Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

They were, as the cliché goes, poor but happy. But behind Foret’s happiness was a constant threat, a cord stretched to the breaking point, an overinflated balloon that could burst at any moment. His joy was always incomplete, like a sort of addiction that in seeking satisfaction, constantly required greater stimulus. Although, for the first time in years, his life seemed to have become a little more settled, there was an elemental haste inside him, a desire to reach the next state, even if this might signify the collapse of his present tranquility. Bea accepted this haste and dissatisfaction as fundamental traits of her new husband’s nature, although she was always aware of their problematic side. If she’d had her way, they would have either stayed in Mexico until their economic difficulties were resolved or awaited the end of the war there before going together to London, Paris, or wherever. But at the time, Richard had not correctly diagnosed his thirst for mutation, his propensity for change, and the tyranny of his own will: he believed that behind every plan was a concrete reality, and that Buenos Aires would really be the place where they could finally form a family. And he wasn’t willing to put anything off.

By June, before they had even been married for six months, the situation had become unsustainable. Richard talked without respite of the marvels awaiting them in Buenos Aires, but he had also begun to propose parallel or, according to his humor, mutually exclusive plans that left Bea in a whirl. If it were raining, he would enthusiastically argue in favor of London. He would enter the country under a false name and shoot himself in the leg to avoid recruitment. Bea would be able to take charge of her inheritance and even bring her two children to live with them. Practical considerations (the impossibility of living together without Matthew, Bea’s first husband, bringing a lawsuit, for example) were set aside with childish arguments or even more complex, makeshift plans to fill the gaps: they would both live in anonymity, or he would have Bea’s first husband killed, and if he did so, they could then settle in Australia.

Bea was overtaken by a sense of unreality and absolute fragility. She imagined Richard’s constant references to other lives to be expressions of subconscious regrets: perhaps he would prefer to be somewhere else, to return to his nomadic existence and the braggart bachelor status some — she had been warned of this in New York, when they tried to dissuade her — considered his dominant trait.

Caught up as he was in a whirlwind of confused and unachievable futures, Richard didn’t notice the deterioration of his present. Not only was Bea’s anxiety growing, but he himself had neglected his work. In the gym, it was as if he were somewhere else, or he would tell his students labyrinthine stories about his past or future life, sometimes in languages the young pugilists had never heard before. One day Señor Ortueta, the owner, called Richard into his tidy office and said he couldn’t go on paying him. As any good Mexican in those years, he laid the blame for everything on the revolution, and he fired Foret, with the only consolation being that he could continue to use the splintered club facilities for his personal training. Foret naturally refused this offer and challenged him to a duel. Luckily his bravado didn’t bear fruit.

For Bea, Richard’s working life debacle was the end of an era. It was not that her instincts were telling her to put distance between them until he calmed down, but that from a financial viewpoint, she found herself forced to do so. She, therefore, suggested a two-stage plan: she would go immediately to Buenos Aires, where she could pick up the money that had been accumulating in London and find a decent place for them to live while he stayed in Mexico for a few months longer, until he could make enough money to cover their debts and buy a passage to Buenos Aires. It might also be simpler to get money to Richard from Argentina than from London.

Bea, who was much more practical than her husband, discovered it was possible to travel from Veracruz to Cuba and, from there, to Buenos Aires, and had made inquiries about the dates: she would sail in two weeks. The news hit Richard like the blade of a guillotine. He went around for several days with a corpse-like face, tramping along Calle Tacuba until the traders became suspicious. Bea tried to calm him, to explain the practical advantages of the plan she had outlined, but it was all in vain: the very idea of being separated from her again weighed down on Foret’s tattooed shoulders like a cedar wardrobe. At the same time, he was, at heart, conscious that the decision had already been taken. He knew Bea was a determined woman, and he also knew financial problems worried her in a way he would never understand. For her, it was important to establish herself in Buenos Aires and have a home, not a pokey hotel room in a city full of bandits (a situation that was more tolerable for him).

The day Bea set off for Veracruz, Foret cried like a baby. He clung to her with occlusive force until the driver of the car that was to take her to the railway station completely lost his patience. Bea’s arrangements were quite clear: she would solve the problem and be responsible for ensuring that Richard arrived in Buenos Aires as soon as possible. There, they would live happily among other European immigrants until the war was over, and they would have hordes of children and both write unbearably beautiful poetry. This was the mantra Richard repeated to himself, even though he was convinced it would be the last time he touched Bea.

Maybe if he had not been so moved, so immersed in his own feelings, Richard would have noticed, during that final embrace, Bea Langley’s slightly swollen belly.

On the day following his wife’s departure, in despair at being suddenly alone, Foret repented having given in to Bea’s pressure, having allowed her to leave, and abandoning all his possessions, he boarded a goods train at nightfall, hoping to arrive in Veracruz in time to stop his beloved from sailing.

A

Marcelo Valente lies very uncomfortably on the bed, looking at the ceiling of his small house in the Puerta del Aire residential estate. Beside him, recently abandoned on the rumpled sheets, lies the book Fundamental Considerations on Something by the admirable Richard Foret. He has been reading the whole day, snacking on grated carrots and turnip (a simple culinary discovery he is addicted to), and later he will go down to Adela’s house in the center of Los Girasoles to have dinner with her.

He looks over the sections he has highlighted in fluorescent yellow in the Foretian Considerations and thinks they are an impossible collection of incoherent, hallucinatory axioms:

“The person who talks to himself knows the First Person does not exist.”

“I warn you, my scant readers, that I have perceived a blossoming of my social concerns. At least once a week, I get the impulse to go out and plant bombs.”

“When you begin to judge days according to the consistency of your excrement, you know you have done something bad in your life.”

“My inclination toward murder, while impressive, is below average.”

“All things are moving, only some of them move too slowly.”

“I am surprised not to have written more frequently about sex, that elephant in the room of my head.”

“The sea is for those who are far away.”

“The person who talks to himself,” Marcelo Valente says aloud, “knows the First Person does not exist.” And he takes a short nap before leaving the house.