Fogwill: an introduction

Fogwill: An Introduction

This paper is a study of two novels and one short story by the Argentine author Fogwill. To call him simply an author does not convey his varied and impressive background, a background that is directly relevant to his writing. The most obvious link between his fiction and his various other jobs in more corporate sectors is his sensitivity to marketing. Rodolfo Enrique, before he became just “Fogwill” (“Yo quería ocupar un lugar tipo Sócrates o Hegel. ¿Quién dice Guillermo Federico Hegel?”[1]), spent a good portion of his life doing publicity and advertisements for corporations; traces of this past come through in much of his work. In the author’s own words:

Estudié medicina, letras, filosofía, matemáticas, canto, música, francés, inglés, alemán, rudimentos de griego y latín, y olvidé casi todo. Enseñé metodología, estadística, teorías de la comunicación, teorías de la ideología y sociología: no aprendí casi nada. Fui publicitario, investigador de mercados, redactor, empresario, especulador de bolsa, terrorista y estafador—según advierte en mi prontuario la Policía Federal--, columnista especializado en muchísimos medios, profesor universitario y consultor de empresas. Con frecuencia imagino que soy una mujer, pero estas fantasías pronto se diluyen o desembocan en una vulgar escena de lesbianismo sádico y desazón.[2]

He has had quite a career, to say the least. This passage also highlights his abrupt, macho style and his tendency always to choose the more vulgar path. His intimate knowledge of the economic sides of both the military dictatorship and the post-dictatorial, neo-liberal functioning of Argentine society puts him in the unique position of being able to truly represent globalization.

The sum of Fogwill’s many influences yields a new twist on realism. His novels and stories, especially the three I will study in depth, distance themselves from any notion of the fantastic. In turn, they concentrate on contemporary events in Argentina, and the gigantic shadow cast by the military dictatorship over all aspects of life. His links to the present lead him to attach importance to the dates and timing of his publications. He wrote Los Pichiciegos, for instance, in seven days during the war of the Malvinas. Of his own style, he says: “¿Por qué mentir? Escribo mal—lo he reconocido—pero rápido.”[3] While the latter might be true, the first is not the case, although ever since Roberto Arlt, “escribir mal” has not necessarily been an attack on an Argentine writer.

The first text I will study is the novel Los pichiciegos. The events in the novel take place during the war in the Malvinas [Falkland Islands]. Then I will look at two other texts that deal with Argentines abroad during the years of the dictatorship. Fogwill wrote the short story “Muchacha Punk” under the military regime, while the novel La experiencia sensible was published in 2000. Together, these three texts will give us a vision of Argentina during the dictatorship and an approximation of what was to follow.

Underground: the War and the Economy

The plot of Los pichiciegos is simple and straightforward: a group of Argentinean deserters in the Malvinas War form an underground trading colony. Survival is the one and only value, which leads them to trade with the British, to spy against Argentina and generally to create an ideal free-market underground (literally) economy. The value of the text comes with Fogwill’s near prophetic visions of the truth about the war and post-dictatorial Argentina. Fogwill wrote the story between the eleventh and the seventeenth of June 1982, in the middle of the war and before any news of the wounded Argentine soldiers had reached the mainland. Obviously the text could not be published during the dictatorship, but the manuscript did circulate in Brazil soon after its completion. It was only in May of 1994 that Editorial Sudamericana officially published the text.

The war was a momentous event in Argentina. Originally conceived as a way for the military to divert attention from the 30,000 desaparecidos and give the population a nationalist rallying point, the War turned out to be a gigantic fiasco that began the eventual fall of military rule and the transition to democracy. The military-controlled press published falsified reports of Argentina’s success against the British, but when the wounded soldiers began to return, the population awoke to the fact that not only had they been lied to about the War, but they had been living in a web of lies since 1976. Fogwill, like many others, saw through the institutional lie; his text is an approximation of what was really happening in the Islas Malvinas. Beyond creating a realistic picture of the present, the text anticipates post-dictatorial Argentina. The underground economy of the pichis (the word comes from a regional Argentine slang word for ‘mole,’ as discussed in the text; ciego means ‘blind’) approximates the capitalist free-for-all that would follow the Latin American dictatorships, while the form of the story looks forward to the testimonios that were so important in the reclaiming of collective memory.

The text is not just an allegory. Fogwill concentrates on a hyper-realistic portrayal of this particular war, and the economics of the pichis do not simply stand for what was happening on the mainland. That is not to say a purely allegorical reading would be inappropriate. The geographic location of the Pichería, the pichis’ underground lair, and its spatial relationship to the actual fighting are of primary importance to the text, and any such allegorical reading runs the risk of losing these important details. As long as the reader keeps the immediate and allegorical levels in mind, none of the subtleties of the text will be lost. The values of the Pichería must be understood as the values that were emerging at the tail end of the military’s opening up of Argentina to foreign investment. The governing principle of the Pichería is survival. Upon arriving, each new pichi goes through an initiation where this principle is stressed:

--¿Ustedes son boludos?

--¡Sí señor!

--¡No! Ustedes no son boludos, ustedes son vivos.[4]

In place of the traditional drill sergeant ‘you are scum’ reception, the leaders scream at the new pichis that they are alive. This is all that matters. To stay alive, the pichis must get food, water, fuel, clothes and other provision. This leads to a purely economic conception of the surrounding war. A dead body or a shipwreck represents material goods for the lair. The savage capitalism which the pichis practice leads them to value those things that will aid their survival above all else. Money has no value, food and fuel are of primary importance.[5] The goal is to live. Death is a given circumstance; the absurdity of war arises from the illogical systems it creates. A pichi reflects: “Un cohete explotó a un jeep: cuentan que cada uno de esos cohetes británicos les cuesta a ellos treinta veces más caro que los mejores jeeps británicos.”[6] For the pichis, sides are immaterial and nationalism is just a shadow of a memory. The war to them is “la idea de que en algún lugar muy lejos algunos estarían bombardeando mucho a otros.”[7] They do not take sides. The pichis know that they will be shot by their countrymen as deserters and that the British with whom they trade could turn them in at any moment.

This is how Fogwill presents the war during its height. The British are powerful, the Argentines are surrendering. The soldiers speculate about what is occurring around them, but they also receive conflicting reports on the radio. The stations from Argentina tell them that they are winning while the pichis watch the British test new weapons for future wars on unknowing groups of the surrendered. The misinformation is a realistic portrayal of the war, as well as a representation of what was happening on the mainland. That is to say, although the military launched a similar public relations campaign on the civilians, the fact that the soldiers are lied to does not function only as an allegorical representation of the propaganda back on the mainland. The economic calculations that the soldiers make do not stand allegorically for the growing neo-liberal, value-the-market-above-all-else sentiment that was growing in Argentina. They stand for the actual reality of the Pichería. In both the civilian and the military realms, the thinking was analogous. When the pichis doubt the logistics of the flights of death, it is an economical and logistical critique that they make:

--Yo sentí que los tiraban al río desde aviones...

--Yo también había oído decir que los largaban al río desde los aviones, desde doce mil metros, pegás el agua y te convertís en un juguito espeso que no flota y se va con la corriente del fondo—indicó el Ingeniero.

--Pero de aviones no puede ser: por más locos que sean, ¿cómo van a remontar un avión, tomarse ese trabajo?—dijo Rubione--. Calculá: cien tipos por avión podrás tirar: son cien viajes. ¡Un cagadero de guita![8]

The same applies for the general population: the dictators preached a free-market logic that would make the ‘flights of death’ unthinkable, but they enacted and enforced that logic upon the nation doing the very things that would have seemed unfeasible in a modern, free-market society. The free market is good for all, they are told, so the moral issue does not even enter the calculation. The benevolent forces of the market simply could not permit such a blatant misdirection of life and resources. It could not have happened because it is not economically feasible, and economic feasibility rules.

The form of Los pichiciegos is a bit more elusive than the story line. The text rarely, if ever, strays from its war-based realism. As Beatriz Sarlo states, “cuando las cosas dicen su verdad, materializan el recuerdo...Para hablar de la guerra no hay términos generales: o se sabe o no se sabe lo que hace la guerra con los cuerpos.”[9] The origin of this realism is the true question. The text begins as a third-person narrative in the past; the narrator is omniscient and the dialogue reproduced faithfully. After the first few chapters, an ‘I’ pops up, and there are mentions of note-taking and recording. The second to last chapter of the first part ends with this quotation: “—Vos anotalo que para eso servís. Anotá, pensá bien, después sacá tus conclusiones—me dijo. Y yo seguí anotando.”[10] The ‘I’ exists without referent. The reader cannot place the subject nor the time of this utterance. Could somebody in the pichis’ lair be taking notes? Later it becomes clear that someone is interviewing either one or all of the pichis to assemble the tale. These moments of first-person intervention, or later in the text, when it is admitted that we are hearing a replayed tape, exist in the text as slippages. As the story develops, these interventions become more and more frequent, until it becomes clear that the story has been put together from confessions, and that Fogwill himself has been transcribing the interviews into the third person narration. Fogwill appears not by name, but one of the interviewees comments upon an earlier collection of Fogwill’s stories, Música japonesa.[11] When the reader finishes the story, he or she realizes that only one pichi has survived, and therefore that he must be the one telling the story to Fogwill. Thus the entire text has been a confession or testimonio that the character/author Fogwill has transcribed into a story. The confession does not begin with the usual “I am so-and-so, this is my story;” it is, in fact, masked. Here again is another astounding example of Fogwill’s foresight. The testimonio is the genre that flourishes in Latin America after the era of the dictatorships. The most well know of these texts is I, Rigoberta Menchú, and the most significant to Argentina are Rodolfo Walsh’s Operación masacre and Verbitsky’s El vuelo. Testimonio has been widely debated, and it is not my current interest to enter that debate.[12] Los pichiciegos is not a testimonial in any rigid sense, but it is significant that Fogwill used an approximation of that form in the earliest Argentinean attempt to treat the War and the dictatorship.

One may attribute the hidden ‘I’ in the text to a more Borges-inspired meta-textual playfulness, but that does not detract from the amazing depth of anticipatory vision that Los pichiciegos presents. Fogwill estimated the truth of the War and of the dictatorship. While governmental control of information was at its height, he wrote a vision of Argentina after the dictatorship that turned out more or less valid, and he did all of this in a disguised form of what was to be the style of choice for the ‘recuperation of memory’ that so many American writers faced.

Traveling Towards Prophecy: Porteños Abroad

The Malvinas War and, in a broader sense, the dictatorship in Argentina during the 1970s and 1980s, is the thread that runs across a large part of Fogwill’s work. And, taking into account that he wrote Los pichiciegos during the war and before any of the wounded had begun to return, we can safely say that prophecy lies close to his project. As Martín Kohan says in his article “La experiencia sensible de Fogwill: el futuro de los años setenta,”[13] Fogwill revisits the seventies, in the case of La experiencia sensible in 2001, to see a prefiguration of tomorrow in yesterday. Los pichiciegos, beyond its masked prediction of defeat, the “flights of death” and systematic cover-ups,[14] can be read as a portent of the neo-liberal capitalist ‘new order’ of the world. Fogwill sees the truth behind of El Proceso (a euphemism for the dictatorship from 1976 to 1984): the opening up of the Argentine national economy to European and North American countries, the use of commerce and exchange as the dominant tropes of all social interaction and the importance of institutional control over all aspects of life.

We can see another prophetic connection in Fogwill’s work: the use of Argentine nationals traveling abroad to show his idea of space in the present time. His short story “Muchacha Punk” presents a traveler in London who is engulfed by a crisis of identity. Fogwill wrote the story in 1979; the references to the dictatorship are subtle and even in code, but the fact of a porteño traveling and spending his “sweet dollars”[15] situates the protagonist as an immediate beneficiary of the Process (and specifically not as an exile). The foreign space, then, is presented as the location of identity confusion as much for the narrator as for his “muchacha punk.” In La experiencia sensible, Fogwill returns to the theme of a porteño abroad during the dictatorship, but this time it is a family who travels, and they go to Las Vegas. In this story, Fogwill uses chance as the definitive trope to create the space. Together, both texts form a vision of the present. We will first examine the crisis of identity and nationality in “Muchacha Punk,” and then the relationship between consumption and desire in La experiencia sensible. To close this section, we will see how La experiencia sensible functions at once as a confirmation and a corrective revision of the prophecy that Fogwill proposes in “Muchacha Punk.”

A Crisis of Nationality

In “Muchacha Punk” all identity finds itself in crisis. The state of the narrator as the narrator of his travels, his situation as a porteño abroad...nothing escapes the author’s questioning. Travel literature occupies a singular space within literature: by definition it breaks the pact of fiction that a non-identity be established between the author and the narrator. It is subjectivity that is central in travel literature: there is an identity precisely between the one who sees and the one who narrates. Fogwill’s story is clearly the story of a traveler—the narrator finds himself abroad, he interacts with the ‘natives’—but the author puts these very rules of the genre into doubt. The reader cannot situate the short story in the realm of the chronicle, nor in that of ethnography; it has marks of both. What begins as a chronicle converts itself into an ethnography of Punks, but below all of this lies something else. The narrator uses his supposed ethnography of the Punk to develop an auto-ethnography. This action conflicts with his status as a travel narrator, and the subject in crisis attempts to de-stabilize his role as the traveling narrator. He punctuates his story with revelations of the deceptions of both the reader and the narrator: “Primera decepción del lector: en este relato yo soy yo”;[16] “Tercera decepción del narrador: mi Muchacha Punk era tan limpia como cualquier chitrula de Flores o de Belgrano”[17]; “Tercera decepción del lector: Yo jamás me acosté con una muchacha punk.”[18] The narrator has a heightened consciousness of his narrative operation; he continuously calls attention to himself as narrator (and not as character), puts in doubt all that he says and in general establishes a relationship with the reader that pertains more to the world of fiction than to travel literature. His self-questioning expands itself to reach, beyond his narratorial status, his Argentiness. But before we arrive to that line of questioning, or on the way there, we must pass the theme of an Argentine (third-world) poet in the home of the Renaissance.

The poet (the narrator-author) finds in London a poetic symbol par excellence, one that also symbolizes the poor South American poetic inheritance: the nightingale. This is the grand opportunity for an author from the Global South to see, to understand the nightingale...Coleridge, Keats, tradition, the encounter of a marginal with the great bird. But what is the narrator’s response? He puns on Borges’s “El ruiseñor de Keats”: “Jamás vi un ruiseñor.”[19] His first encounter is with a dead bird, and the nightingale’s song, so famous throughout literature yet heard so few times by porteños, is sung by her, the Muchacha Punk. Her voice is the “verbal melody,” “la voz deliciosa y tímbrica.”[20] The ‘grand tour’ of the narrator does not reunite him with that poetic symbol, but rather with another, European and postmodern: the Punk.

When faced with these punks, the narrator’s Argentineness converts itself into an aversion. In fact, his Argentineness is an aversion throughout the story, which forms a contradiction with the space that he creates. In a cafe that could not be more inter/trans/post-national (an idea that we will develop soon), he tries to hide his roots. The cafe is of Spanish ownership in a building that used to house a Romanian tourist office where our very narrator had faxed some documents to Italian clients. There he orders Chianti (possibly in honor of his clients) and attempts to pass as a traveler from the Commonwealth, “tal vez un malvinero.”[21] Any nationality besides Argentine, he thinks as he studies the cafe and considers the possibilities of global conformity. Conformity with the exclusion of Buenos Aires:

El mozo me había mirado mal, tal vez porque me descubrió estudiando sus movimientos, perplejo a causa de la semejanza que puede postularse en un relato entre un mozo español de pizzería inglesa, y cualquier otro mozo español de pizzería de París, o de Rosario. He elegido Rosario para no citar tanto a Buenos Aires. Querido.[22]

Obviously, upon mentioning Buenos Aires, he fails in his goal not to cite it. But why does this tension even exist? Why exclude the porteño from all things globalized? And if the aversion is so great that he must deny his citizenship and country, why does he insist on telling the story in Spanish? He concerns himself with language and translation; the first paragraph serves, apart from the immediate unveiling of any possibility of “deception,” to translate the Britannic terms ‘make love’ (hacer el amor) and ‘sleep together’ (acostarse juntos). The narrator informs the reader that he will retell in Spanish a conversation that he had in English. The reader must ask himself why the narrator chooses Spanish, and furthermore, what is, apart from a Julio Cortázar book on the bedside table (translated into English) of the punk’s sister, particularly Argentine about this story. The answer is precisely the identity crisis. The confusion in the translation of British slang, the narrator’s supposed pan-South American origin (“Brasil y Argentina –dije, para ahorrarles una agobiante explicación que llenaría el relato de lugares comunes”[23]), it all serves to augment the crisis. Another interesting point: the non-places, which will play an important role in La experiencia sensible, appear here, but it is an interesting and uncommon thread that binds them together: the “piojosos malolientes sucios hijos de perra”[24] that occupy those non-places. The narrator’s rant against the employs of these non-places could be a precursor to the anti-globalization rants of the present.

The punks, with their mix of total ignorance and cursory knowledge of the Latin American dictatorships, reflect the international imaginary of Argentina. They ask the narrator if he is English immediately after he told them of his South American origin, while at the same time they know something of the Process that motivates the narrator to act against “la horrible imagen de mi patria que desde hace un tiempo inculcan a los jóvenes europeos.”[25] There exists a link between the aristocratic Muchacha Punk and the Argentine traveler during the 1970s. The crash between the “Imperial zone” and the Punk zone at the Muchacha’s house complements the narrator who travels with the pound Sterling he “había comprado tan barato en Buenos Aires.”[26] Both are displaced upon first glance. The Muchacha Punk’s family is, without a doubt, a family of the Empire: spies, linked with oil, India, Africa...they could be the very vanguard of the fight against the Sex Pistols. And he cannot deny that the dictatorship is what has permitted him to travel. Thus, so as to evade an uncomfortable political conversation that would showcase the ambiguous and contradictory state of both parties, the narrator kisses the girl. But his sexuality is still hopelessly connected to the dictatorship. He says: “desde marzo de 1976 no he vuelto a hacer el amor con otras personas.”[27]

Finally, in the London of so much diversity and immigration, the narrator realizes the impossibility of the continued negation of his origin. When he tells the Muchacha Punk that he is indeed from Argentina, it earns him a veiled censure and a song and dance number from Evita. The narrator’s inability to comfortably install himself in the Muchacha Punk’s living room, surrounded by half a dozen stinky, drugged, international punks, can be read as another one of Fogwill’s prophecies. This one speaks to the tension between the national self-conception (lo argentino) and the new order of late capitalism developing in Argentina during the dictatorship that will create an ambiguous space between the post-national, the trans-national, the international and the national. Where does one locate subjectivity in this new space? The answer is not the cosmopolitanism of the traveler, even less a porteño traveling during the dictatorship. How will this space be? We look to La experiencia sensible for possible answers.

Desire, Consumption and the Space-Chance Continuum

Figure 1: Guillermo Kuitca, Belt Conveyors with Unclaimed Luggage, 2000.

In La experiencia sensible, Fogwill is interested in the construction of an urban space. The space that he constructs is very particular. In the hotel-casinos of Las Vegas, the public space of social interaction is converted into the space where desire and consumption meet. In this location the traditional space-time continuum of a meeting place is transformed into a space-chance continuum. In other words, chance takes the role of time in this world. Because of this change, the role of the citizen transforms as well, and those who before were subjects now find themselves as objects of desire or witnesses to consumption.

Fogwill presents this new urban space to the reader with a movement through three different places. The story begins in the Miami airport, where Fogwill presents the exemplary non-place of post-modernity. From Miami, the Romano family moves to the Las Vegas airport. This space functions as a transition between the familiar non-place of an airport and the world of the casino-hotel Paradise, where the Romano family will stay. The airport itself has the slot machines that are the trope of the city converted into game, and the reader notices a marked change in the Romano family from the second they step off the plane. Mrs. Romano enters a “trance hipnótico que le empujaba al shopping”[28] and Mr. Romano goes directly to the minicasino in the central hall. The wife stands fascinated before all of the clothes, pronouncing the brand names, as the husband “se dispuso a perder”[29] in the casino. He doesn’t understand the rules of the slot machines, but he wins anyway, only to try to loose all his winnings in the next instant, as if he wanted to “librarse de las monedas.”[30] His desire to loose, or to be seen spending, creates a scene in the airport. He is not content to play on just one machine, so, to reduce the time between his desire to play and the results of the gamble, he begins to play on every available machine. A small crowd gathers to watch the spectacle of a crazy man running to and from machines to loose his winnings in the quickest possible fashion; they function as witnesses to his expenditures, and that is the extent of their social interactions. But the airport still maintains traces of a traditional non-place. The family says that it “parecía no terminar nunca”[31] and they perceived “la atmósfera argentina de ese local.”[32] This is the phenomenon of the non-place: a place that appears at once every place and an endless, anonymous place. The Argentinean atmosphere is not in reality that, but rather a sense of familiarity and defamiliarization shared by all travelers in the location of a non-place.

From the airport, the family goes to the Paradise, the hotel-casino in the city of Las Vegas. From this point on, all action occurs in the space-chance continuum. In order to understand this continuum, we must look at how desire and consumption converge in the Paradise. To begin, in Las Vegas, one fulfills one’s desire by consuming the desired object, for all desire is comodified. In the space of the hotel-casino, the time that separates the initial desire and the consumption of that desired object tends towards zero; chance replaces time in the equation. A coin enters the slot machine and the gambler already knows the result. This creates a physics of consumption whose fundamental particle is chance. The logic of the space-chance continuum is a circular logic that incorporates its foundation. Chance enters the desire-consumption relationship as a desired object: the need for chance mixes with the desire for the object, and the gambler consumes the chance itself. Chance has the same meaning as the vulgar desire of Verónica, the Romero family babysitter, to “suck off” the black hotel-casino employee. Fogwill establishes a linkage between “algo misterioso en el ámbito de los juegos de azar”[33] and “la excitante sensación de ser puta”[34] that Mrs. Romano feels. This linkage functions as an introduction to the fax machine in the story. In the fax, the reader finds a traditional object of desire (in the technology-communications-business sense) that has been sexualized. Mr. Romano passes his days thinking of the fax, until even his most erotic moments are spent dreaming of it. To get the fax, he doesn’t even need to leave the space-chance continuum. He says that there are better prices in the city, but “no valía la pena alejarse del hotel.”[35] The hotel-casino is the space, it is almost as if the city didn’t even exist. The Paradise has perfected the system of social interaction to create ‘peace.’ It has constructed a universe of chance separated from the outside world, to the point that Mr. Romano denies his will to look for the better offer outside, even though it was his search for a better deal that brought him to Las Vegas in the first place. Fogwill says: “Es la ciudad la que presta su nombre—la ilusión de estar en un espacio geográfico—a los que decidieron estar de paso por sus hotels.”[36] The illusion of Las Vegas also brings the myth of a city founded by mafiosos, a myth that the hotel-casinos perpetuate (in its “savagely thematic”[37] way, in a vacant sense, the mafia without risk or death) with the “apellidos polacos, italianos, colombianos y mejicanos”[38] of the employees.

Mr. Romano tells us that the coins are the “las claves que necesitarían dominar pronto, para no cometer errores en el juego y las propinas.”[39] In the continuum, the material of social interaction is the coin. As Beatriz Sarlo says in her article “Fogwill, la experiencia sensible,” “la moneda es sólo un medio para cuantificar el lucro, no para medir el gasto.”[40] The Romanos always compare their expenses in Las Vegas with what they would have been spending if they had gone on vacation, as they normally do, in Punta del Este. But the quantity of money the family saves serves as motivation to spend more, to take greater monetary risks, to play until nothing remains. Money is nothing and everything at once. The important thing is to spend as if the price didn’t matter, to show the spending. One thousand two hundred a week is five cents, the price of a bottle of Pommery (which he found out only after signing the receipt) is half of the price in Argentina, fifty dollars for a tarot card reading is nothing... But let’s stop to ponder the tarot card reader. This is an example of an empty act in the land of the casino-hotel: an employee of the Paradise will read the future of a gambler. To give any validity to the ‘chance’ (or prophecy) of the tarot cards is a mistake. The fortuneteller creates false hope so that the gamblers continue playing, nothing more. This empty act has much in common with the slot machines. As they say, the most generous slot machines (the ‘loose’ machines) have a payback percentage of 98%. In other words, for every dollar that enters the machine, the house guarantees the return of 98 cents.

In the space-chance continuum, the substitution of chance for time does not allow for a strong connection with the past. The city concentrates itself in the now of the games of chance, and because of this the ‘flow of stories’ so crucial to the seedy Las Vegas of old has stopped. Notwithstanding, a security guard who meets the babysitter tells her two stories, but it surprises him that she even wants to hear them. His stories deal with the exit, or rather the possibilities of exiting the continuum. He describes the tonomoshi as a prohibited act in the Paradise that has its antecedents in the 14^th century. Its manifestation in the second half of the twentieth century depends upon the fact that Las Vegas “se ha convertido en el punto de encuentro entre ciudadanos japoneses...que se diseminaron por el mundo con las grandes oleadas migratorias de la primera mitad del siglo XX.”[41] The ethnography he tells is interesting, but of greater significance is the suicide of the Japanese men who don’t ‘win’ in the sense of the practice. Those who bet it all, including their lives, are a threat to the community because the Japanese cadavers, a “subproducto de la industria hotelera”[42] become a bother that costs the city money. The case of the “Grandes Terminados” works in a different way: they do not voluntarily enter the ‘game’ when they receive an offer of salvation. They are those who have fallen into bad favor with the world of organized crime. During their wait for a mission that will win them back their lives, they live as VIP guests in the hotels without any contact to the outside world. In a round of cards, the Grandes Terminados choose cards by chance that will assign them their missions. They may spend months in the hotel awaiting orders, but only the successful fulfillment of the given mission will save them. Upon first glance, the prohibition of these acts appears an act of self-defense by the hotel-casinos against the practice of strange and dangerous rituals on one hand, and a defense against the exit of the betting system on a more symbolic level, on the other. But the two practices, although prohibited in the hotel-casinos, are not exits from the realm of chance, but rather the culmination of this order of life, even more so in the case of the Grandes Terminados, who serve as an elaborate pun on Borges’s “The Lottery of Babylon.” The image of one of these gentlemen waiting in a hotel-casino is the highest realization of the space-chance continuum. Time does not exist for him, he remains in limbo, a coin perpetually about to enter the slot machine, his ‘numbered days’ converted into the chance of a game of cards.

For the Romano family, the space of the Paradise brings a peace to family life never before experienced. Mr. Romano says: “Esa ciudad le brindaba la oportunidad de habitar un mismo espacio y un mismo tiempo con toda su comitiva.”[43] The unity of family space and time comes from gaming and consumption:

Allí, los mismos dispositivos que el hotel destina a concentrar la atención en el juego y el consumo confluían en mantener a los Romano y su comitiva en una misma cápsula espacio-temporal: la realización del sueño de la mítica unidad familiar perdida para siempre.[44]

Mr. Romano says that in other vacations, the family has shared space, but it has never shared time. But when time disappears and chance replaces it, when the space joins desire with consumption without a temporal intermediary, the family exists in peace. His wife describes the peace as such: “a nadie le importa nada de vos... Entonces, claro... ¡Aquí vivís en paz!”