Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

Cecilia and my mom walk a few steps ahead of me, but not a word passes between them. Cecilia looks eager, as if she is trying to please her impossible mother-in-law, alert to any sign of good faith or a disposition for conversation that this might imply. But my mother walks on unconcernedly, as if indifferent to her visitors’ attentions, thinking her own thoughts, inscrutable, giving me sideways glances, as though she were evaluating me with the corner of her eye, of her conscience, of her wasted or even regretful maternity.

Someone — in fact, Cecilia — suggests going to the movies, but my mother explains that the only movie theater where they show anything new is several miles away, in a ghost mall that probably belongs to the narcos since it stands there, ostentatiously, in the middle of nowhere, completely empty at any time of the day or night, except maybe Saturday afternoons, when some of the university professors drag themselves along to it, hopeful of finding something, anything, on which to spend their salaries and their discount vouchers.

Setting that plan aside as being complicated and too much trouble, we sit on a metal bench with the paint peeling off, next to an orange-juice stand on the edge of the square. The fruit on the stand looks wrinkled. My mother still seems absent, and Cecilia tries to catch my eye in a look of complicity that I suddenly don’t want to share.

7

We sit down and switch on the TV. The fabric of the armchair is slightly faded at a certain level, from use. I point this out to my mom, but she doesn’t deign to acknowledge my comment, waving it off with her hand. Outside, the heat of the afternoon is giving way to the cold of night, without measurable nuances between the two states. I interrupt the rapt contemplation of Cecilia and my mother with a new comment, this time about how good it is that there are no mosquitoes in Los Girasoles. The comment is once again ignored, this time without even the gesture.

On the screen is one of those live, trashy talk shows. There are three couples, all around forty; a blonde, slightly vulgar presenter is opening and shutting her pound of lip silicon before them, admonishing them with amazing rudeness. As far as I can tell, the topic of the program is “I cheated on my wife with my own wife.” The three husbands, apparently, all had sex with their respective wives. They even regularly had sex, just like any other couple, but for some reason that was impossible to communicate, during one of these encounters they were overcome by the certainty that they were committing adultery. And the feeling was shared: both the man and his wife were aware, for a moment, while they were high on pleasure, that they were being unfaithful; not with someone else, but right there during that sexual act, as if they knew their spouse simultaneously was and wasn’t him or herself. And that led to a surge of jealousy. The woman was suspicious of every one of her partner’s activities; the husband spied on his wife and treated her roughly or even violently (in one case, it seems, it even came to blows). For all their promises that it would never happen again, their trust in each other had been irrevocably undermined, and all for screwing each other, but deep down, in some strange way, committing adultery. Little by little, they say, monogamy was restored by means of stubbornly repeating an idiotic routine.

Disconcerted by the direction the program is taking, I get up from the armchair, ready to go to bed while thinking that, in the end, this is perhaps the only way to survive marriage with a degree of dignity. Forget the midlife crises and the sudden preference for youth and motorcycles. Forget the summer affairs and the red-velvet bars to which you go with the dentist’s secretary. Forget the prostitution and the unexpected discovery of closet homosexuality. Endogamous adultery: that’s what’s missing, dammit.

I’m hardly on my feet when the doorbell rings. My mom, not moving from her chair, unsurprised, asks me to answer it, adding, “It must be Marcelo.” I give her a questioning look, but she continues watching the TV as if nothing had happened. I’ve never heard of Marcelo. Cecilia, in the meantime, has fallen asleep in her armchair, and I know it’s not humanly possible to wake her so that she can be with me in this moment of deep uncertainty. Why does it seem so natural to just open the door to him?

Between the house and the gate leading to the street is a minuscule garden with a gravel path. The bulb in the lamppost intended to illuminate the sidewalk outside has blown so that I can only distinguish, beyond the high metal railing, a masculine figure, taller than me, his right hand gripping one of the bars. The light from the other street lamps shines behind him, eclipsing his face.

This, I imagine, is the Marcelo guy. He greets me with a suspicious degree of effusion, speaking my name as if we were old friends. I open the gate wide to him, feeling perplexed, while running through the most obvious possibilities: a neighbor who has only come out about his homosexuality to my mother, who is egging him on to start a civil liberties campaign in Los Girasoles; a psychologist hired by my mom to convince me to return to education or get divorced; and finally — always finally — the most sensible possibility: he’s my mom’s new boyfriend. His friendly, deferential manner points to the last option, although I find one aspect of the situation disconcerting: he’s Spanish. The accent gives him away. And in my mother’s bellicose imagination, no one who’s Spanish can — short of renouncing his ancestry — attempt to display a benevolent attitude toward a Mexican without it being understood as a disregard for the dignity of that person (it’s a relatively historical matter, very difficult to explain). So Marcelo makes an effort to be pleasant from the outset, but the tension caused by his Spanish blood gets in the way of this noble intent, and his amiability ends up being offensive, grating, uncivilized.

Marcelo takes his place in the TV soirée with strange spontaneity. Cecilia has woken and, after greeting the stranger with obvious coquetry, has started asking him questions, while on the now-silent screen the programming continues autistically. My mother laughs at Marcelo’s ingenious replies, and Cecilia, without fully understanding them (they often include highbrow references), also laughs, but with a hesitancy that gives her away.

Marcelo addresses me, trying to include me in the sudden intimacy of the scene.

“Rodrigo, your mother tells me that you’re interested in belles lettres.”

“Me, interested in letters? Really? You could say that I take an interest in some words, or parts of words. Lately I’ve been feeling a particular predilection for vowels,” I reply, attempting to avoid my tone being interpreted as droll.

The conversation quickly veers toward politics, guided by the iron will of my mother’s opinions. Marcelo is ambiguous: he concedes that the left in general has merits, but he despises the Manichaean sense of history. In the face of such an incredibly abstract affirmation, Cecilia takes her leave, alleging drowsiness, and goes to bed.

“Are you coming, Rodrigo?”

“No, my love, I’ll catch you later.” When she hears my reply, Cecilia shoots me a reproachful glance, giving me to understand that she was trying to leave Marcelo alone with my mother. The conversation about politics continues its sinuous course. Marcelo has taken a cold beer from the fridge, and I finally understand what all those bottles are doing there: he’s a regular visitor to this house. It seems, in short, a fairly new but stable relationship.