Mexico City Noir

by Paco Ignacio II Taibo

  “Are you still listening to my confession?”

  “I confess once again that I was waiting for you. You remind me of an old lover. Let’s see … San Fernando whipped the flesh of his soldiers with barbs. Times are changing; you have to adapt to technology. Did you get aroused?”

  “I was a bit soft. My peers harassed me and I had to show I had balls, so yes, yes, I got aroused. I’d caress them after they passed out.”

  “Who did you sleep with?” asked the priest.

  “With Commander Pérez …” The girl practically fainted after saying this, her back to the cross, her face like a Mediterranean spring. The city’s dense air shrouded her white Gap pants and aquamarine Zara T-shirt—flea market bootlegs—in a gray aura. If she’d been naked, an infantile San Juan de Dios would have covered her breasts with his hair like sea foam, Renaissance style.

  The hooded priest took her by the hand. “Look at the grave of Benito Juárez; he gave the order to shoot the soldier buried at the entrance. He was an Indian too. That’s Mexico City: Everything’s mixed. Fatality and hope are tangled in the same vine. This pantheon still smells of death. Supposedly, everything decomposes in the tropics. But some things are still here even if you don’t see them. Look at the tombstone that says Isadora Duncan—she’s here, but she’s also buried in Nice. That’s how Mexicans are: an admirer had this cenotaph made for her to put next to Juárez the Indian. This is miscegenation!” The priest’s flowing sleeve stretched as he gestured toward the cemetery. “Tell me about your erections.”

  The conversation became a murmur reverberating in the crepuscular traffic. When they arrived back at the church, the priest closed the aged oak portico. They made their way down the middle aisle, past the pews now empty of their beatific penitents, whose scents still lingered. A ring of lights like sentries revealed a painting that covered one wall of the nave; hundreds of these sentries guarded a multitude of friars on their knees, gazing up with admiration at the seven martyrs of Ceuta and the seven from Morocco; they praised the Lord on a cross sprouting fir bulbs, and the nine hierarchies of the celestial court in the sky: archangels, thrones, powers, dominions, cherubs, seraphim, angels, principalities, virtues. The painting emanated shadows. A gloom grew on another wall, barely touched by four handfuls of fire coming from the cave of Bethlehem—four is a sacred Indian number. Above the cave, in the stormy sky, a cloud curled up the spiraling stream that represented the native water, water and fire—atl and tlachinolli—and an irascible San Fernando stood on the altar in a niche surrounded by chiaroscuro coils worked by Indian hands.

  Night fell on the children scattered around the church and vestibule. A sad figure in a Burberry raincoat bought at the Galleria on New Bond Street in London turned his back on them. A police officer in Mexico earns enough to take a group vacation, and to finance a sex change for a favorite subordinate. This was Commander Pérez. He looked languidly at the vestibule, raised his eyes to San Fernando, King of Castile, flanked by four angels. For him, a devout Christian, San Fernando was a phantom. The police officer’s spirit had taken a different path, one with lyrics to boleros and desire for a young body whose sex he had changed, who now accosted his soul. He breathed with a deep, loving sadness.

  Inside, the penitent and the confessor continued through the thick darkness of the hall of tombs. A bell rang for the dead. The altar boy with the small brazier let it toll, sighing when an airplane passed above the church.

  “You know what the brains are like in those kids out there?” said the priest. “Like marine sponges with a thousand eyes. They stink of toluene or whatever it is they put in that glue. It perforates their brains. They can be marinated and boiled, then the scent goes away. Do you know what they taste like? Are they the lost ones you’re trying to find? Incidentally, you haven’t even told me your name.”

  “Nausícaa,” replied the girl.

  “How sophisticated. Who gave you that name?”

  “Commander Pérez.”

  “I would have named you Xóchitl Fernanda. It’s much more Mexican. My name is Diego Tonatiuh. Before, I was called Temeraria, reckless. Blame it on my father, an anarchist from Aragón who took refuge in this mixed-up city; he was mestiza like me. They say I killed him with a dirty look for making me become a nun.”

  At that moment, the altar boy with the small brazier peeked over the pulpit and asked, “Do you want to stay the night?” He looked like a little cherub frolicking after the gentle figure of the Archangel Michael, whose lance had been stolen to skewer the devil. Neither penitent nor confessor responded.

  Finally the girl spoke: “I have to go to work, Father … And I never asked you: how long has it been since you changed your sex?”

  “Before the deluge, before the plagues of Egypt, before the First Sun, before the Nahui Océlotl that lasted 674 years, and before all those people were devoured by tigers. Then came four more suns, and then the last: San Fernando.”

  The priest suddenly fell to the ground in ecstasy and Nausícaa thought the altar boy was speaking through him, the nasally voice of a cherub through the throat of an old monk: “Pange, lingua, gloriosi corporis mysterium, sanguinisque pretiosi … God is fanatical, hija,” he said, convulsing. “He makes me say things, see and hear what’s not real. The body is a mystery and blood is precious …”

  The altar boy came down from the pulpit, helped the priest up from the tangle of his robe, and whispered something in his ear. When the priest saw Nausícaa’s astonished look, he told her to pay no mind, it was just an apparition in transit. He recovered his poise, his voice turning deep again.

  “If I were to say it in Castilian, it would be something like a soul en route to … Heaven? Limbo? I can’t tell you for sure. Since we’re dealing with a street kid, I don’t even know if he’s been baptized. If I were to say it in Mexican, then it would be a teyolia disguised as an altar boy on his way to one of the four worlds of Mictlán, an inferno for elders from these parts, something akin to a spirit to us Christians. Where will it go? He’s too much of a lazy ass to be leaning on the teat tree in Chichihualco and sucking away for all of eternity. Will you let me see your tits? I don’t like to call them chichis; it’s a Mexicanism that doesn’t sound right to me—remember, I have Aragonese blood. Anyway, let’s go to the sacristy, we’ll be safe there: the soul, teyolia, or whatever you want to call it, told me there’s a man outside from whom we can only expect the worst.”

  The altar boy ran off to hide in the chapel’s shadows. Nausícaa glanced his way, and the kid laughed uproariously, then quickly disappeared.

  Standing before the façade, Commander Pérez raised the collar of his raincoat and exhaled a sigh of longing. He restrained himself from kicking the children in the vestibule and retraced his steps, like always. His bodyguard was there waiting for him next to the squad car and they returned to the police station.

  Pérez took the day’s bribes, headed down to the dungeons. The cannibal who had been arrested a few days before near San Fernando was there in a moldy cell; a grated night-light dripped stalactites of horror. The scrawny cannibal who had devoured his lover lay trembling there on a concrete bench.

  The commander’s daydream about the end of the workday, when he would go home to his wife and children and take refuge from his love for Nausícaa, was interrupted when his deputy arrived with the kitchen gloves and baseball bat.

  “It smells like human flesh, like heat,” said Nausícaa.

  “Don’t profane this sacristy with your lies. In this city everything filters through, whether it’s sewage or fried food, mint, epazote, thyme, marjoram, incense, or myrrh, you know what I mean? I used to wear perfume when I was a nun, after the abortions, because it made me feel less dirty; it was a pirate essence, a scent the gods could breathe. I stopped being an impure sister and became the Black Brigand. You say that it smells like human flesh. Are you suggesting—”

  “No, no, Father Diego Tonatiuh. I recognize the smell from the incident with the cannibal. The case
was assigned to Commander Pérez, the guy I told you about. I worked on it too. It was the neighbors who called it in. They’d been complaining for more than a year that something smelled weird in a house near where they lived downtown. We went and we found—”

  “More details, hija. Carnality is so exciting.”

  “Commander Pérez kicked down the door and stormed in with a submachine gun. There were about five of us, and the ones behind me kept pushing until they had the barrels of their guns you know where.”

  “Up your ass.”

  “That’s what they always did to me. They said I was a puto. We caught the cannibal stirring a saucepan with a wooden spoon. I don’t know exactly what was in it but it smelled like meat. One of my buddies pulled out his ranger knife and carved into a human leg. We were all dressed in black; we wore knitted caps. Somebody opened the fridge and found two women’s heads. I got dizzy from the smell of the stew—can I say stew? Commander Pérez shoved the cannibal’s head into the pan. One of the other cops pulled me into a room filled with porno magazines and raped me. I let it happen, and then the commander came in and broke the other cop’s face. He totally messed him up. There were teeth on the floor.”

  “Would you eat an altar boy with cous cous à la Mexicana?”

  “We caught the cannibal but he impregnated me with that stench. That’s why I use so much perfume.”

  Perfumed bodies, contraband perfume, insect perfume, thought the priest (the ex-sister, the nun of nuncas, Sister Reckless of the Nuncas). It was too late now for regrets, but she certainly wasn’t going to rob a bank again just to finance a sex change. She was getting older and had little desire to be with anyone except that one man, even though they couldn’t be together anymore because a monkey wrench had been thrown in their destiny. Father Diego Tonatiuh had had a love, a great love, the only true love of his life, and the police had killed him with their wretched justice—they fried his ass with the prod. He had met his love at the convent of the Franciscan Conceptualists, where he’d practiced curettage as a nun, when the man brought his pretty girlfriend in to have an abortion.

  The soul of the priest moved away from Nausícaa. He was lost in his memories, gazing upon a canvas of the Immaculate Conception, a childish virgin standing on a windy platform held up by numerous friars in fine embroidered robes; above them, the shield of San Francisco, five scars and white hairs strewn on a book. The priest recalled himself as Sister Reckless standing in a cloister of orange trees. She was rubbing orange blossoms on the hands of the man who brought the girl to get an abortion. It was love at first sight. The man was struck by the nun’s masculine poise. She of the manly presence was, in fact, a small-time bank robber, and he would soon join her in this pursuit. Mockingbirds sang in the halls, canaries twittered, potted azaleas flowered when he whispered in her ear: “Like foam floating on the mighty river, my azalea, life has swept you away in its avalanche.” She had taken a book from her habit, pointed to a painting that had been laminated with mold since the conquest: framed by flowery jungle vines, a centauress with adolescent legs and wearing huaraches climbs on a monkey; the monkey caresses the woman’s breasts with one hand, masturbates with the other. She told the man that this is how his love should be, a faithful rendition of the colonial impetus painted and imagined by Mexican Indians and Andalusian friars with a good dose of the medieval. She read: “My spirit pushes me to write about the metamorphosis of bodies into new ones. O gods! Since you have also changed, do not hesitate, inspire my efforts and take this poem from the world’s beginnings all the way to our times.” The sister had then entered the abortion room and provided the patient with a triple dose of sodium pentobarbital. There was staff at the convent to take care of these problems, and not long after this, there was Sister Reckless of the Nuncas stumbling along the Great Canal, dependent on the generosity of the police. That’s where his lover wound up.

  Father Diego Tonatiuh’s mind returned to San Fernando, his breath flew from the cloister of orange trees back to the sacristy and retook the conversation with Nausícaa.

  “A few days ago they caught another cannibal close to here, the one we were talking about, the fag.” His voice turned nasally again, vibrating under the hood until it seemed almost hysterical. “If you use perfume it’s because you’re a whore. Don’t make it sound like it’s because you have the saintly smell of a devout nun or because the smell of flesh bothers you. Oh, please forgive me for the whore comment. I have been contaminated by Mexican machismo. Just give me a moment to get back to my normal state.”

  “Where are you taking me?” the girl asked when the priest abruptly grabbed her arm. “This stinks of human flesh. I don’t want to go. Let me go! I’m not a whore, I’m a virgin!”

  “That is the true abstention, the seventh seal, the rest is macho sodomy and it’s just not worth it … although it has its charms.”

  As Father Diego Tonatiuh dragged her out of the sacristy, the stench of flesh burrowed deep in Nausícaa’s heart and burned itself there. The priest noticed this and told her it was because of Father Próspero, who lived in an apartment in the building next to the parish and liked fusion cuisine—very modern for that priest with the torn sneakers. All the Mexican baroque crashed down on her: Nausícaa lived in that very same building.

  The girl shot out of the church, desperately seeking an escape. She stumbled on a glass box and came face-to-face with a Christ overwhelmed by millennia of drops of blood.

  “Up his ass, hija! Tickle his balls with that cattle prod!” the priest screamed hysterically. “He’s a fanatic and he’s accustomed to such passions. You can do whatever you want to him without remorse—he’s merely one more prisoner here. Scream at him, humiliate him! Nobody can hear you, not even the police. Ha! You can’t even hear yourself!” The priest’s voice echoed like metal splinters through the temple.

  In that corner of Mexico City, the sun did not set or rise. It was the sky that was lowered or raised. Night fell on Nausícaa with a layer of reddish soot, like the familiar everyday sky from which people took refuge, trapped in their homes. The young woman gazed on the darkened buildings, a light here and there, the beams of a passing car. The steam from the motors that ran all day now rose from the sidewalk, a dam where the street children made their camp inside the vestibule of San Fernando. To the left and right of the Holy King, Domingo and Francisco watched these creatures ignoring the lessons of discipline. They slept sated with glue, others sweated the glue out in collective fornications. Nausícaa remembered her job. They would scold her. She moved toward a pile and looked at the kids engaging in unseemly activities.

  “This is the true sexual liberation,” whispered a voice in her ear.

  Instinctively, she reached for her gun, a useless reflex; she’d been unarmed since she’d changed her sex.

  “I am Father Próspero. I have seen you dancing on tables. You’re never entirely naked. How did you get that privilege? When you finish your performance, they shout at you and humiliate you—do you like being humiliated?”

  A street sweeper crept by.

  When Nausícaa heard the word humiliation, it struck her like one of those badly pirated DVDs, and the images came to her, one after another, of her debasement at the hands of her fellow officers, the resentment they felt at her middle-class ways. Maybe they would have had more respect if she’d behaved like a whore from Veracruz and let them call her Negra. The DVD paused on an image from adolescence, when his father caught him fucking the maid’s son. He ran to the woman who’d raised him, but he was sent off to become a cop, to get the puto out of him. It didn’t work; his peers did whatever they wanted with him until Commander Pérez, his guardian angel, showed up. That night Commander Pérez paced, unable to read The Odyssey: They had consumed Nausícaa and the slaves. No sooner had they gotten rid of her veils and played, then there was Nausícaa, with her snow-white arms, singing. His protector, his guardian angel …

  Her stomach began to turn, or maybe a psalm came to her, and she
confessed to Próspero the incident with the servant’s son, and how he had massaged the private parts of those who had been tortured. The priest smiled, and her mouth went dry.

  “What are you doing here at this hour, Father?” She spoke now in a calm, solemn tone, but there was coldness in her eyes. “Did you come to bring them something to eat?”

  “No, I came to eat them.”

  “Are you a sinner?” Tears bubbled from the heat of Anáhuac’s merciless night.

  “I’m a goliardo, a clerical nomad,” the priest answered. “As they say: To follow gods and goddesses / will be a good sentence / because networks of love / have already captured adolescence.”

  A squeak filtered through the night. Then there was more noise, more squeaks from the fornicators over to the side, from the mattresses, from under hospice blankets, from the tents, the makeshift dormitory.

  “Hija, this is the fullness of freedom,” the man continued. “No hippie commune produced this. It’s better than the most insolent rap. Any pornographic mosaic from Pompeii pales before this. It can’t be compared to any Parisian watercolor of phalluses and vulvas from the nineteenth century. Your table dance is nothing next to this. These are real swingers. And look where it all takes place, in this very ass—and the city has many—just a few blocks from where liberals from Canada and Finland stroll, every one of them wanting to invent a happiness machine, and whoa! This is the kingdom of primitive Christianity, without any initiation rituals.”

  He pulled a tin from his brown habit and inhaled. Nausícaa saw him blush and it dawned on her that she’d never fully glimpsed the face of the other priest, Father Diego Tonatiuh, which was always hidden under the pointed hood.

  “Are you coming over for dinner, hija? We live in the same building. I prepared something. Cous cous with a guajillo chili marinade and chili morita, spiced with epazote and yerba santa, fusion cuisine.”