Among Strange Victims (30 page)

Marcelo has a certain tendency toward good humor that I find suspicious. He's always asking me about my interests and even shows curiosity when he's with Cecilia. It's as if he believes that all human beings have something interesting to say, waiting there inside. He couldn't be more wrong.

Despite all this, he's a likeable guy, and even if his likeability can become almost intolerable after a few hours, his company is, in general, positive, or at least neutral. He shows himself to be obliging, but then he uses the opportunity of that conquered ground for a crushing display of theories. He proselytizes for the most innocuous causes (“a reevaluation of Epicurus,” for example). His capacity for enjoyment, if not completely atrophied, is clearly dampened by his love of analysis. He's the sort of person who, when watching the most recent Disney movie, uses the word
multiculturalism,
or, when it's over, posits without the least visible trace of sarcasm, “It's a metaphor for almost everything.”

Normally, I'd have thought my mother would have found those attitudes, those almost comical attempts to be intelligent, downright pathetic. Yet she seems fascinated by the man. Marcelo's most imbecilic comments receive an almost immediate echo of approval from her, and at times I feel afraid that he's simply testing her, trying to define the limits of her affection. I then discover an unprecedented impulse: to defend my mother against the possibility of disillusion. I've never before worried about anything like that: it was always she who was constantly trying to convert me to the hopeful club, with little success. She took me to events organized by her
NGO
, convinced that when I saw a little suffering my heart, embalmed in cynicism, would soften. She showed me documentaries about famine in Africa.

But with Marcelo, things are different: her personal enthusiasms lie in abeyance while she's laughing at the frigging Spaniard's jokes, as if twenty-five years of academia and social work were not enough to deal with the cover of
Hola!
magazine.

I learn about how they met, without really paying much attention. Something to do with a rough town somewhere in the vicinity, a crummy bar, something about my mom's car breaking down and Marcelo giving her a lift back to Los Girasoles . . . It all sounds as if it's come from a bad novel about drug trafficking. (The reader discovers, some pages in, that she's the head of a “fucking tough” cartel, and by then he, the professor of philosophy, has already become trapped in her web of corruption and deceit.) There's something about the rhetoric of other people's love stories that makes me feel sick, a tendency for bedroom hyperbole that, particularly when it's my mother speaking, gives me the urge to seek out once again that neutral office-worker tone, or death.

9

Cecilia has discovered literature: to my shame, she has bought a horrendous edition of
Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
The book appears to have been designed by a self-help professional: purple borders,
title in italics, whimsical shading, and photos modified to look like drawings. In the evenings, she reads a couple of pages while my mom and Marcelo discuss minority rights. Then she gets all grandiloquent, says if you concentrate hard enough, you can dream that you're flying, and that benefits your everyday life. That's what she says to me before we go to sleep; then she has a lime tea (I save the bag) and curls up on one edge of the bed, smiling at the wall.

Inspired by her self-help book, she's also written some roughly heptasyllabic verses. She dedicated them to me, and they were about roses. I couldn't actually say it straight out, but instead formulated an unspoken warning: Love me any way you will, except in outmoded stylistic forms.

Cecilia now tells me things about her childhood. She hasn't said so, but everything indicates that an uncle or godparent tried to rape her when she was seven. At least I think that is what she's insinuating; she says, for example, that the bastard gave her photos of little girls like her. The story is dark and makes me shiver, but Cecilia relates it all calmly. I attribute the ease with which she addresses the subject of abuse to her economic background: there are atrocities that are never questioned in low-income families (nor in the ultra-high ones, of course; the middle class has a monopoly on scandal). She also tells me, for example, that two of her mother's children died. “One of them was still in her tummy,” she says.

One night, I can't sleep. The silence in Los Girasoles is so up front that it wakes me. I look out the window and know I'll be lying there until dawn, listening carefully for some familiar noise: a car engine, a siren, bottles thrown against a wall. But there's no sound. Cecilia is sleeping on the other side of the bed. It irritates me to think that in the other room my mother is lying next to a stranger. That we are two couples, sleeping in two rooms of the same house. Like
acquaintances.
It really irritates me.

I go to the kitchen for a swig of milk. Here the milk comes in glass bottles with labels that are always falling off. And the vegetables have the misshapen, earthy look of healthy things. If I were in my apartment right now, I'd look out at the vacant lot, in search of the complicit hen. There's a street lamp on the opposite sidewalk that
shines onto part of the lot below my window. The hen could be there, under the white light, waiting to be abducted or called to heaven.

The milk here is too thick to quench your thirst. All sorts of things here are too thick to quench your thirst. As if an invisible dust comes in from the plains and soaks up the moisture on your tongue, in your throat. When I urinate, it comes out darker than usual. In the city, my urine is almost transparent, unless I drink too much or ingest foodstuffs of an ochre hue or eat beetroot. But here my urine is dark. And so is the night.

I fill a glass with milk and drink it down in one gulp. I hate rustic furniture; to be exact, the pieces of rustic furniture that are always the decorative focus in Adela's houses. As I'm walking back to the bedroom, to try to fall asleep next to Cecilia, I hear a moan in the adjoining room, Adela's—my mother's—bedroom. I think Marcelo must be mounting her. That he'll be emptying into her a milk as thick as the brand they buy and that it's one of the worst conceivable drinks in terms of its thirst-quenching properties. I can't help it: I stop by the door of that room, even though I know anything I hear may perturb me. In a certain sense, I'm seeking out perturbation, as a strange confirmation that I'm human, the son of her, my mother.

Inside the room, the mattress is wheezing like a child on the verge of an asthma attack. They'll have to take it to hospital, I think. They'll have to give it an intravenous shot of Salbutamol. But the mattress suddenly becomes silent and then starts again, breathing slowly and monotonously now, like a swimmer doing the crawl. Every fourth stroke, the twisted mouth surfaces on the right-hand side, just under the armpit, and the swimmer inhales. Then the face goes under again. The hand cuts into the water like a knife and then turns to push the liquid down toward the feet. And then another inhalation. When the face comes out of the water, or rather when one side of the face comes out, the swimmer hears, for a moment, the surrounding hullabaloo: people cheering him, on-your-marks whistles, the splashing of his own legs, and the noise of his body in friction with the water and, above all, the noise of his own respiration, of his mouthful of air, which, when he puts his head down again, is immediately silenced. That's more or less what a swimmer doing the crawl sounds like. And that is also how the inside of
my mother's room sounds, though perhaps with fewer competitive elements (there are no whistles, or people cheering Marcelo as he mounts her). I think they could go on like that all night. All week. Cecilia will wake up; she'll say she dreamed she was flying, and my mom and Marcelo will still be swimming.

I feel a strange pain in the pit of my stomach. I stop myself from hearing all this by going into the bathroom, which is right between the two bedrooms (between hers—my mother's—where they're swimming, and mine, which isn't mine, or only in a provisional sense until we—Cecilia and I—return to our apartment by the vacant lot). I turn on the light and sit on the toilet seat with my head between my knees and my arms pressed tightly into my abdomen. The pain is still there, and now it's throbbing. It throbs, and I feel as if my esophagus is filling with blood, feel the taste of metal rising up my gullet. I kneel down by the toilet, hug it like a pre-Columbian idol, and vomit into the bowl. After the couple of rather loud bouts of retching have worn off, I let a thread of spittle that seems endless fall from my mouth. I think I have an enormous coil of spittle in my belly that is unwinding very, very slowly. It's the milk from the glass bottle, the thick milk. It was the milk that caused me to vomit, and it's still there in my body in the form of an endless thread of spittle. Now I'll have to stay here the whole night, like a beast bleeding to death, facedown.

But no, someone is knocking on the bathroom door, and I have to cut the thread of spittle with my own fingers, leaving everything that has still to come out in my stomach. “Just a moment,” I say. From outside, Marcelo's voice asks if I need any help. As if.

I open the door and sit on the toilet seat, doubled over, hands pressed to my belly. He says the noise woke him. I know that's not true, that he was swimming with my mother or rocking the child on the verge of an asthma attack—the aged mattress. I know he was coming in her, spilling his endless thread of thick, milky spunk while I was vomiting something similar. Anyway, I apologize for having woken him. “No problem,” he says, “I was worried.” Why was he worried? Has my mom told him I'm a worrier? That I'm weak and have a natural tendency to feel fucked up? That she
worries
about me? That everyone around me ends up entering into
a relationship based on worry, their worries about me but also, to a lesser degree, the worry other people make me feel about myself?

“Nothing serious. I'm not used to farm milk. It's coming up.” Marcelo's facial muscles tense almost imperceptibly at the sound of the word
coming,
which I pronounce with a particular emphasis. Now he knows I know he was swimming with her. He knows I heard him, or thinks I saw him, rocking the child on the verge of an asthma attack and then starting his race, which—from the sound—seemed less a speed race than a test of stamina, like swimming the English Channel, or with a rope tied around your waist so you have no possibility of advancing; the thing is that I heard him swimming—and he knows it—on Adela, she underneath him, raising his head to breathe on one side of my mother, of Adela.