I take my lunch to the garden, and since it’s very frugal, I have time to walk around a bit. The only thing that calms me down and makes me forget the meaninglessness of life is watching insects, butterflies, and birds in action. They seem to be the only ones who know how to live. The other day I saw a real gem here: a phosphorescent green beetle crawling among the leaves. Beautiful coprophagous creature. God works wonders with shit, capable of transforming excrement and waste into natural fertilizer. It’s not so easy to find them anymore because of those damn insecticides. Suddenly I had a strange vision: dozens of blue, green, and gold beetles, like the one in Poe’s story, on the body of the girl I presume to be dead, busily decomposing her. Did she have enough peace of mind to enter the next dimension with the required serenity?
Passing in front of the banyan tree, I remember what Rochelle told me about her vision of Mr. Bradford. I approach the tree. I see that someone has left some bottles of water and a couple of Cokes among the roots. The rusty bicycle is still there, covered in blue tape. What if I brought a cushion and, in my free time, devoted myself to doing my transcendence exercises in complete tranquility? It would give me great peace to know that I would leave this world just to avoid having to deal with ghastly characters like that grumpy Jew. If I were to write a book, it would be a manual on how to deal with such undesirable characters. It would undoubtedly become a bestseller. I slip between the gaps in the tree. Barely any sunlight reaches the ground, except for what is filtered through the intertwined vines on the trunks. But what is that I hear? Whatever it is, it snores peacefully. It is old, has a beard, and looks a lot like Mr. Bradford, at least when asleep, but it is not him. Mr. Bradford was short, and this guy is a good six feet tall, it seems. In a rickety folding chair, a yellow-eyed cat stares deeply at me. I really appreciate that cats don’t grumble.
I move forward, leaving the snoring behind, and slip into the adjoining space, another of the interior cavities that no one suspects from the outside. Who is this being taking refuge here? Not a gnome, not an elf, not a druid. There is a strong smell in the air. A mixture of marijuana, insect repellent, and scattered food. Now, in my field of vision, there is someone with their back to me, tearing up papers. They turn around when they hear my footsteps, and that’s when I recognize them. It’s TJ, “the Hoarder”—that’s what we call them—because of the amount of stuff they carry around with them. They come in very early, wash up in the bathroom, and ask for a computer to watch videos nonstop. He then takes out a woman’s torso with a wig and sits it next to him on the table. He starts writing. We can’t say what he’s writing, but I can attest to his discipline and how much he consults with the mannequin. Or is he reading fragments to it? It’s a rather disconcerting scene for apprehensive users, but no clause in the rules of conduct prevents him from doing so.
“What’s up, woman? Are you running away from the sun?”
The sound of snoring is replaced by another that resembles the tearing of paper, one of the first skills we are taught as children and one that will serve us well later on, especially for tearing up the countless offers to spend more, the shameful political propaganda, the medical bills that clarify “this is not a bill,” and the bills to be redeemed, everything that is stuffed into your mailbox every day.
I take a good look at the papers that “the Hoarder” is busy sticking to some cardboard.
“I’m putting together some cardboard panels to put around my mat so they know this piece is mine. I don’t want any intruders here, smoking their crack or drinking poisoned Chinese beer. How’s my artwork coming along?
“Fantastic!” I say as I get closer and see what the sheets he’s attaching to the cardboard are all about. “But where did you get these wonders?”
“Where do you think? Not from a used bookstore, of course not. I picked them up early in the morning outside the library, where people donate all the crap they don’t want. They’re from my time, and I bet from yours too, even if you dye your gray hair platinum blonde. Look at this, some erotic illustrations of John Lennon. What twisted bastards! Could they be the Chinese ones, heh heh…? I think it was that witch who had him killed. I don’t trust any woman, even if she has the most almond-shaped eyes in the world. If it’s to give me a good massage, I’ll accept it, but then, bye bye. Look right now, what this self-confidence is costing us with those disgusting, bat-eating…
–Can I see the ones you have in your hand?
–Yes, ma’am. Marilyn Monroe herself. What a sweet slut she was! Look at those breasts that want to break through the sheer fabric… I don’t want any bastard coming in here to jerk off to these photos. They’re mine, and this space, from these vines to this trunk, is mine.
To think that I could have found those magazines myself if the donor had left them a little later. Or if I had just arrived a little earlier, as I sometimes do when I can’t sleep and come to this garden to wait for the sunrise. I missed them. All fourteen issues of Avant Garde magazine. Damn, what a treasure this slob is destroying! If I had brought my pepper spray and… No, it would give me away later. I’d have to knock him out, and this bastard seems to have more lives than a cat. He wouldn’t understand me if I told him that collecting highly erotic images is my passion. A genital passion under the command of the intellect. That is eros, the refinement of our basest passions, their sublimation through art, which is not always beautiful. There is also atrocious eroticism. Sometimes exasperating. Almost always irresistible.
–Damn, how jealous my partner next door is going to be! Sure, Kennedy got his brains blown out, but look at the kind of woman who enjoyed it… Mine almost got blown out in Iraq. They didn’t kill me, but they fucked up my lungs. Those damn oil wells burning nonstop—he coughed as if to dramatize his words.
Poor man who thought his miserable life was important. However, Ralph Ginzburg was more badass than him. He served eight months in prison, although they were asking for more at first. When I arrived in this country, I tried to catch up on everything my country tried to hide from me. That’s how I read his book on erotic materials secretly stored in American libraries. It took a lot of brainpower to assimilate that in the country of democracy par excellence, any artistic or literary expression that the most puritanical found suspicious—and that could include anything from a novel by D.H. Lawrence to a book by Henry Miller—was gratuitously associated with communist positions. Obscene could be Degas’ illustrations of a brothel, a photographic sequence of an interracial couple, Picasso’s engravings of voyeurs and orgiastic muses, everything that Ralph Ginzburg, editor and director of this magazine and others of a similar ilk, chose to promote in order to broaden, as he said, the sexual boundaries of constrained America. Paradoxically, in my country and its allies, everything seen as obscene or vulgar was an expression of, or influenced by, hateful and unscrupulous capitalism.
“Damn, I’m running out of glue. Do you have any glue in the library you could give me?”
I thought about it for a moment, knowing that I had very little time left to return to the building.
“How about I trade you some glue for one of these magazines? You know, I have my quirks too. At home, I cover walls and shelves with magazine and book clippings.”
“Oh, really? What else do you collect? Stones too? I had a partner who collected stones of all kinds. In his kitchen, you were more likely to find a fragment of a meteorite or a rough emerald from Colombia than a can of condensed milk or Campbell’s soup. Speaking of soup, don’t you want this issue with photos of Andy Warhol’s girls? Look at this one, Ultra Violet, what beautiful eyes, look at that breast on one side and the other pressing against her leg. A contortionist with the face of a witch. I read somewhere that when she was old, she regretted all the revelry that took place in Warhol’s faggot bunker. She even joined one of those Latter-day Saint churches, or something like that. Sure, with wrinkled skin, anyone remembers that the soul exists. Saints… saints we are, huddled among these trees with the opossums and rats, the mosquitoes, the angry ants, the rain, the humidity…
“Tell me something, T.J., when did you start camping here?”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to blab, you won’t, will you?
”No, man, I won’t say anything. If it were my backyard, it would be another story.
“The damn pandemic, woman, that’s cornered us even more. They don’t want us on the streets, but we’re not willing to go to those prisons they call shelters, where you have to behave better than an angel. If we were angels, we wouldn’t be in this situation, nor would we need the shitty public charity. For ten years, we were protected by a law that prevented them from harassing us while we slept, or from taking our belongings and throwing them away. Now everything is changing. Don’t you know what happened the other day downtown? They brought in a crane and lifted people’s tents. They took away mattresses, blankets, ID cards, clothes… Anyway, thank goodness I wasn’t there, because otherwise they would have towed me away with my things.
“Come with me so I can give you the glue. I have to go in now.”
“But, woman, take one of the magazines.”
I look through them one more time and decide on the one with a pair of those spinning tops for tits that Tom Wesselman used to paint on the cover. I see that it also has a report and some photos of a hippie farm in the San Gabriel Mountains in California. The drugged face of communism, if we understand communism as a way of life where the sense of good and common property prevails. They forget that common and property are mutually exclusive. What is common cannot be one’s own, and vice versa. That’s why I know very well that the glue I’m going to give to “the Hoarder” is private property, but even so, I give it to him. The pair of spinning tops is well worth the exchange.
Excerpt from the novel En el nombre de la rusa (Bokeh, 2025).
