Among Strange Victims (12 page)

And here I am now on the other side of the wall, my shoes half sunk in the mud. I walk carefully through the undergrowth, searching for the hen and attempting to attract her with a sound I feel would be familiar, exciting: the equivalent of the sex-wanted ads in the newspaper, but in clucks. “Seeking a female with dirty feathers and loose morals,” I cluck to her.

After walking across a couple of rotting planks, I reach the darkest, wildest core of the waste ground, that part that can't be seen from my window, toward which the hen is usually walking when I lose sight of her. The first time I entered the lot, with the frustrated
intention of enticing her toward the table that was to serve as a shelter, I didn't get as far as this remote, overgrown region. I can hear the hen clucking in the bushes, but although she's close by, it's difficult to get through the dense vegetation to the place where the sound is coming from, and I have to make numerous detours to avoid nettles, thorny branches, and pieces of barbed wire. When I'm at the point of locating its origin, the clucking stops; nor can I see any movement among the leaves. The hen has disappeared. I desperately search all around but don't find a single feather. On the other hand, I do uncover a plastic bag just like the other one that, a few months ago, made me back off and run out of the lot, the bag full of viscera. The possibility that this bag might also be stuffed with intestines in an advanced state of putrefaction horrifies me. Not just because of my disgust and revulsion, my profound and, you might say, fainthearted dislike of blood, but also because finding a second bag during this second incursion into the lot would imply a pattern, a wink of complicity, a recurrence of—for god's sake—grotesque, abhorrent things; it would imply the lot is a place of perversion and death, a place where you could, with astounding impunity, dump the corpses of large mammals, thinking mammals, mammals with skirts.

Confronted with these pure possibilities, I feel overtaken by events. I have the sudden intuition that it wasn't my liking for things rural that led me to move next to the plot, but a propensity for catastrophe and a tendency toward the sordid that goes beyond my conscious undertaking to convert myself into a mediocre, spineless man. So I decide to take a roundabout path through other shady areas of the lot to avoid contact with, or simple closeness to, the bag possibly full of intestines. I stoop to pass below a branch that hangs, as if brought down by lightning, over a heap of trash. And as I move into the darkness, with the foliage of the lianas and the general vegetal disorder covering my body, I feel a blow on the back of my neck. And I fall. I fall as if going beyond the ground. Like Alice when she falls while following the rabbit. The rabbit whose form can be clearly made out in the scar on my arm, and on the moon, so they say. The rabbit that, in my case, is a stray and—who knows?—even imaginary hen, let loose in the weeds of my inertia.

17

I'm woken by a beautiful ray of sunlight falling directly onto my face and the cackling presence of the hen, who is pulling up worms a couple of feet from my ear. I pass my tongue over my lips and discover the taste of dust. I can also sense the dryness of the earth on the skin of my arms, the palms of my hands, my eyelids, my whole body. I'm lying faceup. I received a blow to the back of the neck, and I'm lying faceup, covered in dirt. I probably fell on my front and took the opportunity of an instant of consciousness to turn on my own axis, like a predictable planet.

Pain. Pain very close to the back of my neck. The blow wasn't exactly on the back of my neck. It was on my head, to one side, a few inches from the ear now listening to the clucking of the hen. It was a blow on that part of my head where the infestations of lice always started in my childhood. In the finest, most vulnerable hairs through which I would run my hand to feel the gritty lumps of blood, the pain. Pain and confusion.

I can't have been lying here for long. One or two hours at the most. Cecilia hasn't left the museum, and the sun is still high, so it's somewhere between midday and early afternoon. Two hours maybe. Not more. A few short hours disconnected, absent, lying faceup in the lot—my beloved waste ground next to my building—accompanied by the intermittent clucking of my wardress, by the pain of her victims, the worms. Worm pain. Neck pain. I sense and look at my grimy body. I extract a twig from my mouth. I wipe the earth from my eyelids with the right sleeve of my shirt, which is less dirty than the rest of me. My slow efforts to stand don't seem to surprise the hen, whom I've never before seen at such close quarters. Now I can appreciate the dull opacity of her plumage, the unhealthy look of her legs, the food fighting for survival, wriggling in her mouth. Worms.

Once on my feet, I'm overcome by a slight dizziness, accompanied by the precise sensation of blood flowing and veins pulsing in the area around the wound on my head. I check that my belongings—keys, wallet, cell phone—are still in their usual places—left pocket, back pocket, and right pocket, respectively—and as they
are, I discount robbery as the motive for the aggression to which I was subjected, if that's what it was, and not a falling branch or a stone or a piece of drywall someone threw over from the street, imagining the lot to be empty as usual. Maybe I saved the hen from that very same blow that, I say to myself, given the size and fragility of the bird, would have been lethal.

Though it seems more likely it was a calculated attack. What was I hit with? A bat, a piece of rusty pipe from the lot, a tree trunk struck by lightning, the perpetrator's own wrath? And what was the motive for that sudden, unjustified attack? Simple rage; jealousy; the defense of a particular territory; incomprehensible, naked, unshod Evil?

Pissed off, I make my way back to the wall.

18

From the very moment I start ascending the stairs of my building, while I'm rummaging in my pockets for the key that keeps my meager belongings relatively secure, I suspect something is not as it should be. On the other side of the door, I can hear noises that, though not loud—barely perceptible in fact—only add anxiety to my heightened sensitivity. Despite having ascertained that the wound on my head is more shocking than serious, I can still feel it throbbing, and I think I'll have to invent something to explain the presence of the crusted blood on my scalp to Cecilia. (The truth is unthinkable: I could never explain why I went into the lot, why I followed the hen, why I was hit.) I'm distracted from my thoughts and my future excuses by the sounds on the other side of the door as I'm about to open it. Lo and behold, just to make a frigging awful situation worse, some burglar has, in his wisdom, broken into my dwelling with impunity to commit some outrage that, in my anxiety, I imagine to be not so much robbery as licentious acts involving my underwear and the pink lipstick Cecilia uses when she wants to project an air of elegance.