Return to the Same City
A Héctor Belascoaran Shayne Detective Novel
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright © 1989 by Paco Ignacio Taibo II
First E-book Edition 2012
ISBN: 9781615953516 epub
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.
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Contents
Return to the Same City
Contents
Dedication
A Note from the Author
Foreword
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
More from this Author
Contact Us
Dedication
For my colleague Roger Simon aka Rogelio Simón, who inducted the Lakers into the known religions and placed Moses Wine on my path.
For my colleague Andreu Martín, who clearly delights in writing novels as much as I do.
For my colleague Pérez Valero, who clearly suffers as much as I do.
For colleague Dick Lochte, who lent his name to a character.
For colleagues Ross Thomas and Joe Gores, who will appear as the owners of a brothel in Tijuana in my next novel.
To these, my friends, a novel for the ones they have given me, with the reader’s gratitude.
A Note from the Author
Don’t ask me when and how Héctor Belascoarán Shayne came back to life. I don’t have an answer. I remember that on the last page of No Happy Ending rain was falling over his perforated body.
His appearance in these pages is therefore an act of magic. White magic perhaps, but magic that is irrational and disrespectful toward the occupation of writing a mystery series.
The magic is not entirely my fault. Appeal to the cultural traditions of a country whose history teems with resurrections. Here Dracula returned, El Santo returned (in the film version), even Demetrio Vallejo returned from prison, Benito Juárez returned from Paso del Norte…This particular resurrection gestated a couple of years ago in the city of Zacatecas, when the audience of a conference demanded that Belascoarán come back to life almost (minus one vote) unanimously. From then on, that event would repeat itself several more times before various audiences in different cities, and the voting was accompanied by a long series of letters. It seemed that the character had not found an ending to the liking of his readers, and the author thought there were a few stories left to be told in the Belascoaránian saga. And thus was born this novel, which if it has any virtue, it is because it was written with even more doubts than the previous ones. So let the readers from Zacatecas who attended that conference be as responsible as I am for Héctor’s return.
I have no better explanation.
As always, it must be said that the story told here belongs to the terrain of absolute fiction, although Mexico is the same and belongs to the terrain of surprising reality.
It would have to be added that for narrative reasons, real times have been slightly rearranged, uniting the student protests of early ’87 with the ascent of the Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas campaign of the spring of ’88 in a fictional time that could be situated around the end of 1987.
PIT II
Mexico City, 1987—88—89
Foreword
“‘In his Decalogue on mystery novels,
Chandler forgot to prohibit detectives
from getting metaphysical,’ Héctor Belascoarán
Shayne—gun-carrying Argonaut of Mexico City,
the world’s biggest city at its own expense,
the biggest cemetery of dreams—said to himself.”
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
If this is your first time reading Taibo, I envy you. Return to the Same City, the fifth of his detective novels (the first, Días de Combate, has yet to be translated into English) and perhaps the strangest, is a perfect entry into the world of one of literature’s true originals.
Taibo’s Mexico City is a place where violence erupts without warning, where the unexpected invariably happens; where past and present, reality and myth, tragic and comic are thrown together and pitched back at us through the funhouse mirror of the author’s imagination.
Our guide through this world of absurdity is one-eyed independent detective Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, who in this outing has recently been resurrected from the dead. The story starts out a year after Taibo left his hero’s bullet-ridden body lying face down in the rain. We find Héctor nursing his wounds and trying to understand why he is still alive. His on-again/off-again love, the enigmatic “woman with the ponytail” (we never learn her name) has taken off again, leaving Héctor the present of two live ducks in a basket because she believed that he “became dangerous in solitude.”
The erstwhile detective has decided that his investigating days are over, but he finally gives in to the entreaties of a woman whose sister was driven to suicide by her psychotic, abusive husband. Héctor sets off on a rambling journey to find the man, who’s been involved in drug dealing up in Miami and reportedly has ties to the Cuban mafia. Soon, however, it becomes unclear whether Héctor is the pursuer or the pursued.
As in all of the books, the magic is really in Héctor’s observations as he makes his way through the city, following the elusive strands of his cases, trying to stay sane. Taibo’s novels are complex love letters to Mexico City, full of insight and a melancholy beauty that you won’t find anywhere else. But enough of this…turn the page and see for yourself.
Patrick Millikin
Chapter One
The only rush is that of the heart.
Silvio Rodriguez
“How many times have you died?”
“Uhm,” said the woman with the ponytail, and indicated none with her head.
“Me, yes. A lot.”
She passed her index finger over the scars that made little patterns on his chest. Héctor gently withdrew her hand and, naked, walked toward the window. It was a cold night. The filtered Delicados were on the windowsill; he drew the flame of the lighter into the tip of one, and watched the green lights that the streetlights threw on the trees.
“No, not the scars; that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying sleep, going to sleep and dying again. A hundred, two hundred times a year. The first fucking instant of sleep is not sleep, it’s dying again.”
“You only die once.”
“James Bond must have said that. You die a ton of times. Son of a bitch. I know what it is…Sometimes I wish I could sleep with my eyes open so as not to die. If you sleep with your eyes open, you can never die.”
“Dead people end up with their eyes open,” she said after a pause, turning away. Her bottom shone like the foliage of the trees out front.
“Those dead people die just once. No. I’m talking about dying a lot. Two or three times a week at least.”
“What is your death like?”
Héctor stood there thinking. When he spoke again, the woman with th
e ponytail could not see his face, but she could hear the abnormally hoarse voice with which he told his story.
“You can’t breathe. You feel fire in your stomach. You can’t move the fingers on your hand. You’ve got your face stuck in a puddle and your lips fill up with dirty water. You shit in your pants, you can’t help it. The blood coming out your nose is mixing with the water of the puddle…It’s raining.”
“Now?”
“No, when you die.”
She remained silent for a moment, wanting to look somewhere else. The light in the window illuminated the scars on Héctor’s chest.
“Dead people don’t tell these stories.”
“That’s what you think,” Héctor said, without looking at her.
“Dead people don’t make love.”
“A whole bunch of live people I know don’t either. They’re screwed that way, they’ve been put on a diet.”
Héctor moved away from the window and crossed in front of the bed. She turned again to look at him, the ponytail falling between her breasts.
“Do you want a drink?” Héctor asked, walking down the hall toward the kitchen. The cold rose up inside him through the soles of his feet.
“Could you make decaffeinated?”
“You ask a lot.”
“For a guy who’s died so often, making decaf should be a cinch.”
“Definitely not, a decaf is a decaf and a cinch a cinch. The decaf is much more complicated.”
Héctor came back with a Coke in one hand, a lime split down the middle balancing between the fingers of the other. He sought out the window again.
“It’s raining,” he said as he squeezed the lime and gently stirred the rind so it would mix in.
“When you die?”
“No, now,” he said and he stepped aside to avoid being hit in the head with a copy of Malraux’s Man’s Fate which she had thrown at him.
Héctor smiled.
“Cover your nakedness, woman, here comes the icy wind.”
He opened the window. Indeed, a cold wind forced the rain into the room. One big drop hit him on the nose and trickled over his mustache. He opened his mouth and swallowed it.
“There it is,” said the woman with the ponytail, smiling. “Dead people can’t taste rain.”
“You might be right. It’s just a matter of keeping the eyes open and of convincing the Japanese man I’ve got in here,” he pointed to his temple with his index finger, making the universal sign for suicide.
“You’ve got Quasimodo in your head. And he spends his time ringing the bells of Notre-Dame.”
“And screwing the Japanese man with whom he shares the apartment. In fact, the Japanese guy must be the one who controls the sound and protects the transistors.”
“I never should have fallen in love with a Mexican detective.”
“You never should have fallen in love with a dead man.”
Suddenly, with no forewarning, she started to cry; wrapped up to her chin, covering herself from the cold and from the one-eyed, skinny, mustached detective before her, who made a face intended to be a loving smile, but which instead was the grimace of a man who was cold and couldn’t cry.
***
He had been going back to the office for only a week, refamiliarizing himself with the old furniture and the old colleagues, convinced that the old habits had ended. If he didn’t take down the sign on the door that read “Belascoarán Shayne, Detective,” it was because El Gallo and Carlos Vargas, his officemates, threatened to open an independent detective agency the instant he retired. That stopped him. If he didn’t want to be responsible for himself, he definitely didn’t want to be responsible for others. He’d been walking through that entrance for seven days, sitting at his old desk, shaking off the dust a little, reading papers from two years before and lighting a candle in prayer to Sigmund Freud’s mom to let no one open the door and offer him a job. A week saturated with paranoia and distrust. Irrational anxiety that came like a tropical storm and filled his palms with sweat, numbed his spine, pricked his temples. Tremendous fears, like fifty-story elevator shafts with no bottom except dementia. New fears: going to the bathroom, crossing the long hall outside the office, turning his back to the door, turning on a light in the window and leaving his silhouette outlined against the shadows on the street, answering the phone and having a strange voice speak to him familiarly.
That’s why, after a week of terror that took him back to other people’s childhood stories (his own had been peaceful and calm, as if between the feathers of a sparrow’s nest), when the phone rang he looked to his officemates, even though he knew they weren’t around. He stared at the calendars of cabaret singers’ asses and blondes in beer ads, but the women in print on the wall refused to lend him a hand in answering the phone. They didn’t want to take the inverse route to glory and come back from the image of the calendar to the office from which they had fled.
“Hello?”
“Senor Belascoarán, please.”
“He’s not here,” Héctor said. “He doesn’t come in anymore.”
“Gracias,” said the voice with a strange accent dragging that final s. The voice of a woman. Of a waitress from a fancy restaurant who pronounces the menu correctly. Mexican, maybe? Bolivian? Peruvian?
“You’re welcome,” Héctor added and hung up softly.
A quarter of an hour later, the phone rang again.
Héctor smiled.
“Hello?”
“I’d like to speak with you. You’re the gentleman who answered before, right?”
“The gentleman who answered before isn’t here,” Héctor said. “He just left. He’s retiring from this. He went to get something to drink.”
“And now what does he do?” the woman asked with a little laugh.
“Buddhism. Zen contemplation. Empirical analysis of environmental pollution issues.”
“Thank you,” said the voice.
“You’re welcome,” said Héctor.
He hung up again and walked over to the safe where he stored the drinks and the firearms. Firearms—not even close. A jackknife, two stale Pepsis, a collection of porn photos—graphic reminders of an old case that Gilberto, the plumber, kept like heirlooms. He grabbed the knife and put it in his pocket.
If he had had to go through a metal detector, the machine would have gone crazy with glee; not just because of the knife, but also from the echoes of a stud lodged in his femur that now could never come out, a .45 automatic in a holster around his back and a .38 short-barreled revolver in his pants pocket. “Iron man,” he said to himself. A metallurgical piece of work is what he was.
The phone rang again.
“Could we meet?” asked the woman with the Peruvian? Bolivian? Chilean? Mexican? accent.
“Do we know each other?”
“I do, yes, I know you a little.”
“What kind of bra do you wear?”
“Why?”
“No, nothing. It was to see if we knew each other,” Héctor said, playing with the knife. “I now see that we don’t.”
He hung up again and left the office, putting on his black sheepskin jacket. The phone was ringing as he walked out the door.
***
Now more than ever he had the absurd ability to feel out of place everywhere. It was something new; to be an eternal observer, to be invariably on the outside. When you don’t own them, landscapes can be observed with much greater precision, but you’re also alien to the panorama, unable to touch the ground, to feel the breeze. The sensation of strangeness is permanent. A shadow running through other people’s lands, an actor in a borrowed scene and in the wrong play, a Western movie character in an Italian comedy. The emptiness could come at any moment, intensifying the normal sensation of being out of place. It could happen to him in the lobby of the Bellas Artes Palace during the intermission of the opera, as easily as at a dinner of the ’65–’67 high school class, as in the mattress display room in the Vázquez brothers’ furniture stores, as in
the line to buy tortillas. The things were there, he was there, but they didn’t belong to him. At some point someone would arrive and ask to see his ticket, his visiting permit, his passport, the credentials that gave him the right to a discount that he didn’t have.
This sensation of slipping through life was particularly agonizing in elevators and in supermarkets. Héctor couldn’t explain why, but that’s the way it was. He felt that one moment or another, the apparatus would stop on the third floor and he would be amiably asked to get off; or the supermarket’s cops would stop him from passing through the checkout with his cart, because the bills with which he wanted to pay were no longer legal currency.
Yet the obsession didn’t seem to produce external symptoms. It didn’t contort his face or make his eye red. The messenger, with his yellow helmet and pile of envelopes, and the cleaning lady with the bucket of water didn’t pay him the slightest attention. They didn’t even give him a second glance. Maybe they were experiencing the same thing he was, and that’s why he didn’t seem strange to them; we were all a bunch of unconfessed lepers, all Victoria Holt trying unsuccessfully to imitate F. Scott Fitzgerald.
He got off on the sixth floor and dodged the front desk, going directly to the cashier’s window. The cashier had caught her stocking on a desk drawer and took a while to notice him. Héctor lit a cigarette and watched her manipulate stockings and drawer.
“Ay,” she said, finally making eye contact with the ex-detective. “Your check?”
Héctor nodded, leaving the remains of a smile floating. The girl finally managed to disentangle herself, looked for the check in an enormous folder and walked backward toward the window, trying to hide her ruined stocking, with a consequently quite hunchbacked stride. Héctor signed the papers, took the check, and left without looking at her again.
He walked between the little shops on Ínsurgentes, crossed the subway stop at a sluggish pace, turned at Chapultepec Avenue, absorbing the city’s billboards with his healthy eye. Human misery was striking in the pandemonium of the pre-Christmas season. Underemployment was running rampant. A wave of Mexicans, with sad and feverish eyes, in search of a peso attacked from all sides. The begging hands of charity were more chapped, more tremulous than usual. How to be at one with all this? Héctor asked himself. How to coexist with this without rotting in sadness? He wondered again. Elisa had once read aloud something Cortázar wrote about the train station in New Delhi and the sensation he’d been filled with—that you cannot cohabitate with certain dark regions of this world without becoming a little cynical, turning into a real son of a bitch—came back to him. Cortázar was right. In the language of the 1950s, there was no peaceful coexistence with the part of society that was falling apart, with that other part of you that was sinking. For a one-eyed man it should be easier, you only have to close one eye, he said to himself, and he didn’t dare even smile at the joke.
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