Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

Cecilia is content in her job. She asked Ms. Watkins for a raise, and the director, out of pity for our situation — for which she is, in part, responsible — awarded her one, though lowering the requested sum by a couple of percentage points. I don’t know how she managed to square the books, because the museum budget depends on the federal budget for culture, which wanes with each successive day. And although this recession in the cultural industries is a direct consequence of the government’s contempt for anything intended to make existence more bearable, I can’t help but wish for, and tacitly encourage, the collapse of state culture and the whole ridiculous meritocracy it has installed, forcing people to spit on each other and to make hatred and suspicion their only mode of survival. Because the only people who rise up the pile are those who can fuck up everyone else, the ones who seek their neighbors’ ruin and the ridicule and disgrace of their colleagues, now their permanent adversaries.

But the fact is that Ms. Watkins gave Cecilia a raise, and Cecilia is looking more kindly on the world.

The imminence of the holidays and the prospect of leaving the city make the days more pleasant. My mom was happy to have us stay with her, and I noticed in her mood a notable reconsideration of my virtues, as if she thought that idleness had purified me. And indeed it has: I now understand how wrong I was in trying to persevere with office-ism. Only premature retirement, I’m beginning to understand, justifies undertaking a college degree. (I even consider doing one.) Mexico City seems to me like the oppressive monster it in fact is, forcing a permanent regime of avarice on its inhabitants, from which they will only be released by a violent death or a prolonged respiratory tract disease. The province of the spirit is the only pleasure I defend. In light of this, I reevaluate my childhood in Cuernavaca, my father’s house, the pieces of waste ground that are not hemmed in by buildings but stretch out immeasurably mysterious, gorged with life, across the poverty-stricken hillsides. The vacant lots so large they are called fields. Salvation is, ultimately, in the bucolic.

These reflections fully endorse my decision to seek out vegetal life, in the lowercase sense, in the adjoining lot. But I now understand that the lot is not wide enough to save me from the infinite idiocy, cruelty, and injustice of the city. And that is why someone shat on my bedspread. Civilization is a violent outrage, a clash of the most basic instincts of every citizen. There is no culture that offers redemption from this disguised barbarity, no poem or play that makes this extreme mendacity of the soul more bearable.

All there is in the city is pointless argument and swaggering, gratuitous animosity and the degradation of others. I now know that all jobs, with their eight office hours and their vertical structure and their system of rewards and punishments, are demeaning to the limits of what is humanly tolerable. And all wage earners — the culture bureaucrats who try to pass off the endless battle for the suppression of others as rational discussion of ideas — are themselves victims and perpetrators of the daily dose of filth, from which nothing, absolutely nothing except resignation and silence and ostracism and the margin, can save them. I, now, am going to conquer that margin, among the shrubs of the terrestrial sphere.

Of course there’s a touch of the spasmodic in my sudden aspiration for the rural condition. Something of a last-minute remedy for the oppressive sensation of being in the process of dying. Because I am dying, that is certain: cooped up in a damp apartment, next to a lot inhabited by only a hen, married to a woman whose form oscillates in my spirit between the beloved (to be polite) and the incomprehensible.

In the past, the solidity of an imposed, semi-tyrannical routine allowed me to not worry about what I did with my idle hours. Now all my hours are idle hours, and ideas have time to grow inside me until they become monstrous; feelings have the space and silence to slowly soak into my nerves and reach the darkest regions of my spirit; the contradictions of which I’m made up have enough air to accelerate their combustion, making the collection of minutiae that sustain my existence inflammable and even perilously volatile.

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Finally, the holiday season comes around. Cecilia’s small, red, secondhand car will be good for traveling the highway, even though I don’t drive and have no intention of ever doing so. She, then, will be responsible for getting us there. At heart Cecilia isn’t bothered by that detail, as I had calculated would happen. Resigned to my uselessness, and having accepted it as one of my principal features, she’s unsurprised that it should manifest itself once more in this new impossibility. She suspects — and she’s right — that in the coming years I’ll gradually renounce more and more activities, until I end up sprawled prostrate in a wing chair, observing a collection of tea bags on the coffee table, dribbling a little out of the corner of my mouth, and uttering, with ridiculous emphasis, the word egg.

In any case, Cecilia likes driving, so we set out for Los Girasoles, provisioned with a whole bag of ham-and-cheese sandwiches and several small rectangular cartons of grape juice. The highway, once we’ve left Mexico City, is packed with vacationers, station wagons with inflatable dinghies on the roof. As we travel farther from the city, and the gap between one house and the next widens, I feel I’m shrugging off an exaggerated weight, something irksome on my shoulders, sinking me ever deeper into myself, into the most wretched regions of myself.

The highway makes me think of all the things that happen. Of the madcap or impossible pace of the days that don’t just pass but deny their existence, or turn back on themselves, or anticipate by whole weeks the actual date of their coming. So the accelerations and decelerations Cecilia inexpertly imposes on our family speedster tangentially express that frenetic leaping and prancing of the days, those moments of wonder and those emergency stops of individual perception before the passage of time.

The highway makes me think of all the things that happen. For example, of the waterways I used to construct when I was a child, on the slopes of the waste ground across from my father’s house in Cuernavaca: they were PVC tubes, joined together with anything that came to hand, that formed circuits around which the water and my small Lego toys nimbly slid, although they would sometimes get stuck, or an unexpected leak would prematurely carry them off into the sand of the waste ground. ( Prematurely : like the things that happen when you’re in a hurry.)

The highway makes me think of all the things that happen. For example, of the way human relationships keep changing, in the same way as the Mexican landscape — there outside the car window — changes from conifer forests to vast expanses of maguey. Just like my relationship with Cecilia, which went from indifference to hatred, from there to the unmitigated discord of our opinions, and then, gently, approached tolerance, a discreet form of love, in neutral colors, routine.

“Doesn’t the highway make you think of all the things that happen?” I ask her.

“Oh, Rodrigo, the things you say, you’d think you were a numbskull. . Wouldn’t you like a sandwich?”

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