Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

And as I said, I returned at the beginning of term to the capital, where I was received with hostility, as if the city were reproaching me for having left. Coapa showed its only — negative — side, and I had the misfortune to fall in with the most unsuitable people in the neighborhood. Very soon, at the age of just fifteen, the only conversations that interested me were those related to drugs. Unconsciously subverting the natural order of things, I first tried cocaine at the insistence of the older brother of a well-to-do close friend, and then pot, which touched something more intimate in me. However, my inability to take drugs in the company of others very soon became apparent: when I wasn’t beset by completely unjustified paranoia, irrepressible laughter and sudden attacks of autism alternated in taking control of my nerves. From then on, I decided only to take drugs for purely experimental purposes, which in the end saved me from turning into a foul-mouthed addict like the rest of my neighbors and classmates. Experimentation, as I understood and practiced it, involved always looking for a completely new situation in which to consume: I swallowed a tab of acid in physics class on the day they were explaining the first law of thermodynamics — I’ve never since been able to forget it; I did coke on a school trip to a farm with cuddly deer; I snorted ground ecstasy pills before entering a natural sciences museum; and finally — my master stroke — I ate hallucinogenic mushrooms during a family dinner, under the quizzical gaze of my grandmother.

Despite all this, the resulting experiences were hardly worth mentioning, and if they truly marked my character, it was in making me understand that one of my strengths is an ability to enjoy the most trivial situations intensely, and not because they gave rise to an air of extrovert magnetism. It’s possible that if it weren’t for those experiences, I wouldn’t now be an office worker, or so thoroughly enjoy such an obvious piece of stupidity as asking the museum’s security guard about the previous Sunday’s soccer match between two mediocre provincial teams. A match that, of course, I hadn’t seen and had never had any intention of seeing.

6

Leaving home, on my way to work, I decide to buy a lottery ticket. “Yesterday I spent my money on a cup of tea, and now this,” I think, absurdly, since the sum of these two whims is tiny in relation to the margin of whimsicality my salary allows. But I’ve always felt guilty about spending money on insubstantial things, as if an austerity chip had been implanted into me at the fetal stage. And on top of all that, last week I bought a shirt to replace another, very similar one that had been left unrecognizable by an accident with a dish of black mole sauce. Yes, I feel guilty about the expense, but then I tell myself the rent on my current apartment is a lot lower than what I used to pay for the one near Zócalo, so when you come down to it, I can invest the difference in small trivialities, like a cup of tea in the evenings and a lottery ticket in the mornings, and even more serious things (a trip from time to time, if I liked trips). On finding that fallacious arithmetical balance, I feel less guilty. I’m in the habit of seeking out the exact transaction to redeem myself. I choose the lottery ticket without giving much thought to the numbers, though I do manage to include a six, for which I’ve always had a particular affection.

In fact, and this is a symptom of a solidly middle-class childhood, monetary questions don’t usually bother me much, apart from the guilt certain financial outgoings spark. Saving isn’t so much an effort as a natural consequence of the life I lead, frugal and boring. My salary at the museum is meager, but it’s regular, and the institutions I worked for before the museum still occasionally ask me to proofread the odd program or catalog, so I pocket a few extra pesos every now and then. If I’ve decided to buy a lottery ticket, it’s not for any desire to become a millionaire, but because I know perfectly well that the simple fact of having a lottery ticket in your pocket stimulates the imagination, and that I can spend the day mentally hatching ridiculously dandyish plans, the extravagances I’ll commit in the unlikely event that I win.

In the museum, I distractedly say good morning to Cecilia, the director’s secretary, who tells me that Ms. Watkins won’t be in till later because she’s got a meeting in some restaurant or other in the south of the city, a business or political relations — there’s no difference — breakfast. Without listening to the whole explanation, which seems to me overly long, I sit at my desk in the same enormous room as all the other desks, except for Ms. Watkins’s. The designer, I notice, is watching a TV series on the internet. On his screen, two women are kissing tenderly; he feels someone watching him and gives me a nervous smile.

Cecilia has renounced her love of conversation and is now sitting at her screen laughing, by which I surmise that she is either chatting with some friend or watching the same lesbian series as the designer. While my computer — a PC that takes ages to react to the instructions I give it — is booting up, I go down to the courtyard of the museum, one of those spaces surrounded by arcades that can be found in all the colonial mansions in the center of the city. I sit on the front steps and look toward the entrance to the museum. On the other side, the hubbub of the city’s historic downtown and the suffocating heat of the asphalt seem to be at full force: vans with loudspeakers announcing a deal on oranges, competing CD sellers raising the volume of their speakers. . all this under a sun that, however strong, can’t disguise the ashen scaffolding of the atmosphere.

All the while, the thick stone walls of the museum and the courtyard overshadowed by a high canvas awning keep the air inside cool, and the noise of the street seems to come from a parallel universe that we silent inhabitants of this building can gaze at as calmly as if looking into a fish tank, without any sense of asphyxia.

I calculate that my computer will be ready by now and that the time idled away in rumination must have exceeded that needed for a simple visit to the bathroom, and although the director is at her breakfast meeting in the south of the city, I suspect her secretary, Cecilia — as spiteful and cunning as they come — would be capable of denouncing me for laziness if I spent too long away from the office. So I decide to go back, if only to search the internet for the same series that, it seems most likely to me, all the other employees are watching, until someone with the minimum of authority — the security guard, the bookkeeper, or, in a worst-case scenario, the director herself — appears in the doorway and, pointing with evil intent to the sign saying Administration, tells us all we’re not exactly in a movie theater.

While I’m pretending to write a press release, with the chess window minimized and ready for me to continue my game against the computer — I’ve never won — Jorge, the designer, comes up looking as if he’s about to ask me an enormous favor that will undoubtedly, or so I think for a moment, make me unhappy. Getting ready to refuse, I swivel my chair around to face him. He says — feeling sorry to have interrupted me — that since I’m the “grammar expert,” he wanted to see if I could help him write a reference for a friend, also a designer, he says, who has applied for a job in a cosmetics company. I say I will, that I haven’t got much in my inbox, and that we should do it now before Isabel Watkins, the director, gets back, because when she’s around, we’ll have our noses back to the fucking grindstone.