Death in Veracruz (6 page)

“Don't act like you're talking to the Virgin Mary. Are you in cahoots with this Rojano guy or not? They're trying to screw me, right? You can tell me because, after all, I'm good and drunk. Tomorrow I won't remember a thing, so don't be afraid. Can't you see I've been in cahoots with you ever since high school? What kind of columnist have you turned out to be on me? And tell that bastard to shut up because the booze is making me think you got the asshole who's singing to lace my drink with yumbina. You give women yumbina, and they go for you just like that, right?
You're the love I can't resist,
and the yumbina makes them fall like flies one after the other. That's right. Why don't we go there, what do you think?”

She put her hand over her half empty glass and looked around, supporting herself with her elbows on the table. One elbow slipped. She raised it, it slipped again, and she smiled. Finally, with great effort, she said, “Let's get out of this rotten place, alright?”

The same 66th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution we stumbled back to the apartment on
Artes. Pitcher ready, batter up.
We made it onto the sofa where the evening had begun. I took off her shoes and began to massage her feet. She pulled my hair to make me climb on top of her, and
I obliged. We kissed very slowly at first, then in a fit of overacting, I began stroking her thighs and breasts, and she yielded to my touch. When I again tried to kiss her on the mouth, I discovered she'd fallen asleep. Her makeup had run, her lips were parted and dry, her skirt was hiked high over her knees, and one of her earrings hung loose on its open clasp. Her wrist was pulled up next to her chin as if she were resting on it. Her breathing was normal and rhythmic at once rigid and peaceful like a little girl. I watched a while, for a long while, as she slept on the sofa. Then I got a blanket and put it over her, making sure not to disturb the placement of her wrist under her chin. I made myself another drink and continued to watch her, her loose earring, her wrist, her breathing. For half an hour I wandered about the apartment full of illusions and discoveries, of loose ends to tie in the column, of possible sources. I pulled the blanket back over Anabela: she was snoring.

Daylight and Doña Lila woke me up around ten. I lay sprawled over my bed minus my shirt, dying of cold, and with a dry throbbing in my throat.

“She left early,” Doña Lila said as she gathered up the sheets.

“Where is she?”

“I told you. Like a vampire she left with the dawn.”

“Where did she go?”

“To a luxury cemetery, I'd say. Because that woman belonged to a bullfighter at least, not a reporter.”

“She didn't leave a message?”

“No message, no tip. What do you want for breakfast? You can have the tamales from last night, fried bananas, soft tacos, lime juice with lots of ice. And your tub is full of water hot enough to boil the skin off a chicken.”

I gave in to the ministrations of Doña Lila and the morning papers. I checked my notepad which contained
long paragraphs of my scribbles from the previous day that I no longer understood and three intelligible sentences: “In a fight with Ro over Chicontepec / I'm being nailed / It's even possible he sent her.” At one a messenger came to the door with a package from Mrs. Rojano. The bundle was held together with metal bands and had been delivered by taxi from the Hotel Reforma. I called the hotel right away, but she'd left for Veracruz on the one o'clock plane.

Doña Lila cut the strapping with pliers and handed me a cigar box. The outer label, which hadn't been removed, said: “Special selection for Atty. Francisco Rojano.” Inside was a pouch identical to the ones Rojano had shown me months earlier at their house in Veracruz:
Destroying to create. He who can add can divide.
With the pseudo-Aztec border. Also in the packet were the three files Rojano had promised and an enclosure wrapped in onion paper. I tore open the enclosure and saw the photo: the small charred body and exposed teeth of a six-year-old boy totally consumed and shrunk by fire. On the back in block letters drawn by Rojano: “José Antonio Garabito, age 10, died in fire, Poza Rica, January 14, 1976. With the usual trademark.” There was a small, barely visible yet obvious hole in the right temple. There were four more photos of the burnt house, the coroner's report, and a final note from Rojano. “This is the last member of the Garabito family. The others died in the market in Papantla at the hands of gunmen who were after Antonio Malerva.”

I felt as if I was being manipulated by remote control from the port of Veracruz.

I went back to sleep after I ate. I dreamed I was with Anabela in the pastures along the shores of Lake Ostión. We were walking on the strips of solid, brilliantly green turf built up from the marshes along the inlets to the lagoon. Purebred Brahma cattle with their humps like hillocks of cannon balls hid among the banana palms and pawed the ground.
Suddenly, a band of cowboys on horseback burst onto the sandy shoreline. They pursued us for several meters, then lassoed Anabela. I ran after her trying to free her but sunk up to my chest in a bed of quicksand. One of the cowboys approached me and held out his saddle cinch for me to grab onto and keep from sinking. I clutched the cinch with both hands, and the cowboy pulled me towards him. He drew a pistol, shoved it in my mouth, and ground it back and forth so that my teeth left marks on the barrel. He kept twisting the pistol while muttering: “Whoever can add can divide.” I woke up tangled in the bedcovers and chewing on the belt I was in the habit of draping over the headboard.

Two days later I had the same dream all over again.

Towards the end of the following week I chased down Rojano at a phone number in the state Palace of Government in Jalapa: “Lots of birds on the wire,” he said to warn me his line was tapped. “What do you want me to tell you?”

“I want you to stop running my life by remote control.”

“Whatsa matta, no speek inglish. What are you talking about?” Rojano said.

“I'm telling you to stop pestering me about Pizarro. And if you have something to tell me about him, why do you have to say it through Anabela?”

“Whatsa matta, who's Pizarro? No speek inglish,” Rojano insisted. Before I could answer he hastened to add: “I really don't know how to thank you, brother. Anabela told me all about Mexico City.”

He sounded ambiguous, and he paused for what to me felt like an eternity. Then he added, “I'm really grateful for the way you looked after her. You know how I have Anabela shut in looking after kids and keeping house all day. Thanks for taking her to the opera. And she loved the Museum of Modern Art.”

It was my turn to be caught short. Finally I managed to
say, “She liked the paintings, but that's not what I called you about. I already told you why I called.”

“You didn't beat around the bush, brother. Say no more.”

“I'm going to look into the way land is distributed in Chicontepec.”

“Perfect,” Rojano replied.

“And if it's not the way you say it is, I'll make you pay for it in the column. Agreed?”

“Signed, sealed and delivered, brother. You can't imagine what you're going to find.”

It was nine in the morning, and the apartment reeked of stale drinks from a party the night before. There were cigarette butts in the ashtrays and glasses on the table. The unopened curtains that kept the heavy odor of tobacco from dissipating now evoked the aura of Anabela and the tale she told Rojano about our revolutionary evening.

The government was on the verge of change. Pundits and soothsayers gossiped obsessively about who would get what cabinet post when the new administration took over on December 1st. Among their incantations: “The political class is through,” “Echeverría's the new strongman,” and “López Portillo's a puppy on the technocracy's leash.” In the midst of all the dire predictions and murky conjecture, I began to look more favorably on the Pizarro matter. It gave me an excuse to see my contact in the Government Security Ministry and avoid getting off on false leads.

This, like so many others, was a contact I made through René Arteaga, the reporter for
Excelsior.
When I met René Arteaga in 1969, the wounds of the Tlatelolco massacre were still fresh, and I was even fresher at the outset of my career as a police reporter. I was 23 and Arteaga almost 40. He was drinking watery
Cuba libres
(so-called
mahogany Cuba libres
due to their color, which bore a curious resemblance to dark
rum) at the La Mundial Bar. He let me sit next to him at the bar.

“So you run copy?” he said before draining half his first drink of the day in a single swallow.

Running copy was the entry-level job in the newspaper business. You shuttled stories between the reporters' typewriters and the copy desk and from the copy desk to the press room.

“No, sir,” I replied with the pride that came from having insinuated myself into such distinguished company. “I'm a police reporter.”

“Then you're the remains of a copy boy,” Arteaga said. “You've been blooded.”

He drained the second half of his drink with his second swallow. “It's how we all begin. In the morgue. And it's the best way to start. After that nothing scares you. But I'll tell you the rule. The morgue is a training ground, a stage. Don't get caught there for more than three years. Don't pay too much attention to anyone who's spent a lot of years around blood and corpses if you're serious about becoming a reporter. Keep your distance. If you stay down there too long, you get jaded. Good reporters can't be too sensitive, but they have to numb their nerves and control them, not kill them.”

He added a small splash of Coca Cola to his next
Cuba libre.

“So it's a great beat. It's spawned lots of great reporters, and the public loves it, but there's one thing you always have to keep in mind.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don't call me sir, damn it. I'm not your boss. I'm your colleague even though I'm older than you and have probably forgotten things about the job that you haven't learned yet.” In two swallows he drained a quarter of his watery drink.
“Do you know the Jesuit definition of education?”

“No, sir.”

“Then
Sir
is going to tell you. Education is what's left over after you've forgotten everything else. Don't you agree?”

I wrote it down.

“Don't take notes,” Arteaga said. “You can find that in any collection of quotable quotes from
The Readers' Digest.
What you need to take down in your head, not your notebook, is what I'm going to tell you about cops. First, they're all the same. Second, there never has been or ever will be a human society that doesn't need them. Third, history is full of revolutions the police have outlived. They wind up as the underpinnings of the new regime. Fourth, it follows that if you want to know what makes a society tick, what stays the same no matter what, then you have to do time on the police beat. Wouldn't you agree?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I told you I'm not your boss. My name is Rene, and quit acting as if I were your boss.”

The bartender served him two more watery
Cubas.
Arteaga ordered them in twos, two very tall drink glasses filled to the rim with ice and with dark rum trickling down to within two fingers' width of the top of each glass.

“I'm about to quit drinking,” he said. “I'm going to get so damn wasted that for the next month if anyone so much as mentions the word alcohol in my presence, I'll curse his mother. Do you get what I told you about cops?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then just imagine what the political police must be like. You haven't a clue about them yet. What are you drinking?”

About eight months later, on a day when I'd finished writing, I stopped by the bar at Les Ambassadeurs Restaurant
to see who was there. I wound up at the bar with Miguel Reyes Razo, who was just beginning to show signs of the brilliant reporter he'd later become. We talked and chatted. A half hour later the waiter approached with an air of deference that would have done justice to General Obregón inviting nuns to the Sonora-Sinaloa casino.

“Sir, I've been asked…,” he said, speaking to me, “… would you be so kind as to step into Mr. René Arteaga's private dining room? He'd like to offer you a cognac.”

Arteaga was holding forth in one of the Ambassadeur's private dining rooms with a group of
Excelsior
reporters. Seated to his left was a man with a slight wave in his graying, neatly groomed hair and an impeccable trace of mustache above lips so thin they were barely visible. He was the director of federal security in the Internal Affairs Ministry, the chief of Mexico's political police.

“You're both from Veracruz, you're
paisanos,”
Arteaga said by way of introduction. “And painful as it may be, you always will be.”

The after-dinner drinks continued to flow for nearly half an hour. The guest got up to leave around seven.

“Come see me,
paisano,”
he said affably. “I'm at your service in our offices on Bucareli.”

“Be sure you look him up.” Arteaga sat between us as we talked. “Some day you'll show that bastard there's no such thing as an insignificant friend.”

“Thanks, René,” my
paisano
said with a smile. “You people always teach me something.”

A week later at Arteaga's instigation, I went to see him, and we chatted briefly. He asked if there was anything I needed, if I was earning enough, if there was anything he could do for me. All I asked was what Arteaga told me to ask: that he answer the phone when I called. Nothing more.

Our relations remained distant but cordial, punctuated
by meals and phone calls that grew notably more frequent in 1974 upon the launch of my column, “Public Life.” From then on I had in my fellow Veracruzan an unbeatable source. The information he provided was slanted and never complete, and it always served the interests, however obscure, of his superiors. Our cautiously professional relationship existed in the strange limbo of mutual usefulness well known to journalists and Mexican politicians.