Death in Veracruz (23 page)

She had, in fact, built a thick dossier on the man, a meticulous accumulation of news stories, photos and official reports on Pizarro and his workers' revolution (manifestos, flyers etc.). Our correspondent in Veracruz contributed a substantial collection of interviews, state government documents, family history, union history, and crimes and abuses he was found or alleged to have committed. Between Anabela's arrival in Mexico City with her children in June 1978 and the day the land sale was completed in Xalapa, her file on Pizarro grew from two to twelve organized boxes. It included a small bibliography of books and articles about the region of Chicontepec, the oil industry, the union, agrarian issues, violence, indigenous groups, area bosses, and life in the municipality.

During those months, the city was undergoing a frenzy of street widening, and
Artes
was among the thoroughfares targeted for modernization. On the morning of November 18, 1978, the entrance to the building was blocked when a rear-end loader dumped a mound of dirt and gravel in the doorway. I wrote a column about the horrors of the urban renewal to which the city was imperiously subjected by its tycoon mayor, Carlos Hank González, but it was well after noon before I could get out. I used the downtime to review Anabela's files, including one I paid particular attention to. It contained detailed information about the union's social service activities around Poza Rica over the past ten years, the years of Pizarro's leadership. Nothing was left out. There were clinics and child care centers, schools, discount stores, scholarship programs, interest-free lending agencies. Plus the famous union gardens.

Aside from “La Mesopotamia,” the union had fostered within Pizarro's sphere of influence two more agricultural operations. “Egypt” was located near the Tuxtlas and grew tobacco and coffee. “Tenochtitlán” was near Rinconada on the road to Veracruz. A variety of crops grew on other farms whose state-of-the-art practices and equipment dramatized the potential productivity of rural Veracruz. A strange and incredible economic system was emerging, a closed circuit unaffected by any market and governed solely by its own rules of cost, price, and supply. Prices stayed unchanged within this circuit of self-sufficiency even as they skyrocketed in the rest of the country. The cost of credit remained zero at a time when bank interest rates were prohibitive. The economic rules of the outside world had simply been abolished in an odd system that walled itself off from the forces controlling trade and productivity everywhere else. It struck me that its self-sustaining character perfectly matched Pizarro's determination to depend on no one other than himself, and
to make his own rules. It also seemed clear to me that his iron will was not his alone. It was a force that came from the world he ruled and from which he arose. It was as if Pizarro, disturbed psychology and all, was the personification of a collective will—just as the agricultural complexes were a precise expression of his will, his inner rigidity, and his delusions of autonomy. Nothing in that fertile and abundant world evoked the dark side of Pizarro, the deaths in Chicontepec, the mutilation and the death that his rage burnt into Anabela and her children and into her relationship with me. This world of order and harmony harbored a community rescued from the abuse, speculation, and collapse that afflicted consumers and producers throughout the rest of the country. The file on these farms documented the creation of something like a utopia. It explained and justified the loyalty of its beneficiaries as well as their fervent support and even veneration of Pizarro as their leader.

Prior to that morning, I'd passed through Pizarro's idyllic domain but I hadn't seen the whole picture. I hadn't understood how the civilizing impulse and the dealings of its founder and leader might seem justified by the threats confronting his people. They lived in a reality that was being hacked out of the jungle little by little in defiance of the corruption and brutality of the world surrounding them. A modest, fiercely defended City of God had grown up in the marshes of northern Veracruz, in its rain forests and in the chaos of its awful cities, despite segregation, cutthroat competition, red light districts, and the law of the gun. What could Rojano offer instead? What good could he and Anabela have done for Chicontepec, once the sinister influence of Pizarro had been eliminated? A new dynasty of obscenely rich Veracruzan land barons with an endless parade of heirs educated in New York?

At 5:00 in the afternoon the dirt pile was removed from
the doorway (Anabela didn't come home to eat), but I didn't go out. My review of the boxes and reports that made up the Pizarro file continued through the evening and into the night. It ended at dawn the following day when, for the first time, I was able to see Pizarro whole. I saw him as he was: in the miserable barracks of Poza Rica's first oilfield, a nine-year-old orphan in a red light district rampant with venereal disease, malaria, pityriasis, chiggers, and explosions in abandoned oil pipelines; I saw him climbing on a crate to reach the bar in the saloon where he hawked newspapers as a youngster afflicted with a host of allergies—to powders, chocolate, mangos, seafood, pollen, leather—that isolated him from normality and explained his aversion to physical contact and the circle of fear within which he lived his life; I saw him join the oil workers union as an adolescent peon and lose two fingers, a wife, the two children she bore him, and his best friend in one of the many union meetings that ended in gunfire; and, on March 27, 1952, as a first-time delegate from Local 35, I saw him rise in protest at yet another bloody union gathering after a deranged gunman in a nearby saloon opened fire on the rival candidate.

During elections four years later another fanatic tried to kill him with a bullet that passed cleanly through the middle of his chest with no damage to vital organs. In 1961, he was fired on again, but this time the three attackers were mowed down on the spot by his embryonic corps of bodyguards. In 1962, the first Lázaro Herón Pizarro primary school opened in what had been the city's red light district after its transformation by the union into a green residential zone. In 1966, he was elected general secretary of Local 35 for the first time. A year later the first agricultural complex,
Egipto de los Tuxtlas,
was founded followed by the 1968 founding near
Rinconada de Tenochtitlán.
During the Echeverría presidency, there were three attempts on Pizarro's life, the last of which
occurred in May 1973.

From 1966 to 1976, under Pizarro's leadership, the budget of Local 35 increased a hundredfold (from seven million to seven hundred million pesos). It developed two more residential districts, 35 union stores with prices 40 per cent below the market, seven movie theaters, 17 schools, eight packing plants, and the two agricultural complexes. The deaths of four political rivals (an auto accident, a bar fight, a plane crash, and a drowning in Veracruz) were never fully explained. But during those years, not a single political campaign turned bloody in Poza Rica. There were no pitched battles in the streets and no meetings whose outcomes were determined by pistols or submachine guns.

Pizarro first won recognition as Poza Rica's favorite son, and then he became the favorite son of the whole state of Veracruz. His name adorned the entrances of two more public schools in the state, and, in 1975, his birthplace, the hamlet of Pueblo Viejo near Chicontepec, was officially renamed Pueblo Viejo de Pizarro. That was the year he began the creation of his third agricultural complex, “La Mesopotamia.” A year later, upon the election of Rojano as mayor of Chicontepec, he'd begun to develop his fourth complex, “Babilonia,” to whose construction we were on the way to becoming a bloody footnote.

In October 1978, René Arteaga died from overindulgence and substandard medical care in the ward of a Social Security hospital. We went to his burial in a new cemetery behind the heights of Tecamachalco along with his dumbstruck children and his devastated wife whom he'd left with no resource except her own tears. The paper he worked for covered the funeral expenses and in black on gold letters named its newsroom for him.

In January of the following year, Anabela used money
from the Chicontepec settlement to buy a house above Cuernavaca. It sat on a lane lined with bougainvillea across from the military encampment and near the access ramp to the Mexico City expressway. It was called The Hideaway, and it had three bedrooms, a red tile roof, an unusable fireplace, and a small orchard of rubber and avocado trees. On a terrace above the house, surrounded by carob trees and jacarandas, were 600 meters of unkempt garden with an abandoned, empty and dirty swimming pool in the middle.

She had the garden spruced up, painted, and filled the pool, turned the adjacent cabana into a studio, and converted the central sala into a kind of terrace. Light flooded in from all sides, and there was a long carved wooden bar, and a rectangular table of varnished planks. Both Mercedes and Tonchis had their own rooms. Anabela and I had the other. Honeysuckle and azaleas poured through a large window with a panorama of blue sky. Sometimes, on a clear day, you could see the volcanoes in the distance.

The house drew Anabela, and Anabela drew me. This led to a routine of leaving for Cuernavaca at noon Fridays with the children's friends, and on Sundays with our friends for meals and barbecues.

“I'm moving here,” Anabela announced one day. She was wearing the gardening gloves she used when pruning and weeding the dwarf banana trees in the planters.

This would have been in March 1979. The hearings on political reform were in full swing, and the greatness of Mexico as a petroleum power was the topic of the day. She started to look for a school for Tonchis and Mercedes. In Cuernavaca she found the most expensive one in Mexico, the summer program of a Swiss school whose curriculum included a yearly term in Geneva. It was trilingual, with a riding program, courses in computer science and set theory, and tuition of a 100,000 pesos (the exchange rate at the time
was 24 to the dollar) plus 40,000 for what was termed
menage
(supposedly uniforms but in reality a wardrobe).

She put the children in school and bought herself a Chrysler van with a wooden dash, adjustable steering wheel, power windows and locks, and cruise control. You could go 80 mph on the highway and still not feel as if you were going very fast.

In early June, she began moving out of the apartment on
Artes
and into The Hideaway. Every Friday she filled the back of the station wagon with small mountains of clothes (her staggering accumulation of clothing over the past two months). She also transferred her jewelry to safety deposit boxes in a Cuernavaca bank. One Saturday they extended her the courtesy of opening the vault so she could check her belongings (at the time banks weren't opening Saturdays), and I accompanied her and the manager who handed her the keys and left. Anabela opened the first box and began verifying its contents against a typed checklist, a task that clearly delighted her. She furrowed her brow as she touched each piece, rubbing it like a lucky charm.

I left and, while I waited, read newspapers in the cafe across the street. Later, we had a pre-dinner drink at Casino de la Selva.

“King Solomon's mines,” I said over the first martini.

She had now acquired the habit of drinking martinis made from imported gin.

“You can't lose with jewelry,” she said, oblivious to the joke.

“Especially if they reproduce themselves the way yours do. They're more prolific than Mexicans.”

That struck her funny.

“You were playing the reporter, right
Negro?
You think I'm rich, don't you?”

“And your tastes are expensive.”

“Do you consider yourself to my taste?”

“I'm from the press. It's above class, perfectly objective.”

“How much do you have in the bank,
Negro?”

“
You are as close as I've come to having something in the bank.”

“Seriously,” Anabela persisted. “How much?”

“Maybe twenty thousand in my checking account. Of course I haven't gotten my commission for the Chicontepec deal yet.”

She laughed again. Heartily. It was our first joke about Chicontepec since Rojano's death.

By late July the apartment on
Artes
was finally all mine, unoccupied and twice as empty as before.

“It should serve as your office in Mexico City,” Anabela contended. “Make Cuernavaca your de facto residence. You can live at The Hideaway and work here weekdays. When you have to stay late or have dinner commitments, you can spend the night here. When nothing's pending, you can go to The Hideaway. You can have an office there, too, with a phone and peace and quiet.”

“If you agree,” she went on, “Doña Lila can come and go from Cuernavaca as you wish.”

“And as I wish,” Doña Lila said. She took part in the deliberations with Mercedes in her lap. “I can't let this little tramp grow up like a wild flower. Right, little tramp? And it's time to start keeping an eye on Tonchis too or the little shrimp will be putting his tool where it doesn't belong.”

In the end, Doña Lila didn't go. At least not permanently, just weekends. And the apartment on
Artes
almost reverted to what it had been before. I gave up the office on Hamburg Street and relocated my files and desk back to the space Anabela had made into a diningroom. I put a photo of René Arteaga where Anabela had a photomural of San Juan de
Ulúa. On August 19, 1979, a beginning reporter from the cultural desk at
El Sol de Mexico
spent the night at
Artes
. Come the second week of September 1979, we were duly surprised upon finding ourselves separated by the move, by routine, and by mutual abandonment. One Sunday night Anabela phoned from Cuernavaca.

“Let me remind you my door is open,” she said. “It's been three weeks since you stopped in.”

“Too much work, ma'am.”