Death in Veracruz (34 page)

We pressed ahead, seeking the first vantage point that would enable us to view close-up what we'd come to witness with our own eyes. Not Pizarro's burial but the morbid details of his passing, the final chapter in the blood feud
that one torch-lit night in Chicontepec sealed his fate. The block immediately in front of the union headquarters had been cordoned off by Pizarro's guards and the staff of Local 35. Behind the guards, the line of vehicles that would make up the funeral procession stretched out of view, two flatbed trucks, a union bus and the obligatory passel of motorcycles, sedans with antennas and smoked windows, SUVs, and pickups loaded with bodyguards awaiting the moment when the holy barge, in this case a white hearse, would pull out from the union headquarters and carry Pizarro on his final journey.

My press card got us through the outer guard perimeter, and we made our way down the one street to go in a tidal wave of people like us struggling to get into the union headquarters. “State government!” Anabela bellowed. She forged ahead of me waving her passport over her head, blazing a path through the tumult. “State government, ladies and gentlemen! Urgent government business, please!” Shouting and brandishing her passport, she got us to the main entrance, the one I'd first passed through four years ago, face to face with Pizarro's personal security detail.

Roibal stood in the doorway minus the eye patch he'd had in Salamanca. His left eye was clouded and unfocused as if lost in fog. He'd continued to gain weight but in an unhealthy way—from alcohol or cortisone—that made him look more swollen than bloated. His good right eye also gaped and darted aimlessly about upon catching sight of us in the doorway.

“I'm here to do interviews too,” I lied.

“The national leaders are on the mezzanine,” Roibal said dryly without letting us in.

As he spoke, I spotted my paper's correspondent inside and called out to him over the head of Roibal, who made a show of planting himself indifferently before the half
-open door. I asked our correspondent to find someone in authority from the national leadership, and he brought the press spokesman, who doubled as public relations adviser to the maximum leader, Joaquín Hernández Galicia,
La Quina.
The adviser had negotiated the terms for my interviews of top union leaders with the paper.

The adviser spoke straight into Roibal's ear. “Joaquin says to let the journalist in.”

Anabela stepped in ahead of me, and the adviser accompanied us to the vast mezzanine where Pizarro's coffin lay on an improvised bier. Gathered nearby were virtually all the top union leaders, creating a solemn atmosphere of dark glasses and tropical guayaberas. Yet another guard stood next to the open casket with his eyes glued to the men and women clustered in front of it. Behind them, a line of mourners waiting to take their place snaked down the stairs and all the way to the door where Roibal allowed small groups of people to enter as those inside filed past the casket and made their way out. I was escorted to Joaquín Hernández Galicia and introduced to him for the second time. Anabela remained standing next to the line of mourners. Hernández Galicia listed by name the four regional leaders I was to interview, and ordered his adviser to put them at my disposal.

“Will you be with us a while?” he asked afterwards.

“I just came to set the dates,” I said. “I'll be back later for the interviews.”

“Suit yourself,” he said with a barely perceptible yet imperious glance towards Pizarro's coffin. “But it would be better if you came alone. Chicontepec is over and done with.”

I looked towards the coffin. The attendants were attempting to lift it off the bier, and Anabela was preventing them from closing the lid. She looked especially formidable in her black and white outfit, transfixed and refusing to
budge before the spectacle of the defunct Pizarro. I took the hint from Hernández Galicia and went to get her. In the open casket I glimpsed the lifeless face of the founder of “La Mesopotamia.” His olive skin contrasted with the coffin's white lining. His body seemed shrunken, consumed by cancer or Chanes's bullets. What little remained of his hair looked burned, and his sternum protruded like a keel from the center of his chest. He seemed diminished, like the spoiled remains of a dwarf.

“It's not him!” Anabela exclaimed in my ear with a burst of whispered histeria.

“It's what's left of him after wasting away for six months,” I said.

“No it isn't,
Negro!”
she murmured fiercely. Anabela rubbed her arms and began to shiver.

Wrapped in a white tunic, Little Darling approached us from the other side of the coffin. “We all lost him,” she said, embracing Anabela as if she were one of the mourners. “And we must all keep him in memory. There's a party going on outside. There's no grief. It's a party in memory of Lacho, who gave us so much and now leaves us his memory.”

I felt Anabela's trembling subside. Her whole body relaxed, and she clutched Little Darling's arm. She seemed to take comfort in the other woman's bereavement as if it were her own, as if she were receiving and at the same time offering consolation. The two remained inseparable for the rest of the occasion, and we found ourselves bound to an itinerary set by Little Darling. The attendants closed the coffin and lifted it off the bier. It was carried out by eight of the union's regional leaders, Hernández Galicia among them.

Anabela and Little Darling fell in behind the pallbearers, their white widows' weeds belied solely by the emerald pin on Anabela's chest. Emerging into the organized tumult of the
farewell crowd, we found ourselves engulfed in the phalanx of chief mourners, surrounded by the official representative of the state government, the secretaries of state security and labor, leaders of the nation's industrial unions, municipal authorities, and Pizarro's household staff—two cooks and two teenage houseboys—that Little Darling insisted on placing in the procession's front rank. With Anabela clinging to Little Darling's arm we climbed into the SUV immediately behind the hearse. Roibal, once again wearing the patch that had covered his left eye in Salamanca, took his seat beside the driver in glum silence.

Slowly the procession got under way beneath the blazing sun of Poza Rica. We crawled through the dense crowds in the first few blocks and swam through the sea of confetti washing down from the roofs of the buildings. All at once an agglomeration of bands and ensembles broke into a single melody,
Las golondrinas—The Swallows.
The hearse inched ahead at the pace of a triumphant bullfighter while garlands and carnations plummeted down along with paper hats, handkerchiefs, the world's most forlorn old shoes, and articles of clothing as Lázaro Pizarro made his final grand exit. Little Darling was unabashed in her grief, wracked by sobbing she made no effort to contain. She half hummed, half gargled the Magnificat followed by snatches of prayers, swallowed phlegm, and Our Fathers randomly interspersed with Credos and Rosaries.

In the blocks that followed, a corps of students with drums attached itself to the hearse, and rattled out volleys of military drum rolls. Women and men alike broke through the crowd barriers in hope of a look at Pizarro. Groups with banners shouted full-throated slogans of gratitude and remembrance in unison as we passed. All the while
Las golondrinas
hovered in the background, handed off from Veracruzan harps to electric guitars, to flutes and
keyboards and marimbas played by the musicians lining our way. Anabela was still holding Little Darling by the arm like a grieving sister without taking her eyes off the hearse creeping forward through the carnival bustle and the hubbub of voices rising and falling from beyond the crowd barriers. On the avenue where the taxis were parked, the music gave way to automobile horns and the shriek of ambulance sirens, driving Little Darling to bury her head in Anabela's chest, overcome by a fresh spasm of grief.

“He's going away,” she sobbed. “He's leaving us behind.”

“Forever,” Anabela said firmly.

Roibal jerked around to glare at her and then at me with his one good eye, but its cold anger failed to conceal his grief or the sting of offense that reddened its corners and froze there.

“He's left us forever,” Anabela repeated in open defiance of Roibal while she cradled Little Darling's head.

Another multitude waited at the cemetery beneath the burning afternoon sun. It was a plain cemetery, no trees, no manicured walkways, no marble mausoleums, no family crypts: a bare bones cemetery decorated with crosses, flowers, modest headstones, and nothing extra. We stepped out into the crowd and followed the coffin which the leaders of the oil workers took up once again and carried the remaining 200 meters. Little Darling grew increasingly inconsolable and distraught, and Anabela stood by her unmoved. It seemed as if the sobs and the seizures that wracked Little Darling let Anabela experience the sort of burial she wished she could have arranged. She appeared to be receiving a transfusion of raw grief that settled the scores left pending in Chicontepec.

The recently dug grave lay in the middle of a semicircle cordoned off by guards with some 4,000 sweating people clustered behind them. The guitars and mandolins of the
string band of Local 35 assembled before the grave and broke the silence with one last rendition of
Las golondrinas.
Labor leaders and politicians replaced them, and the music stopped.

“He's not dead. He lives on in us,” someone shouted from the crowd, filling the silence.

There was only one speech, a laconic address delivered by Hernández Galicia, the maximum leader. He declared three days of mourning by the oil worker family for its departed brother and said the region as well as the country had lost a guide. “Lázaro Pizarro isn't in that casket,” he said, looking up at the crowd. “Lázaro Pizarro is here…” He placed his hand on his chest, “…in the hearts of all men of good will, of all the oil workers and the oil workers' friends. Lázaro Pizarro is in the streets we just traveled, in the head and the brain of everyone who came to wish him not ‘goodbye' but ‘so long.'

“Pizarro lives on in what he built and accomplished,” Hernández Galicia continued, “in the achievements of Local 35, in the schools, on the job, in the stores, in the movie theaters, and union gardens. In the sad looks I see on all your faces.

“We say so long to him, to our brother, our guide, our builder. But we also welcome him to live on in what he did. Lacho Pizarro may rest in peace, but we cannot. We must honor his memory by doing more than he did. That's what he wanted when I spoke to him last. Not grief but work. And by our work we will be loyal to his memory.”

Hernández Galicia grew quiet, and the crowd was silent once again. A scrawny old man with a bugle stepped forward from behind the cordon. He wiped his lips and began to play lamentably, but recognizably,
Adiós muchachos, compañeros de la vida—Goodbye my pals, my lifelong friends.

“That was also one of his last wishes,” Little Darling said
to Anabela. “He wanted that played.”

The bugler stood with his legs apart and his shirt open at his bony chest. The cuffs of his pants were rolled up to expose the sinewy shins that supported him firmly atop badly worn sandals. He played without rhythm, missing notes but piercing the air and the silence like a complaint, an animal lament at once metallic and electrifying as the coffin was lowered into the ground and the first shovelfuls of earth landed on top of it.

When he finished, the grave was half full, and the rest of the ceremony consisted of the rhythmic sound of falling dirt and the scrape of shovels digging and spreading it. One by one the union leaders stepped forward and dropped red carnations in the grave. Then the wreaths sent from throughout the country were stacked in a pyre nearly two meters high. People began leaving, and half an hour later Little Darling still lingered in the arms of Anabela. The two women, Roibal, and I were alone before a small mountain of funeral wreaths.

“He'll be just fine now,” Little Darling said. Her voice sounded hollow, serene and exhausted. “Where he is, it isn't cold or hot. There are no rulers, no enemies, no honors or victory parades. All that remains is for me to join him.”

We returned to Mexico City that evening on the 7 o'clock plane from Tampico.

“She's going to have him right there,” Anabela suddenly said when were about to land.

“Have who?”

“Pizarro. Little Darling will have him right there in the cemetery for the rest of her life.”

“You think there's consolation in that?”

“Consolation, no. It just occurred to me that he'd be right there where she can reach him.”

The long hot day had coarsened and sharpened her features. She looked gaunt and worn out. There were small bags under her eyes, and she seemed somewhat distant and distracted. I had the impression she was still processing the transfusion from Little Darling, making sure the account left pending that night in Chicontepec was now settled.

S
he stayed in Mexico for two weeks. The first was celebratory and euphoric, the second bureaucratic and anomic. The first week ended with a prolonged meal at Champs Elysées inevitably accompanied by lots of Chablis and much needling of waiters.

“The only reason we're back is because we ran out of restaurants,” Anabela told the maitre d'. “Don't think it's because we like French.”

We ate out every night that week, then went to some show or other that didn't let out until after midnight. Inebriated, with no purpose except our own amusement, we were erotically inventive, content to let the days slip by without the shadow of Pizarro hanging over us. We awoke hungry and still excited by a lingering alcoholic buzz from the night before. By two in the afternoon we were on our way to the restaurant of the day where we ordered fresh seafood, restorative libations, and lavish meals culminating in long strolls on Reforma or through the center of the city window shopping. We browsed the exclusive stores where Anabela picked out dresses, scarves, handbags, and finally a sable coat in the hidden corner of a shop on Luis Moya.