Death in Veracruz (33 page)

“If the widow made the mistake of sending someone to kill Pizarro, as you told me she did, it was in my interest to talk her out of it. With Pizarro dying of cancer, it made less sense than ever. The situation for the two of you was bad enough already, politically speaking. Too prone to scandal, too much pushing and shoving, and extraordinarily dangerous, believe me. It was dangerous for the two of you
and also for the government's relations with the oil workers' union. And for me as the negotiator caught in the middle. If at the time I'd told Rojano's widow that Pizarro had cancer, she'd have simply assumed that I wanted to marginalize her. So I said her attack had succeeded.”

“The widow didn't order any attack,” I said, sticking with her version to the bitter end.

“Chanes's supposed attack,” my contact said by way of clarification. “And that's what convinced her to leave the country for a while. I lied to her with the truth. What was true then is false now and vice versa. That's all. As for the rest…” He removed his glasses and again looked up at the sky with an expression of sadness and something like longing that disintegrated into a melancholy smile, “…let me say this. I understand you very well. The widow's an impressive woman. I still haven't figured her out, and I don't think you have either. I call her ‘the widow' not to belittle her but out of respect. And also, as I might as well tell you, with a bit of envy for not having met her under more favorable circumstances. Envy of you, of the mayor, of the men who have left their scent there.”

“I understand what you're saying,” I said.

“I know you do,
paisano.”

He put his cigarette out on the haunch of one of the frogs, cleanly removing the ember. “Some friends are getting together in private tonight.” He took his glasses off. “Do you want to come?”

I wrote up a detailed account of the interview and had an Eastern Airlines pilot take it to Los Angeles for Anabela. On April 28, I learned from the correspondent in Veracruz and confirmed with Bucareli that Pizarro was comatose. On an afternoon a week later, the newspaper got notice of his death. I happened to be in the office of the editor in chief
discussing a lengthy series of interviews with labor leaders that the paper had spent a month trying to set up. The oil workers' leadership wanted me to be the interviewer, and the editor was spelling out the journalistic advantages of such an arrangement. The cable reached his desk in the hands of an aide.

“Pizarro died,” it said.

My stomach did a quick somersault followed immediately by a kind of uncontrollable euphoria. “Tell them I agree to do the interviews,” I told the editor, “on whatever terms you decide.”

It was 3:00 in the afternoon. I left the office and called our correspondent to check on details of the death. Then, from the long distance booth at the newspaper, I called Los Angeles. Anabela herself answered the phone.

“Pizarro died at noon,” I told her.

There was a long silence from the other end of the line.

“What's the date today,
Negro?”
She sounded dazed.

“Wednesday, May 4.”

“Wednesday, May 4, 1980,” Anabela said. “It makes me want to cry.”

“Then cry.”

“I don't know how to cry. Rojano was right.”

“Right about what?”

“Revenge is a dish you have to eat cold,” Anabela said, her voice frozen solid. “When's the burial?”

“Tomorrow in Poza Rica.”

“With full honors?”

“With full union honors, yes.”

“Will you be home tonight? I'd like you to talk to the children for a while. They've missed you.”

“I miss them too.”

“Send me a kiss. I feel a void in the pit of my stomach. It seems to me like wanting to cry.”

I ate at Passy with a presidential adviser bursting with enthusiasm for the SAM project announced on March 18. I listened placidly as he went on and on in minute detail about the possibilities and resources for achieving nutritional self-sufficiency in Mexico, about the aberrant use of farmland for cattle grazing, about returning rural areas to crops strategic to the Mexican diet, about the prospect of enriching food staples in just a few years through agroindustrial processes that would add soy to tortillas and double at a single stroke the national protein intake.

After eating, for the first time since Anabela left for Los Angeles, I drank a cognac and smoked a cigar. I cancelled a commitment for a late evening meal, bought magazines from Spain at Sanborn's, and took refuge in the Cine Latino.

Back at
Artes,
I gave Doña Lila the news that the children would be calling. I took off my shoes and tie, poured myself a whiskey, and got down to reading the SAM documents I'd been given at Passy They amounted to a history of its bureaucratic gestation that began with a memo from Cassio Luiselli, who dreamed up the scheme, and culminated in ambitious agroindustrial proposals buttressed by import substitution and the adaptation of new technologies. Two whiskeys later, around 11:00 at night, I heard a knock on the door and the click of a key in the lock as she came in. She was dressed in black leather from head to toe with a red bandanna tied around her neck. She was radiant as if bathed in an aura whose power over me had been cushioned by distance and forgotten. Once again I was caught by surprise as I'd been three and a half years before. She invaded my privacy and deprived me of the means to respond to her intervention.

“I couldn't resist,
Negro.”
She rolled her wheeled suitcase into the apartment as if it were a purebred dog. “I got the 6 o'clock flight out of Los Angeles. I couldn't resist.”

I remained seated on the sofa where I was reading. The
sight of her maneuvering the suitcase while deploying her alibi dazzled me. In the most flattering way she could, she explained her decision to travel and come to me. She was like a model doing a turn on the runway to show off her outfit, graceful, fresh and euphoric. “Rather than cry, I decided to celebrate,” she said. “But we haven't slept together. Aren't you even going to kiss me?”

I stood up and embraced her. We kissed. Then Anabela got out her cigarettes and lit one, staining it as always with her lipstick, then she sat down in one of the pigskin chairs with one leg crossed and nervously jiggling.

“Won't you at least offer me a vodka on the rocks?”

I poured her a vodka on the rocks.

“I wouldn't want to catch you off guard,” Anabela said. “You need to tell me if there's someone in the bedroom.”

“There isn't anybody.”

“If there's someone in the bedroom I can turn my back to the hallway for about 15 minutes while you get her out of here. I promise not to look, listen or remember. Do you need 15 minutes.”

“No.”

“You mean she just left?”

“No.”

“Then why the degenerate face of a guy who just got laid? You look like you're about to tell me you've come down with a case of Vietnamese gonorrhea. You didn't take on an admirer or a beginner without protection, then?”

“No beginners,” I said

“Then veterans only? You caught the Vietnamese clap?”

“No.”

“Boyfriend, sweetheart, consoler, confidant?”

“Nothing of the kind.”

“So you've missed me,
Negro.”

“Lots.”

“Enough to be faithful?”

“To overflowing.”

“And may your cock fall off if you're lying to me?”

“May you come down with the Vietnamese clap if I'm lying to you.”

She took two gulps of vodka and proceeded to the bedroom with her suitcase in tow. From the bedroom she asked for another vodka which I took to her, but by then she'd crawled under the covers and left her clothes on the floor and her earrings, watch and bracelet next to the night table.

The first encounter was quick and superficial, but half an hour later the second was prolonged and intense. I went for more whiskey and vodka. When I returned, Anabela was setting the alarm clock.

“That's it,” she said. “We have to get up early tomorrow. You know why, don't you?”

She hesitated before holding my face in her cold hands, which weren't quite so cold now, and looked at me for a moment, smooth, relaxed and blindingly beautiful, before asking, “You know why I came, don't you,
Negro?”

“For Pizarro's burial,” I said.

“And to see you,
Negro.
To see you. But the burial's a one-time thing. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Are you coming with me?”

“I've got to improve my relations with the oil workers. I'm about to do a long series of interviews with their leadership.”

“Then you're coming with me?”

“Yes.”

“I bought tickets on the plane to Tampico for 7:00 tomorrow.”

“I know the way,” I said.

And I did.

I fell asleep thinking about the “reasons of accuracy” that invariably motivated my contact to refer to Anabela as “Rojano's widow.” I was also aware of the rocky road his possession had traveled and which once again seemed to be reaching its end.

There was no need to ask the way to Pizarro's funeral in Poza Rica. All you had to do was follow the garlands and banners bidding Pizarro farewell, vowing to remember him always and to walk in his footsteps. The garlands began right at the turnoff to the cemetery on the city's outskirts and stretched all the way to its center along the major thoroughfares and down the side streets leading to the headquarters of the oil workers' union. From there the mortal remains of Lázaro Pizarro would depart on the stroke of noon. The way was even easier to follow by virtue of the crowds lined up behind an interminable string of barriers set up along the sidewalks of the route to be taken by the funeral procession. We left the car barely ten blocks from where we entered the city and set out to follow the flowers and the crowds.

During the presidential campaign, I'd seen these orderly and enthusiastic crowds hundreds of times in big cities and remote hamlets. I'd learned to look past first impressions of throngs of people taking spontaneously to the streets, and to see the efficient mechanisms of corporatist Mexico at work. I was familiar with the engineering feats that turned out masses of trade groups, clients, and sympathizers by rewarding attendance and punishing absence. The old staging skills were on display the length of the route the procession would traverse. Classes had been canceled, the city's entire school population mobilized and strategically deployed. Boys and girls from the elementary grades, adolescents, and
teenagers from the high schools and trade schools were all shepherded to their appointed places by their teachers. They waved their tricolor flags and wore small black mourning bands on the sleeves of their uniforms. Members of the city's labor unions stood shoulder to shoulder behind the crowd barriers. The waitresses held red carnations in their hands. The telegraphers and postal workers carried a huge wreath woven from sticks to resemble a microwave dish with the word
adios
spelled out in purple flowers at its center. Peasants and dancers had been trucked in from the sierra, and Poza Rica's 500 taxis—lined up one after the other in the median of a major thoroughfare—were matched by a similar show of union rolling stock: tanker trucks and cement mixers, tractors and backhoes, graders and mobile cranes. Garish banners hung from the outside lighting fixtures of buildings and covered their walls, competing with one another in the expression of a single sentiment: “We won't forget you, Lacho.” At street corners and intersections, barrio dwellers and office workers waved pennants promising that “Your example will guide our children” while police patrols closed streets and kept order. “The electricians of Poza Rica bid Lázaro Pizarro goodbye.” Organizers of the farewell weighed down little girls and old ladies with armloads of flowers. “Healthcare workers wish Lázaro Pizarro immortal health in eternity.” Cheering squads rang cowbells and blew whistles. “You are never gone and never will be gone from our memory.” Prostitutes stood weeping with wilted yellow mourning flowers in their hands. With the sticks intended to hold up their signs they'd improvised a canopy that shielded them from the blazing sun. “Lázaro Pizarro, always together for the victory of the workers.” The railroad workers' siren pierced the air, duly sounding the alarm that signaled disasters and emergencies. “You lost your Life, Lacho, but you made History.” And at carefully staggered 100-meter
intervals were the city's orchestras, marimba bands, marching bands, and other musical ensembles tuning electric guitars, rehearsing riffs on flutes and clarinets, tightening the strings of harps and violins, beating drums, and culminating in a small placard tied to a balcony. “There is only one Lacho; he is all of us” the message said.

Nearer union headquarters in the center of the city, the fiesta intensified with more banners and more slogans. I was well aware of the skeleton beneath this extravagance and excess, the administrative and orchestral clout that could energize a reception or a parade or fill a stadium with a cheering crowd. Still, I never ceased to be surprised by the sense of vivacity and strength I felt upon blending into the living stages of the pyramid, the pyramid from whose peak Pizarro ruled to the point of directing his own farewell and infusing it with the vigor of the crowds flooding the raucous streets of Poza Rica. Choked with people, the streets were more beautiful and less visible than ever before. The impenetrable tumult around the union headquarters was perfectly easy to imagine given, among other things, its visibility from blocks away where the crowd barriers yielded to a throbbing hive of vehicles and people, a giant festival closed to additional traffic. At the far side of the crowd, above the heads of the tangled mass at ground level, a bank of reflectors rained still more light on the crowd's emergent movement as a power greater than itself sliced through it. On the pulsating ribbon of the street, as if part of a mirage created by so much brilliance, the enormous bulk of two buses with their big lights ablaze revealed the spot where proceedings would begin, the offices of the union.