Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

Pain. Pain very close to the back of my neck. The blow wasn’t exactly on the back of my neck. It was on my head, to one side, a few inches from the ear now listening to the clucking of the hen. It was a blow on that part of my head where the infestations of lice always started in my childhood. In the finest, most vulnerable hairs through which I would run my hand to feel the gritty lumps of blood, the pain. Pain and confusion.

I can’t have been lying here for long. One or two hours at the most. Cecilia hasn’t left the museum, and the sun is still high, so it’s somewhere between midday and early afternoon. Two hours maybe. Not more. A few short hours disconnected, absent, lying faceup in the lot — my beloved waste ground next to my building — accompanied by the intermittent clucking of my wardress, by the pain of her victims, the worms. Worm pain. Neck pain. I sense and look at my grimy body. I extract a twig from my mouth. I wipe the earth from my eyelids with the right sleeve of my shirt, which is less dirty than the rest of me. My slow efforts to stand don’t seem to surprise the hen, whom I’ve never before seen at such close quarters. Now I can appreciate the dull opacity of her plumage, the unhealthy look of her legs, the food fighting for survival, wriggling in her mouth. Worms.

Once on my feet, I’m overcome by a slight dizziness, accompanied by the precise sensation of blood flowing and veins pulsing in the area around the wound on my head. I check that my belongings — keys, wallet, cell phone — are still in their usual places — left pocket, back pocket, and right pocket, respectively — and as they are, I discount robbery as the motive for the aggression to which I was subjected, if that’s what it was, and not a falling branch or a stone or a piece of drywall someone threw over from the street, imagining the lot to be empty as usual. Maybe I saved the hen from that very same blow that, I say to myself, given the size and fragility of the bird, would have been lethal.

Though it seems more likely it was a calculated attack. What was I hit with? A bat, a piece of rusty pipe from the lot, a tree trunk struck by lightning, the perpetrator’s own wrath? And what was the motive for that sudden, unjustified attack? Simple rage; jealousy; the defense of a particular territory; incomprehensible, naked, unshod Evil?

Pissed off, I make my way back to the wall.

18

From the very moment I start ascending the stairs of my building, while I’m rummaging in my pockets for the key that keeps my meager belongings relatively secure, I suspect something is not as it should be. On the other side of the door, I can hear noises that, though not loud — barely perceptible in fact — only add anxiety to my heightened sensitivity. Despite having ascertained that the wound on my head is more shocking than serious, I can still feel it throbbing, and I think I’ll have to invent something to explain the presence of the crusted blood on my scalp to Cecilia. (The truth is unthinkable: I could never explain why I went into the lot, why I followed the hen, why I was hit.) I’m distracted from my thoughts and my future excuses by the sounds on the other side of the door as I’m about to open it. Lo and behold, just to make a frigging awful situation worse, some burglar has, in his wisdom, broken into my dwelling with impunity to commit some outrage that, in my anxiety, I imagine to be not so much robbery as licentious acts involving my underwear and the pink lipstick Cecilia uses when she wants to project an air of elegance.

Prepared to frustrate the perverse siege, I enter the apartment and, with great presence of mind, shout out in as deep a voice as I can manage, feigning heroic, baritone, burglar-proof manliness. But at least in the living room, there is no burglar or anyone of a profession akin to that. I head for the bedroom with a crepuscular presentiment but on opening the door don’t immediately see anything out of the ordinary. But this apparent calm masks a more serious perversion: in the geometric center of the bed lies a coiled piece of shit. A perfect turd on the tiger-striped bedspread.

A

Marcelo Valente was sitting on the balcony of his Madrid apartment, marking the final exams of the academic year while mentally running through the objectives of his trip. And although he wanted, at all costs, to escape from that pallid tableland, he also knew he would end up, however unwillingly, missing many of the things that were just then triggering a profound sense of boredom.

This wasn’t to be just any old year. Despite having dedicated as many as four consecutive months to academic tourism (exchanges, conferences, symposia, periods of research in Eurozone countries), he had always traveled with the notion of a quick return in mind. In contrast, he knew his stay in Mexico could become almost indefinite, and spending a year in a remote third-world university, traveling around small, out-of-the-way towns, at the mercy of the sun and the narco wars wasn’t the same as, for example, having breakfast on a comfortable Parisian terrace and walking tranquilly to the small, confined office he had been assigned.

He had only been in Latin America once before, in Buenos Aires. His time in that city had left him favorably disposed toward the whole continent, which had perfectly satisfied his expectations of moderate quaintness, somehow gratifying his vanity and reining in his belief that it was possible to know a little about everything. A three-month stay had been long enough to cover the entire spectrum of the emotions a city could inspire in him, from the blind enchantment of the first weeks to the final relief of watching through the plane window as Ezeiza Airport grew smaller, plus a number of intermediate stages: the shameless wooing of a married woman, the embarrassing bout of drunkenness in a stranger’s home, and the untimely shove given to a dean of philosophy (with the accompanying cry of “Not everyone in Spain is a pompous ass!”). In short, a story he wasn’t sure he could be proud of.

This was something that seldom occurred to him in relation to his past; his usual procedure was to brag, on every possible occasion, about the versatility of his CV: arrogantly list the nationalities of his lovers and the ideological diversity of his thesis advisors, many of whom had asked him, a posteriori, to contribute to books they were editing. The perfect mixture, in short, of an unresolved inferiority complex and a pretty face, which rather than getting uglier with age was becoming more interesting. Marcelo Valente was, even in the words of his friends, “a cretin with a PHD.”

He was aware that his personality inspired not a little reticence. He was no longer on nodding terms with more than one professor. The academic staff of the philosophy department were on the whole, by comparison, much more serious-minded: elderly, blind seminarians who were tangled up in the thousand and one proofs of the existence of God, hangover Marxists who organized independent study groups and papered the chapel of the law department with pro-Chavist leaflets, jaundiced mathematical logicians who put their faith in the advent of the cyborgs and, to some extent, anticipated that arrival with their own mechanical existences. Marcelo didn’t belong to this realm. He had, in fact, studied art history, and only after a PHD in aesthetics at the Sorbonne had he definitely switched departments. For many academics that showed, to say the least, a lack of respect.