Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

He remembered having stared insistently at Micaela sitting next to Jimmie a few yards away. He knew, since the loose change in his pocket clearly reminded him, that he had sent a couple of tequilas to their table by way of the waiter, something he had only ever seen done in movies. To round off the cliché, he had lifted his glass and serenely nodded in a toast to them, and Jimmie had looked at him with an expression of surprise that didn’t seem possible in someone so knocked around by life. Later, Jimmie came up to the table at which Rodrigo sat with the foreign girls — who interpreted it all as a series of steps in a local custom — and thanked him for the drinks, squinting his eyes to study him better. Eventually the gringo asked, unnecessarily, if he was Adela’s son, to which Rodrigo responded with a drunken smile, a pause perhaps too long to be pregnant and a few words that might have been pleasant, but sounded, after that pause, odd: “Among other things.” But they understood each other, and Jimmie was immediately hugging him with manly enthusiasm and beckoning Micaela to come over, bringing with her his tequila, and meet “our new group member” as he put it, in an obvious allusion to the collective hypnotism plan.

Domitile and Daga seemed startled by the presence of the gringo, with his fugitive-from-justice air, but they relaxed on seeing the shy innocence of Micaela, who was the same age as them and showed no fear of that other person. Jimmie set himself up at the head of table and took charge of keeping them well supplied with liquor, even Daga, who had previously declined anything but beer. Maybe due to her clearly low alcohol tolerance, she and Domitile soon exchanged roles, as happens with friends who spend a lot of time together. Daga laughed raucously, continually changed seats, applauded the spineless boleros on the jukebox, and touched Rodrigo with increasing confidence, while the French girl became cautious and monitored the state of inebriety of the others with the superior air that only adolescence can confer.

Jimmie attributed the meeting with Rodrigo to some secret force of destiny that was winking an eye and encouraging them to embark on the hypnotism project with even greater verve. He was wary of talking about the project in front of the European girls, wary of their knowledge of occult matters, but took advantage of every lapse of attention on their part to tell Rodrigo, shouting in his ear, some of the details of the affair. He talked about Marcelo’s initial reluctance and his later conversion to the creed of hypnosis, and the interest he now showed in discovering the future form of art by means of that technique. He also spoke of Velásquez and his propensity for slipping into states of altered consciousness. “Prof Velásquez only needs five minutes to get into the asshole of a trance,” explained Jimmie, resorting to technical language. “And once he’s there, his visions are as clear and detailed as if he were right here, now, with his eyes open.” The allusion was inaccurate because the cantina was full of smoke, and the noise of the boleros mingled with the crude comments the waiter directed at the drunks, thickening the atmosphere and fogging everything.

The gringo was a professional snake oil salesman. There was no doubt that he had a certain sensitivity when dealing with people that went beyond the mere power to convince. Jimmie was able to see a person’s inner vulnerabilities and attack them mercilessly; he knew how to overcome resistance and which strings to pluck for each individual. In Rodrigo’s case, the strategy was obvious: on stressing the joint nature of the hypnosis project, he was not only appealing to one of his most longstanding, secret aspirations but also tangentially hinting that it was Micaela who held the group together with the strange Indian-princess magnetism she exuded.

They poured their own drinks, or their glasses were freshened by Jimmie with the skill of a Turkish con man. Rodrigo downed one shot after another, and it became increasingly difficult for him to pretend his attention was on the gringo’s words and not the lock of black hair that had escaped from behind Micaela’s ear, a lock she gracefully replaced, time after time, very slowly, always with the same movement, as if it were a tai chi position taught to her by a Chinese grandmother, the purpose of which was to tame wild animals. Rodrigo began to see double, and two Micaelas were more than his nerves could bear. He felt stabs of guilt for staring so fixedly at a woman who was not his wife, but then he remembered his wife, and the evoked sound of her voice seemed to him so unworthy of brushing Micaela’s ears that he resolved never to introduce them. He had also, naturally, forgotten about the teenagers whose names began with the letter D.

At a given moment, Domitile asked Rodrigo to go with them to find a cab since her friend was drunk, and their absence had probably been noted in the hotel, causing alarm among the other members of the group. Rodrigo briefly explained the situation to Jimmie and promised to return shortly, not because he found the gringo’s conversation particularly entertaining, but because he couldn’t take his eyes off Micaela. Faced with the girl’s extravagant beauty, both Daga and Domitile had seemed suddenly anodyne, Europeans more insipid than celery sticks who didn’t deserve a place in his desire for longer than half a jerk-off. Despite the fact that she was almost the same age as them — as has already been mentioned — Micaela seemed older because her silence was not the mute expectation of someone who is learning, but the grace with which the magnanimous allow chaos to proliferate around them for a time.

Rodrigo left the cantina with a girl on either arm — an achievement that earned him the respect of a number of the most stupid drunks in Los Girasoles — and the three of them headed for the main square, where he remembered having seen cabs waiting for customers when he was walking alone. On the way, Daga threw up noisily into some bushes, and Rodrigo held her forehead like a patient father. Domitile seemed worried but, nevertheless, thanked Rodrigo for having been their escort for the night. They exchanged telephone numbers, and the girls promised to call soon, even though they would be leaving for another city — they couldn’t remember which — the following afternoon, so the possibility of meeting them again seemed fairly low.

When he returned to the cantina, having put the girls into a cab with instructions to take them straight to their hotel, Micaela had disappeared.

It was this fortuitous disappearance that had contributed to fixing in his mind the image of Micaela with the bewitching aura of a blueprint. If he had met her again on his return, still accompanied by her irritating partner, Micaela would have seemed a more terrestrial creature; if not just an ordinary girl, at least one of flesh and blood. But her disappearance placed a wax seal on the meeting and allowed it to rarefy in his memory. To satisfy that feeling of imperfection the evening had produced, Rodrigo was obliged to see Micaela again soon, alone if possible, without the annoying presence of Jimmie, for whom he felt contempt mingled with envy.

7

He had to wait a week for the second meeting to occur. A long week, cooped up in the house, during which Rodrigo experienced a sense of loneliness more profound than the one that, until then, had lulled him to sleep each night. If his life, including his married life, were indeed that of a loner, it suddenly seemed the fact of having met Micaela, of having glimpsed or sketched out in his warped imagination the possibility of an old age at her side, was essentially modifying the density of the loneliness that had never even come close to disturbing him.