Cecilia has stopped staring at me because Ms. Watkins has called her into her office. To respond to this call, the secretary has to pass very close to my desk as the space is limited and I’m the one who is nearest to the director (physically, that is, because in relation to this institution’s organigram of power, there are only two levels: Ms. Watkins and everyone else). As she approaches me, Cecilia turns as if to make sure no one is looking and leaves a folded note on my desk, giving me, as she does so, a suddenly complicit, deeply disconcerting smile. Wasn’t she some sort of working-life nemesis, perpetually embittered and ready to do her all to ruin the day of any fellow employee, especially me? The note lies there before me on the desk, and Cecilia is already in Ms. Watkins’s office, but I don’t dare read its message.
9
At the end of the workday, when everyone was beginning to switch off their computers and give a distracted “See you tomorrow” from the door, I picked up Cecilia’s note and slipped it quickly into my jacket pocket. I left the office with the same “See you tomorrow” and came home.
The note is here before me, but I still need to pluck up the courage to unfold it. Could it be an invitation to her house? An amorous confession? A raffle ticket? I go out to the corner store in search of cans of beer. The corner store, however, is closed, so I walk through the neighborhood as night falls, looking for somewhere else to buy beer.
Coapa was, as I now know, an inhospitable world. Coming out of college, all the students (or all the ones I remember, myself included) would enter a locality that was like a lost city and, cramming ourselves into a pokey room, silently drink beer. Ever since that time, I’ve liked the flavor of canned Modelo. Now, more than twelve years later, I open an identical can in my small apartment in a better area (that is, closer to the center) and take a couple of swigs of the same cold, almost transparent, slightly greenish liquid I’ve spent half an hour looking for. I drink three beers, one after the other, hardly pausing between swigs, and feel triumphantly drunk. It will be impossible, I think, to go to the office tomorrow. It is in this state that I decide to unfold Cecilia’s note, disposed to satisfy my bloated curiosity. There are two words on the paper, and as soon as I read them I realize there has been a colossal misunderstanding. It is yet to be seen if it’s an ultimately beneficial misunderstanding, insofar as the satisfaction of my concupiscence is concerned, or if the misunderstanding will end up being as much a burden as if I’d decided to carry a truck on my back for the rest of my nights. The words, written in an unsteady hand, have, for once in Cecilia’s lettered life, no spelling errors; they are “I accept.”
Accept what? I consider the possibility that it might refer to an ambiguous, human, metaphysical acceptance, the acceptance of things as they appear in our path as we file along the city’s median strips; the acceptance of the sound of the cars and of the morning announcements of the men selling gas and water and other products, the utility of which is never made clear; a wholesale acceptance, without fissures, that embraces creation, its multiple faces, its most sordid corners; the continual scorn of her father, her post as a secretary, her humiliation at the hands of Ms. Watkins, the unbearable silence of her workmates. I consider all this as the possible reference of the terse message, but later I understand that it was the beer talking, and that Cecilia, the sly secretary, is probably alluding to something more concrete.
It then occurs to me that when I started working at the museum, they gave me a sheet of paper with the extensions of all the employees, and some, the most committed or the most indispensable, had included a home phone number in case some extremely urgent, work-related emergency necessitated their immediate localization — something that, it goes without saying, never occurred in that museum, with its slack work pace. Without much hope, I look through the untidy pile of papers in a drawer until I find the sheet of paper, and there is Cecilia’s cell phone number. Thank goodness it’s her cell phone, I think, otherwise it would be a real pain to call her house and have a male voice — unexpected and hostile — answer the phone.
“Hello,” she says in an almost challenging tone, as if she had been waiting for my call.
“Hi Ceci, it’s me, Rodrigo, from the office.” I’ve never before used the shortened form of her name, nor heard anyone else use it, but her reply is concise and rapid, so I suppose she didn’t mind my affectionate “Ceci” too much.
“I know it’s you, I recognized your voice right away. . So, what is it?” she asks, as if she doesn’t know.
“How do you mean, ‘what is it?’ Your little message, of course.”
“Ah, that.”
There’s an uneasy silence on both sides. I have the sense I should take some sort of initiative but don’t feel up to it. An unexpected timidity has my throat in its stranglehold, and I think my voice will sound more high-pitched than usual. Eventually it is she who breaks the silence, and I have the strange sensation this lack of initiative on my part will have negative repercussions for me at some not too distant point in my life.
“Don’t you think you should talk about the little message you sent me? That came first, right?” she says.
The misunderstanding is now clear: someone, either in error or out of malice, had left a message on Cecilia’s desk, signed with my name or somehow insinuating that I wrote it. As her voice is friendlier than usual, and given that her response to the mysterious note was positive (“I accept”), I don’t want to disillusion her by explaining the mechanisms of the cruel trick that has been played on her. I’m the sort of person who worries about the effects of my actions on others.
“Ah, my little message,” I say, as if we were both not fed up by now with using that ridiculous term. “What did you think about it?”
“Well, to be honest, it was a bit weird of you to say it out of the blue like that, but I’d already thought, you know. . and so I accepted. I just want to ask you not to say anything until I’ve talked to my mom and dad.”
Numbed by the turn the conversation has taken, I decide to let things run their course, guided not only by my drunkenness, but also by a suicidal instinct that at times like this translates into inexplicable forms of behavior and a discursive fluency I’m normally lacking.
“Take as long as you need, Ceci, don’t worry. I’ve waited for this moment a long time, so I can hold on a bit longer.” The words come out as if from an answering machine that has cut in completely against my will. I can scarcely believe the nerve with which I’m playing my own dirty trick, but there’s something impersonal about it all, as if the events were happening far, far away from me, in a movie I’m watching, in a world similar to this one but stranger, where Cecilia and I have an age-old friendship. She, luckily, interrupts my thoughts just when I’m at the point of speaking again.
“Rodrigo, one more thing. I’d like it to be in a church, just to please my grandma; she’s ever so devout.”
This last turn takes me completely by surprise. I suspect that it is Cecilia — the cruel secretary who has made my life impossible since I started at the museum — who tells Ms. Watkins when I leave the office to waste a little time in the courtyard; that it is this same Cecilia who is playing a slightly ridiculous, thoroughly bad-taste joke on me. My response is slow in coming, but I eventually agree in a preoccupied tone and splutter out some impromptu praise of the Catholic Church that she, I note, doesn’t completely believe.