“Yes, Isabel, I appreciate your sincerity. And I understand what you’re saying. But to be honest, I don’t expect anything, except that things happen to me.”
That’s what I say: “Things happen to me.” The expression seems to exasperate Ms. Watkins, who quickly gets rid of me on some invented pretext, but with the menace of “we’ll talk later,” so that I’m on my guard for the rest of the day. It’s Thursday, May 11. In two months, I’m going to be married. After numerous chats with Cecilia’s parents, and Cecilia herself, I’ve convinced them all that the best thing would be for Ceci to move into my tiny apartment “while we’re saving up to buy someplace.” The promise of ownership dazzles them, and they all concur with me, though, in essence, the only motive for my proposal is staying near the vacant lot. During these last three weeks since the engagement became official, I’ve clung to the waste ground as if it were the last possible salvation from the arbitrariness of things.
Mom, against all odds, very quickly washed her hands of the affair, as if she were giving me up as a lost cause.
“And might I know whom you’re going to marry?” she asked sharply over the phone.
“Ceci, you remember her. Ms. Watkins’s assistant at the museum.”
“An assistant?”
“Yes, you met her once, at that opening of the exhibition on social movements in the capital I invited you to about a year ago.”
And she, after a silence pregnant with reproach, “The secretary?”
“Yes, that’s the one. But she’s like Ms. Watkins’s personal assistant, not the secretary. She does a lot of different things in the museum.”
“Ah, I’m happy for you, Rodrigo. Let me know when you’ve fixed a date so I can book the ticket early; you know how it is with the planes — there are only two flights a week, and they’re always packed.”
Maybe if my mother had been indignant. Maybe if she’d shaken me out of this lethargy, this frame of mind that makes me yield to the secret designs of fate, turning up disguised as the most absurd accidents: a note given to a woman who is suddenly in love with me, or says she is; a café that becomes a haunt because I come across it one fine day on my way home; a growing collection of tea bags that occupies more and more wall space in my bedroom, reminding me my wedding day will soon be upon me, and I’ll have no time to prepare myself psychologically before the babies and the diapers and the smell of shit become the ritornello of my nights. . Maybe if my mother had warned me, in her wisdom — as blind as it is immense — that getting married is one of the most serious blunders anyone can make. . Maybe then, well, I would have woken up to a different reality, one in which entering into a marital contract with a woman I don’t respect would mean the complete demolition of my self-esteem. But that wasn’t the case. My mother limited herself to asking about the date of the fateful incident, and we ended the call with a nominal kiss that, for her part, signified simple pity. Pity and compassion.
In the same distant, disillusioned tone employed by my mother, Isabel Watkins called me into her office this morning to tell me she had received my message and didn’t understand the reasons for this unexpected piece of news. Despite the fact that both Cecilia and I come to the office every day, we sent her invitation by mail, a week ago now, at the insistence of my fiancée, who seemed to believe it was bad taste to deliver it in person — but not, for example, to use cheap, pink, scented paper for the invitation to our engagement party.
What I find most impressive about the situation is that never before has Ms. Watkins spoken to me as an equal; I’d never noticed the least sign of empathy in her or seen the smallest gesture of kindness toward us, her unhappy subjects. Diligent, professional, hysterical, she had always treated me with the remote coldness of political figures; but this morning, as if I’d confessed to her that I had prostate cancer, she spoke to me with sincere, unforeseen friendship. I’m disconcerted to think she had hoped to see me rise up the boring pyramid of bureaucracy. I’m disconcerted, but also moved. I imagine myself as the deputy director of cultural heritage or undersecretary for national celebrations or head of the institute for the preservation of her fucking ass.
I leave work and walk home without stopping for tea in the café without coffee. A few days ago I bought a packet of Lipton’s, and now I prepare the infusion myself, so my collection of used tea bags continues to grow at the rate of one a day — if I drink more than one cup of tea, I throw the residue away.
When the discussion about the matrimonial residence began, Cecilia, in the presence of her parents, proposed that she should move in with me immediately, even though it was still a couple of months to the wedding. Don Enrique silently granted his daughter the right to live in concubinage for a while so long as we married at the end of that period. I roundly refused: I intended to respect Cecilia’s dignity until our wedding day, I said.
The resulting situation was equally uncomfortable for us all, and I would gladly have avoided it if it had only been up to me. Don Enrique, with slightly alarming knowledge of the cause, informed me that Cecilia — there present — was not a virgin and added that for such a right-minded person as me, that was a disadvantage. As if that wasn’t enough, Don Enrique said he thought it was normal for me to want to “know” Cecilia before the wedding, and added that he wouldn’t disapprove of our moving in together right away. Finding myself cornered, I argued that it was “a matter of principle,” and independent of the state of my future wife’s hymen — I didn’t put it like that, of course — I’d prefer to wait for the proper moment, to give the ceremony greater meaning.
My decision received Don Enrique’s approval and was particularly welcomed by Carmelita, Cecilia’s mom. My fiancée, meanwhile, distanced herself from the negotiation of her sullied virginity.
12
There’s the hen again. I don’t know how, but she’s survived the frequent storms. She didn’t show herself for several days. Now she’s pecking the earth in the vacant lot, and I suspect she knows I’m observing her. There’s something flirtatious about her I’ve never noted before. She’s making a less unpleasant noise — cluck — than usual, more tuneful, you might say. It’s half past seven on Friday evening, and the setting sun shines on some of her feathers, making her more beautiful. She almost seems like a noble animal, a Paleolithic hen, capable of perching high up in an oak tree, a holly oak, and emitting a melodic, tuneful song.
I go to the kitchen for some grains of rice to throw to her. The hen understands what I’m doing and stands just below the window, moving her tail just as gracefully as she can, which isn’t very gracefully. I think about bringing her into the house, going down and fetching her or lowering a basket full of delicacies into which she will climb, sure of her good luck. Bringing her to my bedroom or leaving her in the living room to surprise Cecilia when she comes to visit me tonight to go over — once again — the details of the wedding.
But the hen isn’t mine, I think. She must have a careful owner who purposely leaves her in the lot so that she doesn’t have to live shut up in an apartment like mine, and so the kindly neighbors and the filthy worms feed her, saving the owner the expense. And if she doesn’t have an owner, the hen is, as are few creatures in this city, in this world, her own mistress. She does just as she pleases, unaware of the precarious situation in which she lives. Tomorrow they could start building on the lot or declare it a parking lot, and the hen would probably be violently evicted, left in the street, vulnerable to the passing cars, alone in the whirlwind of legs of a cloudy afternoon. But in spite of this threat of danger, the hen doesn’t lose her wits, or whatever wits she might have, but continues pecking the ground unconcernedly. The hen is free. Maybe, it occurs to me, because she was never in a uterus. She never dribbled inside a mother or was attached by a fragile cartilage to someone else’s belly. She was born from a limpid egg. A smooth, white egg, devoid of notable features, that opened up for her and left her beak exposed to the harsh Mesopotamian sun. Ah, the oviparous animal, what a model of behavior and temperance during its birth!