Include Me Out Read online

  • • •

  Mara arrives about ten minutes after the stipulated time. The person she is replacing looks at her with what appears to be excessive resentment, puts on a coat that is wholly unnecessary for noon on that boiling hot day, and leaves without saying goodbye. It’s Saturday, and the first specimens of the cultural tourists who show up on weekends have arrived. That prospect, along with the heat, the sticky screeching heat, conspire against her ability to disengage from her surroundings, against her carrying out the exercises that usher her into detachment. The chair feels hard, uncomfortable, there’s no question it will end up destroying her back, which has already been hurting for several days. Someone comes up to her to ask if it’s really true that this man traveled more than twenty thousand kilometers pushing that wheelbarrow just to win a bet. She answers rudely, which makes her feel even worse: intense exchanges have no part in the protocol of her new life. She stands up and takes a turn around the room. Her back pain, she ascertains, lets up when she walks. She stops in front of Vasco’s aforementioned wheelbarrow and confirms that, yes, the information as written is clear, this is not the source of the confusion. She keeps walking, slowly and in a zigzag. She stops in front of the two embalmed horses. She has never been that close to a horse, dead or alive or embalmed. To think that, like her, they traveled for years from place to place and are now motionless in this room. A paradoxical tribute. Truth is, she wouldn’t have wanted any other kind. Her experiment in detachment arose, in fact, out of one of the most powerful forces in the world: saturation. She arrived in this town implacably fed up with what she had left behind. She would ask them, if they weren’t horses, and if they weren’t embalmed, if the same thing had happened to them. If they, like her, are examples of a wounded cosmopolitanism. Her head aches and feels heavy. She walks into the hallway for a glass of water so she can take a painkiller. The water in the water fountain is warm and the little plastic cups have disappeared. She figures she would waste more time if she tried to find out who is in charge of restocking them than if she left the museum and went to the kiosk to get a bottle of very cold water. Leaving the gallery completely unattended could become yet one more episode that would cost her the job, she thinks as she crosses the plaza.

  • • •

  From the Notebook:

  In order to spy on an attractive and elusive neighbor, Xavier de Maistre, the character, identical to Xavier de Maistre, stands on the edge of the abyss, perched on his window sill, one leg on either side. It occurs to him that the nocturnal expedition around his room that he has decided to embark on could very well include a horseback ride—a ride on the back of one of those animals that always fascinated him, especially if they were inanimate. He rides on and on as his mind wanders over a broad array of subjects, memories, and considerations. An homage to Quixote? A fascination with horses, above all inanimate ones, of this alter ego who takes off on a voyage around his room for a second time. A character who goes into hiding after traveling widely. The first time, imposed on him by others: prison for having fought a duel; the second time, not: weary of the din of the world, he rents a small room where he knows nobody can find him. There he devotes himself to minute observations, philosophical digressions, art criticism, gossip, synthetic theories, eulogy, malice, memory, the unparalleled happiness of self-imposed reclusion. The parallel composition of an epistolary poem, which is never published. Rage at the fatherland, war, Russian exile. The permanently mocking tone, a mocking tone that in de Maistre never flags. My temptation to imitate him in this other story of self-imposed exile, but there’s an excess of mockery in our Pampas. Xavier de Maistre’s saturation with discoveries and training and constant chatter. Saturation, saturation. Xavier de Maistre and his two expeditions around his room, which are set forth as manuals. Manuals to inspire stillness, observation, and silence. The quantity of things one can manage to hear, to think, if one remains still, still and alone, still and in silence. A different kind of mockery. A buzz.

  (After Xavier de Maistre, Voyage Around My Room and Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room, New York: New Directions Publishing, 2016)

  • • •

  The lumbar moment—as she calls it when her vertebrae make contact with the back of a chair, never to move again, not for anybody or anything—gets better every day. She could assert without exaggeration that it is the most visible change in her new life. Before, she would sit down any old way, without thinking; now, she always pays attention no matter where that point of contact occurs, not only on the guard’s chair in the room. Muteness is also the art of a still body, so says her manual of rhetoric. To that end, she has come all the way here in order to be still. Still and mute. Or, not exactly: remaining silent is important as a paradoxical speech act, so also says her manual. Mara is just now beginning to perceive the eloquence implicit in this business of remaining silent, and she enjoys it doubly, out of revenge, rage, and vengeance; she enjoys it because she is something like a survivor of a camp, a hospice, a ward, a fire, a conflagration, which in her case, took a discursive form, the form of the ritornello: an interpreter can never, for any reason, remain silent. In her booth, an interpreter can do anything: she can sneak a drink, pop pills, strip naked in front of the colleague she happens to be working with that day; she can plan an assault, a suicide, a brilliant heist that remains a mystery to the police for centuries; she can paint her nails or pull them out, say anything she wants, make mistakes, create a misunderstanding with fatal consequences, unleash a third world war, reveal an unspeakable secret; she can invent, mock, talk about what she dreamed the night before; she can shout, swear, facilitate an unexpected peace treaty, explode a distant bomb; she can make millions from that sentence they wrote down next to the number of a bank account that is impossible to trace; she can speak in dead languages like someone possessed; she can look at a photograph she would never show anybody and make comments about it; she can recite her favorite poet; she can read the headlines of a provincial newspaper; she can practice mnemonics; she can invent lines she doesn’t know of a song she has just discovered; she can dictate her last will and testament; she can talk the way she talks to her dog or her lover in private, but never ever ever can she remain silent. She can even do what she did that day, but she can never remain silent.

  • • •

  Luisa walks up to her carrying a plate full of food that, she insists, Mara should eat. Mara really loves her—how is it possible to love someone after such a short time? Months is all, after having spent entire years without loving anybody, not a single person. Years. Mara looks at the abundance of sweet and savory items that supposedly she will eat. She picks something and chews slowly while Luisa starts to chat with one of the many women making the rounds at this celebration that she organized for her illustrious Aunt Honoria, whom she has lived with since she was a teenager, whom she chose to live with even though her parents weren’t yet dead. There’s nobody from the museum, or at least nobody Mara recognizes, except one of the librarians. The aunt does some kind of volunteer work at the library, if she remembers correctly. There’s music playing in the background, which she also doesn’t recognize. She would be able to sit there for hours if Luisa didn’t keep looking at her and widening her eyes with a certain impatience. Okay, she’ll have to relinquish her lumbar contact, her contemplation, in order to chat or at least pretend to: her muteness protocol provides several ways to get out of these situations. The most effective silence is the one that makes others speak, but in this case there’s no need to make that effort at all. The group she approaches doesn’t notice her presence and continues the conversation about the new minister and his misguided policies, what he was before and what he is now, what he really should have been before he wasn’t, if memory serves, and so on. It’s as if they’d learned the teachings of a religious cult and are now making plans to rid the temple of the Philistines. Then they continue with the story of somebody, which leads to the story of yet another somebody. Although she would like to go ri
ght back to her chair, Mara asks for the bathroom. Next to the office, they tell her. She starts down a narrow corridor lined with books on the spines of which, out of the corner of her eye, she manages to read a few names: Georgi Dimitrov, Einstein, Héctor Agosti, Paul Lafargue, Clara Zetkin, Victorio Codovila, José Díaz Ramos, Mariátegui, Marx, Engels, Ghioldi, Gramsci, Karl Kautsky, Antonio Labriola, Lenin, José Murillo, Leonardo Paso, Alcira de la Peña Aníbal Ponce. What did that uncle do with this hodgepodge, she wonders. There is something anachronistic about this office, something mawkish that families create when they refuse to get rid of the belongings of the dead. Maybe nobody ever enters, maybe it’s a kind of mausoleum, and she is now committing an act of desecration. Maybe her silhouette will remain drawn in the air, as they say happens in Siberia when temperatures drop below thirty-five degrees below zero and the air turn into particles of frost. But no: on the desk are several stacks of handwritten pages and an appointment book open to this week. She looks at the pages before and after and sees that activities are planned through the last months of the year. She wonders if that book and that office-mausoleum function for Honoria as fantasies of control over the future and the past; she wonders what that aunt does in here. The seal of the museum library appears on several of the files surrounding the handwritten pages. And those pages are letters, all with different dates from the nineteen thirties. The script, in ink, is tiny and grows to an implausible extent when the signature of someone named Rosendo Leiva appears. She turns on a lamp and sits down to read. They are letters sent to Udaondo, the founder of the museum, letters in which Leiva says that he had a thousand gazettes printed, that someone wants to donate a sword, that someone else is demanding payment, that the trees are growing well, that the floats are now ready for the parade, that many, or few, people visited, that it rained a lot, or a little, that the shirt is ironed. Letter-reports, to tell the truth. “Yesterday there was a flood of people. Three trains full. From Bernal alone there were 1300. Forgive me for saying that not a single person failed to visit the Museum. There was a moment, between eleven and twelve o’clock, when all the rooms were well-nigh overflowing. When the bell rang, the sidewalk was darkened by people, and at one o’clock, when we opened, there was an avalanche.” A flood and was darkened are underlined. Why not overflowing and avalanche, Mara wonders, and she sets out to investigate the system of underlining in other letters, but she stops when a light goes on. Luisa’s aunt stares at her from the doorway. Only then does she realize that she is sitting on the edge of the chair, totally absorbed in that handwriting with those unforgettable phrases, her lumbar contact totally lost. Un pelandrún, Honoria proclaims, as if she were continuing a conversation, as if she had come up with the formula that would put an end to it. Pelandrún. A chill runs down Mara’s spine: the torment has returned intact, the one she used to undergo when she would come upon a word that had been completely erased from her mental dictionary. During her last few months, mostly. To counteract the dread, she would assemble and write down at least three sentences using that word and stick them around the house in those inevitable places: the bathroom mirror, the door of the refrigerator, the jar of night cream. The word would come back, though at a steep price, because the implacable law of paradox decreed that employing methods from her student days made her feel old. She never felt so old as during that period of time, right before what happened, before her final act. Un pelandrún, Honoria insists, or so it seems to Mara, a middleman Udaondo left in charge of the museum while he was living in his palazzo in Buenos Aires and making off with all the glory. He gave speeches, talked to the press, posed for photographs, but the one who really ran the museum day in and day out was Leiva, and the poor man was so proud. Udaondo really knew how to manage things remotely. Give orders, that is, give orders remotely. If her husband ever found out that she was organizing the archives of a museum founded and run by a Catholic gentleman, a perpetrator of the colonial order, a collector of surplus value, he’d rise from his grave, Honoria says and sits down on a loveseat with very worn upholstery. But he’ll see how, at the right moment, even from an archive in the provinces, the vindication he worked for until his last breath will emerge. It’s just a matter of patience, she adds, now with her eyes closed. Mara doesn’t know if she is talking to her or if she has turned into an interloper, intruding on one of many nocturnal dialogues in the office-mausoleum. She gets up to go, finally, to the bathroom. Luisa convinced her to organize this gathering, who knows why, Honoria adds, but the truth is that she can’t wait for it to be over. If she were a guest like her, she says with her eyes still closed, she’d leave right now.

  • • •

  Imminent rain. She manages to see out the window how the street vendors with their carts full of trinkets flee the plaza and the stray dogs hurry to find shelter under an awning. The onset of storms has become one of her favorite spectacles, one of her new luxuries. She settles in to watch with the same anticipatory pleasure she gets from the opening credits of a movie, but two visitors enter right at that moment, two of those fashionable types who show up very infrequently in this museum. It’s incredible, incredible, he is saying without looking up from the ground, as if searching there for a response. Leaving within a month, everything’s all arranged, the woman says. Buried alive: he told her that’s where it was heading, there’s no other way to look at it. Incredible, he continues. He looks about ten years younger that the woman, and Mara considers how despairing it must be to have a husband or a friend or a lover who is capable of uttering a single predictable sentence in response to everything. They keep walking around the room, her room, the Means of Transportation Room, but without seeing anything, all the time actually circling around the story that, apparently, features the woman’s daughter as the main character. A daughter who has just announced that she will become a nun, and not only that, a cloistered nun. Where could she have gotten it, where, she says, folding herself into the repetitive prosody of her companion while looking for something in her purse, maybe the cigarette she would not be allowed to smoke inside. Mara suffers each time she sees the advent of one of those situations that might require her to take repressive action as a guard; truth is, she suffers from any side other than the contemplative one. She’s lying, lying to herself once again: she also enjoys Wednesday cleanings, that intense flurry of mops and disinfectants and special brooms that, like the Sunday walks, help to empty her mind. The Zen of Pledge. That school the priest wanted to send her to, she should have been removed from there, the woman says before answering her cellphone, which seems to be what she was rummaging around for. She walks over to the window to talk. He tries to focus on a few of the objects, but he is obviously distracted, or rather worried, even upset. Mara can’t figure out who he is, what connection he has with the future nun. Impossible to figure out if he’s a stepbrother, a friend of her mother’s who’s known her since she was little, the new younger husband who’s fallen in love a little with his stepdaughter. He looks distraught. And so fragile inside that jacket, which is so elegant and wrinkled. He goes over to the window, too, and stands there staring at what’s going on in the plaza, or at nothing, how to know even though he’s less than a meter, just centimeters, away from Mara’s chair. The woman turns with a look on her face as if to say that she had to take the call, and it appears she’s interrupting him, or at least that’s how he reacts, as if he hadn’t had time to hide something, his body tense. Maybe that’s why, in order to shift attention elsewhere, he immediately points to the embalmed horses, which, Mara could swear, he hadn’t looked at for even a split second during his first round. He asks the woman if she knew that they’d spent a week in Madison Square Garden, and he tells her that his great aunt has the femurs of one of these two horses, he doesn’t remember which one, in her house. A famous silversmith made two lamps with them, which they didn’t let him touch when he was a child and would go there to visit. How creepy, says she, who seems quite used to putting an end to topics of conversation. They keep wal
king in circles, as if this place were a waiting room and the doctor was taking his time with the results. Actually, no, as if the doctor had already said what he had to say but they hadn’t fully taken it in and so they’d rather not go outside, they’d rather continue to wait, thinking that he was wrong, that the diagnosis belonged to another patient, the one in the other bed. Mara wonders if it could be true what she just heard; she thought that the bones remained inside embalmed bodies. She looks over at the horses, and this afternoon they seem to her to be in a worse state than ever, who knows why. The room grows darker because of the storm that has already started, and the visitors are still there, not moving either, like Mara, like the horses. Suddenly she has the impression that this woman and this man are in fact a couple of travelers who have lost their way and have come to the door of her house to ask for help, where Mara and her horses are happily watching the water pour down.