Adam in Eden

Chapter 26

Abelardo requests an appointment. At my office? No way, I answer, nobody from my family may enter the place where I work. That’s the fundamental law of the well-organized life: separation of home and office.

At The Danube restaurant on Republic of Uruguay Street, we will eat shellfish, we will drink a nice bottle of Undurraga, and nobody will bother us now that the restaurant has been divided into small rooms to accommodate its Chinese clientele.

My brother-in-law tells me his troubles. He expresses them with a sensibility so poetic that I ask myself again, how did this orchid bloom in the midst of that cactus field? After having attended the Faculty of Arts and Ignacio Braniff ’s lectures, he fled the writer’s tyrannical and closed circle and found asylum with Rodrigo Pola in the soap-opera universe. But that intellectual exile, he tells me, did not fill the great void in his heart. His heartache had begun at the Faculty, where the women surrounding the philosopher belonged to the Freudian Generation: they all wanted to match their lives with the experience of the psychiatrist’s sofa, and their conversation aspired to the level of a psychoanalytic treatise; everything that wasn’t psychoanalysis was banality, and the man who didn’t take such monomaniacal anxiety seriously would not only be considered frivolous, but suspected of being — the horror — good in bed. They’d have nothing to do with virility. They feared being dominated. They wanted to tame the impotent man, treating him with enormous affection, searching for the secret reasons of his sexual malfunction: Father? Mother? Oedipus? King Laius? Don’t lay us, Eddypus, Oedi Allan Poe? Blame it on the raven or being prematurely buried in the wrong coffin — or did the black cat choose to be sealed in the wall?

Worn out by the Freudettes, Abelardo sought in contrast the women he met through his work in television. He watched the shows, and despite the insipid dialogue (for which he bore some responsibility) some of the actresses seemed not only attractive, but even smart. However, he chose to associate with a homely one — that is, one who played the part of a homely woman — the little actress who was made up with braces on her teeth and peasant braids, and who usually said, “Yes, boss, whatever you say, boss,” as the cameras rolled. Halfheartedly seduced, the actress in question turned out to be a bossy and foul-mouthed woman, and when Abelardo pointed out this contradiction to her, she treated him as a nincompoop for not understanding that an actress on screen is the opposite of what she is in real life and (as she pronounced the phrase) “vicey-versey.” So if Abelardo wanted to find an angelic girl, he should seduce the muwhahaha-gloating villainess who sported the eye patch.

What a load of crap!

After these two failures, Abelardo, this young man in need of female companionship to compensate for the failure of his literary career, who had taken on the vocation of soap-opera script writer to make a living, felt another need as well: to become closer to God so that he might receive divine assistance and escape the contradictions that consumed him. He began by attending evening mass at the Church of the Sacred Family in front of the Chiandoni ice cream parlor, which is where he’d taken his first communion (in the church, that is, not in the ice cream parlor).

One day, kneeling in the third row from the altar, he scrutinized the place. Only with great effort could he concentrate enough to pray. At that hour there was no service held in the empty church.

There was only a woman, kneeling in the first row.

From behind, he observed a long black veil covering her, from head to waist. The woman didn’t move. Abelardo waited for her to make the slightest movement. She remained still. This worried Abelardo. He felt an impulse to go up to the first row and ask what was wrong. But his natural sense of discretion and the rules of courtesy — raised to the power of the Holy Trinity — stopped him.

He kept watch for five, ten, twelve minutes.

The woman didn’t move at all.

Abelardo made up his mind. He rose from the third row and made his way to the first. He slid in next to the immobile woman. The great veil covered her face. He wondered what he should do? Touch her shoulder? Ask her, Ma’am, are you all right? Or be discreet and wait? To pray together in the otherwise empty church. Only, he didn’t know — he needed to know — what the veiled woman was praying over. He couldn’t hear anything, except for a faraway murmur. Her breath was no more detectable than her movement.

Then the voice of his father Don Celestino Holguín came to him in reproach, coward, wimp, jerk-off, while the invisible Priscila whimpered from behind the empty altar, wine-fortified caramel, the three Magi, Insurgentes at the corner of. .

Abelardo realized, in the half-light of the Holy Family, that he’d unintentionally repeated his father’s and his sister’s phrases out loud, driven to a mysterious imitation that had let itself be heard, as if to substitute for the inaudible murmur of the pious woman kneeling beside him.

But when Abelardo said, “Insurgentes at the corner of. .” the woman in question turned her veiled face toward him and finished his sentence: “at the corner of. . Quintana Roo.”

The rest is history.