Among Strange Victims (35 page)

Cecilia calls me on my cell phone in the evenings, just around sundown. My cell phone only has reception at the front door of the glorified apartment (it's an exaggeration to call it a house), as if on crossing the threshold you were entering hallowed ground, a sort of temple with horrible armchairs, in which it is no longer necessary to communicate, or in which any possible form of communication
depends on the telepathic abilities of the tenant, which is me. I don't have telepathic abilities, or I haven't developed them or been shown how to, so in the evenings, when I see nightfall coming on—the air cools, the dust settles—I sit on the front steps with the door open and put the cell phone down beside me, waiting for Cecilia to call and entertain me with the tangled narrative of her day. She is, in some sense I can't quite put my finger on, let's say a postmodern narrator. She tells me about the museum, about Ms. Watkins's latest uncalled-for remarks, about Ms. Watkins's latest lovers, and about the latest arguments she's had with Ms. Watkins. (Offices are like monarchies; that's why if anyone starts to go mad—even subtly—in an office, their whole conversation becomes centered on the words and actions of the monarch. His, or in this case, her, presence then threatens to overwhelm everything else: the monarch is behind every conversation, like an internal enemy, and his, or in this case, her, recurrence in the sphere of ideas harms the enraptured person and his family. He, or in this case, she, is included in every topic, if only remotely. The possibility of being fired writhes like an overexcited boa constrictor in the subconscious of each and every subject, and when one of them breaks—when one of them, due to personal circumstances, collapses—that possibility seems to announce itself in innumerable ways, and its asphyxiating form begins to tighten its hold on the body of the hireling. When this person finally senses the inescapable grip of the snake, the boa stops; the possibility of dismissal is dimmed and retracts or lies still, as if tamed; then and only then can it be said that the office has matured inside the hireling. Then and only then can the monarch feel satisfied, and go out for breakfasts that last the whole day without fear of a possible riot or an act of irreverence in his, or in this case, her, realm. Cecilia, unfortunately, is that unhinged element in the office toward whom Ms. Watkins seems to have directed her entire constrictive potential.)

So here I am sitting on the front steps, waiting for Cecilia to call and tell me more details of the life of Ms. Watkins, the sovereign of that office in which, until not long ago, I acted as a tame knowledge administrator. And in a certain sense, although I hate those conversations, I'm also grateful for them, because hearing about Ms. Watkins reminds me of my office days, and when I remember
them, I can perceive the at times elusive continuity of my existence: I see myself as a person to whom things happen, and not as two or more unconnected guys who only share a name and a certain speculative propensity.

But Cecilia doesn't call this evening. And night falls slowly as I watch the paving stones soften, or so it seems to me. When I'm at the point of giving up, of going inside and assuming Cecilia isn't going to call today, the security guard of the Puerta del Aire residential estate appears at the end of the street, walking with a confident, strangely rhythmic step. He has the military air that in this country forms a halo around anyone in uniform, making him a potential son of a bitch. The pistol at his waist gleams for an instant when he passes through the milky light of a buzzing street lamp surrounded by moths. The guard walks toward me, and although the light is now behind him, making it impossible to see his face, I suspect he's looking at me, assessing my expression and posture in case it's necessary to eradicate me. (
Eradicate
is a word the uniforms use to try to professionalize their most audacious thoughts.) But he doesn't eradicate me. He walks up, and I raise my eyes, slightly intimidated.

“Everything all right, young man?” he asks. I know it's a rhetorical question, that he couldn't, in fact, give a fuck whether or not everything is all right; he just wants to chat for a while or show me he's doing his job properly. The double standards of security guards: they want you to know they have power, but they can't suppress that sense of inferiority, that inevitably servile attitude against which their spirits struggle, with high-handedness being the outcome of that struggle.

He introduces himself as Jacinto Nogales Pedrosa (“at your service,” he adds). I introduce myself as Rodrigo Saldívar, honoring my elusive dad and the—also elusive—truth. He tells me there have been “incidents” in the area during the last few nights and that I should be careful. He's a good sort, I think. Though I understand why Marcelo might warn me about him: his personality is ambiguous, maybe too ambiguous for an outsider to understand. Even for me, his ambiguity is disturbing. Only provincial people can tolerate such a high dose of ambiguity without feeling themselves in the presence of the unspeakable.

We chat for a while. His speech alternates with pauses so long that at times I believe our conversation is definitively over. But he goes on. And he goes on saying things that don't necessarily have anything to do with what we're talking about, or don't have anything to do with it at first, though later it seems they do, but only in a tangential, elusive, unexpected way. He asks me, for example, about the phone I'm holding, about the brand, its quality, and so on. I briefly explain it's a simple cell phone with good reception. We say nothing for quite a while, and when he speaks again it is to describe his wife. He tells me she's good-looking, with a beauty spot on her face. He tells me she's a mute, a deaf-mute. Then he talks about his children, who are not deaf-mutes, and finally he returns to the topic of the phone, of how he lost his—the reason: he never used it because his wife is a deaf-mute. Stories that bite their tails, or at least chase their own shadows. Bite their own shadows.

Jacinto continues on his rounds, and I go back inside the house. Why don't I call Cecilia? Maybe she fell asleep before the time we had tacitly agreed on. Or had gone to see her parents and would return later. Or she had to stay a couple of hours late in the museum due to some sudden whim of Ms. Watkins. I'll call her tomorrow, I think. And I think that I like talking to her, even if we have little to say to each other. Even if we only talk about Ms. Watkins, and the damp, and how I'm doing with my nonexistent task. At least she's not a deaf-mute.

16

Discovering conversation, the possibility of a real exchange, is a rare event. In general, we proceed without bothering about what those around us understand or fail to understand, and have recourse to language for simply practical matters, to come to an agreement. Conversation, in contrast, forms the basis of a dialect as it unfolds. Conversationalists weave a language of their own, constructed from winks and inferences and keywords, in which words don't mean
what they mean, or always mean a little more than they mean, in a warped, unpredictable way. In the context of complicity, conversations proliferate like climbing plants covering the castle of language, reinvigorating it, negating the aridity of the brutal stone. The layers of conversation are multiple. It often happens that a word stops meaning the thing enunciated and begins to mean another word that in turn can indicate another, and in this way, ad infinitum, the words in the conversation refer to themselves and multiply like a hen in a hall of mirrors.

Marcelo sits down in the opposite armchair and tells me my mother is worried about me. Not only because I haven't submissively become a member of the academic community, a topic she is completely incapable of dropping, but also because she suspects I'm going mad. Marcelo says my mother says that I said something very strange to her about poo when she called the other day at seven in the morning and woke me from a deep sleep. I laugh.

“I might have,” I say, “but at that hour, we're all mental cases. What's odd is that I never said anything about shit on any one of the thousands of days she woke me up for school.”

Marcelo laughs. He tells me that when he was a child, he was sent to a camp in Extremadura every summer, a camp run by nuns on a high yellowish plain, with temperatures reaching 140 degrees Fahrenheit, where they supposedly taught the children to speak English. One year, he had to share a bunk with a boy around fourteen years old, from Galicia, who walked and talked in his sleep. Marcelo had the top bunk and the boy was in the bottom one, so the Galician's soliloquies ascended during the night and filtered through Marcelo's mattress, keeping him awake. Unable to sleep, Marcelo decided to note down the things his bunkmate said. He tells me he still has those childhood scribblings. He has them in a very handsome notebook with a black cover, a brand you can no longer get in Madrid. (Marcelo digresses here; I force him to return to the anecdote.) Mostly the Galician boy sleep-talked about shit (that's why he recalled the event). In an anguished voice, he said things like, “No, that shit's not mine, honest!” And then he also talked a lot about cars: he recited the makes and models of the cars of the day, listed their characteristics, criticized their weak points. Marcelo's
anecdote once again faded into unedifying details, and I stopped paying attention. I was left with the first part: a sleepwalker who talks about shit. A sleepwalker who dissociates himself from his shit. He must have been someone like that person who came into my bedroom in
DF
and shat on the tiger-striped bedspread.

Marcelo suggests that I come back with him for dinner. He says that my mom—Adela—has arranged to go to a party teeming with resentful female academics, and he's decided to do his own thing. He invites me to this thing. I accept.

IV

THE FUTURE OF ART

1

Marcelo Valente walked to his car under the unforgiving sun, wading through the cloud of scalding hot, yellow dust raised by the vehicles leaving the university in single file. The professor squinted to prevent being blinded by the dry earth. This being the case, he had difficulty finding the right key for the car. He coughed. In a low voice, employing Castilian idiomatic expressions, he cursed the arid environment and that fine desert dust that floated in the air throughout the University of Los Girasoles, covering the papers on his desk and drying his skin. He finally managed to locate the lock and speedily got into the car, slamming the door behind him before the cloud of dust could enter.

He had arranged to meet Velásquez in a restaurant in the center. It was Friday and no one had to go back to the university in the afternoon, so it would be a long lunch, washed down, no doubt, by plenty of tequila. Velásquez wanted to introduce him to a friend of his, a gringo practitioner of the plastic arts who had set up his ceramic sculpture workshop in an old, half-ruined house in the center of Los Girasoles, and had, in Velásquez's words, “an absolutely visionary artistic project.”

That description naturally inspired a justifiable degree of mistrust in Marcelo. In general, Velásquez's recommendations were difficult to take on board. He had once lent him a movie, “an indisputable classic of the Mexican counterculture,” that turned out to be one of the worst Marcelo had ever seen: women undressing in trucks with slogans like “Fucking Fast”; pallid vampires sweating out-of-focus; overweight heroes. The visionary gringo artist didn't sound much better, but you never could tell.

They were to meet at the Barraca de Pedro, a restaurant with a simple name but pretensions to haute cuisine, where local dishes were reinvented with a sophistication that, in Marcelo's opinion, removed all their charm. He had been there a couple of times before, first with Adela and then with Velásquez, and on both occasions he had ended up drunk. The array of tequilas, mezcales, aguardientes, and local wines on offer was almost suicidal. The prices were absurdly low.

Marcelo arrived slightly early, at five to three, and was surprised to see Velásquez already installed at a table, laughing uproariously. It was unusual for him to be on time. The gringo was tall, tanned, and too wrinkled for the age that his bearing and presence suggested; he looked as if he had been weathered by small-town life, and his rough-hewn hands did not in the least suggest the delicacy of the pottery he supposedly worked on. He had long, graying hair tied in a ponytail and was wearing a white shirt of some coarse material, with the sleeves rolled up to just below the elbows, faded denim jeans, and snakeskin cowboy boots. He was also laughing, sitting opposite Velásquez and absentmindedly stroking the leg of an adolescent who couldn't be more than eighteen (and that was, in fact, exactly how old she was, as Marcelo would discover a couple of hours later, by then infected with the collective jubilation, taking advantage of the girl's removal to the bathroom to discreetly ask Velásquez her age).

Marcelo introduced himself and shook the rough hand of the gringo, who said his name was Jimmie. He kissed the cold cheek of the adolescent, who didn't say a single word and whom Jimmie introduced as Micaela. When he sat in the only free chair—facing Micaela, on the right of the gringo—he noticed that already waiting for him were a shot of tequila and a cold beer, still misted from the change of temperature after its removal from the fridge, as if they had calculated his arrival to the exact second.

They talked about anything that came to mind as the waiter brought their dishes and placed them in the center of the table, delicacies Velásquez and the gringo ate with their fingers, Marcelo sampled rather ineptly (they were not designed for his strict use of a knife and fork), and Micaela observed with calculated disdain.

Jimmie was from California, from a town an hour from San Francisco that used to be full of manual workers and was now inhabited by Vietnamese immigrants. He had spent his childhood and teenage years in the Bay Area, surrounded by hippies, and told the story of an elder brother who died in the waves after going swimming while high on drugs. Jimmie was ten years older than Marcelo and had done everything: from cycling across the continent to working as a cleaner in the Apple offices in Silicon Valley. He had been living in Los Girasoles for a couple of years, after an argument in San Miguel de Allende with a landlady from New York who had thrown his things out into the street. “Goddamn son-of-a-fucking-bitch gringos,” said Jimmie, resentful of his compatriots, like any good Californian.

Marcelo talked about Madrid, about the Movida years, about women. He gave Jimmie a summary of his Mexican trip: the relationship with Adela, the house he had unsuccessfully rented and that was now occupied by Adela's son, his project for a book on Foret's passage through the country. Velásquez intervened with witty, usually misogynist comments while Micaela sat with a rigid smile on her face and occasionally rested her head on Jimmie's shoulder. Marcelo attempted to include the girl in the conversation; he asked her what she did. “I study,” she said in a voice that was almost a sigh, and smiled timidly, more for Jimmie than Marcelo.

The afternoon passed quickly, and the lamps of the interior patio of the restaurant illuminated a fountain when darkness finally fell. By this time, Marcelo had developed a tolerance for tequila much greater than he had had on his arrival in Mexico, and he was now able to recognize the moment when the next round would be accompanied by catastrophe. He was far from that point. But not so the gringo, who seemed more affected by the drink, or by life in general. It was he who proposed they move on to his studio, where he kept—he said at the top of his voice—much better tequila than the dog piss they served there. Micaela looked smilingly at him, imperturbable. Marcelo calculated that if the gringo passed out in the restaurant, it would be more complicated to transport him to his bed than if he lost consciousness near that bed, so he seconded the idea of moving on to the studio. He hesitatingly asked Micaela if
she needed a ride somewhere else first, but the child shook her head very slowly, swinging her straight black shoulder-length hair, and told Marcelo she lived with Jimmie.

Marcelo offered to drive the five or six blocks that separated the restaurant from Jimmie's house, and they walked unsteadily over to his car. The gringo had begun to lose his fluidity in Spanish and compensated by inserting words in English; Marcelo noticed, by the change in her expression, that Micaela didn't understand that language. It was perhaps for that reason, or simply because of his state of intoxication, that Jimmie passed completely into English and told Velásquez and Marcelo, in an awkward confidence, that he had met Micaela near Nueva Francia; the girl's family was very poor, and she, according to Jimmie, was a brilliant woman, like a Martian, completely unexpected in the familial and social context in which she had been reared. He spoke about her in the way a naturalist would when describing some indigenous flower. Jimmie gave the father five thousand pesos and took the teenager, promising the family they would come back from time to time to visit. “She fucks like an angel,” he added, this time in perfectly clear Spanish, to which Micaela reacted by distancing herself slightly.

The studio was an old building, from the same period and in the same style as Adela's house but in much worse condition and a great deal smaller. The paint was peeling from the walls, or they had only been painted in patches, and in the kitchen the original roof had been replaced by a sheet of rusty metal that allowed a view of the night sky in places. Luckily, it didn't rain much in Los Girasoles. All the interior walls, except for the one delimiting the back bedroom, had been knocked through. A number of load-bearing columns divided the elongated space, along which were scattered pots, shards of pottery, and ceramic plates painted with horrendous designs (horses with auras, blue suns, women drawn in profile whose hair metamorphosed into flocks of birds).

Jimmie rinsed out some glasses and carried them, still wet, to what could be considered the living room: three Acapulco chairs set around a low, rectangular table. Each of the men took one of the chairs; Micaela disappeared into the bedroom and came back
with some pillows, which she put on the floor to make herself more comfortable.

Indoors, Jimmie seemed more sober, as if only the air-conditioning or the desire to insult the waiters had aroused him for a short time. Now he poured tequila for the other two men (Micaela had taken a can of beer from a small icebox but scarcely touched it) and talked about his projects with relative fluency. He was thinking of organizing an exhibition right there in the studio so that the wealthy residents of Los Girasoles would buy his ceramics. He knew the designs were horrible but defended his right to sell them, alleging that people liked having ugly things in their homes. In fact, added Jimmie to Marcelo (much to the satisfaction of Velásquez, who had been waiting for this moment the whole evening), his real passion was not ceramics but contemporary art; the problem was that in this bleak wasteland it was impossible to explain to the natives (“or even worse, to the academics,” he added scathingly, with a wink to Marcelo) what contemporary art really was. Though he knew, he said, that Marcelo was a man of the world, and in Barcelona (“Madrid, Madrid,” Marcelo interrupted), right, in Madrid then, he must have seen contemporary art projects much closer to his own area of interest. In fact, that was why he had told Velásquez that he wanted to meet him: to invite him to join this new project—the word was repeated like a mantra in his discourse—he was putting together. It was going to be a magnificent
exposition,
he said, a performance unlike anything that had ever been done before. He had been in training for this for years, although he had only discovered it a short time ago, and only now, said Jimmie, did he understand that all that training was destined for this moment and this place. By “all that training” he was of course referring to a bunch of unconnected anecdotes spiced up with sex and prog rock.