Dr. Brinkley's Tower (39 page)

By eleven o'clock, gunshots began to echo off the adobe building fronts. As time passed, these interchanges would escalate into bloody running pistol battles. The citizenry took to their root cellars just as they had done during the revolution, surviving off potatoes and pickled cactus. The
fighting — long interludes of silence interrupted by brief, vicious episodes — continued all day and then worsened at nightfall, when the rage of the combatants was sharpened by the swallowing of mescal and psychotropic roots. Finally, around midnight, when the violence had settled, those men unlucky enough to be on cadaver duty would load a donkey cart with that day's bodies, douse them with lime, and then dump them into a large grave that had been created in a field beyond Brinkley's despised tower.

Indigent families, who had been leaving Corazón de la Fuente in a trickle, now began to flee in earnest, their pitiful belongings lashed to the backs of Sicilian burros, their way lit by moonlight and prayers for the future. Madam's few remaining clients finally said goodbye to their beloved Marias, explaining that fear for their personal safety had forced them to make a choice they didn't want to make. For the first time since Brinkley had started broadcasting, there was no lineup of customers at the House of Gentlemanly Pleasures, all eager to test the success of the Compound Operation. This was appropriate, given that the brothel was now occupied by only the most unsavoury of specimens: Ramón and his men had begun to suffer from exhaustion, poor nutrition, and, in some cases, delirium tremens. News of their condition spread, not only through Coahuila, but also to Nuevo León, Chihuahua, Durango, and Zacatecas. Each day, new blood arrived in the guise of former White Shirts, paramilitaries, fascists, Porfirists, and even the odd American freedom fighter, all pleased to resurrect an older, psychopathic way of life.

The enemy — Ramón heard they were captained by an old radical named Patricio Jigán — had set up on the east side,
near the town's smaller plaza, outside the one-room dwelling where the molinero had once lived. Of course, news of Jigán's campaign had spread as well, and his beleaguered forces were bolstered daily by old Villistas, socialists, communists, Gold Shirts, Zapatistas, Trotskyites, anarchists, and even a few good old-fashioned train robbers, who had pilfered and looted so exuberantly during the revolution that they had once shut down passenger rail in all of México. They too had an atavistic longing for those times.

With so many gunmen in town, the running gun battles ended. The truth was that all of the fighters, be they left or right, pro-revolution or anti-revolution, White Shirt or Gold Shirt, looked pretty much the same — same huge moustache, same bandolier marking an X across the centre of the chest, same filthy embroidered sombrero, same disturbed glint in the eye. After a while, both sides came to the sobering realization that the majority of deaths on the battlefield — a.k.a. the streets and plazas of Corazón de la Fuente — were being caused by friendly fire. To remedy this, they established battle lines, just as the Allies and the Germans were said to have done in France. The Villistas piled their sandbags along the eastern edge of the central plaza, while the White Shirts piled their sandbags along the western edge. Every day at noon, three p.m., and dusk, they'd show up to shout insults at one another and fire at anyone foolish enough to lift his head above the line of sandbags. Many died with their hands cupped around their mouths, the words
Your madre takes it in the culo
left to fade with the sound of gunshots in the thin, hot air.

Aerated by pistol rounds, the trees surrounding the plaza bled sap and slowly dropped what little foliage had grown back
since the end of the revolution. The building façades sprouted new bullet holes — the Villistas in particular liked to take potshots at the church, as this inflamed the enemy and tended to make them do things that were strategically unwise. Faced with the food shortages that always accompany times of war, the townsfolk began killing off pigs and chickens and even the odd nag, such that the animal population of Corazón de la Fuente soon expired. Without the sounds made by penned livestock, the village became something unreal, something no longer meant to sustain life. The plazas, streets, avenidas, and back alleys cleared entirely, save for dented cookware and filthy old clothing left behind by those in a hurry to leave. Even the Callejón of Narcoleptic Bitches emptied, the dogs of Corazón all heading to the desert, where they either perished or began producing broods of mangy, distempered coypups.

Throughout all of this, Madam remained locked in the closet, her fingertips bloodied from scratching at the door, her voice hoarse from screaming for release, her clothes pathetically soiled by her own waste, her body kept alive by whatever food and water Ramón's men deemed fit to occasionally throw in to her. Worse was the knowledge that she could have killed Ramón — there was a second, just before his goons jumped her, when she had a clear shot at his grimy forehead, and only the slightest pull on her trigger finger would have dispatched him to hell. And yet she'd hesitated. She was not a killer. She had let Ramon's thug bat her arm down so that the floorboards took the bullet instead of that festering White Shirt. This hurt most of all. Having given up hope, she now lay in a curled ball and awaited the arrival of her own protracted demise.

And then, as if by miracle, the door of the closet was thrown open wide. The light assaulted her eyes, and she pushed herself, whimpering, to the back of the fetid space. She could hear the sound of boot steps retreating along the floorboards, along with a ragged voice yelling
You got thirty seconds to get that whore outta the closet. She's starting to stink up the place.
And then two Marias were there, Maria del Alma and Maria de las Rosas, saying
Madam, please, hurry.
She nodded and said nothing and tried to stand and couldn't. Each Maria took an arm, and with their help she rose to her feet, Madam so foggy-headed she was conscious only of the wooden floor moving beneath her toes. This turned to dusty, pale earth, a change coincident with the sensation of the low orange sun warming her back. Madam let herself be dragged to the first of the pup tents erected by Ramón's men. There, two more Marias washed her with dampened cloths and dressed her in a clean, if unglamorous, smock. They gave her small bites of tortilla and spoonfuls of a tepid meatless broth. A cooling towel was placed upon her forehead.

Madam Félix fell into a deep, tormented sleep. When she finally awoke, she did something she should have done long, long ago. She wept. She wept for the hacendero, and she wept for the loss of her house, and she wept because she was barren and a long time ago a husband she could no longer picture had thrown her, wailing, into the street because she couldn't give him a child. Mostly, she wept because that bastard Ramón wasn't lying dead in the broiling sun, his features ornamented with a bloody third eye, smack dab in the middle of his forehead. At first her sobs were quiet, almost reverential, though when they began to build in intensity she did not attempt to
muffle them in any way. Her cries drifted through the canvas of the tent and filled the yard and unnerved the Marias, who felt powerless in the face of such sorrow. This went on and on, the madam ridding herself of a poison that had infected her system for years.

It was pitch-black when she finally stopped. She felt around, her left hand coming upon the cool, glassy surface of an unlit kerosene lamp. After a little more fumbling she found a box of matches and lit the lamp, the inside of the tent erupting in a nectarine glow. She lowered the flame to a cool, soothing blue. Though she was dressed in someone else's nightdress — she recognized it as belonging to Maria de los Sueños — her own clothes lay cleaned and folded beside her. She stood and dressed, which was difficult, given the low ceiling of the tent. Before pushing open the flaps and stepping into the arid night air, she took a few breaths to collect herself. In a moment she felt imbued with a new resolve.

The Marias were all sleeping, worn out by a day of servicing the needs of Ramón and his cutthroats. Some were in their pup tents, and others were sleeping around the twinkling embers of the fire. The first one she came to was Maria del Alma. Madam kneeled and brushed the hair off the girl's slender forehead. Again, she had to fight against a flaring of tears. She could remember, as though it had happened yesterday, the day Maria del Alma first knocked at the door of Madam's house: sixteen years old, thin as a sapling, as pretty as a dove, her family so poor that she and her siblings had grown up taking turns wearing each other's clothes.

Madam smiled ruefully as she stroked Maria's forehead.
I broke my promise to you,
she thought.
I can no longer protect you,
I can no longer feed your family. But this will not last, I promise you this, mi niña, mi linda, mi preciosa Maria.

Gently she shook the girl's shoulders. Maria came awake silently and looked up at Madam. There was, as always, trust in her expression.

— Qué pasa? she whispered.

— Shhh, mija. Don't say a thing. We are going. Collect your things. We are leaving Corazón.

Maria blinked, her eyes still bearing a glimmer of innocence. As Maria silently collected her things, Madam went around to all of her Marias, including Maria del Mampo, who was now well enough to travel, albeit marred by scars and disfigurements that would prevent her from ever working as a Maria again. Before waking each of her young wards, Madam silently recalled how she had met each girl, and she forced herself to remember as many pleasant moments as possible involving her and their lives in the House of Gentlemanly Pleasures. This helped, for it made her feel as though her life in Corazón hadn't been wasted.
Shhh, mija,
she whispered each time,
we are leaving this place
, and each time the Maria would nod and begin gathering her belongings (the lone exception, of course, being Maria de la Noche, who grinned and saucily whispered
A todo madre, Madam. It's about time
).

They all worked quietly, in absolute silence. Then, like the proverbial wind, they slipped away without saying goodbye to anyone in the town that had forsaken them, not even the hacendero, though Madam did stop her train of Marias in front of his battered mansion. There she forced herself to remember how safe she had felt whenever he was in her bed, scenting her pillows with brandy and tobacco. She indulged
herself this way for only a minute, her Marias understanding why they had stopped behind the ramshackle old hacienda, and why Madam's lips were trembling.

Following instinct and the light of the corona, Madam's caravan of Marias walked east along the riverbank, where they could stop and drink whenever they felt tired. After a while the landscape was lit a natural silver and not the green of high-powered radio frequencies. This pleased them and made them feel as though their new lives had begun.

They existed like nomads, camping under the stars and dining on nopal blackened over fires. They ate soup brewed from jumil bugs and smoked cigarettes rolled from wild punche. These hardships didn't bother them, as they were all savouring a freedom that had nothing to do with male clients and a reignited revolution. They travelled for three days, in no hurry. They admired the skies and drank milk from hacked-apart cacti. At night they huddled for warmth and said prayers in Latin. For the first time in ages, they had time to think about God, the purpose of life, and the meaning of eternity. In this way their journey felt like a gift. Some even acted upon affections that had existed for years, their first Sapphic fumblings occurring under a wash of starlight.

They finally stopped at a stretch of uninhabited desert that was strategically located across the border from Laredo, Texas. There was nothing but chaparral and prickly pear and a sympathetic view of the river, and, in the other direction, a distant sierra. They bathed in cool waters, built a fire, and erected the tents they'd wisely commandeered from Ramón. This, they all realized, was the new way in which decisions would be made: wordlessly, organically, without the issuance
of commands. By nine o'clock the next morning, coffee was bubbling, by ten o'clock their stomachs were filled with griddle cakes, and by eleven o'clock an ad hoc sign had been fashioned. It read, appropriately enough,
The House of Gentlemanly Pleasures II.
By noon Madam's new, makeshift brothel had its first customer, an itinerant seller of encyclopedias who often ducked into México for just such a purpose, and who was giddy with delight that there was now a brothel
here
, just over the border from bustling Laredo. His choice was Maria del Sol, whose gentle, fawn-like movements made the man think of things normally not associated with bordellos, including rainbows, the taste of ripe fruit, and the laughter of children. He left vowing to return.

To mark the occasion, Madam made an announcement.

— Mijas, she said to her Marias. — This place is a good one. We will live here as a family and we will prosper for years to come, and we will all grow wrinkled and rich together. But there is one thing we will do differently here.

— Sí? echoed the Marias.

Madam fought to suppress emotion. — You have all been given the name of the daughter I always wanted but, given the caprices of God, could never have. Instead, you became my daughters. You became my family. This fact has existed for years, even if none of us chose to acknowledge it. When I was locked in that infernal closet, it occurred to me that I no longer wanted to partake in this … in this charade. All visitors, clients, and callers will continue to address me as Madam. You, however, will refer to me by another term.

She paused, and looked adoringly at each one of them.

— From now on, you will all call me Mother.

This made all of the Marias smile, including Maria de la Noche, whose left eye brimmed with the beginnings of a tear.