These reflections fully endorse my decision to seek out vegetal life, in the lowercase sense, in the adjoining lot. But I now understand that the lot is not wide enough to save me from the infinite idiocy, cruelty, and injustice of the city. And that is why someone shat on my bedspread. Civilization is a violent outrage, a clash of the most basic instincts of every citizen. There is no culture that offers redemption from this disguised barbarity, no poem or play that makes this extreme mendacity of the soul more bearable.
All there is in the city is pointless argument and swaggering, gratuitous animosity and the degradation of others. I now know that all jobs, with their eight office hours and their vertical structure and their system of rewards and punishments, are demeaning to the limits of what is humanly tolerable. And all wage earners — the culture bureaucrats who try to pass off the endless battle for the suppression of others as rational discussion of ideas — are themselves victims and perpetrators of the daily dose of filth, from which nothing, absolutely nothing except resignation and silence and ostracism and the margin, can save them. I, now, am going to conquer that margin, among the shrubs of the terrestrial sphere.
Of course there’s a touch of the spasmodic in my sudden aspiration for the rural condition. Something of a last-minute remedy for the oppressive sensation of being in the process of dying. Because I am dying, that is certain: cooped up in a damp apartment, next to a lot inhabited by only a hen, married to a woman whose form oscillates in my spirit between the beloved (to be polite) and the incomprehensible.
In the past, the solidity of an imposed, semi-tyrannical routine allowed me to not worry about what I did with my idle hours. Now all my hours are idle hours, and ideas have time to grow inside me until they become monstrous; feelings have the space and silence to slowly soak into my nerves and reach the darkest regions of my spirit; the contradictions of which I’m made up have enough air to accelerate their combustion, making the collection of minutiae that sustain my existence inflammable and even perilously volatile.
4
Finally, the holiday season comes around. Cecilia’s small, red, secondhand car will be good for traveling the highway, even though I don’t drive and have no intention of ever doing so. She, then, will be responsible for getting us there. At heart Cecilia isn’t bothered by that detail, as I had calculated would happen. Resigned to my uselessness, and having accepted it as one of my principal features, she’s unsurprised that it should manifest itself once more in this new impossibility. She suspects — and she’s right — that in the coming years I’ll gradually renounce more and more activities, until I end up sprawled prostrate in a wing chair, observing a collection of tea bags on the coffee table, dribbling a little out of the corner of my mouth, and uttering, with ridiculous emphasis, the word egg.
In any case, Cecilia likes driving, so we set out for Los Girasoles, provisioned with a whole bag of ham-and-cheese sandwiches and several small rectangular cartons of grape juice. The highway, once we’ve left Mexico City, is packed with vacationers, station wagons with inflatable dinghies on the roof. As we travel farther from the city, and the gap between one house and the next widens, I feel I’m shrugging off an exaggerated weight, something irksome on my shoulders, sinking me ever deeper into myself, into the most wretched regions of myself.
The highway makes me think of all the things that happen. Of the madcap or impossible pace of the days that don’t just pass but deny their existence, or turn back on themselves, or anticipate by whole weeks the actual date of their coming. So the accelerations and decelerations Cecilia inexpertly imposes on our family speedster tangentially express that frenetic leaping and prancing of the days, those moments of wonder and those emergency stops of individual perception before the passage of time.
The highway makes me think of all the things that happen. For example, of the waterways I used to construct when I was a child, on the slopes of the waste ground across from my father’s house in Cuernavaca: they were PVC tubes, joined together with anything that came to hand, that formed circuits around which the water and my small Lego toys nimbly slid, although they would sometimes get stuck, or an unexpected leak would prematurely carry them off into the sand of the waste ground. (Prematurely: like the things that happen when you’re in a hurry.)
The highway makes me think of all the things that happen. For example, of the way human relationships keep changing, in the same way as the Mexican landscape — there outside the car window — changes from conifer forests to vast expanses of maguey. Just like my relationship with Cecilia, which went from indifference to hatred, from there to the unmitigated discord of our opinions, and then, gently, approached tolerance, a discreet form of love, in neutral colors, routine.
“Doesn’t the highway make you think of all the things that happen?” I ask her.
“Oh, Rodrigo, the things you say, you’d think you were a numbskull. . Wouldn’t you like a sandwich?”
5
Far from generating a more open world, as I suspect was their intention, my parents’ generation became obsessed by, and eventually succeeded in, destroying the only frame of staked-out certainties in which it was still possible to enjoy something approaching happiness for a period of time longer than that of an orgasm.
This redundant lecture is just to say that, contrary to any notion of progress, I have, throughout the course of my brief adult life, insisted on behaving in what I imagine to be the same way as my grandparents. My ambitions are restricted to the absence of ups and downs. For that reason, unemployment and the mere thought of doing something radical, like leaving the city for good, of my own free will — this is just a working hypothesis — seem to me minor but significant concessions to the reckless worldview of my parents; as if I felt myself obliged to recognize, at least by intuition, that it’s possible to lead a life that is different from the humdrum existence of an office worker. A sincere, I’d almost say shameful strand of hope, of renewed enthusiasm for the possibilities offered by the vast world, is inveigling itself into the general grayness of my spirit.
The highway is uniform and boring. I doze off every so often without being aware of it and am woken by Ceci’s voice asking me to pass her the money for the tollbooth. At the toll station we’re surrounded, like all the other cars, by vendors, appearing out of nowhere and offering local products: a bag of guavas for ten pesos, a little box of quince jellies, tabloid newspapers.
My mom was born in Ciudad Satélite at almost the same time as Ciudad Satélite itself was born. At the tender age of fifteen, she came to the wise conclusion that her environment was oppressive, and she continued to battle with it for a couple of years more, until she managed to establish herself as a language teacher in a primary school — her English was more or less respectable — and effective agitator among the mass of students just starting out at college. Her jet-black, curly hair, high boots, and determination were all the rage in the eighties, a decade marked by the notable ideological lag of its youth, who in Mexico behaved just as the rest of the world had fifteen years earlier: anarchic behavior that, in the end, changed nothing despite the very widespread belief to the contrary.
My dad studied agronomy because he believed that in this way he could gain a level of nutritional self-sufficiency with respect to a system he loudly decried, but after two years of analyzing the effects of fertilizers on the rubber tree, he decided to switch to law, and that was when he met my mother. (I sometimes like to say “my mother” because the very words impose a certain distance.)