She reproaches me, of course, for not having studied something. And not just anything, naturally: a profession with demonstrable social utility would have been her choice for me. A lawyer, a rural doctor, or even an economist, just so long as I opted for a project that would include the most vulnerable communities. Anything, in fact, that would demonstrate I was concerned about giving continuity, during my lifetime, to her now-diminished desire to change the world. My mother holds youth in very high esteem since hers was intense and madcap, very much in keeping with the times. She therefore hoped my youth would act as a culture medium for a sensitive, decisive character, and not be a fleeting preamble to obesity and tedium. From her point of view, ingenuousness is a concept to be defended during at least the first thirty years of existence, and for a couple of years more that characteristic should translate into a sustained interest in changing the world, even if you then relinquish that desire. The fact that I, from early adolescence, and once my flirtation with drugs was behind me, had begun to exhibit a prebureaucratic attitude as if affiliating myself to the most insipid strand of character, causes my mom a sense of disillusion equivalent to dishonor. My marriage to a secretary—even though she, my mother, would never dare admit it—is the last straw.
14
I have a few thoughts of a general nature about marriage and the limits that should be imposed on it to preserve, as far as possible, some notion of personal decency. First, never, under any circumstances, will I allow Cecilia to defecate while I’m taking a shower. This incontrovertible point cannot be refuted by watertight folding doors or blue patterned shower curtains—it’s a crucial, life-defining question. Second, it should be clear to both parties that I had no expectations of or genuine enthusiasm for the future before getting married. I don’t want such a fundamental aspect of my personality to be relegated, over time, to a collateral effect of the marriage into which we have contracted, taking all credit from my phlegm, so stoically overcome. Third, allowing that I’m willing to yield to many things—using ridiculous pet names when speaking to her: “my cute little piggywinks,” for example—nothing can convince me of the need to be sincere to my wife. (A parenthesis is needed here. At what inalterable juncture, at what hour, did sincerity and communication become related elements? Nothing is further from spontaneous intuition, popular wisdom, historical experience: communication is, precisely, the avoidance of sincerity in order to reach agreement.)
Displaying a composure that, even to myself, seems astonishing, I attempted to elucidate these and other theoretical aspects of marriage in the company of my adored wife, talking as one adult to another. As soon as I said I found the idea of showering while she was shitting repugnant, she gave me a furious look and flounced out of the apartment. She returned half an hour later with a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and her mascara streaked. “I’m going to start smoking,” she said. She’s now smoking in the living room while I get ready to take a shower.
That was our first argument, and her reaction was heartening: instead of confrontation, a new vice. Instead of sorting things out and endlessly talking them over, a protracted, voluntary death. Assumption of pain. Metabolism. (Sorry, I was digressing.)
Mexico City is lovelier than ever. Two days ago, when Cecilia and I were on our way home from work, in a passage of the metro, a woman began insulting a policeman, explaining, with ample smatterings of “idiot” and “shut up,” that her usual station had been closed and she’d had to walk to that one. Unperturbed, the policeman gave her a scornful look and quite rightly replied, “Well, stop voting for the PRD. It’s all the democrats’ fault . . . Up the PRI!” and then he repeated his slogan for the onlookers: “Up the PRI, ladies and gentlemen, up with the Institutional Revolutionary Party!”
I spoke to Cecilia about the possibility of looking for a different job, citing the opportunities for professional development and the need to augment my savings. Obviously, those are not my reasons at all: seeing my wife eight hours a day, only four desks away, then going home to find her overpowering mug on the other pillow, at the table, everywhere, has become a form of torture. We don’t even have recourse to that thoroughly middle-class ritual of asking each other how our days were. Even if the answer to that question is always the same, I suspect there is a deeply calming pleasure to be found in asking it each evening over a microwave dinner.
On the other hand, I find the very idea of leaving the museum, abandoning Ms. Watkins, painful. Ever since she showed her unexpected talent for empathy, reprimanding me for marrying beneath myself, I see her almost as an alter ego: a woman conscious of the general grayness of existence who has let herself be dragged along by the inappropriate speed of events. Although, of course, there is a crucial difference that forms a breach between us: Ms. Watkins still retains the basically romantic belief that the string of accidents determining us can finally lead to the sort of destiny we were, against all odds, made for. I couldn’t disagree more: the pencil that draws the line of my biography can only trace out an insipid figure, oblivious to even the discreet sumptuousness of geometry. If I were able to choose that figure, the final perimeter that represents, once and for all, the collection of vicissitudes I’ve lived through, it would be a dick. Yes, a penis: iconic, puerile, the kind teenagers draw on the chalkboard to annoy the teacher. A simple, unadorned prick that evades all psychological analysis and reclaims its original potential for insult. That would be my ideal figure, the embodiment of all the blunders that make me up. That or an ass.
Maybe I’m saying this because, during the last few days, a ridiculously dense cloud, a lugubrious mood, has been hanging over me. I’m surprised to find conventionally important events—a wedding—happen to me as if to a second cousin, scarcely affecting me. I get news of my life, but I don’t feel it. And it’s not that life is, as some would wish, to be found elsewhere, but that it’s been reduced to a weak, heterogeneous set of associations: a hen walking around a vacant lot, a lottery ticket with the number 6 printed on it, a collection of used tea bags. Every so often, one of those details of my most intimate cartography is erased without any great fuss and a new one appears, substituting it.
In the end, the only thing that matters to me is conserving enough clarity to be able to articulately criticize what I see; if some illness stopped me from doing this, nothing would have meaning anymore. I’m not worried about physical degeneration, the whitish drool dribbling onto a shabby suit, premature baldness, prostate cancer. I’m not worried about them so long as I can go on complaining about what I see. I don’t seek the permission of the Fates to find a soul mate with whom to deploy my melancholy; I can be alone, really alone, but I do ask the god of neural functions to let me retain this faint line of voice that crosses my cranium, allowing me to laugh at the world around me. This is the only grade of intelligence I aspire to, and it makes me immensely happy that it doesn’t depend in the least on books or people.
(I say all this at the risk of sounding maudit; that is neither my intention nor feeling; otherwise, I would be oozing highly profitable mauditism in the modern salons of pomp and circumstance.)
15
The hen appears in and disappears from the lot at completely unpredictable intervals. Sometimes she’s there all night long, and at others there’s no sign of her for several days. I’ve turned the matter over in my mind, but I can’t crack the code of the bird’s irregular life. The topic is beginning to have pathological importance in relation to my daily routine, and I’m aware of it, which makes it even more disturbing.
Cecilia finally noticed the lot.
“Why did you move to a building next to a piece of waste ground, my love? It must have so many rats, you know.”
The exaggeration of her warning irritates me. I tell her there isn’t a single rat in the lot, just a hen. Long silence. I feel I’ve betrayed an enormous secret. Cecilia looks puzzled and gives a, for me, repulsive laugh: the sort of laugh emitted by teenagers who don’t have control over their extremities. She asks how t
here could be a hen there. Plucking up my courage, I grab her arm, drag her to the window, and point to the mound of earth where the hen is usually found. Nothing.
Cecilia gives me a worried look, and I, in the mood for a leg-pull, insist, “Look, there’s the hen. So, believe me now?”
Cecilia extracts herself from my grip—I’m probably hurting her—and goes to the kitchen. I stay here alone, looking at the lot, leaning against what some would call “the sill.” This is our second attempt at an argument after the one when Ceci took up smoking. I wonder what new vice she’ll acquire this time. Hopefully it won’t be coprophagy or getting her nails painted with whole landscapes—I wouldn’t tolerate either.
Then the hen appears from behind some bushes and climbs to the top of the mound with Tibetan calm. I look at her enviously and don’t even contemplate the possibility of calling Cecilia and showing her I’m not out of my mind. Instead, I decide to hatch a plot for discovering every detail of the feathered creature’s lifestyle: I’ll call in sick, even act out a serious illness so Cecilia won’t suspect anything—Would she, at this stage, be capable of reporting me to Ms. Watkins?—and rather than going to the museum, I’ll spend the whole day in the vacant lot, following the hen’s every movement.
While I’m hatching this dishonest scheme, the bird moves back into the bosky shadows of the lot. I sit on the bed and open the drawer in which I keep the used tea bags. After contemplating them for a while, I decide I need a new project, something as ambitious as that collection, one that completely absorbs my intellectual capacities, that aligns my ideas in a single direction, in just the same way as a magnetized metal bar aligns iron filings.
That’s what I need: a Project. The other possible solution to overcoming the lethal sense of dissatisfaction into which I’ve sunk (for how long?) would be to find something like a Community: a close bond with a group of people who understand my interest in collecting tea bags, for instance, or my irrepressible desire to live next to an empty lot. But I suspect that no such groups exist, and that I have steadily dynamited all the communities I ever belonged to—the drug addicts in the gardens near the house in Coapa, the girlfriend I went to Cozumel with, and even Ms. Watkins, that secretly friendly boss who, despite all, believed in my abilities for a while. Dynamited them to the point where I’ve ended up more alone than a chili in a maize field, as my grandmother used to say, living with a woman to whom nothing except neutral Newtonian space seems to unite me.
16
It’s Monday. The minute I woke, I uttered an exaggerated groan that frightened Cecilia more than I’d expected.
“What’s wrong?” she asked in alarm. I invented a complex stomach ailment that would keep me in bed for at least forty-eight hours. Cecilia didn’t believe me, but even so she agreed to tell Ms. Watkins I couldn’t come in. She’s less unpleasant now that she’s my wife. If I’d missed a day at the office while we were simple workmates, she would have hurried to Ms. Watkins to vehemently demand my dismissal. Luckily, I never missed a day during those three years.
So, I stayed at home. The first thing I did was leaf through, without seriously reading, a newspaper from last week. The classified ads occupied my attention more than any other section, and within them, most particularly, those relating to sexual encounters. I amused myself in this way until my imagination sparked up, encouraged by the indecent messages of seek and capture, and I slowly masturbated on the bed, unconcerned about the possibility of ejaculating onto Cecilia’s pillow, which I did. After that, I watched TV for quite a while and once again tried to think up an Important Project that would give meaning to my haphazard existence. Two hours later, resigned to my fate, I resolved to go into the lot to find the bird’s secret hiding place, to decipher the reasons behind her actions. That was to some extent an Important Project, even if it wasn’t really one. It was to some extent because it related one of my most authentic obsessions, the hen, to the need to understand her mechanisms, her minutiae, her little animal decisions that, without being decisions, made up a strangely fascinating, ordinary existence.
And here I am now on the other side of the wall, my shoes half sunk in the mud. I walk carefully through the undergrowth, searching for the hen and attempting to attract her with a sound I feel would be familiar, exciting: the equivalent of the sex-wanted ads in the newspaper, but in clucks. “Seeking a female with dirty feathers and loose morals,” I cluck to her.
After walking across a couple of rotting planks, I reach the darkest, wildest core of the waste ground, that part that can’t be seen from my window, toward which the hen is usually walking when I lose sight of her. The first time I entered the lot, with the frustrated intention of enticing her toward the table that was to serve as a shelter, I didn’t get as far as this remote, overgrown region. I can hear the hen clucking in the bushes, but although she’s close by, it’s difficult to get through the dense vegetation to the place where the sound is coming from, and I have to make numerous detours to avoid nettles, thorny branches, and pieces of barbed wire. When I’m at the point of locating its origin, the clucking stops; nor can I see any movement among the leaves. The hen has disappeared. I desperately search all around but don’t find a single feather. On the other hand, I do uncover a plastic bag just like the other one that, a few months ago, made me back off and run out of the lot, the bag full of viscera. The possibility that this bag might also be stuffed with intestines in an advanced state of putrefaction horrifies me. Not just because of my disgust and revulsion, my profound and, you might say, fainthearted dislike of blood, but also because finding a second bag during this second incursion into the lot would imply a pattern, a wink of complicity, a recurrence of—for god’s sake—grotesque, abhorrent things; it would imply the lot is a place of perversion and death, a place where you could, with astounding impunity, dump the corpses of large mammals, thinking mammals, mammals with skirts.
Confronted with these pure possibilities, I feel overtaken by events. I have the sudden intuition that it wasn’t my liking for things rural that led me to move next to the plot, but a propensity for catastrophe and a tendency toward the sordid that goes beyond my conscious undertaking to convert myself into a mediocre, spineless man. So I decide to take a roundabout path through other shady areas of the lot to avoid contact with, or simple closeness to, the bag possibly full of intestines. I stoop to pass below a branch that hangs, as if brought down by lightning, over a heap of trash. And as I move into the darkness, with the foliage of the lianas and the general vegetal disorder covering my body, I feel a blow on the back of my neck. And I fall. I fall as if going beyond the ground. Like Alice when she falls while following the rabbit. The rabbit whose form can be clearly made out in the scar on my arm, and on the moon, so they say. The rabbit that, in my case, is a stray and—who knows?—even imaginary hen, let loose in the weeds of my inertia.
17
I’m woken by a beautiful ray of sunlight falling directly onto my face and the cackling presence of the hen, who is pulling up worms a couple of feet from my ear. I pass my tongue over my lips and discover the taste of dust. I can also sense the dryness of the earth on the skin of my arms, the palms of my hands, my eyelids, my whole body. I’m lying faceup. I received a blow to the back of the neck, and I’m lying faceup, covered in dirt. I probably fell on my front and took the opportunity of an instant of consciousness to turn on my own axis, like a predictable planet.
Pain. Pain very close to the back of my neck. The blow wasn’t exactly on the back of my neck. It was on my head, to one side, a few inches from the ear now listening to the clucking of the hen. It was a blow on that part of my head where the infestations of lice always started in my childhood. In the finest, most vulnerable hairs through which I would run my hand to feel the gritty lumps of blood, the pain. Pain and confusion.
I can’t have been lying here for long. One or two hours at the most. Cecilia hasn’t left the museum, and the sun is still high, so it’s somewhere between midday and early afternoon. Two
hours maybe. Not more. A few short hours disconnected, absent, lying faceup in the lot—my beloved waste ground next to my building—accompanied by the intermittent clucking of my wardress, by the pain of her victims, the worms. Worm pain. Neck pain. I sense and look at my grimy body. I extract a twig from my mouth. I wipe the earth from my eyelids with the right sleeve of my shirt, which is less dirty than the rest of me. My slow efforts to stand don’t seem to surprise the hen, whom I’ve never before seen at such close quarters. Now I can appreciate the dull opacity of her plumage, the unhealthy look of her legs, the food fighting for survival, wriggling in her mouth. Worms.
Once on my feet, I’m overcome by a slight dizziness, accompanied by the precise sensation of blood flowing and veins pulsing in the area around the wound on my head. I check that my belongings—keys, wallet, cell phone—are still in their usual places—left pocket, back pocket, and right pocket, respectively—and as they are, I discount robbery as the motive for the aggression to which I was subjected, if that’s what it was, and not a falling branch or a stone or a piece of drywall someone threw over from the street, imagining the lot to be empty as usual. Maybe I saved the hen from that very same blow that, I say to myself, given the size and fragility of the bird, would have been lethal.
Though it seems more likely it was a calculated attack. What was I hit with? A bat, a piece of rusty pipe from the lot, a tree trunk struck by lightning, the perpetrator’s own wrath? And what was the motive for that sudden, unjustified attack? Simple rage; jealousy; the defense of a particular territory; incomprehensible, naked, unshod Evil?
Pissed off, I make my way back to the wall.
18
From the very moment I start ascending the stairs of my building, while I’m rummaging in my pockets for the key that keeps my meager belongings relatively secure, I suspect something is not as it should be. On the other side of the door, I can hear noises that, though not loud—barely perceptible in fact—only add anxiety to my heightened sensitivity. Despite having ascertained that the wound on my head is more shocking than serious, I can still feel it throbbing, and I think I’ll have to invent something to explain the presence of the crusted blood on my scalp to Cecilia. (The truth is unthinkable: I could never explain why I went into the lot, why I followed the hen, why I was hit.) I’m distracted from my thoughts and my future excuses by the sounds on the other side of the door as I’m about to open it. Lo and behold, just to make a frigging awful situation worse, some burglar has, in his wisdom, broken into my dwelling with impunity to commit some outrage that, in my anxiety, I imagine to be not so much robbery as licentious acts involving my underwear and the pink lipstick Cecilia uses when she wants to project an air of elegance.
Among Strange Victims Page 6
