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

an envelope of the same color announcing, in gold lettering, the engagement of “Rodrigo Saldívar & Cecilia Román” in the eighteenth-century typeface Jorge, the designer, chose for us. On the diptych she has in her hand, Isabel Watkins reads her name—“plus one”—and the time and place of the event. Below this is the address of a party room Don Enrique, my future father-in-law, has booked against my better judgment. Isabel puts the sheet of paper on the desk beside the scented envelope and looks fixedly at me.
    â€œI don’t know what to say.”
    Silence.
    After a moment, she continues. “When I employed you here at the museum, I thought you wouldn’t last long, that within a few months you’d have found something better, on a magazine or in a publishing house, and that you’d have jumped at the opportunity to further your career. I also thought that you’d have wanted to rise up the cultural ladder, that you’d have politely introduced yourself to the minister at the first opening we held. And although that prospect annoyed me a little, I was also pleased to think you were a kid on the way up. But now you tell me you’re going to get married to my secretary and . . . I don’t know. It’s just that I always thought you were looking for something different, that you expected something else from life.”
    â€œYes, Isabel, I appreciate your sincerity. And I understand what you’re saying. But to be honest, I don’t expect anything, except that things happen to me.”
    That’s what I say: “Things happen to me.” The expression seems to exasperate Ms. Watkins, who quickly gets rid of me on someinvented pretext, but with the menace of “we’ll talk later,” so that I’m on my guard for the rest of the day. It’s Thursday, May 11. In two months, I’m going to be married. After numerous chats with Cecilia’s parents, and Cecilia herself, I’ve convinced them all that the best thing would be for Ceci to move into my tiny apartment “while we’re saving up to buy someplace.” The promise of ownership dazzles them, and they all concur with me, though, in essence, the only motive for my proposal is staying near the vacant lot. During these last three weeks since the engagement became official, I’ve clung to the waste ground as if it were the last possible salvation from the arbitrariness of things.
    Mom, against all odds, very quickly washed her hands of the affair, as if she were giving me up as a lost cause.
    â€œAnd might I know whom you’re going to marry?” she asked sharply over the phone.
    â€œCeci, you remember her. Ms. Watkins’s assistant at the museum.”
    â€œAn assistant?”
    â€œYes, you met her once, at that opening of the exhibition on social movements in the capital I invited you to about a year ago.”
    And she, after a silence pregnant with reproach, “The secretary?”
    â€œYes, that’s the one. But she’s like Ms. Watkins’s personal assistant, not the secretary. She does a lot of different things in the museum.”
    â€œAh, I’m happy for you, Rodrigo. Let me know when you’ve fixed a date so I can book the ticket early; you know how it is with the planes—there are only two flights a week, and they’re always packed.”
    Maybe if my mother had been indignant. Maybe if she’d shaken me out of this lethargy, this frame of mind that makes me yield to the secret designs of fate, turning up disguised as the most absurd accidents: a note given to a woman who is suddenly in love with me, or says she is; a café that becomes a haunt because I come across it one fine day on my way home; a growing collection of tea bags that occupies more and more wall space in my bedroom, reminding me my wedding day will soon be upon me, and I’ll have no time to prepare myself psychologically before the