I went into the café and sat at the counter, next to a man who looked like part of the furniture. I ordered a coffee. A skinny man in a red shirt, on the other side of the counter, replied in a surprisingly brusque tone that they didn’t have any.
“But I can offer you a cup of hot water for Nescafé, we’ve got that.”
“You wouldn’t have chamomile tea, or something similar?”
The man in the red shirt disappeared through a greasy curtain covering the upper half of a doorway (a hole, to be precise) in the wall behind the counter; on the other side of this curtain, I caught a glimpse of some family photos and, hanging from the ceiling, a chandelier with half the bulbs blown; under the light, a green table, and at it, a boy doing his homework. This was probably the home of the owner of the incompetent café, and that simple curtain divided his working and private worlds, if such a distinction made any sense in his particular case, which is questionable.
The owner—or the person I took to be the owner—came back after a while, carrying a packet of tea that looked as old as the photographs in the entrance.
“Yes, but it’s normal tea. I couldn’t find the chamomile.” By “normal” he evidently meant black.
“Well, give me a cup of that then, and let’s hope it doesn’t keep me from sleeping,” I said, seeking some sort of complicity with the owner of the café, though without really understanding why I was seeking that complicity or how such a state would emerge from a situation as trivial as the one that had united us so far. The man gave me a sardonic, scornful look.
“It’s coffee that keeps you from sleeping, son, not tea; they give tea to the sick.”
I had no wish to discuss the effects of theine and halfheartedly agreed with him. He put the cup of steaming water down in front of me and also left the whole packet of black tea on the counter. I extracted a tea bag, put it in the cup, and stared—transfixed by the way it soaked up the scalding water and sank like a shipwrecked barge—before I added a little sugar. I drank the tea in silence, not listening to the complaints the furniture–faced customer addressed to the three or four other locals. (His banality was disturbing and his ability to emit streams of foul language, prodigious.)
When I’d finished my beverage, I looked in amazement at the bag of black tea at the bottom of the empty cup, limp and useless as a newly sloughed skin. I can’t explain exactly what I thought, but that uninspiring object seemed beautiful in its insignificance, so I wrapped it in my napkin and put it in my pocket. I was concerned that the owner or one of the customers, noticing my eccentric maneuver, might berate me, but apparently no one saw me. I paid and went out.
I am now in my apartment and the tea bag is on the table, in the center of a sodden napkin. The pocket of my jacket was also soaked, and if it hadn’t been a dark jacket, I would probably have had to take it to the dry cleaner, because everyone knows that tea, as they say is also true of sin, leaves a permanent stain.
The tea bag doesn’t seem as surprising now as it did when it was at the bottom of the cup, but I’ve decided to keep it, so I get my staple gun from the toolbox, and, after a dull thud, the end of the string with the label is stapled onto the wall, right in front of the bed, so that this useless, vaguely obscene pendulum—aesthetically speaking, it is something akin to a sanitary pad—will be the first thing I see in the morning. The bag is still dripping slightly, and a tiny puddle is gradually forming on the floor, plus an elongated brown stain on the wall. I think the stain will add an interesting touch to the room and perhaps, by accentuating the corrosive effects of the damp, will end up being the decorative focus of the apartment. I think I like the term “decorative focus,” although I’m not completely certain what it means. (On a wall covered in crucifixes, is God the decorative focus?) I also think it will be pleasant to wake up every day and contemplate the tea bag hanging on the wall, not just for its appearance—slightly disagreeable at the moment—but because it will be a souvenir of that afternoon, of that sudden, arbitrary decision to walk home from the museum and have a cup of tea on the way. It’s good to create souvenirs of authentic, minute moments of happiness.
I listen to an argument in the downstairs apartment, related, from what I can gather, to a video game; they are in their forties and arguing about a video game, a Nintendo, almost certainly from twenty years back. It’s already dark and, in the vacant lot, almost impossible to make out any detail. The plants merge with the strands of rusty wire on the ground and the bags of garbage some people in the street throw over the wall. Leaning out the window, I look at the lot and try to imagine that it’s a thicket, or the lot opposite my father’s house in Cuernavaca, the one we used to call the Thicket, or that cities don’t exist and there’s no point in distinguishing between a thicket and anything else.
The neighbors’ argument has finished, or at least is smoldering, awaiting a new spark. I close my eyes and the sound of the canned laughter of a TV program comes to me from another apartment. The insomniac’s questions edge their way in: How much do actors charge for false laughter? What—if anything—do they think of when they want to produce it? Are there actors, in every corner of the world, whose job it is to dub other people’s false laughter into their own language? Do these actors have conventions and conferences, in towering hotels, to share the secrets of false laughter, to mutually amuse one another, to overcome the sadness that stops them sleeping? Are there support groups for false-laughter actors? Are there help lines—1-800-LAUGHTER, for instance—you can call in the early hours so you don’t feel alone, so you can laugh falsely again, talk about your childhood?
The laughter is muffled by a new argument between the forty-something neighbors and their mother, with whom they live. The old lady shouts, “Candy, Candy!” Candy is a small, gray male dog. It doesn’t occur to them, apparently, to give their pet a name appropriate to its gender.
I think I’d like to smoke a cigarette at moments like this, to have something to do while I do nothing, but I’ve never been capable of acquiring the habit.
4
Tuesday, the inertia continues. On opening my eyes, in contradiction to what I’d predicted, it is not the tea bag I first see but the window overlooking the vacant lot. With my morning coffee steaming before me, while I wait for the computer to start up so I can take a quick glance at the day’s headlines on the internet, I look out the window to see how the lot is doing this morning: if there are more or fewer garbage bags—every so often, without explanation, the bags disappear—if it rained during the night and the ground is muddy, if some vagrant has gotten in to find shelter and safety under the branches. Checking out the state of the lot every morning is a basic activity. It makes me think of people who live near a river, who, as soon as they wake, hurry to see what state the waters are in: “It’s low today,” they announce, or “It’ll flood today.”
The garbage bags haven’t gone. There are no down-and-outs. But I notice a movement among the bushes in the lot. “That’ll be a cat,” I think. There have been cats on other occasions. Lost or exiled kittens, or kittens booted out, almost as soon as they’ve left the bloody womb, by happy but practical families who know they can’t live with animals everywhere. But it isn’t a cat: a dirty hen appears between the weeds, pecking at the ground in search of food. How could that hen have gotten there? Perhaps someone has surreptitiously installed himself in the lot and let loose his farm animals, for personal consumption, as they say. But I can’t see anyone, nor any other farm animals, just the hen, which occasionally disappears behind some car tire or scrub plant and reappears on the other side, making that intermittent noise I never know the name for because I’ve never lived a particularly rural life, except for that other vacant lot, the childhood one we used to call the Thicket, which never had any fauna besides the scorpions and spiders my father used to warn me about when I went out to play with the other children.
No, I’ve always been eminently urban. Before this apartment, I lived very close to the Zócalo, in one of those al
leys where the street vendors used to crowd together, shouting, until the city authorities gave the zone a facelift and put them all in an enormous warehouse so they had to suffer the penance of their own cries without deafening the tourists, mutually punishing each other with their earsplitting reverberations.
And before I lived downtown, I was in Coapa, in one of those residential estates with identical houses that were once upper middle class and are now inevitably occupied by hordes of teenagers accustomed to the cultural aridity of the periphery; teenagers who gather in the green spaces to smoke pot and show off their skateboarding tricks, and whose career ambitions are usually to work in a skateboard store or have someone pay them to set fire to vacant lots.
I was one of those innocuous teenagers, I admit it, and not as long ago as I’m ready to accept. I was, let’s say, an aging adolescent in Coapa, when I lived with my mother—in the damp house, near the one where a woman hanged herself from a beam—and I pretended to go to the university every day, while in fact I’d already dropped out and was convinced it wasn’t necessary to study anything (as I am now, although maybe I was more belligerently convinced then). I used to go to the green spaces as well, and though I didn’t skateboard, I did smoke pot and bought acid tabs that I later sold at a profit outside a state high school to make a little money for books or pirate video games, bought in nearby Pericoapa—the video games—or Avenida Miguel Ángel—the books. (I have a particularly fond memory of a book written by a French executioner from who knows what remote century and a video game in which, for the fun of it, you could kick your opponent when he was down.) I never had a dog or a cat, much less a hen, although once, during those horrible teenage years, bored and high on drugs, I bought a rabbit at the traffic lights and then treated it so badly that it attacked me viciously, making the most implausible gash on my arm, from which I still have a scar, and in moments of weariness, it seems to take the shape of a rabbit—as happens, they say, with the full moon, though I’ve never been able to verify that.
After the rabbit, I don’t think I ever again lived with animals. At best I must have seen, out the car window on the highway to Acapulco, the agglomerations of sheep and the distant, iconic cows. And now—right under my window, in a central zone of a city for which, like God, the apt metaphor is the circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere—well, now I can see a dirty hen pecking the ground of the vacant lot. Do you say “crow?” No, that’s cocks. The thing is that hens have their own sound, so inalienably their own, and I can’t go on thinking about what you call that intermittent chirping, because it’s Inertia Tuesday and I have to go to the museum to correct the letters the secretary writes incorrectly and meet—in a corridor; I don’t have my own office—the unwelcome photographers who are proposing an exhibition on heroin users who live in the sewers, or women who live in the upscale suburb of Polanco and screw their chauffeurs when their husbands go to New York on business.
I’ve got it: it’s called clucking. The sound the hen makes is called clucking.
5
My childhood, excepting the above-mentioned absence of pets, was pretty normal, if anyone’s childhood can ever be normal. In Cuernavaca, in my father’s house, I amused myself torturing beetles, tying their legs to watch how they flew in circles, burning them with a magnifying glass, or asphyxiating them with the fuel from a lighter. I also used to make waterways out of the PVC tubing I found in the Thicket, that other vacant lot that may have inspired me in the search for the one that now lies below my window. I would assemble long sequences of tubes, the joints perfectly sealed with Play-Doh, through which I would run the water and then throw in my toys. This ludic activity suggested the fruitful career as a civil engineer I had the good judgment to avoid, to the disappointment of some of my relations and the great disgrace of my savings account.
At school—it was a Montessori school—I liked lying down at the back of the classroom and falling asleep in the middle of the lesson, something that was perfectly allowable and even encouraged by certain ultramodern teachers. These same teachers, who had probably once, or more than once, gotten a divorce, and fancied themselves as artists—one painted in oils; still lifes, I seem to remember—had legs covered in hair, and staring at their calves was like observing the wild, impenetrable depths of the Thicket.
College meant a return to the capital, to my mom’s house. Dad had fallen in love with a woman from Chiapas and had settled in San Cristóbal de las Casas, taking with him his modest workshop for the manufacture of “artistic aromatic” candles and its three or four employees. The designs for the candles included symbols like the yin-yang or Viking runes, and in a San Cristóbal, which—in the final years of the last century—was making its debut as the destination of choice for revolutionary tourism, those New Age details were well received by the floating population of Italians. My dad’s artistic candle business flourished in this context, as did many medium-sized and small businesses that took advantage of a niche in the market produced by the neo-Zapatista movement (the woolen Subcomandante Marcos figures made by the indigenous people, the baggy T-shirts with slogans and motifs related to the struggle, the traditional medicine clinics, et cetera). With the passage of time, my dad got fed up with the candles and delegated the management of sales and manufacture to his wife, returning to academia, if only peripherally, to give a couple of classes in a forgotten political research institute in the center of San Cristóbal.
And as I said, I returned at the beginning of term to the capital, where I was received with hostility, as if the city were reproaching me for having left. Coapa showed its only—negative—side, and I had the misfortune to fall in with the most unsuitable people in the neighborhood. Very soon, at the age of just fifteen, the only conversations that interested me were those related to drugs. Unconsciously subverting the natural order of things, I first tried cocaine at the insistence of the older brother of a well-to-do close friend, and then pot, which touched something more intimate in me. However, my inability to take drugs in the company of others very soon became apparent: when I wasn’t beset by completely unjustified paranoia, irrepressible laughter and sudden attacks of autism alternated in taking control of my nerves. From then on, I decided only to take drugs for purely experimental purposes, which in the end saved me from turning into a foul-mouthed addict like the rest of my neighbors and classmates. Experimentation, as I understood and practiced it, involved always looking for a completely new situation in which to consume: I swallowed a tab of acid in physics class on the day they were explaining the first law of thermodynamics—I’ve never since been able to forget it; I did coke on a school trip to a farm with cuddly deer; I snorted ground ecstasy pills before entering a natural sciences museum; and finally—my master stroke—I ate hallucinogenic mushrooms during a family dinner, under the quizzical gaze of my grandmother.
Despite all this, the resulting experiences were hardly worth mentioning, and if they truly marked my character, it was in making me understand that one of my strengths is an ability to enjoy the most trivial situations intensely, and not because they gave rise to an air of extrovert magnetism. It’s possible that if it weren’t for those experiences, I wouldn’t now be an office worker, or so thoroughly enjoy such an obvious piece of stupidity as asking the museum’s security guard about the previous Sunday’s soccer match between two mediocre provincial teams. A match that, of course, I hadn’t seen and had never had any intention of seeing.
6
Leaving home, on my way to work, I decide to buy a lottery ticket. “Yesterday I spent my money on a cup of tea, and now this,” I think, absurdly, since the sum of these two whims is tiny in relation to the margin of whimsicality my salary allows. But I’ve always felt guilty about spending money on insubstantial things, as if an austerity chip had been implanted into me at the fetal stage. And on top of all that, last week I bought a shirt to replace another, very similar one that had been left unrecognizable by an accident with a dish of black mole s
auce. Yes, I feel guilty about the expense, but then I tell myself the rent on my current apartment is a lot lower than what I used to pay for the one near Zócalo, so when you come down to it, I can invest the difference in small trivialities, like a cup of tea in the evenings and a lottery ticket in the mornings, and even more serious things (a trip from time to time, if I liked trips). On finding that fallacious arithmetical balance, I feel less guilty. I’m in the habit of seeking out the exact transaction to redeem myself. I choose the lottery ticket without giving much thought to the numbers, though I do manage to include a six, for which I’ve always had a particular affection.
In fact, and this is a symptom of a solidly middle-class childhood, monetary questions don’t usually bother me much, apart from the guilt certain financial outgoings spark. Saving isn’t so much an effort as a natural consequence of the life I lead, frugal and boring. My salary at the museum is meager, but it’s regular, and the institutions I worked for before the museum still occasionally ask me to proofread the odd program or catalog, so I pocket a few extra pesos every now and then. If I’ve decided to buy a lottery ticket, it’s not for any desire to become a millionaire, but because I know perfectly well that the simple fact of having a lottery ticket in your pocket stimulates the imagination, and that I can spend the day mentally hatching ridiculously dandyish plans, the extravagances I’ll commit in the unlikely event that I win.
In the museum, I distractedly say good morning to Cecilia, the director’s secretary, who tells me that Ms. Watkins won’t be in till later because she’s got a meeting in some restaurant or other in the south of the city, a business or political relations—there’s no difference—breakfast. Without listening to the whole explanation, which seems to me overly long, I sit at my desk in the same enormous room as all the other desks, except for Ms. Watkins’s. The designer, I notice, is watching a TV series on the internet. On his screen, two women are kissing tenderly; he feels someone watching him and gives me a nervous smile.
Among Strange Victims Page 2