Among Strange Victims

by Daniel Saldaña París

  This idleness has brutally confronted me with the meanness of my spirit. Not only do I spend a great deal of time thinking stupid thoughts, but the curse of the ability to reflect obliges me to recognize that I spend a great deal of time thinking stupid thoughts. An acute case of misanthropy is gestating somewhere deep within me: I conceive my relationship with humans as a, to this point, necessary evil, the reasons for which are increasingly less clear. At this stage in the game, I consider full communion with a group of delightful people to be completely unattainable. The loss of my job and the resulting isolation have only confirmed my belief that the inexorable path I follow leads to an unprecedented, unpredictable level of misery. The only type of communion with people to which I can aspire is through objects. For example, by observing the tea bags I collected at one time, which simultaneously refer me to the humans who produced them and the humans who saw me consume the product. Then I understand that society as a whole is a machine, kept perfectly oiled by relationships of courtesy and the stock and household appliance markets. And I understand that humans are good.

  Cecilia returns from the museum laden with supermarket bags. From her grim expression, I suspect her patience is reaching its limits. As soon as she comes through the door, she starts making sarcastic comments intended to wound my manly pride. Fortunately I’ve never developed any such pride, and I find no satisfaction in defending a dignity I don’t possess, so I observe Cecilia with a mixture of pity and indifference, accepting that, within her scale of values, the situation of having a useless husband is a deeply unhappy one.

  All of a sudden I am invaded by empathy: I comprehend I’ve made this woman unhappier than she was before. As a form of compensation, I tell her that tomorrow, one way or another, I’ll get together the money to take her to Acapulco for a few days. She quite rightly says Acapulco is a horrible city, full of garbage and death and vulgarity and ferocity and drug trafficking and places where they’ll give you a blowjob for two pesos (she doesn’t mention that last one, but it’s true), and that she’d prefer to have a holiday someplace where there’s not even the remotest chance of finding a corpse with its throat slit on the sand, a few yards from the filthy hotel. So I suggest we pay a surprise visit to my mother in Los Girasoles. Cecilia is concerned about the insuperable distance between my mother and me. It seems an idyllic opportunity to strengthen our family bonds; she is satisfied.

  3

  Cecilia had already expressed her wish to own a car. Now, with the December holiday season getting closer, and the trip to Los Girasoles an inalterable fact, her expression of that desire has taken on a more urgent tone. While she understands our economic situation is, to put it mildly, precarious, she continues to go on about the car, as if setting out to needlessly squander money were a means of evoking fortune. I share the underlying current of magical thinking on which this logic is based, and that’s why I love Cecilia. She is, in her superficiality, everything I envy in flexible souls. So I borrow what seems an enormous sum from a cousin and buy Cecilia a small, red, secondhand car.

  Moments of happiness. When it seems as if everything is exasperation and fear, as if the life I’ve been leading will fall apart around me at any moment, that’s when I finally enjoy minor, everyday pleasures. I’ve almost completely forgotten the grotesque episode of the poo on the bedspread. At least I don’t think about it so often, and I’ve decided to temporarily abandon my investigation. Like a parting of the waters, a sign of the need for change, the shit on the bedspread is a positive, fortuitous event.

  Cecilia is content in her job. She asked Ms. Watkins for a raise, and the director, out of pity for our situation—for which she is, in part, responsible—awarded her one, though lowering the requested sum by a couple of percentage points. I don’t know how she managed to square the books, because the museum budget depends on the federal budget for culture, which wanes with each successive day. And although this recession in the cultural industries is a direct consequence of the government’s contempt for anything intended to make existence more bearable, I can’t help but wish for, and tacitly encourage, the collapse of state culture and the whole ridiculous meritocracy it has installed, forcing people to spit on each other and to make hatred and suspicion their only mode of survival. Because the only people who rise up the pile are those who can fuck up everyone else, the ones who seek their neighbors’ ruin and the ridicule and disgrace of their colleagues, now their permanent adversaries.

  But the fact is that Ms. Watkins gave Cecilia a raise, and Cecilia is looking more kindly on the world.

  The imminence of the holidays and the prospect of leaving the city make the days more pleasant. My mom was happy to have us stay with her, and I noticed in her mood a notable reconsideration of my virtues, as if she thought that idleness had purified me. And indeed it has: I now understand how wrong I was in trying to persevere with office-ism. Only premature retirement, I’m beginning to understand, justifies undertaking a college degree. (I even consider doing one.) Mexico City seems to me like the oppressive monster it in fact is, forcing a permanent regime of avarice on its inhabitants, from which they will only be released by a violent death or a prolonged respiratory tract disease. The province of the spirit is the only pleasure I defend. In light of this, I reevaluate my childhood in Cuernavaca, my father’s house, the pieces of waste ground that are not hemmed in by buildings but stretch out immeasurably mysterious, gorged with life, across the poverty-stricken hillsides. The vacant lots so large they are called fields. Salvation is, ultimately, in the bucolic.

  These reflections fully endorse my decision to seek out vegetal life, in the lowercase sense, in the adjoining lot. But I now understand that the lot is not wide enough to save me from the infinite idiocy, cruelty, and injustice of the city. And that is why someone shat on my bedspread. Civilization is a violent outrage, a clash of the most basic instincts of every citizen. There is no culture that offers redemption from this disguised barbarity, no poem or play that makes this extreme mendacity of the soul more bearable.

  All there is in the city is pointless argument and swaggering, gratuitous animosity and the degradation of others. I now know that all jobs, with their eight office hours and their vertical structure and their system of rewards and punishments, are demeaning to the limits of what is humanly tolerable. And all wage earners—the culture bureaucrats who try to pass off the endless battle for the suppression of others as rational discussion of ideas—are themselves victims and perpetrators of the daily dose of filth, from which nothing, absolutely nothing except resignation and silence and ostracism and the margin, can save them. I, now, am going to conquer that margin, among the shrubs of the terrestrial sphere.

  Of course there’s a touch of the spasmodic in my sudden aspiration for the rural condition. Something of a last-minute remedy for the oppressive sensation of being in the process of dying. Because I am dying, that is certain: cooped up in a damp apartment, next to a lot inhabited by only a hen, married to a woman whose form oscillates in my spirit between the beloved (to be polite) and the incomprehensible.

  In the past, the solidity of an imposed, semi-tyrannical routine allowed me to not worry about what I did with my idle hours. Now all my hours are idle hours, and ideas have time to grow inside me until they become monstrous; feelings have the space and silence to slowly soak into my nerves and reach the darkest regions of my spirit; the contradictions of which I’m made up have enough air to accelerate their combustion, making the collection of minutiae that sustain my existence inflammable and even perilously volatile.

  4

  Finally, the holiday season comes around. Cecilia’s small, red, secondhand car will be good for traveling the highway, even though I don’t drive and have no intention of ever doing so. She, then, will be responsible for getting us there. At heart Cecilia isn’t bothered by that detail, as I had calculated would happen. Resigned to my uselessness, and having accepted it as one of my principal features, she’s unsurprised that it should manifest its
elf once more in this new impossibility. She suspects—and she’s right—that in the coming years I’ll gradually renounce more and more activities, until I end up sprawled prostrate in a wing chair, observing a collection of tea bags on the coffee table, dribbling a little out of the corner of my mouth, and uttering, with ridiculous emphasis, the word egg.

  In any case, Cecilia likes driving, so we set out for Los Girasoles, provisioned with a whole bag of ham-and-cheese sandwiches and several small rectangular cartons of grape juice. The highway, once we’ve left Mexico City, is packed with vacationers, station wagons with inflatable dinghies on the roof. As we travel farther from the city, and the gap between one house and the next widens, I feel I’m shrugging off an exaggerated weight, something irksome on my shoulders, sinking me ever deeper into myself, into the most wretched regions of myself.

  The highway makes me think of all the things that happen. Of the madcap or impossible pace of the days that don’t just pass but deny their existence, or turn back on themselves, or anticipate by whole weeks the actual date of their coming. So the accelerations and decelerations Cecilia inexpertly imposes on our family speedster tangentially express that frenetic leaping and prancing of the days, those moments of wonder and those emergency stops of individual perception before the passage of time.

  The highway makes me think of all the things that happen. For example, of the waterways I used to construct when I was a child, on the slopes of the waste ground across from my father’s house in Cuernavaca: they were PVC tubes, joined together with anything that came to hand, that formed circuits around which the water and my small Lego toys nimbly slid, although they would sometimes get stuck, or an unexpected leak would prematurely carry them off into the sand of the waste ground. (Prematurely: like the things that happen when you’re in a hurry.)

  The highway makes me think of all the things that happen. For example, of the way human relationships keep changing, in the same way as the Mexican landscape—there outside the car window—changes from conifer forests to vast expanses of maguey. Just like my relationship with Cecilia, which went from indifference to hatred, from there to the unmitigated discord of our opinions, and then, gently, approached tolerance, a discreet form of love, in neutral colors, routine.

  “Doesn’t the highway make you think of all the things that happen?” I ask her.

  “Oh, Rodrigo, the things you say, you’d think you were a numbskull . . . Wouldn’t you like a sandwich?”

  5

  Far from generating a more open world, as I suspect was their intention, my parents’ generation became obsessed by, and eventually succeeded in, destroying the only frame of staked-out certainties in which it was still possible to enjoy something approaching happiness for a period of time longer than that of an orgasm.

  This redundant lecture is just to say that, contrary to any notion of progress, I have, throughout the course of my brief adult life, insisted on behaving in what I imagine to be the same way as my grandparents. My ambitions are restricted to the absence of ups and downs. For that reason, unemployment and the mere thought of doing something radical, like leaving the city for good, of my own free will—this is just a working hypothesis—seem to me minor but significant concessions to the reckless worldview of my parents; as if I felt myself obliged to recognize, at least by intuition, that it’s possible to lead a life that is different from the humdrum existence of an office worker. A sincere, I’d almost say shameful strand of hope, of renewed enthusiasm for the possibilities offered by the vast world, is inveigling itself into the general grayness of my spirit.

  The highway is uniform and boring. I doze off every so often without being aware of it and am woken by Ceci’s voice asking me to pass her the money for the tollbooth. At the toll station we’re surrounded, like all the other cars, by vendors, appearing out of nowhere and offering local products: a bag of guavas for ten pesos, a little box of quince jellies, tabloid newspapers.

  My mom was born in Ciudad Satélite at almost the same time as Ciudad Satélite itself was born. At the tender age of fifteen, she came to the wise conclusion that her environment was oppressive, and she continued to battle with it for a couple of years more, until she managed to establish herself as a language teacher in a primary school—her English was more or less respectable—and effective agitator among the mass of students just starting out at college. Her jet-black, curly hair, high boots, and determination were all the rage in the eighties, a decade marked by the notable ideological lag of its youth, who in Mexico behaved just as the rest of the world had fifteen years earlier: anarchic behavior that, in the end, changed nothing despite the very widespread belief to the contrary.

  My dad studied agronomy because he believed that in this way he could gain a level of nutritional self-sufficiency with respect to a system he loudly decried, but after two years of analyzing the effects of fertilizers on the rubber tree, he decided to switch to law, and that was when he met my mother. (I sometimes like to say “my mother” because the very words impose a certain distance.)

  They fused into a legendary couple who were observed mockingly by the most cynical kids and with flagrant envy by the most candid. My parents represented free love without the need to leave the family model: their freedom was based on nothing more than a certain high-sounding rhetoric and a slightly faster pace of walking than the rest. In every other way, they were like any couple of the day. But they themselves created their own conceited myth and set themselves up as the model of heroic marriage. When my mother got pregnant with me, the aura of ineffable transgression, of seditious activism, gave way to a portrait of middle-class life, and the specter of Ciudad Satélite hovered over them like an ominous fate. By the time I was born, my father had temporarily given up his academic ambitions and dedicated himself to manufacturing scented candles, which he then sold in boutiques of questionable luxury. My mother, on the other hand, enlisted in a less belligerent form of activism and studied for a master’s in human rights, working as an assistant on a commission whose head used all his arts to conquer her and carry her off to live with him in his house in Colonia Portales, where she stayed for a little over a year. I lived for a time in Cuernavaca, beside a vacant lot that marked my stunted relationship with Madame Nature. Then came Coapa: my mother took on the role of the incorruptible, single woman, and while my dad, in Cuernavaca, was prospering in the paraffin business, she and I lived in the grubby neighborhood where I tasted—puberty, a divine treasure—the sweet delights of drugs and unrelieved ordinariness.

  When my parents saw that I could walk unaided, though still unsteadily, they turned their backs: it was no longer necessary to pay attention to what I was up to. When I was able to make my own way financially with relative confidence, they moved far away. From that time, the relationship with my father waned to the bloodless point it has reached in recent years, while my mother, as I’ve said, calls from time to time, in an offhand manner, disillusioned by my characteristic lack of daring and run-of-the-mill dissatisfaction. So, to visit her now, with Cecilia, may be the nearest thing to an adventure I’m likely to experience in years. An adventure whose only plotline consists of emotional upheaval and reproach, uncomfortable silences and rain. The ordinary, gloomy rain of Los Girasoles.

  The closer we get to the town, the more military roadblocks we encounter. Los Girasoles is still a peaceful place, but around it a multitude of shantytowns and shady settlements—the sort that are never mentioned in the national newspapers—are in the habit of adding to each of their components a prefix that is very fashionable in this country: narco. They are narcotowns, with narcoschools—both elementary and high—and narcobreakfasts for thirty-five pesos, by a narcosquare. And so on. And that’s the reason for all the military roadblocks, which give Cecilia the idiotic and reprehensible sensation that something good is being done.

  “Oh, thank goodness for the army. Even if we do have to stop every couple of miles.”

  “Why do you talk such garbage, my love?”
<
br />   “It’s not garbage, Rodrigo. It means they’re putting ever so many people in prison.”

  6

  My mom thinks I lead a largely dishonorable life. Perhaps she’s right, but her way of saying this is so blunt, so passionately convinced, that it makes me distrust her recommendations.

  “Before you lost your job, you were living a miserable life; now you’re living a miserable life without any money. The only way you’re going to do something useful is by studying for an undergraduate degree, so you can then do a master’s and work fewer hours a day.”

  “Anyway, I wouldn’t know what to do with the free time, Mom. And I don’t mind working eight or nine hours a day, especially if it’s in an old building like the museum.”

  She plays with her black mane and lets her eyelids droop, as if tired, silently discrediting my words. My reply is automatic because, deep down, I enjoy exasperating her: admitting, even for a minute, to the truth in her suggestions would represent a symbolic defeat equivalent to emasculation without anesthetic, and I’ve got no desire for that.

  While this is going on, Cecilia is in the small cactus garden belonging to the house, which, luckily, is right in the center of Los Girasoles, where you can still see some dwellings with internal cactus gardens and high ceilings, and not just quick-build residential estates, as is the case on the outskirts.