Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

I also tell myself that while the lie only justifies a brief delay in my return to DF, a delay of at most one or maybe two weeks, I can always invent, on the hoof, lies that function as extensions, lies that get tangled together and follow each other like the stories in the Thousand and One Nights and put off — as in the Ibidem —the fatal moment, the moment of my return to a gray life, to the unbearable loneliness of marriage, which is more lonely than all other forms of loneliness, than sane, effective lonelinesses: the loneliness of the desert, of the widower, the loneliness of men who live surrounded by cats; marital loneliness is, I insist, more lonely than all the above because it imposes the necessity of being other, even in the sacred space of the shower, where you have to go on pretending that you are like this or like that, are interested in this or that detail of shared life, pretend that progress and the feasibility of a savings plan, the eradication of the damp in the living room walls, the advisability — or otherwise — of getting cable television, really matter. And in contrast, in this modality of simulations, what is impossible, or at least not to be recommended, is the public acceptance of our fallibility, of our devotion to collecting, of our miniature versions of the eternal return of the same that make up the course of the weeks: the contemplation of a vacant lot; the speculation about the way of life of a feathered animal that can’t, however, fly; the particular abnormality of the gland of eroticism that makes us masturbate twice, thinking monstrous things, every Saturday.

So I talk to her, to Cecilia. I ask her to sit down, and she does, and I tell her what I’ve outlined above: the lie about the possible job and the promise of a financial recompense not to be disdained. I round off the story with an homage to us, to us as a couple, appealing to her recently discovered interest in self-help — about how good it is that we can communicate our needs and understand that temporary separation, that state of being alone, doesn’t mean we aren’t together on a deeper plane. Finally, and maybe going slightly over the top, I tell her we can try hard to dream of each other every night, and that in the dreams we have together, we’ll be closer than anywhere else since we’ll fly hand in hand over the tops of scented pine trees, and won’t have to worry about anything except meeting with voracious dragons or other predators of the oneiric skies.

A little confused, Cecilia agrees to my proposal. At the beginning of my soliloquy, when I was talking about practical matters, she seemed slightly distrustful or sad, and then, as I insisted on the importance of finding a job, even if it wasn’t permanent, a smile appeared on her face, and I understood (or intuited, or invented for myself) the idea that she was thinking of her dad, my father-in-law, and in the restored pride of being able to say to him that I’m a good man, and that I’m saving again for that property, the promise of which gained me her hand and her sham virginity. Finally, when the story goes off on a transcendental tack, and I talk about abstractions and the subterranean feelings that unite us, Cecilia looks serious (about the abstractions and subterranean feelings, not the rest), gently frowning and not looking me in the eyes — like when you’re making small talk with another human being — but an inch or so, or maybe less, to the right, as if she can’t focus or is contemplating, beyond my face, the landscape of scented pine trees and the tremendous battles we’ll fight against oneiric, aerial dragons on the symbolic plane.

And Cecilia says yes, I should stay to see what happens with Marcelo’s friend, and she will drive the red car back by the same route and return, as is her duty, to the apartment next to the vacant lot, and the museum, to complete her tasks as an efficient secretary, no longer the frustrated pain in the ass she was with me when we were colleagues, but finally kind and docile and married and relatively happy with her life, even if her husband tells lies — she knows, deep down, that he does — and now has neither a job nor the least scrap of enthusiasm, and doesn’t even join her in the marital bed to consider their future options. Well, she doesn’t say that, but Cecilia does say yes, I should stay to see what happens with Marcelo’s friend, and she’ll drive the car back, and I can catch up with her again, as soon possible, in Mexico City. And that’s it; we don’t say another word, just switch on the television (my mom does have cable) and watch an entertaining documentary on the secret life of snakes, and I think that the secret life of snakes is their whole life, not just some aspect or moment of the night or a recurrent dark thought — as is so often the case for human beings — but all their life: from the moment they wake up until they succeed in swallowing a field rat whole, and also when they shed their skin, slithering out of themselves. I don’t say anything to Cecilia about all this, not, of course, because I’m in an uncommunicative mood — I am — but because I think she has already had enough with all the stuff about flying together and dream dragons chasing us. You could say I believe Cecilia has, for today, heard enough of my thoughts on reptiles — even if they are oneiric — and now, on the screen, snakes are secretly slithering out of themselves and secretly watching their prey and finally, secretly, snaking between the plants, so there’s no need to harp on the topic. Sometimes, even when you’re in a communicative mood, you have to leave things unsaid, keep the words — secretly — to yourself and trust that the people around you are thinking the same things, or something similar, and trust in the possibility of a silent empathy, an empathy related most specifically to space, to the possibility of sharing a space and inhabiting it at a given moment in history, which, in the case of Cecilia and I, is this one: this given moment in history.

12

I thought talking to Marcelo would be more difficult. I had, perhaps, too blind or too naïve a faith in his moral integrity. I thought that lying, the very idea of lying, would be not only alien to him but also reprehensible. That he would feel a sort of congenital disgust at lying in the abstract and, therefore, an acquired disgust at my concrete lie. My lie demanded a degree of complicity on his part that I now regret, because the complicity hatched in lying is always more powerful than the complicity hatched in the bright light of truth, in the same way that wicker woven underwater is hardier than wicker worked beneath an unforgiving sun. It’s the same for everything; it’s said, for example, that there is no friendship more enduring than that formed in prison, or at least when turning a blind eye to legality and consensus. And neither is there a more solid love than the one that is persecuted, or rather that would be hunted down and punished if its existence were known, so forcing the parties in question to lie habitually. Secrets and lies unite one man with another, and one man with himself, and perhaps they also unite snakes, whose secret lives are intensely secret and so must be more united than any other being under the light of the moon.

That’s the way it was with Marcelo. Almost immediately we passed from a cordial, if tense, relationship to becoming conspirators as soon as he’d agreed to participate in the game of my duplicity. He was fascinated by the idea. I didn’t have to go into details as he said he would take care of everything. That the professor implicated in the story, Velásquez, was in fact a friend of his for whom my mother felt a hyperbolic aversion. She would never ask him any questions since she couldn’t bear his presence or to hear news that involved him, even in a secondary role. Marcelo also arranged the matter of the possible extension of my visit: if I wanted to stay for a while longer, I only had to say I was going through certain aspects of the document I felt unsure about with Professor Velásquez. That instead of merely correcting copy, I’d become an authentic, fully fledged, personal editor, and that word had spread like dust in the aesthetics department, and there were already other researchers ready to put their books, their theses, their articles into my blessed hands.