Death in Veracruz (2 page)

“Is that you?” he asked, leaning his elbows on my typewriter.

He spoke warmly without the least hint of sarcasm. Somehow it touched a chord in me. It brought back the years we hung out together in the hilly streets between his house and mine in Xalapa. Walking home from school together, we shared our dreams and ambitions to achieve, accomplish and succeed. We'd go to Mexico City, come back with degrees that would dazzle the neighbors, and ring in a new era for the politics of Veracruz. We'd stamp out bossism, rein in the cattle ranchers, beautify Poza Rica, pave the port of Veracruz, and get rid of pollution in Minatitlan. It was as if my affection for Rojano would suffice to transform the world we were about to leave and to which we would inevitably return.

“It is,” I said.

He pulled up a chair, sat down next to me, and placed a mollifying hand on my thigh.

“I have something I need to talk to you about,” he said.

“For more than two lines there's a fee,” I replied.

“No joke, brother. This is serious. It's all about politics and the press. Something a professional like you can use.”

He ran out of words, but his eyes were still lit up.

“You want to run for the legislature again?”

“No, this is personal. All I ask is an hour in private. What can that matter to you?”

“It can't, but there's a fee for more than two lines.”

He gave up with a smile of submission and pulled himself together.

“If that's how it has to be, then so be it. What time do I pick you up?”

At ten that night, I climbed into the frigid air conditioning of his black Galaxy.

“Anabela wants to say hello,” he said. “Do you mind if we take care of this at the house?”

“I do, but that's all right.”

“What's done is done, brother.”

“How's Anabela?”

“Fine. We've got a five-year-old boy and a girl, four. We live a quiet life, a boring life in the provinces. I'm in Xalapa and come home every weekend, sometimes more often. It depends. Anabela couldn't handle Xalapa. It brought back bad memories. She's right. I really screwed up, you have no idea how much. Now I'm paying the price, I've stopped drinking.”

“Who are you screwing?”

“No one, brother. Like I said, I lead a simple provincial life.”

“You don't even get any from your wife?”

“Watch it,
Negro.
Don't screw around with me.”

“You're no family man. The disguise doesn't suit you.”

“It's no disguise, brother.”

“Then call it a facade. It still doesn't fit.”

“If that's what you say, then it must be so. But the other stuff was killing me. Now I'm at least in limbo. It's a thousand
times better, I swear.”

He seemed overcome by an excess of caution, an angelic slowness. He even drove like an old man. It was both amusing and hard to believe. We went slowly around the soccer stadium and entered a recently opened subdivision with vacant lots between many of the houses. Rojano's took up two lots and had a pitched roof in the architectural fashion then popular with the provincial
nouveau riche.
The fence was a row of heavy iron bars topped with sharp white finials. The front of the house combined imitation marble walls with sliding windows of smoked glass and aluminum molding. Inside were easy chairs with woven upholstery and carved wooden arms, a plaster reproduction of the Venus de Milo, and miniature porcelain footmen in a glass showcase.

As soon as we entered, he shouted for Anabela to come down, then removed the plastic coverings that made the easy chairs awkward to sit in. He went to a corner of the room occupied by a piece of furniture meant to resemble the bar in a saloon. He looked over the bottles and again shouted at Anabela to come down. He needn't have. For several seconds she stood on the landing of the stairway, nervous yet composed, silently watching me with nothing better to do than moisten her lips and pull the sleeve of her dress down over her watch.

Eight years and two children later: Anabela de Rojano. Beneath the modest elegance of her tropical chiffon dress, her bodily perfection, the symmetry of legs and shoulders, remained intact despite the first visible bulges of a what in a few years would turn her into another kind of living statue, a matronly Venus of ample proportions.

“Is that you?” she said just as Rojano had.

It annoyed me to hear her echo him-and to realize that my adolescent jealousy still smoldered. She stepped away from the stairs and kissed me on the cheek.

“Are you going to want whiskey?” Rojano asked from the bar.

“Offer him something to eat, too,” Anabela said. Turning to me, she added, “Nothing comparable to the restaurants you're used to, but the food here will remind you of home.”

“I brought caviar,” Rojano trumpeted from the bar.

“You see?” Anabela said ironically. “He brought caviar. And we have Oaxaca tamales made by the mother of one of
Ro's
godchildren.”

She never called Rojano by his first name. She always used his surname or in more familiar moments
Ro.

“We have deviled ham, too,” Ro added from the bar. “And candied chestnuts for dessert.”

He approached with a bottle of Old Parr and an ice bucket on a large tray. There was a Coca Cola for Anabela and for him soda water with no ice. He made a show of pouring it with the glass held at eye level, at my eye level actually.

In the next hour I consumed three whiskeys and twenty crackers with caviar and deviled ham while enduring a conversation about schools and the consolations of provincial life. Around eleven, using the wail of a child upstairs as an excuse, I attempted my getaway. By then I estimated that festivities would be well under way in Mocambo where the city government was throwing a party for the press.

“Don't leave,” Anabela begged as she headed for the stairs and the source of the wailing. “At least wait till I come down.”

“That's right, brother. Wait for her to come down,” Rojano reiterated as if reading from a script.

Once Anabela had disappeared up the stairs, he reminded me, “I've still got something to show you.”

As he spoke, he regarded me intensely with a stare held over from another time, then he made a nervous exit through
a door in the back of the house. His demeanor confirmed my suspicion that his newfound respectability and stability were pure show, the appropriate backdrop for a proposal of whose nature I was, for the moment, unaware.

I went back to the ice bucket for a fourth whiskey and waited.

He returned from the back of the house with a package under his arm but would not let me see it in the sala. Instead, he took me into a small room, a combination pantry and office that we entered through the garage. Inside was a desk, a pair of dusty file cabinets, an empty bookcase, and several crates of mangos and oranges stacked in one corner. An enlarged photo of Anabela sat on the desk. It showed her running towards the camera with her hair blown back from her forehead by the wind and her thighs clearly defined under a black skirt with a blur of forest in the background.

He pushed the photo aside and lay the package, a bulky manila envelope marked
remittances,
on the desk.

“I've been working on this for two years,” he said.

He undid the red string between the seals on the flap and the body of the envelope, then took out what looked like a leather saddlebag. It was, to be more exact, a square leather letter file with a rigid center panel and four flexible dividers that closed like an accordion over the documents between them. On each divider there was an engraving: a pasture; a factory smokestack; an oil well; and the head of an Olmec statue next to an Indian woman with long braids. Each divider bore the caption
Destroy to create
in large rustic lettering with the motto
Whoever can add can divide
in smaller letters below. Each image was framed by a border composed of intertwined pseudo-Aztec figures.

Rojano opened the leather dividers exposing three file folders, each wrapped in different-colored onion paper.
Nervously and with painstaking care—he'd begun to sweat—he opened the first packet.

It contained a set of photos of semi-nude cadavers still fresh and bleeding from wounds to their skulls and bodies as they lay on stone slabs in what had to have been a smalltown morgue. Eight photos of eight bodies, among them a child of about ten, his lips pulled back by rigor mortis to expose his teeth, his small eyelids half shut. The caption in crude white lettering beneath the photos read:
Municipality of Papantla, Veracruz, July 14, 1974.
Also in the packet was a photocopy of the death certificate issued by the office of the public prosecutor, a file of some twenty pages, and the plat of a parcel of rural property with the surveyor's seals and notations in the margins.

Rojano pushed the letter file and crepe paper to one side of the desk and slapped the photos down one by one in two rows of four as if dealing a deck of cards.

“There they are,” he said without looking up. His demeanor spoke volumes about hours wasted poring over this macabre game of solitaire. “What do you think?”

“What do you want me to think?”

“Don't you see something strange about them?”

“That you're collecting them so meticulously.”

“I'm serious, brother. Does the date mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“It's the carnival of Corpus Cristi in Papantla.”

“Did they get killed at the carnival?”

“In part. They all died in the same incident.”

He waited for me to ask about the incident. I asked, “What incident?”

“At the market in Papantla,” he explained. “The police report said a group of armed men burst into the market screaming insults against Antonio Malerva. This guy.”

He pointed to a naked man with a big belly on the top row with two punctures in his ribs. He had a large mustache and a thinning curl of pompadour.

“He was eating lunch at a food stall when they caught up with him,” Rojano went on. “Witnesses said shooting broke out, and the death toll is what you're looking at. But there's a problem.”

He paused, waiting for me to ask what problem.

“What problem?” I asked.

“Antonio Malerva was unarmed,” Rojano said and again fell silent as if certain of the effect this revelation would have.

Granting the effect of the revelation and with due curiosity, I asked the required question. “Then who did the shooting?”

“No one knows. The fact is that none of the attackers were killed. The other fatalities were the woman who owned the food stall and her daughter.”

He pointed to the photos on the right in the lower row: a woman with Indian features who had been shot in the neck; and a girl with full lips and two bullet holes in her adolescent breasts.

“The two customers eating next to Malerva were also killed,” Rojano continued. “Prospero Tlamatl, a local Indian who helped at the church during carnival. He was identified by the priest.” He pointed to the left end of lower row: two shots to the neck, a blood soaked dress shirt, and a jaundiced complexion that contrasted with a scruffy whitish beard.

“And this last guy's nameless. He was never identified.” He now pointed to the emaciated effigy of a peasant with leathery skin and no teeth whose blazing, half-open eyes recalled the photo of the dead Che Guevara.

“What makes this guy last?” I asked. “You've got three photos to go.”

From left to right next to the shot of Malerva were the
photos of a man, a woman, and the child who caught my eye first.

“That's precisely what I'm getting to.” Rojano said. He placed them in the middle of the desk. “What strikes you about them?”

First of all, they were bloodier than the others. The only blood-free part of the woman's face was the tip of her nose. It was a classical face, the kind an artist might draw with a straight nose descending from a rounded forehead to flaring nostrils. Her widely spaced eyes lay deep in their sockets, and her high cheekbones all but disappeared in their final ascent to her temples from which a liquid seemed to flow, covering her lifeless features with a patina of wax.

“They belong to the same family,” Rojano said. He pointed to the adults. “Raul Garabito, who was a farmer, and his wife. The child is theirs. Now look closely. There are bullet wounds in the Garabitos' bodies just like the others. The women and the child have wounds to the chest, the man's are in his abdomen and ribs.” He pointed with his pen to the wounds in the photos. “But look carefully at their heads.”

There followed the requisite pause.

“Do you see the problem with their heads?”

I nodded mechanically.

“I'm talking about the source of the bleeding.” Rojano sounded vaguely impatient.

“From the wounds,” I said.

“From the wounds to the forehead,” Rojano asserted. “That's exactly the problem.”

I drained what remained of my drink and once again put myself on the line. “What exactly is the problem?”

“They were all killed, but the only ones they made sure of were the ones they were after,” Rojano stated with conviction.

“They weren't after Malerva?”

“They claimed they were, but the ones they made sure were dead were the Garabitos, not Malerva.”

“You're saying that because of the shots to the head?” I asked.

“I say it because they were executed,” Rojano replied.

Acts of bloodshed have a peculiar kind of loquacity. I'd seen it often as a police reporter. People get run over minus their socks but with their shoes still on, shots penetrate a lung but cause only minor hemorrhaging, suicides who fire a .45 at their forehead wake up at home the next morning with a new part in their hair. There was no reason for the Garabitos' head wounds not to follow the coarse logic of bullets.