The heat was suffocating. The sun, like a spoiled child, beat down on the shiny zinc that served as our ultraviolet shelter, but the infrared slice managed to slip through and heat the air we breathed to the point of transporting us to the engine room of a neo-Orleanean steamship. The horns of bus drivers desperate for their last passenger at the most recent yellow light dominated above the matured urban cacophony; at the peak of rush hour, my soles were melting on a sidewalk in the heart of Valencia, fervently attached to a food stand of sausages nested in bread whose dubious hygienic pedigree would surely make Pasteur, in his crypt, an acrobat worthy of the Gasca brothers’ circus. Duty calls, as does the attitude of any self-respecting professional; and there I was, hot dog in hand, ready to allow a colony of undocumented parasites from the exterior mayonnaise to enter my digestive system, all to interview Murphy.
Having rejected invitations to well-known bistros in the city, meat-on-a-stick restaurants, sushi bars, and even a few taverns (the latter under the pretext of “they have too many lawyers, are you crazy?”), Murphy threatened me with the utmost courtesy, saying that if it wasn’t eating a hot dog in Plaza Bolívar, then there would be no interview. When I asked him why this particular preference, he replied: “The interview hasn’t even started yet, so don’t bother me with your questions yet!… Besides, what’s the WORST that could happen…?” I had my doubts, does he know the term “amoebic dysentery”? I think not…
We had each eaten a couple of “little nasties”. I think… no, I’m sure! that the popular belief that spice and garlic sauce kill germs is as true as the tradition of rudely hitting the “refresh” button on the internet browser many times so that “the signal doesn’t go away, it’s like sooo slow”. As I resigned myself to sporting a breath that would crumble any possibility of establishing intelligent contact with anyone with a sense of smell, Murphy ordered another round of the infamous little sausages to try a combination of clam sauce with guasacaca. While furiously shaking the year-old-cheese-container-whose-hole-is-never-too-small, I proceeded to fulfill the task that brought us there:
JR: Mr. Murphy… um… can I call you Murphy?… When did your fatalistic fame begin? When did you discover you had a gift for making things go wrong?
M: (cleaning his beard a bit of remnants of… “something”) “Well, the first time I had the impression of being special was in school. I wasn’t particularly skilled with spinning tops and perinolas, but after watching a Sábado Sensacional special with Uri Geller bending his spoons, I sat like an idiot in the schoolyard for three days, with a little spoon in my hand, trying to bend it with my mind. Apart from a heterogeneous sunburn (and an intact spoon), I developed an incipient curiosity about the repeated fact of perinola strings that would snap and hit their respective owners in the mother, or spinning tops that would fly off in orbits that not even Galileo could predict, endangering corneas, teeth, and exposed mucous membranes around. It didn’t take long for me to notice that it was due to my failed efforts to ethereally mold some alloy.”
JR: And how did you achieve worldwide fame?
M: You see, to be famous there’s a more efficient formula than making homemade porn. Simply become a “scapegoat for humanity” (I think UNESCO is working on an honorary distinction in this regard). People, in general, need someone else to blame for what happens to them. And they need a name, in particular. They need to make it personal. If not, look at Jesus Christ. They whipped him, crucified him, spat on him… they barely didn’t force him to sell Herbalife. Who was to blame…? people want…. no, NEED, to think it was Judas Iscariot. Personal, you see…? The kiss, blah, blah, blah…. The truth is, if you realize, Judas did us a great favor. He gained universal infamy by doing the dirtiest job of all; but someone had to do it! and even today the famous “burning of Judas” survives, which wouldn’t be so humiliating for the poor devil (may he rest in peace!) if they didn’t so often paint him with Chávez’s face. In my case, and seeing on Google the frustration of users of 70’s Rayovac batteries which “You never know when or where they’re going to vomit”, I decided to take the blame for them. And from there Murphy’s Law was born, coupled with my ability to “make” things go wrong.
JR: You mean you’re providing a service to humanity?
M: Of course. People remember me as soon as their house key breaks with their cell phone inside. And don’t even talk about canceling a print job in Windows! there are people who have machete-chopped their printers to rubble and the little light keeps blinking. Fortunately for them, I’m always there for them to name (me and my mom) and some of their frustration is drained. There’s less stress, fewer heart attacks, fewer people drinking cheap rum thanks to me! and that has never been recognized. Ungrateful!
JR: But don’t you yourself cause some – if not all – of these malfunctions? (There are classic examples, like the projector we tested seven times for our first presentation as division managers to the board of directors, which stops working thirty seconds before starting)
M: Your example is good; people think I’m responsible for grand events like the Hindenburg or the Titanic; but my popularity is more like “spam!” it’s those little inconsequential things that happen five or six times a day and drive anyone crazy. Like the supermarket queue: no matter which one you choose, there will always be one or two that go faster… until you switch to them. Or when you try to fold a road map… the best way to fold it is: “another”. Here’s an example:
At that moment, he pointed with a brief turn of his eyes to a specimen trying to serve guasacaca on the sausage that was about to become his lunch. The pressure exerted on the sticky container (inside and out), plus the seasoning cap that obstructed the vacuum spout, obviously produced in a few tenths of a second a green extraterrestrial micro-explosion that, to my surprise, froze in the air. I looked around confused and surprised, confirming that time (and space) seemed to have stopped in time. Pigeons in mid-flight, mouths open like stone museums of halitosis, the chicha-vendor-statue stirring his pearly liquid with his arm elbow-deep… everything was like a photograph. I turned to Murphy, who at that moment was in the difficult task of balancing about fifty cubic centimeters of cheese sauce on the last bit of bread he had left. About to achieve it, the yellow-orange tower wobbled and fell on his shoe. He let out a rather colloquial expletive while proceeding to clean himself. His voice pierced the silence of the three-dimensional daguerreotype we were in.
M: Do you realize that the spread of that gentleman’s guasacaca is totally random, adhering to the laws of chaos? (silly name for a law), and yet, he will surely find a reason to claim that either the sauce fell on his tie, or it fell on his shirt, or both. Or it didn’t splash him, and the hot dog gives him gastroenteritis in a few days. Or anything else.
JR: You mean misfortunes are relative? That they’re in our mind? That they’re not real?
M: I don’t want to sound like Morpheus (or it could be “Murphyus”!), but that’s how it is. Do you think it’s chopped cabbage you’re eating? your mind is telling you that. It also obsessively tells you the amount of carbohydrates and calories you’re eating. That’s the problem. You must free your mind first.
Having said this, everything that had frozen began to move, gradually. “Murphyus” gestured for me not to miss the guasacaca splash of the specimen: Some drops fell on his tie, others on his shirt, even one in his eye. The subject in question, about fifty years old, could only laugh.
M: This individual’s reaction is a bias not consistent with the average, simply because his mind doesn’t process the event as negative. Maybe he’s in love, he won the lottery or simply woke up in a good mood, who knows? But the truth is that he didn’t think of me. He didn’t think that “something bad” was going to happen to him, and he didn’t even care.
JR: Murphy’s Law only affects those who expect it, or those who are predisposed to it?
M: Stupid things happen to all of us all day (he said this while finishing cleaning his hands of the processed dairy). It’s up to us whether that’s transcendent or not. Something of that has to do with being “happy”, a condition so simple and yet so difficult to achieve! Like someone who wins the lottery and forgets about their debts, although ten seconds later they start thinking they might get kidnapped. People find it hard to have peace.
JR: So, Murphy’s Law is also subject to “failing” or “not existing”?
M: I’ve always laughed at the recursive axiom “If Murphy’s Law can go wrong, it will go wrong”. That snake that bites its own tail is here -he held his chubby index finger next to his temple- and we don’t see it because it’s easier to think that we simply have bad luck. Besides, it’s more fruitful as a pathetic topic of conversation in any boring family gathering that comes our way.
JR: You mean, eventually nothing bad will happen to us? Not even when the ring of the “easy-open” can stays in our hand?
M: No, Jesus -he slowly removed his dark glasses, revealing microscopic pupils- I mean that, when you’re ready, what happens around you -good or bad- will stop worrying you and taking over your peace.
A few meters away, a boy was buying a burned DVD of “2001: A Space Odyssey”, and was testing it. The notes of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” filled Plaza Bolívar, above the stridency of the evangelical preachers. I imagined that when I turned around, Murphy would have gone all David Blaine mixed with Obi Wan Kenobi, but he was still there. He was paying the hot dog vendor with a tip included for “treat-me-well-next-time”.
M: Remember… (index on the temple).
If they ever make a movie about Murphy, the actor should be a mix of Sean Connery’s style with Jack Nicholson’s “gone to the dogs”, if such a fusion is imaginable. My interlocutor politely said goodbye, thanking me for the moment, and excused himself because he had an important meeting “regarding the February mess”, and that perhaps we Venezuelans would have something to thank him for. I stayed buying a burned movie and thinking about his words.
Although I knew it wasn’t the last time I was going to talk to him… at home I realized the movie was damaged!
