Death in Veracruz (37 page)

“What are you going to do,
Negro?”

“I need to write tomorrow's column,” I said.

“I don't mean that. What are you going to do, generally speaking?”

“After I do tomorrow's column, I've got to do one for the day after.”

She took my hand. The bags were gone from under her eyes. She looked plain and serene. She wore no jewelry and
seemed unconcerned with her appearance. Part of the effect was thanks to an absence of lipstick and only the slightest touch of eyeliner highlighting the shape of her eyes.

“I ought to apologize to you,” she said.

“There's something good to investigate this week,” I replied. “The dope trade is on the upswing again. I got a report about it yesterday.”

“Thanks,
Negro.”

“I have some letters for the children.” I took them out of my coat pocket.

“Yes,” Anabela said.

“And I think Doña Lila's bringing something.”

What she brought was a plush doll for Mercedes and a giant puzzle that assembled into a minutely detailed representation of the Iztacíhuatl volcano for Tonchis.

“Since he likes rocks and landscapes,” Doña Lila explained, “here's a picture of some very old ones that ought to interest him. And the little girl still loves stuffed dolls more than the things big girls lust after.”

It was nearly two when Anabela boarded after a long embrace with Doña Lila and the few seconds when she melted into me as if we were dancing.

“If it has to be a Gringo, let it be a journalist,” I said with a forlorn sense of professional loyalty.

“Thanks,
Negro,”
Anabela repeated. She headed down the boarding tunnel past the scanner for hand luggage, smiling, walking erect, full of athletic freshness and her seemingly eternal youthfulness.

Doña Lila wiped some tears away. We crossed the pedestrian bridge to the parking complex without speaking, then she said, “There are lots of women and men. All that's missing are real live love affairs.”

Every day I wrote my column for the following day, and
every week through the end of August I got letters from the children. Then, with my saint's day approaching, a letter from Anabela came too. The night before the ex-reporter from
El Sol
had returned to Artes. She was now editor of the entertainment page for one of the capital's major dailies, a young, even-tempered woman and a close reader of newspapers, friendly, warm-hearted, loving and inclined to domesticity. In the morning we went through the daily papers over breakfast, and I waited for her to leave before picking up the mail and getting close to Anabela again. It wasn't a long letter though Anabela's clear and expansive handwriting made it seem to be. Two pages were taken up with descriptions of greetings from the children and of the suburban house they'd moved into from their apartment. The paragraph about Rojano said the following:

“He's buried in a new cemetery with lawns and trees everywhere on a hill overlooking the city of Los Angeles. I'm still alone and happy. I don't miss corrupt journalists, but, unlike Tonchis who's just scored his first
Gringuita,
I do miss some things. Mercedes is taking modern dance at the city art school. The house has a swimming pool, and you can't imagine how calm it is. I think a lot about you and what we went through together. Sometimes I dream about it. But the nightmare always goes away in the morning. The days are so sunny. You can't imagine the peace and quiet, the way the wind blows through the trees where Rojano is now. I go every Sunday and just sit there in the wind which, as I said, is softer than you can ever imagine.”

Despite what she said, I could imagine the wind perfectly well and Anabela too, secure and at peace on her Sunday visits to the new headstone on a hill looking down on Los Angeles, seated with her arms folded, gathering in the years spent preserving the memory of Rojano.

H
éctor Aguilar Camín
(born July 9,1946 in Chetumal) is a Mexican writer, journalist and historian, and author of several novels, among them
Death in Veracruz
and
Galio's War,
of which Ariel Dorfman
(Death and the Maiden)
has exclaimed, “Without hesitation, I would call either one of these a classic of Latin American fiction.” His most recent novel,
Adios to My Parents
was published in Mexico to great critical and popular acclaim in 2014.
Death in Veracruz
is the first work of his fiction to be translated into English.

Aguilar Camín graduated from the Ibero-American University with a bachelor's degree in information sciences and techniques and received a doctorate's degree in history from El Colegio de México. In 1986 he received Mexico's Cultural Journalism National Award and three years later he received a scholarship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation while he was working as a researcher for the National Institute of Anthropology and History.

As a journalist, he has written for
Unomásuno
and
La Jornada
(both of which he also coedited), the magazine
Proceso,
and currently for
Milenio.
He founded and is nowadays the editor of
Nexos,
one of the leading cultural magazines of the country, and hosted Zona abierta, a weekly current—affairs show on national television, and has written articles for prestigious publications as
El país
and
Foreign Affairs.

He has written a classic boook on Mexican history:
La frontera nómada. Sonora y la Revolución Mexicana,
(in translation from U of Texas Press) and numerous books and essays on contemporary Mexico. In 1998 he received the Mazatlán National Prize of Literature for his book,
A breath in the
river.
He is married to Angeles Mastretta and has three sons. Other novels by Héctor Aguilar Camin:
El error de la luna, El resplandor de la madera, La conspiración de la fortuna,
and the collection of novellas and short stories:
Pasado pendiente y otras histories conversadas.

About
CHANDLER THOMPSON

C
handler Thompson acquired his translating chops in the 1960s as a Peace Corps Volunteer, then while writing news stories in English from raw copy in Spanish and French. He's covered Mexico as a stringer for
The Christian Science Monitor
and as reporter for
The El Paso Times.
He translated
Death in Veracruz
between hearings while working as a court interpreter.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

S
pecial thanks to my daughter Elsi, the first reader in English of
Death in Veracruz.
She kept me going by always wanting to know what happened next. My partner Pauline Curry whose admiration for the work of Héctor Aguilar Camín is alway an inspiration.