My mother, unpredictably, interpreted my unemployment as a necessary pause in my existence, a moment for doubt and reflection that might, with a little luck, sooner or later return me to the paths of an enlightened life. She calls me more often now. Tells me a new stationery store has opened in Los Girasoles, and that the event, in its provincial magnitude, has generated a great deal of excitement among the natives. She says that not a few of her university colleagues have gone there to sport their most solemn apparel among the aisles of indelible-ink pens. I suspect she is lying, that my mother wants to seduce me with stupid stories so that I’ll yield to the folksy nature of her anecdotes and move to Los Girasoles. Once there, she would undoubtedly do her utmost to convince me of the need to enroll in a degree program: there is no better way, in that town, of killing time. She will attempt to convince me of the advantages of divorce. Or rather, the disadvantages of marriage. Of the inherent machismo of the very idea of marriage, the senselessness of stable relationships, the enormous number of marriages that fail or end in murder. She will explain that, according to research, the only type of marriage that avoids all these pitfalls is the marriage between homosexuals, which is already legal in the capital. She’ll attempt to convince me to go bi. She’ll give me flowers. Dresses. Plastic pricks with more or less realistic veins and bulges. No. I can’t go to Los Girasoles on my own. If I do, it will be with Cecilia, who at least is a woman, and my wife, and is conservative, and conservatism is a positive force in a world that is falling apart at the seams. Conservatism is the keystone of a wall. The conservative person is an exception, a landmark. A turd in the middle of a tiger-striped bedspread.
This idleness has brutally confronted me with the meanness of my spirit. Not only do I spend a great deal of time thinking stupid thoughts, but the curse of the ability to reflect obliges me to recognize that I spend a great deal of time thinking stupid thoughts. An acute case of misanthropy is gestating somewhere deep within me: I conceive my relationship with humans as a, to this point, necessary evil, the reasons for which are increasingly less clear. At this stage in the game, I consider full communion with a group of delightful people to be completely unattainable. The loss of my job and the resulting isolation have only confirmed my belief that the inexorable path I follow leads to an unprecedented, unpredictable level of misery. The only type of communion with people to which I can aspire is through objects. For example, by observing the tea bags I collected at one time, which simultaneously refer me to the humans who produced them and the humans who saw me consume the product. Then I understand that society as a whole is a machine, kept perfectly oiled by relationships of courtesy and the stock and household appliance markets. And I understand that humans are good.
Cecilia returns from the museum laden with supermarket bags. From her grim expression, I suspect her patience is reaching its limits. As soon as she comes through the door, she starts making sarcastic comments intended to wound my manly pride. Fortunately I’ve never developed any such pride, and I find no satisfaction in defending a dignity I don’t possess, so I observe Cecilia with a mixture of pity and indifference, accepting that, within her scale of values, the situation of having a useless husband is a deeply unhappy one.
All of a sudden I am invaded by empathy: I comprehend I’ve made this woman unhappier than she was before. As a form of compensation, I tell her that tomorrow, one way or another, I’ll get together the money to take her to Acapulco for a few days. She quite rightly says Acapulco is a horrible city, full of garbage and death and vulgarity and ferocity and drug trafficking and places where they’ll give you a blowjob for two pesos (she doesn’t mention that last one, but it’s true), and that she’d prefer to have a holiday someplace where there’s not even the remotest chance of finding a corpse with its throat slit on the sand, a few yards from the filthy hotel. So I suggest we pay a surprise visit to my mother in Los Girasoles. Cecilia is concerned about the insuperable distance between my mother and me. It seems an idyllic opportunity to strengthen our family bonds; she is satisfied.
3
Cecilia had already expressed her wish to own a car. Now, with the December holiday season getting closer, and the trip to Los Girasoles an inalterable fact, her expression of that desire has taken on a more urgent tone. While she understands our economic situation is, to put it mildly, precarious, she continues to go on about the car, as if setting out to needlessly squander money were a means of evoking fortune. I share the underlying current of magical thinking on which this logic is based, and that’s why I love Cecilia. She is, in her superficiality, everything I envy in flexible souls. So I borrow what seems an enormous sum from a cousin and buy Cecilia a small, red, secondhand car.
Moments of happiness. When it seems as if everything is exasperation and fear, as if the life I’ve been leading will fall apart around me at any moment, that’s when I finally enjoy minor, everyday pleasures. I’ve almost completely forgotten the grotesque episode of the poo on the bedspread. At least I don’t think about it so often, and I’ve decided to temporarily abandon my investigation. Like a parting of the waters, a sign of the need for change, the shit on the bedspread is a positive, fortuitous event.
Cecilia is content in her job. She asked Ms. Watkins for a raise, and the director, out of pity for our situation — for which she is, in part, responsible — awarded her one, though lowering the requested sum by a couple of percentage points. I don’t know how she managed to square the books, because the museum budget depends on the federal budget for culture, which wanes with each successive day. And although this recession in the cultural industries is a direct consequence of the government’s contempt for anything intended to make existence more bearable, I can’t help but wish for, and tacitly encourage, the collapse of state culture and the whole ridiculous meritocracy it has installed, forcing people to spit on each other and to make hatred and suspicion their only mode of survival. Because the only people who rise up the pile are those who can fuck up everyone else, the ones who seek their neighbors’ ruin and the ridicule and disgrace of their colleagues, now their permanent adversaries.
But the fact is that Ms. Watkins gave Cecilia a raise, and Cecilia is looking more kindly on the world.
The imminence of the holidays and the prospect of leaving the city make the days more pleasant. My mom was happy to have us stay with her, and I noticed in her mood a notable reconsideration of my virtues, as if she thought that idleness had purified me. And indeed it has: I now understand how wrong I was in trying to persevere with office-ism. Only premature retirement, I’m beginning to understand, justifies undertaking a college degree. (I even consider doing one.) Mexico City seems to me like the oppressive monster it in fact is, forcing a permanent regime of avarice on its inhabitants, from which they will only be released by a violent death or a prolonged respiratory tract disease. The province of the spirit is the only pleasure I defend. In light of this, I reevaluate my childhood in Cuernavaca, my father’s house, the pieces of waste ground that are not hemmed in by buildings but stretch out immeasurably mysterious, gorged with life, across the poverty-stricken hillsides. The vacant lots so large they are called fields. Salvation is, ultimately, in the bucolic.