Autor:    Julián Silva Puentes

A CALL CENTER, THE HOUSE CAT AND MY AUNT

If I were not the age I am now, I would keep a diary in the manner of Dear Diary, where I would record the things that I am ashamed to say out loud, but that I still feel the compelling need to say them. To say them out loud.

“Dear diary —I would have written a couple of weeks ago—, I don´t have enough money to pay my phone bill and I am afraid I will have to look for work in a call center for the fourth time since I returned from Australia”.

Today I am not experiencing the biggest failure of my life. Nor do I have the greatest success of my life. I am at a point that I would not dare to detail out loud unless I was drunk. Unless you were drunk or you kept a journal and wrote at the beginning of each entry:

“Dear diary, the bite that the house cat gave me on my hand got infected and now I have to go to the doctor”.

Diana says that cats never finish being domesticated even if they have lived in a family home for years. Our cat has been with us for 6 months and I can say with all certainty that he wants to kill us. Fortunately for us, he is not big enough to cut our throats while we sleep; however, opening your eyes at night and seeing the cat staring at your face in an attitude of jumping at any moment, is not pleasant. In fact, sleeping has become a challenge, because if we leave him out of the room at night, he meows and scratches the door to the point where it becomes impossible to sleep.

Then we let him in. Then he stares at us all night until we are afraid to sleep. Then he throws himself in our faces when we finally get to sleep.

Writing about the house cat is kind of pathetic and it shouldn´t be. But now that I am 40 years old, I have lost the shame of many things. So:

“Dear diary, my aunt died last Tuesday and I find myself indescribably sad”.

Writing anything else after that was impossible at the moment and it is a bit so now. Now that my aunt died last Tuesday.

It has been a very strange beginning of the year. So was the end of last year because it´s a very difficult time for everyone. People get sick on the streets and hospitals can´t cope. Uncles and aunts are over 70 years old, because at 40 years of age all the people who took care of you as a child must leave one day. Someday it will be sooner rather than later.

My mother is almost 70 years old, but she is not yet. That gives me a couple more years before I start thinking about the long goodbye of all the people in my life. A life that is as fragile as falling asleep at night has been.

“Dear diary, I have not slept for 5 days”, I would write today and for two weeks that is the time that the house cat has gone crazy.

Last year I thought I had sleep apnea, because I woke up at night with the impression that I was drowning. The next day I was so tired that I could barely stay awake during the day to do the things we all need to do. On the day that is when we must work to procure our shelter and food.

“Dear diary, sometimes I feel that life is a succession of frames where you cannot see the beginning or the end”, I would have written at this precise moment.

The end. We know we´ll leave eventually, but what we don´t know is how or when. It is a liberating idea if you look at it from a spiritual point of view. I don´t see it that way at this precise moment, my aunt died last week and I don´t feel liberated at all.

Today I feel like I feel too much. Feeling too much is better than feeling nothing at all. When you feel nothing at all, it is as if you are completely dead.

Not feeling anything when you have died is as fantastic an assumption as the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Assuming something that cannot be verified is a luxury that only creatures with the gift of imagination can afford. I imagine Jesus eating apples on the bank of a river laughing at the jokes of Peter the Zealot. And I do it because I prefer to imagine things in a less terrible way than they really were.

“A Jew enters a bar and the barman tells him...”, Peter the Zealot would say to Jesus in a clearing in the forest next to a river that does not pass through the same place twice.

Imagining someone who has died in a horrible way doing something other than dying is something more liberating than imagining ourselves feeling nothing when dying. Jesus left this world in the worst possible way. The way he died was so macabre that even today, almost 2,000 years after his death, we continue to talk about it. I do not imagine it that way. I imagine it in a totally different way than the silence of death. I imagine him laughing and eating apples by a river.

“Dear diary —I would have written a couple of years ago to the newspaper that I do not write now—, I should have saved when I had the best job of my life to have run off to that hippie colony in India that I heard so much about”.

A few years ago, when I had the best job of my life, I was earning enough to have done whatever I wanted. But a too lax nature and the lack of foresight in the future are a dangerous mix for someone who does not see beyond what occupies him at the moment: the great now! I called it, and I can say that I lived and died by that moment in which I realized that I was experiencing something incredible. I can also say that I felt too much, but not how I feel now that I am so sad. I felt too much in the sense of being happy to be alive and to experience life as I hoped it should be lived.

“Dear diary, the call center bastards have just informed me that my profile does not fit their mission of selling cosmetics”, I would have written a couple of hours ago.

I hadn´t dropped that low since I last worked in a call center when things were really bad a few years ago. I would also have written in the diary that I do not keep, that I am waiting for the best job in life, but life takes time to give you what you want and if you make the serious mistake of losing patience because things do not work out as you expect, you start to feel very ugly things that you prefer to drown with a couple of double tequilas to stop thinking about what is driving you crazy.

Right now I feel like I´m going crazy because I haven´t slept in 5 days. The house cat looks at me as I write and I want to know what he is thinking about.

“What are you thinking, kitty?”, I ask the house cat.

The cat looks me in the eye and then turns his back on me. I do not know if in cat language turning your back means the same as it does to us humans. I only know that the house cat shares attitudes quite similar to those of a person. To those of a person who is a bastard.

“Dear diary, today is Friday because on Fridays I usually write my opinion columns”, I would tell the diary that I am not writing right now.

Now, can I call them opinion columns when I write at the beginning of each paragraph Dear Diary? I don´t know if I can or not, but at 40 years old I would be ashamed to carry a notebook with one of those tiny padlocks with its little key to keep my privacy. Also I am not a 15 year old girl with dreams and aspirations. I am a 40 year old writer with dreams and aspirations that sometimes seem so difficult to achieve.

“Your profile doesn´t match what we look for in one of our bilingual call center agents,” the call center people told me a few minutes ago.

Long ago I did not feel rejection in the manner of adolescence, when you approached a girl at a party to the rhythm of music to ask her to dance and she said no.

Working in a call center is definitely not a party. However, in call centers they receive subhumans of all kinds who can speak a second language. I know this because I´ve been one of those creatures who works all night answering the phone.

“Thank you for calling Macy´s and Bloomingdadale´s collections department”, I used to say in those dark times.

“Fuck off!”, they answered me most of the time, because the collections department is something like a collection department, and nobody likes to be charged what they owe, especially if it is a peasant from the southern United States United who thinks that someone from my part of the world does not deserve to charge on behalf of a chain stores used to enslaving stupid people with the buy now, pay later technique.

Now that I think about it, I should have told the call center people: fuck off!, the second I heard them say that my profile does not fit to sell cosmetics to women tired of seeing the same defeated expression in the mirror.

Maybe they didn´t like that I told them that I was waiting for a job offer of the kind that changes my life forever. Maybe that was a very stupid mistake on my part because I really need to occupy myself with something now until the job that I have been waiting for so long turns out and from this precise moment when I think about what else I could write, because really I feel so anxious that I could well finish the bottle of tequila in front of me and it would not leave me stunned or atrophied by everything that I do not want to feel, but that I still feel a lot.

The truth of all this I say is that I am sorry to have been rejected by a call center, but I would also have felt working in one again. I also feel the death of my aunt because I have actually felt too many very ugly things since she died.

…

The truth of all this that I have said is not what I said before but what I am going to say now: it is not a diary, even though Dear Diary has written in almost every paragraph. Calling everything Dear Diary is a way to get away from the spirit of the writing, something like saying fuck off! to the world without telling it up front. I did not say to the people in the call center “¡go to hell!”, because in the same way I need to find what to do until I get a job that changes my life, mine and Diana´s and the cat´s too.

I would like to know what is going on in the cat´s head right now. Does he knows that I am feeling too much and that I want to scream right now? I might as well think about it because he just approached me without the intention of scratching me. You must know that today is one of those days when I would like to stay in bed without knowing anything about the world. From the world to which I would like to say “fuck off!”, without saying it head-on.

Today I would like to tell the diary that I am not writing, that we all need a victory from time to time, even if it is to sleep a long night because the house cat found something to do other than not let us sleep.

Working in a call center when you are looking for a job in a call center can lift your spirits a bit too, in addition to allowing you to pay the rent. It is not the best victory in the world because it is actually a terrible job, but you have to do what you have to do when you have to, and this beginning of the year we have had to deal with situations that we would have preferred to ignore. The death of my aunt is one of them. Waiting for a job that changes the course of my life is another.

 ...

—Diana —I ask Diana now that I see her passing by—, what do you think of the title Dear Diary, for my new story?

—Sounds like a very fifteen-year-old, right?

—I´m talking about the cat, the call center and the aunt —I answer.

—Are you sure you want to talk about something as personal as your aunt? —she asks, and then I decide to title this writing “A call center, the house cat and my aunt”.

If I were someone other than who I am today, I would think of a more appropriate title and maybe write something less depressing. If I were someone else today, I would write about the Danish film we saw with Diana last night called “Drunk”, about some school teachers, who, bored with the daily routine of their lives, decide to drink 0.5 degrees of alcohol every day to rediscover the joy in life that they seemed to forget after they turned 30.

I could do just that, I mean get drunk like school teachers, to stop feeling the way I do today. I could drink enough to reach 0.5 degrees of alcohol and feel different from how I have felt all these days. But I decide not to because sometimes we must feel to know that we are alive and not dead at all, or dead while alive that it is perhaps worse than everything else.

So I won´t drink the bottle of tequila in front of me, but I won´t stop feeling the way I do now. Feeling means experiencing this dream of ours that means being alive and I definitely find myself alive today. Maybe more alive than I´ve been in a long time.

I wonder how I will feel tomorrow when the sun comes up. Maybe I will feel other things quite pleasant and I may even feel better than I have felt in a long time. Tomorrow they could call me to tell me that I have the best job ever. It might as well not happen, but I decide to think otherwise because the sun will rise in the morning and it will shine like never before has anyone seen anything shine in their life. I really hope it is. I look forward to it with each ounce of my optimistic and confusingly stupid humanity.