Among Strange Victims (3 page)

The owner—or the person I took to be the owner—came back after a while, carrying a packet of tea that looked as old as the photographs in the entrance.

“Yes, but it's normal tea. I couldn't find the chamomile.” By “normal” he evidently meant black.

“Well, give me a cup of that then, and let's hope it doesn't keep me from sleeping,” I said, seeking some sort of complicity with the owner of the café, though without really understanding why I was seeking that complicity or how such a state would emerge from a situation as trivial as the one that had united us so far. The man gave me a sardonic, scornful look.

“It's coffee that keeps you from sleeping, son, not tea; they give tea to the sick.”

I had no wish to discuss the effects of theine and halfheartedly agreed with him. He put the cup of steaming water down in front of me and also left the whole packet of black tea on the counter. I extracted a tea bag, put it in the cup, and stared—transfixed by the way it soaked up the scalding water and sank like a shipwrecked barge—before I added a little sugar. I drank the tea in silence, not listening to the complaints the furniture–faced customer addressed to the three or four other locals. (His banality was disturbing and his ability to emit streams of foul language, prodigious.)

When I'd finished my beverage, I looked in amazement at the bag of black tea at the bottom of the empty cup, limp and useless as a newly sloughed skin. I can't explain exactly what I thought, but that uninspiring object seemed beautiful in its insignificance, so I wrapped it in my napkin and put it in my pocket. I was concerned that the owner or one of the customers, noticing my eccentric maneuver, might berate me, but apparently no one saw me. I paid and went out.

I am now in my apartment and the tea bag is on the table, in the center of a sodden napkin. The pocket of my jacket was also soaked, and if it hadn't been a dark jacket, I would probably have had to take it to the dry cleaner, because everyone knows that tea, as they say is also true of sin, leaves a permanent stain.

The tea bag doesn't seem as surprising now as it did when it was at the bottom of the cup, but I've decided to keep it, so I get my staple
gun from the toolbox, and, after a dull thud, the end of the string with the label is stapled onto the wall, right in front of the bed, so that this useless, vaguely obscene pendulum—aesthetically speaking, it is something akin to a sanitary pad—will be the first thing I see in the morning. The bag is still dripping slightly, and a tiny puddle is gradually forming on the floor, plus an elongated brown stain on the wall. I think the stain will add an interesting touch to the room and perhaps, by accentuating the corrosive effects of the damp, will end up being the decorative focus of the apartment. I think I like the term “decorative focus,” although I'm not completely certain what it means. (On a wall covered in crucifixes, is God the decorative focus?) I also think it will be pleasant to wake up every day and contemplate the tea bag hanging on the wall, not just for its appearance—slightly disagreeable at the moment—but because it will be a souvenir of that afternoon, of that sudden, arbitrary decision to walk home from the museum and have a cup of tea on the way. It's good to create souvenirs of authentic, minute moments of happiness.

I listen to an argument in the downstairs apartment, related, from what I can gather, to a video game; they are in their forties and arguing about a video game, a Nintendo, almost certainly from twenty years back. It's already dark and, in the vacant lot, almost impossible to make out any detail. The plants merge with the strands of rusty wire on the ground and the bags of garbage some people in the street throw over the wall. Leaning out the window, I look at the lot and try to imagine that it's a thicket, or the lot opposite my father's house in Cuernavaca, the one we used to call the Thicket, or that cities don't exist and there's no point in distinguishing between a thicket and anything else.

The neighbors' argument has finished, or at least is smoldering, awaiting a new spark. I close my eyes and the sound of the canned laughter of a
TV
program comes to me from another apartment. The insomniac's questions edge their way in: How much do actors charge for false laughter? What—if anything—do they think of when they want to produce it? Are there actors, in every corner of the world, whose job it is to dub other people's false laughter into their own language? Do these actors have conventions and conferences, in towering hotels, to share the secrets of false laughter, to mutually
amuse one another, to overcome the sadness that stops them sleeping? Are there support groups for false-laughter actors? Are there help lines—1-800-
LAUGHTER
, for instance—you can call in the early hours so you don't feel alone, so you can laugh falsely again, talk about your childhood?

The laughter is muffled by a new argument between the forty-something neighbors and their mother, with whom they live. The old lady shouts, “Candy, Candy!” Candy is a small, gray male dog. It doesn't occur to them, apparently, to give their pet a name appropriate to its gender.

I think I'd like to smoke a cigarette at moments like this, to have something to do while I do nothing, but I've never been capable of acquiring the habit.

4

Tuesday, the inertia continues. On opening my eyes, in contradiction to what I'd predicted, it is not the tea bag I first see but the window overlooking the vacant lot. With my morning coffee steaming before me, while I wait for the computer to start up so I can take a quick glance at the day's headlines on the internet, I look out the window to see how the lot is doing this morning: if there are more or fewer garbage bags—every so often, without explanation, the bags disappear—if it rained during the night and the ground is muddy, if some vagrant has gotten in to find shelter and safety under the branches. Checking out the state of the lot every morning is a basic activity. It makes me think of people who live near a river, who, as soon as they wake, hurry to see what state the waters are in: “It's low today,” they announce, or “It'll flood today.”

The garbage bags haven't gone. There are no down-and-outs. But I notice a movement among the bushes in the lot. “That'll be a cat,” I think. There have been cats on other occasions. Lost or exiled kittens, or kittens booted out, almost as soon as they've left the bloody womb, by happy but practical families who know they can't
live with animals everywhere. But it isn't a cat: a dirty hen appears between the weeds, pecking at the ground in search of food. How could that hen have gotten there? Perhaps someone has surreptitiously installed himself in the lot and let loose his farm animals, for personal consumption, as they say. But I can't see anyone, nor any other farm animals, just the hen, which occasionally disappears behind some car tire or scrub plant and reappears on the other side, making that intermittent noise I never know the name for because I've never lived a particularly rural life, except for that other vacant lot, the childhood one we used to call the Thicket, which never had any fauna besides the scorpions and spiders my father used to warn me about when I went out to play with the other children.

No, I've always been eminently urban. Before this apartment, I lived very close to the Zócalo, in one of those alleys where the street vendors used to crowd together, shouting, until the city authorities gave the zone a facelift and put them all in an enormous warehouse so they had to suffer the penance of their own cries without deafening the tourists, mutually punishing each other with their earsplitting reverberations.

And before I lived downtown, I was in Coapa, in one of those residential estates with identical houses that were once upper middle class and are now inevitably occupied by hordes of teenagers accustomed to the cultural aridity of the periphery; teenagers who gather in the green spaces to smoke pot and show off their skateboarding tricks, and whose career ambitions are usually to work in a skateboard store or have someone pay them to set fire to vacant lots.

I was one of those innocuous teenagers, I admit it, and not as long ago as I'm ready to accept. I was, let's say, an aging adolescent in Coapa, when I lived with my mother—in the damp house, near the one where a woman hanged herself from a beam—and I pretended to go to the university every day, while in fact I'd already dropped out and was convinced it wasn't necessary to study anything (as I am now, although maybe I was more belligerently convinced then). I used to go to the green spaces as well, and though I didn't skateboard, I did smoke pot and bought acid tabs that I later sold at a profit outside a state high school to make a little money for books or pirate video games, bought in nearby Pericoapa—the
video games—or Avenida Miguel Ángel—the books. (I have a particularly fond memory of a book written by a French executioner from who knows what remote century and a video game in which, for the fun of it, you could kick your opponent when he was down.) I never had a dog or a cat, much less a hen, although once, during those horrible teenage years, bored and high on drugs, I bought a rabbit at the traffic lights and then treated it so badly that it attacked me viciously, making the most implausible gash on my arm, from which I still have a scar, and in moments of weariness, it seems to take the shape of a rabbit—as happens, they say, with the full moon, though I've never been able to verify that.

After the rabbit, I don't think I ever again lived with animals. At best I must have seen, out the car window on the highway to Acapulco, the agglomerations of sheep and the distant, iconic cows. And now—right under my window, in a central zone of a city for which, like God, the apt metaphor is the circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere—well, now I can see a dirty hen pecking the ground of the vacant lot. Do you say “crow?” No, that's cocks. The thing is that hens have their own sound, so inalienably their own, and I can't go on thinking about what you call that intermittent chirping, because it's Inertia Tuesday and I have to go to the museum to correct the letters the secretary writes incorrectly and meet—in a corridor; I don't have my own office—the unwelcome photographers who are proposing an exhibition on heroin users who live in the sewers, or women who live in the upscale suburb of Polanco and screw their chauffeurs when their husbands go to New York on business.