Among Strange Victims (13 page)

Prepared to frustrate the perverse siege, I enter the apartment and, with great presence of mind, shout out in as deep a voice as I can manage, feigning heroic, baritone, burglar-proof manliness. But at least in the living room, there is no burglar or anyone of a profession akin to that. I head for the bedroom with a crepuscular presentiment but on opening the door don't immediately see anything out of the ordinary. But this apparent calm masks a more serious perversion: in the geometric center of the bed lies a coiled piece of shit. A perfect turd on the tiger-striped bedspread.

II

FUNDAMENTAL CONSIDERATIONS ON SOMETHING

A

Marcelo Valente was sitting on the balcony of his Madrid apartment, marking the final exams of the academic year while mentally running through the objectives of his trip. And although he wanted, at all costs, to escape from that pallid tableland, he also knew he would end up, however unwillingly, missing many of the things that were just then triggering a profound sense of boredom.

This wasn't to be just any old year. Despite having dedicated as many as four consecutive months to academic tourism (exchanges, conferences, symposia, periods of research in Eurozone countries), he had always traveled with the notion of a quick return in mind. In contrast, he knew his stay in Mexico could become almost indefinite, and spending a year in a remote third-world university, traveling around small, out-of-the-way towns, at the mercy of the sun and the narco wars wasn't the same as, for example, having breakfast on a comfortable Parisian terrace and walking tranquilly to the small, confined office he had been assigned.

He had only been in Latin America once before, in Buenos Aires. His time in that city had left him favorably disposed toward the whole continent, which had perfectly satisfied his expectations of moderate quaintness, somehow gratifying his vanity and reining in his belief that it was possible to know a little about everything. A three-month stay had been long enough to cover the entire spectrum of the emotions a city could inspire in him, from the blind enchantment of the first weeks to the final relief of watching through the plane window as Ezeiza Airport grew smaller, plus a number of intermediate stages: the shameless wooing of a married woman, the embarrassing bout of drunkenness in a stranger's home, and
the untimely shove given to a dean of philosophy (with the accompanying cry of “Not everyone in Spain is a pompous ass!”). In short, a story he wasn't sure he could be proud of.

This was something that seldom occurred to him in relation to his past; his usual procedure was to brag, on every possible occasion, about the versatility of his
CV
: arrogantly list the nationalities of his lovers and the ideological diversity of his thesis advisors, many of whom had asked him, a posteriori, to contribute to books they were editing. The perfect mixture, in short, of an unresolved inferiority complex and a pretty face, which rather than getting uglier with age was becoming more interesting. Marcelo Valente was, even in the words of his friends, “a cretin with a
PHD
.”

He was aware that his personality inspired not a little reticence. He was no longer on nodding terms with more than one professor. The academic staff of the philosophy department were on the whole, by comparison, much more serious-minded: elderly, blind seminarians who were tangled up in the thousand and one proofs of the existence of God, hangover Marxists who organized independent study groups and papered the chapel of the law department with pro-Chavist leaflets, jaundiced mathematical logicians who put their faith in the advent of the cyborgs and, to some extent, anticipated that arrival with their own mechanical existences. Marcelo didn't belong to this realm. He had, in fact, studied art history, and only after a
PHD
in aesthetics at the Sorbonne had he definitely switched departments. For many academics that showed, to say the least, a lack of respect.

Part of Marcelo's misunderstood charm consisted of treating everyone with the same effusiveness, as if turning a deaf ear to rebuffs. This technique of overpowering friendliness ended by softening the hearts of his declared enemies. They once again invited him to congresses on the construction of aesthetic thought during the frenzied interwar years, the only area of study in which he displayed relative assurance—and disproportionate pretensions.

Marcelo had an emotional relationship with his object of study that made him stand out among other philosophy professors. While some—the majority—dedicated themselves to the tediously monotonous repetition of anyone else's ideas, Marcelo was convinced that
thought could be used to know something new about the world, even if that world was the limited field of the aesthetics of the avant-garde. His was not the optimism of the ignorant but that of the egomaniac, though anyone who didn't know him could easily confuse the two.

Marcelo Valente's story—as should be kept in mind henceforth—has two strands: his love life and his theoretical enthusiasms. These two spheres, in his case, cannot be separated. Any attempt to narrate his Mexican experience without taking this into consideration will be unsuccessful.

B

In December 1917, Edmund Belafonte Desjardins—poet and boxer, boastful jewel thief, con man, art dealer, serial deserter, Australian logger, light-heavyweight champion of France, Canadian challenger in Athens, Russian exile in New York, stowaway, teenage orange picker in California, exhibitionist, Irishman living in Lausanne under a false identity, fisherman, conference lecturer, editor of a five-issue magazine, ballet dancer, dandy, boxing coach in Mexico City's Calle Tacuba, expert on Egyptian art, buffoon, lover, liar, front man for nobody and for himself on innumerable occasions, nameless shadow, witness, minor personage in a time brimming over with great names, friend, wretch, brute—convinced Beatrice Langley to join him in Mexico, where he was scraping together a living under a pseudonym that would make him celebrated and despised, in equal measure, in the artistic milieus of Montmartre and New York: Richard Foret.

Bea arrived in Mexico in early January 1918, and twenty-four hours later they were married. Richard had already had enough of the city, the adjoining towns, the constant altercations with gringos and locals. He had had enough of that country full of thugs where he had, due to the painful process of missing Bea, plumbed the deepest abysses of his melancholy. He had been in Mexico for
just six months, but he had had enough. He was mistaken for a spy wherever he went. In San Luís Potosí, the caudillo Saturnino Cedillo had held a gun to his head, threatening to shoot if he didn't confess whom he was working for. His muscular physique, his accent, his tattoos all made him untrustworthy: who was going to believe he was an eccentric writer waiting in Mexico for his wife—an English poetess residing in New York—who would be coming by train to rescue him, to save him from himself? They listened and thought he was insane. And for this reason he began to feign insanity, to exaggerate it to the point of losing himself in it, convinced that only in that way could he survive in a country of gunmen and anarchists.