By Juan Pablo Plata.
The city had gone without power for the tenth time, because the energy transition was going badly in too many places around the planet. But for the purposes of this story, we will tell how things unfolded in Puntera.
Jacobo Silverado went to fill up his car with gasoline at the La Giralda station and found himself in a line that reminded him of Julio Cortázar’s short story “The South.” Everyone was standing outside their vehicles, chatting to kill time. One could sense that at any moment someone would say that diesel and both regular and premium gasoline would not arrive again for another eight days.
Jacobo endured the wait reading Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland without getting out of his vehicle, though he turned off the engine—for that was what these times were about: saving energy, gasoline, and money. It had always been that way, but things were becoming more extreme.
Many trades that had disappeared due to automation and mass production—and the importation of foreign inputs, especially from China—reappeared. People went back to making their own household goods: chairs, tables, recycled paper, clothes to wear. Soon everything that had been discarded and left unused suddenly became susceptible to a new purpose or useful for repairing some device.
Jacobo had once thought that one way to gauge a person’s wealth was by the sum of their imported objects or those of reputable brands. He had also gradually exhausted that idea upon seeing that wealth, now in these difficult times, could be better measured in natural resources: in the quantity of food, textiles, metals, rare earths, and land that someone had at hand.
Alicia Caldera had instilled in Jacobo all these countercurrent ideas, which now proved to be fearful warnings of what was already happening. Alicia had begged him to start saving organic seeds from as many foods and vegetables as possible. Later she had made him buy solar panels and many spare parts for them, so that the house would have electricity from that source. Other requests included water collectors and any tablets or filters for the collected water. Windmills, axes for firewood, and metal tools made up a very necessary set of objects, now that so many things were once again made one by one, and most of the time by a single human being.
The printing presses, with their stock phrases or pre-cast items made from repeated use, comprised a metallic arsenal for writing, making posters, signs, and even cheap advertising affixed, or rather, fixed, with cassava paste. Now that many things had returned to being made one by one, and in a handcrafted, not industrial, way. Montalvo Araz was devoid of joy when things went downhill; his wife had left him for good for Jacobo Silverado, and if he was still afloat it was thanks to squandering an entire collection of printed materials, antiques, and jewelry painstakingly accumulated by the past three generations of his paternal family. His only joy, his true joy, was selling a map by the geographer Amerigo Vespucci or a painting by Wiedmann, only to spend the money in no time.
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