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.
“The fucking grindstone,” that’s how I put it. The expression feels odd on my tongue, and that strangeness appears to be mutual, as even Jorge looks astonished by a word that is, so he believes, so little in keeping with my usual decorum. I write the letter, and the profusion of his thanks makes me doubt his sexual orientation, as if it weren’t possible to be overly nice and at the same time behave like a “real man.” Jorge, the designer, goes back to his desk and leaves me thinking that those discreet genres, such as references and rejection letters, are undervalued areas of poetic expression but as valid and moving as any lousy Italian sonnet.
Later, without Isabel Watkins having returned from her now eternal breakfast, I’m suddenly, for no apparent reason, struck by a whiplash of lust, and resolved to give it free rein in a more private area of the building, I head for the bathroom. In the cubicle, I unfold the pornographic photo I keep in my wallet, together with a pocket calendar with an image of the Virgin, and holding the clipping in my left hand, I give myself up to an age-old pleasure with the right. Masturbating during work hours is, I think, one of those small delights the male office worker has succeeded in safeguarding from the omniscience of the system. The photo acts as a simple amulet, resting in my hand while, eyes closed, I imagine unspeakable perversions involving Cecilia, Ms. Watkins’s unbearable secretary, and even Isabel Watkins, the still-absent director of the museum.
I finish with a rather unsatisfactory grunt. The semen, which in more propitious circumstances would have spurted out with a certain gallantry, seems to reluctantly dribble into the worn pouch of my tighty-whities. After this relief, the pornographic magazine clipping loses its magical powers, and now reveals its true ugliness: the model, who has a hairstyle from the late eighties—one of those gravity-defying perms that made such an impact—is lying in an uncomfortable position next to a pair of fishnet stockings that, if it weren’t for the infinite number of creases in the clipping, would be a phosphorescent green, precursor of the garish chromatic disasters of the nineties, when the advantages of adding insane quantities of lead to any pigment were discovered.
I soak up the traces of sin with a little toilet paper, small fragments of which apparently were glued to my fingertips by the semen, a fact that later, on my return to the office, obliged me to bury the guilty secret in my pockets.
To the delight of us all, the day passes without incident and without Isabel Watkins returning from her appointment, which by this time—six in the evening—would be absurd to still call a breakfast meeting. On leaving the museum, I decide to drop in on the charming characters in the café without coffee, so I set out on the trek to the same greasy counter, at which I once again order a black tea that I prepare myself and, this time without any embarrassment, put the damp tea bag in my pocket by way of a relic or personal fetish. The furniture-faced customer is still in his place, and if he weren’t wearing a different sweater, I’d believe he hadn’t moved from his seat since yesterday. On this occasion, the owner of the café pays me less attention and seems resigned to seeing me among his regulars: I’m already the “cup o’ tea.”
When I get home, it seems to me logical to fetch the staple gun once again and, after the dull thud, contemplate the second tea bag, hanging next to the first one, like the marks a convict makes day after day on the worn paint of his rickety cot to keep a record of the length of his imprisonment. Although in my case, I tell myself, these tea bags are testimony to my two working days, the first two well-deserved days of my full exercise of freedom. A freedom whose chronological beginning was, it’s true, arbitrary, but no less effective for that.
Emboldened by this notion, swollen with pride at my conquest, I look out at the vacant lot and watch the unsteady steps of the hen, clucking through the weeds.
7
Saturday. I’ve spent a whole week waiting for this moment. Saturday morning. I guess it’s already late when I wake up, but I don’t check, for the simple pleasure of exercising the free will I’ve been so proudly boasting of since my first incursion into the café without coffee. Rather than freedom, I’m now tempted to call this sense of uprooting “lack of inhibition.” Regardless of the words used, the important thing is that I no longer perceive, as was my habit, the straitjacket of anguish that used to restrict my movements.
Still in bed, I contemplate the tea bags on the wall, now ten, one for every day since that inaugural Monday evening, excluding weekends, when I’m saved the walk home from work and so the obligatory visit to the café as well. Each of the bags hangs there with its small pile of tea, now dry, as if it were the tail of a comet. Each one like a trophy some government institution might have awarded me in a memorable ceremony to laud my nobility of spirit, to reward the constancy of my freedom, the self-assurance with which I exercise it: all this without renouncing my routine—as would a thoughtless libertarian—still focused on padding out Ms. Watkins’s model letters despite the conviction that I could be doing something else. This is freedom, I say to myself: an eight-hour day that, if I so wished, could be seven, or even less. An affirmation of will, but without unnecessary upheavals. A distracted walk home, aware that it won’t affect the general order of the universe one little bit if I stop to enjoy a cup of tea in a local café where I’m known. And yes, they call me Blacky in—hardly witty—allusion to the color of the beverage I invariably order: cup o’ tea.
Saturday. At home I make myself coffee. Black coffee. I listen to the announcement coming from the megaphone of the gas truck, which is arriving, as it does every Saturday, to deliver the bottles. That makes me think it must be eleven in the morning, more or less, although trusting in the punctuality of megaphone announcements in this city is, to say the least, reckless. What a barbaric custom, receiving the most basic, essential services—gas, drinking water—by means of a raucous shout issuing from a truck in a worrying state of oxidation! Couldn’t we inhabitants of this immense, beautiful city get the gas through invisible in-floor pipes, prudently reinforced with three layers of steel? No, such luxuries are always reserved for citizens of the First World, who—sons of bitches—can drink tap water instead of paying for demijohns, also sold from trucks with blaring megaphones. Everything at top volume here. In the future, I tell myself, we’ll get electricity via blaring megaphones too. Even the most famous national celebration is popularly remembered as “El Grito,” the shout. It’s always a ridiculous occasion, and I have one clear childhood memory of it: the president comes out onto a well-known balcony and shouts. He shouts to his nation—shouts at the top of his voice and is, at the same time, paradoxically mute.
I switch on the TV just to feel its noisy presence, which seems to be adding backing vocals to the gas sellers’ cries, confirming my theory about Mexico and the decibels of noncommunication. The picture is fuzzy: the rabbit-ear antenna has been broken for a couple of months. I make a mental note to do something about it later on, although I suspect, given my idleness, this “later on” could become several months. The sound of the television, in contrast, issues relatively sharply from the speakers. A woman with an unpleasant voice is announcing the winners of a competition and silencing any form of declaration on their part with her laughter of feigned enthusiasm. Despite all this, I leave the TV switched on and sit on the bed to look out the window, to watch the dark clouds looming over the vacant lot. Then it occurs to me that if it rains, the hen, that uncomplicated friend who has been clucking among the shadows for the last two weeks, will die of cold or the famous flu—the ailment that returns periodically to the front pages of the world’s newspapers. It is indeed the first time rain has threatened in the whole year, and I can’t let a storm do away with the local biodiversity, including its wildlife.
Disposed to save the hen’s life, I decide to construct a shelter for it from a small wooden table I never use for anything. “Wrapped in plastic shopping bags, the table will make a good place of refuge for the hen,” I think. When I’ve finished my task and the table is covered with the impermeable material, I realize I haven’t considered the next step: how to get its new home, its planned refuge, to the animal. I dismiss the possibility of entering the lot in person since the distance from my window is too great—I live on the second floor—for me to drop down from here, and I don’t want to get into arguments by climbing the wall from the street like some errant drug addict. Only one idea occurs to me: if I had a rope, a fairly long piece of rope, using the appropriate knots, I could lower the table from my window into the vacant lot and position it right on top of the pile of sand by the wall of my building.
As far as I can see, there are a two problems: how to get the rope back once the table is in place, since there would be no one down there to untie it. The other matter still to be considered is how to let the hen know it should shelter under the table when the rain starts. This second issue is the most difficult to resolve, as it involves a question my encyclopedia of biology doesn’t address. I have little faith in the animal’s instincts, and its mental powers don’t inspire much confidence, either: the hen, while I ponder its means of salvation, continues as usual, walking around in semicircles and pecking the ground, possibly more quietly now, hardly giving a cluck, perhaps intuiting, via some not just avian but—to cap it all—feminine sixth sense, that her—she’s female, after all—luck might change at any moment.
A third problem hinders my progress: I haven’t got any rope. I’ve looked all over the apartment, and the only vaguely similar thing I’ve found is an electrical extension cord that isn’t long enough. I should leave my Saturday seclusion and find a hardware store to buy a good four or even five yards of strong rope, but to tell the truth, the idea doesn’t appeal to me, given the possibility that it’s going to rain soon. So I decide to throw the table out the window, hoping it doesn’t break on impact, then, from the sidewalk, climb the wall surrounding the lot, overcoming my fear of public opprobrium, and position the table in the correct place. If anyone sees me climbing into the lot, I can always say that, due to some difficult-to-explain mishap, a small table wrapped in plastic bags fell from my window, and I’m trying to retrieve it. However unlikely the story sounds, the table will be there in the undergrowth as undeniable proof of my tale.
I proceed as planned. I throw the table out the window and, to my surprise, it doesn’t break. With this happy confirmation, and seeing how sturdy the table is, I think that maybe I should have kept or sold it. But no, the table is no longer a table but a fortified rainy-season refuge for hens, and it is my duty to go down to the vacant lot and position it correctly.
Outside, standing by the lot, I scan the street for cops or curious idlers who might shout out when I climb over the wall, but the streets are empty and only the noise of a distant airplane disturbs the charged air of this Saturday. “The rain will wash everything clean,” I think. Before that, of course, I have to save the hen. I jump lightly up onto the wall (feeling myself infinitely more agile than I’d expected), and once perched atop it, I look down; I don’t want the hen to be passing underneath when I decide to jump and, in my rescue bid, end up killing her (this possibility brings to mind Chinese sayings about the wisdom of immobility). But I jump down toward the weeds and land on solid earth. Now inside the lot, I decide to take a look around to get a detailed idea of all the things I’ve so far only seen from my window, so I carefully make my way through the shrubs, managing to step on the protruding stones and avoiding the areas littered with trash.
In a clearing in the thicket—to use the very widest possible acceptance of the term—in the middle of the lot, I discover a supermarket bag. The central location of this object seems to me deliberate, in contrast to the random placement of the ordinary bags people toss over from the sidewalk, so I go to inspect its contents. The bag is tied with a tight knot, but there’s a hole in one side and I decide to examine it. Something seems to be leaking out, and as I peer into the hole I see that it’s an organ, something like a cow’s intestines, dripping blood and crawling with maggots. As if my sense of smell had, until that moment, been blocked, I suddenly note the strong stench of putrefaction and feel revolted. It’s a repugnant sight, and everything becomes tinged in a violet tone, like in a splatter movie. My visual field registers a hyperbolic, astringent disquiet. I run back toward the wall and with the same agility, if not with equal prudence, leap. On the other side, across the street, two women under a flowered umbrella are staring at me in astonishment. My expression can’t have inspired much confidence in them, because they drop their eyes, walk more quickly, and turn off at the first corner. I drop down into the street and, just as quickly, go back into my building.
Later on it starts to rain heavily. I think the table discarded in the vacant lot will be ruined by the water. I avoid looking out the window for the rest of the day. I also avoid thinking about the hen.
8
Since Saturday I haven’t been able to get the image of the entrails poking through the supermarket bag out of my head. The strength of that memory, its persistent purity, is such that I haven’t even felt like having my black tea after work, and my collection of tea bags stapled to the wall has stopped growing. And neither have I gone down to the bathroom in the museum with lascivious intentions to unfold my pornographic magazine clipping, nor listened to the clucking of the hen in the adjacent vacant lot. I imagine, mournfully, that she has died of pneumonia.
I write letters. I
compose the speech Isabel Watkins is going to give tomorrow to a group of bureaucrats from the Ministry of Culture. Every so often I slip the odd exaggeration into the speech that will show up my boss before the most widely read in the audience but be, otherwise, simply epic, even worthy of applause. Things like “while we are working, we must not, for a single second, forget that the word museum should return to its etymological roots, evoking the Muses.” I consider putting in something even more stupid but am afraid of being fired. I imagine Ms. Watkins reading the speech, her technical pauses, her expression of frustration and terror when she gets to a line that says, “And for this reason, we have decided to knock down all the walls, even if it means a lawsuit with the Commission for Historic Buildings, and convert the museum into a place of sexual diversion, over which I will preside as the Matron Superior.” But no, I can’t write that, nor can Ms. Watkins read it tomorrow to the bureaucrats, all of them prepared to be bored until she comes down from the platform and they’re able to take a discreet look down her plunging neckline.
Rapt in these perverse thoughts, I don’t realize that, momentarily, a grim smile has twisted my lips. Cecilia, the secretary, looks at me distrustfully from her desk. Her expression shakes me out of the state of deep abstraction into which I had sunk, and I feel as if a great noise has suddenly been silenced. I have the sense of having spoken aloud but can’t say if that sensation has any manifestation in interpersonal reality. Apparently not, since only Cecilia has her disapproving eyes fixed on me, while my other colleagues are getting along with their routine tasks, almost without noticing me.
Among Strange Victims Page 3
