protect you from thieves, rapists and murderers, that will be your freedom, and may you enjoy it. You may mistakenly imagine that, guided by your free will and by your every whim, you will be able to organize and defend your lives better than we did using the old methods and the old laws. A very grave mistake on your part. Sooner or later, you will be obliged to find leaders to govern you, if they do not irrupt like beasts out of the inevitable chaos into which you will fall and impose their own laws upon you. Then you will realize the tragic nature of your self- deception. Perhaps you will rebel as you did in the days of authoritarian rule, as you did in the grim days of dictatorship, but do not delude yourselves, you will be put down with equal violence, and you will not be called upon to vote because there will be no elections, or if there are, they will not be free, open and honest like the elections you scorned, and so it will be until the day when the armed forces who, along with myself and the national government, today decided to abandon you to your chosen fate, are obliged to return to liberate you from the monsters you yourselves have engendered. All your suffering will have been futile, all your stubbornness in vain, and then you will understand, too late, that rights only exist fully in the words in which they are expressed and on the piece of paper on which they are recorded, whether in the form of a constitution, a law or a regulation, you will understand and, one hopes, be convinced, that their wrong or unthinking application will convulse the most firmly established society, you will understand, at last, that simple common sense tells us to take them as a mere symbol of what could be, but never as a possible, concrete reality. Casting a blank vote is your irrevocable right, and no one will ever deny you that right, but, just as we tell children not to play with matches, so we warn whole peoples of the dangers of playing with dynamite. I will close now. Take the severity of my warnings not as a threat, but as a cautery for the foul political suppuration that you have generated in your own breast and in which you are steeped. You will only see and hear from me again when you deserve the forgiveness which, despite all, we still wish to bestow on you, I, your president, the government which, in happier times, you elected, and those of our people who remain healthy and pure and of whom you are not at present worthy. Until that day, goodbye, and may the lord protect you. The grave, sad face of the president disappeared and in his place stood the raised flag. The wind shook it furiously about as if it were shaking a lunatic, while the anthem repeated the bellicose chords and the martial accents that had been composed in times of unstoppable patriotic pride, but which now sounded somewhat cracked. The man certainly talks well, said the oldest member of the family, and of course he's quite right when he says children shouldn't play with matches, because, as everyone knows, they'll only pee their beds afterward.
The streets, which, up until then, had been almost deserted, with most of the shops and businesses closed, filled up with people within a matter of minutes. Those who had stayed at home leaned out of the windows to watch the concourse, which is not to say that everyone was heading in the same direction, they resembled, rather, two rivers, one flowing up and one flowing down, and they waved to each other from river to river, as if the city were celebrating, as if it were a local holiday, and, contrary to the fugitive president's ill-intentioned prognostications, there were no thieves or rapists or murderers. Here and there, on some floors of some buildings, the windows remained closed, and, where there were blinds, these were kept grimly drawn, as if the families who lived there were the victims of a painful bereavement. On those floors, no bright lights had been lit in the early hours, at most, the inhabitants would have peered out from behind their curtains, hearts tight with fear, for the people who lived there had very firm political views, they were the people who had voted, both in the first election and the second, for the parties they had always voted for, the party on the right and the party in the middle, they had no reason now to celebrate, on the contrary, they feared attack by the ignorant masses who were singing and shouting in the streets, feared that the sacrosanct doors of their homes would be kicked in, their family memories besmirched, their silver stolen, Let them sing, they'll be crying soon enough, they said to each other to give themselves courage. As for those who voted for the party on the left, the only reason they are not standing at their windows applauding is because they have already joined the crowds, as evidenced in this very street by the occasional flag which, now and then, as if testing the waters, rises above the fast-flowing river of heads. No one went to work. The newspapers in the kiosks sold out, all of them carried the president's speech on the front page, along with a photograph taken while he was giving it, probably, to judge by the pained expression on his face, at the moment when he said he was speaking with his heart in his hands. Very few wasted time reading about something they knew already, most people were more interested in the views of the newspaper editors, the editorialists, the commentators, or some last-minute interview. The main headlines drew the attention of the curious, they were huge, enormous, others, on the inside pages, were normal size, but they all seemed to have sprung from the brain of the same genius of headline synthesis, allowing one blithely to dispense with reading the news item that followed. The headlines were by turns sentimental, Capital City Orphaned Overnight, ironic, Electoral Bombshell Blows Up In Voters' Faces or Blank Voters Blanked By Government, pedagogical, State Teaches Lesson To Insurrectionist Capital, vengeful, Time For A Settling Of Accounts, prophetic, Everything Will Be Different From Now On or Nothing Will Ever Be The Same Again, alarmist, Anarchy Just Around The Corner or Suspicious Maneuvers On Frontier, rhetorical, An Historic Speech For An Historic Moment, fawning, Dignified President Defies Irresponsible Capital, war-like, Army Surrounds City, objective, Withdrawal Of Government Agencies Takes Place Without Incident, radical, City Council Should Assume Total Control, and tactical, Solution Lies In Municipalist Tradition. There were only a few references to the marvellous star, the one with the twenty- seven arms of light, and these were stuck in willy-nilly amongst all the other news, not even graced with a headline, not even an ironic one, not even a sarcastic one, along the lines of And They Complain About The Price Of Electricity. Some of the editorials, while approving of the government's attitude, All Power To Them, urged one of them, dared to express certain doubts about the alleged fairness of the prohibition on leaving the city that had been imposed on the inhabitants, Once again, as always, the just are going to have to pay for the sinners, the honest for the criminals, the worthy men and women of this city who, having scrupulously fulfilled their duty as voters by voting for one of the legally constituted parties that make up the framework of political and ideological options recognized and endorsed by society, now find their freedom of movement restricted because of a freak majority of troublemakers whose one characteristic, some say, is that they don't know what they want, but who, in fact, as we understand it, know perfectly well what they want and are now preparing for a final assault on power. Other editorials went further, calling for the abolition, pure and simple, of the secret ballot and proposing that in future, when the situation returned to normal, as, somehow or other, it was bound to do, every voter should have a record card on which the presiding officer, having first ascertained before the ballot paper was put in the box how the person had voted, would note down, for all legal intents and purposes, both official and personal, that the bearer had voted for this or that party, And which I, the undersigned, hereby declare and confirm to be true. Had such a record card existed, had a legislator, aware of the possibility of the dissolute use of the vote, dared to take that step, bringing together form and content of a totally transparent democratic system, all the people who had voted for the party on the right or the party in the middle would now be packing their bags in order to emigrate to their true homeland, the one that always has its arms wide open to receive those it can most easily clasp to its bosom. Convoys of cars and buses, of minibuses and removal vans, bearing the flags of the different parties and honking rhythmically, p.o.t.r., p.i.t.m., would soon be following the government's example and heading toward the military posts on the frontier, with girls and boys sticking their bottoms out of the windows or yelling at the foot soldiers of the insurrection, You'd better watch your backs, you miserable traitors, You'll get the beating of your life when we come back, you frigging bandits, You rotten sons-of-bitches, or yelling the worst possible insult in the vocabulary of democratic jargon, Illegals, illegals, illegals, which would not, of course, be true, because the people they were abusing would have at home or in their pocket their very own voter's record card, where, ignominiously, as if branded with irons, would be written or stamped I cast a blank vote. Only desperate remedies can cure desperate diseases, concluded the editorialist seraphically.
The celebrations did not last long. It's true that no one actually got around to going to work, but an awareness of the gravity of the situation soon muted the demonstrations of joy, someone even asked, What have we got to be happy about, when they've just put us in isolation as if we were plague victims in quarantine, with an army out there with their rifles cocked, ready to fire at anyone who tries to leave the city, what possible reason have we got to be happy. And others said, We must organize ourselves, but they didn't know how or with whom or why. Some suggested that a group should go and talk to the leader of the city council to offer him their loyal support, to explain that the people who cast the blank votes had not done so in order to bring down the system and to take power, they wouldn't know what to do with it anyway, that they had voted the way they voted because they were disillusioned and could find no other way of making it clear just how disillusioned they were, that they could have staged a revolution, but then many people would undoubtedly have died, something they would never have wanted, that all their lives they had patiently placed their vote in the ballot box, and the results were there for
