I hurriedly make a brief farewell, which doesn’t, however, avoid the worst. “Love you,” she says. “See you tomorrow at the office.”
As I hang up, I’m overwhelmed by corrosive anxiety. What have I done? What am I doing here by the telephone, my hand trembling, having accepted and, apparently, even proposed marriage to the secretary I have always silently despised?
I decide to go to bed without dinner but can’t sleep. I resolve that first thing tomorrow, I will unravel the enormous tangle that has resulted in me getting engaged, in Cecilia sighing tenderly, and, I imagine, some office jokers being doubled over with laughter of secret delight.
10
And such was, in fact, my intention: to clear up that bad joke, even if it meant doing irreparable harm to the unhappy Cecilia, and return to my routine of walks and cups of tea and vacant lots inhabited by clucking hens. But today turned out differently, as if, yet again, against my will.
I am now once more sitting by the telephone in my apartment, waiting to pluck up the courage to call my mom and give her the news of my wedding. I still can’t believe the course events have taken since this same time yesterday, when I called Cecilia with a hint of lust, prepared to take immediate advantage of her enigmatic note.
I arrived at the museum quite late this morning, as if fearing the moment of finding myself face to face with the woman who was now my fiancée. When I entered the office, she was already at her desk, wearing three pounds more makeup than recommended by health experts and gazing at me with an ingenuous little smile that shattered something inside me. I thought she would be deeply disappointed if I didn’t walk over and give her a good-morning kiss, something I had never done in my life. Once I was close enough to her face to hear her accelerated breathing and clearly smell that mixture of perfume and cheap makeup with which she was garnished, Ceci swiveled around and planted a discreet, restrained kiss on my lips in response to what must have seemed to her my invitation. I then heard behind me an uneasy commotion, a noise like people whispering and purposely letting pencils drop from their hands. I began to think I must have imagined that adolescent reaction from my coworkers, because as soon as I turned around toward them, what I noted was enormous indifference. And, having started along that route, I thought their imagined reaction sprang from a profound impulse of my own: perhaps I was the adolescent who turned in his chair while Rodrigo Saldívar, that office worker of rigid habits, threw his existence off-kilter by kissing the museum secretary.
After the kiss, I moved, blushing and looking ridiculous, to my seat and succeeded in keeping my eyes fixed on the computer screen until lunchtime. There wasn’t much work to be done, but I pretended to be writing the salon notes for the next forty exhibitions, while in fact I was robotically copying dictionary entries.
At the set hour, I stood up to go to the small restaurant where I always eat. As soon as she spotted me, Cecilia abandoned her work and caught up with me as I was disappearing out of the museum, ready, she said, to accompany me.
“You’re very shy, aren’t you?” she remarked on the way there. And before I could respond, she added, “That’s what I really like about you. You’re not the same as the other men in the office, spending the whole day going on about their lap-dancing clubs and their whores for all to hear.”
Without being completely sure whom she was referring to, I said I really liked Jorge, the designer.
“Yeah, but he’s as gay as they get. They all used to say the same about you, and that was why you and Jorge sometimes chatted at your desk, but I always knew it was a lie. You’re a real man, right?”
Despite the inconvenience of the whole situation, I felt offended, as if just the mere fact of questioning my manliness didn’t sit well with me, didn’t sit at all well with me, so I responded, with a degree of severity, that one didn’t have to choose between being an idiot and being gay, and that you could be quiet and still be macho. That’s what I said, macho, a word I obviously sorely repented later and one which would have made my belligerent, feminist mother violently strike out my name from the pages of her will.
My mother, whom I am at the point of calling to give the news (that I suspect no one, her least of all, will particularly welcome) of my imminent marriage.
Ceci and I walked to the restaurant. She told me she ate there too sometimes, but as we’d never seen each other, I interpreted her declaration as a gratuitous boast. I was silent, even crestfallen, responding monosyllabically to her infrequent demands. We sat down, and I ordered: soup, rice, diced beef tenderloin. She had the same. Then, suddenly infused with a strange power, I told her she had always seemed to me a very beautiful woman, and I knew she was hardworking as well, so that was why I’d decided to ask her to marry me. This declaration was, I have to admit, partially false, but only partially: I found Cecilia attractive, especially due to the haughty air that accompanied all her movements, as if implying that she, in spite of being a secretary, had us all, at every moment, firmly by the balls. It was this attitude that had, on more than one occasion, made me dream of dominating her, or letting myself be dominated by her toughness.
She smiled in an exaggerated way, as if trying, with her histrionics, to hide a touch of melancholy that was, nonetheless, easy to detect. I wondered if I should kiss her, but the smell of food on our breath and the memory of our clumsy kiss that morning put me off, so I left flirtation for later.
The rest of the day, spent sitting at my desk, passed without incident. I succeeded in avoiding Cecilia’s little glances in my direction, and it was only when she passed near my desk, en route to Ms. Watkins’s office, that I gave her a discreet, barely perceptible smile. I finally left the building and came straight home, without the long, liberating stroll or the cup of black tea in my beloved, perennially greasy café. That’s why I’m sitting here, much earlier than usual, trying to pluck up the courage to call my mom and say, with my characteristic conviction, “I appear to be getting married.”
11
Isabel Watkins looks fixedly at me across her desk. She’s holding a pink card, and lying before her is an envelope of the same color announcing, in gold lettering, the engagement of “Rodrigo Saldívar & Cecilia Román” in the eighteenth-century typeface Jorge, the designer, chose for us. On the diptych she has in her hand, Isabel Watkins reads her name—“plus one”—and the time and place of the event. Below this is the address of a party room Don Enrique, my future father-in-law, has booked against my better judgment. Isabel puts the sheet of paper on the desk beside the scented envelope and looks fixedly at me.
“I don’t know what to say.”
Silence.
After a moment, she continues. “When I employed you here at the museum, I thought you wouldn’t last long, that within a few months you’d have found something better, on a magazine or in a publishing house, and that you’d have jumped at the opportunity to further your career. I also thought that you’d have wanted to rise up the cultural ladder, that you’d have politely introduced yourself to the minister at the first opening we held. And although that prospect annoyed me a little, I was also pleased to think you were a kid on the way up. But now you tell me you’re going to get married to my secretary and. . I don’t know. It’s just that I always thought you were looking for something different, that you expected something else from life.”