Among Strange Victims (25 page)

But as has already been mentioned, Foret was man of fluctuating interests. He had not been long aboard when he decided it would be simpler to head north, to Florida, and take an actual cruise ship bound for the south. He came to understand, perhaps late in the day, the complete impossibility of his original undertaking: no one could reach Argentina in a small boat. Florida sounded more plausible.

When he set the prow to the north, it was already a dark, moonless night, and the clouds were gathering above him.

III

THE SHRUBS OF THE TERRESTRIAL SPHERE

1

A year of economic crisis. The newspapers, the analysts, and the man on the street all make exaggerated complaints about the probable advent of the Apocalypse. There were enormous cuts to the culture budget. A wave of layoffs crashed down on the museum. I saw the effects of the stock market collapse approaching like a domino that, lined up with others, foresees its inexorable fate in the fall of its fellow tiles. Jorge, the designer, was the first to go: they said that in a few months, when everything was better, they would take him back on a freelance basis. Then it was the security guard's turn, in what was, to my mind, an accurate assessment on the part of the authorities: even in times of crisis, no one steals exhibits from a small museum. Finally, they decided they could manage without my wisdom. Though not without the docile flattery of Cecilia, who lives on untouched by the surrounding tsunami, not registering the effects of the crisis. At least, I think, I won't have to see her in the office.

The episode with the turd was a one-off. Maybe if I'd found another, identical one on the table a few days later, the image would have become less vivid. Instead, it remains as an incarnation inaugurating a new era: a personal Christ. Before and after the shit. Before: time killing, the nine-to-five consistency, the modicum of freedom, and the almost involuntary marriage of a person who only wants to reach old age, or not even that. After: unemployment, the idle mornings and their result—judicious reflection, the “things would be better if only . . .”

Cecilia comes back from work and, as in a bad South American film, reproaches me for my idleness, the constant procrastination.
“I've got a job interview tomorrow,” I say, just to calm her for a while. She's beginning to break my balls . . .

Nowadays I offer insults more frequently. Since I don't have a job, I'm allowed to; I'd even say it's expected of me. I insult the institutions, my wife, the people—always invisible, although presumably close to power—who are to blame for the aforementioned crisis. My preference is for gratuitous, unexpected insults: “Frigging damp.” (The complaint is, in reality, aimed at my father-in-law: he never got rid of the damp in the walls.) My father-in-law, of course, likes me less. He says he can get me a little something with one of his friends, but I say no. I imagine, and not without reason, that any job he could find me would make me unhappy for the rest of my days.

I've given up collecting tea bags—“See how I'm saving money, honey?”—and for some time, I've managed not to think about the vacant lot. The hen clucks like a bird possessed. I suspect the crisis has hit us all, except the worms, the twigs, except anything frigging domestic fowl like her eat.

Frigging
seems to me a wonderful insult, being indefinite. It is the human equivalent of the hen's clucking.
Frigging
is one of those words that evokes the unspeakable, that's the only way to explain why this country is always in such a bad way. Now that I'm no longer concerned with the ghosts of progress, I contribute to the proliferation of disaster: “Frigging damp.”

“Stop saying that, Rodrigo. My dad told you it's not damp; he said you can get rid of that with the damp-proofing paint he gave us.”

I couldn't give a fuck about your dad, I think, but cautiously hold my tongue, clinging by my fingertips to the last morsel of common sense I've retained.

Common sense: a happy dodge. I imagine it as a chip inserted into the brain at about the age of seven. Or a vague presence, half magical, that murmurs answers in your ear. If it were a person, Common Sense would be very much like Ben Affleck, that North American parody of a hero who appears in the movies shown on interstate buses.

I haven't said a word about the shit. Not to Cecilia or anyone. I can't discount any suspect, and until my investigation into the situation is complete, I prefer not to speak about the affair. It could have
been Ceci, who had perhaps not gone to the museum and was hiding behind a door to see what I was doing with my sick leave. Maybe she decided to take revenge when she saw me ejaculating on her pillow; or she went to the window, saw me walking around in the lot, and was overtaken by an urgent need. Though she would never have sullied her tiger-striped bedspread. Before doing that, just to screw up my existence, she would have defecated on the collection of tea bags I keep in a drawer in the dressing table. Or just on the floor. Anywhere but on her beloved bedspread.

Although I hate to admit it, I've discovered that in contradiction to my earlier convictions, I'm also excited by the idea of watching Cecilia shit. I've tried getting into the bathroom after her, but she always locks the door. “I'm in here, my love.” “Come on, let me in.” “No, Rodrigo, you're making me nervous. What do you want?” I leave her in peace. The shit on the bedspread has unleashed other deviations. (I can't call them by any other name.) I also, for example, imagine the type of crap passed by all the people I see in the street, as if divining their intestinal secrets would constitute some form of profound psychology. Now that I'm unemployed, I should put these obsessions to good use in some way or other. Setting up a business, for instance. There are businesses for every taste. There's a company in Santa María la Ribera that offers its clients random numbers. They mail them a slip of paper with a number of varying lengths. The customers open the envelope, read the number, consider it, fold the slip of paper, and put it somewhere safe until the next number arrives, two or three months later. Then they throw away the first slip of paper. At least that's what I'm told the company does. But thinking it over, there must be something in the whole process that I'm missing. Something significant that converts the number service into a matter of life or death. Anyway, what I mean to say is that there are all sorts of businesses. I could set up a deep psychology company. A company for intestinal secrets. For shit analysis. A detective company.

In any case, what makes me uneasy is to think that the suspect was still in the room when I entered the apartment. The sounds I heard from the door appear to confirm this theory. Also the fact that, in a moment of weakness I shouldn't have allowed myself,
I took longer than usual to enter the room, giving the crapper the chance to escape through the window, leaping like an athlete into the shadows of the lot. Maybe the intruder was there, getting ready to commit burglary, or just calculating the damage his excreta would cause my daily life because he knew the event would be unspeakably disturbing, forcing me to throw out that tiger-striped bedspread that, though I might loathe it, was the favorite of my wife, who, while not exactly my soul mate, could at least expect me to show her the respect of preserving her bedspread. The intruder must have known all this, and he must have calculated it with a malice only comparable with that of cabdrivers. An environmental malice, I'd say, that impregnates the skin of all the inhabitants of this capital city and imbues them with an unpleasant smell, the smell of stagnant water or dead bird; a malice that doesn't escape my notice even though my natural tendency toward optimism manages to take it for granted, overlooking its consequences and leading me to continue along the rigorous path of a life that, if not exactly based on the model my mother would have preferred, does satisfy me to some extent. At least it satisfies me to the extent that if it were not for that turd, found in ridiculous circumstances in the very center of my bed, I could today say—despite my marriage, my unemployed status, and my absolute lack of perspective in relation to the future—that I'm happy, to the precise and sufficient extent that happiness is the inertia of which I spoke earlier, the inertia that carries me gently from one Saturday to the next, showing me the most agreeable paths of existence, the ones that avoid danger and death, making incomprehensible but ultimately fortunate detours, or fortunate to the precise and sufficient extent that they don't land you in prison, because prisons are horrific in this country, or so I've been told.

Similar stories that I have heard: some burglars, after the robbery, shit at the scene of the crime. A signature, a personal mark, a
little detail.
The initials of two lovers carved into a tree trunk, crap to autograph a crime—it's the same thing; the desire for permanence, when you come down to it. But this burglar, if he was one, reversed the order: he didn't take anything. The turd wasn't a symbolic payment for any removal. Just crap, like a menhir on the tiger-striped bedspread. A semifluid totem. A fucking shitty insult. When I was
capable of returning to the bedroom, I held my nose, screwed up my eyes, and folded the bedspread over the little gift. I disposed of it, not without worrying about how much it would pain Cecilia to lose her horrendous feline bedspread.

I told her I'd taken all the bedding to the self-service laundromat. That I'd sat down to read a celebrity gossip magazine, and when I got up to see how the wash was progressing, I'd found the machine empty: no tiger-striped bedspread, no sheets, no pillowcases. I was even careful to offer her precise details of what I'd been reading: breast implants, infidelities, probable
U
-turns in the sexual preferences of certain television stars, things like that. It was an absurd explanation, but no more absurd than the actual truth. Cecilia threatened to go to the laundromat to complain, to demand the return of her bedspread. I was sharp enough to dissuade her with the promise of new extravagances: I told her they were selling a bedspread exactly like hers, but violet, on the corner of Dr. Vértiz and Río de la Loza. Later, I'd think up another lie to cover the first one. The causal series of lies is no less rigid than its parallel version in the real world. At times the two series become entwined for a moment in a single causal sequence we term, for pure convenience, the first person singular.

The question of the authorship—intellectual, but also material—of the perfect turd kept me awake for many nights following the event. Now, due to my unemployment, the enigma has expanded into the daylight hours, and I can't shake off the grotesque, affectedly symmetrical image of the turd in the center of the bed. I think that if I had any money, I'd hire one of those detectives who advertise in the classified sections of newspapers and set him on the trail of the scatological felon. Given this, I regret having disposed of the evidence since no
DNA
test can now be carried out, nor can single hairs, mistakenly left between the bedsheets during the dastardly act, be extracted, nor a faithful reconstruction of the scene of the shameful deed made.