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

rigid habits, threw his existence off-kilter by kissing the museum secretary.
    After the kiss, I moved, blushing and looking ridiculous, to my seat and succeeded in keeping my eyes fixed on the computer screen until lunchtime. There wasn’t much work to be done, but I pretended to be writing the salon notes for the next forty exhibitions, while in fact I was robotically copying dictionary entries.
    At the set hour, I stood up to go to the small restaurant where I always eat. As soon as she spotted me, Cecilia abandoned her work and caught up with me as I was disappearing out of the museum, ready, she said, to accompany me.
    â€œYou’re very shy, aren’t you?” she remarked on the way there. And before I could respond, she added, “That’s what I really like about you. You’re not the same as the other men in the office, spending the whole day going on about their lap-dancing clubs and their whores for all to hear.”
    Without being completely sure whom she was referring to, I said I really liked Jorge, the designer.
    â€œYeah, but he’s as gay as they get. They all used to say the same about you, and that was why you and Jorge sometimes chatted at your desk, but I always knew it was a lie. You’re a real man, right?”
    Despite the inconvenience of the whole situation, I felt offended, as if just the mere fact of questioning my manliness didn’t sit well with me, didn’t sit at all well with me, so I responded, with a degree of severity, that one didn’t have to choose between being an idiot and being gay, and that you could be quiet and still be macho. That’s what I said, macho, a word I obviously sorely repented later and one which would have made my belligerent, feminist mother violently strike out my name from the pages of her will.
    My mother, whom I am at the point of calling to give the news (that I suspect no one, her least of all, will particularly welcome) of my imminent marriage.
    Ceci and I walked to the restaurant. She told me she ate there too sometimes, but as we’d never seen each other, I interpreted her declaration as a gratuitous boast. I was silent, even crestfallen, responding monosyllabically to her infrequent demands. We sat down, and I ordered: soup, rice, diced beef tenderloin. She had the same. Then, suddenly infused with a strange power, I told her she had always seemed to me a very beautiful woman, and I knew she was hardworking as well, so that was why I’d decided to ask her to marry me. This declaration was, I have to admit, partially false, but only partially: I found Cecilia attractive, especially due to the haughty air that accompanied all her movements, as if implying that she, in spite of being a secretary, had us all, at every moment, firmly by the balls. It was this attitude that had, on more than one occasion, made me dream of dominating her, or letting myself be dominated by her toughness.
    She smiled in an exaggerated way, as if trying, with her histrionics, to hide a touch of melancholy that was, nonetheless, easy to detect. I wondered if I should kiss her, but the smell of food on our breath and the memory of our clumsy kiss that morning put me off, so I left flirtation for later.
    The rest of the day, spent sitting at my desk, passed without incident. I succeeded in avoiding Cecilia’s little glances in my direction, and it was only when she passed near my desk, en route to Ms. Watkins’s office, that I gave her a discreet, barely perceptible smile. I finally left the building and came straight home, without the long, liberating stroll or the cup of black tea in my beloved,perennially greasy café. That’s why I’m sitting here, much earlier than usual, trying to pluck up the courage to call my mom and say, with my characteristic conviction, “I appear to be getting married.”
    11
    Isabel Watkins looks fixedly at me across her desk. She’s holding a pink card, and lying before her is