Among Strange Victims (20 page)

While this was going on, Marcelo Valente finished his two undergraduate degrees in record time—though with unspectacular grades—and, having dazzled the wealthy faction of his family, went to London—partly sponsored by an aunt—for a whole summer with another, also sometime, girlfriend called Lucía.

Marcelo and Velásquez could spend hours like that, analyzing from year to year the tenuous coincidences in their lives and happily laughing at the differences.

After wiping the plates of his three servings of salad with a piece of stale bread, Marcelo would return to Puerta del Aire. Velásquez had introduced him to someone from the university's administrative department who was anxious to sell his car, and Marcelo bought it, convinced he could resell it with equal ease at the end of his sabbatical year. So now he had a car.

Back at his house, he dedicated himself to light reading—war novels for the most part—that he found in the only non-university bookstore in Los Girasoles. He had brought very few belongings with him, and the only books he had were related to his research, so he would have to wait for his next trip to
DF
to stock up on his bibliographic resources and even a couple of box sets to kill time. After reading for a while, he'd begin to feel irritated by his surroundings, the ugliness of the furniture, and would set out again—“I'll be back later, Don Jacinto,” he'd call to the guard—on a drive along the four central streets of Los Girasoles. In the only café that merited the name, he had become a familiar face since his second day, and it was there he sat to leaf through the local newspaper and ignore the indigenous people from other lands offering him multicolored craft items.

The waiter was a lean, diligent man who liked to discover the tastes and manias of his regular customers. He already knew he should serve Marcelo an espresso with just a drop of milk and not bring sugar or sweetener or anything similar. He also had to bring the newspaper from the bar, if it was available, and if not promise he would be the next customer to get it. Sometimes, but only if Marcelo requested it, the waiter served a glass of mineral water with the espresso, but that only happened on very hot days.

Marcelo always greeted the waiter by name and gave a substantial tip when he left the terrace to take a couple of turns around the square with its pavilion. From the café, the professor could be seen taking that ritual, circular walk and then disappearing down one of the streets leading to another, smaller square, only to reappear after a short time in his noisy car, which had been left in a public parking
lot two blocks away. He sometimes stopped off at the supermarket on the road to Puerta del Aire. This was, to cut a long story short, his average day.

Later on, Marcelo planned to visit the nearby towns on the weekends. The nearest was Nueva Francia, which appeared in the newspapers every three or four days, together with the words
narco
or
shoot-out.
In the last six months, Nueva Francia had changed its mayor three or four times. Killed, arrested, or politically ousted, the mayors who left the post were never again mentioned in the press or during conversations on public transportation. An omnivorous silence devoured the names of those defunct functionaries, a silence that passed with giant steps through the ranks of the dwindling population. One day, three beheaded corpses. Another, five individuals tied at the wrists, showing signs of torture. Yet another, a soldier, with his hands cut off, lying at the roadside.

Given these reports, Marcelo postponed the moment of getting to know Nueva Francia and, for the time being, contented himself with visiting the smallest, most distant towns that were featured in the
Globetrotter's Guide
he had brought with him from Madrid. While driving, he listened to Glutamato Ye-Yé on the car stereo, recalling the good times of the eighties and thinking nostalgically of all the women he had been with. Those uncultivated plains, those winding roads pitted with potholes were perfect for remembering the most important moments of his life, to the rhythm of an outdated style of pure rock that gratified the deepest depths of his memory.

“The only thing missing here,” Marcelo would say to himself, “is a woman to help me get through this sabbatical year.” The female staff members Velásquez introduced him to—all flat-chested—had looked at him with an eagerness that put Marcelo on his guard: just as in a cartoon, he believed he saw gold rings and wedding dresses in their black eyes, plus European passports and a life far distant from their offices in Los Girasoles and the executions in Nueva Francia. They were calculating women, academics who delivered their classes any old way and published articles in second-rate journals to gain points and so receive federal bonuses for top-class research. Marcelo knew them because they were the same the world over: in the Inalienably Autonomous University of Madrid,
in the University of Buenos Aires, in the Pontifical University of Anywhere At All. It wasn't just the women, of course; in terms of calculation and mediocrity, there was no possible discrimination: all the researchers were of equal worth. But now Marcelo was polishing up his misogyny because it was the women who looked at him with lascivious desire, drawing an inelegant equivalence between the foreignness of the newcomer and the social redemption of his hypothetical partner.

No. Marcelo needed a different woman, a Mexican with an air of extreme wisdom who would show him the paths of the national mystique and force him to part with his first-world prejudices. An intense, implacable woman who wouldn't allow him to be distracted from his principal mission: to write a book on Foret in Mexico, or rather on the sudden, inexplicable disappearance of Foret in Mexico, on disappearance as the absolute aesthetic experience of the avant-garde—in the sense, that is, of Paul Virilio, but more frivolously. A woman who would open doors for him and explain the codes of conduct in this barren place, who would carry him away from Puerta del Aire to a cool, shady, wooden house in some grove, in some oasis that would isolate him from all the surrounding hostility.

B

The third episode to mark Bea Langley's life and put the finishing touches to the mold of her character takes place in New York. It is 1916, and Bea is a woman in her prime—with thirty-one springs behind her—who won't change substantially, except for the degeneration of an already well-formed character. She has abandoned her husband—who, eaten by jealousy, refuses to give her a divorce—and her two offspring await, optimistically, the return of their mother in an English boarding school a few miles from Florence. The war is a frequent topic of conversation, and Richard Foret, of whom Beatrice still knows nothing, or not much, is crossing the
Atlantic to New York on the liner in which, by chance, Trotsky is traveling into exile.

Bea is received with moderate enthusiasm by New Yorkers. Her exploits alongside the Futurists (the rumors of her affair with Marinetti) don't soften any hearts since the general opinion is that Futurism is overvalued, just a boorish bustling of loudmouthed, hirsute people. And neither has Bea's art had a positive impact: she is branded as a naïve painter, and the adjective is correct. Her poetry, by contrast, has better luck. Alfred Kreymborg, a dapper defender of free verse, invites her to contribute to his magazine,
Others,
and the poems published there are praised in circles she believes to be important, although their leading light, a young man with a pleonastic name, is, in fact, a small-town doctor from New Jersey: William Carlos Williams.

After being initially dazzled, Bea is, in a sense, disillusioned by New York. The people are pretentious or simply imbecilic, and no one has serious conversations about anything. They are all cynics, and erecting a wall of indifference between themselves and all things human is a fashion that coexists with the most ridiculous of hats. Her friend Heather, who has been in New York for a year, avoids her, offering risible excuses, and is only to be seen with a group of famous lesbians. Bea concentrates on her political writing, now more detailed and better argued than in her Italian period. In relation to her poetry, she is unaware that what she does can be justified so elegantly: the battle for free verse contributes to her theoretical redemption.

On an evening when Bea is returning to the apartment that also serves as her studio, having just left one of those salons where the dilettantes take great pains to shock by dressing like standard lamps, she is stopped by a down-and-out who brusquely asks her for money. Bea is accustomed to walking alone and has learned to avoid all manner of altercations. It is not unusual for men to follow her when they notice she lives by herself, and to make indecent proposals in the most sordid streets. But she is a tough woman and knows it is essential to keep smiling and reduce her aggressor to the size of a child, looking derisively at him; they usually leave her in peace.

This down-and-out, however, is persistent. A man of about fifty with a pockmarked face, dressed in stinking rags. He walks with a stoop, as if carrying a heavy load on his right shoulder, and has a long beard that does not completely hide the gauntness of his features. At some point he steps out in front of Bea, blocking her way. It is a narrow street, almost deserted at this twilight hour. Bea impatiently looks the undesirable in the eye and asks permission to pass. And then it happens: she recognizes the eyes and forehead of someone glimpsed in the past. She hesitates an instant longer, with time standing still around her, rummaging in her memory in search of such a face. When she finds it, she pales and her jaw drops in a gesture of surprise that will remain there for several days. The vagabond is none other than the murderer in that Piedmont station, the man who, fifteen years before, in a fit of spite, fired at a woman who was abandoning him in slow motion. Now Bea meets him again, on another continent and with a very different appearance, but it is undoubtedly the same person. She remembers in fine detail the pain on his face when the guards arrested him; under the gray beard, the man's expression is now identical: he seems frozen in that instant, as if it were impossible to feel any new emotion after that last, definitive one.