The Shadow of the Shadow (5 page)

PIOQUINTO MANTEROLA HAD JUST finished writing
up the bloody murder of officers Filiberto Sanchez and Jesus
Gonzalez, shot to death in the backseat of their black Ford, license
number 4087, the same two officers who only a month before had
been showered with praise following the capture of the infamous
"Black Hat." Today the men were nothing but a pair of bloody
corpses in the back of a squad car. They had been quietly lying in
wait for Tufiabla the Arab, who had turned the tables on the two
policemen and not so quietly emptied the chambers of his revolver
into the back of their car before they could take him in.

With this routine piece of work out of the way, the journalist
turned his attention back to the bundle of newspaper clippings
his friend the poet had given him the night before. A stiff breeze
was blowing down from the mountains, and Manterola got up
from his desk on the third floor of the El Democrata building at 15
Humboldt Street to go close the window. A cigarette hung out of
one corner of his mouth. He was feeling particularly beaten down,
washed out, old, and maybe just a little bored.

He walked over to the window and looked down in time to
see a shiny new Exeter pull up in front of the building. The breeze
that had so annoyed him a minute ago refreshed him now. He
went back to his desk and looked at the desolation all around
him. At the other end of the office, Gomez was relating the
latest escapades of the Soviet Nine, the sports reporters' baseball
team. Two desks farther on, Gonzaga dozed at his drawing table.
Manterola tried to concentrate on the clippings in front of him.
They all seemed to be more or less the same, brief single-column
pieces that over a period of ten years followed the somewhat dubious career of a certain Colonel Froilan Zevada (the brother
of the murdered trombonist?): his contribution to the struggle
against the Maderistas, his timely about-face following the Juarez
treaty, his bloody triumph against the forces of Emiliano Zapata,
his less than exemplary participation in the events of the Decena
Tragica, his belated crossover to the side of the Carrancistas, his
union-busting police work on behalf of the oil companies at Mata
Redonda, his ties to Pablo Gonzalez. His promotion to the rank
of colonel during the fight against Pancho Villa, his once again
belated switch over to the opposing side, along with an entire
garrison under his command at Tampico during the Revolt of
Agua Prieta. And mixed in with everything else, the occasional
mention of his presence at some military academy ball, his success
in a marksmanship competition, rumors about a midnight duel
in the Alameda, an article about a ballistics course he attended in
Germany..

Nothing out of the ordinary, thought the journalist as he lit up
another cigarette. A horse-drawn coal cart passed underneath the
window, the animal's hoofs ringing out against the cobbled street,
and he got up to watch it pass by. Something you see less and less
of all the time, he thought.

It was the kind of afternoon made for daydreaming, for blowing smoke out the window-the kind of afternoon to lie back and
let your mind run free, not to let yourself be bothered with the
pointless career of some power-hungry colonel, not to let yourself
be distracted thinking about how the horse-drawn carts were
giving up ground day by day to streets full of Packards and Fords,
perverse imported machines (only the tires were made in Mexico)
running wild in a city that was built for anything but them. It
was a perfect day for daydreams, for long reminiscences, to ring
the bells and set the doves of memory free. But which memories?
That was the question. The saddest ones? The ones that pricked
the spirit like that red sun going down out toward Tacuba? Or
cotton-filled memories, like those clouds over there, nibbling away at the edge of a stubbornly blue sky? He flung his cigarette out
the window, partly because he was tired of listening to his own
thoughts, partly because he liked to watch the little white cylinder
tumble down the three stories to the street. The butt paused in
midair and then continued its descent, landing on the roof of
one of the aforementioned automobiles, from which, at that very
moment, a woman emerged. Tiny sparks scattered off the roof of
the car into the woman's hat. She turned to stare up; he smiled
with embarrassment and quickly pulled the window shut.

Manterola took a step back, like a little boy caught doing
something bad, and then it occurred to him the face he'd just
glimpsed had been a very, very pretty one.

He walked back to his desk and pulled a piece of paper from
his typewriter. Whistling a waltz, he sauntered over to where
Gonzaga nodded off at his drawing table, and shook him gently.
"Hey, artiste, wake up. It's time to go to work."

"What's that, cheggidout...," muttered Gonzaga, not quite
sure who he was talking to.

They said he smoked opium in the dens off Dolores Street,
that he regularly drank mezcal until he passed out with his old
Zapatista buddies in some dive out toward Tacubaya, and that he
would chain-smoke Veracruz cigars until he was on the brink of
nicotine intoxication. But be that as it may, he could draw faster
than anyone, and with both hands at once, like Leonardo da
Vinci.

"Cheggidout. What you got?"

"Tufiabla the Arab sneaks up on a squad car from behind, a
black Ford, license number 4087, and empties his revolver at the
two officers sitting in the back seat."

"Is he dressed like an Arab?"

"I suppose so, more or less. Like the Arabs in the market."

"Cheggidout, cheggidout, one Arab coming right up," mumbled Gonzaga, starting to draw what would soon be the central
illustration on page one, section two of El Democrata.

Pioquinto lit another cigarette and felt himself drawn back
toward the window. What had happened to that pretty face?

Gonzaga sang Flor de Te as he drew, a fine pencil in his right
hand and a piece of charcoal in his left for sketching in the shadows.
Manterola let out a deep sigh and went back to contemplating
the blue of the sky out the open window. Suddenly something
caught his eye, and he looked over toward the third-story window
of the building across the street. He watched as the glass pane
shattered and a man fell through the air waving his arms wildly,
his screams reaching Manterola's ears seconds before he crashed
to the pavement. Manterola stared across into the broken window
and for a pair of seconds stood contemplating the terrified eyes
of the same woman he'd inadvertently thrown his cigarette at
only a few minutes before. He wouldn't exactly have said that
time stood still, but he might have said that time stretched out
while he looked from one to the other, from the woman's eyes in
the building across the street, to the broken body splayed out on
the pavement forty-five feet below. As he watched, the woman
retreated slowly and disappeared.

Unable to believe his own eyes, the journalist leaned out the
window as if to confirm the fact there was actually a body lying
amidst the shards of glass on the street below. It was true, the body
was there, starting to attract the attention of passersby. Slow to
react for the first time in years, Manterola finally started to move
in the direction of the stairs.

"Cheggidout, cheggidout, what's going on?" asked Gonzaga,
but Manterola was already out of sight, running down the stairs
to go stand in front of a dead man in the middle of Humboldt
Street.

ALL DAY LONG HIS SWOLLEN HAND gave him trouble.
The foreman had already come around a couple of times to egg him
on and step up the pressure. Indalecio and Martin, the Chinaman's
coworkers, had tried to cover for him by carrying more than their
share of the work and leaving the easiest jobs for him, but it was no
easy thing to avoid Maganda's "all-seeing" eyes. The foreman made
his way between the looms, repeating obsessively:

"I'm all-seeing. Nothing escapes me. Maybe you think you can
fool the boss man, and maybe sometimes you can, but you can't
fool me, you lazy sons of bitches. I'm all-seeing."

Tomas Wong liked the noise inside the factory, the thick
humidity of the air, the smell of the dyes. As a carpenter, he wasn't
tied down to a machine but could move freely around the big
building, setting a wedge, building a bench-or, like right now,
making shipping crates that would travel around the world in the
hold of some ship.

"Come on, Chinaboy, take it easy, will you? Look at your hand.
Let me cover for you," said Martin, taking the heavy hammer from
Tomas and driving in the big double-headed nails.

A ship, a ship roaming the high seas, never stopping... except
every now and then to fish for a few words, always in a different
tongue, always with a different meaning.

"Nostalgia,"he thought to himself. "Too damn much nostalgia.
Too many memories. You can't live on nostalgia and secondhand
news," and instead he tried to think of a way to get back at Maganda
the foreman.

He'd had it on his mind since a week ago when, at the end of
the day, the management had tried to strip-search him, Martin and Indalecio, the three carpenters at the Magnolia Textile Mill in
Contreras-supposedly because tools had been disappearing from
the factory shop. And, of course, they'd refused to go along and
there'd been a ruckus at the factory gate. They got their way in the
end, and ever since the "all-seeing" Maganda had been trying to
get even.

The Chinaman's swollen hand was as good a pretext as any,
and Maganda spent the whole day egging the Chinaman ontightening the screws. The "All-seeing" got a special pleasure out
of picking a fight with the workers, humiliating them one by one.
He was the kind of man who needed constant affirmation of his
own existence, his power. In those turbulent years in the textile
industry, he found his place as the perfect battering ram on behalf
of an owner class locked in a fierce and violent confrontation with
the unions.

The Chinaman left his two companions hammering away
at the crates and walked over toward the warehouse to see if the
wood had come in for the repair of two old broken-down looms.

At the warehouse door he ran into Cipriano, mill mechanic
and the union's general secretary.

"What's up, Tomas? How've the bourgeois dogs been treating
you lately? I noticed Maganda's been giving it to you all morning
long."

"I sclewed up my hand," said the Chinaman, as if that explained everything.

"Been rearranging faces again, eh?"

The Chinaman shrugged his shoulders. He wasn't much of
a talker. He let other people tell his stories for him. It seemed
as though his friends were always hearing about his adventures
secondhand, if at all, from people who'd known him in other
places. At other times.

"Leave it to Tomas to be like one of those inscrutable
Orientals," thought Cipriano, quoting the reporters from El
Universal, which at that time was leading a massive campaign against the tongs, Chinese gangs that controlled the clandestine
gambling houses and opium dens on Dolores Street.

"Don't forget about the meeting tonight," he said. "We're
going to talk about the dance and solidarity action with the strike
at the Magdalena mill."

The Chinaman nodded and walked on without any hurry. The
factory was divided into three giant bays and a pair of warehouses,
all arranged around a large flagstoned patio in front of the offices.
The shop space, poorly illuminated through small windows high
up on the walls, enclosed 350 workers and 10 foremen. According
to custom, the factory's French administrators never set foot
inside while the mill was in operation. They only went in after the
workers had left. Theirs was the world of the offices, the opposite
of the Chinaman and Cipriano, who roamed the entire factory,
looking for projects here and there, picking up odd jobs. Whenever
they could, they stopped to chat with the other workers who, tied
down to their machines, received the two labor organizers with
enthusiasm, like homing pigeons carrying good news. Cipriano
had been named union general secretary in the last elections and
the Chinaman was elected labor secretary.