Among Strange Victims by Daniel Saldaña París Read Free Book Online

forms of behavior and a discursive fluency I’m normally lacking.
    â€œTake as long as you need, Ceci, don’t worry. I’ve waited for this moment a long time, so I can hold on a bit longer.” The words come out as if from an answering machine that has cut in completely against my will. I can scarcely believe the nerve with which I’m playing my own dirty trick, but there’s something impersonal about it all, as if the events were happening far, far away from me, in a movie I’m watching, in a world similar to this one but stranger, where Cecilia and I have an age-old friendship. She, luckily, interrupts my thoughts just when I’m at the point of speaking again.
    â€œRodrigo, one more thing. I’d like it to be in a church, just to please my grandma; she’s ever so devout.”
    This last turn takes me completely by surprise. I suspect that it is Cecilia—the cruel secretary who has made my life impossible since I started at the museum—who tells Ms. Watkins when I leavethe office to waste a little time in the courtyard; that it is this same Cecilia who is playing a slightly ridiculous, thoroughly bad-taste joke on me. My response is slow in coming, but I eventually agree in a preoccupied tone and splutter out some impromptu praise of the Catholic Church that she, I note, doesn’t completely believe.
    I hurriedly make a brief farewell, which doesn’t, however, avoid the worst. “Love you,” she says. “See you tomorrow at the office.”
    As I hang up, I’m overwhelmed by corrosive anxiety. What have I done? What am I doing here by the telephone, my hand trembling, having accepted and, apparently, even proposed marriage to the secretary I have always silently despised?
    I decide to go to bed without dinner but can’t sleep. I resolve that first thing tomorrow, I will unravel the enormous tangle that has resulted in me getting engaged, in Cecilia sighing tenderly, and, I imagine, some office jokers being doubled over with laughter of secret delight.
    10
    And such was, in fact, my intention: to clear up that bad joke, even if it meant doing irreparable harm to the unhappy Cecilia, and return to my routine of walks and cups of tea and vacant lots inhabited by clucking hens. But today turned out differently, as if, yet again, against my will.
    I am now once more sitting by the telephone in my apartment, waiting to pluck up the courage to call my mom and give her the news of my wedding. I still can’t believe the course events have taken since this same time yesterday, when I called Cecilia with a hint of lust, prepared to take immediate advantage of her enigmatic note.
    I arrived at the museum quite late this morning, as if fearing the moment of finding myself face to face with the woman who was now my fiancée. When I entered the office, she was already at her desk, wearing three pounds more makeup than recommended byhealth experts and gazing at me with an ingenuous little smile that shattered something inside me. I thought she would be deeply disappointed if I didn’t walk over and give her a good-morning kiss, something I had never done in my life. Once I was close enough to her face to hear her accelerated breathing and clearly smell that mixture of perfume and cheap makeup with which she was garnished, Ceci swiveled around and planted a discreet, restrained kiss on my lips in response to what must have seemed to her my invitation. I then heard behind me an uneasy commotion, a noise like people whispering and purposely letting pencils drop from their hands. I began to think I must have imagined that adolescent reaction from my coworkers, because as soon as I turned around toward them, what I noted was enormous indifference. And, having started along that route, I thought their imagined reaction sprang from a profound impulse of my own: perhaps I was the adolescent who turned in his chair while Rodrigo Saldívar, that office worker of