InThe Museum of Useless EffortsCristina Peri Rossi renders familiar, everyday situations uncanny through lyrical reinterpretations; at the same time, she somehow makes the uncanny appear quite ordinary. Crafting peculiarand sometimes claustrophobically smallworlds, Peri Rossi explores the universal themes of desire, violence, and truth and the simultaneous and contradictory human capacities to repress and resist, speak and silence, desire and ignore. In these tales an insomniac is tormented by a stubborn lamb that refuses to jump over the fence; the momentary hesitation of a man on a crowded subway staircase who forgets whether he was going up or down unleashes pandemonium; and a patient receives a frantic call from his psychoanalyst, distraught that his wife has taken a new lover.

Uruguayan-born Cristina Peri Rossi has lived in exile in Spain since 1972. A novelist, poet, essayist, and short story writer, she has written twenty books, including Solitaire of Love and The Ship of Fools. Tobias Hecht is the author of At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil.

The Museum of Useless Efforts

1

(7)

Up on the Rope

8

(8)

Mona Lisa

16

(6)

The Runner Stumbles

22

(5)

Tarzan's Roar

27

(4)

The Session

31

(6)

The Lizard Christmas

37

(7)

The Crack

44

(7)

The Rebellious Sheep

51

(6)

Deaf as a Doorknob

57

(4)

Full Stop

61

(3)

The Inconclusive Journey

64

(7)

Letters

71

(4)

Flags

75

(3)

The Avenues of Language

78

(3)

Instructions for Getting out of Bed

81

(6)

Airports

87

(4)

Time Heals All Wounds

91

(3)

Love Story

94

(4)

A Sense of Duty

98

(3)

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

101

(2)

The Effect of Light on Fish

103

(5)

Keeping Track of Time

108

(3)

Statues, or, Being a Foreigner

111

(2)

At the Hairdresser

113

(2)

Wednesday

115

(7)

The Bathers

122

(10)

Notes on a Journey

132

(5)

The City

137

(16)

Casting Daisies to the Swine

153

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Chapter One

The Museum of Useless Efforts

Every afternoon, I visit the Museum of Useless Efforts. I ask for the catalog and take a seat at the large wooden table. The book's pages are a little faint, so I like to run through them slowly, as if I were turning the leaves of time. I never see other readers, which is probably why the clerk pays so much attention to me. Since I'm one of the few visitors, she spoils me. She's probably afraid of losing her job, what with the lack of public demand. Before entering, I take a close look at the sign hanging on the glass door. In uppercase letters it reads, `HOURS: MORNINGS, 9:00-2:00. EVENINGS, 5:00-8:00. CLOSED MONDAYS.' I almost always know which useless effort I want to look up, but sometimes I ask for the catalog so the gift will have something to do.

`Which year would you like?' she'll ask courteously.

`The 19:12 catalog,' I might answer.

After a little while she'll return with a thick book bound in deep red leather and place it on the table, in front of my seat. She's very accommodating, and if she thinks there isn't enough light coming through the window, she'll switch on the bronze lamp herself, adjusting its green glass shade so that the light falls across the pages of the book. Sometimes I make a brief comment when I return the catalog. For example, I might tell her, `Nineteen twenty-two was a very busy year. A lot of people were determined to make useless efforts. How many volumes are there?'

`Fourteen,' she answers in a very professional voice.

So I have a look at some of the useless efforts of that year, children who tried to fly, men bent on amassing riches, complicated mechanisms that never actually worked, and a lot of couples.

`Nineteen seventy-five was a far more bountiful year,' she says with a touch of sadness. `We still haven't recorded all of the entries.'

`The classifiers must have their work cut out for them,' I think out loud.

`That's right,' she replies. `They've only just made it to the letter C, and several volumes have already been published. And that's without counting the repeats.'

Curiously, useless efforts get repeated, but the repeats aren't included in the catalog. That would take up too much space. With the aid of various contraptions, a man tried to fly seven times; some prostitutes attempted to find another job; a woman wanted to paint a picture; someone sought to overcome fear; nearly everybody tried to be immortal or lived as if they were.

The clerk assures me that only a tiny proportion of useless efforts makes it to the museum. For one thing, the government lacks money, so acquisitions, exchanges, or exhibits in the provinces or abroad are practically impossible. For another, the inordinate number of useless efforts carried out all the time means that a lot of people would have to be willing to work without pay or understanding on the part of the public. Sometimes, when getting official support seems hopelessly unlikely, appeals are made to the private sector. But the returns have been few and discouraging. Virginia (that's the name of the nice clerk who often talks with me at the museum) explains that all the private sources appealed to proved as demanding as they were unsympathetic, failing to understand what the museum is about.

The building is located on the outskirts of the city, in a vacant lot full of cats and refuse where, just slightly below ground level, you can still find cannonballs from an ancient war, rusty sword handles, and donkey jawbones decayed by time.

`Do you have a cigarette?' Virginia asks me with an expression that fails to mask her anxiety.

I search my pockets, finding an old slightly chipped key, the tip of a broken screwdriver, the return ticket for the bus, a button off my shirt, a few coins, and -- finally -- two crumpled-up cigarettes. She smokes furtively, hidden amid thick books (whose spines are peeling), the timepiece on the wall that always indicates the wrong hour of day (usually an hour gone by), and the old, dust-covered decorative molding. It is believed that on the spot where the museum now stands there was once, in the days of war, a fortress. Its thick foundation stones were put to some practical use, some timbers as well; the walls were shored up. The museum opened its doors in 1946. Some photographs of the ceremony survive: men wearing tails; ladies in long dark skirts, sequins, and hats with birds or flowers on them. Behind them, you can imagine an orchestra playing ballroom pieces. The guests have an air between solemn and absurd, as if they were slicing a cake decorated with an official ribbon.

I forgot to mention that Virginia has a slight squint. This minor defect gives her face a touch of humor that diminishes its naïveté. As if her wandering gaze were a floating, humorous comment, detached from any context.

The useless efforts are classified by letter. When all the letters have been used, numbers are added. It's a slow, complicated process. Each effort has its own pigeonhole, page, and description. Walking among them with extraordinary agility, Virginia looks like a priestess, the virgin of an ancient but timeless religion.

Some of the useless efforts are beautiful, others somber. We don't always agree about their classification.

Leafing through one of the volumes, I found a man who spent ten years trying to make his dog talk. Another spent more than twenty trying to win a woman's affections. He would bring her flowers, plants, and butterfly catalogs, offer her trips, write poems, compose songs; he built her a house, forgave all her mistakes, and tolerated her lovers. Then he committed suicide.

`It was hard work,' I say to Virginia, `though possibly stimulating.'

`That's a somber story,' Virginia replies. `The museum has a detailed description of the woman. She was a frivolous, moody, fickle, lazy, embittered little thing. She was also selfish and somewhat dim-witted.'

There are men who have taken long journeys in pursuit of inexistent places, unrecoverable memories, deceased women, disappeared friends. There are children who undertook impossible tasks with great resolve. Like the ones who would dig a hole periodically washed over by the waves.

In the museum, smoking and singing are forbidden. The prohibition on singing seems to affect Virginia as much as the one on smoking. `I'd like to hum a little song now and again,' she confides wistfully.

People whose useless effort consisted in attempting to reconstruct their family tree, digging for gold, writing a book. Others who had hoped to win the lottery.

`I prefer the travelers,' Virginia tells me.

Entire sections of the museum are dedicated to voyages. We reconstruct them from the pages of the books. After a time of drifting across various seas, traversing dense forests, discovering cities and marketplaces, crossing bridges, sleeping on trains and station benches, the travelers forget the purpose of the trip yet nevertheless continue traveling. And then one day -- lost in a flood, trapped in the subway, asleep forever in a doorway -- they disappear without a trace. And no one comes to claim them.

Virginia tells me that there used to be private investigators, amateur enthusiasts who supplied the museum with material. I can even recall a time when it was fashionable to collect useless efforts, as one might do with stamps or ant colonies.

`I think the abundance of items destroyed their appeal,' Virginia states. `It's only exciting to search for scarce things, to find the unusual.'

Back then, people would come to the museum from different places and request information. A certain case would pique their curiosity. They would leave with forms and return bearing stories they had copied down, with the appropriate photographs attached -- useless efforts turned over to the museum, like butterflies or rare insects. For example, the story of the man who struggled for five years to prevent a war, until his head was blown off by the first shot fired from a cannon. Or Lewis Carroll, who spent his entire life trying to avoid drafts but died from a cold because one time he forgot his raincoat.

I don't know whether I've mentioned that Virginia has a slight squint. I often enjoy following her gaze, never knowing where it will fall next. When I see her crossing the room, burdened with folders, books, and all sorts of documents, I can't resist the impulse to get up from my seat and lend her a hand.

Sometimes, in the middle of a task, she'll complain a little. `I'm tired of going back and forth,' she might say. `We'll never manage to classify everything. And then you have the newspapers. They're full of useless efforts.'

Such as the story about the boxer who tried to recover his title five times. He was finally disqualified when he took a bad blow to the eye. Now he probably wanders around some squalid neighborhood, from one bar to the next, remembering what it was like when his eyesight was good and his punches were lethal. Or the story of the trapeze artist who suffered from vertigo and couldn't look down. Or the one about the dwarf who wanted to grow and traveled all over the place in search of a doctor who could cure him.

When she gets tired of moving books around, she sits on a pile of old, dusty newspapers, lights a cigarette -- discreetly, because smoking isn't permitted -- and thinks out loud.

`We probably need to hire someone else,' she might say in a tone of resignation. Or, `I have no idea when they'll pay me this month's salary.'

I've invited her to take a walk in the city, to go out for coffee or to the movies. But she doesn't want to. Only inside the gray, dusty walls of the museum is she willing to talk with me.

If time is elapsing, I wouldn't know, because my afternoons are so busy. But Mondays are days of sadness and abstinence and leave me not knowing what to do, how to live.

The museum closes at eight o'clock in the evening. Virginia turns the simple metal key in the lock; any other measures would be unnecessary because it's unlikely anyone would try to break into the museum. Only once did a man try, Virginia tells me. He wanted his name removed from the catalog. As an adolescent he had made a useless effort that later he felt embarrassed about, and he wanted to eliminate any trace of it.

`We caught him in time,' Virginia explains. `It was very hard to talk him out of it. He kept insisting that his effort was private in nature and that he wanted us to return it to him. That time I put my foot down. It was a rare piece -- practically a collector's item. The museum would have suffered a huge loss had the man gotten his way.'

Melancholy, I leave the museum at closing time. In the beginning I found that the time it took for one day to become the next was unbearable. But I've learned to wait. I've also grown accustomed to Virginia's presence, and I can't imagine how the museum would be able to exist without her. I know that the director (the one in the photograph with the two-tone sash across his chest) feels the same way: he's decided to give her a promotion. In the absence of any organizational structure consecrated by law or common practice, he has created a new position, which is actually identical to her previous one, only it has another name. Reminding her of the sacred nature of her mission, he has named her Priestess of the Temple -- guardian, at the museum's entrance, of the fleeting memory of the living.