The Queen of the South

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  "Everything was fine for ... I don't know ... six or eight months. Until the night the two Gallegos turned up." He turned to Cespedes, gesturing at me. "Did he see Veiga?... Well, that one didn't have much luck. But the other one had less."

  "Santiago Fisterra," I said.

  "Right. And I can still see him: a dark-skinned type, with a big tattoo here." He shook his head disapprovingly. "Something of a troublemaker, like all Gallegos. One of those that you never know what they'll do next.... They came and went through the Strait in a Phantom—Senor Cespedes knows what I'm talking about, right?... Winstons from Gibraltar and chocolate from Morocco ... Back then they weren't working the smack, although it was right around the corner.... So ..."

  He scratched his beard again and spit straight at the ground, bitterly. "So what happened was, one night those two came into the Yamila, and that's when I began to lose the Mexicana."

  wo new customers. Teresa glanced at the clock beside the register. Less than fifteen minutes to closing time. She saw that Ahmed was looking at her questioningly, and without raising her head she nodded once. A quick drink before they turned on the lights and threw everybody out. She went on with her numbers, finished balancing the cash drawer. These two probably wouldn't change the bottom line much. A couple of whiskys, she thought, sizing them up. A little chat with the girls, who were already swallowing their yawns, and maybe a date outside, a while later. Pension Agadir, half a block down the street. Or maybe, if they had a car, a quick trip to the pine groves, alongside the walls of the Tercio headquarters. Anyway, none of her business. Ahmed kept the list of dates in another book.

  The two new customers sat at the bar, leaning on their elbows, next to the beer pulls, and Fatima and Sheila, two of the girls that had been talking to Ahmed, went over to sit with them while the waiter poured two putative twelve-year-old Chivases with a lot of ice, no water. The girls ordered splits of champagne, with no objection from the customers. The men at the broken-glasses table were still toasting and laughing, after having paid the tab without so much as blinking. The guy at the end of the bar couldn't quite reach an agreement with his companions; they could be heard arguing softly, through the sound of the music. Now it was Abigail singing for nobody on the deserted dance floor, whose only sign of life was the monotonous spinning of the disco ball. I want to lick your wounds, she was singing. I want to hear your silences. Teresa waited for the last line of the final stanza—she knew all the songs of the Yamila's repertoire by heart—and looked again at the clock beside the register. Another day down. Identical to yesterday's Monday and tomorrow's Wednesday.

  "Closing time," Teresa said.

  When she raised her eyes, she found herself looking into a quiet smile. And into a pair of light-colored eyes—green or blue, she thought after a second—looking at her with amusement.

  "So soon?" asked the man.

  "We're closing," she repeated.

  She returned to the books. She was never friendly with the customers, especially at closing time. In six months she'd learned that was the best way to keep things in their places and avoid misunderstandings. Ahmed turned on the lights, and the scant charm that the semidarkness had given the place vanished: threadbare fake velvet on the chairs and barstools, stains on the walls, cigarette burns on the floor. Even the smell—of rancid cigarette smoke, of musty upholstery that never saw the light of day—seemed stronger. The men who had broken the glasses pulled their jackets off the backs of their chairs, and after reaching a quick agreement with their female companions, they left, to wait for them outside. The other customer had already left, alone, refusing to pay the price for a double-header. I'd rather jerk off, he muttered as he walked out.

  The girls gathered up their things. Fatima and Sheila, without touching their champagne, were lingering, hanging on the newcomers, but the two men didn't seem interested in becoming any closer acquainted. A look from Teresa sent the girls off to join the others.

  She put the check down on the bar, in front of the dark-skinned one. He was wearing a khaki work shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and when he reached for the check she saw that he had a tattoo that covered his entire forearm: a crucified Christ in a design of sailing symbols. The man's friend was blond and thinner, with light skin. Almost a kid. Twenty-something, maybe. The dark one, thirty-something.

  "Can we finish our drinks?"

  Teresa once again met with the man's eyes as she raised her head. In the light, she saw that they were green. Playful. Maybe mocking. She saw that they weren't just serene, they were also smiling, even when the mouth below them wasn't. His arms were strong, a dark beard was beginning to show on his chin, and his hair was tousled. Almost good-looking, she thought. Or strike that "almost." She also thought he smelled of clean sweat and salt, although she was too far away to know that. She just thought so.

  "Sure," she said.

  Green eyes, a tattoo on his right arm, a skinny blond friend. One of those things that happen in a bar. Teresa Mendoza, far from Sinaloa. One day like another, until one day, something happens. The unexpected that pops up—no fanfare, no signs on the horizon, no warning, just sneaking up on you, easy, so quiet it might be nothing at all. Like a smile or a look. Like life itself, or—that other thing that sneaks up on you—death. Which may have been why, the next night, she expected him to come in again. But he didn't. Each time a customer entered, she looked up, hoping it was him. But it wasn't.

  After she locked up she walked along the nearby beach, where she lit a cigarette—sometimes she would spike it with a few grains of hashish—and looked at the lights on the breakwater and in the Moroccan port of Nador, on the other side of the dark stretch of sea. When the weather was good, she did that, strolled along the sea walk until she found a taxi to take her to her little apartment near the Poligono—bedroom, tiny living room, kitchen, and bathroom rented to her by Dris Larbi, who deducted it from her salary. Dris wasn't a bad sort, she thought. He treated the girls pretty well, tried to get along with everybody, and was violent only when circumstances left him no choice. I'm not a whore, she had told him that first day, straight out, when he met with her in the Yamila to explain the kinds of jobs that were possible in his business. I'm glad for you, he'd said—and left it at that.

  At first he took her in as something inevitable, neither a bother nor an advantage, an arrangement he was forced into by personal commitments— the friend of a friend of a friend—that had nothing to do with her. A certain deference, due to obligations that Teresa knew nothing about, the chain that joined Dris Larbi to don Epifanio Vargas through the man at the Cafe Nebraska, led Dris to let her work behind the bar, first with Ahmed, as bartender girl, and later as cashier, beginning the day there was an error in the figures and she caught it and set the books straight in fifteen seconds. Dris asked whether she'd studied for that. She answered that she'd never gone beyond the sixth grade, and Dris stood looking at her thoughtfully and said, "You've got a head for numbers, Mexicana, you seem like you were born to add and subtract."

  "I did some of that back in Mexico," she answered. "When I was younger."

  So Dris told her that the next day she'd be earning the salary of a cashier, and Teresa took over the place, and they never mentioned the subject again.

  She walked on the beach for a while, until she had finished her cigarette, absorbed in the distant lights that seemed almost to have been strewn over the quiet black water. Finally she looked around and shivered, as though the cold of the late hour had just penetrated the jacket she wore buttoned all the way up, its collar raised around her neck and chin. Hijole. Back in Culiacan, Güero Dávila had often told her that she didn't have what it took to live alone. No way, he would say. You're not that kind of girl. You need a man to take charge. While you stay—why, just like you are—sweet and tender. Unbelievably pretty. Soft. Treated like a queen or not treated at all, mi vida. You don't even have to make enchiladas—that's what restaurants are for. Plus you like that, mi vida, you like what I do to
you and how I do it, and when I get mine, bang, you'll be so sad. He laughed as he whispered, that pinche Güero cabron, his lips between her legs, So come here, prietita. Come down here, to my mouth, and hang on to me and don't let me get away, and hold me tight because one day I'll be dead and nobody will ever hold me again. How sad for you, mi chula. You'll be so alone in the world when I'm not here anymore and you remember me, and miss all this, and know that nobody will ever do this to you again, not the way I do it.

  So all alone. How strange and at the same time how familiar that word was now: alone. Every time Teresa heard it, or said it down deep inside, the image that came to her was not of herself, but of Güero. Or maybe the image was of herself: Teresa watching him. Because there had also been dark times, black doors that Güero would close behind him, and he would be miles away, as though he hadn't come down from wherever he'd been up there. Sometimes he would come back from a mission or one of those runs that he never told her about—but that all Sinaloa seemed to know about— and he would be mute, silent, without his usual swaggering and bravado. He'd dodge her questions from an altitude of five thousand feet, evasive, more self-absorbed than usual, as though he were deeply thoughtful, or preoccupied, or worried. And Teresa, bewildered, not knowing what to say or do, would hover around him like some clumsy animal, in search of the word or gesture that would bring him back to her. Scared.

  Those times, he would leave the house and head downtown. For a while, Teresa suspected that he had another woman—he had them, no question, like all these men did, but she resented the fact that he might have one in particular. That thought drove her crazy with shame and jealousy, so one morning, mixing in with the flow of people, she followed him to a place near the Garmendia mercado, where she saw him enter a cantina called La Ballena. "Vendors, beggars, and minors not allowed"—the sign on the door didn't mention women, but everyone knew that that was one of the unspoken rules of the place: Nothing but beer and nothing but men.

  So she stood out on the street for a long time, more than half an hour in

  front of a shoe store window, doing nothing but watching the swinging doors of the cantina and waiting for him to come out. But he didn't, so at last she crossed the street and went into the restaurant next door, which connected to the cantina through a bead curtain toward the middle of the room. She ordered a soft drink, walked to the curtain, looked through, and saw a large room full of tables, and in the rear a Rock-Ola from which Los Dos Reales were singing "Caminos de la Vida." And the strange thing about the place, at that hour, was that at every table there was a single man with a bottle of beer. One of each per table. Almost all the men looked down-and-out or old—straw hats or baseball caps on their heads, dark-skinned faces, big black or gray moustaches—each drinking in silence, lost in his own thoughts, speaking to no one, like some weird convention of isolated, downcast philosophers, and some of the beer bottles still had a paper napkin stuck in the neck, the way they'd been served, as though a white carnation came with each longneck. The men sat silently, drinking and listening to the music, and once in a while one of them would get up and put a few coins in the jukebox and select another song. And at one of the tables sat Güero Dávila with his aviator jacket over his shoulders, completely alone, his blond head unmoving, staring into space. He sat there minute after minute, breaking his trance only to pull the paper carnation out of the neck of the seven-peso Pacifico and put the bottle to his lips. Los Dos Reales fell silent and were relieved by Jose Alfredo singing "Cuando los Anos Pasen"—"When the Years Have Passed."

  Teresa stepped back slowly from the curtain and walked out of the restaurant, and on the way home she cried for a long time. She cried and cried, incapable of stopping the tears, yet not quite knowing why. Maybe for Güero, and maybe for herself—and maybe for them. Maybe for the years that pass.

  She had done it. But just twice the whole time she was in Melilla. And Güero was right. Not that she'd expected any big deal. The first time was out of curiosity. She wanted to know what it felt like after so long, with the distant memory of her man and the more recent and painful memory of

  Gato Fierros, his cruel smile, his violence, still clear on her flesh and in her memory. She had chosen with a certain amount of care—though care not altogether free of chance—so that there'd be no problems and no consequences. He was a young soldier, a mili, who had approached her outside the Cine Nacional, where she had gone to see a Robert De Niro movie on her day off—a movie about war and friends, with a stupid ending, soldiers playing Russian roulette the way she'd seen Güero and his cousin, out of their minds on tequila, play once, acting like idiots with a revolver until she yelled at them and took the weapon away and sent them to bed, while they just laughed, the miserable, irresponsible drunks. The Russian roulette scene had made her sad, remembering, and maybe that was why, as she was leaving, when the soldier approached her—plaid shirt like Sinaloa men wore; tall, friendly, dirty-blond hair and haircut like Güero's—she let him take her for a soft drink to Anthony's and listened to his trivial conversation, then ended up with him at the wall of the old city, naked from the waist down, her back against the stone, a cat sitting a few yards away looking at them with interest, its eyes glowing in the moonlight. She hardly felt a thing, because her mind was too intent on watching herself, comparing sensations and memories, as though she had split into two people again and the other woman were the cat over there looking on, as dispassionate and silent as a shadow. The soldier wanted to see her again, but she was clear—Another day, mi vida. She knew she would never see him again, or that even if one day she should run into him somewhere—Melilla was a small place—she would barely recognize him, or would pretend not to. She didn't even remember his name.

  The second time was a practical, and police, matter. The processing of her temporary-residence papers was going slow, and Dris Larbi advised her on a way to speed things up. The guy was named Souco. He was a middle-aged inspector, reasonably presentable, who did favors for immigrants. He'd been to the Yamila a couple of times—Teresa had instructions not to charge him for his drinks—and they vaguely knew each other. She went to see him and he put the question to her straight. Like in Mexico, he said, though Teresa couldn't figure out what that hijo de puta could possibly know about customs in Mexico. The options were money or the other thing. With regard to money, Teresa was saving her last peseta, so she opted for the other. Out of some odd machista dedication that almost made her laugh out loud, this Souco managed to acquit himself admirably during the encounter in room 106 of the Hotel Avenida—Teresa had made it more than clear that this was a one-time thing, no follow-ups—and he even asked for the verdict as they lay panting, cigarettes lit, him with his self-esteem on the line and still wearing the condom. I came, she answered, dressing slowly, her body covered in sweat. That means orgasm? he asked. Of course, she replied.

  Back in her apartment, she sat in the bathroom washing herself slowly, pensively, for a long time, then stood at the mirror, smoking a cigarette, looking apprehensively at each of the marks of her twenty-three years of life as if afraid of seeing them morph before her eyes into some strange mutation. Afraid that one day she might see her own image, alone at the table, with the men in that cantina in Culiacan, and not cry, and not recognize herself.

  But Güero Dávila had been wrong, too. Solitude was not hard to take. It was unaltered even by small accidents and concessions, because something had died with Güero. A certain innocence, perhaps, or an unjustified sense of security. Teresa came in out of the cold very young, leaving the rough streets, the poverty, the apparently harshest aspects of life behind. She had thought she had escaped all that forever, not knowing that the cold was still out there, lurking just beyond the door, waiting to squeeze in through the cracks and make her shiver again. The minute you think the horror can never get close again, it pounces. She was just a girl—a narco's morra, all set up with a house, collecting videos and figurines and pretty landscapes to hang on the wall. Attentiveness to her
man repaid in luxury. With Güero, it had been all laughing and screwing.

  Later, she had seen the first signs of trouble from afar, without paying them much attention. Bad signs that Güero laughed off or, to be more precise, didn't give jack shit about. He was very quick, very cunning, and he'd just decided to try to pull off something big, and not wait. Not wait even for her, the cabron. And as a result, one day Teresa found herself out in the cold again, running to save her life, carrying nothing but a gym bag and a pistol.

  Now, on this side of the long journey, she would never be able to forget the cold, sinister wind that blew out there on the outside. Not even if she had her skin and her sex available for men who weren't Güero anymore. Not even if—the idea always made her smile a strange smile—she should fall in love again, or think she had. But, she thought, perhaps the correct sequence might be: first fall in love, then think you've fallen in love, and finally stop loving, or love a memory.

  Now she knew—this frightened her and, paradoxically, calmed her at the same time—that it was possible, even easy, to live in solitude as though in an unfamiliar city, in an apartment with an old television set and a bed that creaked when you turned over, unable to sleep. Possible, even easy, to get up to pee and sit there quietly, a cigarette between your fingers. To get in the shower and caress your sex with your soapy hand, your eyes closed, remembering a man's mouth. And to recognize that a life like that could last forever, and that you could, strangely enough, get used to it. You could resign yourself to growing old, bitter, and alone, stuck in this godforsaken place, while the earth kept turning, just as it always had, even though you never realized it before—impassive, cruel, indifferent.