The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [13]
Leonarda leaned in and whispered to me, “That guy’s the founder.”
I looked around. The crowd was in general substantially younger than the speaker. There was a pale woman with delicate features and hair dyed bright orange, a young slender man in a purple turtleneck.
“The pending question is how are we going to organize ourselves ?” Ernesto said. “At one point, we proposed that this group be something like a permanent assembly. But nobody wanted to do it, nobody wanted to take charge.”
A guy with protruding teeth spoke up. “It’s a problem of representation. Argentines don’t believe in any representative system. Our short history has shown us only the errors of democracy, not its benefits. We always vote for representatives who betray us. All representation for us is linked to evil. We know that sooner or later we’re going to get fucked over.”
“Yeah,” the young man with the hair in his eyes said, “which leads to a whole other definition of democracy. While in the United States, the concept of democracy arises from the American dream and calls into play such things as self-improvement, each person has the capacity to become better, in Argentina there’s no idea of improvement, you are what you are. What democracy means to an Argentine is that each person does what he or she wants.”
“Like in this group?” a voice piped up.
People laughed.
“In this group, nobody does anything!” Ernesto said. “That’s the problem. Look, right here, nobody takes out the trash.”
“But I think that’s also why this group works well. Buenos Aires is an individualistic city.” Milagros once again spoke up. “It’s skeptic and that’s part of its energy. Mercury in this sense is using the energies of the people of this city. There’s a strategy here, to have a place to meet, we don’t know how long it’s going to be here or who’s going to administer it, but we have a place. The agreement has to do with that.”
“But isn’t there a lot of energy lost that way? One of the keys of Mercury is to go toward the minimal effort,” Ernesto said.
The pale delicate woman with the bright orange hair spoke, tilting her head to the side. “We were talking about putting together a project W the other day, a kind of V.I.P. Mercury, for a limited number of people. The question was can we transform Mercury society? No, let’s not waste time. Instead of transforming the old society, let’s make a new one. Here, yes, the rules will be very clear, whoever doesn’t participate in projects with others during a determined time will be systematically left outside and the next candidate invited to join.”
“Yeah, okay, I agree with that plan,” Leonarda suddenly burst out. She spoke harshly, blushing, looking at the floor. Her sudden shyness surprised me. “But the issue is also how we participate. There’s something in democratic stupidity that fetishizes certain words, equality, horizontality, and everything else falls on the side of ‘bad.’ Mercury is a good scenario for demonstrating this, there’s always a kind of Mercurial police making sure that everything that’s done here is participative. What’s lacking is a more complex kind of thinking about the relationship between the individual and the group. What’s needed is that someone in some moment takes the reins and pulls the others along. That way something gets done, instead of discussing how to make a flyer for four years.”
There was an eruption of voices.
Leonarda leaned in and whispered to me, “C’mon, let’s get out of here.” She stood up and, ducking, snuck through the crowd. I followed.
We made it outside. Dusk. Long trails of eucalyptus leaves littered the streets. A small street dog trotted past.
“Sometimes those people drive me nuts,” Leonarda said.
“I thought it seemed interesting,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, it can be interesting. But I agree with the guy Ernesto, that it doesn’t work the way it should. People are lazy. I don’t like that at all.”
She put her bag down on the ground under a streetlamp and got out her makeup case. She pulled a feather boa out of