Among Strange Victims (31 page)

From now on, he'll have to look at me the way you look at someone you've seen defecating—that obvious mixture of intimacy and denial.

10

Cecilia did indeed dream that she was flying, or that's what she says. So I say that I dreamed I was swimming in a pool filled with milk; the image inspires me, and I amuse myself by telling her the particulars of my fictional dream. Around the pool, I say, there was a forest littered with trash, and while I was swimming—with my eyes closed—I
knew
a lot of people were watching me from the side. Eventually, I got out of the pool, shivering, and saw Isabel Watkins, Marcelo, my mom, and her, Cecilia, standing there. Endless threads of milk were streaming from my torso and head, and everyone else was smiling, as if approving my performance. Then I looked behind me, and on the other side of the pool of milk, an asthmatic child was wheezing, making a horrible noise. The child was very dark-skinned, in strong contrast to the pool, which looked more like it was filled with almond milk than the bovine variety, now that I come to think of it. No one seemed to notice the dark, disturbing
presence of the asthmatic child, and they continued to applaud my prowess as a milk swimmer. Angst was taking hold of me, and I dived into the pool, swam across it, and got out on the other side, ready to assist the asthmatic child. But the child wasn't there, and there was no one back on the other side either: not Cecilia, my mom, Marcelo, or anyone else. I was alone, without a towel, next to the milk pool. I got back into the white liquid. Then the milk began to thicken, and it was increasingly difficult to do the arm and leg strokes. The milk got thicker, and the pool was somehow involving me in an abduction phenomenon—I put it that way, “abduction phenomenon,” because Cecilia knows the term and always uses it when she wants to express actions that are beyond human understanding, though it's not particularly appropriate—until I gave up swimming and let myself be pulled to the bottom.

Cecilia is powerfully impressed by my fictional dream. She anxiously tells me I have to concentrate every night and think of positive things (“Like your pets when you were small,” she explains), and that once inside the dream, I have to try to look at my hands. She also says she'll get a book on oneiromancy—she doesn't use that word—to see what the swimming pool filled with milk means.

There's something satisfying about lying to Cecilia, even when it's just innocuous lies like that. She never doubts what anyone says or compares the information she receives with the facts. I could swear to her that I'd walked on water and she would end up accepting it. I believe that, in part, I like lying to her because I envy that capacity of hers for taking things on board as if they were true. I, in contrast, harbor an innate distrust of almost everything, and although until lately I thought that made me a more intelligent person, I'm beginning to suspect it only makes me a more nervous one.

Anyway, I have to take full advantage of this ordinary pleasure, I tell myself, the pleasure of lying to Cecilia. There are few things that make my day: devising arbitrary collections, righting wrongs related to turds on bedspreads, pampering hens. The few ritornellos in my character that make me different from other men while simultaneously destroying me, in the way a drop of water repeatedly hitting a stone gives it a unique shape, while also producing or accelerating its ultimate eradication.

Marcelo has been distant the whole day, ever since I heard him swimming with—or on—my mother last night. He hasn't tried to convince me of the virtues of vegetarianism nor the need to reevaluate Epicurus. He made no effort to display his exaggerated friendliness while we were eating. He's been sitting in the living room, scarcely moving, turning the pages of a book with a boxer on the front cover. I discover that I actually find his silence and distance less tolerable than his love for being friendly, though this is probably because the reasons for his silence and the reasons for his distance—which are the same reasons—have to do with the fact that I heard him swimming on—or with—my mother. All things considered, it's my fault, and being guilty is like having vanilla ice cream in your pants pocket: you can pretend it doesn't exist, but sooner or later it will melt and make you feel uncomfortable, and the stain will be there for all to see.

Out of politeness, but also out of guilt, I go up to Marcelo, who is, as I said, sitting quietly in the living room, and ask him about the person on the front cover of the book, who seems to me to be French due to the simple fact that the book itself, its title, is in that language, which doesn't really mean anything. (There are books about Pancho Villa in French, for example.) Marcelo stops reading for a moment and looks at the cover of the book, the stony or deranged—it seems to me—expression of the Frenchman who might well not be French. “It's Richard Foret,” he says, “taken in 1916, two years before his death. He was mad,” and Marcelo's tone when saying this is also, in some way, the tone of a madman, of a person whose contact with the rest of the human race has been destroyed by a terrible event or idea. But then Marcelo suddenly changes his tone and goes back to being the sane (perhaps too sane) person who tries to convince me of the advantages of vegetarianism and the need to reevaluate Epicurus and says, “My research is on him; it was because of him that I came to Mexico, in the beginning,” and on stressing the “in the beginning,” he is alluding, it seems to me, to the less obvious reasons for his Mexican expedition, maybe reasons like meeting Adela—though he couldn't have known about that in advance—or generally meeting someone who would make him feel alive and swimming again.

“And what have you researched so far? Have you discovered anything yet?” I ask him with a touch of spite, as I know that the sort of research a professor of aesthetics does rarely translates to “discoveries”; they only interpret and offer opinions based on a greater or lesser knowledge of the topic, always taking the opportunity to discredit the interpretations and opinions of others. Marcelo then tells me that he's hardly done anything yet, that he'll have to spend some time in Mexico City, or even Monterrey, or the port of Veracruz, all places Foret passed through, he says, before disappearing without a trace from the face of the Earth—that's how he puts it, as if we were in a bad movie. I'll have to find some unpublished letters, says Marcelo (to my surprise, since it contradicts my prejudices about his kind of research), letters written by Foret from Mexico City and never sent to his wife, Bea Langley, who was waiting for him in Buenos Aires, or replies from Bea; she must surely have written to him from Buenos Aires to plan the details of their life together, to say “I'm pregnant, Richard. You're going to be a father”; to say that Duchamp—as she had discovered in a letter from Picabia—was also planning to come to Buenos Aires for a while. Marcelo insists that he'll have to find all those undiscovered documents to work out the reasons for Foret's madness and disappearance, though it seems increasingly clear, he adds, that there are no reasons for madness, but possibly accomplices: silences or landscapes or people who accompany it, who create a favorable environment for it to blossom and regularly water its monstrous flower. I tell him I've heard of Richard Foret—what I really want to say is, “I'm not illiterate”—but have never read him, or don't remember reading him, which is true. And Marcelo, for the first time since I met him, with a degree of sincerity that damages his image, tells me that he hasn't read him either, or has read very little and, what's more, has hardly understood anything of what he's read, but that for some reason, independent of his—Marcelo's—inability to read him or his—Richard Foret's—inability to be read, he is obsessed with him, or was obsessed with him when it came to choosing a topic and location for his research during his sabbatical year; now he's not so sure that he's still obsessed. There's a tinge of sadness in his voice, as if losing obsessions or interests also involved becoming
detached from an important part of oneself (not from an arm but maybe a little finger), an irretrievable part. And all of a sudden I feel empathy with Marcelo, and sympathy, and a willingness to live for a while with that Spanish professor who swims the crawl with my mother, and also with that boxer on the cover of the book, who was an obsession of his (Marcelo's) and then stopped being one. My obsessions, though more enduring than Marcelo's, have something unknowable about them; they rest on a foundation of impossibility that, when it becomes apparent, leaves me prostrate and exhausted, as if things tire me more when they don't come to fruition, when they abandon me before their due time.

I wonder if I should tell him, tell Marcelo, something about the vacant lot, or about the tea bags, or the hen, or the perfect turd that appeared one day (that seems long ago) on Ceci's bedspread. Tell him I'm also undertaking aesthetic research, or not aesthetic but simply related to life, research that concerns the warp and weft of existence. And I'm also abandoning it (or it's abandoning me; I'm not sure), and I feel tired and betrayed, with no inducement to continue living. But it's probably too much, telling him all that; we probably haven't reached that point. We don't know each other well enough, and Marcelo prefers to go on being the guy who does the crawl on my mother and just wants me to be the on-loan son he has to worry about, the son he has to accompany in the early hours while he vomits or expels an endless thread of thick milk, hugging the toilet bowl, the sacrificial stone that has never, in fact, been anything but a toilet bowl. Most probably Marcelo couldn't care less that I became obsessed and then stopped being obsessed by a hen, a vacant lot and a turd. And he certainly couldn't care less that I have a pornographic photo from the eighties in my wallet, and particularly that, before my marriage, it was my custom—not completely voluntary—to masturbate twice on Saturdays. Who would be interested in all that? And how, above all, could it interest someone who has such a high opinion of himself? And Marcelo has a high opinion of himself.

Most probably I won't reveal my secrets to him. And he'll take up his book by Foret—or is it
about
Foret?—even though he's not obsessed with him, and will finish his research—without going to
Mexico City or Monterrey or the port of Veracruz—in this lost town of Los Girasoles, living with Adela and mounting her, swimming with her every night, until the end of his existence.