The Savage Detectives (72 page)

Now we know for sure: Cesárea Tinajero was here. There was no trace of her at the registry, or the university, or the parish archives, or the library, where for some reason the archives of the old Santa Teresa hospital, now called the General Sepúlveda Hospital after the Revolutionary hero, are stored. And yet, at the
Centinela de Santa Teresa
they let Belano and Lima comb through the morgue and in the news from 1928 there was a June 6 mention of a bullfighter named Pepe Avellaneda, who fought two bulls from Don José Forcat's stock in the Santa Teresa bullring with considerable success (two ears) and of whom there's a profile and interview in the June 11, 1928, issue, in which it says, among other things, that Pepe Avellaneda was traveling in the company of a woman named Cesárea Tinaja [
sic
], formerly of Mexico City. There are no photographs with the piece, but the local reporter describes her as "tall, attractive, and reserved," although I frankly have no idea what he could mean by that, unless he's saying it to emphasize the difference between the woman and the bullfighter she was accompanying, who is described, somewhat bluntly, as a little man, no more than five feet tall, very thin, with a big dented skull, a description that reminds Belano and Lima of a Hemingway bullfighter (Hemingway's an author I unfortunately haven't read), the typical brave and luckless Hemingway bullfighter, more sad than anything else, deathly sad, although I wouldn't dare say as much with so little to go on, and anyway Cesárea Tinajero is one thing and Cesárea Tinaja is another, which is something my friends refuse to admit, chalking it up it to a misprint, a bad transcription, or the reporter's faulty hearing, and maybe even an intentional slip on Cesárea Tinajero's part, saying her name wrong, a joke, a modest way of hiding a modest clue.

The rest of the article is unremarkable. Pepe Avellaneda talks about bullfighting, saying incomprehensible or incongruous things, but so mildly that he never sounds pedantic. A final clue: the July 10 issue of the
Centinela de Santa Teresa
announces the departure of the bullfighter (and presumably his companion) for Sonoyta, where he will share billing in the ring with Jesús Ortiz Pacheco, bullfighter from Monterrey. So Cesárea and Avellaneda were in Santa Teresa for about a month, evidently doing nothing, seeing the local sights or holed up in their hotel. In any case, according to Lima and Belano we now had someone who knew Cesárea, who knew her well, and who plausibly still lived in Sonora, although with bullfighters you never know. Their response to my argument that Avellaneda might be dead was that we would still have his family and friends. So now we were looking for Cesárea and the bullfighter. They told outrageous stories about Horacio Guerra. They said again that he was exactly like Octavio Paz. Considering the short time they'd spent with him I don't know how they could know so much about him, but they said that his acolytes in this lost corner of Sonora were carbon copies of Paz's acolytes. As if in this forgotten province, forgotten poets, essayists, and professors were simulating the mass-media actions of their idols.

At first, they said, Guerra was extremely interested in knowing who Cesárea Tinajero was, but his interest evaporated when Belano and Lima explained the avant-garde nature of her work, and how little of it there was.

We didn't find anything in Sonoyta. On our way back we stopped in Caborca again. Belano insisted it couldn't be just a coincidence that Cesárea had named her magazine after it. But once again we found nothing to suggest that the poet had ever been there.

In the archives of the Hermosillo paper, on the other hand, we stumbled on our first day of searching upon the announcement of Pepe Avellaneda's death. On the fragile old sheets we read that the bullfighter had died in the Agua Prieta bullring, charged by the bull as he prepared to deliver the coup de grâce, a thing at which Avellaneda had never excelled given how short he was: no matter the size of the bull, he had to leap to kill it and as he leaped his little body was unprotected, vulnerable to the beast's slightest lunge.

It didn't take him long to die. Avellaneda bled to death in his hotel room at the Agua Prieta Excelsior, and two days later he was buried in the Agua Prieta cemetery. There was no service. The mayor, the top municipal authorities, and the Monterrey bullfighter Jesús Ortiz Pacheco attended the burial, as did some aficionados who had seen Avellaneda die and wanted to pay their last respects. The story raised two or three lingering questions and convinced us to visit Agua Prieta.

First of all, according to Belano, the reporter was probably going by hearsay. It was possible, of course, that the main Hermosillo newspaper had a correspondent in Agua Prieta and that this correspondent had sent in his account of the tragic event by telegraph, but what was clear (though why I don't know, incidentally) was that here, in Hermosillo, the story had been embellished, lengthened, polished, made more literary. A question: who sat in the vigil over Avellaneda's body? A curious detail: who was the bullfighter Ortiz Pacheco, whose shadow seemed to cling to Avellaneda's? Was he touring Sonora with Avellaneda or was his presence in Agua Prieta purely coincidental? As we feared, we found no other news of Avellaneda in the Hermosillo archives, as if once the death of the bullfighter had been witnessed, he had fallen into absolute oblivion, which, after all, was only natural. The vein of information was exhausted. So we made our way to the Peña Taurina Pilo Yáñez, located in the old part of the city, a family bar with a faintly Spanish air where the Hermosillo tauromachy fanatics gathered. No one there knew anything about a pint-size bullfighter called Pepe Avellaneda, but when we told them that he was active in the 1920s, and the name of the bullring where he was killed, they referred us to a little old man who knew everything about the bullfighter Ortiz Pacheco (again!) although his favorite was Pilo Yáñez, Sultan of Caborca (Caborca yet again), a nickname that we, unfamiliar with the labyrinthine byways of Mexican bullfighting, thought seemed more fitting for a boxer.

The old man's name was Jesús Pintado and he remembered Pepe Avellaneda, Pepín Avellaneda, he called him, a bullfighter who never had much luck but was braver than most, from Sonora, possibly, or maybe Sinaloa or Chihuahua, although he made his name in Sonora, which meant that he was Sonoran by adoption if nothing else, killed in Agua Prieta on a bill he shared with Ortiz Pacheco and Efrén Salazar, during Agua Prieta's big fiesta, in May 1930. Señor Pintado, do you know whether he had any family? asked Belano. The old man didn't know. Do you know whether he traveled with a woman? The old man laughed and looked at Lupe. All of them traveled with women or picked them up along the way, he said. In those days, men were wild and some of the women were too. But you don't know? said Belano. The old man didn't know. Is Ortiz Pacheco alive? said Belano. The old man said yes. Do you know where we could find him, Señor Pintado? The old man said the bullfighter had a ranch near El Cuatro. What's that, said Belano, a town, a road, a restaurant? The old man looked at us as if he had suddenly recognized us from somewhere, then he said it was a town.

To make the trip go faster, I started to draw pictures, puzzles that I was taught in school a long time ago. Although there are no cowboys here. No one wears a cowboy hat here. Here there's only desert, and towns like mirages, and bare hills.

"What's this?" I said.

Lupe looked at the drawing as if she didn't feel like playing, and was silent. Belano and Lima didn't know either.

"An elegiac verse?" said Lima.

"No. A Mexican seen from above," I said. "And this one?"

"A Mexican smoking a pipe," said Lupe.

"And this one?"

"A Mexican on a tricycle," said Lupe. "A Mexican boy on a tricycle."

"And this one?"

"Five Mexicans peeing in a urinal," said Lima.

"And this one?"

"A Mexican on a bicycle," said Lupe.

"Or a Mexican on a tightrope," said Lima.

"And this one?"