This happens to me sometimes: I come back—as if from a distant, parallel world—and have no idea if I’ve spent a long while in silence or absentmindedly speaking aloud. The sensation doesn’t generally have a high enough level of reality to alarm me, but at times like this one, the fine line between what I imagine and what exists is blurred and I panic.
Cecilia has stopped staring at me because Ms. Watkins has called her into her office. To respond to this call, the secretary has to pass very close to my desk as the space is limited and I’m the one who is nearest to the director (physically, that is, because in relation to this institution’s organigram of power, there are only two levels: Ms. Watkins and everyone else). As she approaches me, Cecilia turns as if to make sure no one is looking and leaves a folded note on my desk, giving me, as she does so, a suddenly complicit, deeply disconcerting smile. Wasn’t she some sort of working-life nemesis, perpetually embittered and ready to do her all to ruin the day of any fellow employee, especially me? The note lies there before me on the desk, and Cecilia is already in Ms. Watkins’s office, but I don’t dare read its message.
9
At the end of the workday, when everyone was beginning to switch off their computers and give a distracted “See you tomorrow” from the door, I picked up Cecilia’s note and slipped it quickly into my jacket pocket. I left the office with the same “See you tomorrow” and came home.
The note is here before me, but I still need to pluck up the courage to unfold it. Could it be an invitation to her house? An amorous confession? A raffle ticket? I go out to the corner store in search of cans of beer. The corner store, however, is closed, so I walk through the neighborhood as night falls, looking for somewhere else to buy beer.
Coapa was, as I now know, an inhospitable world. Coming out of college, all the students (or all the ones I remember, myself included) would enter a locality that was like a lost city and, cramming ourselves into a pokey room, silently drink beer. Ever since that time, I’ve liked the flavor of canned Modelo. Now, more than twelve years later, I open an identical can in my small apartment in a better area (that is, closer to the center) and take a couple of swigs of the same cold, almost transparent, slightly greenish liquid I’ve spent half an hour looking for. I drink three beers, one after the other, hardly pausing between swigs, and feel triumphantly drunk. It will be impossible, I think, to go to the office tomorrow. It is in this state that I decide to unfold Cecilia’s note, disposed to satisfy my bloated curiosity. There are two words on the paper, and as soon as I read them I realize there has been a colossal misunderstanding. It is yet to be seen if it’s an ultimately beneficial misunderstanding, insofar as the satisfaction of my concupiscence is concerned, or if the misunderstanding will end up being as much a burden as if I’d decided to carry a truck on my back for the rest of my nights. The words, written in an unsteady hand, have, for once in Cecilia’s lettered life, no spelling errors; they are “I accept.”
Accept what? I consider the possibility that it might refer to an ambiguous, human, metaphysical acceptance, the acceptance of things as they appear in our path as we file along the city’s median strips; the acceptance of the sound of the cars and of the morning announcements of the men selling gas and water and other products, the utility of which is never made clear; a wholesale acceptance, without fissures, that embraces creation, its multiple faces, its most sordid corners; the continual scorn of her father, her post as a secretary, her humiliation at the hands of Ms. Watkins, the unbearable silence of her workmates. I consider all this as the possible reference of the terse message, but later I understand that it was the beer talking, and that Cecilia, the sly secretary, is probably alluding to something more concrete.
It then occurs to me that when I started working at the museum, they gave me a sheet of paper with the extensions of all the employees, and some, the most committed or the most indispensable, had included a home phone number in case some extremely urgent, work-related emergency necessitated their immediate localization—something that, it goes without saying, never occurred in that museum, with its slack work pace. Without much hope, I look through the untidy pile of papers in a drawer until I find the sheet of paper, and there is Cecilia’s cell phone number. Thank goodness it’s her cell phone, I think, otherwise it would be a real pain to call her house and have a male voice—unexpected and hostile—answer the phone.
“Hello,” she says in an almost challenging tone, as if she had been waiting for my call.
“Hi Ceci, it’s me, Rodrigo, from the office.” I’ve never before used the shortened form of her name, nor heard anyone else use it, but her reply is concise and rapid, so I suppose she didn’t mind my affectionate “Ceci” too much.
“I know it’s you, I recognized your voice right away . . . So, what is it?” she asks, as if she doesn’t know.
“How do you mean, ‘what is it?’ Your little message, of course.”
“Ah, that.”
There’s an uneasy silence on both sides. I have the sense I should take some sort of initiative but don’t feel up to it. An unexpected timidity has my throat in its stranglehold, and I think my voice will sound more high-pitched than usual. Eventually it is she who breaks the silence, and I have the strange sensation this lack of initiative on my part will have negative repercussions for me at some not too distant point in my life.
“Don’t you think you should talk about the little message you sent me? That came first, right?” she says.
The misunderstanding is now clear: someone, either in error or out of malice, had left a message on Cecilia’s desk, signed with my name or somehow insinuating that I wrote it. As her voice is friendlier than usual, and given that her response to the mysterious note was positive (“I accept”), I don’t want to disillusion her by explaining the mechanisms of the cruel trick that has been played on her. I’m the sort of person who worries about the effects of my actions on others.
“Ah, my little message,” I say, as if we were both not fed up by now with using that ridiculous term. “What did you think about it?”
“Well, to be honest, it was a bit weird of you to say it out of the blue like that, but I’d already thought, you know . . . and so I accepted. I just want to ask you not to say anything until I’ve talked to my mom and dad.”
Numbed by the turn the conversation has taken, I decide to let things run their course, guided not only by my drunkenness, but also by a suicidal instinct that at times like this translates into inexplicable forms of behavior and a discursive fluency I’m normally lacking.
“Take as long as you need, Ceci, don’t worry. I’ve waited for this moment a long time, so I can hold on a bit longer.” The words come out as if from an answering machine that has cut in completely against my will. I can scarcely believe the nerve with which I’m playing my own dirty trick, but there’s something impersonal about it all, as if the events were happening far, far away from me, in a movie I’m watching, in a world similar to this one but stranger, where Cecilia and I have an age-old friendship. She, luckily, interrupts my thoughts just when I’m at the point of speaking again.
“Rodrigo, one more thing. I’d like it to be in a church, just to please my grandma; she’s ever so devout.”
This last turn takes me completely by surprise. I suspect that it is Cecilia—the cruel secretary who has made my life impossible since I started at the museum—who tells Ms. Watkins when I leave the office to waste a little time in the courtyard; that it is this same Cecilia who is playing a slightly ridiculous, thoroughly bad-taste joke on me. My response is slow in coming, but I eventually agree in a preoccupied tone and splutter out some impromptu praise of the Catholic Church that she, I note, doesn’t completely believe.
I hurriedly make a brief farewell, which doesn’t, however, avoid the worst. “Love you,” she says. “See you tomorrow at the office.”
As I hang up, I’m overwhelmed by corrosive anxiety. What have I done? What am I doing here by the telephone, my hand trembling, ha
ving accepted and, apparently, even proposed marriage to the secretary I have always silently despised?
I decide to go to bed without dinner but can’t sleep. I resolve that first thing tomorrow, I will unravel the enormous tangle that has resulted in me getting engaged, in Cecilia sighing tenderly, and, I imagine, some office jokers being doubled over with laughter of secret delight.
10
And such was, in fact, my intention: to clear up that bad joke, even if it meant doing irreparable harm to the unhappy Cecilia, and return to my routine of walks and cups of tea and vacant lots inhabited by clucking hens. But today turned out differently, as if, yet again, against my will.
I am now once more sitting by the telephone in my apartment, waiting to pluck up the courage to call my mom and give her the news of my wedding. I still can’t believe the course events have taken since this same time yesterday, when I called Cecilia with a hint of lust, prepared to take immediate advantage of her enigmatic note.
I arrived at the museum quite late this morning, as if fearing the moment of finding myself face to face with the woman who was now my fiancée. When I entered the office, she was already at her desk, wearing three pounds more makeup than recommended by health experts and gazing at me with an ingenuous little smile that shattered something inside me. I thought she would be deeply disappointed if I didn’t walk over and give her a good-morning kiss, something I had never done in my life. Once I was close enough to her face to hear her accelerated breathing and clearly smell that mixture of perfume and cheap makeup with which she was garnished, Ceci swiveled around and planted a discreet, restrained kiss on my lips in response to what must have seemed to her my invitation. I then heard behind me an uneasy commotion, a noise like people whispering and purposely letting pencils drop from their hands. I began to think I must have imagined that adolescent reaction from my coworkers, because as soon as I turned around toward them, what I noted was enormous indifference. And, having started along that route, I thought their imagined reaction sprang from a profound impulse of my own: perhaps I was the adolescent who turned in his chair while Rodrigo Saldívar, that office worker of rigid habits, threw his existence off-kilter by kissing the museum secretary.
After the kiss, I moved, blushing and looking ridiculous, to my seat and succeeded in keeping my eyes fixed on the computer screen until lunchtime. There wasn’t much work to be done, but I pretended to be writing the salon notes for the next forty exhibitions, while in fact I was robotically copying dictionary entries.
At the set hour, I stood up to go to the small restaurant where I always eat. As soon as she spotted me, Cecilia abandoned her work and caught up with me as I was disappearing out of the museum, ready, she said, to accompany me.
“You’re very shy, aren’t you?” she remarked on the way there. And before I could respond, she added, “That’s what I really like about you. You’re not the same as the other men in the office, spending the whole day going on about their lap-dancing clubs and their whores for all to hear.”
Without being completely sure whom she was referring to, I said I really liked Jorge, the designer.
“Yeah, but he’s as gay as they get. They all used to say the same about you, and that was why you and Jorge sometimes chatted at your desk, but I always knew it was a lie. You’re a real man, right?”
Despite the inconvenience of the whole situation, I felt offended, as if just the mere fact of questioning my manliness didn’t sit well with me, didn’t sit at all well with me, so I responded, with a degree of severity, that one didn’t have to choose between being an idiot and being gay, and that you could be quiet and still be macho. That’s what I said, macho, a word I obviously sorely repented later and one which would have made my belligerent, feminist mother violently strike out my name from the pages of her will.
My mother, whom I am at the point of calling to give the news (that I suspect no one, her least of all, will particularly welcome) of my imminent marriage.
Ceci and I walked to the restaurant. She told me she ate there too sometimes, but as we’d never seen each other, I interpreted her declaration as a gratuitous boast. I was silent, even crestfallen, responding monosyllabically to her infrequent demands. We sat down, and I ordered: soup, rice, diced beef tenderloin. She had the same. Then, suddenly infused with a strange power, I told her she had always seemed to me a very beautiful woman, and I knew she was hardworking as well, so that was why I’d decided to ask her to marry me. This declaration was, I have to admit, partially false, but only partially: I found Cecilia attractive, especially due to the haughty air that accompanied all her movements, as if implying that she, in spite of being a secretary, had us all, at every moment, firmly by the balls. It was this attitude that had, on more than one occasion, made me dream of dominating her, or letting myself be dominated by her toughness.
She smiled in an exaggerated way, as if trying, with her histrionics, to hide a touch of melancholy that was, nonetheless, easy to detect. I wondered if I should kiss her, but the smell of food on our breath and the memory of our clumsy kiss that morning put me off, so I left flirtation for later.
The rest of the day, spent sitting at my desk, passed without incident. I succeeded in avoiding Cecilia’s little glances in my direction, and it was only when she passed near my desk, en route to Ms. Watkins’s office, that I gave her a discreet, barely perceptible smile. I finally left the building and came straight home, without the long, liberating stroll or the cup of black tea in my beloved, perennially greasy café. That’s why I’m sitting here, much earlier than usual, trying to pluck up the courage to call my mom and say, with my characteristic conviction, “I appear to be getting married.”
11
Isabel Watkins looks fixedly at me across her desk. She’s holding a pink card, and lying before her is an envelope of the same color announcing, in gold lettering, the engagement of “Rodrigo Saldívar & Cecilia Román” in the eighteenth-century typeface Jorge, the designer, chose for us. On the diptych she has in her hand, Isabel Watkins reads her name—“plus one”—and the time and place of the event. Below this is the address of a party room Don Enrique, my future father-in-law, has booked against my better judgment. Isabel puts the sheet of paper on the desk beside the scented envelope and looks fixedly at me.
“I don’t know what to say.”
Silence.
After a moment, she continues. “When I employed you here at the museum, I thought you wouldn’t last long, that within a few months you’d have found something better, on a magazine or in a publishing house, and that you’d have jumped at the opportunity to further your career. I also thought that you’d have wanted to rise up the cultural ladder, that you’d have politely introduced yourself to the minister at the first opening we held. And although that prospect annoyed me a little, I was also pleased to think you were a kid on the way up. But now you tell me you’re going to get married to my secretary and . . . I don’t know. It’s just that I always thought you were looking for something different, that you expected something else from life.”
“Yes, Isabel, I appreciate your sincerity. And I understand what you’re saying. But to be honest, I don’t expect anything, except that things happen to me.”
That’s what I say: “Things happen to me.” The expression seems to exasperate Ms. Watkins, who quickly gets rid of me on some invented pretext, but with the menace of “we’ll talk later,” so that I’m on my guard for the rest of the day. It’s Thursday, May 11. In two months, I’m going to be married. After numerous chats with Cecilia’s parents, and Cecilia herself, I’ve convinced them all that the best thing would be for Ceci to move into my tiny apartment “while we’re saving up to buy someplace.” The promise of ownership dazzles them, and they all concur with me, though, in essence, the only motive for my proposal is staying near the vacant lot. During these last three weeks since the engagement became official, I’ve clung to the waste ground as if it were the last possible salvation from the arbitrariness of things.
Mom, against all odds, very quickly washed her hands of the affair, as if she were giving me up as a lost cause.
“And might I know whom you’re going to marry?” she asked sharply over the phone.
“Ceci, you remember her. Ms. Watkins’s assistant at the museum.”
“An assistant?”
“Yes, you met her once, at that opening of the exhibition on social movements in the capital I invited you to about a year ago.”
And she, after a silence pregnant with reproach, “The secretary?”
“Yes, that’s the one. But she’s like Ms. Watkins’s personal assistant, not the secretary. She does a lot of different things in the museum.”
“Ah, I’m happy for you, Rodrigo. Let me know when you’ve fixed a date so I can book the ticket early; you know how it is with the planes—there are only two flights a week, and they’re always packed.”
Maybe if my mother had been indignant. Maybe if she’d shaken me out of this lethargy, this frame of mind that makes me yield to the secret designs of fate, turning up disguised as the most absurd accidents: a note given to a woman who is suddenly in love with me, or says she is; a café that becomes a haunt because I come across it one fine day on my way home; a growing collection of tea bags that occupies more and more wall space in my bedroom, reminding me my wedding day will soon be upon me, and I’ll have no time to prepare myself psychologically before the babies and the diapers and the smell of shit become the ritornello of my nights . . . Maybe if my mother had warned me, in her wisdom—as blind as it is immense—that getting married is one of the most serious blunders anyone can make . . . Maybe then, well, I would have woken up to a different reality, one in which entering into a marital contract with a woman I don’t respect would mean the complete demolition of my self-esteem. But that wasn’t the case. My mother limited herself to asking about the date of the fateful incident, and we ended the call with a nominal kiss that, for her part, signified simple pity. Pity and compassion.
Among Strange Victims Page 4