Mexico City Noir (17 page)

“I’ve never seen a bigger cat,” he said. I agreed: if he were any bigger, he’d be in some museum as the live part of a Paleolithic diorama.

Not a muscle moved on the man’s face. His gaze was intimidating. There were moments when I wanted to leave, but another drink—or perhaps my fear of simply excusing myself, grabbing Wilson’s carrier, and taking off—kept me in my seat. I had a feeling that the old man was using my visit as an excuse to start some kind of party. From the moment I arrived with Spots, I noticed an eagerness that I first thought was relief at his pet’s rescue. His offer of a drink seemed natural under the circumstances, and fortunate, given the alcohol deficiency at home.

The gringo left his place by the little bar and moved over to his turntable. He put on a record by an American band. “You like Miller?” he asked without smiling, and then took a couple of dance steps, also without smiling.

“Yes, of course I do.”

He turned up the volume and pressed some buttons, concentrating on equalizing the sound. I looked with greater focus at the wall with the gun collection. One could almost imagine the sudden appearance of a red deer or buffalo head. In their place, I noticed photographs; the light from the little bar barely reached them.

I frequently think back to what happened during those three years in Mexico, and especially that night. Imprisonment in a Texas jail provokes obsessions that wouldn’t develop in other places, I suppose, including other jails. Here, the looming presence of death row and its dead men walking make for a different atmosphere. The proximity of the execution room and the condemned bring the past to life, the one that ends here.

Up close, I could see that the photos were of the gringo when he was young: as a soldier in the Second World War; dressed in civilian clothes, next to armed companions; receiving a trophy and, below, a sign that said
The Perfect Marksman
; finally, standing next to a freshly shot animal. There were also photos of John F. Kennedy: with Marilyn Monroe, with Sinatra, with his brother Robert, when he was in the military. Even one in which Kennedy looks like a cadaver, he’s so thin. And one more, a picture of Kennedy next to his wife in a convertible; below it, in an arduous scribble and barely legible in the weak light:
Dallas, Texas
, and the date,
November 1963
. The gringo appeared behind me and asked if it would bother me if he repeated “American Patrol.” No, I replied, then returned to my seat. I was talking carelessly, fueled by alcohol and my host’s silence; the fact that he wasn’t saying anything made me anxious. He was one of those people who hide their emptiness in silence. I spoke about Kennedy, alluding to the photos on the wall; I noted that not even the government’s commission investigating his death had been able to prove in any credible way that there was only a lone gunman. I talked about Alice, how we’d stayed friends even after we married; about Wilson and his ability to smile. I had my hypothesis: this would be the next ability that cats developed in human society; smiling, let’s say, as an extension of purring. An evolutionary leap to become even more desired and nurtured by humans. A resource, a new survival strategy. The gringo looked on, shrugging his shoulders. When I talked to him about Kennedy, I thought he’d at least explain the photos, but he barely blinked. He seemed to get more interested when I first mentioned Alice, but faded again once it became evident I wasn’t offering any intimate details. I only remember him saying one complete sentence: “So you’re Texan, from Dallas, right?” I thought it would lead to something, but he simply kept drinking.

I went back to Dallas, our divorce was finalized, and Alice and I went back to being just friends. Once more, back to classes and routine, until Wilson disappeared for a couple of days and then somebody left his wet corpse on the porch. I was told he’d been drowned by one of the neighbors: taking that delicate delight, so American, in abusing the weak, the neighbor had allegedly submerged Wilson in his pool and amused himself by not letting him back to the surface. I wondered if Wilson had tried to smile at him along the way.

One morning, I crossed my yard over to my Texas neighbor’s pool; I found him swimming with his family. I shot him before he could come out of the water.

Alice’s jail visits usually mean news. A “horrific” earthquake had destroyed Mexico City. The first neoliberal president, Miguel de la Madrid, had initiated a period—who knew how long it would last—of more Mexican misfortunes. My mother continued to play golf. One of the gringo’s sons beat him to death, but the TV station for which he worked paid for a defense that set him free. There was no news about Spots. Wilson’s killer recovered from the shooting, was well for a while, and then had a cardiac arrest; he suffocated from a lack of oxygen in his blood. I was glad, I was very glad.

RENO

BY
J
ULIA
R
ODRíGUEZ

Buenos Aires

I
agreed to meet up on a damn Saturday with my childhood pal El Floren—that’s what we called him cuz he was from Florence, a town in Tejeringo el Chico … no, not really, I’m just messing around—and my compadre Chente, who I hadn’t seen since I baptized his kid—actually, that’s not true either—and my cousin Teobaldo, a.k.a. The Clone, his brother-in-law, a guy known as El Pirañas, and another guy I didn’t know, older than the rest of us, very big and thicklipped and scary, nicknamed San Beni, San to his buds. Our usual territory—that is, the places we lived for short periods of time—was Buenos Aires, Obrera, Tránsito, and part of that Apache zone in the city center.

You get so sick of having to scramble to make a buck that you just put on your best face and take what you can get: sweeper, bricklayer’s apprentice, spontaneous electrician, dressing up like a bullfighter to sell pins to tourists, bank security guard—well, not that, because then you have to fill out that stupid application where you have to list all your names and tell them if you have a criminal record, if you’ve had chicken pox, how long you’ve been unemployed and why, provide a letter of recommendation and explain what you’ve been doing for the last five years—so no, no, and anyway, why stand in line for that pathetic little job that no one wants to give you anyway?

Because living in Mexico City, the Capirucha, the Defe—whatever you want to call it—living here, but not in the nice neighborhoods like del Valle, Florida, San José Insurgentes, San Ángel, Polanco, the Hills, and, nowadays, Santa Fe, means being taken advantage of by everyone, including the big-cheese owner of the main telephone company, because that’s been poor people’s turf forever, and now it’s becoming the Beverly Hills of the Defe, which just fucks with my head; it’s like having a picnic in the middle of an interstate, or intentionally walking against the traffic up Calzada de Tlalpan.

We agreed to meet that ill-fated Saturday at the Poblana, a brewery and family restaurant in Doctores. Happy to see each other again and already quite drunk, we took an oath like the Musketeers and decided to stop being poor, to do whatever it took to live free.

It’s hard living in the shitty neighborhoods, with the exception of Tepito, which just needs this much to become a neighborhood of loafers absorbed into a larger city filled with more of the same. Being marginalized means being jobless: sometimes it means no water, sometimes it means no food; often it means having to hang off a lamppost just to watch a little TV, or knowing the bodies you have to step on to find a place to sleep. It’s being able to fall down drunk on the street, as the case may be, or taking a shit right there if your body demands it. It’s freezing cold and too much heat, floods, rockslides, depending on the season and the place; it’s the perpetual absence of authority, unless, of course, someone wants to fuck with us. It is, I’m telling you, total crap.

As time went by, two of us began taking our chances with the passengers on the Allende metro at the Chabacano, Portales, and Pino Suárez stations. As we got to know the territory, we got in the groove with the local sharks, and everything was love and happiness. My buddy Chente doesn’t like crowds because he starts to sweat, his throat gets tight and his vision hazy, so he doesn’t participate in this type of merchandise exchange, but that’s no prob, we all share with each other and we take care of him. He, like El Pirañas, prefers to do business at the ATMs in the nice neighborhoods. There’s good “food” there, says El Pirañas: there aren’t many people, they’re very civilized, and there’s no need to get stressed out—the clients always cooperate, meaning they put up with El Pirañas’ bites. My cousin Teobaldo is an ace when it comes to identity theft and he’s raked in good profits from that. El Floren is into auto parts and pretty much anything anybody will buy. I serve as a special assistant to everyone, depending on the work, but always with San Beni, who’s the bodyguard for the others during their operations.

At one point I had sunk so low that I was willing to do
anything
to bring home the bacon. Even the biggest nobody has his responsibilities, whether it’s the mamacita, the brother, the old woman (and someone else you might get cozy with on the side) … then there’s the arguments over money with the in-laws, the brothers-in-law … piles of problems, and fuck, there’s the matter with the shorties some woman brought to the crib. This is the basic minimum level of crap, though sometimes it’s a little better: the diapers, the baby bottles, the vaccinations, the schools (if the kids even get in). And the books, notebooks, pencils. And bus fare, rags to wear, quinces celebrations, weddings, funerals … and I’m exhausted. That’s why I think what happened happened.

As it was, our small business was moving along on greased rails and we began to see things differently. I found myself laughing over pretty much anything, San Beni began playing with his grandson, who at this particular moment he just wanted to throw off the balcony. Floren hooked up with the sexiest woman in his neighborhood; this actually provoked so much envy in Buenos Aires that he had to borrow a friend’s Volkswagen to avoid people seeing him when he went to visit her. San was finally able to buy a gym membership to stay in shape, and Chente’s wife took him back. What more could we ask for?

But, you know, there’s always a fly in the ointment or a bug in the rice, and Beni got pissed at some roughneck from his neighborhood who started spreading the rumor that he was a faggot—thus the focus on his biceps and triceps. I never imagined that Beni, so thick-lipped and big, could be that vindictive. With us, he’d always been a child of God: he never raised his voice, never uttered an obscenity. He’d say, “Boys, why do you have to talk like truck drivers and spit like those trashy street hustlers?” He was very decent, very courteous, he even washed his hands when he went to the bathroom. He couldn’t drink, that’s for sure, but he was good with his hands; he was like a fine embroiderer the way he could put together or take apart anything he had in his fat fingers. But whenever he got drunk, he started talking about his childhood, back when he was a good boy. You can’t imagine the kinds of horrible things that haunted him as a former daddy’s boy. The thing is, he decided to get rid of the rumormonger via the guy’s woman, with the objective of also putting a total stop to the gossip.

One wretched night he summoned us as witnesses to an abandoned auto shop in one of those neighborhoods I was talking about before. It was almost dawn. He’d managed to get the girl to come with him—she was tiny but had a pretty face; he’d found her in a bar. “I have a life-or-death message for your man,” he’d told her, and really, after that, who wouldn’t go with? Then, in that auto shop, everything got so intense and we each took turns. But later …

I don’t really want to remember what happened later; everyone did whatever. In the end, San Beni turned out to be more of a bastard than a pretty boy and we had no choice but to get rid of the mess. And there we were, stressed out but half asleep, trying to figure out how to end the story.

If it hadn’t been for my cousin The Clone—that moron made a deal with his gossipy sister-in-law, the one who sells tamales outside the Coyoacán station—I wouldn’t be here, in the RENO prison treatment center (which is nothing like the low-security CERESO), all freaked out about falling asleep next to my friends and their stench. It’s a smell, I swear on my mother, that never fails to provoke a recurrent nightmare in which my buddies are forcing me to eat painted fingertips inside Chiapas-style tamales.