Include Me Out Read online

  (After the website “Badly Stuffed Animals.”)

  • • •

  It happens in spring, one of her colleagues said during lunch. With hot weather on the horizon, people pick up the “microtourism” circuit, which includes the museum, that’s why there are so many more visitors this weekend. The boss joined them at that lunch to beg heartily for them to remember to be particularly alert over the next few days, to not leave their posts, to not get distracted; they know, she underscored, the risks involved when the museum is full of visitors, they’ve even had to suffer the consequences: thefts, damaged pieces, they know exactly what she’s talking about; and then, before sitting to eat her meal that was already getting cold, she added that during the week they would still have time to get back to that little sweater they were knitting for their child or grandchild, and catch up on the latest news about whatever and whoever, but please, for these few days focus on keeping watch, which implies also circulating around their respective rooms, not just sitting there. Precisely today, however, and in a way that hasn’t happened to her in a long time, the lumbar syndrome has taken hold of Mara, keeping her captive. She wouldn’t trade that contact with the chair for anything. She is fortunate to be in the Transportation Room, she has to admit: anybody can stuff a cane or a hairpin or a locket or even a hat under their coat, but nobody is going to steal, undetected, a snowplow or the sailboat that broke the world record for sailing solo around the world. And if they do, Mara will have no choice but to congratulate them. Honoria’s response to her plan has affected her more than it should have, she must admit, though she still can’t figure out exactly why, why so much. More than a week has already passed since that encounter at her house, and she still hasn’t reacted, she still can’t emerge from a combined state of astonishment, rage, and bemusement. Honoria welcomed her into her husband’s office and there, barricaded in that ancient, phantasmagorical stage set, she responded with a proclamation to Mara’s simple request that one of these days, any day that she goes to pick up or leave some work materials in the museum library, Honoria do her best to find out the combination of the safe and, perhaps that same day, open it and copy down the taxidermist’s secret formula. The trust Mara had placed in her before hearing her response, before even suspecting that proclamation, was so great that she’d already shared with her the specifics of her plan, she’d already told her that she would use the taxidermist’s formula to destroy the recently restored horses the night before the opening of the big exhibition, to incriminate him for bad praxis, to humiliate him and all his minions, and, most importantly, to be able to carry on with her life, with her experiment. Her prior trust was so great that she even spoke to her of her detached life experiment that afternoon in that ancient office, and she even spoke at length about the series of events that had inspired her, about the conference, her expulsion, the prohibition against her working in her profession, and above all the fatigue, the existential hangover, the need to take some distance from the world’s redundancy. A tactical distance at least, a limited escape in order to redefine her strategy, she remembers having said because it was only then, with that sentence, she remembers clearly, that Honoria looked up from the papers she had continued to work on while she had been talking. Not a tactical distance, a tactical error, she said. A classic tactical error, she repeated, with that hoarse voice of a smoker that still, whatever detractors of smoking might say, adds legitimacy to assertions. Maybe that’s where Mara’s rage comes from, from her trust that was based on a mistaken intuition, or rather, a mistaken reading of Honoria’s work on Udaondo’s archives, where Mara believed she saw a plan to posthumously checkmate the feudal lord. Solitary acts like that have no meaning, she continued. Or rather, began. The problem with isolated acts like the one Mara is planning and like so many others have planned before her, Honoria said, is that in the end they serve only to weaken the movement, to disrupt it. Such actions undermine the foundations of the combat-ready brigades on which one can pin serious hopes. Individual resistance is nothing but an expression of despair, a lack of faith, unreliable prating, a bourgeois gesture, which is part and parcel of the logic of the enthusiasm of intellectuals, their hysteria, their inability to carry through with a firm and dogged labor. The thing is, she, Mara, and all those who think and act as she does, worship spontaneity instead of channeling their indignation and revolutionary energy into an organization that is capable of uniting their forces and training them to be prepared when the decisive battle arrives. It’s not a simple task, but it is worthwhile to remember Marx’s words, which so often and with so little success have recently been quoted, and affirm that “every step of real movement is more important than dozens” of attacks and individual acts of resistance. It’s important that she understand, know how to distinguish, differentiate. Know how to wait. Tactics shouldn’t be a reaction to the spontaneity of an attack but rather to the organization of united forces. Spontaneous outbursts by solo actors and even the mob always run the risk of going astray, she can assure her. That’s the mistake, that’s the threat implicit in planning to act outside of an organization that organizes, educates, and unites. She doesn’t doubt her good intentions, Honoria added, calling forth a prosody that sounded to Mara vaguely maternal, far be it from her to want to deny the bravery of acts carried out with heroism, no matter how solitary they are, but it’s her duty to warn her against employing such a method in the current situation. She doesn’t doubt her good intentions, but Mara should know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

  • • •

  They order the usual, the waiter says the usual. Luisa mentions that today is actually the anniversary of the death of her mother. A heart attack in the middle of the night, without any warning whatsoever. Without time to say goodbye, finish any conversations, no time for anything. Then she stares out the window. Mara mutters the beginning of several clichés but doesn’t finish any of them. Then, without knowing how, or rather, giving in to the loquacity that has recently only accentuated the holding pattern she finds herself in, she begins to tell the story of a movie she saw a long time ago. It takes place in a cold and sparsely populated country, somewhere in Alaska, she thinks. A woman dies in a snowstorm, the rescuers can’t find her, her family waits for her in vain for days. Until one morning, many months later, while walking to town, one of her sons finds her. His mother is covered with a thin layer of snow, but in spite of how much time has passed, she is intact, identical, as if she were merely sleeping. This son, who happens to be an oddball, the one who has always felt a little uncomfortable in his family, decides not to tell anybody. At least initially, or so it seems, at least until he has had enough time to have those conversations that we always believe have been left hanging when our loved ones die. He doesn’t mention anything to anybody, and every night before going to sleep he jots down a list of questions, accusations, mysteries, confessions: a sort of “collected letters” from a son who holds nothing back. And in the morning, after the family breakfast, he sneaks out to the gully where his mother’s corpse is, but when he wants to mention one of those issues, read one of his own paragraphs, he manages only to stammer out some syllables and can’t even formulate a single sentence. His mother looks at him serenely, sunk in the sweet dreams that come to those who freeze to death, or so they say. The movie reaches points of cruelty and absurdity that can only be tolerated with outbursts of laughter, or at least that’s what happened to her, Mara says, and then she suddenly repents, the sentence sounds so harsh. She’s not used to talking to Luisa, only listening to her. She goes to the bathroom and splashes water on her face. When she returns, Luisa says that she’s worried about what happened with her aunt. If she’d had any inkling that she’d react the way she did, she never would have set up that meeting, and she asks Mara to please forgive her. She should keep in mind that Honoria is over seventy and moreover her plan of sabotage, if she’ll forgive her, is not precisely the kind of thing that wins people over just by being spelled out. Su
ddenly Mara sees her as an adult, without any connection to the Luisa she knows. She has already spoken with her aunt, Luisa adds, and she can vouch for her that nothing incriminating will ever come out of her mouth. She even believes that deep down, and even if it implies a betrayal of her Leninist convictions, Honoria hopes her plan will work. Mara abstains from mentioning the shock her aunt caused her in her mausoleum, speaking like a reincarnation, a ventriloquist’s doll, not of her husband, as she assumed at first, but rather of some kind of composite figure assembled from all the books that she keeps on those endless, old, frozen shelves. There’s something about Honoria that’s similar to an embalmed piece, she thinks, but this time she can’t follow the course of her own meandering thoughts because Luisa is giving her some kind of signal. She has also spoken to people in the museum, she says, a bit bluntly, as if to highlight her irritation at having to put up with another one of those introspective lapses that Mara always thought were imperceptible to others. She says she took it upon herself to find people who had more information about the opening of the exhibition being planned for December and, as far as she understands, it will be in part an homage to the horses, in part a family celebration, and in large part a fundraiser. It seems like it’s really about getting a pharmaceutical company to commit to fund not only this exhibit but also a section of the museum, making it a permanent donor. She doesn’t remember the name of the company, but she’s sure that it’s important; they’re the ones who recently cloned a Criollo horse, it appeared in all the newspapers, they told her. She figures that they’ll all speak on the day of the opening, and they will even hire some historian to tell the in-depth story of the intimate connection between those two heroic examples, now restored, and the new generation of clones. Mara looks at her, flustered by the results of the inquiry, and reviews the definition of one type of silence in her manual of rhetoric, the third one: “Complacent silence consists not only of devoting oneself to listening to those one is trying to please but also of giving them signs of the pleasure we take in their conversation and their behavior, whereby the looks, the expressions, everything compensates for the lack of words that offer praise.” She cannot help wondering once again how it is possible to come to love someone so much in so little time.

  • • •

  From the Notebook:

  A woman used to clean a laboratory at the Faculty of Agronomy in Buenos Aires. She was on the janitorial staff, not part of the team of researchers. She thought that the liquid she found in one of the many receptacles was stagnant water and threw it out, but she was wrong: it was embryos in formaldehyde that the scientists had been working with for more than two months. From those embryos should have been born at least one clone of a famous polo player’s best mare, which would then be auctioned off, as had been done not long before with another clone, which sold to an also famous tennis player for eight hundred thousand dollars. But that other clone was raised in the United States, where cleaning ladies have to sign a piece of paper that says they will be burned at the stake if they move a single item from where they find it. What price did that cleaning lady have to pay for throwing out the clones in the Faculty of Agronomy in Buenos Aires? Was she reprimanded, fired? Deported because she was Paraguayan? Sued, her assets seized? But what—what things, what assets—can be seized from a Paraguayan or an Argentinean cleaning lady? Can a cleaning lady be a character in one of those screenplays that revolve around the value of a single life? Eight hundred thousand dollars for the clone, twenty-five million dollars for the best race horse in the world. That was the equation in 2010, when the first cloned Criollo horse was born in Argentina. BS Ñandubay Bicentenario was his name. An impossible name for a pet but not for the sire of horses that will perform well in the most important races. A laboratory at a California university certified that the genes were identical, that the clone had all the virtues of the sire, the great champion Ñandubay, except that BS Ñandubay Bicentenario is not castrated so can better compete in those races and also sire other specimen who will be castrated and will compete and perform well. The other names come from his other parents: a large pharmaceutical company and the State. BS is the acronym of the first and Bicentenario is the historical moment to be memorialized by the Ministry of Science and Technology. The first celebrates the ability to preserve the genetic capital of the clone and the second celebrates its ability to function as a symbol of a country that does not forget its traditions but is also innovative and technologically advanced. Company and State united once again; in this case, around a project to improve lives. Appraised lives, not just any life.

  (After Gonzalo Figueroa, El joven que clona caballos [“The young man who clones horses”], Brando magazine, Buenos Aires, January 2011.)

  • • •

  Two things surprise her as soon as her eyes adjust to the dim light in the workshop: Gato’s eye now inserted into his body and adorned with perfect, lush eyelashes, eyelashes like those of a high-fashion model; and her work stool occupied by the taxidermist’s wife. Her boss tells her that as soon as she puts down her things she should start setting up the camera to take a few shots he’ll soon specify. This is precisely the right moment, he explains, the key moment when whole sections of the animal still coexist, sections that bear witness to the situation that required his intervention along with others where one can see the soothing effect of his work, his golden touch. In three days there will be no further vestiges of the defects, in three days his work will begin the transition into its final stage, and the ensemble will be on its way to beauty, perfection, he should say. But beware, it is very important to not remove all vestiges of the past. Here there is art, here there is science, and here there is great respect for the original. Being immersed in a taxidermy always means coming in contact with the spirit of the era, establishing a connection with the breath that gave life to the being one is working with, whether human or animal. And to do that, one must dive deep, keep abreast of things, stay focused. He has spent many sleepless nights during that process, Talvikki here can attest to that, he says, pointing to his wife. For him it is, without a doubt, the most demanding stage of his work, the most mystical even, because it means forging a point of entry into a dimension where you recover a light, an unnameable flame, and you plant it in this world again. That is not the same as churning out more specimens, identical to the previous ones. Not in the least. It’s not true that the aura is lost, those are crass theories of haunted minds. He insists that there are multiple ways of proving that none of it is lost. And Talvikki can, too, even though she sometimes refuses to admit it. Just as she is about to take the fifth photograph her boss has requested, Mara looks at his wife, but she doesn’t see any sign at all that she feels she is being referred to. Or anything else. Mara figures she must always be like that: he talks, babbles on and on, explains and justifies, while she gives herself over entirely to her Nordic daydreams. Mara has no doubt about that. On the other hand, as she is leaving once the day’s session is over, she cannot be absolutely certain that she saw from Talvikki a knowing look as she said goodbye, or if it was only in her own head.

  • • •

  She unwraps the bottles of wine she carried hidden in her backpack and places them in the center of the table, like trophies. There is something childlike in the delighted reaction of the two security guards. The previous day she stopped by to see them, and before much was said they had already invited her to join them for a barbeque under the trees. She suggested postponing it till today, even though it’s not ideal for her plans, because now, during this momentary hiatus in her experiment, she can’t help but allow certain habits of her past life to seep back in, such as scheduling, organizing things ahead of time. She always assumed that in her new life she would be freed from this, not by giving herself over to improvisation but by dispensing with plans altogether. Nothing to schedule, nothing to accept. And she still thinks this, except now she must pass through this phase, get past this interruption, defeat it, subdue it. To think that the
other day Honoria accused her of giving in to spontaneity. Spontaneity? Mara? The truth is, she takes it as a compliment: only inside her booth did she know anything about that, but outside of it, never. The one tending the grill asks his friend, who has barely opened his mouth since Mara arrived, to set the table and make sure not to forget anything. Then he employs a ceremonious sentence to announce that, in this heat, he’s going to have to remove his shirt. Mara sees that he’s wearing a plastic cross on his surprisingly hairless chest. As he proceeds through the steps he calls “the rituals of the grill master,” he tells stories of his life at the police academy. Mara assumes that ever since he was young he has been one of those extroverted people, capable of converting friendliness into a means of always doing what he wants. He seems happy with life, or something of the sort. The other one stays a ways away, near the table with the wobbly legs, deep in thought. They make one of those couples that perfectly complement each other. While the extrovert keeps telling stories, Mara has a perfect line of sight to the other one, so she can watch without appearing intrusive. There’s something about him that makes her distrust him, something that perfectly matches the stereotype of the Buenos Aires policeman. He’s retired, they told her yesterday. Actually, the other one told her, the hairless one, who is now explaining in detail about the small business he set up with his brother-in-law to sell spare parts to all the people who’ve recently moved to this town as a result of the security situation, even though as far as he’s concerned they’re just a bunch of rich folks who are impossible to understand. They leave behind their offices, their jobs, and they come here to start from scratch. That’s a security situation for you, he laughs. It’s nuts, but he’s happy, he’s got no complaints at all. Thanks to them he bought a new car at the beginning of the year. And the successes pile up, and apparently include his sons and his nephews, who turn out to be the sons of his partner. Mara tastes a bite of what he offers her and calms down. She has just learned that when they throw her out of the museum for neglecting her duties she’ll have another job to support herself.