Among Strange Victims (10 page)

Cecilia, for her part, hasn't taken a single look at the vacant lot. I doubt if she has even noticed its existence. While she's sitting in the living room, battling with the rabbit-ear antenna on the
TV
in order to watch her game shows, I go to the bedroom, on the pretext of reading, and look out the window at the lot. Now, for instance, I'm scrutinizing it in search of the hen. But she doesn't appear. The muffled sound of the television filters through from the living room, mixed with Cecilia's laughter, which leads me to suspect she's managed to tune in to some program where the contestants are constantly humiliated.

Just as I'd predicted, Cecilia forcefully suggested we take down the tea bags I'd stapled to the wall opposite the bed. After a short exchange of words on the matter, I gave in, resignedly. I bought a couple of pints of whitewash and painted over the brown stain left by the tea bags until it disappeared. In place of my tea bags, Cecilia hung a hideous still life, the only wedding present that didn't comply with
my request: some purple flowers in an earthenware vase, a clumsy imitation of Diego Rivera's essentially despicable creations. The painting was given to us by one of her aunts, who considered my idea of asking for cash to be—as she expressed it—in poor taste.

Apart from that elderly aunt, embittered by stereotypical widowhood and rancor, my in-laws have treated me well. Don Enrique, being old-fashioned in his ways, considers being married to his daughter an enormous sacrifice on my part (and he's not completely wrong), and so is continually making me aware of his profound gratitude. One of the ways in which he believes he is repaying the favor is by showing me how to do repairs around the house: during our wedding day, he started explaining how to deal with a leak if you can't find the valve. I, feigning interest, asked if he knew how to get rid of damp, which must have been a moment of pure joy for him since he immediately assured me he would take on the task of sorting out the problem, especially as his daughter would now be living with me in the apartment. So on Saturday morning, instead of walking to the gazebo to sit contemplating the various speeds of the passersby, or dedicating the morning to pampering the hen with special seeds, I'll have to wait for my father-in-law to stop by to assess the state of the walls.

Cecilia is twenty-nine, two years my senior. Nevertheless, we both look older. My total lack of a life plan and my haste to be a grown-up left the stamp of frustration on my features. My wife, for her part, comes from a family environment in which passing twenty-two without having at least one child is a sign of ingratitude—I don't know for what—or a lack of Guadalupian virtues. She was, at twenty-nine, the black sheep of a multitudinous family that understands marriage as an early rite of passage into adult life. It may be that the pressure from her extended family, in that sense, is responsible for the fact that she perpetually has a slight look of disgust—a haughty upper lip. Even now, when she's laughing her head off in front of the
TV
in our living room.

Little by little, I'm losing all those small details that, until recently, I'd considered to be indispensable, all those minutiae I'd come to count as features that matched my slightly grubby character: the tea bags, the damp in the living room, the laudable undertaking to
walk back to my apartment, and the dead, inane Saturdays in the oval gazebo, dreaming of impossible statistics that depict me as the center of the universe. All this, which until just recently could be considered a protean identity, a fluctuating but almost organic extension of my own body, is now at the point of extinction. In exchange, I have the
DVD
player Cecilia bought to watch her pirate videos on, and sexual activity I don't have to pay money for (at least in the short term) and which I can enjoy almost anytime I want, excluding the hours devoted to
TV
and, for now, the office.

I evaluate the advantages of this apparently irreversible tradeoff and decide I didn't do too badly: when you come down to it, I can store my collection of tea bags in my chest of drawers and staple them up again in around ten years' time when Cecilia will have completely given up on the idea of modifying my habits.

Perhaps the most serious thing this pact entails—except for my wife's sour breath in the mornings—is the great, and now insuperable, distance that has opened up between my mother and me. In the past, despite her explicit repudiation of my major decisions, my mom retained a filament of enthusiasm for having given birth, just over a quarter of a century ago, to a relatively functional son. Now, given that a deceptively golden wedding ring adorns my finger, tying me, like a prison tattoo, to a way of life she disapproves of, her expectations have been notably devalued. We don't speak so often on the phone now, and when we do, her voice acquires the same tired tone she used when I was a boy and she, taking refuge in a migraine, would send me to my room, giving rise to a sharp pang of sadness inside me.

She reproaches me, of course, for not having studied something. And not just anything, naturally: a profession with demonstrable social utility would have been her choice for me. A lawyer, a rural doctor, or even an economist, just so long as I opted for a project that would include the most vulnerable communities. Anything, in fact, that would demonstrate I was concerned about giving continuity, during my lifetime, to her now-diminished desire to change the world. My mother holds youth in very high esteem since hers was intense and madcap, very much in keeping with the times. She therefore hoped my youth would act as a culture medium for a
sensitive, decisive character, and not be a fleeting preamble to obesity and tedium. From her point of view, ingenuousness is a concept to be defended during at least the first thirty years of existence, and for a couple of years more that characteristic should translate into a sustained interest in changing the world, even if you then relinquish that desire. The fact that I, from early adolescence, and once my flirtation with drugs was behind me, had begun to exhibit a prebureaucratic attitude as if affiliating myself to the most insipid strand of character, causes my mom a sense of disillusion equivalent to dishonor. My marriage to a secretary—even though she, my mother, would never dare admit it—is the last straw.

14

I have a few thoughts of a general nature about marriage and the limits that should be imposed on it to preserve, as far as possible, some notion of personal decency. First, never, under any circumstances, will I allow Cecilia to defecate while I'm taking a shower. This incontrovertible point cannot be refuted by watertight folding doors or blue patterned shower curtains—it's a crucial, life-defining question. Second, it should be clear to both parties that I had no expectations of or genuine enthusiasm for the future before getting married. I don't want such a fundamental aspect of my personality to be relegated, over time, to a collateral effect of the marriage into which we have contracted, taking all credit from my phlegm, so stoically overcome. Third, allowing that I'm willing to yield to many things—using ridiculous pet names when speaking to her: “my cute little piggywinks,” for example—nothing can convince me of the need to be sincere to my wife. (A parenthesis is needed here. At what inalterable juncture, at what hour, did sincerity and communication become related elements? Nothing is further from spontaneous intuition, popular wisdom, historical experience: communication is, precisely, the avoidance of sincerity in order to reach agreement.)

Displaying a composure that, even to myself, seems astonishing, I attempted to elucidate these and other theoretical aspects of marriage in the company of my adored wife, talking as one adult to another. As soon as I said I found the idea of showering while she was shitting repugnant, she gave me a furious look and flounced out of the apartment. She returned half an hour later with a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and her mascara streaked. “I'm going to start smoking,” she said. She's now smoking in the living room while I get ready to take a shower.

That was our first argument, and her reaction was heartening: instead of confrontation, a new vice. Instead of sorting things out and endlessly talking them over, a protracted, voluntary death. Assumption of pain. Metabolism. (Sorry, I was digressing.)

Mexico City is lovelier than ever. Two days ago, when Cecilia and I were on our way home from work, in a passage of the metro, a woman began insulting a policeman, explaining, with ample smatterings of “idiot” and “shut up,” that her usual station had been closed and she'd had to walk to that one. Unperturbed, the policeman gave her a scornful look and quite rightly replied, “Well, stop voting for the
PRD
. It's all the democrats' fault . . . Up the
PRI
!” and then he repeated his slogan for the onlookers: “Up the
PRI
, ladies and gentlemen, up with the Institutional Revolutionary Party!”

I spoke to Cecilia about the possibility of looking for a different job, citing the opportunities for professional development and the need to augment my savings. Obviously, those are not my reasons at all: seeing my wife eight hours a day, only four desks away, then going home to find her overpowering mug on the other pillow, at the table, everywhere, has become a form of torture. We don't even have recourse to that thoroughly middle-class ritual of asking each other how our days were. Even if the answer to that question is always the same, I suspect there is a deeply calming pleasure to be found in asking it each evening over a microwave dinner.

On the other hand, I find the very idea of leaving the museum, abandoning Ms. Watkins, painful. Ever since she showed her unexpected talent for empathy, reprimanding me for marrying beneath myself, I see her almost as an alter ego: a woman conscious of the general grayness of existence who has let herself be dragged along
by the inappropriate speed of events. Although, of course, there is a crucial difference that forms a breach between us: Ms. Watkins still retains the basically romantic belief that the string of accidents determining us can finally lead to the sort of destiny we were, against all odds, made for. I couldn't disagree more: the pencil that draws the line of my biography can only trace out an insipid figure, oblivious to even the discreet sumptuousness of geometry. If I were able to choose that figure, the final perimeter that represents, once and for all, the collection of vicissitudes I've lived through, it would be a dick. Yes, a penis: iconic, puerile, the kind teenagers draw on the chalkboard to annoy the teacher. A simple, unadorned prick that evades all psychological analysis and reclaims its original potential for insult. That would be my ideal figure, the embodiment of all the blunders that make me up. That or an ass.