“Not even half the eye of a needle.”
“Nothing, nothing!”
“Enough!” yelled the Boss. “I can’t stand listening to you any more!”
“We’ll shut up, Boss.”
“I have an idea,” exclaimed the First Assistant, suddenly.
“Bravo!”
“This is my idea: Boss, have you ever been to this unpleasant, freezing, desolate, and from a certain point of view even disgusting place, which is nevertheless so promising?”
“Me? Of course not. Are you crazy?”
“Well, there it is!”
“What is there?!”
“We can inaugurate your presence in that place. It’s the first time the Boss is going there. Isn’t that extraordinary?”
“I’m beginning to like the idea. And it makes sense.”
“Nothing so important will ever happen in that place!”
“Don’t exaggerate,” murmured the Boss, while he almost drowned with contentment in his own chin.
“Perhaps one of us should inaugurate your presence in that place, Boss. What do you think?”
“I myself will inaugurate my presence in that place!!”
“It isn’t easy,” said the two Assistants in unison.
“To inaugurate and to be inaugurated at the same time.”
That was when, vigorously raising his chin toward the sky, the Boss responded, all at once, “I’m a man who likes to face difficulties head-on.”
And, in fact, he was.
2
“Boss, everything that occupies volume has already been inaugurated in this blessed land where we have ended up!”
Once again they were disheartened. They looked around them: everything had already been inaugurated.
Some things had even been inaugurated centuries ago.
“This castle …?”
“It’s prior to Your Excellency’s arrival.”
“If everything that occupies volume in this place has already been inaugurated,” said the Boss, “then we will have to think about things that don’t occupy volume!”
“I hadn’t thought of that, Boss.”
“Actually I had thought of that,” exclaimed the other Assistant, “but then I forgot.”
“Very well,” continued the Boss, ignoring the Assistants’ vigorous murmurs, “here’s an idea!”
“Where, Boss?!”
The Boss continued, “Here’s my idea: has today ever occurred before in this place?”
“Boss, you want to know if at any time before today, today existed?”
“In this place, I’m only referring to this place,” clarified the Boss.
“Never, Boss. It’s the first time that this day has dawned in this place.”
“There you have it!”
“What, Boss?”
“We can inaugurate this day in this place. I will inaugurate today.”
“It’s an impressive idea, Boss.”
“Instead of inaugurating spaces, we can inaugurate time. Now that is undoubtedly an important idea.”
The Boss paused. Silence reigned. He began again: “However, to only do one inauguration — that of today — doesn’t seem very substantial. How long are we scheduled to stay in this place, dear Assistants?”
“According to the program, we’re scheduled to stay here for two hours.”
“Two hours? How many quarters of an hour does that give us?”
“Eight, Boss. Four quarters of an hour during the first hour, plus four during the second hour. Eight in all.”
“Very well, we’re not going to inaugurate today, but instead the quarters of an hour. Every fifteen minutes we will inaugurate the next fifteen minutes. Eight inaugurations.”
The two Assistants were dumbfounded.
“So that was what you had in mind when you mentioned the possibility of inaugurating things which did not have volume, which did not occupy space.”
“Essentially, to inaugurate things that are not visible,” clarified the Boss.
“Exactly.”
“Inaugurating the invisible! Oh, Boss, what an idea!!!”
3
“Essentially, the idea is to transmit this message: Everything that cannot be seen, we’re the ones who did it.”
“Excellent, that’s exactly it.”
“Because there are always contestations about what can be seen: I’m the one who did this, this was by him, et cetera, et cetera. You know how people are.”
“People …”
“This way we can relax. Without being subject to criticism.”
“Absolutely.”
“We can say: look around you, look carefully around you: whatever you don’t see, we’re the ones who did it!!”
“Plus, we can even say: everything that cannot be seen didn’t exist before us.”
“That is excellent.”
“Great slogan.”
“If there are phrases that are capable of capturing the imagination of a crowd in a single stroke, this is one of them.”
“Excellent, excellent!”
“But we should establish a limit,” said one of the Assistants.
“A limit, how?”
“We should say something like: everything that is around us in an area of 150 square kilometers and cannot be seen, was made by us; before us it didn’t exist.”
“If we don’t establish limits, we could point to things outside our country.”
“And so?”
“So, people could get suspicious. How can we manage to do things — even if invisible — outside our country? For example, in a neighboring country?”
“You’re right.”
“Plus: if we say that whatever cannot be seen on the other side of the frontier was made by us, we risk being sued. It’s a juridical question.”
“You’re right.”
“We’ve done everything that can’t be seen, but only within our borders. Is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“Seems fine to me.”
“On that side, men following the Boss’s orders fired shots toward the slower birds,” said Mister Kraus.
On this side, the Boss picked up one or two injured birds and, in front of everyone, tried to heal them, dedicating himself passionately, day after day, exclusively to their recovery. Saving at least one of the birds had become an obsession.
A naïve man might think that it would have been easier not to have given orders to shoot at the birds in the first place. However, the process would be repeated the following year.
The Map
1
They had (once again) given the Boss a map of the country — it was already the fifth or sixth one. He had lost the earlier ones, or had written key words for his speeches on top of them, or had blown his nose in them, or had put them under a bottle of wine so as not to stain the table; in short: the Boss was absentminded.
However, he was also quite careful, in a certain way. For example: he would clean all the liquids and stains — wine and other substances — only with the part of the map that depicted the interior regions of the country — the most arid zone.
A more educated Assistant had tried, several months ago, to explain to the Boss that the map was merely a representation.
However, the Boss didn’t understand. He paid no attention to technical pretentiousness. “I don’t want to hear about theories,” he would say.
In truth, the Boss had an intellectual problem: he could not distinguish reality from the representation of reality.