Death in Veracruz (10 page)

Once again he started walking back and forth. He paced the floor behind, around and next to the boy, holding his attention in a clipped voice meant to impress him and also me. “Then on the night of your day off, you leap on your old lady with a shout of glee, then you wake up crying because the fucking horn hasn't gone off to end your shift. You wait and wait for it to go off. But you're not in the factory, you're at home enjoying your day off. You're resting in bed next to your old lady. The trouble is you can't even rest there. You sleep in fits and starts. You cuddle up to the little Japanese girl with the sideways snatch, you put your hand in the groove, and all of a sudden the groove is between the gear teeth on the drill shaft where your hand got caught. You're not dreaming now, you're on the job, and you just lost two fingers. That's the war of the workplace wherever you are. And like any war, you only fight it out of need. You know who the smart ones are?”

“No,” the Echeguren kid said. He'd sunk back in his chair and was staring at the floor.

“The deserters,” Pizarro said. “The ones who don't go in the first place, the ones that take off running the minute
they can and who refuse to get stuck in hell. And that's what I want you to understand if you're able to. And this as well. The sweat, blood and tears from this war are what the world is made of, what you see in the street, what you eat, what you wear, the things you buy in stores, the special panties Japanese girls wear. And the fucking job is the only goddamn thing on earth worth respecting. The only thing.”

He planted himself in front of the boy one more time and glared at him with his cold inimitable stare. “If you want to volunteer for that, all right. You can have the whole fucking thing, don't worry. It's your blood, your dirt, your nightmares. You're going to plead for titty and beg to get out of there like all the others. And like all the others you'll have a houseful of kids and a wife with a big belly and a loose twat by the age of eighteen. I married my girl, and she died in childbirth. Did you know that?”

“No, sir,” the Echeguren boy said.

“The baby died, too. You know why?”

“No, sir.”

“Because I didn't have enough money to take her to Mexico City where they could have saved her life. Because I was just a temporary day worker with no hospital benefits and no money to pay the fee. You'll have your share of that. Sooner or later everybody does. They get their share because there's no way out of it. No one chooses this shit. It hits them, and they can't get out of the way. I didn't choose to have my wife die from being poor. She died from being poor because that's what we were. But if I'd been able to, I'd have sent her to get better not in Mexico City but New York. You want to volunteer for hell and take your wife with you. That's not love. We have another name for it around here. But if that's what you want, that's what you'll get.”

He began pacing the floor again, rubbing his hands together as if purged by the outpourings of his own sermon.
He pressed his hands to his temples and pushed the heavy shock of hair that had fallen over his forehead back into place. He massaged his eyes like someone suffering from conjunctivitis or prolonged sleeplessness. I had the feeling I was looking at an insomniac, a man who slept little and badly. It added unexpected meaning to his repeated descriptions of hellish nightmares and dreams in his talk with young Echeguren.

“I don't intend to die of hunger,” the boy said, breaking a long silence. “How did you get out of that hell?”

“By shafting whoever got in my way, son.” His words sounded melancholy and paternal. “Stomping on other people, making them pay for my wife's death as if everyone I screwed over was guilty of killing her. So I gave them the shaft, I got back at them, but to this day it hasn't helped. It didn't get her back because what matters most in the world is what you let go of and don't have any more.”

“Then I'll stomp too, sir,” young Echeguren said, summoning the courage to stand up to Pizarro.

The reply took Pizarro by surprise. He looked pleased and at the same time disconcerted. He paused for a moment.

“You may have the balls for it,” Pizarro said. “Being hungry helps just like it does for bullfighters, but it's not everything. You just may have the balls to do it.”

“I want to prove that I do,” young Echeguren said.

“Then you'll have your chance,” Pizarro said. He returned to his chair behind the desk and resumed fidgeting with the rubber band. “Give me two weeks to tell you where and how,” he added in a tone that made it clear the interview was over.

The encounter ended with a handshake. Young Echeguren left, and Roibal stood at attention before Pizarro awaiting further instructions.

“Let's find out what this young stud is made of,” Pizarro
said, sounding mildly sympathetic.

“Yes, Lacho.”

“Get Imelda after him, and once she's got him milked out, make sure they hear about it at Chito Mandujano's house. Have a talk with him. Tell him my godson's father came to see me, tell him about Imelda, and, if he'll listen, get him to understand.”

“Yes, Lacho.”

“Then, after he breaks up with Chito's daughter, find him something to do. He may be mean enough to be useful. Who's next?”

The brother of a woman whose son Pizarro had baptized came in to ask for a temporary job in the oil fields then opening up near Villahermosa, where his wife was from.

“Write a letter to the local in Villahermosa,” Pizarro told Roibal. “Have them give him a temporary job. I'll sign it tonight, and they can pick it up tomorrow. Who's next?”

A woman brought in tamales, as she did every week, because Pizarro had pulled strings to get her son a scholarship for the Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City.

“I hear you were by last week and didn't come to see me,” Pizarro complained. “Tell him I don't care about him, just his grades. When he gets them, I want to see them. Next.”

Two farmworkers from the El Álamo cooperative came in to see if Pizarro could help with a heretofore impossible tangle of red tape in the Veracruz governor's office in Xalapa. “Have them see Idiáquez. Tell him to get it all straightened out and put it on the local's bill. Have him get back to you right away. Who's next?”

A woman from the red light district came in to complain that the mayor's office wasn't letting her work due to the whim of a councilman who wanted her all to himself. She asked Pizarro to do something about this obstacle. “Call the distinguished councilman and tell him the young lady's
working for us from now on. Tell him the right to work is inalienable. Who's next?”

A PRI youth leader sought help in buying ten sewing machines and ten typewriters to raffle to his constituents. He got them. A mother of three children whose husband worked in the oilfields and had abandoned her asked Pizarro to guarantee payment of her food allowance. The union was resorting to legal maneuvers to deny her benefits, she said. Pizarro gave her a memo to give the union. A group of striking workers asked for help because their strike fund had run out, and management was sowing dissension with handouts of cash. They got 300,000 pesos.

By ten o'clock the heat in the office was unbearable.

“How many more?” Pizarro asked as if about to shut up shop.

“Ten or twelve.”

Pizarro headed for the door and signaled me to follow him. The guards in the entrance stepped out in front of us. In the blinding light and heat of the orchard, beneath the jagged shadow of the huge oleander and the row of banana palms behind it, was Lázaro Pizarro's waiting room. Two Indian women from Zongolica rushed to kiss his hand as if he were a priest. A widow clung to the arm of her adolescent son. Also among the waiting were a group of temporary PEMEX workers, two representatives of the local Red Cross, a municipal police officer, and a circle of peasants. They held their hats to their chests, and their hair either stuck up from their heads in sweaty spikes or lay plastered to their foreheads by the heat. Pizarro greeted them one by one and explained they could either leave their requests in writing with Roibal or come back tomorrow. “You can go to union headquarters,” he told the temporary workers. “And you'll get your full pension, don't worry,” he said to the widow.

He lowered his voice to address the Indian women from
Zongolica. “You don't have to kiss anybody's hand.”

Minutes later we were in the main patio. Ahead of us were some four, six or eight men who served as his escorts in the vehicles Pizarro used to get around in. His car waited at the entrance to the main house. Pizarro and I climbed in back, and Roibal got in front.

“Dinner party at
Mostrador,”
he told the driver over the intercom. “L-1 on Zero. Expect fifteen casings at
Mostrador.
All on the way, in 4.”

A vanload of armed men pulled out in front of us, and two Galaxies fell in behind.

“Leave me at union headquarters, and go back to take care of those people,” Pizarro told Roibal. “I'm taking our journalist to La Mesopotamia, and we'll be back to eat this evening. That's all. When we get back we'll have dinner with
Cielito
and our journalist if he's willing to dine with us. One more thing. Find out if the piece in the paper came from the governor or from his asshole security chief.

Rojano worked for state security in Xalapa. I got the message without blinking an eyelash.

Pizarro's escort blocked off the street in front of the union headquarters before he got out of the car. Roibal opened the rear door for us, and I walked towards the entrance at Pizarro's side. His bodyguards closed ranks around us as we stepped indoors. As if setting up guard rails for an oncoming vehicle, they deployed in pairs before each doorway in his path. The instant barrier set off a magnetic stir. He attracted greetings and pledges of loyalty from every office he passed. Secretaries stood on tiptoes. Lowly staffers looked on respectfully while others eagerly extended hands to be shaken as he made his way toward a thick glass door of the sort most often used on public restrooms. The wood paneling in the entry to Pizarro's office was painted battleship gray. On the glass in peeling letters was the inevitable admonition:
Whoever can add can divide.

Pizarro's office was on the fourth floor at the center of a large rectangle. A wide hallway set it apart from the other offices all of which had clear glass in the doors, making it easy to see inside. By contrast, Pizarro's office had cement walls from floor to ceiling and artificial climate controls that blew mechanically cleaned air in and sucked stale air out. In front of the door were banks of chairs like the ones for waiting travelers in a bus station. Here visitors sat under the watchful gaze of aides who wrote their names on cards noting the reasons for their presence.

Like his house, his union office was furnished with a rustic table—no drawers, no papers—that served as his desk. Behind him was another photo montage: Pizarro
flecked with confetti in an auditorium; Pizarro in a throng of petroleum workers embracing their maximum leader, Joaquín Hernández Galicia,
La Quina;
Pizarro atop a tractor holding an enormous papaya over his head; Pizarro greeting President Echeverría at the foot of a speakers' platform; Pizarro holding aloft the arm of presidential candidate López Portillo as if he were a victorious prizefighter; Pizarro escorting a frail and decrepit ex-President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines; Pizarro in the midst of a group around ex-President Cárdenas. And an enlarged photo of a youthful Cárdenas in full dress uniform (gloves, cape and sword) gazing into infinity with the languid expression Pizarro seemed so taken with. In the blanks and white spaces of the photo a hand that hadn't fully mastered the art of penmanship had written:

For Lázaro Pizarro, last spawn

of the Mexican Revolution

L. Cárdenas

November, 1958

In the office, a male secretary minded a red telephone which rang constantly. Pizarro again had me sit next to him, and I witnessed a second session of Lacho's court of miracles. The procession of supplicants included an injured worker who needed special surgery to avoid loss of mobility in his right thumb, a soon-to-be-married couple who wanted the union band to play at their wedding, a widow who demanded a lot in a union subdivision about to open on the outskirts of Poza Rica.

Most of the supplicants asked for money. Roibal placed slips of yellow paper on the desk for Pizarro's scribbled signature authorizing loans and advances to the workers. Pizarro controlled and kept tabs of these vouchers himself, account by account. He put one, two, or three check marks on each slip before signing it at the bottom. One check meant:
Tell him to watch out. He's already had one loan.
Two meant:
This person hasn't made any payments. This is the last loan he gets.
Three meant:
Make sure he pays in person because he's spending too much and falling behind.

Around 12:30, a leader of the teachers' union came to ask for Pizarro's support in his bid to become mayor of Altamira, a municipality two hundred kilometers north of Poza Rica in the state of Tamaulipas.

“That's too far away,” Lacho said. “It's out of my territory.”

This was true. It was the domain of the maximum leader, Joaquín Hernández Galicia,
La Quina.

“I have lots of support in the municipality,” the teachers' union leader, one Raúl Miranda, insisted.

“I'm telling you it's too far away, and it's not my territory. You know the saying: ‘In heaven God, but in Tamaulipas,
La Quina
'. What's more, it's been agreed that Altamira belongs to a district controlled by the workers' sector of the PRI. You get your support from the CNOP. So even if it were my territory, I'd be disloyal to my own sector if I backed you.”