Include Me Out Read online

  INCLUDE ME OUT

  INCLUDE ME OUT

  María Sonia Cristoff

  Translated from the Spanish by

  Katherine Silver

  Published by Transit Books

  2301 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, California 94612

  www.transitbooks.org

  Inclúyanme afuera

  © María Sonia Cristoff, 2014

  Originally published in Spanish by Mardulce

  Translation copyright © Katherine Silver, 2020

  First published in English translation by Transit Books in 2020

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2019954071

  DESIGN & TYPESETTING

  Justin Carder

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  Printed in the United States of America

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  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This work published within the framework of “Sur” Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship of the Argentine Republic. Obra editada en el marco del Programa “Sur” de Apoyo a las Traducciones del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de la República Argentina

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  to M.T. Fournau

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  “I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them.

  Said Darwin.”

  Vanishing Point, David Markson

  INCLUDE ME OUT

  ONE

  ON SOME DAYS she is able to follow the trajectory of a fly without anything or anybody getting in the way: its circular flight, the colors on its abdomen, the blur of its wingbeats, its buzzing, the precise instant it lands on a particular surface, its front legs engaged in a kind of frenetic prayer, its huge eyes, a moment of hesitation, its resolute—then idling—steps, its back legs poised to stalk, to flee, its desperate search for a way out, there, an inch away, a search Mara would assist were her circumstances different. On some days she manages to convince herself that she has learned to observe as if it were an act of simple confirmation. She sits in her museum guard chair and watches—silent, ecstatic, with no interruptions of any kind. For moments she believes that her experiment is working. Not always, but on some days she believes she’s enjoying success. And if at one of those moments a visitor approaches to ask her a question about the museum or where the bathroom is or about the best local restaurants, she emulates the pieces in the exhibit, stares straight ahead at a tiny detail, turns a special quality of attention to how she is sitting, the tensing of her muscles, the expression on her face. To remain silent is also a discipline of the body, according to her manual of rhetoric.

  • • •

  A car drives by and the dust it kicks up covers her entirely. A single car, all that dirt, an unlikely equation. She continues walking. Three cows look at her and continue to chew their cud. Why precisely those three, she wonders, they’re not even the closest ones. She would almost swear they were the same ones that checked her out last Sunday, the one day she unfailingly returns on foot. At five, when her shift is over, she changes out of her uniform in one of the museum workrooms, a little surreptitiously though she doesn’t really know why, and starts down the road that leads to the town where she lives. It’s an alternate road, used only by a few locals now that the paved road follows a different route. It usually takes her three hours to get home, sometimes a bit more. She wonders what she’ll do when winter comes and the days grow shorter; she doesn’t want to walk at night, doesn’t want to pay extra attention to the dirt road or be twice as alert to the possibility of an animal crossing in front of her or a car approaching, much less ward off the unpredictable fear imprinted on any nocturnal ambler. If there is something she does not wish to cultivate at all it is a state of greater alertness. In fact, she has chosen this routine of walking home at the end of the week in order to make anything that might have happened over the previous days evaporate, become vaguer and vaguer, more unstable, inoffensive, nonexistent. She also doesn’t want to have any ideas; she doesn’t need them. Much less memories. She wishes only for the events of the week—at the museum, at home, on the bus she takes every day other than Sunday, along this deserted road that could be identical to any other road, during the inevitably gregarious lunches, in the garden that she will soon stake off, along the banks of the polluted river where she also sometimes walks—to vanish. All evaporated into air. And not because they torment her or anything of the sort, but because she wants them to be where they belong, where the truly forgettable belongs. Another car drives by at a paltry speed, which doesn’t prevent it from spraying more dust on her clothes, her hair, her face. She rejoices mentally at those layers and layers of dirt making her ever blurrier, more like yet another mishap of the landscape.

  • • •

  She washes the leafy green vegetables with the utmost devotion, as if she were certain some new-generation plague or crucial clue were dwelling between the ribs and veins. She removes the ends and the singed edges. When she finishes making the salad, she realizes she’s not hungry. She goes out to the garden, once again surprised by how big it is. She has to find someone to cut that grass, those weeds. She looks up at the star-studded sky. She must admit, this business of seeing the sky every day incorporates a whole different dimension into her perception of things, though she still would not know how to accurately define it. The only thing she knows is that sometimes it makes her a bit dizzy. The sensation is that everything has gone belly up and the sky is a basin into which she must, by force of habit, plunge. She returns to the kitchen, still not hungry, goes to the bathroom, thinks it’s a good night to put away some things that are still in the few boxes left from her move. She sneaks like an intruder into the room where she stacked them. She drags one into the kitchen. It takes her a while, but she manages to organize her official papers into two piles. The other kind are more problematic: she doesn’t even know why she brought them. To prevent anyone from finding them, she supposes, though the underlying megalomania of that amuses her in an odd way. Now she could eat, but the salad doesn’t appeal to her. She decides to take a walk to the town center to see if she can find a place that’s open. There’s a breeze outside that feels good. She doesn’t pass anybody on the first few blocks. Some dogs bark, though she doesn’t know if in response to her passing. As she approaches the plaza, there are already some people sitting around tables at the two nearest bars, and there is already a line in front of a barn where, apparently, there’s a dance. It’s the first time since she moved to this town that it occurred to her to go out at night. She looks at her watch; it’s past twelve. She listens to the music coming out of the open windows of the parked cars. The volume is turned way up, as if produced by equipment that is much more expensive than the cars they’re playing in. She wonders what they’re laughing about, what they’re talking about, those who are in the cars and those who are in the two bars and those who are walking around the plaza. She’s always wondered; this thing they call, in disco lingo, nightlife, has always been a mystery to her. And it was also a reason why her colleagues didn’t trust her. Her former colleagues, from before, from then, from when her life consisted of traveling from place to place. How could she stay there in her hotel room, they would ask her, who was she with, what was her problem, what disease did she have. Any answer would seem to them more believable that her confession to a lack of interest. W
ith time they believed her. Though not always, not all of them. There was that breakfast at the hotel in Cairo when someone, one of her booth partners who had been stammering particularly badly while interpreting at the conference the previous day, attacked her with rage and insults and with tears in her tired eyes, and at the end asserted that her lack of interest in going out at night was simply a strategy to remain clearheaded the following day and show up everybody else.

  • • •

  While eating her breakfast she stares at the kitchen shelves. For moments they look like pure geometric shapes. It’s still early, which pleases her. One of the privileges of her new life is that she can get ready to go to work as if she were carrying out a ritual, with enough time to give proper weight to each step. The doorbell rings; she forgot that today they’re delivering her weekly supply of vegetables. Ringo, the name of the farmer or what he wants to be called, apologizes for coming so early, expressing an abundance of remorse. When he brings in the order, he apologizes for asking for a glass of water and, at that very same instant, he sits down precisely where she had been sitting. Mara doesn’t understand how the two or three cordial sentences they exchange once a week has led to this intimacy, and, moreover, she regrets having left her unfinished breakfast things on the table—she doesn’t want witnesses, not even to that. Ringo looks dejected. She imagines him with a young wife and a newborn baby, who again last night didn’t let them sleep. She pours him a glass of water and goes to the back door and opens it. A breeze enters. She stands there looking up at the sky, which at any hour of the day seems to her like a discovery. Ringo stammers out a monologue. Based on what she manages to hear, there’s a father who refuses to let Ringo study what he wants, a father who didn’t abide by an agreement they made three years ago, when they came here, according to which he would become one more cog in the new family venture on the condition that when he finished high school, he would leave this town to go study whatever he wanted and not what his father had in mind, a father who now wears bombachas, those baggy peasant pants, and a beret, and is trying to convert him to his new religion. Remaining silent is a way of making others talk, Mara recalls from her manual of rhetoric. She closes the door and says to Ringo, lies to Ringo, that she has to be at work in an hour. He doesn’t budge. He sits there staring at the two pits of the peaches he brought the week before and that she has just eaten. For Mara, the situation is already verging on the promiscuous. She tries to find another sentence that will push him to leave, but she only manages to take note of the setback her longstanding ability to guess the lives of others has just suffered: the selfless father of a young family ends up being a pampered young man with vocational problems. Just when she thought her powers of observation had entered their best phase. Who knows why, Ringo says, but at some point he thought that Mara would have advice for him, that she would have some ideas. Then, before he leaves, he picks up the two pits and sticks them in his pocket. From the window Mara sees that he appears to change his mind before he gets into his truck. He takes the two pits out of his pocket, throws them on the ground, and steps on them as if he wanted to crush them, taking his time with each one in turn. He uses his right foot for both.

  • • •

  From the Notebook:

  The museum of Luján, today Udaondo, and its initial role as a shield against the cosmopolitan version of the nation. As the nation was approaching its first centenary, the menace disembarking from the ships was too great. On that shield: the gaucho and the Indian. And, also, the recovery of its colonial heritage, of hispanismo. All of this, empowered: modes of countering a certain kind of novelty. The nation’s fear of ships. Accumulation as a reactionary gesture. Udaondo, using his alliances with political power and with donors, who were also connected to political power. The inauguration of the Indian Room in 1926, and the year before, the Gaucho Room. An embalmed Mataco Indian in Udaondo’s first museum. The wax gaucho and the embalmed horse donated by Gustavo Barreto Muñiz. Already vanquished on so many internal fronts, they could now join the epic procession. Exhume the dead, exhume Indians and gauchos, like so many crucifixes to hold up against the threat of the poor immigrants disembarking from the ships. Vanquish them, as well. Design future shields on which the Indian, the gaucho, the Criollo horse, and the hardworking gringo pioneer could all live together. Shield and nation. The idea of the fatherland and its incorrigible necrophilia. Accumulate the dead and the leftovers. Güiraldes, who published Don Segundo Sombra a few months after Gaucho Hall was inaugurated, was also embalmed. Poor Güiraldes—so manipulated, so misinterpreted. His widow donated his collections to the museum. The importance of wealthy women in the construction of Udaondo, in its accumulations. Accumulation and death. According to an article in Natalio Botana’s Crítica newspaper in 1926: “The museum is no longer a Museum, but rather a nest of absurdities that burn and freeze our blood.” Udaondo biting his own tail.

  (After María Élida Blasco, Un museo para la colonia. El museo histórico y colonial de Luján [A Museum for the Colony: The Historical and Colonial Museum of Luján], Rosario: Prohistoria Ediciones, 2011.)

  • • •

  Her boss calls her over when she sees her arrive. She tells her, invoking a camaraderie that catches Mara off guard, that she has something for her, she should come with her to her office. She tells her to make herself comfortable as she struggles to open a grim-looking Tupperware container, which resists her efforts. Finally she presents her with a piece of limp cake, like a dead fish. Mara mumbles a few sentences that combine a sorry and a thank you, both without any well-defined motive. But above all, her boss says, she wants to let her know how proud she is of her. Perhaps she shouldn’t confess this, but she had her doubts the day she hired her, and now she realizes that they were unfounded, that sometimes in small towns people are too prejudiced against outsiders; she wanted Mara to know, in short, how happy she is to confirm that she made the right decision that day. Mara thanks her a couple of times, or more, with all the conviction she is capable of, before walking away down the hallway. She sits down in her chair with the greenish-colored Tupperware resting on her lap. She can’t figure out if there was a museum anniversary, somebody’s birthday, or a local holiday. She’ll soon find out. One of the key protocols of the experiment she came to this town to carry out is to not ask questions. To speak the absolute minimum, and, above all, to never ask questions. One year, that’s all. One year of practicing the art of remaining silent. She gets up, places the Tupperware on the chair, and starts to clean the room, as she does every Wednesday. As she sweeps, she reviews one of the ten kinds of silence as defined in her manual of rhetoric, the seventh: “The silence of consent consists of the approval we give to what we see or hear by limiting ourselves to paying favorable attention, which signals the importance we attribute to it, bearing witness—through a few external signs—that we consider it reasonable and that we approve of it.” Her years as a simultaneous interpreter have equipped her with a prodigious memory, so she remembers even the punctuation.

  • • •

  Luisa’s arm appears through the bars over one of the windows, open today because of the heat, and signals to Mara to hurry up. That’s when she realizes it’s already Friday. When she steps outside, the sun hits her like the blast from a furnace: intense, excessive. They walk the first few blocks to the restaurant without talking, which proves that she has found a true friend in this most unexpected of places. Luisa is wearing one of those dresses that Mara thinks of as hopeful, a wager on the coming weekend, a celebration of the calendar, and she eats with a voracity belied by her wiry body. She reports that they will soon get a raise, that she heard about it from management. If it weren’t for the protocol Mara wrote for herself, which includes among its key items the reduction of any and all conversation to degree zero, she would ask her exactly how much the raise would be. Though she doesn’t really care, the amount is probably negligible. That’s not where she’ll find the solution to not spending a single cent of her sav
ings the entire year, another of her protocol items. Perhaps she should have rented her apartment instead of locking it up, but the less contact with her past life the better: another key item. After all, not having a single extra cent is the perfect excuse for not being able to do anything other than what she has laid out for these months, this year. It lends her experiment a pragmatic advantage. Luisa, it appears, has already moved on to another subject, because now she is talking about a couple who strolled through the gallery a few days ago, and, instead of looking at the candelabras, the paintings, the crucifixes, in other words, everything that was on display, they entered the room as if it really were a chapel—with reverence, she would say. The truth is that when Luisa saw them she felt kind of sorry for them because she knows that the entire museum is more like a stage set, and therefore less effective for achieving the result they were seeking, and that’s why she approached them to tell them that just across the street is the church, but then she realized that something else was going on, that she, the girl, was masturbating her boyfriend or husband, her companion or whatever, with unbelievable skill: the only things moving were her fingers, not even her shoulder or her arm or even her forearm, not even her hand, just her fingers. She was using a very specific technique, like the one used by purse snatchers at bus stations and on crowded buses. She was on the verge of asking her about it but then reconsidered. Afterwards, as they were leaving, she wanted to make some witty comment, as if to signal her complicity, and then, who knows, maybe the girl would tell her how the hell she does it, but she couldn’t think of anything to say, of how to ask. Too bad; she imagined several situations in which she’d love to use that technique. She’d swear that she, Mara, would have known what to say. That very night, while they were eating dinner, she told her aunt, but instead of thereby initiating a conversation on a subject that interested Luisa, that interests her, she had to listen to a keynote address on the aphrodisiacal nature of Catholic imagery. What can you expect from someone married to a Communist: that’s what her mother would say every time she came to her with stories about her Aunt Honoria. At that time, her uncle The Red, as they used to call him in town, was still alive. As was her mother. Anyway, she also wanted to tell Mara that she signed their boss’s birthday card for her. There wasn’t much time to check with her, and anyway she was sure that Mara would have had issues with signing it, but she, who’d been working there for five years, not just a few months, knows all too well that something like that could cost someone their job. It turned out perfect, she would have to retrieve that card from somewhere to show her how well she can fake her signature, or what she imagines her signature must be. She also put in Mara’s share for a gift. Mara agrees with her handling of the situation and tells her that she’s wrong, she wouldn’t have been able to think up a witty comment, either.