Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

Well, I think, maybe this Marcelo isn’t as much of a cretin as he seems. He’s said a couple of things that are not, to my mind, completely misguided: that talking across the table after dinner seems to him a revolting habit, that amusement parks have more revolutionary potential than rhyming jingles, that he had only been in Mexico City for a few hours but had been able to “perceive its close liaison with the Devil.”

In the living room light — one of those so-called energy-saving bulbs — Marcelo appears less attractive than I’d first imagined. There are clear traces of acne beneath his straggly beard, pockmarks that extend down to his collar, and into which he sinks his thumbnail when absorbed in what he’s saying. He’s fair enough to appear European, but not that fair. My mother, who’s never been able to completely rid herself of her Marxist discourse, and these days uses it only out of sentiment, must think he’s a class enemy — his Italian shoes, his obvious preoccupation with style. Yes, she must think he’s a real stiff-necked Spaniard, that he knows nothing about the real world, just a rose-tinted version of it. She must get a kick out of thinking, “He’s a class enemy and I’m fucking him; class struggle is here, in my sweaty, proletariat bed.”

My mother, of course, is not a member of the proletariat, although in her desire to be one, she took a course in indexable lathe tooling when she was young. She’s never been able to explain what an indexable lathe is.

8

Four days and their associated nights have passed, and Marcelo is still here, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. One morning, he disappeared and came back half an hour later with a bundle of clothes and four orange juices that he shared among us. I asked him about his house. It seems that he was conned via the internet in relation to the price and space, the description and photos of the place. He can’t bear the house he’s rented; he says it’s infernally hot and that the residential estate is full of dubious people. But he can’t leave: he paid who knows how many months in advance, and there are various penalty clauses for early departure in the contract. To my mind, it had become for him a matter of principle. Marcelo seems to be the sort of person who invokes principles at the drop of a hat. He hopes to raise controversy every time he says — and he says it very frequently — that he’s a vegetarian; he must be disappointed by my absolute indifference to such provocations. As far as I’m concerned, he could be a coprophage. It’s all the same to me.

Marcelo is a couple of years younger than my mother. (“Just like Ceci and me,” I think.) But at that age, as at the beginning of adolescence, the difference between a man and a woman is obvious. Or maybe it’s just that Marcelo leads a healthy life, including gyms and visits to the homeopath and “a glass of wine in the evenings.” No doubt, a lot of olive oil. And I’m certain he’s never worked in an open-plan office. You notice these things immediately. When someone has worked in an office, a film of boredom spreads over his face and stays there for the rest of his life. His skin, for all that the sun and exercise might try hide it, loses its glow, becomes thin. His vertebral posture is never the same. There’s a classic curvature around the lumbar vertebrae that no ex-office worker can correct, not even with yoga or Arab dancing. The clothing of an office worker is also an irreversible aspect of his demeanor. If he’s lived in this nine-to-five routine, it’s impossible to regain a dignified, presentable style. It makes no difference if he consults Italian men’s formalwear magazines: the starched collar and the mediocrity of his shoes will be permanent shackles.

Marcelo seems like a stranger to this world of weighed-up sacrifices. He’s the sort of person you’d expect to have a healthy hobby: five-a-side soccer on the weekends, energy drinks, massage parlors where they call the prostitutes “helpmates.” He looks young, so young that instead of two, there are five years between him and my mother. And it’s not that my mom is really showing her age. She makes superhuman efforts to keep herself in shape. Almost suicidal diets, expensive depilatory treatments for her hairy body, cowboy boots she buys in the most expensive store in Los Girasoles, and the discreet but ever-present foundation makeup.

Marcelo has a certain tendency toward good humor that I find suspicious. He’s always asking me about my interests and even shows curiosity when he’s with Cecilia. It’s as if he believes that all human beings have something interesting to say, waiting there inside. He couldn’t be more wrong.

Despite all this, he’s a likeable guy, and even if his likeability can become almost intolerable after a few hours, his company is, in general, positive, or at least neutral. He shows himself to be obliging, but then he uses the opportunity of that conquered ground for a crushing display of theories. He proselytizes for the most innocuous causes (“a reevaluation of Epicurus,” for example). His capacity for enjoyment, if not completely atrophied, is clearly dampened by his love of analysis. He’s the sort of person who, when watching the most recent Disney movie, uses the word multiculturalism, or, when it’s over, posits without the least visible trace of sarcasm, “It’s a metaphor for almost everything.”

Normally, I’d have thought my mother would have found those attitudes, those almost comical attempts to be intelligent, downright pathetic. Yet she seems fascinated by the man. Marcelo’s most imbecilic comments receive an almost immediate echo of approval from her, and at times I feel afraid that he’s simply testing her, trying to define the limits of her affection. I then discover an unprecedented impulse: to defend my mother against the possibility of disillusion. I’ve never before worried about anything like that: it was always she who was constantly trying to convert me to the hopeful club, with little success. She took me to events organized by her NGO, convinced that when I saw a little suffering my heart, embalmed in cynicism, would soften. She showed me documentaries about famine in Africa.

But with Marcelo, things are different: her personal enthusiasms lie in abeyance while she’s laughing at the frigging Spaniard’s jokes, as if twenty-five years of academia and social work were not enough to deal with the cover of Hola! magazine.

I learn about how they met, without really paying much attention. Something to do with a rough town somewhere in the vicinity, a crummy bar, something about my mom’s car breaking down and Marcelo giving her a lift back to Los Girasoles. . It all sounds as if it’s come from a bad novel about drug trafficking. (The reader discovers, some pages in, that she’s the head of a “fucking tough” cartel, and by then he, the professor of philosophy, has already become trapped in her web of corruption and deceit.) There’s something about the rhetoric of other people’s love stories that makes me feel sick, a tendency for bedroom hyperbole that, particularly when it’s my mother speaking, gives me the urge to seek out once again that neutral office-worker tone, or death.

9

Cecilia has discovered literature: to my shame, she has bought a horrendous edition of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The book appears to have been designed by a self-help professional: purple borders, title in italics, whimsical shading, and photos modified to look like drawings. In the evenings, she reads a couple of pages while my mom and Marcelo discuss minority rights. Then she gets all grandiloquent, says if you concentrate hard enough, you can dream that you’re flying, and that benefits your everyday life. That’s what she says to me before we go to sleep; then she has a lime tea (I save the bag) and curls up on one edge of the bed, smiling at the wall.