Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

Natalia and Jimmie drank and laughed for two hours, closely observed by Adela without anyone noticing her presence. At the end of those two hours, Adela had drunk, all alone, as many beers as Jimmie and Natalia together and, she realized, was in an almost perilous state of inebriation. Eventually, plucking up her courage, she stood and walked to the table where the gringo was charming the young woman with his anecdotes. Initially Jimmie thought she was a waiter and held out an empty bottle without looking up, muttering thanks. Noting that Adela didn’t take the bottle, Jimmie turned his head and found himself looking at her face, bathed in tears of humiliation. “I’m Adela, you moronic gringo. You stood me up for her at the next table.” Jimmie made a wry face when he understood his mistake. Adela walked unsteadily to the door.

Many things could have happened at that point. Jimmie could have caught up with her and spent hours begging her to forgive him. They might never have got as far as anything approaching a stable relationship, but at least they could have remained friends, which, in a small town like Los Girasoles, was something worthy of consideration. But Jimmie opted for the worst possible reaction. Charmed as he was by the low neckline of his impromptu companion, he said, in a voice loud enough for Adela to hear, “There are some weird, disturbed people in this town, aren’t there?” The girl’s laugh wounded Adela even more deeply than Jimmie’s question, which condemned her to ridicule.

4

Rodrigo listened to Marcelo’s confused, long-winded story, sitting in what was now his armchair, while the Spaniard sat rigid, apparently uncomfortable, facing him. Velásquez had wanted to be there when he explained the plan to the “stepson,” in case he stumbled over some point or forgot some fundamental fact that needed to be addressed, but Marcelo felt Rodrigo would dismiss the proposal immediately if he suspected from the start just how divorced from reality Velásquez now was. So they were alone again, as they had been during their earlier conversations.

He told Rodrigo about the gringo and lingered over a very extended description of Micaela, emphasizing her disturbing beauty and the fact that, despite all odds, her piss tasted divine. He told him there was a lot of alcohol splashing around, and that although there was certainly something ridiculous about the whole affair, what mattered was meeting up with these people every so often — a couple of times a week maybe, or three nearer the time for the actual hypnosis session — sharing something of the disquiet of Los Girasoles.

Rodrigo listened with a poker face. It was impossible to guess what was going through his mind, Marcelo thought, and all the better, because he could be thinking about the possibility of making a sudden return to DF — back to his wife — putting a distance between himself and that bleak, dusty plain, where sensible people ended up giving in to the darkest whims of the soul, to the most grotesque claims of an unknown gringo, to simple, unadorned madness, clearly pronouncing each of that word’s syllables, few though they might be, because madness only has two audible syllables, but is followed by a long series of sounds that seem to seep toward the interior of the word; syllables that are never pronounced, but throb within the word and are, in a certain sense, alluded to when someone says “madness,” especially if they say it consciously, thinking of the multiple, not necessarily pleasant forms of madness, that word of infinite syllables.

Rodrigo listened with a poker face but inside was not really listening, or he was listening and responding and carrying on an angry, inaudible dialogue in which he posed counterarguments and swept aside excuses related to what Marcelo was telling him. That dialogue went more or less like this:

“Frigging Marcelo. He’s got an amazing proclivity for weird situations. Where can he have found those people, those stories of piss drunk at midnight in dark hovels full of ceramic plates? Is he telling me lies? Inventing an absurd story to see how credulous I am, to report straight back to my mother about my reaction to all this? No, that can’t be it. Not after the conversations we’ve had; after we’ve jointly revitalized the dry, dusty house of language with a couple of good conversations. But if he’s serious, what the hell does he expect from me? On the other hand, drinking the piss of a beautiful young girl sounds pretty tempting. Disgusting, but tempting. What’s more, drinking piss is an infallible indication you’re in the presence of the sacred, or something like it. It’s easy to imagine this is the sort of thing that ends in a whole pile of people committing suicide, here in this remote town full of academics. The way I see it, it would be pretty sad to die with a capsule of poison between your teeth and a message tattooed on your skull, next to three or four other guys who drank piss, here in a town full of people dedicated to higher education. But I’ve got nothing else to do. I’ve been cooped up here for weeks. Cecilia is desperate for me to return to DF, and this is just the sort of stupid plan I could use as a triumphal end to my stay in Los Girasoles. So, I’ll drink piss with them a couple of times, let them hypnotize me, then I’ll go back to DF and look for a job as a knowledge administrator someplace. As a bulletin writer somewhere. As a waiter, if I have to. And I’ll be a worthy man. The poor but honorable man my wife deserves: poor, honorable, and unhappy because of my flagrant uselessness.”

5

And so Rodrigo had in the end, if rather vaguely, agreed to join the hypnotists at least once, just to hear Jimmie’s explanation of the project firsthand. That was the most Marcelo could get from him, and he was satisfied.

A few days after that conversation with Marcelo, Rodrigo decided to make a foray beyond the walls of Puerta del Aire and go out for a drink one evening, on his own, in the center of Los Girasoles. Marcelo had lent him a little money to cover his expenses, and so that he could pretend he was receiving payment from Velásquez for the phantom proofreading he was phantasmagorically undertaking.

He asked Jacinto Nogales Pedrosa, the security guard, for the number of a cab service, and was set down in a street flanking the main square. He walked around the colonial part of town without much idea of what he was looking for, and even went a little farther on to the market, where, despite the fact that the stalls had closed, things were quite lively.

The cantina he entered didn’t look too much like the typical local joint: it was, rather, a touristy spot serving regional brews. Only a couple of tables were occupied, and a jukebox was pumping out deafening boleros.

At one of the tables, the darkest and farthest from the bar, Rodrigo made out two foreign girls, looking half-lost and too naive for a country like Mexico. After a couple of shots of tequila at the bar, he plucked up his courage and went over to their table. They, the foreign girls, were very young, and Rodrigo was surprised to see them alone in a bar, without a man or responsible adult to chaperone them. One was good-looking, in a gamin kind of way, with a pretty nose and outlandishly long black eyelashes. Her hair was short, and she seemed, from her smile, more willing than the other to strike up a conversation.