Mexico City Noir (14 page)

“More details, hija. Carnality is so exciting.”

“Commander Pérez kicked down the door and stormed in with a submachine gun. There were about five of us, and the ones behind me kept pushing until they had the barrels of their guns you know where.”

“Up your ass.”

“That’s what they always did to me. They said I was a
puto
. We caught the cannibal stirring a saucepan with a wooden spoon. I don’t know exactly what was in it but it smelled like meat. One of my buddies pulled out his ranger knife and carved into a human leg. We were all dressed in black; we wore knitted caps. Somebody opened the fridge and found two women’s heads. I got dizzy from the smell of the stew—can I say stew? Commander Pérez shoved the cannibal’s head into the pan. One of the other cops pulled me into a room filled with porno magazines and raped me. I let it happen, and then the commander came in and broke the other cop’s face. He totally messed him up. There were teeth on the floor.”

“Would you eat an altar boy with cous cous à la Mexicana?”

“We caught the cannibal but he impregnated me with that stench. That’s why
I
use so much perfume.”

Perfumed bodies, contraband perfume, insect perfume
, thought the priest (the ex-sister, the nun of nuncas, Sister Reckless of the Nuncas). It was too late now for regrets, but she certainly wasn’t going to rob a bank again just to finance a sex change. She was getting older and had little desire to be with anyone except that one man, even though they couldn’t be together anymore because a monkey wrench had been thrown in their destiny. Father Diego Tonatiuh had had a love, a great love, the only true love of his life, and the police had killed him with their wretched justice—they fried his ass with the prod. He had met his love at the convent of the Franciscan Conceptualists, where he’d practiced curettage as a nun, when the man brought his pretty girlfriend in to have an abortion.

The soul of the priest moved away from Nausícaa. He was lost in his memories, gazing upon a canvas of the Immaculate Conception, a childish virgin standing on a windy platform held up by numerous friars in fine embroidered robes; above them, the shield of San Francisco, five scars and white hairs strewn on a book. The priest recalled himself as Sister Reckless standing in a cloister of orange trees. She was rubbing orange blossoms on the hands of the man who brought the girl to get an abortion. It was love at first sight. The man was struck by the nun’s masculine poise. She of the manly presence was, in fact, a small-time bank robber, and he would soon join her in this pursuit. Mockingbirds sang in the halls, canaries twittered, potted azaleas flowered when he whispered in her ear: “Like foam floating on the mighty river, my azalea, life has swept you away in its avalanche.” She had taken a book from her habit, pointed to a painting that had been laminated with mold since the conquest: framed by flowery jungle vines, a centauress with adolescent legs and wearing huaraches climbs on a monkey; the monkey caresses the woman’s breasts with one hand, masturbates with the other. She told the man that this is how his love should be, a faithful rendition of the colonial impetus painted and imagined by Mexican Indians and Andalusian friars with a good dose of the medieval. She read:
“My spirit pushes me to write about the metamorphosis of bodies into new ones. O gods! Since you have also changed, do not hesitate, inspire my efforts and take this poem from the world’s beginnings all the way to our times.”
The sister had then entered the abortion room and provided the patient with a triple dose of sodium pentobarbital. There was staff at the convent to take care of these problems, and not long after this, there was Sister Reckless of the Nuncas stumbling along the Great Canal, dependent on the generosity of the police. That’s where his lover wound up.

Father Diego Tonatiuh’s mind returned to San Fernando, his breath flew from the cloister of orange trees back to the sacristy and retook the conversation with Nausícaa.

“A few days ago they caught another cannibal close to here, the one we were talking about, the fag.” His voice turned nasally again, vibrating under the hood until it seemed almost hysterical. “If you use perfume it’s because you’re a whore. Don’t make it sound like it’s because you have the saintly smell of a devout nun or because the smell of flesh bothers you. Oh, please forgive me for the whore comment. I have been contaminated by Mexican machismo. Just give me a moment to get back to my normal state.”

“Where are you taking me?” the girl asked when the priest abruptly grabbed her arm. “This stinks of human flesh. I don’t want to go. Let me go! I’m not a whore, I’m a virgin!”

“That is the true abstention, the seventh seal, the rest is macho sodomy and it’s just not worth it … although it has its charms.”

As Father Diego Tonatiuh dragged her out of the sacristy, the stench of flesh burrowed deep in Nausícaa’s heart and burned itself there. The priest noticed this and told her it was because of Father Próspero, who lived in an apartment in the building next to the parish and liked fusion cuisine—very modern for that priest with the torn sneakers. All the Mexican baroque crashed down on her: Nausícaa lived in that very same building.

The girl shot out of the church, desperately seeking an escape. She stumbled on a glass box and came face-to-face with a Christ overwhelmed by millennia of drops of blood.

“Up his ass, hija! Tickle his balls with that cattle prod!” the priest screamed hysterically. “He’s a fanatic and he’s accustomed to such passions. You can do whatever you want to him without remorse—he’s merely one more prisoner here. Scream at him, humiliate him! Nobody can hear you, not even the police. Ha! You can’t even hear yourself!” The priest’s voice echoed like metal splinters through the temple.

In that corner of Mexico City, the sun did not set or rise. It was the sky that was lowered or raised. Night fell on Nausícaa with a layer of reddish soot, like the familiar everyday sky from which people took refuge, trapped in their homes. The young woman gazed on the darkened buildings, a light here and there, the beams of a passing car. The steam from the motors that ran all day now rose from the sidewalk, a dam where the street children made their camp inside the vestibule of San Fernando. To the left and right of the Holy King, Domingo and Francisco watched these creatures ignoring the lessons of discipline. They slept sated with glue, others sweated the glue out in collective fornications. Nausícaa remembered her job. They would scold her. She moved toward a pile and looked at the kids engaging in unseemly activities.

“This is the true sexual liberation,” whispered a voice in her ear.

Instinctively, she reached for her gun, a useless reflex; she’d been unarmed since she’d changed her sex.

“I am Father Próspero. I have seen you dancing on tables. You’re never entirely naked. How did you get that privilege? When you finish your performance, they shout at you and humiliate you—do you like being humiliated?”

A street sweeper crept by.

When Nausícaa heard the word
humiliation
, it struck her like one of those badly pirated DVDs, and the images came to her, one after another, of her debasement at the hands of her fellow officers, the resentment they felt at her middle-class ways. Maybe they would have had more respect if she’d behaved like a whore from Veracruz and let them call her
Negra
. The DVD paused on an image from adolescence, when his father caught him fucking the maid’s son. He ran to the woman who’d raised him, but he was sent off to become a cop, to get the
puto
out of him. It didn’t work; his peers did whatever they wanted with him until Commander Pérez, his guardian angel, showed up. That night Commander Pérez paced, unable to read
The Odyssey
:
They had consumed Nausícaa and the slaves. No sooner had they gotten rid of her veils and played, then there was Nausícaa, with her snow-white arms, singing
. His protector, his guardian angel …

Her stomach began to turn, or maybe a psalm came to her, and she confessed to Próspero the incident with the servant’s son, and how he had massaged the private parts of those who had been tortured. The priest smiled, and her mouth went dry.

“What are you doing here at this hour, Father?” She spoke now in a calm, solemn tone, but there was coldness in her eyes. “Did you come to bring them something to eat?”

“No, I came to eat them.”

“Are you a sinner?” Tears bubbled from the heat of Anáhuac’s merciless night.

“I’m a goliardo, a clerical nomad,” the priest answered. “As they say:
To follow gods and goddesses / will be a good sentence / because networks of love / have already captured adolescence
.”

A squeak filtered through the night. Then there was more noise, more squeaks from the fornicators over to the side, from the mattresses, from under hospice blankets, from the tents, the makeshift dormitory.

“Hija, this is the fullness of freedom,” the man continued. “No hippie commune produced this. It’s better than the most insolent rap. Any pornographic mosaic from Pompeii pales before this. It can’t be compared to any Parisian watercolor of phalluses and vulvas from the nineteenth century. Your table dance is nothing next to this. These are real swingers. And look where it all takes place, in this very ass—and the city has many—just a few blocks from where liberals from Canada and Finland stroll, every one of them wanting to invent a happiness machine, and
whoa!
This is the kingdom of primitive Christianity, without any initiation rituals.”

He pulled a tin from his brown habit and inhaled. Nausícaa saw him blush and it dawned on her that she’d never fully glimpsed the face of the other priest, Father Diego Tonatiuh, which was always hidden under the pointed hood.

“Are you coming over for dinner, hija? We live in the same building. I prepared something. Cous cous with a guajillo chili marinade and chili morita, spiced with epazote and yerba santa, fusion cuisine.”

The altar boy with the small brazier appeared, scattering dirt and toluene around the fornicators. The neighborhood’s residents curled up to sleep, hotels cautiously opened their doors. The local dives turned down their music to an intimate proletarian hum. Unaware of having lost a war—only one, and on Mexican land—San Fernando continued on his altar carved by Indians.

Nausícaa wanted to hang herself with San Francisco’s pebbly cord until Father Próspero explained that the altar boy was the pastor of his congregation out in the streets, the one who chose the lambs whose souls would go to Chichihualco, Limbo, Tlalocan, Seville, or wherever.

Commander Pérez completed his part in the death of the queer cannibal. A hate crime, pure homophobia perpetrated by officially sanctioned killers. The guilty were predetermined. A patrol car took the commander home to a garish marble-andaluminum subdivision with swimming pools and a golf club. His wife was sleeping. He gave her a kiss. He went to his children’s bedroom, tucked them in. They’d left him their notebooks, as always, so he could check their homework. He went to his mahogany-walled study, with its diplomas from the Mossad and FBI, each framed by ninja stars. He reviewed the homework; he never let his kids down. He threw himself in an easy chair to watch
Law & Order
—he had the entire series on DVD—and tried in vain to read
The Odyssey
, his only book, which he owned in seven different editions. He had never read anything else in his life. Now an hourglass indicated it was time to deflower Nausícaa, of the snow-white arms, with his declaration of love:
Who takes you as a wife is the boldest of all. No mortal, neither man nor woman, has ever come before me like this, overwhelmed me like this at mere sight
. That very dawn he would tell her; that night they would leave for Cancún. He would buy a table dance and they would fuse orgasmically right there on stage. Oh Nausícaa! If only she’d already returned from the nave.

He left again for San Fernando, this time without escort.

“We are like angels; God made us, but not to marry or reproduce. Unlike the others, we were created individually—he put us in the hands of a surgeon so that each of our parts could be modeled, considered. We are neither cherubs nor seraphim; we don’t marry or reproduce. We are simultaneously impersonal and celestial, but adventurous when it comes to sex. We are expelled from paradise and, because we live in Mexico City, we make rounds with the spirits of Huitzilopochtli, a brotherhood which San Fernando curses and about which he can’t do a thing, even though his spirit comes to us from Seville. We are like the native witch doctors who have the ability to change into other beings, because God is fanatical, hija.”

Father Diego Tonatiuh was hiding in a corner behind the altar, next to the photo of the dead bank robber disappeared by the state police. The decomposed corpse had been discovered unrecognizable in a sewer’s foam. A red battery-powered lamp illuminated the photo, which was signed by
Sister Reckless of the Nuncas
, nicknamed
La Conversa
.

The priest walked through the nave to the choir, crossed himself under the cupola with the Immaculate Conception surrounded by angels with violins, lauds, and zithers. In the Expiatory Chapel, he said the Xochicuícatl:
“Begin, singer. Play your flowered drum. Delight princes, eagles, and ocelots. It’s only for a brief time that we are on loan to each other.”
He went to the inner door in the darkness shot through with lights, undid the bolt, and let the shutters fall on each other. He entered the confession booth and waited as he had on so many nights since he’d first seen Nausícaa in the neighborhood.
On loan to each other
, the phantom of the nuncas said to himself, immune to the blackness of the kettle in which his resentments were boiling over.
The time we’re on loan to each other is so brief
. The bank robberies had only been emotional crises, prequels to a loving eternity that had disgusted Commander Pérez when he saw the effeminate lover in a cell in that wretched police station. Father Diego Tonatiuh sucked rancor from the depths of his hatred, let slip the rest in threads of saliva that thickened the broth of his miseries.