Among Strange Victims (2 page)

The vacant lot my apartment overlooks is the reason I moved here. Fed up with the homogenous panorama of buildings surrounding my former house, I decided I needed a little clean air, a rest for the eyes that only vegetation and a certain rural ambience could provide. As neither of these was to be found at a reasonable distance from the museum, I looked for apartments next to vacant lots. This was the only one I found.

My job isn't particularly difficult, or particularly tedious. In fact, you could say that I like it. Three years ago, when I was out of regular work for almost four months, doing occasional commissions for various government institutions, I thought I would never find a place where spending eight hours a day would seem as pleasant as watching
TV
or looking through one of the volumes of my encyclopedia of biology. Then I got an offer from the museum and decided to accept it, so now I pass the day in an open-plan office with high ceilings, in an old building in the historic downtown of Mexico City, spending hours on end writing texts related to the site: press releases, salon notes, letters and speeches for the director, and so on. I also have other functions, which only occasionally require my skills, such as meeting and repelling the impromptu visitors who turn up to propose ridiculous exhibitions, or battling with the people in the printing department when there's an error in a catalog.

As there was no title for the post I occupy, or at least no one told me what it was, I decided to invent one myself, and now I sign official e-mails as the museum's “knowledge administrator.” I got the idea from a billboard on the Periférico beltway advertising the new degrees of a private university. One of them was just that: Knowledge Administration. I loved it; I felt it expressed my deepest convictions. Considering what is known of the world, it's more than sufficient, I guess. Nowadays, the procedure is to administer knowledge in a way that makes people feel happy, or at least not constantly and irremediably miserable.

I'm not particularly happy. And, moreover, I don't think I'll ever study that degree program. In fact, I'm never going to study any degree program. In fact, I've never taken any course, at least not all the way through. True, I did spend four semesters doing English literature, but a deeply felt rejection of academic zeal made me stop in time, just before—hijacked by one of those diligent pupils who have an opinion about everything—I became convinced of the advantages of opting for a specific area of study, prepared to spend years dissecting the same, identical fragment of a nineteenth-century novel.

2

It must measure more or less 60 by 120 feet, but at night the lot looks bigger than it really is, and then I look out the window and imagine it's really a large thicket. When I was young I also lived next to a vacant lot, in Cuernavaca, that all the local kids called the Thicket. (It wasn't the damp house I mentioned earlier but another one, my father's.) In contrast to my childhood lot, this one has a wall separating it from the street, so you're hardly likely to be aware that the waste ground exists if you're only passing by with other things on your mind. For that reason, I went around noting every lot that might be overgrown with shrubs until I found an apartment for rent next to one. It took me months, but I wasn't in a hurry.

As I don't have many belongings or many visitors, I didn't mind that the place was really a small studio, and not in a very good state of repair. If I had more free time outside of work, I'd think about moving somewhere bigger and in better condition so I wouldn't have to spend hours listening to the downstairs neighbors' untimely arguments. But as I have little free time, I don't mind much, and have even come to feel a certain delight in listening to the disputes of those neighbors, who, late at night, make me feel that I'm not alone.

3

Today, as I was leaving the museum, I decided to walk home rather than take the metro for the four stops that separate downtown from the station nearest to where I live. I'd never done this before. I hadn't even considered the possibility of walking all the way here. I'd always imagined the various zones that make up this city, or the part of the city I know, as being unconnected on the surface, like islands that can only be approached from underground, on the metro. Walking, discovering that the pedestrian level is also a continuum, was a strange experience.

It's curious how a small, apparently innocuous detail like walking home from work instead of taking the metro—a good hour and a half on foot, at a brisk pace—can precipitate events or influence the direction of things in a way that is perhaps irreversible. I'm surprised, truly surprised, that the greatest concepts, and also maybe some of the most vigorous spirits in history, were, in essence, determined by a particular afternoon when a man decided to do something slightly different. On a smaller scale, that's how the decision to walk home now seems to me. I don't mean it has converted me into a twenty-first-century Napoleon, but I have the feeling that the order of something deep in my chest has been irrevocably subverted.

I avoided the main avenues and made my way along back streets, where the noise was more bearable and I could browse the shop windows. One place galvanized my attention, though I recognize that it was arbitrariness—or perhaps a paranormal force, inherent in urban development—which made me stop just there. It was a café that displayed its menu by means of laminated photographs from at least thirty years before. Jurassic omelets with avocado, hamburgers sampled by my forebears. The photos of the dishes made me, nonsensically, think of the stars, which are, according to popular wisdom and expert thought, testimony to a reality that no longer exists.

I went into the café and sat at the counter, next to a man who looked like part of the furniture. I ordered a coffee. A skinny man in a red shirt, on the other side of the counter, replied in a surprisingly brusque tone that they didn't have any.

“But I can offer you a cup of hot water for Nescafé, we've got that.”

“You wouldn't have chamomile tea, or something similar?”

The man in the red shirt disappeared through a greasy curtain covering the upper half of a doorway (a hole, to be precise) in the wall behind the counter; on the other side of this curtain, I caught a glimpse of some family photos and, hanging from the ceiling, a chandelier with half the bulbs blown; under the light, a green table, and at it, a boy doing his homework. This was probably the home of the owner of the incompetent café, and that simple curtain divided his working and private worlds, if such a distinction made any sense in his particular case, which is questionable.