In the same distant, disillusioned tone employed by my mother, Isabel Watkins called me into her office this morning to tell me she had received my message and didn’t understand the reasons for this unexpected piece of news. Despite the fact that both Cecilia and I come to the office every day, we sent her invitation by mail, a week ago now, at the insistence of my fiancée, who seemed to believe it was bad taste to deliver it in person—but not, for example, to use cheap, pink, scented paper for the invitation to our engagement party.
What I find most impressive about the situation is that never before has Ms. Watkins spoken to me as an equal; I’d never noticed the least sign of empathy in her or seen the smallest gesture of kindness toward us, her unhappy subjects. Diligent, professional, hysterical, she had always treated me with the remote coldness of political figures; but this morning, as if I’d confessed to her that I had prostate cancer, she spoke to me with sincere, unforeseen friendship. I’m disconcerted to think she had hoped to see me rise up the boring pyramid of bureaucracy. I’m disconcerted, but also moved. I imagine myself as the deputy director of cultural heritage or undersecretary for national celebrations or head of the institute for the preservation of her fucking ass.
I leave work and walk home without stopping for tea in the café without coffee. A few days ago I bought a packet of Lipton’s, and now I prepare the infusion myself, so my collection of used tea bags continues to grow at the rate of one a day—if I drink more than one cup of tea, I throw the residue away.
When the discussion about the matrimonial residence began, Cecilia, in the presence of her parents, proposed that she should move in with me immediately, even though it was still a couple of months to the wedding. Don Enrique silently granted his daughter the right to live in concubinage for a while so long as we married at the end of that period. I roundly refused: I intended to respect Cecilia’s dignity until our wedding day, I said.
The resulting situation was equally uncomfortable for us all, and I would gladly have avoided it if it had only been up to me. Don Enrique, with slightly alarming knowledge of the cause, informed me that Cecilia—there present—was not a virgin and added that for such a right-minded person as me, that was a disadvantage. As if that wasn’t enough, Don Enrique said he thought it was normal for me to want to “know” Cecilia before the wedding, and added that he wouldn’t disapprove of our moving in together right away. Finding myself cornered, I argued that it was “a matter of principle,” and independent of the state of my future wife’s hymen—I didn’t put it like that, of course—I’d prefer to wait for the proper moment, to give the ceremony greater meaning.
My decision received Don Enrique’s approval and was particularly welcomed by Carmelita, Cecilia’s mom. My fiancée, meanwhile, distanced herself from the negotiation of her sullied virginity.
12
There’s the hen again. I don’t know how, but she’s survived the frequent storms. She didn’t show herself for several days. Now she’s pecking the earth in the vacant lot, and I suspect she knows I’m observing her. There’s something flirtatious about her I’ve never noted before. She’s making a less unpleasant noise—cluck—than usual, more tuneful, you might say. It’s half past seven on Friday evening, and the setting sun shines on some of her feathers, making her more beautiful. She almost seems like a noble animal, a Paleolithic hen, capable of perching high up in an oak tree, a holly oak, and emitting a melodic, tuneful song.
I go to the kitchen for some grains of rice to throw to her. The hen understands what I’m doing and stands just below the window, moving her tail just as gracefully as she can, which isn’t very gracefully. I think about bringing her into the house, going down and fetching her or lowering a basket full of delicacies into which she will climb, sure of her good luck. Bringing her to my bedroom or leaving her in the living room to surprise Cecilia when she comes to visit me tonight to go over—once again—the details of the wedding.
But the hen isn’t mine, I think. She must have a careful owner who purposely leaves her in the lot so that she doesn’t have to live shut up in an apartment like mine, and so the kindly neighbors and the filthy worms feed her, saving the owner the expense. And if she doesn’t have an owner, the hen is, as are few creatures in this city, in this world, her own mistress. She does just as she pleases, unaware of the precarious situation in which she lives. Tomorrow they could start building on the lot or declare it a parking lot, and the hen would probably be violently evicted, left in the street, vulnerable to the passing cars, alone in the whirlwind of legs of a cloudy afternoon. But in spite of this threat of danger, the hen doesn’t lose her wits, or whatever wits she might have, but continues pecking the ground unconcernedly. The hen is free. Maybe, it occurs to me, because she was never in a uterus. She never dribbled inside a mother or was attached by a fragile cartilage to someone else’s belly. She was born from a limpid egg. A smooth, white egg, devoid of notable features, that opened up for her and left her beak exposed to the harsh Mesopotamian sun. Ah, the oviparous animal, what a model of behavior and temperance during its birth!
To be honest, I’ve never seen a hen being born, or any other bird. Once I found the body of a newly hatched turtledove on the sidewalk, but that’s as far as it goes. Despite this, I like to imagine the birth process of birds—something I must have seen on TV, now that I come to think of it. If not, how do I know a bird is born from an egg? Could someone, without having seen it or heard a detailed description, imagine how birds are born? And mammals? Would it be possible to think up the idea of a little calf covered in blood coming out of the rear end of a cow if there were no visual antecedent of such a traumatic event?
It’s as difficult for me to imagine, based on a complete lack of information, the birth of a calf as it is to think of what marriage will be like. I’ve never had close experience of it. No one around me even considered marriage as a possibility. In my life, it appeared next to other myths belonging to some remote era of which even my parents—divorced since time began—spoke of, in a tone of prudent reserve, as something that had now been superseded. I thought of other, almost magical situations that sounded to me contemporary with marriage: the maize field to which a young servant goes at daybreak every morning to soak the grain in water and lime before making that day’s tortillas; the black-and-white television announcing a contretemps between the gringos and the Russians; the firm belief that a group of students can change the world once and for all. All those things I used to hear my mother and her friends commenting on; things my father never wanted to have to mention again. And among those situations, marriage, like an enormous unknown that, in idle hours, I fancy to be perverse.
Now, in just two weeks’ time, I’ll also be one half of a married couple, a perverse husband who will do everything he can to retain the secret of his deepest passions: the Franciscan love I profess for a stray hen, a propensity for making collections of arbitrary objects, my tendency to recall a dull, Coapa-lysergic adolescence as a dark, dusty corner in my history. An office-worker husband who will shut away his pornographic clipping from the eighties and his used tea bags in a desk drawer, together with his photo of his only trip to an island—Cozumel, at the age of sixteen, with a girlfriend who gave every sign of brilliance and ended up selling handicrafts on one side of the main square in Tepoztlán—and the piece of yellow paper on which a potential lover scrawled her telephone number with a pink pen so they could arrange a date in a pay-by-the-hour hotel on the Tlalpan highway.
Yes, because that’s the type of husband I’ll be. If I get married (and it’s not that I’ve made up my mind yet; it’s not really up to me), it won’t be to lovingly accept Cecilia’s fashion sense—she uses the excuse of it being Sunday to wear her favorite T-shirt: faded cotton with a ridiculous slogan in the center (it says something like “Coco Loco,” “Sexy Austria,” or “University of Cars,” an impossible conjunction of words that must have sounded vaguely prestigious in the nineties). No, that’s not why. And neither will I get
married for the pleasure of her company in a silence laden with ingenuous emotion. Nor to dream of taking her to Acapulco on the first possible occasion. No.
13
The wedding was reasonably successful. My mom came to the capital, arrived at the ceremony on time, and left early for a hotel I’d booked in advance. The next day she flew back home to Los Girasoles. I didn’t tell my dad because we have a relationship that is friendly as long as we don’t talk to each other, and I thought it would be a bad idea to change things. What’s more, he lives in San Cristóbal and, in contrast to my mother, doesn’t have enough money to buy a return flight on short notice: as an uncle of mine once informed me, my dad has two other children, both very young, and what with the habitual costs of paternity and the caprices of his wife, the meager profits from his candle factory are eaten up, along with his even more insignificant salary as a second-rank academic.
Cecilia was more excited than ever in her white dress with ten thousand flounces that cost me exactly ten thousand pesos. I was moved. And she even—although I find it hard to accept—inspired a sentiment close to love in me.
The religious ceremony took longer than I’d expected, and it was only possible thanks to my having bribed the priest of a modest neighborhood church, revealing to him that I’d never been baptized and explaining that my fiancée’s family mustn’t know as they were very Catholic. The priest showed himself to be understanding, or perhaps greedy, and accepted the second financial incentive I offered, pretending, despite this display of nerve, that he was saving my soul by bringing me back into the fold. A fold to which I had, in fact, never belonged.
Then came the party proper in the excessively ornate venue my father-in-law had booked. Don Enrique very quickly got drunk and gave an awkward, unintelligible speech that everyone applauded. Carmelita attempted, but obviously didn’t manage, to drag my mother down into a spiral of tears. Jorge, the designer from the museum, was radiant throughout the whole reception, endlessly repeating the same mantra: that he’d watched us fall in love, that he’d been there from the beginning. I abstained from asking him, given his role as a key witness, to provide some explanation of what was happening in my life. Isabel Watkins had hit the bottle too, but she disguised her drunkenness by hanging from the neck of her companion, a photographer ten years her junior whose work had recently been exhibited in the museum.
The honeymoon—a couple of nights at a Guerrero beach—turned out, in spite of our continued state of intoxication, to be pleasant. Cecilia asked me to take her standing up, resting her weight on the window ledge of a cheap, semi-rustic hotel, with her wedding dress bunched up on her brown back. I admit that in the nude, she was more beautiful than she seemed when dressed, and I enjoyed making her tremble by stroking the skin around her anus, a zone privileged by her nervous system. (But I also have to say that I was not, for all this, a notable lover.)
The festivities lasted a weekend, and then we returned—having taken the Monday off for her to move into my apartment—to our respective posts at the museum. I am now sitting at my desk while she looks at me, and I can’t get my head around the idea that the secretary, Cecilia, that woman who wiggles past on her way to Ms. Watkins’s office, is my legally recognized wife, whom I have to watch from my uncomfortable wooden chair while typing letters to no one.
When we leave the museum, we walk hand in hand to the metro. In the carriage, we stand in shy silence, and I pass the time looking at the faces of the other travelers while my hand rests on Cecilia’s right buttock. She seems grateful for this slight contact, which, from her perspective, saves her from the ignominy of being single, so she smiles secretly and, when the crush becomes oppressive, rests her head against my chest. When we come up from the metro, we walk along the less busy streets in the neighborhood. We stop off briefly at the corner store and buy a sugary treat for after dinner. (I have a suspicion that this custom, repeated over decades of wholesome matrimony, will result in consensual diabetes that we will both accept almost without complaint.)
That’s the way it’s been for a whole week. Today is, at last, Friday.
The apartment is a bit small for us, so I’m glad to have never bought large furniture, except for my wooden bed and the chest of drawers that holds my clothes in a knotted mess. Cecilia brought a flat-pack wardrobe from her parents’ home and many boxes with holiday souvenirs, which we’ve put in the tiny storage room on the roof. (That space, I have to admit, was her discovery. I was scarcely aware I had the dirty, peeling storeroom, full of cobwebs, that now holds my wife’s boxes of Veracruz key rings.) She also brought some kitchen utensils, inherited from her mother: a frying pan, two saucepans, a Teflon spatula, and a pewter spoon. There were hardly any wedding gifts; I was very explicit in that respect. Instead, I asked all the relatives—both hers and mine—to give us cash, to add to our savings so we could eventually move to a decent residence. Of course I don’t have the least intention of leaving my apartment, my vacant lot. I put the money we received in a metal box in the wardrobe Cecilia brought with her, keeping it for a rainy day. The office, I realize, makes one humiliatingly prudent.
Cecilia, for her part, hasn’t taken a single look at the vacant lot. I doubt if she has even noticed its existence. While she’s sitting in the living room, battling with the rabbit-ear antenna on the TV in order to watch her game shows, I go to the bedroom, on the pretext of reading, and look out the window at the lot. Now, for instance, I’m scrutinizing it in search of the hen. But she doesn’t appear. The muffled sound of the television filters through from the living room, mixed with Cecilia’s laughter, which leads me to suspect she’s managed to tune in to some program where the contestants are constantly humiliated.
Just as I’d predicted, Cecilia forcefully suggested we take down the tea bags I’d stapled to the wall opposite the bed. After a short exchange of words on the matter, I gave in, resignedly. I bought a couple of pints of whitewash and painted over the brown stain left by the tea bags until it disappeared. In place of my tea bags, Cecilia hung a hideous still life, the only wedding present that didn’t comply with my request: some purple flowers in an earthenware vase, a clumsy imitation of Diego Rivera’s essentially despicable creations. The painting was given to us by one of her aunts, who considered my idea of asking for cash to be—as she expressed it—in poor taste.
Apart from that elderly aunt, embittered by stereotypical widowhood and rancor, my in-laws have treated me well. Don Enrique, being old-fashioned in his ways, considers being married to his daughter an enormous sacrifice on my part (and he’s not completely wrong), and so is continually making me aware of his profound gratitude. One of the ways in which he believes he is repaying the favor is by showing me how to do repairs around the house: during our wedding day, he started explaining how to deal with a leak if you can’t find the valve. I, feigning interest, asked if he knew how to get rid of damp, which must have been a moment of pure joy for him since he immediately assured me he would take on the task of sorting out the problem, especially as his daughter would now be living with me in the apartment. So on Saturday morning, instead of walking to the gazebo to sit contemplating the various speeds of the passersby, or dedicating the morning to pampering the hen with special seeds, I’ll have to wait for my father-in-law to stop by to assess the state of the walls.
Cecilia is twenty-nine, two years my senior. Nevertheless, we both look older. My total lack of a life plan and my haste to be a grown-up left the stamp of frustration on my features. My wife, for her part, comes from a family environment in which passing twenty-two without having at least one child is a sign of ingratitude—I don’t know for what—or a lack of Guadalupian virtues. She was, at twenty-nine, the black sheep of a multitudinous family that understands marriage as an early rite of passage into adult life. It may be that the pressure from her extended family, in that sense, is responsible for the fact that she perpetually has a slight look of disgust—a haughty upper lip. Even now, when she’s laughing her head off in fro
nt of the TV in our living room.
Little by little, I’m losing all those small details that, until recently, I’d considered to be indispensable, all those minutiae I’d come to count as features that matched my slightly grubby character: the tea bags, the damp in the living room, the laudable undertaking to walk back to my apartment, and the dead, inane Saturdays in the oval gazebo, dreaming of impossible statistics that depict me as the center of the universe. All this, which until just recently could be considered a protean identity, a fluctuating but almost organic extension of my own body, is now at the point of extinction. In exchange, I have the DVD player Cecilia bought to watch her pirate videos on, and sexual activity I don’t have to pay money for (at least in the short term) and which I can enjoy almost anytime I want, excluding the hours devoted to TV and, for now, the office.
I evaluate the advantages of this apparently irreversible tradeoff and decide I didn’t do too badly: when you come down to it, I can store my collection of tea bags in my chest of drawers and staple them up again in around ten years’ time when Cecilia will have completely given up on the idea of modifying my habits.
Perhaps the most serious thing this pact entails—except for my wife’s sour breath in the mornings—is the great, and now insuperable, distance that has opened up between my mother and me. In the past, despite her explicit repudiation of my major decisions, my mom retained a filament of enthusiasm for having given birth, just over a quarter of a century ago, to a relatively functional son. Now, given that a deceptively golden wedding ring adorns my finger, tying me, like a prison tattoo, to a way of life she disapproves of, her expectations have been notably devalued. We don’t speak so often on the phone now, and when we do, her voice acquires the same tired tone she used when I was a boy and she, taking refuge in a migraine, would send me to my room, giving rise to a sharp pang of sadness inside me.
Among Strange Victims Page 5