Free Among Strange Victims by Daniel Saldaña París

Instead of sorting things out and endlessly talking them over, a protracted, voluntary death. Assumption of pain. Metabolism. (Sorry, I was digressing.)
    Mexico City is lovelier than ever. Two days ago, when Cecilia and I were on our way home from work, in a passage of the metro, a woman began insulting a policeman, explaining, with ample smatterings of “idiot” and “shut up,” that her usual station had been closed and she’d had to walk to that one. Unperturbed, the policeman gave her a scornful look and quite rightly replied, “Well, stop voting for the PRD . It’s all the democrats’ fault . . . Up the PRI !” and then he repeated his slogan for the onlookers: “Up the PRI , ladies and gentlemen, up with the Institutional Revolutionary Party!”
    I spoke to Cecilia about the possibility of looking for a different job, citing the opportunities for professional development and the need to augment my savings. Obviously, those are not my reasons at all: seeing my wife eight hours a day, only four desks away, then going home to find her overpowering mug on the other pillow, at the table, everywhere, has become a form of torture. We don’t even have recourse to that thoroughly middle-class ritual of asking each other how our days were. Even if the answer to that question is always the same, I suspect there is a deeply calming pleasure to be found in asking it each evening over a microwave dinner.
    On the other hand, I find the very idea of leaving the museum, abandoning Ms. Watkins, painful. Ever since she showed her unexpected talent for empathy, reprimanding me for marrying beneath myself, I see her almost as an alter ego: a woman conscious of the general grayness of existence who has let herself be dragged alongby the inappropriate speed of events. Although, of course, there is a crucial difference that forms a breach between us: Ms. Watkins still retains the basically romantic belief that the string of accidents determining us can finally lead to the sort of destiny we were, against all odds, made for. I couldn’t disagree more: the pencil that draws the line of my biography can only trace out an insipid figure, oblivious to even the discreet sumptuousness of geometry. If I were able to choose that figure, the final perimeter that represents, once and for all, the collection of vicissitudes I’ve lived through, it would be a dick. Yes, a penis: iconic, puerile, the kind teenagers draw on the chalkboard to annoy the teacher. A simple, unadorned prick that evades all psychological analysis and reclaims its original potential for insult. That would be my ideal figure, the embodiment of all the blunders that make me up. That or an ass.
    Maybe I’m saying this because, during the last few days, a ridiculously dense cloud, a lugubrious mood, has been hanging over me. I’m surprised to find conventionally important events—a wedding—happen to me as if to a second cousin, scarcely affecting me. I get news of my life, but I don’t feel it. And it’s not that life is, as some would wish, to be found elsewhere, but that it’s been reduced to a weak, heterogeneous set of associations: a hen walking around a vacant lot, a lottery ticket with the number 6 printed on it, a collection of used tea bags. Every so often, one of those details of my most intimate cartography is erased without any great fuss and a new one appears, substituting it.
    In the end, the only thing that matters to me is conserving enough clarity to be able to articulately criticize what I see; if some illness stopped me from doing this, nothing would have meaning anymore. I’m not worried about physical degeneration, the whitish drool dribbling onto a shabby suit, premature baldness, prostate cancer. I’m not worried about them so long as I can go on complaining about what I see. I don’t seek the permission of the Fates to find a soul mate with whom to deploy my