Nothing out of the ordinary, thought the journalist as he lit up another cigarette. A horse-drawn coal cart passed underneath the window, the animal's hoofs ringing out against the cobbled street, and he got up to watch it pass by. Something you see less and less of all the time, he thought.
It was the kind of afternoon made for daydreaming, for blowing smoke out the window-the kind of afternoon to lie back and let your mind run free, not to let yourself be bothered with the pointless career of some power-hungry colonel, not to let yourself be distracted thinking about how the horse-drawn carts were giving up ground day by day to streets full of Packards and Fords, perverse imported machines (only the tires were made in Mexico) running wild in a city that was built for anything but them. It was a perfect day for daydreams, for long reminiscences, to ring the bells and set the doves of memory free. But which memories? That was the question. The saddest ones? The ones that pricked the spirit like that red sun going down out toward Tacuba? Or cotton-filled memories, like those clouds over there, nibbling away at the edge of a stubbornly blue sky? He flung his cigarette out the window, partly because he was tired of listening to his own thoughts, partly because he liked to watch the little white cylinder tumble down the three stories to the street. The butt paused in midair and then continued its descent, landing on the roof of one of the aforementioned automobiles, from which, at that very moment, a woman emerged. Tiny sparks scattered off the roof of the car into the woman's hat. She turned to stare up; he smiled with embarrassment and quickly pulled the window shut.
Manterola took a step back, like a little boy caught doing something bad, and then it occurred to him the face he'd just glimpsed had been a very, very pretty one.
He walked back to his desk and pulled a piece of paper from his typewriter. Whistling a waltz, he sauntered over to where Gonzaga nodded off at his drawing table, and shook him gently. "Hey, artiste, wake up. It's time to go to work."
"What's that, cheggidout...," muttered Gonzaga, not quite sure who he was talking to.
They said he smoked opium in the dens off Dolores Street, that he regularly drank mezcal until he passed out with his old Zapatista buddies in some dive out toward Tacubaya, and that he would chain-smoke Veracruz cigars until he was on the brink of nicotine intoxication. But be that as it may, he could draw faster than anyone, and with both hands at once, like Leonardo da Vinci.
"Cheggidout. What you got?"
"Tufiabla the Arab sneaks up on a squad car from behind, a black Ford, license number 4087, and empties his revolver at the two officers sitting in the back seat."
"Is he dressed like an Arab?"
"I suppose so, more or less. Like the Arabs in the market."
"Cheggidout, cheggidout, one Arab coming right up," mumbled Gonzaga, starting to draw what would soon be the central illustration on page one, section two of El Democrata.
Pioquinto lit another cigarette and felt himself drawn back toward the window. What had happened to that pretty face?
Gonzaga sang Flor de Te as he drew, a fine pencil in his right hand and a piece of charcoal in his left for sketching in the shadows. Manterola let out a deep sigh and went back to contemplating the blue of the sky out the open window. Suddenly something caught his eye, and he looked over toward the third-story window of the building across the street. He watched as the glass pane shattered and a man fell through the air waving his arms wildly, his screams reaching Manterola's ears seconds before he crashed to the pavement. Manterola stared across into the broken window and for a pair of seconds stood contemplating the terrified eyes of the same woman he'd inadvertently thrown his cigarette at only a few minutes before. He wouldn't exactly have said that time stood still, but he might have said that time stretched out while he looked from one to the other, from the woman's eyes in the building across the street, to the broken body splayed out on the pavement forty-five feet below. As he watched, the woman retreated slowly and disappeared.
Unable to believe his own eyes, the journalist leaned out the window as if to confirm the fact there was actually a body lying amidst the shards of glass on the street below. It was true, the body was there, starting to attract the attention of passersby. Slow to react for the first time in years, Manterola finally started to move in the direction of the stairs.
"Cheggidout, cheggidout, what's going on?" asked Gonzaga, but Manterola was already out of sight, running down the stairs to go stand in front of a dead man in the middle of Humboldt Street.
ALL DAY LONG HIS SWOLLEN HAND gave him trouble. The foreman had already come around a couple of times to egg him on and step up the pressure. Indalecio and Martin, the Chinaman's coworkers, had tried to cover for him by carrying more than their share of the work and leaving the easiest jobs for him, but it was no easy thing to avoid Maganda's "all-seeing" eyes. The foreman made his way between the looms, repeating obsessively:
"I'm all-seeing. Nothing escapes me. Maybe you think you can fool the boss man, and maybe sometimes you can, but you can't fool me, you lazy sons of bitches. I'm all-seeing."
Tomas Wong liked the noise inside the factory, the thick humidity of the air, the smell of the dyes. As a carpenter, he wasn't tied down to a machine but could move freely around the big building, setting a wedge, building a bench-or, like right now, making shipping crates that would travel around the world in the hold of some ship.
"Come on, Chinaboy, take it easy, will you? Look at your hand. Let me cover for you," said Martin, taking the heavy hammer from Tomas and driving in the big double-headed nails.
A ship, a ship roaming the high seas, never stopping... except every now and then to fish for a few words, always in a different tongue, always with a different meaning.
"Nostalgia,"he thought to himself. "Too damn much nostalgia. Too many memories. You can't live on nostalgia and secondhand news," and instead he tried to think of a way to get back at Maganda the foreman.
He'd had it on his mind since a week ago when, at the end of the day, the management had tried to strip-search him, Martin and Indalecio, the three carpenters at the Magnolia Textile Mill in Contreras-supposedly because tools had been disappearing from the factory shop. And, of course, they'd refused to go along and there'd been a ruckus at the factory gate. They got their way in the end, and ever since the "all-seeing" Maganda had been trying to get even.
The Chinaman's swollen hand was as good a pretext as any, and Maganda spent the whole day egging the Chinaman ontightening the screws. The "All-seeing" got a special pleasure out of picking a fight with the workers, humiliating them one by one. He was the kind of man who needed constant affirmation of his own existence, his power. In those turbulent years in the textile industry, he found his place as the perfect battering ram on behalf of an owner class locked in a fierce and violent confrontation with the unions.
The Chinaman left his two companions hammering away at the crates and walked over toward the warehouse to see if the wood had come in for the repair of two old broken-down looms.
At the warehouse door he ran into Cipriano, mill mechanic and the union's general secretary.
"What's up, Tomas? How've the bourgeois dogs been treating you lately? I noticed Maganda's been giving it to you all morning long."
"I sclewed up my hand," said the Chinaman, as if that explained everything.
"Been rearranging faces again, eh?"
The Chinaman shrugged his shoulders. He wasn't much of a talker. He let other people tell his stories for him. It seemed as though his friends were always hearing about his adventures secondhand, if at all, from people who'd known him in other places. At other times.
"Leave it to Tomas to be like one of those inscrutable Orientals," thought Cipriano, quoting the reporters from El Universal, which at that time was leading a massive campaign against the tongs, Chinese gangs that controlled the clandestine gambling houses and opium dens on Dolores Street.
"Don't forget about the meeting tonight," he said. "We're going to talk about the dance and solidarity action with
the strike at the Magdalena mill."
The Chinaman nodded and walked on without any hurry. The factory was divided into three giant bays and a pair of warehouses, all arranged around a large flagstoned patio in front of the offices. The shop space, poorly illuminated through small windows high up on the walls, enclosed 350 workers and 10 foremen. According to custom, the factory's French administrators never set foot inside while the mill was in operation. They only went in after the workers had left. Theirs was the world of the offices, the opposite of the Chinaman and Cipriano, who roamed the entire factory, looking for projects here and there, picking up odd jobs. Whenever they could, they stopped to chat with the other workers who, tied down to their machines, received the two labor organizers with enthusiasm, like homing pigeons carrying good news. Cipriano had been named union general secretary in the last elections and the Chinaman was elected labor secretary.
Tomas Wong crossed to the end of the warehouse looking for the clerk. When he finally found him, lost among the giant rolls of cloth, the man gave him a dozen vague excuses about why the wood he needed hadn't come in yet. "Somebody's scamming here," thought the Chinaman. That was the kind of game the nonunion workers played. If it had been a union man, it would have been different. The union had its code of honor. The workers fought head-on with the bosses. If someone needed extra money, he could earn it organizing for the union. The code had been born with the union and passed down from veterans to newcomers. No one had ever bothered to write it down but everyone knew what it said: Never talk to the foremen unless your work requires it; always work out production problems among the workers; cover for sick or tired comrades; support and nourish the apprentice.
Now as Tomas headed back toward the yard loaded down with wood for the shipping crates, the "All-seeing" suddenly stepped in front of him.
"You lousy Chinese bum," he growled.
The Chinaman dropped the wood onto the floor. He spoke slowly:
"Look, in the last thlee months two folemen have got themselves killed in the mills hele alound San Angel and Contlelas. You know why that is, Maganda? Because they couldn't lealn to stay out of the way, to not get mixed up with the stlike between the wolkels and the factoly. I don't talk much. You do youl job, I'll do mine, and that's as fal as it needs to go."
"You think you're pretty hot stuff don't you, Chiney? You think you can scare me?"
Tomas only hit him once, with his already swollen hand. Maganda fell backward, a cut over his right eye. He looked up uneasily from the floor, but the Chinaman's cold stare cut him short.
The Chinaman picked up the wood and walked away. When he reached his comrades, who had watched the whole thing from a distance, he put down the lumber and massaged his hand. The swelling was getting worse.
"...A SORT OF BLUE-GRAY GABARDINE, and a blue velvet ribbon around her neck. White lace cuffs, and a bonnet," explained the journalist.
"Who ever would've thought you had such an eye for feminine attire?"The poet laughed as he mixed the bones.
"It's amazing when you consider the fact I only saw her for a second. When I got down to the street, I ran right past the body and went into the building to look for her, but she wasn't there. I swear I looked everywhere."
"Do you think she killed him?" asked Verdugo the lawyer, pouring himself a generous glassful of Havana brandy and stretching his legs out under the table. He wore an elegant pair of new boots purchased with the proceeds from his latest successful case.
"Who can say?" Manterola scratched his rising hairline and pictured the woman's fear-filled face seconds after the man broke through the window and fell three floors to the street.
"You'd think this was some rinkydink little town, the way things are going around here-first the trombonist and now this. And they say this town's getting so big you never run into anybody you know anymore..."
"You want to go filst of you want me to?" the Chinaman asked Manterola.
"That hand of yours is never going to get any better if you keep on busting heads," answered Manterola, giving his partner the go-ahead with a wave of his hand.
The Chinaman played the double-threes, and the poet and the lawyer pulled their chairs up to the table. The ritual had begun. Now the conversation mixed with the dry click of the bones, forming a tangle of words and dominoes, double-fives and five/fours. The cantina was far from quiet. Two melancholy drunks sat drowning their sorrows at one end of the bar; a kid played an out-of-tune guitar at a table by the door; and a Lebanese fabric merchant, talking at the top of his lungs, was trying to convince his two drinking buddies of the potential profits to be gotten by establishing a new mule route over the mountains to Acapulco, traditional bastion of the Spanish where his countrymen have never managed to get a foothold. And if that weren't enough, Reckless Ross sat at the other end of the bar telling a bored bartender how three years ago in Chicago-before he found himself obliged to "travel around countries the size of a postage stamp giving shows in fleabag theaters,"-he broke the U. S. motorcycle speed record. His narrative came liberally embellished with the roar of a motor emerging from a throat heavily lubricated with shots of mezcal.
"So what'd you think when you checked out the guy's wallet?" asked the poet.
"Took a little balls on your part, didn't it?" added the lawyer Verdugo.
"Never fear, play away," said Manterola noticing the Chinaman's hesitation.
"You just pay attention, okay? I've got this one lapped up," said Tomas, setting the two/one onto the table.
"Watch it, poet, I smell a trap," said Verdugo, more than anything else to gauge his opponents' reaction.
"I didn't search him," explained Manterola. "A traffic cop had already gotten there by the time I gave up looking for the lady. When I told him I was a reporter, he showed me the guy's wallet and that's when I got the big surprise..."
The poet pulled his own surprise, playing a two and forcing everyone else to pass. Enjoying his move in silence, he played the two/three.
"Playing it pretty close to the chest there, eh partner?" nodded the lawyer Verdugo admiringly.
"Just luck is all," said the poet.
"Looks like we're screwed, Tomas," said Manterola.
"It isn't ovel yet," said the Chinaman flatly.
"Anyway, that's when I find out the guy's name is Colonel Froilan Zevada, and I say to myself, `Now isn't that a hell of a coincidence.' Enough to make a man nervous. Two Zevadas in one week. First yours and now mine..."
"I hear you," said the poet. "If you'd only seen the way they blew that trombonist's brains out, you'd know what nervous really was.
"You surely don't expect me to believe that was the first time you ever saw anyone's brains blown out? After all the time you spent in the Northern Division where they'd blow a fellow's brains out at the drop of a hat," said Verdugo.
"And then eat them," put in the Chinaman.
"Go ahead and have your fun, but the fact is it was a little too much to have to watch a fellow's head blown open while he was playing the Alvaro Obreg6n March."
"I hadn't thought about that," said the lawyer.
The Chinaman turned the game to fours, forcing everyone to pass, and giving his partner the next move.
"See what I mean, inkslingel?"
"Trust in the eternal wisdom of the Orient, that's what I always say. Dios nunca muere. God never dies."
"Wasn't that Confucius who said that?" asked the poet.
"Don't ask me, I'm an atheist," said Tomas Wong. He smiled.
"Do you remember the photograph of that young woman you found in the trombonist's pocket?" asked Verdugo.
"What? Do you think...?" said the poet.
Manterola looked up from the dominoes and stared at the lawyer. "Licenciado," he said, "you have what they call a powerful recall."
FERM 1N VALENCIA HEARD THE BLARE of car horns as he walked along Reforma toward the offices of a mining engineer who'd contracted him to write "a few love poems at a modest price." The fellow had been struck bitterly
by his love for a chorus girl from the Arbeu Vaudeville Theater but, as he himself admitted, was incapable of putting six words together in a row with any kind of feeling.
The poet turned his head and was greeted by an unexpected sight: a long line of cars moved slowly in his direction. At the head of the line were six Fords with about a hundred men marching on foot behind them, followed in turn by some three hundred cars and trucks. Picket signs waved in the air: "Ban the time card!" "No more police assaults!"
As the protesters drew level with him, the poet made up his mind and jumped onto the running board of one of the passing trucks.
"Got room for a fellow traveler?"
"Make yourself at home," said the driver, sealing their pact of solidarity with a nod.
The poet tried to decide whether to go along with the march or finish one of the verses he was working on for the engineer. But the rhymes in his head took over for him and he floated in that cottony paradise all the way until the caravan of cars and trucks turned into the Zocalo, horns blaring raucously.
The Shadow of the Shadow Page 3
