Among Strange Victims (38 page)

Jimmie had seen Rodrigo one day walking through the streets of the town. He had said hello, thinking he was an acquaintance, and the young man had replied with a nod that, to Jimmie, at that moment, seemed touched with some antique grace. He had done his research: Rodrigo was Adela's son, he had been chucked out of his job in
DF
, left his ugly, vulgar wife, and had been staying in a small house on the Puerta del Aire estate since the beginning of the year.

The relationship between Jimmie and Adela was, to put it mildly, dire. In Los Girasoles, everyone knew everyone else, and both Adela and Jimmie frequented those circles surrounding the world of academia, where the professors gave mutual demonstrations of their aesthetic sensibility and theoretical versatility: jazz—or even trova; many of them didn't know the difference—gigs in some café in the center of town, yoga classes given by a professor of economics in the front room of her house, group exhibitions of the photographs taken by the teenage offspring of those same professors.

They had met at one of those events, two years before, neither of them now remembered exactly how, and had flirted listlessly, more to shake off the tedium of provincial life than to get laid or have a real relationship. The fact is that they had exchanged phone numbers—in fact, Adela had given her number to Jimmie, who didn't have a phone at that time—and arranged to meet for a drink during the week. The date had been a complete failure. Jimmie turned up smelling of marijuana and had forgotten what Adela looked like, so he sat down at a table near Adela's where another woman,
much younger, was drinking a beer alone. Adela watched from her table, filled simultaneously with compassion and rage. The young woman, in contrast to what might be expected of someone who has been suddenly accosted by a dirty gringo smelling of marijuana, had taken it well and let the stranger buy her a drink. Jimmie, convinced he was with Adela, the professor he had met a few days before, didn't understand what sort of game she was playing. He followed her lead and acted as if it were the first time they had spoken, convinced that her use of a pseudonym—the Adela who wasn't Adela had told him her name was Natalia—signaled a degree of perversion that would be useful when it came to sex.

Natalia and Jimmie drank and laughed for two hours, closely observed by Adela without anyone noticing her presence. At the end of those two hours, Adela had drunk, all alone, as many beers as Jimmie and Natalia together and, she realized, was in an almost perilous state of inebriation. Eventually, plucking up her courage, she stood and walked to the table where the gringo was charming the young woman with his anecdotes. Initially Jimmie thought she was a waiter and held out an empty bottle without looking up, muttering thanks. Noting that Adela didn't take the bottle, Jimmie turned his head and found himself looking at her face, bathed in tears of humiliation. “I'm Adela, you moronic gringo. You stood me up for her at the next table.” Jimmie made a wry face when he understood his mistake. Adela walked unsteadily to the door.

Many things could have happened at that point. Jimmie could have caught up with her and spent hours begging her to forgive him. They might never have got as far as anything approaching a stable relationship, but at least they could have remained friends, which, in a small town like Los Girasoles, was something worthy of consideration. But Jimmie opted for the worst possible reaction. Charmed as he was by the low neckline of his impromptu companion, he said, in a voice loud enough for Adela to hear, “There are some weird, disturbed people in this town, aren't there?” The girl's laugh wounded Adela even more deeply than Jimmie's question, which condemned her to ridicule.

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Rodrigo listened to Marcelo's confused, long-winded story, sitting in what was now his armchair, while the Spaniard sat rigid, apparently uncomfortable, facing him. Velásquez had wanted to be there when he explained the plan to the “stepson,” in case he stumbled over some point or forgot some fundamental fact that needed to be addressed, but Marcelo felt Rodrigo would dismiss the proposal immediately if he suspected from the start just how divorced from reality Velásquez now was. So they were alone again, as they had been during their earlier conversations.

He told Rodrigo about the gringo and lingered over a very extended description of Micaela, emphasizing her disturbing beauty and the fact that, despite all odds, her piss tasted divine. He told him there was a lot of alcohol splashing around, and that although there was certainly something ridiculous about the whole affair, what mattered was meeting up with these people every so often—a couple of times a week maybe, or three nearer the time for the actual hypnosis session—sharing something of the disquiet of Los Girasoles.

Rodrigo listened with a poker face. It was impossible to guess what was going through his mind, Marcelo thought, and all the better, because he could be thinking about the possibility of making a sudden return to
DF
—back to his wife—putting a distance between himself and that bleak, dusty plain, where sensible people ended up giving in to the darkest whims of the soul, to the most grotesque claims of an unknown gringo, to simple, unadorned madness, clearly pronouncing each of that word's syllables, few though they might be, because madness only has two audible syllables, but is followed by a long series of sounds that seem to seep toward the interior of the word; syllables that are never pronounced, but throb within the word and are, in a certain sense, alluded to when someone says “madness,” especially if they say it consciously, thinking of the multiple, not necessarily pleasant forms of madness, that word of infinite syllables.

Rodrigo listened with a poker face but inside was not really listening, or he was listening and responding and carrying on an angry, inaudible dialogue in which he posed counterarguments and swept
aside excuses related to what Marcelo was telling him. That dialogue went more or less like this:

“Frigging Marcelo. He's got an amazing proclivity for weird situations. Where can he have found those people, those stories of piss drunk at midnight in dark hovels full of ceramic plates? Is he telling me lies? Inventing an absurd story to see how credulous I am, to report straight back to my mother about my reaction to all this? No, that can't be it. Not after the conversations we've had; after we've jointly revitalized the dry, dusty house of language with a couple of good conversations. But if he's serious, what the hell does he expect from me? On the other hand, drinking the piss of a beautiful young girl sounds pretty tempting. Disgusting, but tempting. What's more, drinking piss is an infallible indication you're in the presence of the sacred, or something like it. It's easy to imagine this is the sort of thing that ends in a whole pile of people committing suicide, here in this remote town full of academics. The way I see it, it would be pretty sad to die with a capsule of poison between your teeth and a message tattooed on your skull, next to three or four other guys who drank piss, here in a town full of people dedicated to higher education. But I've got nothing else to do. I've been cooped up here for weeks. Cecilia is desperate for me to return to
DF
, and this is just the sort of stupid plan I could use as a triumphal end to my stay in Los Girasoles. So, I'll drink piss with them a couple of times, let them hypnotize me, then I'll go back to
DF
and look for a job as a knowledge administrator someplace. As a bulletin writer somewhere. As a waiter, if I have to. And I'll be a worthy man. The poor but honorable man my wife deserves: poor, honorable, and unhappy because of my flagrant uselessness.”

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