Among Strange Victims Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Daniel Saldaña París

  English translation © 2016 by Christina MacSweeney

  Cover illustrations by Andy DuCett

  Cover and book design by Karl Engebretson

  Author photograph © Andrea Tejeda K.

  Originally published in Spanish as

  En medio de extrañas víctimas by Sexto Piso, Mexico, 2013

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Saldaña París, Daniel, 1984– | MacSweeney, Christina, translator.

  Title: Among strange victims / Daniel Saldaña París ; translated by Christina MacSweeney.

  Other titles: En medio de extrañas víctimas. English

  Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015033493 9781566894319 (eBook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Humorous.

  Classification: LCC PQ7298.429.A43 E513 2016 | DDC 863/.7—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015033493

  232221201918171612345678

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Daniel and Christina would like to thank the OMI International Arts Center for including them in its Translation Lab residency, which allowed them to work together on the final proofs of Among Strange Victims and to get to know each other better as author and translator.

  On park benches

  Among strange victims

  The poet and amputees come sit together.

  ARTHUR CRAVAN

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  I. The Third Person

  II. Fundamental Considerations on Something

  III. The Shrubs of the Terrestrial Sphere

  IV. The Future of Art

  Epilogue

  Funder Acknowledgments

  I

  THE THIRD PERSON

  1

  It’s unnecessary to start by describing the actions that make up my routine. That tedious list will come later. First, I’d like to state that my head floats about two inches above the top of my neck, detached from me. From that position, it’s easier for me to observe the irritating texture of the days.

  When it rains, I don’t get melancholy. Quite the reverse. I simply have the impression that the weather is, finally, doing justice to the general grayness of existence. Good-bye, tropical hypocrisy; let the sun return to its corner of the galaxy and for once leave us to contemplate the unrelieved darkness that looms over us, sad mortals attired in fake Nike tennis shoes covered in mud.

  I sometimes think it would be wonderful to draw diagrams that, rather than the usual preposterous and hyperspecific statistic, represent a dull, everyday state of affairs. Diagrams that tame the seeming disorder of things and help me to place myself among them. For example, a chart with the speeds, accelerations, and even the manias and minor defects of the passersby who file around this fountain. While I watch them from my disintegrating bench at one end of an oval gazebo, I try to imagine those variables, the columns and colors of that chart. The all-powerful statistics will summarize, in perfectly round numbers, the comings and goings of the pigeons. I’m not really sure how, but the fat man who is right now shifting his weight from one foot to the other and has a tiny mobile phone in his hand will be represented. The children running around their parents like small, feverish satellites will appear as relevant data, as will the couples oscillating around the bushes, looking for a patch of shadow in which to lavish indecent displays of affection on each other. In the chart will be the aimless hobbling of the elderly pensioner who, only a few moments ago, looked at me with a mixture of suppressed rage and resignation as if envying the youth of which, from the old man’s point of view, I am not taking full advantage; and the firm gait of the ice cream seller, who knows exactly what the afternoon holds for him, will be there too. The chart will also register, by means of occasional footnotes, the exceptional cases: the sudden stillness of the passersby when a screeching of tires, after a barely perceptible silence, results in a crash; the collective haste of mothers when the first raindrops fall from the sky.

  And of course the chart will have a whole column, or a huge portion of its round pie, for a detailed account of my meanderings: if I take three turns around the fountain, the chart will know and represent them in a special, phosphorescent color; if I allow my steps to be guided by the perfume of a woman in a tailored dress, the same will be true; if I decide to stop idling away the time in this gazebo and walk slowly home, dragging my feet along the sidewalk as the four-in-the-afternoon sun begins to lose its strength, as I am now doing, the chart will know it too.

  But there is no fanatical god of statistics who amuses himself designing Excel tables on his celestial laptop, paying disproportionate attention to this region of the world, just outside the center of Mexico City, so I have to keep walking and resign myself to the fact that I’m the only person aware of the rhythm of my steps, the only one who knows that I twist my left foot slightly inward and try to cross the digits of my right foot, putting the big toe over the one next to it, a custom thanks to which my foot begins to hurt after a few blocks, and the soles of my shoes always end up splitting in the same place, under the ball of my foot—objects are traitorous. I’m the only person who knows me in such detail, and for that reason I’m the only one who can register this, even if it is only on the ephemeral chalkboard of the memory, for the detail then to disappear, without warning, among thousands of other pieces of data related to the rhythm and cadence of my steps, data no one will ever consult with insatiable curiosity in the immensely vast annals of a virtual library of nonsense. “Statistics doesn’t recognize my true value,” I tell myself, in summary.

  Fortunately, as soon as I enter my apartment, those slightly oppressive thoughts disappear at exactly the same moment I press the stop button on my iPod, take off the headphones, and switch on the living room light. In contrast to the bedroom, the living room is always dark, so I have to illuminate it, even at this hour: 4:17 in the afternoon.

  The vista that is revealed isn’t particularly beautiful, or perhaps I should say it isn’t canonically beautiful. My furniture is old and each piece is slightly broken in some way, with the exception of a small red coffee table I bought two months ago; the fabric lampshade, hanging from a cable repaired with duct tape that sprouts from a hole in the ceiling, accumulates inexplicable stains that are projected onto the walls like cave paintings. Certain parts of the wall, afflicted with damp, have some sort of blisters of paint that eventually burst and cover the dark blue upholstery of my armchair in fine white powder.

  But despite these signs of deterioration, to me my apartment doesn’t seem completely squalid. I have some plants, a small black bookcase holding an encyclopedia of biology—the corner of a page turned down in the fifth volume marks the most exciting chapter: rotifers—and my two windows: the one in the living room, with a view of the interior courtyard of the building, and the one in my bedroom, looking onto a vacant lot. It’s a strange arrangement of space. A sensible architect would have reversed the order, leaving the living room with an external window and the bedroom with a view of the courtyard; but maybe the architect was afraid someone would construct a
ghastly, enormous building, with barbed wire everywhere, on that vacant lot, and so left the bedroom window, always less important than the one in the living room—a domestic agora—with that unfulfilled threat. Luckily, the vacant lot is still vacant.

  Saturdays all, or almost all, go like this: I wake around nine, idle away the first few hours looking at the vacant lot or pretending—to no one—to read in bed; I prepare a simple breakfast and go out to take a walk around the neighborhood; I have something to eat in the street at lunchtime and, afterwards, I sit on the disintegrating bench in the gazebo to watch the people walking by. At about four o’clock, I go back home to try to do all those things I don’t have time for during the week, things that for five days I swear up and down I’ll get around to on Saturday. I do, in fact, try to do them, but I rarely succeed. Today, for example, with great effort, I’ve managed to organize the bills so that early on Monday morning, before work, I can pay the electricity, telephone, and water. Next Saturday, perhaps, I’ll manage to get someone to come and give me an exact diagnosis of what is happening to my living room walls, even though, as I said, the damp doesn’t particularly bother me. I won’t do this for my own benefit but for potential visitors, the women out there waiting for me to talk to them and invite them up for coffee—“Sorry, I’m out of sugar”—in my living room—the domestic agora, as I said. But to tell the truth, I don’t invite many people into my apartment. In fact, I’ve never invited a woman in, except for once, when a neighbor who doesn’t live here anymore asked if she could use the telephone, and that wasn’t even really an invitation, just, at best, a passive concession.

  (Following the line of thought these last reflections timidly suggest, I never cease to be surprised that men in general, or so they say, have certain functional techniques for approaching women that to me seem outrageously aggressive, or at least impossibly audacious. I can’t imagine myself under any circumstances inviting a stranger, or someone only recently met, to come to my apartment; I can’t imagine myself explaining to her, while feigning distraction and opening a beer, the esoteric details of my boring job, let alone asking her about things that don’t interest me—she knows they don’t interest me—in order to get down, as soon as possible, to the hurried ritual of “getting acquainted” and then jump into bed, like in a Discovery Channel sequence. Thinking it over, the only way it would seem natural for someone to come to my apartment is if they had already been there before . . . oh, the paradox.)

  The damp is, from the viewpoint of memory and its symbolic labyrinths, important to me, although I rarely admit that aloud and instead tend to complain about its detrimental effects on the upholstery of my armchair. One of my mother’s houses, when I lived with her, also had damp, and there was no way, however hard we tried, to eradicate that architectural blight permanently. It was the same throughout the whole neighborhood, all twenty-seven blocks of it. There was even a story, probably apocryphal, about a woman on the eighth block who painted the whole façade of her house in proudly traditional fuchsia and, after the damp sabotaged her undertaking in less than a week, strung a noose from a beam in the kitchen and hanged herself. It’s most likely that the two events—the rapidly rising damp and the lady’s suicide—coincided in time but without any sense of cause and effect. Whatever the case, it’s one more of the stories that mark my relationship with damp, and I now prefer to live peaceably with the moist blisters rather than carry on a vain battle against phenomena that are beyond human understanding.

  My life is a repetition of one Saturday after another. What’s in between deserves another name. Sundays don’t count: they consist—I’m exaggerating here—of twenty-four wasted hours of which I will remember nothing the following day, and that following day, Monday, marks the beginning of the reign of inertia, whose only function is to carry me along smoothly, as if floating on a cloud of certainties, to the next Saturday. What’s more, on Saturdays I masturbate twice. This latter action isn’t a norm, but that’s what generally happens, though I don’t plan it: it’s one of those indisputable recurrences of natural phenomena, I guess, like when the fireflies in an area flicker on and off together at regular intervals, synchronized by an invisible being. I masturbate once in the morning, when I wake up, and again in the afternoon, when I come back from my walk around the neighborhood. I usually do it while looking at porn on the internet, though I sometimes resort to traditional methods, like imagination.

  The vacant lot my apartment overlooks is the reason I moved here. Fed up with the homogenous panorama of buildings surrounding my former house, I decided I needed a little clean air, a rest for the eyes that only vegetation and a certain rural ambience could provide. As neither of these was to be found at a reasonable distance from the museum, I looked for apartments next to vacant lots. This was the only one I found.

  My job isn’t particularly difficult, or particularly tedious. In fact, you could say that I like it. Three years ago, when I was out of regular work for almost four months, doing occasional commissions for various government institutions, I thought I would never find a place where spending eight hours a day would seem as pleasant as watching TV or looking through one of the volumes of my encyclopedia of biology. Then I got an offer from the museum and decided to accept it, so now I pass the day in an open-plan office with high ceilings, in an old building in the historic downtown of Mexico City, spending hours on end writing texts related to the site: press releases, salon notes, letters and speeches for the director, and so on. I also have other functions, which only occasionally require my skills, such as meeting and repelling the impromptu visitors who turn up to propose ridiculous exhibitions, or battling with the people in the printing department when there’s an error in a catalog.

  As there was no title for the post I occupy, or at least no one told me what it was, I decided to invent one myself, and now I sign official e-mails as the museum’s “knowledge administrator.” I got the idea from a billboard on the Periférico beltway advertising the new degrees of a private university. One of them was just that: Knowledge Administration. I loved it; I felt it expressed my deepest convictions. Considering what is known of the world, it’s more than sufficient, I guess. Nowadays, the procedure is to administer knowledge in a way that makes people feel happy, or at least not constantly and irremediably miserable.

  I’m not particularly happy. And, moreover, I don’t think I’ll ever study that degree program. In fact, I’m never going to study any degree program. In fact, I’ve never taken any course, at least not all the way through. True, I did spend four semesters doing English literature, but a deeply felt rejection of academic zeal made me stop in time, just before—hijacked by one of those diligent pupils who have an opinion about everything—I became convinced of the advantages of opting for a specific area of study, prepared to spend years dissecting the same, identical fragment of a nineteenth-century novel.

  2

  It must measure more or less 60 by 120 feet, but at night the lot looks bigger than it really is, and then I look out the window and imagine it’s really a large thicket. When I was young I also lived next to a vacant lot, in Cuernavaca, that all the local kids called the Thicket. (It wasn’t the damp house I mentioned earlier but another one, my father’s.) In contrast to my childhood lot, this one has a wall separating it from the street, so you’re hardly likely to be aware that the waste ground exists if you’re only passing by with other things on your mind. For that reason, I went around noting every lot that might be overgrown with shrubs until I found an apartment for rent next to one. It took me months, but I wasn’t in a hurry.

  As I don’t have many belongings or many visitors, I didn’t mind that the place was really a small studio, and not in a very good state of repair. If I had more free time outside of work, I’d think about moving somewhere bigger and in better condition so I wouldn’t have to spend hours listening to the downstairs neighbors’ untimely arguments. But as I have little free time, I don’t mind much, and have even come to feel a certain del
ight in listening to the disputes of those neighbors, who, late at night, make me feel that I’m not alone.

  3

  Today, as I was leaving the museum, I decided to walk home rather than take the metro for the four stops that separate downtown from the station nearest to where I live. I’d never done this before. I hadn’t even considered the possibility of walking all the way here. I’d always imagined the various zones that make up this city, or the part of the city I know, as being unconnected on the surface, like islands that can only be approached from underground, on the metro. Walking, discovering that the pedestrian level is also a continuum, was a strange experience.

  It’s curious how a small, apparently innocuous detail like walking home from work instead of taking the metro—a good hour and a half on foot, at a brisk pace—can precipitate events or influence the direction of things in a way that is perhaps irreversible. I’m surprised, truly surprised, that the greatest concepts, and also maybe some of the most vigorous spirits in history, were, in essence, determined by a particular afternoon when a man decided to do something slightly different. On a smaller scale, that’s how the decision to walk home now seems to me. I don’t mean it has converted me into a twenty-first-century Napoleon, but I have the feeling that the order of something deep in my chest has been irrevocably subverted.

  I avoided the main avenues and made my way along back streets, where the noise was more bearable and I could browse the shop windows. One place galvanized my attention, though I recognize that it was arbitrariness—or perhaps a paranormal force, inherent in urban development—which made me stop just there. It was a café that displayed its menu by means of laminated photographs from at least thirty years before. Jurassic omelets with avocado, hamburgers sampled by my forebears. The photos of the dishes made me, nonsensically, think of the stars, which are, according to popular wisdom and expert thought, testimony to a reality that no longer exists.