The Museum of Useless Efforts Read online

  The Museum of Useless Efforts

  Every afternoon, I visit the Museum of Useless Efforts. I ask for the catalog and take a seat at the large wooden table. The book’s pages are a little faint, so I like to run through them slowly, as if I were turning the leaves of time. I never see other readers, which is probably why the clerk pays so much attention to me. Since I’m one of the few visitors, she spoils me. She’s probably afraid of losing her job, what with the lack of public demand. Before entering, I take a close look at the sign hanging on the glass door. In uppercase letters it reads, HOURS: MORNINGS, 9:00-2:00. EVENINGS, 5:00-8:00. CLOSED MONDAYS.’ I almost always know which useless effort I want to look up, but sometimes I ask for the catalog so the girl will have something to do.

  ‘Which year would you like?’ she’ll ask courteously.

  ‘The 1922 catalog,’ I might answer.

  After a little while she’ll return with a thick book bound in deep red leather and place it on the table, in front of my seat. She’s very accommodating, and if she thinks there isn’t enough light coming through the window, she’ll switch on the bronze lamp herself, adjusting its green glass shade so that the light falls across the pages of the book. Sometimes I make a brief comment when I return the catalog. For example, I might tell her, ‘Nineteen twenty-two was a very busy year. A lot of people were determined to make useless efforts. How many volumes are there?’

  ‘Fourteen,’ she answers in a very professional voice.

  So I have a look at some of the useless efforts of that year, children who tried to fly, men bent on amassing riches, complicated mechanisms that never actually worked, and a lot of couples.

  ‘Nineteen seventy-five was a far more bountiful year,’ she says with a touch of sadness. ‘We still haven’t recorded all of the entries.’

  ‘The classifiers must have their work cut out for them,’ I think out loud.

  ‘That’s right,’ she replies. ‘They’ve only just made it to the letter C, and several volumes have already been published. And that’s without counting the repeats.’

  Curiously, useless efforts get repeated, but the repeats aren’t included in the catalog. That would take up too much space. With the aid of various contraptions, a man tried to fly seven times; some prostitutes attempted to find another job; a woman wanted to paint a picture; someone sought to overcome fear; nearly everybody tried to be immortal or lived as if they were.

  The clerk assures me that only a tiny proportion of useless efforts makes it to the museum. For one thing, the government lacks money, so acquisitions, exchanges, or exhibits in the provinces or abroad are practically impossible. For another, the inordinate number of useless efforts carried out all the time means that a lot of people would have to be willing to work without pay or understanding on the part of the public. Sometimes, when getting official support seems hopelessly unlikely, appeals are made to the private sector. But the returns have been few and discouraging. Virginia (that’s the name of the nice clerk who often talks with me at the museum) explains that all the private sources appealed to proved as demanding as they were unsympathetic, failing to understand what the museum is about.

  The building is located on the outskirts of the city, in a vacant lot full of cats and refuse where, just slightly below ground level, you can still find cannonballs from an ancient war, rusty sword handles, and donkey jawbones decayed by time.

  ‘Do you have a cigarette?’ Virginia asks me with an expression that fails to mask her anxiety.

  I search my pockets, finding an old slightly chipped key, the tip of a broken screwdriver, the return ticket for the bus, a button off my shirt, a few coins, and - finally - two crumpled-up cigarettes. She smokes furtively, hidden amid thick books (whose spines are peeling), the timepiece on the wall that always indicates the wrong hour of day (usually an hour gone by), and the old, dust-covered decorative molding. It is believed that on the spot where the museum now stands there was once, in the days of war, a fortress. Its thick foundation stones were put to some practical use, some timbers as well; the walls were shored up. The museum opened its doors in 1946. Some photographs of the ceremony survive: men wearing tails; ladies in long dark skirts, sequins, and hats with birds or flowers on them. Behind them, you can imagine an orchestra playing ballroom pieces. The guests have an air between solemn and absurd, as if they were slicing a cake decorated with an official ribbon.

  I forgot to mention that Virginia has a slight squint. This minor defect gives her face a touch of humor that diminishes its naiveté. As if her wandering gaze were a floating, humorous comment, detached from any context.

  The useless efforts are classified by letter. When all the letters have been used, numbers are added. It’s a slow, complicated process. Each effort has its own pigeonhole, page, and description. Walking among them with extraordinary agility, Virginia looks like a priestess, the virgin of an ancient but timeless religion.

  Some of the useless efforts are beautiful, others somber. We don’t always agree about their classification.

  Leafing through one of the volumes, I found a man who spent ten years trying to make his dog talk. Another spent more than twenty trying to win a woman’s affections. He would bring her flowers, plants, and butterfly catalogs, offer her trips, write poems, compose songs; he built her a house, forgave all her mistakes, and tolerated her lovers. Then he committed suicide.

  ‘It was hard work,’ I say to Virginia, ‘though possibly stimulating.’

  ‘That’s a somber story,’ Virginia replies. ‘The museum has a detailed description of the woman. She was a frivolous, moody, fickle, lazy, embittered little thing. She was also selfish and somewhat dim-witted.’

  There are men who have taken long journeys in pursuit of inexistent places, unrecoverable memories, deceased women, disappeared friends. There are children who undertook impossible tasks with great resolve. Like the ones who would dig a hole periodically washed over by the waves.

  In the museum, smoking and singing are forbidden. The prohibition on singing seems to affect Virginia as much as the one on smoking. ‘I’d like to hum a little song now and again,’ she confides wistfully.

  People whose useless effort consisted in attempting to reconstruct their family tree, digging for gold, writing a book. Others who had hoped to win the lottery.

  ‘I prefer the travelers,’ Virginia tells me.

  Entire sections of the museum are dedicated to voyages. We reconstruct them from the pages of the books. After a time of drifting across various seas, traversing dense forests, discovering cities and marketplaces, crossing bridges, sleeping on trains and station benches, the travelers forget the purpose of the trip yet nevertheless continue traveling. And then one day - lost in a flood, trapped in the subway, asleep forever in a doorway - they disappear without a trace. And no one comes to claim them.

  Virginia tells me that there used to be private investigators, amateur enthusiasts who supplied the museum with material. I can even recall a time when it was fashionable to collect useless efforts, as one might do with stamps or ant colonies.

  T think the abundance of items destroyed their appeal,’ Virginia states. ‘It’s only exciting to search for scarce things, to find the unusual.’

  Back then, people would come to the museum from different places and request information. A certain case would pique their curiosity. They would leave with forms and return bearing stories they had copied down, with the appropriate photographs attached - useless efforts turned over to the museum, like butterflies or rare insects. For example, the story of the man who struggled for five years to prevent a war, until his head was blown off by the first shot fired from a cannon. Or Lewis Carroll, who spent his entire
life trying to avoid drafts but died from a cold because one time he forgot his raincoat.

  I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned that Virginia has a slight squint. I often enjoy following her gaze, never knowing where it will fall next. When I see her crossing the room, burdened with folders, books, and all sorts of documents, I can’t resist the impulse to get up from my seat and lend her a hand.

  Sometimes, in the middle of a task, she’ll complain a little. I’m tired of going back and forth,’ she might say. ‘We’ll never manage to classify everything. And then you have the newspapers. They’re full of useless efforts.’

  Such as the story about the boxer who tried to recover his title five times. He was finally disqualified when he took a bad blow to the eye. Now he probably wanders around some squalid neighborhood, from one bar to the next, remembering what it was like when his eyesight was good and his punches were lethal. Or the story of the trapeze artist who suffered from vertigo and couldn’t look down. Or the one about the dwarf who wanted to grow and traveled all over the place in search of a doctor who could cure him.

  When she gets tired of moving books around, she sits on a pile of old, dusty newspapers, lights a cigarette - discreetly, because smoking isn’t permitted - and thinks out loud.

  ‘We probably need to hire someone else,’ she might say in a tone of resignation. Or, ‘I have no idea when they’ll pay me this month’s salary.’

  I’ve invited her to take a walk in the city, to go out for coffee or to the movies. But she doesn’t want to. Only inside the gray, dusty walls of the museum is she willing to talk with me.

  If time is elapsing, I wouldn’t know, because my afternoons are so busy. But Mondays are days of sadness and abstinence and leave me not knowing what to do, how to live.

  The museum closes at eight o’clock in the evening. Virginia turns the simple metal key in the lock; any other measures would be unnecessary because it’s unlikely anyone would try to break into the museum. Only once did a man try, Virginia tells me. He wanted his name removed from the catalog. As an adolescent he had made a useless effort that later he felt embarrassed about, and he wanted to eliminate any trace of it.

  ‘We caught him in time,’ Virginia explains. ‘It was very hard to talk him out of it. He kept insisting that his effort was private in nature and that he wanted us to return it to him. That time I put my foot down. It was a rare piece - practically a collector’s item. The museum would have suffered a huge loss had the man gotten his way.’

  Melancholy, I leave the museum at closing time. In the beginning I found that the time it took for one day to become the next was unbearable. But I’ve learned to wait. I’ve also grown accustomed to Virginia’s presence, and I can’t imagine how the museum would be able to exist without her. I know that the director (the one in the photograph with the two-tone sash across his chest) feels the same way: he’s decided to give her a promotion. In the absence of any organizational structure consecrated by law or common practice, he has created a new position, which is actually identical to her previous one, only it has another name. Reminding her of the sacred nature of her mission, he has named her Priestess of the Temple - guardian, at the museum’s entrance, of the fleeting memory of the living.

  Up on the Rope

  From the moment I was born, I’ve been very fond of the rope. At first it was a tight rope, but over time it grew looser. That didn’t matter, because I was well adapted to it. My toes were like hooks and stuck to the rope so I didn’t have to worry about falling off. And I never got off the rope: I liked being in the air all the time. I would eat my meals, read, listen to music, make little wicker things - coasters, table mats, and baskets - while walking around up there.

  When I was little, my parents hired a nice man to watch over me. He was a retired civil servant who ran from one end of the room to the other with a burlap bag stretched between his hands in case I fell. The poor man had his work cut out for him because, being a restless child, I was always dashing from one end of the rope to the other, and he had to chase after me with the sack wide open. The old man would pant, beads of sweat would gather on his brow, and sometimes he would ask me to stay still so he could rest for a while. I wasn’t very talkative, which made his job lonely and tedious. But he can take credit for my knowledge of the arts and sciences. Whenever I would stop somewhere on the rope, he would teach me about the laws of physics or poetic meter. He was a good man and loved me like a son. He would always say he was tired, that he wasn’t cut out for the job, that he was too old, that he was only doing it because his pension was too small to live on. So if he was a little remiss in his work, if he stopped running underfoot from one end of the room to another and took a moment to roll a cigarette or have a glass of wine, I wouldn’t object.

  Sometimes I would play tricks on him. I’d move across the rope as always, taking firm, cautious steps. But when I got to the middle, I would pretend to slip. The poor man would scamper to a spot just below me and open the bag all the way so he could catch me. But I wouldn’t fall. In fact, I don’t remember ever having fallen. Anyway, I had my doubts about whether he was fit enough to make it in time if I really had. He walked very fast and was attentive (with one eye, he would follow my steps across the rope), but the speed of my fall might have been quicker than his legs.

  Playing a trick on him, one day I feigned a scream when I’d almost reached one end of the rope. Terrified, the old man scurried over, and I dropped a pink mouse I’d hidden in my pocket into his open sack. The mouse fell right into the bag, but the old man had closed his eyes and didn’t discover it until later. He got very upset with me that time and almost quit. I offered a heartfelt apology and pleaded with him to stay down there; his presence, what he would do with the bag, the stories he would tell me during the odd peaceful moments, his crazy running around were all very stimulating. And in reality, I’d already decided not to get down. I let him know this a few days later. He didn’t act surprised or try to dissuade me, and I was grateful for that. He immediately began making arrangements so my life up there wouldn’t be uncomfortable. First, he hoisted up a table so I could eat without making a mess of myself. Then, some articles for my personal hygiene. Using an ingenious system of ropes and pulleys, he supplied me with whatever I needed but didn’t have at hand: a bar of soap, a newspaper, candles (blackouts are common here), the odd book, scissors, a clean shirt. I was already an adolescent and he was very concerned about my education. He set up a chalkboard on the wall and would work out formulas and discuss the geography of Ireland while I sat on the rope. Later, he got a slide projector that was put to use throughout the remainder of my education.

  ‘If I were younger,’ he would tell me, ‘I would try to live up there too.’

  He believed every creature had its place - the earth, the air, the water - and he saw no reason why mine should not be the rope. He even assured me that only a change in instincts could alter something like that, which is why terrestrial beings suffer on airplanes, aerial beings don’t like boats, and seamen get dizzy in cities.

  Walking around, I would listen to him with interest. Although I lived in constant danger (any distraction at all - an unanticipated onset of drowsiness, a misstep, a failure of my quick reflexes - could send me plummeting into the abyss), I was also spared other dangers. I would toss banana peels into the garbage - with great accuracy - recite verses from Amado Nervo, and play old Indian melodies on the harmonica; sometimes, from up above, I would oversee the placement of a piece of furniture or fix the electrical wires. Only the prospect of visitors terrified me. I didn’t want to see anyone, and I had ordered the old man to throw out any intruders. Whenever someone would unexpectedly enter the room, I would move to one end of the rope, right next to the ceiling, and try to disappear, become a dark insect. I reckoned that from down below, the visitor wouldn’t see anything but the cord swaying in space, like a cable over the ocean.

  ‘If I were younger,’ the old man would insist, ‘I’d get up there with you
, to rest.’

  One day, the man brought his daughter to meet me. He didn’t give me any warning, which upset me. I hid behind the chandelier. It was one of those big chandeliers you find in theaters or in the drawing rooms of aristocratic houses, with a lot of decorative prisms. Sometimes, just to keep myself busy, I would polish the prisms with a cloth moistened in vinegar. From my corner, I saw her enter. She was wearing black high-heeled shoes and took cautious steps. She had on a beige raincoat and her hair was short. I didn’t think the rope spectacle could possibly interest her. Since my early childhood, I had refused to perform tricks or do exercise on the rope. I would just stroll around, and I despised gymnasts and acrobats who entertained the public at the circus or in shows.

  She proceeded to the center of the room and looked up. The floorboards creaked a little. The old man sat down in a chair, like an usher after the performance has begun. I let her look for me, knowing I would be difficult to spot. I thought she would get tired of looking for me because she wasn’t used to bending her neck to look up at high things. The old man started reading the paper. It was a way of leaving me alone in the face of danger.

  ‘Oh! What a beautiful picture,’ she murmured, as she discovered a Turner reproduction on the wall. I had cut it out and stuck it there. If it hadn’t been beyond my reach, I would have yanked it off the wall to prevent her from looking at it. Unfortunately, the room was full of newspaper clippings, photographs, and objects I enjoyed displaying on the shelves. And she seemed bent on taking inventory.

  ‘Don’t touch that!’ I yelled from my corner as she reached for one of my kaleidoscopes. ‘I only allow the old man to touch it - so he can dust it.’

  She withdrew her hand and looked toward the corner where I was.

  Then she did something completely unexpected. She nimbly climbed up on a chair, to get closer to me. That bothered me. No one had ever dared to do that, not even the old man when I would ask him for something; he always found a way to get things up to me, using the pulley system.