Among Strange Victims

by Daniel Saldaña París

  This courteous gesture softened the other’s manner; he shook Marcelo’s hand firmly, introducing himself as “Jacinto Nogales Pedrosa At Your Service.” Marcelo left the booth and immediately felt the sun beating down once more on his neck. He walked along the main street until he saw the number 9, leaning to one side over a door, and gently tapped on the window with his knuckles. Since no one responded and no movement was to be seen inside, Marcelo had the sudden suspicion Jacinto Nogales Pedrosa At Your Service had been pulling his leg, sending him off to one of the many empty houses. Luckily, before Marcelo could knock again, the door was opened by an elderly woman, anchored to the floor by a pair of pink slippers, who sold him a demijohn of water with a speed and efficiency that, for the first time, met the urgency of his situation.

  Back in the house, Marcelo sat down on his orange two-seater sofa and drank straight from the bottle. Once his thirst was quenched, he began to feel hunger pangs, and he thought he would never manage to do anything until he had a car of his own in which to escape from Puerta del Aire. It was by then almost six in the evening, and Marcelo Valente hadn’t had a bite since the meager bread roll he had eaten with his coffee in the airport before setting off for Los Girasoles. To cap it all off, his moral vegetarianism made things difficult since it was improbable, in this region famous for its cattle, he would be able to find a decent meal of vegetal origin. He then told himself he would eat the first thing he saw. In any case, he thought, none of his colleagues at the University of Los Girasoles would discover him slicing into a filet steak at this hour, so it would be possible to maintain the ethical rigor of his character intact, if not that of his person.

  B

  The second event to mark the life of Bea Langley, now Bea Burton, occurs thirteen years later, in 1914. Her father has died; her mother is living in London, embittered and reclusive, like a dried-up piece of fruit someone has left in a drawer. Bea is now Beatrice, as her husband calls her, and Mama, as her children—a boy and a girl—call her, in an accent that mixes the uncertain tone of five-and seven-year-olds with the insecurity of living in an almost excessive state of linguistic diversity. Their house in Florence is not exactly a villa, but it has a pleasant courtyard where the Burtons receive any foreigner who passes through the city, in addition to their English expatriate friends, who spend their time complaining about Mediterranean manners but can’t go to London without becoming immediately depressed.

  A week before this second event, Bea exhibits some of her most recent drawings in the Florentine gallery where her friend Heather acts as a consultant. Matthew Burton, her husband, is an aspiring art dealer and travels frequently to India, Paris, and the United States, buying and selling pieces on which he makes a marginal profit. They depend, in fact, on Bea’s inheritance. During her husband’s travels, Beatrice lives—according to the gossip among the British community in Florence—an unconventional life. If Marinetti is in the city, he stays at her house, in the studio furnished for visitors on the other side of the courtyard. At night, his hostess slips out to the Futurist’s bed. She has also, judging by the candor of the letters still in existence, enthralled Giovanni Papini, although it’s unclear if she allows him as many liberties as she certainly does Marinetti.

  The Italian spring dissolves, amid rumors of the imminent conflict, into the most stultifying of summers, and Bea’s lovers ditch her to write pamphlets against their country’s neutrality. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife fall time after time in Serbia, brought down by bullets, with every conversation in the Burtons’ courtyard describing their death.

  Matthew is an insensitive husband who attempts to make up for his total lack of empathy by lavishing Bea with advice of an academic timbre on her painting, something she finds deeply and justifiably irritating: “Try to achieve less sinuosity in your forms, my dear; I think it would do you good to spend more time in the Galería degli Uffizi; something tells me Giotto’s brushwork would refine your eye.” Bea listens with manifest embarrassment and casts long-suffering glances at her friend Heather, who laughs silently.

  Matthew writes to Bea from London, where he is closing a deal, saying he intends to postpone his return to Florence until the war fever dies down. The poor man does not suspect he will have to sit there waiting a historical eternity for this to occur: the war fever would never die down. The letter is written in a cold tone, and at the end, in a cramped hand, a phrase shatters Beatrice’s equanimity: “Give my best wishes to your friend Marinetti, you slut.” Bea remembers, more vividly than ever, the top hat and the pool of blood on the platform of that station in Piedmont. That image, which has stayed with her like an ill omen for thirteen years, is added to one of her principal thematic obsessions: The Battle of the Sexes. She has even written a manifesto and shown it to Heather, who extolled the virtues of Bea’s prose. But Bea is not interested in prose; she is interested in the battle of ideas that exemplifies, or perhaps keeps alive, the battle of the sexes. Marriage, for her, is a sweetened version of murder. A top hat and a pool of blood united forever in the gaze of a young girl. A dress like an octopus whose insides have been emptied out into a stone sink.

  This second episode is less dramatic than the first. There are no gunshots or platforms, no father to leave her alone to face the brutality of the world. It is more like a silent revelation, the inkling of a truth that will shed light on her present. Men, she says, are predatory. While her alliance with the Futurists might tell her sex is a dance of pistons, she knows there is another, less obvious reality: a fatal attraction of opposite poles, a mechanism that makes vaginas and penises seek out and yearn for each other in a deeper way. The ghost in the machine. The steam that, expelled from locomotives, becomes consciousness, expansive will, the aspiration to be ether.

  A

  The small office he had been assigned was, indeed, full of pigeons. The birds lived in four cages piled one on top of the other, blocking the only external window. Velásquez explained that the office had belonged to an agronomist who, one fine day, had declared himself to be ill and never returned. His students had received the news with complete indifference, and no one had made any effort to discover his whereabouts. After a few months he had been dismissed, and the caretaker confessed that the agronomist had left him in charge of a number of pigeons. Marcelo suspected, and voiced his suspicion, that the pigeons could have infected the agronomist with some strange disease. That his illness, his disappearance, maybe his death, were related to those pestilential birds. Velásquez, who had never considered that possibility, promised to talk to the administration about having the cages removed before Marcelo installed his books and laptop in the office. But the rhythm of the institution didn’t appear to be very different from what Marcelo had observed in other aspects of that Mexican province, and it took a week for the administration to remove the cages and put down, donate, or liberate the pigeons. In the meantime, Marcelo also took things calmly: he would arrive at the university at any hour he pleased and sit for a long while in a small garden in the courtyard, pretending to read the collection of essays on the work of Foret he had brought with him. After that, he would go to Velásquez’s office and, seated on a filing cabinet, chat with his colleague for a couple of hours, both of them waiting for the canteen to serve the menu of the day (from which Marcelo, of course, only chose the salads and the noodle soup). Their topics of conversation were always the same: women, a comparison of their respective teenage years in different countries, jibes aimed at the university teaching staff in Spain (Velásquez had studied for one semester of his master’s degree in Barcelona and knew very well what Valente was talking about when he criticized the monotonous, pedantic way of speaking of his fellow academics). They also talked about their respective families, but in this, as in questions of music (Velásquez’s only preference was for romantic Bachata songs), the gulf between their experiences was so pronounced that they soon bored of the topics and returned to areas of equivalence.

  Velásquez had been born in Mexi
co City in the early sixties; Marcelo was born in the second half of the decade, but this statistically negligible difference opened like a wide breach between Velásquez’s gray hair and ample waistline and Marcelo’s arrogant slimness and fierce elegance. It amused them to find chronological correspondences, weave their own parallel lives—each equally insipid in the eyes of the other, but, as is natural, deeply moving to themselves.

  “Wow, so when you were screwing around drinking coffee and discussing the dehumanization of art,” Velásquez would begin, referring to the stories Marcelo told, which located him, wearing a turtleneck sweater, in a pretentious tertulia at the Café Comercial, discussing Ortega y Gasset. “I was right there in my baseball period, setting up the famous Tlacuaches de Xochimilco,” he would go on to say, summarizing the exploits of that unsuccessful team, whose name he had chosen for euphonic reasons since they didn’t train in Xochimilco but Ciudad Satélite, on the opposite extreme of DF.

  In 1985, Velásquez was studying journalism, but the vision of horror in the days following the September earthquake had confronted him with a latent theoretical doubt that, misinterpreted, led him to enroll in philosophy. By December the horrors had evaporated, and Velásquez had absolutely no idea what he was doing in philosophy. In spite of everything, he had stuck with the major, promising to redress the balance during his master’s, studying a specialty that would reconcile him with his original vocation. This didn’t occur: he ended up specializing in aesthetics and then made the leap to literary theory and wrote his doctoral thesis on the French writers who had passed through Mexico.

  In that same year of 1985, Marcelo Valente enrolled simultaneously in philosophy and art history. He buried his nose in books and threw himself into the Byzantine discussions on the neo-Kantians with a devotion only equivalent to that he felt for Glutamato Ye-Yé, a rock group of the counterculture Movida Madrileña whose extreme levels of absurdity (“There’s a Man in My Fridge” is the title of one of their most notorious songs) helped him survive the dose of rationalism he was subjected to morning noon and night. He hung around with a number of completely unrelated groups: his school friends, in whose company he experimented with cocaine and bisexuality, the fundamental adornments of the era; his fellow students in philosophy, with whom he shared a naïve desire to change the world by means of the exhaustive analysis of the works of the Frankfurt School; and, finally, other university students in art history, of whom he really only knew two: a sometime girlfriend called Sixi—Remedios in real life, though no one called her by that name—and Guillermo, a misfit cousin two years older than himself, who seemed predestined to sell soft drugs for the rest of his life, a destiny he would fulfill with singular diligence until it landed him in prison seven years later.

  In 1989, Professor Velásquez had a son with a girlfriend he had met through a distant cousin. At the time the child was born, they had just moved to an apartment in Copilco overlooking the University City. She taught math in a secondary school, and Velásquez had become closely involved in editing a magazine that earned him fame but no money. Two years later, she took their son back to her hometown of Toluca, and Velásquez decided not to protest since he had confirmed that, as a father, his performance was pretty poor. He had continued to see his son every couple of weeks until he was offered the research position in Los Girasoles; after that, they only met during holidays, and with increasingly less frequency.

  While this was going on, Marcelo Valente finished his two undergraduate degrees in record time—though with unspectacular grades—and, having dazzled the wealthy faction of his family, went to London—partly sponsored by an aunt—for a whole summer with another, also sometime, girlfriend called Lucía.

  Marcelo and Velásquez could spend hours like that, analyzing from year to year the tenuous coincidences in their lives and happily laughing at the differences.

  After wiping the plates of his three servings of salad with a piece of stale bread, Marcelo would return to Puerta del Aire. Velásquez had introduced him to someone from the university’s administrative department who was anxious to sell his car, and Marcelo bought it, convinced he could resell it with equal ease at the end of his sabbatical year. So now he had a car.

  Back at his house, he dedicated himself to light reading—war novels for the most part—that he found in the only non-university bookstore in Los Girasoles. He had brought very few belongings with him, and the only books he had were related to his research, so he would have to wait for his next trip to DF to stock up on his bibliographic resources and even a couple of box sets to kill time. After reading for a while, he’d begin to feel irritated by his surroundings, the ugliness of the furniture, and would set out again—“I’ll be back later, Don Jacinto,” he’d call to the guard—on a drive along the four central streets of Los Girasoles. In the only café that merited the name, he had become a familiar face since his second day, and it was there he sat to leaf through the local newspaper and ignore the indigenous people from other lands offering him multicolored craft items.

  The waiter was a lean, diligent man who liked to discover the tastes and manias of his regular customers. He already knew he should serve Marcelo an espresso with just a drop of milk and not bring sugar or sweetener or anything similar. He also had to bring the newspaper from the bar, if it was available, and if not promise he would be the next customer to get it. Sometimes, but only if Marcelo requested it, the waiter served a glass of mineral water with the espresso, but that only happened on very hot days.

  Marcelo always greeted the waiter by name and gave a substantial tip when he left the terrace to take a couple of turns around the square with its pavilion. From the café, the professor could be seen taking that ritual, circular walk and then disappearing down one of the streets leading to another, smaller square, only to reappear after a short time in his noisy car, which had been left in a public parking lot two blocks away. He sometimes stopped off at the supermarket on the road to Puerta del Aire. This was, to cut a long story short, his average day.

  Later on, Marcelo planned to visit the nearby towns on the weekends. The nearest was Nueva Francia, which appeared in the newspapers every three or four days, together with the words narco or shoot-out. In the last six months, Nueva Francia had changed its mayor three or four times. Killed, arrested, or politically ousted, the mayors who left the post were never again mentioned in the press or during conversations on public transportation. An omnivorous silence devoured the names of those defunct functionaries, a silence that passed with giant steps through the ranks of the dwindling population. One day, three beheaded corpses. Another, five individuals tied at the wrists, showing signs of torture. Yet another, a soldier, with his hands cut off, lying at the roadside.

  Given these reports, Marcelo postponed the moment of getting to know Nueva Francia and, for the time being, contented himself with visiting the smallest, most distant towns that were featured in the Globetrotter’s Guide he had brought with him from Madrid. While driving, he listened to Glutamato Ye-Yé on the car stereo, recalling the good times of the eighties and thinking nostalgically of all the women he had been with. Those uncultivated plains, those winding roads pitted with potholes were perfect for remembering the most important moments of his life, to the rhythm of an outdated style of pure rock that gratified the deepest depths of his memory.

  “The only thing missing here,” Marcelo would say to himself, “is a woman to help me get through this sabbatical year.” The female staff members Velásquez introduced him to—all flat-chested—had looked at him with an eagerness that put Marcelo on his guard: just as in a cartoon, he believed he saw gold rings and wedding dresses in their black eyes, plus European passports and a life far distant from their offices in Los Girasoles and the executions in Nueva Francia. They were calculating women, academics who delivered their classes any old way and published articles in second-rate journals to gain points and so receive federal bonuses for top-class research. Marcelo knew them because they were the same the worl
d over: in the Inalienably Autonomous University of Madrid, in the University of Buenos Aires, in the Pontifical University of Anywhere At All. It wasn’t just the women, of course; in terms of calculation and mediocrity, there was no possible discrimination: all the researchers were of equal worth. But now Marcelo was polishing up his misogyny because it was the women who looked at him with lascivious desire, drawing an inelegant equivalence between the foreignness of the newcomer and the social redemption of his hypothetical partner.

  No. Marcelo needed a different woman, a Mexican with an air of extreme wisdom who would show him the paths of the national mystique and force him to part with his first-world prejudices. An intense, implacable woman who wouldn’t allow him to be distracted from his principal mission: to write a book on Foret in Mexico, or rather on the sudden, inexplicable disappearance of Foret in Mexico, on disappearance as the absolute aesthetic experience of the avant-garde—in the sense, that is, of Paul Virilio, but more frivolously. A woman who would open doors for him and explain the codes of conduct in this barren place, who would carry him away from Puerta del Aire to a cool, shady, wooden house in some grove, in some oasis that would isolate him from all the surrounding hostility.

  B

  The third episode to mark Bea Langley’s life and put the finishing touches to the mold of her character takes place in New York. It is 1916, and Bea is a woman in her prime—with thirty-one springs behind her—who won’t change substantially, except for the degeneration of an already well-formed character. She has abandoned her husband—who, eaten by jealousy, refuses to give her a divorce—and her two offspring await, optimistically, the return of their mother in an English boarding school a few miles from Florence. The war is a frequent topic of conversation, and Richard Foret, of whom Beatrice still knows nothing, or not much, is crossing the Atlantic to New York on the liner in which, by chance, Trotsky is traveling into exile.