My former student threw Violeta onto the orange futon and turned his back. Looking at the man with the AK-47, he nodded in her direction. His subordinate took two steps forward and emptied the ammo in his assault rifle—thirty cartridges—into her. The air was filled with the shards and smell of shattered concrete. My former student jumped behind the metal desk (which, until that afternoon, had belonged to Esquivel) to protect himself from the flying fragments.
“With your pistol, moron,” he screamed.
But the gunfire had lasted scarcely a few seconds.
Silence reigned for a moment.
Outside, the sun was still beating down.
“Come out, Prof,” said the weary voice of my former student (what was his name?). “It’s El Checo. I’m not going to kill you.”
I dragged myself from behind the inactive-archive wall and, crying all the while, embraced his knees.
“Don’t kill me, Chequito. Be merciful. I swear it wasn’t my fault. They told me everything had been arranged.”
The burning metal on my neck made me shy back but I didn’t let go of his legs.
“That’s how I like it, you bastard, a show of respect. I only came for the mayor. You three were just going to get the plank.”
After a pause, he added:
“That bitch had more balls than you.”
He ordered his men to load Violeta’s and Camargo’s bodies into the Suburban. Then he explained to one of them how to dispose of the goods. The man headed into the sunset at the wheel of what had been our car. Checo and the other gunman made a space in the Pathfinder for Esquivel’s body and for me. We drove east for a while. It was beginning to get dark. A couple of miles before Cuatro Ciénagas, we turned off the highway into the limestone dunes. They motioned for me to get out.
“Right then, baby,” said Checo, putting on a pair of gloves. “I’m gonna switch things up and teach you something for a change.”
He beat me with a thick plank. First on the buttocks and the back. When I tried to get up to run, he beat my shoulders and head until I was half-dead.
I spent the rest of the night on the dunes. The cold woke me. I managed to get on my feet and hobble to town. It was already midmorning by the time I arrived in the square. I went to Doc’s restaurant and begged the waiter to let me use the restroom to wash off the blood. The little fucker took pity on me.
I waited two days before returning to Saltillo on borrowed money and a begged ride. There, I discovered that Esquivel’s body had ended up in Monclova: they’d hung him from one of the thousand new bridges constructed by the state government. There was a sign on his chest saying, “This is what happens to people who don’t ask first.” Or at least that’s what a former colleague at the newspaper told me: the local press and television stations didn’t say a word about the affair. The national media talked about the killing of a valiant border-town mayor by an organized-crime gang. I never found out what happened to the remains of Violeta and Camargo. An attempt was made on Bonilla’s life and since then the Feds have given her a bodyguard.
I stopped doing rock for one or two weeks. Then I went back on it: there’s no hope for me now. I’m living with Karen, a toothless junkie twenty years my junior. We make a living from a new version of an old scam: drugging people in supermarket parking lots and taking their billfolds. We approach them on any pretext at all (she almost always does that part) and smear belladonna on their skin. It’s a dangerous drug. To avoid poisoning ourselves, we have to cover our fingertips in wax before touching the stuff. It takes a few minutes for the effects to show: the client experiences disorientation, blurred vision, partial paralysis, dizziness … Sounds classy, right? Good old Medici intrigue. The reality is we’re birds of prey. We earn a pittance, but at least there are no plankings here.
Proud? Of course I’m not proud. I’m writing this anonymously from an unnamed location and I’m going to send it to a friend with a request to publish it as a sort of confession: I’m not Marcial Lafuente Estefanía, just the coward of the county. Don’t despise me or hate me. After all, what I am is the embodiment of that miracle you pray for every night: an outlaw who’s decided to throw down his gun.
White Paper
For Carlos Amorales
1
They brought us here with the promise that we’d get some hands-on experience. Our specialty is crime scene analysis. This particular scene has become a labyrinth. The house had been purified. Instead of the usual red spatter patterns there are white stains on all the walls. A pale powder covers the furniture and the fixtures in the bathroom and kitchen. It’s as if a whole family had been massacred in a tub of whitewash. We don’t know who we are, what authority we have to be here, or when our task will be completed. We don’t even know one another. Our only credential is a vaguely scientific attitude as we take detailed photographs of a corner of a room or gather evidence in a bedroom and our shoulders happen to touch; nothing else unites us. In contrast to the flush of dawn on the outer edges of the investigation, our identities are obscure. And what’s more, we’re hemmed in by music that prevents us from going outdoors, even to the garden. To figure out where the music is coming from, and so to hide from it, we have to peek through the lace curtains. Some of us doubt that those things covering the windows are really lace curtains. They say that the curtains are evidence: one more white spatter pattern that bleeds into everything. Others think we are ghosts: murder victims eternally trapped in the private residence of our extinction. Yet others doubt if it’s that simple: it would be easier if we were just ghosts rather than witnesses for the prosecution. That way we wouldn’t have to sleep in a huddle on the floor each night or perform juggling tricks to safeguard the disgusting evidence on the walls. We wouldn’t have to suffer hunger, thirst, or drowsiness. We wouldn’t sweat or smell so bad. We wouldn’t have to degrade our evenings filling in form after form in minute writing. The one indication that we might be dead is our recognition that we are on the verge of insanity: madness is the nearest thing to being a ghost.
2
The music hates us. It reinvents itself every day. It’s fast and it throbs in the trees. We have no idea how big the garden is, which is why we don’t dare venture across it: what if the music were to catch up with us and slice us in two before we reached the street? If it was at least monotonous, we’d have gotten the better of it by now. But it isn’t. At times it sounds like a military drum or a tabla flooding bedrooms and bathrooms with its needles of fine rain. At other times it’s exactly like the scratching of a fountain pen amplified five hundredfold, a stylus generating notes as it draws the grooves of our brains on scraps of paper. On yet other occasions it is a string of keys hanging menacingly from the branches. A small forest of lynched pianos. If it was possible to hear just one of those pianos at a time, we’d be able to enjoy it, even knowing that it was a corpse. But hearing them in unison is like sinking into quicksand made of air.
3
Someone is contaminating the evidence. There’s no other explanation. We’ve spent too long (it could be hours or days) inhabiting the object of our scientific methods. Extraneous contact degrades any form of control. Our footprints or the fingerprints we leave on the bannister must be clearly differentiated from the marks left by the original residents of this house. Logic is not sufficient to avoid confusing our own frustration and angst with the victims’: we need something else. It’s an exhausting intellectual exercise. We’re only human: from time to time we amuse ourselves with vain pastimes. The other day, in the garbage (despite having been purified by white spatter patterns, the house is still a monumental trash heap), we found a cardboard box containing hundreds of transparent spinning tops. We guessed that the collection had belonged to a child (possibly dead; a child who was killed within these very walls). We put aside the tweezers, cameras, and precision rulers to sit on the floor and spin tops. We watched them dance under the light of our flashlights, placed bets, and held tournaments until the room was, in forensic terms, a du
nghill.
Some of the investigators have tried snorting or smoking the white powder covering the kitchen furniture. They grind the substance finely with a teaspoon or dice it with a credit card, form it into icy lines on the tabletop or the stove, inhale it through rolled bills … they say it helps them bear the suffocation of our interminably long working days. We don’t believe them. We’ve even wondered if they are infiltrators: murderers who have come among us with the mission of draining the syntax of this crime scene. As a powder, the white spatter loses its maplike dimension. It no longer tells us a story, and becomes an unstable, volatile flow: something capable of penetrating our bodies. An entity with a terrifying similarity to the music.
4
An elderly man was walking in the garden. Someone said he must be one of us: one of us who had evolved into a state where his only option was to defy the music. No: scientists of that age and demeanor don’t do fieldwork; they stay safe in their offices while we, the youngest and least skilled, are sent to lay claim to the evidence that they later use to display their minor genius. So, no, that’s not it.
The elderly man made his way through the palm trees and other flora with inhuman grace, as if rather than walking he was circling above the ground to the sound of the music—which at that moment was particularly awful: the constant tone of a busy telephone line with groaning in the background and superimposed explosions. And, incredibly, he was smiling; his wrinkled visage was like those faces children make by pulling down the corners of their eyes with their fingertips and lifting their cheeks with the palms of their hands. Still rotating on his axis, his arms open wide, he was smiling when a branch suddenly broke off from the trunk of a tree and, with the precision of an industrial blade, sliced him in two. There was no blood: just pieces of skin and viscera that, in the asepsis of distance, gleamed like latex.
Someone pointed out that it was our duty as medical forensic assistants to go out into the garden, gather the remains of the body, and add that scene to the remit of the one we’d been assigned to investigate. Someone else laughed aloud. The rest of us moved away from the windows and returned to our spinning-top tournament in another room.
5
We decided by unanimous vote to dismantle this crime scene until not a single brick was left standing. It’s a procedure with no juridical basis but infused with perfect logic: destroying the residence is the only viable strategy for halting the degradation of its evidence. Lacking a preconceived plan, we simply exploited the situation as we found it: we snorted the powder in the kitchen, scarred the floors with spinning-top tournaments, devoured the whitewash on the walls … Until one of us realized what was happening and said: We’re bona fide science students; we need to design a project. After that we drew diagrams, handed out hammers, chisels, and tweezers.
It’s going to be an arduous process. It might take us the rest of our lives or what remains of our working day. It’s an aggressive plan but destruction has its own music. Soon we’ll be free: when the walls fall and the ceilings of the crime scene we’re investigating finally give way and descend on our heads. We’re ashamed to admit it, but we’re content: our science is beginning to evolve into a religion.
NEETS
The sweetness that fascinates, the pleasure that kills.
Baudelaire
My son comes to visit and decides to stay for dinner. I ask him what he’s been up to and he replies: The usual stuff. I find him almost unbearable: he’s twenty-eight and works with his mother for an NGO connected to the LGBTQ community. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a NEET, I tell him. This doesn’t annoy him. He’s always patient with me. He hands over one hundred Preciss condoms sponsored by the WHO and says all I have to do in return is complete an anonymous questionnaire. Why does he humiliate me like this? Because his mother hates me? Because today is my sixtieth birthday? Because Vianey, my new wife, is thirty years younger than me and pregnant? Because I earn a living sleeping, or pretending to sleep, with sick people? I don’t deserve this. I’m no prostitute; I’m a conceptual artist who has exhibited his work in five international biennials.
Vianey makes a salad. I protest, say I’ll phone for fried chicken, but she says, No, fatso, remember your cholesterol. Goddamn killjoy. There’s a reason every hummingbird that crosses her path dies.
At first we thought it was a good omen. That’s what her brother Nazario said. He was lying flat out in front of the TV in our living room (another NEET: he’s supposedly on a long-term sabbatical from his nontenured lectureship at some gringo university) when a hummingbird flew in. Nazario watched it wing its way through the house; he said the creature was flapping like an Olympic athlete on speed until it reached the room where my wife was having a siesta, and came to rest on her swollen belly, at which point Vianey woke. According to Nazario, she looked disoriented. The hummingbird didn’t move. Vianey was going to shoo it away but Nazario held up his hands to stop her. He said, Sh, it’s a sign, it’s your baby’s nahual, its spirit. Vianey lay there quietly for a few seconds. Then the hummingbird toppled from her belly to the mattress and onto the floor. Dead. So far Vianey and her baby have killed about seven of the tiny birds. They have become a silent machine of destruction.
While we’re eating the salad, my son asks if I’m still picking up women at the Nuestra Señora de las Pruebas Shelter. I explain that I don’t “pick up” anyone: I hire prostitutes who are HIV positive to make gonzo porn movies in which I costar. And no, I haven’t gone back there for months, but I’ll have to soon; I’ve just been invited to exhibit in San Francisco. My son chews his salad, turns down his mouth, and says: I think your movies are disgusting, Dad. I feel the urge to stroke his hair. Me, too, son; that’s my reply. The truth is that Vianey makes delicious salads.
I started out as a photographer covering gory stories in the nota roja, but I discovered my sexual orientation much earlier, possibly when I was still in nursery school and used to go to the park with my grandma. I was unaware that I was working—without being paid—but ever since then I’ve dedicated myself to studying animals that have recently died or are on death’s door. I’ve never literally killed one, not even a fly. That’s what my friends, my siblings, my parents, and my teachers did. Enthralled by the sight, all I did was carefully inspect the remains of their massacres: cockroaches trampled underfoot or drowned in the toilet bowl; ants dissolving in a drop of hydrochloric acid; mice writhing in traps made of metal and wood; decapitated hens running in circles.
Since childhood I’ve been capable of perceiving the eroticism of damaged bodies. My thing isn’t killing but the altered mental states arising from observation. That’s why I’ve never learned to drive, even though my specialty was car crashes: bodies propelled through the thick glass of windshields onto pounds of asphalt, steel, and fluorescent paint. The first time one of my photos—there was something of Francis Bacon in that portrait of a woman with her face splattered over the steering wheel—was printed in large format and hung in the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, I spent half my fee on two hookers from the Blue Moon. My hard-on was painful—it takes me twice as much effort to deal with my priapism when there’s a camera or more than two people in the room—so I paid them a serious sum in sterling just to watch them tipping the velvet. Take it easy, I ordered. Go at it gently, softly. There was a strange and powerful moment when it occurred to me that this was my way of knocking on both their doors simultaneously and offering them flowers.
Despite the fact that I’m considered technically accomplished, I feel absolutely no affection for photography. For decades I practiced it in the capitalist spirit: a cheap technology that can produce an impression with relative ease and has immediate financial rewards; the fast food of the art market. And neither cinema nor video seems to me any better. Quite the reverse: it’s almost impossible to separate cinematic effect from obscenity. Even in the early days that was true. Why did people run from improvised movie theaters when the Lumières’ train approached? Why is the animated post
card of workers leaving their factory so hypnotic? Because they are surfaces on which obscenity (phallic in the former case, vaginal in the latter) consumes everything else. If asked, I’d have to confess that all the conceptual artists I know are, at heart, devoted draftsmen. But that observation might perhaps be too tenuous to counter the hatred of the robust spirits who feed mainstream art criticism in the Morlock era of Avelina Lésper & Co.
My move from photography to video wasn’t a matter of precision but of acrobatics. When I was in high school, I got hooked on unicycles, stilts, and the trapeze. It was my version of rebellious obedience: my father forced me to take part in the pentathlon, so, as a way of being contrary without creating major conflict, somewhere around ’78 I enrolled in one of those profusely intellectual circuses that used to perform in homes, going from one party to the next, in exchange for a little marijuana. Despite my age, I’m still in good shape. From time to time I work out on the bars and rings, and now that our very sensible mayor has installed a cycle path, I can ride five miles on my unicycle without having to dismount. I’m a healthy old bastard.
I gave up my various addictions while still young. At the age of twenty-five I landed in the hospital, suffering from depression. My liver had been destroyed by alcohol, my kidneys were as red as fetuses from the drugs, and my uric acid levels were sky-high due to all that pork I ate. I’ve been looking after myself ever since. I’m a teetotaler and a militant gymnast. Two years ago my cholesterol started rising again and dull-as-a-dishrag Vianey decided we needed to bring it back down with a diet of lettuce.
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino Page 4
