Anonymous

By Ignacio Solares

A man wakes up in someone elses body and then struggles to figure out what has happened. What happened to his former body, wife, and life? Who was the man whose body he is now in? Can he just fit in to a new family and life, or can he get his old life back? Is this all just a bad dream?

Another man receives a series of threatening notes at work (Watch Out!) and then struggles to make sense of the situation and his life. He discovers that others at his office receive identical notes, and panic ensues. Can he and his colleagues puzzle it out? Should they flee or can they fight back?

The stories of these two men intertwine in Anonymous. Their lives come together in a completely unexpected way. Rich scenes populate the novelmany of them highly ironic, others deeply poignant.

Ignacio Solares published the original Spanish version of Anonymous in 1979. It has enjoyed numerous editions and boasts sales of over one hundred thousand copies. It is one of eighteen Mexican novels recently placed in every high school library in the country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524685775

Ignacio Solares

Ignacio Solares has long been one of Mexico’s most outstanding writers and cultural figures. He received Mexico’s highest literary honor in 2010, the National Award for Linguistics and Literature. He has published seventeen novels, four books of short stories, four books of essays, and has written fourteen plays, most of which have been performed on prominent Mexican stages. He recently completed a 13-year term as the director of the Revista de la Universidad de México , arguably the most influential cultural magazine in Mexico.

Book preview

1

It sounds laughable, but that night I woke up being somebody else.

It happened just like that, when I opened my eyes and discovered that my body wasn’t my body.

Stay calm, I told myself, this will be over soon.

But I sat up in bed and didn’t recognize the window, which had no curtain. It was open, and beyond it was a clear and silent night.

I turned quickly and found at my side the face of a woman who wasn’t my wife. I nearly screamed, but fought off the urge, covering my mouth with the back of my hand.

I leaned against the pillow and took a deep breath.

I took a watch (which wasn’t my watch) from a nightstand (which wasn’t my nightstand) and looked at the time: 12:01.

I looked around the bedroom. Despite the fact that I could see the shadows of the furniture, I didn’t recognize anything: not the dressing table, not the dresser, not the religious images hanging on the walls, and not the white shirt hanging on the back of a chair. That shirt reminded me of an upside-down ghost, which somehow reminded me of me.

Just one familiar shadow would have rescued me, but there was none.

I rubbed my eyes. Surely this was just a bad dream.

I pulled the covers over my head and tried to keep from thinking.

No such luck: I couldn’t fall asleep, and as time went on I felt more and more awake. It was like a fire was burning in my awareness.

I remembered what had happened to a friend of mine: one night he was alone in his car, and when he looked in the rear-view mirror he discovered an unfamiliar face, pale and ultra-serious, in the back seat. He didn’t dare turn around because he was afraid he would confirm its presence. He simply kept driving with his eyes riveted on the car in front of him, sweating ice but keeping his composure. He made it home and nothing more came of it. The next day his life went on as usual; he drove back and forth to work and never saw anyone in the back seat.

Why couldn’t the same thing be happening to me? Perhaps I would wake up in the morning and find the things I had been used to finding every morning for years—the same furniture, my wife’s face, the window overlooking our yard.

But I felt that for it to happen, I would need to sleep until sunrise. Light. Yes, sunlight. Daytime would resolve everything.

Several hours later, or maybe it was just minutes later, I was still awake.

Having the covers over my head, combined with a growing sense of anguish, was clearly having a negative effect on my heart. When I could no longer stand it I threw off the covers, but it was like emerging from underwater, yet I was still gasping for air.

I got up and went to the window.

I could finally breathe. The smell of plants entered from the yard. I leaned out to look: it was a small yard, with large flower planters, a cobblestone path, and plants covering a wall which marked the end of the property.

What was I doing there?

I studied the hand I had placed on the windowsill as if it were a rare bug. Thick fingers, with squarish nails and dark hair. Yet they moved when I wanted them to move.

I didn’t dare look at myself in the dresser mirror and went to find the door. I opened it gently, afraid of waking up the woman. It didn’t lead to a bathroom, as I had suspected, but to a hallway. I stepped into it with the sensation of going into a hallway in a dream. Feeling my way along the walls and avoiding furniture, moving very gingerly, I arrived at another door. Doubt paralyzed me for a moment. What should I do? What was on the other side of that door? What if I woke someone up? Perhaps that would be a good solution. Perhaps I should wake someone up and ask: Who am I? Please, tell me who I am and where I am. But I was terrified of talking with anyone in those circumstances. I made a decision. I knocked on the door quietly, hand trembling. I opened it a crack and peeked in, but didn’t recognize a thing. I was about to go back to the bed, close my eyes, and, whether I slept or not, wait for the sun to rise: tomorrow everything would be different. I opened the door a little wider and saw the tenuous reflection of a tiled floor. It was a bathroom. I went in, closed the door and turned on the light. But light magnified my fear. I found myself, suddenly, in a world that wasn’t mine, and now I could see it clearly: a blue floral shower curtain, a blue tiled floor, an opaque window, a neon light over a medicine cabinet, a shelf with containers of various colors… I didn’t move an inch. I don’t know how long I stood there looking around. Although as I bring that moment back to my memory it seems that I wasn’t actually looking at anything. I must have been looking inward, hoping I would recognize something, as I had earlier hoped to recognize something in the bedroom shadows. When I was a boy and my mother would awaken me by whispering my name in my ear, I would open my eyes, rub them, and ask her where I was. It was the sound of her breathing and the tone of her voice, more than the words, which helped me know I was in a familiar world. By contrast, the world I had before my eyes at that moment was uninhabitable because I couldn’t find anything familiar to me there.

Slowly I made my way to the medicine cabinet’s mirror. It didn’t surprise me to see that my face was not my face. I raised my fingers to my cheeks, lips, eyelids, forehead, and hair (yet I had been bald for a very long time). I started to cry. Feeling tears provided some comfort because I felt they were the only thing that was truly mine. I opened my mouth, looked at my teeth, tongue and gums. I made faces, tried to smile. I tried to look deep into the eyes I saw in the mirror and now believe that was the most disconcerting moment of all. Something was in there which made me nauseous and I very nearly fainted. I felt that I no longer knew who I was, who I had previously been, and I even had my doubts whether I had ever been anyone at all.

Starting from that moment confusion has dominated everything.

I am told that I shouted and that I was found scratching up my face violently and pulling my hair, never taking my eyes off the mirror.

I vaguely remember seeing, at my side, the woman I had found in bed when I woke up. Her small hands tried to control mine. Her eyes looked frightened. Her syncopated voice begged me to calm down. She embraced me, which had an effect on me like catching a glimpse of an island after treading water for a very long time. She massaged my neck. Boys crying. Back to bed. An injection and then non-descript dreams.

2

Can any pain be greater than sharing a bed with the woman you love, but being incapable of mustering even a tiny bit of sexual desire?

That’s how it was for me day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

And I found out that the same thing was happening to her, transforming her desire into growing apathy. She stopped taking care of herself, turned off her sensitivity and even lost some color.

I came to understand that trying to fight it was futile.

Everything came to a head the night that I came home and, just like that, told Lucía: I was with a prostitute.

Anguished, I dropped my head into my hands, as if I had been confessing to a priest a sin that could condemn my soul for eternity.

Tears welled up in her eyes. She brought her finger to her lips: the children were near and they could hear me. Why did I feel the need to announce that to her so openly, in such a loud voice? An entirely abnormal reaction. Hidden personal pleasures are a crucial part of the well-being of any relationship. But I was sowing discord and desperation in my home with my absurd sincerity.

I couldn’t sit at the table with them. I sat on the leather sofa in the living room, smoking cigarette after cigarette. She fed the children and took them up to bed.

Do you want something to drink? she asked when she came back down.

No. Nothing.

She picked up her yarn and needles, came over and sat by me, and started to knit in silence.

I’m sorry for what I said.

She didn’t even turn to look at me.

Tell me about it.

How can you ask me that?

I want to know.

I buried my face in my hands and started to cry. I tried not to, but it was of no use. Everything I did that day took me a little closer to madness and I had a better and better view of my proximity to the abyss. It was as if I was, and yet wasn’t, myself.

I felt Lucía’s hand run through my hair and opened my eyes in surprise. She smiled. She put her knitting needles and yarn on the floor, then swept a tear from my cheeks, which she kissed over and over.

Why does love surprise us more than hate?—perhaps because we provoke the latter?

I’m kissing you—the most deeply hidden Rubén that I can imagine, or better yet, the one I can’t even imagine. The Rubén that not even Rubén knows.

How can you?…after what happened?

Tell me about it.

It was horrible.

What happened?

I picked her up on the street. I simply saw a woman standing on the street, looking like she was waiting for someone to pick her up, and I said to myself ‘why not? Maybe this is the way for me to rekindle my desire, with a woman who isn’t my wife, any woman. I took her to a hotel… but I couldn’t.

Was she attractive to you?

Yes. It’s just that…

Did you feel guilty?

No, not guilty. Not at all. But…

Was she more attractive to you than me?

How can you ask that?

Am I attractive to you?

Very much so.

Lucía went to the couch and invited me over. I looked over at the kitchen. Our domestic help could come out at any moment. And the children could show up from their rooms. But Lucía was determined. I went over, took her head in my hands and gave her a long kiss. But I couldn’t go any further. She cried and so did I. I could see how much she was suffering, so intensely that I could feel it in me. Who knows how long we were there, embracing and crying, but I knew it was the last time that we would make such an attempt, that she would never initiate intimacy again, that she felt as defeated as I did, even though she loved me, even if she kept loving me.

3

When I opened my eyes I was alone in the bedroom, with the door closed and immersed in a silence that buzzed in my ears.

Nothing can hurt more than recognizing that a nightmare is continuing in broad daylight.

I thought: It had to happen to me, I’ve always thought that it had to happen to me. The premonition had been there, next to me, every time I would open or close my eyes, when I would look at myself in the mirror, or simply every day when I would lift up my hand and see the miracle of my fingers.

One narrow glimmer of hope remained: that I would get up and find myself back in my normal state. But I didn’t dare try because I was terrified that it wouldn’t come true.

Seeing the shape of my feet at the end of the bed was a constant reminder of my otherness.

It was the least awake with eyes wide open that I could remember.

It occurred to me that an immediate solution would be to hurl myself, head first, through the window. Just like that it would be over as abruptly as it had started, and what a relief!

The world would have a new logic without me. I’m excess baggage; well, at least the other is. Anyway, any other place would be better than being out of place here. But no. I was also afraid of falling into another empty dream like the one I had just had, into one of those dreams that isn’t anything—increasing my desperation.

I also felt something like a magnetic pull toward my real body. Even if I could simply enter it and die, at least I would be in it. Something like returning home, where we find someone we love: that person is the bridge between us and things. But in my case the other was myself.

I had my left hand touch my right hand, then slid it up my pajama sleeve, slowly feeling the hair on my arm, which caused a slight tickling sensation, as if I was touching myself for the first time. I touched my chest, stomach, sex, and legs. I felt melancholy for my other skin, the one in which I had discovered life. And I thought: No one realizes