While I’m hatching this dishonest scheme, the bird moves back into the bosky shadows of the lot. I sit on the bed and open the drawer in which I keep the used tea bags. After contemplating them for a while, I decide I need a new project, something as ambitious as that collection, one that completely absorbs my intellectual capacities, that aligns my ideas in a single direction, in just the same way as a magnetized metal bar aligns iron filings.
That’s what I need: a Project. The other possible solution to overcoming the lethal sense of dissatisfaction into which I’ve sunk (for how long?) would be to find something like a Community: a close bond with a group of people who understand my interest in collecting tea bags, for instance, or my irrepressible desire to live next to an empty lot. But I suspect that no such groups exist, and that I have steadily dynamited all the communities I ever belonged to — the drug addicts in the gardens near the house in Coapa, the girlfriend I went to Cozumel with, and even Ms. Watkins, that secretly friendly boss who, despite all, believed in my abilities for a while. Dynamited them to the point where I’ve ended up more alone than a chili in a maize field, as my grandmother used to say, living with a woman to whom nothing except neutral Newtonian space seems to unite me.
16
It’s Monday. The minute I woke, I uttered an exaggerated groan that frightened Cecilia more than I’d expected.
“What’s wrong?” she asked in alarm. I invented a complex stomach ailment that would keep me in bed for at least forty-eight hours. Cecilia didn’t believe me, but even so she agreed to tell Ms. Watkins I couldn’t come in. She’s less unpleasant now that she’s my wife. If I’d missed a day at the office while we were simple workmates, she would have hurried to Ms. Watkins to vehemently demand my dismissal. Luckily, I never missed a day during those three years.
So, I stayed at home. The first thing I did was leaf through, without seriously reading, a newspaper from last week. The classified ads occupied my attention more than any other section, and within them, most particularly, those relating to sexual encounters. I amused myself in this way until my imagination sparked up, encouraged by the indecent messages of seek and capture, and I slowly masturbated on the bed, unconcerned about the possibility of ejaculating onto Cecilia’s pillow, which I did. After that, I watched TV for quite a while and once again tried to think up an Important Project that would give meaning to my haphazard existence. Two hours later, resigned to my fate, I resolved to go into the lot to find the bird’s secret hiding place, to decipher the reasons behind her actions. That was to some extent an Important Project, even if it wasn’t really one. It was to some extent because it related one of my most authentic obsessions, the hen, to the need to understand her mechanisms, her minutiae, her little animal decisions that, without being decisions, made up a strangely fascinating, ordinary existence.
And here I am now on the other side of the wall, my shoes half sunk in the mud. I walk carefully through the undergrowth, searching for the hen and attempting to attract her with a sound I feel would be familiar, exciting: the equivalent of the sex-wanted ads in the newspaper, but in clucks. “Seeking a female with dirty feathers and loose morals,” I cluck to her.
After walking across a couple of rotting planks, I reach the darkest, wildest core of the waste ground, that part that can’t be seen from my window, toward which the hen is usually walking when I lose sight of her. The first time I entered the lot, with the frustrated intention of enticing her toward the table that was to serve as a shelter, I didn’t get as far as this remote, overgrown region. I can hear the hen clucking in the bushes, but although she’s close by, it’s difficult to get through the dense vegetation to the place where the sound is coming from, and I have to make numerous detours to avoid nettles, thorny branches, and pieces of barbed wire. When I’m at the point of locating its origin, the clucking stops; nor can I see any movement among the leaves. The hen has disappeared. I desperately search all around but don’t find a single feather. On the other hand, I do uncover a plastic bag just like the other one that, a few months ago, made me back off and run out of the lot, the bag full of viscera. The possibility that this bag might also be stuffed with intestines in an advanced state of putrefaction horrifies me. Not just because of my disgust and revulsion, my profound and, you might say, fainthearted dislike of blood, but also because finding a second bag during this second incursion into the lot would imply a pattern, a wink of complicity, a recurrence of — for god’s sake — grotesque, abhorrent things; it would imply the lot is a place of perversion and death, a place where you could, with astounding impunity, dump the corpses of large mammals, thinking mammals, mammals with skirts.
Confronted with these pure possibilities, I feel overtaken by events. I have the sudden intuition that it wasn’t my liking for things rural that led me to move next to the plot, but a propensity for catastrophe and a tendency toward the sordid that goes beyond my conscious undertaking to convert myself into a mediocre, spineless man. So I decide to take a roundabout path through other shady areas of the lot to avoid contact with, or simple closeness to, the bag possibly full of intestines. I stoop to pass below a branch that hangs, as if brought down by lightning, over a heap of trash. And as I move into the darkness, with the foliage of the lianas and the general vegetal disorder covering my body, I feel a blow on the back of my neck. And I fall. I fall as if going beyond the ground. Like Alice when she falls while following the rabbit. The rabbit whose form can be clearly made out in the scar on my arm, and on the moon, so they say. The rabbit that, in my case, is a stray and — who knows? — even imaginary hen, let loose in the weeds of my inertia.
17
I’m woken by a beautiful ray of sunlight falling directly onto my face and the cackling presence of the hen, who is pulling up worms a couple of feet from my ear. I pass my tongue over my lips and discover the taste of dust. I can also sense the dryness of the earth on the skin of my arms, the palms of my hands, my eyelids, my whole body. I’m lying faceup. I received a blow to the back of the neck, and I’m lying faceup, covered in dirt. I probably fell on my front and took the opportunity of an instant of consciousness to turn on my own axis, like a predictable planet.
Pain. Pain very close to the back of my neck. The blow wasn’t exactly on the back of my neck. It was on my head, to one side, a few inches from the ear now listening to the clucking of the hen. It was a blow on that part of my head where the infestations of lice always started in my childhood. In the finest, most vulnerable hairs through which I would run my hand to feel the gritty lumps of blood, the pain. Pain and confusion.
I can’t have been lying here for long. One or two hours at the most. Cecilia hasn’t left the museum, and the sun is still high, so it’s somewhere between midday and early afternoon. Two hours maybe. Not more. A few short hours disconnected, absent, lying faceup in the lot — my beloved waste ground next to my building — accompanied by the intermittent clucking of my wardress, by the pain of her victims, the worms. Worm pain. Neck pain. I sense and look at my grimy body. I extract a twig from my mouth. I wipe the earth from my eyelids with the right sleeve of my shirt, which is less dirty than the rest of me. My slow efforts to stand don’t seem to surprise the hen, whom I’ve never before seen at such close quarters. Now I can appreciate the dull opacity of her plumage, the unhealthy look of her legs, the food fighting for survival, wriggling in her mouth. Worms.