Return to the Same City

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  Faced with this solitude, one’s own city creates its sympathies, tepid dams made of toothpicks that occasionally resist the spate of the flood. The smile of the clerk in the paint shop; the wink of casual complicity on the bus with the guy who’s reading the same novel; the complacency of the subway passengers before the cannibalistic kiss with which two students part company, as if there won’t be classes again tomorrow; the hostile look shared by the passersby before the corner cop who is chewing out a motorcyclist. And inside one’s own city, other cities are made, smaller towns, almost private ranches that connect every once in a while with other people’s cities.

  Which city did I live in this last year? Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, retired detective, asked himself. Who did I live with? Who else did I live with these last twelve months? He couldn’t really remember. A lot of hospital images. A vacation in someone’s house in the mountains near Puebla, surrounded by pine trees. A doctor who insisted on the healing benefits of forest air for lung injuries. An unpaid bill for four liters of blood plasma. A Puma soccer game in the CU stadium with Carlos Vargas, El Gallo, and Gilberto as cheerleading, grandstand, and beer-drinking companions. A job reconstructing a village aqueduct in the state of Querétaro. Two books by Jean-Francois Vilar and the late discovery of Pío Barojas’ social novels. A casual, sweaty relationship, lasting six days, with a redheaded biochemistry student. An entire year. Not much to justify a year. And things had happened in the country. He had a vague notion that the populace was getting nervous, their irritation was taking form, that Mexicans were walking around singing the national anthem: when that happened, Héctor’s historic memory thought it recalled, it was usually a warning of a great storm.

  The elevator creaked up to the office as Héctor was trying uselessly to recover the last year of his life. The elevator door opened before it should have. Alicia gave him a lavish smile and entered without his being able to stop her. She pushed the sixth-floor button.

  “Alicia, remember?” she said.

  “No, I’m not Alicia. I’m a retiree going to the third floor. More than two floors of stoppage against my will can technically be considered an abduction,” he said and looked down at the elevator floor.

  “Damn it,” the woman said.

  Héctor looked at her.

  Alicia was wearing a sweater and black wool pants. She grabbed her sweater at the waist and slowly lifted it to expose her breasts to the open air. She wasn’t wearing a bra. They were bigger than they suggested when covered. Pointed, with pink nipples.

  “It’s true, one is bigger than the other…In addition to the abduction, rape…”

  She put her sweater back where it belonged. Héctor felt dejected. It was like wearing a muzzle. Didn’t they say the mouth was faster than the brain? The door opened onto the sixth floor. Defeated, Alicia pressed the third floor.

  “It’s okay, I give up,” Héctor said. “I’m listening.”

  Chapter Two

  The Story of Luke Estrella as Told by Alicia

  (Just as Héctor Belascoarán would later remember it)

  He killed her, I know he killed her. But it couldn’t have been him. He wasn’t inside the bathroom, she had locked herself in. It wasn’t with his hands, it’s not that he pulled the trigger. He killed her another way, and of that I’m sure, because I know he killed her. He was pushing her down a damned dead-end street, at the end of it was the bathroom with the door locked from the inside and the revolver, and she was sitting on the toilet with her brains smeared across the wall, while the neighbors knocked on the door and a tape recorder in the apartment was playing Manzanero music. That’s how she had to die, to Manzanero music. She was always listening to sugary boleros, you know? Toward the end, she listened to those boleros all day, all the time. She and the tape player walked the house together, while he was pushing her down the hall, sometimes yelling, sometimes with a kitchen knife telling her to take off her clothes so that a few friends who’d come over for dinner could see her naked.

  When I was in Miami in April, three years ago, she told me that she had moved their twin beds as far apart as she could. But every night he pushed them a little closer together. That time she showed me the burns on her arm that he had made with an iron because she didn’t want to try cocaine. And it ended in that, too. The autopsy said she was drugged up to her ears, to the marrow of her bones. But how could that be, if before the most she ever took was Pepsi Light, for the caffeine. How was she going to be on drugs if she never even took two aspirin at a time, one at the most if her head ached too much. That prick, that son of the cunt of his mother, son of a fucking bitch, faggot. That guy would get high and turn red from all the shit he put up his nose, injected into his veins, and then he’d think himself a man and his dick wouldn’t work for shit. How could foolish Elena go and marry a wretch like that? My sister was naive, she was an absolute idiot. Because the guy was handsome, Luke Estrella, the handsome rumba dancer, the charmer. In the beginning he even convinced me with all his turns of phrase, showing off his muscles under his clingy T-shirt, showing off his balls with his fitted jeans, and showing off his dollars and the red sports car that had cost him eight thousand bills right here, right now, old lady, and here it is for you to try out, and my sister, the fool, letting herself fall, drooling over her golden mulatto who would take her away from eight hours in the office and would take her to Hollywood, and instead of that pure bullshit, he gave her sixteen in hell and eight in damn purgatory.

  He killed her. He was pushing her toward insanity and no doubt saying, Don’t you dare? Kill yourself. I bet you don’t have the guts. She wrote me a letter—I don’t have it anymore, I threw it out; the letter went to hell all full of tears, all snotty from my crying—where she told me that he once made her crawl on her knees through the house while he threatened her with a gun. Because that’s how that son of a bitch really was. One day he’d take her to a fancy restaurant to dine over French wine and the next day he’d take her credit card so she couldn’t use it while he was away. One day he’d cry in front of her and tell her he’d never loved anyone so much and the next he’d introduce her to his boss in a bar and leave her there so the other could take her to bed. He was a shiteater, that guy. A sick rat. Elena told me once he was poisoning her with cockroach-killing powder, and then she told me he wasn’t, that he was putting sugar in the cockroach envelopes so she would think he was poisoning her. He wanted to kill her in the head, drive her crazy. He threatened to shoot her if she tried to escape, then he would disappear for weeks, but some gringo would call her every day on his behalf, asking her if she needed anything.

  Elena left the only way she could leave, blowing her brains out. And he must have been quite content because the only thing that mattered to that shit-crazy pig was power. To have her enslaved, to control her so much, so much that one day he could kill her to prove how much she was his, how much he had her. Luke Estrella, the very proud widower, so radiant in his black silk suit, shiny patent leather shoes, little white vest, the asshole who is on his way to Mexico.

  You’ve got to fuck him up, for me. He’s coming to Mexico next week. I’m sure, he’s arriving on Pan Am’s Thursday night flight. Pan Am from New York. I work for an airline and I asked all my friends to tell me if his name came up on the computer. He’s got a reservation to come to Mexico on Thursday and no doubt he’s coming to pull some kind of shit, because that’s the only thing he knows how to do. Up there in Miami, he was always involved in strange things, in drugs, I think, and that shit, with the Cuban mafia in Miami, the gusanos, the guys who owned the neighborhood. And so you have to find out what it is and you have to bring him down, so they can grab him and he can rot in some Mexican jail, forever, to pay for what he did to Elena. Look, here’s a photo, look at him, so smiley, the big asshole, as if he were saying Nobody touches me. Forty-five years old, he was older than my sister when they got married. So you can, can’t you? You’re going to fuck him good, right? There is justice and that son of a bitch is go
ing to die in a Mexican jail, right? Isn’t that right…?”

  Chapter Three

  My scars have roots even in other bodies,

  my wounds move in shame.

  Roque Dalton

  “And what did you tell her?” Héctor asked.

  “What the hell was I going to tell her?” an indignant Gilberto Gómez Letras said.

  “Well, I don’t know, something about common sense.”

  “Shit, yes. I said didn’t it seem stupid to her to change the entire installation instead of just changing the knobs that said hot and cold.”

  “Well, yes, and what did she say?”

  “That ever since she was a little girl, she’d gotten used to the hot being on the right and the cold on the left, and that’s the way she wanted it. Note, stupid Héctor, the stupid dense people one has to deal with every day. At this point, I’d like to shoot myself like one of your lowlifes, those guys who rape worn-out women, those idiots who stick a .45 up their ass then fire. As a murderer and an annoyance, the old lady is tops.”

  Gómez Letras considered the conversation over and concentrated on an eight-foot length of copper tubing that he was whipping around the office from side to side, skipping over desks and chairs.

  Héctor had stolen two packets of sugar from a coffee shop and was trying to improve his Coke, pouring them in along with half a lime. As far as flavor went, the result of the experiment was open to discussion, but quite a nice frothy foam welled up. In the club across the street, they’d spent half the morning playing the same second-rate tropical record, the kind that pounds the rhythm and lacks a melody; he hadn’t been able to pick up much of the words except that they were talking about a mulatto woman with a green ribbon in her hair.

  Gómez Letras was smiling as he worked the copper tube to the rhythm of the tropical piece. His bad mood seemed to have dissolved.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “I was thinking that if we stick a .45 up that woman’s ass, she might not give a shit which side the hot water is on.”

  “Better let your evil thoughts die there.”

  “Did you see that they raised the price of soda?”

  “It’s already common knowledge that in this city we all walk around with a .45 up our ass.”

  “Hand me those tweezers.”

  “I’m going to hand you a .45 so you can see what it feels like.”

  “I feel better, but you must be exhausted by now…And speaking of that, how do you feel?”

  “I don’t know, let me think about it,” Héctor said.

  He walked to the window and took a long swig of his improved Coke.

  “Bad, I think I feel bad.”

  “Well, it’s about time to start feeling better, there’s not much action around here.”

  “What do you know about Afghanistan?”

  “Nothing, it’s a street in the El Rosario neighborhood, isn’t it? What’s going on over there?”

  “The KGB is looking for Mexican plumbers.”

  “The KGB is a water pump factory in León, Guanajuato, right?”

  Now it was Héctor’s turn to smile. Gómez Letras looked at him, annoyed. He moved to counterattack.

  “You call yourself the poor people’s detective, but you haven’t even been to the protests.”

  “The students?”

  “No shit.”

  “Like the little rat in the story said…”

  “What did he say?”

  “I’ve been sick.”

  ***

  “And whoever shits on the record player, pees on it, puts his feet on top of it, splashes water, or coughs up chewed corn, I’ll wring his neck and roast him,” Héctor said to JJ and OP, showing them the John Coltrane cover again, the one with “Stardust.” The ducks emitted a string of quack-quacks and disappeared into the kitchen wagging their tails.

  Héctor turned on the record player, removed the fluff from the needle and took the Coltrane out of its slip; he took off his jacket and turned on every light in the house. It was a new habit developed over these last few months. He was seeking the sensation of being the center of a Christmas tree where the light warded off all fears. He set down the needle and turned up the volume on both speakers. Then he went into the bathroom and pissed peacefully. The two photographs Alicia had given him were pinned to the wall above the toilet. He had them there to get used to during the week prior to the man’s arrival in the Mexico City airport, prior to the encounter with Luke Estrella’s actual face. For now, just the photos: a light-skinned mulatto, slightly split jaw, round nose, dry eyes, broad forehead. The Hollywood Latin mustache, soft, uneven.

  Héctor spun around to the mirror as he shook off and studied his own mustache—rough, chaotic, Pancho Villa style.

  Now he began a history of mustaches and Héctor knew well that tomorrow would be a day of a long-distance runner in training, of reading a book by Lansford about Pancho Villa and the North Division (his latest spiritual guide), of going to Gate E of Benito Juárez Airport and choosing the column from behind which to observe, the store to buy a drink, the parking lots, the place to leave the car. What a joke…mustaches.

  The thing was working, he said to himself. He went down the hall to the kitchen and left the revolver next to the .45 automatic. He stuck everything including the holster in the refrigerator. The thing was working. Well oiled: the ducks, “Stardust,” the lights; all the medicine against loneliness he’d been able to gather.

  ***

  The doorbell rang. It was still night. Gray, black dawn was almost breaking. It was the buzzer on the downstairs door. Héctor tried to fix his pajama bottoms, which had almost fallen off during his nocturnal nightmares. He was drenched with sweat. Again, the sweats, the taste of dirt in his mouth, bitter dirt. Fucking again. He peered out the window, hobbling, because he’d stubbed his toes on the base of the sink. Carlos, his brother, wrapped in a black jacket, stood under the streetlight. Héctor felt the cold.

  “Come down,” Carlos said.

  “You come up.”

  “No, come down and let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “To the campus.”

  Dawn broke decisively as they crossed San Antonio on Revolución, in the midst of a fog that Héctor charitably classified as natural, but that Carlos identified as definitely part of the industrial shit; the black cloud of smog that traveled north to south utilizing the viaduct of the Beltway and Revolución Avenue, pushed by malignant winds whose function was to disperse the pollution and provide cover for the ghost of James Dean who rode around on his motorcycle in those parts.

  The mist made the profile of buildings and trees a hundred yards away look diffuse, phantasmal.

  “Are you carrying a gun?”

  “Two, you want one? They’re half frozen because I kept them in the fridge last night.”

  Carlos laughed. He shook his head no. “No way, armed and I shoot myself…No, I asked so that you don’t even think about using them.”

  “What? Do I look like the Lone Ranger? I don’t go around firing off shots,” Héctor said and then asked, “Why are we going?”

  “I hear they’re trying to break up the CEU strike, the student strike.”

  “Who?”

  “The police, the right-wing groups, the university president’s dogs.”

  Héctor stayed quiet. Yes, it had to be pollution, because his only healthy eye was watering. He should have felt honored by Carlos choosing him as his traveling companion. In other words, the best thing to do was shut up and smile. No asking if they weren’t a little old to go around defending a student strike that for fifteen days had been abusing a city which the earthquake, the economic crisis, and disappointment seemed to have exhausted, and that was now rising up again: trembling, adolescent, shouting, reborn.

  Traffic cleared out on the access road to the university. Héctor felt one brief pang of nostalgia and two of fear. After all, it was his university. Or was it? It was as much his as the rest of the coun
try’s; it wasn’t a housing development belonging to an authoritarian administration with the mentality of a supermarket owner. And anyway, it was as good a return to life as any other.

  Carlos had remained silent. He drove the Volkswagen with a kind of professional cold dexterity, always looking ahead, both hands on the steering wheel.

  “How long has it been since you’ve been to the university?” Héctor asked.

  “About ten years. I think the last time was when I stopped by the Philosophy Film Club to see Fellini’s 8 1/2 again. Too much nostalgia at once. I didn’t like the movie as much as I had before. I left the university like a prisoner just released, hiding, so no ghost would recognize me.”

  “And me not even that much,” Héctor said as he felt his hands starting to sweat. Damned biological, physical fear, stuck in his bones. Would it never disappear?

  The first barricades were next to the gas station. A few barrels of oil were burning, making small black clouds. The stupid students these days were not ecologists. Some five thousand of them had gathered around that entrance to the campus. You couldn’t see any cops around. Carlos, a member of the old and wary left, of the generation that learned to distrust invisible cops, drove around the nearby streets a couple of times. A truck with riot police about ten blocks away, two patrol cars on Copilco, nothing out of the ordinary. They parked in front of the Technical Library and approached the action on foot. A bunch of guys were singing with a couple of guitars. It wasn’t the “We Will Triumph” of Quilapayún or a song from Atahualpa Yupanqui or “The Girl from Guatemala” by José Martí-Oscar Chávez; yet the nostalgia was there in the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” This generation, thought Héctor—looking around at the ponchos and the budding beards, the blue and gold sweaters, light jackets, skirts longer than ever—was like him: it had never found its moment of glory. Not yet, anyway, he said to himself. He walked over to one of the oil barrels to dry the sweat off his hands. He couldn’t shake the fear, but at least he would accompany the five thousand students with the best of brave appearances. It was the least he could do for them.