1
Marcelo Valente walked to his car under the unforgiving sun, wading through the cloud of scalding hot, yellow dust raised by the vehicles leaving the university in single file. The professor squinted to prevent being blinded by the dry earth. This being the case, he had difficulty finding the right key for the car. He coughed. In a low voice, employing Castilian idiomatic expressions, he cursed the arid environment and that fine desert dust that floated in the air throughout the University of Los Girasoles, covering the papers on his desk and drying his skin. He finally managed to locate the lock and speedily got into the car, slamming the door behind him before the cloud of dust could enter.
He had arranged to meet Velásquez in a restaurant in the center. It was Friday and no one had to go back to the university in the afternoon, so it would be a long lunch, washed down, no doubt, by plenty of tequila. Velásquez wanted to introduce him to a friend of his, a gringo practitioner of the plastic arts who had set up his ceramic sculpture workshop in an old, half-ruined house in the center of Los Girasoles, and had, in Velásquez’s words, “an absolutely visionary artistic project.”
That description naturally inspired a justifiable degree of mistrust in Marcelo. In general, Velásquez’s recommendations were difficult to take on board. He had once lent him a movie, “an indisputable classic of the Mexican counterculture,” that turned out to be one of the worst Marcelo had ever seen: women undressing in trucks with slogans like “Fucking Fast”; pallid vampires sweating out-of-focus; overweight heroes. The visionary gringo artist didn’t sound much better, but you never could tell.
They were to meet at the Barraca de Pedro, a restaurant with a simple name but pretensions to haute cuisine, where local dishes were reinvented with a sophistication that, in Marcelo’s opinion, removed all their charm. He had been there a couple of times before, first with Adela and then with Velásquez, and on both occasions he had ended up drunk. The array of tequilas, mezcales, aguardientes, and local wines on offer was almost suicidal. The prices were absurdly low.
Marcelo arrived slightly early, at five to three, and was surprised to see Velásquez already installed at a table, laughing uproariously. It was unusual for him to be on time. The gringo was tall, tanned, and too wrinkled for the age that his bearing and presence suggested; he looked as if he had been weathered by small-town life, and his rough-hewn hands did not in the least suggest the delicacy of the pottery he supposedly worked on. He had long, graying hair tied in a ponytail and was wearing a white shirt of some coarse material, with the sleeves rolled up to just below the elbows, faded denim jeans, and snakeskin cowboy boots. He was also laughing, sitting opposite Velásquez and absentmindedly stroking the leg of an adolescent who couldn’t be more than eighteen (and that was, in fact, exactly how old she was, as Marcelo would discover a couple of hours later, by then infected with the collective jubilation, taking advantage of the girl’s removal to the bathroom to discreetly ask Velásquez her age).
Marcelo introduced himself and shook the rough hand of the gringo, who said his name was Jimmie. He kissed the cold cheek of the adolescent, who didn’t say a single word and whom Jimmie introduced as Micaela. When he sat in the only free chair—facing Micaela, on the right of the gringo—he noticed that already waiting for him were a shot of tequila and a cold beer, still misted from the change of temperature after its removal from the fridge, as if they had calculated his arrival to the exact second.
They talked about anything that came to mind as the waiter brought their dishes and placed them in the center of the table, delicacies Velásquez and the gringo ate with their fingers, Marcelo sampled rather ineptly (they were not designed for his strict use of a knife and fork), and Micaela observed with calculated disdain.
Jimmie was from California, from a town an hour from San Francisco that used to be full of manual workers and was now inhabited by Vietnamese immigrants. He had spent his childhood and teenage years in the Bay Area, surrounded by hippies, and told the story of an elder brother who died in the waves after going swimming while high on drugs. Jimmie was ten years older than Marcelo and had done everything: from cycling across the continent to working as a cleaner in the Apple offices in Silicon Valley. He had been living in Los Girasoles for a couple of years, after an argument in San Miguel de Allende with a landlady from New York who had thrown his things out into the street. “Goddamn son-of-a-fucking-bitch gringos,” said Jimmie, resentful of his compatriots, like any good Californian.
Marcelo talked about Madrid, about the Movida years, about women. He gave Jimmie a summary of his Mexican trip: the relationship with Adela, the house he had unsuccessfully rented and that was now occupied by Adela’s son, his project for a book on Foret’s passage through the country. Velásquez intervened with witty, usually misogynist comments while Micaela sat with a rigid smile on her face and occasionally rested her head on Jimmie’s shoulder. Marcelo attempted to include the girl in the conversation; he asked her what she did. “I study,” she said in a voice that was almost a sigh, and smiled timidly, more for Jimmie than Marcelo.
The afternoon passed quickly, and the lamps of the interior patio of the restaurant illuminated a fountain when darkness finally fell. By this time, Marcelo had developed a tolerance for tequila much greater than he had had on his arrival in Mexico, and he was now able to recognize the moment when the next round would be accompanied by catastrophe. He was far from that point. But not so the gringo, who seemed more affected by the drink, or by life in general. It was he who proposed they move on to his studio, where he kept—he said at the top of his voice—much better tequila than the dog piss they served there. Micaela looked smilingly at him, imperturbable. Marcelo calculated that if the gringo passed out in the restaurant, it would be more complicated to transport him to his bed than if he lost consciousness near that bed, so he seconded the idea of moving on to the studio. He hesitatingly asked Micaela if she needed a ride somewhere else first, but the child shook her head very slowly, swinging her straight black shoulder-length hair, and told Marcelo she lived with Jimmie.
Marcelo offered to drive the five or six blocks that separated the restaurant from Jimmie’s house, and they walked unsteadily over to his car. The gringo had begun to lose his fluidity in Spanish and compensated by inserting words in English; Marcelo noticed, by the change in her expression, that Micaela didn’t understand that language. It was perhaps for that reason, or simply because of his state of intoxication, that Jimmie passed completely into English and told Velásquez and Marcelo, in an awkward confidence, that he had met Micaela near Nueva Francia; the girl’s family was very poor, and she, according to Jimmie, was a brilliant woman, like a Martian, completely unexpected in the familial and social context in which she had been reared. He spoke about her in the way a naturalist would when describing some indigenous flower. Jimmie gave the father five thousand pesos and took the teenager, promising the family they would come back from time to time to visit. “She fucks like an angel,” he added, this time in perfectly clear Spanish, to which Micaela reacted by distancing herself slightly.
The studio was an old building, from the same period and in the same style as Adela’s house but in much worse condition and a great deal smaller. The paint was peeling from the walls, or they had only been painted in patches, and in the kitchen the original roof had been replaced by a sheet of rusty metal that allowed a view of the night sky in places. Luckily, it didn’t rain much in Los Girasoles. All the interior walls, except for the one delimiting the back bedroom, had been knocked through. A number of load-bearing columns divided the elongated space, along which were scattered pots, shards of pottery, and ceramic plates painted with horrendous designs (horses with auras, blue suns, women drawn in profile whose hair metamorphosed into flocks of birds).
Jimmie rinsed out some glasses and carried them, still wet, to what could be considered the living room: three Acapulco chairs set around a low, rectangular table. Each of the men took one of the chairs; Micaela disappeared into the bedroom and came back with some pillows, which she put on the floor to make herself more comfortable.
Indoors, Jimmie seemed more sober, as if only the air-conditioning or the desire to insult the waiters had aroused him for a short time. Now he poured tequila for the other two men (Micaela had taken a can of beer from a small icebox but scarcely touched it) and talked about his projects with relative fluency. He was thinking of organizing an exhibition right there in the studio so that the wealthy residents of Los Girasoles would buy his ceramics. He knew the designs were horrible but defended his right to sell them, alleging that people liked having ugly things in their homes. In fact, added Jimmie to Marcelo (much to the satisfaction of Velásquez, who had been waiting for this moment the whole evening), his real passion was not ceramics but contemporary art; the problem was that in this bleak wasteland it was impossible to explain to the natives (“or even worse, to the academics,” he added scathingly, with a wink to Marcelo) what contemporary art really was. Though he knew, he said, that Marcelo was a man of the world, and in Barcelona (“Madrid, Madrid,” Marcelo interrupted), right, in Madrid then, he must have seen contemporary art projects much closer to his own area of interest. In fact, that was why he had told Velásquez that he wanted to meet him: to invite him to join this new project—the word was repeated like a mantra in his discourse—he was putting together. It was going to be a magnificent exposition, he said, a performance unlike anything that had ever been done before. He had been in training for this for years, although he had only discovered it a short time ago, and only now, said Jimmie, did he understand that all that training was destined for this moment and this place. By “all that training” he was of course referring to a bunch of unconnected anecdotes spiced up with sex and prog rock.
Jimmie went on talking, and Velásquez seemed to have fallen asleep, although it turned out he was listening carefully with his eyes closed. Micaela was looking at her owner (no other word occurred to Marcelo to describe the relationship between the girl and the gringo) with an unsettling mixture of submission and disdain. Marcelo listened to Jimmie and gradually understood that it was he, and not Velásquez, who had wanted them meet, and that Jimmie in some way subjugated the people around him, crushed them with his conversation and anecdotes, reducing them to mere spectators, to supporting actors in the movie of his life. He talked about his artistic project with the conviction of a real estate agent. It was, he said, the future of art. By that he didn’t mean that art would advance by following his model, but that his project thematized the future of art, or rather a vision, a foretaste of that future. To explain this he had to go back to his youth in San Francisco, after the demise of the hippie dream.
In 1975, when Jimmie was twenty, there had been a lot of talk about certain CIA programs related to mind control. Everyone knew all about it: these days, Hollywood most likely lives on stories like that, added the gringo. What happened was that the radicalized hippies who had been arrested for supposed communist affiliations, and then later released, talked about interrogation sessions using hypnosis and experiments with LSD. At first, naturally, no one had believed them; one more invention of anticapitalist paranoia. But then the affair had reached Congress, and Senator Ted Kennedy had demanded clarification. The declassified documents spoke of a group of psychiatrists recruited by the CIA to develop the program, utilizing hypnosis as an interrogation tool. One of these psychiatrists, maybe the most notable since his name was mentioned many times in Senator Kennedy’s reports, was Dr. Francis Cameron. When the scandal broke and the guilt was, more or less randomly, apportioned, Dr. Cameron disappeared for a few years, then, in the mid-eighties, became famous for founding a private counterespionage business based on techniques related to hypnosis: E-Sight Enterprises. They offered services—pharmaceutical, technological, nutritional—to companies—Coca-Cola was even mentioned—anxious to discover if an employee had leaked information to the competition, in infringement of the confidentiality clauses in his contract. E-Sight Enterprises was a failure in financial terms, despite the free publicity given by the tabloid press, who published whole articles on the sinister Dr. Mind, as they nicknamed Cameron, in which they speculated on his pacts with secret societies. But the company had gone bankrupt, and Cameron was out of a job, so he recycled himself as a champion of alternative medicine and other emergent concepts of the New Age in San Francisco at the end of the eighties.
It was there that Jimmie came across him: just another hippie doctor—one of the old guys, burnt out on acid, who preached against the use of vaccines and examined the color of your aura for five bucks. Jimmie was in the herbal business and sold those delirious doctors piles of cacti stolen from the indigenous reservation in the south of the country. It was illegal, but his was the least of illegalities in a universe that changed paradigms every couple of weeks, with the Berlin Wall coming down and various mafias staking out generous areas of the U.S. criminal underworld for themselves before the government decided who their next archenemy was going to be, now that the Soviets had gone out of fashion.
Jimmie brought Dr. Mind some rare cacti and climbing plants that no other medicine man had ever ordered, and talking the matter over one afternoon in his consulting rooms in the Mission District, they had ended by exchanging confidences. Cameron took a liking to him (there was an insinuation of a homosexual relationship in the story told by Jimmie, who spoke of the man with great tenderness) and told him about E-Sight Enterprises and the years before, when he was working for the CIA. In the beginning, Jimmie didn’t believe a word of it, although he thought he had read similar stories years before. But Cameron had kept documents from the company that explained the method used in the hypnosis (patented) and set out guidelines for the training of hypnotists specializing in counter espionage and other pleasantries.
Jimmie saw in all that a possibility for getting rich, so one night, while the parascientist was asleep, he broke into his house (or was already inside; the anecdote didn’t make this clear), stole the papers, plus three thousand dollars in bills, and spent six erratic weeks driving to Guatemala (he stopped off here and there), never again to return to San Francisco.
The narrative flow of his flight was uneven; he amused himself for several minutes telling, with a wealth of detail, what he had eaten in a certain wayside restaurant in Chiapas, then dispatched a couple of years of his life in a single blow with a vague explanation of the profession (“attack-dog trainer”) he had taken up during this interval. Marcelo thought, in the end, it was the story of an obsession that, like a hurricane, returned periodically and departed as violently as it had arrived. Jimmie had come across hypnotism in a moment of desperation, just when he thought his life might consist of stealing cacti from the Indians for five more years and then dying of a heart attack brought on by the abuse of toxic substances. The friendship with Dr. Mind and the promise of salvation that under-laid his conspiratorial nonsense poured down on the gringo like the bucket of meaning he needed to become fully awake.
Maybe, thought Marcelo, there were some E-Sight documents, stolen by Jimmie, that described, in broad outline, the process of hypnosis. Although it was more likely, from his viewpoint, that the gringo had fled his country for a more common reason: pursued by the law or the ghost of a love affair drugs had snatched from him. The point was not the truth of the story, but the pell-mell way Jimmie told it and the delirious look in his eyes. A deeper truth could be perceived in these outward expressions. And finally, wasn’t he himself, Marcelo, very similar in this sense? A man intermittently gnawed by trivial recurrences, a researcher of lives constructed on the knife edge of lies, an imposter convinced of his false story. If he were, for a moment, to strip Jimmie of his most superficial layer, to draw back the curtains of his eccentricity and his adaptation to the stereotype of a Californian in love with drugs and the Third World, what was left was not so different from what Marcelo himself hid under the dermis of sophistication and behind the shield of arrogance. Of course, looking at the matter clearly, all men, stripped of a precise number of superficial attributes, are essentially the same, in the way that the centers of all onions look alike, and what one has deep inside is essentially boring: superimposed layers of tissue bathed in blood, a few entrenched fears, urine, shit, desperation in the face of death. Only in the way these elements articulate with the external conditions—material, political, economic, climatic—do men acquire true interest as objects of study. There is nothing in the noumenon that allows us to concern ourselves with the next guy.
Marcelo strayed off into these vain considerations of a philosophical nature, but in the meanwhile, out there, in the world of material determinants, Jimmie continued talking like a street vendor with echolalia. His story had reached the vicinity of the present, and he was having a fine time discoursing on his artistic vocation and the need to use hypnosis for the good of the cultural world, now barren due to a handful of hypocrites who had betrayed the romantic spirit of art through their cold, financial calculation. In short, Jimmie was spitting out the traditional megalomaniacal rant of all those who propose to do something radically new (that idea gave Marcelo a warm feeling).
Some months before, at the kiosk in the center of Los Girasoles, Jimmie had bought the tabloid he read religiously every Sunday. In a poorly written article, he had discovered that Dr. Mind was dead, and for that reason, he finally, after years of waiting, felt free to apply the CIA and E-Sight techniques of hypnosis for his own benefit. He had already made a few experiments, hypnotizing Central American prostitutes and queers garnered from the streets during his years of bumming about. Any mistake in the technique and the patient would wake up in the middle of the session, screaming and attempting to scratch his eyes out, but Jimmie had persevered until he had polished every detail and could now put even the most reluctant subjects into a trance. Once, he said, he had hypnotized a dog in Ciudad Juárez.
At some point in this hazardous form of amusement, Jimmie had, however, realized that Dr. Cameron’s method had certain applications unforeseen by its creator: doors that opened in the middle of the hypnosis that only an experienced therapist could enter without leaving his patient an idiot. Tunnels to unknown regions of the mind that Dr. Cameron had overlooked, concerned as he was with dragging a clumsy confession from a poor student or, later, from an employee who had attempted to take early retirement by selling a couple of formulae to the highest bidder. Jimmie’s ambitions were more expansive. He didn’t give a shit about the superficial layers of the consciousness, he said. What he was interested in was diving deeper, immersing himself in the gloomy depths of the frontal lobe.
At this point in the story, Jimmie’s voice became more serious. Even Micaela, usually so impassive, looked on edge, like a child waiting for the moment of opening the presents at a party. Velásquez had emerged from his profound meditation and, although he already knew the story, was staring spellbound at Jimmie. Marcelo Valente, trained in the toughest schools of philosophical reason, resisted the effects of the story, but didn’t deny the charm of the narrative, to which the gringo’s accent added an organic contribution.
The dramatic pause gave Jimmie the opportunity to serve another round of tequilas. Micaela continued to take timid sips from her can of beer, sitting on the floor on her pillows. Marcelo Valente glanced at her and for the first time understood her beauty. She wasn’t a child of eighteen; she was a very old woman, with the eyes of one who has seen things go up in flames too many times; she had regressed to her physiological age, thought Marcelo, from some unlikely place.
After downing his tequila in two swigs, Jimmie took up his narrative. Memory, he said, didn’t have a linear structure, as we used to imagine. Within it, all the images from our past were superimposed in a chaotic, random manner. The scenes shuffled together there were not the sediment of time but instantaneous constructions that could take in elements from any lived moment. Sometimes, said Jimmie, during a session of hypnosis, the patient’s images of a memory didn’t correspond to any previous lived experience. Among the family photos of a trip to the beach, a strange element would timidly sneak in, one that didn’t correspond to that or any other memory. They generally appeared in the form of an object—objects are traitorous: a piece of plastic, the function of which is hard to explain, or a gleaming white machine surrounded by rust. Jimmie termed those strange elements that appeared during hypnosis, falsifying the memories, “hypnotic fetishes.” And he had discovered, as he went on to add, that hypnotic fetishes were not imaginary constructions but anticipated future scenes that we would perhaps never see: kitchen appliances, toys our children or grandchildren would use quite naturally some Thursday morning, or multisensory sculptures that would make the visitors to future art galleries shudder. If, during the hypnosis, you managed to concentrate on those fetishes, you could learn about those future art forms and carry them into the present. That was, to cut a long story short, the project.
Marcelo, whose pragmatism had waned during his stay in Mexico and, in particular, during his recent conversations with Rodrigo, had listened with respect to the anecdotal part of Jimmie’s monologue: the intrigues with the CIA, the eighties, the counterespionage business, the financial disaster, the birth of the New Age, the illegal deals, the homosexual relationship between the budding fugitive from justice and the discredited psychiatrist, the betrayal and the flight south, the experiments with hypnosis. He adored the story. He had even thought, during a moment of distraction while Jimmie was rattling on, that he had to find a way to put some of it into his book, to relate it somehow with Foret’s months in Mexico and his disappearance. They’d lap this up in Madrid, he thought. They’d no longer see him as an academic with a talent for taking full advantage of the perks of the office, but as an authentic researcher of the passions of the soul, an explorer of the depths of consciousness who had, in the New World, discovered a parallel logic capable of renewing the stagnant thought of Western philosophy through the unlikely terrain of the aesthetics of madness. These were the delusions of grandeur he childishly gave himself up to from time to time on discovering, for example, an author no one had read. The idea of being a pioneer in some subject, of finding a bundle of yellowing papers in some provincial library that would position him as the man who was capable of rescuing some forgotten aspect of philosophical thought, stirred him to the core of his being. Shining in the pedestrian grayness of academia was such a complicated enterprise that he had dreams of himself as the Christ who would open the gates of a new conception of the world, and then all those miserable wretches would recognize his true worth.
Obviously, there was one aspect of Jimmie’s narrative that he was uneasy about: it was absolute nonsense. The belief that one could secretly look into a future art gallery to anticipate its content by a hundred years was enough to have the poor gringo locked away for life. He decided, nevertheless, to humor him and then later, when he got Velásquez alone, sound out the extent of Jimmie’s derangement.
Micaela stood up and went to fetch a glass from the dilapidated kitchen. Jimmie had his eyes fixed on Marcelo Valente, who was attempting to avoid the question that would inevitably follow.
“What do you think?” Jimmie eventually asked. “Do you want to join the project?”
Marcelo stammered feigned admiration and praised the gringo’s narrative talents. “But I’m not sure,” he then said, “what all this has to do with me.”
Jimmie hit his brow with the palm of his hand, like someone who has remembered that he’s left the stove on three blocks from home. He took a deep breath and began a new monologue at the very moment Micaela returned to the room and sat cross-legged in her place, putting her empty glass down in front of her without having served another round of tequila to the others, as Marcelo imagined she would.
The thing was that the objectivity of the method, its ability to effectively predict or anticipate the future, depended not only on the hypnotist’s training and the willingness of the hypnotized subject, but also on confirmation by others of the content observed during hypnosis. That is to say: a fetish could be a fetish or it could be the fruit of the individual’s imagination, and only during a collective session of hypnosis, with everyone involved simultaneously diving into the future, or into the subconscious, or wherever the hell they were supposed to be diving, could the form of an unmistakably anticipatory object be defined. Everyone would search for the same fetish during the session and, given that they were intimately connected, thanks to the group exercises undertaken beforehand, the anticipatory potential of one member of the group would empower the other hypnotized subjects. On their return from the voyage, they would describe the object to each other, then they would proceed to construct a replica in clay or latex or whatever.
Jimmie paused for as long as it takes to smile. His eyes opened enormously wide and seemed bluer than ever. Marcelo glanced at Velásquez, his ally in reason in the midst of barbarity, but Velásquez was looking fixedly at the gringo and appeared to have jumped the gun on the hypnosis session. Marcelo saw his friend had, some time ago, become ensnared in Jimmie’s web, and that his predilection for all things magical, perhaps due to his American origins, was much greater than his (Marcelo’s origins were, when you came down to it, European and rationalist).
Marcelo had to make some response, and he knew what it should be: this was all madness and too much like the Mexican B movie Velásquez had recommended to him. He had no intention of getting involved in any such game, and if it hadn’t been for the tequila, it would all have been a waste of time. But he didn’t say any of that. His desire to please at any cost was stronger that his convictions, and he didn’t want to generate disaccord between the gringo and Velásquez, since the fat professor must already have said something about his willingness for the gringo to risk inviting him. So, Marcelo agreed with feigned enthusiasm. He said he was ready to participate in the collective hypnosis session, that they should get out the pocket watch or whatever was needed.
Jimmie gave a triumphal smile, and Velásquez’s previously stern face appeared to relax into an expression of relief. Micaela stood up and, after lifting her skirt to her waist, slid her white panties down to the floor, where they lay like a dead animal. She took Marcelo’s glass, which by then contained not a drop of tequila, and placed it under her skirt. After a moment of general expectation, the tinkle of urine was heard and Micaela took the glass, with a little piss in the bottom, from beneath her skirt. She repeated the ritual with the three other glasses and finally arranged them all in the center of the table; then she poured a shot of tequila into each glass of piss. Jimmie drew the girl to him, sat her on his knees, and kissed her on the mouth. Velásquez was the first to raise his glass, and he then clinked it with those of the gringo and the girl. The three looked simultaneously at Marcelo, and he wondered if they had rehearsed this gesture beforehand. His head hurt, and he thought, “I’m drunk; I’m so sloshed I’m seeing things, and this is not happening.” He raised his glass and enthusiastically clinked it against the others.
He had never tasted anything so delicious.
2
There was just one last thing to be done before the preparatory sessions of hypnosis could begin. Each time Jimmie mentioned it, he lost his cool. According to him, it was dangerous to initiate a session of collective hypnosis with an even number of participants. Once, in Trinidad and Tobago (When had he been in Trinidad and Tobago? thought Marcelo, without believing a word of what the gringo was saying, or only half believing it, as if departing from the promise that it was necessary to compensate for his exaggerations with a veil of incredulity, even though, at heart, one might feel darkly attracted by his exaggerations, by the prospect that they might not be exaggerations), he had tried it with a group of four, and the results had been disastrous. Marcelo interrupted: “Aren’t there supposed to be three of us? Micaela, Velásquez, and me, with you directing us?” No, Jimmie also intended to enter the hypnosis, to guide them from the inside, or something like that. Marcelo thought about Foret, about the photos from his final years, where he still looked like an elegant gladiator, a type of dark superhero, living his double life as a poor poet and fifth-rate boxer, his life as a beggar and the prince of brawling, his multiple lives dedicated to love, and that other life, the only redeeming one, the life he shared with Bea until the summer of 1918. Marcelo thought about Foret because there was nothing in his own predictable life story with a high enough level of mysticism or madness with which to compare and measure the madness of what was taking place. He turned to the great ones. That, thought Professor Valente, is what tradition is: a series of parameters for measuring the madness of the things that happen to us. He believed, with Protagoras, that man was the measure of all things. And Richard Foret, in this case, was man.
Micaela already had a lot of experience in individual hypnotism since Jimmie had been inducing deep states in her for months (Before fucking her? Marcelo wondered), but it was possible that, in a group session, the girl would be unable to control the course of the hypnosis.
The reasoning seemed to him, at best, muddled, but after many failed hints from Jimmie, and Velásquez telling him bluntly, Marcelo understood they wanted him to persuade his “stepson”—as they called Rodrigo—to join the project. Marcelo had never thought of Rodrigo as his stepson, but he now realized he could justifiably be considered as such since Adela and he had been living together for a good while, and were talking about the possibility of prolonging this situation, even after Marcelo’s time in Los Girasoles came to an end.
To Marcelo, the warning—foolishly repeated by Velásquez and the gringo since the day they had drunk Micaela’s urine—not to tell Adela anything seemed curious. Only Rodrigo was to be told, and then he would accept the warm invitation to lose his wits and keep the secret from his mother.
3
Jimmie had seen Rodrigo one day walking through the streets of the town. He had said hello, thinking he was an acquaintance, and the young man had replied with a nod that, to Jimmie, at that moment, seemed touched with some antique grace. He had done his research: Rodrigo was Adela’s son, he had been chucked out of his job in DF, left his ugly, vulgar wife, and had been staying in a small house on the Puerta del Aire estate since the beginning of the year.
The relationship between Jimmie and Adela was, to put it mildly, dire. In Los Girasoles, everyone knew everyone else, and both Adela and Jimmie frequented those circles surrounding the world of academia, where the professors gave mutual demonstrations of their aesthetic sensibility and theoretical versatility: jazz—or even trova; many of them didn’t know the difference—gigs in some café in the center of town, yoga classes given by a professor of economics in the front room of her house, group exhibitions of the photographs taken by the teenage offspring of those same professors.
They had met at one of those events, two years before, neither of them now remembered exactly how, and had flirted listlessly, more to shake off the tedium of provincial life than to get laid or have a real relationship. The fact is that they had exchanged phone numbers—in fact, Adela had given her number to Jimmie, who didn’t have a phone at that time—and arranged to meet for a drink during the week. The date had been a complete failure. Jimmie turned up smelling of marijuana and had forgotten what Adela looked like, so he sat down at a table near Adela’s where another woman, much younger, was drinking a beer alone. Adela watched from her table, filled simultaneously with compassion and rage. The young woman, in contrast to what might be expected of someone who has been suddenly accosted by a dirty gringo smelling of marijuana, had taken it well and let the stranger buy her a drink. Jimmie, convinced he was with Adela, the professor he had met a few days before, didn’t understand what sort of game she was playing. He followed her lead and acted as if it were the first time they had spoken, convinced that her use of a pseudonym—the Adela who wasn’t Adela had told him her name was Natalia—signaled a degree of perversion that would be useful when it came to sex.
Natalia and Jimmie drank and laughed for two hours, closely observed by Adela without anyone noticing her presence. At the end of those two hours, Adela had drunk, all alone, as many beers as Jimmie and Natalia together and, she realized, was in an almost perilous state of inebriation. Eventually, plucking up her courage, she stood and walked to the table where the gringo was charming the young woman with his anecdotes. Initially Jimmie thought she was a waiter and held out an empty bottle without looking up, muttering thanks. Noting that Adela didn’t take the bottle, Jimmie turned his head and found himself looking at her face, bathed in tears of humiliation. “I’m Adela, you moronic gringo. You stood me up for her at the next table.” Jimmie made a wry face when he understood his mistake. Adela walked unsteadily to the door.
Many things could have happened at that point. Jimmie could have caught up with her and spent hours begging her to forgive him. They might never have got as far as anything approaching a stable relationship, but at least they could have remained friends, which, in a small town like Los Girasoles, was something worthy of consideration. But Jimmie opted for the worst possible reaction. Charmed as he was by the low neckline of his impromptu companion, he said, in a voice loud enough for Adela to hear, “There are some weird, disturbed people in this town, aren’t there?” The girl’s laugh wounded Adela even more deeply than Jimmie’s question, which condemned her to ridicule.
4
Rodrigo listened to Marcelo’s confused, long-winded story, sitting in what was now his armchair, while the Spaniard sat rigid, apparently uncomfortable, facing him. Velásquez had wanted to be there when he explained the plan to the “stepson,” in case he stumbled over some point or forgot some fundamental fact that needed to be addressed, but Marcelo felt Rodrigo would dismiss the proposal immediately if he suspected from the start just how divorced from reality Velásquez now was. So they were alone again, as they had been during their earlier conversations.
He told Rodrigo about the gringo and lingered over a very extended description of Micaela, emphasizing her disturbing beauty and the fact that, despite all odds, her piss tasted divine. He told him there was a lot of alcohol splashing around, and that although there was certainly something ridiculous about the whole affair, what mattered was meeting up with these people every so often—a couple of times a week maybe, or three nearer the time for the actual hypnosis session—sharing something of the disquiet of Los Girasoles.
Rodrigo listened with a poker face. It was impossible to guess what was going through his mind, Marcelo thought, and all the better, because he could be thinking about the possibility of making a sudden return to DF—back to his wife—putting a distance between himself and that bleak, dusty plain, where sensible people ended up giving in to the darkest whims of the soul, to the most grotesque claims of an unknown gringo, to simple, unadorned madness, clearly pronouncing each of that word’s syllables, few though they might be, because madness only has two audible syllables, but is followed by a long series of sounds that seem to seep toward the interior of the word; syllables that are never pronounced, but throb within the word and are, in a certain sense, alluded to when someone says “madness,” especially if they say it consciously, thinking of the multiple, not necessarily pleasant forms of madness, that word of infinite syllables.
Rodrigo listened with a poker face but inside was not really listening, or he was listening and responding and carrying on an angry, inaudible dialogue in which he posed counterarguments and swept aside excuses related to what Marcelo was telling him. That dialogue went more or less like this:
“Frigging Marcelo. He’s got an amazing proclivity for weird situations. Where can he have found those people, those stories of piss drunk at midnight in dark hovels full of ceramic plates? Is he telling me lies? Inventing an absurd story to see how credulous I am, to report straight back to my mother about my reaction to all this? No, that can’t be it. Not after the conversations we’ve had; after we’ve jointly revitalized the dry, dusty house of language with a couple of good conversations. But if he’s serious, what the hell does he expect from me? On the other hand, drinking the piss of a beautiful young girl sounds pretty tempting. Disgusting, but tempting. What’s more, drinking piss is an infallible indication you’re in the presence of the sacred, or something like it. It’s easy to imagine this is the sort of thing that ends in a whole pile of people committing suicide, here in this remote town full of academics. The way I see it, it would be pretty sad to die with a capsule of poison between your teeth and a message tattooed on your skull, next to three or four other guys who drank piss, here in a town full of people dedicated to higher education. But I’ve got nothing else to do. I’ve been cooped up here for weeks. Cecilia is desperate for me to return to DF, and this is just the sort of stupid plan I could use as a triumphal end to my stay in Los Girasoles. So, I’ll drink piss with them a couple of times, let them hypnotize me, then I’ll go back to DF and look for a job as a knowledge administrator someplace. As a bulletin writer somewhere. As a waiter, if I have to. And I’ll be a worthy man. The poor but honorable man my wife deserves: poor, honorable, and unhappy because of my flagrant uselessness.”
5
And so Rodrigo had in the end, if rather vaguely, agreed to join the hypnotists at least once, just to hear Jimmie’s explanation of the project firsthand. That was the most Marcelo could get from him, and he was satisfied.
A few days after that conversation with Marcelo, Rodrigo decided to make a foray beyond the walls of Puerta del Aire and go out for a drink one evening, on his own, in the center of Los Girasoles. Marcelo had lent him a little money to cover his expenses, and so that he could pretend he was receiving payment from Velásquez for the phantom proofreading he was phantasmagorically undertaking.
He asked Jacinto Nogales Pedrosa, the security guard, for the number of a cab service, and was set down in a street flanking the main square. He walked around the colonial part of town without much idea of what he was looking for, and even went a little farther on to the market, where, despite the fact that the stalls had closed, things were quite lively.
The cantina he entered didn’t look too much like the typical local joint: it was, rather, a touristy spot serving regional brews. Only a couple of tables were occupied, and a jukebox was pumping out deafening boleros.
At one of the tables, the darkest and farthest from the bar, Rodrigo made out two foreign girls, looking half-lost and too naive for a country like Mexico. After a couple of shots of tequila at the bar, he plucked up his courage and went over to their table. They, the foreign girls, were very young, and Rodrigo was surprised to see them alone in a bar, without a man or responsible adult to chaperone them. One was good-looking, in a gamin kind of way, with a pretty nose and outlandishly long black eyelashes. Her hair was short, and she seemed, from her smile, more willing than the other to strike up a conversation.
Rodrigo asked if he could sit down, and the girl with the long lashes answered with a smile while taking a cigarette from a packet and rummaging in her bag for a lighter. Rodrigo decided that what could have been indifference was assent and took the seat beside her. The other girl seemed more concerned with the ambiance of the cantina and only gave him a distracted, aloof glance, the way you look at someone who comes up to offer goods for sale at an inopportune moment.
The girl with the lashes was called Domitile and was French. She spoke faltering Spanish but incorporated into it Norteño expressions, as if she had learned to speak by deciphering narco-corridos. They were both nineteen and had been living in Mexicali for eight months on a cultural exchange—as they explained—which allowed them to spend a year in Mexico learning the language before returning to begin their university studies in their respective countries—the more standoffish one was from Poland. Rodrigo was surprised by the unlikely fate that had befallen them, and jokingly apologized, in the name of all Mexicans, for the ugliness of Mexicali. Domitile agreed, smiling widely again, and explained that they were now on a group trip around the whole country, with the aim of experiencing something besides the unbearable heat of their adoptive city. In comparison with Mexicali, Los Girasoles seemed—according to the French girl—like paradise. The rest of the group was in a hotel on the outskirts of town, and they were the only ones who had dared to leave the comfort of their accommodations to seek a little local color and sample something of the way of life in the town. They had ended up in this cantina thanks to a guidebook—a particularly bad one—that only suggested anodyne places that were, therefore, characteristic of every town and settlement mentioned.
The Polish girl, with obvious annoyance, moved her seat away from her companion’s cigarette smoke, and Rodrigo took advantage of this distance to strike up a more intimate conversation with Domitile. She was from Nantes, had never before been outside France, and had chosen Mexico in the hope of finding a more humid climate and the constant sound of danceable music, only to be confronted with the fact that neither of these things existed in Mexicali. The Norteña music was, for her, little less than dodecaphonic, and she invariably suffered a nosebleed every afternoon due to the exquisite sun of the city and the desert dust. Her journey around Mexico, though brief and organized by people unacquainted with the local terrain, was in some way redeeming the previous months of suffering. She even thought Los Girasoles was pretty, compared with the neighborhood in which she had lived in Mexicali, in the house of a middle-class couple who had given the two girls room and board in exchange for sending their son to France the following year.
Domitile didn’t know much about Mexico, and what she did know was information that Rodrigo, a resident of the capital and more used to the southern cities, didn’t share. She told stories about quinceañeras where the people fired into the air after a quarter of an hour spent swigging from a bottle with no label.
Rodrigo learned that the other girl was called Daga, or rather that she had an unpronounceable name that she had exchanged for this simpler nickname while in Mexico. Daga muttered a beautifully enunciated “Mucho gusto” when she felt herself being referred to, and then asked, in a Spanish her companion must have envied, if he liked the music in the cantina. At that moment, a deeply emotional song was playing that Rodrigo had heard one too many times the year before, at the exit of every metro station and in the streets crammed with ambulant vendors around the museum. He said no, he didn’t like Mexican music, or at least not this kind, and that the only Mexican music he did like was the son jarocho and some rock ’n’ roll numbers from the sixties that were extremely free translations of songs from the States: “Angélica María, for instance, or the incunable Rockin Devil’s,” added Rodrigo, making erroneous use of an adjective that, to him, always sounded like it meant famous. Daga looked as if she had no idea what he was talking about, and Domitile explained that Mexicali only had rancheras and narco-corridos, and that they still hadn’t worked out the difference between these two genres despite having spent various months being forced to listen to them, in the same way that prisoners in Guantánamo had to listen to Barney the dinosaur. To Rodrigo, this political allusion sounded, quite rightly, frivolous, and he thought his relationship with these outsiders was, from that moment, condemned to unmitigated failure.
Rodrigo ordered a round of beers and two tequilas (Daga didn’t want one), and they clinked glasses in a not especially cordial toast while he returned to his private conversation with Domitile. She had not yet been to DF but would be going there in five or six days, she couldn’t remember exactly when, and Rodrigo recommended a couple of neighborhoods not to be missed during her nocturnal excursions, when she again left her boring group of students in the boring hotel restaurant to go out and sample the local nightlife of that monstrous city. Domitile wrote down the names in a notebook she carried in her bag and thanked him for the information with disarming innocence. She said DF was what she was most looking forward to because she’d read the French translation of Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives as soon as she’d learned that she had been awarded the annual exchange grant (in fact, what she said was “anal exchange grant,” but Rodrigo turned a deaf ear to the imbecilic pun and inwardly pardoned Domitile’s poor command of the language). Rodrigo told her he hadn’t read The Savage Detectives, even though he had in fact done so and hadn’t liked it, and preferred to sound ignorant rather than question the adolescent’s tastes. Domitile attempted, without much luck, to summarize the plot of the novel but stopped short to include Daga in the conversation, referring to one of their traveling companions whom they had secretly nicknamed Ulises Lima (Daga had also read Bolaño, apparently).
They continued drinking and tried to agree on which one of them would go to the jukebox to choose the next record. Rodrigo gave way under pressure from the others, alleging his knowledge of the field, and walked to the jukebox, taking a five-peso coin from the pocket of his pants. As he began to flick through the sheets of the cantina’s musical menu, a drunk who was sinking into sentimentality in a nearby chair shouted, “Don’t put on anything stupid, you fucking sod,” and Rodrigo felt too intimidated to choose a song based on his very personal criteria, so he returned to the table and said, “We’d better be going.” Domitile understood the situation and looked serious. Daga was already serious and simply took her bag from the back of her chair and sprang up, as if she had been wanting to do so for several hours.
They left the cantina, and Rodrigo realized that Domitile was having difficulty walking, as if she were very drunk or some bug had bitten the sole of her left foot. He inquired and discovered that the girl’s unsteady gait was a mixture of drunkenness and accident: she’d twisted her ankle a few days earlier, at a waterfall they had visited in another state; besides which, she was sloshed, and when she was sloshed she always walked a bit oddly. From her explanation, Rodrigo understood that Domitile had only ever been sloshed in Mexico, and he thought of her parents’ concern when they learned that Mexicali was Mexicali and that laws in Mexico were mere suggestions.
Domitile started saying her elder sister was still calculating the price of things in francs, but that she, born seven years later, didn’t remember ever having seen a franc and that euros seemed to have been there forever. She laughed inappropriately, unconcerned whether either of her companions shared the joke, if that’s what it was. They walked around the market in search of another open bar and during that search passed along a street lined with prostitutes.
The only open cantina they came across had a more dubious air than the one they had left, although to an inexperienced eye, it might have been the very same cantina, which is exactly what Daga said when they looked inside: “It’s the same cantina.” In any case, they decided to try their luck and went in. It was much more crowded than the other and was so noisy that all three of them, without saying so, felt sheltered in some form of anonymity. They found an empty table, and when they sat down, after borrowing another chair, Rodrigo thought he had no clue what he was doing there. This cantina also had a jukebox, and the music it was pumping out seemed like an exact copy of the other: boleros about the stoical endurance of the nostalgia for a lost joy. It was obvious he wasn’t going to get either of these girls into bed, much less the two of them together, nor did it seem probable that their conversation would be particularly enlightening. He considered beating a retreat but was beset by a vague sense of guilt and decided to stay with them for at least a while longer, so as not to leave them at the mercy of the drunks.
But his guess that the drunks would keep their distance on seeing him sitting with the foreign girls was completely mistaken. They hadn’t finished their first beer before a short guy, his head almost shaven, wafted beery breath in his face, shouting into his ear a request to be introduced to his friends. Rodrigo didn’t know how to react and chose what was, perhaps, the worst possible option: he said they weren’t his friends, that he’d only just met them, and didn’t think they were interested in doing anything or getting to know anyone. Seeking complicity with the drunk, he said he’d already tried it on one of them and been told to fuck off, and they’d also told him they had big gringo boyfriends who were coming to pick them up a little later in another bar.
The drunk with the almost shaven head and the obstinacy of someone used to getting his way continued to insist, even though he appeared to have swallowed Rodrigo’s explanation and taken the bait of the sham friendship. Forgetting about his prey for a moment, he pulled up his chair until he was practically on Rodrigo’s lap and began telling him about isolated episodes from his life. He had a fat wife, and a daughter he was proud of, whose picture he had as the background image on his malfunctioning cell phone. He was a state policeman, and if Rodrigo had any problems during his stay in Los Girasoles, he just had to mention his name, Oliver Rodríguez, to free himself from the injustice his colleagues shamelessly doled out. “You gotta grease the wheels if you wanna move,” the policeman pronounced, making it clear he also took advantage of outsiders to make it comfortably through to payday.
It needed a few more wiles to convince Oliver Rodríguez that the two gringas didn’t want to fuck him, and that he should leave the table of the impromptu trio and return to his solitary corner, where he knocked back a couple more drinks before departing—all the while talking to himself—through the wooden swinging doors leading to the street.
And it was while Rodrigo was watching, with relief, the departure of Oliver Rodríguez, the drunken policeman, that he saw Micaela cross the threshold in the opposite direction. The girl’s solitary presence in the doorway only lasted a second before Jimmie came in behind her and swept the room with the expert gaze of a person prepared for any eventuality. A second or two that, for Rodrigo, seemed to extend in time like a wet shirt thrown up by its extremities, two elastic seconds, or maybe three that seemed to last five or six of the seconds we normally experience, sometimes with greater shame than glory but always without the power to stop the passage of time, as he would have liked to have stopped it at that instant, because Rodrigo had forgotten about Domitile and Daga and thought the alcohol must have been adulterated, since there was no other way to explain the intense heat rising from his stomach and manifesting itself at the back of his throat as an extreme dryness, as if all the dust of Los Girasoles had been summoned to appear in his throat, as if someone had ordered a cemetery to be constructed in his mouth and people were throwing handfuls of earth onto the simple coffins of their most recent dead.
There are coincidences in real life that appear to be dictated by the cliché that rules songs of love and vengeance with an iron fist, and there are coincidences that appear to be neither forced nor gratuitous but essentially necessary, inevitable, and evident, and that no one, having experienced them, would dare say were the creations of an affectedly falsetto voice or an eccentric personality, but are, rather, events with undeniable religious echoes, even if these coincidences involve, as in this case, a song of love and vengeance issuing from a jukebox. Because as soon as the door of the cantina allowed the policeman to leave and set up the arrival of Micaela, suddenly, in the middle of a line, the song playing was interrupted and another began, as equally new to Rodrigo as its predecessor, but in some way related or foreseen, like those songs we hear one single time in our childhood and never again until the day they are played on the most unlikely radio program, and then we remember we have already lived that moment. The words of the song were clear, and the voice was not nasal, unlike all the others that had pulsed through the cantina. It was a female voice and a sad song, like the sad, female figure who entered at that moment through the wooden door and let her eyes wander in the semidarkness until they met with, at the darkest, most distant table, Rodrigo’s, in an elastic, unreal moment of more or less two seconds that both of them would remember as the clearest they had ever experienced. Because there are clear moments when the air really does seem to be a docile material that allows us to understand the world, and there are dirty, noisy moments when any degree of lucidity will be immediately held in check by the insipid material of things that impose themselves like symptoms of a very serious disease we all agree to call “world,” or “cruel world” if we are tragedians.
Micaela walked in and the gringo, Jimmie, appeared behind her, and when Jimmie appeared, Rodrigo understood just who those two people were—Micaela and Jimmie—since they couldn’t be anyone else and perfectly matched the description Marcelo Valente had offered a few days before when suggesting the possibility that Rodrigo join the hypnotism project, the project related to the future of art.
Rodrigo stared fixedly at Micaela’s crotch and joyfully told himself he would soon be drinking piss from that font of eternal youth, although he then thought he wouldn’t like to be young forever; youth was a nebulous, larval stage in which everything seemed more important, and nothing annoyed Rodrigo more than importance, as if he only aspired to a Nirvana of household appliances in which the greatest danger was buying a dishwasher on credit.
As soon as he saw Micaela, he became convinced it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to take part in the hypnotism project Marcelo had invited him to join a few evenings before. Jimmie and the girl sat at a nearby table, and he listened distractedly to Domitile, who was speaking a few inches away, her breath agreeably seasoned with alcohol.
6
A stabbing pain in his temple suggested the night had gone on much longer than necessary. Blurred images of things he regretted floated around in his head. He made an effort to impose a chronological order on that inferno that, by nature, responded to a different logic. Inebriation sets up shortcuts in time, and it might not be such a good idea to try to mold it into a sober form. But despite it all, Rodrigo attempted to do just that.
He remembered having stared insistently at Micaela sitting next to Jimmie a few yards away. He knew, since the loose change in his pocket clearly reminded him, that he had sent a couple of tequilas to their table by way of the waiter, something he had only ever seen done in movies. To round off the cliché, he had lifted his glass and serenely nodded in a toast to them, and Jimmie had looked at him with an expression of surprise that didn’t seem possible in someone so knocked around by life. Later, Jimmie came up to the table at which Rodrigo sat with the foreign girls—who interpreted it all as a series of steps in a local custom—and thanked him for the drinks, squinting his eyes to study him better. Eventually the gringo asked, unnecessarily, if he was Adela’s son, to which Rodrigo responded with a drunken smile, a pause perhaps too long to be pregnant and a few words that might have been pleasant, but sounded, after that pause, odd: “Among other things.” But they understood each other, and Jimmie was immediately hugging him with manly enthusiasm and beckoning Micaela to come over, bringing with her his tequila, and meet “our new group member” as he put it, in an obvious allusion to the collective hypnotism plan.
Domitile and Daga seemed startled by the presence of the gringo, with his fugitive-from-justice air, but they relaxed on seeing the shy innocence of Micaela, who was the same age as them and showed no fear of that other person. Jimmie set himself up at the head of table and took charge of keeping them well supplied with liquor, even Daga, who had previously declined anything but beer. Maybe due to her clearly low alcohol tolerance, she and Domitile soon exchanged roles, as happens with friends who spend a lot of time together. Daga laughed raucously, continually changed seats, applauded the spineless boleros on the jukebox, and touched Rodrigo with increasing confidence, while the French girl became cautious and monitored the state of inebriety of the others with the superior air that only adolescence can confer.
Jimmie attributed the meeting with Rodrigo to some secret force of destiny that was winking an eye and encouraging them to embark on the hypnotism project with even greater verve. He was wary of talking about the project in front of the European girls, wary of their knowledge of occult matters, but took advantage of every lapse of attention on their part to tell Rodrigo, shouting in his ear, some of the details of the affair. He talked about Marcelo’s initial reluctance and his later conversion to the creed of hypnosis, and the interest he now showed in discovering the future form of art by means of that technique. He also spoke of Velásquez and his propensity for slipping into states of altered consciousness. “Prof Velásquez only needs five minutes to get into the asshole of a trance,” explained Jimmie, resorting to technical language. “And once he’s there, his visions are as clear and detailed as if he were right here, now, with his eyes open.” The allusion was inaccurate because the cantina was full of smoke, and the noise of the boleros mingled with the crude comments the waiter directed at the drunks, thickening the atmosphere and fogging everything.
The gringo was a professional snake oil salesman. There was no doubt that he had a certain sensitivity when dealing with people that went beyond the mere power to convince. Jimmie was able to see a person’s inner vulnerabilities and attack them mercilessly; he knew how to overcome resistance and which strings to pluck for each individual. In Rodrigo’s case, the strategy was obvious: on stressing the joint nature of the hypnosis project, he was not only appealing to one of his most longstanding, secret aspirations but also tangentially hinting that it was Micaela who held the group together with the strange Indian-princess magnetism she exuded.
They poured their own drinks, or their glasses were freshened by Jimmie with the skill of a Turkish con man. Rodrigo downed one shot after another, and it became increasingly difficult for him to pretend his attention was on the gringo’s words and not the lock of black hair that had escaped from behind Micaela’s ear, a lock she gracefully replaced, time after time, very slowly, always with the same movement, as if it were a tai chi position taught to her by a Chinese grandmother, the purpose of which was to tame wild animals. Rodrigo began to see double, and two Micaelas were more than his nerves could bear. He felt stabs of guilt for staring so fixedly at a woman who was not his wife, but then he remembered his wife, and the evoked sound of her voice seemed to him so unworthy of brushing Micaela’s ears that he resolved never to introduce them. He had also, naturally, forgotten about the teenagers whose names began with the letter D.
At a given moment, Domitile asked Rodrigo to go with them to find a cab since her friend was drunk, and their absence had probably been noted in the hotel, causing alarm among the other members of the group. Rodrigo briefly explained the situation to Jimmie and promised to return shortly, not because he found the gringo’s conversation particularly entertaining, but because he couldn’t take his eyes off Micaela. Faced with the girl’s extravagant beauty, both Daga and Domitile had seemed suddenly anodyne, Europeans more insipid than celery sticks who didn’t deserve a place in his desire for longer than half a jerk-off. Despite the fact that she was almost the same age as them—as has already been mentioned—Micaela seemed older because her silence was not the mute expectation of someone who is learning, but the grace with which the magnanimous allow chaos to proliferate around them for a time.
Rodrigo left the cantina with a girl on either arm—an achievement that earned him the respect of a number of the most stupid drunks in Los Girasoles—and the three of them headed for the main square, where he remembered having seen cabs waiting for customers when he was walking alone. On the way, Daga threw up noisily into some bushes, and Rodrigo held her forehead like a patient father. Domitile seemed worried but, nevertheless, thanked Rodrigo for having been their escort for the night. They exchanged telephone numbers, and the girls promised to call soon, even though they would be leaving for another city—they couldn’t remember which—the following afternoon, so the possibility of meeting them again seemed fairly low.
When he returned to the cantina, having put the girls into a cab with instructions to take them straight to their hotel, Micaela had disappeared.
It was this fortuitous disappearance that had contributed to fixing in his mind the image of Micaela with the bewitching aura of a blueprint. If he had met her again on his return, still accompanied by her irritating partner, Micaela would have seemed a more terrestrial creature; if not just an ordinary girl, at least one of flesh and blood. But her disappearance placed a wax seal on the meeting and allowed it to rarefy in his memory. To satisfy that feeling of imperfection the evening had produced, Rodrigo was obliged to see Micaela again soon, alone if possible, without the annoying presence of Jimmie, for whom he felt contempt mingled with envy.
7
He had to wait a week for the second meeting to occur. A long week, cooped up in the house, during which Rodrigo experienced a sense of loneliness more profound than the one that, until then, had lulled him to sleep each night. If his life, including his married life, were indeed that of a loner, it suddenly seemed the fact of having met Micaela, of having glimpsed or sketched out in his warped imagination the possibility of an old age at her side, was essentially modifying the density of the loneliness that had never even come close to disturbing him.
Loneliness is always the same, but not the lonely. The discourse we hold back in front of others has a different weight to that which we speak aloud when no one is listening. In a certain sense, one offers inner comfort since it is a form of intimacy. The other, in contrast, makes a hollow in the world, in whose furthest corners the words ricochet to remind us that they have no taste.
Rodrigo called Cecilia one cloudy afternoon. She sounded unusually cheerful, and there was no indication in her voice of the well-known reproach that normally underlay her tremulous vowels, sometimes prolonged into a loving complaint (“They’ll seeee. You’ll be back sooon,” she would say to him). But this time, nothing: a precise description of the atmosphere in the office, a detailed account of her father’s most recent attempts to eliminate the damp in the living room—the old man had taken up the task again, with modest results and an irrational sense of victory . . . in fact, a trivial, if not completely comfortable conversation, without the mild, balsamic triviality of couples who tie each other down with the chains of their inexhaustible affection. Or perhaps Rodrigo’s mood—equivalent to the one that invades a sensitive soul when he considers the possibility of having contracted an incurable disease—was tingeing his perception of the world and other people with a violet hue, the violet of his sporadic migraines and his frequent periods of melancholy. Micaela—like a tumor, the nature of which is still unclear—glowed in his memory, threatening to either spread through his hypothalamus or discreetly dwindle under the benign, chemotherapeutic effects of distance. Rodrigo couldn’t decide which was more worrying: that love existed and had, a few days before, wormed its way into him, or that the adulterated tequila in the cantina had played a dirty trick on him. In the former case, he would be obliged to renounce, out of simple coherence, the greater part of his cynicism, something he found worrying since his cynicism was, as far as he knew, his only recourse for externalizing a sharp intelligence; in the latter, the unbearable confirmation of the mediocrity of the world would weigh on him for several decades, until a merciful case of Alzheimer’s would turn his stern, pensive expression into one of drooling innocence. The dice of his life, as someone given to cliché would say, had been cast.
Marcelo came to visit him on Wednesday afternoon. He had heard from Velásquez of Rodrigo’s meeting with Jimmie and the charming Micaela in the cantina in the center. (The gringo had told Velásquez.) He asked about his impressions of the pair, and Rodrigo looked upward and turned his eyes significantly to the left, a zone he reserved for dark thoughts or the most serious considerations, considerations that left him, after some hours of deep conjecture, with a trochaic murmur in his chest.
Marcelo Valente was less talkative than on previous occasions. However, he embarked on a topic that he rarely touched: his relationship with Adela. He told Rodrigo he had “cultivated” a growing affection for his mother, and that verb immediately reminded Rodrigo of his wild, vacant lot in Mexico City. “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” he recited to himself, with a nod to Voltaire, while Marcelo continued his speech. The Spaniard had moved on to his future plans. He wasn’t sure what to do with his essay on Richard Foret and Bea Langley. Gradually, during the months of study and the rereading of love letters, whirlwind poems and unfinished, romantic manifestos, Marcelo’s interest had moved from Foret to Langley. He was no longer so much interested in the mysterious disappearance of the boxer-poet as in Bea’s life in the aftermath of that event.
“I’d like, I think, to focus on what happens after the letters of ‘The End’ fade from the screen. Sure, Richard Foret disappears in the Gulf of Mexico, or is killed in the revolutionary turmoil, or simply vanishes without a trace, as people skilled in the art of bad writing say. But Bea continues in the world afterwards. She’s pregnant with, and then gives birth to Foret’s posthumous daughter; she returns to her native London only to discover it is a city that has nothing to say to her; she travels to Buenos Aires and then, again, to Mexico in search of clues to Richard’s whereabouts, even though she knows very well there is no hope; she writes poems that don’t attain global fame or change the face of literary modernism but that give her moderate pleasure and arouse the admiration of a few friends; she lives something like forty or forty-five years after Foret’s disappearance; she sets up house in Paris because it is the only city where she feels like a stranger, and to have seen everything before is a more than institutionalized way of life; she raises a daughter with whom she hopes to remedy, karmically, the neglect of her first two kids (both of whom, in time, turn out well, although they retain an indelible core of resentment). Beatrice Langley incarnates a drama more private—less spectacular, if you will—than that of her dead husband, but no less intense for it. Foret’s life is the stuff films are made of; Langley’s is the stuff of a novel that, rather than ending with a bang, extends over hundreds of pages until the ink begins to fade and the words become illegible.”
Rodrigo listens in silence to the monologue of his—the word comes into his mind—friend and thinks that in reality Marcelo is obliquely talking about his own life, and Adela’s. It’s clear that in a short time they have become an authentic couple. His mother absentmindedly strokes Marcelo’s neck at breakfast; Rodrigo does not remember her doing anything like that before. What Marcelo is saying, by means of the story of Richard Foret and Beatrice Langley, is that he wants to stay in Los Girasoles; he is not willing just to remember it all as a more or less happy sabbatical trip, the only product of which will be a monograph on a dead poet and an arsenal of memories in which Adela’s thighs have a starring role. He wants to stay, to renounce his lifelong, vain ambition to gain modest fame through his books; he wants to “cultiver son jardin,” the garden of bluish cacti and perennial weeds in Adela’s backyard in Los Girasoles.
Rodrigo also wants to cultivate his garden but has yet to find it, unless it is that lot filled with thorn bushes where a hen scratches around night and day in search of worms. Which is his garden? he wonders. A placid life in that small town, like the one Marcelo wants, going to spiritualism sessions with a crazy gringo and a girl he silently desires? Imbibing urine every couple of weeks as a member of an exclusive pro-contemporary art sect? Conjugal life with Cecilia in DF and resigning himself to feeling constantly out of place in relation to everything that exists in his grimy routine? Or is his garden death, a patch of dry earth to which his bones are added; the grief, initially, of his loved ones and then an oblivion that slowly falls like a golden mantle on the heads of Adela, Marcelo, his father, Cecilia, and that at times, being fallible, falls back for a moment—during what would have been his birthday, let’s say—to allow them to dream of an Eden that doesn’t exist and from which Rodrigo contemplates, with peace in his soul, the actions of those who are still alive? Or is his garden nomadic, the negation of that fixed custom of being oneself, a custom you have so diligently cultivated until this moment? Which is his cultivable garden? Which is the piece of the world given to him on loan, even if it is only to set fire to it? Which is the corner crammed with supermarket bags full of cadavers where he will erect the temple of his indifference?
8
A couple of days after Marcelo’s visit, Rodrigo walked through the empty streets of the Puerta del Aire residential estate, looking at the drawn curtains and the pickup trucks as if they were desert mirages, until he reached the security booth, where the guardian, the Cerberus of all this abandon, the tough, immutable Jacinto Nogales Pedrosa, called a cab that would take him along a route stretching farther than his wallet to Jimmie’s studio, the provisional temple of that religion invented in the clamor of a few tequilas, of which he was at the point of becoming an acolyte.
The devastation reserved for us by the confirmation of an ominous truth is more subtle than that offered by our first glimpse of that truth. A man can wake every morning and look out his window to check that, there outside, the end of the world—in the biblical and material sense of the topic, setting aside metaphor—is still unraveling in five-hundred-foot flames, and the shock of that everyday confirmation operates inside him in a way that is less visible but more heartrending than the first vision of that same apocalypse. Repetition is a bitch with an arched spine that peacefully and conscientiously gnaws at the bones that keep us upright until it brings us down.
Some such words, to cut a long story short, were passing through Rodrigo’s mind as he entered the dusty house and found Micaela sitting cross-legged on a straw mat. It was no foggy alcoholic delirium that had made him see her, in that cantina, cloaked (in the Catholic usage) by a virginal mantle of gold thread and with a halo of grace around her fawn-like head. All that was still present and even, perhaps, accentuated by the gloomy space in which he now found her and the sweaty, incense-laden greeting Jimmie offered him. There are women who are specialists in benefiting from the contrast with their environment.
Rodrigo tepidly extended a hand to Jimmie, who didn’t hesitate to trap him in a lateral embrace while destroying the metacarpals of his right hand in an irritating impersonation of camaraderie. Frigging grimy gringo. The aroma of dark tobacco exuded by the rags for which he served as a bony clotheshorse made him wretch. Men who use olfactory resources as statement should be hunted down by the forces of law and order, he thought as he detached himself from the unctuous foreigner in the way one detaches a piece of chewing gum from the sole of one’s shoe.
The atmosphere in Jimmie’s studio was so insalubrious that Professor Velásquez dissolved into a trompe-l’oeil worthy of David Copperfield. Only when he spoke—“How are things going with the editing of that phantom book?”—and rounded off his witticism with a wheezing laugh, did Rodrigo become aware of his presence, forgotten in one of the three Acapulco chairs delimiting the borders of the living room.
Although Marcelo had not yet arrived, Professor Velásquez was undiplomatic enough to tell Rodrigo that his place was on the floor, as there were only three chairs, and in that house, decisions were made by the “council of wise old men.” The allusion to this fictitious authority could only be irritating. Rodrigo was obviously younger than the other three men—the gringo, Velásquez, and Marcelo—and was closer in age to Micaela, even though she was a decade younger than him. The fact that these gentlemen were involved in so eccentric an undertaking as deciphering the future form of art by means of hypnosis seemed to be aggravated by their show of insensitivity to two youths—though of very different caliber—like Rodrigo and Micaela. There was, in Velásquez’s reference to the “council of wise old men,” not only a touch of rancor directed at their youth, obliging them to sit on the floor, but also a thinly disguised sense of inferiority. Velásquez, fatty Velásquez, whose cranial terrain was divided between areas of baldness and dandruff; Velásquez, the survivor of three divorces, the anonymous professor who years before had lost the ability to win over his students by any other means than blackmail; Velásquez, the brute, the man who had early on become fascinated by aesthetics—the aesthetics of the avant-garde—and had clung to it, disguising his interest as intellectual research, as if it were the last trace of his youth; that Velásquez had found, in the hypnosis project, the enthusiasm he needed to channel his eighth adult crisis into the sense of power he longed for.
Marcelo Valente’s reasons for embarking on such an unlikely enterprise couldn’t be very different. They were both men who, after a couple of decades given up to teaching, needed a new relationship with the world, a mirage of youth and delirium that would quash their dissatisfactions while erectile dysfunction was gaining ground and stripping them once and for all of their thirst for History—it is well known that History is a phallic aspiration denied to eunuchs, one that women access in a completely different, much more intellectual and tempered way, while men beat totemic drums around it.
For his part, Rodrigo’s motivation was clearer. He couldn’t give a damn about the future of art, the sense of power that hypnotizing others might bring him; he didn’t need any other emotion than that provided by his long conversations with Marcelo in the house in Puerta del Aire, with the addition of an occasional altercation with his mother and the customary coitus with Cecilia on his return to Mexico City. He didn’t particularly need to feel more alive or to gain a timely victory in an idiotic battle that is always lost before it begins. No. What Rodrigo wanted, for the moment, was to go on smelling Micaela for a little longer. And to gather sufficient sensual material to allow him to dream about her later. What Rodrigo needed were reasons to have regrets when he reached a half century and, looking back, say in a tone of moral sententiousness, “I should have . . .” He needed to be wrong; in short, to stumble and doubt, and to be moved in some unique way by the sense that the communion he had searched so hard for was there, with its legs crossed on the straw mat beside him. Rodrigo didn’t need to feel alive, like other people: he needed to be alive.
He and Micaela made themselves as comfortable as possible on the matting, and a slight touching of hands as she maneuvered to make space for him revealed a skin whose softness was only eclipsed by the warmth it radiated. Rodrigo even thought the woman—it was an exaggeration to so describe her—might have a fever, so scorching was his perception of the contact.
Jimmie, as usual, immediately monopolized the conversation. Just as soon as he had handed out the cans of beer—he gave Micaela a glass of water—he sat in one of the three chairs—the other, like an invitation or an offence remained empty—and once again embarked on the tale of his discovery of hypnosis and his later work. Rodrigo had heard the story secondhand, by way of Marcelo’s measured narrative, and had not imagined it could be as complicated as it actually was. Jimmie changed the details with each new version, and now he made it sound as if he had always, from the first moment, despised Dr. Mind and planned his stealthy betrayal. The digressions were also different from those he had embarked on when telling the story to Marcelo. On this occasion, he said almost nothing about the CIA experiments and instead spoke at length, without respite, about his time as an illegal herbalist in the late eighties.
Rodrigo listened patiently, considering whether he should say he had already heard the story from Marcelo. He felt sorry for Micaela, who must have listened to all those innocuous details of the gringo’s drifting pilgrimage three hundred times. Velásquez, who in Jimmie’s presence became, if possible, a little more opaque, vegetated in his chair as if that string of nonsense were a cradlesong lulling a child. Rodrigo’s legs went to sleep. He wasn’t used to sitting on the floor—a level that, in his view, was more appropriate for animals—but accepted the sacrifice because Micaela’s scent, a mixture of incense and vanilla with something more unsettling, came to him like a perfect symphony.
Jimmie rattled out his anecdote for a while longer. As he was moving toward the finale, there was a knock, and Velásquez made the superhuman effort of detaching himself from his chair to open the door to Marcelo, who delayed his greetings and stood by his chair so as not to interrupt the gringo’s monologue. Finally, Jimmie came to the end his story. Marcelo greeted, in this order, Rodrigo, Micaela, and the gringo—he had already absentmindedly clasped hands with Velásquez—and Micaela stood up—an eddy of more potent smells around Rodrigo, who followed her with his eyes—to attend to the visitors and fetch drinks, as was dictated by the rigorous patriarchy in which they lived.
It’s unimportant to mention how much they drank. Suffice it to say that tequila, once again, was the liquor selected to prepare for the coming ritual. Rather than hypnosis, they spoke of everyday matters for a few hours until a chance silence fell on the room, and Jimmie took advantage of it to ask, in a commanding tone, if they should begin. Velásquez was the only one to give a clear answer, in the affirmative, while Marcelo and Rodrigo nodded rather unconvincingly, and Micaela remained, as ever, silent.
9
It’s hard to say if the following morning’s hangover was the result of the hypnosis, the tequila, the imbibing of adolescent urine, or all of the above. To tell the truth, he had, up until the last minute, been fairly skeptical about the real possibilities of the project. He didn’t believe hypnosis was substantially different from, for example, the sleep that followed a bad migraine. He imagined it as a certain misting of consciousness and, at best, an exacerbated imaginary state directed by the words of an invisible guru. But the technique stolen from E-Sight Enterprises was much more complex; in this version, the process for attaining a hypnotic state seemed more like a satanic ritual than guided meditation.
First, as a warm-up, they drank Micaela’s urine. Rodrigo observed with a fascination bordering on psychosis how the beautiful girl pulled up her dress in front of them and moved a wide-lipped glass to her vagina, the humid, rosy lips of which he thought he glimpsed for a brief moment. Desire then installed itself throughout his whole body. He wanted to believe that sooner or later he would manage to eat that cunt, slowly, for hours, but there was no element of reason he could cling to in order to imagine this would happen. Luckily, the taste of the urine dissipated those turbid thoughts. It was, without a doubt, an unexpected sensorial experience; the initial disgust at the smell rapidly gave way to an eagerness to down the drink in one gulp and, afterwards, a sensation of heat down the length of his throat. It tasted like an exotic cocktail, a kind of dirty martini with some top-secret ingredient that made the drink burn.
After that, Jimmie ordered them to perform a strange series of vaguely military exercises. With exaggerated effort, Marcelo and Velásquez copied the movements the gringo carried out more flexibly, as if he were already used to them. Rodrigo and Micaela, in contrast, had little difficulty replicating the gringo’s extremely strange routine. Once that stage was over, Jimmie handed each of them a different object. Objects dragged from the dusty corners of his studio but that, in the hands of those involved, seemed so special it was odd they had not been noticed earlier. Rodrigo, for example, received a small toy truck, made of plastic, with an impressive level of detail. In the driver’s seat a man in a cap could be made out, brutally killed, his shirt stained with blood, his mouth covered with electrical tape. The cargo space could be opened by operating a tiny plastic lever, revealing its disturbing contents: a shipment of doll heads.
Rodrigo accepted his toy and the instruction to examine it carefully. He wondered about the origin of that strange but realistic national souvenir. It was like a narco version of a Playmobil; probably, thought Rodrigo, some artist had constructed the piece for counterpropaganda purposes. He noted that Micaela had also received an object alluding to violence: a tequila shot glass in the interior of which stood the translucent shape of an AK-47 rather than the obligatory cactus of the glasses normally found in airport stores.
The objects allotted to Velásquez, Marcelo, and Jimmie himself had no such reference. They were, respectively, a large marble of the variety known as “cloverleaf,” with twisted abstract figures in its interior, a carved stone scepter, and a pair of women’s panties with a floral print that Jimmie sniffed in an unpleasant way, and which Rodrigo thought might belong to Micaela.
Rodrigo’s was, by far, the most complex and detailed object. It immediately made him think, by free association, of the super market bag he had discovered in the waste ground, what was now a long time ago. He remembered his repulsion, his gloomy suspicions about the origins of those viscera, his fear of seeing them again on his second, and last, incursion into the lot.
Those images, in turn, transported him to the early days of his marriage and that disturbing episode, still unresolved, of the turd found exactly in the center of his bed, on the tiger-striped bedspread Cecilia had been so fond of. And as he was making a detailed reconstruction of the events, searching for some clue he might have overlooked, he gradually sank into the memory, like someone who finds himself trapped in quicksand—if quicksands still exist in spite of the zeal for explaining everything humanity has adopted without reservation.
The small toy truck was melting in his hands, or so it seemed to Rodrigo, and taking different forms: a hen, a handful of tea bags, a newspaper open at the classified pages. When Rodrigo attempted to halt the metamorphosis by looking around him, he discovered that it was, in fact, nothing other than hypnosis. Everything appeared to have been literally rubbed out, as if it were possible to pass an eraser over the things we see, leaving only blurred vestiges, colors, and lights in their place, but swathed in a myopia that veiled the limits of all things.
He was reluctant to believe that by drinking urine and doing a little exercise he had entered into such a deep state of hypnosis. Rodrigo suspected he had been drugged. Maybe Micaela’s urine was psychotropic, and the only function of the frigging sinister truck was to distract him while the drug took effect. He had already, during his lysergic adolescence, experienced similar states of consciousness. Although what he knew about taking acid had prepared him for anything, what was disturbing here was the sudden, unforeseen nature of the thing.
The session, luckily, was short. It hardly gave him time to be frightened, and before he could be assailed by the desire to get out of that trance at any cost, he heard the distant voice of the gringo, deeper than usual, giving very precise instructions on how to terminate the exercise. Once he had “woken,” had recovered the clarity of his senses, he was incapable of reproducing in his memory the instructions he had followed. He feared the possibility of being “trapped in the trip” if he repeated the experience, but Jimmie convinced him that this was unlikely.
His head was now throbbing, and his eyes felt sunken. He had been tossing in his bed in Puerta del Aire for over an hour, attempting to reconstruct the events of the previous night. When he thought of Micaela, a surge of lust took complete hold of him, and he had to masturbate quite aggressively, as if guided by the desire to rid his imagination of those images. He had always found it surprising how the world changed before and after ejaculation. Everything he believed, longed for, expected from life was transformed between one state and the other. Preorgasmic anxiety dissolved into a placid drowsiness; his desire to excel in some area faded into a discreet background shot. This time, when he had finished, he thought of Cecilia. He was still a married man, after all, and it now seemed like he had been away from his spouse for an eternity, although in reality it was little more than a month and a half. Marriage was, however you looked at it, an indelible stain: its reality couldn’t be avoided by the fact of being far away. He felt more isolated than usual, as if the simple truth of being married, even when it might not involve a particularly intense relationship with his wife, was enough to raise a wall between Rodrigo and the rest of mankind. A wall that seemed to get thicker by the day.
Maybe that separation, that distancing from others, didn’t correspond, or only partially corresponded, to his marital state. Perhaps it was just a mean trick of adult life. But Rodrigo related everything to his marriage, conscious that it was the most outstanding mistake of his troubled collection of mistakes, the mistake precipitated by a bad joke that had made him feel even further on the margin of everything. Was there any way back after that?
He dressed in the clothes he had worn the night before, made himself a cup of coffee with cream, and sipped it noisily as he walked around the room. His reflections on the nature of marriage had left him in a melancholy mood, and he felt the need to call Cecilia. It was Saturday, and she would probably still be in bed, either sleeping in or watching television with idiotic interest. He went out of the house in search of a better signal for his phone and keyed in her number while walking in circles on the deserted road. But Cecilia didn’t answer.
Maybe due to his hangover, maybe as a secondary effect of the hypnosis, Rodrigo had, that morning, a mania for signs. He believed he saw a symbol in everything, indicating something else, as if the world were a tautological series of winks. The fact that Cecilia wasn’t answering made him think of a more profound, perhaps even definitive absence. In some way he knew—spurred on by the paranormal phenomena he had recently been involved in—that Cecilia had left for good, that she would never again answer the telephone, that she had disappeared from his life with the same exasperating candor with which she had appeared in it. He imagined a diversity of possible reasons for that sudden distance: the original sender of that initiatory message left on Cecilia’s desk had finally revealed his identity, demanding that the course of events be corrected to restore the proper story, aborted by an error in the plan; he also imagined Cecilia had been raped by the same delinquent who had broken into the apartment to shit on the tiger-striped bedspread; he imagined she had died of asphyxia because of an allergic reaction to the damp, or had just run off with some frigging neighbor.
These possibilities, however, didn’t alarm him. Rodrigo’s hopes lay elsewhere. The arrival of Micaela in his life had helped him put everything in perspective. It might be impossible to possess her, but the idea of a genuine relationship—unlike the one he had with Cecilia—had made an impression on him. In addition, his conversations with Marcelo had revealed the existence of a different style of involvement. All of a sudden, Rodrigo had an intuition of a certain meaning, a certain intention or at least a teleological murmur that gave order to the uneventful sequence of the days. He thought that Cecilia’s arrival in his life had been necessary, that it had contributed to, and even set off, a series of events that had led to a key discovery: communion with others was possible. Perhaps by means of hypnosis, but nonetheless possible. That simple truth completely altered his perception of the world. Now, with that theoretical enlightenment, he suspected he would have to act coherently: abandon his cynicism and give himself up completely to the search for a comrade—the word inevitably chosen by his mother to refer to his girlfriends when he was a teenager, as if in addition to having sex, they were conspiring to “take to the hills to join the guerillas” and “bring down the oppressive government.”
But Rodrigo didn’t have to wait long for this enlightenment, as he liked to call it, to be eclipsed by another, more decisive one.
10
The second session of collective hypnosis, after that brief warm-up, had as its objective the consideration of the future of art. In the multiple, mutable forms they were offered during the trance, the participants had to discover a possibility for art, a concrete suggestion for a possible piece. Rodrigo wasn’t very clear on how he was meant to direct his hallucinations toward a predetermined end, but he supposed that before the session, there would be a more detailed explanation of the process. There wasn’t. Everything proceeded as in the last meeting, but this time they did it early in the morning, which made the ritual even more outlandish: tequila, disinterested conversation, more tequila. Jimmie, Velásquez, and Marcelo laughed loudly and almost shouted each other down in an attempt to seem manlier in the eyes of the ingenuous Micaela, who looked on in silence. Meanwhile, Rodrigo was distracted, distant, since he considered that—faced with such competition—it was wisest to adopt an alternative strategy. It worked: Micaela, against all expectations, asked him about his life—in general—in a neutral tone.
Here Rodrigo came up against what could have been an insurmountable obstacle. He felt an electromagnetic attraction for Micaela, but he knew that everything was against him: his life, hers, the totality of accidents that made up the world. He was, when you came down to it, a married man, and she was, practically, a possession of the grimy gringo. Micaela’s simple question put him in a predicament. That is to say, she most certainly knew Rodrigo’s story through having heard it from Marcelo in one of his conversations with Jimmie, but it is never the same thing to hear the whole story as to have it confirmed by the words of the principal person involved. At the exact moment Rodrigo pronounced the magic words (“I’m married”), a beautiful bridge, like the one in Brooklyn, would shatter and fall into the waters separating him from Micaela, accompanied by the explosion of fireworks.
Rodrigo, given his limited possibilities, chose a sincere but abstract response. The watchful presence of the three other men made him nervous. Even Marcelo, with whom he already had a more than healthy complicity, was completely transformed in the presence of the other alpha males and was displaying the weapons of his arrogance, a heraldry of idiocies. He noticed the three had clearly heard Micaela’s question and had reduced the decibel level to fix their left ears on the development of Rodrigo’s reply. He feared they would intervene, boycotting his prudence, openly pronouncing the word, marriage, which he had planned to avoid by means of philosophical tricks. Luckily none of this occurred, maybe because Rodrigo’s response put a rapid end to it.
“My life has the disadvantage of not being completely my own,” was Rodrigo’s valiant beginning, alluding tangentially to marriage, but also preparing the way for a piece of high flying. He was, however, unable to continue, at least not aloud. The continuation of his reply was a gaze pregnant with implicit meaning that Micaela might or might not have understood. If he had managed to speak, had been capable of saying things openly once and for all, Rodrigo’s reply would have continued, more or less, along these lines:
“The greater part of my time is spent in inertia, and that includes the most crucial decisions, which I take like someone picking a card from a deck held out to him. The result is never magic; I can’t even perceive the adrenaline of objective chance or observe a conspiracy of symbols behind what happens. I just go on living. I tie myself up with nonsense, like someone traveling on top of a train who, to avoid a fall, uses elastic straps attached to a metal projection instead of a leather belt, which would be more sensible. I know that simile is exaggerated. But it’s kind of like that: I feel I’m being pushed and pulled around the whole time. Chronological order seems like a crime to me. And the supposed need to know oneself irritates me. I can only imagine an introspective journey as a rocky descent in a toboggan made of bloody viscera. That’s about as deep as my normal conceptions go. At the same time, I know I don’t have what it takes to be decisively superfluous. I’d like nothing better than to give myself up to frivolity and spend Sundays enjoying the healthy amusement offered by enormous supermarkets, but I get bored very quickly. My relationships with people are always based on mistakes [here Rodrigo thought of his marriage again, but also of his friendship with Marcelo, which had only arisen after he had heard him and Adela fucking], and those fundamental mistakes linger like a shadow of doubt that distances me, emotionally, from everyone. Not even during sex can I completely forget that insuperable distance, even though that’s when I’m closest to doing it. My level of empathy with human beings is near zero, though I once had a pet [Rodrigo is thinking of his hen] whom I loved in a, perhaps you could say, purer way.”
He paused in his unspoken mental monologue. Micaela was breathing more quickly, or perhaps he was excited by her closeness and was projecting an image of desire onto her. He was afraid the hypnosis session would start too soon—though at the same time, he longed for the strange taste of Micaela’s urine and the fleeting glimpse, too short to fix itself in his memory, of her Mount of Venus, her panties lying around her diminutive feet.
Micaela was looking at him strangely, as if she had intuited or even heard, by telepathic means, Rodrigo’s reply. The three older men, sitting, as on the previous occasion, in their respective Acapulco chairs, continued bragging while Micaela and Rodrigo lay, perhaps too close, on the matting at their feet. Suddenly, Jimmie interrupted the conversation to announce it was time to commence the ritual: they had drunk enough.
Mechanically, they did the preparatory exercises, the calisthenics, following Jimmie’s lead. After that, in betrayal of the men’s hopes, Micaela shut herself in the bathroom with a jar and, out of the sight, if not the attentive hearing of the other four, took a long, uninterrupted piss. She came out, triumphal, with the brew ready and handed it to Jimmie, who ceremoniously poured it into the four shot glasses with their two fingers of tequila. They drank.
The objects given to them on this occasion were different, less significant, more neutral. Jimmie briefly explained that he didn’t want to direct the course of the hypnosis in too specific a direction. Rodrigo received a lump of some sort of malleable clay or Play-Doh that made him think of the famous piece of Cartesian wax. He remembered the story of the philosopher, learned in his school days and returned to later with, by then, adult curiosity.
In his search for a truth on which to erect the solid edifice of his science, Descartes systematically discarded (the wordplay is intentional) less reliable sources of knowledge. And among those less reliable sources of knowledge, it is always said, are the senses. But the reliability of the senses can only be questioned by means of examples, that is to say stories, inventions, narrative. The zero degree, or almost, of narrative, but narrative nonetheless. The character of Descartes takes a piece of wax and describes it. He enumerates its physical attributes, its shape, its weight, its color. He cannot doubt what he perceives: he knows the piece of wax with apodictic certainty, or so he believes. A second character (little more than a hand, a neutral voice, a blurred face, a shadow acting as the agent of destiny) takes the piece of wax from the first character and, hiding it from sight, puts it close to the stove. Under the effect of the heat, the wax softens, and the second character molds it and evenly divides it into new fragments. Finally, he gives the first character the result of his operations: the same piece of wax having undergone a change. With it, he also offers a rhetorical question, directed not to the first character (who at this point in the work vanishes, or switches off like an exhausted automaton and ceases to attract our attention) but to the spectator, to the History of Understanding, perhaps: “Can the first character know if this is the same piece of wax? If not, how can the senses be unaware of such a fundamental relationship as the principle of identity, which is not contained in the material attributes of a piece of wax?”
That was, more or less, how Rodrigo remembered it. That was how he recreated it as the clay transformed into a worm in his hands. Following the channel of his thoughts, while he fell deeper and deeper into a hypnotic trance and the world around him faded away, he recalled or began to recall the theory, or rather the example of the evil genius. Descartes let his imagination range too freely with that example, that inkling of a plot. There are some truths, like mathematics, that seem to us impossible to doubt. In order to doubt them and stand alone, triumphant, before the void, Descartes proposes the most delicious theory in the history of philosophy: we have been created by a god who obliges us to be mistaken. An evil genius who is amused by our blunders and laughs at the certainty we assign to the simplest sums. An astute god with the worst of intentions, who made us in the form of his boredom to see us fall into error as Thales of Miletus falls into a well. A god who sows signs in things and sends us out into the world with our faces covered in eyes to search for those signs and be dazzled by our stupid discovery. A bastard of a god, like those in myths that have a better sense of humor than the religious ones.
Rodrigo raised his eyes, forcing himself to defer his reflections, and the shock was so complete that he thought he had lost his wits. He was no longer in Jimmie’s workshop, sitting on the floor next to Micaela, but in his bedroom in the apartment in Mexico City. The bed was made, but the creases in the bedspread—Cecilia’s tiger-striped bedspread—showed evidence of a recent presence. As it seemed impossible to attribute to hypnosis this perfect, detailed recreation of his room, Rodrigo assumed he had fallen asleep and even allowed himself to quietly deride Jimmie, Velásquez, and Marcelo for believing in such an absurd project as the future of art. He didn’t deride Micaela because it wasn’t her conviction that had brought her there, but an irreversible series of events, circumstances somewhere between cruel and ridiculous that made up her distant, melancholy personality.
He decided, since he was there, to enjoy his dream and inhabit that lost moment from the past while he could. He didn’t usually struggle against subconscious promptings, and this would be no exception: he was going to live this dream as if he had gone back in time to those days of unemployment and idleness next to the waste ground.
When he remembered the vacant lot, he naturally decided to look for the hen, his feathered accomplice, who would cluck in the dream as in reality, happily feeding on bugs and seeds. He went to the window and leaned out to get a better view. He saw the hen, walking in her characteristic way among the bushes, and he congratulated himself on the veracity and level of detail of his dream, which was representing the undergrowth and the chiaroscuro of the lot like a photograph. But behind the hen he saw something else: a movement of leaves, a cracking of branches, a glimpse of clothing moving a few yards away. Rodrigo leaned back slightly to avoid being seen, but it was unnecessary: the man who was walking around the lot in search of his feathered friend was himself. He saw him moving thorny branches aside and steadying himself by pushing his foot into the earth to get to the bird. He saw, in a flash of sunlight, his face in profile, in the way mirrors never show it and we are surprised to recognize in photographs. He felt dizzy.
He moved farther away from the window and, letting himself fall backwards onto the tiger-striped bedspread, felt a drop of sweat trickling down from his armpit toward his elbow, and a kind of nausea that made him press his hands to his stomach. As if in a revelation of a mystical nature, he suddenly understood what was happening. He didn’t even struggle against it. He opened his eyes in a gesture of fright in the face of the incomprehensible, but each of his following actions seemed self-evident, without the least need for explanation or exegesis. He stood on the bed, lowered his pants and briefs, the elastic of which stretched over his ankles, then he squatted down and produced a perfect turd in the exact center of the tiger-striped bedspread. He didn’t bother to wipe himself: he raised his pants, jumped off the bed, and contemplated his work. It was, without a shadow of a doubt, the same turd. That turd.
He contemplated it in ecstasy during what could have been a long moment: his perception of time was suddenly as malleable as the piece of Cartesian wax. He thought of—or rather imagined in fast-forward—all the events that had occurred since that day, since he came back from the lot with a pain in the back of his head and was disgusted to find that surprise. In some way, he said to himself, his journey toward abandonment, his perdition, his voyage around the void had begun right there. Or before, perhaps: the first time he decided to walk home from work instead of taking the metro. Or even earlier, when he first entered his childhood Thicket, the one this other vacant lot replicated. Or never, and the milestone didn’t exist, just constancy, atoms falling in the void in perfect verticals and monotony.
When his thoughts had reached this point of irreversible abstraction, Rodrigo heard the key turning in the front door of the apartment. It was him, the first person, coming back from his expedition, injured and upset, to discover a piece of shit on the bed. He didn’t give it a second thought: he raised himself up onto the windowsill and dropped down into the lot.