Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

A couple of days after Marcelo’s visit, Rodrigo walked through the empty streets of the Puerta del Aire residential estate, looking at the drawn curtains and the pickup trucks as if they were desert mirages, until he reached the security booth, where the guardian, the Cerberus of all this abandon, the tough, immutable Jacinto Nogales Pedrosa, called a cab that would take him along a route stretching farther than his wallet to Jimmie’s studio, the provisional temple of that religion invented in the clamor of a few tequilas, of which he was at the point of becoming an acolyte.

The devastation reserved for us by the confirmation of an ominous truth is more subtle than that offered by our first glimpse of that truth. A man can wake every morning and look out his window to check that, there outside, the end of the world — in the biblical and material sense of the topic, setting aside metaphor — is still unraveling in five-hundred-foot flames, and the shock of that everyday confirmation operates inside him in a way that is less visible but more heartrending than the first vision of that same apocalypse. Repetition is a bitch with an arched spine that peacefully and conscientiously gnaws at the bones that keep us upright until it brings us down.

Some such words, to cut a long story short, were passing through Rodrigo’s mind as he entered the dusty house and found Micaela sitting cross-legged on a straw mat. It was no foggy alcoholic delirium that had made him see her, in that cantina, cloaked (in the Catholic usage) by a virginal mantle of gold thread and with a halo of grace around her fawn-like head. All that was still present and even, perhaps, accentuated by the gloomy space in which he now found her and the sweaty, incense-laden greeting Jimmie offered him. There are women who are specialists in benefiting from the contrast with their environment.

Rodrigo tepidly extended a hand to Jimmie, who didn’t hesitate to trap him in a lateral embrace while destroying the metacarpals of his right hand in an irritating impersonation of camaraderie. Frigging grimy gringo. The aroma of dark tobacco exuded by the rags for which he served as a bony clotheshorse made him wretch. Men who use olfactory resources as statement should be hunted down by the forces of law and order, he thought as he detached himself from the unctuous foreigner in the way one detaches a piece of chewing gum from the sole of one’s shoe.

The atmosphere in Jimmie’s studio was so insalubrious that Professor Velásquez dissolved into a trompe-l’oeil worthy of David Copperfield. Only when he spoke—“How are things going with the editing of that phantom book?”—and rounded off his witticism with a wheezing laugh, did Rodrigo become aware of his presence, forgotten in one of the three Acapulco chairs delimiting the borders of the living room.

Although Marcelo had not yet arrived, Professor Velásquez was undiplomatic enough to tell Rodrigo that his place was on the floor, as there were only three chairs, and in that house, decisions were made by the “council of wise old men.” The allusion to this fictitious authority could only be irritating. Rodrigo was obviously younger than the other three men — the gringo, Velásquez, and Marcelo — and was closer in age to Micaela, even though she was a decade younger than him. The fact that these gentlemen were involved in so eccentric an undertaking as deciphering the future form of art by means of hypnosis seemed to be aggravated by their show of insensitivity to two youths — though of very different caliber — like Rodrigo and Micaela. There was, in Velásquez’s reference to the “council of wise old men,” not only a touch of rancor directed at their youth, obliging them to sit on the floor, but also a thinly disguised sense of inferiority. Velásquez, fatty Velásquez, whose cranial terrain was divided between areas of baldness and dandruff; Velásquez, the survivor of three divorces, the anonymous professor who years before had lost the ability to win over his students by any other means than blackmail; Velásquez, the brute, the man who had early on become fascinated by aesthetics — the aesthetics of the avant-garde — and had clung to it, disguising his interest as intellectual research, as if it were the last trace of his youth; that Velásquez had found, in the hypnosis project, the enthusiasm he needed to channel his eighth adult crisis into the sense of power he longed for.

Marcelo Valente’s reasons for embarking on such an unlikely enterprise couldn’t be very different. They were both men who, after a couple of decades given up to teaching, needed a new relationship with the world, a mirage of youth and delirium that would quash their dissatisfactions while erectile dysfunction was gaining ground and stripping them once and for all of their thirst for History — it is well known that History is a phallic aspiration denied to eunuchs, one that women access in a completely different, much more intellectual and tempered way, while men beat totemic drums around it.

For his part, Rodrigo’s motivation was clearer. He couldn’t give a damn about the future of art, the sense of power that hypnotizing others might bring him; he didn’t need any other emotion than that provided by his long conversations with Marcelo in the house in Puerta del Aire, with the addition of an occasional altercation with his mother and the customary coitus with Cecilia on his return to Mexico City. He didn’t particularly need to feel more alive or to gain a timely victory in an idiotic battle that is always lost before it begins. No. What Rodrigo wanted, for the moment, was to go on smelling Micaela for a little longer. And to gather sufficient sensual material to allow him to dream about her later. What Rodrigo needed were reasons to have regrets when he reached a half century and, looking back, say in a tone of moral sententiousness, “I should have. .” He needed to be wrong; in short, to stumble and doubt, and to be moved in some unique way by the sense that the communion he had searched so hard for was there, with its legs crossed on the straw mat beside him. Rodrigo didn’t need to feel alive, like other people: he needed to be alive.

He and Micaela made themselves as comfortable as possible on the matting, and a slight touching of hands as she maneuvered to make space for him revealed a skin whose softness was only eclipsed by the warmth it radiated. Rodrigo even thought the woman — it was an exaggeration to so describe her — might have a fever, so scorching was his perception of the contact.

Jimmie, as usual, immediately monopolized the conversation. Just as soon as he had handed out the cans of beer — he gave Micaela a glass of water — he sat in one of the three chairs — the other, like an invitation or an offence remained empty — and once again embarked on the tale of his discovery of hypnosis and his later work. Rodrigo had heard the story secondhand, by way of Marcelo’s measured narrative, and had not imagined it could be as complicated as it actually was. Jimmie changed the details with each new version, and now he made it sound as if he had always, from the first moment, despised Dr. Mind and planned his stealthy betrayal. The digressions were also different from those he had embarked on when telling the story to Marcelo. On this occasion, he said almost nothing about the CIA experiments and instead spoke at length, without respite, about his time as an illegal herbalist in the late eighties.

Rodrigo listened patiently, considering whether he should say he had already heard the story from Marcelo. He felt sorry for Micaela, who must have listened to all those innocuous details of the gringo’s drifting pilgrimage three hundred times. Velásquez, who in Jimmie’s presence became, if possible, a little more opaque, vegetated in his chair as if that string of nonsense were a cradlesong lulling a child. Rodrigo’s legs went to sleep. He wasn’t used to sitting on the floor — a level that, in his view, was more appropriate for animals — but accepted the sacrifice because Micaela’s scent, a mixture of incense and vanilla with something more unsettling, came to him like a perfect symphony.