Read Online Among Strange Victims by Daniel Saldaña París - Free Book Online Page A

forcefully suggested we take down the tea bags I’d stapled to the wall opposite the bed. After a short exchange of words on the matter, I gave in, resignedly. I bought a couple of pints of whitewash and painted over the brown stain left by the tea bags until it disappeared. In place of my tea bags, Cecilia hung a hideous still life, the only wedding present that didn’t comply withmy request: some purple flowers in an earthenware vase, a clumsy imitation of Diego Rivera’s essentially despicable creations. The painting was given to us by one of her aunts, who considered my idea of asking for cash to be—as she expressed it—in poor taste.
    Apart from that elderly aunt, embittered by stereotypical widowhood and rancor, my in-laws have treated me well. Don Enrique, being old-fashioned in his ways, considers being married to his daughter an enormous sacrifice on my part (and he’s not completely wrong), and so is continually making me aware of his profound gratitude. One of the ways in which he believes he is repaying the favor is by showing me how to do repairs around the house: during our wedding day, he started explaining how to deal with a leak if you can’t find the valve. I, feigning interest, asked if he knew how to get rid of damp, which must have been a moment of pure joy for him since he immediately assured me he would take on the task of sorting out the problem, especially as his daughter would now be living with me in the apartment. So on Saturday morning, instead of walking to the gazebo to sit contemplating the various speeds of the passersby, or dedicating the morning to pampering the hen with special seeds, I’ll have to wait for my father-in-law to stop by to assess the state of the walls.
    Cecilia is twenty-nine, two years my senior. Nevertheless, we both look older. My total lack of a life plan and my haste to be a grown-up left the stamp of frustration on my features. My wife, for her part, comes from a family environment in which passing twenty-two without having at least one child is a sign of ingratitude—I don’t know for what—or a lack of Guadalupian virtues. She was, at twenty-nine, the black sheep of a multitudinous family that understands marriage as an early rite of passage into adult life. It may be that the pressure from her extended family, in that sense, is responsible for the fact that she perpetually has a slight look of disgust—a haughty upper lip. Even now, when she’s laughing her head off in front of the TV in our living room.
    Little by little, I’m losing all those small details that, until recently, I’d considered to be indispensable, all those minutiae I’d come to count as features that matched my slightly grubby character: the tea bags, the damp in the living room, the laudable undertaking towalk back to my apartment, and the dead, inane Saturdays in the oval gazebo, dreaming of impossible statistics that depict me as the center of the universe. All this, which until just recently could be considered a protean identity, a fluctuating but almost organic extension of my own body, is now at the point of extinction. In exchange, I have the DVD player Cecilia bought to watch her pirate videos on, and sexual activity I don’t have to pay money for (at least in the short term) and which I can enjoy almost anytime I want, excluding the hours devoted to TV and, for now, the office.
    I evaluate the advantages of this apparently irreversible tradeoff and decide I didn’t do too badly: when you come down to it, I can store my collection of tea bags in my chest of drawers and staple them up again in around ten years’ time when Cecilia will have completely given up on the idea of modifying my habits.
    Perhaps the most serious thing this pact entails—except for my wife’s sour breath in the mornings—is the great, and now insuperable, distance that has opened up between my mother and me. In the past, despite