Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

That night, he dreamed that Richard Foret came into his room dressed as a boxer and, without saying a single word, handed him the notebook in which he had recorded details of the perambulations of his final months. A so-far undiscovered notebook that he, Marcelo, would rescue from oblivion for the benefit of mankind.

The next day everything went as planned: Marcelo handed in his hotel key in the morning, asked at the reception desk for a cab, and returned to the airport. He quickly found Velásquez in the restaurant where they had arranged to meet — he had seen his face on the University of Los Girasoles’ website — and sat down to breakfast with him. Velásquez seemed excited. He spoke rapidly, and some words were lost in the spiel, but what was important was not the detail but the torrent: he passed agilely from recounting the story of his catastrophic relationship with his second wife to glossing — with added insults — a talk he had heard in San Diego on the Surrealists and Mexico, then to recommending a cantina in Los Girasoles that served the only good bourbon to be had in the country—“the owner of the bar is a wetback who drives his truck full of bottles down from L.A. every two weeks,” babbled Velásquez, pausing only to take a sip of coffee.

Marcelo listened patiently, wondering if he would ever manage to understand all those strange turns of phrase the New World was continually spitting out at him. He was particularly fascinated by the diminutive in the phrase ya merito, which he roughly translated as “any second now,” and attempted to describe the spirit of the expression by referring to an essay by Roland Barthes; luckily for him, Velásquez pretended not to hear this display of his prowess and continued with his unstoppable cascade of verbosity.

During the drive to Los Girasoles, Velásquez quieted down a little and Marcelo felt, for the first time, that he might become his friend. The professor was a proficient driver, taking frequent puffs on a cigar that he held in his left hand and communicating with other vehicles through deft use of the horn. They crossed through such a diverse range of climates that when Marcelo surfaced from a torpor of several hours’ duration and took a good look at the surrounding landscape, he thought for a moment they must have been on the road for more than a day and had already crossed over the frontier to the United States. But no, they were not so far north, not by a long way. Outside, the verdant forests and steep cliffs had disappeared, and now a wide plain stretched out around them, replete with shrubs, prickly pears, and yellow earth.

Los Girasoles was a town of some fifty thousand inhabitants in the middle of that plain. Before the university came, there had been nothing to justify a visit from a foreigner. Like all such towns, it had a rectangular main square with its church and government palace and, surrounding this, a not very extensive area of colonial buildings painted brick red. But beyond the center, the town lacked color: everything merged into the dry air of the plain. Houses with corrugated metal roofs, soccer fields dotted with stones, pedestrian bridges from which hung banners singing the praises of the administration of the moment. (“The Government of Los Girasoles is working for you: more pedestrian bridges for pedestrians.”)

Velásquez asked Marcelo if he wanted to be taken to the house he had rented through the internet, near the University of Los Girasoles, or if he would prefer to get something to eat in the center and settle in afterwards. Marcelo had taken a liking to Professor Velásquez, even before meeting him, when he had written from Madrid announcing that, according to his agreement with the Madrid institution he had the opportunity — and, in this case, the desire — to spend a sabbatical year in the sister, albeit third-world, University of Los Girasoles. But however much this liking for the plump, aging Mexican might make him feel like having a meal in his company, in some traditional restaurant with hot, spicy food, the urgent need to find himself finally alone after the car journey was stronger, so he declined the offer to get to know the center of the town and, after summarizing the reasons for his weariness, asked Velásquez to drop him at his new home.

What was no surprise to Marcelo was that the internet — and, in general, the malicious use of the technology — was an infallible tool for successfully committing fraud. The house he had found on a web page, and for which he had paid six months’ rent up front, was a sad and painful confirmation of this axiom. The online advertisement found on a site for academics described it as “a little tropical paradise just ten minutes from the University of Los Jirasoles ” and stressed its “excellent view, magnificent location, and excellent price.” The only thing that was true had to do with the financial side: the place was cheap, although only in comparison to the exorbitant cost of rented accommodations in Madrid, and taking into account the huge advantage that Marcelo was still being paid in euros despite the fact that he was living in a “little tropical paradise.” The small house was almost an orphaned apartment, as if it had been wrested from a parent building, and also an inferno: it was located in a residential estate that stretched like a biblical plague along an immense hill of bare, rocky earth, raising its water tanks to the sun like an army of Cyclopes.

The residential estate known as Puerta del Aire was some fifteen minutes’ drive from Los Girasoles, on a road connecting the town to the university. The plan for the distribution of the small houses seemed to have been made by a blind man. The bathroom fixtures, which didn’t appear in the promotional photos, were of a chromatic spectrum ranging from lilac with silvery glints to bile green. The house came furnished and, on the internet, the furniture had looked brand-new and reasonably tasteful. The reality was different: the armchairs belonged to different living rooms, none of them were handsome, and on the wall was a painting of a Christ figure and various decorated ceramic plates, attached by some irreversible process. Marcelo knew he would not be able to spend very long there.

He dumped his luggage in the bedroom — painted a mind-boggling red — and went out to look around. The environment was not exactly welcoming: the planners of that estate, in alliance with the corrupt local administration that had tendered the contract, had neglected to put in any sidewalks. Luckily there wasn’t much traffic on those cracked concrete streets: the whole neighborhood gave the impression of having been uninhabited for some time. Outside a house identical to his own, about two hundred yards away in a parallel street, he saw a parked car: a gray pickup with Texas license plates from which, due to the heat, seemed to be rising a fine mist, or a mirage in the process of formation. Marcelo felt dizzy: he had not drunk any water during the entire journey from Mexico City, and the implacable sun of that hillside, which would beat down on his house from seven in the morning until the curtain of the fiery night fell, was, in conjunction with the inevitable jetlag and a night in a fifth-rate hotel, beginning to wreak havoc on his feeble, desk-bound anatomy.

When he first heard of Los Girasoles, he had expected the place to be a sort of colonial retreat, a town founded by the conquistadors to guard their maidens in pools of warm water and to return to from time to time to rest from their battles. He had imagined the university would be an old building, a former hacienda or disused monastery with stories of dark virgins and poet-nuns in voluntary reclusion. He had thought there would be an abundance of rivers and waterfalls nearby, and that the old people would trudge along timeworn paths to sell fruit in a neighboring town. Sunk in his autistic imagination, Marcelo Valente had not bothered to do in-depth research into the topic. Violently drawn on by his desire to get away from Madrid for a while, in his plans he merged fantasies about the last months of Richard Foret’s life with the almost nonexistent information he had about Los Girasoles. Now he was paying the high price of disillusion for that blunder.