The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  * Why does Superman appear to exert himself equally—the same muscle tension, the same knit brow—when he picks up a car or alters the orbit of an entire planet? Which leads to: Is it really something positive for humanity that Superman and his friends—read: Batman & Company—watch over us to such an extent and so efficiently? Isn’t it a little disturbing that every time the Man of Steel and the Batman are momentarily neutralized by one of their many archenemies—read: Lex Luthor or The Joker—neither the police nor the army nor the citizenry can do anything about it? And the way they limit themselves, resigned to the contemplation of the application of their superpower or mega-ability, and do nothing but pray for the, fortunately, inevitable and never too late recovery and shining victory of the guardian, until the next adventure, when everything starts over again and again and again? (Much later, The Boy would regard the increasingly absurd evolutions of multifunctional mobile phones and their “social” applications as “pocket superheroes we can’t live without and depend on, never imagining that they might be super villains.”)

  * Whose fault is it that there are so many red Sugus and so few green Sugus in packs of assorted candies?

  * Why do his parents seem to want to kill him with an overdose of Patty Hamburgers with Maggi brand mashed potatoes?

  * Why don't the members of the expedition to Skull Island in King Kong choose to bring a dinosaur back to civilization, something with a smaller brain and simpler appetites—a bit more attractive and impressive as a spectacle—rather than a giant, unstable, blonde-obsessed monkey? And why in these Japanese monster movies does someone always stop in mid-flight and turn around and raise their arms and scream, immobile, just to be squashed by a giant reptilian foot?

  * How is it possible that the yoga his mother practices—terrifying visions of her with a foot behind her head or her head between her legs, the plasticine elasticity of her whole body—is good for her and not the opposite?

  * Why, at every single one of the childhood shows his parents take him to, is there a terrible moment when the actors or speakers come down from the stage with little hops and, shrill-voiced and giggling, head straight for him to make him participate—coerced and in front of everyone—in something that he never wanted, wants, or will ever want to participate in, with everyone watching him?

  * Where do the holes in cheese come from?

  * And wouldn’t it be much more comfortable and logical to put socks on inside out, with the stitches on the outside?

  *Why do the people who sing “Happy Birthday” always seem to be thinking about something else, and some don’t even sing, but just move their lips without making any sound; just like, he’ll soon learn, when they sing the national anthem for school activities? And why do some of them sing with undisguised hatred, as if wishing the worst on you, as if mocking the fact that you’re celebrating the passing of time, of your own time?

  * Who are the people who decide the colors of countries on maps and globes? And is it possible to get a job doing that?

  * Why do the digits on the hand have specific names and those on the foot do not? (A question made more intriguing when in high school he discovers that, in English, the digits on the hands are called “fingers” and those on the foot are called “toes.”)

  * Is the halo around Jesus Christ’s head the graphic representation of a powerful migraine caused by the crown of thorns?

  * Why does everyone go to such pains to figure out who their babies look like, when it is perfectly obvious that babies don’t look like anyone, like anything, except babies?

  * Is Jell-O animal, vegetal, mineral, or interplanetary?

  * OK, he gets why Barbazul murdered successive inquisitive spouses, but why did he kill the first one?

  * Why are jokes so difficult to retain—both impossible to remember and impossible to forget—and dissolve so quickly in our memories? (An enigma that will grow with him and, as an adult, will be translated into a “Is it possible that jokes are made of the same material as dreams?”)

  * And why is it that in genie tales—so much more interesting than fairy tales—the third and final wish is never “I want three more wishes” and on and on to infinity, a strategy that would make it possible for him to include absurd wishes like that the best student stop understanding lessons, that the water in the pool turn to Coca-Cola, or that the weekend last an entire year, or—too many wishes—that there be peace and love throughout the world, even between his parents?

  * And why do we call them fairy tales when they’re really witch tales?

  * How is it that Cinderella’s glass slipper doesn’t break when it comes off her foot and falls down the stairs?

  * What does Coca-Cola taste like—did the taste of Coca-Cola actually exist?—and how is it possible that so many different people agree and coincide on their love for that soda pop?

  * And that great mystery, the one his parents have never been able to clear up: of all foods, why is asparagus the only one that transfers its flavor to the smell of pee, negating even the pee smell of pee?

  And the last one, the one he’s just added to his list:

  * Why are there red and blue flags waving on beaches—not on this one, which, as mentioned, is a wild, undomesticated beach with no sign of being exploited or exploitable—reporting the liquid and elusive humors of the water, but not the moods of the sand, always quick, where his parents often behave more unpredictably than the climate or the currents and where so many things take place that are, to The Boy, inexplicable?

  There are dozens, hundreds of questions like these dancing in The Boy’s head. And, of course, not all his “preoccupations” are so sophisticated. There’s also his fear of fat women; who, for him, are not just evil, but, in lingua-Disney, malignant or malevolent or maleficent. But the evil has already been done or the evil function already activated. And The Boy is already not all that rational and already thinks like one of those antique windup tin toys. Like his favorite toy. A toy—though The Boy can’t even imagine something like this yet, that things cease to be—that will soon pass out of production. About to be discontinued, like those clever tops or cymbal-clanging monkeys. A model retired for preservation by collectors: a runaway sleigh surrounded by the eternal manpower of politically correct toys and the sound and fury of electronic and computerized monstrosities preparing to land and invade.

  And, though The Boy doesn’t know it, there are many children like him. There, outside. Developing in secret and ready for the assembly line. Like aliens who have infiltrated terrestrial homes, waiting for the signal to activate and start doing their thing, to the joy of specialized psychologists. Children whose childhoods will be modified by the serial separations of not-so-serious parents. Children who, suddenly, to keep from thinking about how strange all of that is, will start to think about things stranger still, to think a great deal, all the time, in order to think as little as possible. “Hey, here come the new Kids of Divorced Parents. Invite Mommy and Daddy to the party!”

  And soon the intensity of the virus will increase forever. And more questions, questions that grow as he grows, without that meaning they get more profound or less playful:

  * What’s a comma doing putting itself between two numbers? Was mathematics created just to drive him crazy, a universal conspiracy in which everyone pretends to understand something that’s clearly incomprehensible and has no sense or logic? And what makes a psychotic so sure that 2 + 2 makes 5, while a neurotic knows that 2 + 2 makes 4 but just can’t handle it? And what about the person who always thinks that 2 + 2 equals 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, or the exact number of times you have to let the phone ring before answering or hanging up?

  * Why, in TV shows and movies, can the fastest speeds only be expressed in the slowest motion?

  * What happened—and, yes, he’s really going to like horror movies, those sympathetic to the monsters—to Dracula’s clothes and cape when he turned into a bat? Did his cape and the clothes also vampirize and then reappear when the Count regained hum
an form? Wrinkled, stained?

  * Why is the Miss Universe contest always won by a woman from planet Earth?

  * Why do people put photos of loved ones on refrigerator doors? Do they think of them as cold matter or food to be warmed up?

  * Why do singers in heavy metal bands sing with such high-pitched voices when, by definition and intention, their voices should be deep, metallic, heavy?

  * Why do zombies’ victims always get caught, when the undead or unliving move so very slowly and without any apparent urgency? Why do zombies need to feed on brrrrrrrrains so badly if consuming them doesn’t increase their negligible intelligence one iota?

  * Why is it that extraterrestrials—instead of abducting global heads of state, eminent scientists, or great artists—always opt to take country bumpkins or sad neighborhood hairdressers, or pretty much whoever is passing by, staring up at the sky?

  * And why do the people who used to stop and help accident victims—undead? Martians?—now just film the accident with their phones and upload it to YouTube as fast as they can? Which leads him to:

  * Why do famous sex addicts who check into clinics to overcome their illness—after rampaging through various harems of long-legged, perky-breasted goddesses—never get caught by their wives with “normal,” unattractive, or even old women?

  * Why are girls so afraid of being spied on in their underwear, but not of being seen in a bikini, and why do they always say “I don’t know what’s going on with me” when really they know perfectly well?

  * And why are women’s feet—under sheets and blankets, even in summer—always cold?

  * In the instant of death, the soul departs through the soles of the feet; is that why anyone who gets hit by a car, in the air of a final, truly fatal leap, loses their shoes, which always land several meters from their body?

  * Why is it that there are so few clocks in the most modern airports and that everything sold in airports is more expensive than it is outside?

  * Why is it that now, later on, when people sing “Happy Birthday” they seem to always be thinking about their own birthday, about how many they’ve had, how many they’ve got left, about whether or not they are happy birthdays?

  * Why is it when people tell you “It’s not your fault,” what they really mean is the exact opposite? (Even though the word “fault” had never entered your head; and now it’s there, forever, yours from here onward, always?)

  * Or why are there more people every day who stop in doorways or at the foot of escalators or at exits to mass transit to consult electronic devices?

  * Is it really true that dreamers in Nordic countries—and those in charge of their frigid hotels—consider themselves more evolved for having renounced sheets and sleeping under pure eiderdown?

  And even though the thing about * King Kong and the thing about the * asparagus and the thing about the * feet and the soul and the shoes continue to perturb him a great deal, like tentacles from the depths of childhood (and, in the former case, will always, over the years, produce in him a strange and scientifically unjustified calm, confirming, or at least convincing him, that his intestines are still functioning as they always have because the thing about * the asparagus keeps happening like clockwork), the most intriguing question of all is that question. A question planted in childhood but that, with time’s passing, keeps inexorably reaching out its roots into the earth, where one day we’ll all be buried to feed the trees so they can grow, a question that Google will never have an answer to:

  * Do they like me or not like me or still like me or no longer like me or did they ever like me? Does she? Does he? Do any of them? Do I?

  But he has a while before he’ll have to ask himself about all of that. (Here it comes, from so far away, so far away that it’s as if it were coming from an alternate dimension, from a possible maybe and, ah, another parentheses like an expansive wave. And The Boy doesn’t yet possess the knowledge necessary to resist the flood that, within a few years and to be continued . . .)

  And meanwhile The Boy would keep on wondering—there again, in that present, onvacation— * how does the sun start to set, to drop from the top of the highest wall? And how, as it lets itself go and falls, shadows begin to reappear. * What color are shadows? The Boy wonders. Because clearly they’re not black, not exactly. Not gray either. Shadows are the color of whatever they cover and change: because, in the shadows, everything acquires a shadowy tone and a shadowy air. And yet, so far, that’s not a problem. Shadows—new shadows, shadows that last until just past midday—are brief, a sketch of shadow. It’s hot, the sky is blue, the sea is darker blue—a blue made turbulent and brown by the river mouth—and the sand is yellow. Everything so fragile, so easily broken. And the oxygen is like pointy flakes of snow that sting a little when breathed in.

  And The Boy drops down next to his parents. It’s colder there, next to them. Lower temperatures. As if his parents were refrigerating the air around them. And The Boy feels the exquisite sensation of clean sweat drying on his skin and, suddenly, his body receives a jolt of electricity. And he’s moving again, back on his feet, jumping and waving his arms and squawking like a crazy, crazy bird. “A bird crazier than a crazy bird,” The Boy thinks and laughs and almost asks himself, with a strange fear, if he just made up a joke, or something like that, and he promises himself not to forget it. And he keeps on honking, making noise. Whatever it takes, anything to break the bellicose truce that his parents had settled into: the calm that precedes the storm that precedes the hurricane that precedes the tsunami that precedes the crack that’ll split the world that precedes the black hole that’ll devour all light that precedes the darkness that precedes nothing—because after the darkness there will be nothing left. The End.

  Later, with the running or rolling of the years, The Boy will learn how to neutralize and ignore the call of that abyss: opening a book, plunging inside, the freest of falls, closing the cover on reality, behind him now not in front, and opening his eyes. And he’ll always marvel at the fact that whenever he picks up a book for the first time—he’s been told that the same thing happens to other people with firearms—he’ll always be surprised by the fact that, no matter the number of pages and type of binding, he thought it’d be lighter or heavier, but never like this. And then it’ll seem logical and narratively appropriate that each book feels unique and different and special. But there’s still time before that. Before reading and writing. There’s still about half as much life as he’s already lived. So, as a protest against the slowness of his learning (with each passing day he incorporates ten to twenty new words whose meaning he doesn’t know or just senses; which doesn’t keep him from savoring their sound, from the pleasure they create inside his mouth when he repeats them; today, this today that he’s remembering now, he’s heard and tried out for the first time the word “parentheses”), The Boy keeps moving. The Boy—before the time of sitting down to read and write, of moving in a different way arrives—runs and spins and leaps and dances and falls down just for the pleasure of standing up and running and spinning and leaping and dancing and falling down again.

  And his parents watch him with a mix of surprise, resignation, and fatigue: The restless Boy is also, according to his pediatrician, a boy with “a proclivity for accidents.”

  In his short but accident-ridden existence, The Boy has already passed through the following predicaments: a) a difficult birth in which he almost died or, actually, did die for a few minutes, first, strangled by his own umbilical cord and, again, when a nurse dropped him on the floor (he doesn’t know this yet, he doesn’t remember it, they’ll tell him a while later, and “a while” is the chronological unit that tends to mean a quarter of a century, or something like that, right?); b) an undesired encounter with a giant cactus; c) a never entirely elucidated episode on a tricycle also involving a truck, two motorcycles, and a wheelchair; d) a fire; e) a flood with a short circuit to boot; f) another fire; g) hand-to-hand combat with one of those mutant dogs that are tr
ained to kill and that, nobody knows how, escaped its muzzle just as The Boy was passing by (see bite scar on left heel; see dog missing an eye); h) a poisoning with cleaning products that, to the emergency room doctor’s bewilderment, should’ve killed any living organism . . . and on and on until z) the time when, a few days ago, a clam shell clamped itself to the middle of his forehead where, now, there’s a mark in the shape of a smile and, soon, any minute now a) it’ll all start over again, alphabetically, like that rotating series of names given to Caribbean hurricanes.

  That's life, that's his life.

  A constant and generalized rehearsal for a death that debuted in the first second of his existence and whose silent applause can and will continue to be heard until the final instant of the final bow, which, in his case, if everything goes well for him and badly for the rest of humanity, will be an incessant enter/exit ghost. Meanwhile and in the meantime, a defenseless and all-powerful and enslaving tyranny of successive disasters (and the cold planning and execution of that one Oh So Particular Great Disaster that will put him in the eyes and mouths of everyone) along with the disaster of his parents as intermittent background music. (Several chapters down the road, inside the horizontal parentheses of a divan, a psychoanalyst will interpret this succession of childhood cataclysms as a system that he used, unconsciously, to keep his parents together through the adversity of their marriage, making them stay together so they thought they were protecting him from catastrophic mishaps when really he was protecting them and keeping them together as a couple.) Parents who, in turn, found themselves surrounded by mercenary armies, at the mercy of their own increasingly defeated and worn-out emotions. Another chapter in the saga. The same chapter as always with more incorrect corrections, with multiplying errata, with a lack of orthography and courtesy.

  On the beach, under the sun, the father and mother read the same book. It’s not the first time they’ve done this. That’s how they met: the two of them reading the same book. On a train, the most romantic of all modes of transit. That same book they never stop reading. And, of course, there’s no better argument than that for putting a conversation in drive and taking a ride down the tunnel of love. But as tends to happen with everything that seems charming in a romance’s initial hours, this ritual of reading separately together—of reading the same book but different books, at the same time—now just produces a kind of irritation. The kind of annoyance we experience when, after a long time, we still feel obliged to do something that we obliged ourselves to do in the first place. And, then, you can’t help but wonder, why am I doing this, damn it, damn it, how did I get here, could I be more of an idiot?