Cecilia sits down next to me in the living room and asks, with a twinkle in her eye, if I’ve succeeded in flying in my dreams.
“No,” I say, “I want to talk to you about something else. I’m going to stay here in Los Girasoles for a few days longer. Marcelo tells me a friend of his at the university needs someone to copyedit a book he’s written so that it sounds less academic and he can send it to a publisher in the real world. I could do it from home, but I need to talk to him first, when the new term starts.” I know I’m touching a sensitive spot: she might have read Jonathan Livingston Seagull and now professes a blind, arbitrary faith in the power of dreams and other shit like that, but what really concerns Cecilia is the issue of my unemployment, and only a promise of work would convince her it’s necessary for me to stay, even if doing so feeds her most deep-rooted fears. The story about Marcelo’s friend comes to me on the spur of the moment, and I don’t stop to consider before opening my mouth that I’ll probably have to ask him—Marcelo—to back me up in public, which clearly implies that my mother will find out about it, and I’ll have to decide whether or not we should make her party to the lie or keep her out of it. The best thing, I think, will be to keep her—my mother—out of it and convince Marcelo to maintain the pretense in front of the two of them, Cecilia and Adela, my wife and my mother.
I also tell myself that while the lie only justifies a brief delay in my return to DF, a delay of at most one or maybe two weeks, I can always invent, on the hoof, lies that function as extensions, lies that get tangled together and follow each other like the stories in the Thousand and One Nights and put off—as in the Ibidem—the fatal moment, the moment of my return to a gray life, to the unbearable loneliness of marriage, which is more lonely than all other forms of loneliness, than sane, effective lonelinesses: the loneliness of the desert, of the widower, the loneliness of men who live surrounded by cats; marital loneliness is, I insist, more lonely than all the above because it imposes the necessity of being other, even in the sacred space of the shower, where you have to go on pretending that you are like this or like that, are interested in this or that detail of shared life, pretend that progress and the feasibility of a savings plan, the eradication of the damp in the living room walls, the advisability—or otherwise—of getting cable television, really matter. And in contrast, in this modality of simulations, what is impossible, or at least not to be recommended, is the public acceptance of our fallibility, of our devotion to collecting, of our miniature versions of the eternal return of the same that make up the course of the weeks: the contemplation of a vacant lot; the speculation about the way of life of a feathered animal that can’t, however, fly; the particular abnormality of the gland of eroticism that makes us masturbate twice, thinking monstrous things, every Saturday.
So I talk to her, to Cecilia. I ask her to sit down, and she does, and I tell her what I’ve outlined above: the lie about the possible job and the promise of a financial recompense not to be disdained. I round off the story with an homage to us, to us as a couple, appealing to her recently discovered interest in self-help—about how good it is that we can communicate our needs and understand that temporary separation, that state of being alone, doesn’t mean we aren’t together on a deeper plane. Finally, and maybe going slightly over the top, I tell her we can try hard to dream of each other every night, and that in the dreams we have together, we’ll be closer than anywhere else since we’ll fly hand in hand over the tops of scented pine trees, and won’t have to worry about anything except meeting with voracious dragons or other predators of the oneiric skies.
A little confused, Cecilia agrees to my proposal. At the beginning of my soliloquy, when I was talking about practical matters, she seemed slightly distrustful or sad, and then, as I insisted on the importance of finding a job, even if it wasn’t permanent, a smile appeared on her face, and I understood (or intuited, or invented for myself ) the idea that she was thinking of her dad, my father-in-law, and in the restored pride of being able to say to him that I’m a good man, and that I’m saving again for that property, the promise of which gained me her hand and her sham virginity. Finally, when the story goes off on a transcendental tack, and I talk about abstractions and the subterranean feelings that unite us, Cecilia looks serious (about the abstractions and subterranean feelings, not the rest), gently frowning and not looking me in the eyes—like when you’re making small talk with another human being—but an inch or so, or maybe less, to the right, as if she can’t focus or is contemplating, beyond my face, the landscape of scented pine trees and the tremendous battles we’ll fight against oneiric, aerial dragons on the symbolic plane.
And Cecilia says yes, I should stay to see what happens with Marcelo’s friend, and she will drive the red car back by the same route and return, as is her duty, to the apartment next to the vacant lot, and the museum, to complete her tasks as an efficient secretary, no longer the frustrated pain in the ass she was with me when we were colleagues, but finally kind and docile and married and relatively happy with her life, even if her husband tells lies—she knows, deep down, that he does—and now has neither a job nor the least scrap of enthusiasm, and doesn’t even join her in the marital bed to consider their future options. Well, she doesn’t say that, but Cecilia does say yes, I should stay to see what happens with Marcelo’s friend, and she’ll drive the car back, and I can catch up with her again, as soon possible, in Mexico City. And that’s it; we don’t say another word, just switch on the television (my mom does have cable) and watch an entertaining documentary on the secret life of snakes, and I think that the secret life of snakes is their whole life, not just some aspect or moment of the night or a recurrent dark thought—as is so often the case for human beings—but all their life: from the moment they wake up until they succeed in swallowing a field rat whole, and also when they shed their skin, slithering out of themselves. I don’t say anything to Cecilia about all this, not, of course, because I’m in an uncommunicative mood—I am—but because I think she has already had enough with all the stuff about flying together and dream dragons chasing us. You could say I believe Cecilia has, for today, heard enough of my thoughts on reptiles—even if they are oneiric—and now, on the screen, snakes are secretly slithering out of themselves and secretly watching their prey and finally, secretly, snaking between the plants, so there’s no need to harp on the topic. Sometimes, even when you’re in a communicative mood, you have to leave things unsaid, keep the words—secretly—to yourself and trust that the people around you are thinking the same things, or something similar, and trust in the possibility of a silent empathy, an empathy related most specifically to space, to the possibility of sharing a space and inhabiting it at a given moment in history, which, in the case of Cecilia and I, is this one: this given moment in history.
12
I thought talking to Marcelo would be more difficult. I had, perhaps, too blind or too naïve a faith in his moral integrity. I thought that lying, the very idea of lying, would be not only alien to him but also reprehensible. That he would feel a sort of congenital disgust at lying in the abstract and, therefore, an acquired disgust at my concrete lie. My lie demanded a degree of complicity on his part that I now regret, because the complicity hatched in lying is always more powerful than the complicity hatched in the bright light of truth, in the same way that wicker woven underwater is hardier than wicker worked beneath an unforgiving sun. It’s the same for everything; it’s said, for example, that there is no friendship more enduring than that formed in prison, or at least when turning a blind eye to legality and consensus. And neither is there a more solid love than the one that is persecuted, or rather that would be hunted down and punished if its existence were known, so forcing the parties in question to lie habitually. Secrets and lies unite one man with another, and one man with himself, and perhaps they also unite snakes, whose secret lives are intensely secret and so must be more united than any other being under the light of the moon.
That’s the way i
t was with Marcelo. Almost immediately we passed from a cordial, if tense, relationship to becoming conspirators as soon as he’d agreed to participate in the game of my duplicity. He was fascinated by the idea. I didn’t have to go into details as he said he would take care of everything. That the professor implicated in the story, Velásquez, was in fact a friend of his for whom my mother felt a hyperbolic aversion. She would never ask him any questions since she couldn’t bear his presence or to hear news that involved him, even in a secondary role. Marcelo also arranged the matter of the possible extension of my visit: if I wanted to stay for a while longer, I only had to say I was going through certain aspects of the document I felt unsure about with Professor Velásquez. That instead of merely correcting copy, I’d become an authentic, fully fledged, personal editor, and that word had spread like dust in the aesthetics department, and there were already other researchers ready to put their books, their theses, their articles into my blessed hands.
I told Marcelo we should think it over, that it all sounded too complicated, and that for the time being I only needed the first excuse, the one I’d broadly outlined and he’d refined with a skill that revealed—against all expectations—a habit of lying, and even a perverse delight in doing so. As a coda to our conversation, Marcelo said that if I got fed up with living at my mom’s house, I could spend a few days at his place in the residential estate of Puerta del Aire. It wasn’t particularly pleasant, he said, or close to the center of town, but if what I needed was to be alone and think my own thoughts, it was a good spot with no distractions. I didn’t know if he was proposing this because he’d realized that our shared lie would oblige him to live with me for a longer period and, hence, be a little discreet about his sexual relations, or because he genuinely wanted me to attain spiritual maturity through living ascetically; my guess is that it had more to do with the former. In any case, I decided to take him at his word later on, not because I thought any good would come from staying in Puerta del Aire, but because I took pity on him and imagined that neither he nor my mother would want me vomiting up her thick milk every night for much longer.
The whole conversation took place in the street while Marcelo and I were walking to the store, at Adela’s request, to buy some things we needed for the New Year’s Eve dinner. I explained to him that I’d already told Cecilia the lie, so all that was needed to put the plan into action was to tell it to my mother when we got back. On January 2, Cecilia would get into the red car and travel, in the reverse direction, the highway that had drawn so many reflections from me on the outbound journey.
13
And so it went: on New Year’s Eve we had a meager, vegetarian dinner—Marcelo had complained about the Christmas turkey and suggested cooking something without meat. And Cecilia got into the red car and set off back to routine, and my vacation changed from being a temporary, reversible rest to a limbo of idleness, promising great satisfaction, or great disillusion, or simply hours and hours of looking at the wall. And my mom returned to her university work, which didn’t take up too much of her time, and Marcelo went back to his small office at the university and spoke to Velásquez and told him about our lie, hatched from his supposed book. And I woke up alone in the morning in Adela’s house without having heard anything too upsetting in the night—no swimming contest, no asthmatic child—and sat by the cactus garden and felt myself to be a little freer, a little lonelier, and a little older, in the venerable sense of old age, which can, I imagine, be positive, to the extent that it allows you—will allow me, if I get there—to think only about the things each morning offers. In my case, the morning offered me the difficult choice between either staying in my mom’s house or moving into Puerta del Aire. But instead of weighing these options, as I would when making a decision during office hours, when one considers the pros and cons and makes a rational decision based on a quantitative calculation—more pros and fewer cons beats fewer pros and more cons—I endeavored to sit silently for a few hours and then suddenly decide one way or the other, basing this decision on, for example, climatic conditions—things related to the moment, which is always unfathomable and irrational. And I wanted it to be the moment, and perhaps the climate—not the climate as a matter of clouds, but something else: the climate defined as the totality of objects that surrounded me, the material climate that is derived or emanates from the harmony and secret communication between inorganic things; objects are traitorous—that would make me suddenly decide to go to Puerta del Aire, to Marcelo’s tasteless little house, where, what’s more (now come the pros and cons), away from any watchful eye, it would be easier for me to pretend I was copyediting Velásquez’s book. And where it would be easier for me, I supposed, to quench my thirst without having recourse to my mother’s thick milk, the thick, maternal milk that comes in bottles with the labels falling off. And where, moreover, it would be easier for me to avoid the reasons for my sleeplessness—swimmers doing the crawl, children with asthma—and give free rein to my collector’s impulse, which is neither a destructive impulse nor a creative impulse, but simply this: an impulse to accumulate without any great degree of coherence, an impulse to conserve and find a space for the things that already exist, that apparently have always existed.
14
Marcelo rings the doorbell of his own house, in which I’ve installed myself. The bell emits a shrill, piercing screech that continues going round and round the spiral of my ear long after the external sound has faded, like the way the sea continues to be heard in the spirals of seashells, or so they say. I know it’s Marcelo because no one else has rung the doorbell; no one else would, or at least I can’t think of anyone who would. I’ve been here for two days, and no one has rung the doorbell. Just Marcelo, yesterday, who rang and came in to see how things were, to see, I suppose, if I’d destroyed the horrendous furniture or had a problem with the security guard, to whom Marcelo has, apparently, taken a certain dislike. Or it could be that Marcelo came yesterday and, as seems likely from the sound of the doorbell, has come again today because he’s genuinely interested in what’s happening to me; in what’s happening to me inside my head, I mean. This is an option that seems—against the grain of my habitual skepticism in relation to the human species in general—probable, and I say this because yesterday Marcelo sat in the armchair opposite me, in the afternoon, at this hour, after leaving the university, where he’d probably done nothing, or at least nothing of any note, nothing worth mentioning: he didn’t mention anything he might have done, or even thought. He sat, as I said, opposite me, in the armchair opposite the armchair where I myself am now sitting, and asked, in a tone of voice new to me—more serious or more sincere, perhaps, if sincerity can be identified in a tone of voice—what I’d been thinking. “What have you been thinking?” he asked, as if he was really interested in what I think, as if I myself was interested in what I think and was capable of retaining and then transmitting it and letting my thought fall into the other person’s mind and then germinate, timidly, and grow into a tree, or at least a small plant of thought, of ideas, of communication. Something of that kind, so they say, though using less hackneyed similes, is possible between people, though it’s never happened to me.
Marcelo rings the doorbell of his own house, a dwelling that was never, strictly speaking, completely his own since just as soon as he came to Los Girasoles, he says, he realized that renting this glorified apartment (it would be an exaggeration to call it a house) had been a mistake, and it was perhaps for that reason he had sought, or at least opened himself to the possibility of, a love affair, of being infatuated by a local, or reasonably local woman like my mother, who wasn’t born in this town but has lived here for some years—I’ve forgotten how many—and, in any case, is more local than Marcelo since she is at least from this country. Marcelo rings the doorbell of his glorified apartment and, hearing the bell, I realize his glorified apartment is, in fact, after only a few days, my glorified apartment. And I say that it is, in fact, mine because I have a proverbia
l ability for setting up home, for occupying a space in a human, cultural way, for impregnating the space with the smell of my actions, which don’t need too much repetition to become everyday actions—it’s enough for me to do the same thing twice, on two successive days, for it to become a ritual, identifiable activity, my way of inhabiting that portion of air in this house in Puerta del Aire, which is the not unpoetic name with which they christened this awful, soulless residential estate. But the glorified apartment is not only mine in the, let’s say, intangible sense of my having actively appropriated its space but also in the, let’s call it tangible sense of having placed in that space a series of objects (not many) that indicate an organizing mind different from Marcelo’s—objects are traitorous. There are, for example, some pieces of volcanic, or at least porous—I know nothing about geology—rock that I found in the sun-scorched streets of Puerta del Aire. Pieces of rock that I liked, I’m not quite sure why, and brought here and distributed around the apartment in an order that could be described as random, though is, in some way, comforting: I am comforted by the visual continuity the pieces of rock confer on the whole house—they are, you could say, its decorative focus.
Marcelo rings the doorbell of his own—my own—glorified apartment, and I get up from the armchair and open the door, which he himself could have opened since he has keys, but which, I guess, he prefers not to open out of respect for my privacy. I open the door, and he comes in and sits in the armchair opposite the one in which I was sitting—I think he must have noticed a sign, the depression left by my weight on one of the armchairs, and for that reason sat in the other one: objects are traitorous—after, naturally, greeting me in a slightly chilly way, the way Europeans do. (But, I ask myself, have I ever in my life greeted any other European person?) And having installed himself in the opposite armchair, he asks what I’ve been thinking, as he did yesterday, as I suspect he will do tomorrow, as I hope he will continue to do for some time (the time I’m here, in his glorified apartment, for example, or the time our relationship lasts, which can’t be forever, I tell myself: nothing is), because I like the idea of someone asking me fairly regularly what I’ve been thinking—it’s never happened before—although I’m not sure if I have today, in contrast to yesterday, anything to tell him.
Among Strange Victims Page 17