The Shadow of the Shadow

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  Most of the demonstrators left their vehicles parked in the wide avenue and the poet got down from the truck and started off toward his appointment with the engineer. Then from the balconies of City Hall someone started firing on the demonstra tion. Panic seized the crowd of drivers spread across the plaza, and the demonstrators ran for cover, some toward the National Palace, others toward the shops that fronted the square.

  The next day, after conferring with the poet, Pioquinto Manterola would write in El Democrata: "Nobody could have guessed what was about to happen. The tragedy spread its bloody wings over demonstrators and spectators alike."

  The drivers counterattacked, hurling stones at the windows of City Hall. Firemen tried to disperse the crowd with water hoses. Then came the charges of the mounted police, which the drivers met head-on in their vehicles. A pair of gendarmes rolled on the ground beside their dying horses. The sirens of the Red Cross and the White Cross added to the confusion. A certain Captain Villasenor, whom the poet recognized from earlier days in Ciudad Juarez, was swept away by a crowd of taxi drivers charging through the arched doorways of City Hall.

  A cab driver lay bleeding from a bullet wound. The poet, hidden under a delivery truck, watched the parade of feet, wheels and hoofs passing before his bulging eyes. Stones flew through the air. The streetcars stopped their circuit around the plaza. Finally the city employees who had started the riot by firing on the demonstrators abandoned the balconies under the hail of stones.

  The poet took advantage of a brief pause in the battle to scramble out from under the truck where he was hiding. He made his way out of the Zocalo hanging onto the back of a White Cross ambulance.

  The next day he read in Manterola's account how the battle between the drivers, city workers, firemen, and police had ended with five dead and more than twenty wounded.

  "And you were there?" the mining engineer asked incredulously a couple of hours later.

  The poet only raised his eyebrows, not knowing what to say. It was as if he'd been there and he hadn't. "This goddam town," he thought, not knowing who to blame for the echo of the bullets that still buzzed in his ears.

  THE MAN HELD OUT THE PHOTO without letting go. The reporter and the policeman tugged on either end of the small picture for several seconds.

  "Much obliged, Captain," said Pioquinto Manterola, finally pulling it from the policeman's grasp with a sudden jerk.

  "Wait a minute."

  "Sir?"

  "You know something I don't?" asked the municipal police captain, a thin glassy-eyed fellow groping with his thumbs for the pockets of a nonexistent vest.

  "No. I just wanted to get a look at this picture for inspiration in another story I'm working on."

  The reporter walked out the door, stepping nimbly over a drunk whose questionable judgment had led him to take his siesta on the stationhouse steps. There was no doubt about it, the woman was the same. And from that point everything was easy enough. A small "F.L." stamped across the lower edge of the picture led the journalist through the dusty streets of Tacuba to the offices of Fotos Larios, a photographic studio used frequently by El Dem6crata. Half an hour later he emerged from the shop with a photo in his hand more or less identical to the one he'd seen in the station house, but with an added advantage: it had the subject's name and address printed on the back.

  He hesitated for a moment before heading down Avenida Juarez, then marched stoically on under a blazing sun, drops of sweat breaking out over his bald dome and running down the sides of his face. "When it comes to journalists," he told himself as he loped along, "you've got your cavalry and you've got your infantry." Manterola crossed the street, neatly dodging a cart driven by a fellow who'd gotten an early start on his jug of mezcal. The man seemed to have infected his horses with his own distorted sense of direction.

  The poet waited in the street, composing a bit of deprecatory verse in honor of General Manrique, the new military governor for the State of Mexico, requested by Manrique's second in command, General Vinuelas. He'd been asked to supply an effectively stinging bit of doggerel that would also guarantee the anonymity of his employer. He'd experimented with variations on: "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet; a man by any other name would reek as...," but it didn't seem to him either original or to the point. He stood in the middle of the street sipping on a bottle of La Camelia brand soda pop when he saw his friend the journalist bustling around the corner with that peculiar walk of his, like a rheumatic locomotive with a full head of steam, his head jutting out leading the way.

  their friendship dated back to before the domino club. The journalist had rescued the poet from abject poverty, finding him odd jobs here and there in the newspaper world. And the poet had once arrived in time to cut the rope the reporter was trying to hang himself with, victim of an unrequited love. Neither of them was inclined to talk much about the past. The poet liked to think of himself and his three friends as something like the tide scum left on the beach at the high-water mark: the indefinable children of a turbulent decade marked by a social upheaval much bigger than themselves, a series of changes they'd experienced peripherally as spectators, protagonists, and victims.

  "Got it," announced Manterola, wiping the sweat off his bald head with a white handkerchief from his vest pocket.

  "Is she the same one? Let's have a look at her."

  "One and the same. And not only that, I've got her name and address, too."

  "Let me see," said the poet, taking a careful look at the photograph. "That's the one all right. So now what? I never really thought of you as the detective type."

  "I was just saying the same thing to myself." He pointed to the bottle of soda in the poet's hand. "Where'd you get that?"

  "In a store. Where'd you think? Come on, I'll treat you to one.

  While the two men stood drinking their sodas in a shop front on San Juan de Letran, the lawyer Verdugo stood in front of his mirror combing a healthy dab of Tres Coronas brilliantine into his hair. He'd woken up from a nightmare and, after counting the few pesos he had on hand, decided it would be a good idea to combine breakfast and lunch into a single meal. Without having to think too much about it, he decided to head over to the Tampico Club near the Ciudadela for a double portion of pork chops in chile pasilla.

  With his hair freshly combed and the prospects of a decent meal ahead of him, the aftereffects of the nightmare began to fade. Just then somebody slipped an envelope under his door. It was an invitation to a private moving-picture show in the home of the Widow Roldan, courtesy of Arenas, Vera & Co. Ltd. The invitation was signed at the bottom: "Your friend Conchita-social secretary to the Widow Roldan."

  He puzzled over the invitation for a while, concluding finally that Arenas and Vera were both strangers to him, not to mention Co. Ltd., whoever that might be. As far as he could tell, his only connection to this Widow Roldan and her luxurious home (or so he assumed from the address in the Colonia San Rafael) was through his old friend Conchita, who he'd rescued several years ago from dire circumstances. From the looks of things, she'd risen considerably in society circles from the days when she used to dance the cancan in second-class cabarets, and was now established as the personal secretary to a wealthy widow. Thinking it would be good to see Conchita again in happier circumstances and sensing the possibility of a free (not to mention substantial) dinner, and also because he'd recently become a fan of the silver screen, Verdugo stuck the invitation in his vest pocket.

  He lived in a flat almost entirely devoid of furniture (there was a bed in one room and a single armchair in what would have been the living room) in a neighborhood full of houses under construction half a mile from the Condesa Track, a part of town that was being rapidly subdivided into lots for sale and which the ads in the newspapers had started to call Insurgentes-Condesa. The apartment had previously belonged to one of Verdugo's clients. The man had taken his own life and left the place to the lawyer in his will, with the provision that after ten years it be converted into ei
ther a bordello or a gambling house. Verdugo moved in, figuring that after the ten years allotted by his client he would simply walk away and leave the keys in the door. For the time being, and probably forever, the bed and the armchair, a coat rack and a single dish (in which he fed milk to a stray cat that wintered over in the apartment) were the only household items he bothered to keep. Whenever he went out, it was with the certainty that he'd left nothing behind and he never felt the need to hurry back.

  Now he fitted his pearl gray Stetson onto his head and set out to fight the blazing sun.

  As he was stepping off a bus on Balderas, he ran into the reporter and the poet arguing about the chances for a GiantsYankees repeat up North.

  "What's new, gentlemen?"

  "Discussing strategy," explained the journalist. "Only with this guy you can't talk for more than fifteen minutes about the same thing without him changing the subject."

  "The fact of the matter is," said the poet, breaking into a brisk walk down Balderas without waiting for the others to follow him, "that this fellow here is an excellent journalist, but when it comes to detective work he leaves a lot to be desired."

  "Maybe it's just that this picture here reminds me of a woman I once held in high esteem," countered the journalist.

  Pastel clouds danced around inside his head as he tried both to evoke and suppress his memories at the same time, painful memories he'd never been able to let go of.

  Verdugo recognized something in the journalist's voice that brought his own experiences to mind and he wisely cut into the conversation, interrupting Manterola's reverie.

  "What's that? Did you find the woman from the trombonist's picture? Is she the same one you saw when the guy fell out the window?"

  The journalist nodded and held out the small photograph. She was a young woman, no older than thirty, with the fine features and languid eyes currently in fashion. She was thinner than he would have liked, and dressed rigorously in black. Pretty but with a certain hardness about her. She sat in a brocaded chair looking out a window. A halo of sunlight enveloped her face, overexposing the picture and producing a strangely exotic effect. On the back of the photograph were the words: "Margarita, the Widow Roldan," and an address.

  "Now there's a coincidence for you," muttered the lawyer.

  "What, do you know her?" asked the poet.

  "I've never seen her before in my life. But-today I got an invitation to go to her house for a private picture show."

  "Dammit all to hell, that's just one coincidence too many," said the journalist.

  "As for me, I'm starting to believe less and less in coincidence all the time," said the poet. "First someone kills the damn trombonist, then Manterola here watches the trombonist's brother fall out of a window, and now you get this invitation to the widow's house."

  "Maybe it's not coincidence, but fate."

  "I don't believe in fate any more either, not since Obregon won the Battle of Celaya," answered the poet. "All I believe in is just plain old bad luck."

  "Bad luck it is, then," said the lawyer Verdugo.

  AT PRECISELY 8: 0 0, the lawyer Verdugo arrived at the small mansion in the Colonia San Rafael and climbed up the wide porch steps along with three members of the Torreblanca Jazz Band and a pair of artillery officers.

  No one was waiting to meet them at the door, and they went on in without having to show their invitations. The customary pre-party chaos reigned in the main hall. A pair of bonneted maids dressed in black rushed about with trays of pastries and two technicians from Arenas, Vera & Co. Ltd. were busy stringing cables to the darkened salon where the pictures would be shown. Verdugo leaned against the mantel of the white fireplace and lit up an Aguila. The two officers followed his example. Finally Conchita appeared through the swinging door from the kitchen, accompanied by the rich smells of carne asada.

  "Gentlemen, please. You should be ashamed of yourselves. When an invitation says eight o'clock, it means you're not supposed to show up before eight-thirty... Why, licenciado Verdugo! Bless my soul!" and with a hurried "excuse me" to the two artillery men, she took Verdugo by the arm and led him off into a corner.

  "I never thought I was going to see you again, Alberto, and then the other day, by chance, a friend of mine gave me your address. I'm in charge of the invitations, and.. .well here you are. I can't tell you how good it is to see you."

  Conchita had been at the height of her career when one of the other actors had inadvertently stuck a foil into her thigh during a performance of Don Juan, and she fell screaming off the stage into the orchestra pit.' That was the beginning of the end of her artistic career. The real end came a couple of weeks later when, back on stage, she took a bronze jug and attacked the fellow who had stabbed her, breaking his collar bone. She was a small, vivacious young woman with a pair of bright green eyes that in her time had turned many a leading actress green with envy. Everything she said was accompanied by a dramatic gesture, a habit she'd picked up in the theater, a unique kind of body language that gave her words the sense of a double affirmation.

  Verdugo took her hand and kissed it.

  "Now let's not overdo it, Conchita. I'm flattered enough as it is," said the lawyer.

  "What do you mean don't overdo it? When I've got this town's only truly civilized lawyer right here in my own hands..."

  "I've come as a spy, Conchita," he whispered.

  The young woman interrupted her chatter to stare at the lawyer.

  "To see how life's been treating you," Verdugo added quickly, retreating in front of those green eyes.

  "Oh, well that's different. I certainly can't complain... Excuse me a minute while I attend to these simpletons, and then I'll be right back."

  She left Verdugo in the hall, hat in one hand, cigarette in the other.

  Society affairs in those days tended to bring together a fairly standard blend of young officers on the rise, cultured senoritas, young students in the Vasconcelos mold practicing their Greek, politically ambitious lawyers who spoke and dressed like their hero Jorge Prieto Laurens, well-to-do industrialists, character actresses from the more acceptable variety theaters, and young renegades from the Porfirian aristocracy whose fathers had the good sense to break with the hacienda and make new fortunes speculating in real estate, removing some of the old stigmata from their sons and families and making them more palatable in the renovated world of postrevolutionary politics. For dessert, there was the whole spectrum of hustlers, crooks, high-lifers and confidence men the war in Europe had loosed upon Mexican shores: Russian counts, French engineers, Catalonian shysters, high-class housebreakers and specialists in the old family jewels game. There were also a few highbrow reporters and Sunday poets from El Heraldo and El Universal, and a smattering of the sons of Spanish immigrant shopkeepers. It was a society whose insecurities sprang out of its own immaturity, virginity, and lack of faith. It wasn't Verdugo's kind of crowd, and he felt out of place as he watched the other guests enter through the front door, liberating themselves of their hats and gloves (a vain and pointless accessory in the warm Mexican spring). For Verdugo's taste, the party-if it could be called thatlacked the necessary contingent of soldaderas, anarchists, lottery ticket vendors, horses, dogs and other assorted livestock, northern cattle ranchers about to make their first million, and a healthy troupe of the prostitutes who were his good friends.

  The press of the late arrivals forced the lawyer and the others toward the back of the great hall and the rooms bordering on it. Verdugo somehow got himself dragged into a conversation about the virtues of the climate in the state of Veracruz with the French industrialist owner of a textile mill and an army captain, adjunct to the general staff of "Tiger" Guadalupe Sanchez.

  The officer knew General Santa Ana's biography by heart and made a great effort to insinuate his knowledge into the conversation wherever possible. Verdugo made an offhand comment about the practice of witchcraft in the Tuxtlas region and its common use against the "paleface" foreigners, but his two companions
only stared at him as if they'd just discovered some rare species of beetle. That was the problem with this new society: it spent so much time trying to be modern that it forgot where it had come from. The only ones they were fooling, however, were themselves.

  Verdugo lit another cigarette and turned his back on his two companions. It was a fortuitous move, because at precisely that moment their hostess, the Widow Roldan, made her appearance. She descended the main staircase dressed in a loose black gown that hung gracefully from her shoulders on two garlands of white velvet flowers. She wore long white Swedish gloves that reached to her elbows, and a pair of high Russian boots. The blackness of her dress stood out starkly against the whiteness of her shoulders and arms. She smiled languidly, the kind of prefabricated grin that had come into fashion lately in the wake of a much-heralded run of Dumas' Camille.

  Endowed with a marvelously utilitarian instinct, the lawyer took his eyes off the widow and concentrated instead on the faces of his fellow guests. There was a little bit of everything: envy, fascination, contempt, lust. He paid particular attention to a certain officer stationed at the bottom of the stairs. The man looked at the approaching woman with an expression of-what? Pride? Possessiveness? "There's my man," thought Verdugo, and he glanced up at his friend Conchita, walking at her mistress's side. As she passed the officer in question (a colonel, thought Verdugo, counting the stripes on his sleeve), Conchita stared at the man with barely concealed contempt.

  Slowly the guests filtered into the screening room. Verdugo took a seat in the back row where he was better placed to sneak a quick nap if the double feature dragged on too long (Los opalos del crimen, ten rolls, starring Beatriz Dominguez, and Los Filibusteros, six rolls, based on the novel by Emilio Salgari).