Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

Although I hate to admit it, I’ve discovered that in contradiction to my earlier convictions, I’m also excited by the idea of watching Cecilia shit. I’ve tried getting into the bathroom after her, but she always locks the door. “I’m in here, my love.” “Come on, let me in.” “No, Rodrigo, you’re making me nervous. What do you want?” I leave her in peace. The shit on the bedspread has unleashed other deviations. (I can’t call them by any other name.) I also, for example, imagine the type of crap passed by all the people I see in the street, as if divining their intestinal secrets would constitute some form of profound psychology. Now that I’m unemployed, I should put these obsessions to good use in some way or other. Setting up a business, for instance. There are businesses for every taste. There’s a company in Santa María la Ribera that offers its clients random numbers. They mail them a slip of paper with a number of varying lengths. The customers open the envelope, read the number, consider it, fold the slip of paper, and put it somewhere safe until the next number arrives, two or three months later. Then they throw away the first slip of paper. At least that’s what I’m told the company does. But thinking it over, there must be something in the whole process that I’m missing. Something significant that converts the number service into a matter of life or death. Anyway, what I mean to say is that there are all sorts of businesses. I could set up a deep psychology company. A company for intestinal secrets. For shit analysis. A detective company.

In any case, what makes me uneasy is to think that the suspect was still in the room when I entered the apartment. The sounds I heard from the door appear to confirm this theory. Also the fact that, in a moment of weakness I shouldn’t have allowed myself, I took longer than usual to enter the room, giving the crapper the chance to escape through the window, leaping like an athlete into the shadows of the lot. Maybe the intruder was there, getting ready to commit burglary, or just calculating the damage his excreta would cause my daily life because he knew the event would be unspeakably disturbing, forcing me to throw out that tiger-striped bedspread that, though I might loathe it, was the favorite of my wife, who, while not exactly my soul mate, could at least expect me to show her the respect of preserving her bedspread. The intruder must have known all this, and he must have calculated it with a malice only comparable with that of cabdrivers. An environmental malice, I’d say, that impregnates the skin of all the inhabitants of this capital city and imbues them with an unpleasant smell, the smell of stagnant water or dead bird; a malice that doesn’t escape my notice even though my natural tendency toward optimism manages to take it for granted, overlooking its consequences and leading me to continue along the rigorous path of a life that, if not exactly based on the model my mother would have preferred, does satisfy me to some extent. At least it satisfies me to the extent that if it were not for that turd, found in ridiculous circumstances in the very center of my bed, I could today say — despite my marriage, my unemployed status, and my absolute lack of perspective in relation to the future — that I’m happy, to the precise and sufficient extent that happiness is the inertia of which I spoke earlier, the inertia that carries me gently from one Saturday to the next, showing me the most agreeable paths of existence, the ones that avoid danger and death, making incomprehensible but ultimately fortunate detours, or fortunate to the precise and sufficient extent that they don’t land you in prison, because prisons are horrific in this country, or so I’ve been told.

Similar stories that I have heard: some burglars, after the robbery, shit at the scene of the crime. A signature, a personal mark, a little detail. The initials of two lovers carved into a tree trunk, crap to autograph a crime — it’s the same thing; the desire for permanence, when you come down to it. But this burglar, if he was one, reversed the order: he didn’t take anything. The turd wasn’t a symbolic payment for any removal. Just crap, like a menhir on the tiger-striped bedspread. A semifluid totem. A fucking shitty insult. When I was capable of returning to the bedroom, I held my nose, screwed up my eyes, and folded the bedspread over the little gift. I disposed of it, not without worrying about how much it would pain Cecilia to lose her horrendous feline bedspread.

I told her I’d taken all the bedding to the self-service laundromat. That I’d sat down to read a celebrity gossip magazine, and when I got up to see how the wash was progressing, I’d found the machine empty: no tiger-striped bedspread, no sheets, no pillowcases. I was even careful to offer her precise details of what I’d been reading: breast implants, infidelities, probable U-turns in the sexual preferences of certain television stars, things like that. It was an absurd explanation, but no more absurd than the actual truth. Cecilia threatened to go to the laundromat to complain, to demand the return of her bedspread. I was sharp enough to dissuade her with the promise of new extravagances: I told her they were selling a bedspread exactly like hers, but violet, on the corner of Dr. Vértiz and Río de la Loza. Later, I’d think up another lie to cover the first one. The causal series of lies is no less rigid than its parallel version in the real world. At times the two series become entwined for a moment in a single causal sequence we term, for pure convenience, the first person singular.

The question of the authorship — intellectual, but also material — of the perfect turd kept me awake for many nights following the event. Now, due to my unemployment, the enigma has expanded into the daylight hours, and I can’t shake off the grotesque, affectedly symmetrical image of the turd in the center of the bed. I think that if I had any money, I’d hire one of those detectives who advertise in the classified sections of newspapers and set him on the trail of the scatological felon. Given this, I regret having disposed of the evidence since no DNA test can now be carried out, nor can single hairs, mistakenly left between the bedsheets during the dastardly act, be extracted, nor a faithful reconstruction of the scene of the shameful deed made.

When I was dismissed from the museum, I had some meager savings. The greater part of my earlier reserve funds had disappeared with the costs arising from my recent marriage: outings to the movies, a leather handbag, board games, alcohol. . anything to relieve the forced regime of living together. Given my penury, I decide to investigate the dark rationale behind the events myself, and given the lack of evidence, and my complete and insuperable ignorance in relation to my point of departure, I decide the investigation will be simply speculative, rational. The first question I have to answer is how the subject who shat on my bed entered and left. After discounting hypotheses in the general area of spontaneous generation and mystical manifestation, I tell myself he must have entered through the door of the apartment, like anyone else. Another option, which can’t be completely discounted, is that he entered through the window overlooking the lot; the other window, the one that looks out on the interior courtyard, has bars. If he entered through the window, he must have used a ladder (coming from the vacant lot) or a rope (coming from the roof); either possibility involves a logistical deployment at odds with the speed of the events. He must, therefore, have entered through the door. But the lock didn’t show any signs of having been forced, so the intruder (a) has a key to my apartment or (b) knows someone who has a key to my apartment. Or even (c) the intruder comes from a parallel reality, another time and space, and just crossed the threshold separating it from this world, appearing directly on the tiger-striped bedspread, squatting, with the crap at the point of exiting through his anus. But no, option (c) is unthinkable. It’s an option that can only be conceived by theoretical physicists. Or mathematicians. Or science fiction writers. Or schizophrenics, which is to say, none of the above.