Horacio Castellanos Moya - Senselessness

I should stop this foolishness, I told myself, throwing back the sheet and jumping energetically out of bed, on my way to the bathroom to take a shower, determined to control once and for all my fantasies, committed to my goal of not jacking off so as not to squander my mental energy, of not wallowing in any of the testimonies that I would never turn into a novel, because nobody in his right mind would be interested in writing or publishing or reading yet another novel about murdered indigenous peoples, and it was the last straw that on the weekend I would carry on in the same vein as I did when I was in the archbishop’s palace as if they were paying me to poison my days off, I scolded myself, while I waited for the water coming out of the shower head to warm up, hoping that Fátima would be as good-looking as Pilar but without those emotional cobwebs left behind by embittered loves, as I’d already gone a month and a half without a fuck, ever since I arrived in this city I had been condemned to chastity as if they were getting me ready to don the habit, I thought once I was under the stream of warm and comforting water, soaping my groin and my balls, pulling on my penis but with my mind set on scrutinizing my wardrobe, for I was determined to look handsome and sporty so the girls would sigh, to which end I chose a polo shirt, salmon-colored, faded blue-denim pants, and brown leather loafers. Putting on my shoes, there I was, when five shots rang out in the street below, five unexpected and piercing shots that I began counting after the first rang out, which I guessed had come from a nine-millimeter-caliber gun, but five, not six as the doorman claimed later, with the inanity so typical of a fool who doesn’t pay attention and just gets scared, because he had to dash into the building to take refuge while I jumped up and looked out my fifth-floor window, trying to catch a glimpse of something, smelling the scent of gunpowder that rose from the street, eager to try to discover the source of such an unexpected event, for after a month and a half in this downtown apartment these were the first gunshots I had heard, my curiosity spurring me on so strongly that one minute later I was in the lobby of the building arguing with the foolish doorman, who insisted that there had been six shots and that it was a car chase, like in the movies when the car doing the chasing shoots at the car being chased, so there were neither victims nor traces of the shootout in the street, he told me already back at the front door, where I could ascertain that apparent normality reigned among the street vendors settled under their plastic shades on the sidewalk. I walked over to the guy who sold pirated CDs, encrusted into the corner of Sexta and Once, about ten steps from the entrance to the building, to ask him what he had seen. “Nothing, I threw myself on the ground,” said the short fat mestizo man without looking me in the eyes, as if I were a policeman who had come to investigate the incident, when all I wanted to know was how many shots he had heard, five like I — who had paid attention — claimed, or six like the doorman — who lost his concentration when he rushed inside — claimed, to which the vendor responded that he also hadn’t paid attention, there could have been five or six, he mumbled, the height of imprecision; so I insisted, explaining to him that there could only have been five shots because after the first one I began counting out loud, an old habit I had acquired during the war in my own country, saying, two, three, four, five, and I remained with the word six in my mouth because there was no sixth shot, and moreover I could be certain that they’d come from a nine-millimeter gun, that my ear wasn’t just any old ear, and if we looked for the bullet casings down the street we would be able to prove the truth of my assertion that the shots had come from a nine-millimeter gun, I told the vendor, who pretended not to know what I was talking about, and, pretending to be busy, he began to dust off the pirated CDs with a flannel rag. I crossed the street, there was very little traffic that day, and in front of McDonald’s I bought two Sunday newspapers — but not that rag that I will never again mention in whose pages I had been maligned — hoping to eat my breakfast while perusing the articles and also so I could ask the newspaper vendor about the shooting that had just occurred, but he turned out to be a worse case than the guy selling pirated CDs, so from there I decided to continue walking down Sexta Avenida under the splendid morning sunshine, not allowing the bad smells and the garbage in the street to soil my soul, content to think that no passerby or street vendor could intuit my thoughts, walking in the direction of the restaurant of the Hotel del Centro, where the buffet of local cuisine would be my Sunday breakfast throughout my stay in that city, at a time of day when the only disturbance came from a marimba that at regular intervals attacked the clientele, but such disturbances were a plague common to all restaurants.

Life is marvelous, I exclaimed to myself, about three hours later, marveling at the sight of the girl with Pilar, that very same Fátima about whom I knew so little until that moment and who was about to become the object not only of my attentions but also those of half a dozen indolent beasts drinking beer in the Modelo Cevichería, a kind of food kiosk with a few plastic chairs squeezed onto one side of the small plaza in front of the Conservatory, half a dozen beasts among whom I ought to include myself a bit shamefacedly and who were stupefied and drooling as they stared at the two girls crossing the street in front of the Conservatory and approaching down the plaza’s sidewalk toward the cevichería, I, possessed of the knowledge that they were Pilar and Fátima, while the others were simply aroused by the prospect of such gorgeous girls, apparently foreigners, coming to perfume that cevichería, where the main attraction was the Sunday soccer match between Mexico and Argentina on the television. Approach, dear ladies, your appearance serves the singular purpose of delighting these ridiculous potbellied men in their stupid shorts, I would have liked to say to them as a greeting, if those same potbellied man hadn’t had on their faces a certain threatening look and if their ears weren’t just a little too close to my words, attentive as they were to that pair of sweet things, who both gave me kisses on both of my cheeks, lighting up my day and darkening the lives of the potbellied men, who soon began to secrete a poisonous envy because the girls ignored them and sat down — so deliciously — very nearly one on each of my legs, an envy mitigated only by the soccer match between Mexico and Argentina though they could no longer concentrate on the game with the same intensity, every once in a while looking libidinously at the girls as they ordered their fish ceviches and beers in a pleasant exchange with the waiter. The first thing I knew about Fátima was that I wanted to lick her all over due to the appetizingly creamy texture and light rosy hue of her skin and her perfect curves pressed into a pair of red-denim jeans and an organdy blouse under which could be descried her seductive belly button as well as a little path of fuzz my eyes began to follow, descending, while she talked about her recent trip to a village in the highlands, where years ago half the population had been slaughtered — initiated by the army but with an enthusiasm that left no room for doubt — by the other half, their fellow citizens, one of the 422 massacres contained in the one thousand one hundred pages that awaited me on the bishop’s desk the following day, when I would continue my task of copyediting and correcting and about which I refused to think, wanting only to descend the peach-fuzz path that would carry me from Fátima’s belly button to her fleshy cave, where I wanted to take refuge from those potbellied spies, from the television sportscasters with diarrhea of the mouth, and from the sudden and unexpected memory of the hundreds of Indians I had strolled among a few hours earlier in Parque Central while I peacefully digested my breakfast and passed the time, enjoying the brilliant morning among these hundreds of Indians decked out in their Sunday dress of so many festive colors, among the most salient being that joyous cheerful red, as if red had nothing to do with blood and sorrow but was rather the emblem of happiness for these hundreds of domestic servants enjoying their day off in the large square surrounded by the cathedral, the presidential palace, and the old commercial arcades, a splendid and telling promenade because as I wandered around under that brilliant sky I realized that not one of those women with slanted eyes and toasted brown skin awoke my sexual appetite or my prurient interests, thanks to which I continued walking lightly and mincingly, my fantasies remaining dormant, attentive rather to the patterns on the textiles and the cut of those ethnic costumes whose colorful skirts prevented the exposure of even the tiniest patch of skin, the opposite of what was transpiring with Fátima’s flirtatious belly button, which was winking at me, luckily without the potbellied men realizing it, for they were fascinated by the battle of the Titans, as the sportscaster defined it with a howl that caught the attention of even the two girls, for whom soccer was, of course, boring, but who couldn’t detach themselves wholly from the reigning emotions, to the extent that Fátima even asked me who I was rooting for, Mexico or Argentina, and as my third eye had already detected some antipathy toward the Aztecs oozing out of said potbellied men, I immediately told her that all of Central America was rooting for Argentina against their giant criminal neighbor, spoken with enough emphasis to guarantee me safe conduct out of there flanked by two such girls as these.