Mexico City Noir (12 page)
I
was still very young and had barely experienced heartbreak when I first saw the bird with enormous wings. The wings were so great they covered the sun and threw shadows over an entire Arab city, across those churches with multicolored towers, round and pointy like a spinning top. I saw the bird in Graciela’s storybook. I see it again now, when there’s nothing left in the city, only the beating of the wings and me; it’s colder here than in Reclusorio Sur prison or Nevado de Toluca.
Black coffee, a roll, and a pastry—I’ve always had the same breakfast. Although sometimes a beer is the one and only remedy for mornings when the sun is blinding and a man regrets that last pint. But now I need my coffee, my roll, and my pastry. Maybe because it’s 3 in the morning and the last time I had a bite to eat was yesterday afternoon, or because of that cold strip between my back and my guts, or because there are only two of us on this empty street and two is a terrible number at this hour, with everything I still have to do, and do without any help or witnesses.
Let me tell you, at this hour, on these streets, it’s best if you’re from the neighborhood. Around here, God helps whoever helps himself, everybody knows what’s going on, and no one expects the head of government to actually solve any problems or for the best fighter to win in the ring. Friendly folk do not abound. Respectable people walk determined to just get home in one piece and with a few bills still on their bodies. The strong survive, that’s the law of the land.
There’s another guy on the street and he moves as if he were alone, as if it were 10 in the morning and the Squirrel didn’t exist; he ignores me and that must mean he wants to control me. I tuck my right hand into my jacket, cover the handle of the sevillana, and squeeze hard to feel it. I took this knife off an aimless gringo leaving the Bar León, up to his ears in local bourbon and without a clue where his hotel was. A gift. He’d even lost his shoes. I decided to go easy and just take the knife. A useful beauty, the best thing in the world.
The guy keeps going. It’s three blocks to my house and then the street is mine. The cold air on my chest shakes me to the core. It’s a good time to go into La Cotorra and ask for an aged tequila and a hot snack. But it’s closed. No way. It’s late.
I think about the One & Only. Graciela is the first woman with whom I’ve resorted to begging, and she’ll be the last. Like Jose Alfredo drunk on love, like an encyclopedia of boleros. I’ve shown more appreciation for her than for a box of gold Rolexes, a new car, or a whole year in Acapulco. Has anyone ever seen me behave like this with any other woman? Not a one. Our names must be written in the Book of Destiny. Celebration and quarrel always come in the wake of the bird in Graciela’s book.
Centuries ago, the One & Only was just a flower of promise and great wings grew from my back.
We lived deep in the neighborhood, my Tía Clodomira and me, in the Republic of Guatemala between Rodriguez Puebla and Vicarious Leona. She took me in after I was abandoned by my mother’s misfortune. She called me Squirrel out of love, and I knew that in her skirts I’d find the first and most exclusive hideout in which to seek refuge. Clodomira worked in a clothing store and she’d leave me playing on the patio. “Do not move from here, Squirrel.” “No, Tía.” “Wait for me.” “Yes, Tía.” Pretty soon I learned to go from patio to patio, and from the patios to the street. Scared to death, I began to wander and made my way around the block. Haven’t stopped since. I must have been about four years old then and that’s my earliest memory. Before then, I can’t picture anything. Although sometimes, on nights when the world crashes in on me, I believe I’ve glimpsed cloudy shapes and shouts that surround and beat me with an incomprehensible ferocity. Frightening things, which I neither recognize nor understand, but which haunt me, force me to turn on the light and smoke one cigarette after another until I see the sun come through my window.
I think about the One & Only and I know that girl—whom I first met when she was just a gaudy, awkward caterpillar, and whom I later witnessed as a butterfly—was whom I truly loved. I say it now because I don’t know if I’ll ever say it again. I remember when I first went to the circus, my aunt’s fiancé—a stocky guy named Reynaldo who was a coyote in Monte de Piedad—told me to keep my eye on the trapeze artist because he might fall and kill himself and it would never happen again, even if I showed up with a fistful of bills and paid a hundred times the ticket price. “Good things only come around once,” said Reynaldo, “and if we aren’t ready to dive in, we risk being left out, forever regretting.” It’s not that Reynaldo was a wise person, because if he were wise he wouldn’t be in prison, but for anybody who depends on hustling to eat, his words make sense.
At fifteen, I was making plans and holding on, barely passing my way through high school, looking to learn more and trying to keep up with Graciela from afar. We weren’t friends anymore. The One & Only despised our little gang from Guatemala, our tricks to get money, the zits that tormented me, and even my skill at beheading rats with a slingshot.
In the gang, it wasn’t a good idea to let on that you were in love; in fact, it was disastrous, because the guys had a cruel laugh reserved for anyone who developed soft feelings more appropriate to old women and fags. Like the men in bars from olden times, the gang didn’t tolerate anybody in uniform, or women. An honorable “Guatemalteco” only concerned himself with those sweet enemies when it came time to steal their panties and their hearts.
Actually, keeping the secret wasn’t that hard in the gang. It was all about taking on an attitude appropriate to a Guatemala hustler. “That chava belongs to me, one way or another. Nobody better touch her cuz she’s mine.” Still, it’s hard to love somebody who looks at you like you’ve got eight legs and can crawl up a wall. But it wasn’t always that way. A lot of time passed from the moment that little girl came to the back patio with her book in hand, to the day the nymph stopped coming, to the time that woman refused to even greet me. There were afternoons when I took to reciting romantic songs and taking her picture when I saw her lower her guard for a moment, revealing a gentle moistness about her eyes and a bloom in her cheeks. An anxious and flattered woman is an open window to anyone who knows how to look into it. I swear I felt like Juan Diego greeting the Virgin of Guadalupe. But each and every time, just when a feeling seemed to be stirring inside the One & Only, just like a chick pecks away at its shell in order to come to life, something would happen, and Graciela would again notice the marks on my skin, and she would wrinkle her nose as if something were rotting and then everything got fucked up again. Furious and desperate, the only thing I could think to do was insult her, bring her down with savage commentary to erase her sense of superiority, twist her rejection of me into fear of the streets. Later, when she was fifteen and I was eighteen, love and scorn were the same thing.
At the plazas in Loreto and La Soledad, I had money to ease things and met adventurers who didn’t faint over smallpox scars. Some became my friends. We ate sweet rolls, drank muscatel, and sometimes waited out the night to see the sun rise. The moment is so magical there in the center of the city that you’re willing to see Aztecs emerge from the ruins; you’re willing to believe the most fantastic legends. “Fuck her good and she’ll be yours forever. You don’t have any other option. Easy or hard, if you’re the first, you have a chance. What’s to lose? Don’t be such a lightweight; women like men who are determined.” They didn’t know Graciela; they were talking about other women.
I pursued Graciela and she rejected me. Like a dog begging for a caress I went after her. I pleaded with her a thousand times in a thousand ways, I robbed a car to take her for a drive, I pressured, I threatened, and, in the end, I hurt her so badly that a hundred years of regret won’t be enough.
If something has to happen, it will. The black hour came when a passing helicopter reminded me of that bird, when my unfulfilled dreams disappeared in its flight, and then there was a knock on the door to the patio and there she was—fruit for the taking in a flowered dress—precisely on a Friday when Clodomira had warned me that she’d be late. In that fatal second, I knew that we had reached a point of no return. Because … could I have done anything differently? … What else could I do, I ask, what else could I do? … Or must the Squirrel call the garbage man, give him some money, and say,“Just stuff me in your truck and toss me in the incinerator”?
What happened that afternoon was unfortunate. First, because it’s unbearable to hurt the woman you love … A crazed and empty-headed bato, a head filled only with tequila and anger and marijuana, so that you can’t think or regret or get it together to disappoint the prostitutes who hope to see you do it and finally stop acting like a fag … obsessed with finding disdain in the face of the beloved … having made the ridiculous decision to make her pay for not loving you … Add it up and none of it makes sense. It was impossible to even hope that the magic of the first time would transform her rejection into love, like what happens in stories and movies we’ve all seen and know: first, the leading lady throws a furious tantrum; then—nobody knows how this happens—passion emerges.
But passion failed to show this time—Graciela didn’t change and that was the first misfortune. Or perhaps, who knows … The second came in terrible words: “You are going to pay. You are going to die for this.” Her eyes were stone cold when she said this, staring right at me so I’d know she was serious.
Truth be told, nobody gets through life keeping promises. If you don’t believe me, just ask the president. Although Graciela is another story. If she says, “It’s gonna rain,” it’s best to take an umbrella. “You are going to die for this,” said the One & Only. I fell to my knees; sick with remorse I swore eternal love, I promised to live to take care of her, I begged. But it was like talking to a wall, like pleading with a statue.
After that, I only searched for her once. I did it because I still had some hope left, and before I gave up the fight I needed to know once and for all if the prostitutes were right. I just looked for her one more time. I saw her coming and I stepped in her path. Graciela saw me and erased all my doubts. Erased my doubts and my will to live as well.
If I didn’t suffer too much it was only because there wasn’t much time. Finding food in this city takes a whole day. Any kind of enterprise requires surveillance and work. Even robbing a gas station means forgetting about Bonnie and Clyde and studying the situation first. Secrets are revealed by going through the details. There might be money at certain times but not at others; the architecture and number of employees will determine how many men are needed to make the assault; depending on the plan, you can pass for a customer or leave in a customer’s car; you have to know the police patrols in the area, find the best route for a getaway, anticipate alternate paths of escape … myriad problems to solve and the man-hours needed to do it. That way, with days and nights turned into work, pain and love are excessive. In other words, romance and regret have a better chance in the movies; on the streets, you have to break your back.
Pretty soon I was sick of Guatemala. I got myself far away from Graciela and from the scene of the crime. I left the neighborhood, I left the city itself, I traveled the country, coast to coast and up and down. And although the newness was exciting at first, in the end it just seemed like going around the block a million times. New landscapes and different faces hide the fact that, no matter where you are, laws apply to everybody, prison bars all look the same, and cop bullets are cop bullets.
I wandered for four years. Now and then I returned to the city, I visited Clodomira on the sly and found out how things were going in the neighborhood. That’s how I learned that Graciela was now with a heavyweight from Morelos. According to the rumors, some dude tied to the Gulf cartel. And since gossip and perversion go hand in hand—they’re certainly kin—I also found out the street had me pegged. Guatemala invented what it didn’t know. Something had happened between Graciela and the Squirrel, something grave, mysterious, and truculent—everybody’s lack of imagination was so depressing that they all thought the same thing: “That cabrón Squirrel must have raped her.” The third nugget of info claimed that, to gain points with his lady, the Morelos heavyweight had put a price on my head. I couldn’t believe it. In the neighborhood, people talk because the air is free. Anybody with a mouth can join the cotorreo and if they don’t have a good story to tell, they just make stuff up. But as the love of my life, Graciela would have never accepted such savagery. I didn’t worry then and I’m even less worried now, when the winds seem to have shifted in the neighborhood. This month’s news is that the Morelos heavyweight was put on a boat and is resting comfortably in La Palma, the high-security prison. So much for him and the stories concocted in Guatemala. I don’t know why I bother with somebody I don’t even know. Must be the loneliness, which grows like pestilence at dawn.
