Include Me Out Read online

  (After Laura Isola, “La paloma gaucha,” Radar magazine, Buenos Aires, April 20, 2003.)

  • • •

  She finds an insect she has never seen before. Might this be what has resulted from those seeds she planted? An insect with improbable legs, as if drawn in zigzags? She looks at the rows in search of something, a tiny sign, any kind of confirmation that she did, indeed, plant the first seeds of her experimental garden months ago, but nothing. Only a never-before-seen insect. Might this be what they call the margin of unpredictability? She kills it immediately. She doesn’t care if it was a derivative of her experiment: she is not Dr. Frankenstein, she can easily destroy the undesired results. She looks at the yard to see where her new flower, La Extraña, also called the Queen Margaret Astor, will do best. According to the Boutelous, it can reach a height of two meters and will have “a thick, fuzzy stalk with many side branches and leaves alternate, ovate, and smooth, almost as long as they are wide, pointed, with unevenly toothed edges, and held by thick, winged petioles.” She plants the seeds in rows: the description suggests that the time will come when a section of her garden will be full of Las Extrañas that will be taller than her, a veritable vegetal fortress. Though she cannot yet be certain, the latest news does not preclude the possibility that she will have to abandon this garden in its infancy long before she planned to. Allow weeds and insects to grow, truncate her experiment in detachment. Just the thought of it outrages her, though this does nothing to shake her out of the confusion that was the source of her initial fury. She first sits then lies down on the ground. She reads again: “The disk florets are tubular, hermaphroditic and yellow, and ringed by ray florets, forming the ligules, which are feminine; the receptacle is naked, and the seeds are topped with downy pappus.” At moments this manual of the Boutelous, she thinks, reads like an undercover Kama Sutra.

  • • •

  She opens the door and is surprised to see Ringo; someone else, an errand boy of sorts, delivered the last few orders. For some reason she can’t figure out, he launches into an account of how busy he’s been, making plans for new deliveries to nearby towns to the west. Maybe he decided to adopt this grandiose air in order to tolerate the fact that he ended up accepting the conditions imposed by his father. Now, in fact, after delivering her order, he’s going back there, Ringo adds. Maybe she wants to come with him, it’s her day off, if he remembers correctly. Mara, to her own surprise, immediately agrees: she needs to get some air, rise to the occasion, overcome this hurdle. The path of tranquility has never been her specialty, but, as some say, it can provide counsel. From the passenger seat of a four-wheel-drive vehicle with the view of an airplane cockpit she is surprised to realize how quickly one can get out of town. She says this and not much else. Ringo doesn’t, either. Both stare absentmindedly at the road, and Mara thinks that she would give anything to have a friend to not talk to. But, after the first gas station, Ringo returns to the expansive version of himself. He wants her to know that in the last few months he has found a way to solve his problem with his parents. The one about his studies. Something tells him that this time he can trust her, her judgment. Mara utters an onomatopoeia that she’s not sure registers with him. Very simple: he stopped ignoring one of his mother’s new friends, another member of the counter-urbanization, or re-ruralization, sect that left good jobs in transnational companies to come to this place and grow vegetables. What they didn’t take into account was how bored they’d be. They didn’t take it into account and they don’t admit to it; but he sees them, he sees them dying of boredom. He’s seen it in his parents all these years, and he keeps seeing it in those new friends who are following the same trend: the fake naïveté when they try to learn a trade, the overvaluing of the trades, the overlapping bodywork seminars given by people for whom they feel actual disdain, disdain above all, deep disdain that deep down they have for everything around them, the poorly disguised paternalism, the dead time when they realize that even though they moved and changed their occupation, they’re getting old anyway. For a second Mara is tempted to ask him what he wants to study, what is it that his father is so dead set against, but she fears that a single question would initiate a dialogue protocol when she can barely deal with the monologues. It’s been a while now since he started to notice, Ringo continues, that one of these new friends of his parents, a psychoanalyst who says she got tired of treating neurotics and now wants to give classes in social psychology or something of the sort, chose him as an antidote to her boredom. She recommended books, discussed movies with him, she even tried to mediate when the conflict with his parents started to intensify. As far as he was concerned this woman was just another nuisance, until a light bulb went on in his head. Okay, he thought, he would be her sex toy, but she would be the card up his sleeve. Now the time has come for him to start dropping hints that will make his parents suspect that something might be going on between him and the psychoanalyst, as, in fact, there is. It’s very important that they suspect something before anything else. If he shoves it in their face, the effect will be lost. A hint dropped here, a bit of evidence there, he has to advance and retreat, advance and retreat, give the subject all the time it needs. If he can manage that, the rest will be simple; his parents, who deep down haven’t changed one bit, will be horrified at the prospect of looking bad in front of their friends, especially the whole group of friends who share all the new arrivals and who took them so much effort to calibrate, and they’ll have no choice but to give in to his blackmail and allow him to leave. But since that alone won’t guarantee that it remains a secret, Ringo will raise the stakes: he’ll be able to study what he wants to study and won’t have to work. He’s convinced that he’s in an optimum negotiating position. Mara interrupts him to say that she’s getting off there, thank you very much, she always dreamed of spending a night in a hotel in this small town where they have just arrived.

  • • •

  They bring her the remote control along with the croissants and coffee. Mara assumes she should take it as a gesture of good will and that’s the only reason she changes the channel. The truth is it’s all the same to her if she eats breakfast with that dubbed movie or a soccer game or an account of the latest catastrophe, exactly the same. Rather than a television at breakfast she expected a town newspaper full of salacious headlines and poorly written ledes. At another time she would have asked for a newspaper, or she would have been out buying one at the corner. At another time she would have asked for a different room. Asking for a different room had become a habit. Million-dollar negotiations, treaties that had been discussed for months and even years, strategic alliances, revolutionary experiments, and opportune career maneuvers could fail if the interpreters did not have all their faculties working when they started to interpret. Sentences like that one were often brandished at three in the morning in front of desk clerks who were as polite as they were impenetrable. By the time she got what she wanted it was five, and she had two hours to sleep, at the most. She hears laughter behind her. Only then does she realize that she is not alone in the dining room. Apparently the regular patron found that something said on TV was funny. He says something to her, but she can’t make it out. She turns around and smiles, as if she agrees.

  • • •

  The bus drops her off at the central bus station around five. Before getting on another one that will take her back to the small town where she lives, she decides to wander around there a little, in the vicinity of the museum, in the area she usually systematically avoids. She walks through what they call the park, along the banks of what they call the river. Two open-air garbage dumps. She steps around small plastic and glass bottles, wine cartons, bags containing unidentifiable scraps, and other bad aftertastes of the weekend. At least there’s nobody around, she manages to think at the very same moment she sees three people implacably approaching her. Her new boss—the taxidermist—is in the middle, wearing a hat that doesn’t even remotely address the diffident sun these days. He walks with
fake self-confidence. The day the director introduced them he seemed a little less pompous. Mara regrets taking this detour: now she’s the one putting her protocol of muteness and quietude in danger. The first inklings of Stockholm Syndrome. She manages to increase her pace, to simulate an athletic rhythm that nothing or nobody should interrupt, but the path along the river is narrower than she thought, and she is intercepted. The taxidermist is euphoric under his hat. He introduces her to his companions as the person who has the honor of looking after Mancha and Gato. He introduces the man on his right as the president of an association whose name means nothing to Mara, though she immediately deduces that it’s the one that has made the donation that Luisa told her about. The woman on his left must be his wife, also according to Luisa, but he doesn’t introduce her, perhaps so as not to disturb her: she seems to be thousands of kilometers away from there. Mara would prefer her to be the one speaking, at least so she could find out if it is true that she’s a foreigner, and above all so she could guess where she’s from. One of her favorite hobbies in her former life consisted of guessing the native language behind the Spanish she was listening to. She got so she could guess not only the most obvious source languages but also Lithuanian, Zulu, Ilocano, and a dialect that is still spoken on a remote Polynesian island. But the woman is nowhere near uttering a word: she is looking toward the river, though her eyes aren’t focused on anything in particular. She must be about her age, Mara figures, late thirties, but she still has childlike features. Something even seems to indicate that she will be like this till the end, that with the passage of time she will become a wrinkled little girl, an oxymoron in a face. A wax face, Mara thinks, exactly like a wax doll. The taxidermist is telling her that this man is a prominent lawyer and also one of the most active members of such-and-such association. Then he reminds her of the day and the hour he expects her in his cabinet, the same way he reminded her a few days ago in front of the museum director, and the same way he must have spoken in the meeting with her boss. It’s fundamental that from the beginning she be clear about what her work schedule will be. Mara cracks a smile as she reviews the definition of one of the ten types of silence defined in her manual of rhetoric, the first: “Silence is prudent when we know how to not speak in an opportune way, according to the moment and the place in which we find ourselves in the company of others, and according to the consideration we must show to persons with whom we are forced to deal and live.” She can’t wait to start, says her future boss, and looks at the lawyer, his jaw tense. Mara mumbles some excuse and continues on her way.

  • • •

  From the Notebook:

  A. F. Tschiffely chooses an odd form of autobiography: a series of portraits of characters he knew throughout his life. Despite their important differences, they are all people who share the furtive impulse, who reject a useful life: advocates for a lack of productivity or the dregs of productivity that are still circulating within the most settled bastions of the era of progress. In this version of Tschiffely, few references to his equestrian adventures. In contrast to the gaucho patina of his Latin American costume. Tschiffely as a collector of characters, his only true passion other than boxing. A few in this prolific series: Jim the Anthropoid, the geologist he met at a bar in some Pacific port, to whom he gave that nickname to distinguish him from his inseparable companion, Jim the Monkey, with whom he came to the bar every afternoon to drink rum, a lot of rum, both the same amount, until inevitably they began to argue and then Jim the Monkey would go into fits of rage, grab his head, and begin to scream “like one of Dante’s condemned souls.” His inseparable companion, in the meantime, would sit silently on his stool, his legs crossed, staring at the continuous and slight movements of his own right foot. That image, says Tschiffely when he writes his autobiography more than twenty years later, “still haunts me, obsesses me.” Another: the sinologist from New York who spent a few days in Lima, a change from his repeated trips to China, and dragged Tschiffely to the most out-of-the-way places in Lima’s Chinatown, where he spent his time bartering in Chinese with experienced antiques dealers, and afterwards, when he was tired of winning or losing, he took him to taste Chinese delicacies and later to the opium dens where tourists never go. And where, he insisted, one could feel much closer to China. Another: Sophocles, a fellow boarder in London, an elusive and chameleonic friend who insisted on converting him to the spiritual teachings of Raymond Duncan, brother of Isadora, an experience Tschiffely finally agreed to, which obliged him to go to the Doré Galleries on Bond Street, where he tolerated the exclamations and exhortations of the New Prophet by imagining the moment he would return to the Boxing Academy, where, he was certain, the true masters could be found. And another one, even at the risk of infusing these notes with the collector’s impulse: the “lonely drinker,” who arrived every two or three months at the London boarding house where Tshiffely lived in order to spend a whole week drinking, shut away in his room. He always brought his own sheets and duvet, tins of caviar and lobster, crackers and butter; and in advance he ordered boxes of whisky, brandy, champagne, and Vichy water, which always arrived at the boarding house punctually, a couple of hours after his own arrival. He was well-mannered and wore good clothes: the only things, after years, that they were able to know about him.

  (After A. F. Tschiffely, Bohemia Junction, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1950.)

  • • •

  She has never been in this part of the museum, which means she has to wander around more than she would like to find what the taxidermist calls his cabinet. It looks more like the chamber where they put the crazy relative to do his occupational therapy, Mara thinks when she finally finds the door. He’s not there and neither is anybody else. She decides to sit down and wait for him. After all, her lumbar contact doesn’t discriminate among chairs. Maybe if she manages to remain centered, quiet, and almost motionless, even when working as an assistant, her plan will end up stronger. She must concentrate on pushing away the bad omens. She sits down. Her eyes are adjusting to the dark. Everything is more or less in a mess except for a heavy wood table in the middle of the room on which Mara can make out a number of tools, jars, a couple of receptacles, papers, and a file folder. Right in front of her is a wood platform, a kind of dais, as if someone were building a stage set. She hears persistent banging. She doesn’t think she needs to respond. It continues, but she doesn’t move. It doesn’t seem to be coming from the door. She wonders if there might be rats in this place. Suddenly the door opens and the light that enters the room makes her squint. The taxidermist seems less aware of her presence than of the things he is carrying and doesn’t know where on the table to leave them. He exhibits the kind of physical hesitation that often functions as an evasive way of asking for help, but she doesn’t move. Then, while looking for something on his tool table, he repeats everything that has already been said about the timetable and their work schedule. He stresses the importance of meeting those deadlines, the overriding need to finish in time for the exhibition. He handed in his preliminary reports on time, but the museum bureaucracy has forced them to start a month later than planned. They will have to make up that time, take it from somewhere or other. He insists on the importance of the exhibition in December. He says a few more sentences about this, addressing her formally as usted, and then lists basic tools that he needs to always have on hand. He’s certain none is missing, but in any case he needs Mara to check their condition and sort them out. He tells her to get some paper and jot down some notes, that’s how she’ll learn. As he dictates, there passes through Mara’s head, crowded together or superimposed, the infinite number of times that her job consisted of studying without the time or curiosity or pleasure that are the basic requirements in other professions. The pedagogical method this man has now mentioned confirms the curse underlying this change, this interruption her boss calls a promotion. He supposes that by the end of this week, very soon, they will have brought him the horses, she hears him say; it’s crucial that by then
they have everything they need in the workshop. He has already prepared at home the formula he’ll use to dampen the hides. The sentence shakes her out of her irritation. It becomes something else, a kind of alarm, a sign. It takes her a while to register exactly what it means, something in her system delays the information from reaching her. That has never happened to her before, ever. She would go so far as to invent sentences, misunderstand what she had to translate, translate a metaphor literally, get stuck in the most foreseeable blind alleys that stalk an interpreter, but she never had problems understanding what she was hearing. She would often even guess the next sentence in a speech or the response to a particular line of dialogue, and then she’d get ahead and save time. Suddenly, she hears the banging again. The taxidermist looks up, his face glowing. Mara sees that there is a small window she had not previously noticed, and a bird is furiously pecking at the glass and then retreating, recovering its strength, then throwing itself back into pecking with the same or more frenzy. A suicidal bird, that’s the only explanation. The taxidermist asks if she sees it. When Mara mutters yes, he tells her that she is a lucky woman. Then he turns his back on her, as if putting an end to the conversation and the work session. Mara looks at her watch. According to the work schedule, there’s still half an hour to go. It doesn’t matter; she grabs her things and leaves.