To be honest, I’ve never seen a hen being born, or any other bird. Once I found the body of a newly hatched turtledove on the sidewalk, but that’s as far as it goes. Despite this, I like to imagine the birth process of birds — something I must have seen on TV, now that I come to think of it. If not, how do I know a bird is born from an egg? Could someone, without having seen it or heard a detailed description, imagine how birds are born? And mammals? Would it be possible to think up the idea of a little calf covered in blood coming out of the rear end of a cow if there were no visual antecedent of such a traumatic event?
It’s as difficult for me to imagine, based on a complete lack of information, the birth of a calf as it is to think of what marriage will be like. I’ve never had close experience of it. No one around me even considered marriage as a possibility. In my life, it appeared next to other myths belonging to some remote era of which even my parents — divorced since time began — spoke of, in a tone of prudent reserve, as something that had now been superseded. I thought of other, almost magical situations that sounded to me contemporary with marriage: the maize field to which a young servant goes at daybreak every morning to soak the grain in water and lime before making that day’s tortillas; the black-and-white television announcing a contretemps between the gringos and the Russians; the firm belief that a group of students can change the world once and for all. All those things I used to hear my mother and her friends commenting on; things my father never wanted to have to mention again. And among those situations, marriage, like an enormous unknown that, in idle hours, I fancy to be perverse.
Now, in just two weeks’ time, I’ll also be one half of a married couple, a perverse husband who will do everything he can to retain the secret of his deepest passions: the Franciscan love I profess for a stray hen, a propensity for making collections of arbitrary objects, my tendency to recall a dull, Coapa-lysergic adolescence as a dark, dusty corner in my history. An office-worker husband who will shut away his pornographic clipping from the eighties and his used tea bags in a desk drawer, together with his photo of his only trip to an island — Cozumel, at the age of sixteen, with a girlfriend who gave every sign of brilliance and ended up selling handicrafts on one side of the main square in Tepoztlán — and the piece of yellow paper on which a potential lover scrawled her telephone number with a pink pen so they could arrange a date in a pay-by-the-hour hotel on the Tlalpan highway.
Yes, because that’s the type of husband I’ll be. If I get married (and it’s not that I’ve made up my mind yet; it’s not really up to me), it won’t be to lovingly accept Cecilia’s fashion sense — she uses the excuse of it being Sunday to wear her favorite T-shirt: faded cotton with a ridiculous slogan in the center (it says something like “Coco Loco,” “Sexy Austria,” or “University of Cars,” an impossible conjunction of words that must have sounded vaguely prestigious in the nineties). No, that’s not why. And neither will I get married for the pleasure of her company in a silence laden with ingenuous emotion. Nor to dream of taking her to Acapulco on the first possible occasion. No.
13
The wedding was reasonably successful. My mom came to the capital, arrived at the ceremony on time, and left early for a hotel I’d booked in advance. The next day she flew back home to Los Girasoles. I didn’t tell my dad because we have a relationship that is friendly as long as we don’t talk to each other, and I thought it would be a bad idea to change things. What’s more, he lives in San Cristóbal and, in contrast to my mother, doesn’t have enough money to buy a return flight on short notice: as an uncle of mine once informed me, my dad has two other children, both very young, and what with the habitual costs of paternity and the caprices of his wife, the meager profits from his candle factory are eaten up, along with his even more insignificant salary as a second-rank academic.
Cecilia was more excited than ever in her white dress with ten thousand flounces that cost me exactly ten thousand pesos. I was moved. And she even — although I find it hard to accept — inspired a sentiment close to love in me.
The religious ceremony took longer than I’d expected, and it was only possible thanks to my having bribed the priest of a modest neighborhood church, revealing to him that I’d never been baptized and explaining that my fiancée’s family mustn’t know as they were very Catholic. The priest showed himself to be understanding, or perhaps greedy, and accepted the second financial incentive I offered, pretending, despite this display of nerve, that he was saving my soul by bringing me back into the fold. A fold to which I had, in fact, never belonged.
Then came the party proper in the excessively ornate venue my father-in-law had booked. Don Enrique very quickly got drunk and gave an awkward, unintelligible speech that everyone applauded. Carmelita attempted, but obviously didn’t manage, to drag my mother down into a spiral of tears. Jorge, the designer from the museum, was radiant throughout the whole reception, endlessly repeating the same mantra: that he’d watched us fall in love, that he’d been there from the beginning. I abstained from asking him, given his role as a key witness, to provide some explanation of what was happening in my life. Isabel Watkins had hit the bottle too, but she disguised her drunkenness by hanging from the neck of her companion, a photographer ten years her junior whose work had recently been exhibited in the museum.
The honeymoon — a couple of nights at a Guerrero beach — turned out, in spite of our continued state of intoxication, to be pleasant. Cecilia asked me to take her standing up, resting her weight on the window ledge of a cheap, semi-rustic hotel, with her wedding dress bunched up on her brown back. I admit that in the nude, she was more beautiful than she seemed when dressed, and I enjoyed making her tremble by stroking the skin around her anus, a zone privileged by her nervous system. (But I also have to say that I was not, for all this, a notable lover.)
The festivities lasted a weekend, and then we returned — having taken the Monday off for her to move into my apartment — to our respective posts at the museum. I am now sitting at my desk while she looks at me, and I can’t get my head around the idea that the secretary, Cecilia, that woman who wiggles past on her way to Ms. Watkins’s office, is my legally recognized wife, whom I have to watch from my uncomfortable wooden chair while typing letters to no one.
When we leave the museum, we walk hand in hand to the metro. In the carriage, we stand in shy silence, and I pass the time looking at the faces of the other travelers while my hand rests on Cecilia’s right buttock. She seems grateful for this slight contact, which, from her perspective, saves her from the ignominy of being single, so she smiles secretly and, when the crush becomes oppressive, rests her head against my chest. When we come up from the metro, we walk along the less busy streets in the neighborhood. We stop off briefly at the corner store and buy a sugary treat for after dinner. (I have a suspicion that this custom, repeated over decades of wholesome matrimony, will result in consensual diabetes that we will both accept almost without complaint.)