The Shadow of the Shadow (21 page)

Sebastian stood up and gave the Chinaman a big hug. Other
people's emotions always made Tomas nervous, but in spite of his
uneasiness he returned Sebastian's embrace.

"You'le awful thin. Don't you evel eat?"

"Hell's bells, man, after I left Tampico I stayed a couple of days
in San Luis Potosi with some comrades and there wasn't a crumb
in the cupboard. What was I supposed to do?"

"Ale they after you hele?"

"I don't think they know I'm in Mexico. But if anyone recognizes me and tells the law, I'm done for. I was in touch with
Huitron and Rodolfo Aguirre and they told me to stick to the
south and not make the city. Any chance of getting work as a
mechanic around here?"

"Thele's always wolk alound fol a good mechanic, boilel loom wolk mole than anything else. But unless you've got a
lecomraendation, the pay's pletty bad. That's the way they wolk
it."

"No problem there, buddy. I've got the best fake recommendations in all of Mexico. Papers are the least of my worries
right now."

"Ought to be easy enough to find you a gig, then. We'll just
have to find someplace whele they don't know youl face. Maybe
the Plovidencia of the Aulela. You going to wolk in the union?"

"No, just with affinity groups. I asked them for somebody to
connect me with the ballsiest group around. I've got a couple of
ideas I want to try out."

"You talking about some kind of dilect action? We've got a
good tough gloup, but it's stlictly fol plopaganda wolk. Sometimes
thele's nothing fol it but to hit the stleets, but we'le not in fol any
individual actions."

"Well, you can at least hear me out before you say no, eh?"
asked Sebastian San Vicente, looking steadily at the Chinaman.

"Of coulse."

"That's the way. You got a place I can stay until I cash in?"

"Sule, you can stay at my place, but thele's only one bed
between the thlee of us," said Tomas. The bed was going to be
awfully narrow with three of them, he thought, and they'd have to
work out another head-to-foot rotation. Rosa wasn't going to be
any too thrilled about it.

"Don't worry, brother, I can sleep on the floor. It won't be the
first time. You get married or what?"

"I've got myself a paltnel. It's a long stoly, I'll tell you about it
some othel time."

"You think you can find a place for another comrade who's
coming in from Puebla? He can be trusted, you've got my
guarantee."

"I don't think it'll be any ploblem. Let me talk to the comlades
this Satulday."

Tomas sat and looked at Sebastian San Vicente, the Spanish
anarchist deported from Mexico in May 1921. He was a true
comrade if there ever was one, a man who could be trusted without
reservation, but prone to respond to the violence of the system
with violence of his own. Still smiling, San Vicente looked out
onto the rain-drenched street.

It was also raining heavily outside the Cafe Paris where a
flower seller had taken shelter in the doorway, blocking Pioquinto
Manterola's view of the street. The rain usually left Manterola
feeling blue, but now he could feel it in his recently mended leg as
well, a subtle diffuse ache in the muscles around the bullet wound.
Whether it was from the sadness or the pain, he couldn't seem to
concentrate. It was that way with almost all journalists in their
late thirties, the rain reminded them of old love stories, romances
ruined by the impatience and possessiveness that come with love.

"Have another one, sir?" asked the waiter, with the bottle of
Spanish brandy in his hand.

"No thanks, Marcial, I think that two is just about enough for
a rainy day. But pour a glass for my friend, will you? In another
minute she's going to be crossing the street, step in that puddle
there, and walk in the door."

"How do you know that?"

"Because ever since I've known her she always comes half an
hour late," said the reporter, pulling a Swiss watch from his vest
pocket. The watch was inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He'd had to
have it repaired once after it was damaged in the line of duty, and
it bore a pair of deep scratches across its silver cover.

The reporter looked up toward the door. The flower seller
leaned to one side, and he caught a glimpse of Elena Torres getting
out of a taxi and running across the street between the puddles.

They'd first met in 1919 when the Yucatecan school teacher
came to Mexico City as the personal representative of Carrillo
Puerto and the Socialist Party of the Southeast. She was the only woman delegate to the Yucatan socialist congress, but she'd left her
mark in the formation of decrees on divorce, working women, and
women's suffrage. Once she came to Mexico City, she'd worked
alongside such figures as Evelyn Roy, editor of the newspaper
Woman and one of the foremost leaders of the first Mexican
Communist party, who at one time had run El Comunista, one of
the party's first newspapers. The Agua Prieta Revolt had ended
with both Elena and Carrillo Puerto on the winning side and
she'd worked for a time as an aide to Mexico City Police Chief
Ramirez Garrido during his brief tenure in office. Later on she'd
joined the feminist bloc inside the Revolutionary Confederation
of Mexican Workers (CROM). She'd broken with the CROM
only recently over disagreements with the sinister Napoleon "The
Pig" Morones, the Mexican Sam Gompers. She still had strong
connections with the Socialist Party of the Southeast and now
worked as chief of staff for the Yucatan congressional delegation.

Shaking a boot filled with water from the puddle in front of
the door, she stepped into the cafe, headed straight for Manterola's
table, and downed the glass of cognac in a single gulp as though
she were in a great hurry.

"Hello there, reporter, what can I do for you?"

She was a short blond woman with a memorable deeply carved
face and a heavy voice. She almost never smiled, and when she did,
watch out.

"Take a seat, Elena. I need some information," said the
journalist, standing up and waiting for the small woman to sit
down.

"That I take for granted, Manterola. What I want to know is
what do I get in return?"

"I don't have anything to trade, Elena. You'll just have to put
it on my tab."

"If you owed everyone in this town as much as you owe me,
you wouldn't dare show your face in the street."

"What do you know about Colonel Gomez? How did he get from being one of Pablo Gonzalez' cronies to commander of the
Mexico City gendarmerie?"

"Is Gomez the saint you're praying to these days?"

"A week ago someone shot a hole in my leg, Elena. I need to
know if Gomez had something to do with it."

"You picked a hell of an enemy, I'll tell you that much. The
man's a snake, I don't even think his friends like him. Have you
ever met him?"

"One time in Pachuca he gave the order to have me shot by a
firing squad, but I don't think I've ever been any closer to him than
maybe about ten yards."

"And the firing squad?"

"Let's just say I was lucky," answered the reporter, and his hand
rose unconsciously to his chest to finger yet another ancient scar.

Elena laughed, her blond curls falling in front of her face. She
brushed them aside with a flick of her hand.

"They say that before Gomez went into the army he was a
foreman in an American-owned mine in Coahuila. He took
up arms late in the game and that's why he never made general
under Carranza, who always sent him out to do his dirty work.
Then he was part of Pablo Gonzalez' inner circle. Paymaster of
the Northwest Division. Military governor in the oil country.
The truth is that if he ever fought in a battle I don't remember it.
That's something you'd have to ask a soldier. I do know that he
was in Tampico in 1919 and that he was the one who gave the
order for the troops to fire on the strikers. That's his specialty:
executioner, firing squad commander. But I guess you know about
that firsthand. With the Agua Prieta uprising, he climbed on the
donkey with the rest of the insurrectionary generals. At first he
stuck with his old protector Gonzalez, but once he saw which way
the wind was blowing and that Obregon's troops were going to get
to Mexico City first, he buddied up with Benjamin Hill, turning
over the garrisons under his command in the Huasteca. The word is
that his wife died somewhere around then, under rather suspicious circumstances. I heard someone say once that he shot her because
she nagged him too much. I wasn't ever sure whether it was a joke
or what. He's a tight-lipped sort, always got some scam going, too.
The man's got a dirty look and a dirty mind."

"You're starting to sound a bit puritanical, Elena." The reporter laughed.

"What do you want? The guy makes me sick. Once at a party
he asked me to dance and I didn't last more than half a polka.
When Obregon became president, he was looking for just that
sort of man to run the gendarmerie here in the city, so he installed
Gomez under General Cruz. Birds of a feather, you know. A few
months back a friend of mine told me Gomez has got some shady
deal going with the government, something to do with fodder for
the army's horses in the Valley of Mexico-he's got the concession
wired, something like that. But that wouldn't be anything new."

"How much money'd be involved in something like that?"

"Probably six or seven thousand pesos, after he pays off the
other five or six people he's got down the line. Is any of this what
you're looking for?"

"Gomez and oil, Gomez and jewels, Colonel Zevada and
Colonel Gomez. Do any of those combinations ring any bells?"

"You do ask a lot, don't you? No bells there. Back a couple of
years ago when I was working with the police, I could have gotten
you more information, but today I'm just a harmless provincial
schoolteacher serving her country in the Chamber of Deputies."

"Provincial maybe, but harmless never, Elena... even your own
mother wouldn't go for that one. I heard you kicked some poor
bastard in a restaurant the other day and broke his leg."

"The idiot slapped his wife in public."

"Maybe you and I should get married, Elena."

"Me marry a journalist? Never, Manterola."

"Well, at least I tried," said the reporter. He looked out at the
rain still falling hard against the window, the words CAFE PARIS
spelled out in reverse.

I LOOK AT MYSELF in this broken mirror and think about
another mirror, tall and set in a white, scented wooden frame. I'm
a different person and I'm not. My body lies to me, tries to fool me,
forgets about me, hides itself. It's almost like this memory of the
mirror belongs to someone else. Other eyes looking at me naked,
admiring this pale skin and the breasts pointing up at the sky as if
they were hunting for birds and ready to shoot. Birds painted on
paper screens in Chinese houses in exile.

I look at myself in the mirror and think that nobody wants
to be different. Nobody. I never asked to belong to a place I never
knew, this naked body of mine never lived in Canton, Shanghai,
Hangchow, Peking. Two-syllable words without any memories,
but with plenty of rules of their own.

I look at myself in this new mirror and I remember the other
one, the other woman, and even though I don't want to I can't help
remembering that the mirror doesn't only reflect a naked body but
also a naked face, another face that doesn't belong to me. A face
looking at this body as if it owns it, and it does. Owner by right
of sale, one woman for three IOU's signed with the name of that
wrinkled old man who was my father.

And I break this mirror in front of me into pieces, but the
other one I can't destroy, and it remains shaken but in one piece in
my imagination, in my memory.