Among Strange Victims (34 page)

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Marcelo rings the doorbell of his own house, in which I've installed myself. The bell emits a shrill, piercing screech that continues going round and round the spiral of my ear long after the external sound has faded, like the way the sea continues to be heard in the spirals of seashells, or so they say. I know it's Marcelo because no one else has rung the doorbell; no one else would, or at least I can't think of anyone who would. I've been here for two days, and no one has rung the doorbell. Just Marcelo, yesterday, who rang and came in to see how things were, to see, I suppose, if I'd destroyed the horrendous furniture or had a problem with the security guard, to whom Marcelo has, apparently, taken a certain dislike. Or it could be that Marcelo came yesterday and, as seems likely from the sound of the doorbell, has come again today because he's genuinely interested in what's happening to me; in what's happening to me inside my head, I mean. This is an option that seems—against the grain of my habitual skepticism in relation to the human species in general—probable, and I say this because yesterday Marcelo sat in the armchair opposite me, in the afternoon, at this hour, after leaving the university, where he'd probably done nothing, or at least nothing of any note, nothing worth mentioning: he didn't mention anything he might have done, or even thought. He sat, as I said, opposite me, in the armchair opposite the armchair where I myself am now sitting,
and asked, in a tone of voice new to me—more serious or more sincere, perhaps, if sincerity can be identified in a tone of voice—what I'd been thinking. “What have you been thinking?” he asked, as if he was really interested in what I think, as if I myself was interested in what I think and was capable of retaining and then transmitting it and letting my thought fall into the other person's mind and then germinate, timidly, and grow into a tree, or at least a small plant of thought, of ideas, of communication. Something of that kind, so they say, though using less hackneyed similes, is possible between people, though it's never happened to me.

Marcelo rings the doorbell of his own house, a dwelling that was never, strictly speaking, completely his own since just as soon as he came to Los Girasoles, he says, he realized that renting this glorified apartment (it would be an exaggeration to call it a house) had been a mistake, and it was perhaps for that reason he had sought, or at least opened himself to the possibility of, a love affair, of being infatuated by a local, or reasonably local woman like my mother, who wasn't born in this town but has lived here for some years—I've forgotten how many—and, in any case, is more local than Marcelo since she is at least from this country. Marcelo rings the doorbell of his glorified apartment and, hearing the bell, I realize his glorified apartment is, in fact, after only a few days, my glorified apartment. And I say that it is, in fact, mine because I have a proverbial ability for setting up home, for occupying a space in a human, cultural way, for impregnating the space with the smell of my actions, which don't need too much repetition to become everyday actions—it's enough for me to do the same thing twice, on two successive days, for it to become a ritual, identifiable activity, my way of inhabiting that portion of air in this house in Puerta del Aire, which is the not unpoetic name with which they christened this awful, soulless residential estate. But the glorified apartment is not only mine in the, let's say,
intangible
sense of my having actively appropriated its space but also in the, let's call it
tangible
sense of having placed in that space a series of objects (not many) that indicate an organizing mind different from Marcelo's—objects are traitorous. There are, for example, some pieces of volcanic, or at least porous—I know nothing about geology—rock that I found in the
sun-scorched streets of Puerta del Aire. Pieces of rock that I liked, I'm not quite sure why, and brought here and distributed around the apartment in an order that could be described as random, though is, in some way, comforting: I am comforted by the visual continuity the pieces of rock confer on the whole house—they are, you could say, its decorative focus.

Marcelo rings the doorbell of his own—my own—glorified apartment, and I get up from the armchair and open the door, which he himself could have opened since he has keys, but which, I guess, he prefers not to open out of respect for my privacy. I open the door, and he comes in and sits in the armchair opposite the one in which I was sitting—I think he must have noticed a sign, the depression left by my weight on one of the armchairs, and for that reason sat in the other one: objects are traitorous—after, naturally, greeting me in a slightly chilly way, the way Europeans do. (But, I ask myself, have I ever in my life greeted any other European person?) And having installed himself in the opposite armchair, he asks what I've been thinking, as he did yesterday, as I suspect he will do tomorrow, as I hope he will continue to do for some time (the time I'm here, in his glorified apartment, for example, or the time our relationship lasts, which can't be forever, I tell myself: nothing is), because I like the idea of someone asking me fairly regularly what I've been thinking—it's never happened before—although I'm not sure if I have today, in contrast to yesterday, anything to tell him.

Marcelo sits in the opposite armchair and asks me what I've been thinking—“What have you been thinking?” he asks—and in his tone I once again note a tinge of sincerity, or at least a consideration for his fellow man I hadn't thought him capable of. A sincerity or consideration I hadn't, in fact, thought any of my fellow men capable of, since not one of them had ever before made the effort to ask me what I was thinking, unless my thoughts had immediate—real and verifiable—repercussions in his own life: people are, in the end, a bit egoistical. Marcelo is also a bit egoistical, like other people, but apparently he is, in addition, a fellow man, in the sense explained above: he's interested in my thoughts. (Oh, fellow men, sailing around under the flag of egoism so they won't be noticed in the busy crowds; fellow men walking hurriedly out of the metro station, or serving
coffee in a greasy café in the downtown of an enormous city, or working in offices and bothering you with all kinds of stupid stuff so you don't know they are fellow men, so you think they are
people,
or even
frigging people:
the frigging people who bother you and plague you and aren't interested in what you're thinking; but they don't fool me, I've got it straight now: everything is full of fellow men; you drop your guard or get distracted, and fellow men come out from under a stone; even a piece of volcanic, or at least porous, rock—I know nothing about geology—can have fellow men under it.)

“I've been thinking of my fellow men,” I tell Marcelo, and he gives me a strange look, as if saying—thinking, I mean—“This guy's as crazy as a coot” or rather—he's not a local—“This guy's lost his marbles.” But I haven't lost my marbles, quite the reverse: I feel sane. Although, of course, you can't trust your own sensations: in their way, lunatics also feel sane; only our fellow men can give us a hint about our own mental health, and if the fellow men are themselves crazy, there's no way of knowing who's the lunatic. It's the same with societies: when the frigging people, all the people, are crazy, the one sane person seems crazy—I think, for example, of the Nazis and those who opposed them.

Marcelo says, “You mean you've been thinking about your fellow
man,
don't you? It's really an abstract category: there are
people
in the plural, but your fellow man is uncountable . . .”

How to tell Marcelo he is fundamentally wrong, and with him all of Christendom?

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