Among Strange Victims (28 page)

Far from generating a more open world, as I suspect was their intention, my parents' generation became obsessed by, and eventually succeeded in, destroying the only frame of staked-out certainties in which it was still possible to enjoy something approaching happiness for a period of time longer than that of an orgasm.

This redundant lecture is just to say that, contrary to any notion of progress, I have, throughout the course of my brief adult life, insisted on behaving in what I imagine to be the same way as my grandparents. My ambitions are restricted to the absence of ups and downs. For that reason, unemployment and the mere thought of doing something radical, like leaving the city for good, of my own free will—this is just a working hypothesis—seem to me minor but significant concessions to the reckless worldview of my parents; as if I felt myself obliged to recognize, at least by intuition, that it's possible to lead a life that is different from the humdrum existence of an office worker. A sincere, I'd almost say shameful strand of hope,
of renewed enthusiasm for the possibilities offered by the vast world, is inveigling itself into the general grayness of my spirit.

The highway is uniform and boring. I doze off every so often without being aware of it and am woken by Ceci's voice asking me to pass her the money for the tollbooth. At the toll station we're surrounded, like all the other cars, by vendors, appearing out of nowhere and offering local products: a bag of guavas for ten pesos, a little box of quince jellies, tabloid newspapers.

My mom was born in Ciudad Satélite at almost the same time as Ciudad Satélite itself was born. At the tender age of fifteen, she came to the wise conclusion that her environment was oppressive, and she continued to battle with it for a couple of years more, until she managed to establish herself as a language teacher in a primary school—her English was more or less respectable—and effective agitator among the mass of students just starting out at college. Her jet-black, curly hair, high boots, and determination were all the rage in the eighties, a decade marked by the notable ideological lag of its youth, who in Mexico behaved just as the rest of the world had fifteen years earlier: anarchic behavior that, in the end, changed nothing despite the very widespread belief to the contrary.

My dad studied agronomy because he believed that in this way he could gain a level of nutritional self-sufficiency with respect to a system he loudly decried, but after two years of analyzing the effects of fertilizers on the rubber tree, he decided to switch to law, and that was when he met my mother. (I sometimes like to say “my mother” because the very words impose a certain distance.)

They fused into a legendary couple who were observed mockingly by the most cynical kids and with flagrant envy by the most candid. My parents represented free love without the need to leave the family model: their freedom was based on nothing more than a certain high-sounding rhetoric and a slightly faster pace of walking than the rest. In every other way, they were like any couple of the day. But they themselves created their own conceited myth and set themselves up as the model of heroic marriage. When my mother got pregnant with me, the aura of ineffable transgression, of seditious activism, gave way to a portrait of middle-class life, and the
specter of Ciudad Satélite hovered over them like an ominous fate. By the time I was born, my father had temporarily given up his academic ambitions and dedicated himself to manufacturing scented candles, which he then sold in boutiques of questionable luxury. My mother, on the other hand, enlisted in a less belligerent form of activism and studied for a master's in human rights, working as an assistant on a commission whose head used all his arts to conquer her and carry her off to live with him in his house in Colonia Portales, where she stayed for a little over a year. I lived for a time in Cuernavaca, beside a vacant lot that marked my stunted relationship with Madame Nature. Then came Coapa: my mother took on the role of the incorruptible, single woman, and while my dad, in Cuernavaca, was prospering in the paraffin business, she and I lived in the grubby neighborhood where I tasted—puberty, a divine treasure—the sweet delights of drugs and unrelieved ordinariness.

When my parents saw that I could walk unaided, though still unsteadily, they turned their backs: it was no longer necessary to pay attention to what I was up to. When I was able to make my own way financially with relative confidence, they moved far away. From that time, the relationship with my father waned to the bloodless point it has reached in recent years, while my mother, as I've said, calls from time to time, in an offhand manner, disillusioned by my characteristic lack of daring and run-of-the-mill dissatisfaction. So, to visit her now, with Cecilia, may be the nearest thing to an adventure I'm likely to experience in years. An adventure whose only plotline consists of emotional upheaval and reproach, uncomfortable silences and rain. The ordinary, gloomy rain of Los Girasoles.

The closer we get to the town, the more military roadblocks we encounter. Los Girasoles is still a peaceful place, but around it a multitude of shantytowns and shady settlements—the sort that are never mentioned in the national newspapers—are in the habit of adding to each of their components a prefix that is very fashionable in this country: narco. They are narcotowns, with narcoschools—both elementary and high—and narcobreakfasts for thirty-five pesos, by a narcosquare. And so on. And that's the reason for all the military
roadblocks, which give Cecilia the idiotic and reprehensible sensation that something good is being done.

“Oh, thank goodness for the army. Even if we do have to stop every couple of miles.”

“Why do you talk such garbage, my love?”

“It's not garbage, Rodrigo. It means they're putting ever so many people in prison.”

6

My mom thinks I lead a largely dishonorable life. Perhaps she's right, but her way of saying this is so blunt, so passionately convinced, that it makes me distrust her recommendations.

“Before you lost your job, you were living a miserable life; now you're living a miserable life without any money. The only way you're going to do something useful is by studying for an undergraduate degree, so you can then do a master's and work fewer hours a day.”

“Anyway, I wouldn't know what to do with the free time, Mom. And I don't mind working eight or nine hours a day, especially if it's in an old building like the museum.”

She plays with her black mane and lets her eyelids droop, as if tired, silently discrediting my words. My reply is automatic because, deep down, I enjoy exasperating her: admitting, even for a minute, to the truth in her suggestions would represent a symbolic defeat equivalent to emasculation without anesthetic, and I've got no desire for that.

While this is going on, Cecilia is in the small cactus garden belonging to the house, which, luckily, is right in the center of Los Girasoles, where you can still see some dwellings with internal cactus gardens and high ceilings, and not just quick-build residential estates, as is the case on the outskirts.

My mom, Adela, takes us for a walk through the center. In the small main square is a man selling balloons, giving an absurd touch
of color to the shade of the fig trees. It's the only part of the town that in any way resembles the central and southern cities of the republic: everything else is closer to the uncultivated north or the excruciatingly Catholic stillness of the El Bajío plateau.

Cecilia and my mom walk a few steps ahead of me, but not a word passes between them. Cecilia looks eager, as if she is trying to please her impossible mother-in-law, alert to any sign of good faith or a disposition for conversation that this might imply. But my mother walks on unconcernedly, as if indifferent to her visitors' attentions, thinking her own thoughts, inscrutable, giving me sideways glances, as though she were evaluating me with the corner of her eye, of her conscience, of her wasted or even regretful maternity.

Someone—in fact, Cecilia—suggests going to the movies, but my mother explains that the only movie theater where they show anything new is several miles away, in a ghost mall that probably belongs to the narcos since it stands there, ostentatiously, in the middle of nowhere, completely empty at any time of the day or night, except maybe Saturday afternoons, when some of the university professors drag themselves along to it, hopeful of finding something, anything, on which to spend their salaries and their discount vouchers.

Setting that plan aside as being complicated and too much trouble, we sit on a metal bench with the paint peeling off, next to an orange-juice stand on the edge of the square. The fruit on the stand looks wrinkled. My mother still seems absent, and Cecilia tries to catch my eye in a look of complicity that I suddenly don't want to share.

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