Among Strange Victims

by Daniel Saldaña París

  Rodrigo left the cantina with a girl on either arm—an achievement that earned him the respect of a number of the most stupid drunks in Los Girasoles—and the three of them headed for the main square, where he remembered having seen cabs waiting for customers when he was walking alone. On the way, Daga threw up noisily into some bushes, and Rodrigo held her forehead like a patient father. Domitile seemed worried but, nevertheless, thanked Rodrigo for having been their escort for the night. They exchanged telephone numbers, and the girls promised to call soon, even though they would be leaving for another city—they couldn’t remember which—the following afternoon, so the possibility of meeting them again seemed fairly low.

  When he returned to the cantina, having put the girls into a cab with instructions to take them straight to their hotel, Micaela had disappeared.

  It was this fortuitous disappearance that had contributed to fixing in his mind the image of Micaela with the bewitching aura of a blueprint. If he had met her again on his return, still accompanied by her irritating partner, Micaela would have seemed a more terrestrial creature; if not just an ordinary girl, at least one of flesh and blood. But her disappearance placed a wax seal on the meeting and allowed it to rarefy in his memory. To satisfy that feeling of imperfection the evening had produced, Rodrigo was obliged to see Micaela again soon, alone if possible, without the annoying presence of Jimmie, for whom he felt contempt mingled with envy.

  7

  He had to wait a week for the second meeting to occur. A long week, cooped up in the house, during which Rodrigo experienced a sense of loneliness more profound than the one that, until then, had lulled him to sleep each night. If his life, including his married life, were indeed that of a loner, it suddenly seemed the fact of having met Micaela, of having glimpsed or sketched out in his warped imagination the possibility of an old age at her side, was essentially modifying the density of the loneliness that had never even come close to disturbing him.

  Loneliness is always the same, but not the lonely. The discourse we hold back in front of others has a different weight to that which we speak aloud when no one is listening. In a certain sense, one offers inner comfort since it is a form of intimacy. The other, in contrast, makes a hollow in the world, in whose furthest corners the words ricochet to remind us that they have no taste.

  Rodrigo called Cecilia one cloudy afternoon. She sounded unusually cheerful, and there was no indication in her voice of the well-known reproach that normally underlay her tremulous vowels, sometimes prolonged into a loving complaint (“They’ll seeee. You’ll be back sooon,” she would say to him). But this time, nothing: a precise description of the atmosphere in the office, a detailed account of her father’s most recent attempts to eliminate the damp in the living room—the old man had taken up the task again, with modest results and an irrational sense of victory . . . in fact, a trivial, if not completely comfortable conversation, without the mild, balsamic triviality of couples who tie each other down with the chains of their inexhaustible affection. Or perhaps Rodrigo’s mood—equivalent to the one that invades a sensitive soul when he considers the possibility of having contracted an incurable disease—was tingeing his perception of the world and other people with a violet hue, the violet of his sporadic migraines and his frequent periods of melancholy. Micaela—like a tumor, the nature of which is still unclear—glowed in his memory, threatening to either spread through his hypothalamus or discreetly dwindle under the benign, chemotherapeutic effects of distance. Rodrigo couldn’t decide which was more worrying: that love existed and had, a few days before, wormed its way into him, or that the adulterated tequila in the cantina had played a dirty trick on him. In the former case, he would be obliged to renounce, out of simple coherence, the greater part of his cynicism, something he found worrying since his cynicism was, as far as he knew, his only recourse for externalizing a sharp intelligence; in the latter, the unbearable confirmation of the mediocrity of the world would weigh on him for several decades, until a merciful case of Alzheimer’s would turn his stern, pensive expression into one of drooling innocence. The dice of his life, as someone given to cliché would say, had been cast.

  Marcelo came to visit him on Wednesday afternoon. He had heard from Velásquez of Rodrigo’s meeting with Jimmie and the charming Micaela in the cantina in the center. (The gringo had told Velásquez.) He asked about his impressions of the pair, and Rodrigo looked upward and turned his eyes significantly to the left, a zone he reserved for dark thoughts or the most serious considerations, considerations that left him, after some hours of deep conjecture, with a trochaic murmur in his chest.

  Marcelo Valente was less talkative than on previous occasions. However, he embarked on a topic that he rarely touched: his relationship with Adela. He told Rodrigo he had “cultivated” a growing affection for his mother, and that verb immediately reminded Rodrigo of his wild, vacant lot in Mexico City. “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” he recited to himself, with a nod to Voltaire, while Marcelo continued his speech. The Spaniard had moved on to his future plans. He wasn’t sure what to do with his essay on Richard Foret and Bea Langley. Gradually, during the months of study and the rereading of love letters, whirlwind poems and unfinished, romantic manifestos, Marcelo’s interest had moved from Foret to Langley. He was no longer so much interested in the mysterious disappearance of the boxer-poet as in Bea’s life in the aftermath of that event.

  “I’d like, I think, to focus on what happens after the letters of ‘The End’ fade from the screen. Sure, Richard Foret disappears in the Gulf of Mexico, or is killed in the revolutionary turmoil, or simply vanishes without a trace, as people skilled in the art of bad writing say. But Bea continues in the world afterwards. She’s pregnant with, and then gives birth to Foret’s posthumous daughter; she returns to her native London only to discover it is a city that has nothing to say to her; she travels to Buenos Aires and then, again, to Mexico in search of clues to Richard’s whereabouts, even though she knows very well there is no hope; she writes poems that don’t attain global fame or change the face of literary modernism but that give her moderate pleasure and arouse the admiration of a few friends; she lives something like forty or forty-five years after Foret’s disappearance; she sets up house in Paris because it is the only city where she feels like a stranger, and to have seen everything before is a more than institutionalized way of life; she raises a daughter with whom she hopes to remedy, karmically, the neglect of her first two kids (both of whom, in time, turn out well, although they retain an indelible core of resentment). Beatrice Langley incarnates a drama more private—less spectacular, if you will—than that of her dead husband, but no less intense for it. Foret’s life is the stuff films are made of; Langley’s is the stuff of a novel that, rather than ending with a bang, extends over hundreds of pages until the ink begins to fade and the words become illegible.”

  Rodrigo listens in silence to the monologue of his—the word comes into his mind—friend and thinks that in reality Marcelo is obliquely talking about his own life, and Adela’s. It’s clear that in a short time they have become an authentic couple. His mother absentmindedly strokes Marcelo’s neck at breakfast; Rodrigo does not remember her doing anything like that before. What Marcelo is saying, by means of the story of Richard Foret and Beatrice Langley, is that he wants to stay in Los Girasoles; he is not willing just to remember it all as a more or less happy sabbatical trip, the only product of which will be a monograph on a dead poet and an arsenal of memories in which Adela’s thighs have a starring role. He wants to stay, to renounce his lifelong, vain ambition to gain modest fame through his books; he wants to “cultiver son jardin,” the garden of bluish cacti and perennial weeds in Adela’s backyard in Los Girasoles.

  Rodrigo also wants to cultivate his garden but has yet to find it, unless it is that lot filled with thorn bushes where a hen scratches around night and day in search of worms. Which is his garden? he wonders. A placid life in that small town, like the one Marcelo wants, going to spir
itualism sessions with a crazy gringo and a girl he silently desires? Imbibing urine every couple of weeks as a member of an exclusive pro-contemporary art sect? Conjugal life with Cecilia in DF and resigning himself to feeling constantly out of place in relation to everything that exists in his grimy routine? Or is his garden death, a patch of dry earth to which his bones are added; the grief, initially, of his loved ones and then an oblivion that slowly falls like a golden mantle on the heads of Adela, Marcelo, his father, Cecilia, and that at times, being fallible, falls back for a moment—during what would have been his birthday, let’s say—to allow them to dream of an Eden that doesn’t exist and from which Rodrigo contemplates, with peace in his soul, the actions of those who are still alive? Or is his garden nomadic, the negation of that fixed custom of being oneself, a custom you have so diligently cultivated until this moment? Which is his cultivable garden? Which is the piece of the world given to him on loan, even if it is only to set fire to it? Which is the corner crammed with supermarket bags full of cadavers where he will erect the temple of his indifference?

  8

  A couple of days after Marcelo’s visit, Rodrigo walked through the empty streets of the Puerta del Aire residential estate, looking at the drawn curtains and the pickup trucks as if they were desert mirages, until he reached the security booth, where the guardian, the Cerberus of all this abandon, the tough, immutable Jacinto Nogales Pedrosa, called a cab that would take him along a route stretching farther than his wallet to Jimmie’s studio, the provisional temple of that religion invented in the clamor of a few tequilas, of which he was at the point of becoming an acolyte.

  The devastation reserved for us by the confirmation of an ominous truth is more subtle than that offered by our first glimpse of that truth. A man can wake every morning and look out his window to check that, there outside, the end of the world—in the biblical and material sense of the topic, setting aside metaphor—is still unraveling in five-hundred-foot flames, and the shock of that everyday confirmation operates inside him in a way that is less visible but more heartrending than the first vision of that same apocalypse. Repetition is a bitch with an arched spine that peacefully and conscientiously gnaws at the bones that keep us upright until it brings us down.

  Some such words, to cut a long story short, were passing through Rodrigo’s mind as he entered the dusty house and found Micaela sitting cross-legged on a straw mat. It was no foggy alcoholic delirium that had made him see her, in that cantina, cloaked (in the Catholic usage) by a virginal mantle of gold thread and with a halo of grace around her fawn-like head. All that was still present and even, perhaps, accentuated by the gloomy space in which he now found her and the sweaty, incense-laden greeting Jimmie offered him. There are women who are specialists in benefiting from the contrast with their environment.

  Rodrigo tepidly extended a hand to Jimmie, who didn’t hesitate to trap him in a lateral embrace while destroying the metacarpals of his right hand in an irritating impersonation of camaraderie. Frigging grimy gringo. The aroma of dark tobacco exuded by the rags for which he served as a bony clotheshorse made him wretch. Men who use olfactory resources as statement should be hunted down by the forces of law and order, he thought as he detached himself from the unctuous foreigner in the way one detaches a piece of chewing gum from the sole of one’s shoe.

  The atmosphere in Jimmie’s studio was so insalubrious that Professor Velásquez dissolved into a trompe-l’oeil worthy of David Copperfield. Only when he spoke—“How are things going with the editing of that phantom book?”—and rounded off his witticism with a wheezing laugh, did Rodrigo become aware of his presence, forgotten in one of the three Acapulco chairs delimiting the borders of the living room.

  Although Marcelo had not yet arrived, Professor Velásquez was undiplomatic enough to tell Rodrigo that his place was on the floor, as there were only three chairs, and in that house, decisions were made by the “council of wise old men.” The allusion to this fictitious authority could only be irritating. Rodrigo was obviously younger than the other three men—the gringo, Velásquez, and Marcelo—and was closer in age to Micaela, even though she was a decade younger than him. The fact that these gentlemen were involved in so eccentric an undertaking as deciphering the future form of art by means of hypnosis seemed to be aggravated by their show of insensitivity to two youths—though of very different caliber—like Rodrigo and Micaela. There was, in Velásquez’s reference to the “council of wise old men,” not only a touch of rancor directed at their youth, obliging them to sit on the floor, but also a thinly disguised sense of inferiority. Velásquez, fatty Velásquez, whose cranial terrain was divided between areas of baldness and dandruff; Velásquez, the survivor of three divorces, the anonymous professor who years before had lost the ability to win over his students by any other means than blackmail; Velásquez, the brute, the man who had early on become fascinated by aesthetics—the aesthetics of the avant-garde—and had clung to it, disguising his interest as intellectual research, as if it were the last trace of his youth; that Velásquez had found, in the hypnosis project, the enthusiasm he needed to channel his eighth adult crisis into the sense of power he longed for.

  Marcelo Valente’s reasons for embarking on such an unlikely enterprise couldn’t be very different. They were both men who, after a couple of decades given up to teaching, needed a new relationship with the world, a mirage of youth and delirium that would quash their dissatisfactions while erectile dysfunction was gaining ground and stripping them once and for all of their thirst for History—it is well known that History is a phallic aspiration denied to eunuchs, one that women access in a completely different, much more intellectual and tempered way, while men beat totemic drums around it.

  For his part, Rodrigo’s motivation was clearer. He couldn’t give a damn about the future of art, the sense of power that hypnotizing others might bring him; he didn’t need any other emotion than that provided by his long conversations with Marcelo in the house in Puerta del Aire, with the addition of an occasional altercation with his mother and the customary coitus with Cecilia on his return to Mexico City. He didn’t particularly need to feel more alive or to gain a timely victory in an idiotic battle that is always lost before it begins. No. What Rodrigo wanted, for the moment, was to go on smelling Micaela for a little longer. And to gather sufficient sensual material to allow him to dream about her later. What Rodrigo needed were reasons to have regrets when he reached a half century and, looking back, say in a tone of moral sententiousness, “I should have . . .” He needed to be wrong; in short, to stumble and doubt, and to be moved in some unique way by the sense that the communion he had searched so hard for was there, with its legs crossed on the straw mat beside him. Rodrigo didn’t need to feel alive, like other people: he needed to be alive.

  He and Micaela made themselves as comfortable as possible on the matting, and a slight touching of hands as she maneuvered to make space for him revealed a skin whose softness was only eclipsed by the warmth it radiated. Rodrigo even thought the woman—it was an exaggeration to so describe her—might have a fever, so scorching was his perception of the contact.

  Jimmie, as usual, immediately monopolized the conversation. Just as soon as he had handed out the cans of beer—he gave Micaela a glass of water—he sat in one of the three chairs—the other, like an invitation or an offence remained empty—and once again embarked on the tale of his discovery of hypnosis and his later work. Rodrigo had heard the story secondhand, by way of Marcelo’s measured narrative, and had not imagined it could be as complicated as it actually was. Jimmie changed the details with each new version, and now he made it sound as if he had always, from the first moment, despised Dr. Mind and planned his stealthy betrayal. The digressions were also different from those he had embarked on when telling the story to Marcelo. On this occasion, he said almost nothing about the CIA experiments and instead spoke at length, without respite, about his time as an illegal herbalist in the late eighties.

  Rodrigo li
stened patiently, considering whether he should say he had already heard the story from Marcelo. He felt sorry for Micaela, who must have listened to all those innocuous details of the gringo’s drifting pilgrimage three hundred times. Velásquez, who in Jimmie’s presence became, if possible, a little more opaque, vegetated in his chair as if that string of nonsense were a cradlesong lulling a child. Rodrigo’s legs went to sleep. He wasn’t used to sitting on the floor—a level that, in his view, was more appropriate for animals—but accepted the sacrifice because Micaela’s scent, a mixture of incense and vanilla with something more unsettling, came to him like a perfect symphony.

  Jimmie rattled out his anecdote for a while longer. As he was moving toward the finale, there was a knock, and Velásquez made the superhuman effort of detaching himself from his chair to open the door to Marcelo, who delayed his greetings and stood by his chair so as not to interrupt the gringo’s monologue. Finally, Jimmie came to the end his story. Marcelo greeted, in this order, Rodrigo, Micaela, and the gringo—he had already absentmindedly clasped hands with Velásquez—and Micaela stood up—an eddy of more potent smells around Rodrigo, who followed her with his eyes—to attend to the visitors and fetch drinks, as was dictated by the rigorous patriarchy in which they lived.

  It’s unimportant to mention how much they drank. Suffice it to say that tequila, once again, was the liquor selected to prepare for the coming ritual. Rather than hypnosis, they spoke of everyday matters for a few hours until a chance silence fell on the room, and Jimmie took advantage of it to ask, in a commanding tone, if they should begin. Velásquez was the only one to give a clear answer, in the affirmative, while Marcelo and Rodrigo nodded rather unconvincingly, and Micaela remained, as ever, silent.