Panic Signs

10. She hands me the scarf

and without light, turning to the past, babbling their memories in a half forgotten litany, sung only by a choir of blind shepherds. In the streets we no longer see mothers holding children in their arms, or street vendors selling toys and children’s clothing, and the circuses no longer stop as they pass through our small region on the map: we are inhabitants of an ignored country, finished. The fire of procreation has been extinguished, a victim of infinite disillusion without consolation. The circuses don’t stop anymore to set up their bulging green tents, their painted cages, their strings of lights, and the zoos, sad and abandoned, have become decrepit; only the zoo keeper walks around, portioning out the meagre food to the emaciated, sad-eyed elephants and lions. Some schools have closed their doors; others have been converted into homes for the aged. There are families that can’t take care of their elders so they put them there, where amongst the plants and wooden benches, they spend their days, sallow and slow, emptied of thoughts and memory. Because more than half of the population is elderly, the young people can’t provide for them. In fact, the state doesn’t take care of its senior sons and daughters, nor has it taken any measures to safeguard their welfare; pensions take more than twenty-five years to be granted and hospitals have closed their doors because the state doesn’t have money available for medicines, and so the young people are left to take care of the old who, though they don’t produce, still indeed consume. But the young are very tired. In order to support the old, they have to work all day, and that’s very hard for them to do in a country where there are no jobs. The only way to find a job is to be the protegé of a rich or powerful older person. In fact, all important positions in the hierarchy are monopolized by older men who, afraid of the future, the revolution, death, change, cling to the past which becomes increasingly onerous, as if it were their only salvation, and they resist any novelty, suspicious of the young people, whom they neither understand nor love, and they become more hostile towards them. Old people are a lot of work. Not only do they make it hard to walk in the streets, but they also they spend all day looking around, prying, snooping, here and there, eager to obtain the million promised by the state as a reward for information about unconstitutional activities. They, who have never seen a million in their lives, don’t give up on the possibility of getting it before they die, like with the lottery or betting on horse races, only this new sport promoted by the state turns people into enemies, one against the other. Every day, old people fight in the street, trying to squeeze information from one another, charging like bulls at one another in pursuit of intelligence, making attempts at bribery and trekking to churches, all this to get the million. This pastime has an additional advantage for the state: since old people are so busy all day trying to denounce —— 7 —— ...