Free Among Strange Victims by Daniel Saldaña París Page A

melancholy; I can be alone, really alone, but I do ask the god of neural functions to let me retain this faint line of voice that crosses my cranium, allowing me to laugh at the world around me. This is the only grade of intelligence I aspire to, and it makes me immensely happy that it doesn’t depend in the least on books or people.
    (I say all this at the risk of sounding maudit ; that is neither my intention nor feeling; otherwise, I would be oozing highly profitable mauditism in the modern salons of pomp and circumstance.)
    15
    The hen appears in and disappears from the lot at completely unpredictable intervals. Sometimes she’s there all night long, and at others there’s no sign of her for several days. I’ve turned the matter over in my mind, but I can’t crack the code of the bird’s irregular life. The topic is beginning to have pathological importance in relation to my daily routine, and I’m aware of it, which makes it even more disturbing.
    Cecilia finally noticed the lot.
    â€œWhy did you move to a building next to a piece of waste ground, my love? It must have so many rats, you know.”
    The exaggeration of her warning irritates me. I tell her there isn’t a single rat in the lot, just a hen. Long silence. I feel I’ve betrayed an enormous secret. Cecilia looks puzzled and gives a, for me, repulsive laugh: the sort of laugh emitted by teenagers who don’t have control over their extremities. She asks how there could be a hen there. Plucking up my courage, I grab her arm, drag her to the window, and point to the mound of earth where the hen is usually found. Nothing.
    Cecilia gives me a worried look, and I, in the mood for a leg-pull, insist, “Look, there’s the hen. So, believe me now?”
    Cecilia extracts herself from my grip—I’m probably hurting her—and goes to the kitchen. I stay here alone, looking at the lot, leaning against what some would call “the sill.” This is our second attempt at an argument after the one when Ceci took up smoking. I wonder what new vice she’ll acquire this time. Hopefully it won’t be coprophagy or getting her nails painted with whole landscapes—I wouldn’t tolerate either.
    Then the hen appears from behind some bushes and climbs to the top of the mound with Tibetan calm. I look at her enviouslyand don’t even contemplate the possibility of calling Cecilia and showing her I’m not out of my mind. Instead, I decide to hatch a plot for discovering every detail of the feathered creature’s lifestyle: I’ll call in sick, even act out a serious illness so Cecilia won’t suspect anything—Would she, at this stage, be capable of reporting me to Ms. Watkins?—and rather than going to the museum, I’ll spend the whole day in the vacant lot, following the hen’s every movement.
    While I’m hatching this dishonest scheme, the bird moves back into the bosky shadows of the lot. I sit on the bed and open the drawer in which I keep the used tea bags. After contemplating them for a while, I decide I need a new project, something as ambitious as that collection, one that completely absorbs my intellectual capacities, that aligns my ideas in a single direction, in just the same way as a magnetized metal bar aligns iron filings.
    That’s what I need: a Project. The other possible solution to overcoming the lethal sense of dissatisfaction into which I’ve sunk (for how long?) would be to find something like a Community: a close bond with a group of people who understand my interest in collecting tea bags, for instance, or my irrepressible desire to live next to an empty lot. But I suspect that no such groups exist, and that I have steadily dynamited all the communities I ever belonged to—the drug addicts in the gardens near the house in Coapa, the girlfriend I went to Cozumel with, and even Ms. Watkins, that secretly friendly boss who, despite all,