Among Strange Victims

by Daniel Saldaña París

  Micaela stood up and went to fetch a glass from the dilapidated kitchen. Jimmie had his eyes fixed on Marcelo Valente, who was attempting to avoid the question that would inevitably follow.

  “What do you think?” Jimmie eventually asked. “Do you want to join the project?”

  Marcelo stammered feigned admiration and praised the gringo’s narrative talents. “But I’m not sure,” he then said, “what all this has to do with me.”

  Jimmie hit his brow with the palm of his hand, like someone who has remembered that he’s left the stove on three blocks from home. He took a deep breath and began a new monologue at the very moment Micaela returned to the room and sat cross-legged in her place, putting her empty glass down in front of her without having served another round of tequila to the others, as Marcelo imagined she would.

  The thing was that the objectivity of the method, its ability to effectively predict or anticipate the future, depended not only on the hypnotist’s training and the willingness of the hypnotized subject, but also on confirmation by others of the content observed during hypnosis. That is to say: a fetish could be a fetish or it could be the fruit of the individual’s imagination, and only during a collective session of hypnosis, with everyone involved simultaneously diving into the future, or into the subconscious, or wherever the hell they were supposed to be diving, could the form of an unmistakably anticipatory object be defined. Everyone would search for the same fetish during the session and, given that they were intimately connected, thanks to the group exercises undertaken beforehand, the anticipatory potential of one member of the group would empower the other hypnotized subjects. On their return from the voyage, they would describe the object to each other, then they would proceed to construct a replica in clay or latex or whatever.

  Jimmie paused for as long as it takes to smile. His eyes opened enormously wide and seemed bluer than ever. Marcelo glanced at Velásquez, his ally in reason in the midst of barbarity, but Velásquez was looking fixedly at the gringo and appeared to have jumped the gun on the hypnosis session. Marcelo saw his friend had, some time ago, become ensnared in Jimmie’s web, and that his predilection for all things magical, perhaps due to his American origins, was much greater than his (Marcelo’s origins were, when you came down to it, European and rationalist).

  Marcelo had to make some response, and he knew what it should be: this was all madness and too much like the Mexican B movie Velásquez had recommended to him. He had no intention of getting involved in any such game, and if it hadn’t been for the tequila, it would all have been a waste of time. But he didn’t say any of that. His desire to please at any cost was stronger that his convictions, and he didn’t want to generate disaccord between the gringo and Velásquez, since the fat professor must already have said something about his willingness for the gringo to risk inviting him. So, Marcelo agreed with feigned enthusiasm. He said he was ready to participate in the collective hypnosis session, that they should get out the pocket watch or whatever was needed.

  Jimmie gave a triumphal smile, and Velásquez’s previously stern face appeared to relax into an expression of relief. Micaela stood up and, after lifting her skirt to her waist, slid her white panties down to the floor, where they lay like a dead animal. She took Marcelo’s glass, which by then contained not a drop of tequila, and placed it under her skirt. After a moment of general expectation, the tinkle of urine was heard and Micaela took the glass, with a little piss in the bottom, from beneath her skirt. She repeated the ritual with the three other glasses and finally arranged them all in the center of the table; then she poured a shot of tequila into each glass of piss. Jimmie drew the girl to him, sat her on his knees, and kissed her on the mouth. Velásquez was the first to raise his glass, and he then clinked it with those of the gringo and the girl. The three looked simultaneously at Marcelo, and he wondered if they had rehearsed this gesture beforehand. His head hurt, and he thought, “I’m drunk; I’m so sloshed I’m seeing things, and this is not happening.” He raised his glass and enthusiastically clinked it against the others.

  He had never tasted anything so delicious.

  2

  There was just one last thing to be done before the preparatory sessions of hypnosis could begin. Each time Jimmie mentioned it, he lost his cool. According to him, it was dangerous to initiate a session of collective hypnosis with an even number of participants. Once, in Trinidad and Tobago (When had he been in Trinidad and Tobago? thought Marcelo, without believing a word of what the gringo was saying, or only half believing it, as if departing from the promise that it was necessary to compensate for his exaggerations with a veil of incredulity, even though, at heart, one might feel darkly attracted by his exaggerations, by the prospect that they might not be exaggerations), he had tried it with a group of four, and the results had been disastrous. Marcelo interrupted: “Aren’t there supposed to be three of us? Micaela, Velásquez, and me, with you directing us?” No, Jimmie also intended to enter the hypnosis, to guide them from the inside, or something like that. Marcelo thought about Foret, about the photos from his final years, where he still looked like an elegant gladiator, a type of dark superhero, living his double life as a poor poet and fifth-rate boxer, his life as a beggar and the prince of brawling, his multiple lives dedicated to love, and that other life, the only redeeming one, the life he shared with Bea until the summer of 1918. Marcelo thought about Foret because there was nothing in his own predictable life story with a high enough level of mysticism or madness with which to compare and measure the madness of what was taking place. He turned to the great ones. That, thought Professor Valente, is what tradition is: a series of parameters for measuring the madness of the things that happen to us. He believed, with Protagoras, that man was the measure of all things. And Richard Foret, in this case, was man.

  Micaela already had a lot of experience in individual hypnotism since Jimmie had been inducing deep states in her for months (Before fucking her? Marcelo wondered), but it was possible that, in a group session, the girl would be unable to control the course of the hypnosis.

  The reasoning seemed to him, at best, muddled, but after many failed hints from Jimmie, and Velásquez telling him bluntly, Marcelo understood they wanted him to persuade his “stepson”—as they called Rodrigo—to join the project. Marcelo had never thought of Rodrigo as his stepson, but he now realized he could justifiably be considered as such since Adela and he had been living together for a good while, and were talking about the possibility of prolonging this situation, even after Marcelo’s time in Los Girasoles came to an end.

  To Marcelo, the warning—foolishly repeated by Velásquez and the gringo since the day they had drunk Micaela’s urine—not to tell Adela anything seemed curious. Only Rodrigo was to be told, and then he would accept the warm invitation to lose his wits and keep the secret from his mother.

  3

  Jimmie had seen Rodrigo one day walking through the streets of the town. He had said hello, thinking he was an acquaintance, and the young man had replied with a nod that, to Jimmie, at that moment, seemed touched with some antique grace. He had done his research: Rodrigo was Adela’s son, he had been chucked out of his job in DF, left his ugly, vulgar wife, and had been staying in a small house on the Puerta del Aire estate since the beginning of the year.

  The relationship between Jimmie and Adela was, to put it mildly, dire. In Los Girasoles, everyone knew everyone else, and both Adela and Jimmie frequented those circles surrounding the world of academia, where the professors gave mutual demonstrations of their aesthetic sensibility and theoretical versatility: jazz—or even trova; many of them didn’t know the difference—gigs in some café in the center of town, yoga classes given by a professor of economics in the front room of her house, group exhibitions of the photographs taken by the teenage offspring of those same professors.

  They had met at one of those events, two years before, neither of them now remembered exactly how, and had flirted listlessly, more to shake off the tedium of provi
ncial life than to get laid or have a real relationship. The fact is that they had exchanged phone numbers—in fact, Adela had given her number to Jimmie, who didn’t have a phone at that time—and arranged to meet for a drink during the week. The date had been a complete failure. Jimmie turned up smelling of marijuana and had forgotten what Adela looked like, so he sat down at a table near Adela’s where another woman, much younger, was drinking a beer alone. Adela watched from her table, filled simultaneously with compassion and rage. The young woman, in contrast to what might be expected of someone who has been suddenly accosted by a dirty gringo smelling of marijuana, had taken it well and let the stranger buy her a drink. Jimmie, convinced he was with Adela, the professor he had met a few days before, didn’t understand what sort of game she was playing. He followed her lead and acted as if it were the first time they had spoken, convinced that her use of a pseudonym—the Adela who wasn’t Adela had told him her name was Natalia—signaled a degree of perversion that would be useful when it came to sex.

  Natalia and Jimmie drank and laughed for two hours, closely observed by Adela without anyone noticing her presence. At the end of those two hours, Adela had drunk, all alone, as many beers as Jimmie and Natalia together and, she realized, was in an almost perilous state of inebriation. Eventually, plucking up her courage, she stood and walked to the table where the gringo was charming the young woman with his anecdotes. Initially Jimmie thought she was a waiter and held out an empty bottle without looking up, muttering thanks. Noting that Adela didn’t take the bottle, Jimmie turned his head and found himself looking at her face, bathed in tears of humiliation. “I’m Adela, you moronic gringo. You stood me up for her at the next table.” Jimmie made a wry face when he understood his mistake. Adela walked unsteadily to the door.

  Many things could have happened at that point. Jimmie could have caught up with her and spent hours begging her to forgive him. They might never have got as far as anything approaching a stable relationship, but at least they could have remained friends, which, in a small town like Los Girasoles, was something worthy of consideration. But Jimmie opted for the worst possible reaction. Charmed as he was by the low neckline of his impromptu companion, he said, in a voice loud enough for Adela to hear, “There are some weird, disturbed people in this town, aren’t there?” The girl’s laugh wounded Adela even more deeply than Jimmie’s question, which condemned her to ridicule.

  4

  Rodrigo listened to Marcelo’s confused, long-winded story, sitting in what was now his armchair, while the Spaniard sat rigid, apparently uncomfortable, facing him. Velásquez had wanted to be there when he explained the plan to the “stepson,” in case he stumbled over some point or forgot some fundamental fact that needed to be addressed, but Marcelo felt Rodrigo would dismiss the proposal immediately if he suspected from the start just how divorced from reality Velásquez now was. So they were alone again, as they had been during their earlier conversations.

  He told Rodrigo about the gringo and lingered over a very extended description of Micaela, emphasizing her disturbing beauty and the fact that, despite all odds, her piss tasted divine. He told him there was a lot of alcohol splashing around, and that although there was certainly something ridiculous about the whole affair, what mattered was meeting up with these people every so often—a couple of times a week maybe, or three nearer the time for the actual hypnosis session—sharing something of the disquiet of Los Girasoles.

  Rodrigo listened with a poker face. It was impossible to guess what was going through his mind, Marcelo thought, and all the better, because he could be thinking about the possibility of making a sudden return to DF—back to his wife—putting a distance between himself and that bleak, dusty plain, where sensible people ended up giving in to the darkest whims of the soul, to the most grotesque claims of an unknown gringo, to simple, unadorned madness, clearly pronouncing each of that word’s syllables, few though they might be, because madness only has two audible syllables, but is followed by a long series of sounds that seem to seep toward the interior of the word; syllables that are never pronounced, but throb within the word and are, in a certain sense, alluded to when someone says “madness,” especially if they say it consciously, thinking of the multiple, not necessarily pleasant forms of madness, that word of infinite syllables.

  Rodrigo listened with a poker face but inside was not really listening, or he was listening and responding and carrying on an angry, inaudible dialogue in which he posed counterarguments and swept aside excuses related to what Marcelo was telling him. That dialogue went more or less like this:

  “Frigging Marcelo. He’s got an amazing proclivity for weird situations. Where can he have found those people, those stories of piss drunk at midnight in dark hovels full of ceramic plates? Is he telling me lies? Inventing an absurd story to see how credulous I am, to report straight back to my mother about my reaction to all this? No, that can’t be it. Not after the conversations we’ve had; after we’ve jointly revitalized the dry, dusty house of language with a couple of good conversations. But if he’s serious, what the hell does he expect from me? On the other hand, drinking the piss of a beautiful young girl sounds pretty tempting. Disgusting, but tempting. What’s more, drinking piss is an infallible indication you’re in the presence of the sacred, or something like it. It’s easy to imagine this is the sort of thing that ends in a whole pile of people committing suicide, here in this remote town full of academics. The way I see it, it would be pretty sad to die with a capsule of poison between your teeth and a message tattooed on your skull, next to three or four other guys who drank piss, here in a town full of people dedicated to higher education. But I’ve got nothing else to do. I’ve been cooped up here for weeks. Cecilia is desperate for me to return to DF, and this is just the sort of stupid plan I could use as a triumphal end to my stay in Los Girasoles. So, I’ll drink piss with them a couple of times, let them hypnotize me, then I’ll go back to DF and look for a job as a knowledge administrator someplace. As a bulletin writer somewhere. As a waiter, if I have to. And I’ll be a worthy man. The poor but honorable man my wife deserves: poor, honorable, and unhappy because of my flagrant uselessness.”

  5

  And so Rodrigo had in the end, if rather vaguely, agreed to join the hypnotists at least once, just to hear Jimmie’s explanation of the project firsthand. That was the most Marcelo could get from him, and he was satisfied.

  A few days after that conversation with Marcelo, Rodrigo decided to make a foray beyond the walls of Puerta del Aire and go out for a drink one evening, on his own, in the center of Los Girasoles. Marcelo had lent him a little money to cover his expenses, and so that he could pretend he was receiving payment from Velásquez for the phantom proofreading he was phantasmagorically undertaking.

  He asked Jacinto Nogales Pedrosa, the security guard, for the number of a cab service, and was set down in a street flanking the main square. He walked around the colonial part of town without much idea of what he was looking for, and even went a little farther on to the market, where, despite the fact that the stalls had closed, things were quite lively.

  The cantina he entered didn’t look too much like the typical local joint: it was, rather, a touristy spot serving regional brews. Only a couple of tables were occupied, and a jukebox was pumping out deafening boleros.

  At one of the tables, the darkest and farthest from the bar, Rodrigo made out two foreign girls, looking half-lost and too naive for a country like Mexico. After a couple of shots of tequila at the bar, he plucked up his courage and went over to their table. They, the foreign girls, were very young, and Rodrigo was surprised to see them alone in a bar, without a man or responsible adult to chaperone them. One was good-looking, in a gamin kind of way, with a pretty nose and outlandishly long black eyelashes. Her hair was short, and she seemed, from her smile, more willing than the other to strike up a conversation.

  Rodrigo asked if he could sit down, and the girl with the long lashes answered with a smile while taking
a cigarette from a packet and rummaging in her bag for a lighter. Rodrigo decided that what could have been indifference was assent and took the seat beside her. The other girl seemed more concerned with the ambiance of the cantina and only gave him a distracted, aloof glance, the way you look at someone who comes up to offer goods for sale at an inopportune moment.

  The girl with the lashes was called Domitile and was French. She spoke faltering Spanish but incorporated into it Norteño expressions, as if she had learned to speak by deciphering narco-corridos. They were both nineteen and had been living in Mexicali for eight months on a cultural exchange—as they explained—which allowed them to spend a year in Mexico learning the language before returning to begin their university studies in their respective countries—the more standoffish one was from Poland. Rodrigo was surprised by the unlikely fate that had befallen them, and jokingly apologized, in the name of all Mexicans, for the ugliness of Mexicali. Domitile agreed, smiling widely again, and explained that they were now on a group trip around the whole country, with the aim of experiencing something besides the unbearable heat of their adoptive city. In comparison with Mexicali, Los Girasoles seemed—according to the French girl—like paradise. The rest of the group was in a hotel on the outskirts of town, and they were the only ones who had dared to leave the comfort of their accommodations to seek a little local color and sample something of the way of life in the town. They had ended up in this cantina thanks to a guidebook—a particularly bad one—that only suggested anodyne places that were, therefore, characteristic of every town and settlement mentioned.

  The Polish girl, with obvious annoyance, moved her seat away from her companion’s cigarette smoke, and Rodrigo took advantage of this distance to strike up a more intimate conversation with Domitile. She was from Nantes, had never before been outside France, and had chosen Mexico in the hope of finding a more humid climate and the constant sound of danceable music, only to be confronted with the fact that neither of these things existed in Mexicali. The Norteña music was, for her, little less than dodecaphonic, and she invariably suffered a nosebleed every afternoon due to the exquisite sun of the city and the desert dust. Her journey around Mexico, though brief and organized by people unacquainted with the local terrain, was in some way redeeming the previous months of suffering. She even thought Los Girasoles was pretty, compared with the neighborhood in which she had lived in Mexicali, in the house of a middle-class couple who had given the two girls room and board in exchange for sending their son to France the following year.