For my compadres Rolo and Myriam. And for Rogelio Vizcaino who, as my lawyer, attended the rebirth of this novel.
For the Tobi Club
"How strange, the shadow of a man!"
- MAXWELL GRANT (WALTER B. GIBSON)
"There's a certain grandeur in all this mixed-up madness."
G JESUS IBANEZ
"GO AHEAD AND PLAY YOUR DOUBLE-TWOS, my friend," said Pioquinto Manterola, with a smile. "I dare say even a poet of your esteemed character can't find a way out of this one."
The poet sank down in his chair, took off his hat, and drummed his fingers on top of his head, keeping time to a song no one else could hear. With the other hand, he flipped over the double-twos and slid it across the marble tabletop.
"They'll screw you coming and going, partner," said the lawyer Verdugo from across the table. As if to make it clear the game had gone beyond the point of no return, he downed his glass of tequila with a single swallow, paused for breath, and with a scarcely audible "excuse me" reached over and emptied the Chinaman's glass as well.
The Chinaman played the two/three, leaving Manterola with the last of the threes.
With only two rounds left to go, Manterola pulled a soiled handkerchief from his jacket pocket and blew his nose loudly, breaking the others' concentration.
Almost, though not quite, forty years old, the journalist Pioquinto Manterola looked much older. Prematurely bald on top with tufts of curling hair sticking out from under his British tweed cap; a faint scar, red at the edges, running from behind his left ear and down his neck; round-lensed glasses perched on a protruding hooked nose: he had the kind of appearance that routinely drew a second glance from passersby, an appearance that gave him a vivid and erroneous air of respectability.
"Pass," said Verdugo the lawyer.
"Permanently, sir," said Pioquinto, playing the two/five. One by one the lights went out in the bar of the Majestic Hotel, number 16 Madero Street, downtown Mexico City. The last click of the pool balls cut softly through the air. Soon the only light left would be the one bulb hanging from the ceiling under its black metal shade, casting an increasingly stark circle of light around the four men at the table.
The poet played the five/one; Tomas Wong the Chinaman passed; Verdugo the lawyer tossed out the double-ones with a sigh; and Manterola went out with the three/four.
"Count `em up, gentlemen," said Pioquinto Manterola with satisfaction.
Tomas the Chinaman got up and walked over to the bar. He focused on a bottle of Havana brandy smiling at him from its place on the shelf. Following his stare, the bartender found the bottle, took it by the neck, and poured the Chinaman a generous glassful. It's an old trick that worked for Tomas nine times out of every ten, so long as there was a professional behind the bar.
"I count twenty-six, inkslinger. Mark it down," said the poet. Again, the bones danced across the marble tabletop while the bartender-somewhat more prosaically-wiped down the counter with a dirty yellow rag. Then he went out to cover the abandoned pool tables at the back of the bar. A cuckoo clock, ridiculously out of place with its little Swiss chalet and its broken beakless bird, struck two.
Two o'clock on an April morning in 1922, for example. Tomas the Chinaman sang softly to himself as he strolled back to his chair:
I'lllemebelyou... It had been a long time since he sang that song, not since the last time he sang it softly (so softly only she could hear it) to a German prostitute he lived with for a few months in Tuxpan back in 1919 (her pink chiffon skirt blowing gently in the breeze, the ocean like a rolling curtain in the distance).
The poet finished mixing the bones and raised his hands over the table like a proud chef about to serve his favorite meal. Fermin Valencia was just over thirty years old and just under five feet tall. He was born in the port of Gijon, Spain, but the land of his birth was only a shadowy memory for him now. He left at the age of six with his widowed father who came to Mexico to set himself up as a printer in Chihuahua. The poet needed glasses to see anything at a distance but he almost never used them. Instead he sported a tremendous mustache which, along with his tall leather boots and the red handkerchief around his neck, served as memories of the years he'd spent fighting alongside Pancho Villa in the Northern Division from 1913 to 1916. It was hard to know what to think about that face, sometimes peaceful as a child's, sometimes convulsed with an inner fury. It was hard to tell the difference between wit and bile, hard to distinguish the amiable youth from the tortured razor-sharp man. There was something broken somewhere inside the poet. The only constant was his smile, a smile that expressed very different things at different times, depending on life's ups and downs and the humors of the body.
Pioquinto Manterola stretched his legs out under the table, arched his back over the back of his chair, and put his hands behind his head. "A bit rusty tonight, aren't you?" he asked the lawyer.
"Nothing lasts forever, sir," said Verdugo dryly.
The Chinaman took his place at the table and started to draw his bones, lining them up in a single neat row, then shuffling them around two or three times until he was satisfied.
Two women stepped through the door. They were dressed comfortably but with style. And yet there was a hint of something wrong about the way they looked, a kind of falseness highlighting the desired imitation, the sense of professional elegance.
"These women want to talk to you, licenciado," said the bartender.
Verdugo slid himself into an upright position and placed his wide-brimmed hat over an unruly mop of hair. He smiled at his friends.
"Duty calls, gentlemen. If you don't mind, I'll just open up the office for a few minutes."
His three companions watched as he greeted the two women, steering them toward a nearby table with a gentlemanly wave of his hand. As if by magic, the light over the table switched on. Professional bartenders like Eustaquio were well versed in the vices and habits of their regular customers. Now, three tables over from where the others sat and inside a second circle of light that matched their own, Verdugo the lawyer tipped back his hat with a flick of his index finger and settled down to listen to his clients. Taking advantage of a break in the action, the bartender approached the domino table with a pair of glasses and the bottle of Havana brandy.
"Excellent, barkeep," said the poet, "only next time try to keep your fingers out of the glasses. It's simply a matter of hygiene."
Eustaquio ignored him and with Olympic indifference poured the liquor into the dirty glasses.
"What's our friend up to now?" Manterola asked the others.
"I heard him say yesterday he'd agreed to draft a petition to the regent on behalf of the ladies of the evening. There was something about it in your paper today, didn't you read it?"
"To tell you the truth, lately I don't even read my own stuff."
"Seems like everybody's gotten into a big huff because the city wants to move the red-light district to La Bolsa. The ladies and their madames over on Daniel Ruiz, Pajaritos, Cuauhtemotzin and Netzahualcoyotl are asking for a little more time.They say La Bolsa's too dangerous. There's no police there, and no sewers either. I think he said they want to move over to your neighborhood instead."
"To Santa Maria?"
"That's what he said."
"I suppose it could be worse. Better than a lot of the riffraff you see out on the street nowadays."
The Chinaman watched his two friends with a dreamlike air. Taking advantage of the pause, he'd gone off inside himself to a place he didn't share with his friends, a place all his own. The place of his frequent silences. A private place inside the mind of this thirty-five-year-old Chinaman who, regardless of the fact that he was born in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, spok
e with a marked accent, swallowing his is and putting the characteristic Z in their place, maybe as a way of affirming his differentness, as a way of getting back at this country where the Chinese were persecuted with an absurd cruelty. Tomas Wong-ex-oil rigger, ex-sailor, extelegraph operator, currently employed as a carpenter in a San Angel textile mill-inhabited many worlds, including the world of his private silences and the world of the most bitter workers' struggle the Valley of Mexico had seen in many years.
Verdugo got up and said good night to his clients, who kissed him and fussed over him, chattering amiably. The light went out over their table.
"Another game, gentlemen?"
THE SURROUNDING HUBBUB of the newsroom was just what he needed to forge that tiny island of silence his thoughts shared with the rhythmic (he would say musical) tap-tap of the typewriter and the ring of the bell signaling the approach of the right-hand margin. He needed that nurturing chaos, the newsroom filled with lines of singing chorus girls, his coworkers arguing the finer points of local politics at the top of their lungs or disputing the latest and always doubtful results from the old Condesa Track (recently converted to the new sport of auto racing), slamming the doors on their way in and out, while Rufino the messenger boy howled disconsolately from a toothache, and some unrequited lover shamed by one of Manterola's colleagues fired a gun into the air, threatening to kill himself.
This was the music of the spheres for Pioquinto Manterola. Only in the midst of that journalistic free-for-all could he truly retreat into his own thoughts, only there could he really enjoy his work. A few years ago he'd gone out to Tlaxcala to write a novel but he'd never gotten past the first page, undone by the silence of the countryside.
So it was nothing out of the ordinary on that afternoon to find Manterola chain-smoking Argentino ovals out of a wrinkled pack while he ran page after page through his typewriter like links of sausage in a chorizo factory.
He was writing the sad story of the capture of Mario Lombardi and his multinational gang (with an Italian capo and a Cuban and a Colombian in its ranks) who had busied themselves during the last two months drilling through the walls of the Coliseo and Ambos Mundos Hotels and the Paris Jewelry Shop.
Lombardi, a mechanical genius, confessed that he would leave the dirty work to his companions while he saved his own talents for the fine art of safecracking and picking the locks on suitcases and chests.
It had only been half an hour since Manterola's interview with Lombardi (hot out of the oven, as they say) and the thing that impressed him most were the criminal's parting words:
"I worked for years in New York City before the cops tumbled to my game. But this town is something else, you can't get any work done around here. When they finally kick me out of the country I'm going to tell all my friends: `Stay the hell away from Mexico."'
Manterola was fascinated by the ambiguity of the whole thing: Lombardi telling his friends not to go to Mexico. What for? Because the police were too tough? Because there was never enough loot in the safes he cracked? Because the weather was no good? Because there was too much traffic?
Once he'd filled four double-spaced pages, he ran quickly back over them, checking for errors, stuck the last page back into the typewriter to add a few lines praising the work of the secret police under the leadership of Special Agent Chief Valente Quintana, and finally went back to the beginning to scrawl a headline:
STAY AWAY FROM MEXICO, LOMBARDI WARNS FRIENDS
He threw his cigarette onto the floor, ground it out energetically under his shoe, and ran downstairs to the print shop.
"I need three columns, first page, second section."
The editor left off setting type, leafed through Manterola's manuscript, and nodded.
THE POET FERMIN VALENCIA stood combing his mustache in front of a broken piece of mirror stuck with a few big-headed nails against the bluish wall. First he combed it down so the hair completely covered both his lips, then with two quick strokes he launched it skyward, first on the left, then on the right.
He stood for a minute admiring his handiwork, but even the jaunty mustache couldn't lift him out of the blackness of his depression. In disgust, he threw the comb onto the bed, covered already with books, dirty clothes, boots, his Colt .45 and cartridge belt, and a heap of empty whiskey bottles (Old Taylor, Old Continental, Clear Brook-all the product, despite their names, of the Piedras Negras National Distillery in Coahuila). He stared unhappily at the mess. He'd slept through what was left of the night, which wasn't much, in an armchair by the window to avoid having to clear off the bed at five o'clock in the morning when he'd gotten in after dominoes and a long late-night walk.
Closing his eyes in the face of so much desolation, he stuck his arms out in front of him and, playing blindman's buff like he used to as a child, walked unsteadily toward the door. His hands touched wood, he turned the knob, and went out.
Passing apartment B on the ground floor, he suddenly realized it had been days since the landlord had been by to pester him. It wasn't for lack of money the poet's rent was always exactly a month and a half overdue. That was just his way of creating some kind of order in the midst of so much chaos. And besides, he loved to get old don Florencio's goat.
"Don Florencio?" he called out softly, rapping his knuckles on the door.
There was no answer and the poet went out into the street.
The First Artillery Regiment Brass Band was playing in the park ("in dedication to the honorable citizens of Tacubaya," according to the program: Sonoran Echoes, followed by A. Castaneda's Alvaro Obregon March, and finishing up with selections from the opera Aida). The poet was never one to turn down something for free, especially concerts in the park. He liked the Secret Policemen's Marching Band the best and after that the Mexico City Police Corps Orchestra which, in the time of Police Chief Ramirez Garrido, had learned to play the Internationale with such enthusiasm that it became a regular practice number for them and they would play it when tuning up before their concerts.
The poet strolled past groups of workers from the nearby munitions factory, bank tellers, and lonely senoritas shouldering bright parasols, until he came to the place where don Alberto the butcher sat along with his family on the chairs they'd brought with them into the park.
"Take a load off, don Fermin. Pull up a chair," smiled the butcher.
"Thanks, don Alberto, but I think I'll walk awhile. I'm just trying to get the blood going and shake off some of this melancholy." He smiled out of the corner of his eye at the butcher's daughter Odilia, who had recently had the honor of being elected "Miss Congeniality" by her coworkers at Munitions Factory Number Three.
The poet strolled on to the beat of the band in his high-heeled boots, hands clasped behind his back, weaving his way through the crowd. He glanced around at the musicians sweating in their heavy uniforms, Odilia with a pair of enormous yellow bows tied around her braids, and a gang of boys trying to fly a small toy airplane but succeeding only in knocking men's hats off or crash-landing into the round bellies of good-humored petit bourgeois picnickers.
"The sun up/ every day it comes/ a gift/ Gladly we would repay it/ but our hats are empty," the poet wrote in his head, trying to memorize a little piece, a few words, a single line so that he could retrieve it again later on. Maybe it was true for other people that writing was the act of giving life to the blank page. But the poet lived a life filled with invisible pages all covered with his invisible thoughts which he tried in vain to recapture, late into the night or mornings round about dawn, with a real piece of paper on the desk in front of him, disconsolately empty.
He dropped anchor at a little juice cart near the bandstand. "What'll it be today, boss?" the vendor asked him. "I'll have a glass of lemonade, Simon."
The vendor, wagging his little goatlike beard back and forth, poured out a glass of lemonade and made another mark on a wrinkled piece of paper. He had agreed to pay the poet twenty-five glasses in exchange for the lines that graced the front of his cart in a
multicolored gargoylish script:
The poet took a sip of lemonade and glanced at the band as it hurried through the final strains of the Alvaro Obregon March. A sudden movement caught his eye. A man whose face the poet couldn't quite make out was climbing the stairs at the back of the bandstand. He approached the trombonist from behind, pulled a small gun from his vest pocket, and without the slightest hesitation held it to the musician's temple and pulled the trigger.
The killer looked out into the crowd and for a moment his eyes met with the poet's myopic gaze. Fermin Valencia rubbed his hands vigorously over his face while the band played on unaware of what had just happened in the back row. The murderer jumped over the bandstand railing and ran off through the groups of Sunday strollers. The poet brought his hand to his waist, confirmed that he was unarmed, and watched as the man crossed the avenue and disappeared into a side street. The music stopped and the startled cries of the crowd rose to replace it. As the shocked musicians hovered around their murdered comrade, the poet tried to get a grip on what he'd seen. A man had climbed onto the bandstand, approached the trombonist from behind, and shot him through the head. He was wearing a vest, the poet remembered that much. And his face? There wasn't any face, just the vague image of a peaked cap, the kind a rich man's chauffeur might wear. And he'd held the gun in his left hand. A southpaw. Wouldn't this be a hell of a story for Pioquinto Manterola, the poet thought. If only his eyes were better...
He approached the bandstand and climbed up through the crowd, swinging his elbows to clear the way. In spite of his diminutive size, the poet commanded respect, maybe because of his magnificent mustache or the look of uninhibited desperation burning in his eyes.
He saw how the blood oozed from the small black hole in the dead man's temple, pooling up on the bandstand floor. He stared for a long moment into the dead man's wide-open eyes-"the stare of death." How many times had he seen it before? He'd never been able to decide whether that look reflected the final brutal pain of death, the slipping off of the mortal coil as it were, or whether it was the first glimmer of what lay beyond. In the face of this uncertainty the poet had become an atheist: something told him the blank stare of death corresponded to the first glimpse of God, and if that was the case, he'd decided long ago he didn't want to have anything to do with Him.
The Shadow of the Shadow Page 1
