Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

When he saw Nueva Francia, Marcelo lost a little of the contempt he felt for Los Girasoles: this town was much worse. If the streets were dirty in Los Girasoles, and the road surface merged into the surrounding dirt every few yards, in Nueva Francia the inhabitants seemed to have been living in the same shit for the last thirty years, with the additional aggravation that a trickle of progress — the only one that had reached its dusty rurality — had provided them with the most up-to-date weapons, carried casually and proudly, not only by the people from the cartels, but even by the ordinary citizens, corrupted to the point of being unable to distinguish between one dead body and two hundred.

Marcelo parked the Renault on one side of the square. On a couple of benches, without even a single tree to relieve the harsh effects of the sun on their faces, two drunks were taking what looked to Marcelo like their last siesta. A policeman, standing in the corner, looking uncomfortable in a bulletproof vest and carrying a rusty rifle, was fanning himself with his blue uniform cap, sweating like a pig abandoned in the Sahara. As there was no one else in sight, Marcelo walked over to ask the policeman for directions.

“Excuse me, officer, do you know where Los Insurgentes cantina is?”

The policeman looked at him in surprise, as if he didn’t even remotely expect anyone around there to talk to him. He gave a long, noisy, mucus-filled sniff and then spat a green substance onto the asphalt. The sun would evaporate that phlegm in a few seconds, and both Marcelo and the policeman would begin to breathe it in if they stayed as they were, regarding each other from close proximity.

“An’ why the fuck d’you wanna go there?” asked the uniformed officer.

“A friend told me I had to see it, that it was cool, ” Marcelo ingenuously replied in his Madrid accent, clearly displaying his foreignness and confrontational ineptitude.

“It’s on this street, ’bout three blocks ahead,” conceded the policeman, pointing slowly and vaguely in the general direction. Marcelo walked down the street, staggering with incomprehension under the fierce sun.

There was no sign over the entrance. If Marcelo realized that shady place was Los Insurgentes, it was because he thought, quite rightly, that nowhere else in the desolate town would be open at that hour. Near the door, barely protected from the sun by the shadow of the cantina, a one-legged man holding out a small box offered products for alleviating bad breath.

Inside, the decor was spare: a wall of bottles behind the bar — as if it were a legendary saloon in some Western — a few posters for music concerts on the opposite wall, and a photograph of Emilio Zapata on the bathroom door — there was no door for women. He ordered a beer. A couple of guys were having a lackluster discussion about soccer, leaning their weight on a tiny round table. From the bar, the manager of the joint added his voice to the argument, alternatively supporting one or the other of his customers. No one took much notice of Marcelo, despite the fact that the fashionable elegance of his clothes was clearly out of tune with the place. Perhaps making too much of their indifference, Marcelo thought this must be one of those touristy anti-tourist spots where foreigners inevitably end up, thirsting for something traditional; a Mexican equivalent of those bullfighting taverns in Hapsburg Madrid that sell decadence as their principal — possibly only — attraction.

But the impression of witnessing an elaborately staged scene immediately evaporated when a new customer appeared in the doorway of Los Insurgentes, a woman wearing a jacket and pants, over fifty but not looking it, with long, curly black hair, who walked confidently to the bar and asked for a dark draft beer, calling the manager by his first name. The woman had a sober, elegant style, and her manners showed an education level superior to that of the other drinkers. Marcelo thought her attractive, interesting to the point of weakening his already well-proven predilection for younger women. She didn’t initially notice his presence, but — elbows on the bar, wrapped up in her thoughts — offered him, before a smile, the not-to-be-disdained landscape of the back of her well-cut pants. Marcelo, for his part, pretended to be unaware of the newcomer and, before heading off to continue his tour of the hostile terrain of Nueva Francia, ordered another beer — this time dark and from the barrel — and it was then that he managed to draw from the woman a first look of interest. But that initial glance was not enough to substantially modify the circumstances, at least not immediately or perceptibly. The look would instead have to remain buried, latent, awaiting the moment in which it would provoke a notable change in the course of events, events that until that moment, and taking Marcelo’s decision to come to live in Mexico as the point of departure, had turned out to be much less interesting and much less intense than he had originally supposed. And this noteworthy disillusion, this unfavorable comparison between expectations and actual events, didn’t have so much to do with the expectations themselves or the events — generally neutral and all equally dispensable — as with the bored, opaque gaze of the person who was experiencing them, the dulled sensations of the person who played out the grotesque comedy of the events without really getting the message, without being changed by it, moved in his depths. Because Marcelo’s depths were the cause of all his tedium, of all the slowness that filled his extremities and dulled his synaptic transmissions, and it was the slowness of Spain, and the slowness of Europe, and the slowness of philosophy that circulated phlegmatically inside him, so that a conventionally intense experience, like living in Los Girasoles and, one morning, visiting Nueva Francia, became an insipid outing in hostile, devastating heat, a ridiculously predictable outing from whose meanness he would not even be saved by the interested look of an attractive woman in a lugubrious cantina.

And in spite of the fact that slowness and opacity and tedium had been the elements of Marcelo’s perpetual, irremediable emotional state for as long as he remembered, he had the sensation things had not always been like that. He suspected that at some moment, the entire pantomime of his enthusiasm for life had been sustained by an authentic feeling. It was somewhere in the remote past, before adulthood, that he located the spring of jubilation and creative vigor from which — in a later version, and according to him — he still drank. In the same way, he had the sense of an intensely creative future, always at the point of emerging, in which he would once again live with enthusiasm and plenitude, fully savoring each detail of everyday life. The perpetual postponement of that moment caused him periods of deep discomfort, but his extreme self-satisfaction impeded him from recognizing that the problem was, in fact, structural, and not a simple question of stages and processes.

Marcelo stood up, ready to make his way home. His excursion to Nueva Francia was beginning to seem like a mistake, an idiotic idea whose spores were spread by the primary inoculum of Professor Velásquez, with his huge propensity for tacky acts of exalted localism. True, he had not yet seen anything of Nueva Francia, apart from this incomprehensibly famous cantina that would leave him one single memory. But that single memory, the woman with curly hair, spoke to Marcelo just as he was preparing to leave.

“You’re not going to Los Girasoles, are you?” she asked with what seemed to Marcelo almost authentically Castilian brusqueness.

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