No. That’s a ridiculous notion.
An unostentatious twin-engine passenger plane lands and taxies to the gate from which Max is due to depart. When the aircraft comes to a halt and the engines have been shut off, Max notices a stir among the media and lay public at the other end of the lounge. The passengers descend a short set of steps at the door of the Fokker F27—after a decade of regular flights, Max has become an expert in the models. The aircraft is almost empty: only seven shadowy figures emerge from it. They walk along an imaginary corridor marked on the tarmac with fluorescent paint to a glass access door, where the cute-but-dumb member of the ground crew awaits them with a smile.
Max’s stomach contracts, forcing a spicy pocket of greasy air upward to his gullet. Who is that elderly dyke with skin like parchment, a boxer’s nose, cracked lips, and a perfect smile, that bent but definitely not frail passenger who looks just like the Disney witch in Snow White? She’s third in the single file of travelers. Her head is covered by a white cloth with blue stripes. He knows her. She’s someone famous. It’s almost a minute before he recognizes her as that repulsive nun Teresa of Calcutta. The reason for Max’s revulsion isn’t her good-heartedness but that sense of nausea caused by being in the proximity of pest controllers: people who spend too much time in the company of toxic, purulent, snuffling creatures. There’s no way you can speak calmly about the contact those people have with Evil. There has to be something infectious in the lymph nodes of their souls.
But he also knows that he’s seduced: he’s never been able to pass up the opportunity to get close to a celebrity. So far, he’s had his photo taken with Celia Cruz and Irma Serrano, José Luis Cuevas, Archbishop Miguel Darío Miranda y Gómez, Carlos López Moctezuma, and Carlos Monsiváis. In years to come he’ll have better luck, and will pose with Silvia Pinal, Ninel Conde, Angélica María, and Franco Nero, among others. But on that day in Charles de Gaulle airport, with Max’s mouth reeking of semidigested seafood and his guts gurgling with an excess of gas, the aberrant Mother Teresa of Calcutta is the highest card in his deck. Max gets to his feet and, screwing up his courage, swallowing his bitter reflux, makes his way unsmilingly toward the welcome committee with his right hand outstretched, just as any other atrophied amiable zombie would do on encountering the philanthropic face of absolute evil.
There’s a sense of epiphany in the moment. It must have something to do with the vigor with which Max approaches the nun: he floats on a cloud of beatitude with a rigid forearm by way of a calling card, as if he were the Angel of the Lord about to impregnate a geriatric crone. The media and lay public move aside to let him pass. Perhaps some of them think he’s a friend and patron, or an eminent ecclesiastic of uncertain identity. Some of the photographers get to work, calculating light levels and the framing of their images. Mother Teresa herself is struck by the lightning bolt of Faith and shifts her gaze from the group to Max, still a few yards away. She slowly extends her right hand and smiles, causing a surge of wrinkles to sweep across her face: her expression, intended to be sweet, is toxic. Max takes two more strides before realizing what is about to occur. Mother Teresa’s smile is a bottomless pit: behind it is an old person with swollen yellow feet covered in flies, and a dark-skinned man using the butt of his rifle to anally rape a girl, and a group of laughing children with rotten teeth, and six teenagers displaying their sex to passersby in Sonagachi, and a fund-raising gala where the downy-cheeked priest is sucking the dick of the black guy in the toilets, and a dozen skeletal women selling wilted green vegetables in the Calcutta traffic, and the sewage in which a group of partying adolescents dance barefoot, and people collecting human shit with their hands, and an orchard where women and children kneel among blossom-laden trees, waiting to receive a bullet in the back of the head, and the explosion in a power plant justified by a Naxalite-Maoist commando, Japanese bombers attacking a port and /
Max’s stomach becomes his mind and memory when, in reaction to the smiling abyss of Mother Teresa’s face, he gives a preliminary belch and then feels something unstoppable rising up his throat: a thick stream of puke composed of partially digested clams and wine that falls onto the extended hand and spotless headdress of the damned old witch crammed to the brim with lepers. Mother Teresa is frozen to the spot. With horror and apprehension, Max calculates that his next emission of vomit will reach the woman’s face. The bystanders intervene: some to hustle the Holy Woman aside, others to remove Max.
“What’s wrong with you?” a stern voice demands.
Max raises his eyes and recognizes the Samuel Beckett photographer. He wants to explain, but all that comes out of his mouth is another dark, viscous stream that falls at the feet of Samuel, who, annoyed and slightly fearful—Max suddenly recalls that since The Exorcist, vomit is seen by the lay public as proof of the presence of Lucifer—turns and puts distance between himself and the puke.
The airport congregation has withdrawn to the far end of the lounge, its back turned to him, protecting Mother Teresa with its body; it turns its shit(ty) scared head to Max in pure Linda Blair mode. Max discovers that the only way he can live down the humiliation is by fulfilling the expectations of this bunch of superstitious believers. He tries to catch Mother Teresa’s eye again, gives a pantomime devil laugh, and walks off (the whites of his eyes showing, his body wracked by epileptic contortions) in search of a restroom. He vomits three times into the bowl, cleans his teeth with a folding toothbrush and a thin line of paste, shits runny feces for a quarter of an hour, and then returns to the profaned waiting area, imagining how he will tell the story of what has just happened: how Satan briefly possessed him and how the Evil Enemy was vanquished by the pious gaze of Mother Teresa.
But the lounge is empty. The floor clean.
Max sits down again. He feels satisfied, freed from the heaviness of indigestion. A few minutes go by. A family arrives: father, mother, two not-bad-looking fair-haired boys. It’s obvious they haven’t slept from the way they constantly knead their eyes. A cute member of the airline ground crew goes to the counter by the departure gate. Another group of travelers turns up and disperses among the rows of seats. Max prepares himself for the flight to the Federal District of Hell.
That’s not how it happened. What Max told me was that once, early in the morning, in the airport of some European city, he found himself in the company of a group of nuns. Although they were unaccompanied, with no security staff or media in tow, Max is certain that one of them was Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
“So what did you do?”
“Nothing,” he answered. Then he thought for a moment and added, “I hid my watch. I was afraid they’d try to steal it to feed the frigging poor.”
Apologies if I’m ruining the story for you. I’m doing it to take my revenge on Max and also, maybe, to give myself the pleasure of depositing a little vomit on those readers who adore straightforward literature, with no digressions or contradictions or shortcuts, those adult babies who read as if the story were the nipple of a baby bottle. Being an autobiography and personal memories coach isn’t easy. Not only do you have to find the right technique for converting a string of trivialities into a pearl necklace of adventures, also you have to grit your teeth as you write and have a strong stomach. The stomach of a whore. And, above all, you have to learn how to collect. Most people have a problem paying for a better version of themselves. They come sniveling to you with their grammatically moronic A4 sheets and their long-drawn-out, stuttering stories. But just as soon as you’ve initiated them into the art of converting their heap of crap into an elegant speech or a judicious memoir, they begin to look at you with derision in their eyes: those poor wretches assume they were the real authors of their recollections. I can deal with that. What I won’t tolerate is the lack of remuneration. That’s why I rolled out this experimental payment strategy: hijacking the memories and anecdotes of certain clients and offering them as short stories—in exchange for a modest sum—to cultural publications and literary supplements.
>
It’s not my intention to betray anyone. I apologize if I have. I’d never have been indiscreet enough to publish this story if Max had paid up on time. But he didn’t. If I’ve chosen him, my old friend, as an example of this mode of blackmail, it’s to demonstrate to the clients that I’m not willing to make concessions. I’m a true Mexican businessman, and that means I’m trained to carry out or condone any low-down action in exchange for money. Don’t fool yourself: that thing you call “human experience” is just a massacre of onion layers.
M. L. Estefanía
I was forty years old and smoking between twenty and thirty rocks a week when I transformed myself into Marcial Lafuente Estefanía. At 120 a Ziploc plus the small change you leave for a can of soda each time you score, do the math. Not even the most corrupt tabloid journalist in the state capital could have kept up a lifestyle like that. And I know because I was that journalist. I’d start as soon as my shift at the newspaper was over, accompanied by some newbie from the prosecutor’s office or one of the off-duty patrolmen who are sometimes given free samples of the goods on the market. Any one of those people would have had the guts to stop before the sun came up. Not me; I was off my head 24-7. One good toke lasts five or ten minutes. If you want to keep on an even keel, you have to suck on the aluminum like a baby bottle, clean the perforations regularly with a needle, and have a Marlboro perpetually lit: the crackhead’s skill lies as much in the rhythm of the inhalation as in the precise application of ash. All this intoxicating paraphernalia made it almost impossible for me to put in a full day’s work. When I was fired, I telephoned my compadre Esquivel for help.
“What can you do?” he asked.
Esquivel is the mayor of a border municipality, and the centenary of the Revolution was coming up. I offered him a lecture on the strategic role of rebel customs officers in financing the Constitutionalist Army after the Ten Tragic Days of 1913.
He roared with laughter.
“You think my wannabe Texan ranchies give a shit about the Revolution? You’d be better off talking to them about Zane Grey. And what’s the problem with your old line of work?”
There was no question of going back to that.
“La Gente might get the planks out.”
I asked for a couple of days to come up with another topic, then called again.
“I can do something on popular culture: a talk about Marcial Lafuente Estefanía. They all know his books there on the border, and many of the plots are based on Spanish Golden Age plays.”
Esquivel, who had experience in showbiz, put it another way:
“Hey, we’ll tell a little white lie: from now on, you’re Marcial. You’ll come onstage with a holster and my Remington. You’ll be dressed as a cowboy. I’ll take care of that: I’ve got a Boss of the Plains here somewhere, we can see if it fits you. I’ll pay five thousand pesos plus expenses for the first talk, and then, if things work out, we’ll sell the idea of a tour to the Public Education people: I’ve got a contact there.”
I hated the thought of pirating the author of over three thousand Western novels. And what if someone filed a lawsuit? But my craving was so strong that I agreed, not before first begging Esquivel to deposit an advance in my bank account that same afternoon.
The first event, held less than a mile from the Río Bravo in a dirt lot with a concrete stage, was very well attended. There isn’t a godfearing soul east of the Mapimí Basin and west of Laredo who hasn’t read at least one pocket book by the author of Terror in Cheyenne. Our success was partly due to the publicity material my wonderful mayor produced: posters with aqua and fuchsia text on a black background, like the ones they use to promote grupero bands. But I excelled myself too. I recited from memory the best passages of The Colt’s Caress, strode back and forth across the stage brandishing the microphone like a revolver, adapted Clint Russell’s dialogues from Duty First, and told stories filched from the repertoire of the legendary Saltillo Chronicler … I was given a standing ovation. After the event I signed a mountain of books published by Brainsco, most of them with broken spines and pages missing, and more than one with disgusting stains. By the end, I was in a cold sweat: withdrawal was killing me. As a version of honor among thieves, I’d told Esquivel about my addiction and he’d sent an official car to take me to a small restaurant on the Ribereña highway, not very far from Ciudad Acuña, where we were to meet. While paying for the gear, sorting out the can, lighting the ash, inhaling, watching a Mexican Navy helicopter maneuvering overhead, and waiting for the smoke to reach my lungs, I made a mental summary of the ways my homeland had changed: since the start of the war on drugs, it had become easier and more lucrative to set up a cocaine outlet than an OXXO store.
If only that thought had never crossed my mind.
My compadre Esquivel was a politician who knew how to swim in dirty water. He’d started off as a leader of the youth wing of the PRI and used that position to blackmail the Confederación Nacional Campesina into appointing him head of the communal land commission for Fraustro, an important rail freight junction. He gained the post without ever having set foot on a farm. Small-time theft had been a local tradition in Fraustro for decades: the inhabitants bribed the brakemen and drivers to “lose” one or two of the washing machines being transported from the nearby CINSA plant. Esquivel revolutionized this custom by teaming up with a councilman from the municipality of General Cepeda to ambush at least one train a week and remove the entire cargo. When the Federal Police decided to get involved in the affair, my friend abandoned a small truck bearing the municipal logo and loaded with stolen white goods by the tracks and went on the run.
While he was living on the margins of the law, Esquivel diversified: he bribed his way into obtaining a concession for cab services, created a music marketing agency in association with Servando Cano and his gunrunning brother Choto, coordinated electoral campaigns behind the scenes … Around ten years later, when the stormy seas of his period as a commissioner and fugitive had calmed, he put his name forward to run for office in his hometown’s municipal elections. The PRI said no. When representatives of PAN and PRD heard of this snub, they formed an alliance to offer him the candidacy. By accepting their offer, Esquivel was killing two birds with one stone: not a single political activist found it convenient to refer to his dark past. He swept the opposition off the map.
A certain Camargo, who drove one of the cabs in a fleet owned by Esquivel, used to supply a schoolmistress named Bonilla—an important figure in the education union of the northeast—with marijuana and cocaine. The driver and union leader eventually became quite close. It was Camargo who introduced us to her. Bonilla took an interest in our project, and by calling in a few favors she succeeded in getting the Secretariat of Public Education to offer us a contract through one of its reading programs: a hundred talks by M. L. Estefanía in rural schools and community colleges. The total budget was 1,360,000 pesos, of which 250k would come to me, 500k clear of tax to Bonilla, and the remainder, less expenses, to Esquivel.
“Don’t give it a second thought,” he replied when the withdrawal symptoms had me so low that I expressed my qualms. “It’s not fraud: we’re working in the gray zone created by postmodern education and culture. The death of the author and all that crap you go on about in your talks.”
“And the kickback to Bonilla?”
“It’s not a kickback. Just an age-old tradition.”
Esquivel requested a temporary leave of absence from the council: he was going to protect his investment by accompanying me throughout the tour.
Two hundred and fifty thousand pesos for three months’ work is not an inconsiderable sum, especially when you take into account that my workday would be under two hours, but money goes up in smoke when you’re a rodeo star. Esquivel’s thing was lap dancers: he was capable of spending whole days going to the back room with one girl after another. I’d accompany him to the clubs because you could always get a line there, if not something better. Between us, the mayor and I c
overed the expenses of Camargo, who, on Bonilla’s instruction, had joined the expedition as bodyguard and driver. He was very tall, well built, and about ten years younger than us, but his beer gut and premature baldness made him look older.
Our respective vices were anything but scarce. There was never any problem finding a brothel with the lights on late at night or a corner with a teenager carrying a black backpack, sometimes still in school uniform, selling snow and rock. It was not uncommon for a supplier, at the sight of my offstage attire, which included items by Dockers and Girbaud, to ask in a slightly somber tone:
“You’re the gunslinger who gave the talk this morning, right?”
I’d nod, open my Levi’s jacket, and give him a brief glimpse of Esquivel’s ancient Remington 1875 Army Outlaw single-action revolver, which, from sheer paranoia, I always carried at my waist, loaded with old lead-alloy bullets and black powder bought from an antiques dealer in Monclova. After that gesture the adolescents would supply me with the bulkiest rocks in their stash.
In Sierra Mojada, where—despite the fact that it had once hosted a performance by the soprano Ángela Peralta—it’s impossible to find a cab, I followed the instructions of a senile miner: “Just go along the rails to La Esmeralda and you’ll find my grandson there with his stuff.” In San Pedro, a country-style goth girl escorted me free of charge to the corner where the dealers hang out, on a street named after a poet, only two blocks from city hall. In Boquillas del Carmen—a town in the Sierra, across the border from Big Bend National Park, and accessible only by light aircraft—every kid for miles around came to greet us on arrival.
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino Page 2
