Among Strange Victims (43 page)

Those images, in turn, transported him to the early days of his marriage and that disturbing episode, still unresolved, of the turd found exactly in the center of his bed, on the tiger-striped bedspread Cecilia had been so fond of. And as he was making a detailed reconstruction of the events, searching for some clue he might have overlooked, he gradually sank into the memory, like someone who finds himself trapped in quicksand—if quicksands still exist in spite of the zeal for explaining everything humanity has adopted without reservation.

The small toy truck was melting in his hands, or so it seemed to Rodrigo, and taking different forms: a hen, a handful of tea bags, a newspaper open at the classified pages. When Rodrigo attempted to halt the metamorphosis by looking around him, he discovered that it was, in fact, nothing other than hypnosis. Everything appeared to have been literally rubbed out, as if it were possible to pass an eraser over the things we see, leaving only blurred vestiges, colors, and lights in their place, but swathed in a myopia that veiled the limits of all things.

He was reluctant to believe that by drinking urine and doing a little exercise he had entered into such a deep state of hypnosis. Rodrigo suspected he had been drugged. Maybe Micaela's urine was psychotropic, and the only function of the frigging sinister truck was to distract him while the drug took effect. He had already, during his lysergic adolescence, experienced similar states of consciousness. Although what he knew about taking acid had prepared him for anything, what was disturbing here was the sudden, unforeseen nature of the thing.

The session, luckily, was short. It hardly gave him time to be frightened, and before he could be assailed by the desire to get out
of that trance at any cost, he heard the distant voice of the gringo, deeper than usual, giving very precise instructions on how to terminate the exercise. Once he had “woken,” had recovered the clarity of his senses, he was incapable of reproducing in his memory the instructions he had followed. He feared the possibility of being “trapped in the trip” if he repeated the experience, but Jimmie convinced him that this was unlikely.

His head was now throbbing, and his eyes felt sunken. He had been tossing in his bed in Puerta del Aire for over an hour, attempting to reconstruct the events of the previous night. When he thought of Micaela, a surge of lust took complete hold of him, and he had to masturbate quite aggressively, as if guided by the desire to rid his imagination of those images. He had always found it surprising how the world changed before and after ejaculation. Everything he believed, longed for, expected from life was transformed between one state and the other. Preorgasmic anxiety dissolved into a placid drowsiness; his desire to excel in some area faded into a discreet background shot. This time, when he had finished, he thought of Cecilia. He was still a married man, after all, and it now seemed like he had been away from his spouse for an eternity, although in reality it was little more than a month and a half. Marriage was, however you looked at it, an indelible stain: its reality couldn't be avoided by the fact of being far away. He felt more isolated than usual, as if the simple truth of being married, even when it might not involve a particularly intense relationship with his wife, was enough to raise a wall between Rodrigo and the rest of mankind. A wall that seemed to get thicker by the day.

Maybe that separation, that distancing from others, didn't correspond, or only partially corresponded, to his marital state. Perhaps it was just a mean trick of adult life. But Rodrigo related everything to his marriage, conscious that it was the most outstanding mistake of his troubled collection of mistakes, the mistake precipitated by a bad joke that had made him feel even further on the margin of everything. Was there any way back after that?

He dressed in the clothes he had worn the night before, made himself a cup of coffee with cream, and sipped it noisily as he walked around the room. His reflections on the nature of marriage had left
him in a melancholy mood, and he felt the need to call Cecilia. It was Saturday, and she would probably still be in bed, either sleeping in or watching television with idiotic interest. He went out of the house in search of a better signal for his phone and keyed in her number while walking in circles on the deserted road. But Cecilia didn't answer.

Maybe due to his hangover, maybe as a secondary effect of the hypnosis, Rodrigo had, that morning, a mania for signs. He believed he saw a symbol in everything, indicating something else, as if the world were a tautological series of winks. The fact that Cecilia wasn't answering made him think of a more profound, perhaps even definitive absence. In some way he knew—spurred on by the paranormal phenomena he had recently been involved in—that Cecilia had left for good, that she would never again answer the telephone, that she had disappeared from his life with the same exasperating candor with which she had appeared in it. He imagined a diversity of possible reasons for that sudden distance: the original sender of that initiatory message left on Cecilia's desk had finally revealed his identity, demanding that the course of events be corrected to restore the proper story, aborted by an error in the plan; he also imagined Cecilia had been raped by the same delinquent who had broken into the apartment to shit on the tiger-striped bedspread; he imagined she had died of asphyxia because of an allergic reaction to the damp, or had just run off with some frigging neighbor.

These possibilities, however, didn't alarm him. Rodrigo's hopes lay elsewhere. The arrival of Micaela in his life had helped him put everything in perspective. It might be impossible to possess her, but the idea of a genuine relationship—unlike the one he had with Cecilia—had made an impression on him. In addition, his conversations with Marcelo had revealed the existence of a different style of involvement. All of a sudden, Rodrigo had an intuition of a certain meaning, a certain intention or at least a teleological murmur that gave order to the uneventful sequence of the days. He thought that Cecilia's arrival in his life had been necessary, that it had contributed to, and even set off, a series of events that had led to a key discovery: communion with others was possible. Perhaps by means of hypnosis, but nonetheless possible. That simple truth completely
altered his perception of the world. Now, with that theoretical enlightenment, he suspected he would have to act coherently: abandon his cynicism and give himself up completely to the search for a comrade—the word inevitably chosen by his mother to refer to his girlfriends when he was a teenager, as if in addition to having sex, they were conspiring to “take to the hills to join the guerillas” and “bring down the oppressive government.”

But Rodrigo didn't have to wait long for this enlightenment, as he liked to call it, to be eclipsed by another, more decisive one.

10

The second session of collective hypnosis, after that brief warm-up, had as its objective the consideration of the future of art. In the multiple, mutable forms they were offered during the trance, the participants had to discover a possibility for art, a concrete suggestion for a possible piece. Rodrigo wasn't very clear on how he was meant to direct his hallucinations toward a predetermined end, but he supposed that before the session, there would be a more detailed explanation of the process. There wasn't. Everything proceeded as in the last meeting, but this time they did it early in the morning, which made the ritual even more outlandish: tequila, disinterested conversation, more tequila. Jimmie, Velásquez, and Marcelo laughed loudly and almost shouted each other down in an attempt to seem manlier in the eyes of the ingenuous Micaela, who looked on in silence. Meanwhile, Rodrigo was distracted, distant, since he considered that—faced with such competition—it was wisest to adopt an alternative strategy. It worked: Micaela, against all expectations, asked him about his life—in general—in a neutral tone.

Here Rodrigo came up against what could have been an insurmountable obstacle. He felt an electromagnetic attraction for Micaela, but he knew that everything was against him: his life, hers, the totality of accidents that made up the world. He was, when you came down to it, a married man, and she was, practically, a possession of the
grimy gringo. Micaela's simple question put him in a predicament. That is to say, she most certainly knew Rodrigo's story through having heard it from Marcelo in one of his conversations with Jimmie, but it is never the same thing to hear the whole story as to have it confirmed by the words of the principal person involved. At the exact moment Rodrigo pronounced the magic words (“I'm married”), a beautiful bridge, like the one in Brooklyn, would shatter and fall into the waters separating him from Micaela, accompanied by the explosion of fireworks.

Rodrigo, given his limited possibilities, chose a sincere but abstract response. The watchful presence of the three other men made him nervous. Even Marcelo, with whom he already had a more than healthy complicity, was completely transformed in the presence of the other alpha males and was displaying the weapons of his arrogance, a heraldry of idiocies. He noticed the three had clearly heard Micaela's question and had reduced the decibel level to fix their left ears on the development of Rodrigo's reply. He feared they would intervene, boycotting his prudence, openly pronouncing the word,
marriage,
which he had planned to avoid by means of philosophical tricks. Luckily none of this occurred, maybe because Rodrigo's response put a rapid end to it.

“My life has the disadvantage of not being completely my own,” was Rodrigo's valiant beginning, alluding tangentially to marriage, but also preparing the way for a piece of high flying. He was, however, unable to continue, at least not aloud. The continuation of his reply was a gaze pregnant with implicit meaning that Micaela might or might not have understood. If he had managed to speak, had been capable of saying things openly once and for all, Rodrigo's reply would have continued, more or less, along these lines:

“The greater part of my time is spent in inertia, and that includes the most crucial decisions, which I take like someone picking a card from a deck held out to him. The result is never magic; I can't even perceive the adrenaline of objective chance or observe a conspiracy of symbols behind what happens. I just go on living. I tie myself up with nonsense, like someone traveling on top of a train who, to avoid a fall, uses elastic straps attached to a metal projection instead of a leather belt, which would be more sensible. I know
that simile is exaggerated. But it's kind of like that: I feel I'm being pushed and pulled around the whole time. Chronological order seems like a crime to me. And the supposed need to know oneself irritates me. I can only imagine an introspective journey as a rocky descent in a toboggan made of bloody viscera. That's about as deep as my normal conceptions go. At the same time, I know I don't have what it takes to be decisively superfluous. I'd like nothing better than to give myself up to frivolity and spend Sundays enjoying the healthy amusement offered by enormous supermarkets, but I get bored very quickly. My relationships with people are always based on mistakes [here Rodrigo thought of his marriage again, but also of his friendship with Marcelo, which had only arisen after he had heard him and Adela fucking], and those fundamental mistakes linger like a shadow of doubt that distances me, emotionally, from everyone. Not even during sex can I completely forget that insuperable distance, even though that's when I'm closest to doing it. My level of empathy with human beings is near zero, though I once had a pet [Rodrigo is thinking of his hen] whom I loved in a, perhaps you could say, purer way.”