Among Strange Victims

by Daniel Saldaña París

  My mom, Adela, takes us for a walk through the center. In the small main square is a man selling balloons, giving an absurd touch of color to the shade of the fig trees. It’s the only part of the town that in any way resembles the central and southern cities of the republic: everything else is closer to the uncultivated north or the excruciatingly Catholic stillness of the El Bajío plateau.

  Cecilia and my mom walk a few steps ahead of me, but not a word passes between them. Cecilia looks eager, as if she is trying to please her impossible mother-in-law, alert to any sign of good faith or a disposition for conversation that this might imply. But my mother walks on unconcernedly, as if indifferent to her visitors’ attentions, thinking her own thoughts, inscrutable, giving me sideways glances, as though she were evaluating me with the corner of her eye, of her conscience, of her wasted or even regretful maternity.

  Someone—in fact, Cecilia—suggests going to the movies, but my mother explains that the only movie theater where they show anything new is several miles away, in a ghost mall that probably belongs to the narcos since it stands there, ostentatiously, in the middle of nowhere, completely empty at any time of the day or night, except maybe Saturday afternoons, when some of the university professors drag themselves along to it, hopeful of finding something, anything, on which to spend their salaries and their discount vouchers.

  Setting that plan aside as being complicated and too much trouble, we sit on a metal bench with the paint peeling off, next to an orange-juice stand on the edge of the square. The fruit on the stand looks wrinkled. My mother still seems absent, and Cecilia tries to catch my eye in a look of complicity that I suddenly don’t want to share.

  7

  We sit down and switch on the TV. The fabric of the armchair is slightly faded at a certain level, from use. I point this out to my mom, but she doesn’t deign to acknowledge my comment, waving it off with her hand. Outside, the heat of the afternoon is giving way to the cold of night, without measurable nuances between the two states. I interrupt the rapt contemplation of Cecilia and my mother with a new comment, this time about how good it is that there are no mosquitoes in Los Girasoles. The comment is once again ignored, this time without even the gesture.

  On the screen is one of those live, trashy talk shows. There are three couples, all around forty; a blonde, slightly vulgar presenter is opening and shutting her pound of lip silicon before them, admonishing them with amazing rudeness. As far as I can tell, the topic of the program is “I cheated on my wife with my own wife.” The three husbands, apparently, all had sex with their respective wives. They even regularly had sex, just like any other couple, but for some reason that was impossible to communicate, during one of these encounters they were overcome by the certainty that they were committing adultery. And the feeling was shared: both the man and his wife were aware, for a moment, while they were high on pleasure, that they were being unfaithful; not with someone else, but right there during that sexual act, as if they knew their spouse simultaneously was and wasn’t him or herself. And that led to a surge of jealousy. The woman was suspicious of every one of her partner’s activities; the husband spied on his wife and treated her roughly or even violently (in one case, it seems, it even came to blows). For all their promises that it would never happen again, their trust in each other had been irrevocably undermined, and all for screwing each other, but deep down, in some strange way, committing adultery. Little by little, they say, monogamy was restored by means of stubbornly repeating an idiotic routine.

  Disconcerted by the direction the program is taking, I get up from the armchair, ready to go to bed while thinking that, in the end, this is perhaps the only way to survive marriage with a degree of dignity. Forget the midlife crises and the sudden preference for youth and motorcycles. Forget the summer affairs and the red-velvet bars to which you go with the dentist’s secretary. Forget the prostitution and the unexpected discovery of closet homosexuality. Endogamous adultery: that’s what’s missing, dammit.

  I’m hardly on my feet when the doorbell rings. My mom, not moving from her chair, unsurprised, asks me to answer it, adding, “It must be Marcelo.” I give her a questioning look, but she continues watching the TV as if nothing had happened. I’ve never heard of Marcelo. Cecilia, in the meantime, has fallen asleep in her armchair, and I know it’s not humanly possible to wake her so that she can be with me in this moment of deep uncertainty. Why does it seem so natural to just open the door to him?

  Between the house and the gate leading to the street is a minuscule garden with a gravel path. The bulb in the lamppost intended to illuminate the sidewalk outside has blown so that I can only distinguish, beyond the high metal railing, a masculine figure, taller than me, his right hand gripping one of the bars. The light from the other street lamps shines behind him, eclipsing his face.

  This, I imagine, is the Marcelo guy. He greets me with a suspicious degree of effusion, speaking my name as if we were old friends. I open the gate wide to him, feeling perplexed, while running through the most obvious possibilities: a neighbor who has only come out about his homosexuality to my mother, who is egging him on to start a civil liberties campaign in Los Girasoles; a psychologist hired by my mom to convince me to return to education or get divorced; and finally—always finally—the most sensible possibility: he’s my mom’s new boyfriend. His friendly, deferential manner points to the last option, although I find one aspect of the situation disconcerting: he’s Spanish. The accent gives him away. And in my mother’s bellicose imagination, no one who’s Spanish can—short of renouncing his ancestry—attempt to display a benevolent attitude toward a Mexican without it being understood as a disregard for the dignity of that person (it’s a relatively historical matter, very difficult to explain). So Marcelo makes an effort to be pleasant from the outset, but the tension caused by his Spanish blood gets in the way of this noble intent, and his amiability ends up being offensive, grating, uncivilized.

  Marcelo takes his place in the TV soirée with strange spontaneity. Cecilia has woken and, after greeting the stranger with obvious coquetry, has started asking him questions, while on the now-silent screen the programming continues autistically. My mother laughs at Marcelo’s ingenious replies, and Cecilia, without fully understanding them (they often include highbrow references), also laughs, but with a hesitancy that gives her away.

  Marcelo addresses me, trying to include me in the sudden intimacy of the scene.

  “Rodrigo, your mother tells me that you’re interested in belles lettres.”

  “Me, interested in letters? Really? You could say that I take an interest in some words, or parts of words. Lately I’ve been feeling a particular predilection for vowels,” I reply, attempting to avoid my tone being interpreted as droll.

  The conversation quickly veers toward politics, guided by the iron will of my mother’s opinions. Marcelo is ambiguous: he concedes that the left in general has merits, but he despises the Manichaean sense of history. In the face of such an incredibly abstract affirmation, Cecilia takes her leave, alleging drowsiness, and goes to bed.

  “Are you coming, Rodrigo?”

  “No, my love, I’ll catch you later.” When she hears my reply, Cecilia shoots me a reproachful glance, giving me to understand that she was trying to leave Marcelo alone with my mother. The conversation about politics continues its sinuous course. Marcelo has taken a cold beer from the fridge, and I finally understand what all those bottles are doing there: he’s a regular visitor to this house. It seems, in short, a fairly new but stable relationship.

  Well, I think, maybe this Marcelo isn’t as much of a cretin as he seems. He’s said a couple of things that are not, to my mind, completely misguided: that talking across the table after dinner seems to him a revolting habit, that amusement parks have more revolutionary potential than rhyming jingles, that he had only been in Mexico City for a few hours but had been able to “perceive its close liaison with the Devil.”

  In the living room light—one of those
so-called energy-saving bulbs—Marcelo appears less attractive than I’d first imagined. There are clear traces of acne beneath his straggly beard, pockmarks that extend down to his collar, and into which he sinks his thumbnail when absorbed in what he’s saying. He’s fair enough to appear European, but not that fair. My mother, who’s never been able to completely rid herself of her Marxist discourse, and these days uses it only out of sentiment, must think he’s a class enemy—his Italian shoes, his obvious preoccupation with style. Yes, she must think he’s a real stiff-necked Spaniard, that he knows nothing about the real world, just a rose-tinted version of it. She must get a kick out of thinking, “He’s a class enemy and I’m fucking him; class struggle is here, in my sweaty, proletariat bed.”

  My mother, of course, is not a member of the proletariat, although in her desire to be one, she took a course in indexable lathe tooling when she was young. She’s never been able to explain what an indexable lathe is.

  8

  Four days and their associated nights have passed, and Marcelo is still here, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. One morning, he disappeared and came back half an hour later with a bundle of clothes and four orange juices that he shared among us. I asked him about his house. It seems that he was conned via the internet in relation to the price and space, the description and photos of the place. He can’t bear the house he’s rented; he says it’s infernally hot and that the residential estate is full of dubious people. But he can’t leave: he paid who knows how many months in advance, and there are various penalty clauses for early departure in the contract. To my mind, it had become for him a matter of principle. Marcelo seems to be the sort of person who invokes principles at the drop of a hat. He hopes to raise controversy every time he says—and he says it very frequently—that he’s a vegetarian; he must be disappointed by my absolute indifference to such provocations. As far as I’m concerned, he could be a coprophage. It’s all the same to me.

  Marcelo is a couple of years younger than my mother. (“Just like Ceci and me,” I think.) But at that age, as at the beginning of adolescence, the difference between a man and a woman is obvious. Or maybe it’s just that Marcelo leads a healthy life, including gyms and visits to the homeopath and “a glass of wine in the evenings.” No doubt, a lot of olive oil. And I’m certain he’s never worked in an open-plan office. You notice these things immediately. When someone has worked in an office, a film of boredom spreads over his face and stays there for the rest of his life. His skin, for all that the sun and exercise might try hide it, loses its glow, becomes thin. His vertebral posture is never the same. There’s a classic curvature around the lumbar vertebrae that no ex-office worker can correct, not even with yoga or Arab dancing. The clothing of an office worker is also an irreversible aspect of his demeanor. If he’s lived in this nine-to-five routine, it’s impossible to regain a dignified, presentable style. It makes no difference if he consults Italian men’s formalwear magazines: the starched collar and the mediocrity of his shoes will be permanent shackles.

  Marcelo seems like a stranger to this world of weighed-up sacrifices. He’s the sort of person you’d expect to have a healthy hobby: five-a-side soccer on the weekends, energy drinks, massage parlors where they call the prostitutes “helpmates.” He looks young, so young that instead of two, there are five years between him and my mother. And it’s not that my mom is really showing her age. She makes superhuman efforts to keep herself in shape. Almost suicidal diets, expensive depilatory treatments for her hairy body, cowboy boots she buys in the most expensive store in Los Girasoles, and the discreet but ever-present foundation makeup.

  Marcelo has a certain tendency toward good humor that I find suspicious. He’s always asking me about my interests and even shows curiosity when he’s with Cecilia. It’s as if he believes that all human beings have something interesting to say, waiting there inside. He couldn’t be more wrong.

  Despite all this, he’s a likeable guy, and even if his likeability can become almost intolerable after a few hours, his company is, in general, positive, or at least neutral. He shows himself to be obliging, but then he uses the opportunity of that conquered ground for a crushing display of theories. He proselytizes for the most innocuous causes (“a reevaluation of Epicurus,” for example). His capacity for enjoyment, if not completely atrophied, is clearly dampened by his love of analysis. He’s the sort of person who, when watching the most recent Disney movie, uses the word multiculturalism, or, when it’s over, posits without the least visible trace of sarcasm, “It’s a metaphor for almost everything.”

  Normally, I’d have thought my mother would have found those attitudes, those almost comical attempts to be intelligent, downright pathetic. Yet she seems fascinated by the man. Marcelo’s most imbecilic comments receive an almost immediate echo of approval from her, and at times I feel afraid that he’s simply testing her, trying to define the limits of her affection. I then discover an unprecedented impulse: to defend my mother against the possibility of disillusion. I’ve never before worried about anything like that: it was always she who was constantly trying to convert me to the hopeful club, with little success. She took me to events organized by her NGO, convinced that when I saw a little suffering my heart, embalmed in cynicism, would soften. She showed me documentaries about famine in Africa.

  But with Marcelo, things are different: her personal enthusiasms lie in abeyance while she’s laughing at the frigging Spaniard’s jokes, as if twenty-five years of academia and social work were not enough to deal with the cover of Hola! magazine.

  I learn about how they met, without really paying much attention. Something to do with a rough town somewhere in the vicinity, a crummy bar, something about my mom’s car breaking down and Marcelo giving her a lift back to Los Girasoles . . . It all sounds as if it’s come from a bad novel about drug trafficking. (The reader discovers, some pages in, that she’s the head of a “fucking tough” cartel, and by then he, the professor of philosophy, has already become trapped in her web of corruption and deceit.) There’s something about the rhetoric of other people’s love stories that makes me feel sick, a tendency for bedroom hyperbole that, particularly when it’s my mother speaking, gives me the urge to seek out once again that neutral office-worker tone, or death.

  9

  Cecilia has discovered literature: to my shame, she has bought a horrendous edition of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The book appears to have been designed by a self-help professional: purple borders, title in italics, whimsical shading, and photos modified to look like drawings. In the evenings, she reads a couple of pages while my mom and Marcelo discuss minority rights. Then she gets all grandiloquent, says if you concentrate hard enough, you can dream that you’re flying, and that benefits your everyday life. That’s what she says to me before we go to sleep; then she has a lime tea (I save the bag) and curls up on one edge of the bed, smiling at the wall.

  Inspired by her self-help book, she’s also written some roughly heptasyllabic verses. She dedicated them to me, and they were about roses. I couldn’t actually say it straight out, but instead formulated an unspoken warning: Love me any way you will, except in outmoded stylistic forms.

  Cecilia now tells me things about her childhood. She hasn’t said so, but everything indicates that an uncle or godparent tried to rape her when she was seven. At least I think that is what she’s insinuating; she says, for example, that the bastard gave her photos of little girls like her. The story is dark and makes me shiver, but Cecilia relates it all calmly. I attribute the ease with which she addresses the subject of abuse to her economic background: there are atrocities that are never questioned in low-income families (nor in the ultra-high ones, of course; the middle class has a monopoly on scandal). She also tells me, for example, that two of her mother’s children died. “One of them was still in her tummy,” she says.

  One night, I can’t sleep. The silence in Los Girasoles is so up front that it wakes me. I look out the window and know I’ll be lying
there until dawn, listening carefully for some familiar noise: a car engine, a siren, bottles thrown against a wall. But there’s no sound. Cecilia is sleeping on the other side of the bed. It irritates me to think that in the other room my mother is lying next to a stranger. That we are two couples, sleeping in two rooms of the same house. Like acquaintances. It really irritates me.

  I go to the kitchen for a swig of milk. Here the milk comes in glass bottles with labels that are always falling off. And the vegetables have the misshapen, earthy look of healthy things. If I were in my apartment right now, I’d look out at the vacant lot, in search of the complicit hen. There’s a street lamp on the opposite sidewalk that shines onto part of the lot below my window. The hen could be there, under the white light, waiting to be abducted or called to heaven.

  The milk here is too thick to quench your thirst. All sorts of things here are too thick to quench your thirst. As if an invisible dust comes in from the plains and soaks up the moisture on your tongue, in your throat. When I urinate, it comes out darker than usual. In the city, my urine is almost transparent, unless I drink too much or ingest foodstuffs of an ochre hue or eat beetroot. But here my urine is dark. And so is the night.

  I fill a glass with milk and drink it down in one gulp. I hate rustic furniture; to be exact, the pieces of rustic furniture that are always the decorative focus in Adela’s houses. As I’m walking back to the bedroom, to try to fall asleep next to Cecilia, I hear a moan in the adjoining room, Adela’s—my mother’s—bedroom. I think Marcelo must be mounting her. That he’ll be emptying into her a milk as thick as the brand they buy and that it’s one of the worst conceivable drinks in terms of its thirst-quenching properties. I can’t help it: I stop by the door of that room, even though I know anything I hear may perturb me. In a certain sense, I’m seeking out perturbation, as a strange confirmation that I’m human, the son of her, my mother.