Mexico City Noir (11 page)
“Mikel, you’ll see that time takes care of these things. Life goes on. Stop crying and get on with your life.”
“Lalo, go to motherfucking hell—”
Click.
[Mikel hung up. He was just a kid, still wet behind the ears. He hung up before I had a chance to respond to his curses. There was a black and furious storm in my head.]
Ponce & Cohen Cassette. Side B.
July 20, 2007
[At 10 o’clock I sat down at a table next to a window from which I could also see the entrance. Ponce liked to control windows and doors, entrances and exits. He arrived at 10:05. As soon as he sat down, he sliced a piece of bread, smeared it with abundant paté, and put the whole thing in his mouth. Then he ordered beers.]
“Fuck! I’m really worried that Violeta’s murder is going to be just another statistic, another one of those 97 percent unsolved.”
“What little confidence you have in your city’s police force! Chema Molina talked to the guys from the district who were on patrol that day. At 9:15 they went by the deceased’s home. She was at the door talking to a nurse and waved at them, nothing out of the ordinary. We think that the 1 percent will pan out in this case.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The 1 percent of killers who go back to the scene of the crime. After the interrogation and the poor description of the nurse that the district guys gave, we sent two of our men to watch the park. They saw a nurse in a cheerful conversation with an old woman and her caretaker. To make a long story short, they hung out for a while, then grabbed her and found a Chinese key on her person. They suspected that the nurse was a he, and so they went to rip off the wig, and
surprise
! There was no wig. But then there was resistance. They discovered that all her documentation was fake. They’re interrogating her right now and I’m going to bet this is it. There will be justice for the deceased.”
“The deceased was named Violeta. She was born, she lived, she died. She was of this world and now she’s just an ordinary cadaver. How sad.”
“I can’t get worked up about every little murder that comes my way, predictable or not. I’d be doped up and in a straitjacket in a psych ward. But enough of this damn mess. I want to tell you what happened the other night at Old Lady Viterbo’s house, though I’ll warn you right now that I won’t tolerate you making fun of me.”
“I’m not going to make fun of you. Let’s order now since service is so slow, and let’s get another round of beer so your throat won’t dry up.”
“The older woman quite happily invited us in. She forced us to sit down and offered us tea, a snack, soda, whatever we wanted.
We’re working, it’s all right, thank you
. I asked if there was a basement under the dining room and she said yes and asked how I knew. I hadn’t answered yet when a tall, thin guy appeared, older than her, more dead than alive. She introduced us. ‘This is my Uncle Carlos, my Aunt Beatriz’s first cousin. A great poet. If you like, he can recite a few of his poems.’ I can’t describe the look that Chema and I exchanged. My spinal cord froze, just like Borges’ did when he went down to the basement to see the aleph, and I felt like we’d fallen into some kind of trap.”
“Actually, Borges never said anything about his spine freezing …”
“Let me finish. We can argue about the details later.
Great
, I told the old woman, killing time and trying to figure a way out. The old man pulled some wrinkled sheets out of the pocket in his robe pocket and read:
‘There is, among your many memories, one that has been irremediably lost / neither the white sun nor the yellow moon / will see you descend to the core.’
‘You’re an impostor! Those verses are by Borges, not Carlos Argentino Daneri,’ I screamed. ‘I recognize them!’ The old man jumped back and tried to speak. ‘You’re wrong, young man, my name is Carlos Andrés Danielli.’ I leapt from the couch as if someone had stuck a needle in my ass. ‘Identify yourself!’ I screamed. The old man was so scared, his eyes popping out as he looked to the old woman for help. ‘Your passport,’ I demanded. ‘Good lord! This man has gone crazy,’ said the old woman as she aimed her .22 at me. Chema stood up, unholstered his weapon, pointed it at the old woman’s head, and shouted, ‘Ma’am, put your gun down!’ I started laughing so hard, I nearly fell over. I couldn’t stop.”
“Motherfucker! You’ve lost your mind, Ponce. If your bosses find out, you’ll get demoted, you’ll end up working as a janitor.”
“Tell me about it, Cohen. Fear—fear is a terrible thing. It plays dirty, gets in your way, and confuses you if you’re not careful. The laughing attack was a response to fear. That’s the subconscious at work.”
“But that old couple’s crazy too. The guy reads verses that aren’t his … How did you know they were Borges’ if you’ve only ever read ‘The Aleph’?”
“Easy—
memories, white sun, yellow moon
—they sounded just like the blind guy. The old woman threw the .22 at Chema’s feet and got silly too, she was laughing and crying, she shook her arms, doubled over, she looked like a puppet. When we calmed down a little, she said, ‘I haven’t had that much fun in a long time. We must have a party, I have a bottle of champagne in the fridge.’ Then Chema and the old man started laughing too. We made a toast to life, to the three Beatriz Viterbos, and to many other things.”
“I envy you, and it pisses me off that you didn’t let me go with you. How did it occur to you that the old man might be named Carlos Argentino, like in the story?”
“Coincidence, accident, who knows? With all that was going down, logic suggested his name was Daneri. But logic doesn’t do fiction any justice.”
“Got it. So you hung out with the old couple, just having fun …?”
“With them and with Beatriz Viterbo, the one who was the opposite of Borges’. We toasted to the three Beatrizes: the imaginary one, the one buried in the Dolores crypt, and the housekeeper’s young daughter, the one with the unknown father.”
“The young Beatriz, she’s also Viterbo? …So Mikel told the truth and the old woman got her confused with the aunt who died in 1929? We must investigate. This is a bit much, it doesn’t seem right.”
“I already investigated. The old woman gave her last name to the housekeeper’s daughter, made her her heir, sent her to school, where she’s earning a master’s degree, and, to cap her good work, wants to marry her off to a good man, like Mikel, ‘that poor innocent,’ she said sweetly. You realize she wants to marry her off to your friend, the faggot from Puebla? I tried to object, to explain we hadn’t determined who the killer was yet, blah blah blah. Those three stooges defended the faggot better than the best defense attorney in the country.”
“Look at that. Despite a few coincidences, look how different the stories of Beatriz and Violeta turned out to be. And that luckless Mikel left thinking Beatriz didn’t want anything to do with him, that he was marked for life.”
“I told you he was a faggot. Instead of facing the girl and the old woman and explaining what had happened, he ran away to his mother. He’s a coward, that guy.”
“Ponce, it’d be better if you just shut up, because you had a lot to do with his running away. Although I confess that right now I could give three shits about that crazy guy. All this smells rotten to me—the three Viterbos, your sudden fearlessness, acting like nothing happened and drinking to madness. Didn’t you think for even an instant that they could have drugged your champagne?”
“Well, then I would have gone down to the basement and seen the aleph. What more can you ask from life?”
[With my head floating from the beer, the tequila, and the interminable literary chat with Ponce, I walked home. As I crossed Mexico Park, I thought of Violeta. I’d met with Ponce to write an article about her, but another story—this one written 1,500 kilometers away—had distracted us from the impact of her death. I remembered that the evening Violeta was killed, she and I had talked for a bit—if exchanging twenty, thirty, forty words can be called that. She had smiled tenderly. I didn’t know anything about Violeta, only that she was nice and asked about people’s health and their work. In ten years as her neighbor, I never once asked her if she needed anything. Nobody else did either. They erased the smile off that lonely woman’s face and killed her for no reason. No one claimed her body, and she won’t have a gravestone to remind us she was born, lived, and died. Pretty soon, those few of us who did know her will forget her as well.]
T
he screams for help crashed through the second-story window with the broken glass. Everybody from the building across the street claimed to have seen the shards hurled like bloody projectiles. The window had turned into a woman’s cry, into the sounds of a torn brassiere and broken matrix. She’s being raped, some of us thought—killed, imagined others—and we all rushed up the stairs. The metal apartment door was jammed. There was no way to open it; the strongest among us slammed against it unsuccessfully. The next-door neighbor called the police but the line was continuously busy. Let’s go get a patrol car, somebody proposed, and two of the other neighbors dashed down to the street. I stayed behind, striking the flat metal of the door with my palms. There was no response from inside and we wouldn’t hear anything again. I was soon informed that the condo was vacant and that the owner had put bars on the bathroom windows.
After a while, the neighbors who had gone in search of a patrol car returned with a promise from a couple of officers to come right away; we elicited the same hope from the phone when a bureaucratic voice finally responded and asked us to spell out the address and summarize the facts. Yes, said the neighbor, it happened about an hour ago, around 2 p.m.
But another hour went by and still the authorities didn’t show. We called again; we even tried the Red Cross, the Green Cross, the fire department—but the phones were dead, busy, or rang endlessly without an answer. It was horrible not being able to do anything, feeling so impotent next to that door blocking our way; we were sure the woman who’d screamed was still alive. We couldn’t hear a thing but we desperately wanted to help her. Plus, the rapist, the killer, was still in there, because no one had left the place after the screams.
I ran down to the street to look for another patrol car, but there wasn’t a single cop, nor an ambulance—nobody. I walked around for a long time and finally, exhausted, I returned to the building, hoping somebody had shown up. But when I saw the others taking action, now with tools, trying to break the locks, I began to curse the irresponsibility of the cops. After all, it was almost 6 p.m. and growing dark and still no help had arrived.
We tried everything with the tools we had: a chisel to loosen the frame, a pickax for leverage to pop the door. But we only managed to chip the point of the chisel and the wall showed barely a scratch. It was even worse with the pickax, because it slipped and cut the leg of the guy from apartment 7, who, accompanied by his wife and a few other neighbors, had to be taken to the hospital, he was bleeding so much.
Then it was after 9 p.m. and nobody had eaten. A neighbor brought coffee for everyone and glorious tacos filled with refried beans. My husband had to stay in bed, she said, because at his age and with all the commotion he’s not feeling well. He’s put up with a lot, we all said, and we thanked her for the tacos. Go take care of him, someone suggested. Don’t worry about us, we understand.
By 11 p.m., those of us who were still there sat down on the stairs, at the foot of that damn door that refused to yield to our demands; worn out, we didn’t even have the energy to bitch about the police.
It was useless to continue keeping watch: we couldn’t go in and we couldn’t hear anything. Perhaps there wasn’t anybody alive to help anymore, perhaps it was too late. Perhaps the killer, the rapist, had gotten away before we’d arrived. We weren’t sure about anything anymore: our certainties had gradually given way to fatigue. What do we do? asked the tenant from apartment 10; he had to go to work in just a few hours. And me, I have a trigonometry test first thing in the morning, said the guy living in apartment 8. The question of what to do floated about on the stairs for a few minutes until I articulated it again: so what do we do? Somebody proposed we take turns on guard duty until dawn, when we could send somebody down to the station to file a complaint and demand that the cops come. But that idea didn’t go anywhere because nobody wanted to stay alone by the door, which could open at any moment and release the rapist or killer; and who could guarantee that it would be just one and not two, and that they wouldn’t be armed? I don’t live in this building, but across the street, I said. Anyway, I need to go home to see if I got a call because I’m expecting a confirmation on a business trip. We each began explaining our needs and by 2 a.m., without having decided who’d go to the station to file the complaint, we decided to just leave.
The message I was hoping for was waiting on my answering machine: the reservation code for a flight that would free me from Mexico City for a week. I hardly had time to pack my suitcase, call for a taxi, and sleep a couple of hours. As soon as I got to the airport I decided to forget about the screams, to concentrate; I had to get my head straight to deal with my business in Guadalajara, to not mess it up. With distance, talk about work, calls to the office, and the detailed report I had to submit upon my return, there was no way I could think about anything else, and the scene on the stairs began to seem to me more like a nightmare than a lived experience.
A month after I got back to Mexico City, I was crossing the street and ran into the man whose leg had been hurt with the pickax. He didn’t know anything either, because his leg had become infected and, between medical appointments and his work, he hadn’t had time to ask about the outcome of that ill-fated night, and neither had his wife. After the accident, she didn’t want to hear any more about it.
Time passed with the rhythm of daily life, and one night, by chance, I bumped into the guy from apartment 10 at the local supermarket; it was the man with whom I had complained the most about the police for hours in front of that damn door. No, as far as I know, nothing’s happened, he said. What? I exclaimed, indignant; seeing him had revived the memory of the screams that came from that poor dead woman, because she had definitely been killed. Yes, he responded, I think they killed her too. But then, I asked, how is it possible that nobody went to the station and filed a report; wasn’t the door finally busted down? No, not that I know of, he said, shrugging his shoulders, then added: we all remember the incident, we even lower our voices when we pass the metal door. Even the next door neighbor, remember? The one who called and called the police? She’s going to move or maybe she already has; she told me last week when I saw her taking boxes up to her apartment. We must do something! I insisted, furious, as if I were determined to go and personally file the report. But you, why would you commit yourself to going to the station? You don’t even live in the building. I stared at him; it had been almost two months … The supermarket cashier then said: That will be 275 pesos. Do you have a parking ticket for validation? I handed over the money, mechanically, picked up my change, and said goodbye to the neighbor.