Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

I wonder if I should tell him, tell Marcelo, something about the vacant lot, or about the tea bags, or the hen, or the perfect turd that appeared one day (that seems long ago) on Ceci’s bedspread. Tell him I’m also undertaking aesthetic research, or not aesthetic but simply related to life, research that concerns the warp and weft of existence. And I’m also abandoning it (or it’s abandoning me; I’m not sure), and I feel tired and betrayed, with no inducement to continue living. But it’s probably too much, telling him all that; we probably haven’t reached that point. We don’t know each other well enough, and Marcelo prefers to go on being the guy who does the crawl on my mother and just wants me to be the on-loan son he has to worry about, the son he has to accompany in the early hours while he vomits or expels an endless thread of thick milk, hugging the toilet bowl, the sacrificial stone that has never, in fact, been anything but a toilet bowl. Most probably Marcelo couldn’t care less that I became obsessed and then stopped being obsessed by a hen, a vacant lot and a turd. And he certainly couldn’t care less that I have a pornographic photo from the eighties in my wallet, and particularly that, before my marriage, it was my custom — not completely voluntary — to masturbate twice on Saturdays. Who would be interested in all that? And how, above all, could it interest someone who has such a high opinion of himself? And Marcelo has a high opinion of himself.

Most probably I won’t reveal my secrets to him. And he’ll take up his book by Foret — or is it about Foret? — even though he’s not obsessed with him, and will finish his research — without going to Mexico City or Monterrey or the port of Veracruz — in this lost town of Los Girasoles, living with Adela and mounting her, swimming with her every night, until the end of his existence.

11

The holidays are almost over. We celebrated Christmas without too much fuss: a turkey and salads that we bought from a small restaurant in Los Girasoles; a good provision of wines, chosen by Marcelo, who thinks himself a connoisseur (in the supermarket checkout line, he told us the story of a wine grape the Chileans had stolen from the French — or vice versa, I can’t remember which — in addition, naturally, to having previously paused to consider the good qualities of each bottle before putting it in the trolley); and a rather unenthusiastic exchange of presents. Cecilia gave me the book on oneiromancy she had promised to buy. We, Cecilia and I, gave Marcelo a fountain pen like the ones Ms. Watkins uses (though surely less expensive) and my mother an elegantly indigenous shawl.

The day after tomorrow will be New Year’s Eve, and after that we’ll have to return to DF. I’ll have to return to my — aesthetic? — research on the origin of the turd on the bedspread, and Cecilia will return to her full-time job at the museum, where perhaps some colleague will leave a scrap of paper on her desk and propose matrimony, and quickly take her from me. Return to DF, and its cruelty.

An alternative occurs to me: to stay here for at least a week longer, without the yoke of marital companionship and with my mother and Marcelo working all day at the university. Then I could spend my time walking around the four bearable streets of the town and striking up rural friendships with some of the locals (friendships, for example, based on whistling from one side of the square to the other, and the ambiguous gesture of raising a hand to the crown of a straw hat).

Returning to the city right now seems to me a rather unattractive option. If I at least had a tyrannical routine to go back to, everything would take on meaning, but what I’ll be returning to is the uncertainty of having no job and the uneventful days steeped in idleness; days that are empty, like a Chinese fortune cookie they’ve forgotten to put a message in, leaving you with the twofold sensation that you have no future and that you’ve just eaten a capsule of air, of nothing, of antimatter.

No, I have to stay here, in Los Girasoles, or even venture to some other place. Cross to the United States undocumented and send remittances to Cecilia while I break my back picking strawberries, or move to a neighboring town and join one of the local cartels, or set up an innovative business right here and squeeze out the salaries and bonuses from the professors at the University of Los Girasoles (squeeze out, for example, the bonuses Marcelo and Adela, my mother and Marcelo, receive). But any one of those alternatives would require an exhausting deployment of ingenuity, and for the moment I’d prefer to sleep in late and walk in my underwear to the kitchen to drink — straight from the bottle — a swig of thick, repulsive milk. So, I’ll stay here alone in Los Girasoles, if I can manage to convince Cecilia that this is best for us both (I’ll have to invent something, which will give me an extra satisfaction; I like telling her lies), and that it doesn’t mean I’m going to leave her for good. (In the family setting she comes from, if the husband sleeps away from the marriage bed for more that two nights, the most likely explanation is that he already has another life — wife included — at the opposite end of the very same street.)

So I talk to her. I ask her to sit down when Marcelo and my mom have gone over to Marcelo’s horrible apartment to see how it all is and, one imagines, to play at swimming together on another mattress filled with asthmatic children. I tell her — Cecilia — to sit down, and she goes slightly pale since never before, I believe, have I threatened to talk seriously with her about something, about anything; all our previous conversations have been uninspiring, or at least have not required such a sensationalist gesture as asking her to sit down. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever asked anyone to sit down before, I’ve only seen it done in movies, where they always ask a person to sit down when they’re about to give him a piece of news that could throw him. (If you fall from a sitting position, it hurts less or does less harm than if you fall from a completely upright position, which is why people prefer to sit down before hearing something that could precipitate a fall; I suppose, I imagine, I guess.)

Cecilia sits down next to me in the living room and asks, with a twinkle in her eye, if I’ve succeeded in flying in my dreams.

“No,” I say, “I want to talk to you about something else. I’m going to stay here in Los Girasoles for a few days longer. Marcelo tells me a friend of his at the university needs someone to copyedit a book he’s written so that it sounds less academic and he can send it to a publisher in the real world. I could do it from home, but I need to talk to him first, when the new term starts.” I know I’m touching a sensitive spot: she might have read Jonathan Livingston Seagull and now professes a blind, arbitrary faith in the power of dreams and other shit like that, but what really concerns Cecilia is the issue of my unemployment, and only a promise of work would convince her it’s necessary for me to stay, even if doing so feeds her most deep-rooted fears. The story about Marcelo’s friend comes to me on the spur of the moment, and I don’t stop to consider before opening my mouth that I’ll probably have to ask him — Marcelo — to back me up in public, which clearly implies that my mother will find out about it, and I’ll have to decide whether or not we should make her party to the lie or keep her out of it. The best thing, I think, will be to keep her — my mother — out of it and convince Marcelo to maintain the pretense in front of the two of them, Cecilia and Adela, my wife and my mother.