Among Strange Victims (33 page)

12

I thought talking to Marcelo would be more difficult. I had, perhaps, too blind or too naïve a faith in his moral integrity. I thought that lying, the very idea of lying, would be not only alien to him but also reprehensible. That he would feel a sort of congenital disgust at lying in the abstract and, therefore, an acquired disgust at my concrete lie. My lie demanded a degree of complicity on his part that I now regret, because the complicity hatched in lying is always more powerful than the complicity hatched in the bright light of truth, in the same way that wicker woven underwater is hardier than wicker worked beneath an unforgiving sun. It's the same for everything; it's said, for example, that there is no friendship more enduring than that formed in prison, or at least when turning a blind eye to legality and consensus. And neither is there a more solid love than the one that is persecuted, or rather that would be hunted down and punished if its existence were known, so forcing the parties in question to lie habitually. Secrets and lies unite one man with another, and one man with himself, and perhaps they also unite snakes, whose secret lives are intensely secret and so must be more united than any other being under the light of the moon.

That's the way it was with Marcelo. Almost immediately we passed from a cordial, if tense, relationship to becoming conspirators as soon as he'd agreed to participate in the game of my duplicity. He was fascinated by the idea. I didn't have to go into details as he said he would take care of everything. That the professor implicated in the story, Velásquez, was in fact a friend of his for whom my mother felt a hyperbolic aversion. She would never
ask him any questions since she couldn't bear his presence or to hear news that involved him, even in a secondary role. Marcelo also arranged the matter of the possible extension of my visit: if I wanted to stay for a while longer, I only had to say I was going through certain aspects of the document I felt unsure about with Professor Velásquez. That instead of merely correcting copy, I'd become an authentic, fully fledged, personal editor, and that word had spread like dust in the aesthetics department, and there were already other researchers ready to put their books, their theses, their articles into my blessed hands.

I told Marcelo we should think it over, that it all sounded too complicated, and that for the time being I only needed the first excuse, the one I'd broadly outlined and he'd refined with a skill that revealed—against all expectations—a habit of lying, and even a perverse delight in doing so. As a coda to our conversation, Marcelo said that if I got fed up with living at my mom's house, I could spend a few days at his place in the residential estate of Puerta del Aire. It wasn't particularly pleasant, he said, or close to the center of town, but if what I needed was to be alone and think my own thoughts, it was a good spot with no distractions. I didn't know if he was proposing this because he'd realized that our shared lie would oblige him to live with me for a longer period and, hence, be a little discreet about his sexual relations, or because he genuinely wanted me to attain spiritual maturity through living ascetically; my guess is that it had more to do with the former. In any case, I decided to take him at his word later on, not because I thought any good would come from staying in Puerta del Aire, but because I took pity on him and imagined that neither he nor my mother would want me vomiting up her thick milk every night for much longer.

The whole conversation took place in the street while Marcelo and I were walking to the store, at Adela's request, to buy some things we needed for the New Year's Eve dinner. I explained to him that I'd already told Cecilia the lie, so all that was needed to put the plan into action was to tell it to my mother when we got back. On January 2, Cecilia would get into the red car and travel, in the reverse direction, the highway that had drawn so many reflections from me on the outbound journey.

13

And so it went: on New Year's Eve we had a meager, vegetarian dinner—Marcelo had complained about the Christmas turkey and suggested cooking something without meat. And Cecilia got into the red car and set off back to routine, and my vacation changed from being a temporary, reversible rest to a limbo of idleness, promising great satisfaction, or great disillusion, or simply hours and hours of looking at the wall. And my mom returned to her university work, which didn't take up too much of her time, and Marcelo went back to his small office at the university and spoke to Velásquez and told him about our lie, hatched from his supposed book. And I woke up alone in the morning in Adela's house without having heard anything too upsetting in the night—no swimming contest, no asthmatic child—and sat by the cactus garden and felt myself to be a little freer, a little lonelier, and a little older, in the venerable sense of old age, which can, I imagine, be positive, to the extent that it allows you—will allow me, if I get there—to think only about the things each morning offers. In my case, the morning offered me the difficult choice between either staying in my mom's house or moving into Puerta del Aire. But instead of weighing these options, as I would when making a decision during office hours, when one considers the pros and cons and makes a rational decision based on a quantitative calculation—more pros and fewer cons beats fewer pros and more cons—I endeavored to sit silently for a few hours and then suddenly decide one way or the other, basing this decision on, for example, climatic conditions—things related to the moment, which is always unfathomable and irrational. And I wanted it to be the moment, and perhaps the climate—not the climate as a matter of clouds, but something else: the climate defined as the totality of objects that surrounded me, the material climate that is derived or emanates from the harmony and secret communication between inorganic things; objects are traitorous—that would make me suddenly decide to go to Puerta del Aire, to Marcelo's tasteless little house, where, what's more (now come the pros and cons), away from any watchful eye, it would be easier for me to pretend I was copyediting Velásquez's book. And where it would be easier for me, I supposed,
to quench my thirst without having recourse to my mother's thick milk, the thick, maternal milk that comes in bottles with the labels falling off. And where, moreover, it would be easier for me to avoid the reasons for my sleeplessness—swimmers doing the crawl, children with asthma—and give free rein to my collector's impulse, which is neither a destructive impulse nor a creative impulse, but simply this: an impulse to accumulate without any great degree of coherence, an impulse to conserve and find a space for the things that already exist, that apparently have always existed.