“It remains to be seen whether this is due to the quality of the words themselves or the noise that the crowd makes when it gets together, which prevents one from hearing,” responded Mister Kraus.
But the chronicles continued even after the elections.
The Day after the Elections
1
“Well, did you win?!”
“Yes, I won.”
“So, you are therefore the Boss.”
“From this moment onward, exactly: the Boss. And you, what do you do?”
“I eliminate redundancies.”
“Very well.”
“For example, if there were two Bosses I would eliminate one. It’s part of my job description. I even have a dagger.”
“Just as well the result wasn’t a tie.”
“That was lucky! But look, sometimes even when there is only one Boss …”
“And do you work alone?”
“Nobody likes to work alone. In truth, I work with another official who tries to ensure that everything is always explained clearly.”
“Wonderful.”
“These joint efforts result in a balance between a little and a lot. Too many explanations and too few explanations. I don’t know if you are following my drift?”
“I am, and it seems to be sensible.”
“Our work method is as follows: my colleague advances first and explains too much, then I appear and I say: it was unnecessary for my colleague to have explained this, this, and this. That and that and that were excessive.”
“Very well. It’s a strategy.”
2
“I apologize for asking again, but Boss, what is your name?”
“Just call me Boss.”
“With a B?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the same name as the last Boss.”
“We are all from the same country. Hence the coincidence.”
“Hence the B.”
“Exactly.”
“In my opinion, it’s very wise. It prevents mistakes with names.”
“That’s one of the advantages.”
“However, there is the question of the small b or the big B. We have one Boss with a big B, as of yesterday: Your Excellency. Bosses with a small b, we have one for every ten square meters.”
“Is that a lot?”
“This pavilion alone has three hundred square meters, so Boss, with a big B, you can do the math and see how many bosses we have with a small b.”
“If we have a boss with a small b for every ten square meters, in three hundred square meters we have …”
“We have …?”
“Thirty bosses with a small b!”
“Exactly, thirty. Isn’t that a crazy number?”
“No: three hundred divided by ten: thirty. What craziness are you talking about?”
“I was talking of the underlying concept. Look, even I, who obey almost everybody, am the boss, with a small b, of two or three wretches. Only the last one on the list is not a boss.”
“It seems unfair.”
“So, we have a new Boss?!”
It was Mister Henri, already in a conversational state par excellence.
Without slowing his pace, Mister Kraus merely responded, “At first glance, at first glance!”
The Return
1
The Assistants were radiant: it had already been weeks since they had assisted anyone, but now all that desire to Assist could once again be applied.
Many of them had tried during the period when the Boss had been absent, but it was as though the objects of their assistance seemed to flee from them. Some, the astute ones, did actually flee. It was quite visible: they ran; they placed one foot after the other and disappeared from sight: it was a fact, those who needed their services fled when the Assistants approached them. Elderly individuals, who had difficulties understanding and moving, even they, with a sudden and surprising burst of vitality, fled. They escaped, they dived into narrow dark alleys — little old men and little old ladies, that’s who we are talking about — and, suddenly, they disappeared, nobody saw them again. And the Assistants had no work to do. They only wanted to assist.
Now this entire period had come to an end. The Boss was back!
Many of the Assistants were so happy that they even underwent profound physiological changes. Their hearts beat like only the hearts of wild men beat. In silence, one of the Assistants, feeling his heart beat to the rhythm of ancient manhunts, had even murmured to himself, “I don’t even seem to be a civilized man!” He was moved.
The Boss was back; the Boss, the Boss, the Boss was back!
2
“Things could have progressed in my absence, but the question is: What is progress? And why are there such preconceived notions about going back, about delaying, about hesitating?”
“Exactly, Boss.”
Little was known about the city, but that, yes, it was a fact: the Assistants’ hearts now beat better! With more intelligence, one could almost say, had the heart not been an organ that specialized in other matters.
But there was work to be done.
“Boss, we have here a series of reports that have been held up and a series of real things that are progressing! Boss, you have to deal with this!”
“I have never seen anything like this,” added the other Assistant.
“When I left, things were proceeding in another direction,” said the Boss.
“Not just in another direction …,” added the first Assistant.
“They were proceeding in precisely the opposite direction!”
“Exactly,” agreed the second Assistant, “real things were held up and it was the reports that were moving.”
“Very well,” said the Boss, “there is no time to lose. We now have to proceed at great speed in the direction of the past.”
“That’s it, Boss.”
3
The Boss was back.
“There is, for example,” said an Assistant, “the question of the public works and the question of the demolitions.”
The Boss paused (how they had missed these pauses) and began, “I have reflected about this matter and come to the following conclusion: the essential thing is to not do the two things at the same time and in the same space.”
“How, Boss?”
“It seems to me,” said the Boss, “that the best thing is to knock down in one space and build up in another space. So as not to confuse things. In fact, I would like to say that the new concept that I will develop during my return is the concept of …”
“Of?”
“Of …” (the Boss was wont to raise his eyebrows a lot, like someone who has just formulated a riddle). “It’s the concept of building upward but downward! Isn’t it an exemplary idea? We knock down old buildings and we build new structures on top that will tumble down; and this because, in a certain way, things later always end up by falling down.”
“It’s almost a philosophical concept.”
“Yes, without doubt,” said the Boss who while resuming his office seemed to have the enthusiasm of a youngster, “it’s a concept that introduces the perception of time. Everything changes, my dear assistants, and everything that is erected, later falls. Thus, from today onward, we are going to be the first city that constructs with the lucidity of perceiving that everything is temporary—temporarium tudio—therefore: we will knock buildings down and we will build buildings on top to fall down.”