2666 (72 page)

Sometimes Juan de Dios
Martinez
would sit and
think how he wished he knew more about the director's life. For example, her
friendships. Who were her friends? He didn't know any of them, except for a few
employees at the psychiatric center, people the director treated warmly but
also kept at arm's length. Did she have friends? He suspected she did, although
she never talked about it. One night, after they had made love, he told her he
wanted to know more about her life. The director said he already knew more than
enough. Juan de Dios
Martinez
didn't insist.

La
Vaca was killed in August 1994. In October the next victim was found at the new
city dump, a festering heap a mile and a half long and half a mile wide in a
gully south of the El Ojito ravine, off the Casas Negras highway, where a fleet
of more than one hundred trucks came each day to drop their loads. Despite its
size, the dump would soon be too small and there was already talk, given the
proliferation of illegal sites, about creating a new dump on the edge or to the
west of Casas Negras. The dead girl was between fifteen and seventeen years
old, according to the medical examiner, although the final word was left to the
pathologist, who examined her three days later and concurred with his
colleague. She had been anally and vaginally raped and then strangled. She was
four foot seven. The scavengers who found her said she was dressed in a bra,
denim skirt, and Reebok sneakers. By the time the police got there the bra and
denim skirt were gone. On the ring finger of her right hand she was wearing a
gold ring with a black stone, inscribed with the name of an English academy in
the center of the city. She was photographed and later the police visited the
language academy, but no one recognized the dead girl. The photograph was
published in
El Heraldo del Norte
and
La Voz de Sonora,
with the same lack
of results. Inspector Jose Marquez and Inspector Juan de Dios
Martinez
questioned the head of the school
for three hours and apparently they went too far, because his lawyer sued them
for harassment. The suit didn't go anywhere but it got them each a reprimand
from the state representative and the chief of police. A report was also issued
on the conduct of the head of the judicial police
in
Hermosillo
. Two
weeks later the body of the unidentified girl was sent to swell the supply of
corpses for medical school students at the
University
of
Santa Teresa
.

Sometimes Inspector Juan de
Dios
Martinez
was surprised how well Elvira Campos could fuck and how inexhaustible she was
in bed. She fucks like someone on the brink of death, he thought. More than
once he would have liked to tell her it wasn't necessary, she didn't need to
work so hard, that just feeling her nearby, brushing against him, was enough,
but when it came to sex the director was practical and businesslike. Darling,
Juan de Dios
Martinez
would say to her sometimes, sweetheart, love, and in the darkness she would
tell him to be quiet and then suck every last drop from him—of semen? of his
soul? of the little life he felt, at the time, remained to him? They made love,
at her express request, in semidarkness. A few times he was tempted to turn on
the light and look at her, but he didn't, not wanting to upset her. Don't turn
on the light, she said to him once, and it seemed to him Elvira Campos could
read his mind.

In
November, on the second floor of a building under construction, some workers
found the body of a woman of about thirty, five feet tall, dark-skinned,
bleached blond, two gold crowns on her teeth, dressed in only a sweater and hot
pants or shorts. She had been raped and strangled. No identification was found
on the body. The building was on Calle Alondra, in Colonia Podesta, in the
upper part of Santa Teresa. Because of where it was, the workers didn't stay to
sleep, as they would at other construction sites. At night a private security
guard kept watch over the building. When he was questioned, he confessed that
despite the terms of his contract, he usually slept at night, since during the
day he worked at a maquiladora, and some nights he would be at the site until
two in the morning and then go home, to Avenida Cuauhtemoc, in Colonia San
Damian. The interrogation, conducted by the chief's right-hand man, Epifanio
Galindo, was tough, but from the beginning it was clear the watchman was
telling the truth. It was assumed, not without reason, that the victim was a recent
arrival and there must be a suitcase somewhere with her clothes in it. With
this in mind, inquiries were made at boardinghouses and hotels in the center,
but none was missing
a
guest. Her picture was published in the
city papers, to no avail: either no one knew her or the picture wasn't good or
no one wanted trouble with the police. Missing person reports from other states
were checked for matches, but no description fit the dead woman who had turned
up in the building on Calle Alondra. Only one thing was clear, or at least
clear to Epifanio: the woman wasn't from the neighborhood, she hadn't been
strangled and raped in the neighborhood, so why dump the body in the upper part
of the city, on streets assiduously patrolled at night by the police or private
security guards? why go to the effort to leave the body on the second floor of
a building under construction, with all the risks that entailed, including a
fall down stairs still missing a railing, when the logical thing would be to
dispose of it in the desert or at the edge of a dump? For two days he thought
about it. As he ate, as he listened to his companions talk about sports or
women, as he drove Pedro Negrete's car, as he slept. Until he decided that no
matter how much he thought about it he wasn't going to come up with a good
answer, and then he didn't think about it anymore.

•

Sometimes,
especially on his days off, Inspector Juan de Dios
Martinez
would have liked to go out with the
director. That is, he wanted to be seen in public with her, eat at a downtown
restaurant with her, neither a cheap nor a very expensive restaurant but a
normal restaurant where normal couples went and where he would almost certainly
run into someone he knew, to whom he would introduce the director naturally,
casually, coolly, this is my girlfriend, Elvira Campos, she's a psychiatrist.
After they ate they'd probably go back to her apartment to make love and then
nap. And at night they'd go out again, in her BMW or his Cougar, to the movies
or some outdoor cafe for a soda or to dance at one of Santa Teresa's many
clubs. The perfect happiness, goddamn it, thought Juan de Dios
Martinez
. But Elvira
Campos wouldn't even hear of a public relationship. Phone calls to the
psychiatric center, yes, so long as they were short. Meetings in person every
two weeks. A glass of whiskey or Absolut vodka and nocturnal landscapes.
Sterile goodbyes.

That
same month of November 1994, the partially charred body of Silvana Perez Arjona
was found in a vacant lot. She was fifteen and thin, dark-skinned, five foot
three. Her black hair fell below her shoulders, although when she was found
half her hair was scorched off. The body was discovered by some women from
Colonia Las Flores who had hung their washing on the edge of the lot, and it
was they who called the Red Cross. When the ambulance arrived the older man,
the ambulance driver, asked the women and the onlookers milling around the body
if anyone knew the dead woman. Some filed by, gazed at her face, and shook
their heads. No one knew her. Then my friends if I were you I'd move along,
said the older medic, because the cops will want to question you all. He didn't
say it loudly, but his voice carried and everyone backed away. Now it looked as
if there was no one in the lot, but the two medics smiled because they knew
people were watching from their hiding places. While one of them, the younger
one, radioed the police from the ambulance, the older one went off on foot down
the dirt roads of Colonia Las Flores to a taco stand where the owner knew him.
He ordered six pork tacos, three with sour cream and three without, all six of
them extra hot, and two cans of Coca-Cola. Then he paid and strolled Back to
the ambulance, where the kid who looked like his son was reading a comic book,
leaning on the fender. By the time the police showed up, both of them had
finished eating and they were having a smoke. For three hours the body lay in
the vacant lot. According to the medical examiner, the girl had been raped. Two
direct stabs to the heart were the cause of death. Then the killer had tried to
burn the body to erase his tracks, but apparently he was a fuckup or else
someone had sold him water for gasoline or else he'd lost his nerve. The next
day it was learned that the dead girl was Silvana Perez Arjona, a machine
operator at a maquiladora in the General Sepulveda industrial park, not far
from where the body had been found. Until a year ago Silvana had been living
with her mother and four siblings, all workers at different maquiladoras around
the city. She had been the only one in school, at Profesor Emilio Cervantes, a
high school in Colonia Lomas del Toro. For financial reasons, however, she'd
had to drop out and one of her sisters found her a job at Horizon W&E,
where she met Carlos Llanos, thirty-five, started to date him, and finally
moved into his house on Calle Prometeo. According to his friends, Llanos was a
good-natured man, a drinker but not a drunk, and a person who read books in his
spare time, which was unusual and gave him the aura of someone exceptional.
According to Silvana's mother, it was this that seduced her daughter, who had
never even had a boyfriend, not counting some innocent romances at school. They
were together for seven months. Llanos read, yes, and sometimes the two of them
would sit in his little living room and talk about what they were reading, but
he drank more than he read and he was an extremely jealous and insecure man.
When Silvana visited her mother, sometimes she would confess that Llanos hit
her. Mother and daughter often spent hours in each other's arms, crying in the
dark. Llano's arrest, which presented no difficulties, was the first in which
Lalo Cura took part. Two Santa Teresa patrol cars drove up, the police knocked,
Llanos came to the door, the police beat him to the ground without a word,
handcuffed him, and took him in to the station, where they tried to stick him
with the murder of the woman on Calle Alondra, or at least of the girl they'd
found at the new city dump, but it wouldn't work, Silvana Perez herself was his
alibi, since he'd been seen with her on the dates in question, strutting around
Colonia Carranza's ramshackle park, where there'd been a carnival, and even
Silvana's relatives had seen the two of them together. As far as nights were
concerned, until barely a week ago he'd spent them on the night shift at the
maquiladora and his fellow workers could vouch for him. Of Silvana's murder he
declared himself guilty and was only sorry he had tried to burn her. Silvana
was a good kid, he said, and she didn't deserve to be treated like that.

Around
this time, too, a seer appeared on Sonora TV. Her name was Florita Almada, but
her followers, whose numbers were small, called her La Santa. Florita Almada
was seventy and it was only recently, ten years before, that she had been
granted the gift of sight. She saw things no one else saw. She heard things no
one else heard. And she knew how to find a meaningful explanation for
everything that happened to her. Before she became a seer she had been an
herbalist, which was her true calling, or so she said, because seer meant
someone who sees, and sometimes she didn't see anything, the picture was fuzzy,
the sound faulty, as if the antenna that had sprung up in her brain wasn't
installed right or had been shot full of holes or was made of aluminum foil and
blew every which way in the wind. So even though she called herself a seer or
let her followers call her one, she put more faith in herbs and flowers, in
healthy eating and prayer. She recommended that people with high blood pressure
give up eggs and cheese and white bread, for example, because those were foods
high in sodium, and sodium attracts
water and causes
extra fluid to build up in the body, which raises blood pressure. Plain as day,
said Florita Almada. No matter how much you like to eat huevos rancheros or
huevos a la mexicana for breakfast, if you have high blood pressure you'd
better give up eggs. And if you've given up eggs, you might as well give up
meat and fish, too, and eat nothing but rice and fruit. Rice and fruit are very
good for you, especially when you're over forty. She also denounced the
excessive consumption of fat. Your total intake of fat, she said, should never
be more than twenty-five percent of the total energy quotient of the food you
eat. Ideally, the consumption of fat should settle at between fifteen and
twenty percent. But the employed sometimes consume up to eighty or ninety
percent of fat, and if their employment is stable, consumption rises to one
hundred percent, which is disgraceful, she said. In contrast, consumption of
fat by the unemployed is between thirty and fifty percent, which is an
affliction, too, because those poor people aren't just undernourished, they're
also malnourished, if you follow me, said Florita Almada, and really, being
undernourished is an affliction in itself, and being malnourished doesn't help,
maybe I haven't made myself clear, what I'm trying to say is that a tortilla
with chile is better for you than pork rinds that are actually dog or cat or
rat, she said, sounding apologetic. Then, too, she was against cults and
healers and all those despicable people who tried to swindle the poor. She
thought botanomancy, or the art of predicting the future through plants, was
trickery. Still, she knew how it worked, and once she explained to a third-rate
healer the different branches of the divinatory art of botanomancy, namely:
floromancy, or the study of the shapes, movements, and reactions of plants,
subdivided in turn into cromniomancy and fructomancy, the reading of sprouting
onions or fruits, and also dendromancy, the interpretation of trees, and
phyllomancy, the study of leaves, and xylomancy, or divination using wood and
tree branches, which, she said, is lovely, poetic, but has more to do with
laying the past to rest and nurturing and pacifying the present than with
predicting the future. Then came cleromantic botanomancy, subdivided into
favomancy, practiced with several white beans and a black bean, as well as the
disciplines of rhabdomancy and belomancy, in which wooden rods were used. She
had nothing against any of these arts and hence nothing to say about them. Then
came plant pharmacology, or the use of hallucinogenic and alkaloid plants,
which she had nothing against either. Everyone was free to mess with their own heads.
It worked well for some people and not for others, especially lazy youths with
regrettable habits. She'd rather not rule in favor or against. Then came
meteorological botanomancy, which really was interesting but which very few
people had mastered, no more than could be counted on the fingers of one hand,
and which was based on observation of the reactions of plants. For example: if
the poppy lifts its petals, the weather will be fine. For example: if a poplar
begins to quiver, something unexpected will happen. For example: if the little
flower with white petals and a tiny yellow corolla, called the
pijuli,
bows its head, it will be hot.
For example: if another flower, the kind with yellowish and sometimes pink
petals, called camphor in Sonora—why I don't know—and crow's beak in Sinaloa
because from a distance it looks like a hummingbird, well, if the little rascal
shuts, then rain is coming. And finally we have radiesthesia, a practice that
originally required a hazel rod, now replaced by a pendulum, and about which
Florita Almada had nothing to say. When you know something, you know it, and
when you don't, you'd better learn. And in the meantime, you should keep quiet,
or at least speak only when what you say will advance the learning process. Her
own life, as she explained, had been a constant apprenticeship. She didn't
learn to read or write until she was twenty, more or less. She was born in
Nacori Grande and she couldn't go to school like a normal child because her
mother was blind and the task of caring for her fell to Florita. About her
brothers and sisters, of whom she preserved fond, vague recollections, she knew
nothing. The gale forces of life had scattered them to the four corners of
Mexico
and they might be in their graves by now. Her childhood, despite the hardships
and misfortunes typical of a peasant family, was happy. I loved the country,
she said, although now it bothers me a little because I've stopped being used
to the bugs. Life in Nacori Grande, believe it or not, could sometimes be very
involving. Taking care of her blind mother could be fun. Tending the chickens
could be fun. Washing the clothes could be fun. Cooking could be fun. The only
thing she regretted was not having gone to school. Then they moved, for reasons
not worth discussing, to Villa Pesqueira, where her mother died and where she,
eight months later, married a man she barely knew, a hardworking and honorable
man, who treated everyone with respect, someone quite a bit older than she was,
incidentally, thirty-eight to her seventeen the day they stood before the
altar, in other words twenty-one years her senior, a livestock dealer who
mostly bought and sold goats and sheep, although
every once in a while he also dealt in cattle or even pigs, and who was
obliged by the circumstances of his work to travel constantly in the area, to
towns like San Jose de Batuc, San Pedro de la Cueva, Huepari, Tepache,
Lampazos, Divisaderos, Nacori Chico, El Chorro, and Napopa, along dirt roads or
animal tracks and on shortcuts that skirted the mazelike mountains. Business
wasn't bad. Sometimes she went with him on his trips, not often, because it was
considered unseemly for a dealer to travel with a woman, especially his own
wife, but she did go occasionally. It was a unique opportunity to see the
world. To get a glimpse of other landscapes, which, though they might seem
familiar, when you looked carefully were very different from the landscapes of
Villa Pesqueira. Every hundred feet the world changes, said Florita Almada. The
idea that some places are the same as others is a lie. The world is a kind of
tremor. Of course, she would have liked to have children, but nature (nature in
general or her husband's nature, she said, laughing) denied her that
responsibility. The time she would have devoted to a baby she used to study.
Who taught her to read? Children taught me, said Florita Almada, there are no
better teachers. Children with their alphabet books, who came to her house for
toasted cornmeal. Such is life that just when she thought her chances of taking
classes or going back to school (unlikely, since in Villa Pesqueira they
thought Night School was the name of a brothel outside San Jose de Pimas) had
vanished forever, she learned almost effortlessly to read and write. From that
moment on she read everything that fell into her hands. In a notebook, she
jotted down thoughts and impressions inspired by her reading. She read old
magazines and newspapers, she read political flyers distributed every so often
from pickups by young men with mustaches, she read the daily papers, she read
the few books she could find and the books her husband got into the habit of
bringing back each time he returned from his buying and selling trips to
neighboring towns, books he purchased sometimes by the pound. Ten pounds of
books. Fifteen pounds of books. Once he came back with twenty-five pounds. And
she read every single one, and from each, without exception, she drew some
lesson. Sometimes she read magazines from Mexico City, sometimes she read
history books, sometimes she read religious books, sometimes she read dirty
books that made her blush, sitting alone at the table, the pages lit by an oil
lamp's light that seemed to dance and assume demonic shapes, sometimes she read
technical books about the cultivation of vineyards or the construction of
prefabricated houses, sometimes she read horror stories or ghost stories, any
kind of reading that providence placed within her reach, and she learned
something each time, sometimes very little, but something was left behind, like
a gold nugget in a trash heap, or, to refine the metaphor, said Florita, like a
doll lost and found in a heap of somebody else's trash. Anyway, she wasn't an
educated person, at least she didn't have what you might call a classical
education, for which she apologized, but she wasn't ashamed of being what she
was, because what God takes away the Virgin restores, and when that's the way
it is, it's impossible not to be at peace with the world. And so the years went
by. One day, by the miraculous laws of symmetry, her husband went blind.
Luckily she was already experienced in the care of the sightless and the
livestock dealer's last years were peaceful, because his wife looked after him
with skill and tenderness. Then she was alone and by that time she had turned
forty-four. She didn't marry again, not for lack of suitors but because she
found she liked being alone. What she did was buy herself a .38 revolver,
because the shotgun her husband had left her seemed unwieldy, and, for the
moment, she took over the business of buying and selling livestock. But the
problem, she explained, was that to buy and especially to sell livestock a
certain sensibility was required, a certain training, a certain propensity to
blindness that she in no way possessed. Traveling with the animals along the
mountain trails was lovely; auctioning them at the market or the slaughterhouse
was a nightmare. So she soon abandoned the business and kept traveling, with
her late husband's dog and her revolver and sometimes her animals, which began
to age with her, but this time she went as a healer, one of the many in the
blessed state of Sonora, and on her travels she foraged for herbs or recorded
her thoughts while the animals grazed, as Benito Juarez had done when he was a
shepherd boy, oh, Benito Juarez, what a great man, so honorable, so wise, and
what a charming boy, too, little was said about that period of his life, in
part because little was known, in part because Mexicans were aware that when
they talked about children they tended to speak nonsense. Mind you, she had
something to say on the subject. Of the thousands of books she had read, among
them books on the history of Mexico, the history of Spain, the history of
Colombia, the history of religion, the history of the popes of Rome, the
advances of NASA, she had come across only a few pages that depicted with
complete faithfulness, utter faithfulness, what the boy Benito Juarez must have
felt, more
than thought, when he went out to
pasture with his flock and was sometimes gone for several days and nights, as
is the way of these things. Inside that book with a yellow cover everything was
expressed so clearly that sometimes Florita Almada thought the author must have
been a friend of Benito Juarez and that Benito Juarez had confided all his
childhood experiences in the man's ear. If such a thing were possible. If it
were possible to convey what one feels when night falls and the stars come out
and one is alone in the vastness, and life's truths (night truths) begin to
march past one by one, somehow swooning or as if the person out in the open
were swooning or as if a strange sickness were circulating in the blood
unnoticed. What are you doing, moon, up in the sky? asks the little shepherd in
the poem. What are you doing, tell me, silent moon? Aren't you tired of plying
the eternal byways? The shepherd's life is like your life. He rises at first
light and moves his flock across the field. Then, weary, he rests at evening
and hopes for nothing more. What good is the shepherd's life to him or yours to
you? Tell me, the shepherd muses, said Florita Almada in a transported voice,
where is it heading, my brief wandering, your immortal journey? Man is born
into pain, and being born itself means risking death, said the poem. And also:
But why bring to light, why educate someone we'll console for living later? And
also: If life is misery, why do we endure it? And also: This, unblemished moon,
is the mortal condition. But you're not mortal, and what I say may matter
little to you. And also, and on the contrary: You, eternal solitary wanderer,
you who are so pensive, it may be you understand this life on earth, what our
suffering and sighing is, what this death is, this last paling of the face, and
leaving Earth behind, abandoning all familiar, loving company. And also: What
does the endless air do, and that deep eternal blue? What does this enormous
solitude portend? And what am I? And also: This is what I know and feel: that
from the eternal motions, from my fragile being, others may derive some good or
happiness. And also: But life for me is wrong. And also: Old, white haired,
weak, barefoot, bearing an enormous burden, up mountain and down valley, over
sharp rocks, across deep sands and bracken, through wind and storm, when it's
hot and later when it freezes, running on, running faster, crossing rivers,
swamps, falling and rising and hurrying faster, no rest or relief, battered and
bloody, at last coming to where the way and all effort has led: terrible,
immense abyss into which, upon falling, all is forgotten. And also: This, O
virgin moon, is human life. And also: O resting flock, who don't, I think, know
your own misery! How I envy you! Not just because you travel as if trouble free
and soon forget each need, each hurt, each deathly fear, but more because
you're never bored. And also: When you lie in the shade, on the grass, you're
calm and happy, and you spend the great part of the year this way and feel no
boredom. And also: I sit on the grass, too, in the shade, but an anxiousness
invades my mind as if a thorn is pricking me. And also: Yet I desire nothing,
and till now I have no reason for complaint. And at this point, after sighing
deeply, Florita Almada would say that several conclusions could be drawn: (1)
that the thoughts that seize a shepherd can easily gallop away with him because
it's human nature; (2) that facing boredom head-on was an act of bravery and
Benito Juarez had done it and she had done it too and both had seen terrible
things in the face of boredom, things she would rather not recall; (3) that the
poem, now she remembered, was about an Asian shepherd, not a Mexican shepherd,
but it made no difference, since shepherds are the same everywhere; (4) that if
it was true that all effort led to a vast abyss, she had two recommendations to
begin with, first, not to cheat people, and, second, to treat them properly.
Beyond that, there was room for discussion. And that was what she did, listen
and talk, until the day Reinaldo stopped by to consult her about a lost love
and left with a diet plan and some calming herbal infusions and other aromatic
herbs that he tucked in the corners of his apartment, herbs that made it smell
like a church and a spaceship at the same time, as Reinaldo told his friends
when they came to visit, a glorious smell, a smell that soothes and gladdens
the spirit, it even makes you want to listen to classical music, don't you
think? And Reinaldo's friends began to insist that he introduce them to
Florita,
ay,
Reinaldo, I need Florita
Almada, one after the other, like a procession of penitents with their purple
or fabulous vermillion or checkered hoods, and Reinaldo weighed the pros and
cons, all right, boys, you win, I'm going to introduce you to Florita, and when
Florita met them, one Saturday night, at Reinaldo's apartment, so thoroughly
decked out for the occasion that there was even a lonely pinata on the terrace,
she didn't turn up her nose or look displeased but instead said why, you've
gone to so much trouble for me, these amazing treats, who made them, I want to compliment
the cook, this delicious cake, I never had anything like it in my life, it's
pineapple, no? the fresh-squeezed juices, the perfectly laid table, what
charming young men, so thoughtful, look, you brought me presents, and it's not
even my birthday, and then