Among Strange Victims (5 page)

In the museum, I distractedly say good morning to Cecilia, the director's secretary, who tells me that Ms. Watkins won't be in till later because she's got a meeting in some restaurant or other in the south
of the city, a business or political relations—there's no difference—breakfast. Without listening to the whole explanation, which seems to me overly long, I sit at my desk in the same enormous room as all the other desks, except for Ms. Watkins's. The designer, I notice, is watching a
TV
series on the internet. On his screen, two women are kissing tenderly; he feels someone watching him and gives me a nervous smile.

Cecilia has renounced her love of conversation and is now sitting at her screen laughing, by which I surmise that she is either chatting with some friend or watching the same lesbian series as the designer. While my computer—a
PC
that takes ages to react to the instructions I give it—is booting up, I go down to the courtyard of the museum, one of those spaces surrounded by arcades that can be found in all the colonial mansions in the center of the city. I sit on the front steps and look toward the entrance to the museum. On the other side, the hubbub of the city's historic downtown and the suffocating heat of the asphalt seem to be at full force: vans with loudspeakers announcing a deal on oranges, competing
CD
sellers raising the volume of their speakers . . . all this under a sun that, however strong, can't disguise the ashen scaffolding of the atmosphere.

All the while, the thick stone walls of the museum and the courtyard overshadowed by a high canvas awning keep the air inside cool, and the noise of the street seems to come from a parallel universe that we silent inhabitants of this building can gaze at as calmly as if looking into a fish tank, without any sense of asphyxia.

I calculate that my computer will be ready by now and that the time idled away in rumination must have exceeded that needed for a simple visit to the bathroom, and although the director is at her breakfast meeting in the south of the city, I suspect her secretary, Cecilia—as spiteful and cunning as they come—would be capable of denouncing me for laziness if I spent too long away from the office. So I decide to go back, if only to search the internet for the same series that, it seems most likely to me, all the other employees are watching, until someone with the minimum of authority—the security guard, the bookkeeper, or, in a worst-case scenario, the director herself—appears in the doorway and, pointing with evil intent to the sign saying Administration, tells us all we're not exactly in a movie theater.

While I'm pretending to write a press release, with the chess window minimized and ready for me to continue my game against the computer—I've never won—Jorge, the designer, comes up looking as if he's about to ask me an enormous favor that will undoubtedly, or so I think for a moment, make me unhappy. Getting ready to refuse, I swivel my chair around to face him. He says—feeling sorry to have interrupted me—that since I'm the “grammar expert,” he wanted to see if I could help him write a reference for a friend, also a designer, he says, who has applied for a job in a cosmetics company. I say I will, that I haven't got much in my inbox, and that we should do it now before Isabel Watkins, the director, gets back, because when she's around, we'll have our noses back to the fucking grindstone.

“The fucking grindstone,” that's how I put it. The expression feels odd on my tongue, and that strangeness appears to be mutual, as even Jorge looks astonished by a word that is, so he believes, so little in keeping with my usual decorum. I write the letter, and the profusion of his thanks makes me doubt his sexual orientation, as if it weren't possible to be overly nice and at the same time behave like a “real man.” Jorge, the designer, goes back to his desk and leaves me thinking that those discreet genres, such as references and rejection letters, are undervalued areas of poetic expression but as valid and moving as any lousy Italian sonnet.

Later, without Isabel Watkins having returned from her now eternal breakfast, I'm suddenly, for no apparent reason, struck by a whiplash of lust, and resolved to give it free rein in a more private area of the building, I head for the bathroom. In the cubicle, I unfold the pornographic photo I keep in my wallet, together with a pocket calendar with an image of the Virgin, and holding the clipping in my left hand, I give myself up to an age-old pleasure with the right. Masturbating during work hours is, I think, one of those small delights the male office worker has succeeded in safeguarding from the omniscience of the system. The photo acts as a simple amulet, resting in my hand while, eyes closed, I imagine unspeakable perversions involving Cecilia, Ms. Watkins's unbearable secretary, and even Isabel Watkins, the still-absent director of the museum.

I finish with a rather unsatisfactory grunt. The semen, which in more propitious circumstances would have spurted out with a certain gallantry, seems to reluctantly dribble into the worn pouch of my tighty-whities. After this relief, the pornographic magazine clipping loses its magical powers, and now reveals its true ugliness: the model, who has a hairstyle from the late eighties—one of those gravity-defying perms that made such an impact—is lying in an uncomfortable position next to a pair of fishnet stockings that, if it weren't for the infinite number of creases in the clipping, would be a phosphorescent green, precursor of the garish chromatic disasters of the nineties, when the advantages of adding insane quantities of lead to any pigment were discovered.

I soak up the traces of sin with a little toilet paper, small fragments of which apparently were glued to my fingertips by the semen, a fact that later, on my return to the office, obliged me to bury the guilty secret in my pockets.

To the delight of us all, the day passes without incident and without Isabel Watkins returning from her appointment, which by this time—six in the evening—would be absurd to still call a breakfast meeting. On leaving the museum, I decide to drop in on the charming characters in the café without coffee, so I set out on the trek to the same greasy counter, at which I once again order a black tea that I prepare myself and, this time without any embarrassment, put the damp tea bag in my pocket by way of a relic or personal fetish. The furniture-faced customer is still in his place, and if he weren't wearing a different sweater, I'd believe he hadn't moved from his seat since yesterday. On this occasion, the owner of the café pays me less attention and seems resigned to seeing me among his regulars: I'm already the “cup o' tea.”

When I get home, it seems to me logical to fetch the staple gun once again and, after the dull thud, contemplate the second tea bag, hanging next to the first one, like the marks a convict makes day after day on the worn paint of his rickety cot to keep a record of the length of his imprisonment. Although in my case, I tell myself, these tea bags are testimony to my two working days, the first two well-deserved days of my full exercise of freedom. A freedom whose chronological beginning was, it's true, arbitrary, but no less effective for that.

Emboldened by this notion, swollen with pride at my conquest, I look out at the vacant lot and watch the unsteady steps of the hen, clucking through the weeds.

7

Saturday. I've spent a whole week waiting for this moment. Saturday morning. I guess it's already late when I wake up, but I don't check, for the simple pleasure of exercising the free will I've been so proudly boasting of since my first incursion into the café without coffee. Rather than freedom, I'm now tempted to call this sense of uprooting “lack of inhibition.” Regardless of the words used, the important thing is that I no longer perceive, as was my habit, the straitjacket of anguish that used to restrict my movements.

Still in bed, I contemplate the tea bags on the wall, now ten, one for every day since that inaugural Monday evening, excluding weekends, when I'm saved the walk home from work and so the obligatory visit to the café as well. Each of the bags hangs there with its small pile of tea, now dry, as if it were the tail of a comet. Each one like a trophy some government institution might have awarded me in a memorable ceremony to laud my nobility of spirit, to reward the constancy of my freedom, the self-assurance with which I exercise it: all this without renouncing my routine—as would a thoughtless libertarian—still focused on padding out Ms. Watkins's model letters despite the conviction that I could be doing something else. This is freedom, I say to myself: an eight-hour day that, if I so wished, could be seven, or even less. An affirmation of will, but without unnecessary upheavals. A distracted walk home, aware that it won't affect the general order of the universe one little bit if I stop to enjoy a cup of tea in a local café where I'm known. And yes, they call me Blacky in—hardly witty—allusion to the color of the beverage I invariably order: cup o' tea.

Saturday. At home I make myself coffee. Black coffee. I listen to the announcement coming from the megaphone of the gas truck,
which is arriving, as it does every Saturday, to deliver the bottles. That makes me think it must be eleven in the morning, more or less, although trusting in the punctuality of megaphone announcements in this city is, to say the least, reckless. What a barbaric custom, receiving the most basic, essential services—gas, drinking water—by means of a raucous shout issuing from a truck in a worrying state of oxidation! Couldn't we inhabitants of this immense, beautiful city get the gas through invisible in-floor pipes, prudently reinforced with three layers of steel? No, such luxuries are always reserved for citizens of the First World, who—sons of bitches—can drink tap water instead of paying for demijohns, also sold from trucks with blaring megaphones. Everything at top volume here. In the future, I tell myself, we'll get electricity via blaring megaphones too. Even the most famous national celebration is popularly remembered as “El Grito,” the shout. It's always a ridiculous occasion, and I have one clear childhood memory of it: the president comes out onto a well-known balcony and shouts. He shouts to his nation—shouts at the top of his voice and is, at the same time, paradoxically mute.