1
It’s unnecessary to start by describing the actions that make up my routine. That tedious list will come later. First, I’d like to state that my head floats about two inches above the top of my neck, detached from me. From that position, it’s easier for me to observe the irritating texture of the days.
When it rains, I don’t get melancholy. Quite the reverse. I simply have the impression that the weather is, finally, doing justice to the general grayness of existence. Good-bye, tropical hypocrisy; let the sun return to its corner of the galaxy and for once leave us to contemplate the unrelieved darkness that looms over us, sad mortals attired in fake Nike tennis shoes covered in mud.
I sometimes think it would be wonderful to draw diagrams that, rather than the usual preposterous and hyperspecific statistic, represent a dull, everyday state of affairs. Diagrams that tame the seeming disorder of things and help me to place myself among them. For example, a chart with the speeds, accelerations, and even the manias and minor defects of the passersby who file around this fountain. While I watch them from my disintegrating bench at one end of an oval gazebo, I try to imagine those variables, the columns and colors of that chart. The all-powerful statistics will summarize, in perfectly round numbers, the comings and goings of the pigeons. I’m not really sure how, but the fat man who is right now shifting his weight from one foot to the other and has a tiny mobile phone in his hand will be represented. The children running around their parents like small, feverish satellites will appear as relevant data, as will the couples oscillating around the bushes, looking for a patch of shadow in which to lavish indecent displays of affection on each other. In the chart will be the aimless hobbling of the elderly pensioner who, only a few moments ago, looked at me with a mixture of suppressed rage and resignation as if envying the youth of which, from the old man’s point of view, I am not taking full advantage; and the firm gait of the ice cream seller, who knows exactly what the afternoon holds for him, will be there too. The chart will also register, by means of occasional footnotes, the exceptional cases: the sudden stillness of the passersby when a screeching of tires, after a barely perceptible silence, results in a crash; the collective haste of mothers when the first raindrops fall from the sky.
And of course the chart will have a whole column, or a huge portion of its round pie, for a detailed account of my meanderings: if I take three turns around the fountain, the chart will know and represent them in a special, phosphorescent color; if I allow my steps to be guided by the perfume of a woman in a tailored dress, the same will be true; if I decide to stop idling away the time in this gazebo and walk slowly home, dragging my feet along the sidewalk as the four-in-the-afternoon sun begins to lose its strength, as I am now doing, the chart will know it too.
But there is no fanatical god of statistics who amuses himself designing Excel tables on his celestial laptop, paying disproportionate attention to this region of the world, just outside the center of Mexico City, so I have to keep walking and resign myself to the fact that I’m the only person aware of the rhythm of my steps, the only one who knows that I twist my left foot slightly inward and try to cross the digits of my right foot, putting the big toe over the one next to it, a custom thanks to which my foot begins to hurt after a few blocks, and the soles of my shoes always end up splitting in the same place, under the ball of my foot—objects are traitorous. I’m the only person who knows me in such detail, and for that reason I’m the only one who can register this, even if it is only on the ephemeral chalkboard of the memory, for the detail then to disappear, without warning, among thousands of other pieces of data related to the rhythm and cadence of my steps, data no one will ever consult with insatiable curiosity in the immensely vast annals of a virtual library of nonsense. “Statistics doesn’t recognize my true value,” I tell myself, in summary.
Fortunately, as soon as I enter my apartment, those slightly oppressive thoughts disappear at exactly the same moment I press the stop button on my iPod, take off the headphones, and switch on the living room light. In contrast to the bedroom, the living room is always dark, so I have to illuminate it, even at this hour: 4:17 in the afternoon.
The vista that is revealed isn’t particularly beautiful, or perhaps I should say it isn’t canonically beautiful. My furniture is old and each piece is slightly broken in some way, with the exception of a small red coffee table I bought two months ago; the fabric lampshade, hanging from a cable repaired with duct tape that sprouts from a hole in the ceiling, accumulates inexplicable stains that are projected onto the walls like cave paintings. Certain parts of the wall, afflicted with damp, have some sort of blisters of paint that eventually burst and cover the dark blue upholstery of my armchair in fine white powder.
But despite these signs of deterioration, to me my apartment doesn’t seem completely squalid. I have some plants, a small black bookcase holding an encyclopedia of biology—the corner of a page turned down in the fifth volume marks the most exciting chapter: rotifers—and my two windows: the one in the living room, with a view of the interior courtyard of the building, and the one in my bedroom, looking onto a vacant lot. It’s a strange arrangement of space. A sensible architect would have reversed the order, leaving the living room with an external window and the bedroom with a view of the courtyard; but maybe the architect was afraid someone would construct a ghastly, enormous building, with barbed wire everywhere, on that vacant lot, and so left the bedroom window, always less important than the one in the living room—a domestic agora—with that unfulfilled threat. Luckily, the vacant lot is still vacant.
Saturdays all, or almost all, go like this: I wake around nine, idle away the first few hours looking at the vacant lot or pretending—to no one—to read in bed; I prepare a simple breakfast and go out to take a walk around the neighborhood; I have something to eat in the street at lunchtime and, afterwards, I sit on the disintegrating bench in the gazebo to watch the people walking by. At about four o’clock, I go back home to try to do all those things I don’t have time for during the week, things that for five days I swear up and down I’ll get around to on Saturday. I do, in fact, try to do them, but I rarely succeed. Today, for example, with great effort, I’ve managed to organize the bills so that early on Monday morning, before work, I can pay the electricity, telephone, and water. Next Saturday, perhaps, I’ll manage to get someone to come and give me an exact diagnosis of what is happening to my living room walls, even though, as I said, the damp doesn’t particularly bother me. I won’t do this for my own benefit but for potential visitors, the women out there waiting for me to talk to them and invite them up for coffee—“Sorry, I’m out of sugar”—in my living room—the domestic agora, as I said. But to tell the truth, I don’t invite many people into my apartment. In fact, I’ve never invited a woman in, except for once, when a neighbor who doesn’t live here anymore asked if she could use the telephone, and that wasn’t even really an invitation, just, at best, a passive concession.
(Following the line of thought these last reflections timidly suggest, I never cease to be surprised that men in general, or so they say, have certain functional techniques for approaching women that to me seem outrageously aggressive, or at least impossibly audacious. I can’t imagine myself under any circumstances inviting a stranger, or someone only recently met, to come to my apartment; I can’t imagine myself explaining to her, while feigning distraction and opening a beer, the esoteric details of my boring job, let alone asking her about things that don’t interest me—she knows they don’t interest me—in order to get down, as soon as possible, to the hurried ritual of “getting acquainted” and then jump into bed, like in a Discovery Channel sequence. Thinking it over, the only way it would seem natural for someone to come to my apartment is if they had already been there before . . . oh, the paradox.)
The damp is, from the viewpoint of memory and its symbolic labyrinths, important to me, although I rarely admit that aloud and instead tend to complain about its detrimental effects on the upholstery of my armchair. One of my mother’s houses, when I lived with her, also had damp, and there was no way, however hard we tried, to eradicate that architectural blight permanently. It was the same throughout the whole neighborhood, all twenty-seven blocks of it. There was even a story, probably apocryphal, about a woman on the eighth block who painted the whole façade of her house in proudly traditional fuchsia and, after the damp sabotaged her undertaking in less than a week, strung a noose from a beam in the kitchen and hanged herself. It’s most likely that the two events—the rapidly rising damp and the lady’s suicide—coincided in time but without any sense of cause and effect. Whatever the case, it’s one more of the stories that mark my relationship with damp, and I now prefer to live peaceably with the moist blisters rather than carry on a vain battle against phenomena that are beyond human understanding.
My life is a repetition of one Saturday after another. What’s in between deserves another name. Sundays don’t count: they consist—I’m exaggerating here—of twenty-four wasted hours of which I will remember nothing the following day, and that following day, Monday, marks the beginning of the reign of inertia, whose only function is to carry me along smoothly, as if floating on a cloud of certainties, to the next Saturday. What’s more, on Saturdays I masturbate twice. This latter action isn’t a norm, but that’s what generally happens, though I don’t plan it: it’s one of those indisputable recurrences of natural phenomena, I guess, like when the fireflies in an area flicker on and off together at regular intervals, synchronized by an invisible being. I masturbate once in the morning, when I wake up, and again in the afternoon, when I come back from my walk around the neighborhood. I usually do it while looking at porn on the internet, though I sometimes resort to traditional methods, like imagination.
The vacant lot my apartment overlooks is the reason I moved here. Fed up with the homogenous panorama of buildings surrounding my former house, I decided I needed a little clean air, a rest for the eyes that only vegetation and a certain rural ambience could provide. As neither of these was to be found at a reasonable distance from the museum, I looked for apartments next to vacant lots. This was the only one I found.
My job isn’t particularly difficult, or particularly tedious. In fact, you could say that I like it. Three years ago, when I was out of regular work for almost four months, doing occasional commissions for various government institutions, I thought I would never find a place where spending eight hours a day would seem as pleasant as watching TV or looking through one of the volumes of my encyclopedia of biology. Then I got an offer from the museum and decided to accept it, so now I pass the day in an open-plan office with high ceilings, in an old building in the historic downtown of Mexico City, spending hours on end writing texts related to the site: press releases, salon notes, letters and speeches for the director, and so on. I also have other functions, which only occasionally require my skills, such as meeting and repelling the impromptu visitors who turn up to propose ridiculous exhibitions, or battling with the people in the printing department when there’s an error in a catalog.
As there was no title for the post I occupy, or at least no one told me what it was, I decided to invent one myself, and now I sign official e-mails as the museum’s “knowledge administrator.” I got the idea from a billboard on the Periférico beltway advertising the new degrees of a private university. One of them was just that: Knowledge Administration. I loved it; I felt it expressed my deepest convictions. Considering what is known of the world, it’s more than sufficient, I guess. Nowadays, the procedure is to administer knowledge in a way that makes people feel happy, or at least not constantly and irremediably miserable.
I’m not particularly happy. And, moreover, I don’t think I’ll ever study that degree program. In fact, I’m never going to study any degree program. In fact, I’ve never taken any course, at least not all the way through. True, I did spend four semesters doing English literature, but a deeply felt rejection of academic zeal made me stop in time, just before—hijacked by one of those diligent pupils who have an opinion about everything—I became convinced of the advantages of opting for a specific area of study, prepared to spend years dissecting the same, identical fragment of a nineteenth-century novel.
2
It must measure more or less 60 by 120 feet, but at night the lot looks bigger than it really is, and then I look out the window and imagine it’s really a large thicket. When I was young I also lived next to a vacant lot, in Cuernavaca, that all the local kids called the Thicket. (It wasn’t the damp house I mentioned earlier but another one, my father’s.) In contrast to my childhood lot, this one has a wall separating it from the street, so you’re hardly likely to be aware that the waste ground exists if you’re only passing by with other things on your mind. For that reason, I went around noting every lot that might be overgrown with shrubs until I found an apartment for rent next to one. It took me months, but I wasn’t in a hurry.
As I don’t have many belongings or many visitors, I didn’t mind that the place was really a small studio, and not in a very good state of repair. If I had more free time outside of work, I’d think about moving somewhere bigger and in better condition so I wouldn’t have to spend hours listening to the downstairs neighbors’ untimely arguments. But as I have little free time, I don’t mind much, and have even come to feel a certain delight in listening to the disputes of those neighbors, who, late at night, make me feel that I’m not alone.
3
Today, as I was leaving the museum, I decided to walk home rather than take the metro for the four stops that separate downtown from the station nearest to where I live. I’d never done this before. I hadn’t even considered the possibility of walking all the way here. I’d always imagined the various zones that make up this city, or the part of the city I know, as being unconnected on the surface, like islands that can only be approached from underground, on the metro. Walking, discovering that the pedestrian level is also a continuum, was a strange experience.
It’s curious how a small, apparently innocuous detail like walking home from work instead of taking the metro—a good hour and a half on foot, at a brisk pace—can precipitate events or influence the direction of things in a way that is perhaps irreversible. I’m surprised, truly surprised, that the greatest concepts, and also maybe some of the most vigorous spirits in history, were, in essence, determined by a particular afternoon when a man decided to do something slightly different. On a smaller scale, that’s how the decision to walk home now seems to me. I don’t mean it has converted me into a twenty-first-century Napoleon, but I have the feeling that the order of something deep in my chest has been irrevocably subverted.
I avoided the main avenues and made my way along back streets, where the noise was more bearable and I could browse the shop windows. One place galvanized my attention, though I recognize that it was arbitrariness—or perhaps a paranormal force, inherent in urban development—which made me stop just there. It was a café that displayed its menu by means of laminated photographs from at least thirty years before. Jurassic omelets with avocado, hamburgers sampled by my forebears. The photos of the dishes made me, nonsensically, think of the stars, which are, according to popular wisdom and expert thought, testimony to a reality that no longer exists.
I went into the café and sat at the counter, next to a man who looked like part of the furniture. I ordered a coffee. A skinny man in a red shirt, on the other side of the counter, replied in a surprisingly brusque tone that they didn’t have any.
“But I can offer you a cup of hot water for Nescafé, we’ve got that.”
“You wouldn’t have chamomile tea, or something similar?”
The man in the red shirt disappeared through a greasy curtain covering the upper half of a doorway (a hole, to be precise) in the wall behind the counter; on the other side of this curtain, I caught a glimpse of some family photos and, hanging from the ceiling, a chandelier with half the bulbs blown; under the light, a green table, and at it, a boy doing his homework. This was probably the home of the owner of the incompetent café, and that simple curtain divided his working and private worlds, if such a distinction made any sense in his particular case, which is questionable.
The owner—or the person I took to be the owner—came back after a while, carrying a packet of tea that looked as old as the photographs in the entrance.
“Yes, but it’s normal tea. I couldn’t find the chamomile.” By “normal” he evidently meant black.
“Well, give me a cup of that then, and let’s hope it doesn’t keep me from sleeping,” I said, seeking some sort of complicity with the owner of the café, though without really understanding why I was seeking that complicity or how such a state would emerge from a situation as trivial as the one that had united us so far. The man gave me a sardonic, scornful look.
“It’s coffee that keeps you from sleeping, son, not tea; they give tea to the sick.”
I had no wish to discuss the effects of theine and halfheartedly agreed with him. He put the cup of steaming water down in front of me and also left the whole packet of black tea on the counter. I extracted a tea bag, put it in the cup, and stared—transfixed by the way it soaked up the scalding water and sank like a shipwrecked barge—before I added a little sugar. I drank the tea in silence, not listening to the complaints the furniture–faced customer addressed to the three or four other locals. (His banality was disturbing and his ability to emit streams of foul language, prodigious.)
When I’d finished my beverage, I looked in amazement at the bag of black tea at the bottom of the empty cup, limp and useless as a newly sloughed skin. I can’t explain exactly what I thought, but that uninspiring object seemed beautiful in its insignificance, so I wrapped it in my napkin and put it in my pocket. I was concerned that the owner or one of the customers, noticing my eccentric maneuver, might berate me, but apparently no one saw me. I paid and went out.
I am now in my apartment and the tea bag is on the table, in the center of a sodden napkin. The pocket of my jacket was also soaked, and if it hadn’t been a dark jacket, I would probably have had to take it to the dry cleaner, because everyone knows that tea, as they say is also true of sin, leaves a permanent stain.
The tea bag doesn’t seem as surprising now as it did when it was at the bottom of the cup, but I’ve decided to keep it, so I get my staple gun from the toolbox, and, after a dull thud, the end of the string with the label is stapled onto the wall, right in front of the bed, so that this useless, vaguely obscene pendulum—aesthetically speaking, it is something akin to a sanitary pad—will be the first thing I see in the morning. The bag is still dripping slightly, and a tiny puddle is gradually forming on the floor, plus an elongated brown stain on the wall. I think the stain will add an interesting touch to the room and perhaps, by accentuating the corrosive effects of the damp, will end up being the decorative focus of the apartment. I think I like the term “decorative focus,” although I’m not completely certain what it means. (On a wall covered in crucifixes, is God the decorative focus?) I also think it will be pleasant to wake up every day and contemplate the tea bag hanging on the wall, not just for its appearance—slightly disagreeable at the moment—but because it will be a souvenir of that afternoon, of that sudden, arbitrary decision to walk home from the museum and have a cup of tea on the way. It’s good to create souvenirs of authentic, minute moments of happiness.
I listen to an argument in the downstairs apartment, related, from what I can gather, to a video game; they are in their forties and arguing about a video game, a Nintendo, almost certainly from twenty years back. It’s already dark and, in the vacant lot, almost impossible to make out any detail. The plants merge with the strands of rusty wire on the ground and the bags of garbage some people in the street throw over the wall. Leaning out the window, I look at the lot and try to imagine that it’s a thicket, or the lot opposite my father’s house in Cuernavaca, the one we used to call the Thicket, or that cities don’t exist and there’s no point in distinguishing between a thicket and anything else.
The neighbors’ argument has finished, or at least is smoldering, awaiting a new spark. I close my eyes and the sound of the canned laughter of a TV program comes to me from another apartment. The insomniac’s questions edge their way in: How much do actors charge for false laughter? What—if anything—do they think of when they want to produce it? Are there actors, in every corner of the world, whose job it is to dub other people’s false laughter into their own language? Do these actors have conventions and conferences, in towering hotels, to share the secrets of false laughter, to mutually amuse one another, to overcome the sadness that stops them sleeping? Are there support groups for false-laughter actors? Are there help lines—1-800-LAUGHTER, for instance—you can call in the early hours so you don’t feel alone, so you can laugh falsely again, talk about your childhood?
The laughter is muffled by a new argument between the forty-something neighbors and their mother, with whom they live. The old lady shouts, “Candy, Candy!” Candy is a small, gray male dog. It doesn’t occur to them, apparently, to give their pet a name appropriate to its gender.
I think I’d like to smoke a cigarette at moments like this, to have something to do while I do nothing, but I’ve never been capable of acquiring the habit.
4
Tuesday, the inertia continues. On opening my eyes, in contradiction to what I’d predicted, it is not the tea bag I first see but the window overlooking the vacant lot. With my morning coffee steaming before me, while I wait for the computer to start up so I can take a quick glance at the day’s headlines on the internet, I look out the window to see how the lot is doing this morning: if there are more or fewer garbage bags—every so often, without explanation, the bags disappear—if it rained during the night and the ground is muddy, if some vagrant has gotten in to find shelter and safety under the branches. Checking out the state of the lot every morning is a basic activity. It makes me think of people who live near a river, who, as soon as they wake, hurry to see what state the waters are in: “It’s low today,” they announce, or “It’ll flood today.”
The garbage bags haven’t gone. There are no down-and-outs. But I notice a movement among the bushes in the lot. “That’ll be a cat,” I think. There have been cats on other occasions. Lost or exiled kittens, or kittens booted out, almost as soon as they’ve left the bloody womb, by happy but practical families who know they can’t live with animals everywhere. But it isn’t a cat: a dirty hen appears between the weeds, pecking at the ground in search of food. How could that hen have gotten there? Perhaps someone has surreptitiously installed himself in the lot and let loose his farm animals, for personal consumption, as they say. But I can’t see anyone, nor any other farm animals, just the hen, which occasionally disappears behind some car tire or scrub plant and reappears on the other side, making that intermittent noise I never know the name for because I’ve never lived a particularly rural life, except for that other vacant lot, the childhood one we used to call the Thicket, which never had any fauna besides the scorpions and spiders my father used to warn me about when I went out to play with the other children.
No, I’ve always been eminently urban. Before this apartment, I lived very close to the Zócalo, in one of those alleys where the street vendors used to crowd together, shouting, until the city authorities gave the zone a facelift and put them all in an enormous warehouse so they had to suffer the penance of their own cries without deafening the tourists, mutually punishing each other with their earsplitting reverberations.
And before I lived downtown, I was in Coapa, in one of those residential estates with identical houses that were once upper middle class and are now inevitably occupied by hordes of teenagers accustomed to the cultural aridity of the periphery; teenagers who gather in the green spaces to smoke pot and show off their skateboarding tricks, and whose career ambitions are usually to work in a skateboard store or have someone pay them to set fire to vacant lots.
I was one of those innocuous teenagers, I admit it, and not as long ago as I’m ready to accept. I was, let’s say, an aging adolescent in Coapa, when I lived with my mother—in the damp house, near the one where a woman hanged herself from a beam—and I pretended to go to the university every day, while in fact I’d already dropped out and was convinced it wasn’t necessary to study anything (as I am now, although maybe I was more belligerently convinced then). I used to go to the green spaces as well, and though I didn’t skateboard, I did smoke pot and bought acid tabs that I later sold at a profit outside a state high school to make a little money for books or pirate video games, bought in nearby Pericoapa—the video games—or Avenida Miguel Ángel—the books. (I have a particularly fond memory of a book written by a French executioner from who knows what remote century and a video game in which, for the fun of it, you could kick your opponent when he was down.) I never had a dog or a cat, much less a hen, although once, during those horrible teenage years, bored and high on drugs, I bought a rabbit at the traffic lights and then treated it so badly that it attacked me viciously, making the most implausible gash on my arm, from which I still have a scar, and in moments of weariness, it seems to take the shape of a rabbit—as happens, they say, with the full moon, though I’ve never been able to verify that.
After the rabbit, I don’t think I ever again lived with animals. At best I must have seen, out the car window on the highway to Acapulco, the agglomerations of sheep and the distant, iconic cows. And now—right under my window, in a central zone of a city for which, like God, the apt metaphor is the circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere—well, now I can see a dirty hen pecking the ground of the vacant lot. Do you say “crow?” No, that’s cocks. The thing is that hens have their own sound, so inalienably their own, and I can’t go on thinking about what you call that intermittent chirping, because it’s Inertia Tuesday and I have to go to the museum to correct the letters the secretary writes incorrectly and meet—in a corridor; I don’t have my own office—the unwelcome photographers who are proposing an exhibition on heroin users who live in the sewers, or women who live in the upscale suburb of Polanco and screw their chauffeurs when their husbands go to New York on business.
I’ve got it: it’s called clucking. The sound the hen makes is called clucking.
5
My childhood, excepting the above-mentioned absence of pets, was pretty normal, if anyone’s childhood can ever be normal. In Cuernavaca, in my father’s house, I amused myself torturing beetles, tying their legs to watch how they flew in circles, burning them with a magnifying glass, or asphyxiating them with the fuel from a lighter. I also used to make waterways out of the PVC tubing I found in the Thicket, that other vacant lot that may have inspired me in the search for the one that now lies below my window. I would assemble long sequences of tubes, the joints perfectly sealed with Play-Doh, through which I would run the water and then throw in my toys. This ludic activity suggested the fruitful career as a civil engineer I had the good judgment to avoid, to the disappointment of some of my relations and the great disgrace of my savings account.
At school—it was a Montessori school—I liked lying down at the back of the classroom and falling asleep in the middle of the lesson, something that was perfectly allowable and even encouraged by certain ultramodern teachers. These same teachers, who had probably once, or more than once, gotten a divorce, and fancied themselves as artists—one painted in oils; still lifes, I seem to remember—had legs covered in hair, and staring at their calves was like observing the wild, impenetrable depths of the Thicket.
College meant a return to the capital, to my mom’s house. Dad had fallen in love with a woman from Chiapas and had settled in San Cristóbal de las Casas, taking with him his modest workshop for the manufacture of “artistic aromatic” candles and its three or four employees. The designs for the candles included symbols like the yin-yang or Viking runes, and in a San Cristóbal, which—in the final years of the last century—was making its debut as the destination of choice for revolutionary tourism, those New Age details were well received by the floating population of Italians. My dad’s artistic candle business flourished in this context, as did many medium-sized and small businesses that took advantage of a niche in the market produced by the neo-Zapatista movement (the woolen Subcomandante Marcos figures made by the indigenous people, the baggy T-shirts with slogans and motifs related to the struggle, the traditional medicine clinics, et cetera). With the passage of time, my dad got fed up with the candles and delegated the management of sales and manufacture to his wife, returning to academia, if only peripherally, to give a couple of classes in a forgotten political research institute in the center of San Cristóbal.
And as I said, I returned at the beginning of term to the capital, where I was received with hostility, as if the city were reproaching me for having left. Coapa showed its only—negative—side, and I had the misfortune to fall in with the most unsuitable people in the neighborhood. Very soon, at the age of just fifteen, the only conversations that interested me were those related to drugs. Unconsciously subverting the natural order of things, I first tried cocaine at the insistence of the older brother of a well-to-do close friend, and then pot, which touched something more intimate in me. However, my inability to take drugs in the company of others very soon became apparent: when I wasn’t beset by completely unjustified paranoia, irrepressible laughter and sudden attacks of autism alternated in taking control of my nerves. From then on, I decided only to take drugs for purely experimental purposes, which in the end saved me from turning into a foul-mouthed addict like the rest of my neighbors and classmates. Experimentation, as I understood and practiced it, involved always looking for a completely new situation in which to consume: I swallowed a tab of acid in physics class on the day they were explaining the first law of thermodynamics—I’ve never since been able to forget it; I did coke on a school trip to a farm with cuddly deer; I snorted ground ecstasy pills before entering a natural sciences museum; and finally—my master stroke—I ate hallucinogenic mushrooms during a family dinner, under the quizzical gaze of my grandmother.
Despite all this, the resulting experiences were hardly worth mentioning, and if they truly marked my character, it was in making me understand that one of my strengths is an ability to enjoy the most trivial situations intensely, and not because they gave rise to an air of extrovert magnetism. It’s possible that if it weren’t for those experiences, I wouldn’t now be an office worker, or so thoroughly enjoy such an obvious piece of stupidity as asking the museum’s security guard about the previous Sunday’s soccer match between two mediocre provincial teams. A match that, of course, I hadn’t seen and had never had any intention of seeing.
6
Leaving home, on my way to work, I decide to buy a lottery ticket. “Yesterday I spent my money on a cup of tea, and now this,” I think, absurdly, since the sum of these two whims is tiny in relation to the margin of whimsicality my salary allows. But I’ve always felt guilty about spending money on insubstantial things, as if an austerity chip had been implanted into me at the fetal stage. And on top of all that, last week I bought a shirt to replace another, very similar one that had been left unrecognizable by an accident with a dish of black mole sauce. Yes, I feel guilty about the expense, but then I tell myself the rent on my current apartment is a lot lower than what I used to pay for the one near Zócalo, so when you come down to it, I can invest the difference in small trivialities, like a cup of tea in the evenings and a lottery ticket in the mornings, and even more serious things (a trip from time to time, if I liked trips). On finding that fallacious arithmetical balance, I feel less guilty. I’m in the habit of seeking out the exact transaction to redeem myself. I choose the lottery ticket without giving much thought to the numbers, though I do manage to include a six, for which I’ve always had a particular affection.
In fact, and this is a symptom of a solidly middle-class childhood, monetary questions don’t usually bother me much, apart from the guilt certain financial outgoings spark. Saving isn’t so much an effort as a natural consequence of the life I lead, frugal and boring. My salary at the museum is meager, but it’s regular, and the institutions I worked for before the museum still occasionally ask me to proofread the odd program or catalog, so I pocket a few extra pesos every now and then. If I’ve decided to buy a lottery ticket, it’s not for any desire to become a millionaire, but because I know perfectly well that the simple fact of having a lottery ticket in your pocket stimulates the imagination, and that I can spend the day mentally hatching ridiculously dandyish plans, the extravagances I’ll commit in the unlikely event that I win.
In the museum, I distractedly say good morning to Cecilia, the director’s secretary, who tells me that Ms. Watkins won’t be in till later because she’s got a meeting in some restaurant or other in the south of the city, a business or political relations—there’s no difference—breakfast. Without listening to the whole explanation, which seems to me overly long, I sit at my desk in the same enormous room as all the other desks, except for Ms. Watkins’s. The designer, I notice, is watching a TV series on the internet. On his screen, two women are kissing tenderly; he feels someone watching him and gives me a nervous smile.
Cecilia has renounced her love of conversation and is now sitting at her screen laughing, by which I surmise that she is either chatting with some friend or watching the same lesbian series as the designer. While my computer—a PC that takes ages to react to the instructions I give it—is booting up, I go down to the courtyard of the museum, one of those spaces surrounded by arcades that can be found in all the colonial mansions in the center of the city. I sit on the front steps and look toward the entrance to the museum. On the other side, the hubbub of the city’s historic downtown and the suffocating heat of the asphalt seem to be at full force: vans with loudspeakers announcing a deal on oranges, competing CD sellers raising the volume of their speakers . . . all this under a sun that, however strong, can’t disguise the ashen scaffolding of the atmosphere.
All the while, the thick stone walls of the museum and the courtyard overshadowed by a high canvas awning keep the air inside cool, and the noise of the street seems to come from a parallel universe that we silent inhabitants of this building can gaze at as calmly as if looking into a fish tank, without any sense of asphyxia.
I calculate that my computer will be ready by now and that the time idled away in rumination must have exceeded that needed for a simple visit to the bathroom, and although the director is at her breakfast meeting in the south of the city, I suspect her secretary, Cecilia—as spiteful and cunning as they come—would be capable of denouncing me for laziness if I spent too long away from the office. So I decide to go back, if only to search the internet for the same series that, it seems most likely to me, all the other employees are watching, until someone with the minimum of authority—the security guard, the bookkeeper, or, in a worst-case scenario, the director herself—appears in the doorway and, pointing with evil intent to the sign saying Administration, tells us all we’re not exactly in a movie theater.
While I’m pretending to write a press release, with the chess window minimized and ready for me to continue my game against the computer—I’ve never won—Jorge, the designer, comes up looking as if he’s about to ask me an enormous favor that will undoubtedly, or so I think for a moment, make me unhappy. Getting ready to refuse, I swivel my chair around to face him. He says—feeling sorry to have interrupted me—that since I’m the “grammar expert,” he wanted to see if I could help him write a reference for a friend, also a designer, he says, who has applied for a job in a cosmetics company. I say I will, that I haven’t got much in my inbox, and that we should do it now before Isabel Watkins, the director, gets back, because when she’s around, we’ll have our noses back to the fucking grindstone.
“The fucking grindstone,” that’s how I put it. The expression feels odd on my tongue, and that strangeness appears to be mutual, as even Jorge looks astonished by a word that is, so he believes, so little in keeping with my usual decorum. I write the letter, and the profusion of his thanks makes me doubt his sexual orientation, as if it weren’t possible to be overly nice and at the same time behave like a “real man.” Jorge, the designer, goes back to his desk and leaves me thinking that those discreet genres, such as references and rejection letters, are undervalued areas of poetic expression but as valid and moving as any lousy Italian sonnet.
Later, without Isabel Watkins having returned from her now eternal breakfast, I’m suddenly, for no apparent reason, struck by a whiplash of lust, and resolved to give it free rein in a more private area of the building, I head for the bathroom. In the cubicle, I unfold the pornographic photo I keep in my wallet, together with a pocket calendar with an image of the Virgin, and holding the clipping in my left hand, I give myself up to an age-old pleasure with the right. Masturbating during work hours is, I think, one of those small delights the male office worker has succeeded in safeguarding from the omniscience of the system. The photo acts as a simple amulet, resting in my hand while, eyes closed, I imagine unspeakable perversions involving Cecilia, Ms. Watkins’s unbearable secretary, and even Isabel Watkins, the still-absent director of the museum.
I finish with a rather unsatisfactory grunt. The semen, which in more propitious circumstances would have spurted out with a certain gallantry, seems to reluctantly dribble into the worn pouch of my tighty-whities. After this relief, the pornographic magazine clipping loses its magical powers, and now reveals its true ugliness: the model, who has a hairstyle from the late eighties—one of those gravity-defying perms that made such an impact—is lying in an uncomfortable position next to a pair of fishnet stockings that, if it weren’t for the infinite number of creases in the clipping, would be a phosphorescent green, precursor of the garish chromatic disasters of the nineties, when the advantages of adding insane quantities of lead to any pigment were discovered.
I soak up the traces of sin with a little toilet paper, small fragments of which apparently were glued to my fingertips by the semen, a fact that later, on my return to the office, obliged me to bury the guilty secret in my pockets.
To the delight of us all, the day passes without incident and without Isabel Watkins returning from her appointment, which by this time—six in the evening—would be absurd to still call a breakfast meeting. On leaving the museum, I decide to drop in on the charming characters in the café without coffee, so I set out on the trek to the same greasy counter, at which I once again order a black tea that I prepare myself and, this time without any embarrassment, put the damp tea bag in my pocket by way of a relic or personal fetish. The furniture-faced customer is still in his place, and if he weren’t wearing a different sweater, I’d believe he hadn’t moved from his seat since yesterday. On this occasion, the owner of the café pays me less attention and seems resigned to seeing me among his regulars: I’m already the “cup o’ tea.”
When I get home, it seems to me logical to fetch the staple gun once again and, after the dull thud, contemplate the second tea bag, hanging next to the first one, like the marks a convict makes day after day on the worn paint of his rickety cot to keep a record of the length of his imprisonment. Although in my case, I tell myself, these tea bags are testimony to my two working days, the first two well-deserved days of my full exercise of freedom. A freedom whose chronological beginning was, it’s true, arbitrary, but no less effective for that.
Emboldened by this notion, swollen with pride at my conquest, I look out at the vacant lot and watch the unsteady steps of the hen, clucking through the weeds.
7
Saturday. I’ve spent a whole week waiting for this moment. Saturday morning. I guess it’s already late when I wake up, but I don’t check, for the simple pleasure of exercising the free will I’ve been so proudly boasting of since my first incursion into the café without coffee. Rather than freedom, I’m now tempted to call this sense of uprooting “lack of inhibition.” Regardless of the words used, the important thing is that I no longer perceive, as was my habit, the straitjacket of anguish that used to restrict my movements.
Still in bed, I contemplate the tea bags on the wall, now ten, one for every day since that inaugural Monday evening, excluding weekends, when I’m saved the walk home from work and so the obligatory visit to the café as well. Each of the bags hangs there with its small pile of tea, now dry, as if it were the tail of a comet. Each one like a trophy some government institution might have awarded me in a memorable ceremony to laud my nobility of spirit, to reward the constancy of my freedom, the self-assurance with which I exercise it: all this without renouncing my routine—as would a thoughtless libertarian—still focused on padding out Ms. Watkins’s model letters despite the conviction that I could be doing something else. This is freedom, I say to myself: an eight-hour day that, if I so wished, could be seven, or even less. An affirmation of will, but without unnecessary upheavals. A distracted walk home, aware that it won’t affect the general order of the universe one little bit if I stop to enjoy a cup of tea in a local café where I’m known. And yes, they call me Blacky in—hardly witty—allusion to the color of the beverage I invariably order: cup o’ tea.
Saturday. At home I make myself coffee. Black coffee. I listen to the announcement coming from the megaphone of the gas truck, which is arriving, as it does every Saturday, to deliver the bottles. That makes me think it must be eleven in the morning, more or less, although trusting in the punctuality of megaphone announcements in this city is, to say the least, reckless. What a barbaric custom, receiving the most basic, essential services—gas, drinking water—by means of a raucous shout issuing from a truck in a worrying state of oxidation! Couldn’t we inhabitants of this immense, beautiful city get the gas through invisible in-floor pipes, prudently reinforced with three layers of steel? No, such luxuries are always reserved for citizens of the First World, who—sons of bitches—can drink tap water instead of paying for demijohns, also sold from trucks with blaring megaphones. Everything at top volume here. In the future, I tell myself, we’ll get electricity via blaring megaphones too. Even the most famous national celebration is popularly remembered as “El Grito,” the shout. It’s always a ridiculous occasion, and I have one clear childhood memory of it: the president comes out onto a well-known balcony and shouts. He shouts to his nation—shouts at the top of his voice and is, at the same time, paradoxically mute.
I switch on the TV just to feel its noisy presence, which seems to be adding backing vocals to the gas sellers’ cries, confirming my theory about Mexico and the decibels of noncommunication. The picture is fuzzy: the rabbit-ear antenna has been broken for a couple of months. I make a mental note to do something about it later on, although I suspect, given my idleness, this “later on” could become several months. The sound of the television, in contrast, issues relatively sharply from the speakers. A woman with an unpleasant voice is announcing the winners of a competition and silencing any form of declaration on their part with her laughter of feigned enthusiasm. Despite all this, I leave the TV switched on and sit on the bed to look out the window, to watch the dark clouds looming over the vacant lot. Then it occurs to me that if it rains, the hen, that uncomplicated friend who has been clucking among the shadows for the last two weeks, will die of cold or the famous flu—the ailment that returns periodically to the front pages of the world’s newspapers. It is indeed the first time rain has threatened in the whole year, and I can’t let a storm do away with the local biodiversity, including its wildlife.
Disposed to save the hen’s life, I decide to construct a shelter for it from a small wooden table I never use for anything. “Wrapped in plastic shopping bags, the table will make a good place of refuge for the hen,” I think. When I’ve finished my task and the table is covered with the impermeable material, I realize I haven’t considered the next step: how to get its new home, its planned refuge, to the animal. I dismiss the possibility of entering the lot in person since the distance from my window is too great—I live on the second floor—for me to drop down from here, and I don’t want to get into arguments by climbing the wall from the street like some errant drug addict. Only one idea occurs to me: if I had a rope, a fairly long piece of rope, using the appropriate knots, I could lower the table from my window into the vacant lot and position it right on top of the pile of sand by the wall of my building.
As far as I can see, there are a two problems: how to get the rope back once the table is in place, since there would be no one down there to untie it. The other matter still to be considered is how to let the hen know it should shelter under the table when the rain starts. This second issue is the most difficult to resolve, as it involves a question my encyclopedia of biology doesn’t address. I have little faith in the animal’s instincts, and its mental powers don’t inspire much confidence, either: the hen, while I ponder its means of salvation, continues as usual, walking around in semicircles and pecking the ground, possibly more quietly now, hardly giving a cluck, perhaps intuiting, via some not just avian but—to cap it all—feminine sixth sense, that her—she’s female, after all—luck might change at any moment.
A third problem hinders my progress: I haven’t got any rope. I’ve looked all over the apartment, and the only vaguely similar thing I’ve found is an electrical extension cord that isn’t long enough. I should leave my Saturday seclusion and find a hardware store to buy a good four or even five yards of strong rope, but to tell the truth, the idea doesn’t appeal to me, given the possibility that it’s going to rain soon. So I decide to throw the table out the window, hoping it doesn’t break on impact, then, from the sidewalk, climb the wall surrounding the lot, overcoming my fear of public opprobrium, and position the table in the correct place. If anyone sees me climbing into the lot, I can always say that, due to some difficult-to-explain mishap, a small table wrapped in plastic bags fell from my window, and I’m trying to retrieve it. However unlikely the story sounds, the table will be there in the undergrowth as undeniable proof of my tale.
I proceed as planned. I throw the table out the window and, to my surprise, it doesn’t break. With this happy confirmation, and seeing how sturdy the table is, I think that maybe I should have kept or sold it. But no, the table is no longer a table but a fortified rainy-season refuge for hens, and it is my duty to go down to the vacant lot and position it correctly.
Outside, standing by the lot, I scan the street for cops or curious idlers who might shout out when I climb over the wall, but the streets are empty and only the noise of a distant airplane disturbs the charged air of this Saturday. “The rain will wash everything clean,” I think. Before that, of course, I have to save the hen. I jump lightly up onto the wall (feeling myself infinitely more agile than I’d expected), and once perched atop it, I look down; I don’t want the hen to be passing underneath when I decide to jump and, in my rescue bid, end up killing her (this possibility brings to mind Chinese sayings about the wisdom of immobility). But I jump down toward the weeds and land on solid earth. Now inside the lot, I decide to take a look around to get a detailed idea of all the things I’ve so far only seen from my window, so I carefully make my way through the shrubs, managing to step on the protruding stones and avoiding the areas littered with trash.
In a clearing in the thicket—to use the very widest possible acceptance of the term—in the middle of the lot, I discover a supermarket bag. The central location of this object seems to me deliberate, in contrast to the random placement of the ordinary bags people toss over from the sidewalk, so I go to inspect its contents. The bag is tied with a tight knot, but there’s a hole in one side and I decide to examine it. Something seems to be leaking out, and as I peer into the hole I see that it’s an organ, something like a cow’s intestines, dripping blood and crawling with maggots. As if my sense of smell had, until that moment, been blocked, I suddenly note the strong stench of putrefaction and feel revolted. It’s a repugnant sight, and everything becomes tinged in a violet tone, like in a splatter movie. My visual field registers a hyperbolic, astringent disquiet. I run back toward the wall and with the same agility, if not with equal prudence, leap. On the other side, across the street, two women under a flowered umbrella are staring at me in astonishment. My expression can’t have inspired much confidence in them, because they drop their eyes, walk more quickly, and turn off at the first corner. I drop down into the street and, just as quickly, go back into my building.
Later on it starts to rain heavily. I think the table discarded in the vacant lot will be ruined by the water. I avoid looking out the window for the rest of the day. I also avoid thinking about the hen.
8
Since Saturday I haven’t been able to get the image of the entrails poking through the supermarket bag out of my head. The strength of that memory, its persistent purity, is such that I haven’t even felt like having my black tea after work, and my collection of tea bags stapled to the wall has stopped growing. And neither have I gone down to the bathroom in the museum with lascivious intentions to unfold my pornographic magazine clipping, nor listened to the clucking of the hen in the adjacent vacant lot. I imagine, mournfully, that she has died of pneumonia.
I write letters. I compose the speech Isabel Watkins is going to give tomorrow to a group of bureaucrats from the Ministry of Culture. Every so often I slip the odd exaggeration into the speech that will show up my boss before the most widely read in the audience but be, otherwise, simply epic, even worthy of applause. Things like “while we are working, we must not, for a single second, forget that the word museum should return to its etymological roots, evoking the Muses.” I consider putting in something even more stupid but am afraid of being fired. I imagine Ms. Watkins reading the speech, her technical pauses, her expression of frustration and terror when she gets to a line that says, “And for this reason, we have decided to knock down all the walls, even if it means a lawsuit with the Commission for Historic Buildings, and convert the museum into a place of sexual diversion, over which I will preside as the Matron Superior.” But no, I can’t write that, nor can Ms. Watkins read it tomorrow to the bureaucrats, all of them prepared to be bored until she comes down from the platform and they’re able to take a discreet look down her plunging neckline.
Rapt in these perverse thoughts, I don’t realize that, momentarily, a grim smile has twisted my lips. Cecilia, the secretary, looks at me distrustfully from her desk. Her expression shakes me out of the state of deep abstraction into which I had sunk, and I feel as if a great noise has suddenly been silenced. I have the sense of having spoken aloud but can’t say if that sensation has any manifestation in interpersonal reality. Apparently not, since only Cecilia has her disapproving eyes fixed on me, while my other colleagues are getting along with their routine tasks, almost without noticing me.
This happens to me sometimes: I come back—as if from a distant, parallel world—and have no idea if I’ve spent a long while in silence or absentmindedly speaking aloud. The sensation doesn’t generally have a high enough level of reality to alarm me, but at times like this one, the fine line between what I imagine and what exists is blurred and I panic.
Cecilia has stopped staring at me because Ms. Watkins has called her into her office. To respond to this call, the secretary has to pass very close to my desk as the space is limited and I’m the one who is nearest to the director (physically, that is, because in relation to this institution’s organigram of power, there are only two levels: Ms. Watkins and everyone else). As she approaches me, Cecilia turns as if to make sure no one is looking and leaves a folded note on my desk, giving me, as she does so, a suddenly complicit, deeply disconcerting smile. Wasn’t she some sort of working-life nemesis, perpetually embittered and ready to do her all to ruin the day of any fellow employee, especially me? The note lies there before me on the desk, and Cecilia is already in Ms. Watkins’s office, but I don’t dare read its message.
9
At the end of the workday, when everyone was beginning to switch off their computers and give a distracted “See you tomorrow” from the door, I picked up Cecilia’s note and slipped it quickly into my jacket pocket. I left the office with the same “See you tomorrow” and came home.
The note is here before me, but I still need to pluck up the courage to unfold it. Could it be an invitation to her house? An amorous confession? A raffle ticket? I go out to the corner store in search of cans of beer. The corner store, however, is closed, so I walk through the neighborhood as night falls, looking for somewhere else to buy beer.
Coapa was, as I now know, an inhospitable world. Coming out of college, all the students (or all the ones I remember, myself included) would enter a locality that was like a lost city and, cramming ourselves into a pokey room, silently drink beer. Ever since that time, I’ve liked the flavor of canned Modelo. Now, more than twelve years later, I open an identical can in my small apartment in a better area (that is, closer to the center) and take a couple of swigs of the same cold, almost transparent, slightly greenish liquid I’ve spent half an hour looking for. I drink three beers, one after the other, hardly pausing between swigs, and feel triumphantly drunk. It will be impossible, I think, to go to the office tomorrow. It is in this state that I decide to unfold Cecilia’s note, disposed to satisfy my bloated curiosity. There are two words on the paper, and as soon as I read them I realize there has been a colossal misunderstanding. It is yet to be seen if it’s an ultimately beneficial misunderstanding, insofar as the satisfaction of my concupiscence is concerned, or if the misunderstanding will end up being as much a burden as if I’d decided to carry a truck on my back for the rest of my nights. The words, written in an unsteady hand, have, for once in Cecilia’s lettered life, no spelling errors; they are “I accept.”
Accept what? I consider the possibility that it might refer to an ambiguous, human, metaphysical acceptance, the acceptance of things as they appear in our path as we file along the city’s median strips; the acceptance of the sound of the cars and of the morning announcements of the men selling gas and water and other products, the utility of which is never made clear; a wholesale acceptance, without fissures, that embraces creation, its multiple faces, its most sordid corners; the continual scorn of her father, her post as a secretary, her humiliation at the hands of Ms. Watkins, the unbearable silence of her workmates. I consider all this as the possible reference of the terse message, but later I understand that it was the beer talking, and that Cecilia, the sly secretary, is probably alluding to something more concrete.
It then occurs to me that when I started working at the museum, they gave me a sheet of paper with the extensions of all the employees, and some, the most committed or the most indispensable, had included a home phone number in case some extremely urgent, work-related emergency necessitated their immediate localization—something that, it goes without saying, never occurred in that museum, with its slack work pace. Without much hope, I look through the untidy pile of papers in a drawer until I find the sheet of paper, and there is Cecilia’s cell phone number. Thank goodness it’s her cell phone, I think, otherwise it would be a real pain to call her house and have a male voice—unexpected and hostile—answer the phone.
“Hello,” she says in an almost challenging tone, as if she had been waiting for my call.
“Hi Ceci, it’s me, Rodrigo, from the office.” I’ve never before used the shortened form of her name, nor heard anyone else use it, but her reply is concise and rapid, so I suppose she didn’t mind my affectionate “Ceci” too much.
“I know it’s you, I recognized your voice right away . . . So, what is it?” she asks, as if she doesn’t know.
“How do you mean, ‘what is it?’ Your little message, of course.”
“Ah, that.”
There’s an uneasy silence on both sides. I have the sense I should take some sort of initiative but don’t feel up to it. An unexpected timidity has my throat in its stranglehold, and I think my voice will sound more high-pitched than usual. Eventually it is she who breaks the silence, and I have the strange sensation this lack of initiative on my part will have negative repercussions for me at some not too distant point in my life.
“Don’t you think you should talk about the little message you sent me? That came first, right?” she says.
The misunderstanding is now clear: someone, either in error or out of malice, had left a message on Cecilia’s desk, signed with my name or somehow insinuating that I wrote it. As her voice is friendlier than usual, and given that her response to the mysterious note was positive (“I accept”), I don’t want to disillusion her by explaining the mechanisms of the cruel trick that has been played on her. I’m the sort of person who worries about the effects of my actions on others.
“Ah, my little message,” I say, as if we were both not fed up by now with using that ridiculous term. “What did you think about it?”
“Well, to be honest, it was a bit weird of you to say it out of the blue like that, but I’d already thought, you know . . . and so I accepted. I just want to ask you not to say anything until I’ve talked to my mom and dad.”
Numbed by the turn the conversation has taken, I decide to let things run their course, guided not only by my drunkenness, but also by a suicidal instinct that at times like this translates into inexplicable forms of behavior and a discursive fluency I’m normally lacking.
“Take as long as you need, Ceci, don’t worry. I’ve waited for this moment a long time, so I can hold on a bit longer.” The words come out as if from an answering machine that has cut in completely against my will. I can scarcely believe the nerve with which I’m playing my own dirty trick, but there’s something impersonal about it all, as if the events were happening far, far away from me, in a movie I’m watching, in a world similar to this one but stranger, where Cecilia and I have an age-old friendship. She, luckily, interrupts my thoughts just when I’m at the point of speaking again.
“Rodrigo, one more thing. I’d like it to be in a church, just to please my grandma; she’s ever so devout.”
This last turn takes me completely by surprise. I suspect that it is Cecilia—the cruel secretary who has made my life impossible since I started at the museum—who tells Ms. Watkins when I leave the office to waste a little time in the courtyard; that it is this same Cecilia who is playing a slightly ridiculous, thoroughly bad-taste joke on me. My response is slow in coming, but I eventually agree in a preoccupied tone and splutter out some impromptu praise of the Catholic Church that she, I note, doesn’t completely believe.
I hurriedly make a brief farewell, which doesn’t, however, avoid the worst. “Love you,” she says. “See you tomorrow at the office.”
As I hang up, I’m overwhelmed by corrosive anxiety. What have I done? What am I doing here by the telephone, my hand trembling, having accepted and, apparently, even proposed marriage to the secretary I have always silently despised?
I decide to go to bed without dinner but can’t sleep. I resolve that first thing tomorrow, I will unravel the enormous tangle that has resulted in me getting engaged, in Cecilia sighing tenderly, and, I imagine, some office jokers being doubled over with laughter of secret delight.
10
And such was, in fact, my intention: to clear up that bad joke, even if it meant doing irreparable harm to the unhappy Cecilia, and return to my routine of walks and cups of tea and vacant lots inhabited by clucking hens. But today turned out differently, as if, yet again, against my will.
I am now once more sitting by the telephone in my apartment, waiting to pluck up the courage to call my mom and give her the news of my wedding. I still can’t believe the course events have taken since this same time yesterday, when I called Cecilia with a hint of lust, prepared to take immediate advantage of her enigmatic note.
I arrived at the museum quite late this morning, as if fearing the moment of finding myself face to face with the woman who was now my fiancée. When I entered the office, she was already at her desk, wearing three pounds more makeup than recommended by health experts and gazing at me with an ingenuous little smile that shattered something inside me. I thought she would be deeply disappointed if I didn’t walk over and give her a good-morning kiss, something I had never done in my life. Once I was close enough to her face to hear her accelerated breathing and clearly smell that mixture of perfume and cheap makeup with which she was garnished, Ceci swiveled around and planted a discreet, restrained kiss on my lips in response to what must have seemed to her my invitation. I then heard behind me an uneasy commotion, a noise like people whispering and purposely letting pencils drop from their hands. I began to think I must have imagined that adolescent reaction from my coworkers, because as soon as I turned around toward them, what I noted was enormous indifference. And, having started along that route, I thought their imagined reaction sprang from a profound impulse of my own: perhaps I was the adolescent who turned in his chair while Rodrigo Saldívar, that office worker of rigid habits, threw his existence off-kilter by kissing the museum secretary.
After the kiss, I moved, blushing and looking ridiculous, to my seat and succeeded in keeping my eyes fixed on the computer screen until lunchtime. There wasn’t much work to be done, but I pretended to be writing the salon notes for the next forty exhibitions, while in fact I was robotically copying dictionary entries.
At the set hour, I stood up to go to the small restaurant where I always eat. As soon as she spotted me, Cecilia abandoned her work and caught up with me as I was disappearing out of the museum, ready, she said, to accompany me.
“You’re very shy, aren’t you?” she remarked on the way there. And before I could respond, she added, “That’s what I really like about you. You’re not the same as the other men in the office, spending the whole day going on about their lap-dancing clubs and their whores for all to hear.”
Without being completely sure whom she was referring to, I said I really liked Jorge, the designer.
“Yeah, but he’s as gay as they get. They all used to say the same about you, and that was why you and Jorge sometimes chatted at your desk, but I always knew it was a lie. You’re a real man, right?”
Despite the inconvenience of the whole situation, I felt offended, as if just the mere fact of questioning my manliness didn’t sit well with me, didn’t sit at all well with me, so I responded, with a degree of severity, that one didn’t have to choose between being an idiot and being gay, and that you could be quiet and still be macho. That’s what I said, macho, a word I obviously sorely repented later and one which would have made my belligerent, feminist mother violently strike out my name from the pages of her will.
My mother, whom I am at the point of calling to give the news (that I suspect no one, her least of all, will particularly welcome) of my imminent marriage.
Ceci and I walked to the restaurant. She told me she ate there too sometimes, but as we’d never seen each other, I interpreted her declaration as a gratuitous boast. I was silent, even crestfallen, responding monosyllabically to her infrequent demands. We sat down, and I ordered: soup, rice, diced beef tenderloin. She had the same. Then, suddenly infused with a strange power, I told her she had always seemed to me a very beautiful woman, and I knew she was hardworking as well, so that was why I’d decided to ask her to marry me. This declaration was, I have to admit, partially false, but only partially: I found Cecilia attractive, especially due to the haughty air that accompanied all her movements, as if implying that she, in spite of being a secretary, had us all, at every moment, firmly by the balls. It was this attitude that had, on more than one occasion, made me dream of dominating her, or letting myself be dominated by her toughness.
She smiled in an exaggerated way, as if trying, with her histrionics, to hide a touch of melancholy that was, nonetheless, easy to detect. I wondered if I should kiss her, but the smell of food on our breath and the memory of our clumsy kiss that morning put me off, so I left flirtation for later.
The rest of the day, spent sitting at my desk, passed without incident. I succeeded in avoiding Cecilia’s little glances in my direction, and it was only when she passed near my desk, en route to Ms. Watkins’s office, that I gave her a discreet, barely perceptible smile. I finally left the building and came straight home, without the long, liberating stroll or the cup of black tea in my beloved, perennially greasy café. That’s why I’m sitting here, much earlier than usual, trying to pluck up the courage to call my mom and say, with my characteristic conviction, “I appear to be getting married.”
11
Isabel Watkins looks fixedly at me across her desk. She’s holding a pink card, and lying before her is an envelope of the same color announcing, in gold lettering, the engagement of “Rodrigo Saldívar & Cecilia Román” in the eighteenth-century typeface Jorge, the designer, chose for us. On the diptych she has in her hand, Isabel Watkins reads her name—“plus one”—and the time and place of the event. Below this is the address of a party room Don Enrique, my future father-in-law, has booked against my better judgment. Isabel puts the sheet of paper on the desk beside the scented envelope and looks fixedly at me.
“I don’t know what to say.”
Silence.
After a moment, she continues. “When I employed you here at the museum, I thought you wouldn’t last long, that within a few months you’d have found something better, on a magazine or in a publishing house, and that you’d have jumped at the opportunity to further your career. I also thought that you’d have wanted to rise up the cultural ladder, that you’d have politely introduced yourself to the minister at the first opening we held. And although that prospect annoyed me a little, I was also pleased to think you were a kid on the way up. But now you tell me you’re going to get married to my secretary and . . . I don’t know. It’s just that I always thought you were looking for something different, that you expected something else from life.”
“Yes, Isabel, I appreciate your sincerity. And I understand what you’re saying. But to be honest, I don’t expect anything, except that things happen to me.”
That’s what I say: “Things happen to me.” The expression seems to exasperate Ms. Watkins, who quickly gets rid of me on some invented pretext, but with the menace of “we’ll talk later,” so that I’m on my guard for the rest of the day. It’s Thursday, May 11. In two months, I’m going to be married. After numerous chats with Cecilia’s parents, and Cecilia herself, I’ve convinced them all that the best thing would be for Ceci to move into my tiny apartment “while we’re saving up to buy someplace.” The promise of ownership dazzles them, and they all concur with me, though, in essence, the only motive for my proposal is staying near the vacant lot. During these last three weeks since the engagement became official, I’ve clung to the waste ground as if it were the last possible salvation from the arbitrariness of things.
Mom, against all odds, very quickly washed her hands of the affair, as if she were giving me up as a lost cause.
“And might I know whom you’re going to marry?” she asked sharply over the phone.
“Ceci, you remember her. Ms. Watkins’s assistant at the museum.”
“An assistant?”
“Yes, you met her once, at that opening of the exhibition on social movements in the capital I invited you to about a year ago.”
And she, after a silence pregnant with reproach, “The secretary?”
“Yes, that’s the one. But she’s like Ms. Watkins’s personal assistant, not the secretary. She does a lot of different things in the museum.”
“Ah, I’m happy for you, Rodrigo. Let me know when you’ve fixed a date so I can book the ticket early; you know how it is with the planes—there are only two flights a week, and they’re always packed.”
Maybe if my mother had been indignant. Maybe if she’d shaken me out of this lethargy, this frame of mind that makes me yield to the secret designs of fate, turning up disguised as the most absurd accidents: a note given to a woman who is suddenly in love with me, or says she is; a café that becomes a haunt because I come across it one fine day on my way home; a growing collection of tea bags that occupies more and more wall space in my bedroom, reminding me my wedding day will soon be upon me, and I’ll have no time to prepare myself psychologically before the babies and the diapers and the smell of shit become the ritornello of my nights . . . Maybe if my mother had warned me, in her wisdom—as blind as it is immense—that getting married is one of the most serious blunders anyone can make . . . Maybe then, well, I would have woken up to a different reality, one in which entering into a marital contract with a woman I don’t respect would mean the complete demolition of my self-esteem. But that wasn’t the case. My mother limited herself to asking about the date of the fateful incident, and we ended the call with a nominal kiss that, for her part, signified simple pity. Pity and compassion.
In the same distant, disillusioned tone employed by my mother, Isabel Watkins called me into her office this morning to tell me she had received my message and didn’t understand the reasons for this unexpected piece of news. Despite the fact that both Cecilia and I come to the office every day, we sent her invitation by mail, a week ago now, at the insistence of my fiancée, who seemed to believe it was bad taste to deliver it in person—but not, for example, to use cheap, pink, scented paper for the invitation to our engagement party.
What I find most impressive about the situation is that never before has Ms. Watkins spoken to me as an equal; I’d never noticed the least sign of empathy in her or seen the smallest gesture of kindness toward us, her unhappy subjects. Diligent, professional, hysterical, she had always treated me with the remote coldness of political figures; but this morning, as if I’d confessed to her that I had prostate cancer, she spoke to me with sincere, unforeseen friendship. I’m disconcerted to think she had hoped to see me rise up the boring pyramid of bureaucracy. I’m disconcerted, but also moved. I imagine myself as the deputy director of cultural heritage or undersecretary for national celebrations or head of the institute for the preservation of her fucking ass.
I leave work and walk home without stopping for tea in the café without coffee. A few days ago I bought a packet of Lipton’s, and now I prepare the infusion myself, so my collection of used tea bags continues to grow at the rate of one a day—if I drink more than one cup of tea, I throw the residue away.
When the discussion about the matrimonial residence began, Cecilia, in the presence of her parents, proposed that she should move in with me immediately, even though it was still a couple of months to the wedding. Don Enrique silently granted his daughter the right to live in concubinage for a while so long as we married at the end of that period. I roundly refused: I intended to respect Cecilia’s dignity until our wedding day, I said.
The resulting situation was equally uncomfortable for us all, and I would gladly have avoided it if it had only been up to me. Don Enrique, with slightly alarming knowledge of the cause, informed me that Cecilia—there present—was not a virgin and added that for such a right-minded person as me, that was a disadvantage. As if that wasn’t enough, Don Enrique said he thought it was normal for me to want to “know” Cecilia before the wedding, and added that he wouldn’t disapprove of our moving in together right away. Finding myself cornered, I argued that it was “a matter of principle,” and independent of the state of my future wife’s hymen—I didn’t put it like that, of course—I’d prefer to wait for the proper moment, to give the ceremony greater meaning.
My decision received Don Enrique’s approval and was particularly welcomed by Carmelita, Cecilia’s mom. My fiancée, meanwhile, distanced herself from the negotiation of her sullied virginity.
12
There’s the hen again. I don’t know how, but she’s survived the frequent storms. She didn’t show herself for several days. Now she’s pecking the earth in the vacant lot, and I suspect she knows I’m observing her. There’s something flirtatious about her I’ve never noted before. She’s making a less unpleasant noise—cluck—than usual, more tuneful, you might say. It’s half past seven on Friday evening, and the setting sun shines on some of her feathers, making her more beautiful. She almost seems like a noble animal, a Paleolithic hen, capable of perching high up in an oak tree, a holly oak, and emitting a melodic, tuneful song.
I go to the kitchen for some grains of rice to throw to her. The hen understands what I’m doing and stands just below the window, moving her tail just as gracefully as she can, which isn’t very gracefully. I think about bringing her into the house, going down and fetching her or lowering a basket full of delicacies into which she will climb, sure of her good luck. Bringing her to my bedroom or leaving her in the living room to surprise Cecilia when she comes to visit me tonight to go over—once again—the details of the wedding.
But the hen isn’t mine, I think. She must have a careful owner who purposely leaves her in the lot so that she doesn’t have to live shut up in an apartment like mine, and so the kindly neighbors and the filthy worms feed her, saving the owner the expense. And if she doesn’t have an owner, the hen is, as are few creatures in this city, in this world, her own mistress. She does just as she pleases, unaware of the precarious situation in which she lives. Tomorrow they could start building on the lot or declare it a parking lot, and the hen would probably be violently evicted, left in the street, vulnerable to the passing cars, alone in the whirlwind of legs of a cloudy afternoon. But in spite of this threat of danger, the hen doesn’t lose her wits, or whatever wits she might have, but continues pecking the ground unconcernedly. The hen is free. Maybe, it occurs to me, because she was never in a uterus. She never dribbled inside a mother or was attached by a fragile cartilage to someone else’s belly. She was born from a limpid egg. A smooth, white egg, devoid of notable features, that opened up for her and left her beak exposed to the harsh Mesopotamian sun. Ah, the oviparous animal, what a model of behavior and temperance during its birth!
To be honest, I’ve never seen a hen being born, or any other bird. Once I found the body of a newly hatched turtledove on the sidewalk, but that’s as far as it goes. Despite this, I like to imagine the birth process of birds—something I must have seen on TV, now that I come to think of it. If not, how do I know a bird is born from an egg? Could someone, without having seen it or heard a detailed description, imagine how birds are born? And mammals? Would it be possible to think up the idea of a little calf covered in blood coming out of the rear end of a cow if there were no visual antecedent of such a traumatic event?
It’s as difficult for me to imagine, based on a complete lack of information, the birth of a calf as it is to think of what marriage will be like. I’ve never had close experience of it. No one around me even considered marriage as a possibility. In my life, it appeared next to other myths belonging to some remote era of which even my parents—divorced since time began—spoke of, in a tone of prudent reserve, as something that had now been superseded. I thought of other, almost magical situations that sounded to me contemporary with marriage: the maize field to which a young servant goes at daybreak every morning to soak the grain in water and lime before making that day’s tortillas; the black-and-white television announcing a contretemps between the gringos and the Russians; the firm belief that a group of students can change the world once and for all. All those things I used to hear my mother and her friends commenting on; things my father never wanted to have to mention again. And among those situations, marriage, like an enormous unknown that, in idle hours, I fancy to be perverse.
Now, in just two weeks’ time, I’ll also be one half of a married couple, a perverse husband who will do everything he can to retain the secret of his deepest passions: the Franciscan love I profess for a stray hen, a propensity for making collections of arbitrary objects, my tendency to recall a dull, Coapa-lysergic adolescence as a dark, dusty corner in my history. An office-worker husband who will shut away his pornographic clipping from the eighties and his used tea bags in a desk drawer, together with his photo of his only trip to an island—Cozumel, at the age of sixteen, with a girlfriend who gave every sign of brilliance and ended up selling handicrafts on one side of the main square in Tepoztlán—and the piece of yellow paper on which a potential lover scrawled her telephone number with a pink pen so they could arrange a date in a pay-by-the-hour hotel on the Tlalpan highway.
Yes, because that’s the type of husband I’ll be. If I get married (and it’s not that I’ve made up my mind yet; it’s not really up to me), it won’t be to lovingly accept Cecilia’s fashion sense—she uses the excuse of it being Sunday to wear her favorite T-shirt: faded cotton with a ridiculous slogan in the center (it says something like “Coco Loco,” “Sexy Austria,” or “University of Cars,” an impossible conjunction of words that must have sounded vaguely prestigious in the nineties). No, that’s not why. And neither will I get married for the pleasure of her company in a silence laden with ingenuous emotion. Nor to dream of taking her to Acapulco on the first possible occasion. No.
13
The wedding was reasonably successful. My mom came to the capital, arrived at the ceremony on time, and left early for a hotel I’d booked in advance. The next day she flew back home to Los Girasoles. I didn’t tell my dad because we have a relationship that is friendly as long as we don’t talk to each other, and I thought it would be a bad idea to change things. What’s more, he lives in San Cristóbal and, in contrast to my mother, doesn’t have enough money to buy a return flight on short notice: as an uncle of mine once informed me, my dad has two other children, both very young, and what with the habitual costs of paternity and the caprices of his wife, the meager profits from his candle factory are eaten up, along with his even more insignificant salary as a second-rank academic.
Cecilia was more excited than ever in her white dress with ten thousand flounces that cost me exactly ten thousand pesos. I was moved. And she even—although I find it hard to accept—inspired a sentiment close to love in me.
The religious ceremony took longer than I’d expected, and it was only possible thanks to my having bribed the priest of a modest neighborhood church, revealing to him that I’d never been baptized and explaining that my fiancée’s family mustn’t know as they were very Catholic. The priest showed himself to be understanding, or perhaps greedy, and accepted the second financial incentive I offered, pretending, despite this display of nerve, that he was saving my soul by bringing me back into the fold. A fold to which I had, in fact, never belonged.
Then came the party proper in the excessively ornate venue my father-in-law had booked. Don Enrique very quickly got drunk and gave an awkward, unintelligible speech that everyone applauded. Carmelita attempted, but obviously didn’t manage, to drag my mother down into a spiral of tears. Jorge, the designer from the museum, was radiant throughout the whole reception, endlessly repeating the same mantra: that he’d watched us fall in love, that he’d been there from the beginning. I abstained from asking him, given his role as a key witness, to provide some explanation of what was happening in my life. Isabel Watkins had hit the bottle too, but she disguised her drunkenness by hanging from the neck of her companion, a photographer ten years her junior whose work had recently been exhibited in the museum.
The honeymoon—a couple of nights at a Guerrero beach—turned out, in spite of our continued state of intoxication, to be pleasant. Cecilia asked me to take her standing up, resting her weight on the window ledge of a cheap, semi-rustic hotel, with her wedding dress bunched up on her brown back. I admit that in the nude, she was more beautiful than she seemed when dressed, and I enjoyed making her tremble by stroking the skin around her anus, a zone privileged by her nervous system. (But I also have to say that I was not, for all this, a notable lover.)
The festivities lasted a weekend, and then we returned—having taken the Monday off for her to move into my apartment—to our respective posts at the museum. I am now sitting at my desk while she looks at me, and I can’t get my head around the idea that the secretary, Cecilia, that woman who wiggles past on her way to Ms. Watkins’s office, is my legally recognized wife, whom I have to watch from my uncomfortable wooden chair while typing letters to no one.
When we leave the museum, we walk hand in hand to the metro. In the carriage, we stand in shy silence, and I pass the time looking at the faces of the other travelers while my hand rests on Cecilia’s right buttock. She seems grateful for this slight contact, which, from her perspective, saves her from the ignominy of being single, so she smiles secretly and, when the crush becomes oppressive, rests her head against my chest. When we come up from the metro, we walk along the less busy streets in the neighborhood. We stop off briefly at the corner store and buy a sugary treat for after dinner. (I have a suspicion that this custom, repeated over decades of wholesome matrimony, will result in consensual diabetes that we will both accept almost without complaint.)
That’s the way it’s been for a whole week. Today is, at last, Friday.
The apartment is a bit small for us, so I’m glad to have never bought large furniture, except for my wooden bed and the chest of drawers that holds my clothes in a knotted mess. Cecilia brought a flat-pack wardrobe from her parents’ home and many boxes with holiday souvenirs, which we’ve put in the tiny storage room on the roof. (That space, I have to admit, was her discovery. I was scarcely aware I had the dirty, peeling storeroom, full of cobwebs, that now holds my wife’s boxes of Veracruz key rings.) She also brought some kitchen utensils, inherited from her mother: a frying pan, two saucepans, a Teflon spatula, and a pewter spoon. There were hardly any wedding gifts; I was very explicit in that respect. Instead, I asked all the relatives—both hers and mine—to give us cash, to add to our savings so we could eventually move to a decent residence. Of course I don’t have the least intention of leaving my apartment, my vacant lot. I put the money we received in a metal box in the wardrobe Cecilia brought with her, keeping it for a rainy day. The office, I realize, makes one humiliatingly prudent.
Cecilia, for her part, hasn’t taken a single look at the vacant lot. I doubt if she has even noticed its existence. While she’s sitting in the living room, battling with the rabbit-ear antenna on the TV in order to watch her game shows, I go to the bedroom, on the pretext of reading, and look out the window at the lot. Now, for instance, I’m scrutinizing it in search of the hen. But she doesn’t appear. The muffled sound of the television filters through from the living room, mixed with Cecilia’s laughter, which leads me to suspect she’s managed to tune in to some program where the contestants are constantly humiliated.
Just as I’d predicted, Cecilia forcefully suggested we take down the tea bags I’d stapled to the wall opposite the bed. After a short exchange of words on the matter, I gave in, resignedly. I bought a couple of pints of whitewash and painted over the brown stain left by the tea bags until it disappeared. In place of my tea bags, Cecilia hung a hideous still life, the only wedding present that didn’t comply with my request: some purple flowers in an earthenware vase, a clumsy imitation of Diego Rivera’s essentially despicable creations. The painting was given to us by one of her aunts, who considered my idea of asking for cash to be—as she expressed it—in poor taste.
Apart from that elderly aunt, embittered by stereotypical widowhood and rancor, my in-laws have treated me well. Don Enrique, being old-fashioned in his ways, considers being married to his daughter an enormous sacrifice on my part (and he’s not completely wrong), and so is continually making me aware of his profound gratitude. One of the ways in which he believes he is repaying the favor is by showing me how to do repairs around the house: during our wedding day, he started explaining how to deal with a leak if you can’t find the valve. I, feigning interest, asked if he knew how to get rid of damp, which must have been a moment of pure joy for him since he immediately assured me he would take on the task of sorting out the problem, especially as his daughter would now be living with me in the apartment. So on Saturday morning, instead of walking to the gazebo to sit contemplating the various speeds of the passersby, or dedicating the morning to pampering the hen with special seeds, I’ll have to wait for my father-in-law to stop by to assess the state of the walls.
Cecilia is twenty-nine, two years my senior. Nevertheless, we both look older. My total lack of a life plan and my haste to be a grown-up left the stamp of frustration on my features. My wife, for her part, comes from a family environment in which passing twenty-two without having at least one child is a sign of ingratitude—I don’t know for what—or a lack of Guadalupian virtues. She was, at twenty-nine, the black sheep of a multitudinous family that understands marriage as an early rite of passage into adult life. It may be that the pressure from her extended family, in that sense, is responsible for the fact that she perpetually has a slight look of disgust—a haughty upper lip. Even now, when she’s laughing her head off in front of the TV in our living room.
Little by little, I’m losing all those small details that, until recently, I’d considered to be indispensable, all those minutiae I’d come to count as features that matched my slightly grubby character: the tea bags, the damp in the living room, the laudable undertaking to walk back to my apartment, and the dead, inane Saturdays in the oval gazebo, dreaming of impossible statistics that depict me as the center of the universe. All this, which until just recently could be considered a protean identity, a fluctuating but almost organic extension of my own body, is now at the point of extinction. In exchange, I have the DVD player Cecilia bought to watch her pirate videos on, and sexual activity I don’t have to pay money for (at least in the short term) and which I can enjoy almost anytime I want, excluding the hours devoted to TV and, for now, the office.
I evaluate the advantages of this apparently irreversible tradeoff and decide I didn’t do too badly: when you come down to it, I can store my collection of tea bags in my chest of drawers and staple them up again in around ten years’ time when Cecilia will have completely given up on the idea of modifying my habits.
Perhaps the most serious thing this pact entails—except for my wife’s sour breath in the mornings—is the great, and now insuperable, distance that has opened up between my mother and me. In the past, despite her explicit repudiation of my major decisions, my mom retained a filament of enthusiasm for having given birth, just over a quarter of a century ago, to a relatively functional son. Now, given that a deceptively golden wedding ring adorns my finger, tying me, like a prison tattoo, to a way of life she disapproves of, her expectations have been notably devalued. We don’t speak so often on the phone now, and when we do, her voice acquires the same tired tone she used when I was a boy and she, taking refuge in a migraine, would send me to my room, giving rise to a sharp pang of sadness inside me.
She reproaches me, of course, for not having studied something. And not just anything, naturally: a profession with demonstrable social utility would have been her choice for me. A lawyer, a rural doctor, or even an economist, just so long as I opted for a project that would include the most vulnerable communities. Anything, in fact, that would demonstrate I was concerned about giving continuity, during my lifetime, to her now-diminished desire to change the world. My mother holds youth in very high esteem since hers was intense and madcap, very much in keeping with the times. She therefore hoped my youth would act as a culture medium for a sensitive, decisive character, and not be a fleeting preamble to obesity and tedium. From her point of view, ingenuousness is a concept to be defended during at least the first thirty years of existence, and for a couple of years more that characteristic should translate into a sustained interest in changing the world, even if you then relinquish that desire. The fact that I, from early adolescence, and once my flirtation with drugs was behind me, had begun to exhibit a prebureaucratic attitude as if affiliating myself to the most insipid strand of character, causes my mom a sense of disillusion equivalent to dishonor. My marriage to a secretary—even though she, my mother, would never dare admit it—is the last straw.
14
I have a few thoughts of a general nature about marriage and the limits that should be imposed on it to preserve, as far as possible, some notion of personal decency. First, never, under any circumstances, will I allow Cecilia to defecate while I’m taking a shower. This incontrovertible point cannot be refuted by watertight folding doors or blue patterned shower curtains—it’s a crucial, life-defining question. Second, it should be clear to both parties that I had no expectations of or genuine enthusiasm for the future before getting married. I don’t want such a fundamental aspect of my personality to be relegated, over time, to a collateral effect of the marriage into which we have contracted, taking all credit from my phlegm, so stoically overcome. Third, allowing that I’m willing to yield to many things—using ridiculous pet names when speaking to her: “my cute little piggywinks,” for example—nothing can convince me of the need to be sincere to my wife. (A parenthesis is needed here. At what inalterable juncture, at what hour, did sincerity and communication become related elements? Nothing is further from spontaneous intuition, popular wisdom, historical experience: communication is, precisely, the avoidance of sincerity in order to reach agreement.)
Displaying a composure that, even to myself, seems astonishing, I attempted to elucidate these and other theoretical aspects of marriage in the company of my adored wife, talking as one adult to another. As soon as I said I found the idea of showering while she was shitting repugnant, she gave me a furious look and flounced out of the apartment. She returned half an hour later with a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and her mascara streaked. “I’m going to start smoking,” she said. She’s now smoking in the living room while I get ready to take a shower.
That was our first argument, and her reaction was heartening: instead of confrontation, a new vice. Instead of sorting things out and endlessly talking them over, a protracted, voluntary death. Assumption of pain. Metabolism. (Sorry, I was digressing.)
Mexico City is lovelier than ever. Two days ago, when Cecilia and I were on our way home from work, in a passage of the metro, a woman began insulting a policeman, explaining, with ample smatterings of “idiot” and “shut up,” that her usual station had been closed and she’d had to walk to that one. Unperturbed, the policeman gave her a scornful look and quite rightly replied, “Well, stop voting for the PRD. It’s all the democrats’ fault . . . Up the PRI!” and then he repeated his slogan for the onlookers: “Up the PRI, ladies and gentlemen, up with the Institutional Revolutionary Party!”
I spoke to Cecilia about the possibility of looking for a different job, citing the opportunities for professional development and the need to augment my savings. Obviously, those are not my reasons at all: seeing my wife eight hours a day, only four desks away, then going home to find her overpowering mug on the other pillow, at the table, everywhere, has become a form of torture. We don’t even have recourse to that thoroughly middle-class ritual of asking each other how our days were. Even if the answer to that question is always the same, I suspect there is a deeply calming pleasure to be found in asking it each evening over a microwave dinner.
On the other hand, I find the very idea of leaving the museum, abandoning Ms. Watkins, painful. Ever since she showed her unexpected talent for empathy, reprimanding me for marrying beneath myself, I see her almost as an alter ego: a woman conscious of the general grayness of existence who has let herself be dragged along by the inappropriate speed of events. Although, of course, there is a crucial difference that forms a breach between us: Ms. Watkins still retains the basically romantic belief that the string of accidents determining us can finally lead to the sort of destiny we were, against all odds, made for. I couldn’t disagree more: the pencil that draws the line of my biography can only trace out an insipid figure, oblivious to even the discreet sumptuousness of geometry. If I were able to choose that figure, the final perimeter that represents, once and for all, the collection of vicissitudes I’ve lived through, it would be a dick. Yes, a penis: iconic, puerile, the kind teenagers draw on the chalkboard to annoy the teacher. A simple, unadorned prick that evades all psychological analysis and reclaims its original potential for insult. That would be my ideal figure, the embodiment of all the blunders that make me up. That or an ass.
Maybe I’m saying this because, during the last few days, a ridiculously dense cloud, a lugubrious mood, has been hanging over me. I’m surprised to find conventionally important events—a wedding—happen to me as if to a second cousin, scarcely affecting me. I get news of my life, but I don’t feel it. And it’s not that life is, as some would wish, to be found elsewhere, but that it’s been reduced to a weak, heterogeneous set of associations: a hen walking around a vacant lot, a lottery ticket with the number 6 printed on it, a collection of used tea bags. Every so often, one of those details of my most intimate cartography is erased without any great fuss and a new one appears, substituting it.
In the end, the only thing that matters to me is conserving enough clarity to be able to articulately criticize what I see; if some illness stopped me from doing this, nothing would have meaning anymore. I’m not worried about physical degeneration, the whitish drool dribbling onto a shabby suit, premature baldness, prostate cancer. I’m not worried about them so long as I can go on complaining about what I see. I don’t seek the permission of the Fates to find a soul mate with whom to deploy my melancholy; I can be alone, really alone, but I do ask the god of neural functions to let me retain this faint line of voice that crosses my cranium, allowing me to laugh at the world around me. This is the only grade of intelligence I aspire to, and it makes me immensely happy that it doesn’t depend in the least on books or people.
(I say all this at the risk of sounding maudit; that is neither my intention nor feeling; otherwise, I would be oozing highly profitable mauditism in the modern salons of pomp and circumstance.)
15
The hen appears in and disappears from the lot at completely unpredictable intervals. Sometimes she’s there all night long, and at others there’s no sign of her for several days. I’ve turned the matter over in my mind, but I can’t crack the code of the bird’s irregular life. The topic is beginning to have pathological importance in relation to my daily routine, and I’m aware of it, which makes it even more disturbing.
Cecilia finally noticed the lot.
“Why did you move to a building next to a piece of waste ground, my love? It must have so many rats, you know.”
The exaggeration of her warning irritates me. I tell her there isn’t a single rat in the lot, just a hen. Long silence. I feel I’ve betrayed an enormous secret. Cecilia looks puzzled and gives a, for me, repulsive laugh: the sort of laugh emitted by teenagers who don’t have control over their extremities. She asks how there could be a hen there. Plucking up my courage, I grab her arm, drag her to the window, and point to the mound of earth where the hen is usually found. Nothing.
Cecilia gives me a worried look, and I, in the mood for a leg-pull, insist, “Look, there’s the hen. So, believe me now?”
Cecilia extracts herself from my grip—I’m probably hurting her—and goes to the kitchen. I stay here alone, looking at the lot, leaning against what some would call “the sill.” This is our second attempt at an argument after the one when Ceci took up smoking. I wonder what new vice she’ll acquire this time. Hopefully it won’t be coprophagy or getting her nails painted with whole landscapes—I wouldn’t tolerate either.
Then the hen appears from behind some bushes and climbs to the top of the mound with Tibetan calm. I look at her enviously and don’t even contemplate the possibility of calling Cecilia and showing her I’m not out of my mind. Instead, I decide to hatch a plot for discovering every detail of the feathered creature’s lifestyle: I’ll call in sick, even act out a serious illness so Cecilia won’t suspect anything—Would she, at this stage, be capable of reporting me to Ms. Watkins?—and rather than going to the museum, I’ll spend the whole day in the vacant lot, following the hen’s every movement.
While I’m hatching this dishonest scheme, the bird moves back into the bosky shadows of the lot. I sit on the bed and open the drawer in which I keep the used tea bags. After contemplating them for a while, I decide I need a new project, something as ambitious as that collection, one that completely absorbs my intellectual capacities, that aligns my ideas in a single direction, in just the same way as a magnetized metal bar aligns iron filings.
That’s what I need: a Project. The other possible solution to overcoming the lethal sense of dissatisfaction into which I’ve sunk (for how long?) would be to find something like a Community: a close bond with a group of people who understand my interest in collecting tea bags, for instance, or my irrepressible desire to live next to an empty lot. But I suspect that no such groups exist, and that I have steadily dynamited all the communities I ever belonged to—the drug addicts in the gardens near the house in Coapa, the girlfriend I went to Cozumel with, and even Ms. Watkins, that secretly friendly boss who, despite all, believed in my abilities for a while. Dynamited them to the point where I’ve ended up more alone than a chili in a maize field, as my grandmother used to say, living with a woman to whom nothing except neutral Newtonian space seems to unite me.
16
It’s Monday. The minute I woke, I uttered an exaggerated groan that frightened Cecilia more than I’d expected.
“What’s wrong?” she asked in alarm. I invented a complex stomach ailment that would keep me in bed for at least forty-eight hours. Cecilia didn’t believe me, but even so she agreed to tell Ms. Watkins I couldn’t come in. She’s less unpleasant now that she’s my wife. If I’d missed a day at the office while we were simple workmates, she would have hurried to Ms. Watkins to vehemently demand my dismissal. Luckily, I never missed a day during those three years.
So, I stayed at home. The first thing I did was leaf through, without seriously reading, a newspaper from last week. The classified ads occupied my attention more than any other section, and within them, most particularly, those relating to sexual encounters. I amused myself in this way until my imagination sparked up, encouraged by the indecent messages of seek and capture, and I slowly masturbated on the bed, unconcerned about the possibility of ejaculating onto Cecilia’s pillow, which I did. After that, I watched TV for quite a while and once again tried to think up an Important Project that would give meaning to my haphazard existence. Two hours later, resigned to my fate, I resolved to go into the lot to find the bird’s secret hiding place, to decipher the reasons behind her actions. That was to some extent an Important Project, even if it wasn’t really one. It was to some extent because it related one of my most authentic obsessions, the hen, to the need to understand her mechanisms, her minutiae, her little animal decisions that, without being decisions, made up a strangely fascinating, ordinary existence.
And here I am now on the other side of the wall, my shoes half sunk in the mud. I walk carefully through the undergrowth, searching for the hen and attempting to attract her with a sound I feel would be familiar, exciting: the equivalent of the sex-wanted ads in the newspaper, but in clucks. “Seeking a female with dirty feathers and loose morals,” I cluck to her.
After walking across a couple of rotting planks, I reach the darkest, wildest core of the waste ground, that part that can’t be seen from my window, toward which the hen is usually walking when I lose sight of her. The first time I entered the lot, with the frustrated intention of enticing her toward the table that was to serve as a shelter, I didn’t get as far as this remote, overgrown region. I can hear the hen clucking in the bushes, but although she’s close by, it’s difficult to get through the dense vegetation to the place where the sound is coming from, and I have to make numerous detours to avoid nettles, thorny branches, and pieces of barbed wire. When I’m at the point of locating its origin, the clucking stops; nor can I see any movement among the leaves. The hen has disappeared. I desperately search all around but don’t find a single feather. On the other hand, I do uncover a plastic bag just like the other one that, a few months ago, made me back off and run out of the lot, the bag full of viscera. The possibility that this bag might also be stuffed with intestines in an advanced state of putrefaction horrifies me. Not just because of my disgust and revulsion, my profound and, you might say, fainthearted dislike of blood, but also because finding a second bag during this second incursion into the lot would imply a pattern, a wink of complicity, a recurrence of—for god’s sake—grotesque, abhorrent things; it would imply the lot is a place of perversion and death, a place where you could, with astounding impunity, dump the corpses of large mammals, thinking mammals, mammals with skirts.
Confronted with these pure possibilities, I feel overtaken by events. I have the sudden intuition that it wasn’t my liking for things rural that led me to move next to the plot, but a propensity for catastrophe and a tendency toward the sordid that goes beyond my conscious undertaking to convert myself into a mediocre, spineless man. So I decide to take a roundabout path through other shady areas of the lot to avoid contact with, or simple closeness to, the bag possibly full of intestines. I stoop to pass below a branch that hangs, as if brought down by lightning, over a heap of trash. And as I move into the darkness, with the foliage of the lianas and the general vegetal disorder covering my body, I feel a blow on the back of my neck. And I fall. I fall as if going beyond the ground. Like Alice when she falls while following the rabbit. The rabbit whose form can be clearly made out in the scar on my arm, and on the moon, so they say. The rabbit that, in my case, is a stray and—who knows?—even imaginary hen, let loose in the weeds of my inertia.
17
I’m woken by a beautiful ray of sunlight falling directly onto my face and the cackling presence of the hen, who is pulling up worms a couple of feet from my ear. I pass my tongue over my lips and discover the taste of dust. I can also sense the dryness of the earth on the skin of my arms, the palms of my hands, my eyelids, my whole body. I’m lying faceup. I received a blow to the back of the neck, and I’m lying faceup, covered in dirt. I probably fell on my front and took the opportunity of an instant of consciousness to turn on my own axis, like a predictable planet.
Pain. Pain very close to the back of my neck. The blow wasn’t exactly on the back of my neck. It was on my head, to one side, a few inches from the ear now listening to the clucking of the hen. It was a blow on that part of my head where the infestations of lice always started in my childhood. In the finest, most vulnerable hairs through which I would run my hand to feel the gritty lumps of blood, the pain. Pain and confusion.
I can’t have been lying here for long. One or two hours at the most. Cecilia hasn’t left the museum, and the sun is still high, so it’s somewhere between midday and early afternoon. Two hours maybe. Not more. A few short hours disconnected, absent, lying faceup in the lot—my beloved waste ground next to my building—accompanied by the intermittent clucking of my wardress, by the pain of her victims, the worms. Worm pain. Neck pain. I sense and look at my grimy body. I extract a twig from my mouth. I wipe the earth from my eyelids with the right sleeve of my shirt, which is less dirty than the rest of me. My slow efforts to stand don’t seem to surprise the hen, whom I’ve never before seen at such close quarters. Now I can appreciate the dull opacity of her plumage, the unhealthy look of her legs, the food fighting for survival, wriggling in her mouth. Worms.
Once on my feet, I’m overcome by a slight dizziness, accompanied by the precise sensation of blood flowing and veins pulsing in the area around the wound on my head. I check that my belongings—keys, wallet, cell phone—are still in their usual places—left pocket, back pocket, and right pocket, respectively—and as they are, I discount robbery as the motive for the aggression to which I was subjected, if that’s what it was, and not a falling branch or a stone or a piece of drywall someone threw over from the street, imagining the lot to be empty as usual. Maybe I saved the hen from that very same blow that, I say to myself, given the size and fragility of the bird, would have been lethal.
Though it seems more likely it was a calculated attack. What was I hit with? A bat, a piece of rusty pipe from the lot, a tree trunk struck by lightning, the perpetrator’s own wrath? And what was the motive for that sudden, unjustified attack? Simple rage; jealousy; the defense of a particular territory; incomprehensible, naked, unshod Evil?
Pissed off, I make my way back to the wall.
18
From the very moment I start ascending the stairs of my building, while I’m rummaging in my pockets for the key that keeps my meager belongings relatively secure, I suspect something is not as it should be. On the other side of the door, I can hear noises that, though not loud—barely perceptible in fact—only add anxiety to my heightened sensitivity. Despite having ascertained that the wound on my head is more shocking than serious, I can still feel it throbbing, and I think I’ll have to invent something to explain the presence of the crusted blood on my scalp to Cecilia. (The truth is unthinkable: I could never explain why I went into the lot, why I followed the hen, why I was hit.) I’m distracted from my thoughts and my future excuses by the sounds on the other side of the door as I’m about to open it. Lo and behold, just to make a frigging awful situation worse, some burglar has, in his wisdom, broken into my dwelling with impunity to commit some outrage that, in my anxiety, I imagine to be not so much robbery as licentious acts involving my underwear and the pink lipstick Cecilia uses when she wants to project an air of elegance.
Prepared to frustrate the perverse siege, I enter the apartment and, with great presence of mind, shout out in as deep a voice as I can manage, feigning heroic, baritone, burglar-proof manliness. But at least in the living room, there is no burglar or anyone of a profession akin to that. I head for the bedroom with a crepuscular presentiment but on opening the door don’t immediately see anything out of the ordinary. But this apparent calm masks a more serious perversion: in the geometric center of the bed lies a coiled piece of shit. A perfect turd on the tiger-striped bedspread.