of cider. For the rest of the morning, they work in groups, deciding on the disposition of various cases. In the kitchen, there’s always a kettle on the stove. As they talk and occasionally argue, the professional staff makes tea and instant mate, which they take with artificial sweetener. In general, the team members are women, but a few men are also

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present. The victims of domestic violence are encouraged to participate for six months in therapy groups, coordinated by a psychologist or a social worker. In certain more complicated cases, they’re offered a brief course of individual treatment. Those who display psychotic tendencies are directed to public hospitals. Marina’s change of plans allows her to accept a lunch invitation from one of her colleagues. At the restaurant she orders a consommé that she estimates at 65 calories (it isn’t fat-free) and a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, without sugar, containing no fewer than 80 calories. They bring her a very tall glass, made from the juice of three or four oranges, which has at least 180 calories. Her colleague has steak and salad, followed by a fruit cup. She tries to convince Marina to do the same, arguing that fruit is healthy and low in calories, but Marina stands firm. However, when dessert is served, Marina asks her friend, whom she knows well enough to permit such an unusual request, to eat the fruit, leaving the liquid for her. Slowly she savors that delicious, sugary juice, carbohydrates, true, but not too much, maybe three or four teaspoonfuls, around 80 calories. Her friend is amazed at her willpower and moved by the effort if represents. Before returning to work, Marina calls home on her cell phone. Everything’s normal. Her first afternoon appointment is an intake interview with a couple. The statistical model for cases of filial violence tends to be a single mother, or a woman with an absent husband who is beaten by her son. The cases that come to the center are usually middle-class families that have suffered a sudden, major change in their economic situation. Deprived of conveniences to which they have been accustomed and are entitled, the adolescent boys discharge their frustration on their mothers, whom they blame for their personal failures. There are also frequent cases in which the woman has been separated, voluntarily or through abandonment, from an abusive man: the son, as he gets older, takes his father’s place.

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This time, however, Marina meets with a couple. The session is unusual in several ways. This elderly couple is being abused by a forty-something son who lives with them off and on. At first the son had raised his hand only against his mother, they tell her, but after a while, as the father grew older and weaker and began spending more time at home, he began to hit him, too. The man is a short little fellow with a gnomelike face, probably around 160 pounds. His wife, even shorter, is quite overweight, practically obese, no doubt more than 180. Marina has to fill out several forms with the responses to an objective test, in order to establish, among other things, the escalation of violence. The man hangs his head mutely. He seems embarrassed to be at the session. The woman babbles, lying. She describes an idyllic domestic situation in which violence suddenly erupted for no apparent reason, as if the first symptom of the problem was the son’s hands squeezing her neck. “But before he started hitting you, wasn’t there ever any fighting? Arguments? Insults?” Marina asks. The woman smiles shamefacedly and pulls out a package of crackers, with a 14 percent fat content and approximately thirty calories apiece. She eats the crackers as she speaks, trying to clarify in words the great confusion in which she lives. She’s very ashamed to tell this nice, well-dressed — but exceedingly heavy — lady that her son yells at her: “Fat fuck.” She extends a cracker to Marina, who hesitates for a moment and then accepts it. She knows that the woman needs this gesture of empathy in order to be able to trust her and somehow find the thread of this knot she’s trying to unravel. It’s 3:30 in the afternoon. The cracker is the first solid food she’s ingested all day, and she can’t avoid feeling a shiver of pleasure. Marina concentrates all her professional attention on the couple while at the same time slowly chewing the ball of food with plenty of saliva in order to make it bigger and last longer. The interview begins to

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focus, and in about forty minutes, it’s all over, along with the package of crackers, of which only the wrapper remains. Also over is the liquid diet, but Marina doesn’t feel guilty. In this case, eating the crackers was a professional requirement. When she leaves for home, she even allows herself to take a white-bread sandwich left over from that morning, its dry, hard crusts rising like the roof of a Chinese pagoda. Just 250 calories, at most. The afternoon personnel are different from the morning staff, so no one remarks on her resolution to fast. In order to mitigate her lapse somehow, she walks home. Almost thirty blocks. She walks with difficulty because she’s wearing the wrong shoes and the sidewalks are in bad condition. She stops a few times to buy something. As she emerges from a supermarket close to her home, she sees a group of dark-skinned boys poking around in the trash bins. They are part of the urban landscape, such a common spectacle that people see right through them. However, Marina notices that one of the boys has found an entire apple, half-rotten, in the garbage and is nibbling the good part. At a bakery stand she buys five puff pastries. But she’s made a mistake in her arithmetic, because now she sees that there are only four boys and one of them has just left. On the route from there to her house, she eats the fifth puff pasty herself. The pastries are very high in calories, but they’re light. A normal puff pastry with dulce de leche weighs no more than two ounces and has just under three hundred calories. Señora Rubin arrives home at 7 p.m. She chats with her children in the kitchen, a warm, comfortable place. Her thirteen-year-old son has dyed his hair purple, but Marina doesn’t overreact because she’s used to teenage fashion. She hasn’t eaten anything (any solid food, that is) all day except the crackers, the sandwich, and the puff pastry. She’s very hungry. She begins with a fat-free yogurt at eighty-six calories to fool her stomach, and she drinks several cups of tea with artificial sweetener, and then she eats a hard boiled egg, just seventy calories, and another eighteen calories in the form of a rice cake, and

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then she discovers a delicious piece of leftover potato omelet in the fridge and she drinks some more tea, followed by some sugar cookies, but only four, and then the last slice of chocolate cake that was still in the freezer, and a piece, just a tiny piece, of bread and butter, and she finishes off the rest of some cold cuts, a little sour and dark around the edges, along with an end piece of cheese, the part that sticks to the rind. Then she pours some dried shredded cheese into a coffee cup and mixes it with cream and drinks more tea while she lets the mixture soak for a long time so that the cheese will soak up the cream, forming a compact paste that she sips with a teaspoon. She’s given up counting the calories, but while she eats, she makes up her mind not to have any dinner at all; anyway, she’s pretty full. “Papa wants to talk to you, Mom. Can you call him on your cell phone?” asks the girl, who’s just received the message on call waiting. Tomás wants to know if she’s still fasting. An opportunity has come up to have dinner with a client at a French restaurant, but he doesn’t want to thwart his wife’s diet plans because he knows how important they are to her. “No,” Marina says. “I’ve stopped fasting. I wasn’t planning to eat dinner, but . . .” “Whatever you want, honey. You don’t have to.” “All right, let’s go,” Marina says. “Today I’ll say my farewell to food, and tomorrow I’ll really start. I’ll tell the kids to order in a pizza.” That night at the French restaurant, Marina isn’t very hungry, which allows her to await her food with relative calm, without eating all the bread. Tomás’s client is a pleasant, intelligent man who lives in Miami. The conversation flows easily. Marina doesn’t feel good, and yet she selects, as an appetizer, some melted Camembert en croûte with endive salad, and for her main course a traditional coq-au-vin. Although the portions aren’t huge, Marina begins to feel slightly queasy, with a sour taste at the back of her palate that fills her mouth with saliva. The conversation turns to national politics.

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Marina says very little because she disagrees with her husband’s client and prefers to avoid an argument. That allows her to devote all her attention to enjoying her food. When it’s time for dessert, she vacillates between the crème brûlée and the chocolate mousse filled with molten chocolate. With some effort and a sensation of wooziness, she eats the perfect crème brûlée, cold underneath and with an exquisitely fine layer of hot caramel on top. Marina taps the caramel with her spoon to break it open and combines a little bit with the custard in each mouthful. Despite her growing discomfort, including a feeling of pressure on the back of her tongue and a strong, localized headache, Marina focuses her concentration so she won’t lose a single drop of the custard or the caramel layer clinging to the sides of the dish. At the same time, she tries not to scratch it brutally with her spoon, to avoid producing an audible scraping sound. She partially succeeds. Outside the restaurant, away from the other diners and leaning against a light pole, Marina bends over to vomit, trying to avoid staining her clothes. She vomits a little, like someone overflowing, and immediately feels better. She rejects her husband’s offers of help, accepting, however, his invitation to go to a café, where she orders herbal tea without sugar or sweetener. Back home again, Marina and Tomás discover, to their annoyance, that their children have left their dirty dishes and dinner leftovers on the kitchen table. “I don’t even ask them to wash up,” Marina complains. “Just to leave their things in the sink.” Tomás attributes his children’s slovenliness to mistakes made by his wife in their upbringing, including the daily presence of a housekeeper. Marina accepts this hypothesis and feels guilty. She changes, hangs up her dress clothes, and, clad in her nightgown, returns to the kitchen. Her daughter doesn’t like the rounded, crispy pizza crusts and usually leaves them on her plate. For Marina, however, they’re the best part. As she clears the table, she nibbles the leftovers.

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Due to the delivery boy’s lack of motorcycle skills, the inside lid of the pizza carton is coated with a significant amount of melted cheese, now cold. She scrapes it off, devouring it blissfully before tossing the box into the trash. Although she feels unsteady, almost as if she were drunk, Marina makes a new resolution. She tells her husband that within the week she plans to sign up at The Reeds. They’ve discussed it before. Tomás doesn’t like the idea because he doesn’t want to be apart from his wife for so long. The minimum stay at The Reeds is three months. Nevertheless, he’s prepared to accept any solution that might lessen the anguish of the woman he feels so protective of. Before she falls asleep, Marina cries a little in her husband’s arms. She imagines this scene as an objective observer might and feels ridiculous. Fat people feel ridiculous in their joy and in their sorrow.

3

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The Group

The focus group at The Reeds began like all the weight-loss groups Marina had attended. The difference was in the number of people. More than 250 fat people were jammed into the lecture hall of the Main Pavilion. In the middle of the floor were some low folding chairs, almost recliners, where only those Campers who had reached a certain minimum level of agility could sit. Surrounding them were ordinary chairs that barely contained the bulk of those people who couldn’t squeeze into the others. Up front, in the row where the Coordinators sat, facing the group and exposed to general scrutiny, were the Fattest Folks. Marina hadn’t really run into them during the day because they could barely move and didn’t do the same exercises or participate in the cleaning chores and maintenance with the others. A Coordinator introduced herself as Elvira (For the new people who don’t know me, you can call me Elvi), and what followed wasn’t much less predictable. She was a skinny brunette with sharp features, teeth like a beaver, and very long hair, unevenly cut. She had a hysterical little laugh and spoke in a singsong cadence that made her teeth gnash, giving everything she said an aura of implausibility.

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She went on excessively with an all-too-familiar speech on the joys of weight loss. She had many of the listeners participate, authenticating her claims with little examples from their personal lives. It was a question of establishing projects and setting goals: What did they plan to do with their future new bodies when they got out of here? What things did they now want to do, but couldn’t? Besides being young and beautiful, of course — that fantasy common to all humanity. A man with a mustache spoke of his life’s dream: to climb Mount Aconcagua. “If I get there, I’m going to plant a flag on top with the logo of The Reeds,” he declared. At that moment, it looked like a pretty distant goal. He could barely get out of his chair; his knees hardly supported him. A very short woman with droopy eyelids seemed to emerge from a sort of lethargy to tell everyone her dream: She wanted to ride the subway. To go up and down the stairs, to get into the cars without the drowning feeling that had overtaken her lately. Elvi rewarded them with energetic cries of “Very good!” — teacherly to the core. That was what made her so annoying, Marina thought, her dull, schoolmarmish air. She wanted to kill her and eat her. Seasoned and roasted, with golden brown potatoes and slices of squash drizzled with oil. First rubbing the pan with lemon so the potatoes wouldn’t stick. Adding the onion rings much later than the potatoes, because they need less roasting time. Her flesh would be white and chewy, not very flavorful, like a rabbit’s, but at the end she could add a raspberry and mustard sauce, and the last few minutes in the oven would caramelize her, making her tasty for the first and last time in her life. Immersed in her fantasy, her mouth watering with saliva, Marina could no longer hear the voices, either of those who were talking aloud or in background whispers. But she was startled back to reality when the room grew silent. The Professor had entered.

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He was a minuscule man, bald, with black, shining eyes like glass marbles. Elvira was just finishing up a brief discourse on freedom and limits. When the Professor walked in, there was a tiny, almost imperceptible change in her voice. Now she was speaking to him, seeking his admiration, which the Professor granted her with a smile, nodding his head. It was obvious that he noted her mistakes and rejoiced in them. Efficiency without competence was what the Professor wanted in his subordinates. “Some chairs you’ve got here, Professor!” one of the new admits joked. “With what you charge, you could have at least bought decent chairs for everybody.” “Some body, you mean. Instead of looking at the chairs, why don’t you take a look at that belly of yours that won’t let you sit down?” The man smiled, abashed. “Herminia, go on, please,” the Professor asked. A diminutive woman leaped to her feet in a display of good physical condition. Marina recognized her immediately, because she had seen her at breakfast. She was one of those who had caught her attention because of her slimness. She wore a white uniform, belted at the waist. Her cheeks were sunken in a wrinkle-free face. “I lost two hundred pounds in one year,” said Herminia, with a combination of tearfulness and joy that Marina would later see her repeat flawlessly at every subsequent session as if it were the first or only time. “When I arrived here I had to put two chairs together in order to sit down. I couldn’t put on my shoes by myself. If I could do it, anyone can. And even if I died today, I wouldn’t care. At least the pallbearers wouldn’t have to complain about carrying such a fat piece of shit!” The group joined her in supportive peals of laughter. Herminia seemed to be well liked by her peers. “But you’re not going to die today, Herminia, quite the oppo-

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site,” the Professor hurriedly added. “You were dying when you came here.” “And now I’m really and truly alive, like never before,” Herminia said. She gazed at the Professor with a lap dog look of infinite gratitude. “Anyone else here who’s lost more than 175 pounds?” Marina watched in astonishment as many people raised their hands. Among them were some outrageously fat individuals; it was impossible to imagine them 175 pounds heavier. And also some enviably thin people: beautiful women with perfect bodies, who wore the white uniform, belted to show off their waistlines, like Herminia. The same ones whom that morning she had taken for anorexics. “Leonor, tell us about your experience,” the Professor said. One of the Fattest Folks spoke. She was very tall, dressed in red, and her monstrous size was slightly scary. “I don’t know how much I weigh,” she said, “because an ordinary scale still won’t hold me. You’d had to have an industrial scale, Professor.” “We prefer not to use industrial scales,” said the Professor. “Getting weighed will be your first goal.” “But I want to say that since I’ve been here . . . I’ve . . .” Leonor’s voice cracked with emotion. “I want to say that last night . . . for the first time in five years . . . I was able to turn over in bed by myself.” As the audience applauded, a woman got up to leave. “Where are you going, Alicia?” Like Napoleon, the Professor remembered the names of all the sheep in his flock. “I have to go.” “You’re disrupting the group. You have to go? What do you mean, ‘have to’? What are you going to do?” “I’m going to the bathroom.” “Is it absolutely necessary?” “Professor, you make us drink four liters of liquid a day!”

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“And wouldn’t it be good to learn to control our urge to pee, just like we control our urge to eat? Alicia, I can suggest a self-control exercise for you.” “I’m peeing in my pants!” Alicia groaned, with a mixture of indignation and anguish. “How much did you lose, Alicia?” “Twenty-three pounds in three weeks. Down from 320.” “Go back to your seat. I give you permission to pee in your pants. No one will make fun of you.” The door was ajar and there were no Tutors present to enforce the Professor’s sentence. Of her own free will, Alicia chose to return to her seat, determined to prove she was right. There she discovered that it’s not easy for an adult to relax her sphincter while fully dressed and in public. The Professor already knew that. “No one who’s been here for more than four days is hungry,” said the Professor. “Otherwise do you think I’d be able to stand here, calmly chatting with 250 desperate fat people? For example, you over there — are you hungry?” He pointed to the woman with droopy eyelids, whose face was swollen, indifferent. “No,” said the woman. “Let’s play ‘To Tell the Truth.’ Yes, you’re very hungry. You’re dying of hunger, because you started yesterday. The first three days are brutal. For everyone: the food we give you here isn’t enough to live on. You have to use up your fat reserves. And when the organism begins to break down fat for energy, that same process sends signals of fullness to the hypothalamus. You follow me?” Marina raised her hand. “This business of fat taking away your appetite reminds me of how bad feelings can be used for a good purpose. If all these fools can lose weight, why shouldn’t I?” “You’re an intelligent person,” the Professor said. Marina felt a halo of warmth surround and protect her. The Professor stared at her intently, with an interest that made her feel like the only one he saw in the crowd. “And surely you’re a psychologist.”

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“I would have liked to be,” Marina said, taken aback. “How much do you want to lose?” “Thirty-five or forty pounds. If I can keep it off, I’ll be satisfied.” “Another lie,” the Professor smiled, not unkindly. A group of 250 whispered and smiled along with him. The majority knew what was coming. “Let’s see — get up. Look me in the eye. You weigh about two hundred pounds and you’d like to lose more than sixty-five. You want to be thin, but you can’t bring yourself to do it. You think you won’t succeed. That’s why you’re preparing for failure.” “I’ve tried so many times!” Marina sniveled, suddenly exposed. “This time is different,” the Professor assured her. And he suddenly withdrew his attention, giving her the painful feeling of being abandoned by the light of glory. “I want to know what it’s going to be like afterward. What will we be able to eat later, outside, in real life,” said a man who identified himself as Gerardo. “You’re new, right? You’re a little over forty,” the Professor said. “And you’ve already got heart problems.” Gerardo looked at him in surprise. The Professor might have read his admission file, but in any case, it was astonishing how he could recall every one of them. “What if, instead of thinking about the future, I read your past for you? Last night you were having your farewell to food. You pigged out so outrageously that you were miserable all day today and you’re just now starting to feel a little hungry.” “Losing it isn’t so hard; I’ve lost weight lots of times, Professor,” Gerardo insisted, corroborating, by changing the subject, what the Professor had said. “I want to know about later; how am I going to maintain it?” “You’re asking that today because you just got here and you’ve still got a piece of spaghetti sticking out of your mouth,” said the Professor. “You haven’t lost anything yet, and you’re already thinking about eating again. The food is doing the talking for you. The pizza

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speaks. I don’t talk to pizza. There’s no point in answering you right now. When you get over your bender, we’ll discuss it.” After a half hour of squirming uncomfortably, Alicia, the woman who needed to go to the bathroom, defiantly stood up again and headed toward the exit. Her expression revealed that she was determined to leave no matter what, and that she had spent that half hour looking for an intelligent remark to spew out furiously, but the Professor didn’t say a word, barely casting a sideways glance at her. After that, several other people left the room and re-entered, causing waves and swells in that human tide, too large for the size of the room. “Professor,” began a blond man with an enormous face that seemed to be implanted on his body without the intermediation of a neck, like the head of a snowman, “the thing is, in here I can do it because there’s no temptation, but outside, it’s a different story. Outside, I can’t. I can’t control myself!” “Come here. Here, to the front. Your name?” “My name’s Esteban.” The man came forward slowly from the back of the crowded room. From his suit pocket, the Professor extracted a package of sugarfrosted puff-pastry cookies, opened it, and placed it on a chair. Cookies: flour, sugar, fat: a kind of collective sigh, combining terror and desire, filled the room. Esteban, dressed in a green uniform that made him look like a nurse, walked over. He was a man of indeterminate age, with skin stretched tight across his face and the tiny eyes of the obese. “Esteban. Look. Cookies. Can you control yourself or not?” “I can’t. That’s why I’m here. Because I can’t!” Esteban furiously reached out his hand toward the object of his desire, in a show of affirmation of identity, of rebellion. The Professor brought his hand to his chest and pulled a weapon from an underarm holster. It was a standard 9-millimeter police revolver. He held the pistol to Esteban’s head.

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“Can you control yourself or not?” Esteban hesitated. The hand advancing toward the cookie hung immobile, sustained for a moment in the air. “You can’t or you don’t want to?” the Professor shouted. “See how you can, now? Look what your will can do!” Esteban grabbed a cookie. The Professor cocked the gun and released the safety. An enormous silence fogged the air in the room. Esteban left the cookie on top of the package and fell to his knees. With his head in his hands, he began to cry. “See how you can control yourself when you want to?” said the Professor. He put away the weapon, made the man stand, and embraced him. A little puddle of urine on the floor corroborated the damp stain on Esteban’s pants leg. “You can do it, we all can, we all will. It can be done. For many of you, to keep on eating is the same thing you’ve just witnessed — it’s the difference between life and death.” When the tension broke, the whispering resumed. “Would he really have killed him?” Marina asked Alelí. “There’s never been any evidence of the Professor killing a good client,” Alelí said. “But he could have. It’s in the contract.”

4

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Case History I

When Marina checked into The Reeds, she hadn’t abandoned all hope. Quite the contrary, she felt full of enthusiasm, illusion, and magic, just as she did every time she began a new diet, tried a new appetite suppressant medication, or met a new diet doctor. She had been a chubby girl, a good eater, capable of taking advantage of a moment of adult distraction to pilfer half a pound of cheese from the refrigerator or to gobble a few bananas. Her mother, who came from a family of immigrants, always watched to make sure Marina ate well (that is to say, a lot), but at the same time she didn’t want her to get too heavy. As an adolescent and young woman, Marina challenged her mother’s contradictory behavior, until she finally accepted that it was a generational trait. Poor immigrant families throughout the world and in all eras have always associated abundant food with well-being and good health. On the other hand, the female desire for a reed-slim figure through various stages of life appears in literature dating back to remote times. Take the example of the corset as evidence. A story by de Maupassant describes the monstrous conduct of a stunning woman who’s pitied because of her children’s deformities. Very few people

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know that it was she who caused that hideous effect by refusing to give up her corset during pregnancy. However, the generalized, intense social obsession with thinness unleashed itself in the middle class following the Second World War, at the same time as the beginning of the obesity epidemic. Conscience, control, and excess were accompanied by the development and growth of the food industry. At age eleven, accompanied by her mother, Marina met Dr. Lochman, her first diet specialist. From him she learned to weigh all the food she was planning to eat on a little scale. The little scale fascinated her. There she would weigh her four ounces of uncooked meat and her four ounces of cooked beans. She also weighed her school supplies. She knew how much her ruler, her pencils, and her pencil sharpener weighed, but not her books or notebooks because they were too heavy for her little scale. The doctor had told her it wasn’t necessary to weigh salad, but she weighed the lettuce and tomato anyway, and she measured the exact quantity of oil with a teaspoon. It was the first time she took a hormone supplement (thyroxin) to accelerate her metabolism. She lost a little weight and grew taller at the same time, with admirable results. When she got fat again, they took her to Dr. Pinsk, who had become the rage among a certain middle-class sector and who was treating their parents, their aunts and uncles, and many other relatives and friends. Dr. Pinsk subjected his patients to a complex battery of tests. For the first time, Marina, a healthy adolescent, underwent a blood test, collected urine in a bottle, and had a basal metabolism test, which consisted of lying quietly, dressed only in her slip (a synthetic, ephemeral version of a petticoat), and breathing through her mouth for a half hour. The clip that squeezed her nose together was innocuous enough at first, but soon her mucous membranes began to burn in an annoying way that gradually became painful. A fecal analysis revealed that Marina’s body didn’t produce enough amylase, which explained her problem digesting foods high in cellulose fiber. Her glycemic index was normal.

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The entire Rubin family, including Marina’s father and two sisters, took Dr. Pinsk’s capsules, created from a magnificent recipe by a pharmacy that worked with the doctor and reimbursed him half of what it earned from the medication. The capsules killed the appetite, but they also produced various strange, fortuitous side effects. Superman is critically affected by green kryptonite, which causes him weakness, general malaise, and even death if he doesn’t manage to get away from it or avoid its radiation with a dose of lead. But red kryptonite can produce astonishing effects: turning him into a rubber man, robbing him of his superpowers, making his x-ray vision combustible, or reducing him to the size of a fly. To his patients, Dr. Pinsk’s capsules were like red kryptonite to Superman, although they surely didn’t cause all the effects with which they were attributed. Marina was still unacquainted with weight-loss drugs. She wasn’t accustomed to reading prospectuses or prescriptions, and she took the medication with confidence and calm. One day her father passed out in the hallway of the building where they lived while waiting for the elevator, and that was the end of the Pinsk capsules. At age fifteen, measuring five feet, one and a half inches, and weighing 148 pounds, Marina went with her mother to consult Dr. Lescano, who examined her, asked a few questions, and presented her with the usual prescription. It was written practically in code for the specific pharmacy where he sent his patients (because he relied on that pharmacy and that pharmacy alone; the others didn’t include the correct amount of active ingredients, the doctor explained), in handwriting his patients didn’t even attempt to decipher. Together with the medicine that was to be prepared, and without further explanation, he also prescribed, from a certain laboratory, some pills that were to be taken once a day. Marina soon realized that the only thing that produced concrete weight-loss results was the preparation, and she stopped taking the other pills. She quickly dropped several pounds. One morning she tried to get up to go to school, but her legs wouldn’t respond. Her two sisters

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had to carry her to the bathroom. When they got back to the bed, they couldn’t support her and she fell, cracking her coccyx. The emergency doctor they called asked her what medications she was taking, looked at the label on the bottle, and diagnosed a potassium deficiency. Dr. Lescano’s prescriptions included a powerful diuretic that made her eliminate, along with the fluid, a large quantity of minerals. Without the potassium supplement contained in the pills that Marina had stopped taking, her muscles couldn’t function. She might have suffered cardiac arrest. From then on Marina learned to study the diet specialists’ prescriptions, which tended to combine a laxative, an amphetaminebased appetite suppressant, a barbiturate or anti-anxiety drug (for its effect on appetite as well as to compensate for the excitement caused by the amphetamine), plus a bit of thyroid hormone, generally triiodothyronine. The laxative was usually Cascara Sagrada: that strange, heretical name associating intestinal activity with holiness stood out among the artificial names of chemical compounds. For a long time the young woman took Dr. Planchet’s appetite suppressants, which filled her with joy and optimism. The doctor chatted with her, telling her that she shouldn’t allow herself to be subverted by her internal saboteur. When the government placed stricter controls on psychotropic drugs and went to a double-prescription filing system, Planchet’s new pills ceased to bring her to that state of brilliant lucidity; her internal saboteur awoke with renewed energy, and Marina got fat again.

5

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The Barracks

No radios or cell phones were allowed at The Reeds, but musical equipment, records, magazines, and certain books — those that passed inspection — were. It’s pointless to court temptation with images or descriptions of food, the Coordinators said as they ripped the cooking sections out of magazines. Isolation was essential at that stage of the struggle against addiction. That night, in Barracks Nine, Marina organized her few belongings, trying to create her own niche, a tiny personal refuge. She would have enjoyed having her new friend Alelí nearby, but the Cagers slept in a different section. As a result of the exercise (thanks to the exercise, she forced herself to think) and the physical labor, she could hardly move. She was hungry, sore all over, and in a state of exhaustion unlike anything she had ever experienced in her life. As she taped some photos of her children to the nightstand shared between two adjoining cots, Marina looked the other women over with curiosity. Some appeared to be around forty-five to sixty pounds overweight, while others had more than a hundred extra pounds to shed. On one of the beds across from her, a young woman had just arranged a pile of old magazines and was preparing, as

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best she could, to lie down on her cot, which valiantly resisted her weight. Her deformed body spilled over the edges of the bed. Despite the egalitarian intent of their uniforms, Marina immediately realized — perhaps from the magazines or her badly dyed hair or the color of her skin — that she was a Scholarship Camper. A stay at The Reeds cost a fortune, and it cost still more (much more) to leave before the date stipulated in the contract. But the Professor offered a certain percentage of scholarships for those fat people who were unable to pay his exorbitant fees. A change in the world population’s habits, stimulated by the food industry, had created a new problem: obesity among the poor, widely prevalent throughout Latin America thanks to the proliferation of inexpensive, processed foods, pure carbohydrates, and trans fats, especially in the form of hydrogenated vegetable oils, like margarine. These were unsatisfying, addictive foods, which in many low income people, particularly women, created obesity and malnutrition at the same time. Scholarship Campers were keenly aware of how privileged they were to be at The Reeds. Many had first applied for admission years before. Those who managed to navigate the tedious selection process and were lucky enough to be chosen by lottery felt like souls in limbo who had suddenly been summoned to Paradise. They were being offered The Best, luxuries that were generally destined for the wealthy, or in any case, for certain middle-class families that were prepared to make a collective effort to save or protect one of their members. Thus, it was unnecessary to make them sign a contract. The Scholarship Campers were the best, the most diligent, the ones who beat all records. They could leave whenever they wished, without penalty, but they never quit ahead of time. Some of them stayed on working as Tutors. Despite their name, the Campers didn’t camp. At least not until they reached Survival. Meanwhile, they shared communal dormitories, men and women separately: the barracks. In spite of the enormous debt incurred by rescinding the contract, there were many

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who couldn’t tolerate the treatment, the hunger, the humiliation, the punishments, the groups, the forced gaiety. If the barracks were always full, it was because of the constant flow of new fatties arriving every day. Those who came within fifteen pounds of their ideal weight were considered Recovered. Clad in white uniforms, they approached the final test that would grant them their passports to freedom and danger: they were nominated to participate in Survival. Before signing the contract, as part of a group of undecided fatties, Marina had attended a lecture that included videos and a model of the establishment. The barracks had caused her grave doubts. She had to be prepared to surrender all privacy. It was very difficult for Marina to adapt to the rituals and customs of a group. She’d always hated group activities, the games, the graduation trips, the situations requiring laughter and choral singing. Any one of these women might have become a personal friend, but together, in that unholy multitude, they seemed intolerable, dull, and most of all, threatening. She was about to collapse onto her cot when a young girl with milky white skin, dressed in red, stopped her with a scream. “No! Don’t lie down. Look!” and with a surprisingly nimble leap (for her weight and size) she stood up on top of the bed. There was a creaking sound as the bed frame collapsed. “Paula, you’re an asshole!” another girl shouted from the opposite end of the room. “We spent ages loosening all the screws on that frame!” While the older women smiled, the two girls became embroiled in an argument that Marina didn’t understand. If only Paula hadn’t intervened; if only they had let her go through with the prank, the initiation ritual that might have given her access to the heart of the tribe. She realized that it hadn’t been Paula’s intention to defend or protect her, but rather simply to challenge the other girl’s leadership. Now, entangled in a quarrel whose language was comparable to that of her own adolescent children, and with a degree of aggression and crudeness that Marina found difficult to accept among women,

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they had forgotten about her. About her and her destroyed bed, a jumble of broken pieces of frame, sheets, and a mattress that she stared at desolately, feeling that she simply had no strength left to put it together again. “C’mon, let’s go, I’ll help you,” said a fiftyish woman whose wedding ring dug cruelly into the flesh of her thick ring finger. “They’re just kids, poor things; they get bored.” With her assistance, Marina managed to find the missing screws that had flown through the air and rolled behind a piece of furniture, and they were able to reassemble the bed. The woman’s name was Griselda, and she had been at The Reeds for two weeks. She was flat-chested: the fat deposits had more or less respected her body from the waist up. But from the waist down was the vast spread of the ugliest hips Marina had ever seen. Viewed from behind, Griselda’s ass was a huge promontory on the map of her body, bulging incredibly toward either side. “I’m really losing,” she remarked proudly. “Aren’t you starving? How can you stand it?” Marina inquired as she made the bed. “Not at all. You get used to it — it’s amazing,” Griselda said. “I lost almost fifteen pounds in the first two weeks.” And she went on talking about herself with a certain self-deprecating style that Marina, in her profession, was quite accustomed to observing among women, always ready to hang their heads, to blame themselves, to accept the violence, scorn, or indifference of their partners, their children, their employers: we women, such gossips, bitches, fools, difficult, complicated, phonies, such . . . women. “For me, it’s different — this is doing me good for other reasons. I’m terrible.” And yet there was also a note of pride in Griselda’s voice: no one was as bad as she, the worst of all. “I’m fat and a bingo addict. The last time I played bingo, it was a disaster. The pot was very big, you know? I mean very. I bought four hundred cards. But, hey, there were some real possibilities. I used the money we got from

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selling the car. I didn’t win, but I could have. My husband said, ‘Baby, I didn’t want to do it, but now I see you were right. You need to sign up. I’d rather put myself in debt and try to get you cured once and for all than let you hock everything we own.’ This place really helps: if I can control my eating, I can control the gambling and I can control my life. That’s what the Professor says, and what can I tell you? He’s right.” The brawl between Paula and her adversary was growing louder and more intense, and some women were beginning to meld into one faction or the other, while others tried to intervene to calm them down. There was some talk of summoning Herminia, whose authority everyone seemed to respect. At that moment they heard a violent banging at the door and a strident, malignant voice. “Order in the stable! Back to your places, cows!” “It’s an inspection,” Griselda whispered. Marina imitated everyone else and stood in front of her bed. An inspection? For what? “The Thyroid won’t find anything today, I’ll bet you anything you want,” she heard Griselda say in a very quiet voice to the woman on her right. “What do you wanna bet?” “I’ll bet you the snack.” “You got it.” The door flung open, as if it had been brutally kicked in. But the creature who entered the dormitory wasn’t one of the Tutors. It was a woman with an enormous belly, tiny head, narrow shoulders, and relatively thin calves. The entire package had the tapered contours of a rugby ball. She was exploding with laughter. “I scared you guys shitless, didn’t I?” she spurted between guffaws that made her belly wobble like Jell-O. But the others didn’t seem to share her sense of humor. Grumbling, they threw themselves on their beds or went back to their groups, although the interrupted argument didn’t start up again.

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“They didn’t find anything, right?” Griselda said. “So, I won! You owe me your snack.” “It was the Clown, Griselda. Stop fucking with me; the bet’s off.” Marina listened, puzzled, disconcerted. “How often do they have inspections?” The girls didn’t seem to want to fight anymore. They had united in the face of a common enemy. “Hah. If only we knew,” Paula replied. “And what are they looking for? Weapons? A clandestine radio?” Paula and Griselda looked at each other and burst out laughing.

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Case History II

Dr. Alfaneque practiced something he called hypnosis. He began by asking the patient to remove her street clothes, put on an examining gown, and lie down on a cot in a darkened room. After being left alone for a while and having ostensibly achieved a state of relaxation induced by the peremptory instructions — “Stay here and relax” — the doctor returned. He approached the patient, sat down on a chair beside the cot, and as he spoke in a soft monotone of the advantages of being thin and attractive, he would squeeze her neck until he interrupted the flow of blood through her carotid artery. This produced in her a not altogether unpleasant wooziness that stopped just short of passing out. He concluded the “hypnotic” treatment with his usual prescription. Dr. Alfaneque was a dark-skinned man of Arab descent. Some time after completing her treatment, Marina learned that the doctor had left his somewhat overweight wife for his young, slender assistant. However, a year later he went back to his wife, who received him without a word of reproach. On her wedding day, Marina Rubin had a nearly perfect figure. It amused her husband to watch her eat with such gusto; he was happy to be married to a woman with such a capacity for enjoy-

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ing food and life in general. Marina gained seven pounds on her honeymoon, and twenty-two more in her first year of marriage. Whenever she stopped taking her iodinated thyroxin or any other thyroid hormone supplement, there was a boomerang effect, and she quickly gained weight because her thyroid gland’s normal functioning was temporarily altered. She began hearing about cases of women whose thyroids atrophied because of long-term use of hormone supplements that ended up becoming essential for them to lead normal lives. For a while, fed up with pills and their multiple effects, she consulted only diet specialists who didn’t resort to medication, responsible people who proposed balanced, low-calorie diets. She learned to divide her food into small portions that she ingested several times a day. The more often, the better, the doctors said. And their patients didn’t object. Besides breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner, Marina added “nibbles” and “small bites,” tiny reinforcements designed to help her survive till the next meal without excessive hunger. Dr. Conay and Dr. Terrina worked in a very similar way. They surveyed their patients’ tastes and preferences and created long, complex, personalized lists of dietary possibilities and their equivalents, including recipes for preparing them. They based their treatment on the magic of their own personalities. They saw their patients twice a week and obtained excellent results for a limited time, just like all the rest. One day, on the way to a spa on the coast, Marina had an attack of nerves because her husband suggested stopping for a chorizo sandwich. The list of equivalents, which shone in her mind like a glowing billboard, revealed that she would have to deprive herself of fruit for three days and abstain from salad dressing for a week in order to make up for the caloric content of the sandwich. Marina’s obstetrician was very rigid concerning what he considered to be a healthy prenatal weight gain. In each pregnancy, her visits to the doctor reminded Marina of the anxiety she felt at school whenever the teacher sent her to the principal’s office. Every time

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the scale revealed that she had eaten more than was permissible and prudent in her condition, the obstetrician reprimanded her with the superior air of an adult before a child who doesn’t know right from wrong. Tomás was saddened and embarrassed by these scenes, in which the doctor made him feel like an accomplice to his wife’s weight gain. Marina stopped smoking and gave up appetite suppressants. She gained forty-eight pounds in her first pregnancy and thirty-five in the second. Nursing brought her great pleasure and a ravenous appetite. Each time the baby latched on to her nipple, Marina drank a full glass of whole milk with sugar, as if she were nursing both of them at the same time. Contrary to the predictions of her neighbors and relatives, who assured her that breast-feeding would help her reduce, she gained between seven and nine additional pounds while she was nursing her babies. Luckily, all the diets Marina tried worked perfectly. While she was on them. Every time a specialist lost his magic, Marina would take some time off from her doctor’s visits, but she never neglected herself. During those intervals, she would choose from among the myriad diets offered by magazines. She followed the moon diet and the apple diet, the grapefruit and potato diets; she combined fasting with days of liquid diet and partial fasts. All the diets produced results, excellent results.

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Beat Your Face

Just a few days after checking in, following an angry confrontation with one of the Tutors, Marina was about to quit. It would have cost her a fortune: according to the contract, ten times what she had paid to enroll in the first place. Tomás, who had never liked the idea of her entering The Reeds, wouldn’t have forgiven her endangering the family budget on a whim. However, that wasn’t what held her back, but rather the support of her barracks mates. Griselda, in particular, helped her quite a bit. And Denise. After that episode, Marina began to understand the importance of what at first had seemed to her an unnecessary lack of privacy. They should be happy and grateful to be in Herminia’s barracks, the “old-timers” remarked. As one of the Recovered, Herminia was the indisputable boss. She had the last word in arguments; she decided whose turn it was to clean the bathrooms every day; she helped the new arrivals adapt and made sure everyone complied with the routine. She was trustworthy, generous, and fanatical, the go-to person whenever hunger, fatigue, and ill humor became unbearable, but she never could have become a friend. On the other hand, it was easy for Marina to form relationships

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with those newcomers who had arrived a couple of days before her. Denise was a librarian. She weighed 215 pounds and had undergone bariatric surgery, an intestinal bypass that had reduced her stomach to little more than a memory. Following the operation, she lost 65 pounds in the first four months, but her weight stabilized at that point and eventually began climbing again. The minute size of her new stomach barely allowed her to eat solid foods, and obviously, she couldn’t ingest large portions. Any overeating caused nausea and vomiting. She vomited frequently. Her ability to absorb food had also been reduced by the surgical intervention. But with time and practice, she discovered several interesting strategies: for example, it was perfectly possible to eat dulce de leche by the teaspoonful all day long. It was also easy to ingest and metabolize alcohol. If she melted chocolate in her mouth, it was a cinch to absorb it. Small, very small quantities. Many, many times a day. Whenever possible, liquids or semiliquids. With her deformed, deficient digestive system, Denise was at The Reeds for the same reason as everyone else: to learn self-control. “I see you talking to Alelí all the time. Be careful — don’t let her get too close. There’s a reason she’s a Cager,” Herminia warned Marina the first night. The day of her arrival, everything had been novelty and enthusiasm, typical of all diets and all treatments. She had trouble falling asleep that night, partly because of the excitement and partly out of hunger. But the next morning she awoke with a sad, empty feeling inside, and at breakfast she felt like crying. At The Reeds, people ate four times a day. The Professor was against frequent, small meals. With the opportunity to eat “legally” every two hours, he said, overweight people live in anticipation of their next meal. The main challenge his piggies (as he sometimes affectionately called them in private) faced was to stop eating. The more times they had to start, the more times they would have to struggle to regain control. The Professor was a genius at constantly rediscovering the obvious, those

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things that had been hidden and twisted by years of fantasies and lies woven around the huge business of obesity. The hunger of the poor deserves respect, compassion, indignation, and struggle. The hunger of fat people on a diet provokes laughter. But that didn’t make the call of Marina’s guts any less painful. The message coming from within her body was stronger, clearer, and more consistent than any stimulus from the outside world. It was impossible for her to focus on what she was doing. She worked for hours on end in the laundry, stuffing clothing into the machines, taking it out, folding it, with the help of industrial size washers and dryers. It was the most demanding work assignment at The Reeds; the nearly constant physical activity forced the Campers, drenched in fetid sweat combined with a ketosis that produced a strange odor of rotting apples, to change uniform at least twice a day. Trudging through her forced march around the perimeter of the entire institution, practicing gymnastics with the others, swabbing the hallway floors with a mop, participating in group sessions, or cleaning the bathrooms, Marina could think only of food, of the next meal that awaited her at the clinic — and also of the other, forbidden ones, those she had left behind of her own free will while she still had hope. She never quite understood the mixture of techniques that were used at The Reeds, that maddening combination of persuasion and coercion. A cheerful tune coming from the loudspeakers was the call to lunch. Lunch consisted of an assortment of pleasant, varied, and miniature dishes. Everyone picked up a tray from the kitchen. They sat wherever they liked, at shared tables. There were two menus to choose from: with or without carbohydrates. The carbohydrate-free meal consisted of a cucumber, a small portion of steamed spinach with lemon — the size of a demitasse cup — a little mound of grated carrot, half a tomato, and a chicken leg. The menu with carbohydrates replaced the chicken leg with a tablespoonful of rice. For

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dessert, there was diet Jell-O for everyone, in a choice of flavors. As always, liquid, lots of liquid. Water and artificial juices with practically no calories. Marina had imagined more options to select from and menus that would be adapted to the tastes or needs of each person (allergies, intolerances, intestinal problems). But the food was the same for everybody. Such microscopic portions were unlikely to produce any ill effects, and if there was anything in the food that bothered you, you could simply leave it behind. Instead of a tray of solid foods, Cagers like Alelí were given a tube whose contents they could absorb without opening their jaws. Marina began with the spinach, a food she’d never liked but that now tasted delectable to her. She separated the vegetable fibers one by one and placed them in her mouth, where she caressed them gently with her tongue before dispatching them southward with pleasure and sadness: the first mouthful was the beginning of the end, the poignant moment when her meal began to disappear. Others chose to eat their chicken leg first. Marina noted with surprise how Alelí took advantage of the Tutors’ momentary distraction to snatch something from someone else’s plate, and shove it, quick as a flash, into the yogurt container she always wore between her belly and the elastic waistband of her pants. One of the female Campers climbed up onto a platform and, in a toneless voice, recited a passage from the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 28:52–57, into the microphone. It was a section about the terrible curse with which God threatens those who stray from the path and refuse to obey the commandments and ceremonies set down by the Lord, and what will happen to them if they adore false gods of wood and stone: And he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, until thy high and fenced walls come down, wherein thou trustedst, throughout all thy land: and he shall besiege thee in all thy gates throughout all thy land, which the Lord thy God hath given thee. And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters, which the Lord thy God hath given thee, in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith

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thine enemies shall distress thee: so that the man that is tender among you, and very delicate, his eye shall be evil toward his brother, and toward the wife of his bosom, and toward the remnant of his children which he shall leave: so that he will not give to any of them of the flesh of his children whom he shall eat: because he hath nothing left him in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall distress thee in all thy gates. The tender and delicate woman among you, which would not adventure to set the sole of her foot upon the ground for delicateness and tenderness, her eye shall be evil toward the husband of her bosom, and toward her son, and toward her daughter, and toward her young one that cometh out from between her feet, and toward her children which she shall bear: for she shall eat them for want of all things secretly in the siege and straitness, wherewith thine enemy shall distress thee in thy gates. If thou wilt not observe to do all the words of this law that are written in this book, that thou mayest fear this glorious and fearful name, the Lord thy God. “Get that, cows?” said the screechy voice that Marina immediately recognized. Being able to ascribe a face to the sound would make the morning weigh-in ceremony less mortifying. “Did you get what it’s about?” The Tutor was an excessively skinny woman. The lack of flesh on her facial bones made her light blue eyes appear larger and more protuberant than they really were. That’s why they called her the Thyroid. Like all the staff at The Reeds, she was threatened with expulsion if she gained weight. Rumor had it that the bony Thyroid ate secretly, keeping her weight down by taking hormone supplements to speed her metabolism. These caused hyperthyroidism and, consequently, bulging eyeballs. Of course, that version didn’t take any serious physical considerations into account. When the Thyroid smiled, her skin, nearly devoid of collagen, wrinkled all the way up to her eyebrows in wavelike folds. A woman dressed in yellow raised her hand. “God threatens them with hunger,” she said.

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“And are you very hungry?” asked the Tutor. “Yes,” the woman replied, defiantly. “Would you eat your own child?” “No.” “What about you?” “Not me,” replied a gray-haired woman with a burdensome belly, disproportionate in comparison to the slenderness of her ankles, which peeked out from beneath the hem of her pants. Judging from the mother’s age, Marina thought, that woman’s son must be much older and therefore, when the moment arrived, would make quite a substantial dish. A little tough, maybe, but extra boiling would take care of that. Out of the corner of her eye, Marina managed to see what Alelí was hiding in her yogurt container: squeezed-out lemon quarters. She also saw her “decapitate” the end of a piece of gnawed chicken bone, stowing the cartilage and the minuscule piece of yellowish fat that stuck to the joint. “And you?” the Thyroid asked a dark, bearded man who would have been very attractive a hundred pounds earlier. “I don’t know — I’d have to think about it. It depends.” The man smiled, revealing his large, white, brilliant teeth. “You still feel like making jokes, Alex? You know you’re not losing as much as you should. And you know why.” But the Tutor could only provide a pallid imitation of the Professor’s speech: she lacked his aura of authority and his charisma. Alex regarded her defiantly, without relaxing his smile. With a single phrase, he had readjusted reality to its normal confines. They were not prisoners in a concentration camp, abused by a Nazi Kapo. They were people with a lot of money who were paying for a service, and the Tutor was not much more than a high-priced servant, a stewardess. “Those with money can do what they want,” Alex said. “Is that what you want? That piece of crap you see in the mirror? Well, it’s your business, but don’t jeopardize the others.” The Tutor

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knew him well and wasn’t about to become entangled in a power struggle. Now she turned to the rest. “No, God’s threat isn’t hunger. It’s about becoming inhuman, beasts, monsters capable of eating their own children. He threatens them with the loss of control! Do you understand? Do you understand that to be human is to be the owner of your body, to be able to manage your impulses? That’s what we’re doing here: we’re trying to turn pigs like you into human beings.” Meanwhile Marina, with enormous curiosity, watched Alelí blissfully absorb the liquid from her tube, the color and nature of whose contents she couldn’t see. Was it thick or thin? Sweet or salty? Better or worse than her own rations? She desperately wanted to try it. Distracted, she grabbed the chicken leg with her hand and brought it to her mouth. There she could feel the desire of that extraordinary impulse, to dig her teeth into that tender flesh all the way to her gums. But the bite was never consummated. As swiftly as a bird, a long, thin rod inserted itself between her arm and her mouth. Then, with a gentle but precise rap on her knuckles, it forced her to let go of the chicken leg. “Wipe off that greasy hand, pig,” said the Thyroid, dryly. “Rule number four?” “No eating with hands,” repeated those who had already learned the rule, in chorus. “I didn’t hear you. Everybody. Louder.” “No eating with hands!” they all repeated, shouting fiercely. “Keep the drug at arm’s length. Knife and fork. How shall I punish you, you disgusting pig?” “Liquid diet for one day?” suggested Marina immediately, without thinking. “So you feel like trying the other menu?” the Tutor screamed. “Name, age, height, weight!” “Marina, forty-three, five foot two, two-oh-seven.” “On the floor, face down. Beat your face!”

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“Huh?” “You heard me. Drop and gimme two!” “Two what?” “Push-ups,” someone whispered pityingly. Exactly as she had imagined it: like in U.S. Marine training films. Only in the movies, the sergeant barks, “Gimme thirty!” and if the recruit doesn’t obey immediately or doesn’t understand, the thirty turn into fifty. Two push-ups was a ridiculous number. With a faint smile, although with difficulty, Marina lowered herself face down to the concrete dining room floor. When she was young, along with her successive diets, jazzercise, spot reduction, and aerobics, Marina had taken salsa, karate, tai chi, and Pilates classes. In general her passion for physical exercise would last about a month, sometimes two. She hadn’t attempted push-ups, a typically male exercise, since childhood. She thought her pride and outrage against the Thyroid would give her sufficient impetus to rise and fall, at least for the first pushup. Marina had never possessed much arm strength. Her mistake had been to start off flat on the floor instead of lowering herself with the support of her hands. Face down on the ground, she felt defenseless and exposed. With all her might she concentrated on transmitting instructions from her brain to her muscles. Her arms trembled, and her entire body was bathed in sweat. Strange: lifting herself with her arms proved as impossible as if she lacked the necessary muscles or nerves required for the task. As impossible as wiggling her ears or willing her heart to stop beating. “That’s it. I can’t,” she said, smiling, from the floor. “This isn’t a gym class, fatty,” the Tutor replied. “If you can’t do the two push-ups, you’ll do without the chicken.” The idea of giving up her chicken leg was terrifying. With a little cheating and the assistance of her knees, Marina somehow managed to rise a few inches, but she couldn’t support herself enough to execute a controlled descent. Someone had spilled a few drops

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of broth. One of her hands slipped on the wet floor, and Marina collapsed, banging her chin against the floor, to a thunder of generalized laughter. When she stood up and took her seat again, she saw that the Tutor had removed the chicken leg from her dish and was carrying it off, triumphantly, wrapped in a paper napkin. But Alex gave her a wink.

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Case History III

Although many doctors advised her against it, Marina briefly followed the Atkins Diet, which consisted of freely eating foods high in protein and fat while reducing carbohydrate intake to a minimum. For a while she was amazed at the astonishing quantity of cold cuts, pâté, eggs, cream, bacon, meat, and organ meats she could eat without gaining. But she didn’t lose, either. At first she thought Dr. Atkins had underestimated the human capacity for consuming salami. But on examining the diet more closely, she realized that its supposed freedom was very limited, and that, in fact, if one followed Atkins’s recommendations strictly, it was merely a low-calorie diet without carbohydrates. He devoted one chapter of his book to answering frequently asked questions. One of the patients asked why Asians, whose diet is based on rice, a cereal whose primary chemical components are carbohydrates, can nevertheless stay so slim. Because they don’t eat very much of it, replied Dr. Atkins sagely. Like any other fat person in this world, Marina knew that the key to the problem lay in that response. Like any addict, she never gave up the search for a magic formula that would allow her to continue enjoying the pleasure of the drug without suffering its consequences.

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There was a time when the entire developed world, including the developed enclaves of the Third World, practiced the Scarsdale Diet. Marina was enthusiastic. Scarsdale didn’t specify quantities (it simply recommended small portions) and based its efficacy on a specific, varied combination of foods to be consumed in the same way every day according to a fixed, pre-established menu. During the intervals (always so long) between one meal and another, it recommended an unlimited quantity of raw carrots. As usual, Marina began the Scarsdale Diet very successfully. Later she imperceptibly increased the size of the small portions and ended up eating two pounds of carrots per day. Those were prosperous times, and the practice of having diet foods delivered to one’s home became popular, an expensive but effective method of achieving portion control. In pretty packages, garnished with green pepper or zucchini ribbons, or even with maraschino cherries, the miserable servings would arrive punctually, four times a day, at Marina’s door. But the world is big and full of food for those who can afford it. There were parties and invitations and candy displays and supermarkets and the freezer and the pantry, and Marina was always hungry, very hungry. For a time she tried acupuncture. The specialist was a Chinese doctor who, she was warned, didn’t have the same type of overly familiar relationship with the patient as Western doctors tend to do. In effect, the man treated her with apparent disdain. He hardly spoke to her, didn’t ask her any questions, didn’t order tests, and limited himself to silently inserting the needles. This time the magic lasted barely a week, although Marina followed the treatment for two months because the person who had referred her insisted that results took time. She also visited a couple of homeopaths. One of them, Dr. Cervantino, after staring with great interest at her iris through a machine, prescribed a broad spectrum of liquids that she had to combine four times a day with a precise quantity of drops from each of the twenty tiny bottles that were sold, as usual, by a single, reliable pharmacy. To the beech, valerian, juniper, and many other names

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that evoked Mother Nature, plus others that included Latin terminology, she added a pill that she was required to take once daily. It was the clever old mixture of diuretic, thyroid hormone, appetite suppressant, anti-anxiety drug, and laxative. The method was quite entertaining: whenever it was time for her medication, that is, four times a day, it took Marina nearly twenty minutes to figure out the exact combination of drops. Dr. Del Valle was a homeopath, too. He looked at her iris without the benefit of machinery, and in addition to the liquids and little globules, he based his treatment on his personal seductive charm. He insisted that Marina give him her hand, and, squeezing it forcefully, made her repeat aloud several times: “I trust you, doctor.” There was nothing overtly sexual in this pressure. Marina didn’t detect any desire for her body on the doctor’s part, only for a moderate but regular surrender of the contents of her wallet. Her homeopathic treatments proved quite beneficial, of course: she lost several pounds with Dr. Cervantino as well as with Dr. Del Valle. Attracted by their ads, Marina visited the Skinny Center, where they offered, at exorbitant prices, a quick weight-loss system based on a low calorie diet with daily medical supervision (you could show up anytime). They provided a form on which the patient had to jot down everything she ate during the day. Not even the most obsessive patients could complete this ridiculous task for more than two days in a row. The method included wrapping the patient tightly in cold bandages that had been dipped in some mysterious ingredient, restoring elasticity to the tissues and contributing in some unspecified way to weight loss. But in order to qualify for the wraps, whose material must have cost a certain amount of money, it was first necessary to lose 15 percent of one’s starting weight. Marina never made it. At her office visit, they injected her with a medication whose label the patients were not allowed to see. The doctor assured them that it was a vitamin compound, and perhaps it really was. Marina quit the treatment after two weeks, embarrassed at having allowed herself to be injected with a substance with no name.

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The Clockwork Orange

The building that everyone called the Clockwork Orange was located at the rear of the property, behind the barracks. It was a onestory chalet with a charming slanted roof. Inside was a single large room with two bathrooms. The first time Marina walked in, it reminded her of a classroom. And that was the general idea. Only instead of chairs with little individual tables attached to the armrests, the seats looked like a combination of old-fashioned school desks and dentist’s chairs, each with its own computer. As in a Japanese house, everyone removed their sneakers on entering. And their stockings. Unlike a Japanese house, it wasn’t a question of protecting the mat floor. A much nicer Tutor than the Thyroid had explained the system to them, its application and its purpose. In his novel A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess devised a method to eliminate his character’s passion for crime and sadistic aggression, based on Pavlov’s experiments. They injected the boy with a certain preparation that made him feel ill whenever he saw scenes of cruelty or violence. Tied down, with his lids held open by clips that prevented him from closing his eyes, he was forced to watch sadistic horror films, including

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some documentaries, while he squirmed in his chair, nauseated and in horrific pain. At The Reeds, the Professor had simplified the method, which no longer bore any trace of science fiction. The soothing music of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, playing softly, filled the room. Nearly all the desks were occupied. From time to time, Marina observed, the people occupying them shook as though they were startled, their expressions distorted into a strange grimace. And yet, no one cried out: a strip of plastic tape covered their mouths. Obediently, Marina sat down at her desk in front of a computer screen. A tall old man with very thick, bushy, white eyebrows came over to adjust her wrist straps. He positioned her bare feet on a metal plank. He brought over three little Styrofoam balls of different sizes in sealed, sterilized plastic bags, trying them out until he found the one that best adapted to her mouth. With the little ball wedged behind her teeth, between her palate and her tongue, and a wide strip of plastic tape across her lips, there was no possibility that her screams would be heard. The device was simple, and above all, personalized. On the computer screen there appeared images of permitted and forbidden foods. The foods and the order in which they appeared had been determined through previous interviews with each Camper. Using the index finger of her right hand (of course, there were also special seats for lefties), Marina was to press the yes button for the permitted foods and the no button for the forbidden foods. There is no forbidden food, the Professor insisted; the only thing that’s forbidden is overeating. Therefore, on the Clockwork Orange computers, the only foods that were considered absolutely and irrevocably forbidden were those that Marina herself had indicated as very addictive for her, the ones she really couldn’t resist and that impelled her to eat too much. For almost everyone, these foods were sweets and starches, those damned carbohydrates. But everyone had his or her own personal Achilles’ heel. (For Marina, for example, nothing was as irresistible as hard cheese. Denise’s perdition was pâté. Herminia,

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who would often discuss her own weakness in order to give the others strength, was crazy about fruit candies.) For the majority of the images, the idea was to press no when a large quantity was shown and yes when a small portion appeared on the plate. For a very few foods, like leafy, green vegetables, raw mushrooms, or cucumbers, the quantity didn’t matter so much. It seemed impossible to make a mistake, and yet it wasn’t. The photos flashed by at high speed; temptation led to error; the differences between large and small portions were ambiguous for the beginners. Each time someone erred or hesitated too long, the photo would remain on the screen for five seconds, while the apparatus discharged a low-voltage electric shock to the soles of his or her feet. Once, long ago, in another era of psychiatry, Marina had read an article about the beneficial effects of electrical stimulation on autistic children. The children walked barefoot on a metal floor; small shocks served to produce certain responses. The article never mentioned the word pain. However, it wasn’t exactly pain that Marina felt with the first shock, but rather an unpleasant sensation more like the “sticking” she had occasionally experienced with the freezer or the microwave or the elevator door. The current passing through her body shook her for five seconds as she looked at the photo of a chocolate mousse–and–cream cake, from which an overly large piece had been removed. A violated cake, on a serving dish that was slightly smudged with bits of mousse, was infinitely more tempting than a whole, perfect, impeccable one, and Marina’s finger, which had been automatically hitting yes, yes, yes to successive, moderate servings of spinach, boiled broccoli, and tomato and onion salad, was not quick enough to switch buttons. It was a question of distraction, not temptation, she wanted to explain, but she was gagged and there was no one to explain to. Lucho, the proctor, watched over the entire classroom with an indifferent, vacant expression. The first shock was practically a tickle, but after repeated errors, without any need to

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raise the voltage, the stimulus grew more and more annoying, until it became intolerable. Fear provoked doubts, slowing her reactions, which in turn led to more shocks. Sweat dampened her feet and improved the electrical conductivity. She recognized Esteban, who was sitting in the other chair, having apparently survived the feigned shooting. He squirmed more frequently than the others, either tempted by his favorite dishes or simply slow to react. Mistakenly pressing the no button also resulted in punishment, but the image that remained frozen while the shock was delivered was always that of a forbidden food. The Recovered Campers, those who were approaching their ideal weight and were nominated for Survival, were no longer required to participate in the Clockwork Orange sessions. The Cagers weren’t brought in, either. As Alelí later explained, mandibulo-maxillary immobilization — or jaw-wiring — was hardly ever used anymore for intake control because it had several obvious weak points: it was perfectly possible to get fat on liquids; when the patients’ wires were removed, they resumed eating as usual; and, above all, there was the danger of asphyxiation in case of vomiting, since liquid could enter their lungs. The Cagers wore a pair of pliers around their necks at all times for cutting the wires in case of emergency. “But you can refuse to wear the wires, I imagine,” Marina said, horrified. “You can refuse anything. For starters, you can leave, right? But if you want to stay at The Reeds, you have to obey. If you don’t, they take you to pt — Personalized Treatment.” At the Clockwork Orange, Lucho the Caretaker’s job was to stay with the patients, help strap them into the machines, and deal with all mechanical maintenance problems. A young boy, the one in charge of the computers throughout the complex, stopped by once a day to check on things. Lucho, however, had to be present at all times because of occasional awkward malfunctions, like an electric

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charge that didn’t cut off in time or a machine that broke down and stopped generating electricity. The Caretaker was obliged to stay constantly alert, in order to immediately disconnect anyone who was zapped for more than five seconds or who appeared very ill. But he also had to control what happened whenever someone didn’t experience the expected tremors. Had she finally learned that fats and carbohydrates were her real enemies? Had he managed to develop sufficiently quick visual-motor coordination to consistently come up with the right answer? It hardly ever became necessary to call the doctor, but in those rare cases, Lucho had an alarm that rang directly in Dr. Delledonne’s private office. According to rumor, Lucho had been a torturer in a concentration camp during the Dictatorship. After a while, Marina got to know him well. In his free time the man was fond of bird watching. He would station himself, binoculars in hand, next to the wire fence that faced the river, and there he would remain for hours, observing the comings and goings of herons and great kiskadees. For years, Marina’s kids had owned Australian cockatoos, a bird that’s very susceptible to illnesses. As the cockatoos can live only in pairs, they were constantly obliged to replace one of the partners, until Marina, tired of burying cockatoos, set the last one free. One of them had a beak that routinely grew too long, and every so often they had to take it to the vet to have its beak trimmed with a scissor, because it interfered with the bird’s ability to eat. Another one suffered from calcifications that gradually petrified its body until its legs grew rigid, and it toppled off its perch and plummeted in its death throes to the bottom of the cage, where its companion finished it off. Yet another had a pulmonary disease. They had to catch it and force its beak open in order to dose it with cough syrup several times a day, until its heart could no longer withstand the terror of being imprisoned by a human hand, and the bird passed out and died. Marina and Lucho spent some pleasant moments discussing birds.

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One day he confessed to her that some of the rumors were true. Yes, he had been in a concentration camp during the Proceso, as he insisted on calling it. “But don’t believe everything you hear, Marina. I wasn’t a soldier. I was an orderly. I did the cleaning. I never tortured anybody. Just like here. I watched, that’s all.” The tone of his voice, which aimed at neutrality, nonetheless revealed traces of a deep sorrow. It hinted at such intense feelings of failure and disappointment that Marina couldn’t help believing him.

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Case History IV

In her Fatties Anonymous groups, Marina learned many new tricks for avoiding eating that developed into just as many excuses and strategies for eating too much. They were urged, for example, to brush their teeth after finishing a meal as a way to give the meal closure. Another recommendation was to prevent their hunger from getting out of control; to this end they were instructed to divide their allotted food rations into small portions, to be consumed throughout the day at intervals of at least one and a half, but no more than three, hours. Even if they happened to overindulge and were ready to burst, at the three-hour mark they had to eat the preestablished portion, regardless. It was a matter of principle, the imposition of order in the face of chaos. At first she really enjoyed this because it allowed her to eat constantly throughout the day, but soon the hour-and-a-half intervals began to seem intolerably long. The method included the somewhat annoying requirement of sucking on a sourball candy before every meal, supposedly to help control appetite and stimulate the secretion of insulin. For those fatties who “nibbled” in between (a weight-gain behavior typical of housewives), the coordinator recommended keeping a large can

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or jar on hand into which they were to throw the same thing they had nibbled. If one consumed half a lady finger, for example, the other half went into the can. Two teaspoons of honey, a thin slice of ham, three French fries, a bite of cheese, and so on. By the end of the day, a glance at the overflowing, repulsive contents of the can would make the person aware of how much she had really eaten. Another requirement designed to promote intake awareness was never to eat with one’s hands or while standing, but rather seated and with utensils. Talking about food was prohibited at meetings. The Fatties Anonymous groups quickly became social places where members could gather to tell each other how and why they hadn’t managed to control themselves that week and to dispense mutual consolation. After listening to dozens of stories, Marina understood that there was no common psychological factor: there were fat folks with fat parents and others with thin parents; permissive and castrating parents; orphaned fatties as well as those from intact families, and still others with parents who were separated; fat folks who had been breast fed by their mothers and those who had been given a bottle; some that had been weaned too soon, and some who had sucked milk from a straw till the age of ten; some had been fat since childhood, others since adolescence; still others, especially men, had started putting on weight after marriage. (Over time, excess weight had ceased to be exclusively a female problem; more and more men wanted to get thin.) In these groups Marina discovered many nonfat, low-calorie products that she hadn’t yet tried, and she became a die-hard consumer. Her refrigerator was always filled with low-calorie flan, gelatin, cheese, jam, and yogurt. Her pantry bulged with rice cakes and “lite” crackers. There were no sugary sweets or desserts in her home: whenever she bought such delicacies, she ate them on the street. One day her family doctor told her about Xenical. The drug was called Orlistat, and it provided great health benefits. It didn’t work systemically throughout the organism, but rather acted only locally,

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impeding the absorption of fat by the small intestine. Nearly 30 percent of ingested fat is eliminated in the stool, the prospectus promised. And so it was. The fat globules that floated in the water of the toilet bowl created the giddy sensation of an effortless liberation from Evil. But Marina wasn’t so easily fooled: she couldn’t help thinking that the only way to eliminate three hundred fat calories was to eat nine hundred fat calories (and happily take advantage of the other six hundred). In fact, Orlistat possessed another secret charm: when the effect of the drug was combined with the ingestion of high lipid content foods, the result was bouts of hideous diarrhea. In theory, this should have made the fat folks more vigilant about avoiding fats. In practice, Marina, just like many other consumers of Orlistat (a product that was, besides, astronomically expensive), used it as a laxative to mitigate the effect of her excesses, not unlike the relationship between bulimics and vomiting. Over the last few years she had reached a sort of agreement with a traditional, pill-dispensing diet specialist who prescribed drugs for her without laxatives, thyroid hormone, or diuretics: simply medicine to suppress her appetite, that is, amphetamine derivatives combined with an anxiety-reducing drug or a barbiturate. Marina suffered the successive effects of dietilpropion, which kept her awake, combined with oxazepam; and of phenylethylamine, which at first made her feel happy and powerful, until the diazepam kicked in, plunging her into a dull state of indifference. She tried Fen-Phen (fenfluramine with phentermine), an apparently miraculous discovery that soon was found to cause irreversible heart damage. Then there was Sibutramine, still used in the United States even after being discontinued in several European countries for its effect on cardiac activity. Next came Mazindol, with its unpleasant side effects. Finally she was left with a combination of the old phentermine of her youth with fluoxetine, that is, Prozac, perhaps the most calming of antidepressants, with a certain anorexic effect of its own. As the drugs contained in the magic capsule didn’t work simultaneously, at

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certain times of the day Marina would feel her jaws clench terribly, due to the effect of the phentermine on her nervous system. Like many others, this pill didn’t prevent her from sleeping, but it made her sleep feel as if she was gliding on sharpened skates over a thin layer of ice that cracked apart here and there, plunging her several times a night into the frigid waters of wakefulness, long, agitated nights interrupted only by the relief of morning. The concoction helped her control her appetite a little. A little. She did weigh over 190 pounds, true, but she hadn’t yet broken 200. Meanwhile, Marina participated in the history of the world and of her country while at the same time constructing her own personal history. She attended school, had boyfriends, got married, gave birth to children, built a career. But while she intensely lived her own small role in the general evolution of humanity and of her individual, personal story, every day, every hour, every minute a huge, central part of her mind was consumed with a ferocious, forbidden desire: the anticipation, anguish, fear, and craving of her next meal.

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The Inferno

The first time Marina saw a white object fly over from the other side of the privet fence and fall to earth, she thought it must be one of those Styrofoam balls they stuck in people’s mouths in the Clockwork Orange. And yet she couldn’t help noticing how swiftly the gym instructor picked it up from the ground and stuffed it into his pocket. In exercise class the patients were categorized by body mass index, age, and fitness level. Denise and Marina were in the same group. The Professor, opposed as he was to any unnecessary expenditure, knew that The Reeds didn’t require bright, shiny equipment to seduce its hopeless clients. There’s no better equipment than your own body, the gym instructor remarked in response to a question, adding, just look how rusty yours is! Marina imagined she would excel in the pool; she had once been a strong swimmer. However, aquatic exercises and swimming were not for everyone (the sheer number of Campers would have required three times as many pools as they owned); they were reserved only for those who were within forty-five pounds of their ideal weight: water privileges had to be earned. Whenever it rained, they cleared the chairs from the

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Assembly Hall, turning it into a gymnasium. Aerobic exercises were the favorites, especially marching, which was accompanied by meaningful chants and incorporated obstacles and tests to gauge the patients’ weight loss and body mass reduction. The Recovered Campers, who had started out at a slow trot, ended up competing in eight-kilometer races, running laps around the perimeter of The Reeds while the dogs barked hysterically. Marina couldn’t bear to watch them dragging themselves through the mud of the obstacle courses; it meant more work for the laundry. In addition to gym activities, during their few free hours they were offered dance workshops (salsa, rock, and cumbia; tango and bolero for the morbidly obese). These, while not obligatory, somehow added points for the Professor’s and the Tutors’ consideration and were consequently more sought out than one might have imagined. Living for months without tv, radio, or computers was rather strange and uncomfortable, and, for the majority, required a kind of re-education. For that reason, any form of distraction was much appreciated, even if it demanded further movement. As for obligatory exercises, the morbidly obese were required only to walk slowly and move their arms a little. Lying on enormous mattresses, they practiced the difficult task of turning from side to side. In Marina’s group, some exercises were as simple as lying on the floor and standing up again: for people whose bmi was greater than thirty-five, most daily activities were in themselves a miserable form of exercise; after four or five repetitions they became torment. “What if I don’t want to?” Marina tried to rebel. “It’s like everything else. If you don’t want to, they’ll take you to pt,” Denise sighed, sadly shaking her mane of thick, wild, chestnut hair, for the moment her only attractive feature. Was Denise pretty or ugly? It would be hard to determine until she lost at least fifty pounds, Marina concluded. The contracts authorized the institution to apply whatever treatments they deemed necessary to each patient, even against their will.

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Unless they wanted to leave. Many of the Tutors and Guards had been nurses in psychiatric institutions and knew how to subdue a patient physically with the least possible amount of damage. Besides, the obese patients at The Reeds had been carefully selected for their physical and mental health: the first rule was to obey, and almost no one resisted. None of the adults, at least. In any case, those who weren’t prepared to endure the demands of confinement were completely free to go . . . by paying the corresponding penalty, a condition that some had accepted unthinkingly and others had willingly consented to when they signed the contract. Marina had no intention of testing her ability to withstand Personalized Treatment. What her barracks mates had told her about it was more than enough. After walking at a normal pace, (for them it seemed like a forced march), they began doing light stretching exercises. Behind the green privet fence, which concealed a wire fence, was the Children and Young Adults’ Pavilion, the place from which the object so swiftly hidden by the gym instructor had come. In addition to the adults over the age of twenty-one, who had signed the contract and were “camping” at The Reeds of their own free will, there were also many children, particularly adolescents (children under twelve were not accepted), whose parents had committed them by force, in many cases with a judge’s orders, because their obesity put their lives at risk. These minors were housed on the other side of the fence, in a camp that functioned like a maximum security prison. It was impossible to see anything that went on there, and the mystery was a source of curiosity for all the adults. “It’s the Inferno. That’s what we call it. I was there,” Fat Pedro told Marina one day as they were folding sheets in the laundry, moving toward and away from each other as though practicing a slow dance step. His lively, dark eyes were briefly clouded by the shadow of a memory. Not just anyone at The Reeds could earn the nickname “Fat.” Pedro was a very young boy who in real life had worked as a dog

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walker while his weight still allowed it. For Marina, the task of folding sheets was moderate exercise, but Pedro started panting immediately. His hands were so thick that his fingers resembled sausages, and yet he could move them with the precision of a watchmaker. “Because of the torture?” “No, don’t be silly; it’s not so different from here. We called it the Inferno because there sinners don’t repent. We all lost weight, but there were very few real Recovered Campers. Here, we think of them as heroes. There, they called them the Penitents, and they’re outcasts. I was like the majority. I hated my parents, the judge who committed me, and above all, I hated the Professor. I wanted to kill him. That’s what we did there whenever we had a free second: we made plans to kill the Professor and escape. They put me in there several times; every time I got out, I got fat again. I had my twenty-first birthday in there, and since I was legally an adult they couldn’t keep me anymore. Who would’ve guessed I’d be back here voluntarily a couple of years later?” Pedro sighed: mysterious indeed, oh Lord, are the ways of addiction. His broad, well-upholstered chest rose and fell heavily. Despite his youth, it was no simple, automatic matter to move the layer of accumulated fat cushioning his pectoral muscles. After a certain age, lung disease can be fatal for a morbidly obese person. Perhaps that was why hardly any of them could be found in the Smokehouse. Once in a while the kids managed to throw something over the fence to the other side, Pedro explained to Marina. In general they were pleas for help. There were also proselytizing groups that sent childish pamphlets and manuscripts, calls for mass rebellion, an impossible fantasy for many reasons. For one thing, the population of the Inferno rotated constantly, and no one remained there more than a year, an eternity for each of the kids but too short a time for any kind of real organization to take place. And besides, it was ridiculous to imagine that they might find allies among the adults, who had paid a fortune to be there. The kids would wrap the paper

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around a stone, a saucer, a teaspoon, any object heavy enough to allow them to launch their message efficiently to the other side. The second time it happened, Marina and Denise were alone. A little wad of paper surrounding a stone fell at Marina’s feet. She bent down and picked it up in a flash, moving more quickly than she had ever imagined possible (daily gymnastics were beginning to produce results) and kept it in her clenched fist until she could conceal it in her bra. In one of their few free moments between activities, Marina and Denise had been participating in a minor, forbidden pastime: they were talking about food. At The Reeds, this was not a topic to be discussed in public, or at least not in the presence of the staff or of a Recovered Camper. When there was no choice but to mention the drug, they were to call it by its generic name: food. However, the Professor never tired of insisting that the real drug wasn’t food but overeating. Sometimes in group sessions, when using a specific example was unavoidable, they spoke of pizza, a simple, common, apparently unremarkable food, but one that nonetheless occupied an important place in the lives of most of the fat folks. A food that everyone was familiar with, one whose fearsome temptation they all had succumbed to. Precisely to remove them from that temptation, isolation was prescribed: for that reason they weren’t allowed to listen to the radio or watch tv, and new arrivals had to leave their cell phones at the door. Only once a week did they have permission to make an outside call from one of the phones in the administrative office. But it was impossible to control private conversations. Marina, like everyone else, enjoyed everything that had to do with food: she loved seeing it, smelling it, touching it, talking about it. She soon discovered that in Herminia’s presence she couldn’t mention anything on the subject. Herminia, with her somewhat abrupt gestures, was a sweet, witty person who enforced the establishment’s rules to the letter. She had become a sort of lay nun who recited the rules as

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if they were the rosary. With the other Recovered Campers she was even more demanding than the Tutors, although she didn’t have as much power. All those who had lost more than seventy-five or a hundred pounds became fanatics of one kind or another, and that wasn’t a bad thing: fundamentalism saved them from temptation. Soon they’d be out on the streets again, in the brutal world teeming with madness: they were afraid. And yet, whenever Herminia wasn’t in the barracks, or whenever they went out for a walk on the property together, Marina and Denise spoke endlessly, joyously, of food, like shipwreck victims with no hope of rescue. Denise was quite the gourmet: discussing food with her was a pleasure that filled one’s mouth with saliva and one’s soul with expectation. It wasn’t for nothing that she worked in a library: like a character from Fahrenheit 451, she knew many foodrelated passages from famous books by heart. For each one of the horror stories read to them during lunch and dinner (generally having to do with loss of control), she could offer as counterpoise (but only in private) some strictly prohibited passage from Gargantua and Pantagruel. But when the conversation ventured beyond the literary, when they spoke of themselves, of their tastes and desires, they needed some strategy that would allow them to discuss food without feeling as guilty as if they were actually eating right then and there. In general their pretext was to talk about those foods they missed the most and their problems with self-control in the face of temptation; their pretext was that they were merely planning for afterward, in the real world, and elaborating (deliciously detailed) plans for maintaining what they were achieving through so much effort. They would have loved to sit down and take a break, but if a Tutor or a Recovered Camper were to see them, they would immediately force them back into motion. It was better to amble along very slowly without stopping. The Smokehouse was a good place to chat, though only the biggest smokers could stand that asphyxiat-

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ing, painful place, which confronted them with the worst aspects of their addiction. “Size is everything: portion control,” Denise said. “If I make pâté with just chicken liver . . . if I use skim milk instead of cream . . . if I add just a couple of drops of whiskey . . .” As they spoke, Denise combed her beautiful hair with a tiny, broad-toothed comb that she always carried with her, tucked into her bra. They were walking alongside the hedge that concealed the Inferno when Marina saw the little white ball fall to earth. Casting furtive looks around, she unwrapped the stone, folded the paper in quarters without reading it, and stuck it in the hem of her uniform. In addition to what could be slipped inside a bra or underpants, hems were handy for carrying certain forbidden objects or simply those things one didn’t want to share with others. She read it later on, in the bathroom. The little scrap of paper had been hurriedly scrawled with a ballpoint pen that was almost out of ink. It asked only to tell someone named Sebastián that Carola was there. A cell phone number was included. Marina memorized it without trying.

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The Phone Call

One week after her arrival at The Reeds, the Professor’s promise was half-fulfilled. Marina’s organism had entered ketosis. She was now living off her fat reserves. Because of a lack of food, in particular carbohydrates (which, while not forbidden, had been reduced to a minimum), the breakdown of fats was incomplete, and the products of this process circulated through her blood in the form of ketones. Total fasting produces severe ketosis; what we do is much less harsh, the Professor explained, insisting on sharing all the scientific details of the diet with his Campers. Marina understood about half of it and suspected that most of her fellow Campers did too. At heart, weren’t all those explanations about the mysterious Krebs Cycle the equivalent of a shamanic incantation? The circulation of ketones sends messages to the hypothalamus, or the fullness center, causing urgent sensations of hunger to disappear. Wasn’t that declaration, perfectly executed in reality, as mysterious and effective as any hocus-pocus? She had begun to lose weight. Fast. She was eliminating ketones in her urine and through her lungs. Her body, her sweat, her breath, all had a certain intense odor that had unnerved her when she first arrived at The Reeds, especially in the group meetings and in the

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barracks, a cloying smell that reminded her of rotten fruit, one that would have been unpleasant if it hadn’t been shared by all the residents. She felt fine. To her surprise, she wasn’t lightheaded or faint, as she had been on other quick weight-loss programs. Perhaps because her diet was minimal but regular, and every morning, along with breakfast, they provided vitamins and magnesium and potassium supplements, making sure everyone took them. Her hunger was no longer painful, nor did she have the sensation that her stomach walls were rubbing desperately together, as if trying to devour themselves. She had no desire to nibble plaster from the walls, like some García Márquez character, and she could even look at the dogs that guarded the periphery of the institution without imagining them skewered over a barbecue pit. As for weight loss, the minimal portions produced an effect comparable to that of total fasting, although they were less harmful to the organism, especially — as the Professor insisted — because they conserved proteins. Like any fakir, like starving artists everywhere, residents of The Reeds entered a sort of mystic ecstasy, a combination of euphoria and constipation. Despite their intense exercise, it was hard for them to sleep at night. They referred to this relative lack of appetite as the State of Grace. But hunger is the driving force of life. And life doesn’t give up so easily. Huddled at the center of each body, hunger turns into a hard little ball, ready to explode. It’s always there, under control but anxious to take the wheel again. Men and women, accustomed to eating less than necessary to sustain life, but sustaining it nonetheless by using the abundant reserves of their own organisms, feel their beloved enemy gathering forces to take up the attack once again. They no longer feel hungry; yet hunger is still there: lurking, threatening, goading their desire. Although no one had offered her anything yet, Marina began to suspect that there was a black market at The Reeds. It wasn’t just

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Alelí hoarding leftovers in her little yogurt container. She had seen a small, mysterious packet change hands, and during gym class, her sense of smell heightened by the State of Grace, she had detected alcohol on the breath of one of the Campers. Over the course of several days it became clear than not everyone was losing weight at the same rate, and it wasn’t merely a question of hormonal or personal differences. Some of her fellow Campers seemed just as fat — or fatter — as when she’d met them. For the time being, she was strong enough to resist any temptation, but she was grateful she hadn’t yet been faced with the decision. Don’t put yourself in the way of temptation, her grandfather Rubin used to say: not even King David himself could resist. What could have possibly tempted King David? Was he fat? The more experienced Campers didn’t trust her, which was a great advantage. For those who took part in food trafficking, a neophyte, an unknown quantity, might be as dangerous as any Recovered Camper. Now, at last, the moment of the first permitted telephone call had arrived, and Marina, who at first had bitterly suffered the separation from her family and had for the first few days rehearsed constant mental dialogues with Tomás and her children, telling them about the Tutors, her campmates, the Professor’s focus groups, now discovered she had nothing to say to them. There was something about The Reeds that turned her stay into an intimate, private experience that she preferred not to discuss with those outside. Many people experience the same feeling. And so she barely listened to her children’s voices, anxious as they were to get back to their homework or their friends, trying to stay afloat in the whirlwind of adolescence, too immersed in it to be interested in their mother’s slightly ridiculous problems. And so her conversation with Tomás turned out to be brief, repetitive, and absurd, like those long distance calls in the days when communication was difficult, iffy, and very expensive. Are you all right? people would repeat to one another, as if to reassure themselves that the channel was open, that they still were connected.

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But suddenly, without thinking, without realizing or foreseeing it, Marina found herself asking the same old questions that had served to fill in her flimsy conversations with her children when they were away at camp or on a school trip, when they had seemed so uninterested in revealing details of a secret life to which their parents — for the first time — had no access. What did you eat? she asked, trying to help Tomás, who seemed uncomfortable and hesitant. What did we eat when? Last night, for example, what did you eat? We’re not going to talk about that, Tomás replied ill-humoredly; you know I never liked the idea of you checking yourself into that nuthouse, but now that you’re there because you got some crazy idea in your head, don’t tell me you called to ask what we ate for dinner. Marina suddenly realized it was true — that, and nothing else, was precisely what she wanted to talk about, and when Tomás abruptly changed the subject, she lost interest in the conversation. She screwed up her courage, too, and decided to ask him for help on Carola’s behalf: I need for you to call a certain number, Tomás, ask for Sebastián, tell him Carola is here. And why can’t she call him herself? She wants to, but it’s not her turn yet. God knows why she had decided to lie in Carola’s name: come on, be nice, just tell him, okay? Before the actual phone call, the fifteen allotted minutes had seemed desperately short; now she felt worn out, as if she had been talking for hours. She hung up with relief. “It seemed long to you, right? The fifteen minutes?” Herminia said. “It’s just that you start to feel different, to see things differently, when you’re in here.”

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The Campfires

In spite of the jokes, petty thefts, and gossip, solidarity reigned in Barracks Nine. The women supported and helped one another. The one that received the greatest shows of affection, care, and tenderness, the one that everybody protected and spoiled like no other, was the immense creature known as Becky, or Becky the Scholarship Queen. That deluge of attention might have been warranted by the number of simultaneous functions her presence fulfilled. In real life, Becky lived within the cracked walls of a prefabricated house in a poor neighborhood, on an unpaved road. She had five children. Prior to her marriage she had worked as a maid. The other women, who once might have been her employers, were proud of her, like a leftist university group that prides itself on finding a genuine worker among its ranks, a proletarian emblematic of the proletariat itself, the poor of the world, the magnificent, irreplaceable, singular Worker. Her presence helped relieve their guilt, proving that it wasn’t just an excess of money, leisure, or well-being, a surfeit of egotism, that had made the rest of them get fat, but rather that they all suffered from a sickness that could afflict any social class. On the other hand, she was the fattest, a fact that infused her friends

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with a sense of compassion tinged with pity, a great enthusiasm for working with her and helping her approximate the relative normalcy of the other obese women, who could then afford themselves the luxury of feeling practically slim by comparison. A significant part of the treatment at The Reeds was based on sustaining that feeling of solidarity, on following the rules and helping the others follow them, too, on losing weight so as to set an example, to show it could be done. Becky rarely spoke and needed a good deal of help getting dressed, moving, entering and exiting through a narrow door (in her case, all doors were narrow), and cutting her toenails. She also needed help getting up if she fell: it took no fewer than four people to encircle her and place her upright again on her fat, abused feet. But most of all, she needed help drying off after a shower. Anyone who so desired could shower in the morning. But at night, after the day’s exhausting exercises, a shower was mandatory before climbing into bed. Becky’s short arms, limited in movement by rolls of fat, were useful only for drying her front portion; they barely reached the sides of her deformed body. That night it was Marina and Paula’s turn to dry Becky, who helped out with any part of her enormous body that was within her reach. It was a slow, painstaking task that required several bath towels and one that had to be carried out meticulously, because Becky was susceptible to fungal infections. At the slightest carelessness, the many heavy folds of her flesh would begin to display whitish or greenish marks that in some cases rapidly turned into scabby little puffs. Paula’s pale, pale skin, her white, translucent hands with their visible veins, contrasted with Becky’s sallow, mustardy tones, quite unlike the beach or salon tans still sported by some of the Campers. “Since you’re standing there, could you scratch my back a little? Higher, to the right,” Becky said, seizing the opportunity. At another time in her life, she had been obliged to clean the grime off women like these, who now competed to attend her. Everyone was equal

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at The Reeds; everyone was there for the same reason; everyone worked together — it was just that she had an advantage since she was more accustomed to it. Concentrating on her task, Marina recalled her experiences of the last few days. She was tired and worked almost mechanically, and her mind meandered among confusing images: the Professor, Elvi-the-Beaver, the scrawny Thyroid, Alex winking at her . . . Alex . . . That black beard, full despite his excess pounds, despite the fact that the hair follicles on his face were separated by layers of fat . . . his dark, olive complexion . . . those green, melancholy eyes . . . What did they remind her of? She tried to pin down an image that stubbornly evaded her, an elusive corner of her memory that she could capture only by not fixating on it directly. After Becky was completely dried, Marina decided, for the first time, to attend a Campfire. Campfires weren’t mandatory (although they provided bonus points, like the Dance Workshops). But up until now, Marina hadn’t wanted to leave the barracks at night. Her body, unaccustomed to walking and exercise, let alone physical labor, was exhausted by nightfall, following the Spartan dinner. Although hunger (but it wasn’t hunger, she had to remember that; it wasn’t the same thing she used to call “hunger,” but rather a new, strange sensation of emptiness) often kept her awake, she had had enough of group activities and lacked the strength or desire to huddle around a campfire. Nights were her only chance to be alone, the only time she was allowed to connect with herself at The Reeds, an institution where the value of collaboration, of “go team” was celebrated vigorously and with spirit. Denise, who had a literary example for every occasion, said that this constant, regulated group glee reminded her of the story of a Chinese dissident. Gao Er Tai, condemned for “deviance” during the Cultural Revolution, managed to emigrate and, while in exile, wrote a story called “On the Obligation to Smile in

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Chinese Work Camps.” Now those guys were really skinny, sighed Denise. Besides, what was the point of a campfire without some nice buttered corn on the cob to roast over the flames or a few chunks of hard cheese to thread on a skewer and gnaw on, charred on the outside, melted on the inside, or some chocolate, that bedtime chocolate, the perfect substitute for mother’s milk, the ultimate nursing experience, oozing into sleep: warm, comfortable, enfolding, somniferous, chocolate dissolving gently between tongue and palate, dark and unctuous on the mucous membranes, sliding sweetly into the throat, toward that part of the tongue where the taste buds capture its flavor fully and completely, where it’s too late for regrets, where there’s no turning back because the thick saliva-and-chocolate liqueur has deliciously begun invading the pharynx. Shaking her head violently as if to physically free herself of the daydream, Marina approached one of the Campfires. The twinkling lights gaily illuminated the warm evening. It was easy to delude herself, to tell herself she hadn’t made a conscious choice, that she was drawn there by proximity, that she had rejected the first Campfire because there were too many people around it and the second because she didn’t feel like being with Paula, decked out in her usual red outfit to ward off the Evil Eye, that pure chance had brought her to the Campfire where Alex sat with other men and women, sharing thermoses of mate, tea, and decaffeinated coffee, with or without artificial sweetener. Not even the Campfire was an entirely free activity. Although the Tutors didn’t participate, a Recovered Camper, in her snug white uniform with a belt that emphasized her enviable waistline, was directing a group game. She briefly explained the rules. One of them, the Detective, had to guess who the Pizza was (something the others had secretly agreed upon) before it could kill the other players. The Camper playing the role of the Pizza “killed” by making a previously arranged gesture at the exact moment the Detective wasn’t

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looking. Each assassinated player had to announce his or her demise and leave the game. But if the Detective caught the murderous gesture, the Pizza was discovered and lost the game. All day long there were many games like this one, games that generally included more physical exercise, like tag, hurdle-jumping, or ball toss. They were infantile and humiliating for Marina, but others found them quite entertaining. They identified the damn Pizza and symbolically burned it in the Campfire. Esteban, the Gunshot Victim, who looked like a snowman and bobbled his neckless head so that it appeared to roll on his shoulders, told a fat joke that made everyone roar with laughter. This immediately provoked a joke contest based on exaggeration: “He was so fat that . . .” Two jokes were declared the winners. The one Marina liked best was slightly surreal: He was so fat that he fell out of bed on both sides at the same time. (Marina remembered Becky the Scholarship Queen.) The other one she already knew in a cruder version: He was so fat that he needed a map to find his own belly button. Jokes, stories, songs — it was all predictable. What wasn’t predictable was the look Alex gave her. What wasn’t predictable was the fact that a man would look at her as if she were a woman. Marina returned his gaze with fear, shyness, and guilt. “You’re Marina, Lucy’s cousin,” Alex said. “I’m Alejandro Piriz. Remember me?” Now Marina knew who, from where, and also why he had looked at her (and it wasn’t because of some absurd notion that, for one moment, she had become a woman who could still attract a man). She never would have recognized that ex-boyfriend of her cousin’s twenty years and 130 pounds after their first meeting. Then Alex, with a warm, possessive gesture, took her hand. And Marina felt something like a tickle running up and down her skin, entering her, filling her to her core, a tickle she hadn’t experienced since adolescence. But Alex’s gesture in itself couldn’t guarantee her attractiveness;

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she couldn’t even be sure it had been motivated by an attempt to provoke the feelings she was trying to ignore, because together with the terrible-wonderful-forbidden tickle, she also felt Alex hand her a tiny object the shape, size, and consistency of a chocolate candy, slightly melted by the heat of his body. Marina stood up, took leave of the group, and returned to her barracks. Along the way, she casually raised her hand to her face, as if she was scratching her nose. It was a chocolate candy. She licked the palm of her hand.

14

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New Friends

“They need to be protected, guided. They’re like kids. Like little kids,” Pedro explained. The rottweilers that guarded the borders of The Reeds, enclosed in a broad passageway between two wire fences, didn’t look like little kids. They were 110 pounds of solid heft, 110 pounds of pure, brutal force. Like crocodiles in a castle moat (but where and how would Medieval European noblemen find crocodiles?), there they were, guarding their turf. The adults weren’t imprisoned by the dogs, just by their contracts. Only the minors locked in the Inferno could try to escape (and did). However, the dogs’ primary function was to protect the establishment from outside attacks. At The Reeds, there was plenty of money, food, medication, and, especially, rich, obese people whose families, in spite of everything, wanted them back, fatties who would have paid their weight in gold to be set free, the perfect bait for kidnapping. “The rottweilers are used as a deterrent,” Pedro explained to them. “Because they have a dangerous reputation. But in fact, if they’re well trained, they’re the best critters in the world. All they

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need is love and discipline. One thing, though: when they attack, they go blind with rage; it’s hard to separate them from their prey. They have an incredibly strong bite.” “That reminds me of a story about . . .” Denise began. But the others interrupted her with jokes and laughter, cutting her off. Sometimes Denise’s stories helped them fill those very brief moments of leisure that nonetheless seemed long, a substitute for the gaps that the lack of tv and computers had left in their lives. And sometimes Denise’s stories just got on their nerves. Pedro was the only one bold enough to lean on the wire fence and talk to those stolid, silent animals. Occasionally they would even come over and appear to listen to him. “Weight is a factor in the rottweiler’s character,” he remarked. Alex and Alelí, whose participation in the discussion was somewhat desultory, suddenly perked up. Weight. A topic that awoke fascination in all the Campers. The dogs eat everything their master gives them, so they’re prone to obesity, just like humans. Obese rottweilers (some can become as much as forty-five pounds overweight) have joint problems that make them bad-tempered and unreliable. “Why are they all females, Pedro?” Marina asked. The boy loved dogs almost as much as he did food. He had been raised with animals from childhood; he had been a trainer, and later, when his weight began to make certain physical movements difficult, a dog walker. He himself sometimes seemed like an overfed puppy. “It’s because the females can’t be bribed.” Whenever he got started on his favorite topic, Pedro’s expression changed. He lit up from within as if he had just spotted a bowlful of ravioli. “Well, except when they’re ovulating, but that happens only every six months. On the other hand, no matter how well trained the males may be, if they see a female in heat, or even just a rag with her scent on it, they go crazy; all the training goes to hell, it all gets undone.” “It doesn’t matter,” Alelí said. “Since I don’t want to leave . . .”

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“But I do,” Alex said. “And I think I’ve figured out a way.” “Damn, are you really going to pay that ridiculous fee?” Alex owned a restaurant, which his partner was running during his internment. “There’s another possibility. They’re going to throw me out,” he announced triumphantly. Pedro and Alelí, who had more experience, smiled at each other. Another one that had made the great discovery, the crack through which the contract could fall. Everybody thought he was the first and only. Aside from these new friends, with whom she had so much in common, Marina got along very well with Herminia, the Recovered Camper in charge of the barracks. And yet she had to admit feeling hugely relieved whenever she thought about the moment when Herminia would finally move to Survival. She felt like a teenager waiting for her parents to leave on their weekend vacation. Herminia cared for her, protected her, was her supporter, the solid post she could lash herself to when the urge to eat, like a hurricane-force gale, shook and tormented her. But at the same time, Herminia was her guard, much more so than scrawny Thyroid, the Tutor. The Thyroid controlled her through punishment, while Herminia controlled her through love and guilt. In the barracks she was the leader of the pack, the alpha dog, although in groups she yielded, like everyone else, to the absolute supremacy of the Professor. Paula, who was dropping pounds quickly, was poised to become her annoying successor, though she was too young for the position and, above all, too obsessed with the New Age claptrap that induced her to dress all in red and toss Bach’s flowers and the power of the pyramids into the same crazy salad. Good old Paula advocated an intimate relationship with the energy of the universe, something she claimed to have achieved but which nonetheless had never helped her maintain a reasonable weight. Survival was the ultimate test, as well as a privilege. Only those

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who were within fifteen pounds of their ideal weight could go to the island, provided they were under sixty years old and in excellent physical condition. They went in groups of three or four. The island was in the middle of the river. While Recovered Campers were in survival, security people were posted at the dock night and day, with walkie-talkies and lifeboats at the ready in case of accidents or prowlers. The chosen ones who returned from Survival were greeted with a ceremony that also served as their graduation. Tanned, slim, and proud, they had managed to survive for a week at Nature’s mercy, they themselves (who had arrived there as defenseless little urban slugs) now a part of that indomitable bit of nature which the Professor carefully controlled for his own purposes. Now they were strong, brutal, happy, crowned with laurels of admiration, and for their last days at The Reeds, afforded power and favor. During the long nights, awakened so often by the impatient voice of her guts, Marina fell asleep again soothed by fantasies of her distant, yearned-for, possible Survival.

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His Own Grave

“Can someone explain Listen and Obey to the newcomers?” “I’m Lucrecia. I’ve lost sixty pounds in two months. We obey in order to be free,” said a woman in a yellow uniform. “Because we’re starting from scratch. Learning to be adults,” shared a bottle blonde who didn’t appear to have lost the seventy pounds she boasted of. “Audio et obsequo,” everyone chanted in chorus. “Louder! I can’t hear you,” Elvi demanded. “audio et obsequo!” “Why ‘Listen and Obey’ if you’ve got no choice here?” said the Professor, appearing out of nowhere. Silence and electricity. “Of course you have a choice to do otherwise. And some do. Some of you. Or do you think I don’t know? And it’s not because I’m so brilliant. It’s just because I’m no fool.” It was the first time Marina had ever heard him mention the taboo subject, the one about which she herself — for the moment — harbored many suspicions and little proof: the secret food trafficking that took place throughout and beneath the official organizational structure of The Reeds.

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That day the Professor tackled one of his favorite topics: the obesity epidemic. The strange international phenomenon that was making slim people disappear from the well-nourished world, people who slipped one by one into the realm of fatness, to such an extent, according to the Professor, that thin folks were becoming an endangered species, a subject for study and experimentation. How did they manage to resist? What psychological and physical characteristics preserved their immunity? What did Tito have to say, after losing 150 pounds? “One hundred fifty-two this week, Professor. They told me this morning. Here at The Reeds, we are bastions against the onslaught of fat,” Tito said, proud as a general, without exactly answering the question. “What about you, Mariana? You’re a psychologist. What do you think?” asked the Professor. And Marina said what was expected of her, something encouraging and positive, as she thought of Napoleon’s trick. Obviously he wasn’t capable of remembering the names of all his soldiers, let alone their ages or weights, but who would have dared to contradict him publicly? “While four thousand children die every day of illnesses related to malnutrition, that is, of hunger, the other half of the world’s population is advancing toward obesity. In the United States, where the food industry produces daily three thousand eight hundred calories per person, 65 percent of the population is overweight and 30 percent is obese . . .” “Professor,” interrupted Alex, “if the most powerful nation in the world chooses to be fat, couldn’t that be the answer? Isn’t it possible that fatness could be humanity’s ideal destiny?” “I’m not going to discuss humanity’s destiny. Who among you chose to be fat?” Not a single hand went up.

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“Couldn’t there possibly be happy fat people, people that are satisfied with their bodies?” “Yes, of course there could be. Only I don’t know any. Does anyone in this room know a fat person that’s satisfied with his body?” The silence discredited Alex, who defiantly raised his hand. “You can always leave, Alex. No one is keeping you at The Reeds. In fact, I’d advise you to leave. For your own good.” “You’re keeping me here! With that crooked contract I’m sorry I ever signed!” “You’re an adult, Alex. We’re all adults here. We take responsibility for our actions. If we overeat, we get fat. If we sign a contract, we abide by it. That’s what The Reeds is about. Becoming responsible for yourself.” “I went through a stage like that, too,” Herminia interjected. “They sent me to Personalized Treatment, and I decided to go on a hunger strike. So I could leave as soon as possible.” “Tell him what happened to you, Herminia.” “I didn’t lose much faster than with the usual diet. Meanwhile, two weeks had already gone by. And I had lost over twenty pounds. I realized I wanted to stay here. To learn to eat less. It’s much harder than not eating at all, but that’s what I want. I can’t fast for the rest of my life.” “You’re rebelling against yourself, Alex,” the Professor concluded. “Why don’t you rebel against a pizza instead? Why don’t you stand up and fight when the sixth serving of mozzarella goes into your mouth, instead of bending your head and obeying and swallowing it? You call that freedom?” “I’m out of here,” Alex said, standing up so suddenly that his belly bumped and knocked over the chair in front of him, where a former fatty — almost lightweight and convinced now — sat. “I’m not going to participate in Group anymore.” The woman arose without protest, righted her chair, and not ut-

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tering a word, looked at Alex with a mixture of compassion and scorn. “Alex,” the Professor said, “you’re going to dig your own grave.” Many of those present knew he wasn’t kidding. The Professor never proposed anything he wasn’t prepared to carry out. They prepared for the show. The following morning Alex was given three options: go home, enter Personalized Treatment, or dig his own grave. His Tutor unflinchingly recommended Personalized Treatment: isolation from the others was best for everyone, the rotten apple removed from the barrel. The pt pavilion was designed with large, comfortable, individual windowless rooms whose only furnishings were a bed and a chair. The walls were solid, impeccable, white, as if freshly painted. The bed was covered with white sheets and a white quilt. Everything was immaculate. There wasn’t a single stain to gaze at. The rooms faced a central patio where the pt patients, if they so desired, could exercise at different times of day, separately and in shifts all day long, following a virtual instructor that marked the rhythm from a video screen. In each room was an intercom that could be used to call for help in case of serious problems. It didn’t respond to any other sort of communication. The doors contained a built-in revolving tray or wheel, like those in a convent or a by-the-hour motel, for delivering food to those locked inside, without the need for any human interaction. That was all: nothing blatantly terrible, and yet, according to Denise — who never let an opportunity go by without flaunting her literary knowledge — as John Donne wrote, not even in Hell are we threatened with the punishment of solitude. The first twenty-four hours were very tough, and no one endured there more than three days. Personalized Treatment was nothing more or less than old-fashioned solitary confinement of the kind used in prisons everywhere: the worst sentence, the penalty all inmates fear more than pain. Alex and his Tutor knew that the combination of hunger and

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solitude was nearly intolerable, and that her recommendation was really an exercise in reverse psychology. Alex assessed his possibility of facing the penalty stipulated by the contract if he left before the established term, considered not paying it, imagined the long legal battle with the Professor’s shrewd lawyers (he knew of other cases), calculated the fines and costs, and made up his mind. At least temporarily. By the time Marina had finished breakfast and set off for her first round of exercises, Alex had started digging his own grave. He wasn’t alone. The Professor carefully avoided creating martyrs. Three volunteers, two women and a man, dug alongside him. They had been chosen out of many. Alex and one of the female volunteers, who had lost more than fifty pounds but was still very fat, were hooked up to various machines that monitored their heart rates and blood pressure. Dr. Delledonne, with his long, bored face, sat in a beach chair, reading in the shade of a willow tree and controlling the machinery. In the monotonous routine of The Reeds, it was quite a spectacle. Alex started out with the enthusiasm of an athlete. He weighed only 315 pounds, was very tall, and had never given up golf. A few weeks at The Reeds had begun to get him in shape, and beneath the layer of fat, his muscles responded pleasingly. The other three worked cheerfully, singing a children’s song. Alex dug his shovel into the earth with pleasure and fury, as if he were thrusting it into the Professor’s head. For the first hour he thought about competing with the volunteers: it would be especially easy to dig faster than the women. The task was relatively unchallenging because they were working in the Cemetery, the name the residents gave the area where troublemakers were sent to dig their own graves. The ground there had been dug up many times and responded readily to the shovel, which sank effortlessly into the loose, barely tamped earth. It was almost like digging a hole in the sand at the beach. Of course, digging one’s own grave wasn’t the same for a person with a thirty-inch waist as for one with seventy inches of girth.

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Alex’s grave needed to be much broader and deeper. An hour later, the hands that grasped the shovel (so different from a golf club) were covered with blisters. Alex bent over with difficulty, huffing and panting every time he had to plunge the shovel in, and lifting it again, filled with dirt (less dirt with each exertion), caused him terrific back pain. The other three, who had spent months at The Reeds, advanced at a calm but steady pace. They had a tin of fresh water at hand, constantly refilled, from which they drank at will. “Alex, you remind me of a movie I saw when I was a kid . . . How many times did you rent the movie Hud?” asked the Professor, smiling as he walked by. “I bought it on dvd,” Alex replied with a snort. He soon realized he would have to rest if he wanted to keep going. No one stopped him. The other three took between five and eight hours to dig their respective holes and fill them with dirt again. Alex had to stop every few minutes. His numb arms behaved like pieces of wood that only an insane act of will could mobilize. He was allowed to rest, even sleep, as often as necessary, as long as he didn’t move away from the hole. They brought him an enormous sleeping bag, adequate for his size, and at the appropriate times they delivered his four meager meals. On the second day, he awoke with pain in his entire body and thought his arms wouldn’t respond. Regardless, he was obliged to get moving and discovered that after a while, in the heat of activity, the pain became more bearable. Nearly three days after the first stroke of the shovel, Alex finished digging his own grave and began filling it again. He didn’t need for anyone to point out that he was losing weight. But another feeling had taken hold of him, a feeling that horrified him and one he tried to reject, a feeling that reminded him of another film even older than Hud — a 1950s movie in which a group of English soldiers, taken prisoner by the Japanese, performed forced labor for their captors, building a bridge over the River Kwai. Without any

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assistance, Alex had dug a hole large enough to contain his gigantic body. And he was proud of his accomplishment. He knew that the Professor had counted on his pride and that once more, as in a judo hold where a competitor takes advantage of his opponent’s strength to defeat him, he had managed to capture Alex’s will and turn it in his own favor.

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Food Trafficking

What was Alelí doing with those leftovers that under any other circumstance Marina would have found disgusting but that now struck her as mysteriously attractive? What was she doing with those little slices of squeezed lemon, those chicken bones, the fruit peels, spinach threads, tiny bits of boiled carrot that couldn’t have passed through the barrier of her wired teeth in any case? Marina found the answer at snack time one day, when she saw Alelí furtively exchange her container of leftovers for a yogurt that Griselda had barely started. And yet, one or two or three extra yogurts couldn’t explain the persistence of fat deposits on her body. It was obvious that Alelí wasn’t losing weight, and not even the experienced staff at The Reeds could explain the situation. That night, in the darkness of the barracks, Griselda wordlessly offered to share the contents of her container with Marina, something that in real life both of them would have simply called garbage. Marina rejected it, but it was harder than ever for her to fall asleep. After all, she had always liked chicken bones. Everything had its price at The Reeds, and everything was paid for in food. The kitchen staff was incorruptible and constantly mon-

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itored, and it was practically impossible to pilfer anything from the abundant reserves in the freezers and pantries. But certain other employees — guards, Tutors, gardeners, or gym instructors — could be bought. Campers couldn’t bring money into The Reeds, but they had some possessions and could offer certain services that would allow them to operate a clandestine black market through bartering, not to mention the signed vouchers that corrupt employees redeemed on the outside. Many residents depended on external accomplices, friends or associates who, without the families’ knowledge, traded those vouchers for cash. The newest coin of the realm was dog food. The man charged with feeding the rottweilers was one of the organization’s weaker links, and his merchandise filtered throughout the camp in every way imaginable. People said that the Dogcatcher (as he was called) was even willing to purchase certain male sexual favors. Pedro had befriended the man, with whom he shared an interest in (passion for) dogs, and from time to time, out of sheer friendship, he acquired handfuls of kibble that he circulated, giving them to his friends or using them to buy small services. For the first few weeks Marina had refused to try those small, compact, hard, earth-colored bits. Only when she was sure of her control over hunger did she dare to try one. They were salty, crunchy, and incredibly light, and their flavor reminded her of the beef stock her grandmother used to keep in the corner of the pantry. Instantly she wanted more and was sorry she had sampled it. They were called “pips.” For twenty pips Becky would make your bed for you; nobody else did it with such attention to detail, the legacy of long years of practice. For ten pips, Griselda would do it for you, and sometimes even the Clown would, with the occasional wrinkle. For thirty pips, a veritable bargain, you could avoid bathroom cleaning duty. Pips could be carried quite comfortably in the hem of one’s uniform, concealed in a bra, hidden in underwear, at

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the cost of losing some of their best qualities (that light, crunchy consistency) due to body heat and humidity. Those who engaged in the transport and distribution of the pips didn’t just have to hide them from the Tutors: the Recovered Campers, always eager to denounce their fellow residents for their own good, covetous of the anticipated reward, public accolades, and the Professor’s approval and affection, were a much greater danger. However, they weren’t all alike. Herminia, for example, couldn’t be fooled: after a year’s residence at The Reeds, she knew all the tricks. But she considered pip trafficking a minor offense, although she herself had never participated in it and she never would have allowed it to take place before her own eyes. The amount of calories the residents took in every day was so small that a few pips wouldn’t change the steady decline in numbers reflected on the scales. The women in the barracks knew that Herminia knew, but even so, they didn’t fail to guard their hiding places zealously so as to keep on exchanging the forbidden food. Marina wondered if everybody didn’t know, including the Tutors and the Professor, if it wasn’t the sort of transgression all rules demand if they’re to be followed. In all human cultures, the list of social norms is equal to that of transgressions; the compendium of ethical requirements is the other face of sin. Bestiality would never have been condemned if shepherds hadn’t thought of carnally desiring their goats. Marina wasn’t too interested in collecting pips: she had become so addicted to them that she ate them at once, locked in the bathroom or with Denise in their hiding place in the shed, and afterward, instead of satisfaction, she felt a desperate emptiness. One night, the same day Herminia returned from Survival bronzed, strong, and happy, while preparations for the farewell party were underway (rumor had it that every resident would be allowed a glass of wine), they heard violent banging on the door and the Thyroid’s strident voice shouting: “Order in the stable! To your places, cows!”

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Automatically everyone scanned the room for the Clown, who was in her bunk returning their glares with an apologetic look. The door opened and each one stood, erect and firm, beside her bed. The Thyroid entered with two guards. One of them was accompanied by a skinny, hungry-eyed dog that pulled desperately at his leash. It took only a second for the dog to sniff out a little bag of pips stuck in the filling of Griselda’s pillow. Other pips were scattered among Becky’s magazines. “They’re not mine!” Becky screamed. “They’re not mine, they planted them on me, those bitches, I knew it, those dirty, ass-licking sluts can’t stand me, they want me thrown out of here!” But the Thyroid didn’t seem interested in listening to excuses. Other pips, wrapped in a shower cap, were under a floorboard. The sounds coming from outside indicated that inspections were taking place simultaneously in all the barracks. The Campers were required to attend an immediate general meeting in the central quad. It was a cool night, but the humidity made the air feel dense and heavy. The Professor arrived, very grim. Those who were up front said later that he seemed truly aggrieved. He mounted the stage and, taking the microphone in hand, improvised a brief speech about the meaning of self-deception, reminding them that they were adults who not only were there out of their own free will, but who had also paid a fortune to get in. He emphasized how pained, how hurt, he felt. His voice broke a few times. “My dear friends,” he said. “This is a personal defeat for me. I feel guilty: you are my responsibility. I want you to understand the importance of eating a pip, just one single, extra pip, over and above the diet that’s been designed for you. It isn’t a question of calories. It’s a question of discipline, and also affection. It doesn’t matter that you don’t like me, that you don’t like this place. You don’t like one another, you don’t like your bodies, and you’ve proved that you don’t like yourselves.”

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The Professor used the word “pips.” That showed that the origin of the incident hadn’t been a slip-up: it was a rat. “I want you to know everything I know. I’m quite aware that those of you who have been discovered with pips aren’t the ones that are most out of control. On the contrary, many of you, perhaps most of you, don’t have pips saved up simply because you ate them immediately, because, in your greed, you were unable to save them so you could exchange or sell them. But those who managed to save the pips are a little guiltier, just as drug dealers, even the smallest ones, are guiltier than simple consumers. You’re guilty of using your capacity for self-control to harm your weaker colleagues. You have deceived me. All of you. Especially the Recovered Campers, the ones who knew about it and didn’t tell us, the ones who had no compassion for their friends and allowed them to wallow in the mud instead of helping them raise themselves up. I’m not accustomed to failing, and this is a failure. For you and for me.” Some of the women cried. The Professor briefly announced that the person in charge of feeding the dogs had been fired and that any Scholarship Camper discovered with pips could no longer remain at The Reeds. Becky cried even harder. In three months she had lost seventy-five pounds, and she knew that leaving The Reads under those conditions would deal a terrible psychological blow to her diet. On the outside she would gain even faster than before. The Professor left. Immediately, with the help of several Tutors, the Campers were arranged in a large circle. “The Professor has ordered that there will be no punishment for the guilty parties,” said Elvi-the-Beaver. “Because they’ve already punished themselves. What we’re going to do now is have a little ceremony so no one will forget what happened. Bring the food,” she ordered the Tutors. The Thyroid and another Tutor brought several large bags of dog food and emptied them in the center of the circle. “Dogs, over here. On all fours.”

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Those who had been discovered hiding pips were forced to get down on all fours. Marina was happy not to see Alex among them. In any case, she didn’t think Alex was capable of saving a pip for later. “Now come forward. Bark and eat. No hands. One mouthful, one bark. We want you to fill your mouths up with this delicacy. Every time you hear the gong, you’ll go after one another and bite. You don’t have to hurt anyone. Since you’re capable of eating dog food, we want to see what kind of dogs you really are.” Two men and a woman refused to follow the order. The woman was led off to Personalized Treatment. The men chose to go to the office to sign discharge forms. For them, leaving and submitting to the punishing fine was preferable to the humiliation the Professor had dreamed up or the anguish of pt. The rest trotted around obediently on all fours. Many thought they deserved it. Like fat, deformed depressed dogs, they barked and ate and snapped at one another. When it was over, the staff placed leashes around their necks. Elvi-the-Beaver and the other Tutors, like dog walkers, led their packs away on all fours around the perimeter of the camp. The ceremony lasted till 3 a.m. But Marina knew that the pips were just the tip of the iceberg. She knew that the constant, silent, general food trafficking would resume a few days later. She also knew, because she had proof, that certain infinitely more attractive food circulated clandestinely among a few elite. The day before, they had announced her weight: she had lost more than thirteen pounds in a month and felt she deserved a reward. And she hated herself for feeling that way.

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Sob Stories

Some Campers complained about the constant changes in the group, people leaving, arriving. How much better, they thought, to be part of a closed, constant group where the members could really get to know one another and become friends. “And forgive one another for overeating. Groups of mutual absolution,” the Professor countered. “This way, with each new arrival we learn and are enriched. Hurrah for change!” Besides, the Professor needed new contributions, and not just of the monetary variety, although, of course, it was a matter of money. It was a matter of a certain utterly essential innocence. The most expert Campers no longer fell into certain verbal traps, certain selfdelusions that the Professor needed to uncover in public for the amusement and instruction of the rest. “I work downtown, Doctor, and I never ate lunch, I swear. At most I would have a little sandwich, a little salad,” said a man who could have used a cart to comfortably support his protuberant belly. “Around here we don’t know what a little sandwich is. Or a little salad, either. We’re adults. We don’t talk in diminutives, we don’t minimize,” the Professor replied. “Maybe what you ate was really a

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sandwich. Or two. With bread, cold cuts, mayonnaise. In two bites you gulped down all the calories we give you here in twenty-four hours. Your little salad was a real beauty, right? With lots of dressing or oil, at nine calories per gram.” “What I mean,” ventured a new fatty, beginning with the phatic function of language, the verification of the channel, “what I mean is that I’m not here just because . . .” She glanced down at the miserable, sweaty bulk of her abdomen, “I had a screwed-up childhood. When I was six, my mother fell in love with another man, a younger guy, and she went off to live with him in Quito, Ecuador. My dad suffered, he was destroyed, and I didn’t see my mom again until . . .” “It’s very expensive to be here at The Reeds,” the Professor interrupted. “Did you pay for us to help you lose weight or to listen to your sob story?” “But I didn’t get fat because I wanted to!” “Around here no one gets fat because they wanted to. There’s always a good excuse for lack of control. Do you want me to ask all the orphans to raise their hands? Everyone who was or still is seriously ill? All the women whose husbands left them? All the guys whose wives fucked them up? Everyone who had some loved one that died slowly of cancer? Everyone who lost a child? A brother? Or do you think life is free?” “You’re a son of a bitch.” “Exactly. I’m the son of a bitch that’s going to stop your addiction, and if you want someone to listen to your sob stories, go pay a psychoanalyst. He’ll be delighted to be your support system. For a modest monthly fee.” “Is the Prof against psychoanalysis?” someone to Marina’s left whispered. “No, and I ask you not to talk among yourselves,” replied the Professor, who could hear like a bat. “Not at all. Psychoanalysis can be very useful and has a different function.” The new arrival cried tears of rage.

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“What do you want, for me to say ‘poor little thing’? Poor little fatty, she needs pizza to fill the void of her rotten childhood.” “You don’t understand anything. You were never fat. You don’t know what hunger is; you don’t understand the need to eat.” “Let me tell you another thing, Soledad: you’re not going to make it here. You’re going to leave early so you can keep eating in peace. What the hell — your sad story makes it all right, doesn’t it? You need some pleasure in your life. All those ice creams your mama didn’t buy you, you’re going to eat them now until your arteries burst. You won’t make it at The Reeds.” “You don’t know me!” Soledad shouted. “You don’t know what I can and can’t do!” “We’ll see, we’ll see,” said the Professor, enormously satisfied: another wayward sheep back in the fold.

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The Farewell Party

The glass of wine turned out to be just a rumor. With a combination of disappointment and relief, Martina and Denise wandered among the outdoor tables in the open air, in the shade of the trees, drinking a sparkling light apple juice very much like cider. It made Marina recall another glass of cider, the last one she had drunk with her colleagues at work shortly before checking into The Reeds. Her very last cider ever? She imagined that once reintegrated into society, people would have to incorporate all kinds of foods in moderate amounts little by little and with control. And yet everyone knew what he or she could not control. “My kingdom for a croissant,” Denise said, looking forlornly at the trays of food. “For one croissant? One? Don’t give me that crap.” Marina had developed a little exercise that she practiced every time the desire to eat gripped her, an exercise she had shared with her fellow Campers in one of the Groups, with the Professor’s benevolent approval. I’m the one who learns from you, he would say in such cases, flushed with the love of his obese followers. The exercise was very simple: it consisted of mentally pinpointing the moment

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immediately after finishing that ardently craved slice of pizza (croissant, puff pastry, chocolate). Had she even felt satisfied? Had her anxiety been assuaged? Marina knew what everybody else knew: that pleasure is not the same as satisfaction. After eating one, she’d want another. And another. And after tasting a croissant, crunching the golden crust between her teeth, then ecstatically plunging into the soft interior, she would crave the next one even more fervently. Denise wasn’t sighing for one croissant. She was sighing for at least a dozen. Every month there were parties. They were attended by Survivors, Recovered Campers, and skinny Graduates with their diplomas under their arms, and those who remained at The Reeds prayed never to see them again, at least not there. Not as Recidivists. In every barracks, the person closest to reaching his or her ideal weight would don the belt of the white uniform and take control. In Barracks Nine, Paula eagerly awaited Herminia’s departure. The others feared her: she was very young, slightly tyrannical, and she lacked Herminia’s natural joyfulness, her conviviality. The combination of Paula’s youth and fanaticism made her dangerous at times. Would she be capable of shedding her eternal red uniform for the white one worn by Recovered Campers? While Herminia was in Survival, Paula had organized reiki sessions some distance away from the barracks: it was an exercise in joining mental forces and sending them, in the form of positive energy, to those on the island. No two parties were alike. They resembled one another only in the formal aspects of the leave-taking ceremony for the elect, the Newly Thin, the ones who had returned from Survival and were now about to depart, to plunge into the jungle of the everyday, that much more difficult form of survival. Of course they made plenty of jokes about whether what they had survived was the battle against nature or against the diet at The Reeds. The Professor looked radiant, and his farewell message contained no platitudes, no repetitions

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of his usual speeches. He knew each one of his Campers thoroughly; he knew their fantasies, their emotions, their personal histories. He especially knew the Recovered Campers, who had spent a long time at camp, and he said goodbye to each one publicly in a completely personal way. The parties provided an opportunity for him to present his sheep (or pigs) with a new challenge. This time it was Quantity. Tables mounted on trestles and covered with bright tablecloths were heaped with huge trays of crudités, like the trays every politically correct North American housewife must assemble when organizing a large get-together (among whom there might possibly be vegetarians) and which hours later are carried back to the kitchen perfect, gaily colored, and untouched. There were green and orange trays brimming with skewers of raw carrots and broccoli, red and white trays alternating cauliflower florets with cherry tomatoes, naked salads featuring arugula and raw mushrooms, bowls of alfalfa and bean sprouts, tender baby spinach leaves, crunchy lettuce, chopped radishes, red pepper strips, fresh green cucumber rounds, little stalks of celery, beets that looked like they were bleeding, and fruit: oranges, strawberries, grapefruit, kiwis — in short, everything and nothing: nothing that had more than twenty-five calories per ounce. Except, possibly, for the varieties of dip made with dietetic cream cheese or skim milk mixed with assorted condiments: mustard here, ketchup there, oregano, tarragon, garlic, onion, parsley, thyme, green onion. For the Cagers there was a delicious oil-free gazpacho and pitchers of tomato and carrot juice. The ceremony ended, and the Campers meandered in the sunshine as if mesmerized, casting furtive, greedy looks at the groaning tables. For people capable of going berserk over an apple peel, fatties accustomed to devouring squeezed-out lemon rinds with tepid yogurt as though they were exquisite, forbidden delights, that vast display of greens was practically obscene, and the sudden permission to eat reasonably, without externally imposed limita-

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tions, provoked confusion and giddiness. That permission, however, was relative. The Professor wandered among them, nursing a dainty stalk of celery. Tutors, Coordinators, Recovered Campers, the Newly Thin — everyone was there. The moment had come for them to demonstrate that they had learned something, that they could eat a little more than usual without going crazy, that they could exceed their 150-calorie limit without losing their heads. Denise, who was controlled from within by the bariatric surgery that had turned her stomach into a harmless smidgen, couldn’t ingest much solid food in any case. She slowly chewed on a few delectably sweet tomatoes. Marina caught Esteban, the Gunshot Victim, slipping a little carrot stick into the hem of his uniform. Most of the Campers walked away, heading for the tables, where they nibbled almost stealthily from the trays, trying to distract themselves with conversation. Some practiced the technique of holding a glass in each hand to keep them occupied. “Let’s try to imitate skinny people,” said the Professor loudly, as if they were in a group meeting. “What happens to a skinny person when he overeats?” Griselda raised her hand. “He doesn’t feel hungry later.” “Exactly,” the Professor agreed. “At this party, you folks are going to eat a little more than normal. So tonight you won’t feel like having dinner.” Anyone observing the party from a certain distance, or better yet from above, would have noticed how, at the Professor’s pronouncement, the traffic to and from the tables sped up imperceptibly. Like squirrels — or possibly bears — preparing to face long months of hibernation, some of the residents tried to stock up on reserves without displaying their strategy openly or admitting it even to themselves. The genuinely Recovered Campers regarded them with slightly condescending smiles. For them, a night without supper

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was just a pleasant challenge that they took on joyfully. The others, for the most part, simply ate as much as possible, all the while keeping up the game of fake indifference. But a few tried to carry away food for later, for the long night ahead. Marina noticed a huge, bespectacled, white-haired man, with masses of flesh and fatty tissue that stuck out from beneath his uniform, scratching (or pretending to scratch) his belly. He must have had a hidden pocket inside his pants, which his deformed bulk allowed him to conceal like just one more blob of fat. At that moment a wave of tension began to wash over the party. Something was happening in the Clockwork Orange Pavilion. People began thronging around the building. Like concentric ripples that form from a pebble striking a pond, the crowd started to swirl. Those up front, in the middle circle, saw Lucho, the caretaker of the Orange, half-push and half-pull a man who was dropping a trail of little carrot sticks from a stash that he attempted to conceal as he resisted the attack. It was Esteban, the Gunshot Victim. As was often the case at The Reeds, the muddle of opinions and rumors made it difficult to determine just what had happened. Some said Lucho had nabbed Esteban operating one of the machines in the Orange, deliberately trying to zap himself with electrical currents. According to this rumor, Esteban had become addicted to electricity and had discovered that when administered in a certain sequence, the charges produced violent sexual pleasure, culminating in marvelous, electric orgasms. Others said no, he had been caught trying to adjust his personal program in order to escape punishment the next day by pretending to feel the shocks although they had actually been deactivated. This version contained a modicum of logic: in real life Esteban had been a computer programmer. Marina sought out her friends to find out more about what was going on. Just then the Professor intervened, issuing orders. A group of Tutors swiftly surrounded Esteban, who was carried off to Personalized Treatment. The loudspeakers, which up till then had

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been broadcasting the gently undulating rhythms of the New World Symphony very quietly so as not to interrupt conversation, suddenly blared out a lively, easy cumbia that made people move their feet despite the melancholy, Andean melody lurking behind the beat. The dance had begun! The volume was so loud that it was impossible to continue discussing the incident: life was there, calling them. That was what the Professor had wanted to tell them. All they had to do was lose enough weight to seize it. Men and women, young and old, fatties and Recovered Campers hit the dance floor, many of them showing off the new agility and moves they had learned in their salsa, cumbia, and rock workshops. Within the padded walls of the gym, safe from the rapid beat required by the music from outside, the super-obese, for their part, moved slowly but constantly, turning by themselves or in pairs, separated by the volume of their bellies, to the slow, cloying rhythm of love songs. Out on the lawn, Marina saw Alex dancing with Paula, cupping her waist in his thick, swarthy hand. She felt a stab of jealousy and hate in her chest: Paula had a waist. She had abandoned her red uniform and appeared very proud to be sporting the white one assigned to Recovered Campers. Denise was nowhere to be found. Suddenly Marina understood. She was probably in their hiding place, where they used to meet and devour pips together. She found her there, in the toolshed, behind a rusty wheelbarrow. She was with Alelí. They had managed to swipe two bowls of diet-cream-cheese-and-skim-milk dip. It was dangerous, because the number of bowls was strictly monitored, so they’d have to take their chances on returning them and leaving them on the tables that the kitchen staff would begin clearing at any moment. One dip was mixed with ketchup and the other with fines herbes. Alelí sipped the contents through one of the straws she always carried with her in the hem of her uniform. Denise stuck her finger in the mixture and sucked it with delight.

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For perhaps the first time in her life, instead of hunger and desire, Marina felt a wave of nausea in her guts. She knew she wanted to distance herself from those unrepentant, clingy fatties, that she, too, wanted to become a Recovered Camper, that she wanted a man to slip his arm around her waist — a real waist — once more. The sensation morphed into a firm decision, with glimmers of eternity, one that would last until midnight.

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The Orgy

In pt, at midnight, with Alex, someone (but who?) had whispered into her ear as Marina danced in the very heart of the multitude. There were only three hundred people in total at The Reeds, but it seemed like more because of the space each one occupied (especially when they were all in motion). Among so many fat folks, the Newly Thin stood out, although they were not in the majority. Marina felt like just one of the crowd, neither better nor worse, as attractive as anyone else. She no longer felt ridiculous; she had managed to put aside — for a while — the place she occupied in the universe, and so she danced, enjoying the suppleness of her new, waning thighs, initiating the movement from the very core of her body: she danced as though she were alone, without mirrors, like a teenager, like a thin person, more concerned with herself than with the stares of others. She danced as she hadn’t since the age of fourteen, since the time when she weighed 130 pounds. She danced with her eyes closed, so she didn’t know who had issued the invitation. But . . . in pt? Had she heard right? By midnight the dance was over; the Campfires had been extinguished, and most of the Campers were exhausted, in their barracks, in bed. Exhausted, in bed, and

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hungry. Their unusually large intake, the greens that their digestive tracts had processed so swiftly and converted to fiber and water, had temporarily evoked a pleasant, warm feeling of satisfaction that canceled out the customary, hard nucleus of controlled hunger nesting in their stomachs. Now those stomachs were empty and ravenous again, and in spite of their fatigue, they couldn’t fall asleep. Many of them had to get up every so often to go to the bathroom, after having endured weeks of painful constipation caused by The Reeds’ starvation regimen. Marina returned to Barracks Nine to take part in a final farewell toast to Herminia, who was to leave the next morning (paper cups, carrot juice). Shortly after lights out, she arose, trying not to make noise, and went outside to breathe the night air. There were always those who had trouble sleeping at The Reeds: it wasn’t unusual to run into other insomniacs out for a nighttime stroll. Besides, sexual encounters weren’t prohibited, at least no more so than in the rest of society, which demands a certain degree of secrecy for romantic trysts. Obviously the collective dorms limited privacy. Depending on the identity of the fellow Camper who stole away from the barracks in the middle of the night or simply didn’t return there to sleep, the others either acted indifferent or else giggled and gossiped about her the following day. Marina wondered if her appearance (just 180 pounds!) would lead to certain suspicions, certain admiring — or even envious — snickers, or if she was already too old for that sort of thing. With Alex in pt? What nonsense. A mistake: she must have misunderstood. And yet. Without the ghostly gleam and smoky fragrance of the Campfires, now illuminated by the powerful orange searchlights, the sodium night spread, placid and spongy, across the sky, like the carpet of lawn beneath her sneakers. In their watchtowers along the perimeters of The Reeds, the guards focused more on the outside than the inside of the camp. Marina recalled a detective novel in which the protagonist, a professional thief, gave his girlfriend tips on how to

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go unnoticed. Whatever you do, he told her, remember the initials sss: shape, shadow, and shine. It was a matter of avoiding smooth surfaces, flat buildings with no nooks or crannies. The key was to blend in, to remain in the shadows without ever casting one. Never to carry anything shiny. Marina had chosen a brown uniform that camouflaged her against practically any background. The little house at the end of the field where Personalized Treatment was conducted was patrolled by a guard armed with a stick, who walked back and forth with his dog, watching over the main entrance and one side. His job was just a formality. Those who were locked inside pt didn’t attempt to escape: they themselves had chosen to stay at The Reeds and could change their minds if they couldn’t take it anymore. In any case, the doors of each one of the white rooms had high-tech locks, and the main entrance to the little house was also bolted securely. It was mostly a question of preventing the Personalized Treatment Campers from having contact with the outside. Pacing calmly, with a measured gait, the guard patrolled all possible points of escape (or entry). The rottweiler’s muzzle confirmed the dog’s role as merely a deterrent. Marina scurried along in the shadows, sidling up against the back wall of the house. She started to crawl along the wall. Luckily, wristwatches were permitted. She verified that it would take the guard about two minutes to walk slowly from the door to the most distant point, a window on the side of the house. Counting his steps, Marina, calculated that she could reach the door in the long minute it took the man to walk away from her. But how would she open it? And how could she keep him from hearing her? Then, suddenly, unavoidably and hating herself, she sneezed and figured it was all over. Nevertheless, the guard didn’t pounce on her. He didn’t see her. He didn’t turn around. He kept advancing steadily, like a mechanical doll, like a deaf man. And then, after a few seconds of terror and distress, Marina understood what was going on. Without struggling

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to remain concealed (except perhaps from the eyes of some solitary walker), she coolly walked toward the little house. She immediately realized that the guard in the closest watchtower was staring at her intently, silently. How many others were involved? She went over to the door and pushed. Naturally, it was open. She was in the most terrifying part of The Reeds. Just as she’d been told, there was nothing inside. A small entryway led to a corridor with a few doors. Everything was painted a perfect, immaculate white. A door opened. To her astonishment, there was Alelí, smiling uncomfortably and revealing her wired teeth. In the room were Esteban, who had been taken to pt that same day, the woman who had been punished for food trafficking, as well as Pedro. And Alex. They had spread a thick sheet of plastic over the bed and floor to keep from sullying the virginal whiteness. They were seated on the floor, and from the glee with which they greeted her, Marina understood that they had been waiting just for her to get the party underway. It wasn’t just the quantity and chemical composition of the obscenely displayed food. It was a gourmet banquet. There was no need to taste the prosciutto to realize that it was the best Iberian ham available, a Pata Negra that Marina had seen (and tasted) only once, many years ago, in Spain. There was imported Brie, a fragrant Pont l’Eveque, Parmesan and provolone cheese, fresh buffalo mozzarella in brine, and a marvelous Saint-Agur, a French blue cheese that melted in one’s mouth like divine ambrosia. Unobtainable wines, like those that can only be found on the top shelves of wineries, served as nectar. There were white-bread sandwiches that tasted like childhood, fresh, crispy French bread, braided challah with raisins, and walnut-studded black bread. In hermetically sealed, heatretaining jars were pastas and meat in sauces and creams. Protected by a barrier of dry ice, the ice cream awaited. They had even thought of bringing a small food processor, so that Alelí could liquefy and sample all these morsels.

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It was fair, fair, fair. If justice exists in this world, it was just. That was what Marina thought when she saw the food and smelled whatever she couldn’t see. She had earned it. Then panic ensued. “But I don’t want . . . I don’t want . . .” she said. “We don’t want to, either,” soothed Alex. “Look at me. I’ve lost fifty-five pounds. You think I want to gain them back again?” “It’s just this once,” Alelí said. “Just one time,” Esteban insisted. “That sounds familiar,” sighed the woman who had been locked up in pt for smuggling pips. It sounded familiar to Marina, too. Just once, just this time, the single, solitary, only time. On how many occasions had she granted herself that permission? Only when she could say, “Not this time” would she be a real Recovered Camper. And yet, she knew she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t resist. “And tomorrow morning? The scale?” “There’s no weigh-in tomorrow,” Alelí reminded her. “There never is after a farewell party. With the nothing they feed us, by the day after tomorrow no one will notice a thing. This week you’ll just lose a little less. It’s normal. How many times does it happen for no reason?” “In the Inferno we sometimes made a deal with a guy from Weigh-In; he would rig one of the scales for a day, and those of us who had been at the banquet would get weighed on that one,” Pedro revealed. If Denise had been there, she would have told them that the Polish writer Stanislav Lem once imagined a world where a destructive virus had turned the sexual act into a necessary but unpleasant chore for humanity, something like washing clothes. From that moment on, the taboos surrounding sex in all human society became meaningless. But humanity and culture need taboos in order to exist. The norms once surrounding the sexual act are then transferred to the act of eating, which becomes secret and private. Of course,

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at that point the equally human need for transgression emerges: in spectral cities, tourists are invited to see particularly scandalous shows in which two women lick a floor smeared with mayonnaise. Perverts are imprisoned for eating in the presence of small children. In certain hidden corners of dark alleys, for astronomical sums, one can stealthily edge up to a counter to sip fried eggs through a straw. It’s even rumored that there’s a New York basement where people eat hamburgers while staring at one another. In one way or another, this is the world inhabited by fat folks on a diet. Eating is a forbidden, perverse pleasure. Eating is taboo, and every time they eat, they break — with horrible joy and guilt — an iron-clad, absolute law, comparable to the law of incest. That was exactly how Marina and her friends ate that night. Like food perverts. With their hands, of course. And, in a sense, with the rest of their bodies, too. Watching one another eat. Enjoying the food with all their senses, with a hideous sensation of sin that made the joy even more exquisite while it lasted and which fatally descended upon them as soon as they felt that one more mouthful would inevitably make them retch. Denise wasn’t there, but she sent her good wishes. Alex read a forbidden text, the flipside of the awful readings that were sometimes imposed on the Campers at mealtimes. It was a story from The Arabian Nights. Although she had refused to participate in the orgy, Denise agreed to jot down the text for the attendees, more or less as she remembered it, with the zeal and imprecision of a character from Fahrenheit 451. Marina was a little annoyed that Denise hadn’t mentioned anything to her (the text was proof that she knew about the orgy before Marina did). She envied Denise’s strength in the face of temptation, realizing only later that in any case, there was very little room for much food, even the liquefied or processed variety, in the tiny space left in her body that Denise could call a stomach. In a certain city there once was a public bath where the cream of society and the local nobility would gather. And one fine day a young prince arrived there.

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The boy was enormously fat. The caretaker of the baths took it upon himself to attend him, and while he helped him undress, he realized he could not see his private parts because they were concealed by the folds of his huge belly and his rotund thighs, and because, due to his excess fat, they appeared to be no bigger than a hazelnut. Noticing this defect in the prince, the caretaker of the baths, distraught, began to cry. “Why are you crying so?” asked the young man. “Alas, my lord! I burn and ache for you, because although you are such a handsome and kindhearted lad, you have nothing with which to give and receive pleasure like the other men Allah has created.” “Can that really be true? I should like to put it to the test,” said the prince. “Take this gold coin and find me a beautiful woman.” The bathhouse keeper took the money and went off to find his wife. “Look here, woman,” he said, relating what had happened. “You deserve to earn this money more than anyone else. There is nothing to fear with this young man, because his private parts are no bigger than a hazelnut. And I will be there. I think you should go and be with him for a while: it will amuse you, and we could certainly use this dinar.” The woman took the dinar, arranged and groomed herself, put on her best finery, and accompanied her husband, who introduced her to the youth, leaving them alone in a secluded place. The woman looked at the young prince and found him very handsome, with his round face, like a full moon. The boy’s heart started to race: it completely unnerved him to see such a beautiful woman smiling at him sweetly and coquettishly. He stood up, locked the door, and embraced the woman. On doing so, his rod, which no longer resembled a hazelnut, rose and swelled like a donkey’s. He threw himself upon the woman and rode her, as she sighed, moaned, and thrashed about. “Right, Alex, we fat guys are the best,” Esteban interrupted, a little annoyed and uncomfortably full, at that critical moment when regret begins to overtake satisfaction. “So tell me, then, what we’re

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doing locked up in here at The Reeds. Don’t give me that bullshit.” And for a moment the spell was broken. As they ate, Marina discovered the organizational details that had made the banquet possible. Not even Alex knew exactly how many and which of the guards and Tutors were in on the game. The arrangement had been made with the guard in charge of pt, but it was obvious that he had accomplices. “I’m sure there are hidden cameras in here,” Marina said. “Someone is watching us from the Administration Building. Someone who’s also in on it. How much did this spread cost you, Alex?” They even speculated on whether the Thyroid herself might be implicated. “Impossible,” Alelí said. “Don’t be so sure,” said Alex. “Slip some money in its pants, and the monkey starts to dance.” And the image of the Thyroid dancing, tied to an organ grinder’s cart, brightened the festivities briefly. Alex’s partner was operating the restaurant by himself during Alex’s stay at The Reeds, with the understanding that he, too, would be admitted when Alex left. It was he who had redeemed the signed vouchers that the guard had agreed to accept. Alex had selected the menu; his partner was responsible for providing the food; the guard and his accomplices were in charge of smuggling it into The Reeds. “Definitely not the Thyroid,” Alelí insisted. “Didn’t you see what she’s like?” “Even assuming she’s involved, she won’t treat you any better as a result,” Alex explained. “Just the opposite — she’ll have to act like the biggest bitch of all so no one will suspect her.” “I’m kind of scared. Pretty soon I’m going to feel really sick. They’ll find out!” “There’s always too much to eat at parties, and you overdid it way before you got locked in here. Tonight there’s going to be a mad rush for the toilets because of all those vegetables,” said Alex, the only

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one who kept his calm and composure. He had eaten less than the others, choosing the best morsels carefully. One by one they left the building, pretending to hide in case anyone outside should see them and, in a sense, to avoid offending the guard’s dignity. The woman who had been confined to pt returned to her room with a loud sigh, allowing herself to be locked in again. She had only one day of Treatment left and would be released at the same time as Esteban, whose offense had been less serious. “But what did you really do in the Orange?” Marina wanted to know. “Nothing. I figured it was the best way to be here,” Esteban said. “The idea of playing hide-and-seek made me very nervous.” Who could be sure it was true? Fat people are notorious liars, thought Marina, who throughout her life had learned to listen, smiling understandingly, to the lies, excuses, and half-truths exchanged in nutritionists’ office, so many falsehoods emphatically asserted with the utter assurance typical of those who try to deceive themselves: Stress makes me put on weight, I eat nothing but oranges, I have water retention, I eat just a salad and a piece of fruit every day, I walk three hours a day, I have a hyperactive thyroid even though it doesn’t show up in my blood tests, I fast completely every other day. The only truth was the one they were being taught at The Reeds: if the number of calories ingested daily is not enough to survive on, the body extracts the rest from fat reserves. Period. She decided, therefore, to accept the fact that she’d never know what dear old Esteban, that fat liar, was doing or trying to do with the electricity in the Clockwork Orange. Alelí left, then Pedro, and there were still a couple of hours left before the guard’s mysterious sidekicks would show up and take away the remains of the banquet. Alex walked up to Marina, and even though they were alone, he whispered a single word into her ear, that desired, expected, and terrifying word: “Stay.”

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Elephant Seals

Elephant seals come to shore to mate. For months, without eating or drinking, they energetically hurl themselves into sexual activity, which includes fighting among males for the right to establish a harem. Swift and supple in the sea, they are slow, clumsy, heavy, and deformed on shore. In two months’ time they lose 30 percent of their weight. Dominant males that manage to establish, maintain, and defend enormous harems can impregnate more than 150 females in a frenzy of incessant, arduous activity, thanks to their peculiar anatomy: a penile bone that allows them to remain constantly at the ready. But there are others, too: modest winners in their own way, champions among losers, who, scar-covered from lost battles, through shrewdness and patience manage to mate with females belonging to their rivals and even form small harems of their own by despoiling the dominant males of their less-protected females — the not-so-young, the less attractive ones, perhaps, those that for one reason or another find themselves far from their master within the vague limits of the harem. At The Reeds, great pains were taken to avoid any sort of excess: one excess leads to another, and impulse control is the abc of curing

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fat people, of curing addicts. Griselda had good reason to believe that learning to control her food obsession would help her with her addiction to gambling. Tobacco was forbidden everywhere on campus, except in the Smokehouse, a tiny, unventilated room where those heavy smokers who couldn’t say no to hunger (or life) without a daily dose of nicotine crowded together. The place was suffocating and uncomfortable; it smelled of cat piss, and everything in it was designed to remind the smokers that they were succumbing to a filthy, repulsive, harmful activity, nothing like the image of a cowboy lassoing calves in the open air atop a pristine, snowy landscape. Sex was not considered an addiction that the Campers needed to control (although, of course, any human activity can become addictive under certain circumstances). On the contrary, the Professor saw it as a positive element that stimulated greater awareness of body image and reinforced the goal of attaining a desirable physique. However, he didn’t exactly encourage it, either. Everyone had to figure out a way as best they could: love gives ingenuity wings. Although the barracks were deserted for most of the day, the sheer number of people sharing quarters necessitated complex negotiations for those wanting to reserve them for private use. As in normal life, those in love or in lust had to work things out on their own. The alpha male, of course, was the Professor. Regardless of whether or not he exercised his prerogative (and he didn’t), all the females belonged to him. In order to obtain any privileges, the other males were forced to defy him from time to time, and the bite marks on their backs were clearly visible. And yet sometimes their humble stratagems worked. Alex was one of those champions of defeat. Without stopping to analyze the matter, he knew he didn’t have a chance with the female Recovered Campers, devoutly committed as they were to the Professor, with their perfect, forbidden waists and faithful, in many cases, to their impossible love (the Professor was incorruptible). This group was willing to couple only with other Recovered Campers. For

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that reason, he resigned himself to conquering the most attractive elephant seals he could find on the fringes, those females who could detach themselves from the Professor’s huge harem, attracting their attention with his useless defiance, winning them over with his lost battles. Alex and Marina surrendered to desire with all the intensity that a body whose energy is concentrated on the arduous task of digestion could allow. They hadn’t drunk much wine, but their sated viscera created a kind of placid intoxication that didn’t manage to dull their sensitivity to caresses. Afterward, suddenly aware of where they were, tired, happy, and wordlessly trusting that their passion had consumed an adequate number of calories, Alex and Marina gazed at one another, sniffed one another, examined each other’s bodies. Marina wanted to get dressed right away, or at least hide under the covers, but Alex wouldn’t let her. Sweetly, with an erotic intelligence that only experience can provide, he reminded her that it was those very undesirable, rejected bodies that had given them so much pleasure. They had savored that vast expanse of flesh bristling with desire, the folds of their bellies, the great, meaty thighs, the full shoulders, Marina’s enormous, lovely breasts, his own chest with its bulky pectorals. At home in bed with her husband, Marina felt protected by the darkness and by habit. Now she was more naked than ever, yet she wasn’t embarrassed. “Tell me your dreams,” Alex said then. “Not about being thin. The other ones.” It was something Alex had learned to do during the first afterglow, a question that filled that awkward moment when the woman returns to herself filled with doubts and anguish, needier than before, confronting her partner’s cold satiety, the terrible absence of her own desire. Tell me your dreams, he would say to them, and they would turn sappy and purr and reply. Because Alex was a Don Juan, not a Casanova, and so it wasn’t enough for him to conquer the

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bodies of the women he liked; the pleasure and satisfaction of his desire weren’t enough. He was a Don Juan who believed in love, at least in the love women felt for him. A few times Marina was startled by violent pounding at the door. But Alex soothed her: it was his friend, the guard who had let her in; there was nothing to fear. Suddenly they noticed the time. It must have been nearly dawn. This wasn’t just about the two of them: they had put their accomplices in grave danger. They left together, not bothering to pretend they were hiding. The irate guard met them face on. “Are you crazy? Don’t you know what time it is?” “Calm down, it’s nothing,” said Alex, at peace with the universe. And he flashed him a smile of male complicity that the guard ignored. “It’s nothing to you! I’m the one risking my kids’ meal ticket!” The guard looked all around, anguished. He seemed terrified. “Okay, okay. We’re going to the barracks now. See you next time,” Alex said. “There won’t be a next time, you fat son-of-a-bitch,” the guard replied. “You took too long. I may have risked my neck once. But not twice.” “They won’t chop off your head, brother,” Alex joked. Marina looked the other way, staying one step behind and trying to hide her face as the guard’s fury escalated, feeding on itself and revealing the depth of hatred, scorn, and envy that all the personnel at The Reeds felt for the Campers. “That’s what you think. If they throw me out, it’ll be like cutting my throat.” “Next time I’ll pay you double.” “You can stick your money up your ass. Or down your throat, since it’ll end up in the same place, anyway. If I catch you eating out of turn, I’ll set the dogs on you. Didn’t you know there’s never a next time here? If the piggies don’t drop pounds the Administration starts investigating, and we’re the ones who get dropped. But

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what the hell do you care? You’re rolling in dough. You two can rub your flab together at the expense of poor bastards like us. Fat fucks!” Like Cinderella at the stroke of twelve, Marina watched her Prince disappear. In his place was an unpleasantly overweight man, sweaty, ridiculous, a haughty, willful fat guy with whom Marina had — God knows why — been unfaithful to her husband.

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I Have a Lover

That night Marina didn’t sleep more than an hour. She awoke with a start, opening her eyes wide, feeling like she was suffocating, her heart racing crazily. I have a lover, she said to herself. I have a lover, I have a lover. The idea struck her as wonderful and terrible. She washed her face and looked into the mirror, frightened: for the moment there was no stamp, no mark on her forehead. The mark of an unfaithful woman. Unfaithful. Unfaithful. Unfaithful. However, her eyes were swollen and her face puffy from overeating. She could always blame her hormones; women have that advantage. In spite of everything, she felt beautiful, more beautiful than she had felt in a long time. Her tissues were still elastic. Her rapid weight loss hadn’t resulted in sagging skin. Little by little the shape of her head, the solid foundation of her features, her chin, her jaw, her cheekbones, were emerging from beneath the heavy layer of fat. Another strange sensation accompanied her new state: she wasn’t hungry. She had even managed to lose that hard, threatening little ball, which could no longer be called hunger but still lurked dangerously in the pit of her stomach. Even more (or less): she was full. Her belly felt swollen and taut. Her intestines, grown accustomed to receiving less than

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subsistence quantities of food, reacted with commotion to this sudden plenitude by producing methane. She decided to skip breakfast and give her yogurt to Denise: the same old tricks. Another fast day? No. She was prepared to eat whatever they served her at the other meals. Right now, though, she simply couldn’t ingest one more mouthful. To restore her peace of mind, she reminded herself that a single setback, just one, like an island in that sea of hunger, couldn’t affect her weight. If she immediately returned to The Reeds’ usual regimen, it would count just as little as skipping a meal. All day long she found herself in a magical, almost surreal state, in which guilt and infatuation blended with the turbulent churning of her digestive tract, thrown into turmoil by the profound change that was shaking up her life. Then, when she was convinced no one would find out (I’m an unfaithful woman, unfaithful, unfaithful; I have a lover), that nothing obvious was betrayed by her gestures or her eyes, she had an urge, a powerful urge, to tell someone. To use any excuse for pronouncing Alex’s name out loud. “He who laughs alone . . .” said Denise, eager to hear a secret. “. . . is remembering a naughty deed,” Alelí completed the proverb. Her enormous smile revealed the wires holding her jaws together. As the Thyroid watched over them in the dining room, Alex gestured to Marina to remind her of the night before, her complicity in the crime, that shared peccadillo nobody else was supposed to know about. Marina was relieved to think that she had another good reason to keep to herself, absent and smiling, that she now had another forbidden pleasure to savor secretly. She ran into Alex in gym class and greeted him with an apparent, absurd indifference, while their eyes met in a brief, intense glance. It took her a moment to realize that not even her effort to dissemble attracted her colleagues’ attention. The aerobics instructor had recently changed the routine, and everybody was concentrating on following his movements.

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That afternoon they found a moment to arrange an evening rendezvous. In the hiding place, Marina proposed, happy to be able to suggest a meeting point, she, a woman of the world, with secrets and strategies, feeling less foolish, less stupidly in love. But Alex’s smile was tinged with pity. “The toolshed? You have no idea what it’s like at night. Like the subway at rush hour.” “I don’t want to go to the bathrooms,” Marina said, with eyes downcast and in a tiny voice. What right did she have, an unfaithful, unfaithful, unfaithful woman, to propose or reject anything? Everyone knew that in an amorous emergency, some couples, especially the younger ones, made use of any of the many chemical toilets scattered around the grounds. “Silly. The bathrooms are for quickies,” Alex said. “I really want to be with you. Tonight we’re going to gaze at the stars.” Their stargazing took place in a little wooded grove in the corner between the electric fence and the hedge separating them from the Inferno. Marina hoped Alex would bring her a treat so she could prove to herself that she was capable of resisting it, that she could say no to him, even giving him a little lesson in behavior. To her disappointment, he brought nothing. Maybe because — but only if he really had insisted — she might have given in, but only so as not to offend him, of course, she might have accepted a little bite of that nonexistent treat, perhaps a bit of marzipan or a puff pastry, whose absence now was painful, creating a sour taste between her palate and tongue. They spoke in whispers, and they didn’t tell each other the story of their lives, but rather those fragments of childhood that suddenly become relevant to two lovers on a warm evening. Alex knew how to ask questions. He had a fascinating, possessive style about him that made Marina feel like the only woman on earth, a woman Alex wanted to know everything about, every detail. But Marina didn’t

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feel like discussing Tomás; that was a betrayal she wasn’t prepared to commit. Before leaving, she saw a little white ball falling toward her from the other side of the fence. When she unrolled the paper, she realized, horrified, that someone had been watching them. Someone who knew her. The paper read only: “Thanks, Carola and Sebastián.” She returned to the barracks, astonished at her own behavior. With newborn furtiveness (how many things she was learning all at once!), she walked over to the door, trying to figure out how to open it without making noise, yet resigned to the fact that all the others would note her arrival. They were whispering in the darkness. “. . . Alex’s new girlfriend,” said Paula’s voice. His new girlfriend? Who had all the others been, then? Paula herself? Marina remembered Alex’s arm around Paula’s waist as they danced. “How long will it last?” asked Griselda. “A week.” Paula giggled. “Two weeks, minimum. I’ll bet you . . .” “You’re not gonna bet your breakfast against me!” said Paula. “You fat little hustler. The last thing in the world I care about is eating a double yogurt.” “I’ll make your bed for a week. Bet?” “Bet.” The next morning rumors flew that Esteban had managed to leave The Reeds without paying: in an ambulance.

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It Had to Be Esteban

It wasn’t exactly true that Esteban had managed to accomplish what so many others only dreamed of: to leave The Reeds without paying the terrible fine that tied them to a decision made at a moment of irresponsible enthusiasm, a decision they almost regretted. For the moment, Esteban had escaped the penalty stipulated in the contract, but Dr. Delledonne, as always in such cases, had already collected stool samples, and as soon as the test results came back, his lapse would be detected. The conspirators were worried: in cases like this, the Professor offered hefty discounts to those willing to inform on their accomplices. All they could do was hope that Esteban would keep their names secret. It was doubtful. In movies, heroic men and women endure their punishment in silence. In real life, ordinary people are more likely to withstand a certain minimum level of punishment than to spend good money. As the diet at The Reeds, with its ridiculous paucity and the nearly total absence of calories, produced constipation in the majority of Campers, at dinnertime practically limitless supplies of mineral oil were passed around. Some Campers swallowed it by the

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tablespoon, partly out of necessity and partly to fill their stomachs with something, anything, before bedtime. The sudden deluge of fats in Esteban’s digestive system had produced a violent, torrential diarrhea, but also acute pain in the general area of his gall bladder. To his credit it must be said that he tried to resist with courage and cold sweats as long as he could, but finally he called for help through the intercom in pt, which allowed messages to be sent, although not received. The guards must have been watching him with hidden cameras, as Marina had thought, because they showed up instantly. The Professor intelligently avoided any possibility of getting involved in malpractice suits against his institution or against his preferred physician. Dr. Delledonne attended to Esteban right away, took stool samples, and immediately called an ambulance that whisked him to a hospital within the patient’s health care system. Rumors spoke of the orgy and its divine punishment: pancreatitis. Among the Campers there were also medical doctors who tried to convince the others with scientific arguments that a single lapse, no matter how excessive, couldn’t cause pancreatitis. “Pedro, can you see anything from inside the Inferno?” Marina asked, more concerned with Carola’s recent message than with Esteban’s fate. “Can they watch us, spy on us?” “Sure, they can. We could,” Pedro said. “Just imagine, there are kids in there for months on end. Years. They get out for a while and go right back in again. If you’ve never been locked up at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, you have no idea what boredom is. With the patience of a saint they figure out ways to break off little bits of the hedge, through the fence. They can do that and anything else.” “Honey, you know I really miss you,” Tomás told Marina during their next phone call. Marina felt a spasm in her chest, as if a hand had suddenly squeezed her coronary arteries: for the first time she understood an expression that until then had been nothing more than an abstract combination of words: her heart skipped a beat.

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“Me too,” she quickly replied, and it was no lie. She missed the peace and security, the refrigerator, her bed, and Tomás. She wanted to lay her head on his shoulder and tell him about the anxiety her relationship with Alex caused her, the shame with which she faced her barracks mates, the annoyance and fear she felt at having them as involuntary accomplices. How many others at The Reeds knew? Everyone. She had to change the subject: the words of endearment lodged in her larynx, pushing and shoving against one another to reach her mouth, her tongue, but just as they were about to pop out, she swallowed them again. They slid down to her esophagus, and there they remained: acid, sharp — a burning in her heart, so different from common heartburn, and yet so much the same. “Tell me about the kids,” she asked. “Florencia brought home a stray cat. Matías has a girlfriend. The kids are fine.” “Do they ask for me?” “Yesterday there was an article in the paper saying they’ve discovered a huge meteorite in Peru. The size of a house.” “What’s going on in the world?” “If a nuclear bomb explodes, you’ll find out soon enough. Nothing very important. Some people got food poisoning from eating at a barbecue place that served dog ribs.” Marina thought about the rottweilers again. They were fat, too.

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The Divine Comedy

I was Count Ugolino. I shall tell you what you cannot possibly know: the cruelty of my death. A narrow window in the Tower, which for my sins today is called the Tower of Hunger, had for many moons allowed me to peer through it when I had the bad dream that rent the veil of the future for me . . . When I awoke before dawn, still half-dreaming, I thought I heard my sons, who were with me, crying and asking for bread. We were already awake, and the hour when they brought us our food was approaching, but we were all troubled by our common dream. I heard them nailing up the door of the terrible tower, and so I looked into my sons’ faces without saying a word: I could not weep because the pain had turned me to stone. But they were weeping, and my little Anselm said: “What is wrong, Father, that you stare at us so?” And yet I did not shed a tear or utter a word in response all that day or the next night, until the sun once more illuminated the world. When a weak ray of sunlight entered the wretched prison and I saw in those four faces a reflection of my own expression, I began to bite my hands in desperation, and they, thinking I acted out of hunger, rose swiftly and said: “Father, our pain would be far less if you would eat us. You gave us this miserable flesh; therefore you should strip it from

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our bones.” I calmed myself, so as not to make them sadder, and that day and the next we remained silent. Oh, harsh Earth! Why did you not open up for us? On the fourth day, Gaddo threw himself at my feet, crying: “Father, why won’t you help me?” Then he died and just as you see me, I saw the other three fall, one after another, between the fifth and sixth days. And then, already blind, I groped my way along, trying to find each one of them, calling them for three days after their deaths until, at last, my hunger overcame my pain. “There’s a mistake in this text,” said the Professor, suddenly appearing in the dining room. “An error on Dante’s part. Because of a lack of experience and ignorance of certain physiological facts. Even though it’s clear he must have consulted a doctor before writing on the subject. Let’s see — what did Count Ugolino and his children die of?” “Of . . . of hunger?” replied a very fat newcomer, who by the second day strongly identified with Count Ugolino. Fortunately, new Campers kept arriving to sustain the Professor. Because the old ones already knew his tricks and didn’t dare offer such a fatuous response. “Obviously not. Not even people in an advanced state of malnutrition, which would have been unlikely in those days for a Count and his children, die in four days for lack of food. Do we have another answer?” “Of thirst,” Pedro ventured. “Exactly! They’re nailed in, right? That is, they lose all communication with the outside. From that moment on, they no longer get water. It’s very important that all of you, who are eating less than what your organisms need to stay in balance, drink your famous four liters a day. At a minimum. And there’s nothing wrong with drinking more than that amount. With plenty of water, Count Ugolino and his children would have lasted at least one month, and if they had been fat, with good fat reserves, much longer. I have colleagues today who work with total fasting diets for up to three

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months, with perfectly healthy patients. Many of you have gone on diets like that, haven’t you?” Several hands shot up. “But others are frightened, because never in their lives have they eaten as little as what we’re giving them here. They’re afraid of getting sick, and even of dying. Am I right?” “Professor, I have a bad headache.” “And you think that’s from lack of eating. Take Ibuprofen and find a sport to play. You people were killing yourselves with food and yet you weren’t afraid of that. But now, when you’re on the road to good health, you’re frightened. Those who have experience with fasting should go and talk to the others: aside from bad breath, nothing terrible happens. Especially if you follow all our recommendations and take your vitamins and minerals. And liquid. Just remember the Count’s blindness in the final stages: a typical symptom of dehydration.” The Professor let them finish the rest of the meal in peace. Some pretended that the text of the Divine Comedy had ruined their appetites, acting as if they were authentically thin people by nature. They finished the entire meal (fat-free broth, ten cucumber slices, two tomato wedges, and three lettuce leaves dressed with oregano and lemon juice, four ravioli, a serving of diet gelatin) exquisitely slowly, cutting the ravioli into tiny pieces to make them last longer.

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Passion

Unreality. That was her primary sensation in the days that followed. Marina was in love, with the same, wild intensity as the first time, in a way she’d never imagined would happen again. Passion is always the same. It’s always forever. And yet, our first passion has a singular quality that makes it superior and absolute: anyone affected doesn’t realize that, in spite of everything, it will end. We don’t believe we’ll ever feel the same way again, with the same intensity, toward another object. Anyone who falls in love again, even though she might feel that same, perfect madness, even though she might feel that it’s forever, knows that it isn’t: she’s already lived through the experience of finality. Although her entire body and mind may deny it, she knows she’ll be able to start over; she knows the truth behind that monstrous phrase engraved on King Solomon’s ring: This, too, shall pass. If Romeo or Juliet had had the opportunity to fall in love for a second time, even with the same ferocity, they wouldn’t have attempted suicide. Shakespeare made no mistake with the age of his characters. Everything passes. That’s what Marina told herself during those days when her reality seemed out of focus, technicolored, with the

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two protagonists outlined in the foreground, like the culminating moment of the first kiss in a bad romantic film. It won’t last forever, she told herself. And yet. And yet she manifested all the symptoms of the illness. Merely pronouncing Alex’s name gave her relief and pleasure. In her wardrobe she kept a piece of paper on which Alex had written the message, “3 p.m. in the barracks.” It wasn’t even signed, but it was in his handwriting. Marina traced her index finger along the clumsily drawn letters: his handwriting, her lover’s, chosen by her, desired. Desired, desired. When she saw him, her heart literally jumped in her chest. Even discounting the love factor, her diet-induced ketosis created a state of exaltation not unlike the ecstasy saints must have felt. She was giddy, overcome by a nervous energy that allowed her to outshine the others in exercise class a little more every day, so much so that they eventually transferred her to a different group, leaving Denise behind. Now it wasn’t just a matter of walking: they jogged, they dragged themselves through a tunnel, they ran two-hundred-meter sprints, they walked some more. Seeking the inner balance she couldn’t achieve through exhaustion, she signed up for voluntary tai chi chuan workshops, which the Clown described to all the residents of Barracks Nine, making them laugh till their sides ached: “I spread the wings of the flea-bitten crane,” the Clown would say, gesticulating with her hands. And she’d continue with a sweeping movement that ended in a small, intense gesture. “I introduce the suppository into the constipated crocodile . . .” Marina took part in these innocent jokes and was grateful to tai chi, which restored, albeit briefly, her feeling of calm. She needed a regimen of harmonious movements to compensate for the growing brutality of the military-like exercises that the instructors devised for them. One day, at dinner, she covered for Alelí just as she was about to

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cadge some gnawed bones with a few remnants of meat left on them from her neighbor’s plate. The Thyroid caught them. “Name, height, weight,” she roared severely. “Marina, five foot two, one hundred sixty-three pounds.” And that was how everybody learned that Marina now could do twenty pushups, even if it was with the help of her knees. Only after number twenty-two was she unable to get up again. She’d never cared much for music. She confused different bands, sounds, voices, all parts of a universe she had no access to, one that didn’t matter to her. Yet now she began listening to music; she became insatiable, borrowing cds in exchange for favors like taking on other people’s chores, even swapping discs for tiny portions of her own food, which she now could hoard and use as currency because it hardly interested her anymore. Love songs made her eyes well with tears. She imagined they had all been written for her, for him. She applied makeup for her nighttime dates with Alex at the Campfires. Her married life seemed distant, vague, alien, and yet, whenever she thought of it, threatening. She was afraid, very afraid, of her kids. What would become of her when she left this strange bubble, this time warp, this crystal dome of The Reeds that isolated her from reality? “What are we going to do afterward?” she asked Alex one afternoon, as they lay peacefully in the barracks they had all to themselves. In general, the men readily agreed to take turns when reserving the barracks for private use. For a group of young women, that sort of agreement would have been simple, but in the barracks women of all ages slept together — single, married, and widowed: for reasons of modesty and privacy, they all preferred to go to the men’s barracks. “Afterward? Eat and sleep, princess. We’ve got to be up tomorrow at six.” “I mean afterward, Alex.”

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“Why do women always think about afterward? Let’s think about right now. Isn’t right now nice enough? Now I’m going to . . .” And Alex whispered warmly, destructively, into her ear what he felt like doing to her right now. Alex’s voice in her ear, the proximity of his tongue, the tickle of his breath drove her even crazier than his words. Alex was losing weight too, but Marina didn’t care: she was in love with his body, his entire body, every inch of his flesh, with his crooked right shoulder, with the moles beneath his pubic hair that she now knew so well, with the way the last joint of his pinky bent toward the ring finger, with the slight inward tilt of his upper teeth, with his feet, smallish in relation to the rest of his body; she was in love with his flesh and his fat, but it was his personality, it was Alex himself, not his body, that produced the overflow of love that body encompassed, and that was why Marina didn’t care whether or not Alex was losing weight. She, too, would rather not have thought about afterward, and sometimes she succeeded. Sometimes the two of them recalled why and to what end they were there. They were achieving that end. The guard’s brutal reaction had a stronger effect on Alex than the Professor’s constant, repeated harangues in Group. He never again attempted to organize a clandestine banquet, and both of them rejected sporadic invitations to participate in other such festivities. They made a pact: they would go to Survival together. That was the only afterward they allowed themselves to think about. And then there was Carola.

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Carola

Zombies exist. They’re people who are condemned by their community. And executed. To begin with, they’re given blowfish toxin, which produces catalepsy. This is easier than it sounds. It’s such a powerful toxin that mere contact with the skin is enough to activate it within the organism. In the heat of the tropics, wakes are brief and burials quick. Everyone knows that the supposed corpse isn’t really dead, but they bury it anyway. After twelve hours, usually at dawn, someone is assigned to dig it up. Stupefied by the effect of the poison and the shock of being buried alive, the victims are easily induced to eat the “zombie cucumber,” a fruit that causes amnesia and disorientation. In that state, they’re taken as far from their villages as possible and sold as slaves on some plantation, where they’re converted into a brutalized, efficient work force. If any of them manages to recover and return to his village, the neighbors pretend not to see or hear him; he doesn’t exist for them. He has become the living dead. Esteban recovered and returned to The Reeds as a zombie. Or at least that was what the alleged conspirators believed. No one could be sure he hadn’t implicated them, and for a long time, no one spoke

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a word to him or even glanced in his direction. At last they were convinced that Esteban was telling the truth, that he had assumed total responsibility for a solitary orgy and hadn’t revealed who had provided the food for him or in what way, and that in spite of everything, the Professor, at times arbitrarily magnanimous, had allowed him to remain in treatment. In any case, Esteban was quite changed. He had become a fanatic and, in fact, was on his way to becoming one of the Recovered Campers. One morning at breakfast, they heard the blare of a siren coming from the Inferno, along with the sound of an unusual mobilization of vehicles. Other sirens seemed to announce ambulances or police cars. “Someone’s escaped,” Pedro explained. “They’re setting the dogs after him.” The Reeds was near the river but somewhat removed from the nearest town. It was practically impossible for any of the forcibly confined youngsters to escape for long. Their slow, ungainly bodies weren’t easy to conceal and tended to leave obvious traces behind. Any of them that managed to slim down simply didn’t leave, no matter what. That afternoon, Alelí, who was still nearly as fat as when Marina had first met her at The Reeds, came looking for her at naptime to invite her for a walk. They walked toward the toolshed. There, ill-concealed by the wheelbarrow, which could hardly hide her 320 pounds distributed across a five-foot-one frame, and pathetically disguised in a red uniform with white polka dots, was Carola. She had broken free from the Inferno. In the Inferno, females wore polka-dot uniforms, while the males wore paisley. Far from ugly, these garments looked like gaily colored pajamas. Finding normal clothing was one of the first obstacles would-be escapees encountered. “You’re the one that helped me,” Carola said. “You told Sebastián. Everything’s ready — I’m gonna get outta here.”

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Her diction was even more tortured than Alelí’s. Although her jaws had been wired shut, she had managed to snip the wires with a not entirely suitable instrument, probably the same one she had used to cut the wire fence between the Inferno and rest of The Reeds. There were scratches all over her body, and the irregularly cut wires bruised her mouth. It pained Marina to see that enormous body, so young, the right arm covered with tattoos, the squinty but pretty eyes outlined with thick eyeliner that would have looked ridiculous on an older girl. “How old are you?” “What do you care? You’re gonna help me, right? You’re my idol — you’ve helped us a lot already. Please, I’ve gotta hang out on this side for a couple of days. They think I’ve left The Reeds. As soon as the search quiets down, I’ll really leave. I love him, y’know? I’m crazy about him, and they’ve got me locked up in here.” Carola’s uniform, like the others, lacked pockets. From inside her bra she extracted a photo of an immense boy with a smooth, round face, long hair, a smile — oh, it was impossible not to think about the muscular effort that smile must have required, the exertion necessary to move the adipose mass of his cheeks. “How old are you?” Marina insisted. “Sixteen. He’s eighteen, but his parents understand him, they get it; they’d never put him in here.” Two years older than her daughter. To her surprise, Marina felt a certain admiration for the girl. It was quite a feat to have packed on so many pounds in only sixteen years. “How do you know I’m the one that helped you?” “Your husband called Sebastián. He said who he was.” “Carola, don’t you see? If you keep this up, you’ll never make it to thirty. I . . .” “Always the same old shit with you guys, huh? You don’t understand anything. I don’t wanna make it to thirty. I’m not interested in turning into a shriveled old lady.”

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Carola was suddenly irate. “It doesn’t matter. If you don’t help me, it doesn’t matter. I’m gonna get outta here, no matter what, even if I have to kill myself so they can drag my corpse away.” She burst out crying in desperation. “I’m hungry, I’m hungry, I’m so hungry . . .” Marina and Alelí looked at each other. They hesitated, and they understood. Hunger and love. “The first thing is the uniform. That’s easy,” Marina said, in a sudden decision that she would later regret many times. “I work in the laundry. Alelí, give her what you have.” Held up by the elastic in her pants was the little container of yogurt where Alelí collected all her leftovers during the day, the result of her enterprising spirit, whatever she could cadge here and there. She looked at Marina defiantly. Why do I have to hand all this over to that stranger? In exchange for what? “I’ll give you my yogurt from snack time. All of it.” Carola anxiously stared at that tiny garbage can in which edible leftovers were stored. Wasn’t Marina crazy to do this? And if it were her own daughter? It was apparent that the girl was putting her life in danger. But no more so than any other addict. There are far more perilous addictions, more instantly lethal. She was sixteen. Lots of time for a change of heart. Food addiction takes time; there would be a relatively long period before the physical destruction was complete. Her daughter. If it were her daughter. Marina couldn’t stop thinking about her own daughter. What would she do if her daughter were trapped in the snare of a serious addiction? She wouldn’t lock her up in a place like this. Never. And especially not after Marina herself had lived through the experience. Only adults, and not even all of them, were capable of benefiting from The Reeds. There were very few adolescents who would derive useful results from forcible confinement, deprivation, fasting, electroshock, or involuntary phys-

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ical exercise. For the majority, like Pedro, it only served to stoke their rebellion. Banded together outside of their normal environment, they forgot about their deformity. The only anomalies among them were the Penitents; the rest goaded one another on in their hatred of all forms of control. The Professor himself, who never resorted to lying, explained to the families that there was only a 20 percent recovery rate at his establishment. All the parents who committed their children to the Inferno, some with the help of a Juvenile Court judge, bet that their son or daughter would be part of that exceptional 20 percent. The Penitents. But what right did she, Marina, have to interfere in the life of that family, to decide how their children’s lives should be led, when it still was — or seemed — possible to achieve something? She didn’t feel qualified to decide by herself. She needed to consult someone, talk to her friends — to Griselda, probably not Denise, at least not right now, to Pedro, and of course Alex, without letting Paula find out. It was pathetic to watch Carola gobble down those disgusting leftovers so eagerly, while at the same time trying to hold back, with the constant, frustrated objective of making them last longer. In a totally unexpected maneuver, producing them so fast that even Marina couldn’t figure out where she’d hidden them, Alelí made two slices of bread appear. Carola started to cry. “Bread! You’ve got bread!” she moaned between sobs. She took the bread slices, touched them, sniffed them, ran them against her cheeks, pressed them gently between her chubby little hands with their black-polished fingernails, as if trying to evaluate their freshness, the spongy softness of their centers. Where could Alelí have gotten those two slices of fresh bread? Whatever could she have exchanged for them? What was it that filtered through her wired teeth besides nonfat yogurt and milk? Better not to ask. “Where shall we hide her?” Alelí asked.

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“You’re out of your mind,” Alex said. “I won’t be responsible for this.” Sixteen years old! “We’ve got to turn her in. Now,” said Griselda. Marina knew they were right. It was the voice of common sense, logic, maturity, the same voice that had always fallen silent throughout their lives, whenever they were told they needed to control themselves around food. Pedro wasn’t quite so categorical. He knew better. “What’s going to happen to her, Pedro? Will they send her to pt? For how long?” Pedro explained that in the Inferno no one was beaten. They didn’t use Personalized Treatment on adolescents, either. There had been a couple of cases of psychotic episodes resulting from isolation. Of course, those were fragile personalities, possibly with family histories, where anything at all might have been the precipitating event, but just to be on the safe side they’d decided to suspend that technique. The Professor made sure that those who were caught

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sneaking food, like the ones who tried to run away, kept their “hands busy,” as he liked to say. “At a party where there’s lots of food available,” Elvi-the-Beaver reminded them, “always remember to keep something in one hand. A book, a magazine, an umbrella. In the other hand, a glass of water or fruit juice. Although it’s not impossible, it’s a lot harder to eat with your hands full. That will help you take better care of yourselves.” In the Inferno, what kept the rebels’ hands busy was a straightjacket. Using a chain of predetermined length, they would chain the kids to a post, outdoors. If it was raining or very sunny, the youngsters could take shelter in a kind of dollhouse, quite a bit bigger than a doghouse, adequate to contain the bulk of its presumed occupants, but which they could not enter standing erect. Their four daily meals would be placed on a small, high table, to be eaten as best they could, if desired, and the four-liters-of-liquid-per-day rule was carefully enforced. The victims of this punishment were clad in loose robes that allowed them to use the urinal without assistance, although they couldn’t wipe themselves, of course. It was nothing like the isolation of pt, but it was a little like a pillory. With its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, they were exposed to the taunts of some of the residents (there were enemy cliques), but on the other hand the encouraging words of their friends easily reached them. As did, occasionally, something to eat. “And how long does that last?” Griselda asked. She was starting to have regrets. “It depends. You know how well the Professor knows us, how much each person can take. But if they turn themselves in, it’s different. They go on to become Penitents, and then they split.” “If only we could convince her,” Alex said. “We’ll keep her for twenty-four hours, no more. And we’ll try to convince her to turn herself in,” Marina added.

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“I’m not getting involved in this,” said Griselda. “I won’t take the chance.” “I know where we can hide her,” Alelí said. “Or rather, I know someone that does.” And so they discovered the identity of Alelí’s lover — or maybe even her beloved — her occasional provider of melted ice cream and sour cream with a dash of salt, and banana milkshakes and any other liquid form of food that she could ingest between her teeth, the one responsible for her failure, if anyone besides Alelí herself could be considered responsible for that enormous body that bobbled with nervous ebullience. He was nearly forty years her senior, an old man with thick, unruly eyebrows. He was Lucho, the caretaker of the Clockwork Orange, a clod, a miserable serf, who had practically been sold along with the land where the facilities of The Reeds were to be constructed. The only employee that lived there and never took a vacation. The one that intimately knew every cranny of every building. Marina and Alex looked at each other, amused: evidently Lucho was no great fan of oral sex. Marina found a plain uniform for Carola, much larger than necessary, so that she could stuff herself into it over the polka-dot outfit. She needed to hang onto the regulation clothing: if they managed to persuade her to surrender, she wouldn’t be allowed to bring anything with her, anything that might prove she’d gotten help from any of the Campers. For the time being, they told her there was no place to hide the polka-dot uniform: the most practical solution would be to wear it underneath the other one. That night, sporting a wig boldly donated by Griselda (“If they catch us, we’ll say we stole it from you,” they promised her) and accompanied by her new friends and protectors, Carola crossed The Reeds. Marina held her arm to hide her tattoos. Skirting the Campfires, the accomplices advanced nonchalantly. New fat folks were admitted every day; one unfamiliar face wouldn’t attract anybody’s

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attention. On the other hand, too many precautions might have alerted a Tutor. In the Clockwork Orange Pavilion, which at certain precise times went unguarded (though not by accident), they immediately found the wooden floor board that served as the entrance to the basement. A long, gray cement corridor, its sole source of illumination a light bulb hanging from a wire, led to several tiny, unventilated rooms with metal doors. In one of the little stripped and grim rooms were a sleeping bag and a battery-operated flashlight. “I’m not staying here,” Carola said. “You have no choice,” Marina replied. “Just for tonight. While we think of a way to get you out,” Alex said. “You’re crazy — this is worse than the Inferno. You don’t have to figure anything out. I’ve got it all arranged. Tomorrow I’m outta here.” “All the more reason, Carola,” said Alex. And Marina launched into her little speech, the one she had prepared to try to persuade the girl. Didn’t she want to have a woman’s body, a normal body, like most girls her age? Didn’t she want to be pretty, attractive, sexy? But Carola responded with a snigger: she did feel pretty, attractive, and sexy. She didn’t believe in that popular garbage that connected sexual attractiveness with slimness. She had no use for those scrawny, frigid girls, those poor bitches, she said, who could only fuck their mirrors because men didn’t turn them on anymore. Sebastián loved her and wanted her, and he wasn’t the only guy who got it up for her, she went on, in great, vulgar detail. Backpedaling slightly, a little unnerved and assailed by doubts of her own, Marina insisted that it was best for her to return to the Inferno: for her own good. “For my own good, my twat,” Carola erupted. “For my own good, just like my parents, those stupid fucks! Why don’t you take a look at yourself? Can’t you see you’re a fat old dieting piece of shit?” “Carola,” Alex cautioned, “take it easy.”

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Alex’s paternalistic but threatening tone was more than Carola could take. She burst out crying again, desperately. “You’re here because you want to be. You have no way of knowing . . . Jughead’s in there! It’s horrible! You can’t imagine the things they do to Jughead!” Carola’s outburst was disjointed and confusing. She spoke of Jughead with a mixture of affection, admiration, and sadness. At first they thought she was referring to one of the rebel chiefs, those adolescents Pedro had mentioned more than once, the ones the Coordinators called “negative leaders.” The males, especially, tended to form violent gangs, difficult to control. The purpose of those groups was to get food, even by stealing from the others, and to encourage their members to practice passive resistance to anything the Tutors and Coordinators suggested. To reject everything. Having few resources to corrupt the guards with, the kids lost weight, although they devised ways to remain practically immobile. And little by little they joined the physical activities. The gangs grew more dangerous as their members approached normalcy and their muscles began to respond. Despite the obvious improvement in their bodies, most of the teenagers refused to accept the benefits of getting thin; they refused to become Penitents. Strangely enough, however, they stopped trying to run away. But the boy they called Jughead, they began to realize as they listened to Carola, was no gang leader, and yet all the kids claimed him as the most rousing symbol of the resistance. “What’s Jughead like? Physically?” asked Marina, briefly interrupting Carola, whose convulsive tirade was punctuated with sobs. “He’s fantastic, he’s a sweetie, he’s a very special person,” Carola said. And she described a pale-skinned boy, morbidly obese, with small ears, almond-shaped eyes, a very thin upper lip and a droopy mouth, “like a sad clown,” with very tiny hands, “this small.” “Jughead doesn’t want anything; he just wants to eat. And listen to

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music. He liked it when I sang for him. He’s the only thing I’m going to miss about this place, my poor baby.” Jughead was a Prader Willie. As a social worker Marina had run across a family with that problem, so little by little she filled in the gaps in Carola’s description, mentally ordering her confusion and mistakes until she could understand what she would later explain to her friends. Prader Willie syndrome, or pws, is a disorder of Chromosome 15 that occurs in one of every twelve to fifteen thousand births, with equal incidences in both sexes and all races. pws victims manifest flaccid muscles, underdeveloped genitals (they’re sterile), mental retardation, thick, viscous saliva that forms crusts at the corners of the mouth, and an uncontrollable urge to eat and eat without stopping. This bulimia comes from a defect in the hypothalamus, the center of appetite and fullness, resulting in a crushing, uncontrollable, physiological need to eat. If the family somehow succeeds in managing this tendency through rigorous vigilance that generally includes the use of locks and bolts, Prader Willie patients can enjoy good health and the hope of a normal life. Otherwise, they eat ceaselessly until they die, their internal organs squashed by the fat inside their chests and abdomens, their hearts overcome by more than they can withstand. Jughead, Carola explained, was everyone’s friend. Sweet and generous, he was happy to share everything he had. His cds, his magazines, his toys. He had brought a bunch of action figures with him, reflecting the merchandising trends of various movies and tv shows over the past fifteen years: old-fashioned soldiers, modern soldiers, parachutists, supernatural beings with magical powers. Jughead’s toys were a veritable catalogue that pressed the nostalgia button of all his companions. Anyone over the age of twelve already knows that there’s no turning back, that the lost, yearned-for world of childhood can be invoked only by remembering. Jughead was good at giving out hugs. In a hostile environment, where besides having to contend with Professor and the Tutors, kids

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attacked one another in enemy bands, where sex was the coin of the realm, Jughead was childlike, neutral, and affectionate, a sixhundred-pound mass of pure love, the only one capable of embracing without desire, available to receive his friends’ tears and anguish without asking questions, like a soft, loving pillow. Not only was he very fat, he was also enormously tall. In order to allow him to eat as much as possible without damaging his health, the pediatrician had recommended that his parents give him growth hormones. Jughead stood nearly six feet, seven inches tall, and for a while, until they became convinced his psychomotor coordination wouldn’t improve over time, his parents had dreamed of seeing him play basketball in the Special Olympics. Only in the presence of food was Jughead transformed. He was able to tolerate the diet at The Reeds for a few days. He showed up punctually at the dining room four times a day for the assigned meals, with a somber expression, his head lowered. He devoured his minuscule portion in an instant and spent the rest of the time watching the others eat, a murderous gleam in his almond-shaped eyes. The memory of punishment helped him control his impulses. Then, suddenly (no one knew exactly when it might happen, no one could predict if it would occur at breakfast or dinner, in three days or in two weeks), Jughead would laboriously rise from his seat and hurl himself savagely on the other Campers’ food. Everyone knew that the Professor forbade replenishing the food the others gave away to Jughead, so they all defended their portions as best they could, fighting for them, but none of the residents was willing to hurt the retarded boy. Out of control, with wild movements, blind to the people around him, and trembling at the odor of food like a male after a female in heat, like a hungry rhinoceros, Jughead upended tables and chairs, sometimes flinging himself on the refrigerators. He didn’t attack anyone in particular; he simply knocked over anything or anyone that got between him and the object of his desire: food. Once he even yanked the fire extinguisher from the wall

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and used it to break a refrigerator lock: at once everybody lunged for the yogurt and skim milk inside, with the Guards and Tutors powerless to stop them. Weapons didn’t frighten Jughead: the only way to subdue him without hurting him too badly was to attack him en masse. On average it took five people to get him under control. Jughead spent much of his time in a straitjacket, dragging his chain as he circled round and round the dollhouse that could barely contain his body when the weather demanded he go inside for shelter. No one bothered him. The most irreconcilable groups fought for the privilege of being his friends. Because Jughead was the symbol and representative of the kids locked up at The Reeds: he was those kids, all of them; he was their desperate need taken to the most uncontrollable physiological extreme. Jughead would never be a doctor, or a model, or a journalist, or a graphic designer, or an economist; his parents’ more or less frustrated expectations would never weigh him down, and yet they kept him in there anyway, trapped and hungry. Every time Jughead was punished, the two hundred kids locked in The Reeds against their will took up a collection. Everyone worked out a way to save a bit of their longed-for, minimal rations in order to feed him. Sometimes they managed to elude the Guards and slip him a morsel while he was right there, chained up. Other times they awaited him in his barracks with a small, secret banquet when at last he was set free. “But you’re not Jughead. You’re Carola. You’re intelligent. Very.” Marina tried to be persuasive, seductive. “You know that self-control is in your best interest. Look at us: we’re learning. If only we had learned at your age.” “You! What do you know? Learning, my ass. You’ve forgotten whatever you knew!” Carola said passionately. “You’re losing the best thing you ever had! You’re a bunch of soul-dead old geezers! You bow your heads, you listen to the bullshit you hear on tv! You used to be rebels like me — you fought, you had something going for you, but now you’ve lost it! You’ve lost your spirit, you’ve lost

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the fight, you’ve lost your freedom, and now you don’t even know who you are, you poor fuckers, you douchebags! You’re all fat, fat like me. You’d kill to eat, you pee your pants at the smell of food, just to touch it, to pass it between your lips, bite down on it, taste it with your tongue, feel it slip down your throat. You’ve had a lot more time to enjoy life, air, sex, the world, and you’re handing it over, trying to become something you’re not, something you’ll never be. Don’t you see how idiotic you look, how ridiculous? You’re like giraffes that go to a plastic surgeon to have a neck reduction, like turtles that want their shells removed, fat people in Recovery, kissing the Professor’s ass. You’re nothing. You’ve already blown your chance, you’re obedient shits, and you’ll spend the rest of your lives counting the calories in every little piece of shit you put in your mouths.” Alelí stared at her, fascinated. That might have been her own speech if she’d had a different kind of personality and a gift for words. Far more modest, she’d limited herself to playing tricks and feeling guilty, without any justification. Marina, on the other hand, felt her gorge rising and was preparing to embroil herself in a pointless debate, clinging to the Professor’s arguments, even those she’d disagreed with when she’d first heard them. A debate like the ones she used to have with her own daughter, in which Tomás intervened with the intelligent, superior calm that Alex now employed. “Not bad for a kid of sixteen,” he remarked with admiration. “Leave me alone with her, you guys.”

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Betrayal

That night Marina hardly slept. At 5 a.m., one hour before reveille, as the sodium lights faded with the arrival of daybreak, Alelí gently rapped on the window of the barracks where Marina tossed sleeplessly on her cot. Carola had disappeared. Apparently she had never used the little room in the basement of the Clockwork Orange. Lucho was furious with her, Alelí said, but that didn’t matter, because he couldn’t report her without implicating himself. “Didn’t you leave her there, in the basement?” she asked Alex later. “I didn’t have the heart,” Alex said. “Leaving her all locked up like that: there’s no way to open that trap door from inside. I’m scared of it myself.” “So where did she stay?” “Right there, in the Orange. Loose. She begged and begged. I thought I had convinced her. She swore up and down that she’d turn herself in in the morning.” Nobody realized that someone was missing, someone they’d stopped searching for within the confines of The Reeds two days before. Could she have reunited with her Sebastián? Marina thought

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of the anguish, the guilt of those parents, desperately searching for their daughter, taking turns at the telephone. She didn’t get the impression Carola would call to ease their minds. That day, however, another news bulletin spread throughout the camp. Something had happened with the dogs. There was talk of a couple of dead rottweilers. As soon as she could, Marina went over to the corridor between the two gates where the animals played, ran, and stood guard, but she wasn’t able to verify a thing. To her the dogs were all more or less the same. There were a lot of them; the perimeter of The Reeds was vast; the same dogs didn’t always hang out in the same place. In the laundry, Pedro confirmed the news. “Didn’t you notice that Speckles is missing, the one with that speck in her eye? And Honker, the one with the long snout?” he asked indignantly. “How can you be so dense? You’re deaf — you can’t tell one band from another, and you don’t give a shit if a cumbia or a waltz is playing, as long as it’s romantic. All dogs look the same to you. What a boring world you live in!” Marina wasn’t offended. She knew that Pedro was upset by the dogs’ death. There was nothing to say: he’d apologize when he felt better. Speckles and Honker, or whatever their real names happened to be, had been found near the exit, suffocated and with broken ribs. It was rumored that the other animals kept at least six feet away, as if the police had placed a tape line around the bodies. It could have been anybody. No one connected it with the escape from the Inferno a couple of days earlier. The fugitives still hadn’t been found. As always, all sorts of rumors circulated: some said it had been a group of twenty kids; others, that just one had escaped, the youngest and fattest of all, a twelve-year-old, 250-pound boy, who was talked about throughout The Reeds with a horror tinged with secret admiration, not unlike Marina’s feelings on meeting Carola. The episode was soon forgotten, though, eclipsed by the fight between Dorita and the Thyroid.

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It happened in the dining room, and it began in much the same way as what had happened to Marina shortly before she enrolled at The Reeds. The Thyroid caught Dorita just as she was about to stick her hand in a fellow Camper’s plate. This was a serious offense, condemned not only by the authorities of The Reeds, but also by all the residents. Respect for other people’s portions was one of the unwritten rules among the Campers. That was why Dorita received no sympathetic looks when the Thyroid ordered her to do ten pushups. She was a Scholarship Camper, a young, strong girl in good physical condition despite her ample volume. But Dorita had as little control over her temper as over her food consumption. She was a street fighter, and when she bent over to do the pushups, she grabbed the Thyroid by the ankle, knocking her to the floor to the raucous laughter of her audience, who by now forgave her everything. The Thyroid should never have allowed herself to be carried away by impulse: in a case like this, all she would have needed to do was to leave the dining room and call the guards. But she couldn’t contain herself. She threw herself on top of Dorita with the speed of a martial arts expert, immobilizing her in an arm lock, while Dorita groped for the Thyroid’s eyes with her nails. The girl knew she had lost her opportunity to remain at The Reeds, and now nothing mattered anymore; she risked it all. It was quite a show. In the end Dorita was expelled, of course, but the Thyroid was seriously sanctioned as well for not following the rules: a week’s leave without pay. “It’s a big deal to her,” Denise remarked. “She really needs the money.” Dorita was a newcomer. After a few months in the establishment, the old-timers felt more solidarity with those they had known for a while, even their jailers, than they did with the new, pathetic, clueless fatties who didn’t really understand the rules yet and so also lacked the savvy to violate them.

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“Have you heard anything about the Thyroid?” Marina was taken aback by her own question. “Airhead. You have no idea what’s going on,” Denise replied, deliberately trying to embarrass her. “You talked to the Thyroid?” “What if I did? Don’t you discuss birds with Lucho? She’s a human being, isn’t she? She has a daughter in Montevideo. And a sick grandson who needs lots of financial support.” “Is that why she’s such a bitch?” “She has to act like the worst one of all. She can’t take any chances. She earns good money for a woman with no education. She was a Scholarship Camper.” “So you’ve made yourself a new little friend.” “Marina, please, don’t mention what I’ve just told you. If anyone finds out, they’ll fire her. The Professor doesn’t want people with serious financial problems here. They’re easier to bribe.” “Who doesn’t have serious financial problems? That chick is paranoid, Denise. With the people on top and the ones on the bottom.” When the Thyroid returned, Marina began to see her through different eyes, to imagine the impossible scenario of that evil, popeyed woman with a baby in her arms. Around the same time, another rumor spread through the camp, this time the murmurs advancing so intrepidly and so consistently that there was no choice but to accept them as true. They had caught the girl who escaped from the Inferno. She was found with her boyfriend in a cheap diner on Route 3, near Tandil. Each of them had consumed four hamburgers with all the trimmings and four beers, and they had no money to pay the bill. That day there was very little traffic on the road. The owner of the diner locked them inside and called the police. The girl was back in the Inferno, and her boyfriend was in custody. Carola’s parents had accused him of kidnapping a minor. One day later Alelí handed Marina a message. It wasn’t in Carola’s handwriting, but it was signed with her name.

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“Marina, you fat dumbass, if it was up to you I wouldn’t have even taken that little vacation. You should be happy now. I’m back in the Inferno. Say hi to your Alex for me, and give him a special kiss on that mole he has you know where.” The girl must have been in a straitjacket and dictated the message to someone. The worst, the most terrible part for Marina, wasn’t the idea that Alex had gone to bed with Carola, but rather the terror and embarrassment of knowing how many people were aware of their relationship. How could she have made an enemy of that girl she’d wanted so badly to help? A girl she’d compared to her daughter? Rigid, with an icy stab of pain that left her depleted, she felt that her affair with Alex was over. That night she showed him Carola’s note. “Is it true?” she asked. But she already knew that it was. Alex bowed his head. Marina began to know him better. Alex was such a bad liar that sometimes he preferred to risk uttering the harshest truth as proof of his sincerity. And this time his argument was sincere, brutally recreational. “I . . . Marina . . . I . . . I’d never slept with such a fat girl before.” He was stammering a little. Alex bowed his head, ashamed.

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At the Finish Line

At the library in The Reeds, there were no books by Simenon, Ian Fleming, or Vázquez Montalbán. Not because the Professor had anything against detective fiction, thrillers, or spy novels, but rather because these authors, by who knows what strange association, combined the intensely physically active lives of their main characters with a high degree of gourmet taste that involved rather detailed, tempting descriptions of meals, enough to perturb the fasting monks of The Reeds. For obvious reasons, Gargantua and Pantagruel wasn’t part of the collection, either, although a few clandestine copies were in circulation. People said Alex had one of them; they said he used it at his orgies. Marina was certain that Denise knew several chapters by heart. On the other hand, there were plenty of copies of Robinson Crusoe and García Márquez’s Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, the books most often consulted by those who had reached the final stage: Survival. Or those who dreamed of it. In just three months that impossible dream had become a tangible, immediate reality for Marina. “I don’t like it,” Tomás told her over the phone. “Of all the things

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they showed us before you started, it was what I liked the least. It’s dangerous.” “Not at all,” Marina laughed. Even her voice had changed: even her laugh. Tomás listened to it, worriedly. “Do they provide enough security?” “There’s the boat that takes us there. There’s always a guard stationed at the dock on the other side, on the shore, well armed and ready to man the boat. Relax. We have walkie-talkies.” “No cell phones?” “No, Tomás,” Marina said, sighing patiently. It was difficult to make outsiders understand. “We’re still technically at The Reeds. No cell phones. Being isolated is part of the treatment, and now I know it’s an important part.” “What if you have an accident?” “Darling, please, we call the security guy. He sees us, we see him, we’ve got the walkie-talkie. We’re one mile from The Reeds and four miles from the road. The boat comes to pick us up, takes us to the mainland, and in twenty minutes we’re at the hospital. And what if you have an accident? You think the city is less dangerous than a little island in the river? It’s just the opposite.” “How much do you weigh?” “You’ll see me soon enough. It won’t be long.” “Will you still be my little fatty?” “I’ll be your little fatty, only skinny.” “Skinny-skinny? With your ribs sticking out?” “Don’t be crazy, Tomás. All I can tell you is that now I can fasten my belt. I’m in charge of my barracks.” “But how much do you weigh?” “They haven’t told me yet this week. Tell me what’s new with you.” Marina was afraid to mention the magic numbers that the harsh scale at The Reeds sang out, the numbers she’d never imagined

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she’d even approximate. She listened to his weekly report, barely paying attention to Tomás. Kids: all right; parents: all right; she’d been lucky. More than one woman had found herself obliged to interrupt treatment, summoned by family problems in the outside world. When men were forced to quit, it was usually because of work issues: partners who were demanding or useless or restless, economic belt-tightening in the world, changes in the rules of the game that affected their businesses. Family problems had to be very serious indeed to obligate a man to deal with them. On the other hand, she’d seen some women forced to leave treatment (despite the Professor’s indignation or caustic remarks) because one of their children had problems with the teacher or was going to be tested in all his subjects, because her mother was sick, or simply because her husband, who had been prepared to get along on his own, had changed his mind and summoned her back to his side. She felt a wave of love for Tomás, for that man who didn’t understand her and yet, out of pure affection, or solidarity, or that deep, enormous love that makes a good marriage, had been prepared to handle all the family’s daily little problems. “I love you,” she told him. It was true, it was intense, and it didn’t diminish her feelings for Alex one whit. Because the cold stab of pain she had felt when she found out about Carola, the sensation that all her vital energy was abandoning her body, leaving her inert, with something like the muscular indifference that follows a high fever and turns every simple movement into a violent effort of will, had given way to overwhelming desire: crazy, lethal love, the kind only jealousy can provoke. Marina no longer lied to herself. Now she knew what Alex was like; she knew that her barracks mates had been right, that Griselda had won the bet, but that she also had lost it. Because in spite of everything, she was still Alex’s girlfriend, one of Alex’s girlfriends. And in a certain way, it didn’t matter to her.

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“Let’s see, Marina. Stand up. Let the new folks have a look at you,” the Professor said. And Marina, in her white uniform, her belt snugly fastened to highlight her remarkable new female form, stood up and proudly gazed around. “If I could do it, anyone can,” Marina said. The new fat folk looked at her in amazement. And she anxiously scanned the faces and bodies of the seated women. Which ones, how many, had gone to bed with Alex? How many, which ones, had he tried to seduce? Now Marina regarded the other women with the same look she imagined Alex gave them. She saw the blue-gray eyes of a 200-pound woman, the astonishing, interesting mammary glands of a 265-pound specimen, the shapely legs of another Recovered Camper, the new, saucy, pert rear end of an unexpected physical exercise fanatic (a young girl with very pocked skin who had discovered the magic of endorphins and now frenetically moved around all day long, perfecting and enjoying her glutes). She evaluated them with her gaze, comparing their charms, understanding or believing she understood what a man might see in each of them, trying to group them with her eyes. She saw, for example, in a woman of a certain age, those hands with their long, fine fingers wrapped around Alex’s sex, in another, whose face was unattractive, the thick, silky blond hair spilling over her shoulders as she threw her head backward with pleasure — produced by Alex. At moments like these, Marina was so intimately suffused with her love that she felt transformed, Alex in her blood, Alex in her very self, Alex in her gaze, Alex her curiosity and her desire. “Alex, how many pounds did you lose?” the Professor asked. “One hundred sixteen pounds,” Alex muttered, svelte, attractive, indifferent, embarrassed at being made an example, him of all people, Alex the Rebel, and yet, at the same time, powerfully happy to be able to rely on his body once more, now agile, strong, attractive. “Louder, Alex, the people in back didn’t hear you.”

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“one hundred sixteen pounds,” Alex shouted violently, testily. He didn’t consider himself a Recovered Camper and he hated being forced into playing the role. “Alex arrived here like many of you,” the Professor said. “With secret pride, a hard head, an unreconstructed fatty, a rebel, a selfproclaimed ‘incurable,’ in love with his own fat: no diet specialist can handle me, I’m going to conquer the Professor just like I conquered so many others.” “We’ll see, Professor,” Alex said. “We’ll see what happens when I get out of here.” “Think about what you’re about to say before you open your mouth, Alex. Think of what would happen if talking is suddenly forbidden and the last thing out of your mouth was something stupid,” the Professor retorted. And the whole Assembly Hall burst out laughing. It wasn’t enough for the Professor to defeat his enemies; he wanted them to lick his boots. “But my enemies aren’t fat people,” the Professor said. “My enemy is addiction, and you people are my allies.” “It’s a worthwhile sacrifice,” said a new fatty, tall, heedless, her mouth brightly lipsticked, trying to call attention to herself through submission, just as others attempted to stand out by rebelling. And that was precisely the cue the Professor had been waiting for. “Sacrifice? Just walk outside, two hundred meters from The Reeds and you’ll see what sacrifice is: a mother who has a cup of boiled mate for dinner so she can give the last slice of bread with milk to her children, that’s sacrifice. What you people are doing is an effort. Aren’t you ashamed to talk about sacrifice?” And the fat folk and the Recovered and Recovering Campers all hung their heads and were ashamed at the enormous sum they had paid to be there, locked up and hungry, a sum that would have sufficed to feed many poor people for many days, one that in fact could have saved the lives of many malnourished children, a sum that the

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Professor, however, wasn’t ashamed to collect, just as each one of them was unashamed of the money their businesses, or their professions, or their investments, or whatever they had inherited from their ancestors had provided for them. Because nobody is ashamed of earning money, and yet many people are ashamed of spending it, as if using their savings to feed the reserves of banks or businesses or institutions that generate stocks and bonds was holy work compared to the personal decision of putting the money into circulation on their own, of sending their own money on its way throughout the world, changing hands along the way. And the Scholarship Campers, who had paid nothing but who had been eye witnesses, who had participated very closely in the pain and misery and hunger of many of their neighbors, perhaps of their own families, or who may have even experienced it in their own bodies, their own childhoods, were even more ashamed of their enormous, ridiculous, deformed bodies, filled with something that others (other close acquaintances, others whose first and last names they knew, others who were less theoretical for them than for the rest) lacked.

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Survival

The first thing was the sensation of freedom. No guards, no Tutors, no routines. On a happy, gentle autumn day with the sparkle of springtime. No routines. A supposedly pleasurable situation that suddenly felt uncomfortable. No mealtime schedules, no gym sessions, no workshops, no swim sessions. No obligations. What to do without routines? Survive, of course. So this was the famous Nature, Marina said to herself, looking around and trying to distinguish, to enjoy the various shades of green, the differences between the trees, the vines, the scrub, the wild grasses that grew everywhere, and the pasture that covered the ground. She was able to identify the weeping willows and the pines unerringly, and she might even have been able to point out a kapok tree (though only in springtime — how could she recognize it without its flowers?). The palo borracho, that one was easy, with its greenish, pot-bellied trunk, and so were the eucalyptus, but the rest of the trees, the plants, who could tell? “Look, honeysuckle,” said Alex, who bragged about his knowledge of the islands in the Delta, having been in a rowing club as a

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child. “You have to pick the ones that are wide open, right before they wilt.” He plucked the little white flower, already a bit crumpled, from a vine. Its edges were just starting to turn brownish. He sucked on the stalk end. He picked one for each of the women, who sucked the sweet, minimal nectar, a drop of perfection. Yónatan regarded them with an ironic smile. He was from the area, a Scholarship Camper, a wry youth of few words who had lost 160 pounds in five months and wasn’t even thin. “Are they doing something wrong?” Marina asked him. “No,” he said. “But that’s not honeysuckle, either.” The Professor had seen them off, unexpectedly embracing each one with a damp gleam of pride in his eyes. For the first time they viewed him off his pedestal, at their own level, emotionally overwrought. They realized he was small and fragile; it made them tremble with anguish to squeeze that package of tiny bones, barely cloaked in flesh, which had held them in check for months with the mere power of words. His hard, dark eyes were rimmed with the reddish shadow of old age. He was the Professor, and yet he was human. They had been trying to discover this the whole time; they had wanted to uncover some defect, no matter how minor, any imperfection at all, in the impeccable, implacable director of The Reeds, and now they weren’t at all glad they had. Like all the islands in the lower Delta, Survival Island was elevated, in the shape of a soup bowl. Its ridges were high, boggy, and covered with forest. The interior was low and swampy, with stagnant waters, true marshland. The proud, sworn silence of those who returned from Survival had enough boastful cracks in it to reveal to the others practically everything that awaited them. They knew, for example, that they wouldn’t need to search for a suitable campground, that they wouldn’t have to clean it or smooth out the dirt. Group after group of new thin folk, successive survivors, had left ample traces of their presence.

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Assembling the pop-up tent was pure fun, an erector-set game that reminded them of their rich-kid childhood toys. Yónatan watched them without participating. “Tent cover and stakes,” he said when they had finished. “They’re not necessary,” said Marina, who had never gone camping in her life. “Look: it stays up just fine with the weight of the sleeping bags and backpacks. There are no hurricanes here.” “But there are floods,” Griselda remembered. “Floods aren’t the same as tsunamis, honey,” Alex said. “They give you some warning. If the wind gets too bad, we’ll leave.” Yónatan lost no time in reacting. He chose the thickest, hardest branches (poplar? willow? carob?) he could find but that could nonetheless be cut and worked with the hunting knives they carried in their survival kits. With Alex’s assistance, he installed the tent cover and secured the tent with the stakes. When they were done, Griselda extracted a deck of cards from her backpack and suggested a game of gin. “Griselda, I thought you were Recovered,” laughed the Clown, another one of the women in the group. “Gin isn’t a game of chance,” Griselda said, very seriously. “It’s about memory and ability. And besides, we won’t bet. We’ve got nothing to bet here anyway, right?” “There’s always something to bet,” replied Alex with a wink. The Survival group was very traditional and respected the relative gender ratio at The Reeds: four women and two men. Marina and Alex had reached Survival together; both of them had earned it, but it was nothing like what Marina had imagined when they made that passionate promise to each other. She looked at the other three women. From her first days at The Reeds, Marina understood that Alelí would never make it to Survival, but she had hoped to have Denise as a companion. However, for some reason (it was really always the same reason for all transgressors), Denise had reached a plateau and hadn’t been able to break the 175-pound barrier.

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Two other people from her barracks formed part of Marina’s group. Griselda, the older one, had dropped eighty-three pounds without losing the most striking characteristic of her figure: an elemental, impressive butt. The Clown was the big surprise: as she was still young, her overflowing flesh had shrunk closer to her bones as she lost weight, without sacrificing the elasticity of her skin. But the biggest change was in her personality. She had been a loud, jolly fat girl, the kind everyone wanted to befriend, always in high spirits, with a foolproof sense of humor and a garishly made-up face that explained the origin of her nickname. The loss of pounds had turned her into a quiet, pleasantly plump woman with an intelligent, slightly cruel smile and a charming, subdued laugh that made everyone else’s laughter sound raucous and vulgar by comparison. She used hardly any makeup now, and of course her cosmetics kit wasn’t part of her Survival necessities. Aglaura came from another barracks; the other women barely knew her. She bore a name inflicted on her by her mother, a professor whose specialty was the fantasy literature of Leopoldo Lugones, who in his letters and poems had assigned that name to the love of his life. But life is always full of surprises: her mother never dreamed of an Aglaura who would eventually tip the scales at just under 300 pounds. She still weighed nearly 155, but she was tall. They called her Lauri: at twenty-two, she was the mascot of the group. No one knew much about Yónatan, except that as he lost weight, he began to excel in every sport and in the fierce competitions that were part of their training. All six of them felt strong, brave, and indifferent to the demands that the concept of Survival exerted on ordinary people or even on themselves at an earlier point in their lives. Now they had survived The Reeds; they were used to getting by on a minimal quantity of food, and they had no fear of fasting. And yet.

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And yet, they were also used to a routine that included four daily meals. Although they were thin, provisionally thin, they were fatties at heart and always would be. Now, as lunch hour approached, they began thinking, with incorrigible fondness, about the limited but concrete possibilities on The Reeds’ menu. Raw vegetables, diet Jell-O, no-cal broth. And as always, as through their entire lives, as they had done ever since acquiring use of reason, they began to think with anticipation, with illusion, with desire, about their next meal. “We can play gin after lunch, Griselda,” Lauri said. “Right now let’s concentrate on what we came here for. Survival for everyone!” Marina looked around. There didn’t appear to be anything that looked edible, except some birds, which gave the impression of being completely out of reach. The Survivors had no weapons. She recalled Lucho the bird watcher’s remarks on the habits of the purple heron. “At this time of year there are nests with eggs,” she said. “We just have to look in the scrub grass.” “The scrub grass is just a swamp,” replied Yónatan, who had already begun making a spear out of a long, sturdy branch. A huge, fat, gray fly had landed on Lauri’s arm, but she brushed it away too late. A big, hard swelling had begun to form, and the girl scratched it in desperation: gnats. “I think the gnats use our insect repellent as salad dressing,” the Clown observed. They laughed, but they replenished their application, rubbing their skin and spraying their clothing with a foul-smelling spray. “Shall we go fishing?” Griselda proposed, a touch of anxiety in her voice. “We have to find bait first,” Alex reminded her. “If worse comes to worst, each one of us can donate a little flesh: we still have extra,” said the Clown. But nobody laughed. “We’ll divide up in two groups and go out looking for whatever we can find,” Alex proposed. “Two women with each man.”

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Aglaura and the Clown protested indignantly. They didn’t need any male assistance. In fact, Lauri had already cut a couple of stalks of giant cane and was sharpening them, trying to imitate Yónatan. But when they attempted to form the other two groups, they noticed that Yónatan was gone. He had disappeared so silently, and the rightness of his vanishing just like that, without a sound, was so obvious, as was the others’ inability to do the same, that no one said a word. Little mountain trails led out of the campground. Lauri and the Clown went one way; Alex, Griselda, and Marina, the other. A couple of hours later they were back in camp, not because the island was so large, but rather because they had waited too long, trying to use all the tools at their disposal, to actually find any food. There were no coconut trees here, unlike the desert islands of books and movies, but on the other hand, there were citrus trees. In fact, the only thing Alex, Griselda, and Marina’s expedition had yielded was a pile of bitter oranges, horribly acidic. They hoped that the other groups might have had better luck, so that they wouldn’t be forced to eat that fruit, which by themselves could have saved the entire crew of Columbus’s three caravels from scurvy. At least they wouldn’t have a vitamin C deficiency. They knew animals lived on the island, but all they managed to spot was a big, lazy purple lizard that darted away unexpectedly quickly when they tried to catch it. Lauri and the Clown were waiting for them. They made a fire. At The Reeds no time was wasted lighting campfires. They used dry firewood, paper, and lighter fluid. The fires ignited with a violent flame and burned for hours. On the island it was difficult to find anything truly dry. Nonetheless, the women had managed pretty well by using handfuls of pine needles and other dry leaves. With a little effort they found a few branches in good condition. Theoretically the campfire was perfect, with air in the center and coneshaped piles of branches surrounding a somewhat thicker piece of wood. Everyone was supplied with four matches, the match heads protected by wax to keep them from getting wet. They were to use

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them very prudently, saving them, monitoring the fire: under no circumstances was it to be allowed to spread or go out. Additionally, the women had managed to trap a couple of brook turtles. “What are you planning to do with those two things?” Marina asked, a little uneasy at the notion of eating an animal that she had always thought of as a pet. But didn’t the Japanese eat the animals from the Tokyo Zoo during the wartime famines? “Soup,” Lauri said. “We’re going to make turtle soup.” Then Yónatan showed up. He had three little creatures impaled on an improvised spear. “I’m not ready to eat rats yet,” Alex said. “They’re field mice. They don’t eat garbage. It’s white meat, delicious,” said Yónatan. “Anyway, you’ll only get a little. One piece is for bait.”

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The Unforeseen

What they hadn’t foreseen was hunger. By evening dense clouds of mosquitoes had gathered. Yónatan taught them how to fend them off by throwing a green branch on the campfire. Claiming they wanted to avoid insect bites, but in fact prompted by the dense, mysterious, uncomfortable night descending on them, they huddled closer to the thick smoke, which they endured with reddened eyes. Marina had prepared herself to accept and resist all sorts of discomfort. She didn’t mind the little branches poking her through the tent floor, digging into her body in spite of the sleeping bag. She didn’t mind the pervasive mud caking her sneakers and her clothing. She didn’t mind coexisting with every variety of threatening or just plain annoying insect. She didn’t mind the indignities connected to her most basic needs. What she hadn’t foreseen was hunger. For the men, peeing anywhere at all, barely concealed behind some bush, was pleasant, even entertaining. There was no reason to keep the campfire going all night long: they sent the women inside the tent and blissfully competed with one another, making the embers crackle as they extinguished them with their urine. For the

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women, it was pure misery: they had to lower their pants and squat, all the while perfecting the subtle technique of not wetting their clothes, but above all, they had to expose the tender, delicate parts of their anatomy to the mysteries of nature, like someone swimming in a dark sea without knowing what kind of sharks might surface from below to ravage their bellies. For more solid necessities, Alex suggested using a good, comfortable fork in any tree. It was easy to picture Yónatan in a squat, that sensible healthy position for giving birth and defecating, defended by alternative medicine against the custom of sitting, yet another unnatural Western practice, that is to say, as if any human activity, even in the most elemental culture, could be considered part of the impossible, inhuman magic of nature. In spite of all the insect repellent they had slathered on, LauriAglaura’s skin seem to exude a sweet scent that attracted mosquitoes, chiggers, and especially gnats. Even at the hottest times of day, she was forced to wear the long-sleeved sweatshirt that everyone else put on at nightfall and athletic socks to protect her ankles. Wasps followed her around, and the ants seemed particularly interested in her flesh. One of the bites on her ankle was inflamed, hot, and red. Lauri insisted she had never been allergic, but the group decided not to take any chances and gave her an injection of Decadron from their medicine kit. Although they had all completed the first aid course, the Clown insisted on acting as nurse. What they hadn’t foreseen was hunger. Marina tried to read her companions’ faces to determine if they were feeling the same as she was. They had official permission, carte blanche, to eat anything they could snag on their own, and that possibility made her mouth fill with saliva. The hard little ball of hunger that had been contained, concentrated, and controlled in the pit of her stomach had unraveled. Although she knew it was all a pre-planned game that would last only five days, her hunger seemed to have acquired a new dimension, a life-or-death urgency.

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After all, their bodies could no longer count on those exceptional fat reserves they had brought with them to The Reeds. The field mice provided just about one bite per person. Fortunately, the meat was tasty enough to attract a few catfish, which provided them with bait as well as some (not very pleasant) variety in their diet. “Aren’t you hungry?” Marina half-whispered to Griselda, as she held her fishing pole with little bits of field mouse suspended on the hook. Survival equipment included several feet of nylon cord and some safety pins that had been twisted into fishing hooks, but no floats or sinkers. “Let’s not even mention that,” Griselda smiled, sticking rigorously to the rules. Without further comment, she untied the belt of her uniform and refastened it more snugly around her waist. They had tied the fishhooks to the line so they would fall of their own weight to a certain depth. The island was fairly far out in the river, beyond the usual route of boats: fishing wasn’t impossible. Suddenly, Griselda cried out: the cane stalk that had been bobbing around, tied to the line as a kind of float, had submerged. She dug in her heels and reeled in the nylon cord that was wrapped around her wrist. “It’s a big one,” she muttered, mostly to herself. And while Marina watched in amazement as the fish or whatever it was pulled vigorously at the line, which was now digging into Griselda’s reddened wrist, the ground on which they stood, the shoreline itself, gave way beneath their feet, a large chunk of coast broke off, and the two of them suddenly found themselves in the muddy, unexpectedly deep, water. A little while later, they were back on dry land, laughing at their own fright. The nylon cord dangled loosely from Griselda’s hand. They changed and hung their wet clothes from the tree branches. “Surubí. Unusual around here,” pronounced Yónatan when they told him. “What a pity.” That “what a pity” was laced with a tone of annoyance even

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greater than the fisherman’s frustration; it went beyond his scorn for the mistakes Griselda had made and the resentful realization that the best catch would have been made by the least adept of them: in that tone of annoyance there was hunger. And for one moment an image flashed before the eyes of those six Survivors: the image of the oily, yellowish, potential flesh of a magnificent twenty-five- or thirty-pound surubí. At night, aided by a flashlight, they hunted frogs. Attracted, dazzled by the light, they gave themselves up easily. To skin them, the Survivors boiled them in a pot sitting on top of the embers, after innumerable failed attempts to suspend the pot that always ended up the same way, with water spilling on the campfire and dousing the firewood. How many frogs does it take to feed six people? Many more, certainly, than the number the expedition managed to hunt. Skinned and cooked, boiled or roasted, the amount of meat each one produced was negligible and not all that tasty. Those delicious meals of frog legs Provençal that Alex remembered having consumed in some restaurant or other suddenly revealed the secret of their sumptuousness: it was the oil with garlic and parsley, the side of bread, the cold appetizer that preceded them, the anticipated dessert, the golden fries that accompanied the skinny frog legs that now constituted their entire nourishment. The second day an argument arose between Alex and the Clown. “It’s a guinea fowl,” said the Clown. “It’s a cormorant,” Alex said. Instinctively, both of them turned to the group’s nature guide. “It’s edible,” Yónatan said. In a flash he pulled out the slingshot he kept hidden in his pants and stunned the bird with a stone to the head. It was a very interesting weapon, fashioned from the elastic waistband of Yónatan’s pants (which he now held up with the rope they had previously used to assemble the tent) and a piece of tree bark for holding the stone.

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Marina practiced with the slingshot for hours without accomplishing a thing besides growing furious: with herself, with the slingshot, with the stupid birds that wouldn’t keep still. Her anger at the birds was unfair, since she couldn’t hit a sitting target, either. The truth was she couldn’t hit a tree trunk at ten paces. She tried to take comfort in the thought that Yónatan would never be as skillful as she was with a cell phone, but even that was a lie. “How do you like our honeymoon?” Alex asked Marina. It was the third night of Survival. A brilliant round moon hung in the sky, and the little island jungle echoed with the sounds of the night. They were close to shore and far from the campground, and they hadn’t dared undress for fear of the bugs. The discomfort of the situation brought back the memory — and the ardor — of their clandestine adolescent passions. Marina’s jealousy had been unjustified. Aglaura and the Clown seemed quite content to hang out together and didn’t pay much attention to the men. Despite her rotund femininity, Griselda didn’t appeal to Alex, who was much more discriminating in his tastes than what Marina had fantasized. “Our honeymoon,” Marina repeated. Our farewell, she thought silently. “Let’s just call it our moon. I don’t even want to remember the word honey!” Then they heard Yónatan’s voice very close by, calling them. A voice that was always calm, dry, and clear, and which now, for the first time, had a frightened edge. “Over here,” Alex said. Yónatan appeared from among the trees. Even with the full moon, they didn’t see him till he was nearly beside them. “It’s Aglaura,” he said. “She’s having trouble breathing. The guard doesn’t answer.” At the campsite, the Clown was frantically trying to find the most comfortable possible position for Lauri, who was red-faced and breathing with a nasty rattle in her throat.

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“It’s an allergic shock,” Marina said. This was something the others already knew. “Did you give her the other shot of Decadron?” “Of course,” the Clown said. “But it’s not enough — she needs an iv, a tracheotomy, what the hell do I know? It looks to me like her glottis is swollen; it’s urgent. It was a wasp.” “The security guy’s not around,” Griselda explained. “Isn’t the walkie-talkie working?” “Go on, try it,” Yónatan said. “No one answers,” Griselda insisted. “The security boat’s there, though. You can see the light from the lantern, but it’s not moving. Either the guy left or he’s passed out cold or who knows what.” A moment of silence followed. Yónatan was the natural leader of the group. They were waiting for his command. “I can’t swim,” Yónatan said. Marina tried to recall if she had ever seen Yónatan, such an expert in other sports, in the swimming pool. “I’m not leaving her,” the Clown said, holding Lauri to try to keep her upright. “Marina’s the best swimmer,” Griselda remembered. “I’ll go with her,” Alex said. And while they stripped off their uniforms to dive into the black water, illuminated by the light of the lantern and by the flashlights that their companions would use to help them in the crossing, one section of Marina’s mind that she couldn’t control was delighted to be able to show off that new, recently acquired body of hers, which might not be considered slender, but which was already so different from the flabby mass she’d brought into The Reeds. The opposite shore wasn’t far; they could see the lights on the dock.

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The Crossing

For a strong swimmer like Marina, the 100 or 150 meters separating them from the opposite shore were a short distance; it was easy. Not for Alex, though. For neither of them was it short or easy to plunge into the cold, black river, with the moonlight barely gleaming on the surface. The cool night, with a breeze that intermittently brought gusts of cold, helped them tolerate the water temperature, which immediately seemed tepid to them. Standing on the muddy bottom was nauseating: they both knew the river. They felt the swampy sensation of something like dirty rags curling around their feet, enveloping them, as if a formless mass of excrement and slime was trying to swallow them. They dived in, trying to avoid touching bottom. Yet, as Marina had already discovered when she tumbled over, the bottom was far away; the shore enclosed a deep basin. They advanced with rapid strokes, attempting to stay as close as possible to each other. “It’s more dangerous than the ocean,” Alex said. “The currents.” “Forget the currents and keep moving.” The famous river currents. Who hadn’t heard of them? The light of Yónatan’s flashlight accompanied them for the first few meters.

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After that, it was only the moon. The forest on both sides was outlined darkly and indistinctly against the sky, like headlands with threadbare borders that suddenly admitted the dull light of some distant star. As they approached the middle of the river, the current grew swifter and swifter, sweeping them along at an alarming speed. “Don’t fight it,” Marina said. In the silence, interrupted only by the splashing of their kicks, her voice sounded like a scream. “Let it carry you along; we’ll get out pretty far up and walk from there.” They moved forward with difficulty, on a diagonal, propelled by that gigantic force. The slope of the riverbed was gentle, but the flow was powerful, immense. The current gradually diminished as they neared shore. When at last they managed to stand again — and there was no choice but to step on the muddy, repulsive bottom (although they were happy to do so) — they were about a half mile away from the lighted dock. The boy and the girl. Marina’s thoughts followed ridiculous tangents, the urgency of her errand insufficient to control them. Like an adventure film: the boy and the girl. But in Old Hollywood the boy and the girl are single, young, and brave: clear owners of the vast future that spreads beyond the words the end. This was a reallife film, revisionist in a way, where the actors are two people of a certain age, with well-worn flesh and craggy skin, sagging a little in certain places from sudden weight loss. In a classic film they might even have been two veteran actors, hired because of their reputations for a production that normally would have demanded much younger stars. They took off the little clothing they were wearing, wrung it out, and put it back on again. They were soaked, numb with cold, tortured by the wind. They embraced for a moment to warm up, but there was no time to lose. They continued along the wild, pathless shore as quickly as possible, trying to distinguish in the darkness the trunks and roots that crossed their path through the scrub, with an

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involuntary shiver of fear at each step. Where to place their bare feet, prepared to bear all the weight of their bodies? They reached the dock half-naked, their feet damaged and bruised, but they no longer felt chilled; in fact, they were almost overheated. The lantern that had guided them was still there, still lit, resting on a bench. The boat was there, too, tied to its moorings, rocking. The security guard had disappeared together with his jeep. Did they dare run barefoot along the dirt path? Alex and Marina didn’t ask themselves that question. Almost simultaneously they dashed off to run the twenty blocks separating them from The Reeds. Alex carried the lantern. They kept their eyes on the uneven ground, prepared to alert each other if they saw a stone, as stick, a twisted root. And at the same time they ran as if they were competing against one another, as if they had wagered on who would get there first. They felt agile and strong, light and grateful. Their feet were very sore, but in the heat of the race they felt no pain. There would be time for healing later. They arrived, panting, at the entrance, where the security booth was. They were surprised to see several guards with rifles in their hands. They didn’t recognize any of them. Notably, these guards were much younger and fatter than one might have expected of The Reeds’ staff. Their uniforms were too short and tight on them; most of them wore the baggy, elastic-waist pants of the Campers’ uniforms. There were two women. “Emergency!” Marina shouted. “On Survival Island!” “Allergic shock — call an ambulance!” Alex explained. “No problem, we’ll take care of it,” said one of the youths, triumphantly brandishing a cell phone, which he pointed at them like a pistol. “Come in, come in. You can’t walk around like that. Go to your barracks and get dressed.” It was a night filled with surprises. One of the guards went with them. But they didn’t head toward the barracks, but rather toward the Main Pavilion, where the Group Therapy room was located.

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Near Marina’s barracks she managed to hear someone banging on the door from inside. She heard the voice of a woman screaming, but she didn’t understand her words. When Marina tried to walk in that direction, the guard stopped her with a movement of his rifle. The campfires seemed to be lit like on an ordinary night, but they gave off a strange odor, like burning hair. Smoke floated in the orange haze of the sodium lights. That smell. Barbecued meat, maybe, but of what animal? Lamb? A small crowd surrounded each fire. At this time of night? Could it be another farewell party? Was the Professor testing their ability to control themselves with fatty foods? Sweetbreads, sausages, kidneys? A farewell party before the Recovered Campers returned from Survival? Suddenly she began to hear electronic music coming from the loudspeakers, a sound Marina found insufferable, monotonous, hypnotic, screechy. However, among the people surrounding the campfires, there were many that didn’t seem to share her opinion, because they began moving their arms and hips rhythmically. The fattest simply slapped their thighs. “Dogs. On the grill. Look, Marina, they’re dogs! The dogs!” Alex said, astonished. Now the guard was aiming at them with no attempt at dissembling. He addressed them dismissively. “What, now you’re going to tell me you never imagined this scene? No matter how Recovered you may be. All right! Let’s see if you’ve lost your memory along with the pounds.” Of course it was true. There wasn’t a single Camper at The Reeds that hadn’t at one time or another pictured the rottweilers, skewered and turning slowly on a spit. Marina thought of Pedro. Where was he? What had he been able to do to defend them? The spectacle didn’t produce the fierce joy she’d imagined. It made her afraid. Terribly afraid.

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The New Order

The guard pushed them toward the Main Pavilion, which was brightly lit. The impeccable perfection of The Reeds, with its welltrimmed lawns and its geometric order, was disturbed by all sorts of objects lying on the ground. There were empty yogurt containers, uniforms piled in unruly heaps, chicken bones, milk cartons. Marina saw a parade of ants savaging a gnawed peach pit, now black with insects. The trash cans had been upended, their contents strewn all about. There were countless cigarette butts everywhere. Apparently no one used the Smokehouse anymore. “The sick woman on the island,” Marina told the guard, frantically. “She can’t breathe. She won’t last much longer!” “Don’t worry,” the young man said. “The people at the entrance are responsible types. We don’t want any accidents. I’m sure they’ve already notified the authorities. They’ve probably sent the regional ambulance boat by now.” Alex and Marina shivered, half-naked, frozen, ridiculous, despoiled of the fat layer that might have protected them at another point in their lives. They could hear the distressed voices of the

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people gathered in the Assembly Hall. There were many of them, and they were shouting. “What do we want?” demanded an angry, imperious female voice. “Food!” responded a thick, cracking voice with impeded pronunciation that nonetheless managed to achieve a thunderous volume. “Food! Food! Food!” shouted a chorus of youthful voices all at once. Alex gave Marina an ironic smile. “And they say kids today don’t care about politics.” The guard ushered them inside without a word, nudging them gently with the barrel of his rifle. Before them, in the middle of the room, in the place usually occupied by the Professor and Elvirathe-Beaver, was Carola, considerably thinner (or less fat) than the last time they had seen her. Her face was garishly painted and she had taken a scissors to her uniform to adapt it to her own idea of elegance. Next to her, pathetic and immense, was someone Marina recognized although she’d never seen him before: Jughead. Lying on a tray was a chunk of roasted animal (dog? chicken?) that Jughead ate slowly but relentlessly, ripping off tiny bits of meat with surprising elegance for his size and chewing them assiduously. The Assembly Hall had been invaded by a general chaos that seemed to have taken over The Reeds. Nearly all the low, uncomfortable white chairs had been smashed to bits. The fragments were strewn against the walls. About a hundred kids of various ages between twelve and twenty were sitting in the comfortable chairs designed for the super-obese, although very few of them fit that description. Most of them had probably been at The Reeds for a few months. Almost all of them were eating something. A fruit, a carrot, a yogurt. Many of them were smoking tobacco; others, marijuana. It wasn’t just food that could be bought on the black market. The Inferno had spilled its flood of souls throughout the entire campus of The Reeds. The insurrection of the damned. “We want justice!” Carola resumed, haranguing her people. “We

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want what shouldn’t be denied to anyone! We want what even the poorest of the poor want! we want bread!” The rebels ignited with rage and desire at the forbidden word. They wanted bread. Why not? Bread and butter. Marina, proud of her new figure, her agility and swiftness, her swimming ability, nonetheless knew what they were talking about: she understood. Above all, she sympathized. As her adherents screamed themselves hoarse in an orgasm of shouting, joining in a crazy chant that they seemed to be improvising on the spot (We want bread bread bread / we like bread bread bread / we eat bread bread bread / life is bread bread bread, they sang, clapping their hands, kicking the ground or the walls with each bread bread bread), Carola appeared to note their presence without surprise and whispered something to the guard. “Have those two put on some clothes before they catch pneumonia,” she said. “Inferno uniforms. But don’t put them in the barracks. Bring them to me at the Administration Building in a little while.” And she kept on haranguing her people. “Are we going to let ourselves die of hunger?” Carola asked. “No-no-no,” said Jughead in his thick, toneless voice, moving his head and torso from side to side in a resounding physical refusal. “Nooooooo!” shouted the people, aflame with fervor. Walking toward the Administration Building in their new uniforms, Marina and Alex passed a group of adults emerging from inside. Alelí and Denise were among them. Alelí approached them, happy and nervous as ever, seeking their approval. “We’re the Advisory Council,” she said, enunciating clearly. “They trust us, those of us that have been here for a long time. There must be a good reason why we’re not recovering. They trust Recidivists and Cagers even more,” and her broad smile now revealed a jaw free of clamps and wires, free and happy at recovering their normal movements. Especially the ones associated with chewing. Denise didn’t seem very proud of her new functions; she looked

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the other way when they greeted her. In any case, the kids didn’t appear to have all that much confidence in the so-called Advisory Council. A group of young folks, some with weapons, surrounded them. They were heading for the Clockwork Orange Pavilion. In the Administration Building, Carola was in a meeting with her closest staff. Jughead remained at her side, eating without pause. “At this rate, tomorrow all the food we found will be gone,” said a twenty-year-old boy with a metal rod through his eyebrow. “We won’t even have enough for breakfast.” “We can’t keep holding three hundred hostages — what for?” Carola said. “It doesn’t make sense. We don’t have enough to feed them with. Not even the normal Reeds portion. Everything’s being used up.” “We could eat them!” jubilantly suggested a boy that Marina would have described as no more than fourteen. Obesity deformed their features; it was always so hard to guess their age. “Think of what would happen if talking was suddenly forbidden and the last thing out of your mouth was bullshit,” Carola replied. The others looked at her, astonished, and she burst out in nervous laughter. “Here’s the thing — I ate the Professor,” she said, still laughing. “No, we’re going to let them all go. We’ll just keep the staff. The worst of the staff.” “But then the people on the outside will find out,” said the boy. “They’ll send in the police, the army!” “We’re not important enough to bring the army,” replied a very dark-skinned girl with long, black hair. She was chewing candy. “They’ll find out anyway,” Carola said. “Tomorrow, when the suppliers show up. And the new admits. Already more than one family that couldn’t make contact is starting to suspect something fishy.” The kids were drinking whiskey and had a special supply of cookies, candies, and chocolates. It was obvious that they had searched the staff ’s rooms: many employees kept forbidden food hidden for

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their own consumption or to sell on the black market. But the haul was insufficient to distribute among them all. As usual, as in any revolution, the leaders had privileges. “Food or death!” shouted the boy with the baby face. “Shut your hole!” Carola yelled at him, in one of those attacks of rage that Marina and Alex knew so well. “You’re a regular bullshit factory. Why don’t you go wipe your pussy with sandpaper? Death, my ass!” Then Jughead stopped eating for a moment, rested his enormous arms on Carola’s shoulders and gazed at her with his deep, serious, empty eyes. “No say ass, Carola. That bad word,” he said clumsily. Carola struggled to restrain herself, as if she had suddenly become aware that her leadership didn’t allow her certain vulgar remarks. She looked at Jughead with protective tenderness. “Nobody’s gonna die here. That’s their argument. That we’re committing suicide by eating. Food is life!” “Food is life!” the group echoed. “We’ll have to hold out as long as possible. To let them know it’s not in their interest to lock us up again,” Carola said. The girl with straight hair muttered something incomprehensible, her mouth so stuffed with candy that a thread of sticky saliva ran down her chin. “Swallow, you disgusting blob — nobody can understand you like that,” the boy with the rod through his eyebrow remonstrated. “We’ve got to negotiate.” “We’ll threaten them!” shouted the baby-faced boy. And it was increasingly obvious that, in fact, he was no older than fourteen. “We want bread! Dulce de leche! Pizza! If they don’t give us food, we’ll kill a hostage every two hours.” “Get him out of here, Jughead,” said Carola, biting her lips and rolling her eyes in a gesture of I can’t take this anymore. “You can listen from outside, Pilo — I can’t deal with you.”

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Jughead responded slowly, with calm resolve and without violence. He walked over to the boy, hugged him with a strength not devoid of affection, hoisted him into the air, and carried him out of the office, while the youngster kicked and screamed, threatening to withdraw the Coyotes’ support. With the leader of the Coyotes outside, the meeting became more productive; decisions were made expeditiously. They would begin to free the adults that were locked in the barracks in stages. Each group would emerge alone, separately, carefully guarded all the way to the exit. “What should we do with the Advisory Council?” “We’ll release them first. They’re the ones that eat the most. I’ll keep these two, since I already know them,” Carola said, pointing to Marina and Alex. “I wouldn’t trust Recovered Campers,” said the boy with the pierced eyebrow, regarding them unsympathetically. “Who are they?” “America’s heartthrob and one of his lovely girlfriends,” Carola said with an ironic smile. “After you free the first group of adults, you can figure that in half an hour you’ll be surrounded by police,” said Alex, assuming his role to Marina’s surprise. “We know that,” Pierced Eyebrow replied superciliously. “That’s when the negotiations start.” The plan was quite simple. It involved waiting with a group of hostages: the most despised staff members, people they could mistreat without a twinge of conscience. They’d exchange them for provisions. They proposed waiting two days, three at the most. “As soon as they find out, they’ll cut the lights,” Marina reminded them. “There’s an electric generator,” said Carola. “The main thing is to keep the phones and computers working. We have a couple of good electricians.”

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“You don’t need us — let us out,” Marina said. “Yeah, right. I wanted to leave, too, remember? And I still do,” Carola replied. “What did you do with the Professor?” Alex asked. The kids shot each other a look of complicity and burst out laughing. “We’re making him swallow a dose of his own medicine,” said the straight-haired girl, who had finally polished off her candy. “Wanna see?” Carola asked.

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Outside

The staff meeting adjourned, and each one of the generals resumed his tasks. At that hour, the main task was to sleep. “Go on — tomorrow’s going to be tough,” Carola said, dismissing them. And with a gesture, she invited her new advisors to follow her. Marina had always thought that there must be a hidden camera somewhere in the whiteness of Personalized Treatment, to control patients and keep them from hurting themselves. And so it was. In one of the administrative offices, a group of televisions surveyed the entire camp, and several of the tvs were especially dedicated to pt. “Are you making them fast?” Alex asked impatiently. Carola snorted cruelly. “They’d love that,” she said. “These people are lost; they don’t know what hunger feels like, they don’t know what it is to crave food, they’re naturally skinny, anorexic sons-of-bitches. They don’t understand a thing. What we’re doing is giving them a little of their own medicine, something that’ll make them feel what we felt.” “Pedro!” Marina suddenly cried. She had spotted her friend locked in one of the white rooms. His hands were cuffed behind

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his back and he was lying face down in the bed, crying pathetically. “Why do you have him like that?” “He didn’t seem like a bad guy,” Carola said. “But he went ballistic when we decided to eat the dogs. We had to lock him up for his own good. The Coyotes were about to lynch him.” “Who are the Coyotes?” “The kids under fourteen. They’re impossible.” There they were, distributed throughout several rooms of pt. Marina recognized the Professor; the Thyroid; Elvi-the-Beaver; Lucho, the caretaker of the Clockwork Orange; one of the gym instructors; plus a few others that must have been Tutors, instructors, and coordinators in the Inferno, because the adults didn’t know them. “We’ve got the guards and the rest of the staff locked in the pantry,” Carola said. “People who collected their salaries and did their jobs. There’s no reason to destroy them. We’ll let them go a few at a time.” The Professor, the Thyroid, a big guy who must have been a guard, and another very skinny woman with long nails were sitting on a bed, with their hands cuffed behind them. The door opened and two armed youths walked in. The Professor tried to say something, and one of them slapped him in the face. “We don’t want to hurt them, but it’s better not to let the Prof talk,” Carola remarked. And from her perspective, that made sense. The other boy extracted three hard-boiled eggs from a little bag and popped one in each prisoner’s mouth. The three of them ate as though they were hungry, swallowing enthusiastically. “They have to eat something every ten minutes,” Carola said. “Any little thing — it doesn’t have to be a lot. A yogurt, a hard-boiled egg, a piece of chicken. A candy, a cookie. Something.” “What if they don’t want to?” asked Alex. “Of course at first they didn’t want to. So we made a little arrangement in the Clockwork Orange to convince them. I told you we have good electricians! Look how they want to eat now.”

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“They’ll explode,” remarked Marina, for whom the spectacle wasn’t altogether displeasing. “They’ll throw up.” “Tough luck for them,” Carola said. “They’ll have to swallow their puke.” She turned on the intercom to connect with pt. “Let them sleep a few hours and we’ll start again,” she ordered. “Breakfast is served at seven o’clock sharp!” They had begun to release the adults locked in the barracks. They left The Reeds in groups of nine. Marina watched them enviously. If they wouldn’t let them out by the books, they would have to find a way to escape. In spite of the madness that night, exhaustion finally won out, and Marina fell asleep on a couch in the Administration Building, lulled by the monotonous strains of the electronic music. Alex woke her with news. “The police have the campus surrounded,” he said. “They’ve started negotiations.” In fact, the loudspeakers had stopped transmitting blaring music. In its place was a very calm, soothing male voice from outside, urging them to hand over their weapons and free the hostages. “I saw how they do it. I saw it on tv,” Pierced Eyebrow said. His left hand opened and closed in a kind of nervous tic. “One of them calms you down. You think you’re negotiating, and the others come in through a different entrance and they riddle us with bullets and free the hostages.” “Kids,” Alex said. “This isn’t a maximum security prison, you’re not delinquents, and the hostages don’t matter so much. The most important hostages are you yourselves. Don’t imagine they’re about to burst in here with blood and gunfire. No one wants to harm you. Your parents are surely out there with the police.” Carola and the Eyebrow exchanged a look. Alex’s observation reoriented them back to reality: they were fat kids, the children of middle-class families, not dangerous evildoers. In a way, that clari-

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fication wounded their self-esteem and made them lose face, but it was a practical reminder. “I told you these guys would be useful to us,” Carola remarked. The rebel leaders plunged into a discussion about how much and what they would have to demand in exchange for the liberation of each of the hostages. They had no idea how much they needed to feed their hordes. A hundred pounds of bread? A thousand? Should they ask for butter? Ice cream? Prepared foods? Dry noodles? Twenty pounds of hard cheese? Or two hundred? When they finally managed to agree on something, they noted it down on a sheet of paper. “We were wrong to kill all the dogs,” the Eyebrow said. “They would’ve defended us now.” “They would have shot them,” Carola reassured him. “Are all our people around the periphery armed? The ones in the watchtowers, too?” “They are,” said General Eyebrow. “But how many of them really know how to use weapons?” “If we don’t know how many, neither will they. They’ll be careful,” Carola replied. Marina reluctantly conceded that she admired Carola’s intelligence and her leadership ability. At that moment a group of kids came running as fast as their still uncomfortable bodies would allow. “Red alert,” they shouted. “The Coyotes are attacking pt!” “Shitheads,” Carola grumbled. “They want to finish off the Professor once and for all. Let’s go surprise them. The first thing is to stop them. Everyone to pt.” “Careful, no one fire a shot,” the Eyebrow said. “The last thing we need is a bunch of dead or wounded.” Just then some random shots rang out. Carola and General Eyebrow ran out toward Personalized Treatment. “Now,” Marina said to Alex. “We’re leaving. Right now.” “I’m staying,” Alex said. “Are you crazy?”

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“I’m staying,” Alex repeated. “These kids don’t have the faintest idea; they need help. I’m going with them.” Marina suddenly understood. This was Alex’s dream. The dream of his lifetime. Insurrection. Revolution. A crazy, foolish, adolescent dream, which suddenly had become a reality. Alex the rebel, collaborating with the rebels. There were three candies left in the box. Alex ate them. He stuck a package of cookies in the elastic waistband of his pants, like a pistol, and dashed off toward pt. The long-awaited moment had arrived. How many times, in her fantasy, had Marina thought about the moment when she would cross (forever, that was a foregone conclusion) the threshold of The Reeds. The absurd polka-dot uniform hung on her. The feeling of cloth loosely draping her firm body made her feel almost elegant. She walked with measured steps toward the exit, the pace of a woman in control of her movements, the queen of her own body, a woman. It wasn’t hard to convince the kids at the entrance to let her through. She was going to negotiate food, she explained to them. She held the paper where Carola had jotted down what they planned to ask for. She signed Carola’s name. If she wasn’t too familiar with Carola’s signature, the others had never seen it. In any case, it didn’t matter much to let out one more adult who wasn’t even a member of staff. Quite far from the entrance, a police blockade prevented the throng from approaching any closer. With a feeling of unreality, Marina spied Tomás’s face among the crowd and raised her arm to wave to him, but he didn’t seem to recognize her. Three policemen and a doctor came toward her. Marina had the impression she was walking in slow motion. From the look on their faces, many of the people must have been shouting, but she didn’t hear them. She was returning to the marvelous, terrible world. She was returning without Alex and was glad. The taut thread that united them had snapped. Now, once again, she

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was a wife, a mother, Señora Marina Rubin de Carletti, five feet, two inches, 136 pounds. She had lost 68 pounds and now she would be a free woman again. Free to exercise her own free will. She savored the perfection of the moment. She savored it with delight. Now I have to start the maintenance diet, she thought. But first, as soon as they leave me in peace, I’m going to ask Tomás to take me out to celebrate. We have a lot to celebrate. He has no idea how much. Before I start maintenance, I want to eat a slice of pizza. With an icecold beer, with little drops of moisture condensing on the outside of the bottle. A slice of pizza with plenty of garlic and gooey, melted mozzarella. Golden on top. With a thin, crispy crust. One slice, just one. Or maybe two.

in the latin american women writers series Underground River and Other Stories By Inés Arredondo Translated by Cynthia Steele With a foreword by Elena Poniatowska Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer: Vaudeville Novel By Alicia Borinsky Translated by Cola Franzen in collaboration with the author With an interview by Julio Ortega Mean Woman By Alicia Borinsky Translated and with an introduction by Cola Franzen

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The Fourth World By Diamela Eltit Translated and with a foreword by Dick Gerdes

Translated by Elizabeth Jackson and K. David Jackson Violations: Stories of Love by Latin American Women Writers Edited and with an introduction by Psiche Hughes In a State of Memory By Tununa Mercado Translated by Peter Kahn With an introduction by Jean Franco Death as a Side Effect By Ana María Shua Translated by Andrea G. Labinger Microfictions By Ana María Shua Translated by Steven J. Stewart The Weight of Temptation By Ana María Shua Translated by Andrea G. Labinger

The Women of Tijucopapo By Marilene Felinto Translated and with an afterword by Irene Matthews

Call Me Magdalena By Alicia Steimberg Translated by Andrea G. Labinger

The Youngest Doll By Rosario Ferré

The Rainforest By Alicia Steimberg Translated by Andrea G. Labinger

Industrial Park: A Proletarian Novel By Patrícia Galvão (Pagu) To order or obtain more information on these or other University of Nebraska Press titles, visit www.nebraskapress.unl.edu.

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