The Museum of Useless Efforts Read online

  Excited, the coach gave him a signal: just one lap to go. Just one more. And his pace remained steady. He passed a panting runner who had his hand on his waist. Oh, that sharp pain below the ribs, that pressure that makes it hard to breathe. If you feel it, you’re done for and you may as well get off the track. But out of self respect, you can’t. That pain was in the spleen, an organ people rarely discuss because it only bothers you when you’ve exerted yourself in some unusual way, when you’ve run too much, as he’d learned after years of training. And this strange, uncontrollable desire to quit, to stop on the side of the track, to look at the trees, to breathe deeply. Every lap is the same, in your memory one merges with another and you don’t know if you’re on the twenty- third or the twenty-fourth, on the sixteenth or the seventeenth. Like that poor guy who thought he’d reached the finish line and threw himself on the ground. Someone - his coach, probably, or one of the referees - came up to him and, without touching him, gave him the news that he wasn’t there yet, that he’d miscounted: he still had three laps to go. And there he was, unable to get up off the ground, his muscles stiff. And if he got up, it would only be to continue running - if he didn’t faint first, that is.

  Nothing like that would ever happen to him. He ran naturally, as if running were the most normal thing in the world, as if he could run forever. Regularly, but with a constant, unchanging velocity, unlike that of light, which had betrayed him, which now seemed to move inconsistently. He was on the verge of breaking a record. And then, the ecstasy of allowing himself to fall; that hallowed, sublime ecstasy of stopping, of softly slipping off the track, just a few meters from the end, just a little before the finish line, of slipping calmly to the ground and raising his head, oh those tall trees, the blue sky, the slow clouds, the curly branch ends, the leaves fluttering, raise his eyes and watch the measured flight of birds, there’s gibberish all about but he does not hear it, words of reproach surely, insults surely, his coach exasperated, seeing the other runners pass by, their shorts, some positively panting, that one with his hand on his side, you won’t finish, you won’t make it, but up above, the trees were floating, floating in an illusory realm no one could see, now the blond runner with a cramp, hobbling on - have I ever seen that bird before? - the announcer telling of the incredible success, like light, his speed is constant, but he had the urge to stop. And he raised his eyes toward the sky.

  Tarzan’s Roar

  Johnny Weissmuller roared and the entire Jungle (with its suggestive vines and dense foliage) seemed to tremble. The whisky tumbler slid off the small glass table and fell onto the lion-skin rug, leaving a dark, circular, rain-swollen lake. Johnny roared: a long, enduring roar with its outer crust and littoral, its mountains of sound, its lichen-rimmed caves, its hidden depths where bats fly and nimble clouds waft off like smoke. Protracted, deep; long, profound - a roar that soared through the air from branch to branch, summoning the blue birds and gray elephants, a roar that pierced the chiaroscuro of the leaves and the scarred trunks, that whipped through the rocks like a blizzard. It scaled the peaks of the solemn, still mountains, rushed amid the primary stones darkened by the foliage and hastened the slow, crystalline summer rivers. Not only did the tumbler fall, so too did the ashtray, a porcelain ashtray shaped like a banana leaf, a gift from one of his old fans. A lot of crumpled cigarette ends were scattered about like tiny scorched trunks.

  Summoned by the call were birds that took long migratory flights, little fish that licked the sides of rocks, regally horned deer, and vigilant crows; crocodiles extended their long heads, and the trees seemed to sway. It was a triumphal roar, a key heeded by large pachyderms, haughty flamingos, elusive mollusks. Then, Jane - tan and glistening - raised her head, moved by the roar as if by a long-awaited provocation. And Jane ran, ran along the jungle trails, fighting her way through the big, fleshy-leaved branches; guided by the roar, protected by the roar, encouraged by the roar, Jane traveled the moist corridors of the jungle. The birds flew after her, the lions hid, the vipers concealed their heads, the great hippopotami gave way.

  Not only did the ashtray shatter on the floor: a picture in the bedroom shook; it seemed to bang against the wall and after quivering for a moment in the air (dense with smoke and alcohol), it came to a rest, crooked, yearning, out-of-kilter. It was the full- color copy of an old still of the jungle, of the prefabricated jungle of Lake Toluca, with its cardboard mountains, baobab wallpaper, and swimming pools turned into lakes brimming with piranhas. Outside the apartment, the automobiles making their way down the avenue were alarmed by the roar and came to a halt, but then hastily continued on their way. The elephants shook their huge ears like slow fans; high above, the monkeys traversed the jungle, leaping from one branch to the next; the birds snapped their wings like whips against the fronds of the tall banana trees. In the picture there was also a girl in tiger skins, lying on the ground, chained, her swollen breasts rising from between the dark spots of the tiger, her pale thighs (thighs of someone who takes little sun) visible between the orderly tears in her skirt, her thick, ruddy lips half-opened in what could be a provocative gesture of pain or a sensual entreaty. Johnny was a few steps behind - his broad, muscular torso naked, his chiseled nose, his graceful bones, the small suggestive shadows around his nipples and waist; just above the navel, the beginning of a line, a shapely crease concealed by the triangular loincloth (long between the legs but narrow on the sides, perhaps to highlight the contours of his formidable muscles), but the course of which - like a flowing river - could be imagined.

  The picture, based on a scene from Tarzan and the Amazons starring him and Brenda Joyce, had been painted by one of his fans, many years ago. From what he could remember of the movie, there was an extraordinary number of girls, arrow bearers, all decked out in sandals fashioned from vines and in tiger skins (discovering that the black spots on the fabric were really the result of an excellent studio dye-job had enraged him; but lions were scarce, at least in Hollywood, and in any case an unbelievable number of advocacy societies for what-have-you - dogs, tigers, even whales - had cropped up, making cinematography a difficult art form). In the movie, he projected his long, sharp, penetrating roar, a roar of the jungle and the mountains, of the water, wood, and wind; a roar that ululated like the foghorn of a Mississippi paddlewheeler, that made the bluebirds of Nork-Fold flap their wings, that attracted salamanders from the swamps of West Palm (West of the Colorado River there’s a place I love. . .), and encouraged the ducks of Wisconsin to fly. Johnny roared; he roared on the slopes of the bison-skin couch, and the deer head on the wall didn’t move; he roared again, thinking of Maureen O’Sullivan, and the roar thundered across the room like a heavy rock falling on the reefs of Leyte: the madreporic island reproduced the roar in the whisky tumbler that bore the marks of lips and cigarettes and in the Caribbean conch shells, keepsakes in whose cavities the raucous notes of the phosphorescent sea united with the shrill notes of his roar. Johnny roared across the velvety animals of the African blankets that covered the empty double bed of his California apartment, he roared across the ivory curios and the tobacco leaves - a long, desperate, dislocated roar, the roar of a humble receptionist at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, where he’d held his last job, and for a moment he thought that Jane would come, that Jane would cross the snarled central streets, that she would make her way through the shining traffic lights and the glistening metal of the automobiles, that Jane, wearing a leopard-skin overcoat, would cross the neon-sparkling avenue, hurdle the river of peanuts and little bags of popcorn, run through the billboards announcing porno flicks and American Noble Savage cigarettes, and reach the humble apartment where Edgar Rice Burroughs was drinking whisky before he dialed the Retired Actors’ Retreat in Woodland Hills, because the roars of an old man named Johnny Weissmuller wouldn’t let the neighbors sleep.

  The Session

  At four o’clock in the afternoon, my psychoanalyst called. Having just discovered his wife’s second lover, he was very upset.

/>   ‘It’s unbelievable!’ he shouted. I won’t have it.’

  ‘Calm down,’ I advised him. ‘Bodies don’t exist. People don’t either. In reality, we can only talk about functions. Are you with me? None of us is who we think we are, not in relation to ourselves or in relation to others. So, your wife’s second lover. . .’

  ‘I don’t want to hear about him!’ he yelled, out of sorts. ‘I haven’t been able to eat since I found out about them. I haven’t had a bite all day.’

  ‘That means you can’t accept reality. Food has come to represent what you reject. . .’

  ‘I know,’ he whimpered, almost bursting into tears.

  ‘No one dies from not eating for a day or two. The diet will do you good, you’ll eliminate toxins.’

  ‘I don’t understand why she has to see him on Tuesdays,’ he confided more calmly.

  I took advantage of the pause to try to put reality into a glass, which is a tricky maneuver. I’d been working at that since dawn, but each time I tried to grasp it, reality slipped away from me. Now, as I spoke over the phone with my psychoanalyst, I tried to hold the glass, reality, and the receiver all at the same time.

  ‘What happens on Tuesdays?’ I asked as I pushed the glass toward the center of the nightstand.

  ‘Nothing in particular,’ he said. ‘It’s just that she sees her second lover on that day, and not on any other. I don’t understand, why does it have to be on Tuesdays?’

  ‘It’s probably the only day they both have free,’ I reasoned plainly.

  ‘Far from it,’ he corrected me. ‘Tuesdays are very complicated. In the morning he gives his philosophy class, at twelve he has lunch with his children, and at six he has his weekly meeting at the university auditorium. As for her, on Tuesdays we have breakfast together, after which she does some yoga and attends her anthropology course, and at night she sings in the Friends of the Baroque choir. Tuesdays are hectic. She should have chosen Saturday. On Saturdays, I visit my mother, the children are out, and he doesn’t have any classes to teach.’

  I detest the word classes, which may explain why at that precise moment reality slid down the legs of the nightstand. As I continued speaking with my psychoanalyst, I attempted to bend over and pick up reality. He must have realized I was up to something, because he suddenly became annoyed.

  ‘But you aren’t listening to me,’ he snapped.

  ‘Of course I am. I hear you,’ I said in my defense. ‘Don’t be so impatient. Let’s try to analyze your feelings of anxiety about this new guy. ...’

  ‘Don’t mention him!’ he repeated. ‘I find his very existence intolerable, I can’t accept it. I don’t want to know anything about him. He’s disturbing my peace of mind. He’s an intruder. Besides, what would the first one say? I can’t understand why one lover wasn’t enough for her. After all, we’re talking about a good kid - intelligent, serious-minded, even handsome. She has no right to do this to him. I’m certain he has no idea about any of this. We might have even come to be friends - although I hate chemistry, which is his specialty.’

  ‘Wasn’t it botany?’ I asked innocently, holding the glass in one hand and the receiver in the other. Reality was hiding under the bed. I had to squat in a way that neither he nor reality would notice.

  ‘Botany, chemistry - it makes no difference,’ he said. ‘One of those horrible scientific fields that explains the world superficially. She adores simple explanations. The description of a tricotyledonus is enough to seduce her.’ With great difficulty, I managed to bend my knees. ‘To add insult to injury,’ he continued, ‘the world is full of tricotyledonuses.’

  ‘But according to you,’ I stated, not wanting to lose ground (by then I was almost on my knees), ‘he’s a professor of philosophy.’ ‘She believes that philosophy is a branch of chemistry,’ he remarked bitterly. ‘And now don’t try telling me that that’s proof of her intelligence, because I won’t accept that.’

  ‘There are too many things you’re unwilling to accept, my friend,’ I countered firmly. On my knees, I was able to look under the bed. ‘The question is, are you in a position not to accept?’ Cunningly, he evaded my question. ‘I don’t understand why she couldn’t make do with the first one,’ he said, whimpering once again. ‘It’ll come as such a blow to him. The poor guy is really in love. And at the moment, he’s working on a very difficult essay - about the effect of laser beams on frog pepsins. He won’t be able to take this blow.’

  On the floor - I was down on my knees - I found two cigarette butts, an empty matchbox, and a sock I’d lost the day before. But reality remained in hiding, camouflaged by dust.

  I tried to console him. ‘It’s always possible he’ll never find out.’

  ‘True, just like parents are the last ones to find out what their children are up to,’ he admitted. ‘But if they do something careless, like take a stroll arm in arm, or show up at the movies at the same time. . . .’

  ‘People no longer stroll arm in arm,’ I said. ‘In reality, I don’t think people stroll at all these days. As for the movies, it’s very dark in the theaters. I suppose it’s possible the three of them might run into one another before the lights are turned off. It would be a matter of slipping away in time.’

  ‘I don’t think she would,’ he replied. ‘She’s an exhibitionist. For example, she loves to go to the movies with me, even though there’s always the possibility that lover number one might see us together. That’s why I prefer to go in after the movie has started.’

  ‘The movie has always begun,’ I argued subtly, as I thought to myself, now I’ll catch it! I’d seen reality under the bed, behind an old shoe.

  ‘I hate beginnings almost as much as endings,’ he confided. ‘In reality, I’m only interested in what comes in the middle. That’s where everything acquires depth. Apart from that, the ending can always be found within a good beginning, which only undermines the denouement. But the middle can develop in so many ways.’

  Either it wasn’t an old shoe or it wasn’t reality, because I couldn’t grasp either, not in any case without letting go of the receiver.

  ‘I notice that your voice sounds faint at times. What are you doing?’ he demanded to know.

  ‘It’s the telephone exchange,’ I lied. ‘There’s interference on the line.’

  ‘There’s always interference on the line,’ he said, categorically.

  ‘It has to do with the tension,’ I added.

  ‘A physical problem,’ he argued.

  ‘Impossible to control from a room,’ I stated.

  ‘Especially if the room is shuttered and dark.’

  ‘And no one has opened the windows.’

  ‘Because there’s something unbearable about light.’

  ‘The specks of dust that you begin to see, like an invasion of mysterious, sparkling, hungry particles.’

  ‘Last night, she came in through that door,’ he sobbed, ‘and she wasn’t with the usual man. She was with the other one.’

  ‘And you were afraid because you didn’t know him.’

  ‘She’d never introduced me to him before.’

  ‘But his face was vaguely familiar.’

  ‘Yes, it was vaguely familiar, like the face in a dream I had as a child.’

  ‘And you didn’t know what to say to him.’

  ‘I held out my hand. This hand. Then I rushed to wash it. I apologized. I felt I was annoying them.’

  ‘On how many previous occasions would you say you’ve been annoying?’

  ‘I think I’ve always been a slight annoyance, like something out of kilter. My hand is too cold or else it’s sweaty, my tone of voice is one note lower or higher than it should be, I make the witty remark a moment too soon or a moment too late. And then she comes in with this other guy.’

  ‘Into the dark room.’

  ‘I couldn’t bring myself to turn on the light.’

  ‘The invading particles.’

  ‘Or even to say, “Go away!” ’

  ‘E
very act has its consequences.’

  ‘To be avoided, if possible.’

  ‘To refuse to act is to refuse to accept the consequences.’

  ‘The other party would commit the act anyway.’

  ‘Audaciously.’

  ‘Boldly. I hate his courage.’

  ‘Which exists in relation to its opposite.’

  ‘There are no people, just functions.’

  ‘And submissiveness, which presupposes the existence of an authority.’

  ‘Of power.’

  ‘In the face of which there are only two possibilities: rebellion or slavery. Which are interchangeable. Little by little, the hunter becomes the prey. And the prey, the hunter.’

  ‘That’s a very sound observation. Ah, it’s 4:50 now. Your session is over,’ my psychoanalyst decreed in his typical fashion. ‘I’ll see you again tomorrow afternoon. Remember, if for any reason you can’t attend, my secretary will charge you anyway. Goodbye.’ When I heard him hang up, I rushed to look under the bed. I thought I saw reality slithering across the wall. Like a tiny, dark patch of dust.

  The Lizard Christmas

  I got up early to go hunt lizards. With my black stick that has a stone at the end of it. It hasn’t rained for nine months, and it still isn’t raining. If it doesn’t rain before the Baby is born in the manger at the church, we probably won’t have Christmas or New Year’s, or any year. The years will come to a standstill, turn to stone, and stop going by. We’ll be stuck in this age forever and I won’t grow and we’ll die children, thirsty and dust-covered, wither away, dry up like the fields, the plants, the grass. And the Baby won’t be born either, even though the road is full of lizards warming themselves in the sun, sleeping in the drowsy heat on a bed of dry earth, on earth so dry there isn’t a shriveled up plant or a miserable little tree in sight. But I like the heat.