Among Strange Victims (32 page)

11

The holidays are almost over. We celebrated Christmas without too much fuss: a turkey and salads that we bought from a small restaurant in Los Girasoles; a good provision of wines, chosen by Marcelo, who thinks himself a connoisseur (in the supermarket checkout line, he told us the story of a wine grape the Chileans had stolen from the French—or vice versa, I can't remember which—in addition, naturally, to having previously paused to consider the good qualities of each bottle before putting it in the trolley); and a rather unenthusiastic exchange of presents. Cecilia gave me the book on oneiromancy she had promised to buy. We, Cecilia and I, gave Marcelo a fountain pen like the ones Ms. Watkins uses (though surely less expensive) and my mother an elegantly indigenous shawl.

The day after tomorrow will be New Year's Eve, and after that we'll have to return to
DF
. I'll have to return to my—aesthetic?—research on the origin of the turd on the bedspread, and Cecilia will return to her full-time job at the museum, where perhaps some colleague will leave a scrap of paper on her desk and propose matrimony, and quickly take her from me. Return to
DF
, and its cruelty.

An alternative occurs to me: to stay here for at least a week longer, without the yoke of marital companionship and with my mother and Marcelo working all day at the university. Then I could spend my time walking around the four bearable streets of the town and striking up rural friendships with some of the locals (friendships, for example, based on whistling from one side of the square to the other, and the ambiguous gesture of raising a hand to the crown of a straw hat).

Returning to the city right now seems to me a rather unattractive option. If I at least had a tyrannical routine to go back to, everything
would take on meaning, but what I'll be returning to is the uncertainty of having no job and the uneventful days steeped in idleness; days that are empty, like a Chinese fortune cookie they've forgotten to put a message in, leaving you with the twofold sensation that you have no future and that you've just eaten a capsule of air, of nothing, of antimatter.

No, I have to stay here, in Los Girasoles, or even venture to some other place. Cross to the United States undocumented and send remittances to Cecilia while I break my back picking strawberries, or move to a neighboring town and join one of the local cartels, or set up an innovative business right here and squeeze out the salaries and bonuses from the professors at the University of Los Girasoles (squeeze out, for example, the bonuses Marcelo and Adela, my mother and Marcelo, receive). But any one of those alternatives would require an exhausting deployment of ingenuity, and for the moment I'd prefer to sleep in late and walk in my underwear to the kitchen to drink—straight from the bottle—a swig of thick, repulsive milk. So, I'll stay here alone in Los Girasoles, if I can manage to convince Cecilia that this is best for us both (I'll have to invent something, which will give me an extra satisfaction; I like telling her lies), and that it doesn't mean I'm going to leave her for good. (In the family setting she comes from, if the husband sleeps away from the marriage bed for more that two nights, the most likely explanation is that he already has another life—wife included—at the opposite end of the very same street.)

So I talk to her. I ask her to sit down when Marcelo and my mom have gone over to Marcelo's horrible apartment to see how it all is and, one imagines, to play at swimming together on another mattress filled with asthmatic children. I tell her—Cecilia—to sit down, and she goes slightly pale since never before, I believe, have I threatened to talk seriously with her about something, about anything; all our previous conversations have been uninspiring, or at least have not required such a sensationalist gesture as asking her to sit down. In fact, I don't think I've ever asked anyone to sit down before, I've only seen it done in movies, where they always ask a person to sit down when they're about to give him a piece of news that could throw him. (If you fall from a sitting position, it hurts less or
does less harm than if you fall from a completely upright position, which is why people prefer to sit down before hearing something that could precipitate a fall; I suppose, I imagine, I guess.)

Cecilia sits down next to me in the living room and asks, with a twinkle in her eye, if I've succeeded in flying in my dreams.

“No,” I say, “I want to talk to you about something else. I'm going to stay here in Los Girasoles for a few days longer. Marcelo tells me a friend of his at the university needs someone to copyedit a book he's written so that it sounds less academic and he can send it to a publisher in the real world. I could do it from home, but I need to talk to him first, when the new term starts.” I know I'm touching a sensitive spot: she might have read
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
and now professes a blind, arbitrary faith in the power of dreams and other shit like that, but what really concerns Cecilia is the issue of my unemployment, and only a promise of work would convince her it's necessary for me to stay, even if doing so feeds her most deep-rooted fears. The story about Marcelo's friend comes to me on the spur of the moment, and I don't stop to consider before opening my mouth that I'll probably have to ask him—Marcelo—to back me up in public, which clearly implies that my mother will find out about it, and I'll have to decide whether or not we should make her party to the lie or keep her out of it. The best thing, I think, will be to keep her—my mother—out of it and convince Marcelo to maintain the pretense in front of the two of them, Cecilia and Adela, my wife and my mother.

I also tell myself that while the lie only justifies a brief delay in my return to
DF
, a delay of at most one or maybe two weeks, I can always invent, on the hoof, lies that function as extensions, lies that get tangled together and follow each other like the stories in the
Thousand and One Nights
and put off—as in the
Ibidem
—the fatal moment, the moment of my return to a gray life, to the unbearable loneliness of marriage, which is more lonely than all other forms of loneliness, than sane, effective lonelinesses: the loneliness of the desert, of the widower, the loneliness of men who live surrounded by cats; marital loneliness is, I insist, more lonely than all the above because it imposes the necessity of being other, even in the sacred space of the shower, where you have to go on pretending that
you are like this or like that, are interested in this or that detail of shared life, pretend that progress and the feasibility of a savings plan, the eradication of the damp in the living room walls, the advisability—or otherwise—of getting cable television, really matter. And in contrast, in this modality of simulations, what is impossible, or at least not to be recommended, is the public acceptance of our fallibility, of our devotion to collecting, of our miniature versions of the eternal return of the same that make up the course of the weeks: the contemplation of a vacant lot; the speculation about the way of life of a feathered animal that can't, however, fly; the particular abnormality of the gland of eroticism that makes us masturbate twice, thinking monstrous things, every Saturday.

So I talk to her, to Cecilia. I ask her to sit down, and she does, and I tell her what I've outlined above: the lie about the possible job and the promise of a financial recompense not to be disdained. I round off the story with an homage to us, to us as a couple, appealing to her recently discovered interest in self-help—about how good it is that we can communicate our needs and understand that temporary separation, that state of being alone, doesn't mean we aren't together on a deeper plane. Finally, and maybe going slightly over the top, I tell her we can try hard to dream of each other every night, and that in the dreams we have together, we'll be closer than anywhere else since we'll fly hand in hand over the tops of scented pine trees, and won't have to worry about anything except meeting with voracious dragons or other predators of the oneiric skies.

A little confused, Cecilia agrees to my proposal. At the beginning of my soliloquy, when I was talking about practical matters, she seemed slightly distrustful or sad, and then, as I insisted on the importance of finding a job, even if it wasn't permanent, a smile appeared on her face, and I understood (or intuited, or invented for myself ) the idea that she was thinking of her dad, my father-in-law, and in the restored pride of being able to say to him that I'm a good man, and that I'm saving again for that property, the promise of which gained me her hand and her sham virginity. Finally, when the story goes off on a transcendental tack, and I talk about abstractions and the subterranean feelings that unite us, Cecilia looks serious (about the abstractions and subterranean feelings, not the rest),
gently frowning and not looking me in the eyes—like when you're making small talk with another human being—but an inch or so, or maybe less, to the right, as if she can't focus or is contemplating, beyond my face, the landscape of scented pine trees and the tremendous battles we'll fight against oneiric, aerial dragons on the symbolic plane.

And Cecilia says yes, I should stay to see what happens with Marcelo's friend, and she will drive the red car back by the same route and return, as is her duty, to the apartment next to the vacant lot, and the museum, to complete her tasks as an efficient secretary, no longer the frustrated pain in the ass she was with me when we were colleagues, but finally kind and docile and married and relatively happy with her life, even if her husband tells lies—she knows, deep down, that he does—and now has neither a job nor the least scrap of enthusiasm, and doesn't even join her in the marital bed to consider their future options. Well, she doesn't say that, but Cecilia does say yes, I should stay to see what happens with Marcelo's friend, and she'll drive the car back, and I can catch up with her again, as soon possible, in Mexico City. And that's it; we don't say another word, just switch on the television (my mom does have cable) and watch an entertaining documentary on the secret life of snakes, and I think that the secret life of snakes is their whole life, not just some aspect or moment of the night or a recurrent dark thought—as is so often the case for human beings—but all their life: from the moment they wake up until they succeed in swallowing a field rat whole, and also when they shed their skin, slithering out of themselves. I don't say anything to Cecilia about all this, not, of course, because I'm in an uncommunicative mood—I am—but because I think she has already had enough with all the stuff about flying together and dream dragons chasing us. You could say I believe Cecilia has, for today, heard enough of my thoughts on reptiles—even if they are oneiric—and now, on the screen, snakes are secretly slithering out of themselves and secretly watching their prey and finally, secretly, snaking between the plants, so there's no need to harp on the topic. Sometimes, even when you're in a communicative mood, you have to leave things unsaid, keep the words—secretly—to yourself and trust that the people around you
are thinking the same things, or something similar, and trust in the possibility of a silent empathy, an empathy related most specifically to space, to the possibility of sharing a space and inhabiting it at a given moment in history, which, in the case of Cecilia and I, is this one: this given moment in history.