“My inclination toward murder, while impressive, is below average.”
“All things are moving, only some of them move too slowly.”
“I am surprised not to have written more frequently about sex, that elephant in the room of my head.”
“The sea is for those who are far away.”
“The person who talks to himself,” Marcelo Valente says aloud, “knows the First Person does not exist.” And he takes a short nap before leaving the house.
B
Foret, as his notes confirm, arrived in Veracruz too late. Bea had sailed three days earlier, and it took Richard quite some time to understand that there were sixty hours, of which he had no recollection, missing from his life. He had been robbed of the last of his money, his shirt was covered in vomit, and he had absolutely no memory of where he had obtained the hat he was wearing. He talked to strangers in the street and had the fevered gaze of those who have watched an era collapse around them.
Little is known of those final days. Bea Langley’s later reconstructions suggest he was employed in a brothel, ejecting impertinent drunks in exchange for room, board, and a limited dose of violent entertainment. He had left a hefty bill behind in Mexico City, and the owner of the hotel would soon be sending someone to look for him; this was one of his main worries. He started to suspect an international conspiracy to discover his whereabouts; he imagined the U.S. draft board was in cahoots with Duchamp, with Marinetti, with his creditors in Germany, Paris, and Barcelona. They were all plotting to keep him away from Bea, to bury him at the bottom of a trench, to drive him mad.
Pursued by these and other visions, none of them realistic, Foret lived like a vagabond, trying unsuccessfully to pass as a seaman, for almost two weeks. But impatience was one of the crosses he had to bear, and he convinced himself of the immediate need to go to Buenos Aires, where Beatrice would greet him with kisses and exotic fruits. He wrote a couple of letters to his wife, telling her of his latest plan: to sail single-handed to the coast of Argentina in a sturdy boat. But he had no address to send the letters to and had to content himself with keeping them in a wooden box one of the prostitutes—driven by irrepressible tenderness—kept for him out of sight of the brothel keeper.
One Sunday afternoon, as if to gild the lily of a week of excess, Foret staggered to the port. He picked out a small boat that could be handled with a crew of one. He had some knowledge of sails, knots, and winds, and thought it would not be too hard for him to set out to sea and come ashore on the southern coast of Argentina. He imagined himself arriving in his boat at the very door of the house Bea would have prepared for their future life together, a house that would look directly out to sea or onto the River Plate. He stole the boat.
But as has already been mentioned, Foret was man of fluctuating interests. He had not been long aboard when he decided it would be simpler to head north, to Florida, and take an actual cruise ship bound for the south. He came to understand, perhaps late in the day, the complete impossibility of his original undertaking: no one could reach Argentina in a small boat. Florida sounded more plausible.
When he set the prow to the north, it was already a dark, moonless night, and the clouds were gathering above him.
III
THE SHRUBS OF THE TERRESTRIAL SPHERE
1
A year of economic crisis. The newspapers, the analysts, and the man on the street all make exaggerated complaints about the probable advent of the Apocalypse. There were enormous cuts to the culture budget. A wave of layoffs crashed down on the museum. I saw the effects of the stock market collapse approaching like a domino that, lined up with others, foresees its inexorable fate in the fall of its fellow tiles. Jorge, the designer, was the first to go: they said that in a few months, when everything was better, they would take him back on a freelance basis. Then it was the security guard’s turn, in what was, to my mind, an accurate assessment on the part of the authorities: even in times of crisis, no one steals exhibits from a small museum. Finally, they decided they could manage without my wisdom. Though not without the docile flattery of Cecilia, who lives on untouched by the surrounding tsunami, not registering the effects of the crisis. At least, I think, I won’t have to see her in the office.
The episode with the turd was a one-off. Maybe if I’d found another, identical one on the table a few days later, the image would have become less vivid. Instead, it remains as an incarnation inaugurating a new era: a personal Christ. Before and after the shit. Before: time killing, the nine-to-five consistency, the modicum of freedom, and the almost involuntary marriage of a person who only wants to reach old age, or not even that. After: unemployment, the idle mornings and their result—judicious reflection, the “things would be better if only . . .”
Cecilia comes back from work and, as in a bad South American film, reproaches me for my idleness, the constant procrastination. “I’ve got a job interview tomorrow,” I say, just to calm her for a while. She’s beginning to break my balls . . .
Nowadays I offer insults more frequently. Since I don’t have a job, I’m allowed to; I’d even say it’s expected of me. I insult the institutions, my wife, the people—always invisible, although presumably close to power—who are to blame for the aforementioned crisis. My preference is for gratuitous, unexpected insults: “Frigging damp.” (The complaint is, in reality, aimed at my father-in-law: he never got rid of the damp in the walls.) My father-in-law, of course, likes me less. He says he can get me a little something with one of his friends, but I say no. I imagine, and not without reason, that any job he could find me would make me unhappy for the rest of my days.
I’ve given up collecting tea bags—“See how I’m saving money, honey?”—and for some time, I’ve managed not to think about the vacant lot. The hen clucks like a bird possessed. I suspect the crisis has hit us all, except the worms, the twigs, except anything frigging domestic fowl like her eat.
Frigging seems to me a wonderful insult, being indefinite. It is the human equivalent of the hen’s clucking. Frigging is one of those words that evokes the unspeakable, that’s the only way to explain why this country is always in such a bad way. Now that I’m no longer concerned with the ghosts of progress, I contribute to the proliferation of disaster: “Frigging damp.”
“Stop saying that, Rodrigo. My dad told you it’s not damp; he said you can get rid of that with the damp-proofing paint he gave us.”
I couldn’t give a fuck about your dad, I think, but cautiously hold my tongue, clinging by my fingertips to the last morsel of common sense I’ve retained.
Common sense: a happy dodge. I imagine it as a chip inserted into the brain at about the age of seven. Or a vague presence, half magical, that murmurs answers in your ear. If it were a person, Common Sense would be very much like Ben Affleck, that North American parody of a hero who appears in the movies shown on interstate buses.
I haven’t said a word about the shit. Not to Cecilia or anyone. I can’t discount any suspect, and until my investigation into the situation is complete, I prefer not to speak about the affair. It could have been Ceci, who had perhaps not gone to the museum and was hiding behind a door to see what I was doing with my sick leave. Maybe she decided to take revenge when she saw me ejaculating on her pillow; or she went to the window, saw me walking around in the lot, and was overtaken by an urgent need. Though she would never have sullied her tiger-striped bedspread. Before doing that, just to screw up my existence, she would have defecated on the collection of tea bags I keep in a drawer in the dressing table. Or just on the floor. Anywhere but on her beloved bedspread.
Although I hate to admit it, I’ve discovered that in contradiction to my earlier convictions, I’m also excited by the idea of watching Cecilia shit. I’ve tried getting into the bathroom after her, but she always locks the door. “I’m in here, my love.” “Come on, let me in.” “No, Rodrigo, you’re making me nervous. What do you want?” I leave her in peace. The shit on the bedspread has unleashed other deviations.
(I can’t call them by any other name.) I also, for example, imagine the type of crap passed by all the people I see in the street, as if divining their intestinal secrets would constitute some form of profound psychology. Now that I’m unemployed, I should put these obsessions to good use in some way or other. Setting up a business, for instance. There are businesses for every taste. There’s a company in Santa María la Ribera that offers its clients random numbers. They mail them a slip of paper with a number of varying lengths. The customers open the envelope, read the number, consider it, fold the slip of paper, and put it somewhere safe until the next number arrives, two or three months later. Then they throw away the first slip of paper. At least that’s what I’m told the company does. But thinking it over, there must be something in the whole process that I’m missing. Something significant that converts the number service into a matter of life or death. Anyway, what I mean to say is that there are all sorts of businesses. I could set up a deep psychology company. A company for intestinal secrets. For shit analysis. A detective company.
In any case, what makes me uneasy is to think that the suspect was still in the room when I entered the apartment. The sounds I heard from the door appear to confirm this theory. Also the fact that, in a moment of weakness I shouldn’t have allowed myself, I took longer than usual to enter the room, giving the crapper the chance to escape through the window, leaping like an athlete into the shadows of the lot. Maybe the intruder was there, getting ready to commit burglary, or just calculating the damage his excreta would cause my daily life because he knew the event would be unspeakably disturbing, forcing me to throw out that tiger-striped bedspread that, though I might loathe it, was the favorite of my wife, who, while not exactly my soul mate, could at least expect me to show her the respect of preserving her bedspread. The intruder must have known all this, and he must have calculated it with a malice only comparable with that of cabdrivers. An environmental malice, I’d say, that impregnates the skin of all the inhabitants of this capital city and imbues them with an unpleasant smell, the smell of stagnant water or dead bird; a malice that doesn’t escape my notice even though my natural tendency toward optimism manages to take it for granted, overlooking its consequences and leading me to continue along the rigorous path of a life that, if not exactly based on the model my mother would have preferred, does satisfy me to some extent. At least it satisfies me to the extent that if it were not for that turd, found in ridiculous circumstances in the very center of my bed, I could today say—despite my marriage, my unemployed status, and my absolute lack of perspective in relation to the future—that I’m happy, to the precise and sufficient extent that happiness is the inertia of which I spoke earlier, the inertia that carries me gently from one Saturday to the next, showing me the most agreeable paths of existence, the ones that avoid danger and death, making incomprehensible but ultimately fortunate detours, or fortunate to the precise and sufficient extent that they don’t land you in prison, because prisons are horrific in this country, or so I’ve been told.
Similar stories that I have heard: some burglars, after the robbery, shit at the scene of the crime. A signature, a personal mark, a little detail. The initials of two lovers carved into a tree trunk, crap to autograph a crime—it’s the same thing; the desire for permanence, when you come down to it. But this burglar, if he was one, reversed the order: he didn’t take anything. The turd wasn’t a symbolic payment for any removal. Just crap, like a menhir on the tiger-striped bedspread. A semifluid totem. A fucking shitty insult. When I was capable of returning to the bedroom, I held my nose, screwed up my eyes, and folded the bedspread over the little gift. I disposed of it, not without worrying about how much it would pain Cecilia to lose her horrendous feline bedspread.
I told her I’d taken all the bedding to the self-service laundromat. That I’d sat down to read a celebrity gossip magazine, and when I got up to see how the wash was progressing, I’d found the machine empty: no tiger-striped bedspread, no sheets, no pillowcases. I was even careful to offer her precise details of what I’d been reading: breast implants, infidelities, probable U-turns in the sexual preferences of certain television stars, things like that. It was an absurd explanation, but no more absurd than the actual truth. Cecilia threatened to go to the laundromat to complain, to demand the return of her bedspread. I was sharp enough to dissuade her with the promise of new extravagances: I told her they were selling a bedspread exactly like hers, but violet, on the corner of Dr. Vértiz and Río de la Loza. Later, I’d think up another lie to cover the first one. The causal series of lies is no less rigid than its parallel version in the real world. At times the two series become entwined for a moment in a single causal sequence we term, for pure convenience, the first person singular.
The question of the authorship—intellectual, but also material—of the perfect turd kept me awake for many nights following the event. Now, due to my unemployment, the enigma has expanded into the daylight hours, and I can’t shake off the grotesque, affectedly symmetrical image of the turd in the center of the bed. I think that if I had any money, I’d hire one of those detectives who advertise in the classified sections of newspapers and set him on the trail of the scatological felon. Given this, I regret having disposed of the evidence since no DNA test can now be carried out, nor can single hairs, mistakenly left between the bedsheets during the dastardly act, be extracted, nor a faithful reconstruction of the scene of the shameful deed made.
When I was dismissed from the museum, I had some meager savings. The greater part of my earlier reserve funds had disappeared with the costs arising from my recent marriage: outings to the movies, a leather handbag, board games, alcohol . . . anything to relieve the forced regime of living together. Given my penury, I decide to investigate the dark rationale behind the events myself, and given the lack of evidence, and my complete and insuperable ignorance in relation to my point of departure, I decide the investigation will be simply speculative, rational. The first question I have to answer is how the subject who shat on my bed entered and left. After discounting hypotheses in the general area of spontaneous generation and mystical manifestation, I tell myself he must have entered through the door of the apartment, like anyone else. Another option, which can’t be completely discounted, is that he entered through the window overlooking the lot; the other window, the one that looks out on the interior courtyard, has bars. If he entered through the window, he must have used a ladder (coming from the vacant lot) or a rope (coming from the roof ); either possibility involves a logistical deployment at odds with the speed of the events. He must, therefore, have entered through the door. But the lock didn’t show any signs of having been forced, so the intruder (a) has a key to my apartment or (b) knows someone who has a key to my apartment. Or even (c) the intruder comes from a parallel reality, another time and space, and just crossed the threshold separating it from this world, appearing directly on the tiger-striped bedspread, squatting, with the crap at the point of exiting through his anus. But no, option (c) is unthinkable. It’s an option that can only be conceived by theoretical physicists. Or mathematicians. Or science fiction writers. Or schizophrenics, which is to say, none of the above.
Naturally, even when all the loose ends of the break-in have been tied, the motive for the misdemeanor will still need to be clarified. Either the poo has a meaning or it doesn’t. If it does, then it can be thought of as a sign and is waiting happily in its loathsome image for me to venture onto the course of its exegesis. If it has no meaning beyond that of perturbing me, it can feel satisfied with itself, can pull up its pestilential anchor and set sail for other, more fragile sensibilities.
I allow myself a rather unscientific deduction: if the intruder has keys or knows someone who does, he must also know me (I changed the locks as soon as I moved here), and if he knows me, he knows the shit on the bedspread would perturb me, but also that I could find in it a pretext for reflecting on other regions, perhaps less traveled, of human existence. The intruder is a sower of
clues, a plotter of consequences, sufficiently wise to even anticipate these reflections of mine. Everything would seem to confirm that the intruder is the person who knows me best, the person most naturally close to me, my—until now—unknown brother.
2
Living with Cecilia is self-inflicted torture. Her scorn for me grows with the weeks, festering like a tenacious parasite in the inches of mattress that separate us each night. Sex, the last bastion of our reduced cohabitation, has, in this situation of overt antagonism, become watered down. In the mornings, Cecilia leaves for the museum, and I wander around the local streets in search of clues and evidence. (I think maybe some malevolent neighbor had been watching my movements for months before dealing the final blow. Now he amuses himself observing my increasing desperation, like a psychoanalyst who is entertained by the perversions of his patient, provoking them with decidedly indiscreet mother-related comments.)
My mother, unpredictably, interpreted my unemployment as a necessary pause in my existence, a moment for doubt and reflection that might, with a little luck, sooner or later return me to the paths of an enlightened life. She calls me more often now. Tells me a new stationery store has opened in Los Girasoles, and that the event, in its provincial magnitude, has generated a great deal of excitement among the natives. She says that not a few of her university colleagues have gone there to sport their most solemn apparel among the aisles of indelible-ink pens. I suspect she is lying, that my mother wants to seduce me with stupid stories so that I’ll yield to the folksy nature of her anecdotes and move to Los Girasoles. Once there, she would undoubtedly do her utmost to convince me of the need to enroll in a degree program: there is no better way, in that town, of killing time. She will attempt to convince me of the advantages of divorce. Or rather, the disadvantages of marriage. Of the inherent machismo of the very idea of marriage, the senselessness of stable relationships, the enormous number of marriages that fail or end in murder. She will explain that, according to research, the only type of marriage that avoids all these pitfalls is the marriage between homosexuals, which is already legal in the capital. She’ll attempt to convince me to go bi. She’ll give me flowers. Dresses. Plastic pricks with more or less realistic veins and bulges. No. I can’t go to Los Girasoles on my own. If I do, it will be with Cecilia, who at least is a woman, and my wife, and is conservative, and conservatism is a positive force in a world that is falling apart at the seams. Conservatism is the keystone of a wall. The conservative person is an exception, a landmark. A turd in the middle of a tiger-striped bedspread.
Among Strange Victims Page 13