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"It's
time, let's go," said
Rosa
.

Fate followed her. They crossed the yard and the street and their
bodies cast extremely fine shadows that every five seconds were shaken by a
tremor, as if the sun were spinning backward. When he got in the car Fate
thought he heard a laugh behind him and he turned around, but all he saw was
Amalfitano and the young man still talking in the same position as before.

It didn't take Guadalupe Roncal and Rosa Amalfitano more than a
minute to share their respective woes. The reporter offered to drive with them
to
Tucson
.
Rosa
said there was no need to go overboard. They
deliberated for a while. As they spoke in Spanish, Fate looked out the window,
but everything was normal around the Sonora Resort. All the reporters were
gone, no one was talking about boxing matches, the waiters seemed to have
stirred from a long lethargy and were less friendly, as if waking put them out
of sorts.
Rosa
called her father from the
hotel. Fate watched her head toward the reception desk with Guadalupe Roncal,
and while he was waiting for them to come back he smoked a cigarette and took
some notes for the story he still hadn't filed. In the light of day the
previous night's events seemed unreal, invested with childish gravity. As his
thoughts drifted, Fate saw Merolino's two sparring partners, Omar Abdul and
Garcia. He imagined them taking a bus to the coast. He saw them get off the
bus, he saw them take a few steps
t
hrough the scrub. The oneiric wind whipped grains of sand that
stuck to their faces. A golden bath. So peaceful, thought Fate. How simple it
all is. Then he saw the bus and he imagined it black, like a huge hearse. He
saw Abdul's arrogant smile, Garcia's impassive face, his strange tattoos, and
he heard the sudden sound of dishes breaking, not many of them, or a crash of
boxes falling, and only then did Fate realize that he was asleep and looked
around for the waiter, to ask for another coffee, but he didn't see anyone.
Guadalupe Roncal and Rosa Amalfitano were still on the phone.

"They're good people, friendly, hospitable. Mexicans
are hardworking, they're hugely curious about everything, they care about
people, they're brave and generous, their sadness isn't destructive, it's life
giving," said Rosa Amalfitano as they crossed the border into the
United States
.

"Will you miss them?" asked Fate.

"I'll
miss my father and I'll miss the people," said
Rosa
.

When they were in the car on the way to the Santa Teresa
prison,
Rosa
said no one had answered the
phone at her father's. After she called Amalfitano several times,
Rosa
had called Rosa Mendez's house, and there was no one
there either. I think
Rosa
's dead, she said.
Fate shook his head as if he couldn't believe it.

"We're
still alive," he said.

"We're
alive because we haven't seen anything and we don't know anything," said
Rosa
.

The
reporter's car was ahead of them. It was a yellow Little Nemo. Guadalupe Roncal
drove carefully, although every once in a while she stopped, as if she didn't
quite remember the way. Fate thought it might be better to stop following her
and head straight for the border. When he suggested it,
Rosa
was strongly opposed. He asked her whether she had friends in the city.
Rosa
said no, she didn't really have any friends. Chu-cho
Flores and Rosa Mendez and Charly Cruz, but he wouldn't call them friends,
would he?

"No,
those aren't friends," said Fate.

They saw a Mexican flag flying in the desert, on the other
side of the fence. One of the border police on the American side scrutinized
Fate and
Rosa
. He wondered what a white girl,
and a pretty white girl at that, was doing with a black man. Fate held his
gaze. Reporter? asked the officer. Fate nodded. A big fish, thought the
officer. Every night he must knock her around. Spanish?
Rosa
smiled at the officer. A shadow of frustration crossed the officer's face. When
they pulled away the flag disappeared and all they could see was the fence and
warehouses surrounded by walls.

"The
problem is bad luck," said
Rosa
.

Fate
didn't hear her.

As they were waiting in a windowless room, Fate felt his
penis getting harder and harder. For a moment he thought he hadn't had an
erection since his mother's death, but then he rejected the idea, it couldn't
have been that long, he thought, but it could have, the irremediable was
possible, the unsalvageable was possible, so why couldn't the blood flow to his
cock have stopped for what really was a fairly short period of time? Rosa
Amalfitano looked at him. Guadalupe Roncal was busy with her notes and her tape
recorder, sitting in a chair bolted to the floor. Every once in a while the
everyday sounds of the prison reached them. Shouted names, muted music,
footsteps receding in the distance. Fate sat on a wooden bench and yawned. He
thought he would fall asleep. He imagined
Rosa
's
legs on his shoulders. He saw his room at the motel again and wondered whether
or not they'd made love. Of course not, he said to himself. Then he heard
shouts, as if a bachelor party were being held in one of the prison chambers.
He thought about the killings. He heard distant laughter. Roars. He heard
Guadalupe Roncal say something to Rosa and he heard
Rosa
answer. Sleep overtook him and he saw himself peacefully sleeping on the sofa
in his mother's apartment in
Harlem
, with the
TV on. I'll sleep for half an hour, he said to himself, and then I'll get back
to work. I have to write the fight story. I have to drive all night. When the
sun comes up everything will be over.

After
they crossed the border, the few tourists they saw on the streets of El Adobe
seemed to be sleepwalking. A woman in her seventies, in a
f
lowered dress and Nike sneakers, was
kneeling down to examine some Indian rugs. She looked like an athlete from the
1940s. Three children holding hands watched some objects displayed in a shop
window. The objects were moving almost imperceptibly, and Fate couldn't tell
whether they were animals or machines. Outside a bar some men in cowboy hats
who looked like Chicanes were gesticulating and pointing in opposite
directions. At the end of the street there were some wooden sheds and metal
containers on the pavement and beyond them was the desert. All of this is like somebody
else's dream, thought Fate. Next to him,
Rosa
's
head rested delicately on the seat and her big eyes were fixed on some point on
the horizon. Fate looked at her knees, which struck him as perfect, and then
her hips and then her shoulders and her collarbones, which seemed to have a
life of their own, a dark, suspended life that gave signs of itself only now
and then. Then he concentrated on driving. The highway out of El Adobe headed
into a kind of swirl of shades of ocher.

"I wonder how Guadalupe Roncal is doing," said
Rosa
in a dreamy
v
oice.

"By
now she must be flying home," said Fate. "Strange," said
Rosa
.

Rosa
's voice woke him.

"Listen,"
she said.

Fate
opened his eyes but he didn't hear anything. Guadalupe Roncal had gotten up and
she was standing next to them now, her eyes very wide, as if her worst
nightmares had come true. Fate went over to the door and opened it. One of his
legs had fallen asleep and he couldn't quite manage to wake up yet. He saw a
hallway and at the end of the hallway he saw a rough cement staircase, as if
the builders had left it half finished. The hallway was dimly lit.

"Don't
leave,"
Rosa
said to him.

"Let's
get out of this trap," said Guadalupe Roncal.

A
prison official appeared at the end of the hallway and headed toward them. Fate
showed his press ID. The official nodded without looking at the ID and he
smiled at Guadalupe Roncal, who remained standing in the doorway. Then the
official closed the door and said something about a storm.
Rosa
translated into Fate's ear. A sandstorm or

 
 
a
rainstorm or an electric storm. High clouds dropping down
from the mountains, clouds that wouldn't burst over Santa Teresa but that cast
a pall on the landscape. A miserable morning. The inmates always get nervous,
said the official. He was a young man, with a skimpy mustache, maybe a little
bit soft around the middle for his age, and you could tell he didn't like his
job. They're bringing the killer now.

•

You have to listen to women. You should never ignore a woman's
fears. It was something like that, remembered Fate, that his mother or her
neighbor, the deceased Miss Holly, used to say when both of them were young and
he was a boy. For an instant he imagined a set of scales, like the scales of
Blind Justice, except that instead of two platters, there were two bottles, or
something like two bottles. The bottle on the left was clear and full of desert
sand. There were several holes in it through which the sand escaped. The bottle
on the right was full of acid. There were no holes in it, but the acid was
eating away at the bottle from the inside. On the way to
Tucson
, Fate didn't recognize any of the
things he'd seen a few days before, when he'd traveled the same road in the
opposite direction. What used to be my right is my left, and there are no
points of reference. Everything is erased. Toward noon they stopped at a diner
on the highway. A group of Mexicans who looked like jobless migrant workers
watched them from the counter. They were drinking bottled water and local
sodas, the names and logos odd to Fate. New businesses that would soon fail.
The food was bad.
Rosa
was sleepy and when
they got back to the car she fell asleep. Fate remembered the words of
Guadalupe Roncal. No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of
the world is hidden in them. Did Guadalupe Roncal say that, or was it
Rosa
? At moments, the highway was like a river. The
suspected killer said it, thought Fate. The giant fucking albino who appeared
along with the black cloud.

When Fate heard footsteps approaching he thought they were the
footsteps of a giant. Guadalupe Roncal must have thought something similar,
because she seemed about to faint, but instead of fainting, she clung to the
prison official's hand and then his lapel. Rather than pull away, he put his arm
around her shoulders. Fate felt
Rosa
's body
next to
h
im. He
heard voices. As if the inmates were egging someone on. He heard laughter and
calls to order, and then the black clouds from the east passed over the prison
and the air seemed to darken. The footsteps came closer. He heard laughter and
pleas. Suddenly a voice began to sing a song. It sounded like a woodcutter
chopping down trees. The voice wasn't singing in English. At first Fate
couldn't figure out what the language was, until
Rosa
,
beside him, said it was German. The voice grew louder. It occurred to Fate that
he might still be dreaming. The trees fell one by one. I'm a giant lost in the
middle of a burned forest. But someone will come to rescue me.
Rosa
translated the suspect's string of curses for him. A
polyglot woodcutter, thought Fate, who speaks English as well as he speaks
Spanish and who sings in German. I'm a giant lost in the middle of a charred
forest. And yet only I know where I'm going, only I know my destiny. And then
the footsteps and the laughter could be heard once more, and the goading and
words of encouragement of the inmates and the guards escorting the giant. And
then an enormous and very blond man came into the visitors' room, ducked his
head, as if he were afraid of knocking it on the ceiling, and smiled as if he
had just done something naughty, singing the German song about the lost
woodcutter and fixing them all with an intelligent and mocking gaze. Then the
guard accompanying him asked Guadalupe Roncal if she would prefer that he be
handcuffed to the chair and Guadalupe Roncal shook her head and the guard gave
the tall man a little pat on the shoulder and left and the official who was
standing with Fate and the women went out too, though not before saying
something into Guadalupe Roncal's ear, and they were left alone.

"Good morning," said the giant in Spanish. He sat down
and stretched his legs under the table so that his feet stuck out the other
side.

He was wearing black tennis shoes and white socks. Guadalupe
Roncal took a step back.

"Ask
whatever you want," said the giant.

Guadalupe
Roncal raised her hand to her mouth, as if she were inhaling a toxic gas, and
she couldn't think what to ask.

4 THE PART ABOUT
 
THE CRIMES

The girl's body turned up in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores.
She was dressed in a white long-sleeved
 
T-shirt and a yellow knee-length skirt, a size too big. Some children
playing in the lot found her and told their parents. One of the mothers called
the police, who showed up half an hour later. The lot was bordered by Calle
Pelaez and Calle Hermanos Chacon and it ended in
a
ditch behind which rose the walls of an abandoned dairy
in ruins. There was no one around, which at first made the policemen think it
was a joke. Nevertheless, they pulled up on Calle Pelaez and one of them made
his way into the lot. Soon he came across two women with their heads covered,
kneeling in the weeds, praying. Seen from a distance, the women looked old, but
they weren't. Before them lay the body. Without interrupting, the policeman
went back the way he'd come and motioned to his partner, who was waiting for
him in the car, smoking. Then the two of them returned (the one who'd waited in
the car had his gun in his hand) to the place where the women were kneeling and
they stood there beside them staring at the body. The policeman with the gun
asked whether they knew her. No, sir, said one of the women. We've never seen
her before. She isn't from around here, poor thing.