Death in Veracruz (24 page)

“That's pretty lame,
Negro.
I'm not calling to criticize you, but I'm not your suffering wife, remember?”

“I remember.”

“That's exactly what I want you to remember. Even cars need to be serviced. How many girls have you taken to
Artes?”

“It's all news all the time.”

“Just little lady reporters. Isn't that right, you bastard?”

“I told you nothing but news.”

“Oh,
Negro,
I wish you were here.”

“Get a grip, ma'am. This line is tapped.”

“Your cock's been tapped,
Negro.
Tonchis says hello. They're teaching him show jumping. When are you coming?”

“Next week.”

“Not next week,
Negro,
because next week
I'm
going to Mexico City. I'm warning you now to set aside five days for me. I have travel plans and things to tell you.”

She did indeed show up the following week. She arrived at the apartment around 8:00 Friday evening in a black silk pant suit that was open in back, revealing an expanse of tanned skin all the way down to her buttocks. She'd had her hair cut short again, and her face was as toasted as her back, intensifying the brilliance of her eyes. She was also wearing gold earrings and a matching necklace engraved with pre-Hispanic motifs, red lipstick, and a beauty spot on her left cheek.

“You owe me this night and five days, as we agreed,” she said.

She went straight to the bedroom. She turned on the shower, then selected, and laid out on the bed a suit and tie, a shirt, and socks and shoes. Half an hour later we climbed into her Chrysler van, and by 9:00 we were at the Champs Elysees. The night was cool and clear, and by 9:00 we were seated on the terrace overlooking Reforma. We ordered fish and shrimp, and from the wine list a vintage dry Chablis. We went through the first bottle in a hurry just as we had in the past, then we ordered the second.

“This dinner's on me,” Anabela said. “You know why?”

“Because you're the rich widow.”

“You don't have to be a widow to be rich. You invited me to dinner here once, and you're still the bachelor outcast.”

“But you're the Queen of Sheba now.”

“And now you're a maker of national opinion who doesn't understand a damn thing. You know why I invited you to dinner?”

“I already said I did.”

“And I said you didn't. I'm inviting because you put my life in order. That is, you straightened out all the problems one person can solve for another. It's a given that the rest is nothing but booze and Chicontepec. Agreed?”

The wine was beginning to have its affect, making her tongue careless and loose as it always did.

“Agreed.”

“There's no way out, right?”

“Right.”

“And remembrances aren't worth much. Vengeance may help, but it doesn't bring back the past, does it?”

“No, it doesn't”

The trout came garnished with almonds as requested, and Anabela ordered a third Chablis.

“You're the one who introduced me to these European delicacies,
Negro.
Before I was just a Little Red Riding Hood from Veracruz. How was I to know about European wines and first class restaurants? I want to ask you something.”

“Ask me something?”

“And I want you to answer as if you really were a national opinion-maker. Not as the fag you actually are. Understand?”

“What's the question?”

“Just one,
Negro,
here and now between the two of us, looking each other in the eye.”

We looked each other in the eye.

“I want to know if you like the way I am,” she said with her gaze fixed on me.

She was very tan from the sun. Her eyes were brilliant and clear, and the elongated oval of her face glowed from the wine that reddened her cheeks and dilated her eyes. Her lipstick was smudged from eating, and the meal left a film of grease on her lips.

“You've seen better times.”

“No, no, no,” Anabela said, beginning to crack up over her own joke. “What I mean is would you let your cock be cut off just to get a smile out of me? Would you hock the fucking newspaper that made you a national opinion-maker if I asked you for money? Would you die for me or are you just screwing around with me? That's what I want to know.”

“I'd give up the column.”

“All right,” Anabela said. “What else?”

“There is nothing else.”

“No, no, no, that's just the beginning,” Anabela said. “You've got to keep going. You need to trade the newspaper for my earlobe, your apartment for my used underwear, your birth certificate for a piece of my tail. Something romantic,
Negro.
Because I'd give anything. Believe me. No,
you don't believe me, but I would. That's what I came to tell you tonight, and now I've said it.”

We drank the rest of the wine. Unburdened and relaxed, Anabela dug into the desserts and liqueurs with a relish born, she said, of the four months of diet and exercise that turned her into a tanned and rejuvenated jet-setter as slender and robust as a beach bunny.

We went to hear Manzanero at Villa Florencia and rented a suite at the Fiesta Palace at 3:00 in the morning. At seven we sipped the last of the cognac we'd brought with us, and I felt Anabela fall asleep with her head resting on my legs.

She woke me up at noon, freshly bathed and in full voice. “Let's go,
Negro.”

She had two tickets on the afternoon flight to Cancún. In the suite's sala a breakfast with cold beer and
huevos rancheros
awaited us, luxuriously served under a silver cover.

She refused to go by the apartment on
Artes
for clothes, preferring that we buy beachwear, sandals, and a pair of travel bags at the store in the hotel. We were in the airport waiting area long enough for two drinks apiece, and we had another two along with the in-flight meal. We landed as night fell on Cancún. We checked into the Hotel Presidente and went for a nighttime swim on its blissfully quiet beach where we remained until our legs were shivering. We ate a candlelight dinner at Casablanca in the Hotel Krystal, a dive stuffed with Bogart memorabilia and assorted pieces of the usual Hollywood kitsch. Anabela ordered a bottle of champagne.

“Love me,
Negro,
and don't forget me,” she said by way of a toast, “because after me they broke the mold.”

I toasted the mold.

“I'm going to show you my refuge,
Negro.
And once you've been to my refuge, you'll know everything there is to know about me.”

Very early the next day we set out for the refuge in an automatic min-van driven by a man with a small mustache. His name was Julio Pot, and he treated Anabela with the curious and attentive familiarity of a driver and secretary.

“Did you say we were coming?” Anabela asked after we boarded the min-van.

“I went yesterday to see for myself that everything was in order,” Julio Pot said. “All that was needed was gas for the generator and more of the insecticide that was used up and never replaced. How long has it been since you last came?”

“A year and five months, Julio.”

“You left in January of last year.”

“January of last year,” Anabela admitted.

We headed towards Tulum on the road that also goes through Carrillo Puerto, formerly Chan Santa Cruz. In the 19th century, this was the center of the Maya rebellion known as the Yucatán Caste War. We drove for an hour next to a curtain of jungle through which an endless array of foxes, iguanas, and armadillos broke out onto the highway.

At the Tulum-Pueblo crossroads, on the far side of Akumal and Playa del Carmen, Julio Pot turned into a corridor that stretched down the middle of a long tongue of land separated from the mainland by a lagoon called Boca Paila and from the open ocean by a reef that fended off the tempests of the Caribbean.

Coconut trees lined the beaches on either side, tall slender palms bent inland by the prevailing sea winds. They created a landscape punctuated only by patches of mangroves along the lagoon and an abundance of wild almond trees. It was a spur of land occupied by copra farms and waterside fishing villages under gradual invasion by
fishing resorts,
meaning bungalows with no electricity and the other rustic charms that attract tourists seeking a way back to nature.

Julio Pot maneuvered the mini-van onto one of the
side roads. We stepped out into a weeded clearing planted with perfectly aligned palm trees forming a lush walkway that led to a cluster of small dwellings topped by thatched roofs. They were built to look like
palapas-the
simple shelters characteristic of the region since time immemorial. A slender white woman stood in the middle of one of the paths drying her hands on her apron. Her broad smile revealed a pair of gold incisors.

Anabela kissed her.

“Are you coming to la Punta?” the woman said.

“Yes,
Güera,”
Anabela said.

“Have Julio let me know when so I can make you a meal.”

“We want to go to Punta Pájaros,” Anabela said. “And Cayo Culebras. How is your brother?”

“You know, either hungover or drunk. There's no middle ground with him. But when it comes to fishing, he can't be beat. I'll tell him to get you some snails and lobster for tomorrow. He's sure to get us something.”

Julio Pot went to the back of the largest palapa and started a generator. He unloaded the luggage and several boxes of groceries from the mini-van.

Behind the large palapa was a long strip of beach edged with snail shells. A ribbon of white sand curled southward for some two kilometers, ending at a rocky point with waves breaking over it. In the shallows the water was emerald green. Farther out it turned turquoise, then purple some three hundred meters offshore where it washed over the ragged barrier of the reefs.

There were three palapas with stone and masonry walls and thatched roofs supported from within by beams whose lower ends came together in an inverted cone. The two smaller palapas were rooms with baths. The third and largest included a diningroom with a bar, an empty bookcase, and
wicker sofas. A mounted sailfish hung on the wall. Next to the bar were a kitchen and a room housing the generator that provided electricity and a shadow box in which the acrylic paint was peeling off a boat named the Mercedes. Salt-caked green lettering identified the spot where the craft was beached as Paradise.

Julio Pot placed a dish of abalone with Havana chile and a pair of Tom Collinses on our table. Shadows of palm trees swaying in the breeze moved back and forth across its surface.

“This is my refuge,
Negro,”
Anabela told me. “We bought it five years ago.”

“With funds from the Veracruz CNOP?” I asked.

At the time Rojano headed the state chapter of the National Confederation of People's Organizations.

“Funds from the Guillaumín family. They sold seventeen hectares of copra here for three million pesos. For four hundred thousand I was able to get the five least profitable, the beachfront that was of no interest to the buyers. Later we built the palapas. We built the big one first, and we used to sleep here one on top of the other. Then we built the other two.”

It was not yet noon. The day was a bit overcast, but the sun beat down hard. We walked a kilometer towards the tip of the reefs. There were pelicans and heron, a thick anchor rope washed up by the sea, and blindingly white sand as far as the eye could see. Anabela picked up the plastic thigh of a doll, cleaned the seaweed off it, and put it in the pocket of her
huipil.
The beach took an unexpected turn and curved inland in a semicircle.

“This is the refuge of my refuge,” Anabela said, pointing to a small green inlet, a sort of natural swimming pool. “Come.”

She dropped her huipil on the sand and entered the water naked.

When we returned to the palapa, Julio Pot had prepared a ceviche of snail and mullet. There was also a bottle of cold Chablis.

“I got my taste for this from you,” Anabela said by way of a toast.

We made love one more time in the palapa before the siesta and again upon awakening as the sun began to set. We did it with an intensity that came not from ourselves but from the place, from a need of nearly adolescent urgency.

We stayed three days. On the last one we went to the point with la
Güera
for the excursion to Cayo Culebras in the middle of Bahía de Ascensión. It was an irregular agglomeration of islands on the way to becoming overgrown with mangroves, a huge natural snake nursery. Clouds of frigatebirds with inflatable red throat pouches wheeled overhead, and those in flight were a small fraction of the thousands perched nervously on the canopies and branches of the mangroves. In places clusters of birds blotted out the green foliage with their white breasts and black flanks.

“They're suicide birds,” Anabela said. “When they can't find food, they nosedive into the trees and break their own necks by getting them snagged in the forks of the branches.”

“Like politicians out of a job,” I said.

La
Güera
laughed.

“Like widows abandoned by the leaders of national opinion,” Anabela said.

In her house la
Güera
prepared a Belize dish called fish
cerec
(fish broth with coconut milk), and we had drinks with her brother, who by that hour of the day had already downed half a bottle of Viejo Vergel rum. We returned to the palapas at nightfall in the mini-van. Shadows stretched seaward as the sun set over the lagoon. A stiff breeze came up, rippling the water with waves and rustling the palms. Anabela put on
a blue turban, and the lotion on her face glistened. Her green eyes seemed larger and brighter than ever.

We drank without speaking.

“Did you come here with Rojano?”

“Is that the best question you can come up with in a place like this?”