Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

14

I have a few thoughts of a general nature about marriage and the limits that should be imposed on it to preserve, as far as possible, some notion of personal decency. First, never, under any circumstances, will I allow Cecilia to defecate while I’m taking a shower. This incontrovertible point cannot be refuted by watertight folding doors or blue patterned shower curtains — it’s a crucial, life-defining question. Second, it should be clear to both parties that I had no expectations of or genuine enthusiasm for the future before getting married. I don’t want such a fundamental aspect of my personality to be relegated, over time, to a collateral effect of the marriage into which we have contracted, taking all credit from my phlegm, so stoically overcome. Third, allowing that I’m willing to yield to many things — using ridiculous pet names when speaking to her: “my cute little piggywinks,” for example — nothing can convince me of the need to be sincere to my wife. (A parenthesis is needed here. At what inalterable juncture, at what hour, did sincerity and communication become related elements? Nothing is further from spontaneous intuition, popular wisdom, historical experience: communication is, precisely, the avoidance of sincerity in order to reach agreement.)

Displaying a composure that, even to myself, seems astonishing, I attempted to elucidate these and other theoretical aspects of marriage in the company of my adored wife, talking as one adult to another. As soon as I said I found the idea of showering while she was shitting repugnant, she gave me a furious look and flounced out of the apartment. She returned half an hour later with a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and her mascara streaked. “I’m going to start smoking,” she said. She’s now smoking in the living room while I get ready to take a shower.

That was our first argument, and her reaction was heartening: instead of confrontation, a new vice. Instead of sorting things out and endlessly talking them over, a protracted, voluntary death. Assumption of pain. Metabolism. (Sorry, I was digressing.)

Mexico City is lovelier than ever. Two days ago, when Cecilia and I were on our way home from work, in a passage of the metro, a woman began insulting a policeman, explaining, with ample smatterings of “idiot” and “shut up,” that her usual station had been closed and she’d had to walk to that one. Unperturbed, the policeman gave her a scornful look and quite rightly replied, “Well, stop voting for the PRD. It’s all the democrats’ fault. . Up the PRI!” and then he repeated his slogan for the onlookers: “Up the PRI, ladies and gentlemen, up with the Institutional Revolutionary Party!”

I spoke to Cecilia about the possibility of looking for a different job, citing the opportunities for professional development and the need to augment my savings. Obviously, those are not my reasons at all: seeing my wife eight hours a day, only four desks away, then going home to find her overpowering mug on the other pillow, at the table, everywhere, has become a form of torture. We don’t even have recourse to that thoroughly middle-class ritual of asking each other how our days were. Even if the answer to that question is always the same, I suspect there is a deeply calming pleasure to be found in asking it each evening over a microwave dinner.

On the other hand, I find the very idea of leaving the museum, abandoning Ms. Watkins, painful. Ever since she showed her unexpected talent for empathy, reprimanding me for marrying beneath myself, I see her almost as an alter ego: a woman conscious of the general grayness of existence who has let herself be dragged along by the inappropriate speed of events. Although, of course, there is a crucial difference that forms a breach between us: Ms. Watkins still retains the basically romantic belief that the string of accidents determining us can finally lead to the sort of destiny we were, against all odds, made for. I couldn’t disagree more: the pencil that draws the line of my biography can only trace out an insipid figure, oblivious to even the discreet sumptuousness of geometry. If I were able to choose that figure, the final perimeter that represents, once and for all, the collection of vicissitudes I’ve lived through, it would be a dick. Yes, a penis: iconic, puerile, the kind teenagers draw on the chalkboard to annoy the teacher. A simple, unadorned prick that evades all psychological analysis and reclaims its original potential for insult. That would be my ideal figure, the embodiment of all the blunders that make me up. That or an ass.

Maybe I’m saying this because, during the last few days, a ridiculously dense cloud, a lugubrious mood, has been hanging over me. I’m surprised to find conventionally important events — a wedding — happen to me as if to a second cousin, scarcely affecting me. I get news of my life, but I don’t feel it. And it’s not that life is, as some would wish, to be found elsewhere, but that it’s been reduced to a weak, heterogeneous set of associations: a hen walking around a vacant lot, a lottery ticket with the number 6 printed on it, a collection of used tea bags. Every so often, one of those details of my most intimate cartography is erased without any great fuss and a new one appears, substituting it.

In the end, the only thing that matters to me is conserving enough clarity to be able to articulately criticize what I see; if some illness stopped me from doing this, nothing would have meaning anymore. I’m not worried about physical degeneration, the whitish drool dribbling onto a shabby suit, premature baldness, prostate cancer. I’m not worried about them so long as I can go on complaining about what I see. I don’t seek the permission of the Fates to find a soul mate with whom to deploy my melancholy; I can be alone, really alone, but I do ask the god of neural functions to let me retain this faint line of voice that crosses my cranium, allowing me to laugh at the world around me. This is the only grade of intelligence I aspire to, and it makes me immensely happy that it doesn’t depend in the least on books or people.

(I say all this at the risk of sounding maudit ; that is neither my intention nor feeling; otherwise, I would be oozing highly profitable mauditism in the modern salons of pomp and circumstance.)

15

The hen appears in and disappears from the lot at completely unpredictable intervals. Sometimes she’s there all night long, and at others there’s no sign of her for several days. I’ve turned the matter over in my mind, but I can’t crack the code of the bird’s irregular life. The topic is beginning to have pathological importance in relation to my daily routine, and I’m aware of it, which makes it even more disturbing.

Cecilia finally noticed the lot.

“Why did you move to a building next to a piece of waste ground, my love? It must have so many rats, you know.”

The exaggeration of her warning irritates me. I tell her there isn’t a single rat in the lot, just a hen. Long silence. I feel I’ve betrayed an enormous secret. Cecilia looks puzzled and gives a, for me, repulsive laugh: the sort of laugh emitted by teenagers who don’t have control over their extremities. She asks how there could be a hen there. Plucking up my courage, I grab her arm, drag her to the window, and point to the mound of earth where the hen is usually found. Nothing.