Supply + demand + magic

Supply + demand + magic is a formula spoken by Boris Yeltsin in a dream of Oscar Amalfitano. Yeltsin calls magic the third leg of the human table: the element that keeps life from collapsing into the garbage pit of history and, beyond it, the void. The equation turns an economic account of existence into a proposition about imagination, desire, and play.

The Dream and Its Speaker

The formula appears during a dream prompted by the lingering effect of young Guerra’s grandiloquent words. Amalfitano sees a gray-haired, large-bodied man in a dark suit and sky-blue tie singing in Russian as he crosses a pink marble courtyard. The singer intermittently mixes in English and French words and other tunes, then returns to a lament Amalfitano associates with a Volga boatman’s sad fate. When the man reaches a red-streaked patch of majolica resembling a crater or latrine, Amalfitano recognizes him as Boris Yeltsin.

The dream is strange but not frightening: it leaves Amalfitano with a light sense of well-being. Yeltsin looks at him as if Amalfitano had entered his dream, and announces that he will explain the third leg of the human table. The framing matters: the equation is not delivered as an abstract lecture, but as counsel inside an episode whose illogical images coexist with a feeling of peace.

What the Formula Adds

Yeltsin begins with the claim that life comes down to demand and supply, or supply and demand, but insists that this is no way to live. Without a third leg, the table will fall into history’s garbage pit, which is itself perpetually collapsing into the garbage pit of the void. Magic is therefore not a replacement for material conditions; it is what the formula says those conditions cannot provide on their own.

Yeltsin defines magic through a series of additions: it is epic, sex, Dionysian mists, and play. The list places imaginative scale, desire, intoxication, and ludic freedom beside economic necessity. The equation’s force lies in that contrast: the ordinary language of supply and demand is made to carry a surplus that cannot be reduced to transactions.

The Formula’s Coda

After explaining the equation, Yeltsin sits on the crater or latrine and shows Amalfitano the fingers he is missing. He speaks of his childhood, the Urals, Siberia, and a white tiger roaming immense snowy spaces, then takes a flask of vodka from his suit pocket and says, "I think it’s time for a little drink." The intimate, disjointed details do not clarify the formula so much as extend its dream logic: economics gives way to memory, an impossible-seeming animal image, and a drink.

Yeltsin drinks, gives the Chilean professor a sly squint, and resumes singing with greater brio. He then disappears into the red-streaked crater or latrine. Amalfitano does not dare look down the hole and wakes. The formula is left as a momentary answer to collapse, not a practical system: its magic is articulated, but the dream ends in disappearance and a refusal to look into the void.