Among Strange Victims

by Daniel Saldaña París

  Bea is received with moderate enthusiasm by New Yorkers. Her exploits alongside the Futurists (the rumors of her affair with Marinetti) don’t soften any hearts since the general opinion is that Futurism is overvalued, just a boorish bustling of loudmouthed, hirsute people. And neither has Bea’s art had a positive impact: she is branded as a naïve painter, and the adjective is correct. Her poetry, by contrast, has better luck. Alfred Kreymborg, a dapper defender of free verse, invites her to contribute to his magazine, Others, and the poems published there are praised in circles she believes to be important, although their leading light, a young man with a pleonastic name, is, in fact, a small-town doctor from New Jersey: William Carlos Williams.

  After being initially dazzled, Bea is, in a sense, disillusioned by New York. The people are pretentious or simply imbecilic, and no one has serious conversations about anything. They are all cynics, and erecting a wall of indifference between themselves and all things human is a fashion that coexists with the most ridiculous of hats. Her friend Heather, who has been in New York for a year, avoids her, offering risible excuses, and is only to be seen with a group of famous lesbians. Bea concentrates on her political writing, now more detailed and better argued than in her Italian period. In relation to her poetry, she is unaware that what she does can be justified so elegantly: the battle for free verse contributes to her theoretical redemption.

  On an evening when Bea is returning to the apartment that also serves as her studio, having just left one of those salons where the dilettantes take great pains to shock by dressing like standard lamps, she is stopped by a down-and-out who brusquely asks her for money. Bea is accustomed to walking alone and has learned to avoid all manner of altercations. It is not unusual for men to follow her when they notice she lives by herself, and to make indecent proposals in the most sordid streets. But she is a tough woman and knows it is essential to keep smiling and reduce her aggressor to the size of a child, looking derisively at him; they usually leave her in peace.

  This down-and-out, however, is persistent. A man of about fifty with a pockmarked face, dressed in stinking rags. He walks with a stoop, as if carrying a heavy load on his right shoulder, and has a long beard that does not completely hide the gauntness of his features. At some point he steps out in front of Bea, blocking her way. It is a narrow street, almost deserted at this twilight hour. Bea impatiently looks the undesirable in the eye and asks permission to pass. And then it happens: she recognizes the eyes and forehead of someone glimpsed in the past. She hesitates an instant longer, with time standing still around her, rummaging in her memory in search of such a face. When she finds it, she pales and her jaw drops in a gesture of surprise that will remain there for several days. The vagabond is none other than the murderer in that Piedmont station, the man who, fifteen years before, in a fit of spite, fired at a woman who was abandoning him in slow motion. Now Bea meets him again, on another continent and with a very different appearance, but it is undoubtedly the same person. She remembers in fine detail the pain on his face when the guards arrested him; under the gray beard, the man’s expression is now identical: he seems frozen in that instant, as if it were impossible to feel any new emotion after that last, definitive one.

  While Bea is thinking about the strange trajectories life traces out, the man continues to try to wheedle some money out of her, claiming hunger, but he becomes increasingly desperate and his words of entreaty less sweet. The destitute man pulls a rusty knife from his tattered overcoat and waves it before Bea’s face. His movements become jerky and his voice, now shrill, demands that Beatrice give him everything she has, including her jewelry. But Bea stands motionless a few seconds longer. When aggression seems almost inevitable, when she becomes aware that the man is advancing on her, determined to get what he wants, Bea, in her most elegant British accent, pronounces the magic words: “You shot a woman in Italy fifteen years ago, in a train station.”

  The effect is instantaneous: the vagabond’s expression suddenly changes. Starting in his neck—the tendons strained—a look of terror ascends his face and even seems to change the color of his uncombed hair. His right hand swells, and then opens with visible impotence, dropping the knife, which falls to the ground making much less noise than Bea would have supposed. The vagabond takes four steps back, his eyes wide open, then turns and runs.

  At that moment, completely alone in the by then absolute darkness, Bea has a first inkling of the meaning of destiny.

  A

  The weeks passed. Having exhausted the list of nearby towns he was interested in driving to, Marcelo finally decided to visit the dreaded Nueva Francia. Out of prudence, he invited Velásquez to accompany him, but that weekend his friend had at last managed to arrange a meeting with his son, whom he was to pick up from the interstate bus terminal.

  “You go, dude,” he said to Marcelo in a tone of sincere intimacy, “but be really careful over there. Nueva Francia isn’t exactly at its best right now. You’ll have to go through a whole heap of military checkpoints, so take your passport and university ID with you. If they see you’re a foreigner and a professor, they won’t search you as often . . . unlike me. Even though the fucking sons of bitches know who I am, they make me empty my pockets every time. Oh, and don’t miss Los Insurgentes cantina—it’s the nearest thing Nueva Francia has to a tourist attraction.”

  Marcelo took his friend’s recommendations on board and set out in his Renault at eleven in the morning with a bottle of water and several forms of identification, which he did indeed have to show the soldiers at the first checkpoint he came to, just over a mile from Los Girasoles. Other checkpoints followed the same pattern, and as he got closer to Nueva Francia, the sense of danger increased and the stony military gazes became more accusing, more difficult to avoid. At the fifth checkpoint, and despite the fact that his credentials gave him a certain advantage, they asked him to get out of the car and open the trunk. Marcelo, who was used to trusting the forces of law and order, was annoyed by the notion that the military was essentially bad. But everything pointed in that direction: these men spat, tended to be high-handed, and an emptiness in their eyes suggested sudden, gratuitous violence. At this last, fifth checkpoint, they asked him more precise questions, silently laughing at his answers and keeping their fingers on the triggers of their assault rifles.

  When he saw Nueva Francia, Marcelo lost a little of the contempt he felt for Los Girasoles: this town was much worse. If the streets were dirty in Los Girasoles, and the road surface merged into the surrounding dirt every few yards, in Nueva Francia the inhabitants seemed to have been living in the same shit for the last thirty years, with the additional aggravation that a trickle of progress—the only one that had reached its dusty rurality—had provided them with the most up-to-date weapons, carried casually and proudly, not only by the people from the cartels, but even by the ordinary citizens, corrupted to the point of being unable to distinguish between one dead body and two hundred.

  Marcelo parked the Renault on one side of the square. On a couple of benches, without even a single tree to relieve the harsh effects of the sun on their faces, two drunks were taking what looked to Marcelo like their last siesta. A policeman, standing in the corner, looking uncomfortable in a bulletproof vest and carrying a rusty rifle, was fanning himself with his blue uniform cap, sweating like a pig abandoned in the Sahara. As there was no one else in sight, Marcelo walked over to ask the policeman for directions.

  “Excuse me, officer, do you know where Los Insurgentes cantina is?”

  The policeman looked at him in surprise, as if he didn’t even remotely expect anyone around there to talk to him. He gave a long, noisy, mucus-filled sniff and then spat a green substance onto the asphalt. The sun would evaporate that phlegm in a few seconds, and both Marcelo and the policeman would begin to breathe it in if they stayed as they were, regarding each other from close proximity.

  “An’ why the fuck d’you wanna go there?” asked the uniformed officer.

&nbs
p; “A friend told me I had to see it, that it was cool,” Marcelo ingenuously replied in his Madrid accent, clearly displaying his foreignness and confrontational ineptitude.

  “It’s on this street, ’bout three blocks ahead,” conceded the policeman, pointing slowly and vaguely in the general direction. Marcelo walked down the street, staggering with incomprehension under the fierce sun.

  There was no sign over the entrance. If Marcelo realized that shady place was Los Insurgentes, it was because he thought, quite rightly, that nowhere else in the desolate town would be open at that hour. Near the door, barely protected from the sun by the shadow of the cantina, a one-legged man holding out a small box offered products for alleviating bad breath.

  Inside, the decor was spare: a wall of bottles behind the bar—as if it were a legendary saloon in some Western—a few posters for music concerts on the opposite wall, and a photograph of Emilio Zapata on the bathroom door—there was no door for women. He ordered a beer. A couple of guys were having a lackluster discussion about soccer, leaning their weight on a tiny round table. From the bar, the manager of the joint added his voice to the argument, alternatively supporting one or the other of his customers. No one took much notice of Marcelo, despite the fact that the fashionable elegance of his clothes was clearly out of tune with the place. Perhaps making too much of their indifference, Marcelo thought this must be one of those touristy anti-tourist spots where foreigners inevitably end up, thirsting for something traditional; a Mexican equivalent of those bullfighting taverns in Hapsburg Madrid that sell decadence as their principal—possibly only—attraction.

  But the impression of witnessing an elaborately staged scene immediately evaporated when a new customer appeared in the doorway of Los Insurgentes, a woman wearing a jacket and pants, over fifty but not looking it, with long, curly black hair, who walked confidently to the bar and asked for a dark draft beer, calling the manager by his first name. The woman had a sober, elegant style, and her manners showed an education level superior to that of the other drinkers. Marcelo thought her attractive, interesting to the point of weakening his already well-proven predilection for younger women. She didn’t initially notice his presence, but—elbows on the bar, wrapped up in her thoughts—offered him, before a smile, the not-to-be-disdained landscape of the back of her well-cut pants. Marcelo, for his part, pretended to be unaware of the newcomer and, before heading off to continue his tour of the hostile terrain of Nueva Francia, ordered another beer—this time dark and from the barrel—and it was then that he managed to draw from the woman a first look of interest. But that initial glance was not enough to substantially modify the circumstances, at least not immediately or perceptibly. The look would instead have to remain buried, latent, awaiting the moment in which it would provoke a notable change in the course of events, events that until that moment, and taking Marcelo’s decision to come to live in Mexico as the point of departure, had turned out to be much less interesting and much less intense than he had originally supposed. And this noteworthy disillusion, this unfavorable comparison between expectations and actual events, didn’t have so much to do with the expectations themselves or the events—generally neutral and all equally dispensable—as with the bored, opaque gaze of the person who was experiencing them, the dulled sensations of the person who played out the grotesque comedy of the events without really getting the message, without being changed by it, moved in his depths. Because Marcelo’s depths were the cause of all his tedium, of all the slowness that filled his extremities and dulled his synaptic transmissions, and it was the slowness of Spain, and the slowness of Europe, and the slowness of philosophy that circulated phlegmatically inside him, so that a conventionally intense experience, like living in Los Girasoles and, one morning, visiting Nueva Francia, became an insipid outing in hostile, devastating heat, a ridiculously predictable outing from whose meanness he would not even be saved by the interested look of an attractive woman in a lugubrious cantina.

  And in spite of the fact that slowness and opacity and tedium had been the elements of Marcelo’s perpetual, irremediable emotional state for as long as he remembered, he had the sensation things had not always been like that. He suspected that at some moment, the entire pantomime of his enthusiasm for life had been sustained by an authentic feeling. It was somewhere in the remote past, before adulthood, that he located the spring of jubilation and creative vigor from which—in a later version, and according to him—he still drank. In the same way, he had the sense of an intensely creative future, always at the point of emerging, in which he would once again live with enthusiasm and plenitude, fully savoring each detail of everyday life. The perpetual postponement of that moment caused him periods of deep discomfort, but his extreme self-satisfaction impeded him from recognizing that the problem was, in fact, structural, and not a simple question of stages and processes.

  Marcelo stood up, ready to make his way home. His excursion to Nueva Francia was beginning to seem like a mistake, an idiotic idea whose spores were spread by the primary inoculum of Professor Velásquez, with his huge propensity for tacky acts of exalted localism. True, he had not yet seen anything of Nueva Francia, apart from this incomprehensibly famous cantina that would leave him one single memory. But that single memory, the woman with curly hair, spoke to Marcelo just as he was preparing to leave.

  “You’re not going to Los Girasoles, are you?” she asked with what seemed to Marcelo almost authentically Castilian brusqueness.

  B

  There is among Richard Foret’s eventful wanderings a chapter that eludes simple interpretation. The few students of his uneven work know this, and so prefer to leave it to one side or play down its importance in the offhand manner academics habitually reserve for anything they consider incomprehensible. This episode is, moreover, fundamental in terms of Foret’s biography since it coincides with the writing of his most intriguing work, the Considerations, and the first suspicions, on Bea’s part, that her lover is as mad as a hatter.

  Richard and Bea, as all accounts indicate, met in New York at the beginning of 1917, although their mutual fame may have conceded them a brief glimpse of the other’s personality (in the form of gossip) while Bea was living in Florence and Foret reeling drunkenly between Berlin and Paris in those epic years before the Great War. But it is generally agreed that the rumors flying across Europe were not strong enough to awaken in either of them a particular fascination for the existence of the other; yet the scraps of information they did obtain would form a firm basis, in the New World, for embarking on a first conversation that would, as the hours passed, become an enthused monologue on the part of Richard to which Bea listened with a smile of equal parts complicity and sheer delight.

  When Foret reaps the same hatred in New York that he harvested in France, his few friends turn their backs on him, and Duchamp, as has been said, plays a joke of questionable innocence that attracts the attention of the draft board to him, or so the boxer-poet records in his bissextile magazine, perhaps pursued by more profound ghosts. And so his flight recommences (his whole life had been one); his unfounded hope for a home switches from the illuminated New York night to the muddy streets of Buenos Aires, the city toward which Foret sets the needle of the impetuous compass that could have pointed toward any other place. But despite being an indefatigable traveler—or perhaps precisely because of this—his understanding of world geography is somewhat dreamlike: Foret persuades himself of the convenience of making a discreet stopover in Mexico City before going on to Buenos Aires. Later he would discover to his great disillusionment that, given the distance and the paucity of the marine schedule, to get to Argentina from Mexico, he would either have to pass through Spain or embark in Florida, with the great risk of being either recruited or going out of his mind due to ridiculous suspicion.

  But let us not get ahead of ourselves: that has yet to come. For now, Foret departs from New York disguised as a cadet on leave and, incomprehensibly, tries to reach the northern frontier. The reason
: he wants to go to Canada in order to leave behind as soon as possible a country that, in his frazzled consciousness, is pursuing him with the intention of sending him to his death. His plan is confused, but from his letters it can be deduced that he intends to board a ship bound for Mexico at some point on the Canadian coast.

  This is where matters become complicated. From the moment Foret first meets Bea until he flees to the north, only three months pass. Months that are definitive in the history of nations (the United States enters the war), and months in which Foret and Bea cohabit, it can be assumed pleasurably since, from that point on, the letters between them reveal a plan in which their lives are entwined.

  For Foret, those three months are enough for him to decide he wants to be with that woman forever. And Beatrice cannot ignore the evidence that something great is happening, and that if she wants to be true to the paths fate is laying out before her, she has to sacrifice the stability of her New York life to follow that madman wherever he leads. Yet in spite of that reciprocal conviction, Foret undertakes a delirious journey that separates him from Bea for a period of eight months.

  During his first days in Canada, Foret travels around Quebec because he believes it will be simpler for him to mingle with the French-speaking natives, that being his first language, and so easier to find work as a merchant seaman on some ship bound for Mexico. But putting those plans into action takes two months. On his first afternoon in Montreal, he takes part in an antiwar demonstration, gives a spontaneous speech (he is expelled by two guards), and fornicates in a park with a prostitute. He then spends a week in an alcoholic stupor, sleeping in the room of a psychic. After that, he makes an effort to regain his lucidity and writes to Bea every day. Little is known of his actions for the following month and a half because his letters do not include anecdotes. In them, he attempts to sketch out for Bea his most personal creed: there are paragraphs of great theoretical density, many of which reiterate themes philosophers have already addressed, but which Foret has not read. (Some scholar or other has established a forced parallel between these scribblings and Spinoza’s concept of conatus.)