Public office also generates rent, of course, along with other benefits. Eighty per cent of workers depend on the Coral Palace, and it seems like everyone around here has a government contract, for which they have to express their gratitude by paying a thirty per cent commission to the governor. And obviously we also have to talk about the dark cell of illicit activities that toys so persistently with the financial logic of people who’ve gone hungry for so long. Money-laundering, drug trafficking, the embezzlement of public funds. That’s what really thickens a wallet, and the pickpockets on the corner will never get there, no matter how hard they try. In the end, they’re small fry, casualties, a mafia’s marionettes, collateral damage in a war of information: what do you know?

Nothing. The ones who come in on budget flights from the mainland, snatch a few purses and head back the same day; the ones who calculate operations to steal money from shops on the way to the bank – they don’t know anything. The ones who will end up blocking off the import warehouses because they live in slums, because the money for paving the roads has been stolen, again and again, by people whose full names everybody knows – they don’t know anything either. People with those kinds of names leech money from the schools, people with their home address on file in the noosphere. Right now, on the corner, barefoot dropouts are stealing, and what do they know about the underlying reasons that funnelled them into disgrace? The future, the underclass vision, runs on a short timeline. Hunger is immediate and rage won’t let you think. Hate pulls the trigger. Those who have nothing risk little; they’re the ones waiting for the dust to rise; some lament that fights twenty years ago were fought only with bottles, then suddenly with knives; they mourn because death comes more easily now. What do you know? And how do you use it? That’s what draws the line.

People with full names – they know more or less how things work, where the money is, what the money needs, and what has to happen for others to pay the price of channelling it. Sometimes I think this chaos is the instrument of all those interests, the perfect excuse for more hideous buildings, for more active military in the streets, for states of emergency and hirings at whim. After the months I’ve spent here, nothing will strike me as coincidental ever again; every occurrence obeys a sequence of causes, all potentially manipulable, at least to an extent. What do we know about all this?