(Following the line of thought these last reflections timidly suggest, I never cease to be surprised that men in general, or so they say, have certain functional techniques for approaching women that to me seem outrageously aggressive, or at least impossibly audacious. I can’t imagine myself under any circumstances inviting a stranger, or someone only recently met, to come to my apartment; I can’t imagine myself explaining to her, while feigning distraction and opening a beer, the esoteric details of my boring job, let alone asking her about things that don’t interest me — she knows they don’t interest me — in order to get down, as soon as possible, to the hurried ritual of “getting acquainted” and then jump into bed, like in a Discovery Channel sequence. Thinking it over, the only way it would seem natural for someone to come to my apartment is if they had already been there before. . oh, the paradox.)
The damp is, from the viewpoint of memory and its symbolic labyrinths, important to me, although I rarely admit that aloud and instead tend to complain about its detrimental effects on the upholstery of my armchair. One of my mother’s houses, when I lived with her, also had damp, and there was no way, however hard we tried, to eradicate that architectural blight permanently. It was the same throughout the whole neighborhood, all twenty-seven blocks of it. There was even a story, probably apocryphal, about a woman on the eighth block who painted the whole façade of her house in proudly traditional fuchsia and, after the damp sabotaged her undertaking in less than a week, strung a noose from a beam in the kitchen and hanged herself. It’s most likely that the two events — the rapidly rising damp and the lady’s suicide — coincided in time but without any sense of cause and effect. Whatever the case, it’s one more of the stories that mark my relationship with damp, and I now prefer to live peaceably with the moist blisters rather than carry on a vain battle against phenomena that are beyond human understanding.
My life is a repetition of one Saturday after another. What’s in between deserves another name. Sundays don’t count: they consist — I’m exaggerating here — of twenty-four wasted hours of which I will remember nothing the following day, and that following day, Monday, marks the beginning of the reign of inertia, whose only function is to carry me along smoothly, as if floating on a cloud of certainties, to the next Saturday. What’s more, on Saturdays I masturbate twice. This latter action isn’t a norm, but that’s what generally happens, though I don’t plan it: it’s one of those indisputable recurrences of natural phenomena, I guess, like when the fireflies in an area flicker on and off together at regular intervals, synchronized by an invisible being. I masturbate once in the morning, when I wake up, and again in the afternoon, when I come back from my walk around the neighborhood. I usually do it while looking at porn on the internet, though I sometimes resort to traditional methods, like imagination.
The vacant lot my apartment overlooks is the reason I moved here. Fed up with the homogenous panorama of buildings surrounding my former house, I decided I needed a little clean air, a rest for the eyes that only vegetation and a certain rural ambience could provide. As neither of these was to be found at a reasonable distance from the museum, I looked for apartments next to vacant lots. This was the only one I found.
My job isn’t particularly difficult, or particularly tedious. In fact, you could say that I like it. Three years ago, when I was out of regular work for almost four months, doing occasional commissions for various government institutions, I thought I would never find a place where spending eight hours a day would seem as pleasant as watching TV or looking through one of the volumes of my encyclopedia of biology. Then I got an offer from the museum and decided to accept it, so now I pass the day in an open-plan office with high ceilings, in an old building in the historic downtown of Mexico City, spending hours on end writing texts related to the site: press releases, salon notes, letters and speeches for the director, and so on. I also have other functions, which only occasionally require my skills, such as meeting and repelling the impromptu visitors who turn up to propose ridiculous exhibitions, or battling with the people in the printing department when there’s an error in a catalog.
As there was no title for the post I occupy, or at least no one told me what it was, I decided to invent one myself, and now I sign official e-mails as the museum’s “knowledge administrator.” I got the idea from a billboard on the Periférico beltway advertising the new degrees of a private university. One of them was just that: Knowledge Administration. I loved it; I felt it expressed my deepest convictions. Considering what is known of the world, it’s more than sufficient, I guess. Nowadays, the procedure is to administer knowledge in a way that makes people feel happy, or at least not constantly and irremediably miserable.
I’m not particularly happy. And, moreover, I don’t think I’ll ever study that degree program. In fact, I’m never going to study any degree program. In fact, I’ve never taken any course, at least not all the way through. True, I did spend four semesters doing English literature, but a deeply felt rejection of academic zeal made me stop in time, just before — hijacked by one of those diligent pupils who have an opinion about everything — I became convinced of the advantages of opting for a specific area of study, prepared to spend years dissecting the same, identical fragment of a nineteenth-century novel.
2
It must measure more or less 60 by 120 feet, but at night the lot looks bigger than it really is, and then I look out the window and imagine it’s really a large thicket. When I was young I also lived next to a vacant lot, in Cuernavaca, that all the local kids called the Thicket. (It wasn’t the damp house I mentioned earlier but another one, my father’s.) In contrast to my childhood lot, this one has a wall separating it from the street, so you’re hardly likely to be aware that the waste ground exists if you’re only passing by with other things on your mind. For that reason, I went around noting every lot that might be overgrown with shrubs until I found an apartment for rent next to one. It took me months, but I wasn’t in a hurry.
As I don’t have many belongings or many visitors, I didn’t mind that the place was really a small studio, and not in a very good state of repair. If I had more free time outside of work, I’d think about moving somewhere bigger and in better condition so I wouldn’t have to spend hours listening to the downstairs neighbors’ untimely arguments. But as I have little free time, I don’t mind much, and have even come to feel a certain delight in listening to the disputes of those neighbors, who, late at night, make me feel that I’m not alone.
3
Today, as I was leaving the museum, I decided to walk home rather than take the metro for the four stops that separate downtown from the station nearest to where I live. I’d never done this before. I hadn’t even considered the possibility of walking all the way here. I’d always imagined the various zones that make up this city, or the part of the city I know, as being unconnected on the surface, like islands that can only be approached from underground, on the metro. Walking, discovering that the pedestrian level is also a continuum, was a strange experience.