Similar stories that I have heard: some burglars, after the robbery, shit at the scene of the crime. A signature, a personal mark, a little detail. The initials of two lovers carved into a tree trunk, crap to autograph a crime — it’s the same thing; the desire for permanence, when you come down to it. But this burglar, if he was one, reversed the order: he didn’t take anything. The turd wasn’t a symbolic payment for any removal. Just crap, like a menhir on the tiger-striped bedspread. A semifluid totem. A fucking shitty insult. When I was capable of returning to the bedroom, I held my nose, screwed up my eyes, and folded the bedspread over the little gift. I disposed of it, not without worrying about how much it would pain Cecilia to lose her horrendous feline bedspread.
I told her I’d taken all the bedding to the self-service laundromat. That I’d sat down to read a celebrity gossip magazine, and when I got up to see how the wash was progressing, I’d found the machine empty: no tiger-striped bedspread, no sheets, no pillowcases. I was even careful to offer her precise details of what I’d been reading: breast implants, infidelities, probable U-turns in the sexual preferences of certain television stars, things like that. It was an absurd explanation, but no more absurd than the actual truth. Cecilia threatened to go to the laundromat to complain, to demand the return of her bedspread. I was sharp enough to dissuade her with the promise of new extravagances: I told her they were selling a bedspread exactly like hers, but violet, on the corner of Dr. Vértiz and Río de la Loza. Later, I’d think up another lie to cover the first one. The causal series of lies is no less rigid than its parallel version in the real world. At times the two series become entwined for a moment in a single causal sequence we term, for pure convenience, the first person singular.
The question of the authorship — intellectual, but also material — of the perfect turd kept me awake for many nights following the event. Now, due to my unemployment, the enigma has expanded into the daylight hours, and I can’t shake off the grotesque, affectedly symmetrical image of the turd in the center of the bed. I think that if I had any money, I’d hire one of those detectives who advertise in the classified sections of newspapers and set him on the trail of the scatological felon. Given this, I regret having disposed of the evidence since no DNA test can now be carried out, nor can single hairs, mistakenly left between the bedsheets during the dastardly act, be extracted, nor a faithful reconstruction of the scene of the shameful deed made.
When I was dismissed from the museum, I had some meager savings. The greater part of my earlier reserve funds had disappeared with the costs arising from my recent marriage: outings to the movies, a leather handbag, board games, alcohol. . anything to relieve the forced regime of living together. Given my penury, I decide to investigate the dark rationale behind the events myself, and given the lack of evidence, and my complete and insuperable ignorance in relation to my point of departure, I decide the investigation will be simply speculative, rational. The first question I have to answer is how the subject who shat on my bed entered and left. After discounting hypotheses in the general area of spontaneous generation and mystical manifestation, I tell myself he must have entered through the door of the apartment, like anyone else. Another option, which can’t be completely discounted, is that he entered through the window overlooking the lot; the other window, the one that looks out on the interior courtyard, has bars. If he entered through the window, he must have used a ladder (coming from the vacant lot) or a rope (coming from the roof); either possibility involves a logistical deployment at odds with the speed of the events. He must, therefore, have entered through the door. But the lock didn’t show any signs of having been forced, so the intruder (a) has a key to my apartment or (b) knows someone who has a key to my apartment. Or even (c) the intruder comes from a parallel reality, another time and space, and just crossed the threshold separating it from this world, appearing directly on the tiger-striped bedspread, squatting, with the crap at the point of exiting through his anus. But no, option (c) is unthinkable. It’s an option that can only be conceived by theoretical physicists. Or mathematicians. Or science fiction writers. Or schizophrenics, which is to say, none of the above.
Naturally, even when all the loose ends of the break-in have been tied, the motive for the misdemeanor will still need to be clarified. Either the poo has a meaning or it doesn’t. If it does, then it can be thought of as a sign and is waiting happily in its loathsome image for me to venture onto the course of its exegesis. If it has no meaning beyond that of perturbing me, it can feel satisfied with itself, can pull up its pestilential anchor and set sail for other, more fragile sensibilities.
I allow myself a rather unscientific deduction: if the intruder has keys or knows someone who does, he must also know me (I changed the locks as soon as I moved here), and if he knows me, he knows the shit on the bedspread would perturb me, but also that I could find in it a pretext for reflecting on other regions, perhaps less traveled, of human existence. The intruder is a sower of clues, a plotter of consequences, sufficiently wise to even anticipate these reflections of mine. Everything would seem to confirm that the intruder is the person who knows me best, the person most naturally close to me, my — until now — unknown brother.
2
Living with Cecilia is self-inflicted torture. Her scorn for me grows with the weeks, festering like a tenacious parasite in the inches of mattress that separate us each night. Sex, the last bastion of our reduced cohabitation, has, in this situation of overt antagonism, become watered down. In the mornings, Cecilia leaves for the museum, and I wander around the local streets in search of clues and evidence. (I think maybe some malevolent neighbor had been watching my movements for months before dealing the final blow. Now he amuses himself observing my increasing desperation, like a psychoanalyst who is entertained by the perversions of his patient, provoking them with decidedly indiscreet mother-related comments.)