Inside the room, the mattress is wheezing like a child on the verge of an asthma attack. They’ll have to take it to hospital, I think. They’ll have to give it an intravenous shot of Salbutamol. But the mattress suddenly becomes silent and then starts again, breathing slowly and monotonously now, like a swimmer doing the crawl. Every fourth stroke, the twisted mouth surfaces on the right-hand side, just under the armpit, and the swimmer inhales. Then the face goes under again. The hand cuts into the water like a knife and then turns to push the liquid down toward the feet. And then another inhalation. When the face comes out of the water, or rather when one side of the face comes out, the swimmer hears, for a moment, the surrounding hullabaloo: people cheering him, on-your-marks whistles, the splashing of his own legs, and the noise of his body in friction with the water and, above all, the noise of his own respiration, of his mouthful of air, which, when he puts his head down again, is immediately silenced. That’s more or less what a swimmer doing the crawl sounds like. And that is also how the inside of my mother’s room sounds, though perhaps with fewer competitive elements (there are no whistles, or people cheering Marcelo as he mounts her). I think they could go on like that all night. All week. Cecilia will wake up; she’ll say she dreamed she was flying, and my mom and Marcelo will still be swimming.
I feel a strange pain in the pit of my stomach. I stop myself from hearing all this by going into the bathroom, which is right between the two bedrooms (between hers—my mother’s—where they’re swimming, and mine, which isn’t mine, or only in a provisional sense until we—Cecilia and I—return to our apartment by the vacant lot). I turn on the light and sit on the toilet seat with my head between my knees and my arms pressed tightly into my abdomen. The pain is still there, and now it’s throbbing. It throbs, and I feel as if my esophagus is filling with blood, feel the taste of metal rising up my gullet. I kneel down by the toilet, hug it like a pre-Columbian idol, and vomit into the bowl. After the couple of rather loud bouts of retching have worn off, I let a thread of spittle that seems endless fall from my mouth. I think I have an enormous coil of spittle in my belly that is unwinding very, very slowly. It’s the milk from the glass bottle, the thick milk. It was the milk that caused me to vomit, and it’s still there in my body in the form of an endless thread of spittle. Now I’ll have to stay here the whole night, like a beast bleeding to death, facedown.
But no, someone is knocking on the bathroom door, and I have to cut the thread of spittle with my own fingers, leaving everything that has still to come out in my stomach. “Just a moment,” I say. From outside, Marcelo’s voice asks if I need any help. As if.
I open the door and sit on the toilet seat, doubled over, hands pressed to my belly. He says the noise woke him. I know that’s not true, that he was swimming with my mother or rocking the child on the verge of an asthma attack—the aged mattress. I know he was coming in her, spilling his endless thread of thick, milky spunk while I was vomiting something similar. Anyway, I apologize for having woken him. “No problem,” he says, “I was worried.” Why was he worried? Has my mom told him I’m a worrier? That I’m weak and have a natural tendency to feel fucked up? That she worries about me? That everyone around me ends up entering into a relationship based on worry, their worries about me but also, to a lesser degree, the worry other people make me feel about myself?
“Nothing serious. I’m not used to farm milk. It’s coming up.” Marcelo’s facial muscles tense almost imperceptibly at the sound of the word coming, which I pronounce with a particular emphasis. Now he knows I know he was swimming with her. He knows I heard him, or thinks I saw him, rocking the child on the verge of an asthma attack and then starting his race, which—from the sound—seemed less a speed race than a test of stamina, like swimming the English Channel, or with a rope tied around your waist so you have no possibility of advancing; the thing is that I heard him swimming—and he knows it—on Adela, she underneath him, raising his head to breathe on one side of my mother, of Adela.
From now on, he’ll have to look at me the way you look at someone you’ve seen defecating—that obvious mixture of intimacy and denial.
10
Cecilia did indeed dream that she was flying, or that’s what she says. So I say that I dreamed I was swimming in a pool filled with milk; the image inspires me, and I amuse myself by telling her the particulars of my fictional dream. Around the pool, I say, there was a forest littered with trash, and while I was swimming—with my eyes closed—I knew a lot of people were watching me from the side. Eventually, I got out of the pool, shivering, and saw Isabel Watkins, Marcelo, my mom, and her, Cecilia, standing there. Endless threads of milk were streaming from my torso and head, and everyone else was smiling, as if approving my performance. Then I looked behind me, and on the other side of the pool of milk, an asthmatic child was wheezing, making a horrible noise. The child was very dark-skinned, in strong contrast to the pool, which looked more like it was filled with almond milk than the bovine variety, now that I come to think of it. No one seemed to notice the dark, disturbing presence of the asthmatic child, and they continued to applaud my prowess as a milk swimmer. Angst was taking hold of me, and I dived into the pool, swam across it, and got out on the other side, ready to assist the asthmatic child. But the child wasn’t there, and there was no one back on the other side either: not Cecilia, my mom, Marcelo, or anyone else. I was alone, without a towel, next to the milk pool. I got back into the white liquid. Then the milk began to thicken, and it was increasingly difficult to do the arm and leg strokes. The milk got thicker, and the pool was somehow involving me in an abduction phenomenon—I put it that way, “abduction phenomenon,” because Cecilia knows the term and always uses it when she wants to express actions that are beyond human understanding, though it’s not particularly appropriate—until I gave up swimming and let myself be pulled to the bottom.
Cecilia is powerfully impressed by my fictional dream. She anxiously tells me I have to concentrate every night and think of positive things (“Like your pets when you were small,” she explains), and that once inside the dream, I have to try to look at my hands. She also says she’ll get a book on oneiromancy—she doesn’t use that word—to see what the swimming pool filled with milk means.
There’s something satisfying about lying to Cecilia, even when it’s just innocuous lies like that. She never doubts what anyone says or compares the information she receives with the facts. I could swear to her that I’d walked on water and she would end up accepting it. I believe that, in part, I like lying to her because I envy that capacity of hers for taking things on board as if they were true. I, in contrast, harbor an innate distrust of almost everything, and although until lately I thought that made me a more intelligent person, I’m beginning to suspect it only makes me a more nervous one.
Anyway, I have to take full advantage of this ordinary pleasure, I tell myself, the pleasure of lying to Cecilia. There are few things that make my day: devising arbitrary collections, righting wrongs related to turds on bedspreads, pampering hens. The few ritornellos in my character that make me different from other men while simultaneously destroying me, in the way a drop of water repeatedly hitting a stone gives it a unique shape, while also producing or accelerating its ultimate eradication.
Marcelo has been distant the whole day, ever since I heard him swimming with—or on—my mother last night. He hasn’t tried to convince me of the virtues of vegetarianism nor the need to reevaluate Epicurus. He made no effort to display his exaggerated friendliness while we were eating. He’s been sitting in the living room, scarcely moving, turning the pages of a book with a boxer on the front cover. I discover that I actually find his silence and distance less tolerable than his love for being friendly, though this is probably because the reasons for his silence and the reasons for his distance—which are the same reasons—have to do with the fact that I heard him swimming on—or with—my mother. All things considered, it’s my fault, and being guilty is like having vanilla ice cream in
your pants pocket: you can pretend it doesn’t exist, but sooner or later it will melt and make you feel uncomfortable, and the stain will be there for all to see.
Out of politeness, but also out of guilt, I go up to Marcelo, who is, as I said, sitting quietly in the living room, and ask him about the person on the front cover of the book, who seems to me to be French due to the simple fact that the book itself, its title, is in that language, which doesn’t really mean anything. (There are books about Pancho Villa in French, for example.) Marcelo stops reading for a moment and looks at the cover of the book, the stony or deranged—it seems to me—expression of the Frenchman who might well not be French. “It’s Richard Foret,” he says, “taken in 1916, two years before his death. He was mad,” and Marcelo’s tone when saying this is also, in some way, the tone of a madman, of a person whose contact with the rest of the human race has been destroyed by a terrible event or idea. But then Marcelo suddenly changes his tone and goes back to being the sane (perhaps too sane) person who tries to convince me of the advantages of vegetarianism and the need to reevaluate Epicurus and says, “My research is on him; it was because of him that I came to Mexico, in the beginning,” and on stressing the “in the beginning,” he is alluding, it seems to me, to the less obvious reasons for his Mexican expedition, maybe reasons like meeting Adela—though he couldn’t have known about that in advance—or generally meeting someone who would make him feel alive and swimming again.
“And what have you researched so far? Have you discovered anything yet?” I ask him with a touch of spite, as I know that the sort of research a professor of aesthetics does rarely translates to “discoveries”; they only interpret and offer opinions based on a greater or lesser knowledge of the topic, always taking the opportunity to discredit the interpretations and opinions of others. Marcelo then tells me that he’s hardly done anything yet, that he’ll have to spend some time in Mexico City, or even Monterrey, or the port of Veracruz, all places Foret passed through, he says, before disappearing without a trace from the face of the Earth—that’s how he puts it, as if we were in a bad movie. I’ll have to find some unpublished letters, says Marcelo (to my surprise, since it contradicts my prejudices about his kind of research), letters written by Foret from Mexico City and never sent to his wife, Bea Langley, who was waiting for him in Buenos Aires, or replies from Bea; she must surely have written to him from Buenos Aires to plan the details of their life together, to say “I’m pregnant, Richard. You’re going to be a father”; to say that Duchamp—as she had discovered in a letter from Picabia—was also planning to come to Buenos Aires for a while. Marcelo insists that he’ll have to find all those undiscovered documents to work out the reasons for Foret’s madness and disappearance, though it seems increasingly clear, he adds, that there are no reasons for madness, but possibly accomplices: silences or landscapes or people who accompany it, who create a favorable environment for it to blossom and regularly water its monstrous flower. I tell him I’ve heard of Richard Foret—what I really want to say is, “I’m not illiterate”—but have never read him, or don’t remember reading him, which is true. And Marcelo, for the first time since I met him, with a degree of sincerity that damages his image, tells me that he hasn’t read him either, or has read very little and, what’s more, has hardly understood anything of what he’s read, but that for some reason, independent of his—Marcelo’s—inability to read him or his—Richard Foret’s—inability to be read, he is obsessed with him, or was obsessed with him when it came to choosing a topic and location for his research during his sabbatical year; now he’s not so sure that he’s still obsessed. There’s a tinge of sadness in his voice, as if losing obsessions or interests also involved becoming detached from an important part of oneself (not from an arm but maybe a little finger), an irretrievable part. And all of a sudden I feel empathy with Marcelo, and sympathy, and a willingness to live for a while with that Spanish professor who swims the crawl with my mother, and also with that boxer on the cover of the book, who was an obsession of his (Marcelo’s) and then stopped being one. My obsessions, though more enduring than Marcelo’s, have something unknowable about them; they rest on a foundation of impossibility that, when it becomes apparent, leaves me prostrate and exhausted, as if things tire me more when they don’t come to fruition, when they abandon me before their due time.
I wonder if I should tell him, tell Marcelo, something about the vacant lot, or about the tea bags, or the hen, or the perfect turd that appeared one day (that seems long ago) on Ceci’s bedspread. Tell him I’m also undertaking aesthetic research, or not aesthetic but simply related to life, research that concerns the warp and weft of existence. And I’m also abandoning it (or it’s abandoning me; I’m not sure), and I feel tired and betrayed, with no inducement to continue living. But it’s probably too much, telling him all that; we probably haven’t reached that point. We don’t know each other well enough, and Marcelo prefers to go on being the guy who does the crawl on my mother and just wants me to be the on-loan son he has to worry about, the son he has to accompany in the early hours while he vomits or expels an endless thread of thick milk, hugging the toilet bowl, the sacrificial stone that has never, in fact, been anything but a toilet bowl. Most probably Marcelo couldn’t care less that I became obsessed and then stopped being obsessed by a hen, a vacant lot and a turd. And he certainly couldn’t care less that I have a pornographic photo from the eighties in my wallet, and particularly that, before my marriage, it was my custom—not completely voluntary—to masturbate twice on Saturdays. Who would be interested in all that? And how, above all, could it interest someone who has such a high opinion of himself? And Marcelo has a high opinion of himself.
Most probably I won’t reveal my secrets to him. And he’ll take up his book by Foret—or is it about Foret?—even though he’s not obsessed with him, and will finish his research—without going to Mexico City or Monterrey or the port of Veracruz—in this lost town of Los Girasoles, living with Adela and mounting her, swimming with her every night, until the end of his existence.
11
The holidays are almost over. We celebrated Christmas without too much fuss: a turkey and salads that we bought from a small restaurant in Los Girasoles; a good provision of wines, chosen by Marcelo, who thinks himself a connoisseur (in the supermarket checkout line, he told us the story of a wine grape the Chileans had stolen from the French—or vice versa, I can’t remember which—in addition, naturally, to having previously paused to consider the good qualities of each bottle before putting it in the trolley); and a rather unenthusiastic exchange of presents. Cecilia gave me the book on oneiromancy she had promised to buy. We, Cecilia and I, gave Marcelo a fountain pen like the ones Ms. Watkins uses (though surely less expensive) and my mother an elegantly indigenous shawl.
The day after tomorrow will be New Year’s Eve, and after that we’ll have to return to DF. I’ll have to return to my—aesthetic?—research on the origin of the turd on the bedspread, and Cecilia will return to her full-time job at the museum, where perhaps some colleague will leave a scrap of paper on her desk and propose matrimony, and quickly take her from me. Return to DF, and its cruelty.
An alternative occurs to me: to stay here for at least a week longer, without the yoke of marital companionship and with my mother and Marcelo working all day at the university. Then I could spend my time walking around the four bearable streets of the town and striking up rural friendships with some of the locals (friendships, for example, based on whistling from one side of the square to the other, and the ambiguous gesture of raising a hand to the crown of a straw hat).
Returning to the city right now seems to me a rather unattractive option. If I at least had a tyrannical routine to go back to, everything would take on meaning, but what I’ll be returning to is the uncertainty of having no job and the uneventful days steeped in idleness; days that are empty, like a Chinese fortune cookie they’ve forgotten to put a message in, leaving you with the twofold sensation that you have
no future and that you’ve just eaten a capsule of air, of nothing, of antimatter.
No, I have to stay here, in Los Girasoles, or even venture to some other place. Cross to the United States undocumented and send remittances to Cecilia while I break my back picking strawberries, or move to a neighboring town and join one of the local cartels, or set up an innovative business right here and squeeze out the salaries and bonuses from the professors at the University of Los Girasoles (squeeze out, for example, the bonuses Marcelo and Adela, my mother and Marcelo, receive). But any one of those alternatives would require an exhausting deployment of ingenuity, and for the moment I’d prefer to sleep in late and walk in my underwear to the kitchen to drink—straight from the bottle—a swig of thick, repulsive milk. So, I’ll stay here alone in Los Girasoles, if I can manage to convince Cecilia that this is best for us both (I’ll have to invent something, which will give me an extra satisfaction; I like telling her lies), and that it doesn’t mean I’m going to leave her for good. (In the family setting she comes from, if the husband sleeps away from the marriage bed for more that two nights, the most likely explanation is that he already has another life—wife included—at the opposite end of the very same street.)
So I talk to her. I ask her to sit down when Marcelo and my mom have gone over to Marcelo’s horrible apartment to see how it all is and, one imagines, to play at swimming together on another mattress filled with asthmatic children. I tell her—Cecilia—to sit down, and she goes slightly pale since never before, I believe, have I threatened to talk seriously with her about something, about anything; all our previous conversations have been uninspiring, or at least have not required such a sensationalist gesture as asking her to sit down. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever asked anyone to sit down before, I’ve only seen it done in movies, where they always ask a person to sit down when they’re about to give him a piece of news that could throw him. (If you fall from a sitting position, it hurts less or does less harm than if you fall from a completely upright position, which is why people prefer to sit down before hearing something that could precipitate a fall; I suppose, I imagine, I guess.)
Among Strange Victims Page 16